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The Santa Fe Fiesta, Reinvented adds a new perspective on the controversial identity formation of New Mexico's Hispanos. Through close readings of canonical texts by New Mexican historian Fray Angelico Chavez about La Conquistadora, a fifteenth-century Marian icon to whom legend credits Don Diego De Vargas's "peaceful" resettlement, and through careful attention to the symbolic action of the event, this book explores the tropes of gender, time, genealogy, and sexuality through which this form of cultural nationalism is imagined. Interviews and archival research reveal that even as Hispanos were increasingly minoritized in the former homeland site of Santa Fe, Hispano elites progressively invented and re-created the four cultural organizations that organize the Fiesta to lay claim to this disappearing homeland. Such organizations not only Hispanicized the Fiesta's content and key roles, usurping the role of De Vargas from Anglos, but sacralized their claims through foregrounding the role of Hispanos' "sacred mother," La Conquistadora. With narratives of Fiesta organizers and colorful vignettes of life in contemporary Santa Fe, this book documents Hispanos' veiled protest of Anglo imperialism and the transformation of this city into what has been called an "Adobe Disneyland."
"This study offers fresh insight into the icons, roles, performances, and players that make up the Santa Fe Fiesta. Horton shows how this popular festival has become a symbolic assertion of cultural nationalism in response to the social and economic forces that are driving Hispanos from the gentrified core of the city. The Santa Fe Fiesta, Reinvented is an important contribution to the literature on New Mexico and community festivals that will interest students, scholars, and residents of the region."---Dr. Sylvia Rodriguez, UNM Professor of anthropology and Director, Ortiz Center for Intercultural Studies.
"For decades, many observers have dismissed Hispanos' homeland identity as an anomaly among mexicanos in the United States---a `fantasy heritage,' something inauthentic or illegitimate. Horton brings refreshing complexity and reason to the subject. By exploring the rich iconography, evolution, and meanings of the Santa Fe Fiesta, she demonstrates the power of modern traditions to express the spirit of a people in the face of their displacement. It is there, in the making of traditions, that power, space, and identity are contested. This is a meticulously researched, wonderfully written book that promises to change the way we think about Latino nationalisms."---John Nieto-Phillips, author of the Language of Blood: The Making of Spanish-American Identity in New Mexico, 1880s-1930s
