Book Report on Enchantment and Exploitation: The Life and Hard Times of a New Mexico Mountain Range
Introduction
A lot of things have happened over Northern New Mexico and its Sangre de Cristo Mountains. Mexicans at that time basically called it home even though there were a lot of changes about the mountains that they witnessed. This paper tackles the main themes presented by the book “Enchantment and Exploitation: The Life and hard times of a New Mexico Mountain Range”. The book was divided into two. The first book discusses the changing character of New Mexico together, focusing on the three major cultures which were a significant part of its history: The Hispanic, Anglo and the Native American cultures. The first book also examines how humans have influenced the changes in the New Mexican Region. The Second book focused on the same topics similar to book one. However, it paid more attention on things like the effects of European presence in the region.
The book is simply a collection of the things that have happened over New Mexico and how it affected the people living there during that time. Mexico has been occupied by humans some 11,000 thousand years ago. Several artifacts such as human remains and debris from campsites have been discovered by archaeologists and have been used as evidence for their claims. In the first part of the book, the author focused on the different cultures that made New Mexico distinct over its regional counterparts within America. One of the major focuses of the first book was the resistance of the natives over the cultural transitions. There are passages in the book that states how the native villages of Northern New Mexico attempted to resist the acculturation into the Anglo World. It was stated in page 121 of the book that “unconsciously, indeed unavoidably, the Hispanic villagers of northern New Mexico resisted acculturation into the Anglo world as much as the pueblos had resisted the encroachments of Hispanos” (deBuys, 1985). There is more than one cultural transition that happened throughout the rich history of New Mexico and the Hispano-Anglo transition isn’t the only thing that aroused the people to conduct acts of resistance against acculturation and assimilation.
Discipline
Back then, religiosity and piety have been heavily regarded as signs that an individual is disciplined. This could have been the people’s perception because there the northern Mexican region suffered a lot of morbidities and deaths due to the failure to control unknown epidemics. One of the evidences in the book that could support this claim is the church’s statement about Antonio Barreiro’s coming to Santa Fe. The reason why the northern Mexican churches scandalized this man is because of his criticisms about the church in Santa Fe, one of the significant places he visited. He said in p. 124 of the book that “the church there (in Santa Fe) is in a truly doleful condition. Nothing is more common than to see an infinite number of sick die without confession or extreme unction”. It has something to do with discipline because the authorities let corpses remain unburied for many days just to let thousands of children be baptized. The author also tried to cite example of some of the ungodliness of the members of the clergy and priests there were. This all leads down to the absence of discipline of New Mexican people; seeing how they treat their dead, how they ignore the ungodliness of their officials and how the poor often suffers from cases of injustice.
Political Issues
Aside from religion, political issues were also thoroughly discussed by the author. There is an organization in New Mexico that they call the brotherhood. During the 1880s a significant percentage of New Mexican men were already members of the brotherhood. The members of the brotherhood were both unified and strong in numbers and so they started to dabble in political matters. Members of the brotherhood became politicians and have participated in handling pubic and social issues. One thing that is worthy to be discussed here is the politicians who were also a member of the brotherhood’s reluctance to discuss their political interests and internal affairs to the public. A passage from the book (pg. 130) states that “It should be no surprise that by the 1880s, probably, a majority of the Hispanic males in New Mexico belonged to the brotherhood. Strong in numbers and united in outlook in the late nineteenth century, a number of local Penitence chapters began to dabble in politics.” This later on resulted to the delay of declaration of New Mexico as an independent state. The declaration was delayed until the year 1912. The brotherhood members who entered politics didn’t only cause political troubles over New Mexico. They also caused conflict with the Catholic Church as they further grew in strength and numbers. A passage from the book (pg. 130) states that “the brotherhood also came into conflict with the Catholic Church in New Mexico”.
Conclusion
The author did a great job integrating different sociological and anthropological topics about New Mexico into a single book. Individuals who will read this book will really be enlightened about the real events that happened over New Mexico because of the sequencing and comprehensiveness of the book.
References
DeBuys, W, Enchantment and Exploitation: the life and hard times of a new mexico mountain range. (University of New Mexico Press, 1985).
