Quintana, Frances Leon

Frances Webster Léon was born on August 6, 1917 in Irvington, New York. In 1940, she married Morris H. Swadesh. Their marriage lasted until 1958, but she continued to use the surname Swadesh until 1978 when she married Miguel F. Quintana. Thereafter she published under the name Frances Léon Quintana.

Quintana completed her high school education at the International School of Geneva in 1933, after which she entered Vassar College to train as a teacher of French. She quickly discovered anthropology and became interested in Mayan artistic achievements. In 1936, Quintana conducted archeological field research at Chaco Canyon, New Mexico where her interactions exposed her to contemporary Navajo culture and the Quechua indigenous culture of Peru. She attended Yale University in 1938 on a one year graduate fellowship where she studied with Edward Sapir. After Sapir died, Quintana went to the Instituto Politécnico in Mexico City where she continued her linguistics studies with Sapir's former student Dr. Morris Swadesh. Under his auspices Quintana began working as a reading and writing teacher in Tarascan and Otomí indigenous communities of Mexico until 1940, at which time the newly elected Mexican president put an end to the Indian literacy projects. In that same year Quintana and Swadesh married. They returned to the U.S. in 1941. It was not until the early 1960s that she resumed her graduate studies at the University of Colorado. There, she joined the Tri-Ethnic Project as a research assistant, conducting field and archival research on Spanish-Ute-Anglo relations in southern Colorado. This research resulted in her 1962 M.A. thesis, The Southern Utes and Their Neighbors and directly contributed to her doctoral dissertation, Hispanic Americans of the Ute Frontier, which she completed in 1966.

From 1968-1973 Dr. Quintana served as ethnologist-evaluator for the Home Education Livelihood Program (H.E.L.P.), sponsored by the Museum of New Mexico. The program created national awareness about rural Hispanic poverty, discrimination, and land grant grievances. Dissatisfied with the treatment of the program by the Nixon administration, Quintana left H.E.L.P. She worked as Curator of Ethnology at the Laboratory of Anthropology/Museum of New Mexico in Santa Fe until 1978. During her tenure at the Laboratory of Anthropology, Dr. Quintana wrote Los Primeros Pobladores: Hispanic Americans of the Ute Frontier, first published in 1974. Following her employment with the Laboratory of Anthropology, Quintana continued ethnohistorical research for archeological projects as well as projects relating to Chicano heritage, the Alianza movement, land grants, water rights, Indian civil rights, and Indian-Hispanic relations.

Dr. Quintana's served briefly as a visiting professor at Antioch College and Colorado College and also gave class presentations at various venues in New Mexico. She is a well known and respected professional in the history, cultures, and politics of the Southwest.