Decolonial New Mexican@ Travels: Music, Weaving, Melancholia, and Redemption Or, “This is Where the Peasants Rise Up!”

Abstract

The authors of this crónica1 were privileged to participate in the funeral rites held for Doña Teofila Marcelina Jaramillo Serrano on August 9, 2012. Chela Sandoval’s beloved Tia Teofila was 95 years old, born in Cañones, New Mexico in 1917. Here in the Río Arriba is where most of the Serrano-Sandoval-Lucero-Archuleta family dynasty has lived since the sixteenth century—and before. Doña Teofila Jaramillo lived her entire life in the village of Cañones, where in 1936 she married Salomon Serrano, another lifelong resident of Cañones. Many of Don Salomon and Doña Teofila’s surviving friends, and loved ones remain in that village. But many more live in the neighboring pueblos of Abiquiú, Medenales, Coyote, the Santa Clara Pueblo—indeed, throughout Río Arriba county.