Funding for Colores was provided in part by New Mexico PBS, Great Southwestern Arts and Education Endowment Fund, and the Nellita E. Walker Fund for KNME-TV at the Albuquerque Community Foundation, McCune Charitable Foundation, New Mexico Arts, a division of the Department of Cultural Affairs, and by the National Endowment for the Arts.

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Historian Estevan Rael-Gálvez looks closely at New Mexico's place in America's 250th anniversary.

>>Faith: What were the things that he left out of that report?

>>Estevan: Thank you for-- you-- Now you've entered into the subject that is the heart of my work.

>>Narrator: Once one of silent films biggest stars, Theda Bara█s remarkable life and career are rediscovered through her unpublished memoirs.

Reckoning with 1776.

>>Faith: When Americans usually think about 1776, we think about, you know, the 13 colonies and the Declaration of Independence.

But what is missing from that national narrative?

It was implicit that the political individuals named in the Declaration of Independence were male, were propertied people.

So it was a class issue as well.

And they did not even mention women or, the enslaved African Americans living in the 13 colonies.

And they did mention indigenous people, but as merciless Indian savages, which was really about marginalizing them, but also justifying claim for land, right, claim for, for for territory.

And so I want to interrogate that particular moment and everything that followed after 1776.

>>Faith: You mentioned a man named Dominguez, who was here in 1776 doing a report about what was going on in New Mexico.

So who was Dominguez?

>>Estevan: A young 37 year old by the name of Ray Francisco Dominguez, who was from Mexico City, originally arrived in New Mexico basically to do what was then called a visita.

He was he needed to do an-- an ethnographic survey of all of the missions of New Mexico.

And so he went to every single mission, including here in Albuquerque and in Santa Fe and Taos.

And he he he wrote about all of that.

And so that was developed in 1776.

So it gives us, at least from an ethnographic perspective, from his writing, what this looked like.

It's a window into what New Mexico looked like in that particular year.

>>Faith: And what did his investigation of New Mexico reveal?

>>Estevan: It's a fascinating account.

But what he reveals in that particular investigation is a really complex, multilingual society that existed in New Mexico at that time.

So if you remember, New Mexico is ancient, thousands of years old at the time that that it was settled in the 16th century.

At the end of the 16th century, there were thousands of indigenous people here, estimated to have been almost 100,000 people by 1776.

>>Faith: And he like also talked about in his report the different languages that were spoken, and-- >>Estevan: I love what he says about language.

>>Faith: Yeah, I thought that wa interesting too.

>>Estevan: It's especially interesting to me, faith, because there's this narrative that we New Mexicans say about the type of language that we speak.

And, and oftentimes that story that we tell and part of, again, an origin story.

We often say we speak an ancient Castilian language.

This document counters that mythology because he actually goes to each of these villages, and he comments on how they are speaking Spanish.

And he in many, many places he writes that they spoke a broken Spanish, they spoke a Spanish that that was not quite Castilian.

Now you have to understand who he was.

He brings all of his own bias, ethnocentrism.

He was from a very family from Mexico City.

And so when he's looking at these villages, including places like Santa Fe or Albuquerque or Belen or any of these places, he's bringing all that bias.

But there's some grain of truth to what he's saying, because there there are mixtures of languages.

I love what he says about Taos, for instance.

He says they spoke the language of the pueblo with ease, and they speak Ute, Comanche and Apache languages as well.

So he's speaking about a multilingual society, right?

>>Faith: Yeah, and what I found interesting too, was that Dominguez like his report, you know, he was sent to talk about and to look at the different churches and the monasteries and stuff like that, but he, like, kind of left out some of the story behind how those churches were built.

And I also found interesting that he talked about the trade of deer skin in Abiquiú, I believe.

But he also left out the human slave trade.

So he left out a couple of things.

What were the things that he left out of that report?

>>Estevan: Thank you, for-- you-- Now you've entered into the subject that is the heart of my work, right?

The the subject of of human trafficking, which is one of the most painful stories that we can tell.

But, but, but a story that is actually so important to tell.

So it's true.

Dominguez actually glosses over a lot of these issues.

And and, you know, when he's talking about a trade fair that happens annually in Abiquiú he's more attentive to the trade and deer skins.

Right.

Precisely what you said.

And yet, humans were actually being trafficked at that trade fair.

And really not just at that moment.

They were being trafficked throughout that time period.

I run a project called Native Bound Unbound, and we're building curriculum around this year, and we're gathering not just what Dominguez says in this mission, in this mission survey, but also in all the sacramental records, baptisms, marriages and burials.

And and it's overwhelming what is included in those sacramental records.

Maria Antonia is baptized in July 18th, 1776, in Santa Fe is identified as Comanche.

She's 4 to 5 years old, and she had been captured in in a in attack against the Comanches somewhere in the north, I'm guessing in the San Luis Valley of southern Colorado.

And and she's brought in.

And two years after she is captured, she is baptized in the home of Antonio Rivera and his wife, Graciana Sena.

And they're holding her enslaved.

Dominguez not only glosses that over in in the in the trade fairs, but you're absolutely right.

Most of what he's describing is the contours and the holdings of each and every one of these mission churches, right?

Whether Taos, Santa Fe, Albuquerque.

And he describes in great detail all of what is held there, the buildings, what it looks like, what it holds, all the sacramental material.

But those buildings were made by enslaved people.

They were made by indigenous people.

They were not just made constructed, but they were they were maintained by them.

You know, I think of probably the church which has been the most preserved to this date that might have looked exactly as it would have looked in 1776.

Is that building that is an Acoma Pueblo today.

And I mean, if you look around Acoma, there are no trees in sight.

They're far away at Mount Taylor.

Right?

What it would have taken to fell those trees, cut them down, bring them on to to Acoma, take them onto the mesa and gather ground into adobes and build those walls that are this thick.

That was all human labor, right?

And it was forced labor.

Let's be clear about what it was.

>>Faith: Yeah.

Yeah, I found that interesting because it's like kind of mirrors the Declaration of Independence, and who gets to tell that story.

So.

So Frederick Douglass once said, what to the slave is the 4th of July?

So if we were to ask that same question to the genízaros and the Pueblo communities at that time in New Mexico.

What do you think they would have answered?

>>Estevan: on July 5th of 1852, I believe, is when he asked that question and gave an incredible speech about this.

1852.

What does your July 4th, the fact that you all want to commemorate July 4th, what does that mean to an enslaved person?

So this is the moral tension embedded in the Declaration of Independence.

And what Frederick Douglass was doing was pointing to that moral tension and the hypocrisy for people living here who are identified as genízaros who are living and laboring for free.

In 1776, they were actually being told that you were Christianized, right?

And so Christianity was the value being exuded instead of liberty, necessarily.

And they were saying, by being Christianized, you're saved.

And so anyone who would have been living in that time, who was identified as genízaro█or as a criado would have recognized the hypocrisy in that moment.

Because for them, for them, we will never know exactly what they felt because we don't have their words.

But for them, they were captured, taken away from their homeland, forever severed from their ancestry.

They were separated from their mother, their father, their grandparents, their ancestors, their homeland, their worldview, their language.

I mean, think about that, that separation.

Families were being separated.

Think about Maria Antonia, who I spoke about earlier.

So had she, years later, been asked in the 1800s, but you were Christianized.

You were saved.

You were brought in, she would have said, but I was separated from who I was, right.

It's a very good question to actually be thinking about what does it mean to think not just about origin stories, but the stories, the histories that get told.

What would it mean to be thinking about women, about children, about the enslaved, about the marginalized?

What if the lions told the story of the hunt, rather than the hunter, to actually draw from an old African proverb, you know, the story would be told differently, right?

If Maria Antonia had been asked in 1776, or any of the people who had been asked, tell us your story.

Tell us what it means to be enslaved here.

What does it mean to be existing in this colonial society?

It would have reshaped how we think about that story.

What if that that story of slavery had been included by the president in the Declaration of Independence?

And what if we had been taught about that, about that moral conundrum early on?

What if we had been thinking about, like, the fact that slavery at any time period was bad, right?

This is why our project Native Bound Unbound right now, is gathering material from that year to actually provide teachers and educators more material to actually understand 1776 from other perspectives.

And so it's important to actually think critically about the past, to always question it, and to actually think about issues of perspectives.

What would this year mean to women?

What would this mean to a child if they were asked what this commemoration means?

>> Faith: Yeah, so it sounds like we have a lot more to think about for this 4th of July.

>> Estèvan: I hope so.

So as people are out there celebrating July 4th Declaration of Independence, particularly in this particular political moment when people are still fighting for their rights, where families are still being separated from each other, it's important to think about issues of belonging, what it means to belong to a nation.

It's important to think about the stories that we tell.

It's important to think about how we treat each other right, in this particular moment.

You know, not just in a national sense, you know, not just to think about celebrating the nation, but to think about what it means to be human, what it means to be human in a world that is interconnected, that doesn't have borders, right.

I want to think more about -- I want to be cognizant of a mother who just wants to -- hold on to her children, no matter where they were born in the world.

Peterborough's Lost Legacy [Silent Film Orchestra] >> Glaser: Peterborough was a silent film star of the early years of the 20th century.

She is someone that a lot of people don't know about nowadays.

However, at the time, roughly from 1914 to 1920 or so, she was pretty much one of the top stars in film of the times, she was considered the original, as they called it vamp, which doesn't mean quite the same thing that it does now, but meant that you were a seductive woman who was dangerous to men.

Even though the studio, Fox Studios, made a biography for her that made her sound very exotic and told everyone that she was born literally in the shadows of the Sphinx, in Egypt.

She was actually just a nice Jewish girl from Cincinnati, as she sometimes said.

And she grew up as a middle class Jewish girl in the Avondale section of Cincinnati, which was at the time a predominantly middle class Jewish area.

And she went to Walnut Hills High School.

>> Harter: That's the Theodosia Goodman who became Theda Bara, later on.

>> Glaser: She attended the synagogue, the Plum Street Temple Synagogue.

>> Harter: Theodosia did attend UC [University of Cincinnati] after she graduated from Walnut Hills High School.

She attended for two years.

We do see Theodosia Goodman in 1904 and the 1905 yearbooks.

She does not seem to have graduated.

She left for New York in the midst of her studies.

>> Glaser: She had this very condensed career from roughly 1914 to 1919 or 1920.

During that time, she made over 40 films, which is hard for us to think of given how films work today.

But some of her most significant films were A Fool There Was, which was an early film that really created that vamp image for her.

It's where she broke out as a star, and in that film, she played the seductress who was bringing a man who had a wife to his room.

she was an early vamp and one of our early sex symbols in film.

And so she's had a huge effect, I think, on future starlets and representations of women in film.

And yet we know so little about her because her films didn't survive into the contemporary period.

One of the painful things that she went through was the loss of her legacy.

So 1937, which was during her lifetime, there was a fire in the vaults of Fox Studios.

And so something like 90% of Theda Bara's output was destroyed at that time.

And she was alive.

And she was very aware of this happening.

>> Harter: The archives and Rare Books Library is one of 13 library units at the University of Cincinnati.

So we have a collection here that the official name is the T. Everett Harré Manuscript on Theda Bara, the University of Cincinnati Library is an Archives and Rare Books Library, acquired this manuscript in 2008 and was through the efforts of a man named Kevin Grace, who was then the head of the Archives and Rare Books Library, who spotted this manuscript listed in a local manuscript dealer's catalog, it is about 450 typewritten pages of a manuscript on the life of film actress Theda Bara.

It was a completed but never published memoir that was supposed to be published under Theda Bara's name, and so it was ghostwritten in collaboration with Theda Bara by T. Everette Harré who was a newspaperman and author and editor from Philadelphia.

Apart from the manuscript, there's also about 60 letters between Theda Bara and Harré talking about that collaboration.

The importance of this manuscript is it really gets to the heart of Theda Bara's life.

This transformation from Theodosia Goodman, who described herself as a good Jewish girl from Cincinnati into this femme fatale figure.

We've been very fortunate to work with our preservation lab colleagues who were able to stabilize the document.

>> Prochaska: The lab is responsible for the preservation of the treasures of the library.

We are a book and paper lab, so we primarily work with bound objects and paper.

The manuscript is an unbound manuscript.

It's a typed manuscript.

It was in good condition.

There wasn't a lot of tearing, but with paper that is that thin, it becomes delicate.

And because it was typewriter ribbon, it is stable.

But you could still rub some things off.

There are marginalia where they've written in pencil, so that could also be rubbed off.

The question was, how to make sure it stays in that condition, both by handling by researchers and in the future if it would be digitized.

And that's why we made the decision to sleeve it instead of encapsulating it so it could be removed from the sleeves if it was digitized in the future.

>> Harter: It includes a cover page with the title Woman or Vampire It includes chapter titles such as I Procured Poison Caramels with full Intent to use them, or -- Saved from an early marriage by a Ouija Board or -- Devil's Handmaiden, am I, So if you look at the table of contents, it seems like this almost -- intended to be somewhat this scandalous, spectacular memoir.

When you look at the actual content of it, it's more of a day to day life of Theda Bara, everything from her early childhood and education in Cincinnati, the move to New York, entering Broadway and film productions all the way up to about 1917-1918, when she was the lead in the film Cleopatra.

Theda Bara's career kind of goes into a decline.

She has, I think, one stage production, which is not received well by critics.

And then there's a few years before she has, I think there were two remaining films in her career.

So unfortunately this is being written kind of, I think, as she's sliding out of the public eye in a certainly Hollywood producers eyes, which may have led to why this was ultimately not successfully published.

>> Glaser: But its a fascinating document and testament to the fact that we can continue to find artifacts from silent film stars like Theda Bara.

>> Prochaska: They outlook is very good for it.

Nothing lasts forever, but it'll be around before -- probably I pass or anyone I know passes.

>> Glaser: We perceive her as having completely lost her legacy when the films burned in the Fox Fire.

But as time has gone on, what we found is that a lot of silent films were shown all over the world because they were silent.

They were very easily translatable to other audiences have survived in different forms.

There have been clips of Theda Bara films that have been found in various other countries, so it's absolutely the case that we can continue to find more of her films over time.

As we go into the vaults of various old cinemas, there really is a sense of kind of a treasure hunt to find material like Theda Bara's films.

She wasn't just a studio creation, she was also her own creation.

She is very much a woman of her age.

She grew up middle class.

She grew up in Avondale.

She grew up as part of the Reform Jewish movement.

All of these are very central parts of that time period in Cincinnati history.

And she's emblematic of what it was like to be a smart young woman who wanted to make it -- from the Midwest on -- you know, the big screen.

And I think that story is is one that can absolutely still capture people█s imagination if they're told it.

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