Estévan Rael-Galvéz
Katrin H. Lamon
Resident Scholar
1999-2000
Identifying Captivities and Capturing
Identities: The Contest of Stories and Memories in the American Indian
Captivity and Servitude of Northern New Mexico and Southern Colorado
In the tradition of the storyteller, resident scholar Estévan Rael-Galvéz
follows the life of one man, Luis, to reveal the intricate complexities
of evolving identity and community in the region of northern New Mexico
and southern Colorado. During the Spanish, Mexican, and American occupations
of this area, Luis represents one of thousands of American Indians taken
into Spanish/Mexican households and communities as captives and slaves.
Rael-Galvéz’s dissertation, The Culture of Memory within an Imagined
Community: The History and Discourse of Indian Captivity and Slavery, examines
how captivity wove diverse communities and histories together in a multi-layered
reality obscured even now by denial, memory, and silence.
Rael-Galvéz was able to trace Luis and his descendants
from an Indian Agent’s 1865 inventory of Indian captives, to a 1934 encounter
with a U.S. Civil Works Administration agent, to a recent interview in Denver,
Colorado. Having lived within the Valdez family all of his life, Luis embodies
the plight of the "criado" or "servant" held captive yet
treated "like family" over generations: while "Indian slavery" was
officially illegal throughout all three periods of occupation in this region,
the lived experience of servitude calls this "age-old custom" into
question."
My goal is to examine indigenous captivity and servitude
as experience, as a contest of stories, and as memory," explains Rael-Galvéz. "Tracing
the experience and story of even a few of those thousands of captured indios
means attempting to account for the particular ways in which multiple subjectivities
race, caste, gender, nation, and even between the centrally imagined dichotomy
of ‘savaged’ and ‘saved’ mark one’s relation toward
this reality."
His investigation will include an analysis of the concept
of slavery, as well as the impact of Indian captivity on the collective cultures
of the Hispanic communities of the interconnected valleys of Espaola, Taos,
and San Luis, where the largest number of captivities occurred.
Affiliation at time of award: Ph.D. Candidate, Program
in American Cultures, University of Michigan
Return to Resident Scholars
1999-2000.
