When Fray Francisco Atanasio Domínguez traveled from Mexico City to the far frontier of New Mexico in 1776 on behalf of the Church and the Spanish Crown, he was on a record-keeping mission. As Estevan Rael-Gálvez writes in his article about reckoning with the 250th anniversary of U.S. independence, Domínguez also documented the state of the written archive in this place far removed from the small, new U.S. nation. The archival materials Domínguez encountered in New Mexico were a mess; many documents had been ripped from books and used to fill gaps in the windows or to roll cigarettes.
Although we now have a vast array of methods and means by which to record and preserve history, the challenges of creating a comprehensive archive remain as thorny as they were 250 years ago. Who does the recording, whose version is deemed credible, and what is erased has always been about power. Anyone who has spent time looking for evidence from the past can attest to just how messy, complicated, and filled with contradictions it can be.
For example, due to the diligence of scholars, Domínguez’s 1776 report is readily available. I only had to drive down to Albuquerque to see a copy in person. But finding photos of the LBGTQ+ community in the 1950s and ’60s in New Mexico for Lazarus Letcher’s essay about queer life along Route 66? Impossible. Likewise, sources for Indigenous fire practices in New Mexico forests prior to the arrival of the Spanish—for Oliver Horn’s article about the loss of communal lands contributing to catastrophic wildfire—proved to be elusive.
As the U.S. marks 250 years since independence this year, and as Route 66 celebrates its centennial, it’s worth pausing to ask how we know what we know about the past. As humans, our attention can be fickle, and human bias has always informed decisions about what is worth preserving and what is not. Are the documents we have written by reliable narrators? What do we know about their contexts, biases, and motivations? Similarly, what materials are missing—and why? Were materials destroyed? Was information passed down through an oral storytelling tradition that has since vanished? Piecing together the past is not easy—and especially when dominant narratives become calcified or are used to replace stories that complicate or contradict the status quo.
Understanding how our past has been constructed is vital and often requires us to dig deeper, look beyond traditional archives, and read between the lines. Historical anniversaries offer an opportunity to reckon with what we know and what remains unknown. Holding the complexity and contradictions we discover helps us to guard against the alternative—simplification and erasure.
Still, there is much to learn from the past, even as we acknowledge that what we don’t know exceeds what we do. In Myrriah Gómez’s article about art that reckons with the nuclear legacy of the Trinity Test, in Sandra Schulman’s article about the success of Diné elders in stopping the construction of a power plant, and in Letcher’s essay about queer community in Albuquerque, readers of El Palacio will learn about how and why communities come together around the common goals of safety, dignity, and resistance to erasure.
A rigid curation of the past can often hamper our imaginations about what is and isn’t possible in the present and the future. As Adrienne Rich wrote in her poem,
Diving into the Wreck
We are, I am, you are
by cowardice or courage
the one who find our way
back to this scene
carrying a knife, a camera
a book of myths
in which
our names do not appear.*
When we dig for the untold stories, reach for each other, and talk to our neighbors face-to-face, we are planting seeds for an archive that foregrounds inclusivity, complexity, and a movement from precarity to mutualismo.
*Excerpted from Diving into the Wreck: Poems 1971-1972. Copyright (c) 1973 by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. Used with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.