Scandinavia and the Southwest may seem worlds apart, but UNM’s Center for Southwest Research contains a collection of oral histories that reveals how one group of people from Europe’s cold northern fringes—the Finns—came to call sunny New Mexico home.
In 1991, amateur historian Dr. Raymond Wargelin led an effort to interview people of Finnish heritage living in New Mexico. He and a team of interviewers eventually produced thirty-six recordings, which are now cataloged and available to researchers as the Finlandia Society of Albuquerque Oral History Project.
Topics of discussion varied, but most of the interviewees, especially those who were born in Finland, reflected on the two most important events in twentieth-century Finnish history: the Revolution of 1917-18, whereby Finland acquired its independence from Russia, and the Winter War of 1939-40, when the country resisted Soviet invasion during the Second World War. Others spoke about the experiences of their immigrant parents, what it was like to grow up in Finnish-American communities, and efforts to preserve Finnish national customs abroad.
Jobs in mining, forestry, and agriculture, as well as a mild climate and sense of adventure, were what brought most Finns to New Mexico. A few, such as Tauno Keranen, came to seek relief for tuberculosis.
Although their numbers were small, Finns made several important contributions to their adopted state.
The most prominent Finn to put down roots in New Mexico was Yrjö Paloheimo. Born in 1899 into a wealthy family with a passion for the arts, he grew up in the company of painters, novelists, and musicians, including Finland’s greatest composer, Jean Sibelius, with whom he remained in touch for many years (his eldest brother Arvi married Sibelius's daughter Eva). Reminiscing about his childhood, Paloheimo remembered dancing with a group of children one winter day while Sibelius improvised at the piano. “It was born and it disappeared at the same time,” he said of the piece.
When Finland declared its independence in 1917, the young Paloheimo helped out in the war that followed by delivering secret messages. After the Revolution, he studied agriculture and lived in California briefly before returning to Finland. In 1933, however, he came back to the U.S. for good, marrying Leonora Curtin, a wealthy socialite with an interest in Southwestern history and culture. The couple built a home in Santa Fe and restored an eighteenth-century ranch located along the former Camino Real. Opened to the public in 1972 as El Rancho de las Golondrinas, it is now the Southwest’s premier living history museum.
Although Wargelin lost the original recording, he also interviewed Hella Broeske Shattuck. Born Hellä Keränen to Finnish immigrants in South Dakota in 1906, she moved to New Mexico from Oregon in 1929 and joined the booming local arts scene. In Taos, she lived for a few years with Mabel Dodge Luhan, who had recently hosted one of Finland’s most important artists, Akseli Gallen-Kallela. Acclaimed today for his illustrations of the Finnish national epic, the Kalevala, he had visited Taos to study Native American art. With Sibelius, Gallen-Kallela took a leading role in helping Finland develop its national identity.
Hella painted many Indian pueblos and developed close ties with Native and Hispanic communities. In 1936, she illustrated a popular textbook, George Hammond and Thomas Donnelly’s The Story of New Mexico. Her first husband, Fritz Broeske, used her original pen-and-ink drawings to design the book’s woodcuts.
Another Finn who left his mark on New Mexico was Kaarlo Jokela. A native of Jyväskylä, he came to the U.S. in 1953, following in the footsteps of his grandparents, who had worked in Massachusetts in the early 1900s before returning to Finland and purchasing a farm. Joining the American air force, Jokela was stationed in southern Germany and assigned to the ski patrol. In the 1960s, after graduating from college in Colorado, he purchased the Thunderbird Lodge in the Taos Ski Valley. With fellow European immigrants and army vets Ernie Blake and Jean Mayer, whom he mentions in his oral history, Jokela played a part in developing the valley into the world-famous ski destination that it is today.
To explore these and other oral histories, stop by the Center for Southwest Research & Special Collections, located in the historic west wing of UNM’s Zimmerman Library. A related collection of interest is the Lutheran Family Folklore / Folklife Oral History Project. Papers of Yrjö Paloheimo and his family are available at the Women’s International Study Center / Acequia Madre House archives in Santa Fe.
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