In honor of the beginning of this year’s National Hispanic Heritage Month (September 15th – October 15th), today we look at the history of the Manito Trail and the interdisciplinary Following the Manito Trail exhibit that tells its story.
As previously covered in our blogs on Laramie’s Latin Club and the Powell Tribune’s 1927 Spanish-language La Pagina Español, Wyoming has both a rich past and rich present of Hispanic and Latine populations. One facet of this is Wyoming’s community of Manitos and Manitas. Drawing from endearing diminutive forms of hermano and hermana, Manito and Manita have come to describe Hispanic New Mexicans who left New Mexico to seek out work in various other states, including Wyoming.
Laying the Roots
As Manito/as spread out and took on jobs in agriculture, the railroad, mines, and sheepherding, to name a few, there developed what poet and University of New Mexico (UNM) academic Levi Romero referred to as a “Manito trail” along Interstate 25, from Albuquerque to Cheyenne. Many of these families have since settled in Wyoming, rebuilding their New Mexican cultures in the Cowboy State.
As a project, Following the Manito Trail began officially in 2015, co-directed by Romero and Dr. Vanessa Fonseca-Chávez, then an Assistant Professor of Latina/o Studies and English at UW. Both shared their own familial Manito/a roots and were spurred on to collect oral histories of Manito/as who came to call Wyoming home, building on interviews previously recorded by Romero’s students in 2007. Another vital member of the project was Manita Dr. Trisha Martínez, then pursuing her doctorate at UNM. The very first oral history she reviewed on the project was miraculously of her own grandmother, Alice Martínez.
Following the Manito Trail’s First Exhibit
The Following the Manito Trail exhibit debuted in 2017 at the American Heritage Center, weaving a colorful tapestry of Manito/a stories across time and space, and across many mediums. The interweaving stories of the Manito/a communities throughout Wyoming were told by archival documents, oral histories, family and project photographs, and a heritage quilt loaned by Riverton Manita Annie Mejorado.
There were additionally three documentaries created for the project. One told the story of the South Park Barrio in Riverton, where Manito/a neighbors, including Mejorado, came together in 1986 to repave the streets of their neighborhood after a lack of response and multiple denials of grants from the city. Another documented the carvings, known as arborglyphs, left behind by Manito sheepherders on the aspen trees of the Sierra Madres in southern Wyoming as early as 1905. The third told the story of a Manito family’s journey to Wyoming through both oral history and song.
The exhibit has since become a traveling exhibit, traveling to locations such as Taos’s Millicent Rogers Museum, and recently, Cheyenne’s CHISPA Festival. With every installation, the project only grows.
Manito Futures: In Conversation with Dr. Trisha Martínez
In pulling this blog together, I had the wonderful opportunity to speak to Dr. Martínez (who is now an Assistant Professor of American Cultural Studies here at UW) about both the meaning and the future of Following the Manito Trail. At the heart of the ongoing project is connection and the acknowledgement of complex identities, as well as empowering Manito/as of Wyoming to be seen and valued as integral members of the state’s community.
Another important facet is the theme of place and the power of memory as it weaves into querencia, or one’s sense of a cherished place, where one draws their strength and sense of belonging. At the time of writing, Martínez’s grandmother, Alice, has sadly passed. With her voice being what strongly drew her into Following the Manito Trail in its beginnings, Martínez commented upon how the sense you have of a place can change greatly when those you associate with it are gone. For this reason, it becomes all the more important to document the stories of elders, to preserve and honor those memories and querencias.
Following the Manito Trail is set to return to the American Heritage Center in 2027, from September through February. If you have family stories woven into the Manito trail, please feel free to reach out to Dr. Martínez for more information at tmarti40@uwyo.edu.
For further reading on the Manito trails that extend across the United States, consider visiting the Manitos Community Memory Project’s Digital Resolana. Some of the oral histories from the Following the Manito Trail project can also be listened to online here.
Post contributed by AHC Audiovisual Archivist Aide Marty Murray.