By Irene I. Blea
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| Santa Clara Parish Cemetery, Wagon Mound, NM |
Carolina P. Wengert was proud to say, “I’m older than the state of New Mexico.” She passed away peacefully surrounded by her large family on Monday, April 9, 2012, the year of New Mexico’s one-hundredth birthday. I knew the lady as Doña Cora from Wagon Mound, the place where the Great American Plain meets the Rocky Mountains. However, she was born in Cebolla in 1909, only a few miles from my own birth place. For nearly forty of her one hundred and two years I visited her house, her family, attended her birthday parties and holiday celebrations. I never stopped to think about what Doña Cora saw during her life time. Her husband, Jose V. Wengert, preceded her in death well before I met her. They raised their family in Wagon Mound and were cattle ranchers. She was my friend, Gloria’s, mother.
There are many ways of talking in the archaic Spanish of northern New Mexico. When I talked about Carolina it was always in the context of Dona, a highly respected elderly woman. When talking about her to another person I called her "Grandma" because members of the family referred to her in this manner. After Jose died, Grandma, her sons and daughters, along with hired help continued to run the ranch. She was the boss, no question about it.
It was ironic that this small, bent over woman was as strong as she was, and that she didn’t seem to age. She lived alone after Jose died, but when Gloria needed her, she moved to Tucumcari to help raise Gloria’s two children. Doña Cora lived there for thirteen years. The family moved to Albuquerque and Grandma lived with Gloria for twenty-one years until her passing. Albuquerque or Tucumcari, it didn’t matter, where ever she lived Doña Cora made good friends and impressed people with her energy and quick, sometimes cutting, wit.
She was a wealth of knowledge about herbs, Spanish dichos, language, culture, money and, parenting. No matter where she lived, Wagon Mound was home to Doña Cora. It was the place to which she returned often, and visiting her usually meant house or outdoor work. Thus, it was customary, in earlier days, to get in the truck with Gloria and, “Go check on the cattle.” Nor was it unusual to shake out bedding for twelve or more people, cook beans, potatoes, fry meat and, sleep on a mattress on the floor next to gunny sacks full of beans and potatoes. One night after she took us home early from a dance to “fix the beds,” for visitors, Gloria and I talked as we tried to sleep in the stuffy storeroom. The door opened quickly and Doña Cora said firmly, in Spanish, “Go to sleep, don’t you know people are trying to sleep.” She was mad at us for dancing too much with the same young men. I guess she thought our behavior was scandalous.
It was in Wagon Mound that I once saw her, wearing her customary bonnet in a senior citizen van waving at the crowd that multiplies the village population of under 300 to well over 2000 people on Bean Day. The number of attendees changes each year. What did not change is that the village is so small the parade went around twice. Doña Cora was as old as Bean Day(s), which takes place each Labor Day weekend. The celebration is rooted in the work of Higinio Gonzales and others, who cooked up beans in wash boilers behind the schoolhouse in 1909 for what was then called the Mora County Farmers Harvest Jubilee. Wagon Mound was a major center for the production of pinto beans. The bean tradition stuck and in 1910, the name of the celebration was changed to Bean Day. I bet Doña Cora knew some of these people.
She knew her beans. She knew how to grow, pick, store and cook pinto beans. In fact, she lived mostly on beans and yeast bread. Her home was never without beans, the crop that was a mainstay of the local farming economy well before white settlers arrived. It was that economy that fed the soldiers of Fort Union, met the travelers along the Santa Fe Trail several years before Doña Cora was born.
The Wengert house is near the railroad tracks that delivered a variety of articles via the old Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe Railway to Fort Union via a stop at nearby Watrous. The night we slept in the storeroom, Gloria and I heard and felt the train as it rattled by. Doña Cora told time by the passing of the train. She knew the tracks well, and she saw the old two lane Highway 85 become Interstate 25. Vehicles rush past Wagon Mound north and south on four lanes now. Some of them stop to read the historical marker, but not many.
Unlike years ago, Wagon Mound is now a poor community with few people living there. It has a high school that serves the surrounding rural area and, is now a National Historic Landmark, named after the shape of a butte that resembles a covered wagon. The butte was the last great landmark that American soldiers and pioneers saw on their journey to Santa Fe, Mexico and California. Before it was Wagon Mound, it was Santa Clara. The Catholic Church and the cemetery where Doña Cora’s funeral was held and where she is buried are named Santa Clara.
Doña Cora was a devout Catholic who prayed the rosary daily and received Holy Communion every Sunday. Catholicism was brought by the Spanish and has been the main religion in Wagon Mound, including when the Americans came there on the Cimarron Route of the Santa Fe Trail. The trail was shorter and more suited to wagon travel. It shortened the traveling time to Santa Fe by about ten days, but it was considered more dangerous than the Mountain Route due to the shortage of water and the fear of Indian attack. As a student of the Santa Fe Trail, I’ve read about how sweet the water and how kind the people of Santa Clara were to the weary travelers. The sign declaring Wagon Mound a National Historic Landmark went up in 1963.Nearby are wagon train ruts. Doña Cora knew where they were, and she told me.
We never talked about the US-Mexican war that made New Mexico a United States Territory in 1848, but she told me about how women worked the ranches and fields while waiting for men to return from World War I and World War II. I visited during Viet Nam, the war that never was declared a war, and the wars that followed. She had strong opinions about war, but we also talked about the many cattle they owned, the winter storms that delivered over four feet of snow, how helicopters dropped hay to feed the cattle in the dead of winter. She gave me cuttings from her plants and seed from her Hollyhocks. Much later, we sat and talked about the quilts she made, the caps she crocheted from yarn. One day she honored me with one.
At her funeral I thought about how Doña Cora had traveled on horses, buggies, automobiles. She saw the introduction of home radios, saw rockets to the moon on television, heard rock and roll on record players, disco on eight track tape players and operated the microwave oven even though she preferred to cook and heat her meals on top of the stove: cast iron, gas and eclectic stoves. She saw her daughter, Gloria and me become professional women that she sometimes did not understand or appreciate but, she stuck in there with us, through our divorces, career struggles, single parenting, and mischief. No matter how old we were, it made no difference to her, she still scolded us, advised us even if we didn’t want advice. Yes, Doña Cora saw many things, heard many things, knew many things. She was on this earth for one hundred and two years with Wagon Mound on her mind.
Carolina P. Wengert is survived by her children: son Art and his wife, Dorothy; daughter Brenilda and her husband, Moises Sandoval; daughter Bessie Namath; son Maurice and his wife, Carol; daughter Dr. Gloria Wengert; over fifty-two grandchildren; nineteen great-grandchildren; a large number of great-great grandchildren; nephews, nieces and friends. Funeral and burial services were held on a most windy day in Wagon Mound, New Mexico, Saturday, April 14 at 11:00 a.m. at Santa Clara Parish.
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| Irene I. Blea |
Irene I. Blea, a New Mexico native, earned her Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Colorado-Boulder, and retired as a tenured Full Professor and Chairperson of Mexican American Studies at California State University-Los Angeles. Suzanna, the first novel in a trilogy about a 13 year-old girl married off to a 32 year-old man in 1920's New Mexico, will be followed soon by the second novel, Poor People's Flowers. Visit Dr. Blea at www.facebook.com/blea.