Remembering the Past, Contesting the Past

We end the course, and this blog concludes, with an examination of one location of struggle over the interpretation and continued meanings of the Spanish conquest, in this case the conquest and settlement of New Mexico. Acting as a microcosm of sorts, the modern dispute over how to remember/memorialize/monumentalize the Conquest is emblematic of disputes over history not just in the Americas but throughout the modern world. Invariably comparisons to Hitler appear, as do allegations of genocide, racism, political correctness, and a host of others, often deployed by all sides involved. As several of the articles this week noted, the violence of the past is re-projected, ‘ligamentally,’ into the present, as different groups and individuals within those groups align themselves with a real or perceived identity- both genealogical and presently emotional- between themselves and the actors in the past.

The problem, of course, addressed somewhat across these articles, is that the past- and the present- is terribly messy. There are not, in the end, the sorts of clear good guys and bad guys we would like to uncover and deploy. Nor does the past fit neatly into our present day conceptions; only through a conscious or unconscious process of effacement and selective addition can any side in a given conflict or construction of memory arrive at the desired ends. Some things must be forgotten; some things must be deliberately remembered in order to arrive at forgetting. Even more problematically, few struggles over memory exist in a strict binary which could lend itself to clear good guys and bad guys across time. In the case of New Mexico, Hispanics can lay claim to their own narrative of oppression and violence directed against them, whether via stories of the massacres of Po’pay’s revolt, or of later Anglo-American conquest and domination. They can simultaneously employ narratives of victory and of subjugation, while also being subjected to the charge of being oppressive and racist themselves.

I am reminded in all of this of my own conflicted experience and identity as a white Southern American (with indigenous ancestry as well, though its history of deployment in my own family and across the South is ambiguous and conflicted): articulations of Southern identity and memory seem to largely oscillate between being the ‘bad Americans’ whose past (and present) is a fitting target for opprobrium and disgust by non-Southerners. As white yet highly rural and still heavily religious the white South provides, and has long provided, a convenient location to express emotions and sentiments that would be dangerous to deploy against non-white minorities. Yet the all too typical white Southerner’s reaction to this effective demonization and marginalization is to go in the opposite direction, and to seek to efface and forget the very real ‘sins of our fathers’; the present our past as only one of heroics and proudly produced and defended traditional culture, without allowing for any of the messiness and moral ambiguity and outright abuses and evils that also make up our past (and the past of everyone else on the planet). Navigating between these two extremes is not restricted to us, or to the heirs of the Spanish conquest. It is- if I may indulge in a universal statement- an experience that spans the globe, even if it is not always felt with the same acuteness. Finding ways of remembering and even constructing the past- our pasts, real and imagined- has long been a human endeavor, and we still have a great ways to go before we come to any sort of truly constructive and humane conclusion.