Honoring Nina Otero-Warren with coin and student drama

By Judy and Dennis Reinhartz

Over a century after her birth, Nina Otero-Warren has been honored nationally in the United States and locally in Santa Fe. She was chosen by the U. S. Mint as one of the first five honorees in its American Women Quarters Program, which will be struck in San Francisco and run for the next four years with five women being so esteemed each year. The well known portrait of Washington appears on one side of the quarter, and a mature Otero-Warren is shown on the reverse with three New Mexico yucca flowers and the suffragist call Voto para la Mujer ("Votes for Women"). The other four women honored in 2022 are writer, performer, and social activist Maya Angelou; physicist, astronaut, educator, and first American woman in space Dr. Sally Ride; first female principal chief of the Cherokee Nation Wilma Mankiller; and first Chinese- American film star in Hollywood Anna May Wong. The quarter is one of the most popular and collected American coins, hence the women pictured in this eventual set of 20 will receive worldwide recognition.

In Santa Fe Otero-Warren was celebrated at the Nina Otero Community School, a pre- school to 8th grade school, by the performance of a unique play, "You Can Call Me Nina," created by some of its teachers and performed by students, dealing with her life and considerable achievements.

Maria Adelina Isabel Emilia (Nina) Otero (1881-1965) was born near Los Lunas into an old Hispano family. On her mother’s side, the Lunas came with Oñate in 1598, while her father was descended from settlers who emigrated from Spain in 1786. Nina attended a boarding school that came to be known as the Maryville College of the Sacred Heart in St. Louis from 1892 to1894. In 1897 she relocated from Los Lunas to Santa Fe, where her father’s cousin Miguel Antonio Otero had just been named Territorial Governor. She married Lt. Rawson D. Warren, a cavalry officer at Fort Wingate, in 1908 but divorced him two years later. She kept his name her entire life and referred to herself as a widow, a common practice at the time. After the death of her mother in 1914, Otero-Warren, now a suffragist, became the first Hispanic leader of Alice Paul's Congressional Union (soon to become the National Woman's Party) in New Mexico and also was a tireless worker on several key committees of the New Mexico Republican Party and the Federation of Women's Clubs. When New Mexico ratified the 19th Amendment, Alice Paul ascribed a major role in seeing it passed to Otero-Warren. Thereafter, she became the first female Santa Fe Superintendent of Instruction (1917- 1929), the chair of the New Mexico Board of Health, and in 1923 an inspector of Indian schools in Santa Fe County, opposing the federal policy of sending Native American children to government boarding schools away from their reservations for assimilation. In 1922, as a Republican she became the first Hispanic woman to run for Congress, challenging the Democrat John Morrow for New Mexico’s single seat in the House of Representatives. She campaigned in English and Spanish, championing the preservation of Spanish culture, restoration of Spanish land grants, and various education, health, and welfare issues. She was at least a generation ahead of her time and believed strongly in equal access to public education for all children. Her advocacy of bilingual education, Spanish language teaching, and the hiring of Hispanic women teachers, along with the fact of her divorce becoming public knowledge, insured her defeat by almost 9,500 votes.

But that did not end her service. President Franklin Roosevelt made her the state director of the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) and later the overall Director of Literacy Education for the CCC. During the New Deal, she worked tirelessly in the CCC and Works Progress Administration (WPA) for adult education, and she became deeply involved in the preservation of historic buildings and art, especially in Santa Fe and Taos. She also managed to write several books, including Old Spain in Our Southwest (1936) and Mexicans in Our Midst: Newest and Oldest Settlers of the Southwest.

Announcement of the Nina Otero Quarter inspired the Nina Otero Community School teachers and students to want "to do something special as a school," said fourth grade teacher Brenda Dominguez. "We have been honored to have Nina Otero as our namesake and wanted to share this with our community." The results were collages and poems by Dominguez's students and "You Can Call Me Nina." The play has students acting as KOAT-TV news anchors and reporters interviewing the Santa Fe Public Schools superintendent, various New Mexico politicians, and people on the street about Otero-Warren and her accomplishments, but due to a time travel glitch they are transported back in time to talk to her in person. At the end of the play, when the anomaly is fixed, Superintendent Hilario Chavez, U. S. Rep. Teresa Leger Fernandez, former state Rep. Linda Trujillo (representing Gov. Michelle Lujan-Grisham), and Santa Fe City Councilor Renee Villareal share some of their thoughts about Otero-Warren. As the play came together, Carlos Carreon’s seventh and eighth grade class filmed and edited the play and the ensuing real time interviews. The final collaborative production has a running time of approximately 16 minutes and was premiered at the school to an audience of the student actors and other students, teachers, parents, community members, and Superintendent Chavez and Deputy Superintendent Vanessa Romero. "Throughout the process of developing the play, we all learned much about our namesake, and we were able to teach both students and adults about the powerhouse known as Nina Otero-Warren," said Brenda Dominguez.

The play may be viewed on Youtube