The Writings of Eusebio Chacón

Introduction

The Writings of Eusebio Chacón

Eusebio Chacón: Context and Contributions

A. Gabriel Meléndez

On the morning of May 15, 1924, the feast day of San Isidro, Eusebio Chacón and members of his household woke up not to the singing of melodious canticles by Trinidad’s Catholic parishioners, processing the statute of San Isidro at dawn to the town’s ditch banks and creeks, but rather to the crackling thuds of burning timbers and the acrid smell of smoke coming off a crude wooden cross burning a few feet away from the Chacón house. The customary scenes of Trinidad’s blessing way to spring planting did not play out as expected as members of the local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) descended on the Chacón home, set ablaze a cross, and let loose upon Trinidad’s Mexican residents a brutal message of fear and intimidation.

Klan activity surged in southern Colorado during the early 1920s, the stock of the hidden empire rising with sympathizers. Historian Robert Alan Goldberg calls this period the kluxing of Colorado, a decade in which the Klan’s claim to be a defender of law and order appealed to the citizens of towns with real or perceived threats to white dominance. These years were auspicious for the Klan. In May 1923, Klansmen gathered in Denver to celebrate the first anniversary of the induction of the Colorado realm into the Invisible Empire.¹ Goldberg notes, The Klan’s stand for law and order was well received in Trinidad, Walsenburg, and other southern Colorado towns. In Pueblo and other southern Colorado towns, immigrants and corrupt police officials were blamed for an epidemic of crime.²

Apparently, however, the local Klan chapter did not completely think through the repercussions of its actions in deciding to burn crosses at thirteen spots in and around Trinidad. Although the Klan disliked Catholics and Mexicans, it may have been unaware that the house it targeted at 420 East Topeka Avenue was the home of the assistant district attorney for Las Animas County. In a rare turn around, Chapter 15 of the Colorado Empire of the KKK published an open letter addressed to Eusebio Chacón in the Evening Picket Wire, explaining that the Klan had never intended to attack him, but had burned the cross to celebrate the admission of the Colorado Klan into the national empire of the Ku Klux Klan.³ The Spanish-language press reported the profuse apology. Beside themselves, spokesmen for the Klan explained their decision to burn a cross on Topeka Avenue, unaware that Chacón lived in that part of Trinidad. We wish to let you know, the klansmen continued, that we hold you in the highest esteem as a citizen of Trinidad and Las Animas County.⁴

We do not know whether Chacón responded directly to the assault on May 15, but the Spanish-language press was outraged and indignant, calling the Klan shameless beyond redemption. La Bandera Americana, a newspaper located in Albuquerque, New Mexico, two hundred miles south of Trinidad, was the most ardent Chacón defender. In Una desgracia para la patria (A Disgrace to the Nation) and Lo genuino y lo espurio (What is Genuine and What is Specious), two short columns published on May 30, 1924, the editor pounded the Klan, first pointing out that its invasion of Trinidad had sown fear, violence, and intimidation. Lives were shamelessly threatened while those flaming crosses burned at thirteen different locations in a challenge to the Catholics and Jews in that community, the editor decried.⁵ The Klan had disrupted the peace by firing off gunshots throughout the night and making threatening phone calls to local residents all day on May 15. Most disturbing: they had dared to target one of the most distinguished and illustrious citizens of Trinidad, the son of Major Rafael Chacón, a distinguished commander in the Indian Wars and a Civil War veteran, who, as La Bandera Americana pointed out, had rendered great service to the nation. It was odious, the editor continued, for these tar and feather knights to insinuate that the Chacóns were anything less than full citizens. We know the vicious aims of the Ku Klux Klan, swore the editor, these cowards who hypocritically give themselves the title of being a hundred percent American. Down with them!⁶

The cross-burning at his home and the commentary it elicited in the Spanish press represents one of the last times area newspapers would mention Chacón’s name. The event was followed by a lacuna that lasted for the next quarter century and was only broken with the publication of Chácon’s obituary on April 3, 1948 (see part 5).

The last published work by Chacón, Cosas raras de nuestra historia de Nuevo México (Odd Things About the History of New Mexico), reprinted in part 3 of this collection, appeared ten years ahead of the Klan incident in La Revista Ilustrada, a magazine issued by Camilo Padilla in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Padilla had invited Chacón’s contribution, praising him for his knowledge of the Hispanic history of New Mexico and giving him free reign to write on the subject. The article opens with a series of references to the Great War in Europe, but is silent on contemporary events in the Southwest.

Chacón, a central figure in the literary arts movement sponsored by the Spanish-language press in New Mexico and Colorado, occupied the attention of that press for some four decades.⁷ His oratory and writing were regularly noted and celebrated. The earliest mention of Chacón came in 1884, when Eusebio, then only thirteen years old, was asked to deliver a talk for the Trinidad Mutual Aid Society. A short but exuberant note followed in La Aurora of Santa Fe: This lad is only thirteen years old. He exhibits surprising talent that promises great things; a future in which he will gather the laurels of a happy and bright career. Over the next four decades, Chacón’s life and writings would be a subject of interest in Mexican American communities across the Southwest.

A few scholars have flagged the importance of Chacón’s literary career, noting its centrality to the experience of Mexican Americans in the South-west.⁸ Still, until now, they have only worked with a partial and fragmented archive of Chacón’s writings. The central aim of this collection, as my colleague Francisco Lomelí points out, is to bring together all the known writings that Chacón published over the course of some four decades.

Until now, scholarly assessments of Chacón have rested on just three of his published texts: his novelettes, The Calm After the Storm (Tras la tormenta la calma) and The Son of the Storm (El hijo de la tempestad), published jointly in Santa Fe in 1892; and his extended essay, An Eloquent Speech (Elecuente discurso), published in Las Vegas, New Mexico, in 1901. Even this meager recovery suggests the importance of Chacón’s contributions to the literary history of the Hispanic Southwest.

Chacón’s versatility is on display in The Writings of Eusebio Chacón, which amply shows his proclivity to move outside established expectations that a writer either be a novelist, a poet, or an essayist, but that he or she should not hope to excel at all three. This collection provides samples of his work as an accomplished orator, translator, essayist, historian, novelist, and poet. Chacón worked least as a poet. Only five minor works of poetry by Chacón have been identified. One of these poems, Santa Teresita of Lisieux, never made it to print. Instead, it is a devotional prayer used by Chacón family members and was never meant to be published. Fortunately, we are able to include this text, which my colleague found pressed between the pages of Chacón’s personal Bible. How much poetry Chacón wrote is an open question. I conclude that Chacón’s real strength lay in writing prose. He was especially inclined to the historical/cultural essay, a genre where his ideas flared and brightened with rich descriptions and images. Several of his contemporaries pointed out that Chacón was an extremely careful and conscientious curator of documents. If so, it defies common sense to think that he had amassed a sustained output of poems only to let it be lost or dispersed by neglect. It is not unreasonable to think, too, that he felt insecure about his talents as a poet in light of his first cousin, Felipe Maximiliano Chacón’s (1873–1949) career.⁹ Felipe would have provided Eusebio both a model and an outlet for the craft of poetry. As an editor of a half dozen newspapers in New Mexico and southern Colorado from 1911 to 1928, Felipe could have easily and regularly published Eusebio’s submissions. Furthermore, as the author of a remarkable book of poems entitled Prosa y poesía (1924), Felipe would have been in a position to encourage Eusebio’s work. Indeed, it might have led Eusebio to crown his cousin Felipe the true bard of the family and give himself over to other kinds of writing.

Clearly, however, Eusebio Chacón cultivated oratory, verse, fiction, and the sociohistorical essay, although he did not publish equally in each of these areas. The texts that appeared in local newspapers were in every instance a response to some external stimulus rooted in the status of his community, and each exhibits Chacón’s talents and skills as a social critic.

A look at Chacón’s biographical sketch provides ample evidence of multiple career demands. Working as a full-time attorney and a public servant meant that Chacón wrote as an avocation. Indeed, comparatively speaking, the corpus of Chacón’s writing is not large. The thirty or so pieces we have been able to recover only amount to some two hundred pages of original Spanish text. Still, they are important for a number of reasons.

First, his writings reflect the central position Chacón occupied during the period of neo-Mexicano cultural ascendancy that emerged at the end of the nineteenth century, when new educational and technological advancements began to impact the Hispanic New Mexican region of northern New Mexico and southern Colorado. This movement caused a generation of nuevomexicano youth to believe they were at the start of a literary, cultural, and political renaissance greater than any in their history. Greater access to education and the availability of mechanical printing presses in the rural West made this ascendancy possible. From their ranks developed a group of writers and journalists, a first generation of Mexican Americans in professions ready to push beyond the limitations of poverty, rural isolation, racial discrimination, and the recent history of the American conquest of the Southwest. Chacón’s generation was infused with a sense of mission and the urgency to oppose the suppression of culture that nuevomexicanos had experienced since the close of the Mexican-American War in 1848. Here was a generation not simply concerned with announcing grievances but one committed to a program of social and cultural empowerment.

Armed with the education he received at Notre Dame, Chacón led the movement, providing the clearest example of this new sensibility among Mexican Americans of his generation. He believed that the popular press, long absent in the Southwest, would enlighten and educate the Spanish-speaking communities of his region. Unlike others who were equally hopeful about the press, Chacón advanced the cultural agenda of his generation by offering an ars poetica for his community, one that called on his fellow writers to fill the pages of local presses with works of literature and history. Chacón is the first Mexican American writer to list the liberating possibilities of what he termed, una literatura nacional (a national literature). As he saw it, the project would register the achievements of Mexican American citizens in the public imagination of the United States as a whole. In introducing the two novelettes he published in 1892, Chacón put forth his literary credo, declaring, My writings are the sincere creation of my own imagination and have not been stolen or borrowed from Anglos or foreigners. Upon New Mexican soil, I dare lay the seed of a literature.¹⁰

Chacón’s bold and significant agenda challenged nuevomexicanos to seize control of their social and cultural destiny. His vision of this cultural work embraced both the literary arts and history. This twin focus provided an epistemological base that made sense to his generation, since the fullest measure of the nuevomexicano experience in the Southwest rested on a long, complex, and profound narrative of past events, as well as on its proclivity to produce culture in oral and written literary forms.

Chacón’s writings stirred the imagination of Mexican Americans across the Southwest, and the Spanish-language press widely reported his postulations on the arts. In July 1896, José Escobar, the editor of Las Dos Repúblicas in Denver, published Progreso literario de Nuevo México (Progress of the Literary Arts in New Mexico), an extensive commentary on the progress of education and literacy among Spanish speakers. In this piece, Escobar characterizes Chacón as the spearpoint of this movement:

The attorney, E. Chacón, was the first who two or three years ago gave the public a small tome that consisted of two novels: the first is in the genre of the fantastic and the second is a work of realism. In the first, The Tempest’s Son, one can appreciate the author’s ease of style and his fertile and astounding imagination. And then in the second work, after having read just a few pages, one senses the early development of a superior talent; it is the work of one who has been at the task of reasoning and of observing life from an early age. There are episodes here, worthy of Valera or Father Coloma’s pen, and just as with these writers, we are treated to the talents of a young writer who is at times burlesque, sarcastic and at other times high-minded, philosophical and of high morals. In summary, Chacón’s small book, even as it remains unknown to many native New Mexicans is a true jewel in our national literature.¹¹

Seeing Chacón’s novelettes both in Spanish and in English, readers can measure Escobar’s aesthetic appreciation of what was deemed suitable writing at this point in the history of Mexican American expressive culture. More importantly, readers now have access to two foundational texts of Mexican American, later called, Chicano/a literature.

Chacón and Escobar had a tenuous professional relationship over the course of several years. Another key figure in the Spanish-language press movement, Escobar immigrated to New Mexico from Mexico in the late 1880s. Although little is known of his background or formal training as a journalist, judging from the quality of the papers he edited, Escobar was no doubt extremely knowledgeable of trends in Latin American literature and history. He was a member of La Prensa Asociada Hispano-Americana, the first Spanish-language press association founded in Las Vegas, New Mexico, in 1891. Escobar edited some fourteen newspapers in ten separate communities in both Colorado and New Mexico. Each of his papers included a literary arts column that reprinted literary and historical texts from Mexican and New Mexican newspapers. Escobar’s talents as an editor caught the attention of Eusebio Chacón’s father-in-law, Colorado rancher and legislator Casimiro Barela.¹² Escobar edited Trinidad’s El Progreso and Denver’s Las Dos Repúblicas, two newspapers owned by Barela.

The relationships each man cultivated with Barela are likely the source of tension between them. By definition, a mine-strewn set of associations pitted Chacón, a member of the Barela family and the homegrown writer, against Escobar, Barela’s employee and an outsider. These tangled interests insured rivalries would develop. In no uncertain terms, Escobar equaled Chacón as a writer. A farsighted thinker, Escobar quickly came to understand the plight of nuevomexicanos and made it his own, delineating the root causes of their social problems in a series of masterful editorial essays. Escobar’s status as a full-fledged journalist, dedicated entirely to the nuevomexicano cause, may have also fueled Chacón’s animosity toward him and his work, especially considering a fundamental principle of the movement to which they both subscribed premised that it should showcase the work of native New Mexican authors and thinkers. Despite his important works and his abiding support of the New Mexican cultural movement, Escobar would always be seen as an outsider. Escobar, however, apparently always held Chacón in high regard as demonstrated in the passage cited above. He may have been content to share the spotlight with Chacón, giving him his due for his work as a novelist, but it was in the pursuit of a history project that these men tangled.

Other writers of his generation knew well Chacón’s efforts to produce a history of New Mexico. His socioliterary avocation led him to compile an important cache of historical documents. Chacón collected materials on his travels to Mexico, and friends and associates entrusted other important documents to him. Escobar, however, outflanked Chacón in October 1893, when he announced that he was on the verge of publishing a historical work titled, Nuevo México y sus hombres ilustres: 1530–1894 (Illustrious Men of New Mexico, 1530–1894). Escobar listed Chacón as a collaborator on the project, but not long after announcing the book, Escobar left Barela’s employ at Trinidad’s El Progreso and formed a partnership with Pedro García de la Lama, the editor of La Opinión Pública in Albuquerque. Chacón then expressed dissatisfaction with Escobar’s continued pursuit of a history of New Mexico, claiming that he was never consulted about the direction and ultimate form the book would take. Withholding his participation, Chacón added, In the future, I alone shall take up the writing of the history of New Mexico (see part 5). Escobar and his new partner apologized to Chacón, noting the magnitude of the proposed work and wishing him great success and great triumph in his solo venture to write the history of New Mexico.

Despite the breakup, Escobar and Chacón managed to mend their relationship when Escobar returned to Colorado and Barela rehired him to edit Las Dos Repúblicas. Between March and July 1896, Escobar published Chacón’s series on colonial history called, Descubrimiento y Conquista de Nuevo México en 1540 por los Españoles: Disertaciones de historia patria (Discovery and Conquest of New Mexico by the Spanish in 1540: Treatises on the History of the Homeland). Reproducing it here in both Spanish and English provides readers a full measure of Chacón’s commitment to the writing of New Mexico history. Chacón passionately believed that documenting and codifying this history was key to renewing a sense of confidence in his fellow nuevomexicanos. This example of history by installment also points to a heightened awareness among Chacón’s generation of the need to write their own history.

Escobar’s characterization of Chacón as the spearpoint of the intellectual ascendancy of young nuevomexicanos during the 1890s proved prophetic in a very real sense as Chacón’s most lasting legacy has ultimately been that of a defender and spokesman for the nuevomexicano cause. In this regard, his talent as an orator, more than the elegance of his fiction and poetry, has caught the attention of contemporary southwestern scholars. The power of his eloquence did not go unperceived in his own lifetime and the Spanish-language press regularly praised his skill at the lectern. The lead story in Trinidad’s El Progreso for July 15, 1899, for example, summarizes a day-long gathering of the Society for Mutual Advancement, the local Hispanic mutual aid association, at the home of Casimiro Barela in southern Colorado. The 4 p.m. session gave way to debate and speeches, with Chacón, the association’s honorific president, leading off with a challenge talk, which he improvised on the prompt, Through the eye of the needle. The reporter on scene remarked, He [Chacón] began his speech on the topic with such eloquent and scientific words, that my pen does not do them justice. I can only say that he moved his talk through ‘the eye of the needle’ making such sublime comparisons that managed to show that the ‘needle’ was essential to all industry from the sewing machine to the needle on the governor of the steam engine.¹³ This example illustrates the ubiquity of the art of speechmaking in Chacón’s lifetime and shows oratory as both entertainment and a display of intellectual acuity. Clearly, the performance above was a staged event, an improvised demonstration that allowed Chacón to show off his creative decision-making skills on a topic chosen to entertain an audience of friends, neighbors, and family members.

Chacón’s oratory took on a deadly seriousness during the fall of 1901, while he was living in Las Vegas, New Mexico. On October 26, a sizeable group of community residents inducted Chacón to denounce publicly an article penned by Nellie Snyder, a Protestant missionary who had been proselytizing in northern New Mexico. An agitated group of some six hundred nuevomexicanos gathered at the county courthouse to express their indignation at what they perceived as a barrage of derogatory, demeaning attacks on their culture, religion, and way of life that had appeared a week before in the English-language newspaper, The Review.

Chacón’s Elecuente discourso, or An Eloquent Speech (reproduced in part 3), stands as Chacón’s signature work. La Voz del Pueblo, one of the largest Spanish weeklies in the New Mexico Territory, immediately published Chacón’s speech in its entirety. In recent years, cultural and literary critics, as well as historians and sociologists, have made their way to this text and find it a remarkable commentary on the social condition of nuevomexicanos at the start of the twentieth century. Other lesser known essays published in various newspapers are included in this anthology. Viewing the essays in serial order, one is able to appreciate Chacón’s shifts between jocular and serious erudition. This trait stands out in five somewhat unorthodox prose pieces that carry the pseudonym Adelfa and appear in part 3 of this collection. While these works carry no by-line, they bear Chacón’s hallmark style and delivery. Someone operating as a reporter or correspondent submitted the five texts to El Boletín Popular in Santa Fe, the press that published Chacón’s novelettes in 1892. The pieces include a number of allusions to classical literature and are peppered with Chacón’s wry, homegrown sense of satire. In the installment that appeared on July 15, 1897, Adelfa reveals that he was a student at the Jesuit college in Las Vegas, the institution where Chacón received his education. In the same installment, and again on August 5, 1897, the writer takes up a spat with José Escobar, tagging him with two pseudonyms Escobar favored most, Zig-Zig and El Cantor de Popé. As if harkening readers back to earlier disputes, Adelfa caustically described himself as less historical than Zig-Zag, a thinly disguised allusion to the quarrel the two men had over the authoring of a history just a few years before.

A Native of the Southwest

Francisco A. Lomelí

Born in Peñasco, New Mexico, on December 16, 1869, Eusebio Chacón was the prodigal son of Captain Rafael Chacón and Juanita Páez, both of whom possessed deep-rooted backgrounds and long-standing family pedigrees in the region, recognized for their intimate involvement in military actions and the colonization of the remote northern frontier of New Spain. On his father’s side, for example, Chacón’s lineage dates back to military leaders in fifteenth-century Spain. Chacón’s first ancestor in New Mexico, José María Chacón, was appointed governor and captain general of the province of New Mexico by King Philip V in 1707. Chacón’s mother descended directly from don Juan Páez Hurtado de Mendoza who served as lieutenant governor for don Diego de Vargas, the distinguished military leader who spearheaded the reconquest of New Mexico with his large caravan of families from Mexico City in 1693. Chacón’s father, a decorated and renowned military man and a veteran of the American Civil War, retired after serving at various military forts and outposts in the region during the Mexican period and beyond when New Mexico became a territory of the United States. Prior to his military service, Rafael Chacón attended a military school in Chihuahua before the American invasion of 1848 and rose to the rank of major in the U.S. Cavalry. In the late stages of his life, Rafael Chacón wrote a fascinating memoir, which Eusebio translated, recounting his many experiences and close calls with death as a subject of Spain, a citizen of Mexico, and a soldier of the U.S. Army during the conquest of the American West.¹⁴ In addition, Albino Chacón, Eusebio’s paternal grandfather, was a notable judge and a member of the assembly under Mexican rule. Eusebio’s uncle, Urbano Chacón, founded and edited important newspapers in New Mexico. Urbano’s son Felipe stood out as a gifted poet and writer. Therefore, young Eusebio acquired a keen awareness of his family’s role in history from both sides of his prominent parents. Stories of past conquests, public service, and heroic deeds were not just fanciful confabulations at family gatherings; their past gave Eusebio a profound sense of place and historical responsibility. Discussions about letters and the sword commingled freely in the Chacón family, setting them apart for their bravery, their devotion to culture and country, and their intellectual prowess.

Although Eusebio was born in New Mexico, when he was a child, his family moved to and settled outside Trinidad, Colorado, shortly after his father retired from the U.S. Cavalry. He spent a good portion of his life on the border between Trinidad and Las Vegas, New Mexico, and, in a real way, served as an important bridge unifying the concerns of the minority Hispanics in southern Colorado and the nuevomexicanos who flexed their muscle as a clear demographic majority. A true product of this dual environment, Chacón received a strong parochial and Catholic education through high school in Trinidad. He then moved to Las Vegas to pursue a bachelor’s degree at the Jesuit Las Vegas College, where he graduated in 1887. Along with his brother Ladislao Chacón, Eusebio later attended University of Notre Dame, where he received various recognitions for his academic excellence and overall intelligence. He graduated with a law degree from that institution on June 30, 1889.¹⁵

It quickly became evident that Chacón possessed many talents and solid intellectual credentials as well as a keen sensibility with literary aspirations. At Notre Dame, he began to cultivate his expository style in a series of insightful essays on a variety of subjects, including the last king of Granada, current trends in Mexican literature (in three parts), and Christopher Columbus, as well as a critical response to art, a thesis on law, and a poem on Geoffrey Chaucer. All these texts appeared in the Notre Dame Scholastic between 1888 and 1889, demonstrating a remarkably seasoned writer for an eighteen- and nineteen-year-old. Moreover, Chacón’s early works revealed a classical training, a well-articulated rhetoric, and an admirable philosophical bent for his young age. The article on Christopher Columbus, for example, was part of an oratorical contest, and its publication suggests that he won. In 1884, as a young thirteen-year-old, Eusebio earned a reputation for his natural penchant for public speaking, when he delivered a resounding speech before the Asociación de Mutuo Adelantamiento (Association of Mutual Advancement) in Trinidad.¹⁶ Given his prodigious nature coupled with his academic performance and eloquence in oratory, [Eusebio] was invited in 1889, when he was only nineteen years old, to deliver the welcoming address in Spanish to the Pan American Congress at St. Paul, Minnesota.¹⁷

In 1889, with a solid educational background from University of Notre Dame, Chacón ventured into Mexico to teach English and to serve as vice-director at the Colegio Guadalupano in the city of Durango. Poor health, however, forced him to return to Colorado in 1891, the same year he passed his bar exam, set up his law practice, and married Sofía Barela, the daughter of Colorado senator, president pro tempore of the Colorado legislature, and Mexican consul Casimiro Barela (1847–1920). In Historia ilustrada de Nuevo México, historian Benjamín M. Read synthesized what he considered the outstanding qualities of Eusebio’s growing talent during this period: Es un joven de costumbres ejemplares; afable y cortés con todos, muy trabajador en su despacho y un estudiante laborioso (He is a young man of exemplary habits, affable and courteous with everyone, a hard worker in his business and a diligent student).¹⁸

Consequently, his career and reputation catapulted between 1891 and 1899, when he was appointed official translator and interpreter for the U.S. Court of Private Land Claims, recently established to hold hearings in Santa Fe to adjudicate and mediate contentious land grant titles from past Spanish and Mexican governments. In 1894, Chacón was admitted to the New Mexico Bar, which allowed him to practice law in both Colorado and New Mexico. Of fundamental importance to this book project, during this period, Chacón published two novelettes in 1892, numerous essays, some poetry, and several newspaper editorials. He also worked diligently to recover and disseminate old manuscripts of both literary and historical value, allowing others to discover and appreciate a written Hispanic heritage.

In 1899, Chacón moved his family to Las Vegas, New Mexico, and a year later, he returned to Trinidad, where he practiced law on a regular basis until he retired in 1933. Around 1900, Chacón was elected assistant district attorney and later deputy district attorney, a position he held until his retirement. Chacón lived at 420 East Topeka Avenue in Trinidad until his death on April 3, 1948. Here, he and his wife Sofía raised their six children: Josefina Enriqueta Chacón, Ernestina Chacón, Casimiro Gustavo Chacón, Carmen Chacón, Ana Isabel Chacón, and Dolores Chacón.¹⁹ The various personal letters included in this collection reveal an affectionate and kind father and grandfather at a time when Chacón was acerbic with rivals and testy with those who