It's no secret that in Washington, D.C., corruption is everywhere, and I should know my mom's the speaker of the House, my friends are all in the same boat, daughters of the D.C. elite. When you're this close to power, there's nowhere to hide.

But in here, no one knows me as James Parker. They only know me as storm alloy. You see, I'm a bit of a hacker. Join me and my friends. Four daughters in D.C., a new 12 part scripted podcast, political thriller from the team that brought you Lethal It Einhorn's Epic Productions and I Heart Radio. Listen to Dogs for Free and I heart radio, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey there, it's Mango who a part time genius, co-founder of Mental Floss, and like many of you, I'm one of the 21 million people that have picked up gardening in the past six months.

That's why I'm hosting the brand new podcast, Humans Growing Stopped, Brought to You by Heart Media and your friends at Miracle-Gro join me on a green adventure as we talk with experts, friends and surprise guests.

And here, gardening means to them listening to humans, growing stuff on the radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcast. Welcome to stuff you missed in History Class, A production of I Heart Radio. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy Wilson. And I'm Holly Fry. This past August, as I'm sure our listeners are aware of, the United States marks the 100th anniversary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment to the Constitution. That happened on August 18th of 1920.

And we really just didn't do anything to commemorate it on the show in any way because we have talked about the 19th Amendment specifically in suffrage more generally a lot in the past. Plus, the 19th Amendment was important, but in practice it mainly affected white and relatively affluent women. So it just it did not feel as much like it was a story we needed to tell yet again. And people also seemed way more conscious of this on social media this time around in terms of who the 19th Amendment actually applied to.

In practice, I saw way more people pointing out other later dates that related to voting rights for non-white women. And in some cases, this was about citizenship. Like indigenous people were not considered U.S. citizens until twenty four. And a lot of Asians couldn't become citizens until 1952. And then there were other dates that were more related to outlawing discrimination, especially through the Voting Rights Act of 1965. That's mostly discussed in the context of black Americans.

But it was more broadly framed to outlaw practices that were meant to deny voting rights to anyone on account of race or color. So all of those milestones that people had been tweeting when they were talking about the 19th Amendment, those were all familiar to me.

But another one that caught my eye that wasn't was 1975. And that's the year that the Voting Rights Act was amended to include, in the words of the amendment, language minorities. And that was defined in this amendment as American Indians, Asian-Americans, Alaska Natives and people of Spanish heritage. And if one of those populations in a particular area gets to a certain threshold, then the voting material that's available in English needs to be available in that language as well.

So the person we're talking about today to finally get to that predates that amendment to the Voting Rights Act. But her work was directly tied to this idea. It is Nina Otero Warren whose work in the suffrage movement and the U.S. was largely focused on people who spoke Spanish.

So Nina Otero Warren was descended from two of the most prominent Hispanic families in northern New Mexico. So for that background, by about the year 100, this part of North America was home to ancestral Pueblo Inns, whose descendants include the Pueblo people still living there today by about the 13th century. It was also home to Navajo and Apache peoples when Spain started colonizing the area in the 16th century. Otero Warren's ancestors on her mother's side, the Lunas, were part of multiple expeditions.

This started with Don Treston DeLuna Arellano de Castillo, who sailed with Hernan Cortez in 30. The Lunas were also part of forces that were led by Conquistadores. One day on Yati and Francisco Coronado.

Diego de Luna and his family were driven out of the region during the Pueblo revolt of sixteen eighty, which we covered on the show back in 2014.

They came back to the area with Diego de Vargas when he reconquered it in the 90s and then Otara Warren's father's family, the Oteros. They arrived in New Spain from Europe in 1786. On September 16th 1810, Mexico declared its independence from Spain, starting the Mexican War of Independence, which lasted for just over a year. The Mexican-American War followed just over 35 years later, ending in 1848 with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Under this treaty, Mexico ceded a huge amount of land to the United States, including most of what became the southwestern US.

This included the territory of New Mexico, which was established in 1850.

This newly formed territory of New Mexico was home to indigenous people, some of whom had been enslaved under the Spanish Empire and then continued to be held in bondage. In the decades and centuries that followed, these people and their descendants were known as enemies arose. This is a term that was initially used as a slur but has been reclaimed by their descendants living today. There were also people of both indigenous and European ancestry who were known as mestizos, as well as enslaved and free Africans and their descendants.

Slavery was legal in New Mexico under the compromise of 1850, and it continued to be so until the U.S. outlawed slavery and all of its territories.

In 1862, New Mexico's elites, including Nina Otero, Warren's family, generally described themselves as hispanos, focusing on their ancestral ties to Spain. Their family's presence in the Americas dating back to before Mexican independence rather than any connection they might have to indigenous or African ancestry or to Mexico, people describing themselves as hispanos today might define that in a different way.

And much more broadly, though, in terms of things like the U.S. Census, people of European ancestry who had been born in New Spain or in Mexico were considered to be white and Hispanic. Emphasis on their Spanish heritage was also reinforcing this idea that they were white. But in practice, there were nuances within New Mexico's Spanish speaking community who as a group were also seen as separate from English speakers or Anglos for the first few decades of the territory of New Mexico's existence, the vast majority of the population spoke Spanish or an indigenous language.

At first, newly arrived Anglos generally tried to learn Spanish and assimilate with the local Spanish speaking culture. But that started to shift when railroad lines into the area were finished in 1881, bringing a much larger number of English speakers to the area much more quickly.

That's also the same year that Nina Otero Warren was born. She was born Maria Adelina Isabel, Amelia Otero. On October twenty third of 1881, her parents were Luisa Luna and Manuel Basilio Otero, and she was born on the family hacienda, which was known as La Constancia. That was about 20 miles south of Albuquerque. And her childhood and her youth, she went by the name Adelina.

The Lunas and the Oteros were very prominent, affluent families. Both of Nina's parents had been educated outside of New Mexico and Luisa at a private Catholic boarding school in New York and Manuel at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. and at Heidelberg University in Germany. Much of the family's wealth came from sheep ranching, and they also owned vineyards and a lot of land. Yeah, in addition to these ancestral ties, going back to the initial colonization of of New Spain, like they had a lot of money as a family.

Nina was the Oteros second child and their oldest daughter. And tragedy struck the family before her second birthday. Two brothers from Massachusetts, James and Joel Whitney, had challenged the Oteros claim to some land. Each side was claiming that the other were squatters and the case was making its way through the courts. The witness were staying at a cabin on this contested property after they had evicted one of the Oteros cattle drivers. From it, Manuel Atara went to the cabin with some other man to try to talk things through.

It seemed like things were being settled amicably. But for reasons that are not entirely clear, James Whitney shot Otero, sparking a shootout that killed another man instantly and injured two others, including James Whitney. Manuel Otero survived long enough to give a statement to the Justice of the Peace, but he died shortly thereafter. Whitney was later tried for murder and acquitted. There were allegations that he had bribed the judge to give the jury instructions that were skewed in his favor.

It really wasn't the first or only land dispute for the immediate or extended Otero family. Spain had been issuing land grants for centuries before Mexico became independent, and there were questions about which of those land grants were valid. And then, of course, there were also cases in which the government had granted colonists land that had not actually been ceded by the indigenous peoples who were living there, and also cases in which the same land had been granted to two different people by two different governing bodies.

Complicating all of this, the U.S. government also didn't really recognize grazing land as occupied. When disputes went to court, the courts generally recognized only land that had cultivated crops or a home or another structure on it as actually in use. Under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the United States had agreed to recognize indigenous land holdings and allow indigenous peoples to retain their language, culture and customs. But in general, courts found in favor of Anglos more often than Hispanics or indigenous people in these disputes.

When Manuel Otero was killed in 1883, Nina's mother was nineteen and she was pregnant with her third child. The following summer, she went to Philadelphia to look for an English speaking governess so that her children could grow up fluent in both English and Spanish and be more able to move in both Hispanic and Anglo circles. She hired twenty four year old Mary Elizabeth Doyle, who was Irish. The family knew her as Teta, and she worked and lived with them until her death in 1947.

In 1886, Nina's mother remarried to Alfred Morris Bajour, known as A.M. He was born in Liverpool to parents who had come from Italy but were of both French and Jewish ancestry. Re The Lunas had some Jewish ancestry as well, although it's not as clear if it was known to the family at the time they likely converted to Christianity during the Spanish Inquisition, Eloísa and AM had another 12 children together, nine of whom survived infancy. And as the oldest daughter of this family, Mina was expected to take a lot of responsibility with her younger siblings.

And we'll get to that after a sponsor break. Welcome to Teach Me Something New, a podcast from my heart radio in Britain. Carl, I'm your host Brit Moron. I'm an entrepreneur, a CEO and a mom. And I'm curious about a lot of things. But how do you learn about everything? The answer, make the world's best experts teach you.

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Hi, this is Melanne Verveer and this is Kim Mazzarelli and we're co-hosts of Senecas Conversations on Power and Purpose, brought to you by the Seneca Women Podcast Network and I Heart Radio.

We're launching a brand new season of this podcast, which brings you fascinating conversations with leaders like two time gold medalist, author and activist Abby Wambach and actor, producer and entrepreneur Justin Baldoni, among many others. Listen to Senecas conversations on power and purpose on the radio app Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Nina Otero's mother and stepfather wanted their children to be educated, so Nina studied with private tutors before being enrolled in St Vincent's Academy in Albuquerque when she was 11.

She went to Maryville College of the Sacred Heart, which is now Maryville University in St. Louis, Missouri. At the time, this was essentially a Catholic finishing school for affluent young ladies, and Nina returned home from there when she was 13. Nina lived under a clear set of social expectations. She had a duty to help keep the family home and raise her younger siblings. And one day she would marry and have children in a household of her own.

But living on a hacienda also afforded her some freedom. She grew into an independently minded young woman taking part in ranch life and helping to inspect the property on horseback. She also got some of her male relatives to teach her how to shoot when she was 16. President William McKinley appointed Miguel Antonio Otero, the second as the territorial governor of New Mexico. Miguel Otero was one of the Oteros cousins, and he appointed Nina's stepfather to be a judicial clerk.

So the family relocated to the capital of Santa Fe. Santa Fe was also home to a growing society of mostly Anglo artists, writers and craftspeople within this community. Nina was soon regarded as witty, intelligent, respectable and accomplished. She was also increasingly interested in social causes, something that had been part of her school instruction at Maryville College of the Sacred Heart. She was also following her mother's example. In this, Eloísa was especially active in causes related to education during these years.

As Nina was growing up, the attitudes of the New Mexican Hispanic elite were shifting, connected to an ongoing effort to pursue statehood. Outsiders, especially viewed New Mexico, is pretty backward and there was a lot of stigma around speaking Spanish. So especially in cities, more people started building Victorian style homes using brick rather than adobe and speaking English rather than Spanish. But at the same time, there were more and more Anglo newcomers moving into the area, thanks in part to aggressive advertising by railroad lines.

So the Spanish language and Spanish and Mexican culture were becoming less prevalent and less respected, especially in more urban areas. Intermarriages between Hispanic and Anglo people were common and widely accepted during all of this, applying not just to Nina's mother but also to Nina herself. When she was 26, she met Lieutenant Rosten de Warren of the 5th U.S. Cavalry. They got married on June 25th, 1988, and she went back with him to Fort Wingate, where he was stationed.

A news article covering her wedding described her as, quote, very popular, very bright, charming, finely educated and attractive, endowed with many graces of the heart, mind and body, the descendent of one of the oldest and best families in New Mexico.

Well, marriage was not a happy one, though. And within two years, they had divorced and Nina had returned to Santa Fe. She didn't leave any kind of personal documents about her feelings and all of this. But it does seem like she just didn't enjoy the restrictions of being an officer's wife. She flouted some of the conventions that she was supposed to help uphold, like dancing with a private when she was only supposed to be socializing with officers and their wives.

Also, Rosten apparently had a common law wife in the Philippines from when he had served there during the Spanish American war. And to Nina, this was bigamy.

However, divorce was flatly unacceptable for both a social and a religious perspective. So even though her ex-husband lived until 1942, Nina told people she was a widow. She used her hyphenated surname for the rest of her life, adding Warren to her surname disguised her divorce, and it gave her an added degree of respectability among Anglos. But it could also raise suspicion among Hispanics. Occasionally, she dropped the use of Warren to stress her Hispanic heritage, including when she published books and articles about Spanish culture in New Mexico that her her name she used socially was pretty much a warren for the rest of her life.

But sometimes we'll see bylines that have the Warren part omitted.

In 1910, the Otero Brasier family bought and expanded a home in Santa Fe to accommodate their growing family. This was on unseeded land belonging to the Tiwa people, and it still stands today as home to the Georgia O'Keeffe museums, library and archives. That same year, Nina convinced her mother to set up trusts for her and her unmarried sisters, including the youngest, Isabel, who had an intellectual disability. Nina had realized that territorial law really limited when. Property rights, especially after they got married and she didn't want any of them to have to rely on the goodwill of men to survive, in 1912, New Mexico became a state.

And that year, Otero Warren moved to New York City to keep house for her brother, Luna Linebarger, while he studied at Columbia University while living in New York, she volunteered at a settlement house run by and Morgan, the daughter of J.P. Morgan.

But then, in 1914, Otero Warren's mother, died at the age of 50 as the oldest daughter. It was Nina's duty to take up the role of family matriarch, so she went back home to New Mexico. One of her sisters, Anita, had been in the final steps of joining a convent when their mother died. Anita put her religious vocation aside and she went back home as well, beyond their grief over the loss of their mother.

This seems to have been difficult for everybody involved. Nina inherited the Luna family lands, but she was not particularly interested in the day to day running of the household or caring for her siblings. The youngest was Joe, age eight, and most of the daughters were still living at home. All of this work mostly fell to Anita, who was really doing this out of a sense of obligation, and she later described it as ruining her life.

Nina was also strict and had very strong opinions about her siblings, romantic partners and whether they were good enough to marry. This was something that led to tensions and rifts within the family. Nina also made decisions about things like whether to sell property and how to handle finances, sometimes without really consulting anybody else. And that led to some frustrations and animosity when people disagreed with what she had done as the family was still adjusting to all of this. Nina Otero, Warren became involved in the suffrage movement, something that really did not have a huge presence in New Mexico at the time when New Mexico became a state.

It was the only one in the western U.S. that didn't give women the right to vote. And the state constitution made it really hard to change that, requiring a vote to pass by three quarters of both houses and two thirds of every county suffrage bills that were introduced in the legislature repeatedly failed. Attempts to combine a movement for suffrage with one for prohibition also failed. Casual drinking was an accepted part of everyday life, particularly in affluent Catholic families. For her part, Otara Warren took what she called a drinking basket with her any time she had to take a long trip by train.

I'm going to adopt this practice. Also, women could be appointed to office in New Mexico, but could only hold elected offices that were related to things like education. I tried to find a little more detail about exactly what was in this drinking basket, and I failed. But I think it is like a picnic basket, but with spirits involved, which might also be in your picnic basket, right? Yeah, I, I'm, I don't know if you've ever seen those little tin kind of.

Oh yeah. Craft kits so you can take them on your plane and do your mixed drink with them. I just envision a bigger version of that.

So in general there really was a lot of resistance to the idea of votes for women in New Mexico. There was just a lot going on in terms of culture and religion. This was especially true among Spanish speakers. So in the late 19 teens, Alice Paul sent Ella St. Clair Thompson, who spoke some Spanish to New Mexico to try to organize. And after working with several Hispanic women directly, including O0, Warren Thompson asked her to lead up the New Mexico chapter of the Congressional Union, which later became the National Woman's Party.

Otero Warren did extensive work, especially among Spanish speakers, to rally support for women's suffrage, including making sure suffrage materials were printed in both English and Spanish. Although there were indigenous people involved in the suffrage movement, including people advocating for both suffrage and dual citizenship with the U.S. and indigenous nations, Otero Warren's approach was really about outreach to the Spanish speaking community.

Otero Warren's political and community work also went beyond the suffrage movement, and we will get to that after a sponsor break. Hi, I'm Bethany Van Delft, host of a new podcast, The 10 News, 10 Minutes of News and Fun for the new generation of Curious Thinkers.

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In 1917, Nina Otero Warren was appointed superintendent of public schools in Santa Fe County, New Mexico. The position became elective in 1918 and at that point she was elected and then re-elected, defeating male candidates to do so. She was 37. This made her the youngest school superintendent in the state at the time. And in that role, she pushed for raising teacher pay, restoring and rebuilding schools that were in disrepair and increasing the length of the school year to nine months.

It really varied from place to place, and there were some places where the school year was as short as three months, largely because children are needed to work on family farms in more rural areas. She also wanted the government to put more money into education, including paying off schools debts. She also advocated teaching to use her framing traditional Spanish culture, arts and crafts, particularly in rural, predominantly Spanish speaking areas. The influx of Anglo newcomers, industrialization and commercialization had eroded the quality of life in many rural areas, and people that had been living in self-sustaining communities were instead having to find work as migrant farm workers or service workers.

Otero Warren thought that professional instruction in traditional crafts could give these students a vocation for later in life, while also preserving Spanish culture and arts. This really did not go so far at the time as advocating that students be taught in Spanish. Though as New Mexico had been pursuing statehood, the federal government had passed a law that required New Mexico's public schools to be taught only in English. Arizona's statehood was also connected to all this, but it's outside the scope of what we're talking about today in response to that federal law.

New Mexico's state constitution included several protections for Spanish speakers, including a provision for training teachers in Spanish so that they could teach Spanish speaking students. So as public school superintendent Otero, Warren was trying to uphold the federal government's policy of English only education, while also trying to protect the school system's Spanish speaking students, discouraging them from speaking Spanish while also discouraging schools from punishing them for doing so. In her words, quote, It is to our best interests that we become educated according to the standards of the nation.

It has for us its distinct advantages, its definite protection. Yes, she really, in a lot of cases in her life and work, was sort of trying to to walk a very fine line between the Anglo and the Hispanic communities like she evolved in, some of which we're going to talk about later. But this was a case where it really seems like she was trying to do her best to serve all of the interests that were placed on her.

In addition to her work in the suffrage movement and as school superintendent after the U.S. entered World War One, Otero Warren was appointed as her district chair of the Women's Auxiliary of the State Council of Defense, which later became the woman's committee of the National Council of Defense. Then in 1917, she was appointed chair of the State Board of Public Health. In 1919, Congress passed the 19th Amendment to the Constitution, and Otara Warren shifted the focus of her suffrage work from changing the law in New Mexico to getting the state to ratify the amendment, something that would only be possible with support from the Spanish speaking community.

She also stressed the importance of Spanish speakers exercising their right to vote so they could get people into office who would represent them and protect their interests. Even so, the 19th Amendment faced a lot of opposition in New Mexico and the first attempts to ratify it failed. It was finally ratified by the state on February 21st, 1920, making it the thirty second out of 36 states that were necessary for full ratification.

That same year, Otero Warren met Mamie Metters, who had been born in Arkansas and had come to New Mexico seeking treatment for tuberculosis. And a lot of ways these two women were opposites. Nina was far more outgoing. She loved going to parties and she had really extensive social and political connections, maybe with a lot more reserved and maybe a little socially awkward. But the two of them became inseparable and they were nicknamed Last Dose or the two by the people who knew them.

In 1921, New Mexico senator home Burzum introduced a bill into Congress that would have allowed non-indigenous people to claim Pueblo land if they could prove they had been living on it for at least ten years. That would have been devastating for Pueblo communities. This bill was ultimately defeated in 1926 following intense advocacy by indigenous people, including 19 of the Pueblos uniting to send a delegation to Washington, D.C.. Otara Warren had advocated for at least some kind of compromise with this bill.

In her mind, the Burzum bill had the potential to protect Hispanics from losing land that they had been living and working on to Anglos. Also, in 1921, New Mexico passed an amendment that allowed women to hold elected office beyond positions that were related to things like education. And with that, Otero Warren decided it was time to move up and she ran as a Republican for the U.S. House of Representatives. Otara Warren faced a lot of criticism and derision during this campaign, including repeated suggestions that her running for office was some kind of cute novelty because of her gender.

Her platform included a focus on education, labor rights, tariffs to protect sheep and cattle ranchers, Hispanic land rights and the enforcement of prohibition, which at this point, in spite of that drinking basket that we previously talked about, that was the law of the land and she was sort of reluctantly supporting it. In the primary, she defeated the incumbent, Nestor Montoya, by a ratio of almost four to one.

The 1922 general election was another story, though late in her campaign, her cousin, Miguel Otero, the one who had previously been territorial governor, publicly revealed that she was really divorced and not widowed. As part of her campaign, Otero Warren had emphasized her family's political history and its involvement in the colonization of New Mexico. Going back to Cortez and her cousin apparently felt slighted that she had not included him in the roster. And Sarah Waron lost to her opponent, John R.

Morrow, by more than 9000 votes, or about nine percent. And it's not entirely clear how much of this revelation of her divorce influenced the vote. It was definitely a topic of discussion. But Democrats also swept the entire state in this election year. Doesn't seem like she probably had a huge chance anyway. But, yeah, it could not have helped, that's for sure.

In 1923, Otero Warren was appointed to be Santa Fe County's inspector of Indian schools, becoming the first woman to be appointed to the position. She inspected the schools in the area and found the conditions to be appalling. She made a series of recommendations about hygiene and safety, everything from having a secure place to put used towels in the washrooms so they would not be reused among students to burning all of the mattresses in the boy's dormitory at Santa Fe Indian School because they were in such horrible condition and then replacing them with army cots, etc.

.

Warren was also really critical of the boarding school system itself. That system had been established to force indigenous children to assimilate with white culture and to separate them from their own cultures. We have covered that in our previous two parter on Fort Shore Indian School and specifically their girls basketball team. Attari Warren wrote of this boarding school system, quote, The Indian child trained in modern schools has little in common with his parents. When he finishes, he must be taught to appreciate the history and traditions of his own race and thus inspire to continue the native arts of his own people, as well as acquire a new type of learning.

When he finishes school, he should feel closer to his own people and desire to help them. Leaders and teachers should be developed from their own race.

There were some similarities between Otara Warren's approach to the boarding schools and her approach to Spanish speaking communities as school superintendent. She agreed with the prevailing view that both indigenous and Hispanic children needed to learn English and to at least some degree, to assimilate with the Anglo world. But she also thought that their languages, cultures and traditions should be taught and preserved.

At the same time, though, her work as inspector could be pretty paternalistic. For example, like a lot of other people, she put a big focus on the idea of needing to teach hygiene to indigenous women. And in all of this, she also really romanticized Spain's colonization of the Southwest and the Spanish Empire's treatment of indigenous peoples in the area. Like she really seems to have understood that Hispanic people living when she was were basically being colonized by Anglos who were coming into the area.

But she never seems to have quite made the connection that her ancestors did the same thing to the indigenous people who had already been living in the area.

All of that said, though, her criticisms of the boarding school system were not particularly popular to her bosses, and she was in this position for less than two years. In 1927, Otara Warren got into a dispute with State School Superintendent Lewis Randolph Otero. Warren had started working as the local sales rep for a textbook publisher, which violated a school code that had been passed in 1925. Although the school board ultimately exonerated her, she decided not to run for re-election afterward.

She didn't stop advocating for Spanish speaking students, though, and she became more of an advocate for bilingual education instead of focusing on teaching English. This included applying for a grant from the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Foundation and her letter for this read in part, quote, The Spanish American has met the fate of all small colonial groups. Namely, he has suffered from the inability to compete economically or industrially with the overwhelming odds of the standardized commercialism of this country and an effort to preserve the Spanish American people and their culture.

I feel this can be best accomplished through education. She went on to say that, quote, The standardized methods adopted from the English speaking schools to a large extent have discouraged and subordinated every semblance of Spanish culture in the educational life of the Spanish speaking native people. Otara Warren had always kept herself very busy, and after her tenure as school superintendent was over, she looked for another challenge, this time homesteading. On March 17th, 1930, she and Mamie Metters each filed homestead applications on adjoining parcels that totalled more than 100 acres about 15 miles outside of Santa Fe to finalize their claim on the land.

They had to live there for at least five months of the year for four years since the property irrigated and build homes. Otero Warren also spent some of those years writing a book. This was old Spain in our Southwest, which was published in 1936. She wanted to document the society she had grown up in, one that she saw as disappearing through assimilation with Anglo culture. And the resulting book is both a romanticized look at life on a New Mexican hacienda, including local folklore, and then also a testament to a culture that had been lost in what amounted to a second wave of colonization in New Mexico on September six, 1935.

The Los Dos homes. It officially belonged to Nina Otero, Warren and Mamie Metters, it became a retreat both for family and for friends who came for weekend visits or even longer. By that point, Otero Warren had also helped Cleophus Jaramillo found the society at Folklorico de Santa Fe, which was meant to help preserve the Spanish language and Hispanic folk traditions in New Mexico, as well as trying to dispel negative stereotypes and to offer training in arts and crafts.

That year, she also became the literacy director of the Civilian Conservation Corps, where she focused on bilingual literacy education. In 1936, the College of the Sacred Heart awarded her an honorary baccalaureate, and in 1937 she became supervisor of literacy education for the Works Progress Administration. In nineteen thirty nine, Otero Warren's stepfather, Amberger, died, leaving her essentially as the head of the household. By this point, two of her sisters and the family's former governess were still living in the family home.

In 1941, Otara Warren's work with the WPA took her to Puerto Rico, where she was the director of the work conference for Adult Teachers. That same year, New Mexico passed a law requiring schools that meet a certain size requirement to teach Spanish in grades five through eight. This was really a huge deal since before this point, Spanish could only be taught in high school and a lot of Spanish speaking students were leaving school before that.

By that point, Sarah Warren had shifted totally away from the idea that students in New Mexico should be taught only in English, calling the teaching of Spanish in elementary school both desirable and necessary. She expressed her hope that soon Spanish should be taught even earlier. Other laws regarding bilingual education in New Mexico followed from there, including the Bilingual Multicultural Education Act of 1973. In 1947, when Nina was 65, she and Mamie established a real estate and insurance company, which they called Los Docx with Neinas widespread social and political network helping them to get clients.

Otero Warren particularly enjoyed selling big houses. She also loved riding at the head of the hysterical parade at the Santa Fe Fiesta each September, along with poet and translator Whitter Binner. The two of them became a fixture of the parade over the disapproval of some of Otero Warren's family, who objected to Binnaz homosexuality. That parade is still held today. It is also called the historical hysterical parade. Mamie Metters died on August 10th of 1951. At the age of 64, she left Nina Oliver property at the homestead and the option to buy out her half of the property that they had owned together.

Pnina maintained the lassos business afterward, although she did seem to slow down and she eventually hired an assistant, Otero Warren experienced several embolisms in her later years, possibly connected to her having been a smoker for most of her life.

She died on January 3rd, 1965, at the family home in Santa Fe. Her death was sudden. She had told her sister, Anita, that she didn't feel well, and Anita brought her some brandy at her request. After drinking it, Nina Otero Warren collapsed and died. She had two rosary services, one in English and one in Spanish.

Nita Otero Warren's focus on Spanish language school instruction and bilingual education and on voting access for Spanish speakers continues to be a big part of life in New Mexico today. According to the US Census Bureau, almost half the population of New Mexico identifies as Hispanic and more than a third of the state's population speaks a language other than English at home. In 1989, New Mexico passed an English plus resolution, which read in part, quote, proficiency on the part of our citizens and more than one language as to the economic and cultural benefit of our state and the nation.

Whether that proficiency derives from second language study by English speakers or from home language maintenance, plus English acquisition by speakers of other languages. That is Mina Otero Warren, I like that she advocated for people to get out and vote, so their representation was people that would honor their desires or at least hopefully do so. Yeah, this remains an important message. Yeah. When you read brief write ups about her, for the most part, they really stick to her advocacy of access to suffrage materials and voting for people who spoke Spanish.

A lot of them don't touch on her like more troubling record with indigenous people and all like that was something I had to get a lot deeper into research to learn about. Yeah. Do you also have listener mail for us? I sure do.

It's actually a listener tweet group followed by an amount of additional information. So Dr. Emily Friedman tagged us in a tweet, and that was on the day that our six impossible episodes, there's a book about that episode came out and the tweet said, Relevant to Missed in History's episode that dropped today. And this was a, quote, tweet of a thread about a paper that was called Colonial Rewriting of African History, Misinterpretations and Distortions and Belcher and Climber's Life and Struggles of While Out of Petro's.

That is one of the six books that we talked about in the episode. So this paper was published in the Journal of Aphro Asiatic Languages, History and Culture. It was written by Dr. Yirga Guillaume Multiuse, who is from Lalibela. And it is a detailed and very pointed critique of both the life and struggles of our mother, a out of Petro's, which we talked about in that episode, and a paper that Beltzer published that interpreted that work in 2016.

So this newly published paper contends that Professor Wendy Lara Belcher and translator Michael Kleiner just don't have the familiarity with Ge'ez or with Ethiopian monasticism that are needed to accurately translate and interpret this text. He notes that most traditionally trained experts in Ghias actually live in Ethiopia and don't speak English and that most of the Ethiopian scholars that they did consult, they disregarded. So consequently, according to this paper, the resulting translation is viewed through a Western and colonial lens. But then really beyond that, he says that they added words and changed meanings from the original text to sort of create a same sex attraction between a lot of Petro's and another nun when what they really were was just an entirely platonic relationship of monastic sisterhood.

So this. Is a very detailed and precisely argued paper, it is like ninety six pages long of a PDF, maybe tannish pages of that are the notes at the end. But I mean, it's quite lengthy. It also circles back around the how many Ethiopian manuscripts today are held in Western institutions rather than in Ethiopia, and ethical concerns about outsiders getting access to these holy texts and then having photographed them and published them online. So in his tweets on this subject, Dr.

Yirga Gila Wilderness describes this translation as intellectually dishonest and ethically questionable. I am not sure when this paper was actually published, but his tweets about it were from September 4th and the thread that we were looped in on came out from the 9th.

I said, Holly, the outline to this episode on September 2nd and we recorded the episode on the 8th. So this was like immediately before all of this came out.

Clearly, I would not have been recommending this book in the episode I had I had all of this other perspective at the time. It was something that was frankly very surprising to me based on the reception that the book got at the time. I knew there was some controversy about it, but as I understood it, the controversy was about like a misinterpretation of what Belcher was saying, not the contention that that Belcher have added words that were not in the original text.

Right, right. That's a whole other thing. So based on how many people had praised this translation, including specifically Ethiopian scholars, most of them now living in the US and other like black historians and institutes that focus on African languages, like the fact that this paper is so contrary to all of that was like very unexpected to me. If I had a time machine, we would have handled that obviously very differently. So there is a lot in this paper beyond what I have just tried to summarize.

The whole paper is online at the You Are Elford is not easily shareable in an audio podcast at all, but it is currently pinned to the top of his Twitter timeline at Yirga Gilla, which is at why IRG a G.L. w. So thank you to Dr. Emily Friedman for tagging us into this tweet. I don't know that this would have crossed my radar otherwise because it's like it's not a journal that is part of the databases that I usually consult for things I, I apologize again for not I don't know.

I don't I don't know which thing to apologize for because, like, this paper didn't exist when we did that episode. But it's great. I also feel like did I miss something in the research that I was not aware of having missed until reading this paper.

So I'm working on stuff that is that far out of our own experience can be complicated for this reason. So thank you again to Emily Friedman for tagging us in that tweet.

If you would like to write to us about this or any other podcast we're at History podcast that I heart radio dotcom. There were all over social media at MTT in history, which is where you'll find our Facebook and Twitter and Pinterest and Instagram. And you can subscribe to our show on the I Heart radio app and Apple podcasts and anywhere else that you get your podcasts.

Stuff you missed in history class is the production of I Heart Radio for more podcasts for My Heart radio visit by her radio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Hi, this is Hillary Clinton, host of the new podcast, You and Me both, there's a lot to be anxious and worried about right now, and it's made so much worse by the fact that we can't be together. So I find myself on the phone a lot, talking with friends, experts, really anyone who can help make some sense of these challenging times, like Semin Nasrat, author of one of my favorite cookbooks, or Stacy Abrams, who we know as the woman who should be governor of Georgia.

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