Casimiro Barela and his second wife, Damiana
CASIMIRO BARELA, PERPETUAL SENATOR
THE ROTUNDA of the Capitol Building in Denver, Colorado, features sixteen stained glass portraits. They honor important citizens of the state. Among familiar names such as Kit Carson and Chief Ouray is a lesser-known man, Casimiro Barela. Even before Colorado became a state, Barela was a representative in the territorial legislature. He was one of the men who drafted the state constitution. After Colorado became a state in 1876, Barela served in the state senate for over thirty-seven years! That is why he is referred to as the “perpetual senator.” His influence spread beyond the walls of the state capitol. Barela continued to speak on behalf of the people in southern Colorado until he died.
FROM NEW MEXICO TO TRINIDAD
Casimiro Barela was born in Embudo, New Mexico, on March 4, 1847
—during the U.S.–Mexico War
of 1846-48. At the end of the war, this territory was turned over to
the United States. Barela’s ancestors
had emigrated from Spain to California in the 1770s. They ey
eventually made their way east to Embudo,
New Mexico. When he was twenty, Barela made his start in the
fledgling city of Trinidad. The year was 1867, and the town was just
six years old. Barela proved to be quite an entrepreneur and
businessman. Before long he was involved with freighting, newspaper
publishing, and other enterprises. His major business, though, was a
profitable ranch twenty miles east of Trinidad, where he raised
sheep, cattle, and thoroughbred
horses. He lived there with his wife Josefita Ortiz and some of
their extended family.
ON A ROLL
Barela’s political career started when he was just twenty-two. He
was elected justice of the peace in Trinidad. He became county
assessor and the territorial representative for Las Animas in 1870,
and county sheriff in 1871. By the time Barela turned twenty-six, he
had also established a blacksmith shop and mercantile store in the
little town where he lived near Trinidad. He had also been named
postmaster. He did so much for the town that they named it Barela,
Colorado, in his honor. In 1875, Barela became a delegate to the
Colorado
constitutional convention. He helped write the laws for the new
state of Colorado. Barela then championed one of the causes that
would make him a hero to many people. He ensured that the
constitution would be published in Spanish and German as well as
English. In 1876, Barela won his first term as a state senator.
HOME LIFE
Barela and his wife had nine children, but only three daughters
survived. They were Leonor (born in 1869), Juana (born in 1871), and
Sofia (born in 1874). Then his wife died in 1883. Barela remarried
the following year. He and his new wife, Damiana Rivera, had no
children of their own, but they took in at least three other
children to raise. By all accounts, he was a very loving father.
With Damiana’s assets added to his own, Barela became one of the
three wealthiest stockmen in Colorado. Although his work required
him to spend a large amount of time in Denver, Barela kept his land
and other holdings in southern Colorado. Before the turn
of the century, Trinidad was fairly isolated from the northern part
of the state. Then coal was discovered. The rush of people into the
southern part of the state gave Barela a lot of work. Many people
were trying to take the coal-rich land from the old owners, and
Barela tried to protect them from these schemes.
CAUSES AND COMMITMENTS
Barela worked for many different causes and individuals in his
lifetime. He established and owned two printing businesses. The
newspaper Las Dos Republicas was for Hispanos in Denver, and El
Progresso was for people in Las Animas County. They were both
printed in Spanish. Barela also served as the Denver consul for the
republics of Mexico and Costa Rica. He ceaselessly pushed for
statehood for New Mexico, which finally came to pass in 1912. He
supported women’s voting rights in Colorado. He also worked on the
personal issues of many individuals.
DIFFERENT PARTY, SAME WORK
In 1904, Barela decided to switch from the Democratic party to the
Republicans. Democrats were out of favor after Governor Davis Waite
was blamed for the 1893 economic depression in Colorado. At the same
time, Republican President Theodore Roosevelt was spearheading
reforms. So Barela switched parties. He
was a clever supporter of popular stands in the state, like populism
and the progressive movement. He realized that he increasingly
needed the Anglo vote to stay in office.
CELEBRATING COLUMBUS
Barela is responsible for the celebration of Columbus Day. He spoke
on October 12, 1905, at the opening of a parade in Pueblo where a
statue of Columbus was erected. Barela noted that the Italians,
Portuguese, and Spanish all claimed Columbus, but that he “is not
the property of a single nation. He is the property of all the
Latin race.” He may have been trying to appeal to new Italian
immigrants. In 1900, his Las Animas County had
thirteen residents of Italian birth. By 1910, it had 3,362. He
needed their vote. In 1907, Barela’s Columbus Day bill became
law in Colorado. The federal government did not adopt it until 1971.
THE RACE HE LOST
In 1916, Barela lost his bid for Senate re-election to Wesley De
Busk. His thirty-seven-year Senate career was over. He returned home
to southern Colorado. In 1920, Barela was selected to attend the
inauguration of President Obregon of Mexico with Colorado Governor
Oliver Shoup. When he returned home he developed pneumonia. Barela
died December 18, 1920, and is buried in Trinidad. People who knew
Casimiro Barela described him as sharp-tempered, boisterous, and
pragmatic. He was known for his eloquent speaking style,
enhanced by his New Mexican accent. He worked hard for his power and
wealth, and yet the welfare of his constituents was always near to
his heart. When he began, no one in Denver thought much about New
Mexico Territory. Forty-seven years later, his influence was felt
all over the state. Barela was a “perpetual senator,” and much more.
BY MAYA D. WRIGHT
FURTHER READING:
Fernandez, Jose E. The Biography of Casimiro
Barela. Trans. and annot. by A. Gabriel Melendez.
Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press,
2003.
Monnett, John H. and Michael McCarthy. Colorado
Profiles: Men and Women Who Shaped the
Centennial State. Niwot, CO: University Press of
Colorado, 1996, pp 151-158.
American History of Christopher Columbus...
America's national memory is filled with icons and symbols, avatars of deeply held, yet imperfectly understood, beliefs. The role of history in the iconography of the United States is pervasive, yet the facts behind the fiction are somehow lost in an amorphous haze of patriotism and perceived national identity. Christopher Columbus, as a hero and symbol of the first order in America, is an important figure in this pantheon of American myth. His status, not unlike most American icons, is representative not of his own accomplishments, but the self-perception of the society which raised him to his pedestal in the American gallery of heroism.
This gallery was not in place at the birth of the political nation. America, as a young republic, found itself immediately in the middle of an identity crisis. Having effected a violent separation from England and its cultural and political icons, America was left without history--or heroes. Michael Kammen, in his Mystic Chords of Memory explains that "repudiation of the past left Americans of the young republic without a firm foundation on which to base a shared sense of their social selves." A new national story was needed, yet the Revolutionary leaders, obvious choices for mythical transformation, were loath to be raised to their pedestals. "Even though every nation needs a mythic explanation of its own creation, that process was paradoxically elaborated by the reluctance of Revolutionary statesmen to have their story told prematurely." To be raised above others would be undemocratic, they believed. The human need to explain origins, to create self-identity through national identity, was thwarted by this reluctance. A vacuum was created, and was slowly filled with the image of Christopher Columbus.
"The association between Columbus and America took root in the imagination" in the eighteenth century. "People had even more reason to think of themselves in distinctive American terms." Americans, searching for a history and a hero, discovered Columbus. A rash of poetic histories and references to Columbus emerge in the years following the Revolution: Philip Freneau's The Pictures of Columbus, Joel Barlow's 1787 The Vision of Columbus, and Phillis Wheatley's 1775 innovation, the poetic device "Columbia" as a symbol of both Columbus and America. King's College of New York Columbia, in deference to those who would name the country after Columbus. Noble observes that,
It is not hard to understand the appeal of Columbus as a totem for the new republic and the former subjects of George III. Columbus had found the way of escape from Old World tyranny. He was the solitary individual who challenged the unknown sea, as triumphant Americans contemplated the dangers and promise of their own wilderness frontier...as a consequence of his vision and audacity, there was now a land free from kings, a vast continent for new beginnings. In Columbus the new nation without its own history and mythology found a hero from the distant past, one seemingly free of any taint from association with European colonial powers. The Columbus symbolism gave America an instant mythology and a unique place in history, and their adoption of Columbus magnified his own place in history.
If the Revolutionary generation was inspired by Columbus, consider the reaction of the nineteenth century: Columbus was an embodiment of that century's faith in progress--seeking out new lands, a fearless explorer. However, nineteenth century America's discovery of Columbus was not as straightforward as that of the late eighteenth century. The United States certainly by the 1830s, was in the throes of a love affair with the new. America was seen as the "Country of the Future", the new more important than the "ancient" of history. Formal education, for most of the nineteenth century, "gave short shrift to the past. American history remained very much a minor subject in the schools--rarely a part of the curriculum." Americans had a "limited attention span for history, even the history of their own heroes." What was important was that their heroes were bold, adventurous, and represented innovation: who better than Columbus to represent the bold new America? Americans still needed a heroic pantheon; the facts behind the faces were of little importance.
Again, as in the late eighteenth century, Columbus was a reflection of the society which created and recreated him. Kammen reminds us that "societies in fact reconstruct their pasts rather than faithfully record them: and do so "with the needs of contemporary culture clearly in mind." The culture of the early nineteenth century was one of growing fragmentation, and "obstacles to achieving a viable coherent sense of national tradition were numerous: distinctive sections as well as value systems with conflicting self-images of one another and themselves: as well as diverse political factions and parties. Columbus was a perfect icon for the confusing days of the early nineteenth century, cutting across social, political, and regional boundaries, providing a kind of superficial unity for the American national identity, a decontextualized and increasingly mono-dimensional hero, created in the image of the age.
How did Columbus achieve this status? Again, through his valorization of writers. Washington Irving was part of a "small yet vocal group of antebellum Americans" who "felt deeply troubled by the irrelevance of memory to their contemporaries" and in 1819 expressed a desire to "lose myself among the shadowy grandeurs of the past." He did just that with the newly discovered Navarrette manuscripts (a work on Columbus' life by one of his contemporaries) which were published in 1825, utilizing the documents to create a romantic hero for the nineteenth century. His version of Columbus' life, published in 1829, was incredibly popular, "read avidly in the United States and contributed to the idealized image of the discoverer that dominated literature for more than a century and has not been entirely expunged. His soaring fancy produced a romance, more than a judicious biography."
It was not simply Irving, or the early Revolutionary Columbus boosters, who created an idealized version of the explorer's life. His contemporaries could not agree on the facts of Columbus' life, either. Scholars still debate issues which may seem to the public somehow already set in stone--what he looked like, whether or not he originated the idea of sailing west to reach the east, even what island he first landed on. The confusion began with the first "official" biography of the "Admiral" by his son Don Hernando, which was strangely vague in a number of key areas--including those mentioned above. Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo, Martin Fernandez de Navarrette, Peter Martyr d'Anghiera, and Bartolome de la Casas all presented differing views of the man who was to become an important American hero. Humphrey Gilbert, a citizen of the first British colony in the New World said of Columbus, "Christopher Columbus of famous memory was not only derided and generally mocked, even here in England, but afterward became a laughing-stock of the Spaniards themselves." and yet in 1614, Lope de Vega portrayed Columbus in a more familiar light. In his play El Nuevo Mundo descubierto por Cristobal Colon, Columbus is a "dreamer up against the stolid forces of entrenched tradition, a man of singular purpose who triumphed, the embodiment of that spirit driving forces to explore and discover." The conflicting details, the vague rendition of biography, and the prejudices of early writers made it easy for early Americans to take Columbus and mold him to their purposes.
"Irving's Columbus was a figure of heroic stature, eminently useful to Americans who were attempting the first democratic experiment in modern times. Irving presented him to young America as a culture hero divinely inspired and divinely sent..." The vision of Columbus as underdog, triumphing over circumstances and his "betters" was particularly resonant for the new republic, as was his image as the great explorer, a "symbol of the adventuring human spirit and an avatar of the Western faith". His reputation seemed to have been secured the mid-nineteenth century, when the sculptor of the Capitol's Columbus Doors, Randolph Rogers, stated, "Perhaps there is but one man (i.e., George Washington) whose name in more intimately connected with the history of this country or who better deserves a lasting monument to his memory than Christopher Columbus." Basing his work on the romantic stories of Irving, Rogers portrayed an heroic underdog, bold and ingenious explorer, a figure perfect for the age--and for inclusion in America's pantheon of heroes in the temple of legitimacy, the Rotunda. "Daniel Boorstin observes that people 'once felt themselves made by their heroes' and cites James Russell Lowell: 'The idol is the measure of the worshipper.' Accordingly, writers and orators of the nineteenth century ascribed to Columbus all the human virtues that were most prized in that time of geographic and industrial expansion, heady optimism, and an unquestioning belief in progress as the dynamic of history."
By 1893, the year (one late) of America's celebration of the 400th anniversary of Columbus' landing (in the West Indies), Columbus had become, in the minds of Americans, the real "founding father," with any problems of controversies (specifically his treatment of the native peoples he encountered) swept aside. "Most people living in America four centuries after the voyages of discovery had created a Columbus they wanted to believe in and were quite satisfied with their invention." Amy Leslie, a correspondent for the Chicago Daily News, covered the World's Columbian Exposition, in name a celebration of Columbus' "discovery" of America. She remarked that she was surprised to see a statue of George Washington there, "who, until Columbus was so vehemently discovered by America, held something of a place in the hearts of his countrymen." The United States, as a country, had fully embraced the ideals that their Columbus represented: he was "the symbol of American success...Clearly, the exposition was more than a commemoration of the past, it was also the exclamation of a future that the self-confident Americans were eager to share and enjoy."
By the Quincentenary of 1992, Columbus had been virtually stripped of all positive symbolic meaning. The pendulum has swung, and now he "is the post-colonial and demythologized Columbus. He has been stripped of the symbolic cloak of optimism and exposed as a human being whose flaws were many and of reverberating consequence." In our multicultural, and often cynical, society, we have created Columbus in our image. As Noble notes, "Each generation looks back on the past and drawing on its own experiences, presumes to find patterns that illuminate both the past and the present."
Christopher Columbus was literally in the right place (Spain) at the right time (the dawning Age of Discovery) to set his place in history. America was the right place at the right time to appropriate, simplify, and mould Columbus to reflect the image of an independent and growing America. Columbus is found throughout American popular culture, national commemorations and memory, and prominently in the Rotunda of the U.S. Capitol. Randolph Roger's massive bronze Columbus Doors express this vision of Columbus, the ultimate visual expression of America's self-identity as embodied in the explorer. He "emerged from the shadow, reincarnated not so much as a man and historical figure as he was a myth and symbol. He came to epitomize the explorer and discoverer, the man of vision and audacity, the hero who overcame opposition and adversity to change history."
Below are links on the history of Christopher Columbus in Colorado...
Columbus Day: a celebration of diversity
http://www.columbusnavigation.com/destruct.shtml
Commission for Social Justice Responds to Criticism of Columbus
Celebration
Columbus Day Parade should take place
http://www.annieshomepage.com/columbusday.html
To view the following articles you need to have Adobe Reader Installed.
1.
"Columbus: Fact vs. Fiction" by the Order Sons of Italy in America
This study
presents a series of documented facts on the life of Columbus, his
explorations and their significance, as well as the history of Columbus
Day in the United States. It also examines the controversial charges
about the explorer that have been levied in recent years, which accuse
him of racism, genocide, and slave trading.
Using seminal sources, including Columbus's own journals, scholarly
biographies and recent research, "Columbus: Fact vs. Fiction" presents
convincing evidence that:
- The Vinland Map, which allegedly proves that the Vikings
arrived in North America in 1000 AD, is probably a forgery.
- Columbus never owned any slaves or brought any to the Western
Hemisphere from Africa.
- Columbus did not consider the natives he encountered to be
racially inferior. In fact, according to his own journals, he
admired the gentle Tainos, whom he described as physically
beautiful, generous, innocent and intelligent.
- The New World was not a disease-free "Garden of Eden" that the early European explorers contaminated. Tests on pre-Columbian mummies, recently discovered far from the first European colonies, reveal the native populations suffered from syphilis, tuberculosis, arthritis and periodontal disease. Few lived past the age of 40.
To download the PDF file (68K) of "Columbus: Fact vs. Fiction", click here.
2. Why We Should Celebrate Columbus Day
Click here to download the PDF file (23K).
3. Christopher Columbus: Biography
Click here to download the PDF file (23K).
4. What Columbus Accomplished
Click here to download the PDF file (24K).
5. Who is Buried in Columbus' Tomb?
The remains of the man who first crossed the Atlantic Ocean more than 500 years ago could be in either the Old World of Europe or the New World of the Americas...or both! Although this mystery will never be solved, the fact that Christopher Columbus' ashes are shared by the two worlds he helped connect seems poetically appropriate.
Click here to download the PDF file (348K).