We carry their stories. Photo collage: Elena Valdez

It’s the day before the 4^th of July and we are driving north from Denton toward the Llano Estacado.  José is behind the wheel and I’m not sure who of us first says that Priscilla’s house was for us a “feminist rest stop.” We are beginning to put this language of the blog into use, feeling out what it means.  We are talking about the wellbeing of Priscilla’s and María’s care ethic, the ways that care infuses connections to land, food, and to mutual ways of being with one another, listening to one another across generations.  We feel secure knowing we have Priscilla’s lunch tucked away for later on ice in our cooler.  Immediately outside of Denton the trees change, become scrubbier, bushier, and a sense of distance on all sides tells us we’ve entered the southern plains. We’re in cattle country, passing through Park Springs, Chico, and roadside signs for The Jackson Spread, The Shaw Ranch. A water reservoir paralleling the Texas 101 is filling up with today’s rain. We do not take the roads toward Waurika, Oklahoma, Chickasaw country.

Close to Harrold, Texas, the wind farms begin.

We are headed for Santa Fe and spending time with Elena Valdez.  And with Zenaida, nickname Zeni!  Zeni is the ten-month old daughter of Elena and Matt Pacheco. We are going officially to interview Elena, and see Matt too, but we can barely contain ourselves looking forward to Zeni.  We will stay at their place. Elena and Matt have been cooking, asking us what we like to drink, are we hungry after 600 miles on the road?  The answer is YES.  When we get close enough, they wait for us in the driveway.

Visiting Elena means visiting, broadly speaking, the world Elena lives herself through.  The collage above shows some of it via intergenerational memory, relations, pride, and a sense of forwarding the future through woman-centered education. The collage photo is what Elena sends as an example of “Feminist Wests.”

Today Elena works as Hispanic Education Specialist, part of the Language & Culture Division of the New Mexico Public Education Department. Since she left Rice with her PhD in 2019, Elena made the major life decision to decline a Vanderbilt postdoc offer and come home instead to Santa Fe with the goal of using the PhD training to connect what she learned in the academy to other publics. She has in mind “publics” like her family, neighbors, former classmates, as well as other thinkers who may or may not have PhDs and who already are doing great work for communities and trying to impact public policy. On behalf of the Center for Education and Study of Diverse Populations at New Mexico Highlands University, she’s recently written “Reclaiming Our Past, Sustaining Our Future: Envisioning a New Mexico Land Grant and Acequia Curriculum,” an astute reflection on how conversations about acequias and land grants are unfolding and might better unfold in New Mexico. In this piece, Elena points policy makers to great examples of how to take more of a lead from existing curricula coming often from Indigenous sources like the Pueblo Indigenous Wisdom Curriculum Project and Tewa Women United.  For Elena’s scholarly bio, see here.

Our interview takes place in Cebolla, a drive up from Santa Fe into the mountains. En route both Matt and Elena’s windshield gets pockmarked from loose stone on the roads, as does our van windshield. The highway in those parts is rough and gravelly. Looks like rain is coming, always welcome in this dry land.

Rain in the distance, Cebolla, New Mexico. Photo: José Aranda

We pass a spot known to folks in these parts as Bode’s, and stop a minute. The place has everything from night crawlers and fishing rods to woven blankets, enamel cook out pots, and wide brimmed hats.  It’s 4^th of July, and a lotta 12 packs of beer are under the arms of guys passing through the doors.

“By the way,” Elena tells me when we stop, “This place is not O’Keeffe country.”

She says this after just passing Abiquiu and a sign on the road proclaiming “O’Keefe Country.”  The point is crucial in relation to feminist Wests, to artistic traditions that locate some of us in places but signal, to others, unaware takeovers of space and place.  Recently the state of New Mexico produced some promotional ads, for tourism.

Map visual courtesy of the Albuquerque Journal https://www.abqjournal.com/715114

The ads angered a lot of people.  In the popular imagination and consciousness people associate Abiquiu with O’Keeffe, and the landscape and the ads quoted O’Keefe saying “I saw this land, and it was mine, I knew it was mine.” A lot of critiques came up right away about land possession, especially from Indigenous feminists.

The Where of Here: Cebolla, New Mexico.

Krista Comer.  We’ve already been talking about the chamiso. So if you would, tell us about the where of here, for you.

Elena Valdez.  We’re surrounded by chamiso. This is where my dad grew up, this area, not this house, in particular, but in Cebolla. My father’s side of the family is from here. I don’t know at what point they all arrived.  They’re some of the first settler-colonial, Spanish colonial people to come here. I recently learned that some of my family members may have been among those people from Abiquiu who were enlisted to defend territory, even though they were de-tribalized. A group of people living in Alpine Abiquiu came here to be a buffer between the Spanish empire and Native people, because this was a Native land.

Krista Comer.  So we wanted to begin with some place people know, or where people feel welcome.  Recognizing the complications . . .  [the mixings of Spanish settler and Indigenous backgrounds].

Elena Valdez. There’s lots of complications here in northern New Mexico. But this always felt like home to me. The smells, the sights. It’s been open to me, to listen and learn and observe, and look for camaleones [specific to this region, the horned lizard, or horny toad].  I spent so much time just being by myself and playing out here, climbing the trees, listening to family members because we’re in an area where many of my family members who live in other surrounding villages . . . if they pass by, and were to see that my mom and dad were here, they would stop and come and talk and eat.

Zenaida Pacheco, in the chamiso. Photo: José Aranda.

Zenaida Pacheco, with parents Elena Valdez and Matt Pacheco. Photo: José Aranda

Krista Comer.  And today we brought Zeni with us.  She went right into the chamiso, touching the flowers, squatting to pick up rocks.

Elena Valdez.   Yes, this is her first visit here to Cebolla and to our house, my grandparents’ house.  I hope she forms the relationships that I formed, to place, to the mountain, one day I hope to tell her more….

Krista Comer.  Let’s talk about the mountain, and the place of here.

Elena Valdez.  I smell the dryness. The dirt has a particular scent. But chamiso, of course, the Juniper, you smell that too.  There’s a kinda animal smell, elk, cows, horses, sheep, people keep sheep.

Krista Comer. Yeah, we were hearing some mooing a minute ago.

Elena Valdez.  There are always living things crossing through here. We are close to the Carson National Forest and the Trout Lakes. I’ve spent lots of time fishing there with my family and hearing stories about people who were once alive and where they lived and what they did. This place contains lots of memories embedded in things.

Krista Comer. Does one come to mind for you?

Elena Valdez. My own memory or somebody else’s?

Krista Comer.  Yours, though memories, recognizing “our own” memories travel through other people’s memories.

Elena Valdez.  Lots of my memories seem melded together of the time I’ve spent out here. I haven’t spent the kind of time I used to, now that I’m an adult and working and having a child. But I remember going to the pond in the neighboring property that belongs to my uncle and looking for camaleones, the frogs, and just admiring the little, tiny, tiny frogs and being amazed by how they can live in this environment that is so dry.  Nothing is certain, we don’t know if there will be enough water to fill up the pond, but they still come back. It’s like a miracle.

Querencia, Feminist Attunements to Family/Land, US West Spaces

• Elena writes about “querencia.”  For her, the concept evokes a deep sense of being rooted in place, being part of place, of loving place, and “love” is respecting it, knowing how to live in balance with nature and the other living things. Acequia culture, also a topic Elena is writing about, is so important to land management histories in New Mexico. It is based in ancient irrigation systems where one digs ditches from a main primary water source to water crops, and it is done communally. Everybody is responsible for taking care of each other and equal shares of water.  Querencia is partly about how one lives this system of water sharing, because water is sacred.
• Related to querencia, we talk about Elena’s mother’s family, their move to Albuquerque in the 1950s from Wagon Mound (NM) and Las Vegas (NM). Her grandparents built a house from what they could find, making do with anything useful, and gardening.  Elena connects this house in Albuquerque to feminism through gardening and food growing. Her grandparents took soil that had no nutrients and made it flourish with apple trees, peach trees, apricot trees, and every kind of native and non-native plant. Her parents, in Cebolla, took trips to the mountain with Elena overhearing what plants are good for what ailments, learning that those resources were understood as valuable.  Thinking more now, the “feminism” of this knowledge, she says, is the way she carries it, and practices it, protects it, and transfers it to her daughter Zeni and others to continue the way of being in this place.
• “West.” As a Nuevo Mexicana from northern New Mexico, this place was never “West” to Elena.  She talks about the family jokingly saying “Cebolla is the ombligo of the universe.” It’s a joke that’s not a joke, because it’s true, everyone is connected.  The value of talking about “the US West” is being able to track “how we got here,” meaning how conversations about belonging, land use, and vying histories, continue to shape lives and how people live in relation to one another and to the natural world.  For her, always there was the awareness of New Mexico as part of Mexico, a Spanish speaking place, a Spanish territory before that, and that it has been and continues to be a Native place.

Closing Thoughts for Now.   We end with talk about creating partnerships with other people who already are well along the way of imagining how to manage land and relate to one another in sustainable ways.  The Indigenous Wisdom project and Tewa Women United are examples.  Elena does not know them personally, yet, but she learning from them, and sometimes they’ve been kind enough to accept social media requests. Daphne Littlebear posted something recently about how difficult of a choice it seemed at one point to get an education, but then go back to her home Pueblo when other people or the world of academia makes it seem you should get out to “be successful.”  She is on the other side of that choice now, focused on activisms and knowledges that benefit the communities she writes about and thinks about.

José Aranda, who was Elena’s dissertation director and is now Director of Graduate Studies for the Rice English Department, sees these directions Elena has charted as a way of going forward in a job market that, for graduate students, has been bad for years and gotten worse.  What’s great about her directions is not only how they chart a path to fight for the worlds we want, but how they create joy as one does so.  “Feminist Rest Areas.”

Inside the coolness of the Cebolla house, where we have a picnic after our interview, we bring out the last of Priscilla’s food.  We are sharing it, connecting Denton and Cebolla. We are waiting for Zeni to come back with her father Matt from visiting his family nearby.  Later on we will have dinner and time with Elena’s parents.  We saw them at Elena’s ZOOM PhD graduation, but in person, we haven’t seen them since Elena’s and Matt’s wedding!