A family poses outside a log cabin in the New Mexico Territory. The woman sitting is an Indian servant. Many Indian people worked for U.S. settlers throughout the 19th century, and enslavement of Native Americans was common before the Civil War. National Archives, 111-SC-89608
A frame grab of actress and former KRQE-TV news anchor Kim Trujillo in a TV ad for ancestry.com. Trujillo thought she was 100 percent ‘Spanish’ but discovered she has indigenous ancestry as well.
A family poses outside a log cabin in the New Mexico Territory. The woman sitting is an Indian servant. Many Indian people worked for U.S. settlers throughout the 19th century, and enslavement of Native Americans was common before the Civil War. National Archives, 111-SC-89608
A frame grab of actress and former KRQE-TV news anchor Kim Trujillo in a TV ad for ancestry.com. Trujillo thought she was 100 percent ‘Spanish’ but discovered she has indigenous ancestry as well.
Actress and former KRQE-TV news anchor Kim Trujillo appears in a new national video advertisement for the genealogy website ancestry.com, announcing with surprise that her DNA revealed she is “26 percent Native American.”
As with many New Mexico Hispanics, Trujillo, born and raised in Belen, had considered herself 100 percent “Spanish.” “I am very proud to find out I’m Native American, though,” Trujillo told The New Mexican. “I’m excited to learn more about that line of my heritage.”
Pride in Native American ancestry (or mestizaje) among Latinos elsewhere in the nation has been a foundation of the Chicano and other movements since the 1960s, but in New Mexico, historians say, many members of the Hispanic population have been slow to accept their Native American roots. There are complex historical and sociological reasons why Hispanics here have clung so fiercely to a “pure” European identity. Science, however, is breaking down that barrier.
