SURVIVING THE 1930's-ITALIANS IN NEW MEXICO - #3

Antonio Domenici ran the Montezuma Grocery with his brother Cherubino. This picture was taken in front of his home at 407 North Fourth Street.

LA COLONIA SURVIVING THE 1930's - ITALIANS IN NEW MEXICO - #3

by: f. g. lopriato y lopez

STRETCH IT OUT, MAKE IT LAST, MAKE IT DO OR DO WITHOUT.

Bedsheets wear out when you use them enough. The women in Old Town during the 1930's did not have electric washing machines. They heated their wash water in pots, on a wood burning stove, in the winter, and outside in a galvanized tub and scrubbed everything on galvanized washboards. Whites faded, and very fast colors were boiled and scrubbed, inspected for wear and patched. Socks were darned and dingy colors bleached out and readied. If the sheets were still serviceable, the holes would be repaired or reboiled and rebleached for further use, often as curtains or dish towels. Lye was an indispensable household item. Sometimes bedsheets would be repaired and folded, both halves sewn together for reuse.

Flour came in cloth bags. Most people bought large quantities: twenty five, fifty and hundred pounds sacks, depending on how large a family they had to feed, and white flour tortillas were the fare three times a day. Corn tortillas were also used but not as regularly as wheat, sopaipillas were served at special meals. Besides that, flour was also used to thicken gravies, sauces took starch, chicken, cutlets, pork chops, each made better eating if breaded with white flour. The cloth bags in which the flour came was probably more sought after than the flour itself. With a little boiling, bleaching, and dying, those bags became beautiful dresses and blouses for little girls, shirts, a hanky, slips, and panties. Cloth, not gold, was the big thing to most Old Town women. Most women could sew. The luckiest had pedal operated machines, but most sewed by hand.

A man's suit could become clothing for his children, and the same went for women's clothing and when they had served their time, the same thing might end up as part of a patchwork quilt or a throw rug.

Homemade laundry soap, and homegrown almost everything, even the dyes that they used made the need for money not as pressing but a hell of a lot more work for the women of Old Town in the 1930's. Little did they realize it was just basic training for what was ahead and that some day those who survived would look back on those days with nostalgia.

FDR's WPA Projects did a lot of good, despite the fact that the managers of those funds used the bulk of the money to feather their own nests first and then saw to it that those who could do them more good, socially, politically and financially got what they wanted, but, when those funds finally got down the common people. Any job was better than none in a money hungry world that, at last, found a way to make Old Towners need money. As I said before, we were as self-relying for most of our necessities and financial needs were kept at a bare minimum.

Now, you tell me if what they came up with does not rate, at least an E for effort on the confidence game of politics. There were just over a hundred thousand people in all of New Mexico, the CCC camps did a lot of good planting trees, and dressing up the landscape, there were jobs there for many people and most of them trying to make the transition from farming to business or something that would enable them to fit into their changing world.

There were no roads in the entire state, the WPA built several large dams, in fact most of the dams you see now in New Mexico are WPA projects, and Highway 66 from one end of the state to the other was a WPA project, there were many jobs there, but most of these jobs were being filled by people who were brought in to do the work. New Mexico was high on FDR's priority list. but New Mexicans were joining the armed services and the National guard in order to help their families make ends meet. Someone noticed this and made a fuss about it.

The next thing Old Towners knew, "Singing Teachers" were making the rounds weekly to teach grade school students songs that were already part of their folklore. And the Plaza in Old Town was having a very imposing and out of place stone wall built around the plaza in Old Town. It did not last long, and for the short time that it stood, it cost more to maintain than anything else. Other than being used as an emergency makeshift rest room by migrants who could not make it to a real rest room, it was cleaned up and maintained once a year at Fiesta time. Other than that it was avoided even by church goers who would walk around it rather than cut through even on cold days. Even the stone mason who built the wall hated it, but could not talk his supervisors into doing what the Old Town Plaza has now.

The project that really took the cake, was the WPA Outhouse Brigade. Old Towners didn't live beyond their means and their means were not very demanding to begin with. They made conscious efforts to minimize them more all the while they also made a show of their better materialism to put up a prosperous front. This tempted the controllers to reason that if they could not control the intake they would control the output. The WPA brought in the Outhouse Brigade. Everybody had to have a New State of the Art outhouse, built by "El Diablo a Pi‚. " They made it sound so official that some still think it was a felony not to comply. The city was expanding and Old Town would be incorporated making "City Water " and indoor plumbing mandatory, the new outhouses did no more than tear down the old outhouse and replace it with a prefabricated one of their own, over the existing hole, but, at last, someone had pulled something on Old Town. The word for outhouse used in old town was "Comun" pronounced "Ko MOON" from Commode." The Outhouse Brigade was called "Los Communistas." (The Communists.)

The 1930's were lucky years in a lot of ways for Old Towners. Mainly because of the Italian influence in the town. Italians had been the real leaders in the community, and why not? They don't make a big hoopla about themselves or their accomplishments, no matter where they end up. The segment of Italians who chose New Mexico as their new home left indelible footprints in the sands, not just of this state, but in states surrounding New Mexico and as far as Washington, D. C.. Not just lately, but historically. If walls could talk, they'd do it and be fluent in Wopajo. (all languages) ////fglyl

UNA PALOMA BLANCA

UNA PALOMA BLANCA

by: f. g. loprlato y lopez

The prospects for quickly climbing out of the economic crisis in which we find ourselves are not very promising, but we can and we will do it. All we need is leadership that understands New Mexico and New Mexicans... Diane Denish, slated to be our first woman governer, and first to choose her own second in command, is off to an excellent start, by surrounding herself with people who do not think that New Mexico is a newly conquered foreign country and do not act as if they are an occupying force. History, indeed repeats itself. Scholars of authentic New Mexico's past will hate the similarities between the state's populace today and the populace of our state in the 1900's in relation to today's incur­sions from other states and the role played by the Ital­ian community in forming a bridge between the American and the New Mexican cultures, and the New New Mexicans, such as, soon to be, Governor Denish, and her expressed desire to have more of the same in dignified positions of trust, and respect in state government The Land Of Enchantment's beautiful sand ­dunes are now covered over with a thick growth of imported Political Climbing Ivy that has been too long neurished with the bovine droppings from Texas, and (now) other states, whether it fits or not. It is about time that a New Mexican Woman restore New Mexico's true decor. Do you, dear reader, know that, in the Navajo culture a girl could not get married until she had demonstrated to the women of the tribe, her abilities to make use of every part of a sheep, seasoned with everything that can be found in the desert within walking distance of her hogan ? (including the wood used for cooking.) That chapter in the history of our state, apparently, capitulated to the modernization of education. Think of that next time you see a young Navajo girl approach a sheep, as if she has never seen one before and is afraid te do so. I have. Just as I have seen modern Navajo girls go to special schools to learn the art of weaving, intrigued with the knowledge of where the yarn that they are using came from and the processes that the yarn underwent to get to that point and it isn't even a rug with the traditional designs yet. Of course the world is not going to end because a few Navajo girls have left the way of the Dine. Those same girls can and will teach you some tricks you can use in the use of computers, nursing, business, and a host of other things. This is only to illustrate that knowledge is accumulative. Education places you in the present, knowledge is awareness what you are because of your heritage. When you approach "book learning" you bring all you are; your entire potential, not just what you would like to be or what you think you are but the potential to become whatever it is that you are going to attempt to be. Your culture and heritage mold your potential, and awareness of this is knowledge. To leave your past behind and forget about it is to disown part of yourself. If you then attempt to live a complete life as an incomplete human being is possible but not very likely, certainly a lot more difficult. You can't easily do it as an individual, and neither can New Mexico do it without involving all that New Mexice has been and is at this present time in history. In other words, it is up to us to mold the New Mexico of the future... Is it going to remain stunted by handicaps because outside influences devaluing your worth to appear indispensable. The Navajos are not the only New Mexicans who have played a significant part in the making of this state. Other tribes and other Pueblos have helped as have the Spanish, the Mexicans, and the Anglos, not to mention Jews, Arabs, Orientals, Blacks, Greeks, Italians, and more. It is only lately that I have need to inform the younger set, as well as new comers, and to remind people... such as Fernando C De Vaca, former County Chairman of the GOP, that if it had been left to anyone of these single groups, New Mexice would not have progressed AND regressed as dynamically as it has the Civil War era. No ethnic group, anywhere, is completely free of it's trouble makers and muck rakers, and you can be sure that because of these few misfits, an entire group can and have been condemned, because igno­rance thrives in an atmosphere of suspicion. The mind is the most wonderful thing in creation. It controls everything, your breathing, temperature, voluntary and involuntary systems and all that is you. From your first heart-beat to your last sigh. But as wonderful as it is, the mind is, it's subconscious part is incapable of reasoning, discerning and judgment. Further more, it is amenable to suggestion, and always accepts the dominant of two suggestions. Suggestion 1 subconsciously accepted authority figure suggests that a person, place, thing condition or state exists. It becomes real, whether it really exists or not. We've all seen hypnotized people, and see fanaticism of every type in our daily lives. All these methods will be discussed in future editions of The Wopajo, stay tuned.

ASI ES NUEVO MEJICO, LOVE IT OR LEAVE IT!

HOLISTIC MEDICINE IS HERE!

MIND - BODY AND SPIRIT

by F.G. Lopriato y lopez Albuquerque, New Mexico

The genuinely interested in Health and The Healing hail UNM's bold escalation of the eternal war against illnesses under one official canopy, "The Center For Life," due to open in July. Leading the three pronged attack is the most qualified general medical community of New Mexico and beyond. Take it from those who know her, no one is more worthy of that trust. Efforts to integrate all different facets of medicine are not new, and heaven knows that the only reason we don't have it now is because of infighting within the profession it­self, and the all out frontal assaults by other special interest, groups. as well as opposing religious and cultural philosophies. It goes without saying, that the center will have enough opposition from people who will see it as a threat to their own financial security, those opposed to blood transfusions, vaccines, transplants, stem cell research etc., without having half informed and totally ignorant comments from would--be experts. Therefore, we will publish only what is presented by that center in the way it is presented, if and when we do comment on the center's activities, otherwise, we will write only about Holistic Medicine itself, and subjects which may and may not be related to the center's activities.

One of the most intriguing films I have ever seen was once shown at a seminar I was attending in Califomia, A group of doctors had filmed it in a foreign country, one of those doctors was the principle speaker at the seminar. He vouched for its authenticity. The movie showed a woman smiling as she underwent an operation. The open cavity dearly visible and the surgeon's hands, and Hawaiian shirt bloody from reaching into that cavity and showing the woman's viscera to the observing witnesses, The doc­tor who was speaking at our seminar and a half dozen or so of his colleges, all from Stanford Medical SCHOOL. The surgeon on the screen wiped his hands, closed the wound, then ran one hand over the closure and the woman got up and, still smiling, stood and allowed the wit­nesses to examine the closure, the camera zoomed in to show that there was not a sign of a scar. The doctor who was addressing our group tumed off the projector and called for the lights to be tuned on, ending his talk with this question; "Would you believe that what you have just seen was done without the benefit of anesthesia?" This happened in the late 1950's before it was generally known that a few dentists practiced hypnosis in some of their work. Before that, I met one of the Korean K. P.'s who worked in our compound in the village one day. He told me that he was going to the local doctor and I asked him if I could tag along. I had never seen a Korean doctor work. The K. P. was also seeing the GI doctor in the compound, but he did not think that American Medicine was doing him any good. That was the first time I saw acupuncture done in real life, somehow I knew that it existed, but for some reason I thought that it had to do with ancient medical practices but it was no longer used, like blood letting or the use of leeches or maggots. Back at work in the compound next day, the doctor asked how my day off had been, and I told him how l had met the KP on his way to the local doctor and how I had seen acupun­ture done. The interest that my boss, the doctor, had initially shown in my off duty activities vanished and was replaced by rage He pulled the KP's record jacket and ordered me to tell him that he no longer wanted to see him in the dispensary. Anyone involved in the care of patients for any length of quickly finds out that there are times when a patient is in trouble, a pinched or broken oxygen hose, or a malfunc­tion of indispensable equipment, any life threatening situation that accelerates the sur­vival instinct's panic button that makes an otherwise helpless patient perform seeming miracles to save his or her life. These are the type of tales that we will be writing for the next few months, or until the election for Lt. Governor of New Mexico heats up. The objective of these stories is to make the reader aware that dealing with the sick and the dying, takes more than just a knowledge of the illness itself, but also a profound respect of the patient's thinking, and the patient's own spiritual needs. A human being is like a tight-rope walker, that reaches the most dangerous part of his balancing act when survival or certain death are a real threat and the slightest upset of that balance can mean the end for him or her.