On Corn Mothers, Absent and Otherwise

Perhaps Ramon Gutierrez was attempting something cute and postmodern when he titled and arranged the contents of his book, When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality, and Power in New Mexico, 1500-1846. Despite the promise of the title, perhaps only a third gets devoted to marriage and issues of power (allegedly focusing on ‘how marriage structures inequality’ or something to that effect); if sexuality means ‘sex,’ as it often does in these sorts of books, then it’s interspersed in that one-third. Otherwise, there are a few discussions of the indigenous New Mexicans’ apparently prolifigate sexuality and sexual practices, including one brief, unsubstantiated paragraph promising that the Pueblo engaged in bi-sexual identification and other no doubt fascinating gender constructions suppressed by the evil Franscicans.

Alas, whatever promise the indigenous people hold- reconstructed voices, recovered narratives, yadda, yadda- Gutierrez either loses interest in or realizes that his tenuous evidence base can no longer be forced to support his constructions. As a result, most of the book ends up being a hybrid (ha ha) narrative/analysis of the history of Spanish conquest and colonisation of New Mexico. This is not, I think, necessarily a bad thing- some of the sections describing the history of Spanish activity were useful enough, at least in terms of giving an idea of what was going on in the Spanish world. However, the stated premises of the book- focus on the indigenous (hence the ‘Corn Mothers’), and marriage and sexual practice- strangely disappear for the bulk of the study. And when Gutierrez does examine his stated themes, he either suffers from a poor evidence base, as with the indigenous, or slips into tenacious moralizing, as with his descriptions of the Franciscans. Despite his valorous intentions of giving voice to the Pueblo people, depending upon far-flung anthropological studies and time-collapsed, mostly external, even deeply hostile, sources is probably not the best way to go about, one would think. Certain contradictions become evident: the indigenous swing between sexually promiscuous, the pueblos veritable havens of free love- yet with the intrusion of Spaniards into the narrative, it becomes clear that the indigenous women are not quite so free with their bodies as they initially appear. Granted, Gutierrez attempts a resolution, but the problem remains that all of his evidence for these attitudes flows from either contemporary Spanish accounts, or from modern-day anthropological/ethnographic studies. In describing the indigenous, chronology clearly does not matter: as with so many other writers, we are implicitly given to understand that non-European socities are refuges of the unchanging, their myths and rituals subsisting mystically outside the streams of time. Whether this is rooted in some metaphysical speculation or the simple utility of having a larger source base through ignoring dates is immaterial.