We Are Descendants of People, But Also of Ideas
A tribute to Bernardo P. Gallegos II
In the early 1990s, before postcolonial studies had migrated from the humanities into mainstream educational discourse, I sat in a classroom at California State University, Los Angeles, and watched a professor teach colonial history from inside that history. Bernardo Gallegos was a Genízaro descendant, an indigenous mixed-blood whose own ancestry ran through the slave records of colonial New Mexico. He did not need theory to explain what dispossession meant. He had inherited it.
Bernardo identified as a Coyote, a Genízaro: a mixed-blood of Pueblo (Zuñi and Isleta), African, and Spanish descent, his family rooted in communities just south of Albuquerque, bordering Isleta Pueblo. His scholarship on Genízaros, indigenous slaves and their descendants, granted state recognition by the New Mexico Legislature only in 2007, was not an academic exercise. The scholarship and the biography were the same project. He had learned as much from his own mentor, Professor Nelia Olivencia, who told him as a young man that we are descendants not only of people but of ideas. Gallegos spent his career demonstrating that the two cannot be separated. His final book, Postcolonial Indigenous Performances: Coyote Musings on Genízaros, Hybridity, Education, and Slavery, wove together indigenous identity, hybridity, religious syncretism, and personal narrative into a work of sustained intellectual force.
His 1988 dissertation, Literacy, Schooling, and Society in Colonial New Mexico: 1692–1821, had established the terms of that project decades earlier. In it, Gallegos demonstrated how the printed word functioned as an instrument of conquest, deployed by Spanish colonial authorities to implant a foreign worldview into the consciousness of a newly subjugated people, systematically rearranging their perceptions of themselves and their environment. The missions, he argued, were not sites of education in any neutral sense; they were sites where colonization established a foothold through literacy. That the Genízaros appear explicitly in his analysis, named alongside the vecinos as targets of Hispanicization through print. He was writing about his own ancestors.
Bernardo was a teacher and a storyteller who could walk into a lecture hall with an anecdote from his own community and illuminate how dispossession, power, and resistance were bound together in ways no textbook had managed to convey. He could not always hold back his emotions when teaching that history. That grief bore witness to what colonialism had taken from his community across generations — the very community whose slave records had supplied the archive for his scholarship.
He saw potential in students that they could not yet see in themselves. Students remembered him as someone who went out of his way to mentor them, with several going on to earn doctorates and secure faculty positions in fields he had helped open. It was Bernardo who advised me to apply to the doctoral program at UCLA and to seek out Peter McLaren. One of the assigned readings in his Social Foundations course was McLaren’s Life in Schools, a book that arrived at the right moment in my development as a scholar. What Bernardo understood, and what that pairing of assigned text and personal counsel demonstrated, was that intellectual formation and mentorship are inseparable.
Bernardo P. Gallegos II passed away on October 6, 2019. He was 67. What he left behind is a body of scholarship that refuses to let the dispossession of indigenous communities in New Mexico pass as heritage — work that named the missions as instruments of colonial control, that recovered the Genízaros from the margins of the historical record, and that insisted biography and scholarship could occupy the same page without apology.
His students have carried his work forward. I am one of them. In the last thirty years, I have been trying to see in my own students what he saw in me.