Furthermore, a school district that effectively prepared its students in both Spanish and English would be helping to fill an important national need. As the United States is engaged in a prolonged struggle for survival against the Comaunists, it must compete for the hearts and souls of men all over the world. One of the most serious and notorious American weaknesses is that there are so very few Americans who speak more than one language or who have a real Knowledge of the cultural values of other parts of the world. Americans are serously handicapped by their cultural and linguistic isolation.

Therefore, a minority group in the United States such as the Spanish-Americans and Mexican-Americans who possess a language and a culture shared by millions outside the United States should be treated as a national resource of great importance. The schools should encourage and support the existence of minority cultures and languages. Thus, the Spanish-speaking people of the Southwest could become an effective bridge of communication between Latin America and Anglo America. The need is so great for bilingual college graduates, that such a person has a definite competitive advantage over the mono-lingual individual.

Now to return to the emotional problems of the Spanish-speaking child fighting blindly for survival in an English-speaking school system. As Spanish is not used in the school, and as he is often punished for speaking Spanish during school hours, the Spanish-speaking school child comes to regard it as an inferior language to English. He also feels that he is inferior to English-speaking children and that his family and his culture are inferior to theirs. This deeply rooted feeling of inferiority may often paralyze his intellectual and cultural potentialities. It weakens his ability to compete with the English-speaking person. Also many Spanish-speaking children develop considerable self-hatred against themselves and against their families and their minority groups and its culture. This is a tragic price to pay for an ideological rigidity that forbids the use of Spanish in the classroom.

Furthermore there is little in the mass of reading materials, textbooks, or instructional material that has any meaning at all to the life of a poverty stricken Spanish-speaking child. The material portrays a middle class Anglo suburban world of which he is completely ignorant. The great cultural contributions of the Spanish and of the Mexicans to the cultural development of the Southwest tend to be ignored. The child cut off from his own cultural roots comes to believe that his people have contributed little of any value to human civilization.

The Spanish-speaking child is also in almost complete ignorance about the important cultural, economic, and social progress taking place south of the Rio Grande. He is unaware that Latin American novelists, essayists, and poets are translated into all of the major languages of the world and that they rate very highly in the modern literary world. He knows nothing about the great artistic traditions of Mexico, Brazil, or Argentina. He is in ignorance of the fact that Latin American scientists, engineers, and statesmen are commanding a world reputation. The tortilla curtain along the Rio Grande cuts him off as it does the Anglo child from all contact with the dynamic, rapidly growing cultures of the Latin American countries on the other side of the Rio Grande.

In closing, I would like to paint two contrasting pictures of the Southwest. One is a Southwest that has been completely anglicized. The Spanish-speaking and Indian groupings have been completely absorbed. The entire population is standardized and homogenized. It is no better or no worse than the state of Kansas, Oklahoma, or Nebraska. It has become an intellectual and cultural backwater, a parochial isolated stagnant backwater because it is so far from the cultural centers of Anglo American culture.

The other picture is that of a Southwest in which the full flowering of Anglo American, Spanish American, Mexican American, and Indian cultures and languages has been encouraged. It has become a cultural and linguistically plural region. The cross fertilization of cultures may well create a regional culture that is richer in art, literature, education, culture, and perhaps even in science than any of the neighboring regions of the United States. The Southwest could develop a cosmopolitan culture open to all the cultural currents that flow from both Anglo American and Latin America. It could be a region where the two great cultural centers meet and blend in a creative synthesis.

In closing, I again want to express my appreciation to Superintendent Leger for the opportunity of being with you here today. I hope to see all of you again. If I may be of any assistance to you, or if you want to argue, to criticize my ideas, or to start a dialogue please call on me. I wish you the very best of luck during the recent school year.

82-388-67-
7-17

PROBLEMS AND PROSPECTS OF THE RURAL SPANISH AMERICAN VILLAGE OF NORTHERN NEW MEXICO

Dr. Clark S. Knowlton, Department of Sociology, Texas Western College-Prepared for the Annual Meeting of New Mexico Conference on Social Welfare. Albuquerque, November 1, 1963

Ladies and Gentlemen, it is an honor for me to serve as co-chairman of this panel on the rural village of northern New Mexico. I have come to deeply respect the officers and members of the New Mexico Conference for Human Development. They are men and women who are quite concerned about the quality of New Mexican institutions and ways of life. They are working long and hard to improve the work of private and state agencies and to study basic New Mexican problems and trends. It is also an honor to be associated on this panel with Dr. Sazaki. Dr. Ulibarri, Mr. Vigil, and Mr. Cloud our resource person. I have had the privilege of knowing most of the gentlemen for a number of years. I deplore the fact that living outside the state denies me the opportunity of working with them as closely as was possible when I was living and teaching within New Mexico. As you know, this panel is concerned with the fundamental trends among the rural northern New Mexican villages, the problems that they are now facing, the causes of these problems, and perhaps some recommendations on their solution. Dr. Sazaki will discuss the Indian rural communities, and I shall try here to bring to your attention some considerations about the rural Spanish-American villages.

The Spanish American rural farm village has been such an accustomed part of northern New Mexican life that there is a tendency in the state to take it for granted. Few New Mexicans realize what a unique settlement pattern it is. Besides the Spanish Americans, only the Mormons, the Louisiana French, and some New England groups live in the farm village. The vast majority of American farmers have traditionally lived on scattered farms, each physically and socially isolated. However, throughout the world, the vast majority of rural people do live in farm villages.

Economists and sociologists have long quarreled over the relative efficiency of the farm village pattern versus the open country settlement pattern. From the standpoint of efficient commercial farming, the open country neighborhood with each farmer living on his own landholding is the most efficient. What is often forgotten is that from a social and cultural standpoint, the rural farm village is a more efficient and flexible social and human mechanism that deserves greater study and analysis as a settlement pattern from private and government agencies. The social and financial costs of providing water, sewerage, and electrical services to scattered farms are often staggering. They are provided quite cheaply for the inhabitants of a farm village. A decent network of farm roads is easily and cheaply constructed for a farm village population but not for scattered rural inhabitants. The population of farm villages finds it easier to cooperate together and to work together. The stubborn independence of the average American farmer is quite notorious. As Kraenzel has pointed out in his book, GREAT PLAINS IN TRANSITION, the difficulties and problems created by a scattered farm population make adequate economic and social development of a rural area extremely difficult and at times almost impossible. Furthermore, it is far easier to bring industry into farm villages than into an open country neighborhood. These are points that need to be emphasized and repeated, as most of the thinking and planning of private, state, and federal organizations on agriculture in New Mexico and in the United States are based upon the characteristics, values, and problems of the typical American farmer living on his single farm, producing for the market, and in contact with scientific discoveries and developments. As a result the great majority of farm programs when applied to the northern New Mexican rural farm village or villager usually have failed.

The Spanish American farm village is presently in a state of acute crisis. Some believe that this crisis marks the death throes of the Spanish American culture, the Spanish Americans as a distinctive cultural group, and the Spanish American farm village. There are many in the state who would like to see the end of the Spanish American culture and village structure in New Mexico. Others, like myself, are hoping that this crisis is part of the painful readjustment of this culture and village form to the rather harsh realities of modern technological changes and developments. We feel that the Spanish American farm village pattern is probably an efficient settlement pattern in northern New Mexico in terms of geography, climate, natural resources, and human needs. We would like to see it strengthened and preserved.

It is easy to document the existence of this crisis. Almost all of the predominantly Spanish American counties of New Mexico have undergone since 1940 persistent and large-scale migration of the young and the able to the urban enters of Colorado, California, Arizona, and New Mexico. Thus Mora County between 1940 and 1960 lost virtually 60 percent of its total population. Almost all of these counties have extremely high rates of unemployment. Their welfare rates are far above those of the rest of the state. The per capita income of their inhabitants is incredibly low. Malnutrition is common, and the death rates from tuberculosis and related diseases are among the highest in the United States. Their educational systems in spite of the heroic endeavors of devoted teachers and school administrators are shamefully inadequate. The dollar values of their total agricultural production is also extremely low. And finally, their use of present land and water resources is not as efficient as it might be.

The causes of this crisis are not too hard to find. It does, however, involve stripping away the New Mexican convention; that one should not discuss the fundamental differences and values of the major cultural and racial groups in New Mexico, the problems that they face, the conflicts that arise between them, and the conclusion that such racial or cultural factors are immaterial in considering the basic trends and problems of the state as a whole. It is my fundamental conviction that the basic problems of northern New Mexico are the problems of the Spanish American villages. Northern New Mexico cannot prosper unless the Spanish American village flourish. New Mexico as a state will always be retarded economically unless northern New Mexico enjoys prosperity. Unless the inhabitants of Albuquerque and other sections of the state begin to pay attention to the needs of the people of the north, they may well have to subsidize them through unemployment and welfare payments.

The basic and fundamental problems of the Spanish American village have both an economic and a cultural component. Economic problems cannot be solved unless major attention is paid to the cultural values, the basic traditions of the Spanish American people, and the often ignored serious difficulties of acculturation, cultural shock, and culture conflicts.

The fundamental cultural cause of the decline of the Spanish American farm village is the process of acculturation. A culture with great achievements in the folk arts, in architecture, in the problems of adjustment to an arid climate, and in the values of the extended family, community life, and attitudes toward life and toward nature, is slowly giving way before the complex technological, materialistic, aggressive culture of Anglo America that in many aspects is weak precisely where the Spanish American culture is strong. At a time when America needs large numbers of bi-lingual people to staff numerous programs in foreign countries and to assist in the comprehension of foreign values and ways of life, the schools of New Mexico are engaged in the reprehensible program of replacing bi-lingualism by monolingualism or perhaps, rather than developing a proficiency in two languages they are creating an effective illiteracy in both Spanish and English among large numbers of school children. Thus a knowledge of Spanish that could be such as asset becomes a detriment in the present school system.

As a result, the morale, the esprit de corps, and the cultural values of the Spanish Americans are being destroyed. The loss unfortunately is not being replaced by a genuine perception of the core values of the Anglo culture. Unless a genuine cultural renaissance can develop among the Spanish Americans built upon a reinterpretation and defense of their culture and a willingness to maintain their language, they are apt to become a submerged minority existing on the margins of American life. One can recall to mind the cultural renaissance of the Welsh language and culture in England and the French language and culture in Quebec as examples which the Spanish Americans might well follow. Furthermore, tourists do not come to New Mexico to see Anglo communities.

Among the economic forces leading to the decline of the village structure of northern New Mexico are: (1) the continued and systematic shift of land from the Spanish Americans to the Anglos either by force or violence or by entrapment in a legal and tax system completely foreign and alien to the Spanish Americans, (2) their treatment in many respects as a conquered people with little attention given to their traditional customs of land and water usage, (3) the failure of private, state and federal agencies since the 1930's to develop regional programs adjusted to the cultural values of the Spanish American villagers and the problems that they face, (4) a school system that has become dysfunctional, (5) the development of costly flood control and irrigation programs that have led to the massive displacement of Spanish American farmers, (6) the general decline of

agriculture and the small farm in the United States, (7) the persistence of traditional farming practices in a changing World, (8) relatively inefficient marketing practices that work against the interests of the villager, (9) the lack of de velopment of the natural resources of northern New Mexico. And finally, (10) the gradual decline of migrant agricultural labor.

There is much that can be done to remedy the problems and bolster the declining economy of northern Spanish American farm villages. I would like to give a few recommendations that seem to have some value. They are as follows: (1) a realization on the part of public and private organizations that the future of New Mexico is seriously handicapped unless the villages of northern New Mexico can be brought into the stream of economic progress and development, (2) the utilization of the Spanish American village as the basic unit of research, study, and action programs by private agencies and by bureaus and departments of the state and national governments rather than the individual farmer, (3) the development by the State Planning Office, an office manned by a very efficient and capable force, of a comprehensive people centered plan for the economic and cultural development of northern New Mexico based upon respect for, and utilization of existing cultural values and traditions, (4) a development of a com munity type school system specifically adjusted to the vocational and educational needs of the Spanish American children, (5) the creation of programs on a state and national level specifically designed to improve local water and land usages, (6) the formation of a state handicraft board perhaps as part of the museum program of the state to foster Spanish American handicrafts and provide marketing outlets, (7) the development of a state marketing service for village prod ucts such as fruit, chili, vegetables, and christmas trees; to provide grading and inspection services, and to encourage the use of auctions as a means of sales, (8) the training and development of village leaders, (9) the development of adequate irrigation facilities among the villages financed by the state or federal government utilizing facilities among the villages financed by the state or federal government and using local labor and raw materials, (10) the encouragement and assistance of village marketing and purchasing cooperatives, (11) a land purchase program to buy up land that once belonged to the villages which they have lost and to resell it to them under conditions that will prevent alienation again; (12) a homestead exemption from the land tax of small farms under a minimum acreage such as 10 acres. And finally (13) the growth of an appreciation in the state, sympathy, and a willingness to assist the Spanish American villages such as that which is beginning to surround the New Mexican Indian communities. In closing, I would like to express my appreciation for the opportunity that I have had in expressing my ideas. I trust that they may be of assistance in creating a dialogue between Spanish American, Indian, and Anglo that can strengthen the economy and enrich the culture of a unique state. Thank you.

THE IMPACT OF SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC CHANGE UPON THE MAJOR SOCIAL SYSTEM OF RURAL SPANISH AMERICAN VILLAGES OF NORTHERN NEW MEXICO AND SOUTHERN COLORADO

Clark S. Knowlton, University of Texas at El Paso, Texas Western College The Spanish-American rural farm villages of northern New Mexico and southern Colorado were first brought to the attention of the public through the writ ings of tourists, magazine and newspaper correspondents, folklorists, government employees, and military personnel stationed in New Mexico.' Their writings exploited the strangeness of Spanish-American culture, the archaic nature of their agriculture and the imagined romance and color of their adobe villages.

1 For a scattering of such reports see the following: Mary Austin. "The Trail of the Blood", Century Magazine, 108, (May, 1924) pp. 34-44; Ruth L. Barker, "Where the Americans are Anglos", North American Review, 228. (November 1929), pp. 568-573: Katherine F. Gerould, "New Mexico and the Backwash of Spain". Harpers, 151. (July, 1925), pp. 199-212; Charles F. Lummis, "The Land of Poco Tiempo". Scribner's, 10. (December, 1891). pp. 760-771; Rideing, William H., "A Trail in the Far Southwest". Harpers New Monthly Magazine, 53, (June, 1876) pp. 15-24; Frank W. Blackmar, Spanish Colonization in the Southwest, (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins Press, 1891). Lt. J. W. Abert. Report of Lieutenant J. W. Abert of his examination of New Mexico in the years 18461847. Senate Exec. Doc. 23, 30th Congress, 1st Session. Washington, GPO, 1848; James M. Cook, Fifty Years on the Old Frontier, (New Haven: Yale University Press), 1923.

It was not until the depression and drought of the 1930's forced large numbers of the village population to seek government assistance that sociologists and other social scientists began to study their culture and social systems. Most of hese men either taught at the University of New Mexico or were employed by New Deal agencies.

From their work there came a series of lucid studies and reports describing the impact of depression, land loss, drought, and poverty upon the SpanishAmerican farm village residents." Although there was a greater focus upon economic problems than upon social systems, these studies provide an important base line against which more recent social change can be measured. They fortunately caught the villages just before the impact of urbanization, industrialization, government defense expenditures, and massive Anglo-American immigration brought about accelerated social change, acculturation and depopulation. The majority of these publications are extremely hard to find. It is unfortunate that the regional archives of the major New Deal agencies active in the Southwest, such as the W.P.A., P.W.A., Department of Agriculture, and the Department of Interior, were not centralized in a region library. The archives have now been scattered.

The activities of these New Deal agencies came to an end during World War II. Sociologists connected with them drifted out of New Mexico. Others associated with the University of New Mexico also left. Since then, the Spanish Americans have received but sporadic attention from sociologists and anthropologists who for the most part were teaching or working in New Mexico or Colorado. Most of these scholars did not stay long in the state, and upon leaving shifted their efforts to other areas. As a result, the Spanish Americans, one of the largest and most important Spanish-speaking groups in the Southwest, have never been comprehensively studied.

This is unfortunate, as the rural Spanish-American village culture in northern New Mexico and southern Colorado, one of the few examples of a rural farm village system in the United States, has undergone rapid social and economic changes. The villages at present offer an excellent social laboratory for students interested in population movements, the processes of culture contact, and acculturation, and the impact of urbanization and industrialization upon a folktype society, that until recently were quite resistant to acculturation. The SpanishAmerican villages are an excellent laboratory in which to study the processes that create distressed areas in the United States. These rural communities also offer a field of social experimentation for the development of programs suitable for underdeveloped areas in Latin America. The villages also offer considerable data for the students of the family, juvenile delinquency, social stratification, folklore, social integration, and small group interaction.

In this paper, the impact of uncontrolled and undirected social and economic change upon the social integration and the major social systems of the rural Spanish-American villages of northern New Mexico and southern Colorado will be delineated. The Spanish-Americans are here defined as a distinct and separate Spanish-speaking group located within perhaps a three hundred mile radius of Santa Fe, New Mexico. It is not often realized that there are a number of diverse Spanish-speaking groups in the Southwest that differ considerably from each

For a selection of the riches available, if they can be found see: Glen Grisham, Basic Needs of Spanish-American Farm Families in northern New Mexico, (Albuquerque, Farm Security Administration, United States Department of Agriculture, no date). Glen Grisham and Julia H. Martinez, El Pueblo Experimental Area, Report, 1940. (Albuquerque, Farm Security Administration, United States Department of Agriculture, 1941), Interdepartmental Rio Grande Board, Report and Recommendations, Washington, D.C., Departments of Agriculture and the Interior, 1937). Roger D. Morris, A Dependency Study of Northern New Mexico, (Albuquerque: Forest Service, United States Department of Agriculture, 1939). Hugh C. Calkins, Village Dependency on Migratory Labor in the Upper Rio Grande Area. (Albuquerque: Soil Conservation Service, United States Department of Agriculture, 1937). There is a long series of studies by Calkins on the villages in the entire Rio Grande Valley that are among the best of their kind.

See for a sampling: George I. Sanchez, The Forgotten People (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1940); Paul A. Walter, Jr., "A Study of Isolation and Social Change in Three Spanish-Speaking Villages of New Mexico" (unpublished doctoral dissertation, Stanford University. 1941); Charles P. Loomis, and Olen E. Leonard, Cultural of a Contemporary Rural Community (Washington, D.C. Bureau of Agricultural Economics, U.S. Department of Agriculture, 1941); Lyle Saunders Cultural Differences and Medical Care (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1954); Allan G. Harper, et. al.. Man and ReSources in the Middle Rio Grande Valley (Albuquerque, University of New Mexico Press, 1943). Kalervo Oberg, "Land Use Planning in Cuba Valley New Mexico," Rural Sociology, 5 (December, 1940), pp. 438-448.