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Alika Jimenez: Okay, it should be recording. I'm Alika Jimenez. I'm a second year student at Rice University and I'm working on this research project with Dr. Weston Twardowski and the Texas Tribal Buffalo Project. Toni Moreno: Hi, my name is Dr. Toni Danielle Moreno. I am a professor at Texas State University and I'm very happy to have an opportunity to share my story. Alika Jimenez: Great, thank you so much. So for our first question, I wanted to ask if you have a tribal affiliation. If so, what? And also where were you born, where you grew up, kind of like information about that. Toni Moreno: Okay. So I was born in Odessa, Texas in 1979. My dad is from Odessa and my mom is from Marfa. Marfa is a little bit further southwest. We moved to Austin when I was seven years old and I've called Austin home ever since then. I did not have a tribal affiliation or indigenous histories or cultures growing up, but we did have family stories that my grandpa was indigenous – was Apache. Understanding my ancestry has always been really interesting to me. I started probably back in middle, maybe as late as high school to put some of those pieces together and it wasn't until the last two years or so that I was able to connect formally and my family, my mom, my dad, myself and my sister are all now formal members of the Jumano Nation. And my mom, my sister and I are applying for membership to the Jumano Apache Nation.

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Alika Jimenez: That's so interesting to hear. So was everyone in your family aware of your grandfather's indigeneity and everybody was sort of interested in connecting to that or was that something that you were more pushing towards? Can you tell me more about that? Toni Moreno: I'm the family historian in the family. My sister is not really concerned. She just says, send me the PDF. She's a year and a half older than I am. My mom and dad are extremely interested in it. My dad's actually the one that helped me find documents the first time. So I am working on all branches of my family tree. Both of my parents were only aware of their grandparents' names and I'm actually named after my paternal grandfather. So my father's mother, her dad, I'm named after Antonio Marrufo . It turns out finding documentation. It's always a story that I share whenever I'm asked about my name that he and his wife crossed over on October 6th, 1922. And I was born on October 6th, 1979. My dad named me after him and I asked him: why, why did he pick that name for me? And he said that he had been visiting with his grandpa one time and his grandpa just told him simply don't ever forget me. Nunca me olvidas. Toni Moreno: And so in honor of him and in honor of that, I became Toni Danielle instead of Anthony Daniel. They didn't get a son , but when you ask if everybody's interested, very much so. My mom had a handful of stories that she would share every once in a while when I would ask, but it was always the same stories and the same names. I know that my grandparents' names are this and this and my dad would have the same thing. I know my grandparents' names are this and this and good luck to you. My dad helped me apply for the social security application information for the great-grandfather that I am named after. And I have had the same one since high school. A nd I just collected, I didn't know what I was looking for or how, and so I would hop online, but this is back in the early aughts. Toni Moreno: I am older and we didn't have a lot of great information online like we do now. And whatever I would find out, I would print. And it just so happened that my mom and her family had a lot of records in West Texas and they had a lot of documentation in the Catholic Church. So my parents and I would always joke that my dad's side of the family were the heathens and my mom's side of the family were the saints because of the documentation that I was able to find for her and not for him, it turned out that my mom's maiden name is the line that I was able to track most easily. And it was a little disappointing because it was my mom's father that was supposed to be Apache. Come to find out that all of my parents, grandparents, are indigenous. I've done several DNA tests, so I've got myself, I've got my mom and dad to do three different ones.

00:05:06.000 - 00:08:07.000

Toni Moreno: I've done two different ones. We even got my grandpa to do one. This is on my dad's side. So I have at least five immediate family members that have done DNA for me because of my interest in this. And then a handful of cousins that have also participated in joined in somewhat in finding out the DNA. We can see that my mom is 49 to 50% indigenous. My dad's right at 40, I'm about 42, I think my sister's 42, 44, something like that. So all of us have maintained a very high level of indigeneity. There's some Spanish, but that's predominantly indigenous from Chihuahua, um, Durango, in West Texas. Alika Jimenez: Yeah. So you're telling me the process of documentation started: You had some stories, you looked for some names through the Catholic church and stuff. Could you tell me more about the stories that your mom told you that she had to tell you? Toni Moreno: Yeah, all my mom would say was that my grandma was from El Polvo and she said, we always called it El Polvo growing up, but they came in and they changed it to Redford. I don't know why they called it Redford. And so I didn't know who the days were in all of the stories. These were just the parts of the details that she knew. She said, and I know that my mom was told not to go outside, not to get too much sun, not to get too dark. She said that when she was growing up, she knew that her mom came from a little bit of means and that her family had land, that they owned land back, and that she didn't know what had happened. And she didn't know how my grandma and my grandpa had married to each other because their personalities, their lifestyles and their circumstances seemed to be so different. Toni Moreno: So when I started looking, we moved from Odessa, we happened to move to Austin. Austin is the capital of Texas, and that's where all of our county records are stored. So I just started going down to the library, the archives downtown, and started looking for records in the only place that I knew that there might be something to track down. So my mother's name is Librada Ocon . Her father is Santiago Ocon and he was married to Zeferina Lujan . Santiago is my understanding, our direct connection to our Apache lineage. Santiago's father's name was Francisco. We don't know what Francisco – No, excuse me.

00:08:07.000 - 00:12:55.000

Toni Moreno: Santiago's parents are Francisco Ocon and Zeferina Lujan and Francisco's father is also named Francisco. My grandpa Santiago also had a son. His son's name is Santiago. There's a lot of repetitions of names, and so it's a little difficult when you're making sure that you're connecting to the right one. My grandma is Eulalia Evaro , her dad's name is Pablo Evaro, and her mom's name is Juliana Carrasco. I learned through speaking to one of my mom's cousins that Pablo also had a younger brother. His younger brother's name was also Pablo. This is really important to me in being able to communicate that the family stories and tracking all the pieces are really important because you never know when those details are going to help you put the pieces together. It helped me put the pieces together. He shared, my mom's cousin shared with me that Pablo had a younger brother, Pablo. Toni Moreno: My grandpa Pablo went by Pablo Grande. His younger brother went by Pablo Chico. And it's important because both Pablo's married sisters: Pablo married Juliana Carrasco, Pablo Jr. married Juliana's little sister, Victar Evaro. Married into Evaro. Victar's last name was also Carrasco. That's important because when I'm hopping online and I'm looking at documentations, there was a website called Life Before the Ruins. And it's so funny because I remember all of these steps. I remember how I came about all of this information. It was life before the ruins. There was a fantastic website. It's still up and it's still available. And this archeologist went to West Texas. He fell in love with West Texas and he just started documenting families and putting all of the families that he was able to together. So anytime I hop on a website and they have surnames, I will pop in the list of Ocon, Evaro, Carrasco, and Lujan knowing that this would possibly take me into my family lines. Toni Moreno: I happen to notice that there was Acosta that married a Victar and her maiden name was Evaro. And so I put the pieces together to find out that this indeed was another generation back. You asked me about documentation in the story. So I go to the land grant office and I'm looking for Evaros, and I find the documentation, I find my great-grandpa, my mom's grandfather, Pablo Evaro and the land ownership, and I find all these other Evaros and all of these other names. And when of course I get a map printed and you can see the plots of land and they are all parallel to each other, lining up with one end to the river. So I was able to confirm for my mom that her family did indeed own land and it was on the river during that time. And so it was through the names on the land grants and through building my family tree that you can see where our families were marrying into each other. So Victar had married in, her maiden name was Evaro. She had married a Carrasco. It's true, she was the daughter of Mateo Carrasco and Cecilia Acosta they're very important because they were some of the first families and they were invited by the governor of Texas to come from Chihuahua to settle into what became El Polvo that was taken and renamed Redford. Toni Moreno: My family is in history books. My family is in: The River Has Never Divided Us, Cecilia Thompson's, Presidio County, two volume edition. I have half a dozen books downstairs and I saw the names, I saw the last names. I knew that they were familiar, but I didn't know if they were my relatives or not. And as I started to build my family tree, now I can go back several generations. I can go back several hundred years to be able to say, this is how we're related to this person that's in this book here.

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Alika Jimenez: That's really cool. Toni Moreno: And that comes from one story with my mom telling me that she knows that her mom came from a little bit of means and that they had land along the river. She even had, and she gave it to me, it's a paper receipt from the 1920s of her grandpa Pablo where he had paid, he had bought corn, I think it's where he had bought corn. Alika Jimenez: That's a lot of amazing work that you did to piece all of that together. I can't even imagine. Toni Moreno: There's a story that we pass around as family historians and it just says that there's one of us in each family that's called to put the skin and the stories back onto our ancestors, and that's just me for my family.

00:13:46.000 - 00:17:25.000

Alika Jimenez: That's amazing. I'm curious, you mentioned how you did a lot of research when the internet wasn't as advanced. I'm curious what you think about how technology now impacts people's indigenous identity and ability to connect to their history and stuff like that. Toni Moreno: I personally think it's fantastic. I love it, because it made finding documents so much easier and substantiates the stories and the connections that are being passed through. So once different family members started to understand my interest and the older I got, the more comfortable it seemed like they felt in telling me some of the stories that they had been holding onto. I don't know if it was too recent in the past for them to want to share some of the details or if they didn't feel like I was old enough. It doesn't matter because there came a time where I was able to gather these stories from them and then substantiate it. For example, on my dad's side of the family, his dad's name is Isidro, and my grandma's name was Enriquetta. Isidro’s father's name was Nieves Moreno, and his wife is Angelita Escobedo. Enriquetta’ s parents were Antonio Marrufo, my great-grandpa that I'm named after. Toni Moreno: And Maria Salazar, it's a very common name. And I didn't think I would ever be able to move backwards on Maria because we learned with our Catholic heritage that people are Maria something or Jose something, and they usually go by that second name. My great-grandpa Nieves Moreno, and when I found his records, it was Jose Nieves Moreno. It makes it a little bit more difficult to locate. We went to Wink, Texas, far west Texas. We visited my dad's tia Luisa, mi tia Luisa was my dad's mom's little sister. My dad and his mom and his two siblings had gone to live in Wink for a little while, while my grandpa was out in the oil fields and so they were all very close. When we would go to visit family, we would stop by of course and visit and catch up with everybody. And every once in a while a conversation would come up, oh, by the way, Ton i 's really interested and this would start getting them talking and what was going on. Toni Moreno: And one time my Tia Luisa shared with me that she knew her parents had come from Mexico, that they had come over from Mexico. And it was when my grandma was going to get married that she went to go get her papers and she had been raised as Enrique Salazar and just offhandedly. They were like, oh yeah, and by the way, you're not a Salazar that you're actually Marrufo. But when your parents came over, they used Maria's last name instead of Antonio's last name. Several theories as to why that might be and will respect their stories. But what my tia shared with me was that they had come over as siblings, they had come over as brother and sister. They had had a child Consuelo, and she, excuse me, Consuela, and she was listed as a sibling as well. And so I just tucked it away, just all of these little stories.

00:17:25.000 - 00:22:21.000

Toni Moreno: I had an opportunity to go to Washington DC for a work trip and while everybody else is going out to conferences and dinners and things like that, I go to the national archives and I pull up the immigration records, the border crossings. And sure enough, I find an Antonio Salazar and a Maria Salazar and a Consuela Salazar all traveling over his brother and sister. And again, on my birthday, October 6th, 1922, if my Tia Luisa had never told me that they had come over and claimed brother and sister, I would've never known to recognize that document as being my family because the last names were close, but they didn't match up. They were siblings, not spouse, but it's because I had both ends of things. My dad had a younger brother, my Tio Frank, he just passed away recently and he was one of my partners in crime because my Tio Frank was a talker. Toni Moreno: And so whenever I would find names or people or he'd have an excuse, he would call distant relatives, he would call tios and tias, he would call second cousins and just be like, Hey. And he would start chatting them up and he would get the stories and he would pass the stories to me. So I would document the names and the details. And so I was the sleuth online, I was finding the documents and he was the chatter upper, I don't speak Spanish, I'm not fluently bilingual, but he is so he could speak to anybody. My great-grandpa, Nieves Moreno, the story was that he had a family before. He had his family with my great-grandma and nobody knew what his first wife's name was. All they knew was that he had five sons and they didn't have name names, they had nicknames: they had Chale, they had Guerro, and they had Monico and they had Juan. Toni Moreno: And so it was through my tio’s very persistent conversations with that side of the family and his connecting me to another cousin that I started to get really close to – and I've gotten close to several cousins because of our interest in putting our family histories together – that we were able to find the real names of the five brothers. I was able to find them on a census record in Texas. I never did convince my Tio that they were in Texas and then moved over to New Mexico. He has another story, and he spoke to a gentleman that came across from Mexico into New Mexico with them. And I said, tio, I said, do you happen to remember that individual's name? And he goes, mija, I don't remember what his first name is. He goes, but his last name was Olguin. And I said, tio, you're never going to believe this. Toni Moreno: But I found what Nieve's wife's first name was, and it was Natividad Olguin. I'm thinking they were probably traveling together as family clusters and groups, much like my mom and her family was traveling in clusters and groups. Husbands and wives were traveling together, but they were usually bringing siblings with them and siblings were possibly married. And so it was jumping back and forth between my mom's side and my dad's side and feeling like I was learning a little bit about my history and what things might have been like for them because patterns started to emerge by just watching the names. One of the other first things I did was get a map of Mexico and I just started highlighting. So each of my grandparents had a different color so I could see where they were at the time and if I could travel back further, were they in the same location or had they traveled from somewhere? So with my mom's side of the family, the members of the Jumano Nation, we have always been in Chihuahua. There was one church in particular, and it was the Church of Latter Day Saints. They have free resources online. They're the ones that I have been looking at since the nineties. They're the ones that put the first pieces together for me. Jesus Nazarino, something like that. That is where all of our documents are and stem from back into the 1700s.

00:22:21.000 - 00:25:00.000

Toni Moreno: The Ocons, that is the line that is supposed to be Apache, is one that I haven't been able to find or put together. With the Evaros, they are highly represented in the church records as well. And the Carrascos are too. The Carrascos are also in some of the books. The River Has Never Divided Us and they were a part of the family group that was invited from Chihuahua into Texas. It gets complicated in being able to say my mom's mom's side or my mom's dad's side because with Z eferina Lujan, she married Francisco and he was Apache. But I have not been able to find any documentation for Zeferina Lujan. I have found several other Lujan and they are on my mom's mom's side and they're also been around for several hundred years. Toni Moreno: I would like to guess that Zeferina is probably a part of this Lujan branch because they have both been in the area for several hundred years, but I just have not been able to find anybody that could document the story to tell me who her parents were or who her line was. And the same goes for Francisco. I have very little documentation on him, and what I have found is a second wife, and this goes back to stories with mom, and Mom said, oh, when we're growing up, we always knew, but we thought maybe that there were relationships happening at the same time. I said, no, mom, if I'm looking at the paper trail, it looks like he had a first wife and children with them and then a separate relationship because all the children with my mom's grandparents were born after the relationship from his first wife. The reason that I bring up his first wife is because some of their church records come from El Mulatto and El Mulatto is one of the older indigenous Pueblo's encampments. I don't know the most appropriate word or name for it. Alika Jimenez: Wow. You have a lot of information that you've put together. It's really impressive. No, genuinely. It really is. Toni Moreno: I'm sorry because I feel like I'm jumping around all over the place. This is not a linear story.

00:25:00.000 - 00:29:10.000

Alika Jimenez: It's okay. This is your time to share. So I appreciate you putting all this information out there because there could be someone watching eventually that connects to this. It would be really cool. I'm curious to know, now that you've been able to find all of this documentation, it's still a journey, right? But like, being able to enroll with the Jumano tribe you mentioned, how has the process been with that and have you been able to connect to other native people and are there other practices or things that you guys get to do together? How is that sense of community? Tell me more about that. Toni Moreno: It's really wonderful. It sounds kind of hokey. One of the reasons that I wanted to do this was because there was something on the Texas history portal, the Texas portal online, something like that. I pop in all of my family names. I found a picture of my grandpa when he was 12 years old, and I learned that it was housed in the Marfa Library. And when my mom and I went back to visit, I was able to show her and she was able to hold a picture of her dad that has been dead for many, many years and to see what he looked like at 12 years old. She had never known him to be that young. And there apparently was a high school teacher back in the sixties that did an oral history project with the high school students. So my family names are there and some of the relatives in the family groupings I'm able to piece together because they did leave these stories for us. Toni Moreno: I do very much want to leave the same kind of stories. So I don't even how I got ahold of cousin Bert , cousin Bert Lujan , not from my Zeferina Lujan side, but from my Carrasco-Evaro side. Go back a couple of generations and we all connect to Ciriaco Lujan and Bert has gathered all of the Lujan families together and a very large family tree. And he knew that they were one of the first families that went from Chihuahua into El Polvo. And he's a very sweet man and he was a little frustrated because history had misrepresented because they're referred to as the first five. A lthough his family was a part of that first grouping, and it's not the first five, just – we don't know why they picked five. There were more than five families that established this area, and his family was one of those as well. Toni Moreno: And so Bert made it a point, he started two different Facebook groups. There's a Lujan genealogy family group. There is now an El Polvo Facebook group for families that can trace their lines back. And he pulled together an anniversary in Presidio close to El Polvo, Redford, at the 150 year anniversary mark of the creation. And so I got to go and I got to take my mom and I got to take my dad and my mom got to meet family because her mother, her father, her brother and her sister have all been gone for a very long time. It was very, very meaningful to be able to see my mom amongst relatives because she thought she was the only one left because she doesn't have a lot of cousins. She came from a smaller family and there were two individuals that, or brothers, they weren't twins, but they looked close enough alike that they could have been. And they looked like my tio Santiago, they looked like my mom's brother. And they joked around with her. They were her older brothers and they've stayed in touch with her since that time, one’s just right up the road in Dallas. And we're over here in Austin. But I talk to Bert all the time.

00:29:10.000 - 00:32:47.000

Toni Moreno: Bert will introduce me to other family members. Bert introduced me to a Carrasco cousin and I gave her a call because apparently she was the one that was recruiting individuals to apply for membership into the Jumano Apache Nation. And the reason that she was trying to do that was because there is another Apache group I believe in New Mexico that is trying to get federally recognized . And through our tribal chief, and our connection, they said, yes, you can put your band in with our application. So we need to know who all is a member of your community. So because I learned from Bert that there are indigenous family groups together on Facebook, I had already connected to an Evaro nation and they also came from my Evaro family line. And another pattern that I have seen emerging is that we tend to be able to go back to a certain generation where a lot of us stem from a certain progeny, if that makes sense. Toni Moreno: So Dionicio Evaro probably our fourth, fifth, sixth, great grandpa for some of us, the majority of us can tie our line back to him just like Ciriaco Lujan, we can all trace our line back to him. And so I introduced to the Evaro nation that we are Jumano Apache and I've gotten all sorts of cousins reaching out so that they can get an application so that they can apply and they can put their family line together, they send in their DNA, and we can put in our names for application as well. So a sense of community. Absolutely. There is, at least for the folks that I have run into a very large interest in understanding what happened and what their roots really are and individuals saying, I never knew that I was indigenous, and that kind of blows my mind. But what I finally put together was that it wasn't just my grandpa that was indigenous. It makes me wonder because my grandpa was Apache – cool – but my mom's mom was also indigenous. But I guess they didn't identify themselves as the same kind of indigenous. I don't know. I just think it's really cute, honestly, it's like, oh, no, no, you're Indian, but I'm not Indian. But yes, they were all Indian. Alika Jimenez: Yeah, I feel like I've heard from other people that we've interviewed about some family members not talking about being indigenous or not using that word or saying they're Mexican or something else when there's a lot of overlap. And so it's a very interesting separation there. Toni Moreno: One of the other reasons that I've heard that might be the case though is because it wasn't, and if you look at the timelines of the generation that stopped talking, and this is true for my grandpa and my folks, when they told me, we just didn't talk about these kind of things like you're asking us questions, but from what I understand, it wasn't safe to be Native American. It was, oh, it wasn't a whole lot safer to be Mexican, but they weren't actively out looking to kill Mexicans like they were Native Americans. And so when my parents say, oh, we just didn't talk about it, I just wonder how much of it was out of self-preservation.

00:32:47.000 - 00:34:28.000

Alika Jimenez: Yeah. And you mentioned that they were told not to go outside, really. Right. Toni Moreno: But that was just so that they wouldn't get sunburn so that they wouldn't get darker skin. And I think that had something to do with what we term now colorism, but the thought that you wanted to stay more fair skinned. Alika Jimenez: I see. I see. That makes sense. I want to ask a little bit more about just broader culture questions, I guess. So what are your favorite things about your culture? Are there any stories from your life that you feel like capture the culture you grew up with or that you're reconnecting to? Toni Moreno: I would have to say going back to my mom and the feeling that I never felt like I was Mexican-American, that label never really fit me well, and I don't think it would, a part of it had to do with me not speaking Spanish, but Spanish also didn't feel like a natural thing. It was something that my folks spoke to separate children from adult conversation. But the food, I feel like I lost an opportunity to learn more of my history. When we moved from West Texas to Austin, there was just that separation. We stayed in contact with some family members. But when I think about culture and what I grew up in and what I visit when I go back home and what my mom retained and brought with us is the food. We have tortillas. My mom makes homemade tortillas. They're flour, but they're the size of dinner plates.

00:34:28.000 - 00:39:55.000

Toni Moreno: So when I came here and I had a breakfast taco, it was this little folded and I was like, what is this? Because what they call burritos here is tortillas where I come from, and we didn't have tacos. Everything was a burrito and we didn't have sandwiches. We had tortillas. My mom would talk about them raising goats and having cabrito and her remembering the sounds of them – I don't know the right word other than – killing the goats. And that's why she doesn't eat cabrito now because she can remember that. I remember her talking about moving around. And the same with my dad. So my mom and her family, my grandpa was a part of the railroad and he was a rancher and a ranch hand. So he would manage those. And they moved from Marfa. When my mom was little, they moved up to Valentine, and then from Valentine they moved out to Crane. And if you've ever been out in W est Texas, it is just flat land. Toni Moreno: They're itty bitty, they're very small. And my dad, his father, so my grandpa on his side worked the oil fields. And so whenever I would try to get family stories from them, I wanted to know where they were and how, not how they moved, but the different places they lived because I was trying to figure out where I might be able to find some of our family and some of our relatives. So we would go back every year to New Mexico to visit my tio Frank for my dad's side of the family. And that's where we had the green chiles, the Hatch, New Mexico, and they're delicious. When my mom makes enchiladas back on her side, it's the red chile. There aren't any enchiladas here in central Texas or San Antonio. It's just completely different. I don't know how they make their red sauce, but I know my mom gets the red chiles, they're dried. Toni Moreno: She even sent me a video so that I would know. I haven't practiced, I haven't tried, I didn't do the whole cooking bit growing up, but I have a video of her rehydrating, the chilies, and then taking the chiles and a little bit of the water and then putting them in the blender and then showing me, you also don't measure, right? It's a little bit. So it's not like I'm going to come away with a recipe, but I have the steps. I have tried to make tortillas for years. I still don't have the right consistency. I haven't. But yes, if you ask me about family, it goes back to I can make her beans about the only thing that I'm really good at. So the culture for me is the stories. It's finding my relatives. It's knowing where they're laid to rest. Going back out to Marfa, finding out where El Polvo wa , going out to El Polvo with my mom and finding the cemetery out there and locating Pablo Sr. and Pablo Chico buried next to each other with their wives buried next to them, knowing that they are my great grandparents. Toni Moreno: Those are siblings. I know their story. Going to that cemetery and seeing that somebody in my family had cared enough to reinturn our great grandparents, and not only had they interned them, they had put their names of their parents on the back of their headstone providing me another layer of generations to go back. And you remember Bert, he connected me to a Carrasco cousin when I talked to her. She goes, yeah, and when we got back together in El Polvo and we reburied them, and I was like, oh my God, are you the guys? And she said, yes. And so the stories, they just keep coming back together. She asked me when I was connecting with family to ask if anybody knew where one of our family's houses was. It sounds kind of random, but the physical house had been moved from Redford. And I said, Adelina, that's her first name. I said, was it Teofilo’s house? And she was like, yes. How did you know that? I said, Adelina, I don't know how this happened. I said, but I was over at UTSA and they have a Texas Heritage Center, and I saw his house and I had wondered how I was connected. And she goes, oh my God. And so I found the house, but we all have pieces that we're looking for. We all have pieces that we're carrying and we get together. So building community, absolutely, because we're connecting people to relatives that they didn't know that our families were as big as they are. So the Evaro Nation Facebook group, they're all folks that are up in Montana. They know their people are from Mexico and they have a slight idea, but they don't really have the history of how they went from Chihuahua to Montana, but they know that they're farthest back, they're able to go is the Dionicio, and we can track that for Them.

00:39:55.000 - 00:40:53.000

Alika Jimenez: Yeah. I didn't realize there were some parts of your family so far up north too. Toni Moreno: There's also a little town called Evaro, and I don't know, and I haven't looked into find out if we're named, if that town is named after one of my other ancestors. Alika Jimenez: Wow, that's so interesting. Toni Moreno: I hear the stories that on my dad's side, that he was a Villaista, and so you have those points of pride. So the idea that on my mom's side that we are related to Montezuma and we have a whole group of people that are working on the documentation of that. It's not just one of those family lore kind of situations. It's not like, oh, everybody has a Comanche princess. It's not like that. It's like, no, so and you can trace the line all the way back again.

00:40:53.000 - 00:43:07.000

Alika Jimenez: That's so amazing. There's so many people who are working. Is this through the Facebook groups that you guys are documenting that? Toni Moreno: There's another one? Yes. There's one called the Descendants of Petrolina. That's the one that I'm a part of because that would be my ancestral line. I have over a thousand people on my family tree. Alika Jimenez: That's so cool. I cannot imagine that. I know my direct family and my grandparents and I don't really know much beyond there. That's so cool. Kind of along the same line of culture, it seems like talking to people and connecting stories is a big part of keeping your culture alive, right? I'm wondering if there's any other practices or traditions or get together type things or just daily things that you do that you feel keep your culture alive? Toni Moreno: Unfortunately, no. Unfortunately, it's my practices of going back and finding out who I came from that's giving me that culture and giving me honestly that confidence to claim my indigeneity and to wear my jewelry and to feel comfortable going to powwows. I've also connected with an indigenous group in San Marcos, and we're not blood related, but they're the ones that have shared with me different practices, indigenous practices. There's something called smudging, so I should know the name. It's not cedar, but what they burn for the smoke, and I can't believe I don't remember. They taught me how to smudge myself. So when we went back to the 150 year reunion, I was really excited because they opened up with a ceremony, a blessing instead of just taking off into things like we do in Western society. They were very mindful and very intentional. And that practice in and of itself has felt me grounding into who I am.

00:43:07.000 - 00:45:07.000

Toni Moreno: So they opened with a blessing and it was one of our relatives that did the smudging. And when he got to me, I knew what to do with the smoke. But if I hadn't connected with this indigenous community in San Marcos, I wouldn't have known what was going on, but I felt more comfortable. So yes, even if I'm not connected by blood, I do feel like there's kinship now between indigenous populations because I think I'm very glad that some have been able to keep that knowledge and that information to pass back to those of us that weren't able to retain it. Alika Jimenez: Yeah, it's really cool that they were able to give you information that ended up being so helpful, a big gathering like that. Toni Moreno: I think if I had stayed in West Texas, something else that comes to mind that I want to share was visiting my t ia. It was my grandpa Ocon who we believe is Apache, lived in a house, and I remember her having a ton of birds, the little parakeet ones, itty bitties and cages all over the house. And I have an awful memory. I don't remember very much at all, but I remember being in there and not thinking anything of it. And now when I put pieces together, how natural the environment was and how close they were to earth and nature, still having cabritos, still raising their own goats, still having their own animals and losing some of that moving into a city, right? Taking, not necessarily taking those things for granted, but stepping away from it and having a different lifestyle. I think the natural lifestyle is so much more fun and so much more peaceful. Alika Jimenez: Are you able to find ways to connect with nature even if you are more in the city?

00:45:07.000 - 00:47:11.000

Toni Moreno: Absolutely. Now I do, especially when I go down to San Marcos. So one of their areas is a sacred space called Sacred Springs. They label it Aquarena Springs. But because of my understanding of that space, whenever I need to connect or whenever I just need to disconnect from work, I'll go over there and I'll have my meal and I'll just sit outside and I'll enjoy it. I'vetaken my nephews from my husband's side when they wanted to go to a park, I took 'em there and they weren't impressed because it didn't have a playscape, but I just wanted to introduce them to the water and the greenery and the trees. But I was, started to read a book called Wisdom Sits in Place, and one of the first lines talks about not noticing your sense of space until it's gone. When I drive to West Texas, I love driving to West Texas because it's massive and there aren't any buildings in the way. Toni Moreno: And you can see the horizon and you can see the blue sky and you can see the clay colored rocks, and then you can see it turning into mountains. And whenever I think about home, that's what I think about. So going out into nature is all fine and good, and I like it, but what makes me feel like home is that wide open sky in that sense. Not even Odessa, but Marfa in that area. And that's not where I was born, that's where my mom, but if you ask me where I feel an affinity and where I feel a connection, it's in Marfa. I remember my mom telling me several occasions, she was like, that's one thing that I do miss from being out this way is not being able to watch the storms roll in. Alika Jimenez: That sounds beautiful. Being able to see the whole sky. It's hard with all the skyscrapers here. Were you going to say something else? Sorry. Toni Moreno: No, I'm sorry that I don't have more cultural and more, but I really don’t.

00:47:11.000 - 00:49:01.000

Alika Jimenez: No, no, absolutely. No worries. This is your time. Toni Moreno: One thing I will share, and both of my grandmas had it in common, but they quilt. They would quilt, and so they would make clothes, they would make blankets, and I'm very appreciative because both of my parents have given me a quilt from each of my grandmas. So I know that they were the ones that made those, and I know that they are very skilled and talented in what it was that they were able to make. They're beautiful quilts. Alika Jimenez: That's actually great because there's a few questions here about art, and I was curious about if art plays a role in your life, like you mentioned your grandparent, your grandmas were doing quilting. How is it in your life and is it a significant part of your life? Toni Moreno: I find it very interesting because I'm very artistic. My dad is very artistic. He always has been with photography, with drawing. He became a gemologist and he can draw all of those things. I love photography. I enjoy drawing. I have a painting here in front of me, but it's never been a lifestyle. No, it's always been about employability, about careers, about being able to maintain ourselves with my mom and my sister, I'm not see ing artistic, but they both have green thumbs and that's something that I don't have, but that's something that my mom got from her mom. So we have a home remedy of when your stomach is upset and nothing sounds good, you've lost your appetite. It's almost like you've eaten something that has unsettled you. And so my mom would give us her home remedy and we would get fixed up after a little while, but she would say that we were empachado.

00:49:01.000 - 00:52:27.000

Toni Moreno: So anytime I ran into anybody that talked about being indigenous, I would ask them about this random term empachado. And recently, within the past year, I've ran into a medicine woman. She was like, oh yeah, she was at empachado, and she explained the whole bit to me and what it meant and how there were different remedies for it. And again, she has an indigenous practice. This came from my grandma, and so I know it's not Mexican, it's not Spanish. These are things that are generational knowledge. The same thing with some words, quechee. When we went back to the 150 year anniversary, there was a historian there and he said, if you said it one way, you knew you were Apache. If you said it another way, you knew you were a Comanche. And both of my parents cracked up because apparently it was a word they heard in their house on a regular basis, but they hadn't grown up and used it with us. Toni Moreno: But for them to be able to make that jump back to their indigeneity with that word, I mean even the words in the language that we use, there's another book, it's very thin and it has a couple of columns of words that were indigenous Nahuatl in Spanish, and I would ask my mom how to say the word, and she would tell me in Nahuatl, not in Spanish. And I would say, did you know that was Nahuatl not Spanish? And she was like, no. And so being able to introduce her to those kind of things, being able to reconnect my mom to her indigeneity has been very impactful and powerful for me because I know she didn't lose it on purpose, and I know it wasn't taken from her, by her parents on purpose. Alika Jimenez: Just the idea of quizzing about which word in your language is really smart. I would never have thought of that. You mentioned the home remedy. How do you, like you had some home remedies? Can you tell me more about if your life was mostly home remedy healthcare, not really at the doctor's office or if it's a lot of modern healthcare, how that is in your life? Toni Moreno: So I love how my dad would always say, and my mom too, she was like, we don't really call this Mexican food. We don't call this Indian food. It is just kind of–poor folk food. When they were raised, right, it was a lot of rice and beans and tortillas. When my folks were raising us, it was a lot of ground beef with tomato, onion, garlic, salt and pepper, and she makes it taste fantastic, but I didn't grow up on veggies and if I did, they were canned. It is a matter of survival, and this is, I don't want to ever say anything to demean my parents' means of being able to get us to the place that they want. We didn't really go to the doctor, I don't remember, but they always made it a point of us going to the dentist. But if we were sick, it would pass. I fell off my bike and it chipped my tooth. I can see it's crooked where it is now. I did not go to the doctor, but she did take me to the dentist to make sure my tooth wasn't going to fall out.

00:52:27.000 - 00:54:48.000

Toni Moreno: So I honestly don't know because dad had good insurance and when we needed to go to the doctor, we could. I will have to ask them now. I'm very fortunate that I still have both of my parents. They're in their mid seventies, but I don't think it was for a lack of affordability. I wonder if they just figured we would be, that we would be fine. They were fine, so we would be fine. I have a family member, I'm not going to say which one because I'm just not going to put our business out there like that, but they would put gasoline alcohol on cuts to clean them and heal them out. Alika Jimenez: Yeah. I've never tried that, so. Toni Moreno: I wouldn't recommend it. And they are fine. We don't have history of illnesses or cancers. We have some family members that have had, right, but the illnesses that come through for our line unfortunately is diabetes, and that's just for the food and some lack of inactivity and whatnot. For myself, I'll go to the doctor. I do my regular checkups, I get my vaccines. I go to the dentist less than I go to the doctor, which is not a good thing for my folks. They tried really hard, but I wouldn't say that my upbringing has influenced me largely one way or another. I would say the influence comes from honestly being able to afford, from having the type of job and having the insurance and knowing that it's an option. To me, it's a privilege, right? It's something that we work towards. We have the option and I can choose whether to go or not go. Alika Jimenez: Yeah, that makes sense. And I know that your nutrition and food can be really connected to your health and wellbeing, and you mentioned your mom would make tortillas herself. I'm curious more about any specific memories or favorite foods involving growing up with food or cooking. I know maybe it wasn't always cooking if you needed, but just curious about that.

00:54:48.000 - 00:58:17.000

Toni Moreno: Oh my God, yes. I remember just telling my husband, I was like the days when I would wake up on the weekends and I could smell the fresh tortillas that were cooking the pot of beans that was already on. And even the rice, I can tell when my husband's making rice because I can recognize the sauteing of the onion and the adding of the different, and it is my favorite smell in the whole wide world. So absolutely my mom and in West Texas, you do enchiladas where they're layered on top of it like a pie, and it is hardy, and you get an egg over easy and you put it on top. You're not going to find that over here. They'll look at you weird, but you go to West Texas, they offer it on the menu. But I have changed my diet to be respectful of my body, and I put it in mindset of indigeneity. Toni Moreno: We didn't have flour. I'll eat corn with abandon and I'll eat corn tortillas with abandon. But as soon as I stopped eating raw sugar, as soon as I stopped eating refined carbs, I don't do flour tortillas anymore. It is hard. It's very hard. But no spaghetti, no white rice, those kind of things. And I am in better physical condition because of it. But yes, my mom will make carne asada for Christmas time. She will make chicken tacos that her sister taught her how to make. Apparently my grandma didn't cook very much, and I don't know if that's why we don't have a whole bunch, but I can do a lot with some ground beef, a onion, tomato or a whole tomato and salt. Toni Moreno: My dad's great at barbecuing. I don't know where he gets that from. The chiles are pretty key, the green chiles and being able to make our own ranchero sauce, and that's good times. But other memories. Grandpa used to go fishing a lot. My dad wasn't the outdoor type. There were three brothers and it was only my oldest tio that really took to the camping and the fishing. I think I would've enjoyed it. We went fishing with my grandpa a couple of times and he could fish all night. He could sleep. He slept with the fish poles under his feet, and he would just knock his head back and then he could tell when the fish were biting because he'd fill it on his feet going back and visiting family. We would always drive. We never flew. We always drove taking the same paths and then hearing the same stories. Toni Moreno: Okay, so your Tia lives over here and they moved over here because her husband was in the Air Force, so they landed in San Angelo. That's how they came all the way out here. We were in Crane because we moved here after we lived in Valentine because of the, and so it was just tracing that history and that story. But those are the kind of things that I remember, especially with my dad and my Tio Frank, because my Tio Frank, like I said, he was the storyteller and the story keeper, he took us, it was a whole day. I didn't know we were going to be gone that many hours, but he took us and my grandpa was with us at the time, and we went to go visit the apple orchard that my dad lived at for a little while when they were little.

00:58:17.000 - 01:01:41.000

Toni Moreno: And he talked about being on the school bus for hours because it would take an hour just to get from the Runyon Ranch where they were to school and having to travel back. But my grandpa enjoyed going out there because he said, mija, how you see that house over there? I built that house. We were out there, and I'm the one that put that up on a different trip. My dear Frank had taken us out to a little town, little spot in the ground in New Mexico called Hagerman, and that's where some of our other relatives were. Nieves and his first five sons, his oldest son, settled in Hagerman. He took me to the cemetery and showed me where those relatives were before the rest of them moved off to California. Balmorhea and going swimming in the water and the fresh pool with the fishes in there, doing those kind of things. Alika Jimenez: That sounds really fun. You mentioned driving a lot, a lot to different places to meet family. Is most of your travel surrounded or is most of your travel intended to meet family or do you do travel for other reasons? How is your experience with leaving home and going around the country outside of your home? Toni Moreno: My parents brought us up to travel and to travel by ourselves and not to be scared of it. So I've been traveling since high school on my own for school things, for work things. So I don't have any problem with it. But vacation for me, I'm the dork of the family and I go back to Marfa and I like to go to the courthouse and I like to find records. And I'll take a road trip with my family’s side of the family and his nephews and go visit my old home places. I took them to Balmorhea. I took them to Carlsbad Caverns out in New Mexico where I used to go when I was little, but when I traveled with my family, they wanted to make sure that we knew that there was a bigger world out there. So they took us to Disneyland, they would take us out to NASA. Toni Moreno: They would make sure that we had money and we saved up. And whenever I worked, I went out to New York When I was in high school, we were parts of different programs, the National Hispanic Institute. And so I went out to California for one of 'em. So travel means different things to each one of us in our family. My dad was in Vietnam, he went to Hawaii. He traveled out from there, and he had always wanted to go back. My sister went to Europe before a semester in college to celebrate my folks' 50th anniversary and their 75th birthdays. My sister and I took my parents back to Hawaii so that my dad could have that experience that he had been wanting to go back for, since he was 20 years old, going to Vietnam. But he was able to show us on all the maps where he went to the Panama Canal, where he went to Okinawa, where he lived in Japan and those kind of things. But my sister's the traveler. She's taken 'em to Europe. She takes 'em on cruises. I'm not getting on boats. It was hard for me to get on the flight to get to Hawaii. But yeah, when I travel for pleasure, I go back and I visit family.

01:01:41.000 - 01:03:23.000

Alika Jimenez: That's cool to know that travel means something different to all of you, but you all get to do it and go together. Sometimes. This is kind of a, oh, sorry. Go ahead. If you have anything. Toni Moreno: My mom always says that I gave her roots and my sister gave her wings, and I think it's a really accurate capturing. Alika Jimenez: That's a very sweet saying. Yeah. So shifting a little bit . W e're coming towards the end of this interview, but I have a few more questions. One of them is, do you consider yourself a spiritual person? And if you are, how is that presented in your life? Toni Moreno: I do. I consider myself spiritual in both senses. My mom is a very devout Catholic, and we were raised Catholic. We went to private school. I went through middle school attending private. And so Catholicism, understanding all of that and what that's reflected when I started connecting with the indigenous population here, they had a different representation of spirituality. And what I noticed was that it didn't really fit and mesh with me. And so I had some cognitive dissonance and I was like, oh, maybe I'm just not indigenous enough. But then I connected with my indigenous people from West Texas and come to find out, we have a very strong affinity with the Catholic church. We don't have a negative relationship with the mission and the mission histories like other indigenous populations do. We actually have the Lady in Blue, so a saint that had exhibited, by location, abilities.

01:03:23.000 - 01:08:00.000

Toni Moreno: So she was actually, I believe it was in France where Jumanos were able to see and communicate. I personally believe, and it's something that I hold to that I live in both worlds in that respect. I don't completely cut off either side. I don't remember where I picked it up, but the idea that we all have different kind of gifts, and I have had experiences since I was little of being able to wake up from having had dreams and felt like some of my ancestors had communicated with me. Toni Moreno: […] Alika Jimenez: Yeah, definitely. Kind of hopping back to earlier when you were talking about being artistic, like photography, things like that, I'm curious, what is a piece of artwork –c an you describe something that you're the most proud of being involved with, whether it's your own piece or something you could do with family or something else? Toni Moreno: Honestly. Okay, one I'm going to show you. This one has actually stayed with me. I did this in high school. I probably did my best work in high school when I could actually paint and I was painting with acrylics and I tried to paint again probably during COVID when everybody was picking up their habits and passing it. I just wasn't any good at it anymore. I loved photography. I loved black and white photography. I loved being in the dark room, absolutely fantastic. I was not going to be a photojournalist. All of these things tie back to what are you going to do in beef when you grow up, but if you ask me, I wouldn't consider it art in this sense, but I took the time to compile all of the documents, all of the stories and all of the oldest pictures that I could and put 'em in one of those honestly Shutterfly books and I collected all of the names, all of the now great-grandchildren that I'm not even, I don't even know their birthdays. And I put 'em together and I got it printed out and I sent one to each of the brothers in my dad's side of the family. And I know that those have made the rounds to my cousins and that's what I'm the most proud of.

01:08:00.000 - 01:10:53.000

Alika Jimenez: Yeah, that sounds like such an amazing gift to receive. Toni Moreno: That was good times, my tio Frank, he's the storyteller. He actually was able to get ahold of – It's so funny to think about who's willing to share and what they have and who knows how long they've had it when, I don't know what prompts them to, but my Tio Frank had a picture of our great-grandpa. He had the original copy and he had copies made for all of us. He shared those out. My Tia Luisa’s daughter-in-law actually had a picture of my Tia Luisa's parents, Antonio and Maria. It was an original, she had copies made and she sent me one of those. And so I know it doesn't have anything to do with art, but photography has been kind of important in my ability to be able to actually see some of my ancestors that I've never met and collecting those I think would be my biggest contribution. But artistically not, we don't really sing, we don't play. My Tio Joe, he's fantastic at singing and playing the guitar, but nah, we are not musicians and not too artistically inclined. Not that we do and practice on a regular basis, Alika Jimenez: But I mean collecting all of the stories and this family tree, it is like a large storytelling practice I feel. Lastly, my last I think concrete question and then I'll just ask you if you have anything else you want to add. How does your work in academia and your environment there contribute to, I don't know, how do you feel? Do you feel like that's a place where you belong in within between other professors and students? How does that connect to your indigenous identity? How is that for you? Toni Moreno: That's an interesting and a tricky question for potential redaction. That way I can speak freely. I connected with the Indigenous Cultures Institute and through them and with them I'm learning about indigenous pedagogies and about learning being relational. I just completed my doctorate and started teaching at the collegiate level when I started getting introduced to these indigenous pedagogical practices, and that's what I take into the classroom. And so I feel like I have a stronger working relationship and healthier teacher student, but those are the wrong terms, learners, community of learners, and I take those practices into the classroom with me.

01:10:53.000 - 01:14:58.000

Toni Moreno: When it comes to knowledge and the creation of knowledge, I have a different perspective than much of academia and that's why I was so careful and look so closely at the consent forms because I am also looking at IRB processes and as a researcher and what does research look like and what does creation of knowledge look like and what does ownership of knowledge look like? And yes, from an indigenous perspective, from my personal perspective, I diverge quite significantly from traditional academia. I don't believe that knowledge is owned and I don't believe that it should be able to be possessed or sold or hidden behind a paywall that can only be accessed by individuals that can afford either college or fees to access the journals. I also have a different perspective of whose perspective is being put forth because of who's doing the studying and who's doing the sharing. Toni Moreno: However, I do consider myself and have a desire to be a translator or a bridge. I think we can communicate to and with each other that they don't have to be mutually exclusive. Just because I don't agree a hundred percent with western creations of knowledge and dissemination doesn't mean that there can't be some conversations and overlap about a deeper understanding and a desire for others to continue learning. Also, I think we have a lot more learning to do from nature and each other would be the primary difference as opposed to coming in as an expert and dissecting and explaining. Alika Jimenez: Yeah, thank you for sharing that. Again, I will send you the transcript and you can let me know what you want me to, but yeah, thank you for sharing that. Lastly, I just want to ask, are there any last thoughts or stories or things you'd like to share before we wrap up the interview? Toni Moreno: I would love if this project would bring us together so that we can compare our family trees so that we can see, so we can physically see how connected we are to each other. I love the thought that this is going broadly so that we can look at travel and patterns and settlings. Randomly, and because I think it's important, and I would love for this to be a part of my grandpa on my dad's side, Nieves Moreno, who had a first wife that nobody knew of, Natividad Olguin. She's actually from West Texas. Her family line is actually connected to my mom's side of the family line. So there's a deeper history than just West Texas and Chihuahua because my father's side of the family goes all the way down into Villa O’Campo, Durango, Mexico, and I would be fascinated to know what people's traveled up from Mexico because he clearly found a wife further up into Chihuahua and continued on and traveling. So yes, my parting thought is thank you so much for collecting these stories because they're still there and I have found hundreds of years and this was starting with we don't know anything, so I wonder by you all taking the time and talking to people that aren't related to see how those stories might connect, just like when my thes spoke to each other to find out how far back they were able to put their pieces and stories together. So thank you very much.

01:14:58.000 - 01:15:08.000

Alika Jimenez: Thank you so much. If that's everything, I'll stop the recording and then I'll debrief a little bit after.