...In this extraordinary and incisively penned collection of essays, Bernardo Gallegos presents a heartfelt and compelling counter-narrative to the swamp of lies. Memorializing of the Alamo is an ebullient heresy according to Gallegos,...
more...In this extraordinary and incisively penned collection of essays, Bernardo Gallegos presents a heartfelt and compelling counter-narrative to the swamp of lies. Memorializing of the Alamo is an ebullient heresy according to Gallegos, which he illustrates in a poignant story about touring the Alamo with his son, an event that he refers to as a “postcolonial moment” in which he attempts to explain to his son that the people being honored had given their lives for the cause of Manifest Destiny, or European domination over North America, and the conquest and colonization of their (Gallegos and his son) people.
Unquestionably, history is replete with imperialist invasions and accompanying acts of genocide often under the cover of the Catholic Church. For instance, “El Requerimiento” (The Requirement) a document issued in the names of King Ferdinand and Queen Juana, his daughter, and under the authority of the Pope, was read in Spanish to the native peoples of Las Americas from caravels anchored off the shores of the New World, and served as a religious and legal justification for the subjugation of any who dared to refuse religious conversion and submission to Spanish authority. Simply put, the Requerimiento legitimized the conquest of indigenous peoples by natural law, and by the doctrine of “just wars” and gave Spain the inherent right to conquer and dominate the New World.
Few people understand this history as completely as Bernardo Gallegos. His book, Postcolonial Indigenous Performances: Coyote Musings on Genízaros, Hybridity, Education, and Slavery is itself a performance by the author who uses his own lived experience, transcribed archival documents, and his extensive knowledge of the history of Colonial Mexico and in particular, New Mexico, to weave together a dance that moves between personal narrative and postcolonial theory. It is a powerful dance that is at once a tribute to his ancestors’ ability to survive and sometimes even thrive under extreme adverse conditions, and a clarion call to recognize the raw plight of indigenous peoples especially those who are descendants of captives and slaves. Gallegos ancestors were Coyotes (Indigenous mixed bloods), Spanish/Pueblo Mixed bloods, and Genízaros, indigenous descendants of household servants that were purchased as slaves.
Indigenous descendants of household servants, whose lineage can be traced to the 1600s, experienced no less a fate than their tribal brethren. For a people deprived by a settler colonial state of economic self-sufficiency and an equitable land base of their own, the devastation that we have witnessed that historically impacts the Genízaro and their descendants should not be surprising, yet the history of the Genízaro remains largely unknown.
In this extraordinary collection of essays, Gallegos offers historical accounts, often through first person narratives, of the devastating legacy of imperialist Christianity and industrial capitalism on the indigenous communities of Las Americas, employing his own family and community narratives from Albuquerque, New Mexico to tell a larger story.
Gallegos, a scholar of of 18th and 19th century New Mexican history, embraces the term, Coyote, a term employed during the colonial period to designate someone who shares both mestizo and Indian ancestry. He traces his own paternal ancestry back to Estevan Padilla, the illegitimate son of an Espanol and an indigenous woman, and his wife Jacinta identified with no last name in some documents, a common practice for Indians from the Pueblos. Their children and descendants were variously described in official documents as Coyotes, Lobos (African/Indigenous admixture) and mestizos. Gallegos’s maternal family are descendants of Josefa Hinojos, Coyota of Zuni Pueblo and sister of Ventura, War Captain and resident of the Village of Holona, to be raised near Albuquerque. Gallegos explains that family members would often tell their growing children that they had been purchased from the Indians and if they didn’t behave they would be returned to the Indians. He concludes that kidnapping and slavery are likely the most under-theorized characteristics of local New Mexican culture.
Gallegos, however, refuses to essentialize identity. For him, identities are performances that occur within given contexts. Gallegos grew up in Barelas, which he describes as a mixed blood indigenous barrio where his paternal and maternal families had lived since the late 1800s, just south of downtown Albuquerque. Most of his neighbors in Barelas came from Belen, Tome, Valencia and surrounding areas, or from the Manzano Mountain communities. Gallegos himself variously identifies as Chicano, Latino, and as Native American, but most often embraces a Coyote identity as it is fluid and adaptable and dependent on the contextual specificity of daily situations and choices that must be made. Embodying the trickster aspect of Coyote identity, enabled the young Gallegos to survive the rough and tumble days of his barrio youth, where he variously performed as smooth and streetwise, athletic and studious, and where he became an expert on finding the right transitional moments to move from one performance to another.
The braiding of personal history with meticulously archived historical evidence is reflected best in Gallegos’ discussions of Comanche dances at the Sanchez/Saracino home in the community of Atrisco in Albuquerque’s South Valley that occurred around Christmas each year, his descriptions of Genízaro barrios and communities, his discussion of Indian slavery in New Mexico, most often referring to the theft of indigenous girls (Criadas), and his compelling and heart-rendering stories about his grandmother and his cousin, Johnny, give this book an immediacy and authenticity that strikes you from the very first page to the end of the book.
Gallegos’s position cannot be concertinaed in the file cabinet of the disinterested and overweening rationalist historian who speaks through the elegiac murkiness of a dusky library, or barricaded in an ivory tower office filled with dust-covered reliquaries and shopworn theories perilously reliant on empirical evidence. Rather, his work is brought to life through the bone and gristle of Gallegos own historically informed memories and working- class subjectivity. It is to his credit that Gallegos, the product of the streets of his childhood barrio, neither romanticizes nor condemns his life growing up in what was often a fractious environment. What is most compelling about Postcolonial Indigenous Performances is that the author is committed to breaking out of the realm of isolated ideas into the arena of lived experience. Here he uncovers his working-class indigenous roots to which he owes most of his subjective formation, roots that speak not only of isolation, neighborhood taboos and sanctions, poverty, and the violence that often follows in its wake, but of friendship, loyalty, and an unrestrained openness to the joy of life.
Postcolonial Indigenous Performances documents with unvarnished probity, life’s turbulence and torpor, its inscrutable racism and grinding dispossession of an entire people who have been omitted from the legers of official personhood. His peripatetic journey is one that travels far beyond the conceits of white suburban dwellers and their patriciate of law and order who have been assigned to ‘moderate’ U.S. culture and have the privilege of ignoring genocide as an immoveable ideal of U.S. history—which is why the genocide of indigenous peoples has been confined to the dank and slippery cloister of U.S. culture.
...For Gallegos, memory and testimony are ways of rupturing the colonial narrative of the sovereign nation state as he picks apart the settled assumptions that permeate colonial discourse and offers ways to resist the established colonial order. Here he puts aside a rarefied scholasticism in order to plainspeak truth to power, breaking us out of the cultural-historical amnesia of the present.
Through his direct and unvarnished prose, Gallegos constructs a heart- rendering fellowship with the dispossessed who are his ancestors, his cousins, his grandparents, his children and grandchildren. For Gallegos, the struggle for justice within Euro-American/colonial contexts becomes the leaven of education, a force that can overcome the blindness of Western civilization, a force that can lead to the celebration of different cosmologies and histories, and one that remains open to the gods and goddesses of redemption and retribution.
Widely disseminating the stories of the suffering of others-than-white is anathema to U.S. educational policy and for this reason the soi disant, post- critical educational clerisy could easily ignore Gallego’s passionate against colonialism and the matrix of empire. But they do so at their peril. In all, Gallegos’s erudite treatise is startlingly earnest and cuts right through to the marrow of imperialism without cagey theoretical qualifications and those tentative academic gestures intended to deracinate resistance and transformation. This is a book that is becoming increasingly more relevant with each passing day. This will be become clear from the opening page.
