Montana Standish

It’s Not A Cookie, It’s Our Culture

My first act of vandalism took place when I was five and my family had just moved into our new house in Santa Fe, New Mexico. I was in my room and decided to hold my own house warming party by using a metal screw I found to carve the word home into the wood siding of the window. The next day my father discovered the caveman letters cut deep into the wood of his new house and asked me if I was the “artist”. Always one to be proud of my work, I took full credit for the carving; not even aware that it is typically a bad idea to take responsibility for destroying property. Unlike future clumsy accidents such as breaking the front door, I was not punished after I explained myself. I think my dad saw past the number of dollars needed to be spent at Home Depot to replace the wood and instead recognized my carving as some kind of grand sentimental statement. Unfortunately, my work to come involving a blob of melted crayons on the carpet did not prove as intellectually stimulating.

I spent the first few years of my life in California, though I have little to no recollection of my time there. My family decided to move to Santa Fe where the cost of living was even higher, and the taxes haunted us ever since. Our first year there had its ups and downs. Most people were friendly but occasionally our California license plates elicited vandalism in the grocery store parking lots. My blonde, fair skinned sister went to the public high school where there were frequent stabbings and bomb threats. She handled it quite well however, and when asked how she managed not to get beat up by
the gangs she said she just made sure never to look anyone in the eyes. Making sure not to piss anyone off seemed to be the way to get along peacefully in New Mexico but there was an instance in which my father accidentally caused some trouble. Like most Anglo newcomers, he made the mistake of sounding like a dumb gringo.

One year we were at a Christmas party and they were serving the usual holiday foods of posole, green chile, tamales, and biscochitos. I was scampering around the room, no doubt eating things I found on the floor as little kids tend to do when my father called me over. He held up a sandy brown, cinnamon smelling treat and asked me if I wanted to try a cookie. This gruff, older native New Mexican man somehow heard my father use the word cookie and whipped his head around. He scowled at my father and me for a moment as he sized us up.

“It’s not a cookie, it’s our culture!” he barked at my father in his heavy accent.

The idea of culture as an object which could hypothetically be dipped in a glass of milk and eaten was new to my family. I was too young to realize the meaning of the metaphor. Thinking of the biscochito man getting angry over a baked good induced an outbreak of laughter from me for some time. Aside from being entertaining, this incident also supports Santa Fe’s claim of being “The City Different.”

When we moved to New Mexico we entered into a borderland world of cultural tradition combined with new age hippy antics that would take years for the rest of my family members to fully adjust to. In this way, I suppose I was the lucky one of my family to be raised in Santa Fe and have a native upbringing. I didn’t cry the first time I ate green chile and seeing grown homeless men walking down the street in women’s dresses never seemed to phase me. The first time I ate salsa I reported to my dad that it burned, but I wanted more. Thus I began my love affair with spicy foods as a slobbering toddler with an appetite for enchilada plates instead of the standard American chicken fried steak. I would have been confused to hear that most American kindergarteners did not sing De Colores daily. And, until recently, I never questioned the fact that hundreds of people gather each year in Santa Fe to burn a giant puppet named Zozobra. Growing up I just assumed that it was the same everywhere. The unusual was usual to me.

My parents never came right out and explained this to me. They didn’t sit me down and warn me that I would experience culture shock later in life. The realization that New Mexico was different from other places came slowly. It came from watching movies and wondering why all the houses had pointy roofs and none of the towns had Spanish names. It came from cross country road trips and observations of how green the grass was, without even being watered! Most of all, the realization of being different came from tourists from the outside world. I never noticed the unique aspects of living in the Southwest until I had them pointed out to me by foreigners. Slowly I began to piece together an understanding of my home based on my own experiences there and the perceptions of others.

What makes my own journey to understand and define the place I call home so confusing at times is that the Southwest is both a real and imagined enclosure. It has inspired some of the country’s most fantastic misperceptions and myths to the point where truth and fiction bleed into one another. Foreign ideas about New Mexico have
mixed with the desired image of the natives to create the place that I live in. My experiences growing up there and the public perception of what it means to grow up there are equally important. More often than not, depictions of the Southwest have grossly exaggerated the idea of a wild frontier where the barbaric natives are so backwards they still live in mud huts. I once heard a young tourist boy ask his parents where all the cowboys and “injuns” were as they strolled along downtown where some of the country’s most impressive art galleries are. That young boy did not just imagine the misperception; his parents planted the idea somewhere in his mind even though they also must have been aware of Santa Fe’s modernity if they had chosen it as a sight seeing location.

In contemporary times, the Southwest has been highly romanticized as some kind of desert utopia full of open minds and the real issues of racial tensions, poverty, and drunk driving are glossed over. I learned just how far off most of the country is when it comes to understanding New Mexico when I moved to the Midwest for college. Until I left my home, I was unaware of all the mystery and confusion that surrounds my home. It seems that many Americans have yet to even recognize New Mexico as an actual state even though the United States claimed the territory in 1912. Nearly a century later and people are still under the impression that New Mexico is just a cleaner, fancier part of Mexico. When I was working at a cafeteria in Illinois, an older woman asked me where I was from. I told her New Mexico to which she said “Oh Mexico must be real hot this time of year.” When I corrected her, adding in the “new” part, she shrugged and said it was the same thing anyway. A large percentage of people who do accept New Mexico as a state have completely vague perceptions of its geography and culture. In the minds of these folks, New Mexico is some indistinguishable chunk of hot desert located near Texas where we ride around on horseback slaying rattlesnakes all day.

Yet the cafeteria woman wasn’t completely wrong in her comparison. While New Mexico doesn’t belong to Mexico anymore, it can’t exactly be called the United States either. The fact that the American government never thought up a more creative name to set the state apart, and instead just tacked a ‘new’ on to an already existing country could also explain why New Mexicans themselves don’t fully accept their place in America. We are a relatively new state and changing into a completely assimilated culture takes time, assuming that we would even want to become the same. The native New Mexicans are in no rush to become a clone of Maryland and so we grip to old traditions and ways of life, and outsiders who move there do so because they want that way of life as well. For many people, my state is as close as they can get to escaping modern corporate America without fleeing the country. I have never lived in a house with adjustable heat; we use a wood stove.

Much of New Mexican identity comes from cultural and geographical distinctions. Sometimes the distinctions are real differences and sometimes they are just misperceptions, but New Mexicans thrive off them either way. We need people who don’t know about our culture for us to feel that we are part of a unique community. A certain amount of exclusion must occur if our culture is to stay alive and ours. On certain days, I catch myself getting angry at tourists who don’t understand my home for what it actually is. I see them walking around the plaza in cowboy hats wearing gaudy turquoise jewelry that they probably bought here and will never wear anywhere else but here. Yetthese people, these tourists that we so despise, are also our source of identity. We depend on their foreign perceptions to fuel our tourism industry and our own native pride. I may not like the pasty white guys in moccasins asking where to get some good “tay-cos”, but I am always flattered that they chose to visit my home.

When I describe New Mexico to my Midwestern friends, I play off the already existing clichés which make the state seem far more romantic and mysterious than I typically see it as being. Instead of a snake, it was a rattlesnake, and we were drinking tequila not Coors Light. My friends walk away from the story thinking New Mexico is as exotic as they imagined, and I trick myself into believing, if only for a moment, that New Mexico is a mythic place where I just happen to live. Of course, not all details need to be embellished. There is really no way I could describe a New Mexican blood orange sunset or a summer lightning storm and make it sound anymore beautifully thrilling than it already is. The truth about New Mexico is usually more interesting than anything else.

A truth that few people know about New Mexico is that it is always being tugged back and forth by different groups who want to call it their home. The space is shared but not always by choice, and coexistence is often less than peaceful. From the time when Spanish conquistadores first fought Native Americans for the Southwest, to Anglo America’s war for the land, there has always been a struggle for ownership. There has been conflict over land, but more importantly over culture. Whoever posses ownership of the land, also dictates what the culture surrounding that land will be. This is where the clear definitions of culture in the Southwest begin to get as messy and muddled as the Rio Grande’s water. Land in the Southwest has been stolen, given back, sold again to
different people, and infringed upon by outsiders like my own family all throughout history. At this point, no one group of people can claim the history, geography, and culture of New Mexico as their own creation. That is not to say that any group should try either. Even the oldest families of New Mexico had to move to there at some point. People don’t remain outsiders forever once they assimilate into the shared space. New Mexico is the product of hybridity in which Native American, Mexican, Spanish, and Anglo culture and tradition have all fused into one.

Since New Mexico is a combination of all these influences, the issue of cultural ownership comes into question. There are some who believe that ethnicity is the only way that a person can claim ownership of a culture. If that is true, then it would seem nothing separates me from any other Anglo kids living in Americaville, USA. I know this can’t be true because there are abstract and physical differences between myself and an Anglo from anywhere else, as I discovered living in Galesburg, Illinois. When I dress in a way that is acceptable back home, I am scoffed at and ridiculed for looking like a floozy. I try to explain that New Mexico is in a hot, desert climate so of course we wear less clothes, but it doesn’t change anyone’s attitude towards me. They believe that I should fit in with their culture and I try to resist. Once I start fitting in to the place I am living, I will start assimilating and becoming one of them. As soon as I lose my culture, I lose myself.

Since I am an Anglo New Mexican, there is some debate over what I can rightfully claim as my culture. I can’t point to Mexican, Native American, or Spanish culture as mine because I am not any of those ethnicities, and it would be wrong to do so.What I can call my own and identify with is the culture of New Mexico, because that is where my home is. Not everyone claims their culture in the same way either. I have white friends who have not adopted and embraced New Mexican culture to the extent that I have. These are the undeniably WASP-y kids who could be dropped into the suburbs of New England and no one would know the difference. My friends sometimes tell me I’m not white, I’m New Mexican. That’s only half true though; while I am white by default, I am New Mexican by choice. Culture is not something that necessarily just falls in our laps. We have the choice and ability to seek culture out and decide how much of it we want to incorporate into our own identities.

Since I grasped on to New Mexican culture so tightly, I knew it would be difficult to leave my home. I have always placed a great deal of importance on saying goodbyes—to people and places and even things. I see goodbyes as a kind of ceremony. I hate the idea of leaving without first spending time to reflect and make peace with the place and people. On family road trips I was always adamant about saying goodbye to each hotel by collecting the little soaps and on vacations I had the impulse to remember a place by taking dirt samples with me. I procrastinated and put my goodbye with New Mexico off until my very last night there.

That night I sat in my backyard under the heavy blanket of a thunderstorm. It was late summer and there was a chill in the air but the rain was warm on my face. Lightning struck the mesas in the distance, illuminating the desert landscapes in bright flashes that faded as quickly as they came. My view of the land was fleeting. I saw everything but only for a few seconds. Those few seconds were long enough for me to remember how
much I love New Mexico and need it. I always told my parents that I would never live in New Mexico as an adult; that I would find some place else. My sister said the same thing growing up. She was dead set on moving to New York and becoming an important big city girl. Years later and she is now looking for her own house in Santa Fe. That night in the rain made me realize that I may wander around for awhile but I will always end up back home.

I tried to make my goodbye with New Mexico a meaningful parting between two longtime lovers, but I still catch myself feeling like I am cheating on New Mexico with what is to me (ironically) the exotic state of Illinois. I enjoy the humid mornings here and the way the grass is everywhere, green and natural. Winter was interesting for me; I wore layers of sweaters and had never before seen ice cling to tree branches and power lines. ‘Freezing rain’ made its way into my vocabulary. Most of the food I eat here is in one way or another fried, and then covered in thick orange cheese sauce as opposed to the green chile that is offered as a condiment on any New Mexican menu. I actually like my new all-American diet but I still call home requesting bottles of chipotle salsa that I later hoard for months at a time. My life is very different here, but I haven’t changed as much as I expected.

I do not regret moving to the Midwest but I am homesick always. I can spend months at a time in a foreign place, but I can’t spend one day without thinking of my home. When I think of New Mexico, I think of pressing my face against the sun warmed brown stucco walls of my house and walking barefoot through the garden after it has just rained. I think of that man who says the cookie is his culture. I’m beginning to think he is on to something, in a sense. Culture is as abstract as it is real. It’s like a cookie you can crumble in your hands, and it can fall apart or be created just as easily. I’m starting to realize that my home is the same—it’s a place on a map (somewhere near Texas?) I can drive to and it’s a feeling. My home is the choice I make of where to return to. I was in a cab one afternoon in Galesburg, Illinois when the driver, who was sporting a combo mullet and John Deere hat, asked me where my home was. I braced for it and told him, to which he said:

“Ahh, you must talk pretty good Mexican then, huh?”

I just smiled, told him sure I did, and looked forward to telling that story back home.