September 30, 2020 • 43 mins
Nina Otero-Warren was from a prominent New Mexico family, and worked in education, politics, and the suffrage movement, focusing largely on Spanish speakers.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. This past August,
as I'm sure our listeners are aware of, the United
States marked the hundredth anniversary of the ratification of the
(00:24):
Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution that happened on August eighteenth,
ninety and we really just didn't do anything to commemorate
it on the show in any way, because we have
talked about the Nineteenth Amendment specifically and suffrage more generally
a lot in the past. Plus, the nineteenth Amendment was important,
but in practice it mainly affected white and relatively affluent women,
(00:48):
So it just it did not feel as much like
it needs was a story we needed to tell yet again.
And people also seemed way more conscious of this on
social media this time around, in terms of who the
nineteenth Amendment actually applied to. In practice, I saw way
more people pointing out other later dates that related to
(01:09):
voting rights for non white women, and in some cases
this was about citizenship, like Indigenous people were not considered
US citizens until nineteen four, and a lot of Asians
couldn't become citizens until nineteen fifty two. And then there
were other dates that were more related to outlawing discrimination,
especially through the Voting Rights Act of nineteen sixty five.
(01:31):
That's mostly discussed in the context of black Americans, but
it was more broadly framed to outlaw practices that were
meant to deny voting rights to anyone on account of
race or color. So all of those milestones that people
had been tweeting when they were talking about the nineteenth Amendment,
those are all familiar to me. But another one that
caught my eye that wasn't was nineteen seventy five, and
(01:55):
that's the year that the Voting Rights Act was amended
to include in the words of the amendment language minorities,
and that was defined in this amendment as American Indians,
Asian Americans, Alaska Natives, and people of Spanish heritage. And
if one of those populations in a particular area gets
to a certain threshold, then the voting material that's available
(02:17):
in English needs to be available in that language as well.
So the person we're talking about today finally get to
that predates that amendment to the Voting Rights Act, but
her work was directly tied to this idea. It is
Nina Otero Warren whose work in the suffrage movement and
the US was largely focused on people who spoke Spanish.
(02:38):
So Nina Otero Warren was descended from two of the
most prominent Hispanic families in northern New Mexico, so for
that background. By about the year one hundred, this part
of North America was home to ancestral Pueblo ends, whose
descendants include the Pueblo people still living there today. By
about the thirteenth century, it was also home to Navajo
(02:59):
and Apache people's When Spain started colonizing the area in
the sixteenth century, o Tero Warren's ancestors on her mother's side,
the Lunas, were part of multiple expeditions. This started with
Don Tristan de Luna Ariano de Castillo, who sailed with
her non Cortez in fifteen thirty. The Lunas were also
(03:20):
part of forces that were led by conquistadors Juan Dayonnante
and Francisco Coronado. Diego de Luna and his family were
driven out of the region during the Puebler Revolt of
sixteen eighty, which we covered on the show back in fourteen.
They came back to the area with Diego di Vargus
when he reconquered it in the sixteen nineties, and then
(03:41):
Ottero Warren's father's family, the Otero's. They arrived in New
Spain from Europe in seventeen six. On September six, eight ten,
Mexico declared its independence from Spain, starting the Mexican War
of Independence, which lasted for just over a year. The
Mexican American War followed just over thirty five years later,
(04:02):
ending in eighteen forty eight with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.
Under this treaty, Mexico ceded a huge amount of land
to the United States, including most of what became the
southwestern US. This included the territory of New Mexico, which
was established in eighteen fifty. This newly formed territory of
New Mexico was home to indigenous people, some of whom
(04:24):
had been enslaved under the Spanish Empire and then continued
to be held in bondage in the decades and centuries
that followed. These people and their descendants were known as
hens Ros. This is a term that was initially used
as a slur, but has been reclaimed by their descendants
living today. There were also people of both indigenous and
European ancestry who were known as mestizos, as well as
(04:47):
enslaved and free Africans and their descendants. Slavery was legal
in New Mexico under the Compromise of eighteen fifty, and
it continued to be so until the U S outlawed
slavery in all of its territories in eighteen sixty two.
New Mexico's elite, including Nino Otero Warren's family, generally described
themselves as Hispanos, focusing on their ancestral ties to Spain
(05:10):
and their famili's presence in the America's dating back to
before Mexican independence, rather than any connection they might have
to indigenous or African ancestry or to Mexico. People describing
themselves as Hispanos today might define that in a different
way and much more broadly, though, in terms of things
like the US Census, people of European ancestry who had
(05:32):
been born in New Spain or in Mexico were considered
to be white, and Hospano's emphasis on their Spanish heritage
was also reinforcing this idea that they were white, but
in practice, there were nuances within New Mexico's Spanish speaking
community who as a group were also seen as separate
from English speakers or Anglos. For the first few decades
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of the territory of New Mexico's existence, the vast majority
of the population spoke Spannah or an indigenous language. At first,
newly arrived Anglos generally tried to learn Spanish and assimilate
with the local Spanish speaking culture, but that started to
shift when railroad lines into the area were finished in
eighteen eighty one, bringing a much larger number of English
(06:17):
speakers to the area much more quickly. That's also the
same year that Nina Otero Warren was born. She was
born Maria Adelina Isabel Amelia Otero on October twenty eight one.
Her parents were Eloisa Luna and Manuel Basilio Otero, and
she was born on the family hacienda, which was known
(06:37):
as La Constancia I was about twenty miles south of Albuquerque.
In her childhood and her youth, she went by the
name Adelina. The Lunas and the Otero's were very prominent,
affluent families. Both of Nina's parents had been educated outside
of New Mexico, Eloisa at a private Catholic boarding school
in New York and Manuel at Georgetown University in wash Shington,
(07:00):
d c. And at Heidelberg University in Germany. Much of
the family's wealth came from sheep ranching, and they also
owned vineyards and a lot of land. Yet, in addition
to these ancestral ties, going back to the initial colonization
of New Spain, like they had a lot of money
as a family. Nina was the Otero's second child and
(07:23):
their oldest daughter, and tragedy struck the family before her
second birthday. Two brothers from Massachusetts, James and Joel Whitney,
had challenged the Otero's claim to some land. Each side
was claiming that the other were squatters, and the case
was making its way through the courts. The Whitneys were
staying at a cabin on this contested property. After they
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had evicted one of the Otero's cattle drivers from it,
Manuel Otero went to the cabin with some other men
to try to talk things through. It seemed like things
were being settled amicably, but for reasons that are not
entirely clear. James Whitney shot oh Terry Row, sparking a
shootout that killed another man instantly and injured two others,
including James Whitney. Manuel Otero survived long enough to give
(08:09):
a statement to the Justice of the Peace, but he
died shortly thereafter. Whitney was later tried for murder and acquitted.
There were allegations that he had bribed the judge to
give the jury instructions that were skewed in his favor.
It really wasn't the first or only land dispute for
the immediate or extended Otero family. Spain had been issuing
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land grants for centuries before Mexico became independent, and there
were questions about which of those land grants were valid.
And then, of course, there were also cases in which
the government had granted colonists land that had not actually
been seated by the indigenous peoples who were living there,
and also cases in which the same land had been
granted to two different people by two different governing bodies.
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Complicating all of this, the US government also didn't really
recognize grace land as occupied. When disputes went to court,
the courts generally recognized only land that had cultivated crops
or a home or another structure on it as actually
in use. Under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the United
States had agreed to recognize indigenous landholdings and allow indigenous
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peoples to retain their language, culture, and customs, but in general,
courts found in favor of Anglos more often than Hispanics
or Indigenous people in these disputes. When Manuel Otaro was
killed in eighteen eighty three, Nina's mother was nineteen and
she was pregnant with her third child. The following summer,
she went to Philadelphia to look for an English speaking
(09:41):
governess so that her children could grow up fluent in
both English and Spanish and be more able to move
in both Hispanic and Anglo circles. She hired twenty four
year old Mary Elizabeth Doyle, who was Irish. The family
knew her as Teta, and she worked and lived with
them until her death in ninety seven. In eighteen eighty six,
Nina's mother remarried to Alfred Maurice Berg Are known as
(10:04):
a m He was born in Liverpool to parents who
had come from Italy but were of both French and
Jewish ancestry. The Lunas had some Jewish ancestry as well,
although it's not as clear if it was known to
the family at the time. They likely converted to Christianity
during the Spanish Inquisition. Eloisa and a m had another
twelve children together, nine of whom survived infancy, and as
(10:27):
the oldest daughter of this family, Nina was expected to
take a lot of responsibility with her younger siblings, and
we'll get to that after a sponsor break. Nina Otero's
mother and stepfather wanted their children to be educated, so
(10:48):
Nina studied with private tutors before being enrolled in St.
Vincent's Academy in Albuquerque. When she was eleven, she went
to Maryville College of the Sacred Heart, which was now
Maryville University and Say Louis, Missouri. At the time, this
was essentially a Catholic finishing school for affluent young ladies,
and Nina returned home from there when she was thirteen.
(11:09):
Nina lived under a clear set of social expectations. She
had a duty to help keep the family home and
raise her younger siblings, and one day she would marry
and have children in a household of her own, but
living on a hacienda also afforded her some freedom. She
grew into an independently minded young woman, taking part in
ranch life and helping to inspect the property on horseback.
(11:32):
She also got some of her male relatives to teach
her how to shoot. When she was sixteen, President William
McKinley appointed Miguel Antonio Otero the Second as the territorial
governor of New Mexico. Miguel Otero was one of the
Otero's cousins, and he appointed Nina's stepfather to be a
judicial clerk, so the family relocated to the capital of
(11:53):
Santa Fe. Santa Fe was also home to a growing
society of mostly Anglo artists, writers, and crafts people. Within
this community, Nina was soon regarded as witty, intelligent, respectable,
and accomplished. She was also increasingly interested in social causes,
something that had been part of her school instruction at
Maryville College of the Sacred Heart. She was also following
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her mother's example in this Eloisa was especially active in
causes related to education during these years. As Nina was
growing up, the attitudes of the New Mexican Hispano elite
were shifting, connected to an ongoing effort to pursue statehood. Outsiders,
especially viewed New Mexico is pretty backward and there was
(12:36):
a lot of stigma around speaking Spanish, so, especially in cities,
more people started building Victorian style homes, using brick rather
than Adobe, and speaking English rather than Spanish. But at
the same time, there were more and more Anglo newcomers
moving into the area, thanks in part too aggressive advertising
by railroad lines, so the Spanish language and Spanish and
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Mexican culture were becoming less prevalent and less respected, especially
in more urban areas. Intermarriages between Hispanic and Anglo people
were common and widely accepted during all of this, applying
not just to Nina's mother but also to Nina herself.
When she was twenty six, she met Lieutenant ross and
d Warren of the fifth U. S. Cavalry. They got
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married on June night, and she went back with him
to Fort Wingate, where he was stationed. A news article
covering her wedding described her as quote very popular, very bright, charming,
finely educated and attractive, endowed with many graces of the heart, mind,
and body, the descendant of one of the oldest and
(13:42):
best families in New Mexico. Marriage was not a happy
one though, and within two years they had divorced and
Nina had returned to Santa Fe. She didn't leave any
kind of personal documents about her feelings and all of this,
but it does seem like she just didn't enjoy the
risk frictions of being an officer's wife. She flouted some
(14:03):
of the conventions that she was supposed to help uphold,
like dancing with a private when she was only supposed
to be socializing with officers and their wives. Also, Ross
And apparently had a common law wife in the Philippines
from when he had served there during the Spanish American War,
and to Nina, this was biggamy. However, divorce was flatly
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unacceptable from both the social and a religious perspective, so
even though her ex husband lived until nine, Nina told
people she was a widow. She used her hyphenated surname
for the rest of her life. Adding Warren to her
surname disguised her divorce and it gave her an added
degree of respectability among Anglos, but it could also raise
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suspicion among Hispanics. Occasionally, she dropped the use of Warren
to stress her Hispano heritage. Including when she published books
and articles about Spanish culture in New Mexico. Yeah, her,
her name she used socially was pretty much a Taro
Warren for the rest of her life. Um, but sometimes
we'll see bylines that have the Warren part omitted. In
(15:07):
nineteen ten, the Otero Bregaire family bought and expanded a
home in Santa Fe to accommodate their growing family. This
was on unseated land belonging to the Tewa people, and
it still stands today as home to the Georgia O'Keeffe
Museum's library and archives. That same year, Nina convinced her
mother to set up trusts for her and her unmarried sisters,
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including the youngest, Isabel, who had an intellectual disability. Nina
had realized that territorial law really limited women's property rights,
especially after they got married, and she didn't want any
of them to have to rely on the goodwill of
men to survive. In nineteen twelve, New Mexico became a state,
and that year Otara Warren moved to New York City
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to keep house for her brother, Luna Brajaire while he
studied at Columbia University. While living in New York. She
volunteered at a settlement how was run by Anne Morgan,
the daughter of JP Morgan. But then in en Tera,
Warren's mother died at the age of fifty. As the
oldest daughter, it was Nina's duty to take up the
role of family matriarchs, so she went back home to
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New Mexico. One of her sisters, Anita, had been in
the final steps of joining a convent when their mother died.
Anita put her religious vocation aside and she went back
home as well. Beyond their grief over the loss of
their mother, this seems to have been difficult for everybody involved.
Nina inherited the Luna family lands, but she was not
(16:36):
particularly interested in the day to day running of the
household or caring for her siblings. The youngest was Joe
age eight, and most of the daughters were still living
at home. All of this work mostly fell to Anita,
who was really doing this out of a sense of obligation,
and she later described it as ruining her life. Nina
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was also strict and had very strong opinions about her
siblings romantic partners and whether they were good enough to marry.
This was something that led to tensions and riffs within
the family. Nina also made decisions about things like whether
to sell property and how to handle finances, sometimes without
really consulting anybody else, and that led to some frustrations
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and animosity when people disagreed with what she had done.
As the family was still adjusting to all of this,
Nina o Tera Warren became involved in the suffrage movement,
something that really did not have a huge presence in
New Mexico at the time. When New Mexico became a state,
it was the only one in the Western US that
didn't give women the right to vote, and the state
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constitution made it really hard to change that, requiring a
vote to pass by three quarters of both houses and
two thirds of every county. Suffrage bills that were introduced
in the legislature repeatedly failed. Attempts to combine a movement
for suffrage with one for prohibition also failed. Casual drinking
was an accepted part of everyday life, particularly in affluent
(18:02):
Catholic families. For her part, oh Tera Warren took what
she called a drinking basket with her anytime she had
to take a long trip by train. I'm going to
adopt this practice. Also, women could be appointed to office
in New Mexico, but could only hold elected offices that
were related to things like education. I tried to find
(18:22):
a little more detail about exactly what was in this
drinking basket, and I failed, imagining it is like a
picnic basket, but with spirits involved, which might also be
in your picnic basket. Right, yeah, I'm I don't know
if you've ever seen those little tin kind of craft kits,
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so you can take them on your plane and do
your mixed drink with them. I just did envision a
bigger version of that. So, in general, there really was
a lot of resistance to the idea of votes for
women in New Mexico. There was just a lot going
on in terms of culture and religion. This was especially
true among Spanish speakers. So in the late nineteen teens,
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Alice paul sent Ella st. Clair Thompson, who spoke some Spanish,
to New Mexico to try to organize, and after working
with several Hispanic women directly, including Otaro Warren, Thompson asked
her to lead up the New Mexico chapter of the
Congressional Union, which later became the National Woman's Party. OH
Tara Warren did extensive work, especially among Spanish speakers, to
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rally support for women's suffrage, including making sure suffrage materials
were printed in both English and Spanish. Although there were
Indigenous people involved in the suffrage movement, including people advocating
for both suffrage and dual citizenship with the US and
Indigenous nations, o Tera Warren's approach was really about outreach
to the Spanish speaking community. Tera Warren's political and community
(19:51):
work also went beyond the suffrage movement, and we will
get to that after a sponsor break. In nineteen seventeen,
Nina o Tero Lawren was appointed superintendent of public schools
in Santa Fe County, New Mexico. The position became elective
(20:12):
in nineteen eighteen, and at that point she was elected
and then re elected, defeating male candidates to do so.
She was thirty seven. This made her the youngest school
superintendent in the state at the time, and in that
role she pushed for raising teacher pay, restoring and rebuilding
schools that were in disrepair, and increasing the length of
the school year to nine months. Really varied from place
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to place, and there were some places where the school
year was as short as three months, largely because children
were needed to work on family farms in more rural areas.
She also wanted the government to put more money into education,
including paying off school's debts. She also advocated teaching to
use her framing traditional Spanish culture, arts, and crafts, particularly
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in rural, predominantly Spanish speaking areas. The influx of Anglo newcomers,
industrialization and commercialization had eroded the quality of life in
many rural areas, and people that had been living in
self sustaining communities were instead having to find work as
migrant farm workers or service workers. Oh Tera. Warren thought
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that professional instruction in traditional crafts could give these students
a vocation for later in life, while also preserving Spanish
culture and arts. This really did not go so far
at the time as advocating that students be taught in Spanish, though,
as New Mexico had been pursuing statehood, the federal government
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had passed a law that required New Mexico's public schools
to be taught only in English. Arizona's statehood was also
connected to all this, but it's outside the scope of
what we're talking about today. In response to that federal law,
New Mexico's state constitution included several protections for Spanish speakers,
including a provision for training teachers in Spanish so that
(22:02):
they could teach Spanish speaking students. So, as public school
superintendent o Tero, Warren was trying to uphold the federal
government's policy of English only education while also trying to
protect the school system Spanish speaking students, discouraging them from
speaking Spanish while also discouraging schools from punishing them for
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doing so. In her words, quote, it is to our
best interests that we become educated according to the standards
of the nation. It has for us, it's distinct advantages,
it's definite protection. Yeah, she really, in a lot of
cases in her life and work was sort of trying
to walk a very fine line between the Anglo and
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the Hispanic communities. Um and like she evolved in some
of us which we're going to talk about later, but
this was a case where it really seems like she
was trying to do her best to serve all of
the interests that were placed on her. In addition to
her work and the stuff Ridge movement, and as school superintendent.
After the US entered World War One, Otara Warren was
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appointed as her district's chair of the Woman's Auxiliary of
the State Council of Defense, which later became the Women's
Committee of the National Council of Defense. That in nineteen seventeen,
she was appointed chair of the State Board of Public Health.
In nineteen nineteen, Congress passed the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution,
and Otara Warren shifted the focus of her suffrage work
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from changing the law in New Mexico to getting the
state to ratify the amendment, something that would only be
possible with support from the Spanish speaking community. She also
stressed the importance of Spanish speakers exercising their right to
vote so they could get people into office who would
represent them and protect their interests. Even so, the Nineteenth
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Amendment faced a lot of opposition in New Mexico, and
the first attempts to ratify it failed. It was finally
ratified by the state on February twenty one, nineteen twenty
making it the thirty second out of thirty six states
that were necessary for full ratification. That same year, a
Tero Warren met Mami Metters, who had been born in
Arkansas and had come to New Mexico seeking treatment for tuberculosis,
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and a lot of ways these two women were opposites.
Nina was far more outgoing, she loved going to parties,
and she had really extensive social and political connections. Mamie
was a lot more reserved than maybe a little socially awkward.
But the two of them became inseparable, and they were
nicknamed Las dos or the two by the people who
knew them. In one New Mexico, Senator Home Bursum introduced
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a bill into Congress that would have allowed non indigenous
people to claim Pueblo land if they could prove they
had been living on it for at least ten years.
That would have been devastating for Pueblo communities. This bill
was ultimately defeated in Nix following intense advocacy by indigenous people,
including nineteen of the Pueblos U nineing to send a
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delegation to Washington. D c oh Tara Warren had advocated
for at least some kind of compromise with this bill.
In her mind, the burst and Bill had the potential
to protect Hispanics from losing land that they had been
living and working on. Two Anglos, also in New Mexico
passed an amendment that allowed women to hold elected office
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beyond positions that were related to things like education, and
with that, Tera Warren decided it was time to move up,
and she ran as a Republican for the U S
House of Representatives. Oh Tera Warren faced a lot of
criticism and derision during this campaign, including repeated suggestions that
her running for office was some kind of cute novelty
(25:40):
because of her gender. Her platform included a focus on education,
labor rights, tariffs to protect sheep and cattle ranchers, Hispanic
land rights, and the enforcement of prohibition, which at this point,
in spite of that drinking basket that we previously talked about,
that was the law of the land and she was
sort of reluctantly supporting it. In the primary, she defeated
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the incumbent Nestor Montoya by our ratio of almost four
to one. General election was another story, though late in
her campaign, her cousin, Miguel Tero, the one who had
previously been territorial governor, publicly revealed that she was really
divorced and not widowed. As part of her campaign, o
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Tero Warren had emphasized her family's political history and its
involvement in the colonization of New Mexico going back to Cortes,
and her cousin apparently felt slighted that she had not
included him in the roster. Tara Warren lost to her
opponent John R. Morrow by more than nine thousand votes
are about nine percent, and it's not entirely clear how
(26:47):
much of this revelation of her divorce influenced the vote.
It was definitely a topic of discussion, but Democrats also
swept the entire state in this election. Yeah, it doesn't
seem like she probably had a huge chance anyway, but yeah,
it could not have helped, that's for sure. Ine oh
Tero Warren was appointed to be Santa Fe County's Inspector
(27:09):
of Indian Schools, becoming the first woman to be appointed
to the position. She inspected the schools in the area
and found the conditions to be appalling. She made a
series of recommendations about hygiene and safety, everything from having
a secure place to put used towels in the washrooms
so they would not be reused among students, to burning
(27:30):
all of the mattresses in the boys dormitory at Santa
Fe Indian School because they were in such horrible condition,
and then replacing them with army cots. Otaro Warren was
also really critical of the boarding school system itself. That
system had been established to force Indigenous children to assimilate
with white culture and to separate them from their own cultures.
(27:52):
We have covered that in a previous two parter on
Fort Shaw Indian School and specifically their girls basketball team.
Otaro Warren wrote of this boarding school system quote, the
Indian child trained in modern schools has little in common
with his parents. When he finishes, he must be taught
to appreciate the history and traditions of his own race,
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and thus inspired to continue the native arts of his
own people, as well as acquire a new type of learning.
When he finishes school, he should feel closer to his
own people and desire to help them. Leaders and teachers
should be developed from their own race. There were some
similarities between Otaro Warren's approach to the boarding schools and
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her approach to Spanish speaking communities as school superintendent. She
agreed with the prevailing view that both Indigenous and Hispanic
children needed to learn English and to at least some
degree to assimilate with the Anglo world, but she also
thought that their languages, cultures, and traditions should be taught
and preserved. At the same time, though her work as
(28:54):
inspector could be pretty paternalistic. For example, like a lot
of other people, she put a big focus on the
idea of needing to teach hygiene to indigenous women. And
in all of this, she also really romanticized Spain's colonization
of the Southwest and the Spanish Empire's treatment of indigenous
people's in the area. Like she really seems to have
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understood that Hispanic people living when she was were basically
being colonized by Anglos who were coming into the area,
but like she'd never seems to have quite made the
connection that her ancestors did the same thing to the
indigenous people who had already been living in the area.
All of that said, though her criticisms of the boarding
(29:35):
school system were not particularly popular to her bosses, and
she was in this position for less than two years.
In seven, O Tera Warren got into a dispute with
state school superintendent Lois randolph O. Tero Warren had started
working as the local sales rep for a textbook publisher,
which violated a school code that had been passed in
(29:58):
Although the school bore ultimately exonerated her, she decided not
to run for re election. Afterward. She didn't stop advocating
for Spanish speaking students, though, and she became more of
an advocate for bilingual education instead of focusing on teaching English.
This included applying for a grant from the Laura Spelman
Rockefeller Foundation, and her letter for this read, in part, quote,
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the Spanish American has met the fate of all small
colonial groups. Namely, he has suffered from the inability to
compete economically or industrially with the overwhelming odds of the
standardized commercialism of this country. And an effort to preserve
the Spanish American people and their culture. I feel this
can be best accomplished through education. She went on to
(30:44):
say that quote the standardized methods adopted from the English
speaking schools, to a large extent, have discouraged and subordinated
every semblance of Spanish culture in the educational life of
the Spanish speaking native people. Oh Tera Warren had always
kept herself very busy, and after her tenure as school
superintendent was over, she looked for another challenge. This time homesteading.
(31:07):
On March seventeenth, nineteen thirty she and Maymi Metters each
filed homestead applications on adjoining parcels that totaled more than
twelve hundred acres about fifteen miles outside of Santa Fe.
To finalize their claim on the land, they had to
live there for at least five months of the year
for four years, fence the property, irrigated, and build homes.
(31:29):
Tero Warren also spent some of those years writing a book,
This was Old Spain in Our Southwest, which was published
in nineteen thirty six. She wanted to document the society
she had grown up in, one that she saw is
disappearing through assimilation with Anglo culture, and the resulting book
is both a romanticized look at life on a New
(31:50):
Mexican hacienda, including local folklore, and then also a testament
to a culture that had been lost in what amounted
to a second wave of colonization in New Mexican Coo.
On September six, nineteen thirty five, the Lost Dose Homestead
officially belonged to Nina Otero Warren and Mami Metters. It
became a retreat both for family and for friends who
(32:12):
came for weekend visits or even longer. By that point,
o Tera Warren had also helped Cleophas Haremo found the
Sociedad Fotorico de Santa Fe, which was meant to help
preserve the Spanish language and Hispanic folk traditions in New Mexico,
as well as trying to dispel negative stereotypes and to
offer training in arts and crafts. That year, she also
(32:34):
became the literacy director of the Civilian Conservation Corps, where
she focused on bilingual literacy education. In nineteen thirty six,
the College of the Sacred Heart awarded her an honorary
back laureate, and in nineteen thirty seven she became Supervisor
of Literacy Education for the Works Progress Administration. In nineteen
thirty nine, o Tera Warren's stepfather, a Ambergaier, died, leaving
(32:57):
her essentially as the head of the household. By this point,
two of her sisters and the family's former governess were
still living in the family home. In nineteen forty one,
Ottera Warren's work with the w P a to cur
To Puerto Rico, where she was the director of the
Work Conference for Adult teachers. That same year, New Mexico
passed a law requiring schools that met a certain size
(33:20):
requirement to teach Spanish in grades five through eight. This
was really a huge deal, since before this point Spanish
could only be taught in high school, and a lot
of Spanish speaking students were leaving school before that. By
that point, Otara Warren had shifted totally away from the
idea that students in New Mexico should be taught only
in English, calling the teaching of Spanish and elementary school
(33:43):
both desirable and necessary. She expressed her hope that soon
Spanish should be taught even earlier. Other laws regarding bilingual
education in New Mexico followed from there, including the Bilingual
Multicultural Education Act of nineteen seventy three. In ninety seven,
when Nina was sixty five, she and Mamie established a
(34:04):
real estate and insurance company, which they called Los Dos,
with Nina's widespread social and political network helping them to
get clients. Oh Tera Warren particularly enjoyed selling big houses.
She also loved riding at the head of the hysterical
parade at the Santa Fe Fiesta each September, along with
poet and translator Witter Binner. The two of them became
(34:26):
a fixture of the parade over the disapproval of some
of O Tero Warren's family, who objected to Binner's homosexuality.
That parade is still held today. It is also called
the Historical Hysterical Parade. Mammi Matters died on August tenth
of nineteen fifty one at the age of sixty four.
She left Nina Oliver property at the homestead and the
(34:47):
option to buy out her half of the property that
they had owned together. Nina maintained the Lost Dose business afterward,
although she did seem to slow down, and she eventually
hired an assistant. Oh Tera Warren experience against several embolisms
in her later years, possibly connected to her having been
a smoker for most of her life. She died on
(35:07):
January third, nineteen sixty five, at the family home in
Santa Fe. Her death was sudden. She had told her
sister Anita that she didn't feel well, and Anita brought
her some brandy at her request. After drinking it, Nina
o Tero Warren collapsed and died. She had two rosary services,
one in English and one in Spanish. Nino o Tero
(35:28):
Warren's focus on Spanish language school instruction and bilingual education,
and on voting access for Spanish speakers continues to be
a big part of life in New Mexico today. According
to the US Census Bureau, almost half the population of
New Mexico identifies as Hispanic, and more than a third
of the state's population speaks a language other than English
(35:51):
at home. In nine New Mexico passed an English plus
resolution which read, in part quote proficiency on the part
of our citizens and more than one language as to
the economic and cultural benefit of our state and the nation.
Whether that proficiency derives from second language study by English
speakers or from home language maintenance plus English acquisition by
(36:15):
speakers of other languages. So that does Nina Otara Warren
I like that She advocated for be able to get
out and vote to their representation. Was people that would
honor their desires or at least hopefully do so. Yeah,
this remains an important message. Yeah. When you read brief
write ups about her, for the most part, they really
(36:36):
stick to her advocacy of access to suffrage materials and
voting for people who spoke Spanish. A lot of them
don't touch on her like more troubling record with indigenous
people at all, um like that was something I had
to get a lot deeper into research to learn about. Yeah,
(36:58):
do you also have listener mail for us? I sure do.
It's actually a listener tweet followed by an amount of
additional information. Uh So, Dr Emily Friedman tagged us in
a tweet, And that was on the day that our
six Impossible episodes. There's a book about that episode came
out and the tweet said relevant to missed in History's
(37:18):
episode that dropped today. And this was a quote tweet
of a thread about a paper that was called Colonial
Rewriting of African History, Misinterpretations and Distortions in Belcher and
Kleiner's Life and Struggles of wall Lot of Petros. That
is one of the six books that we talked about
in the episode. So this paper was published in the
(37:40):
Journal of Afro Asiatic Languages, History and Culture. It was
written by Dr Yurga Geelao Woldas who is from La Labella,
and it is a detailed and very pointed critique of
both the life and struggles of our mother A Lot
of Petros, which we talked about in that episode, and
a paper that Belcher published that interpreted that work. In So,
(38:05):
this newly published paper contends that professor Wendy Laura Belcher
and translator Michael Kleiner just don't have the familiarity with
GIAZ or with Ethiopian monasticisms that are needed to accurately
translate and interpret this text. Um He notes that most
traditionally trained experts in GIAZ actually live in Ethiopia and
(38:26):
don't speak English, and that most of the Ethiopian scholars
that they did consult they disregarded. So consequently, according to
this paper, the resulting translation is viewed through a Western
and colonial lens. But then really beyond that, he says
that they added words and changed meanings from the original
text to sort of create a same sex attraction between
(38:51):
Wallata Petros and another nun, when what they really were
was just an entirely platonic relationship of monastic sisterhood. So
this is a very detailed and precisely argued paper. It
is like nineties six pages long of a PDF. Maybe
tannish pages of that are the notes at the end,
(39:11):
but I mean it's quite lengthy. It also circles back
around to how many Ethiopian manuscripts today are held in
Western institutions rather than in Ethiopia, and ethical concerns about
outsiders getting access to these holy texts and then having
photographed them and published them online. So in his tweets
(39:32):
on this subject, Dr Yura describes this translation as intellectually
dishonest and ethically questionable. I am not sure when this
paper was actually published, but his tweets about it were
from September four, and the thread that we were looped
in on came out from the ninth. I said, Holly
(39:54):
the outline to this episode on September two, and we
recorded the episode on the eight, So this was like
a immediately before all of this came out. Clearly, I
would not have been recommending this book in the episode
had I had all of this other perspective at the time.
Um it was something that was frankly very surprising to
(40:17):
me based on the reception that the book got at
the time. I knew there was some controversy about it,
but as I understood it, the controversy was about like
a misinterpretation of what Belcher was saying, not the contention
that that Belcher had like added words that were not
in their original text. Right, that's a whole other thing.
(40:40):
So based on how many people had praised this translation,
including specifically Ethiopian scholars, most of them now living in
the US, UM and other like black historians and institutes
that focus on African languages, like the fact that, um,
this paper is so contrary to all of that was
(41:02):
like very unexpected to me. If I had a time machine,
we would have handled that obviously very differently. So there
is a lot in this paper beyond what I have
just tried to summarize. The whole paper is online. It's
uh the u r L four. It does not easily
share able in an audio podcast at all, but it
is currently pinned to the top of his Twitter timeline
(41:26):
at your Gagi law, which is at y I R
g A G E l A w UM. So thank
you to Dr Emily Freedman for tagging us into this tweet.
I don't know that this would have crossed my radar
otherwise because it's like it's not a journal that is
(41:46):
part of the databases that I usually consult for things. Um,
I I apologize again for not I don't know. I
don't know which thing to apologize for, because like this,
this paper to didn't exist when we did that episode,
but it's saved. I also feel like, did I miss
something in the research that I was not aware of
(42:08):
having missed until reading this paper. So UM, working on
stuff that is that far out of our own experience
can be complicated for this reason. So thank you again
to Emily Freedman for tagging us in that tweet. UM,
if you would like to write to us about this
or any other podcast, where at history Podcasts at i
(42:29):
heart radio dot com. They we're all over social media
at Missed in History, which is where you'll find our
Facebook and Twitter and Pinterest and Instagram, and you can
subscribe to our show on the iHeart Radio app and
Apple podcasts and anywhere else that you get your podcasts.
Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of
(42:52):
I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio,
visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
listen to your favorite show
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. This past August,
as I'm sure our listeners are aware of, the United
States marked the hundredth anniversary of the ratification of the
(00:24):
Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution that happened on August eighteenth,
ninety and we really just didn't do anything to commemorate
it on the show in any way, because we have
talked about the Nineteenth Amendment specifically and suffrage more generally
a lot in the past. Plus, the nineteenth Amendment was important,
but in practice it mainly affected white and relatively affluent women,
(00:48):
So it just it did not feel as much like
it needs was a story we needed to tell yet again.
And people also seemed way more conscious of this on
social media this time around, in terms of who the
nineteenth Amendment actually applied to. In practice, I saw way
more people pointing out other later dates that related to
(01:09):
voting rights for non white women, and in some cases
this was about citizenship, like Indigenous people were not considered
US citizens until nineteen four, and a lot of Asians
couldn't become citizens until nineteen fifty two. And then there
were other dates that were more related to outlawing discrimination,
especially through the Voting Rights Act of nineteen sixty five.
(01:31):
That's mostly discussed in the context of black Americans, but
it was more broadly framed to outlaw practices that were
meant to deny voting rights to anyone on account of
race or color. So all of those milestones that people
had been tweeting when they were talking about the nineteenth Amendment,
those are all familiar to me. But another one that
caught my eye that wasn't was nineteen seventy five, and
(01:55):
that's the year that the Voting Rights Act was amended
to include in the words of the amendment language minorities,
and that was defined in this amendment as American Indians,
Asian Americans, Alaska Natives, and people of Spanish heritage. And
if one of those populations in a particular area gets
to a certain threshold, then the voting material that's available
(02:17):
in English needs to be available in that language as well.
So the person we're talking about today finally get to
that predates that amendment to the Voting Rights Act, but
her work was directly tied to this idea. It is
Nina Otero Warren whose work in the suffrage movement and
the US was largely focused on people who spoke Spanish.
(02:38):
So Nina Otero Warren was descended from two of the
most prominent Hispanic families in northern New Mexico, so for
that background. By about the year one hundred, this part
of North America was home to ancestral Pueblo ends, whose
descendants include the Pueblo people still living there today. By
about the thirteenth century, it was also home to Navajo
(02:59):
and Apache people's When Spain started colonizing the area in
the sixteenth century, o Tero Warren's ancestors on her mother's side,
the Lunas, were part of multiple expeditions. This started with
Don Tristan de Luna Ariano de Castillo, who sailed with
her non Cortez in fifteen thirty. The Lunas were also
(03:20):
part of forces that were led by conquistadors Juan Dayonnante
and Francisco Coronado. Diego de Luna and his family were
driven out of the region during the Puebler Revolt of
sixteen eighty, which we covered on the show back in fourteen.
They came back to the area with Diego di Vargus
when he reconquered it in the sixteen nineties, and then
(03:41):
Ottero Warren's father's family, the Otero's. They arrived in New
Spain from Europe in seventeen six. On September six, eight ten,
Mexico declared its independence from Spain, starting the Mexican War
of Independence, which lasted for just over a year. The
Mexican American War followed just over thirty five years later,
(04:02):
ending in eighteen forty eight with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.
Under this treaty, Mexico ceded a huge amount of land
to the United States, including most of what became the
southwestern US. This included the territory of New Mexico, which
was established in eighteen fifty. This newly formed territory of
New Mexico was home to indigenous people, some of whom
(04:24):
had been enslaved under the Spanish Empire and then continued
to be held in bondage in the decades and centuries
that followed. These people and their descendants were known as
hens Ros. This is a term that was initially used
as a slur, but has been reclaimed by their descendants
living today. There were also people of both indigenous and
European ancestry who were known as mestizos, as well as
(04:47):
enslaved and free Africans and their descendants. Slavery was legal
in New Mexico under the Compromise of eighteen fifty, and
it continued to be so until the U S outlawed
slavery in all of its territories in eighteen sixty two.
New Mexico's elite, including Nino Otero Warren's family, generally described
themselves as Hispanos, focusing on their ancestral ties to Spain
(05:10):
and their famili's presence in the America's dating back to
before Mexican independence, rather than any connection they might have
to indigenous or African ancestry or to Mexico. People describing
themselves as Hispanos today might define that in a different
way and much more broadly, though, in terms of things
like the US Census, people of European ancestry who had
(05:32):
been born in New Spain or in Mexico were considered
to be white, and Hospano's emphasis on their Spanish heritage
was also reinforcing this idea that they were white, but
in practice, there were nuances within New Mexico's Spanish speaking
community who as a group were also seen as separate
from English speakers or Anglos. For the first few decades
(05:54):
of the territory of New Mexico's existence, the vast majority
of the population spoke Spannah or an indigenous language. At first,
newly arrived Anglos generally tried to learn Spanish and assimilate
with the local Spanish speaking culture, but that started to
shift when railroad lines into the area were finished in
eighteen eighty one, bringing a much larger number of English
(06:17):
speakers to the area much more quickly. That's also the
same year that Nina Otero Warren was born. She was
born Maria Adelina Isabel Amelia Otero on October twenty eight one.
Her parents were Eloisa Luna and Manuel Basilio Otero, and
she was born on the family hacienda, which was known
(06:37):
as La Constancia I was about twenty miles south of Albuquerque.
In her childhood and her youth, she went by the
name Adelina. The Lunas and the Otero's were very prominent,
affluent families. Both of Nina's parents had been educated outside
of New Mexico, Eloisa at a private Catholic boarding school
in New York and Manuel at Georgetown University in wash Shington,
(07:00):
d c. And at Heidelberg University in Germany. Much of
the family's wealth came from sheep ranching, and they also
owned vineyards and a lot of land. Yet, in addition
to these ancestral ties, going back to the initial colonization
of New Spain, like they had a lot of money
as a family. Nina was the Otero's second child and
(07:23):
their oldest daughter, and tragedy struck the family before her
second birthday. Two brothers from Massachusetts, James and Joel Whitney,
had challenged the Otero's claim to some land. Each side
was claiming that the other were squatters, and the case
was making its way through the courts. The Whitneys were
staying at a cabin on this contested property. After they
(07:45):
had evicted one of the Otero's cattle drivers from it,
Manuel Otero went to the cabin with some other men
to try to talk things through. It seemed like things
were being settled amicably, but for reasons that are not
entirely clear. James Whitney shot oh Terry Row, sparking a
shootout that killed another man instantly and injured two others,
including James Whitney. Manuel Otero survived long enough to give
(08:09):
a statement to the Justice of the Peace, but he
died shortly thereafter. Whitney was later tried for murder and acquitted.
There were allegations that he had bribed the judge to
give the jury instructions that were skewed in his favor.
It really wasn't the first or only land dispute for
the immediate or extended Otero family. Spain had been issuing
(08:31):
land grants for centuries before Mexico became independent, and there
were questions about which of those land grants were valid.
And then, of course, there were also cases in which
the government had granted colonists land that had not actually
been seated by the indigenous peoples who were living there,
and also cases in which the same land had been
granted to two different people by two different governing bodies.
(08:55):
Complicating all of this, the US government also didn't really
recognize grace land as occupied. When disputes went to court,
the courts generally recognized only land that had cultivated crops
or a home or another structure on it as actually
in use. Under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the United
States had agreed to recognize indigenous landholdings and allow indigenous
(09:19):
peoples to retain their language, culture, and customs, but in general,
courts found in favor of Anglos more often than Hispanics
or Indigenous people in these disputes. When Manuel Otaro was
killed in eighteen eighty three, Nina's mother was nineteen and
she was pregnant with her third child. The following summer,
she went to Philadelphia to look for an English speaking
(09:41):
governess so that her children could grow up fluent in
both English and Spanish and be more able to move
in both Hispanic and Anglo circles. She hired twenty four
year old Mary Elizabeth Doyle, who was Irish. The family
knew her as Teta, and she worked and lived with
them until her death in ninety seven. In eighteen eighty six,
Nina's mother remarried to Alfred Maurice Berg Are known as
(10:04):
a m He was born in Liverpool to parents who
had come from Italy but were of both French and
Jewish ancestry. The Lunas had some Jewish ancestry as well,
although it's not as clear if it was known to
the family at the time. They likely converted to Christianity
during the Spanish Inquisition. Eloisa and a m had another
twelve children together, nine of whom survived infancy, and as
(10:27):
the oldest daughter of this family, Nina was expected to
take a lot of responsibility with her younger siblings, and
we'll get to that after a sponsor break. Nina Otero's
mother and stepfather wanted their children to be educated, so
(10:48):
Nina studied with private tutors before being enrolled in St.
Vincent's Academy in Albuquerque. When she was eleven, she went
to Maryville College of the Sacred Heart, which was now
Maryville University and Say Louis, Missouri. At the time, this
was essentially a Catholic finishing school for affluent young ladies,
and Nina returned home from there when she was thirteen.
(11:09):
Nina lived under a clear set of social expectations. She
had a duty to help keep the family home and
raise her younger siblings, and one day she would marry
and have children in a household of her own, but
living on a hacienda also afforded her some freedom. She
grew into an independently minded young woman, taking part in
ranch life and helping to inspect the property on horseback.
(11:32):
She also got some of her male relatives to teach
her how to shoot. When she was sixteen, President William
McKinley appointed Miguel Antonio Otero the Second as the territorial
governor of New Mexico. Miguel Otero was one of the
Otero's cousins, and he appointed Nina's stepfather to be a
judicial clerk, so the family relocated to the capital of
(11:53):
Santa Fe. Santa Fe was also home to a growing
society of mostly Anglo artists, writers, and crafts people. Within
this community, Nina was soon regarded as witty, intelligent, respectable,
and accomplished. She was also increasingly interested in social causes,
something that had been part of her school instruction at
Maryville College of the Sacred Heart. She was also following
(12:16):
her mother's example in this Eloisa was especially active in
causes related to education during these years. As Nina was
growing up, the attitudes of the New Mexican Hispano elite
were shifting, connected to an ongoing effort to pursue statehood. Outsiders,
especially viewed New Mexico is pretty backward and there was
(12:36):
a lot of stigma around speaking Spanish, so, especially in cities,
more people started building Victorian style homes, using brick rather
than Adobe, and speaking English rather than Spanish. But at
the same time, there were more and more Anglo newcomers
moving into the area, thanks in part too aggressive advertising
by railroad lines, so the Spanish language and Spanish and
(13:00):
Mexican culture were becoming less prevalent and less respected, especially
in more urban areas. Intermarriages between Hispanic and Anglo people
were common and widely accepted during all of this, applying
not just to Nina's mother but also to Nina herself.
When she was twenty six, she met Lieutenant ross and
d Warren of the fifth U. S. Cavalry. They got
(13:22):
married on June night, and she went back with him
to Fort Wingate, where he was stationed. A news article
covering her wedding described her as quote very popular, very bright, charming,
finely educated and attractive, endowed with many graces of the heart, mind,
and body, the descendant of one of the oldest and
(13:42):
best families in New Mexico. Marriage was not a happy
one though, and within two years they had divorced and
Nina had returned to Santa Fe. She didn't leave any
kind of personal documents about her feelings and all of this,
but it does seem like she just didn't enjoy the
risk frictions of being an officer's wife. She flouted some
(14:03):
of the conventions that she was supposed to help uphold,
like dancing with a private when she was only supposed
to be socializing with officers and their wives. Also, Ross
And apparently had a common law wife in the Philippines
from when he had served there during the Spanish American War,
and to Nina, this was biggamy. However, divorce was flatly
(14:24):
unacceptable from both the social and a religious perspective, so
even though her ex husband lived until nine, Nina told
people she was a widow. She used her hyphenated surname
for the rest of her life. Adding Warren to her
surname disguised her divorce and it gave her an added
degree of respectability among Anglos, but it could also raise
(14:46):
suspicion among Hispanics. Occasionally, she dropped the use of Warren
to stress her Hispano heritage. Including when she published books
and articles about Spanish culture in New Mexico. Yeah, her,
her name she used socially was pretty much a Taro
Warren for the rest of her life. Um, but sometimes
we'll see bylines that have the Warren part omitted. In
(15:07):
nineteen ten, the Otero Bregaire family bought and expanded a
home in Santa Fe to accommodate their growing family. This
was on unseated land belonging to the Tewa people, and
it still stands today as home to the Georgia O'Keeffe
Museum's library and archives. That same year, Nina convinced her
mother to set up trusts for her and her unmarried sisters,
(15:30):
including the youngest, Isabel, who had an intellectual disability. Nina
had realized that territorial law really limited women's property rights,
especially after they got married, and she didn't want any
of them to have to rely on the goodwill of
men to survive. In nineteen twelve, New Mexico became a state,
and that year Otara Warren moved to New York City
(15:52):
to keep house for her brother, Luna Brajaire while he
studied at Columbia University. While living in New York. She
volunteered at a settlement how was run by Anne Morgan,
the daughter of JP Morgan. But then in en Tera,
Warren's mother died at the age of fifty. As the
oldest daughter, it was Nina's duty to take up the
role of family matriarchs, so she went back home to
(16:14):
New Mexico. One of her sisters, Anita, had been in
the final steps of joining a convent when their mother died.
Anita put her religious vocation aside and she went back
home as well. Beyond their grief over the loss of
their mother, this seems to have been difficult for everybody involved.
Nina inherited the Luna family lands, but she was not
(16:36):
particularly interested in the day to day running of the
household or caring for her siblings. The youngest was Joe
age eight, and most of the daughters were still living
at home. All of this work mostly fell to Anita,
who was really doing this out of a sense of obligation,
and she later described it as ruining her life. Nina
(16:56):
was also strict and had very strong opinions about her
siblings romantic partners and whether they were good enough to marry.
This was something that led to tensions and riffs within
the family. Nina also made decisions about things like whether
to sell property and how to handle finances, sometimes without
really consulting anybody else, and that led to some frustrations
(17:17):
and animosity when people disagreed with what she had done.
As the family was still adjusting to all of this,
Nina o Tera Warren became involved in the suffrage movement,
something that really did not have a huge presence in
New Mexico at the time. When New Mexico became a state,
it was the only one in the Western US that
didn't give women the right to vote, and the state
(17:39):
constitution made it really hard to change that, requiring a
vote to pass by three quarters of both houses and
two thirds of every county. Suffrage bills that were introduced
in the legislature repeatedly failed. Attempts to combine a movement
for suffrage with one for prohibition also failed. Casual drinking
was an accepted part of everyday life, particularly in affluent
(18:02):
Catholic families. For her part, oh Tera Warren took what
she called a drinking basket with her anytime she had
to take a long trip by train. I'm going to
adopt this practice. Also, women could be appointed to office
in New Mexico, but could only hold elected offices that
were related to things like education. I tried to find
(18:22):
a little more detail about exactly what was in this
drinking basket, and I failed, imagining it is like a
picnic basket, but with spirits involved, which might also be
in your picnic basket. Right, yeah, I'm I don't know
if you've ever seen those little tin kind of craft kits,
(18:43):
so you can take them on your plane and do
your mixed drink with them. I just did envision a
bigger version of that. So, in general, there really was
a lot of resistance to the idea of votes for
women in New Mexico. There was just a lot going
on in terms of culture and religion. This was especially
true among Spanish speakers. So in the late nineteen teens,
(19:04):
Alice paul sent Ella st. Clair Thompson, who spoke some Spanish,
to New Mexico to try to organize, and after working
with several Hispanic women directly, including Otaro Warren, Thompson asked
her to lead up the New Mexico chapter of the
Congressional Union, which later became the National Woman's Party. OH
Tara Warren did extensive work, especially among Spanish speakers, to
(19:27):
rally support for women's suffrage, including making sure suffrage materials
were printed in both English and Spanish. Although there were
Indigenous people involved in the suffrage movement, including people advocating
for both suffrage and dual citizenship with the US and
Indigenous nations, o Tera Warren's approach was really about outreach
to the Spanish speaking community. Tera Warren's political and community
(19:51):
work also went beyond the suffrage movement, and we will
get to that after a sponsor break. In nineteen seventeen,
Nina o Tero Lawren was appointed superintendent of public schools
in Santa Fe County, New Mexico. The position became elective
(20:12):
in nineteen eighteen, and at that point she was elected
and then re elected, defeating male candidates to do so.
She was thirty seven. This made her the youngest school
superintendent in the state at the time, and in that
role she pushed for raising teacher pay, restoring and rebuilding
schools that were in disrepair, and increasing the length of
the school year to nine months. Really varied from place
(20:35):
to place, and there were some places where the school
year was as short as three months, largely because children
were needed to work on family farms in more rural areas.
She also wanted the government to put more money into education,
including paying off school's debts. She also advocated teaching to
use her framing traditional Spanish culture, arts, and crafts, particularly
(20:59):
in rural, predominantly Spanish speaking areas. The influx of Anglo newcomers,
industrialization and commercialization had eroded the quality of life in
many rural areas, and people that had been living in
self sustaining communities were instead having to find work as
migrant farm workers or service workers. Oh Tera. Warren thought
(21:19):
that professional instruction in traditional crafts could give these students
a vocation for later in life, while also preserving Spanish
culture and arts. This really did not go so far
at the time as advocating that students be taught in Spanish, though,
as New Mexico had been pursuing statehood, the federal government
(21:39):
had passed a law that required New Mexico's public schools
to be taught only in English. Arizona's statehood was also
connected to all this, but it's outside the scope of
what we're talking about today. In response to that federal law,
New Mexico's state constitution included several protections for Spanish speakers,
including a provision for training teachers in Spanish so that
(22:02):
they could teach Spanish speaking students. So, as public school
superintendent o Tero, Warren was trying to uphold the federal
government's policy of English only education while also trying to
protect the school system Spanish speaking students, discouraging them from
speaking Spanish while also discouraging schools from punishing them for
(22:22):
doing so. In her words, quote, it is to our
best interests that we become educated according to the standards
of the nation. It has for us, it's distinct advantages,
it's definite protection. Yeah, she really, in a lot of
cases in her life and work was sort of trying
to walk a very fine line between the Anglo and
(22:45):
the Hispanic communities. Um and like she evolved in some
of us which we're going to talk about later, but
this was a case where it really seems like she
was trying to do her best to serve all of
the interests that were placed on her. In addition to
her work and the stuff Ridge movement, and as school superintendent.
After the US entered World War One, Otara Warren was
(23:05):
appointed as her district's chair of the Woman's Auxiliary of
the State Council of Defense, which later became the Women's
Committee of the National Council of Defense. That in nineteen seventeen,
she was appointed chair of the State Board of Public Health.
In nineteen nineteen, Congress passed the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution,
and Otara Warren shifted the focus of her suffrage work
(23:26):
from changing the law in New Mexico to getting the
state to ratify the amendment, something that would only be
possible with support from the Spanish speaking community. She also
stressed the importance of Spanish speakers exercising their right to
vote so they could get people into office who would
represent them and protect their interests. Even so, the Nineteenth
(23:46):
Amendment faced a lot of opposition in New Mexico, and
the first attempts to ratify it failed. It was finally
ratified by the state on February twenty one, nineteen twenty
making it the thirty second out of thirty six states
that were necessary for full ratification. That same year, a
Tero Warren met Mami Metters, who had been born in
Arkansas and had come to New Mexico seeking treatment for tuberculosis,
(24:10):
and a lot of ways these two women were opposites.
Nina was far more outgoing, she loved going to parties,
and she had really extensive social and political connections. Mamie
was a lot more reserved than maybe a little socially awkward.
But the two of them became inseparable, and they were
nicknamed Las dos or the two by the people who
knew them. In one New Mexico, Senator Home Bursum introduced
(24:35):
a bill into Congress that would have allowed non indigenous
people to claim Pueblo land if they could prove they
had been living on it for at least ten years.
That would have been devastating for Pueblo communities. This bill
was ultimately defeated in Nix following intense advocacy by indigenous people,
including nineteen of the Pueblos U nineing to send a
(24:57):
delegation to Washington. D c oh Tara Warren had advocated
for at least some kind of compromise with this bill.
In her mind, the burst and Bill had the potential
to protect Hispanics from losing land that they had been
living and working on. Two Anglos, also in New Mexico
passed an amendment that allowed women to hold elected office
(25:19):
beyond positions that were related to things like education, and
with that, Tera Warren decided it was time to move up,
and she ran as a Republican for the U S
House of Representatives. Oh Tera Warren faced a lot of
criticism and derision during this campaign, including repeated suggestions that
her running for office was some kind of cute novelty
(25:40):
because of her gender. Her platform included a focus on education,
labor rights, tariffs to protect sheep and cattle ranchers, Hispanic
land rights, and the enforcement of prohibition, which at this point,
in spite of that drinking basket that we previously talked about,
that was the law of the land and she was
sort of reluctantly supporting it. In the primary, she defeated
(26:02):
the incumbent Nestor Montoya by our ratio of almost four
to one. General election was another story, though late in
her campaign, her cousin, Miguel Tero, the one who had
previously been territorial governor, publicly revealed that she was really
divorced and not widowed. As part of her campaign, o
(26:24):
Tero Warren had emphasized her family's political history and its
involvement in the colonization of New Mexico going back to Cortes,
and her cousin apparently felt slighted that she had not
included him in the roster. Tara Warren lost to her
opponent John R. Morrow by more than nine thousand votes
are about nine percent, and it's not entirely clear how
(26:47):
much of this revelation of her divorce influenced the vote.
It was definitely a topic of discussion, but Democrats also
swept the entire state in this election. Yeah, it doesn't
seem like she probably had a huge chance anyway, but yeah,
it could not have helped, that's for sure. Ine oh
Tero Warren was appointed to be Santa Fe County's Inspector
(27:09):
of Indian Schools, becoming the first woman to be appointed
to the position. She inspected the schools in the area
and found the conditions to be appalling. She made a
series of recommendations about hygiene and safety, everything from having
a secure place to put used towels in the washrooms
so they would not be reused among students, to burning
(27:30):
all of the mattresses in the boys dormitory at Santa
Fe Indian School because they were in such horrible condition,
and then replacing them with army cots. Otaro Warren was
also really critical of the boarding school system itself. That
system had been established to force Indigenous children to assimilate
with white culture and to separate them from their own cultures.
(27:52):
We have covered that in a previous two parter on
Fort Shaw Indian School and specifically their girls basketball team.
Otaro Warren wrote of this boarding school system quote, the
Indian child trained in modern schools has little in common
with his parents. When he finishes, he must be taught
to appreciate the history and traditions of his own race,
(28:12):
and thus inspired to continue the native arts of his
own people, as well as acquire a new type of learning.
When he finishes school, he should feel closer to his
own people and desire to help them. Leaders and teachers
should be developed from their own race. There were some
similarities between Otaro Warren's approach to the boarding schools and
(28:32):
her approach to Spanish speaking communities as school superintendent. She
agreed with the prevailing view that both Indigenous and Hispanic
children needed to learn English and to at least some
degree to assimilate with the Anglo world, but she also
thought that their languages, cultures, and traditions should be taught
and preserved. At the same time, though her work as
(28:54):
inspector could be pretty paternalistic. For example, like a lot
of other people, she put a big focus on the
idea of needing to teach hygiene to indigenous women. And
in all of this, she also really romanticized Spain's colonization
of the Southwest and the Spanish Empire's treatment of indigenous
people's in the area. Like she really seems to have
(29:15):
understood that Hispanic people living when she was were basically
being colonized by Anglos who were coming into the area,
but like she'd never seems to have quite made the
connection that her ancestors did the same thing to the
indigenous people who had already been living in the area.
All of that said, though her criticisms of the boarding
(29:35):
school system were not particularly popular to her bosses, and
she was in this position for less than two years.
In seven, O Tera Warren got into a dispute with
state school superintendent Lois randolph O. Tero Warren had started
working as the local sales rep for a textbook publisher,
which violated a school code that had been passed in
(29:58):
Although the school bore ultimately exonerated her, she decided not
to run for re election. Afterward. She didn't stop advocating
for Spanish speaking students, though, and she became more of
an advocate for bilingual education instead of focusing on teaching English.
This included applying for a grant from the Laura Spelman
Rockefeller Foundation, and her letter for this read, in part, quote,
(30:21):
the Spanish American has met the fate of all small
colonial groups. Namely, he has suffered from the inability to
compete economically or industrially with the overwhelming odds of the
standardized commercialism of this country. And an effort to preserve
the Spanish American people and their culture. I feel this
can be best accomplished through education. She went on to
(30:44):
say that quote the standardized methods adopted from the English
speaking schools, to a large extent, have discouraged and subordinated
every semblance of Spanish culture in the educational life of
the Spanish speaking native people. Oh Tera Warren had always
kept herself very busy, and after her tenure as school
superintendent was over, she looked for another challenge. This time homesteading.
(31:07):
On March seventeenth, nineteen thirty she and Maymi Metters each
filed homestead applications on adjoining parcels that totaled more than
twelve hundred acres about fifteen miles outside of Santa Fe.
To finalize their claim on the land, they had to
live there for at least five months of the year
for four years, fence the property, irrigated, and build homes.
(31:29):
Tero Warren also spent some of those years writing a book,
This was Old Spain in Our Southwest, which was published
in nineteen thirty six. She wanted to document the society
she had grown up in, one that she saw is
disappearing through assimilation with Anglo culture, and the resulting book
is both a romanticized look at life on a New
(31:50):
Mexican hacienda, including local folklore, and then also a testament
to a culture that had been lost in what amounted
to a second wave of colonization in New Mexican Coo.
On September six, nineteen thirty five, the Lost Dose Homestead
officially belonged to Nina Otero Warren and Mami Metters. It
became a retreat both for family and for friends who
(32:12):
came for weekend visits or even longer. By that point,
o Tera Warren had also helped Cleophas Haremo found the
Sociedad Fotorico de Santa Fe, which was meant to help
preserve the Spanish language and Hispanic folk traditions in New Mexico,
as well as trying to dispel negative stereotypes and to
offer training in arts and crafts. That year, she also
(32:34):
became the literacy director of the Civilian Conservation Corps, where
she focused on bilingual literacy education. In nineteen thirty six,
the College of the Sacred Heart awarded her an honorary
back laureate, and in nineteen thirty seven she became Supervisor
of Literacy Education for the Works Progress Administration. In nineteen
thirty nine, o Tera Warren's stepfather, a Ambergaier, died, leaving
(32:57):
her essentially as the head of the household. By this point,
two of her sisters and the family's former governess were
still living in the family home. In nineteen forty one,
Ottera Warren's work with the w P a to cur
To Puerto Rico, where she was the director of the
Work Conference for Adult teachers. That same year, New Mexico
passed a law requiring schools that met a certain size
(33:20):
requirement to teach Spanish in grades five through eight. This
was really a huge deal, since before this point Spanish
could only be taught in high school, and a lot
of Spanish speaking students were leaving school before that. By
that point, Otara Warren had shifted totally away from the
idea that students in New Mexico should be taught only
in English, calling the teaching of Spanish and elementary school
(33:43):
both desirable and necessary. She expressed her hope that soon
Spanish should be taught even earlier. Other laws regarding bilingual
education in New Mexico followed from there, including the Bilingual
Multicultural Education Act of nineteen seventy three. In ninety seven,
when Nina was sixty five, she and Mamie established a
(34:04):
real estate and insurance company, which they called Los Dos,
with Nina's widespread social and political network helping them to
get clients. Oh Tera Warren particularly enjoyed selling big houses.
She also loved riding at the head of the hysterical
parade at the Santa Fe Fiesta each September, along with
poet and translator Witter Binner. The two of them became
(34:26):
a fixture of the parade over the disapproval of some
of O Tero Warren's family, who objected to Binner's homosexuality.
That parade is still held today. It is also called
the Historical Hysterical Parade. Mammi Matters died on August tenth
of nineteen fifty one at the age of sixty four.
She left Nina Oliver property at the homestead and the
(34:47):
option to buy out her half of the property that
they had owned together. Nina maintained the Lost Dose business afterward,
although she did seem to slow down, and she eventually
hired an assistant. Oh Tera Warren experience against several embolisms
in her later years, possibly connected to her having been
a smoker for most of her life. She died on
(35:07):
January third, nineteen sixty five, at the family home in
Santa Fe. Her death was sudden. She had told her
sister Anita that she didn't feel well, and Anita brought
her some brandy at her request. After drinking it, Nina
o Tero Warren collapsed and died. She had two rosary services,
one in English and one in Spanish. Nino o Tero
(35:28):
Warren's focus on Spanish language school instruction and bilingual education,
and on voting access for Spanish speakers continues to be
a big part of life in New Mexico today. According
to the US Census Bureau, almost half the population of
New Mexico identifies as Hispanic, and more than a third
of the state's population speaks a language other than English
(35:51):
at home. In nine New Mexico passed an English plus
resolution which read, in part quote proficiency on the part
of our citizens and more than one language as to
the economic and cultural benefit of our state and the nation.
Whether that proficiency derives from second language study by English
speakers or from home language maintenance plus English acquisition by
(36:15):
speakers of other languages. So that does Nina Otara Warren
I like that She advocated for be able to get
out and vote to their representation. Was people that would
honor their desires or at least hopefully do so. Yeah,
this remains an important message. Yeah. When you read brief
write ups about her, for the most part, they really
(36:36):
stick to her advocacy of access to suffrage materials and
voting for people who spoke Spanish. A lot of them
don't touch on her like more troubling record with indigenous
people at all, um like that was something I had
to get a lot deeper into research to learn about. Yeah,
(36:58):
do you also have listener mail for us? I sure do.
It's actually a listener tweet followed by an amount of
additional information. Uh So, Dr Emily Friedman tagged us in
a tweet, And that was on the day that our
six Impossible episodes. There's a book about that episode came
out and the tweet said relevant to missed in History's
(37:18):
episode that dropped today. And this was a quote tweet
of a thread about a paper that was called Colonial
Rewriting of African History, Misinterpretations and Distortions in Belcher and
Kleiner's Life and Struggles of wall Lot of Petros. That
is one of the six books that we talked about
in the episode. So this paper was published in the
(37:40):
Journal of Afro Asiatic Languages, History and Culture. It was
written by Dr Yurga Geelao Woldas who is from La Labella,
and it is a detailed and very pointed critique of
both the life and struggles of our mother A Lot
of Petros, which we talked about in that episode, and
a paper that Belcher published that interpreted that work. In So,
(38:05):
this newly published paper contends that professor Wendy Laura Belcher
and translator Michael Kleiner just don't have the familiarity with
GIAZ or with Ethiopian monasticisms that are needed to accurately
translate and interpret this text. Um He notes that most
traditionally trained experts in GIAZ actually live in Ethiopia and
(38:26):
don't speak English, and that most of the Ethiopian scholars
that they did consult they disregarded. So consequently, according to
this paper, the resulting translation is viewed through a Western
and colonial lens. But then really beyond that, he says
that they added words and changed meanings from the original
text to sort of create a same sex attraction between
(38:51):
Wallata Petros and another nun, when what they really were
was just an entirely platonic relationship of monastic sisterhood. So
this is a very detailed and precisely argued paper. It
is like nineties six pages long of a PDF. Maybe
tannish pages of that are the notes at the end,
(39:11):
but I mean it's quite lengthy. It also circles back
around to how many Ethiopian manuscripts today are held in
Western institutions rather than in Ethiopia, and ethical concerns about
outsiders getting access to these holy texts and then having
photographed them and published them online. So in his tweets
(39:32):
on this subject, Dr Yura describes this translation as intellectually
dishonest and ethically questionable. I am not sure when this
paper was actually published, but his tweets about it were
from September four, and the thread that we were looped
in on came out from the ninth. I said, Holly
(39:54):
the outline to this episode on September two, and we
recorded the episode on the eight, So this was like
a immediately before all of this came out. Clearly, I
would not have been recommending this book in the episode
had I had all of this other perspective at the time.
Um it was something that was frankly very surprising to
(40:17):
me based on the reception that the book got at
the time. I knew there was some controversy about it,
but as I understood it, the controversy was about like
a misinterpretation of what Belcher was saying, not the contention
that that Belcher had like added words that were not
in their original text. Right, that's a whole other thing.
(40:40):
So based on how many people had praised this translation,
including specifically Ethiopian scholars, most of them now living in
the US, UM and other like black historians and institutes
that focus on African languages, like the fact that, um,
this paper is so contrary to all of that was
(41:02):
like very unexpected to me. If I had a time machine,
we would have handled that obviously very differently. So there
is a lot in this paper beyond what I have
just tried to summarize. The whole paper is online. It's
uh the u r L four. It does not easily
share able in an audio podcast at all, but it
is currently pinned to the top of his Twitter timeline
(41:26):
at your Gagi law, which is at y I R
g A G E l A w UM. So thank
you to Dr Emily Freedman for tagging us into this tweet.
I don't know that this would have crossed my radar
otherwise because it's like it's not a journal that is
(41:46):
part of the databases that I usually consult for things. Um,
I I apologize again for not I don't know. I
don't know which thing to apologize for, because like this,
this paper to didn't exist when we did that episode,
but it's saved. I also feel like, did I miss
something in the research that I was not aware of
(42:08):
having missed until reading this paper. So UM, working on
stuff that is that far out of our own experience
can be complicated for this reason. So thank you again
to Emily Freedman for tagging us in that tweet. UM,
if you would like to write to us about this
or any other podcast, where at history Podcasts at i
(42:29):
heart radio dot com. They we're all over social media
at Missed in History, which is where you'll find our
Facebook and Twitter and Pinterest and Instagram, and you can
subscribe to our show on the iHeart Radio app and
Apple podcasts and anywhere else that you get your podcasts.
Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of
(42:52):
I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio,
visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
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Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
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