Moments of Enchantment; Laguna Pueblo Village Nicknames

Moments of Enchantment brought to you by the New Mexico Office of Cultural Affairs. Travelers heading west out of Albuquerque on Interstate 40 probably don't realize that in less than an hour they'll be passing by some big name places, places like New York and Philadelphia, Bunker Hill and Chinatown, more in a moment. The Laguna Pueblo Indians live in more villages than any other Pueblo tribe, but it isn't the number of Laguna villages that's so remarkable. Rather, it's the names these people with their satiric sense of humor gave some of their small communities. Take New York, Philadelphia and Harrisburg, for example. All are suburbs at the larger village, Sayama. Harrisburg, which is located just under Bunker Hill, is quite small. Only a handful of houses, but New York and Philadelphia are teaming metro areas with a couple of dozen houses each. These place names are a legacy to a 19th century experiment in Native American education. In the 1880s, a number of Laguna Pueblo youngsters joined other Indian students

from the Southwest at the Carlisle Institute, a boarding school in Pennsylvania. When the young Laguna men came home from the east, they thought it'd fun to name some of the little Laguna villages after big cities where they had worked in Play Baseball during summers away from the institute. So that explains the East Coast counterparts. But what about Chinatown, a half mile due west of the village of Pawati? Chinatown, New Mexico consists of one house and a couple of buildings on the side of a small anonymous hill. The name, the result of a Laguna resident's strong impression of his trip to California. To learn more about the fascinating history of New Mexico's Pueblo Indians, visit the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center in Albuquerque. Moments of Enchantment brought to you by the new Mexico Office of Cultural Affairs. For Moments of Enchantment, I'm David Griffin.