page_title: Adelina Otero-Warren
section_title: Early life and education
hierarchical_section_title: Adelina Otero-Warren / Early life and education
caption_attribution_description: English: Title: Adelina Otero-Warren Abstract/medium: 1 negative&#160;: glass&#160;; 5 x 7 in. or smaller.
context_page_description: Adelina "Nina" Otero-Warren was a woman's suffragist, educator, and politician in the United States. Otero-Warren created a legacy of civil service through her work in education, politics, and public health. She became one of New Mexico's first female government officials when she served as Santa Fe Superintendent of Instruction from 1917 to 1929. Otero-Warren was the first Latina to run for Congress. In 1922, she ran for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives as the Republican candidate for New Mexico.
context_section_description: On October 23, 1881, María Adelina Isabel Emilia (Nina) Otero was born on her family's hacienda “La Constancia,” close to Los Lunas, New Mexico. Her mother, Eloisa Luna Otero Bergere, and father, Manuel B. Otero, were part of the Hispanic elite (known as Hispanos). Her mother's family were among the first to settle in New Mexico arriving in 1598 during the Oñate settlement. Her father was also a descendant of longtime settlers, who migrated to New Mexico from Spain in 1786. Manuel was well-educated, studying in Washington D.C. at Georgetown University and in Germany at Heidelberg University, while her mother had studied at a Catholic Academy in New York. Her ancestors' successful "sheep drives" in California in the Gold Rush era enabled the family to develop political connections and rise to being landowners. Otero-Warren had an older brother, Eduardo, who lived from 1880 to 1932, and a younger brother, Manuel, who lived from 1883 to 1963, and nine half siblings.
  In 1883, her father died during a quarrel against a band of Anglos who questioned his property ownership, leaving his daughter fatherless at the age of two. In 1886, Otero-Warren's mother married Alfred Maurice Bergere, an Englishman. The businessman had migrated to New Mexico in 1880 and worked for the Spiegelberg brothers’ mercantile enterprise. He was well-connected to the German mercantile and Anglo-American families in the New Mexican territory. This cross-cultural marriage between Eloisa and Alfred merged political and economic agendas between Anglos and the Spanish elite.
  Her mother raised Adelina within the traditional realm of a Spanish Hacienda in Los Lunas, surrounded by relatives and other well-to-do Hispanic families. Their family lived in the Luna Mansion, an adobe-brick home built to resemble a Southern plantation. The Santa Fe Railroad built the Luna Mansion in 1881 in exchange for the rights to pass through the Lunas' land. Adelina was raised, in part, by an Irish governess named Mary Elizabeth Doyle.
  Her mother was an activist for social and educational developments, and in the early 1900s, she became the director of Santa Fe’s Board of Education. A mother figure of Santa Fe, she opened her home to political exchange. Her mother focused on the importance of education, improving schools locally, and she cared for those who are poor and sick. 
  From 1892 to 1894, Otero-Warren attended a private Catholic boarding school (later known as Maryville College of the Sacred Heart) in Saint Louis, Missouri. This school helped develop her social consciousness, and it imparted the idea that women could have careers as teachers and community leaders. Even from a young age, her family remembers her desires to lead, describing that she "had the brains of the family." After returning from her time in St. Louis, she taught her siblings what she had learned in school, and asked her male relatives to teach her how to shoot pistols and other firearms so she could protect herself.
  
  In 1897, she moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, when her father Manuel's cousin, Miguel Antonio Otero II, was appointed territorial governor of New Mexico (1897-1906).
caption: Adelina Otero-Warren, 1900
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