Growing up in Santa Fe, New Mexico, Elena Ortiz (Ohkay Owingeh) was allowed to go to the events of the annual late summer week of Fiestas, such as the burning of Zozobra and the Pet Parade, but never to the Entrada.

“My father would not stomach it,” she recalled. “He always told us, ‘It’s the celebration of the conquest of your people.’”

Ortiz didn’t see the Entrada until she was an adult, and it was still a scarring experience.

The Entrada is a one-hour reenactment of the conquest of Santa Fe by Don Diego de Vargas in 1692, twelve years after the expulsion of the Spanish during the Pueblo Revolt of 1680. Though Los Caballeros de Vargas, who sponsor the pageant, declare that it’s an accurate portrayal of historical events, that assertion gets a hearty laugh from Ortiz.

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“Revisionist history and racist” is how she’s described it in the countless letters she has written to newspaper editors and school and city government officials in the past decades trying to raise the issues of cultural insensitivity that bedevil the Entrada.

Ortiz, who holds a management position in an international educational touring company, is adamant that all vestiges of the Entrada be abolished, especially the visits by the member of the Fiesta court wearing faux armor and full Colonial Spanish regalia to the public schools. Over the years, if Ortiz found out which day they were visiting her children’s schools, she’d pull them out, without apology or excuse.

“They promote this Eurocentric conquest agenda, and it’s a violation of our civil rights,” she said. “It’s a religious event, and has no place in the schools.”

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