Tuesday, December 1st, 2009
Cities of Gold
A Journey Across the American Southwest in Pursuit of Coronado
Douglas Preston, 1992
463 richly researched and documented pages detailing 450 years of southwest adventure and discovery! Very hard to put down!
Douglas Preston literally takes you in his saddle bag on two 900-mile horseback/roughing-it odysseys with his cantankerous Santa Fe artist friend Walter Nelson. Two journeys cover the same geography: Coronado’s 1540 epic exploration from New Spain/Mexico through Arizona, New Mexico and Kansas.
The chapters and episodes are written from multiple viewpoints: New Spain’s (Mexico’s) culture, Coronado’s expectations in planning and leaving New Spain, Coronado’s experiences en-route, various and numerous native American initial encounters with white Europeans – Mexican Aztecs – and black Africans, And last, but not least by a long shot, … Doug and Walter’s experiences and observations of both what had changed and how little had changed in the intervening 450 years.
I found this a tremendous context piece to open my understanding and appreciation of the nearly complete uniqueness of New Mexico in particular and America’s great southwest in general. You will be exposed to amazing repeating patterns of history from 1540s Spain and New Spain right up into today’s New Mexico business and politics.
Cites of Gold is a thoroughly charming, entertaining, amazing, irritating, enlightening, frustrating, and fulfilling read! Check it out for yourself!
Tags: Apaches, Arizona, Comanches, Coronado, Esteban, Estevanco, Mexico, Navajo, New Mexico, New Spain, Pueblo Indian, Southwest, Spain, Zuni
Posted in Albuquerque, Ethnic/Cultural events, History, Mexico, Native American, New Mexico, Pueblo Indian, Santa Fe Trail, Southwest, Spain, Uncategorized | No Comments »
Wednesday, July 22nd, 2009
I just put the finishing touches on this video overview of Mexican Immigration through New Mexico and the Southwest and uploaded it to YouTube at http://twurl.nl/gmqs07 . This was about a month in the making, what with the researching, scripting, recording, editing and all, but it holds together pretty well. It’s a nine-minute summary or overview “from 30,000 feet,” so it covers quite a lot of ground in a short time.
It follows the 600-year period from 1400 to 2009 covered by the Albuquerque, New Mexico Historical Timeline, and correlates historical events in Mexico, New Mexico and the Southwest. It begins with the thousand years of native populations trading from New Mexico into Mexico and over to the coastal areas that would become California. It covers the northward pull of silver mining from Mexico City to Zacatecas and Chihuaha in the 1500s, and Oñate’s extension of El Camino Real an additional 700 miles northward, establishing the first permanent settlement in Nuevo Mexìco in 1598. Other events affecting Mexican immigration in this period include:
• The 1803 Louisiana Purchase
• 1821 Independence from Spain and the Mexican Republic period
• Creation of the Lone Star Republic of Texas in 1835
• The 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo’s massive land transfer
• Railroads arriving in the 1880s
• The Mexican Revolutionary period from 1910 to 1930
• The Great Depression and the Mexican Repatriation Program
• The Bracero “guest worker” program from 1942 to 1964
• Operation Wetback in 1954
• The Maquiladora Program from 1964 to now
• 1994 NAFTA
• Corporate globalization
• The 2005 California Apology Act for the 1930s Mexican Repatriation Program
• The effects of the current economic downturn
In these events, you can see a “we want you – we don’t want you” pendulum swinging for over 150 years, and some acknowledged racial profiling of U.S. citizens of Mexican descent in the Mexican Repatriation Program of the ‘30s and Operation Wetback in 1954.
The intent of the video is to bring some hopefully neutral historical information and perspective to the current discussion of immigration. If you have comments or observations, I would appreciate your sharing them with me on this blog post so interested individuals may see and appreciate them.
If you’d like to know more about the Timeline itself, click on 5 Perspectives On Albuquerque or Creating The Timeline.
Tags: Albuquerque, Albuquerque Timeline, Apology Act, Bracero, Bracero Program, Camino Real, Cezar Chavez, Chihuahua, Cibola, di Niza, Esteban, Estevan, Gadsden Purchase, globalizing, Immigration, Louisiana Purchase, Maquiladora, Mexican independence, Mexican Repatriation, Mexican Republic, Mexican Revolution, Mexico, NAFTA, New Mexico, Onate, Operation Wetback, Santa Fe Trail, Spain, Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, U. S., Zacatecas
Posted in History, Immigration, New Mexico, Southwest, Timeline, Uncategorized | No Comments »