The Making of the West

PUEBLO WOMEN COOKING - by Pablita Velarde

Red Hills. Grey Sky (1937) - Georgia O'Keeffe

For thousands of years the American West had been inhabited by native peoples. In the sixteenth century, Spanish explorers and Catholic missionaries serving God and their country arrived in the region and transformed the lives of the natives and their own in ways that they could have never imagined. One way to understand the making of the West after the arrival of the Spaniards is to look at how both groups of people managed to forge their everyday lives. The colonial encounter was fashioned in large part by women in their homes. For generations Pueblo women had been in the forefront of running their communities and once the Spaniards arrived they played an important role in maintaining peace and sustaining a livable environment for themselves and the outsiders. The natives and the conquitadores had to learn from each other, adopting customs and adapting to new situations, in order to coexist. Thus, their cultures, which include their art, architecture, cuisine, landscape, religion, language, etc, intertwined and produced a rich hybrid culture. Women were in the center of this intertwining of customs, weaving, making pottery, building houses, tending gardens, cooking meals, painting portraits of the landscape, creating and running businesses, making love and raising their children. It is in a sense much through their endeavors that the West was built prior to Spanish contact and re-built after the Spaniards arrived. Today the vivid colors and shapes of New Mexico, for instance, which so much enchanted artists, such as Pablita Velarde and Georgia O’Keeffe, represent a heritage that was built in ways peaceful and violent through the encounters of cultures and the work of both men and women who labored to make the West their home.
Neda Bezerra