from Southwest BookViews: New Books from the American Southwest
Summer 2004, Vol. 3 No. 3
A publication of the New Mexico Book Association

New Mexico possesses a geography of stark beauty, multicultural influences, rich history and an insidious undercurrent of social tension. It is on the graffitied walls of Santa Fe and Taos, in the graphic gap of income from Albuquerque's Sandia Heights to the heights of Acoma Pueblo, in the intermittent skirmishes over pueblo land in the town of Taos. The tension is there, deeply rooted in a past that spans 450 years, sometimes boiling up to the surface of modern New Mexico.

The Spanish arrived and exited, arrived again and became Mexican nationals. Americans followed as traders, then as soldiers. The cultural mix that strains today was born in 1845 with the imposition of a political system that canonized law as the final arbiter, replacing one that relied on compromise and the settling of dispute by mediation and friendship.

John Durand's book does not address the currency of cultural tension specifically, but in writing the history of the 1847 uprising of allied Pueblo and Mexican discontents in Taos it is hard to miss. Durand's writing is workmanlike, moving the story smartly, and through chapters cutting back and forth in time, he builds the tension of a good mystery.

It is also a good historical presentation. The book is a novel but the research done by Durand is detailed and exemplary, including maps of the various military campaigns in putting down the rebellion and a schematic drawn by the author from visual examination of the ruins at Turley's Mill, a site central to the rebellion outside of Taos. There is also a map of the Plaza on the Day of Governor Bent's murder that is enlightening as you walk the Plaza today, translating the art galleries, restaurants and curio shops to their historic predecessors.

If you visit the pueblo in Taos you will see the magnificent San Geronimo Church, built in 1850 to replace one destroyed during the rebellion. Walk north to the ruins that are still visible on the grounds -- a dark heap of melted adobe. There, on February 3 and 4, 1847, the six-pound cannon of the Missouri 2^nd Volunteers breached the walls after two days of bombardment. I knew the background of this ruin from my visits to the pueblo over the years. I did not know of the 300 pueblo people who died in the siege and subsequent massacre as they fled the bombardment, nor of the military battles on the road north from Santa Fe to Taos at La Cañada and Embudo. There are no road signs designating the events, no historical plaques citing the rebellion or the subsequent show of military force. It is as if the history had never taken place. This is interesting given a state that economically thrives on its history. Read the book. Walk the Plaza in Taos and ride out to the quiet of the pueblo. Feel the tension that we like to believe is not there.

Pete Warzel