The Killing of a New Mexican State Trooper: Ways of Telling a Historical Event

Abstract

On Good Friday in 1952 New Mexico state trooper Nash Garcia was killed and burned in his patrol car twenty miles from McCartys, New Mexico, deep in the Acoma reservation, and the following Monday two Acoma brothers, Willie and Gabriel Felipe, were arrested and charged with the murder. From the outset the killing stirred imagination. Willie Felipe's confession printed on the front page of the Albuquerque Journal appeared a forced and inadequate explanation for the charred pile of bones and St. Christopher medal pictured sensationally above on the same page. Motive was the most persistent question in press coverage, the long hearing and trial, through the final psychiatric testimony in the case which gained the brothers a reduced sentence of life imprisonment early in 1953. The press, the court, the psychiatrists all looked for meaning in the event before they allowed it to sink into some slight chapter in the history of New Mexico. The small meanings they found were colored by the expectations of their professions and the majority community which they shared, and it remained for two Pueblo writers, in fictions published some twenty years after, to turn that small line segment of history into circles of form.