Jumano Milpa
A mini essay storytelling the drawing…
Jumano Milpa (Aug 2021), Maternal figure and child with striped tattoos, as many ancestral Jumano peoples of the Chihuahuan desert were documented to wear, being called "gente rayada," tending to a small garden plot of corn and squash. Other cosmological-cultural-natural elements dance around the image.
Although there may not have been a need or even a practice for extensive agriculture, Jumanos, Julimes, Tobosos, Sumas, Conchos, and other ancestral communities of La Junta de Los Ríos cultivated small gardens with 3-sisters and other food medicines, that supplemented their extensive trade economies and “hunting and gathering” traditions. La Junta is the historical and cultural region nearby the Big Bend of the Río Grande, where the river meets with the Río Conchos at the so-called “Texas/Chihuahua border.”
According to Enrique Madrid, Jumano Apache historian, La Juntan pueblos historically may have used “floodplain agriculture” along with other more advanced irrigation methods near the Río Grande & Río Conchos. Rains were also deeply important and rainy seasons played important roles in our Jumano/La Juntan ancestors’ ceremonial-agricultural cycles, as Madrid says, “the La Junta natives must have been moved by powerful religious impulses,” in his observation of the summer monsoon rains (16-17). Going about a 3 hour drive west near El Paso, a rock art painting of "Tlaloc," the "Mesoamerican" "god" of Rain can be found in Hueco Tanks. Archaeologists theorize that the goggle-eyed imagery of "Tlaloc," along with cultural worldviews, from the culture region called "Mesoamerica" (or better Anahuac) near present-day Southern Mexico/Central America may have been shared through trade and migratory relationships with the so-called "Southwest."
One of the first so-called "explorers" to visit the region was Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, who was led to La Junta de los Ríos after being shipwrecked on the Gulf coast on his way to Tenochtitlan. After traveling through the lands now known as Texas, Jumano ancestors being a really welcoming people, greeted Cabeza de Vaca with corn, beans, and squash (Madrid 16-17). The three sisters have historically and continue to be staple foods for many peoples on Turtle Island/North America. Corn is a crop that was created through a deep relationship between human beings and the grain teosinte in Southern Mexico/Central America more than 6,000 years ago. Like Paula Domingo Olivares says, “Maíz is like a human being; it cannot grow without human care and human beings cannot grow without maíz” (Rodriguez xvi), we are reminded that corn and human beings have a symbiotic relationship. Through a millennia of observation, science, and sacred relationship, corn has evolved and dispersed into the hundreds of varieties we have today. Recently, archaeologist Bryon Shroeder has found ancient maíz remains in a burial site within the Spirit Eye cave in the Chinati Mountains in West Texas, nearby La Junta. Radiocarbon dating of the cobs say that they are at least 2,000 years old (Shroeder 2), which leads to the possibility that the distribution of corn and relationships between said cultural regions are much much older and deeper than many are led to think.
La Junta de los Ríos was/is culturally diverse, because of its location by major waterways and being an important location for trade. On the bottom right is a pottery vessel in the Casas Grandes style of the ancestral puebloan Paquimé culture of Chihuahua. Paquimé was one of the largest trading locations in “North America,” which connected “Mesoamerica” to the north from about 1130 AD-1450AD. The more “ancient” cultures of the La Junta that existed around those times were linked through trade and possibly more intimate ways with those of Paquimé— which is why I added the vessel with corn seeds, to signify the ways corn also traveled through those trading relationships. Jumanos, whom are documented as having both sedentary communities centralized at La Junta, and semi-sedentary trading groups, maintained trade relationships with these routes and those more north. The ancestral communities of these regions maintained a vast economic-cultural connection between so-called "Mesoamerica," the "Southwest," and the "Plains" well into the colonial era, after the 1500s.
Floating in the air are symbols found on rock art along the Lower Pecos River and the Big Bend areas of Texas. Although I personally do not know what they mean, I feel very drawn to them. I once had a dream several years ago that encouraged me to see how rock art can tell the story of deep relationships... how symbols can be shared across time and space, even with the diversity of languages and landscapes. I feel they serve as a reminder of an older way of knowing.
I am reminded by the words of Xicana/Odami artist Celia Herrera Rodriguez:
“Looking at indigenous cultures, before all of the claiming of territory and borders, certain elements recur. There is consistency underneath all the variation in our nations that are older than contemporary tribal affiliations. The simple fact is that knowledge was passed down and shared amongst Indigenous peoples of this land. Acknowledging this can give us an idea of the development of thought on this continent. By looking at symbols and responding intuitively to them (and this can be deceptive because of colonization, with its patriarchal and Christian overlays), we can base our interpretation on something more reliable than the politics of the day. This requires us that we ‘get out of the way to know.’ Sometimes we're wrong. But if we don't take the chance we are left with the uninspired, perverse version of ourselves that the U.S. and México have handed to us” (Moraga 202).
The story of “loss” and “extinction” permeates the mainstream narrative about the Indigenous world of La Junta de los Ríos. This story of “extinction” is fabricated by settler societies in order to justify genocide, disenfranchisement, and the non-recognition of many peoples and descendants of nations that have been present in the area for millennia. In the late 1700s, Jumanos and other La Juntan peoples are written out of “existence,” through paper genocide, as they no longer were written in Spanish documents. In the 1800s, with the establishment of settler-state governments, once Mexico gained independence from Spain in 1821 and the region then being divided by the United States after the Treaty of Guadalupe in 1848, a series of genocidal policies were created to further “erase” the region’s Indigenous people. Formally organized communities and nations of people became “assimilated” into both “Hispanic” and “American” ways of life and hid their Indigenous ways and identities, under the guise of “mestizaje” and “americanism” in order to survive in the next era. The “cultural amnesia” that Cherrie Moraga speaks about in her work, also plagues the long-standing communities of the region through the loss of ancestral memory. This includes part of my family, who then migrated from the region in the mid-1900s to become migrant farm workers.
Madrid states that “past cultural processes […] still reside in the consciousness of the people,“ even if “Very little is known about the prehistory, the history, the culture and the religion of the Native Americans of La Junta de los Ríos” (64). This drawing is a small act of recovery, drawing on various historical elements and exploring subconscious memories to make sense of a world before our own. I wonder sometimes if exploring ancestral memory is not worthwhile; who is to know for sure that what emerges is true? Celia Herrera Rodriguez asks us to “get out of the way to know,” yet as we attempt to understand our roots, how do we know what we “see” is authentic, honest, and not saturated in romanticism? I believe in the possibility of reindigenization— a process that many are committed to that seeks to restore balance, right relationship with the land, undue the colonial project, heal from settler violence, and center the leadership of Indigenous peoples and others impacted by colonization. With navigating competing identity politics, internalized oppression, lateral violence, and ongoing systemic violence towards colonized people, it becomes exhausting to even want to continue on, and my vision becomes cloudy with self-doubt. It is a hefty task, yet it is possible that the restoration of ancestral memory can be a powerful tool that can help lead the way. I am reminded of the power of dreams, the wandering mind, the subtle hum, synchronicity, and family oral story.
Nana remembers working in the corn fields. As a teenager, Nana’s parents moved their family to Digiorgio, a segregated farm working camp designated for Mexican migrant farm workers, near Bakersfield, California. While in high school, Nana worked the corn fields, pouring pesticide powder on each of the cobs.
Unfortunately, the over exposure exposure to pesticides for a lot of her family caused various sicknesses from porphyria to cancer, taking her youngest sister and mother at young ages.
Nana loves to eat corn. She remembers walking down isles and isles of green corn stalks, and then taking a few cobs herself home to eat. She tells me how she loved being able to bring corn home, and that corn with butter was her favorite thing to eat.
Nana also remembers her father having his own small garden plot, wherever they found themselves living as they hopped around from town to town following the crops. She loved to watch him grow his own corn, tomatoes, squash, and other foods.
I wonder if any traditional farming knowledge ever continued to be passed down in families once they became part of the influx of people working for large-scale industrial farming. The majority of people working the fields of California have historically and continue to be majority Indigenous-rooted people. I see large-scale farming as an extension of the colonial project, benefiting from the uprooting of brown bodies from their homes, and using their labor in order to feed the masses. The same thing happens with the genetic modification and standardization of seeds, erasing the beautiful diversity that is ancestral foods… that is who are as human beings.
To return to La Junta de los Ríos, the mid-1700s is considered the “last phase” of Jumano history, according to mainstream historians that uphold the “extinction” narrative of Indigenous peoples of the region. The Catholic missionization project was very heavy during that era, and many of the La Juntan pueblos found that joining the missions and presidios forging themselves in the area served their best interest. The lack of documentation does not mean that the people ceased to exist, but adapted to a rapidly changing cultural and political landscape. Although much ancestral culture is said to be “gone,” in Madrid’s analysis of a Spanish report written by the “explorer” Joseph de Ydoiga between 1747-1748 in La Junta, he found that “Native American farming methods reported by Ydoiga— with a few improvements— are still in use almost 250 years later” (20). The material reality and the collective memory of people of the region will demonstrate survivance and resilience. Madrid telling us of the continuation of ancestral farming methods sheds light on cultural continuity… deeply rooted in a corn culture that spans thousands of years.
References
Madrid, Enrique. (1996). Native American and Mestizo Farming at La Junta de los Ríos. The Journal for Big Bend Studies, Sul Ross State University, 8, 15-31.
Madrid, Enrique. (2003). The Lost Mission of El Polvo: Searching for the History of a State Archaeological Landmark. The Journal of Big Bend Studies, Sul Ross State University, 15, 55-68.
Moraga, Cherrie. (2011). Sola, Pero Bien Acomapañada: The Art of Celia Herrera Rordriguez. A Xicana Codex of Changing Consciousness. Duke University Press, 200-207.
Rodriguez, Roberto. (2014). Cente Tlakatl Ke Cente Cintli: Paula Domingo Olivares. Our Sacred Maíz Is Our Mother: Indigeneity and Belonging in the Americas. University of Arizona Press, xv-xvi.
Shroeder, Bryon. (2018). Trans-Pecos Perishables and the Evolution of Maize. La Vista de la Frontera, 28. Center for Big Bend Studies, Sul Ross State University, 1-2).
