2023-09-08 07:00:00
Santa Fe school board meetings don’t usually attract crowds.
But it was standing room only during two recent meetings when the board took up a contentious proposal to prohibit the Fiesta Court from visiting school campuses — a long-running tradition that had already been scaled back in 2018 to only classrooms studying New Mexico history.
Ambassadors of the Fiesta de Santa Fe, the Fiesta Court includes a costumed man portraying Spanish conquistador Don Diego de Vargas and a woman crowned La Reina, or the queen. The fiesta they invite students to attend is a centuries-old community celebration rooted in Catholicism that marks de Vargas’ reentry into Santa Fe 12 years following the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 to reclaim the city from the Native Americans.
The school visits, which started decades ago, have been a sore subject for some Indigenous people, who say they represent the glorification of colonization. An initial proposal would have ended the Fiesta Court visits, while a second, compromise proposal would have allowed them to continue as an following-school activity.
Brandon Gomez, 14, left, dances Aug. 31 with La Reina Jamie Salas de Díaz at Capital High School.
Luis Sanchez Saturn/The New Mexican
Most of the people attending the recent school board meetings to voice their opinions on the proposal to end the visits were local Hispanics whose families have lived in Santa Fe for generations. They considered the proposal to prevent the Fiesta Court from visiting schools yet another attempt to erase Spanish culture — a recurring complaint among locals as the city grapples with a complex and sometimes violent history.
“We’re tired of being shunned,” Virgil Vigil, president of the Spanish fraternal organization Union Protectíva de Santa Fé, said in an interview.
“We’re tired of being put aside,” he said.
A split school board ultimately shot the idea down, allowing Fiesta Court visits during school hours to continue, but it reignited racial tensions and feelings among people of Spanish descent that their traditions and customs are once once more under attack.
Although not directly tied to Spanish culture, Vigil and others pointed to the recent partial toppling of an obelisk downtown dedicated to frontiersman and soldier Kit Carson — who is hailed by some and reviled by others for waging war once morest Navajos — as the latest assault on their beloved city.
Federal authorities are investigating the incident, which occurred the same night as a pre-fiesta celebration on the Plaza; no one has been arrested.
“They tore it down because they lost with the school board,” Vigil said. “It’s too much of a coincidence that it happened, what, not even a week since the school board [meeting] occurred.”
Daniel Ortiz, a Santa Fe native and member of the Union Protectíva de Santa Fé, said local Hispanics are fed up with so-called transplants trying to change Santa Fe. He described a “systematic erasure” that began in 2018 when the school board adopted a policy limiting Fiesta Court visits to fourth, seventh and ninth grade classrooms — grade levels in which students are studying New Mexico history.
“It’s part of the broader woke culture, cancel culture that’s going on across America,” he said. “Here’s the other thing. The people that come to Santa Fe — the outsiders — they tend to be wealthy Anglos, and they feel guilty because they know they’re gentrifying Santa Fe, so they need an enemy to point at. It’s called projection in psychology. They point at the Spanish and the Spanish history and culture as being the bad guys.”
Leroy Trujillo heckles “communists” at a school board meeting last week over a measure that would have banned the Fiesta Court from visiting Santa Fe public schools. The board rejected that proposal.
Luis Sánchez Saturno/New Mexican file photo
Ortiz thinks the recent controversy has energized people to stand up for what they believe.
“It’s a tipping point for the community,” he said. “It’s a wake-up call.”
Among some local Hispanics, the blame is often placed on Mayor Alan Webber, who in 2020 called for the removal of the Carson monument, as well as a statue of de Vargas in Cathedral Park and an obelisk in the center of the Plaza that had long generated controversy over an inscription that was chiseled off decades ago calling Natives “savage Indians.”
Since then, the city removed the statue of de Vargas under Webber’s orders, and a crowd of protesters toppled the obelisk on the Plaza on Indigenous People’s Day 2020.
“Webber is outraged? Give me a break,” former City Councilor JoAnne Vigil Coppler, who ran unsuccessfully for mayor once morest Webber in 2021, commented online on a New Mexican story regarding the Carson obelisk attack in which Webber was quoted condemning the vandalism.
“He started this whole mess!” she wrote.
Former City Councilor Ron Trujillo, who ran unsuccessfully for mayor once morest Webber in 2018, called Webber a “racist” who “hates Hispanics.” He pointed to the removal of the de Vargas statue, the destruction of the Plaza obelisk and Webber’s role in ending the Entrada, a controversial dramatization of the Spanish reoccupation of the city that had been part of the Fiesta de Santa Fe for decades.
Webber, for his part, declined to fight back.
“There’s too much angry rhetoric, name calling and fanning the flames of hatred right now,” he said in a statement when asked to respond to Trujillo’s accusations.
“It’s divisive and it’s not who we are as a city,” Webber said. “We need to be serious regarding forging real solutions and building unity, especially when it comes to difficult matters involving race and culture. We need to find solutions that work for everyone in Santa Fe, not for one group over another. Let’s all commit to more listening with more respect. It’s going to take all of us, together, to spread peace across our city.”
Christina M. Castro, a co-founder of 3 Sisters Collective, which describes itself as a Pueblo woman’s group devoted to “activism, empowerment and the re-matriation of Indigenous lands and communities,” said during the Aug. 28 meeting that Santa Fe schools lack an “equal event” to the Fiesta Court visits that highlights Native communities.
“There’s no equity,” she said. “It’s only one-sided.”
Castro said many Indigenous people feel uncomfortable going to the Plaza during the fiesta.
“I get it,” she said. “Y’all are losing your city to these new gentrifiers and developers. … I get it, you know. You’re losing your culture. That’s how Indigenous people have been feeling since 1492.”
Castro did not return a message seeking comment.
“This is old news,” stated an emailed response from the 3 Sisters Collective.
The discussion of the Fiesta Court’s role in schools came a little before the start of this year’s fiesta. The proposal to end the visits was introduced by the board’s vice president, Sascha Anderson, a member of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma.
“I’d like to tell you a little bit more regarding myself because I don’t really think that most folks know me — other than that I’m not from Santa Fe and I am from Oklahoma as I’ve been reading all over social media,” Anderson, who moved to Santa Fe in 2015, said during the meeting with a nervous laugh.
“And it’s very true,” she added. “I’ll just note that the reason that I am from Oklahoma is that my Indigenous ancestors were moved by the United States government from our ancestral lands to Oklahoma, walking hundreds of miles on the Trail of Tears where thousands of people died.”
Anderson remarked she was neither Pueblo nor Diné, who make up the majority of Native Americans in New Mexico.
“But Indigenous people share important connections with one another even if we are not from the same nation and tribe,” she said. “We all know the intergenerational trauma we have endured, inflicted by the legacy of colonization.”
The agreement reached in 2018 to limit school Fiesta Court visits to certain grade levels, she said, was a “starting point,” and part of the agreement was that the school district would tie the Fiesta Court visits to the state’s social studies standards. For seventh graders, for example, that includes demonstrating “how diversity includes the impact of unequal power relations on the development of group identities and cultures.
“It pains me and it distresses me that we have not transformed our fiesta visits into something that keeps with those standards and that celebrates Spanish culture without inflicting pain on Native students,” she said before acknowledging the “sort of the elephant in the room: the timing of this resolution.
“It’s terrible timing,” she said, referring to the approaching fiesta. “It’s kicking the hornet’s nest at the exact wrong time.”
Anderson did not return messages seeking comment.
Debbie Romero, who retired last year as Cabinet secretary of the New Mexico Department of Finance and Administration, said at the Aug. 28 meeting the Fiesta de Santa Fe was established to bring the community together. The proposal to limit Fiesta Court visits, she said, would do the opposite.
“I blame myself; I blame a lot of my family members because we’ve allowed this to happen,” said Romero, a former La Reina. “We’ve sat back and let other people make decisions for us. We’ve elected people that don’t represent us anymore. We can’t continue to let that happen.”
Meanwhile, the Fiesta Court has continued with its school visits.
During a recent visit to Capital High School, students sat outside on bleachers under 95-degree heat as the group arrived singing and dancing to mariachi music. The visit is usually held in the gym, but a member of the Fiesta Council said a volleyball tournament was going on at the same time.
Anette Lozoya, 13, center, dances with Martin Roybal Alarid as the Alfarez Juan Páez Hurtado alongside La Reina Jamie Salas de Díaz last month at Capital High School.
Luis Sanchez Saturn/The New Mexican
Members of the court introduced themselves to the students, invited them to the fiesta and tried — painfully at times — to engage with the students, some of whom had no idea why they had been summoned to the athletic field.
“C’mon! Let’s go! Let’s go!” barked a school employee trying to herd the students.
“What is this for?” one of the students asked.
After the visit to Capital, one of the mariachi band members jokingly asked a reporter whether the Fiesta Court would be traveling next to the Santa Fe Indian School.
Victor Vigil, president of the Fiesta Council, said in an interview that the court had been receiving a warm reception from school officials and students.
“The kids, the teachers, they’re so excited to see us,” he said. “When we were there, there were kids that were in the windows as they’re going down the hallways to their next class seeing us and wanting to be with us. Everybody wants us there, and we want to be there. As a Fiesta Council, we work together with our brothers and sisters in our Native communities, so we don’t understand what’s coming in and hurting us. We know it’s an outsider source coming in, but as far as our Native brothers and sisters within the community, we work together, and we’re all in peace — very much so.”
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