We Fed Them Tales: The Print Culture of Indigenous Dispossession, Folklore, and US Agricultural Modernity in the Writings of Fabiola Cabeza de Baca

Abstract

Abstract This essay draws from Fabiola Cabeza de Baca’s previously unexamined publication files housed at the University of New Mexico Press to elucidate how US settler regimes of print and crop, upheld by the seizure of Mexican and Indigenous lands, unleashed ecological violence. A noted New Mexican folklorist and teacher, Cabeza de Baca also served as a home economics agent for the US extension service. In the essay’s first section, I trace Cabeza de Baca’s extension writings to demonstrate how US print modernity intersected with devastating ecological transformations sparked by agricultural industrialization. In the following section, I analyze her folkloric work in the context of La Folklórica, a New Mexican Hispanic folkloric society formed in the early twentieth century that amplified the racisms of US modernity while also challenging its claims to agricultural expertise. After tracing Cabeza de Baca’s writings at the juncture of multiple publishing institutions that vied over the value of land and the means of subsistence, I conclude by showing how her folkloric work paradoxically unfolds an ecological praxis that disputes capitalist extraction and centers the vitality of Indigenous knowledge.