Documenting Juan de Oñate’s Diminishing Influence over the Southwest: The Last Conquistador on El Paso’s Trialectics of Spatiality

When sculptor John Houser obtains funding from the El Paso City Council in the late eighties to complete an equestrian statue of the controversial conqueror Juan de Oñate, a Native American deluge of anger and hurt pours over the city of El Paso, Texas. Meant to celebrate the Spanish involvement in the founding of the Texan city of El Paso and the New Mexican cities of Santa Fe and Las Cruces, the statue comes under fire when the Acoma Pueblo Native Americans inform the City Council of the cruel treatment their community suffered at the hands of the last conquistador to have ruled over present-day US territories. The documentary The Last Conquistador (Valadez and Ibarra 2008) follows the pro-Oñate activists of the New Mexican Hispanic Culture Preservation League (NMHCPL), the Acoma, John Houser, and the City Council over the course of about 10 years, capturing the feud from different angles. Basing ourselves on Foucault’s notion of heterotopia (2008 [1967]), Soja’s spatial trialectics (1996, 2000), and Bakhtin’s heteroglossia (Bakhtin 1983; Tjupa 2013), we argue that The Last Conquistador depicts the decaying city of El Paso as a heteroglossic and heterotopic Thirdspace: a paradoxical in-between where several sociocultural paradigms coexist and overlap thanks to the continual collision of distinct, and often completely opposite, voices and points-of-view. The article concludes with a metadiscursive reflection on The Last Conquistador and its status of independent documentary. Considering The Last Conquistador was a co-presentation between Latino Public Broadcasting, Vision Maker Media (formerly Native American Public Telecommunications), and the North Texan public television station KERA, we suggest the documentary’s chronicling of El Paso’s misguided use of public funds can be read as a metaphor for the insecurities plaguing the field of public service broadcasting at large.

Publication year:2019

Accessibility:Open