Cuartocentenario

Published with permission from the Santa Fe New Mexican

Legacy from New Mexico's Past, Lessons for the Future

By Thomas Chávez – April 24, 1998
Tom Chávez is the director for the Palace of the Governors and a regular columnist for The New Mexican

Juan de Oñate is an icon who has been and will be continue to be vilified as well as venerated this year.

This year, 1998, is the cuartocentenario, or fourth centennial of the first legal and permanent Spanish colony in New Mexico.

Based on the histories of previous celebrations, my fearless forecast for the year is that the legacy of that first settlement and of Oñate the human being will be lost in a fog of rhetoric that will divide people rather than get them to ponder some of the real issues of why the descendants of that initial episode are here today.

Modern society seems to want simple solutions to complex questions. Desired answers, not unlike the rhetoric of talk radio, need to be black and white, and never gray. History inevitably and clearly demonstrates that the more complicated and gray areas are, the more real answers can be found there.

Oñate, for his time, can be described accurately in neither black nor white terms. He accomplished amazing feats, yet made grievous errors. He was punished by his own people for his wrongs, yet praised by his own captain, the poet Villagra (who was himself brought to task), for his achievements. In many ways, his attempt to establish a colony resembles modern day attempts at various projects.

But the legacy begun with the first colony is more important than the individual. Much of what we see, eat, smell and hear today originated from the planting of the Spanish New World seed in the fertile ground of Puebloan culture four centuries ago.

It is not without reason that the state flag contains a zia sun symbol in Spanish colors, or that New Mexico, originally “la Nueva Mexico,” which translates to “another Mexico” in reference to Tenochititlan/Mexico City, is this nation’s only official bilingual state, or that the state’s largest university has a Spanish mascot, the Lobos, just as most of the towns have Spanish or Indian names (Lobos, Albuquerque, Santa Fe, Los Alamos, Española, Las Cruces, Taos, Pecos, etc.).

No serious historian of the area is surprised by the fact that more American Indians in New Mexico live on the same land their ancestors occupied at European contact than in the whole eastern half of the United States. That legacy is a product of a people who were here and those who came after.

New Mexico’s history, its patrimony, does not lend itself to simple solutions and stereotypes. Nor does New Mexico’s cultural survival lend itself to the ethnic chauvinism that builds itself on the denigration of others.

New Mexico is a story of survival. All of us have benefited from the overlaying of various cultures throughout New Mexico’s history. The various cultures—and there are more than three—were not eliminated in any holocaust but have survived and function today. This is the legacy of 400 years.

It is a legacy with a lesson, for the people involved with this story learned the lesson of toleration. They learned to live with each other despite disagreements and disruptions and, over time, have learned that we are better off as a result. The alternative has been amply demonstrated in the intolerance of the Northern Ireland, the Middle East and the former Yugoslavia.

The cuartocentenario is much more than the celebration of an individual or of a culture. It is the example of learning to live together despite battles, rebellions, occupations, religious differences, technological advances and superimposed political systems. We New Mexicans have improved upon the old melting-pot concept. We continue to survive together, yet have maintained and even admire our cultural differences. As a result we, as New Mexicans, have much to commemorate.