An Extraordinary Experience at UNM-Taos Bachelors and Graduate Program

Last night, my penultimate class for UNM’s Bachelors and Graduate Program in Taos, where I have been teaching upper division courses (300 and 400 level courses in comparison to the Taos Branch’s 100 and 200 level courses) since 2010, I was reminded of T.R. Reid’s “It Happened in Taos,” a record of amazing accomplishment when government, however briefly, worked.

Reid was project director of the New Deal for the Roosevelt administration’s alphabet series of programs. The Taos Project coordinated some 36 agencies and 22 communities during the late 30s and early 40s in a battle against poverty with technical and financial support for health care, education, farming, training, construction, road-building, etc.

The federal programs came to an end due to WWII and the attempt to revive the efforts fell afoul of “McCarthyism” in the post war prejudice against “communal” and “cooperative” ventures because they sounded like communist conspiracies to politicians.

(My students watched the film “Salt of the Earth” and got a dose of the 50s prejudice against labor, minorities, women, and free speech.)

Today Pope Francis has mentioned the ravages of capitalism and pointed out how the poor are taken advantage of by the wealthy, not unlike the way Euro-Americans, who settled New Mexico in the days of Manifest Destiny came looking for gold and stole land but discovered, as second homers and moderns have, that the Land of Enchantment is a kind of funky antidote to capitalism.

My students read Plato’s “Life and Death of Socrates, followed by the Bible’s Book of Genesis and Gospel of Matthew as well as Shakespeare’s Hamlet. We followed with Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence and Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, along with Emerson’s “Self Reliance, Thoreau’s “ON Civil Disobedience,” Lincoln’s “Second Inaugural,” Baldwin’s “Notes of a Native Son,” and King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” Then we read Virginia Wool’s “Sketch of the Past” and “Death of a Moth.”

Lincoln used the Gettysburg Address to extend Jefferson’s notion of equality, which only applied to white men, as a way to transcend the U.S. Constitution, which ignored Indians and women and treated Black people as partial persons. Due to Lincoln’s principled leadership in the Civil War, the 14th amendment, passed in 1868, which guaranteed all native-born Americans citizenship and “due process.”

As a footnote to the 14th amendment, which allegedly extended and protected citizens, Congress passed in 1934, the Indian Reorganization Act, federal legislation that led to the recognition of Tribes and eventually the policies of self-determination, sovereignty, and the “Indian New Deal,” thanks to lobbying by the first Commissioner of Indian Affairs, John Collier under the Secretary of the Interior, Harold Ickes.

But American Indians i.e. Native Americans in New Mexico were not allowed to vote until 1948 when WWII vets sued for their rights, long after African American males began voting in 1868 and 28 years after white and black women got the right to vote in 1920. Today the white man still fights back against enfranchising so-called minorities as states under Republican control have continued to block the rainbow-hued population from reaching the ballot box.

Baldwin and King neatly sum up the scourge of racism and convoluted identity issues that affect the minority cultures in the country. Anyway the above summarizes what my students and I discussed during the course. In preparation for the last paper, I assigned a variety of books in terms the interests expressed by a semester of discussion.

Two Hispanic males presented George Sanchez’s “Forgotten People,” one of the inspirations for T.R. Reid’s Taos Project and “It happened in Taos.” Sanchez’s book, published in 1940 alalyzes New Mexico’s poor education system, high child mortality rate, poverty and los politicos’ narrow focus on roads and relatives while neglecting the community at large. Another Hispanic student, interested in the ravages done to the environment, summarized Sylvia Rodriguez’s fine book on “Acequias,” which includes a focus on both spiritual and irrigation practices in the Taos Valley.

Two residents of Taos Pueblo and a fellow traveler and ponsigh gave a passionate review of R.C. Gordon-McCutchan’s “Taos Indians and the Battle for Blue Lake,” a wonderful political thriller and tribute to the tenacity of Taos Pueblo leaders. My student, who could barely hold back her tears, said she was so proud of her people and wondered why the Taos Day School didn’t teach this book. She works in the tourist industry and said she loves telling the story of Taos Pueblo to rapt listeners.

For a comic interlude, my quirky poet in residence gave a quick and dirty review of the Taos saint of realtors and developers, one Arthur Manby. The serial killer was made famous in Frank Water’s “To Possess the Land.” We still don’t know if he is actually buried in Kit Carson Park or if a body, mangled beyond recognition, was substituted for Manby and he got away.

Finally, four women reviewed Marguerite Duras’s “The Lover,” a novel and film, set in the Indo-China (Vietnam) of the thirties. Herein existential themes as well as issues of ethnicity, gender, and race, romantic and carnal love compete for attention and complete the experience of reading Duras’s exemplary lyrical novel, based on her life.

(Alas my two philosophers, due to circumstances, weren’t in attendance to present Richard Rorty’s views from “Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity” on Nietzsche, Proust, and Heidegger.)

One of my students, who presented the class previously with Virginia Woolf’s “A Room of Her Own,” was encouraged to read the feminist artist by her grandmother, a well known Taos artist (RIP). She, my student, did not go to school as a child. “Were you home-schooled,” I asked. “No, I just did what I wanted.” She recounted how, growing up in Ranchos, her family participated in the community and benefitted from the barter and trade practices extant among neighbors, who grew their own vegetables. She’s graduating from UNM in May with a Bachelor’s Degree in Liberal Arts and going to graduate school.

Others students are applying to various graduate programs or just trying to complete their Bachelor’s degrees for the sake of their own edification and to see where an education might lead them.

The unsung hero of UNM Taos Bachelors and Graduate Program is Mary Lutz, who coordinated operations for students and faculty alike. During the last 22 years she has dedicated her life to making sure we in Taos enjoyed the academic freedom to create imaginative courses that appealed to local students. Students and faculty alike benefitted from the lively “face to face” exchange of ideas, thanks to Mary.

Hola and thank you, Mary.