Posted by Bruce Berman
Girl in northern New Mexico, 1937
by Mary Lamonica
Drive through New Mexico today and you’ll find a state awash with vibrant cultures. Hispanics, Native Americans, Anglos, African Americans, and Asian Americans all call New Mexico home. Back in the late 1930s and early 1940s, Russell Lee and his boss, Roy Stryker, the head of the Farm Security Administration (FSA) which employed Russell Lee and the other FSA shooters (including Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, Arthur Rothstein, John Vachon), knew many Americans were unfamiliar with Hispanics and Hispanic life. Racial laws supposedly providing “separate, but equal” facilities were anything but. Stryker and Lee were determined to do their part to change the situation by sending Lee on a lengthy documentary trip through the Southwest to showcase Hispanic life. New Mexico’s more than 221,000 Hispanics were the key draw.
Lee appeared to have first photographed Mexican Americans in 1937 during a swing through Minnesota. Lee encountered Hispanic sugar beet workers bringing in the year’s harvest. He and his wife Jean so loved Mexican culture that the two took their honeymoon in Mexico. Detailing Hispanic life became a priority for the photographer. The Lees made a preliminary trip to New Mexico in 1939 for the FSA, photographing Hispanic and Native American life around Taos.
But Taos was just one community in New Mexico. By early 1940, Stryker and Lee agreed that an extensive swing through New Mexico to document Hispanic life was a top priority. Lee’s notebooks and his letters to Stryker reveal a scholarly, almost anthropological preparation for the shoot. Lee obtained and read multiple historical and culture studies on Mexican Americans and the history of New Mexico. But the readings were not enough.
Since Lee didn’t speak Spanish but wanted to know more about Hispanic life, Stryker knew a contact was in order. Fortuitously, Stryker had recently learned about a new book, called Forgotten People: A Study of New Mexicans by Dr. George Sanchez, a New Mexico sociologist and educator. He quickly fired off a letter to Lee in April 1940, suggesting that the photographer head to Albuquerque, find Sanchez, read the book, and gain as much understanding of Hispanic life and the issues facing Mexican Americans, as possible.
In a 1964 interview for the Smithsonian Institution, Lee admitted that his discussions with Sanchez greatly improved the photographer’s understanding of Hispanic life, work, and racial issues. The admiration went both ways. Sanchez hired Lee a decade later to document Hispanic life and culture in Texas in 1949. In particular, Sanchez wished to show, visually, that Hispanics led separate and unequal lives compared to the lives of Anglo Americans. This body of work was titled The Study of the Spanish-Speaking People of Texas. It is digitized and housed at the University of Texas at Austin and can be seen here: http://www.cah.utexas.edu/ssspot/
Lee undertook his documentary work of New Mexico’s Hispanics with vigor. The FSA collection at the Library of Congress shows Mexican Americans at rodeos, during chile harvests, repairing adobe homes, preparing tortillas, gathering vegetables, making soap, doing woodworking and weaving, and plowing fields. Stryker and Lee had planned to go beyond the FSA’s mandate and create a book on Hispanic life. World War II intervened, however, and the book was never completed.