As a sixty-plus year practitioner of generalism, I’ve always been a bit leery of specialist. Knowing just enough about a bunch of subjects to get into trouble regarding any of them has always seemed much more comfortable to me than diving deep into rabbit holes and coming back up to ask common, everyday folks (i.e., blog readers) questions like:

Why and how the heck did Adelina (“Nina”) Otero-Warren replace New Mexico’s single sitting U.S. House of Representative Néstor Montoya as Republican nominee in 1922?

Generalist that I’ve always been, I kinda feel self-conscious and a tad uncomfortable just bringing up the question to the millions of common folks who make up BB’s readership. Still, that’s where my head is at these days, less on modern non-motorized transportation and more on an obscure mid-term early 20th Century election that probably preoccupies the current mental space of precisely one person out of the almost 8 billion worldwide.

The Internet and its vast, easy, yet infuriatingly incomplete reservoir of information is at least somewhat to blame for this situation. In ye olden days your preoccupied humble blogger would invisibly exorcise this preocupation by spending 1.5 million hours at UNM and other libraries clacking through microfilm readers and diving into old, musty reference tomes nobody ever reads, before eventually coalescing thoughts and narrative into some fashion of published manuscript that nobody ever reads.

Nah, we’re not doing that. Instead, we’re gonna, maybe, answer a big question in a haphazard fashion over hundreds of disjointed blogposts. The shared aspect of this new v. old way of doing such things is that nobody will read these disjointed blogposts, either.

Unless.

Unless, somebody amongst the 8 billion out there somehow undergoes the mental equivalent of the monkeys at typewriters thing and somehow gets similarly obsessed with the question:

Why and how the heck did Adelina (“Nina”) Otero-Warren replace New Mexico’s single sitting U.S. House of Representative Néstor Montoya  as Republican nominee in 1922?

Yeah, the chances of that are not good. But this is the Internet and 8 billion is a lot of permutations. Monkeys, Shakespeare, reader, Nestor Montoya…I dunno, it could happen. More importantly, it doesn’t really matter, because that’s what we’re gonna do here anyway.

So let’s get back to the italicized question and begin our haphazard journey with an ad placed by the Bernalillo County Republicans in the September 6, 1922 edition of the Albuquerque Morning Journal:

With Shakespeare in mind, let’s use the rest of this already overly long post (this is the Internet, after all) for some Dramatis Personae before we subsequently dive into the five-act tragedy of Othello Néstor Montoya or almost triumph of Adelina Otero-Warren, depending on how you look at it.

O.A. Larrazolo (Octaviano Ambrosiano) is at the time of the ad/statement above New Mexico’s governor. He won’t be for long and ends up being the state’s last Hispano governor for over fifty years.

Frank A. Hubbell ran local and sometimes territorial/state Republican politics for decades of the late 19th and early 20th Century as boss or “Jefe Político” of his political machine following the established patterns of what is known in the literature as a “Patrón System.”

Néstor Montoya had served in a variety of Albuquerque/BernCo roles, including BernCo County Clerk, before winning his Congressional seat in 1920. In the course of that election, Montoya split from Hubbell and the Republicans to help form a pretty successful “fusion ticket” of disaffected Ds and Rs.

September 6, 1922 meant Republican state convention time back in those days and thus time to determine who would constitute the Party’s ticket in November’s election.

Having described a few of the actors and the setting, let’s leave the actual start of our long, long play for the next installment, as we also wonder just why Hubbell, Montoya and some Republicans thought placing such an ad/statement in the paper was necessary in the first place and who Adelina Otero-Warren was and what she might have thought about Hubbell, Montoya, and the fact that only the pronoun “his” and not “his or her” was employed in the ad/statement.