Excerpts from "Las Mujeres: Conversations from a Hispanic Community"

Abstract

The women speaking in this book are great-grandmothers and great-granddaughters. They are city women and country women. They are farmers, politicans, factory workers, teachers, artists, and housemaids. They have described their work and their lives because they want to help make a written record of a culture and a heritage which, while omitted from written history, has been passed on orally, like much of women's culture, from mother to daughter, from grandmother to grandchild. Who are the Hispanic women of New Mexico? Historically, this question has several answers, one of them beginning 400 years ago when Spanish and Mexican colonists emigrated north from Mexico to settle in the upper Rio Grande valley. Some of these colonists were direct descendants of the Spanish conquistadores; some were descended from unions of the Spanish with Indian peoples of Mexico. Further racial and cultural mixing occurred in New Mexico through the unions of the colonists with Native Indian people who had settled in the region thousands of years earlier. Mexico achieved final independence from Spain in 1821; however, almost the entire northern half of Mexico was annexed by the United States as a result of its war with Mexico (1846-1848). The territory taken over in that war is the present day southwestern United States that includes New Mexico. Emigration from Mexico to the Southwest increased after the Mexican Revolution (1910), and continues today. Thus, some Hispanas trace their New Mexican origins back hundreds of years, while others are more recent arrivals. Many of the older women we interviewed, emphasizing their Spanish heritage, referred to themselves as Spanish. Others spoke of coming from Mexico, or called themselves Mexican, as did some of the younger generations. Also, the younger women we interviewed often called themselves Chicana, a term reflecting their political identification, their Indian ancestry, and pride in their southwestern heritage. In writing of these women collectively, we have referred to them as Hispanic, a term referring broadly to Spanish-speaking people.