1. Roseann S. Willink and Paul G. Zolbrod, Weaving A World: Textiles and the Navajo Way of Seeing (Santa Fe: Museum of New Mexico Press, 1996), p. 5. During the eighteenth century, the term “coyote” referred to a person of both Spanish and New Mexican Indian parentage, often of darker skin color. Today “coyote” identifies people who are part Hispanic and part Anglo. For a discussion of the ethnic-racial classes of New Mexico, see William DeBuys, Enchantment and Exploitation: The Life and Hard Times of a New Mexico Mountain Range (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1985), p. 69; and Chris Wilson, The Myth of Santa Fe: Creating a Modern Regional Tradition (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1997), pp. 41–43. See Michael J. Ettema, “History, Nostalgia, and American Furniture,” Winterthur Portfolio 17 (1982): 135–36; and Edward S. Cooke, “Craftsmen,” in Decorative Arts and Household Furnishings in America 1650–1920: An Annotated Bibliography, edited by Kenneth L. Ames and Gerald W. R. Ward (Winterthur, Del.: Winterthur Museum, 1989), p. 334 for a summary of the limits of American decorative arts studies.

2. As relics of a frontier culture, cajas typically have more period or use-related repairs and modifications than New England chests, thus complicating traditional assessments of condition relative to use. The carving on cajas also differs from New England work in both design and placement. New England chests rarely have carved side panels (see fig. 3), although they are common in Hispanic traditions (see fig. 17).

3. Lonn Taylor and Dessa Bokides, New Mexican Furniture, 1600–1940 (Santa Fe: Museum of New Mexico Press, 1987), p. 23. For a general discussion and visual survey of the types of New Mexican chests, see ibid, pp. 23–24, 28–34, 40–46. My observations and analysis are principally drawn from direct experience with and extensive research on the collection of Mr. and Mrs. Al Luckett, Jr., of Santa Fe, New Mexico. See Sotheby’s, American Furniture and Decorative Arts from Spain’s Northern Colonial Frontier 1700–1900, The Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Al Luckett, Jr., (New York: Sotheby’s, January 15, 1997).

4. Wilson, Myth of Santa Fe, pp. 26–32, provides an overview of the interaction between Indians and Hispanics. DeBuys, Enchantment and Exploitation, p. 70. There was a complicated casta hierarchy in New Mexico in which social status was equated with ethnic ancestry and skin color. Interracial marriages could involve any combination of continental Spanish, Hispanic Mexican, Mexican Indian, New Mexican Indian, and African peoples.

5. “Memoria of the Castaño de Sosa Expedition,” as cited in John L. Kessell, Kiva, Cross, and Crown: The Pecos Indians and New Mexico 1540–1840 (Washington, D. C.: National Park Service, U.S. Department of the Interior, 1979), p. 55.

6. Wilson, Myth of Santa Fe, p. 26. Joseph Toulouse, The Mission of San Gregorio de Abó: A Report on the Excavation and Repair of a Seventeenth-Century New Mexico Mission, Monographs of the School of American Research 13 (Santa Fe: School of American Research, 1949), p. 19.

7. DeBuys, Enchantment and Exploitation, p. 9. The ideological and cultural divergence between the northern and southern colonies is framed in terms of their respective relationships to the Old World in Jonathan Prown, “‘A Preponderance of Pineapples’: The Problem of Southern Furniture,” in American Furniture, edited by Luke Beckerdite (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England for the Chipstone Foundation, 1996), p. 7.

8. Ramón A. Gutiérrez, When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality, and Power in New Mexico, 1500–1846 (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1991), pp. 146, 154, 162–66. A table enumerating nomadic Indian baptisms during the eighteenth century is on p. 154.

9. Wilson, Myth of Santa Fe, p. 24. For a discussion of the particulars of the carpentry ordinances, see Taylor and Bokides, New Mexican Furniture, pp. 7–8. Willink and Zolbrod, Weaving A World, pp. 18, 24. Wilson, Myth of Santa Fe, p. 50. Chris L. Miller and George R. Hamell, “A New Perspective on Indian-White Contact: Cultural Symbols and Colonial Trade,” Journal of American History 73, no. 2 (September 1986): 321; the authors discuss how societies attempt to incorporate novel historical circumstances into their cognitive world.

10. George Kubler, “Time’s Perfection and Colonial Art,” in Spanish, French, and English Traditions in The Colonial Silver of North America, Winterthur Conference Report 1968 (Winterthur, Del.: Winterthur Museum, 1969), p. 11. Raw materials like pine, however, were not necessarily abundant everywhere in New Mexico.

11. Marc Simmons, “Colonial New Mexico and Mexico: The Historical Relationship,” in Colonial Frontiers, Art and Life in Spanish New Mexico: The Fred Harvey Collection, edited by Christine Mather (Santa Fe: Ancient City Press, 1983), pp. 71–73.

12. Kubler, “Time’s Perfection,” pp. 7–8.

13. In the context of New Mexico, the term hacienda refers to a landed estate with a central house in which rooms are built around a courtyard or series of courtyards. Fray Francisco Atanasio Dominquez, The Missions of New Mexico, 1776, translated and edited by Eleanor B. Adams and Fray Angelico Chavez (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1956), p. 214. Kessell, Kiva, Cross, and Crown, p. 133.

14. See Taylor and Bokides, New Mexican Furniture, pp. 7, 23, for a more thorough account of the technical aspects of the ordinances regulating proportions, construction methods, and appropriate surface designs.

15. The use of geometric units in the layout of New England chests is discussed in Robert Blair St. George, “Style and Structure in the Joinery of Dedham and Medfield, Massachusetts, 1635–1685,” Winterthur Portfolio 13 (1979): 20–21. Taylor and Bokides, New Mexican Furniture, p. 12.

16. Taylor and Bokides, New Mexican Furniture, p. 23. The caja is the furniture form most frequently cited in eighteenth-century New Mexican probate inventories held at the Spanish Archives of New Mexico, New Mexico State Record Center and Archives, Santa Fe, New Mexico. More cajas survive than any other colonial New Mexican furniture form. Kubler, “Time’s Perfection,” p. 11.

17. Marc Simmons and Frank Turley, Southwestern Colonial Ironwork: The Spanish Blacksmithing Tradition from Texas to California (Santa Fe: Museum of New Mexico Press, 1980), pp. 151, 153.

18. Probate Inventory of Señor Armijo, 1748, Twitchell 240, Spanish Archives of New Mexico.

19. See Angel San Vicente, Cristina Monterde, Maria Pilar Pueyo, Rosa Gutierrez, and Asuncion Blasco, eds., Origen y Armas de Varios Nobles de España (Zaragoza, Spain: Biblioteca de la Universidad de Zaragoza, 1983), especially p. 36 for designs of Spanish coats-of-arms that include lions similar to those on the New Mexican board chests. Robert St. George, “Style and Structure,” p. 25.

20. For more information on Pueblo cosmology, see DeBuys, Enchantment and Exploitation, p.
21 and Peter Nabokov and Robert Easton, Native American Architecture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 348–401. Nabokov and Easton, Native American Architecture, p. 368.

21. Sotheby’s, Luckett Collection, lot 156. Willink and Zolbrod, Weaving A World, p. 52.

22. Nabokov and Easton, Native American Architecture, p. 366.

23. Frantz Fanon, “On National Culture,” in Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader, edited by Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), pp. 41, 46.

24. Taylor and Bokides, New Mexican Furniture, pp. 24, 28.

25. This theory is introduced in Timothy H. Breen, “An Empire of Goods: The Anglicization of Colonial America, 1690–1776,” The Journal of British Studies 25, no. 4 (October 1986): 499.

26. My understanding of creolization derives from Edward Brathwaite, The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica 1770–1820 (Oxford, Eng.: Clarendon Press, 1971), xii–xv.