Ofrenda a Mis Maestros: Finding Wisdom in the Campo

Speech by
Arturo Sandoval

to the

Grantmakers For Education National Conference

Tamayá Resort, New Mexico

September 18, 2007

In 1967, when I was 19, I dropped out of my studies at the University of New Mexico to join VISTA--Volunteers in Service to America.

After a very short but intense training period, I was sent to a small rural community on the northeastern plains of New Mexico located along the Rio Pecos.

Anton Chico was one of the still existing land grants in northern New Mexico. I arrived there at the height of the land grant struggle and the blossoming of the Chicano civil rights movement.

In June of 1967, for example, Reies López Tijerina had led an armed raid on the Rio Arriba county courthouse, which is about 90 miles north of here. César Chávez had launched the United Farmworkers Union and Corky Gonzales in Denver was organizing the Crusade for Justice.

I had been raised in northern New Mexico, in a small town called Española, about 25 miles north of Santa Fe along the Rio Grande. I was one of 11 children and my parents both had some college. My father had a job with the federal government and my mother worked herself to the bone raising us and trying to make ends meet.

When I started my formal education in first grade in Española, I spoke both English and Spanish. Almost every one of my teachers through grade school and middle school were Chicanos—all spoke both English and Spanish, which was common in the 50s in northern New Mexico. I would guess that 95-98% of all the students at my school were Chicanos, and about 90% of the teachers were Chicano as well.

But someone had decided that all of us needed to be on the assimilation track—to be successful, we needed to forget Spanish and learn only English.

I was one of the lucky ones in first grade, because I had a decent command of English, but there were other first graders who came in speaking only Spanish, or very little English. It was painful to see the confusion, the pain and the anger that was created in each of these kids as time after time, they were punished for speaking the only language they knew. While the rest of us went out to recess, these poor souls had to stay in the classroom for using Spanish words.

We lived within a block of the Catholic Church, so I grew up getting a full dose of religion. Our social life consisted to a large extent in our participation in church activities.

To place what I experienced in context, I want to quote from Franz Fanon. In his seminal work on the psychology of oppression, he argues that racism generates harmful psychological constructs that both blind a colonized person of color to his subjection to a universalized white norm and alienate his consciousness. A racist culture prohibits psychological health in the colonized person of color.

For Fanon, being colonized by a language has larger implications for one's consciousness: "To speak . . . means above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilization". Speaking English means that one accepts, or is coerced into accepting, the collective consciousness of Americans, which identifies blackness (or brownness) with evil and sin.

In an attempt to escape the association of blackness (or brownness) with evil, the black (or brown) man dons a white mask, or thinks of himself as a universal subject equally participating in a society that advocates an equality supposedly abstracted from personal appearance. Cultural values are internalized, or "epidermalized" into consciousness, creating a fundamental disjuncture between the black or brown man's consciousness and his body.

Under these conditions, the black and brown man is necessarily alienated from himself. In the simplest of terms, to speak English in New Mexico is good. To speak Spanish is bad.

So when I was assigned to Anton Chico as a VISTA, I was a nice, assimilated Catholic boy who spoke mostly English, with a smattering of Spanish. I had chosen English Lit as my major course of study. Between classes at the university, I hung around the Catholic student services center. I was on my way to a safe, sedate, sanitized middle class life. The educational system had succeeded. I was almost totally assimilated

Anton Chico changed all that. It was the place where I became born again—not as a Christian—but as a Chicano. And the basis of my conversion, my return to myself really, was through language.

There, I was tossed into a reality that I had only had glimpses of growing up. We were poor, but I saw stark poverty and its effects on the human body and soul I had never imagined existed. I saw for the first time in my life the effects over time of injustice on an entire group of people.

There was incredible tension in Anton Chico. The land grant had more than 100,000 acres of common lands, but there was great inequality in who got grazing permits from the land grant board of directors. A small in-crowd manipulated board elections time after time to retain control of the land grant, and then gave themselves huge grazing tracts and froze the majority of land grant heirs out of their rightful access to these grazing areas.

As a VISTA, I was assigned to a community action agency called HELP. I got involved in providing adult ESL classes, organizing youth for after school activities, and helping to start a food cooperative. Most of the members of the food cooperative were the dispossessed heirs of the land grant—the poorest of the poor.

There, I met two of my greatest teachers.

José Tenorio worked for the HELP program. He lived in a small neighboring village called Tecolote. José was a seasonal migrant worker, who lived in his adobe home in Tecolote during the winter, then packed his wife and eight kids into his pickup truck to go plant and then pick crops across Texas beginning in the spring and through the summer and fall.

José had an eighth grade formal education, I believe. He spoke very little English. His salary with the HELP program was just enough to keep his family fed. He often invited me to have supper with the family, and after a few times, I noticed that every supper, by necessity, was the same. We always ate homemade tortillas, beans and either red or green chile. I later learned that was what the Tenorio family ate for every meal, breakfast, lunch and dinner, only occasionally adding a box of macaroni and cheese, or a few eggs with breakfast. One of my greatest joys in Anton Chico was showing up at the Tenorio’s for supper with one or two several-days-old pies that a bakery van from Las Vegas would sell door-to-door in Anton Chico.

José began to teach me, without my even knowing it. All in Spanish, he would talk about power and how he saw it operate from his vantage point on the bottom of the power matrix.

He used dichos—folk sayings in Spanish—to help me understand power and people and life and love. He was a short, dark man who claimed to have Apache blood.

But if José lived on the bottom rungs of society, he never let it show. He had great patience. He laughed often and easily.

He loved his children unconditionally and they loved him unconditionally.

 He accepted an urbanized, Spanish illiterate kid like me and turned me into a more thoughtful and caring young man. And he did it all with love and patience.

I learned from José that the landscape around us was alive and could teach us innumerable lessons. If it thundered and stormed, for example, José had a story about storms that somehow illuminated human behavior.

I can’t remember—after more than 35 years—the specifics of what José taught me. But I continue to be a better person because he passed through my life. José was patient. He was loving. He was forgiving.

José led from behind. He was not one to take the lead at meetings, or call anyone a bad name, no matter how badly they acted toward him. His leadership and wisdom came from his connection to the land, to people and to himself. But he was fearless and would take difficult positions. And when he did, others followed.

My only regret is that because of my own limitations I never fully understood his greatness at the time, and years later, when I did realize how great a teacher he was, he had died without ever hearing from me how deeply I loved him.

And hearing myself talk about him now, I feel embarrassed that I cannot better capture his deep humanity and that language fails me when I need it most.

My other great teacher, H.H. Mondragón, was a charismatic leader. He was quiet, but whenever he walked into a room, everyone silently deferred to him. Power oozed out of him. It was power freely given by the villagers to a person who held power through his actions and not his words. Everyone knew HH had killed a man in self defense at one of the regular dances that occur in rural communities on Saturday nights, but they also knew he was a gentle and kind man.

Often in rural communities, once people get a few drinks in them, long-held resentments, imagined slights, and the unfocused anger that springs from the unknown but real forces of colonization and oppression kick in and all hell breaks loose. It was at one of those events that HH had defended himself.

He was the acknowledged leader of the dispossessed land grant heirs and spoke fiercely and passionately in defense of the poor. He used to say that the poor were jealous of their poverty and didn’t want others speaking for them.

He rode a motorcycle, but he dressed like he was riding a horse, sort of. He wore a necktie around his neck, a cowboy shirt, Levis, cowboy boots and a black motorcycle helmet.

From him, I learned how powerful language can be to inspire and illuminate even the poorest of the poor. I saw how his words, so carefully chosen, so chock full of dichos, would move a roomful of people to feel better about themselves and to see the possibility of power in their collective actions.

José and HH put me firmly and irrevocably on a path back to myself. And they did it by teaching me anew the language of my parents and my grandparents. And it wasn’t just words they taught me. They taught me a world view I had once possessed but had papered over in my schooling. I saw for the first time that taking language away from someone—anyone—deprives them of a vision of the world that is their birthright.

José and HH took me—a raw chunk of humanity—and marinated me in the deep red chile of my native language and culture. I became a tasty piece of carne adovada—a young man in touch with himself, with his voice, and with his people.

Because of these two great teachers, I became who I am today. Since my time in Anton Chico, I have been on a journey of personal discovery that has included a commitment to try to be part of the solution to the issues we seek to resolve here in New Mexico.

I returned to the university and took numerous Spanish classes. I began to travel to Mexico and to read New Mexico history. I was blessed to meet a beautiful and talented Mexicana, and with her, have had three wonderful children.

I am proud to say that I am now completely fluent in Spanish. I have read deeply and broadly across the spectrum of Spanish and Latin American literature. I know formal Spanish but I proudly retain the patois of my northern heritage.

Thanks to the education I received from José and HH, I made a commitment that my children would be at least bilingual and bicultural. I’m happy to report they are.

If there is anything I want to leave you with today, it is that we must lower the walls of certainty that we carry within us and around us. Perhaps what we think we know isn’t such a sure thing. Perhaps what we call knowledge is just a thin thread on a much larger sarape, where other voices and other experiences wait for us to listen and learn.