3 posts tagged “culture”
Sunday morning, before leaving Albuquerque, we went to the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center. Strix had heard that it was a neat place to visit, so as long as we were in Albuquerque with a morning to spare, we went to check it out.
There are 19 Indian Pueblos in New Mexico. Ethnically, they belong to specific tribes, like the Hopi and Zuni tribes, but they are otherwise isolated communities of Native Americans, having been isolated by the influx of European settlers in the late 1600's and again by a push for Indian land following the Indian Appropriations Act in 1851. Today, many of these communities have been designated Indian Pueblos and granted a degree of home-rule, much like the larger Reservations.
The Indian Pueblo Cultural Center was built as a place to celebrate the cultures of those Pueblos... and to sell their goods. They do a good job on both counts.
The first thing I noticed when I entered the Center was the shape of it. It's a D-shaped building with a courtyard, which has circles in the center of it.
This is reminiscent of the shape of some of the more famous Native American ruins of New Mexico.
This is the much larger Pueblo Bonito, an extensive Anasazi ruins site in Chaco Canyon.
We arrived just in time for a demonstration of native dance. I stupidly didn't bring my camera, so you get treated to blurry camera-phone pics. Enoy:
A couple of the several murals out in the courtyard.
The Silverfox Dance.
I apologize for the quality of this video. It's very poor. But, at least you can year a little bit of the singer/drummer beating out the rhythm of the dance.
After watching the dancers, we visited the museum which was followed, predictably, by the gift shop and gallery. Honestly, we spent more time in the gift shop and gallery, and I was astonished by the high quality works of art there.
One thing I find interesting about Native American culture is that much of it is centered around the preservation of traditions. However, when you look at the "traditions," much of it does not date back to before the Spanish colonization. "Traditional" Native American food contains ingredients that didn't exist before the Spaniards came (like the "traditional" Navajo fry bread), and are influenced by Spanish and Mexican cuisine. Many of the dances were actually created in the 20th Century for competitive Powwow events. The costumes contain things, like tin bells, which they could not have had prior to Spanish colonization. Many of their arts and crafts, today, like their pottery, have been updated to include techniques that didn't exist before colonization.
At the same time, even if their cultures aren't "authentic" in their tradition, in that they are a fusion of Native American and European cultures, they are still unique, and therefore worth preserving. I was glad to have visited the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center.
Originally posted on my old blog on February 23rd, 2006:
After lunch, our goal was to go to Mexico. Stina had never been to Mexico, and I had never been out of the country, so this was one of those trips you make just to say that you've been there. We could have gone south from Las Cruces to El Paso, Texas, and gone from there to Ciudad Juarez across the border. As it happens, Ciudad Juarez is notorious for its crime, so we decided to cross at another location, so we headed west from Las Cruces on I-10 to Deming, New Mexico, then south on Highway 11 to the border.
We parked on the U.S. side of the border and crossed into Palomas, Mexico. We had expected poverty, but we did not really expect to feel so completely out of place just across the border from the U.S. It was obvious that the people of Palomas were not used to seeing caucasians. Other than the children begging us for change and one guy that tried to sell us something, no one bothered us, but neither of us wanted to stay very long.
We did take a couple of pictures while we were there. Palomas has a church that is somewhat famous for photographers, so we stopped there and took a couple of shots.
A statue in front of a government building.
After about half an hour in Palomas, we walked back across the border, showing our ID to the border guard. I'm hoping to have a more positive experience in Mexico in the future. If I do, it won't be in Palomas.
After being back in the good old U.S. of A., we made our way back to Alamogordo and called it a night.
My vision is blurring now, so I guess I'll write about what we did today tomorrow!
