We Fed Them Cactus: Cultural Identity in New Mexico
This paper examines Fabiola Cabeza de Baca's memoir We Fed Them Cactus (1954) as a work of cultural preservation and social commentary set on the Llano Estacado of northeastern New Mexico. Drawing on biography, folklore, and regional history, Cabeza de Baca documents the displacement of Hispanic and Native communities by Anglo settlers whose exploitative farming practices contributed to the Dust Bowl. The paper explores how Cabeza de Baca navigates multiple cultural identities — as a woman, a Hispanic descendant of Spanish conquistadors, and an advocate for Native peoples — and how her deliberate use of English allowed her to challenge the dominant Anglo narrative while honoring a vanishing way of life.
- Introduction: Hispanic Pioneers of the Llano Estacado: Memoir's setting, author background, and central themes
- Observing the Land and Its People: Cabeza de Baca's narrative style and social observation
- Cabeza de Baca's Personal History and Frontier Life: Author's childhood, family, and frontier living conditions
- The Loss of the Land and the Dust Bowl: Anglo encroachment, cultural loss, and environmental destruction
- Honoring Native Culture and Languages: Author's advocacy for indigenous foods, languages, and history
- Cultural Perspective and Compassion for the Marginalized: Cross-cultural empathy and life as educator and extension agent
- Conclusion: Harmony with the Land: Land stewardship versus exploitation as the memoir's core lesson
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What makes this paper effective
- Grounds literary analysis in specific textual evidence, using direct quotations from the memoir to support each interpretive claim about cultural identity and land use.
- Connects biography to broader historical context — linking Cabeza de Baca's personal narrative to the Dust Bowl, Anglo settlement, and Native displacement — without losing sight of the individual author.
- Balances thematic analysis (gender, race, land ethics) with attention to the author's narrative technique, such as her blending of historiography, folklore, and autobiography.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper employs close reading alongside cultural and historical contextualization. By situating individual passages within the broader sociohistorical moment — Anglo encroachment, indigenous erasure, gendered expectations — the writer demonstrates how a literary text can function simultaneously as personal memoir, cultural testimony, and political act.
Structure breakdown
The essay opens by establishing the memoir's historical and cultural setting, then moves through Cabeza de Baca's narrative style, her personal biography, the environmental tragedy of the Dust Bowl, her advocacy for Native peoples, and her capacity for cross-cultural empathy. It concludes by synthesizing these threads around the central theme of living in harmony with the land versus exploiting it. Each section builds naturally on the previous one, maintaining a clear argumentative through-line.
Introduction: Hispanic Pioneers of the Llano Estacado
The story of the early pioneers of the American West has been told and retold. However, it is important to remember that people of Mexican heritage also colonized the plains, even after many of the formerly Mexican territories were incorporated into the United States. Before New Mexico formally became a state, Fabiola Cabeza de Baca — a descendant of Spanish conquistadors — was one of the last Hispanic residents of the Llano Estacado. These were the great plains of northeastern New Mexico and northwestern Texas, also known as the Staked Plains, that were dominated by Hispanics before Anglo farmers came to populate and profit from the area.
In her memoir We Fed Them Cactus, Fabiola Cabeza de Baca portrays an ethnically diverse world that was gradually encroached upon by white Americans who abused rather than used the land for their own enrichment. Fabiola also depicts a world where conventional gender norms of either Hispanic or Anglo society do not necessarily apply, and where strong women like herself were able to transgress cultural expectations of womanhood.
Work Cited
Cabeza de Baca, Fabiola. We Fed Them Cactus. UNM Press, 1954.
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