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.
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.
The tone of Cabeza de Baca's memoir is more descriptive than confessional: she is an acute social observer who focuses on historical and geographical details rather than personal reminiscences. Even those reminiscences usually take the form of folklore, told to her by visiting travelers, ranchers, or people of the land who unfold their stories. Cabeza de Baca has been called part of a "first generation of Nuevamexicana writers who were conscious of their heritage and cultural identity" because of her seamless integration of lore, agriculture, and biography (Cabeza de Baca xix).
Cabeza de Baca's first chapter, entitled "The Llano," centers on the lives of the settlers who lived in New Mexico before her, even before she begins her own tale: "Between these boundaries are the settlements, whistle-stops, trading posts, chapels, ranch headquarters and homesteader's houses — some new, some old, many abandoned — which tell the story of more than a hundred years of living on the Llano" (Cabeza de Baca 1). Long before white Americans came, Mexicans lived upon the Llano, and long before any foreign settlers made their homes upon the Staked Plains, the native inhabitants resided there.
Cabeza de Baca writes as both an outsider and an insider: as a woman, but also as a resident, and as a non-white individual of Spanish heritage who could cast a critical eye upon the ways whites farmed and settled the land she loved, and treated the native populace. She attempts to preserve her native traditions, medicine, and way of life for posterity, and to commemorate practices no longer common, such as buffalo hunting.
Cabeza de Baca's own story is no less fascinating than that of the land on which she lived. Her mother died when Fabiola was four years old, and she was born in 1894, on the precipice of two eras — the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth. "As a child I was a problem to my grandmother and was forever running away from her" (Cabeza de Baca xiii). The young Fabiola was a tomboy, delighting in local rodeos and enthusiastically helping out with the chores, not all of which were conventionally feminine.
The land was rough, and the family's living conditions were rough despite their fine name and heritage: "The hard dirt floor of the patio always had a certain coolness about it. Just a few nights before, the boys had been in the mood to renovate it. They brought a load of dirt, which we sprinkled with water and spread over with burlap sacks. We had such fun tramping it down. We made it a game by jumping on it until the soil was packed hard. This was repeated until we had a solid, even patio floor. Around it the boys built a supporting wall of rock filled in with mud" (Cabeza de Baca 9).
The family's home was thus created from the earth and was part of the earth — an earth so flat that a storm could be seen "still thirty miles away" when it was approaching, bringing precious rain that the family appreciated in a way no city-dweller could (Cabeza de Baca 31).
"Anglo encroachment, cultural loss, and environmental destruction"
"Author's advocacy for indigenous foods, languages, and history"
"Cross-cultural empathy and life as educator and extension agent"
While Cabeza de Baca does not engage in long periods of introspection, the book as a whole suggests that living in harmony with the land toughened her. Periods of punishing drought alternate with heavy rain on the Llano: "Money in our lives was not important, rain was important" (Cabeza de Baca 11). Unlike the Anglo settlers, Cabeza de Baca and her family respected their dependence upon that rain — and upon the soil in general. The Hispanic culture she documents treated the land as a shared inheritance rather than a resource to be consumed.
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