Three Roads to Magdalena

Hundreds of hours of interviews plus decades of field work and research inform this substantive study that, as its author explains, “is written at the intersection of borderland and childhood history” (p. x). The richest insights come from memories presented in personal stories that David Wallace Adams uses most thoughtfully. His work navigates the cultural context and social intersections of three distinct groups within the immediate region of Magdalena—Hispanics, Anglos, and Navajos. What emerges is a multicultural, yet remarkably intimate, portrait of a distinct place in the American Southwest. Located in the high mountain country of west central New Mexico, the town takes its name from a nearby peak that, according to legend, reminded Spanish soldiers of a mountain in their homeland. By the late 1880s, “What had once been a raw-boned frontier settlement was now the regional shipping point for cattle, sheep, wool, and mineral ore” (p. 17). High hopes and boom times gave way to a slow decline, but what captures Adams's attention is the generations of children who tried to make sense of the “world they were born into, a world where the crosscurrents of race, class, gender, and religion, cut in ways both predictable and surprising” (p. 18). The predictable appears through accounts of early childhood with stories of birth, family, work, play, and religion. The surprising emerges most readily once children from each group start attending school. The Alamo Navajos who lived outside Magdalena and were separated from the “Big Navajos” have the most difficult tales of education, including being sent away to boarding schools. Eventually, they attended school in Magdalena, where a federal program provided dormitories. Yet, when they finally established a “community” school on their own land, a substantial number of Navajos chose to stay in the Magdalena schools. As for the Hispanic and Anglo students, they continued to sort out their interactions in classrooms and on playing fields, where memories of taunts, fights, and occasional friendships demonstrated the dynamics of bicultural and tricultural existence. Some boundaries were crossed with team sports like basketball or at school dances, but courtship and marriage provided more lasting results for a few.

Archaeology · Baby boom · Context (archaeology) · Ethnology · Frontier · Genealogy · Geography · Homeland · Immigration · Legend · Multiculturalism · Political science · Politics · Population · Settlement (finance) · Sociology · Demography · Gender Studies · History · Migration, Health, Geopolitics, Historical Geography