When
Ketchum ran across this store, photographed
by John Collier in 1943, in Chacon, New Mexico,
it was well-worn and missing its sign. He wasn't
sure he had found the same place until he counted
the number of planks on the roof, matching what
he saw in the photograph. Later, he found the
old sign in the attic.
|
Con
Nombre
By
Michael Penn MA'97
Photos courtesy Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs
Division, FSA-OWI Collection
Lately,
Ketchum's search has had a tinge of desperation. He's
running out of time. Not only is he getting within
a few years of retirement, but the people he's looking
for are pushing the envelope of longevity.
The
young boys in the matching sweaters, for example,
would by now be entering their seventies. Their youth,
frozen on silver nitrate for all these years, has
silently slipped away. And if a camera shutter can't
stop the march of time, then a professor nearing his
own twilight surely can't.
"It really scares me," he says. "We can still find
these people, but we have to do it fast. It's going
to have to be done in the next five to eight years."
The
clean mountain air seems to have preserved many of
the people Ketchum has been seeking. He has found
numerous FSA subjects — even those who were adults
when Lee and Collier came through — still alive and
alert in the towns that raised them. He has located
a woman who is now 105, and others who are in their
nineties. Enlisting students has also helped. Ketchum
is able to work more quickly, and he has passed on
some of the tricks he knows for reading the visual
cues in photographs — such as using magnifiers to
read fliers on the walls of churches or license plates
on vehicles.
This fall, he and art professor Truman Lowe will take
a group of students to the Smithsonian Institution,
where Ketchum will lead a seminar on his research
methods. One of the students' projects will be to
identify and locate a family of Oklahoma migrants
from a 1939 FSA photograph.
But there is a sense of passing in New Mexico, and
it's not just the subjects that Ketchum worries will
perish. The culture itself seems to be withering on
the bone. "Younger people are not staying," Ketchum
says. "They want more than the ability to make a subsistence
living. The abuelitos and the abuelas
are there, but in most cases, their grandchildren
have moved on. I don't know what will happen to these
villages once they're gone."
Jennifer Price '01, one of the students who went to
New Mexico, says that some of the elderly people she
met seemed lonely, despite having raised large families.
Price made photographs of a woman who lived alone
on a farm outside one of the towns. Her barn, long
ago retired and falling apart from disuse, is routinely
pilfered by petty thieves, and her husband and most
of her relatives are now buried in a graveyard beside
the house. "She told me, 'I have all this land. I
don't even know what I'm going to do with it,' " Price
says.
The
students also witnessed traditional festivals, some
of which have been going on since before the Revolutionary
War. They're still glamorous affairs of color and
pride, although these days only small handfuls of
people participate. In some years, villages have to
choose their "Queen of the Acequia," the ceremonial
town princess of water, by default, since only one
girl of the proper age lives there.
Alicia
Fedelina Ch·vez, a professor of educational administration
and a native of the region, says she knows firsthand
the culture Ketchum is trying to record. Jobs and
education have taken her away from the area, but she
says she feels responsibility to preserve and promote
her heritage from afar. The former dean of students
at UW-Madison, she studies diversity in higher education,
and says Ketchum's work "reminds me why I choose to
study culture. It's so important to recognize how
it defines people."
Ch·vez
knows something about cultural ambassadorship. Her
family settled near Taos in the 1500s and has tended
sheep there ever since. When her aunts and uncles
speak, you can hear traces of the original dialect
their ancestors brought with them from Spain, untainted
after four centuries. Her father, Gabriel, and uncle,
Miguel, were the basis for the movie And Now Miguel,
a semifactual account of Miguel's desire to become
a man by joining his older brothers as they moved
the family's sheep flock high into the mountains.
Later a Newbery Award-winning children's book, the
story is well-known throughout the Americas; when
he was nineteen years old, Gabriel Ch·vez won a Fulbright
to travel around South America, showing the film and
sharing the story of his young life with fellow farmers.
For the son of a poor sheepherder, the opportunity
was unheard of, a once-in-a-lifetime chance.
That
is why Alicia Ch·vez understands how important it
is for Ketchum to find the people who were the FSA's
nameless ambassadors. "My beliefs about research and
scholarship are that we should try to contribute something
to the lives of the subjects we study," she says.
"I'm very proud that Cavalliere is contributing by
giving back these memories. And what a wonderful gift
he's giving."
"It's certainly the most rewarding thing I've done
in all my years at this university," says Ketchum.
"Frankly, I'd hang my photographs in Chamisal or Penasco
before the Museum of Modern Art. [In those places],
I have to deal with the people that they're about.
They're not anonymous."
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