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The
Wopajo Says . . .
LA COLONIA
SURVIVING THE 1930'S
by:
f. g. lopriato y lopez
ITALIANS
IN NEW MEXICO - #3
STRETCH IT OUT
MAKE IT LAST
MAKE IT DO
OR DO WITHOUT.
Bed sheets wear out,. when you use them enough. The women in Old Town during
the 1930's did not have electric washing machines. They heated
their wash water in pots, on a wood burning stove, in the winter, and outside,
in a galvanized tub and scrubbed everything on galvanized washboards, whites,
faded, and very fast colors were boiled and scrubbed, inspected for wear
and patched, socks were darned and dingy colors bleached out and readied.
If the sheets were still serviceable, the holes would be repaired
or reboiled and rebleached for further use, often as curtains or dish towels,
Lye was an indispensable household item. Sometimes bed sheets would be
repaired and folded, both halves sewn together for reuse.
Flour came in cloth bags, most people bought large, twenty five,
fifty and hundred pounds, depending on how large a family they had to feed,
and white flour tortillas were the fare three times a day. Corn tortillas
were also used but not as regularly as wheat, sopaipillas were served at
special meals. Besides that, flour was also used to thicken gravies, sauces
took starch, chicken, cutlets, pork chops, each made better eating if breaded
with white flour.
The cloth bags in which the flour came was probably more sought after than
the flour itself. With a little boiling, bleaching, and dying, those
bags became beautiful dresses and blouses for little girls, shirts,
a hanky, slips, and panties. Cloth, not gold was the big thing to most
Old Town women. Most could sew, the luckiest had pedal operated
machines, but most sewed by hand.
A man's suit could become clothing for his children, and the same went
for women's clothing and when they had served their time, the same thing
might end up as part of a patchwork quilt or a throw rug.
Homemade laundry soap, and home grown almost everything, even the
dyes that they used made the need for money not as pressing but a
hell of a lot more work for the women of Old Town in the l930's.
Little did they realize it was just basic training for what was ahead and
that some day those who survived would look back on those days with
nostalgia.
FDR's WPA Projects did a lot of good, despite the fact
that the managers of those funds used the bulk of the money to feather
their own nests first and then saw to it that those who could do
them more good, socially, politically and financially got what they wanted,
but, when those funds finally got down the common people, any job was better
than none in a money hungry world that, at last, found a way to make Old
Towners need money, As I said before, we were as self relying for most
of our necessities and financial needs were kept at a bare minimum.
Now, you tell me if what they came up with does not rate, at least an E
for effort on the confidence game of politics. There were just over a hundred
thousand people in all of New Mexico, the CCC camps did a lot of good planting
trees, and dressing up the landscape, there were jobs there for many people
and most of them trying to make the transition from farming to business
or something that would enable them to fit into their changing world.
There were no roads in the entire state, the WPA built several large dams,
in fact most of the dams you see now in New Mexico are WPA projects, and
Highway 66 from one end of the state to the other was a WPA project,
there were many jobs there, but most of these jobs were being filled
by people who were brought in to do the work. New Mexico was high on FDR's
priority list. but New Mexicans were joining the armed services and the
National guard in order to help their families make ends meet. Someone
noticed this and made a fuss about it.
The next thing Old Towners knew, "Singing Teachers" were making the rounds
weekly to teach grade school students songs that were already part of their
folklore. And the Plaza in Old Town was having a very imposing and
out of place stone wall built around the plaza in Old Town. It did
not last long, and for the short time that it stood, it cost more to maintain
than anything else. Other than being used as an emergency
makeshift rest room by migrants who could not make it to a real rest room,
it was cleaned up and maintained once a year at Fiesta time. Other than
that it was avoided even by church goers who would walk around it rather
than cut through even on cold days . Even the stone mason who built the
wall hated it, but could not talk his supervisors into doing what the Old
Town Plaza has now.
The project that really took the cake, was the WPA Outhouse Brigade
Old
Towners didn't live beyond their means. and their means were not
very demanding, to begin with they made conscious efforts to minimize them
more all the while they also made a show of their better materialism to
put up a prosperous front.
This
tempted the controllers to reason that if they could not control
the intake they would control the output. The WPA brought in
the Outhouse Brigade. Everybody had to have a New State The Art,
outhouse, built by "El Diablo a Pi‚. " They made it sound so official that
some still think it was a felony not to comply.
The
city was expanding and Old Town would be incorporated making
"City Water " and indoor plumbing mandatory, the new outhouses did no more
than tear down the old outhouse and replace it with a prefabricated one
of their own, over the existing hole, but, at last, someone had pulled
something on Old Town. The word for outhouse used in old town was
"Comun" pronounced "Ko MOON" from Commode." the Outhouse Brigade
was called "Los Communistas." (The Communists.)
The l930's were lucky years in a lot of ways for Old Towners. Mainly because
of the Italian influence in the town. Italians had been the real leaders
in the community, and why not? They don't make a big hoopla about
themselves or their accomplishments, no matter where they end up.
The segment of Italians who chose New Mexico as their new home left indelible
footprints in the sands, not just of this state, but in states surrounding
New Mexico and as far as Washington, D. C.. Not just
lately, but historically. If walls could talk, they'd do it
and be fluent in Wopajo. (all languages) ////fglyl
ASI
ES NUEVO MEJICO,
LOVE
IT OR LEAVE IT!
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