ABSTRACT
“Our ancestors penetrated into these deserted and dangerous regions many years before the Mayflower floated over the dancing waves that washed Plymouth Rock,” declared legislator Rafael Romero in 1878, speaking at the Jesuit College of Las Vegas in New Mexico. “The emigrants who disembarked at Plymouth Rock came under the flag of England. Our forebears arrived under royal pennon of heroic Spain.” Most nineteenth-century schoolchildren in the United States rarely encountered such settlers in their schoolbooks. The Mayflower, the Puritans, the Indians, the landscape of the Northeast—these remained the familiar subjects in the story of American settlement. “Catholics settled New Mexico,” concluded Romero, “people filled with respect for any group concerned with the culture and growth of Catholic faith and doctrine.” 1 At the time of his speech, the Jesuits in New Mexico clashed with the territorial governor over an attempt to obtain tax-exempt status for their college. Across the country, Catholic educators struggled with local, territorial, and state governments, public school administrators and policymakers, and various social and political groups to obtain tax relief or some share of public funding for the educational institutions they developed as an alternative to the public system of common schools spreading across the country.
