Jacobo D. Baca, a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History at UNM speaks on "Pueblos and Hispanos in the Era of Federal Relief: The New Deal, 1933-1945" on Tuesday, June 5 at 1 p.m. in the Waters Room (105) of Zimmerman Library on the UNM campus.
During the New Deal, the federal government inaugurated more than a half-decade of intensive studies of Pueblo and Hispano villages that demonstrated similarities between their dependence on and relationships to the land. Led by Indian Commissioner John Collier, activists-turned-bureaucrats held on to their notions the Pueblo Indians and Hispanos were fundamentally different peoples whose fortunes depended on mutual hostility and deprivation. Building from these ideas they fashioned during the crusade for Pueblo land rights in the Pueblo Lands Boards fight of the 1920s, advocates worked to use New Deal liberalism to repatriate land to Pueblo Indian communities.
They faced stern and steady opposition to their unilateral pro-Pueblo approach from Senator Dennis Chavez, who stood firm against Collier's will to aid the Pueblos at the expense of surrounding Hispano villages. This lecture focuses on how the Indian Pueblos and Hispano villages in the Tewa Basin experienced New Deal reform and how this reform impacted their raltionship with one another and with the federal and state governments.
Baca is working on his dissertation "Somos indigena: Ethnic Politics and Land Tenure in Modern New Mexico, 1904-2004." In it he explores ethnic politics and modern land tenure in the Indian Pueblos and Hispano villages in New Mexico's Tewa Basin. He also studies the changing relationship with federal, state and local governments and how that impacted social and structural relations among the Pueblo and Hispano peoples.
Bryan W. Turo will speak on "An Empire of Dust: Thomas Benton Catron and the Rise of Corporate Enterprise in New Mexico, 1866-1921." As a Republican Party boss in New Mexico for half a century, Thomas Benton Catron contributed to the growth of the territory and its incorporation into the larger frame of democracy and capitalism in the United States and abroad.
But more than that, Catron's life can help to explain how American culture and institutions infiltrated the western territories in the years following the Civil War. This lecture will explore how Catron grew an empire out of the acquisition of land in New Mexico and other parts of the west and how he used it to make money in the form of joint stock companies.
Turo was raised in White Plains, N.Y. and completed his Bachelor's degree in Binghamton University. After tiring of harsh winters, he moved to Tucson, Ariz. To earn a Master's in History at the University of Arizona in 2008. Since then, he has lived in Albuquerque where he is in the process of earning a Ph.D. from UNM. He studies U.S. history, with a focus on the West and Southwest. He is currently finishing his dissertation on the life and times of Thomas Catron.
The lecture is free and the public is welcome.