glad to greet you and wait on you with a smile. Almost all the food on the menu is served spicy.” De la Garza said that he admires the official Green Building Code that went into effect July 21, 2009 in Santa Fe, which is rigorously applied and enforced. De La Garza commented, “Many of the tourists we spoke to said that that they had visited there before or that they would like to visit again -- maybe Laredo can learn something from Santa Fe. We definitely need to work on improving a few things.” Not far from Santa Fe is the centuriesold Taos Indian pueblo, a city that has been inhabited since three or four hundred years before Columbus discovered America. “It is constructed entirely of adobe, and it is completely under Native American control,” De La Garza said, adding, “The tribal government makes all the decisions, not the state government. They have their own tribal governor and their own department of tourism. The shows and seminars they conduct are part of an effort to raise public awareness of the American Indian way of life. The place is very well maintained, and it attracts tourists from all over the world.” The Loretto Chapel on the Old Santa Fe Trail is the home of the Miraculous Staircase of Saint Joseph, a beautiful, winding staircase in pristine condition that is no longer in use for reasons of preservation. It is much visited and much appreciated for its fine workmanship and graceful appearance. De La Garza explained how the staircase came to be considered ‘miraculous.’ “Since the architect of the chapel had suddenly died before the church was completed, the chapel was left unfinished, with no means of access to the raised choir loft. The nuns prayed hard to St. Joseph for divine intercession, and one night a hungry stranger came to the church in the middle of the night and was given food and shelter by the Sisters of Loretto. “The stranger was a carpenter by trade. When he became aware of the nuns’ di-
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lemma he asked for, and was granted, three months of total privacy within the chapel. At the end of three months, the nuns reentered the chapel to find the stranger gone. They also found, rising in a graceful spiral from the floor to the choir loft, an incredibly beautiful staircase made of non-native woods and put together entirely with joinery -- no nails were used,” De la Garza said. The investigative television program Unsolved Mysteries explored the idea that the spiral staircase at Loretto was built by German woodworker Johann Hadwiger, a claim made by Hadwiger’s grandson Oscar Hadwiger, who could produce no evidence to substantiate his claim. The chapel, now under private ownership, is a popular wedding venue, and the Miraculous Stairway is billed as the Helix to Heaven. A visit to the Río Grande Gorge is a natural for a band of sightseeing schoolteachers from Old Laredo while in northern New Mexico, and the De la Garza party zipped over in their rented car and got an awesome eyeful of the 800-foot-deep canyon formed
by eons of seismic activity (which continues to this day) known as the Río Grande Gorge. “It’s an impressive sight to see the Río Grande running crystal-clear through that majestic landscape, long before it winds its way down to us in Laredo,” De La Garza said. Yet another site worth visiting in northern New Mexico is the little adobe church of miracles known as the Santuario de Chimayó. Multiple legends about this humble little structure, some dating back centuries to pre-Colonial times, add to its intrigue and have long attracted visitors to the site to see and seek miracles. Early Spanish missionaries commented that the spot in the hillside near the Santa Cruz River where the shrine is now located was an Indian pilgrimage destination even before a chapel was built over it in 1815. It was Good Friday, 1910 when Bernardo Abeyta, a member of the Hermandad de Nuestro Padre Jesús el Nazareno (Penitentes), saw bright lights emanating from the hillside as he walked home. Curious, he climbed up to the light’s source -- a foot-wide hole in
the ground containing a crucifix, which he picked up and carried to the local church. But the crucifix kept mysteriously returning to its native niche in the soil on the hillside. After several repetitions of the round-trip phenomenon, the area residents and the local clergy decided to build a chapel over it where it could be permanently housed. The crucifix as well as the soil at that location are said to possess miraculous healing qualities, and thousands of pilgrims flock to the shrine several times each year. In 1970 it was designated as a National Historic Landmark by the Department of the Interior. “People are allowed to take small quantities of the soil home with them -- yet they say that the soil keeps replenishing itself at the source,” De La Garza said. Before heading south on I25 to Albuquerque to board a jet back to Dallas, the De La Garza party stopped by the studios of Amado Peña in downtown Santa Fe. As most Laredoans know, or certainly should know by now, Amado Peña is Laredo’s most successful and famous artist ever. His Indian and Southwest motifs are instantly recognizable the world over. “We’re old friends -- we went to high school together,” De La Garza said. The two good friends had a lot to talk about as they toured Peña’s multi-roomed studios loaded with a treasure-trove of masterpieces from the master’s hand. “He’s incredibly prolific,” De La Garza said, “and he and I are going to continue to strive to secure a worthy place in Laredo to house some of his paintings in a permanent collection,” De La Garza said. As the De La Garza party discovered first-hand, the string-of-pearls of compelling cultural sites on and all around New Mexico’s Turquoise Trail is in a way like a holy rosary that, if you count its beads, can lead you right back to the deep, beautiful heart of Laredo. ◆
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