The ghosts of our ancestors and the ghosts of lost land haunt the region and cast shadows that I believe we either do not sense or understand. Death lingers and taints the area’s present consciousness – we live painfully aware that giants in boots can come along, any day, and crush our lives and send us into the abyss of alienation. Not from the world, but from ourselves.
I see this alienation on two different fronts: 1) My great-great grad mother, Maria Dolores Quintana disappered from the Earth with no trace; and, 2) My family’s land grant disappearing into oblivion. I’ve had tantalizing clues drop on my lap for both branches of research, but all clues have led to dead ends and shrugged shoulders.
It really does seem to me like Maria Dolores Quintana almost never existed. I know she was my Grandma’s mom; says so on my Grandma’s birth certificate. But there’s almost no record of her existence. While she was listed on the U.S. government’s 1910 census, that’s the only formal documentation of her life. See, the Spanish people used oral traditions to maintain their history and the Catholic Church documented everything else. Formal record keeping is an “American” thing and history has apparently lost any record that Maria Dolores Quintana ever lived because I can’t find any birth record, death record, or any record in between.
From family history, it seems that Maria Dolores suffered from some form of emotional disorder. According to family tradition, both she and her husband, my great-great-grandfather Jose Inez Quintana, spent time in what was then known as the Las Vegas Sanitarium. Jose Inez was there first and had no idea that Maria Dolores was also there until one night, he heard familiar sobs emanating from the courtyard and recognized his wife from the sound of her cries. At some point, they were released and Jose Inez with the help of a neighbor cut Maria Dolores down from a beam that she used to hang herself. According to Ancestry.com, she died on September 16th, 1913 in San Ildefonso, NM.
San Ildefonso is now an Indian “Pueblo” and its history and relationship with my family is even more complicated than Maria Dolores’ story. At this point, what I know and what I can prove is that, my great-grandmother and great-grandfather (and his three brothers) were evicted from the San Ildefonso when the Pueblo Lands Act was enacted in 1924. They were not tribal members and therefore had no claim, according to the new law, of any property ownership. But then, I found evidence in the form of a land grant that the US government granted a private claim to my great-grandfather (and his brothers) that appears to have been inside to Pueblo boundaries. However, there’s no record of anything relating to the property in Santa Fe County’s records. The land grant, like Maria Dolores, appears to be a ghost that may or may not have ever been real.
I’ll continue researching each’s respective fate, but I suspect that their fates are as intertwined as the Gordian knot that is Northern New Mexico’s historical relationship with its inhabitants. This relationship has created, in my opinion, a consciousness of generational trauma, poverty, and alienation that continues to haunt the area. Opiates seem to be the undercurrent of treating this haunting.
