In
1943, students in eight grades packed the one-room
schoolhouse in Ojo Sarco, an isolated village
tucked into the New Mexico mountains. The school
employed two teachers — one of whom now lives
a few doors away and has helped identify many
of her former students.
|
Con
Nombre
By
Michael Penn MA'97
Photos courtesy Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs
Division, FSA-OWI Collection
Although
merely a remote corner of the bigger puzzle, New Mexico
seemed a logical place for Ketchum to begin assembling
the pieces of history. He returned to the Library
of Congress and culled 450 large black-and-white prints
from a collection of twenty thousand photographs taken
across the American Southwest. He examined them closely,
singling out 650 unique faces. Of those, eight were
identified in captions.
Ketchum
set to work on the rest, returning to New Mexico during
summers, logging thousands of miles, and paying expenses
out of his pocket. Given the scant clues offered by
the photo captions, the process was strictly gumshoe
diligence. For most of the photos, he had only the
name of a town, leaving him little choice but to drive
straight into it and begin asking anyone who would
talk to him, "Do you know who this is?"
The
world of the high road is one that functions by its
own rules, almost entirely independently from mainstream
ways. Villages like Penasco, Chamisal, Truchas, Ojo,
and others in some ways more closely reflect the era
of Spanish exploration than modern times. Many land
rights are still governed by treaties signed with
the Spanish government after the Mexican War. Farmers
still use the long ditches, known as acequias,
that their ancestors chiseled into the mountains four
hundred years ago to irrigate the same fields. Water
or soil can be as important a currency as dollars
and cents, and English, if spoken at all, is used
only when Spanish won't suffice. It's not the sort
of place that strangers can roll into — waving
old pictures of relatives — without some risk.
Although
he doesn't speak Spanish fluently, Ketchum, who has
Latino roots, says, "I can speak English with a Spanish
accent." He invested years warming up the long-established
families of the mountains, winning their trust, establishing
boundaries, and, eventually, learning their histories.
He handed out copies of the FSA photographs and made
judicious use of his own camera. He learned that in
northern New Mexico, you can often still trade goods
for cuentos — stories of life and customs,
and so he traded photographs for information.
As
the years went by, he began to learn to whom the faces
in the old images belonged. He was surprised to discover — but perhaps shouldn't have been, given the constancy
of the place — that many of the people he was looking
for hadn't moved much at all from where Collier and
Lee had first found them.
At
times, when Ketchum arrived with his photographs,
people were as astonished to see their younger selves
as they might have been to see a long-dead relative.
Matilda Lovato, for example, nearly fainted when Ketchum
introduced himself with a photo of her and her daughter,
Elsie, taken in 1940 in their home in Chamisal. But
soon, Lovato, who still lives in Chamisal, was spilling
stories and fond memories. Passing through Questa,
New Mexico, Ketchum wandered into a store he recognized
from FSA pictures and found it being run by the grandson
of the woman originally photographed. The young man
became so excited that he left Ketchum to operate
the store while he ran to find his grandmother.
"It
can come as a great shock to have someone show up
with these photos," Ketchum says. But he adds that
most people express both pride at having been part
of history and gratitude for having it restored. Rarely
have the people Ketchum has found recalled the FSA
photographs being taken, and none had copies of them.
In those days, a camera would have been a rich person's
toy, and certainly a foreign object on the high road,
where to live well was to survive. The photos from
the government archives are like pages from the family
albums that they could never afford to keep.
Once,
as Ketchum shared a meal with some people to whom
he had given photographs, an elderly woman referred
to him as "the professor who brings us our history."
Another at the table disagreed. "No, no," she insisted.
"He is the professor who brings us our youth."
Whatever
he's bringing to the photo subjects, Ketchum is also
indemnifying their place in the FSA files. He is now
confident of the identities of more than 150 people
who are not named in the FSA photographs, and he intends
to pass along to the Library of Congress the names
he discovers so that they can be appended to the images.
"I feel my responsibility toward these people is that
they're identified at the Library of Congress," he
says. "They've been anonymous for too long."
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