 And speaking of the Hispanic student and his experience in the United States, we have to consider that they come from a variety of places. It is not just one place south of the border. They come from all over the place. You ask a New Yorker what an Espanol is, they will say, people from Puerto Rico. You ask somebody from Florida the same question, they'll say they are Cubanos, they are people from Cuba. Ask somebody from Texas, they'll say, oh no, they come right across the border from Mexico, or maybe even as far away as Belize. You ask somebody from Chicago, or maybe San Diego, they'll say they come from Guatemala, Guatemala, and then you bring them over to New Mexico itself. And they will probably say, well, depends on which part of New Mexico you're talking about. For example, the people of northern New Mexico, north of Espanola, would probably consider themselves descendants of the first Hispanic settlers in New Mexico. But wait a minute, when they go to Spain, they are not recognized by Spaniards as being their own. And then you ask the same question to people of southern New Mexico. They say, no, no, we're closer to Mexico, we are Mexican-Americans. You ask the people of western New Mexico, and they say, well, you know, we are part Spanish, but we're part Navajo as well. And they go over to Clovis and Tucumcari, they say, I'm sorry, but Texas is our culture. So how do you define the Hispano in many different ways across the United States and in New Mexico? Just tremendously different. You want more complications? Let me give you this one. Hispanos, for the longest time, if you look at the ancient archives, used to classify themselves into different castes. The people of India were usually said to have three different castes ranging from the Brahmins to the Untouchables. They had nothing compared to what our ancestors had. We had 40 different castes, depending on who you happen to be married to. For example, a Spanish person board in the Iberian Peninsula would be called a gauchupín or a ladino. This same Spanish person board in Mexico or New Mexico would be called a crioyo. And then this person happens to marry an Anglo-American. Well, their offspring would be called coyotes. Don't you just love that? The Spanish person marries a French person. Their offspring would be gabachos. The Spanish person marries into New Mexico Indians. Their offspring would be called heníceros. And what I'm getting to you is that we have 40 different classifications of blood types. There is even one classification called tente en aire. Hold yourself up in the air until I can figure out what you are. So we do this kind of gauchique these days, but we have to remember that at one time, all of these definitions for what is hispano were taken quite seriously. What an Hispanic might be is a very loaded question. Depends on who happens to answer this. Speaking as a linguist, I would say that an Hispanic is someone who is a descendant of mother Spain. Mother Spain in Spanish is called Hispania. Before that was called Hispania. So you see where the word Hispanic might come from, from the word Hispania. Before that it was called Hisperia. Before that it was called Finistere, the land at the end of the earth. So I could get into all of these complicated linguistic explanations, but simply put an Hispanic is one who is a descendant of mother Spain. And then when you come to the New World, the variations go multiple. They go into Mexico, into South America, into the American experience, but in Hispanic roughly, but someone who is of Hispanic descent. Now again, we have to say not so much Latino descent, although there are some people in California who might take offense at this. Latino in my definition would be anyone who is a descendant of Latin culture that would include French people, Italian people, Portuguese people, Romanians, et cetera. All of these we would all be Latinos together, but Spanish people tend to be Hispanic. The textbooks tend to tell us that the centers of the Southwest were Spaniards. But let's look at it logically and see what happened. When New Mexico was settled in 1540, there were exactly 336 men and three women that came in that initial entrada, that initial expedition. Out of that 336 men and three women, there were 227 that weren't even Hispanic. Not Hispanic. Who were they? They were Portuguese, they were Greeks, they were Italians, they were Frenchmen, they were blacks, there were Moors, there were Jews, there were Arabs. There was even one Scotsman listed in the expedition. So the question then arises as to who all these people were and what they were doing in this part of the world. Well we had to remember that Spain had been conquered by the Moors from the year 711 and occupied for 784 years until 1492. Now all of this was a time when Mother Spain was trying to get rid of the Moors and in trying to get rid of them, they brought forth many mercenaries from many nations. When 1492 comes around, the mercenaries are left without any viable job back in Spain, so they come to Mexico to try to eke out some kind of a living. Ooh, but we forget, 1521, already the Aztecs have been conquered. So when a guy by the name of Coronado, Francisco Vasquez de Coronado says, I'm going up to do Mexico, then they say, ooh, can we come with you? And that's how all of those foreigners tended to be here if you will permit me to use the vernacular. That's how all of those foreign people, mercenaries, tended to be coming over here. But of course, since they were funded by the Spanish crown, they had to speak Spanish. Now across all of these years, we have thought that we were all totally, totally Spanish, but beginning to analyze the last names, the dances, the rituals, the bogie creatures of the Southwest, suddenly we are beginning to clarify the fact that we come from multiplicity of cultures that have collectively been called Hispanic here in New Mexico for the last 500 years. So that when we even analyze last names like Guruley and Marques and we say those are Spanish, no, those are French. We can look at last names like Medina and Salazar, Spanish, no, Arabic. Really, let's look at names like Espinoza and Pérez, Spanish, not at all, Jewish. So what is an Espano, and again you ask yourself, are there really Spanish people in New Mexico? The answer is yes and no at the same time, depending on where you happen to be looking. The people of New Mexico have a strange experience in the fact that they tended to suppress their own identities for the sake of leaving the old world and coming to the new world. They did this for a variety of reasons. For example, let's look at the Jewish experience in New Mexico. The whole Pecos Valley, just on the other side of Santa Fe to the north central part of New Mexico, was settled without the permission of the king of Spain nor the viceroy of Mexico. They were led by a man into this wilderness, the New Mexico Moses I call Castaño de Sosa. Castaño de Sosa brought them over here because he, from a little place called Almaden, Mexico, because he believed that the 170 people there were threatened by the Spanish Inquisition. There were people who had come to the New World pretending to be Christians, but really when we look at their last names, Pérez, Trevino, Gutierrez, Eventores, Rael, all of these people were wanted by the Spanish Inquisition. So they came trying to hide in the deserts of the southwest for security reasons. And they kept their identities so much a secret that they wouldn't even tell their children that they were crypto-Jews, so that for years and years children would ask their moms, mom, why do we light candles and put them at the windows on Fridays? I don't know, just because your grandmother did it. Mom, why do we lace our coffee with bitter herbs on Friday? Because your grandmother did it. But she wouldn't tell them that they were secret Jews. Suddenly we're beginning to uncover all of these hidden cultures in New Mexico. The Jews are but one of the examples that I'm giving over here. There are certain others. The Rodriguez is, for example, when you look at the word Rodriguez, a Rodrigo is a support that's used for vines. So when you put grape vines out in the middle of the desert, you put a support to it. That's called a Rodrigo. And so that tells us, Edwin begins to uncover the fact that Germans were among the first grape growers in the New World. And New Mexico particularly was the first place where grapes were grown in the New World by the early settlers over here. So analyze all those things. Let's look at the dances, for example. We do a traditional New Mexico dance called the Varsoviana, something called Varsaliana in northern New Mexico. But the Varsoviana is the dance of Varsovia. Well, what is Varsovia? Varsovia is Warsaw. We have been doing a Polish folk dance in New Mexico, thinking that it is totally Hispanic. But really, if truth be told, it is a Polish folk dance. Same thing could be said about a folk dance called the Talian. Talian, Italian, Talian, Italiano. Chottis, the Scottish dance. So bam, bam, bam, our myths are being shot down. So what we do is we tend to invent a myth for someone else. And as the years go by, we tend to believe the tales ourselves. So one of the reasons that we have to talk about this culture, when we bring it into the textbook culture or into the institutional culture, is because we have to get rid of a lot of myths and move forward from there. But before we can do this, the professors of these universities also have to be educated as to who their students are and why they think the way they do. When we speak about the totality of the Hispanic student experience in New Mexico, we have to bring in the food, of course. Now, a lot of people who visit us here in the Southwest say that the horno, the beehive oven that you find next to many pueblos and in some Hispanic villages was probably invented by the natives. Truth of the matter is that it was not. The natives, the Indians of this area used to cook in pits lined with deer hide to which they would put boiling water and then they would drop hot stones into it and thus cook their food this way. That was done on the plains. The Hispanos brought the horno. Were the Hispanos the geniuses who invented the horno? Not at all. They learned this technique, this cooking technique, from the Moors. The Moors were an offshoot of the Berbers of North Africa. So it was North African cooking that went to Spain, that went to Mexico, that went as far North as Taos for heaven's sakes. But we have to give credit to these Moors for being the people who were the originators of this. And if we do linguistic experience, we can even probably trace it even further than North Africa into the Indus Valley, which you call the clay ovens or the tandoori ovens, the great ancestor of the horno in New Mexico. But speaking of Moors, we can also talk about the foods. These Moors also gave us such foods as the saffron, a safran, saffron, which is the base of Paella, the national dish of Spain, where they still have the fires, these wonderful celebrations and festivals in celebration of this very, very golden-tinted rice. When we think of Soapai Pies, what some people call Indian fried bread, not at all invented here. For starters, there was no flour in the Southwest. Remember, there was no wheat in the Southwest. Corn was a staff-of-life dot wheat. But this wheat flour was brought from the plains of La Mancha in Spain. And it was there that the Moors invented this fried bread technique that you call Soapai Pies. Back in Spain, the Arabs used to call it, the Moors used to call it Sopaipas. Sopaipia just means a little Sopaipa, a little piece of fried bread. What else did the Moors give us to show us that our cultures come from way, way, way back when? Those wonderful turquoise necklaces that women wear in the Southwest, which they call squash blossoms. Beautiful name. Of course, they're squash blossoms after all of these years. But really, it was a pomegranate blossom. It was a motif that was very common in the tin smithing, in the silver smithing, in the gold smithing among the Moors. But it was a pomegranate blossom before it was changed into a squash blossom. By the same reason, we can say that those beautiful intricate designs that you find on rugs in the Southwest are those beautiful geometric designs. Our Southwestern, they are now, of course, but they weren't in the beginning. In the beginning, Moorish designs. You have to remember that among the Moors, it was forbidden to depict the face of God in any way. And so what they did was they concentrated on that heavy geometry, which you find still all over the Alhambra, the Alhambra in Spain. And, of course, it was the basis of many other artists that were to come later on. They were so inspired by these interlocking motifs all over. So all of the, such as MC Escher, the artist, for example, was inspired by the art of the Alhambra to work his art. And the Navajo weavers now in New Mexico are doing the same thing.