connecting with history

As you know, I like history. I like it so much I'm making it a career and working toward a second graduate degree in it. But just because I like it doesn't mean I always feel especially "connected" to it. Maybe that's part of its appeal--it's like a different world. Like fiction, only more awesome (and sometimes more tragic or unbelievable) because it's not fiction.

Often in my history classes someone speaks up in class with a personal story that is (or at least they think it is) connected to whatever we're reading that week. For example, when reading a book on suburbanization and consumer culture one guy shared that he grew up in the city the book centered on during the 1960s, and remembered learning to drive in the giant suburban mall's parking lot. When reading about mining in the West, a girl from Montana said her family got there back in the day specifically because they went to mine copper.

I've read a couple of books about New Mexico this past year, and they are always exciting because I'm from New Mexico. But honestly, I don't feel very connected to striking Mexican-American miners in southern New Mexico in the 1950s, or to the Pueblo Indians and their Spanish conquerors in the seventeenth century. (Unless you count the that fact that I attended De Vargas Junior High, and our mascots were the Conquistadors.)

But this last week I felt a real connection. We read a book about the manipulation and control of rivers in the American West, and it dawned on me that irrigation and water control had a very large role to play in my family going to and staying in New Mexico. My great grandfather moved his family to Albuquerque during the Depression (or maybe just before?) to work as a dragline operator digging irrigation ditches. And his son, my granddad, was a civil engineer who worked in New Mexico for the Bureau of Reclamation, the Department of Agriculture, and finally in the State Engineer's Office managing water resources. Irrigating the arid West has played a pretty fundamental role in the development of the region (and the country), for better or worse, and my family took part. I'm connected.