Customer Reviews

Women's Tales from the New Mexico WPA: La Diabla a Pie (Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage Series)

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I found these short stories endlessly fascinating, their derivation as well. Most New Mexicans my age (I'll let you guess) knew somebody, parent, uncle, friend who had gone to the WPA, el diablo apie, had had the good fortune perhaps to have enjoyed a well-constructed WPA outhouse, or played in a WPA constructed park. I knew too that Roosevelt's Works Progress Administration, among the millions for whom it provided employment for eight years before war brought relief, also provided employment for people in the arts and literary fields. But I never realized that WPA people had roamed New Mexico recording the recollections of the old people among la gente, some first-hand accounts, others oral accounts handed down for generations, and that these are all still stashed away somewhere among the records in DC.
I read these stories with the same delight I experienced as a child listening enthralled to adults, los viejos, recounting stories from their past, the old ways, the old methods, the old superstitions. I already knew a fair amount of what these WPA stories disclosed, generally. But these stories, set particularly in the area of Placitas and its environs, the Sandia Mountains, Bernalillo, nearby Pueblos, San Pedro and other villages, reveal a history with which I was woefully unfamiliar and which other readers familiar with the area will also find interesting.
The stories describe in detail how la gente survived, eking out a living from the reluctant soil, pasturing their flocks of sheep and goats never far from their shelters against the bears, coexistence with local pueblo Indians, raids by Navajos or Apaches, exploitation by their own ricos. Exceedingly interesting are descriptions of how to make a wooden plow, a flour mill, a musical instrument, the manner in which houses were built and furnished.
Again, I was familiar already with much of what is described, but I reached a new personal understanding with regard to several elements. First, I was struck by a realization of how pitifully backward we really were, on our own, far from the centers of the evolving Spanish world, helpless before the onslaught of a voracious, aggressive, industrialized American nation. Second, although I know that the rich have always exploited the poor, I was not familiar with the system of legal peonage with which the down trodden Nuevo Mejicano had to contend at the hands of the ricos. Peonage was apparently not illegal in the United States until 1867. Third, although I had heard many of the old scary stories, I had never really internalized how great and how real a part in the lives of these early New Mexicans was played by superstitions, fear of the occult and witchcraft. Finally, four, although I was taken aback by Robert Redford's depiction of an old viejo in white pajamas in his Milagro Beanfield War, deeming it preposterous, it appears that such an outfit, traje, vestido de manta, or white muslin would not have been unusual in Spanish New Mexico.
All in all a very enjoyable read. I recommend it.