Cabeza de Baca, Fabiola (1894–1991)
Born in northern New Mexico on May 16, 1894 (although some sources give her birth date as 1898), Fabiola Cabeza de Baca became a famous home economist, teacher, folklorist, and writer. She was one of several New Mexican women, such as Cleofas M. Jaramillo and Nina Otero-Warren, who wrote of the culture and heritage of their Hispano ancestors. Her parents came from long-established Hispano families who had been in New Mexico for over 200 years. Her grandparents raised her from the age of four, after her mother died, leaving Fabiola with one brother and two sisters. She attended the Loretto Academy in Las Vegas and after graduating from high school became a teacher in a rural area six miles from her father’s ranch in La Liendre. In 1921 she received a B.A. degree from New Mexico Normal (now New Mexico Highlands University) and in 1929 a B.S. in home economics from New Mexico College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts (now New Mexico State University). In between she also spent one year studying in Spain.
For over thirty years she worked as an extension agent, teaching the traditional ways of preparing foods and emphasizing the nutritional value in the native diet. Two of her books, Historic Cookery and The Good Life, depict the way of life of the Hispanos in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In We Fed Them Cactus she presents a biography and ethnography of her family, especially her grandmother, a strong woman and a curandera, and retells the stories narrated to her by her father. She depicts the arrival of the Hispano pioneers on the llano (plains) of western New Mexico in the 1830s, and also that of the Anglos in the 1880s, the loss of land, the fencing-in of the plains, and the end of the era with the death of her father. The title of the book refers to the custom in New Mexico of feeding cattle cactus to keep them alive during droughts. In The Good Life, not a long book, Cabeza de Baca creates a fictional family, the Turrietas, and uses their story to narrate the rituals, customs, food, and culture of New Mexico. The customs of Christmas, Lent, marriage, and a funeral are presented, along with many recipes of the foods prepared for these celebrations. She wrote many articles for various New Mexican publications. In 1959 she retired but continued to work giving lectures, writing, and acting as a consultant to the Peace Corps. She died at the age of ninety-seven on October 14, 1991.
Genaro Padilla refers to her writing as “folkloric autobiography,” a significant genre, since it is one of the few kinds of writing by Hispanos that depicts the life they either experienced or learned from their ancestors at the turn of the century. Her folkloric work is extremely important because she wrote about women and how their complicated and elaborate daily work so profoundly maintained the culture and traditions of the Hispanos. Cabeza de Baca was an active member of many community organizations and was president in 1955 of the New Mexico Folklore Society.
References Cabeza de Baca 1954, 1982; Padilla 1991; Perrigo 1985; Ponce 1992; Rebolledo 1989, 1994
Calavera (Skeleton)
A bony skeleton and/or the skull of a skeleton. The calavera has become the symbol of the downtrodden, who must laugh at life in order to survive it. It is also used to mean a drunkard or a very stupid person. During the celebrations of the holy day Día de los Muertos, candy skulls are made and sold in bakeries throughout Mexico and the United States. These skulls may be placed on home altars or given as gifts to children, family, and friends. The Mexican artist and printmaker Jose Guadalupe Posada started drawing calaveras during the late nineteenth century to coincide with this holiday. Their popularity is primarily attributed to him and his work. His images of calaveras have been reproduced thousands of times and can be found year-round, but especially during celebrations of Día de los Muertos. Posada printed many calaveras during the period of the presidency of Porfirio Díaz and during the Mexican Revolution. He introduced the humorous satirical calavera that showed the objectionable side of life, that engaged in regular daily activities such as eating, dancing, drinking, fighting, enjoying life, and being a regular Mexican. The Mexican concept of death is exemplified in the satiric antics of the calavera and this perspective is also found in the art, literature, and performance arts of Chicanos. Calaveras are depicted dancing, drinking in cantinas (bars), crowding and falling out of buses, and playing instruments in musical groups. El Teatro Campesino in its performances always has a calavera character that either represents La Muerte (death) or typifies a disturbing alter ego of one of the main characters.
A Mexican tradition of the late nineteenth century was the publication of a poetic broadside that was called a calavera. Published before or during the festivities of Día de los Muertos, these calaveras carried poems that poked fun at socially prominent people such as politicians and the very wealthy. Some calaveras, such as the poems, were printed in newspapers, but most were small pamphlets or single sheets that were sold on the street. For a small fee, people could hire a composer to write a calavera for them and draw a skeleton to go with it. According to Tinker, “their main functions are to remind us in a good-humored way that we all are mortal, and to poke fun at friends and attack public officials. These last are supposed to take it all in good grace. Calaveras are still published every November 1 in many cities of Mexico, and in some cities in Texas, notably San Antonio” (Tinker 1961, 20). The calavera is now an integral element of Mexican and Chicano folk art and it adorns murals, stationery, postcards, party invitations and decorations, and even religious art.
See also Día de los Muertos; La Muerte
References Carmichael and Sayer 1991; Día de los Muertos 1983; Morrison 1992; Tinker 1961
Califas (California)
An in-group name for California used continuously since at least 1940. It was originally used by the pachucos (1940s youths) in the jargon they developed in the 1930s. Los referred to Los Angeles, which was also called Losca, meaning Los Angeles, California. Barker’s glossary of pachuco words from Arizona shows that the name Califa, without the s, was used to mean a boy from California. Today, Chicanos continue to refer to Califas, when speaking of California, in an affectionate and proprietary manner. The name can be found in art and literature as well as in academic and official documents. Not infrequently the return address on an envelope will be Califas, Aztlán.
See also Pachucos
References Barker 1974; Braddy 1971
California Folklore
The settlement of California by Spanish colonizers happened much later than in New Mexico and Texas. The first Franciscan mission was established in San Diego in 1769, 200 years after the exploration of New Mexico. A second great difference was that many of the Spanish settlers came by way of Mexico, so many of them represented a mestizo (mixed-race) culture rather than a purely sixteenth-century Spanish culture, as the earlier explorers had. Many were Mexican Spaniards and of course did not bring the Spanish language and culture of the Golden Age of Spain with them. Their Spanish language and culture had evolved into a slightly New World variant.
The population of California did not grow much during the eighteenth century, and after the independence of Mexico from Spain in 1821, Spanish culture quickly declined in the region. Many Spaniards left the region, and the great migration of thousands of Anglo American gold seekers took place, so the Spanish culture and language could not survive in California as it did in Texas and New Mexico. By 1880 the Mexican, or Californio, inhabitants of the state represented 1 percent of the total population. At the turn of the century the Chicano population in Los Angeles was only 5 percent. It wasn’t until 1910, with the beginnings of a revolution in Mexico, that the first large wave of Mexican immigration was felt in California.
In discussing Hispano folklore, Aurelio M. Espinosa, the foremost Mexican American folklorist of the early twentieth century, delineated three generations of Hispanics in California. First were the Mexican Spaniards who settled the region in the eighteenth century and their descendents, called Californios, who represented the California Spanish traditions that Espinosa most wanted to study. Second were the Mexicans who continued to migrate into California during the nineteenth century, and these people, as Espinosa delicately put it, were “gente de mas baja condición y cultura” (people of a lower condition and culture) (1930, 301). And third, as he wrote his study in the 1920s, he found many Spaniards who had recently immigrated to California from Andalucía in Spain and who represented a Spain from a different era, and not that of the Spanish Californios. As he states, he collected romances from the true Californios, mostly from the Monterey region. In addition, he collected folktales, proverbs, ballads, and other lore, which were published in the California Folklore Quarterly in the 1940s.
A renowned proponent of Mexican Spanish folklore in the Southwest and California was Charles F. Lummis (1859–1928), a self-taught photographer, ethnologist, musicologist, journalist, and the founder of the Southwest Museum in Los Angeles. Lummis “discovered” the Mexicans in Colorado, New Mexico, and California in the 1880s and 1890s and became enamored of the Mexican way of life, especially of their “hospitality, courtesy, and respect for age” (Heisley 60). He collected oral traditions, specifically Spanish folk songs, from Mexicans in New Mexico and California and felt an urgency to record them before they disappeared. The Southwest Museum holds hundreds of songs he recorded on wax cylinders, songs in Spanish and in twenty-four Indian languages from southern California. He equated Spanish folk songs with the romantic past of the Californios and Mexicans and felt almost a nostalgic fascination for early California history and the era of the large ranchos. In his own words, “The Romance of California is Spanish Romance. Everybody knows that who knows anything” (1923b, 9).
Although not a trained folklorist, Arnold Rojas writes of the vaquero (cowboy) culture of California, especially in the San Joaquin Valley at the turn of the century and into the first third of the 1900s. He describes the life of the Mexican vaqueros, how their lives were spent working on large ranches like the Tejon Ranch and the Kern County Land Co. Their lives were very narrowly focused on cattle and ranch life and they all spoke mostly Spanish. In his reminiscences of vaquero culture and of the impact Mexican Sonorans had on California, Rojas shows a side of Chicano culture not commonly known. Born in California, where his mother and grandmother were also born, it is clear he loved the life he lived. He writes of La Llorona and Joaquín Murrieta, and of Tiburcio Vásquez, who once gave food to his grandmother and mother when they were fleeing from the gringos in Los Angeles.
There are no overall written accounts or collections of the oral traditions and folklore of the early Californios as we have of the Hispanos of New Mexico. In Angustias de la Guerra, Ord’s Occurrences in Hispanic California, she describes some customs, but her work was not intended to preserve for history the way of life of the Californios. Glimpses of customs, games, dances, theater, and other traditions can be found in the writings of early western travelers, although these were often depicted prejudicially and with a lack of historical context. Spanish-language newspapers from the late nineteenth century exhibit folk customs and traditions. The folklore collected from Mexicans and Mexican Americans in the twentieth century, even if it’s from a third- or fourth-generation Chicano, generally will be folklore from Mexico transplanted to California since the turn of the century by immigrants fleeing a revolutionary war, or those coming to work in the agriculture fields. Of course it could also originate in New Mexico or Texas, since there has been much migration into California by Chicanos from those states. Folktales, jests, folk songs, corridos (ballads), and customs related to religious and secular holidays, foods, and other folk traditions found in contemporary California will have a lot in common with those found in other southwestern states and with Mexico. Chicano students have taken an active interest in folklore in the last twenty years, and archives established at the University of California at Berkeley and Los Angeles hold growing collections of many genres of Mexican American folklore. There are published collections from the 1970s and 1980s of folk medicine rituals and folk narratives collected primarily from Mexican immigrants in the Los Angeles area, but there is still much fieldwork to be done in this area.
See also Espinosa, Aurelio Macedonio
References Espinosa 1925, 1930; Espinosa Jr. 1947; Heisley 1985; Lummis 1923a, 1923b; Miller 1973; Ord 1956; Peña 1989; Robe 1976; Roeder 1988; Rojas 1958, 1979; Sanchez 1993
Caló (Spanish Slang)
Caló comes from the gypsy word zincaló, which is one of the idioms of the Spanish gypsies. It is a very old argot influenced by many languages, including French, English, Italian, Greek, and Hebrew, and was spoken by the gypsies of Spain. It was brought to New Spain by the Spanish conquistadores, where it continued to be identified as the language of the poor, the uneducated, and also the criminal class. Caló became the dialect of the underworld of Mexico City and migrated into the Southwest, as some believe, through the city of El Paso.
Published studies of the speech of the Chicano investigate the diverse communication modes by examining the language that reflects the cultural experiences of the various subcultures of Mexican and Chicano communities. Some of these idioms are the pachuco dialect, Chicano Spanish, New Mexico colonial Spanish, south Texas vocabulary, caló, and the argot of the tirilones of El Paso. The pachuco dialect has been especially influenced by caló; it was and still is primarily a male speech and if used by women they were considered to be street women or girlfriends of gang members. Today, however, many words from caló are fully integrated into the standard -vocabulary of Chicano Spanish, and writers incorporate it into poetry, short stories, and novels. What makes caló and its appropriation into Chicano Spanish distinct is its use by working-class Chicanos and Mexicanos. It is a shared language across the Mexican-U.S. border, equally used on both sides.
The vocabulary of Chicano Spanish is congested with Old World words, words from the pachuco era, and consequently heavily influenced by caló. Chicanos have a sense of pride in being aware of these words and expressions, and knowing how to use them. There are many studies that examine the Spanish spoken by Chicanos and several published dictionaries of Chicano Spanish and of caló. Most of the studies provide examples of the male use of caló, but there is recent research that shows that female cholas and pachucas also have an extensive vocabulary in caló. Galindo’s studies of Chicana prisoners show the social importance of caló in conveying a “sense of intimacy and camaraderie between women who shared similar life experiences and acquaintances” (1993, 34).
One published dictionary of caló, by Jay Rosensweig, presents caló in a rather harsh manner, referring to it as gutter Spanish, which prompted a reader to take the privilege of writing a comment on the title page of the book. This example of “book graffiti” is presented here because it is an excellent example of the use of Chicano Spanish influenced by caló and used at an opportune moment:
Este gabacho pendejo y su pinche libro no valen ni un coraje
—que vaya a agarrar las nalgas a la puta que le parió.
(This stupid gringo and his f— book aren’t worth anger;
he can go grab the buttocks of the whore that gave him birth.)
“La Vida de un Bato Loco,” written by an informant of Linda Katz and reproduced in her work, provides a good example of the literary uses of caló. Katz includes a glossary of the caló words used in the story.
See also Bato; Cholos; Pachucos
References Barker 1974; Cerda and Farias 1953; Coltharp 1965; Galindo 1992, 1993; Hinojosa 1975; Katz 1974; Ortega 1977, 1991; Rosensweig 1973; Sagel 1992
Campa, Arthur Leon (1905–1978)
One of a handful of Hispanic folklorists who have spent their careers studying the folk songs, folk theater, customs, traditions, and folkways of the Hispanic population of the Southwest. Arthur Leon Campa was a pioneer in his study of the folklore of the Hispanic population primarily of New Mexico and Colorado. His great achievement and comprehensive work, Hispanic Culture in the Southwest, was published in 1979, one year after his death. Campa was born on February 20, 1905, in Guaymas, Sonora, Mexico, the third of five children. His early years were spent mostly in Mexico, in Baja California and Sonora. His father, Daniel Campa, was a lieutenant in the Federal Army and was killed in 1914 by Pancho Villa revolutionaries. His mother, Delfia Lopez de la O, American-born, returned with her children to the United States. First they settled in a ranch outside of El Paso, and later she moved to Albuquerque, where she opened a store and restaurant.
Arthur Campa earned a B.A. (1928) and an M.A. (1930) from the -University of New Mexico, and a Ph.D. from Columbia University (1940). Campa taught at the University of New Mexico from 1932 to 1942, and again after World War II from 1945 to 1946. In 1946 he became the chair of the Department of Modern Languages and Literature at the University of Denver, and he stayed there until he retired in 1974. Campa wrote nine books, nine bulletins, and forty-nine articles, mostly about folklore, but also on the Spanish language. He considered Hispanic Culture in the Southwest his most important achievement. This comprehensive work is a cultural history of the Hispanic population of California, Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico, and the Texas-Mexico border region. Campa presents the salient char-acteristics of Hispanic culture—customs, language, arts and crafts, and witchcraft—while also discussing distinctive character traits such as individualism, as well as the right to be and the right to do, perspectives on time, and remnants of the medieval honor code. He married Lucille Cushing in 1943 and they had four children. He died of a heart attack on May 13, 1978.
References Arellano and Vigil 1980; Campa 1976, 1979, 1980
Camposanto (Cemetery)
The place where Chicanos and Mexicanos bury their dead is called a camposanto, a “holy field” or “field of the saints.” Although some people use the better-known term cementerio, meaning “cemetery,” camposanto is a word still used in many families. Interestingly, some Spanish dictionaries define the word as a “cemetery for Catholics,” whereas they define cementerio as an “enclosed place for burying the dead.”
Camposantos are important in Chicano families, and the concept of death is always present in personal narratives, songs, and in the religious holy days observed. El Día de los Muertos, or All Souls’ Day, is a religious and folk holy day that is devoutly celebrated; it usually includes a visit to the cemetery. The family cleans the grave sites of loved ones, sets up flowers and candles, and visits with and prays for the departed. During the rest of the year, attendance to burial sites does not diminish, and graves are kept decorated and colorful.
During the colonial period of New Spain, burials were made within the church itself, as was the tradition in medieval Spain. Spaniards and the clergy were allowed to be buried in the missionary churches, whereas the mestizos (people of mixed race) and Indians were buried in the camposanto located in front or to the right of the church. By the late eighteenth century, the Catholic Church forbade additional burials inside churches, supposedly for public health reasons, but the ricos, the well-to-do, continued to buy their way into the churches. So the camposantos were still left for the poor mestizos. A recognizable sign of a colonial frontier camposanto was a large public, eight-foot wooden cross that stood in the front or center of the cemetery. Some can still be found today in rural parts of northern New Mexico and Texas. Another feature that can also still be found in parts of the Southwest is segregation and isolation from Anglo cemeteries. Many were located side by side but were fenced off and had separate entrances. The sites chosen for rural camposantos were often on tierra muerta, barren land that was too poor to cultivate.
Cemetery and graveyard decorating traditions have been researched and written about as a means of appreciating and understanding Mexican folk beliefs about death and grieving. The adornment of grave sites reflects religious folk practices, and ethnic and family attitudes about death and remembrance. Some of the customs include decorating and designing a space that will be revisited by a family for many generations. The intent is to keep the deceased person alive in the family’s memory. Some design motifs that are distinctive to Chicano cemeteries are the construction and design of crosses. Terry Jordan’s book has an illustration of twelve different “subtypes of wooden Latin crosses found on Mexican graves in Texas” (78). In the nineteenth and even into the twentieth century crosses were built of wood, but these didn’t last long, being destroyed either by the elements or by vandalism. More common today are crosses made of molded concrete. Many grave sites have a cerquito, a low wood, metal, or concrete fence, an enclosure that surrounds an individual grave. Another common trait is to construct a cement grave marker, with a nicho (niche) built into it, so that the statue of a saint, La Virgen de Guadalupe, or a photograph of the deceased can be placed in it. Sometimes a concrete cross will have a nicho built into its base for the same purpose. Although fresh flowers are often placed at grave sites, paper and plastic flowers are more common. Colorful plastic wreaths are sometimes attached to the wooden or cement cross. Another dis-tinguishing feature in Chicano camposantos is the wide range of materials used in decorating a grave. As with home yard shrines and home altars, everyday objects are used as personal and artistic statements. It is often in the performance of highly charged personal rituals that people create folklore, folk art, and folk music.
Many grave markers are brightly painted, and some even have religious scenes painted on them. This tradition has been linked to Mexico’s indigenous heritage, for, as Terry Jordan states, “Such use of color in a sacred context has ample pre-Columbian precedent in Mexico, where even the huge pyramids once bore bright paints” (80). He goes on to say, “Hispanic graveyards are places of color, where paints, flowers, and tiles combine to comfort the bereaved and startle the gringo” (88).
See also Altars; Folk Art; Nichos
References Barber 1993; Gosnell and Gott 1992; Griffith 1985; Jordan 1982; Sanborn 1989
