Conversazione by Cristina Gonzalez

One of my work projects is to put together the very first San Miguel County-wide Artist Guide, a full-color 68-page book of our artists, artisans, writers, poets, musicians, theatre folk. 188 artists are participating in the project, and even though this is a small town and a sparsely populated county, the number of artists we sport is much, much higher. It’s a start, though, a beautiful start.

The guide goes to print next week. Already, our pre-publicity efforts have resulted in several national media venues contacting us with requests for artist interviews. Look for your artistic friends featured in print and on television soon! My heartfelt thanks to every artist who is participating in the guide.

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The roads outside of Las Vegas churn over age-chiseled rock, curve around prairie swells as gentle and curvaceous as any woman’s breast. They reach into villages you may not know exist, into hidden river valleys as old and mysterious and familiar as La Folia. You can hear the early summer rush of the Rio Gallinas, of the Rio Pecos, nature’s music as mad and deceptively repetitive as Corelli’s skipping rise of heartbreaking violin.

Listen to La Folia. Listen to it. I dare you to listen with open eyes. You can’t. The New Mexican sun rises, orange-red flame returns rooster call, blankets your coffee with sweet cream, a kindness to mask bitter reality. But La Folia is the sunset, is purple and black and tangled, is the weary comfort of Orien’s Belt over Johnson’s Mesa, the scatter of forgotten villages with names like San Ignacio, Tecolotito, El Cerrito, Las Dispensas, San Geronimo, villages so dust-covered that you could zoom and zoom into a Google Map and never find them.

These are the places where art isn’t art. A painting of the Madonna on a broad flat of oak – in colors that mimic the amber pitch of piñon, the soft ocher of a desert rose, the faded green of sweetgrass – inspires you to kneel, to move your right hand to forehead, chest, each shoulder in succession. Pull that painting into a town gallery, and it looks like Art, a souvenir of a weekend trip through Northeastern New Mexico, perhaps, or a gift for a devout grandmother. But in rural San Miguel, in a cosy adobe home fashioned from the very earth herself, the Madonna offers a living smile. She breathes. She carries sacred memory. She sees the Eucharist hit extended tongue. She blesses a hundred thousand moments with her outstretched hands, the serpent beneath her bare feet hissing, waiting, angry.

An old man met me for coffee and conversation on the Old Town Plaza. White hair stuck up in tufts around his ears. He walked with a slight stoop, a carved wooden statue under each arm. He didn’t have to tell me that it was his first visit to the cafe. He looked unsure. He looked unsteady. He sat at my table, but didn’t loosen his grip on San Martin, on the Virgin of Guadalupe. The tiny dull scars of chisel lined both of his hands.

I am the foreigner when I meet an old Spaniard. My ancestors didn’t farm this land for four hundred years. My love for Las Vegas, though deep, is crisp and new. It hasn’t weathered decades of summer monsoon hail and fury. My father didn’t have stories to share of Anglo cattle barons stealing family land, my mother didn’t cry tales of having to work as a cafeteria worker at the local schools because of a Spanish last name. I am the invader, the symbol of oppression, the ghost of every stolen acre, every racist remark. Las Vegas has – ever since it was founded by the Spanish – carried a Hispanic-dominant population. But that means nothing when a handful of rich Anglos ride onto the Plaza with Westward Ho on their breath, hands on loaded gun.

It is still the way of Las Vegas to be Spanish or Anglo, East or West. The townspeople know a divide wider than the river that splits the town, as wide as the crevice between Hermit Peak’s two monoliths. Doesn’t matter your ethnicity; if your family didn’t call the slip of land between the Sangre de Cristo range and Great Plains home for a few hundred years, if your family didn’t carry a last name like Vigil, Santillanes, Romero, then you are Anglo. You can be Native American, African American, Japanese, Russian, Irish, Armenian. Anglo. It’s fair, I think. If you’re not from here, you don’t get it. I don’t get it, and I’ve been interviewing and writing about long-time residents for years, working my pen under their skin. I get it as much as any Anglo can, but I know it’s not enough.

The old man eyed me with trepidation. I knew that he took a risk in driving to town to meet the crazy woman on the phone who asked him to share his art with the world in the pages of the first county-wide artist guide. I didn’t call it art when I called him. I called his wooden statues “Blessed Works.”

“We have so many people in our county who share faith through their works,” I said over the phone. I cringed as I used the word ‘our,’ immediately knowing it was a mistake. I heard the sharp intake of breath. My voice didn’t lilt in Castilian lullaby. I spoke like an East Coast grade-school Spanish teacher, my consonants a little rough, forced. My tongue trips over the soft “t” of Tecolotito, the little owl, the village the man calls home.

But the old man came to meet me. He carried the hand-hewn labors of his faith. He let me photograph him, there in the cafe, his back to a mauve stucco wall, a living, sentient piece of wood cradled in each arm. He tilted his head, placed the Virgin on a tall table, reached into a worn denim pocket, and paid twenty-one dollars and fifty-three cents for his artist guide listing and photograph in pennies, nickels, and dimes.

“I think all of us want to do good things,” he said. He scooped the Virgin back under one arm. “I will take this chance. Just this one time. I’m 93 years old, after all.” He shook his head as if he had just uttered a joke. “I don’t want to sell my santos. But I want my great-grandchildren to hold this book and know that they come from a long line of santeros.”

A middle-aged man in jeans and a worn button-down shirt sat at the cafe piano. He flipped open the scratched mahogany cover with a thunk, his large hands pressed key into submission, into a pattern ancient and alive. La Folia. A shaft of sunlight played with his salt-and-pepper hair.

“My grandmother played that song,” the old man smiled. “We keep waiting for things to happen, but we want certain people to take the reigns. Sometimes that happens. Sometimes it doesn’t. But we all have to work together, hey?”

That kind of generosity comes from ninety-three years of hard labor. The old man’s father carved local pine into heavenly beauty, as does his son, his granddaughter. Generations of santeros dot the fertile valleys. As your car winds over cattle guard, through acres of scrubby brush, past a fallen adobe morada, you can’t help but feel the sunlight shoot through your veins. When you own land this stark and beautiful over many generations, the divine works through you in ways strong and true.

Next week, the guía artista goes to print. The art of nearly 200 local artists – musicians, santeros, painters, poets – will call us to gasp, to wonder, to smile in recognition, to cry in memory. We all have a long way to go, a long life ahead of us on this fine planet. But with such a wealth of beauty surrounding us, how can we go wrong?

Blessed are the Artists.