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Fray Angélico Chávez and the Colonial Southwest: Historiography and Rematerialization

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2015

Ellen McCracken
Ellen McCracken*
Affiliation:
University of California, Santa Barbara
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Extract

In the summer of 1924, townspeople recount, 14-year-old Manuel Chávez built models of colonial New Mexico mission churches in the dirt outside Our Lady of Guadalupe Church in the village of Peña Blanca. He was staying with the Franciscan friars after expressing his desire to enter the seminary, where he would become the first native New Mexico Hispano to be ordained a Franciscan priest in the centuries since the Spanish colonization. Still a boy, but one who was about to embark on a life-changing path, the small missions he playfully constructed in the dirt and staunchly protected foretold the strategy of rematerialization that would characterize his future: he would become a pioneering Franciscan historian who organized and interpreted the vast collection of Catholic Church documents from the colonial period in New Mexico through the twentieth century. The author of two dozen books and over 600 shorter works, Fray Angélico Chávez (1910–1996) was a visual artist, literary figure, historian, genealogist, translator, and church restorer—one of New Mexico's foremost twentieth-century intellectuals.

Type
Tibesar lecture
Information
The Americas , Volume 72 , Issue 4 , October 2015 , pp. 529 - 547
Copyright
Copyright © Academy of American Franciscan History 2015 

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References

1. Author interview with Erlinda Baca, August 9, 2001, Albuquerque, N.M.

2. For a complete list of Fray Angélico's works, see Morgan, Phyllis S., Fray Angélico Chávez: A Bibliography of His Published Works (1925–2010) and A Chronology of His Life (1910-1996) (Los Ranchos de Albuquerque: Rio Grande Books, 2010)Google Scholar. See also the literary biography by McCracken, Ellen, The Life and Writing of Fray Angélico Chávez: A New Mexico Renaissance Man (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2009)Google Scholar; and the volume of essays edited by McCracken, Fray Angélico Chávez: Poet, Priest, and Artist (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2000).

3. John Pen La Farge made his taped August 14, 1989, interview with Chávez in Santa Fe available to me. An edited version was published in La Farge, John Pen, Turn Left at the Sleeping Dog: Scripting the Santa Fe Legend, 1920–1955 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2001), pp. 34–42Google Scholar.

4. Ibid.

5. Chávez, “Old Missions in New Mexico,” St. Anthony Messenger 41, March 1934, pp. 532–533.

6. See The Friars of Duns Scotus College, The Beloved Crusader: A Historical Drama of the Life of St. Anthony of Padua (Cincinnati: St. Anthony Messenger, 1931)Google Scholar, Franciscan Archives of St. John the Baptist Province, Cincinnati [hereafter FASJB]. For a discussion of Chávez's multiple contributions to the play, see McCracken, The Life and Writing, pp. 107–109.

7. The play is reprinted in Chávez, Guitars and Adobes and the Uncollected Stories, McCracken, Ellen, ed. (Santa Fe: Museum of New Mexico Press, 2009)Google Scholar.

8. Fray Angélico Chávez, 1937 ordination card, FASJB.

9. John Gould Fletcher to Chávez, April 3, 1949, Fray Angélico Chávez History Library and Photographic Archives, Santa Fe, Chávez Collection, Box 520, File II.

10. Chávez to Fr. John Forest McGee, March 1941, and October 23, 1941, “Correspondence with Chronicle,” Chávez File, FASJB, Correspondence with Chronicle, Chávez File; entry by Fray Angélico in the Peña Blanca House Chronicle, August 28, 1941. A copy of the latter was made available to me by Fr. Jack Clark Robinson O.F.M.

11. See Simmons, Marc, “The Making of a Maverick Historian,” in Fray Angélico Chávez: Poet, Priest, and Artist, McCracken, Ellen, ed. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2000), pp. 11–23Google Scholar; and Chávez to Provincial Mollaum, February 27, 1947, FASJB, Correspondence with the Provincial, 1947–1949, Chávez File.

12. Fray Angélico's first historical discoveries appear in his articles: “The Archibeque Story,” El Palacio 54 (August 1947), pp. 179–182; “The Mystery of Father Padilla,” El Palacio 54 (November 1947), pp. 251–268; and “The Gallegos Relación Reconsidered,” New Mexico Historical Review 23:1 (January 1948), pp. 1–21. See also “Santa Fe Church and Convent Sites in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” New Mexico Historical Review 24:2 (April 1949), pp. 85–95; and “How Old is San Miguel,” El Palacio 60 (April 1953), pp. 141–150.

13. Chávez, Origins of New Mexico Families in the Spanish Colonial Period (Santa Fe: Historical Society of New Mexico, 1954)Google Scholar.

14. See Chávez, “Nuestra Señora del Rosario, La Conquistadora,” New Mexico Historical Review 23:2 (April 1948), pp. 94–128, continued in 23:3 (July 1948), pp. 177–216. A revised version of these articles was published as a book, Our Lady of the Conquest, (Santa Fe: Historical Society of New Mexico, 1948).

15. Chávez, La Conquistadora: The Autobiography of an Ancient Statue (Paterson, N.J.: St. Anthony Guild Press, 1954)Google Scholar; Chávez, “Pilgrimage of La Conquistadora,” Provincial Chronicle 27:1 (1954), p. 29Google Scholar. For this article Chávez gave himself the byline "Fray Angélico Chávez C. C. C. C. C." with wry humor intended to recognize the roles he had carried out in taking the statue on its long pilgrimage, inserting the initials to stand for “Chávez, Concionator [predicator], Chauffeur, Couturier, Conquistadorae.”

16. Chávez, “The Modern Story of La Conquistadora,” Santa Fe New Mexican, Viva (Sunday supplement), July 1, 1973, pp. 6–7.

17. See Chávez, “The Unique Tomb of Fathers Zárate and De la Llana in Santa Fe,” New Mexico Historical Review 40:2 (1965), pp. 101–115Google Scholar; and The Santa Fe Cathedral of St. Francis of Assisi (Santa Fe: Archdiocese of Santa Fe, [1947] 1995), pp. 50–51.

18. Chávez, , From an Altar Screen: El Retablo: Tales from New Mexico (New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1957)Google Scholar; Domínguez, Fray Francisco Atanasio, The Missions of New Mexico, 1776, trans. and annotated by Adams, Eleanor B. and Chávez, Fray Angélico (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1956)Google Scholar.

19. Chávez to Provincial Kroger, January 25, 1959, and Kroger to Chávez, January 29, 1959, FASJB, Correspondence with the Provincial, 1957–1970, Chávez File.

20. Chávez, Coronado's Friars (Washington, D.C.: American Academy of Franciscan History, 1968)Google Scholar.

21. Chávez, “San Francisco de Golden, New Mexico,” Provincial Chronicle 33:2 (Winter 1961), p. 173Google Scholar.

22. Quasthoff herself left a material trace of Fray Angélico's role in writing New Mexico history and designing the doors by including an image of him in panel 15, which depicts the 1960 papal coronation of La Conquistadora. He is in the background wearing a beret. After his death, Quasthoff was commissioned to make the large bronze statue of Chávez that now stands in front of the Fray Angélico Chávez History Library and Photographic Archives on Washington Street in downtown Santa Fe.

23. See James Joyce's Digital Dubliners: For Students by Students: A Multimedia Edition, Apple iBooks, June 2014.