Introduction and Personal Goals
Recently, while I was having coffee with a friend at an outdoor café in downtown Santa Fe, out of nowhere a band of about twenty brightly costumed dancers appeared and started dancing in the street below. Rhythmic footwork pulsed to the beat of a steady drum while a Spanish soldier and an Aztec slave tussled for supremacy. It was the Baile de los Matachines, the story of the Aztec conquest by Imperial Spain and the Aztec people's resistance to it. This story, retold countless times, came alive again in mythic guise for me right there on Burro Alley, reminding me that the kingdom of Aztlan lives on in the daily lives of all of us who inhabit the Indo-Hispanic Southwest. The dancers melted away, as mysteriously as they had appeared, and I was left with only the vibrating air and the myth surrounding it.
Living in Santa Fe, New Mexico is living in antiquity and possibility. My students and I dwell where magical experiences can happen on the streets and frequently do. However, the majority of my students also live in a land of poverty and oppression. It's a landscape of subsistence living, toil, yearning for family and country (Oh! How they yearn!) and crossing borders. Literal and figurative borders. Or it's the reality of a low-pay job with little room for advancement and going to the rancho to visit family and to touch and be touched by the land. La Tierra. These are my students, the present-day people of Aztlan, and it is my privilege and sometimes my despair to live and teach among them.
How to reconcile these two opposite faces of the people of Aztlan and, as a language arts bilingual secondary teacher, gently guide these sons and daughters of Aztec ancestry and Spanish heredity to recognition of their cultural unity? Although "Aztlan" is defined variously as "the northern kingdom," "the white kingdom," or "the place of the white heron," to me cultural unity is the modern definition of Aztlan because it describes the intermarriage of two cultures. Some historians believe that Aztlan was the original northern kingdom of the Aztecs, much glorified in the oral histories of the people, and much sought after when they left this paradise and made the journey to Tenochtitlan about 1000 C.E. About 500 years later, when Spanish conquistadors brought their Aztec captives to Santa Fe, these conquered people settled in Barrio Analco and this location metaphorically became one of the new locations of the kingdom of Aztlan. In the 1970's the Chicano movement seized on the concept of Aztlan as a focal point for positive growth and as an explanation for the new race created by the intermingling of Spanish and Indian peoples. Hence, Aztlan has existed for at least 1000 years as at the very least a symbolic concept, if not a literal one, and so it continues today.
I believe that by reading the literature of both cultures, from past to present, by recognizing and honoring their heroes and their everyday folk, and by sharing their own personal stories of their life journeys and those of their families, we may begin to accomplish this reconciliation. It's a delicate undertaking, for many of the stories of crossing borders are of necessity secret tales. But there are the stories of whys and wherefores that bypass the hows and lead to understanding and truth. It is these stories we will pursue.
My intention is to build, through reading narrative, biography and fiction, a cultural bridge between Aztec/Spanish Mexico and Indo/Spanish New Mexico. This is the literature that captivates and motivates my students. They will then build on their reading by writing and recounting their own personal biographical and autobiographical narratives. My bridge-building goal is driven by a compelling vision to transcend cultural misunderstandings and misinformation and above all racial and cultural arrogance and prejudice, and to promote peace and harmony in the lives of my students in our classroom and in the world.
We will achieve this unity by employing the symbol of "mirrors" as a unifying theme. Mirror images abound in the literature of preconquest Mexico and they persist to this day. I wish to examine the literature of Mexico and Hispanic America through the mirrored lens, thereby linking los tiempos antiguos to modern times. I want my students to use the mirror images to see themselves and each other with a view to comprehending their own histories and the interdependencies that resulted from that famous and infamous encounter between Moctezuma and Cortes. Ultimately, my goal is to introduce the cultural faces of indigenous and Hispanic Mexico to their counterparts in the American Southwest and vice versa, with a view to recognition of self-in-other, and finally, looking squarely in the mirror themselves, to seeing Self with new eyes and with increased self-esteem. Con orgullo y con gusto. With pride and pleasure.
I wish to recreate, with the help and consensus of my students, a new kingdom of Aztlan in our classroom where students are safe, respected, valued, encouraged and loved—a "coming home" place—Aztlan!
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