My New Mexico

A photographer digs deep into his archives for images that stir memories of a place he can’t forge t BY

KEVIN MOLONEY

In late January 1998 I stood enchanted, photographing the setting sun’s glow on the modest, weather-beaten monument atop the ruin mounds of San Gabriel de Yunque-Ouinge. That year marked an important anniversary; it had been 400 years since more than a dozen of my soldier-colonist ancestors and their families took over the homes of the Tewa people who lived in this small pueblo. It crouches just across the Río Grande from Ohkay Owingeh, called San Juan de los Caballeros by the Spanish who arrived there in 1598. Throughout that anniversary year I photographed one site after another where my family disrupted the Indigenous world with war, taxation, and disease until they fused with it through intermarriage and collective struggle.

My family is a mix of wanderers, explorers, and refugees who all found themselves in what was long the most remote outpost in North America of any government that claimed it. With names like Márquez, Pérez de Bustillo, Robledo, and Baca, they pushed in with Spanish conquistador Juan de Oñate, became Mexican citizens in 1821, and then Americans in 1848. Their children married into wandering, exploring, refugee Irish and German families. My greatgreat grandfathers founded San Luis, the oldest town in Colorado. To them the state line was just a bureaucratic imposition across which culture and family flowed as unimpeded as the waters of the Río Grande. When I am asked where I am from, I reply that I was born in Colorado. But really, because of my long, deep roots here, I am of New Mexico.

To be of New Mexico is to have a very long memory. Those memories come from a heart swelling with pride or sometimes a stomach knotted with grudge. Like most things in a desert, they last forever. If, as photographer Minor White once wrote, all photo - graphs are ultimately self-portraits, my New Mexico images are memories that connect my lifetime to a cascade of others—they inhabit my bones. To be of New Mexico is to know that anything that happened in the last 200 years, even the invention of photography, is recent news.

To be of New Mexico is to know that architecture is inhabited by the land rather than simply built atop it. Whether it is the 1,000-year-old Taos Pueblo, Santa Fe’s cherished 1610 chapel of San Miguel, or Mexican modernist Ricardo Legorreta’s Santa Fe Art Institute, valued structures here fuse with the landscape so fundamentally that they could only be replicated soullessly elsewhere. In other cities glass towers and particle-board tract houses sit temporarily atop the ground, waiting to be scraped off by environmental or developmental disasters. To be of New Mexico means that no matter where you live, you long for a home that is cradled by the land.

To be of New Mexico is to have a religion, no matter what that might be. Among those soldier-colonists of 1598 were zealous treasure seekers, dogmatic conquerors, pilgrim refugees of European caste systems, secretive crypto-Jews fleeing the Inquisition, and a handful of Franciscan friars hoping to convert by charm or force the Indigenous people who, despite those efforts, held onto important traditions. From those friars and the self-punishing Penitentes they inspired to ashrams, Sikh enclaves, and Latino Pentecostals, mystical religions abound here. Many of us also find belief and meaning outside established religion, as I have in the vocation of journalism or the priesthood of teaching.

My father, who had the heart and imagination of a mystic, carried that fervor to his own work as a photojournalist and a teacher. His love of land, image, and ritual attracted me irresistibly while I traveled with him as a child, making pictures of New Mexico and the West. No matter the mythology or mode, to be of New Mexico is to believe in something passionately and selfsacrificially.

To be of New Mexico is also to understand that eventually your culture will be changed by collision or conflict with another. From prehistoric Clovis people to Ancestral Puebloans, Navajo, Pueblo, and Apache, Indigenous people have arrived, colonized, created, and dissipated here for millennia. They conflicted with ever-larger bands of Europeans, from Spaniards in 1598 and 1692 to blue-coated American soldiers in 1846.

Those soldiers opened routes to St. Louis on the far Mississippi River that my merchant great-great grandfather Dario Gallegos traveled. As a young man he joined the Santa Fe Trail trade and made commercial connections on the other side of the Plains that he later used to stock a mercantile store—still in business—in San Luis. Those wagon trains, then the Santa Fe Railroad and Route 66, brought rare goods, new ideas, and eventually artists and writers seeking distant inspiration. They changed Taos, Abiquiu, and Santa Fe in their wake. To be of New Mexico is to know that more collisions will come, and that Santa Fe will again and again become a “city different.”

To be of New Mexico is to savor each meal as if it is your last. The high desert surrenders little surplus. Until the railroads changed the economics of supply, privation or starvation were only a dry or freezing season away. Here food is celebration, food is art, food is love. Traditional local dishes abound in the terroir of difficulty: earthy, complex, sharp, piquant, and bitter. My Nana’s Depression-era recipe for posole—our Christmas Eve staple still—embodies all of this through only six ingredients: dry hominy and red chiles from Fernandez Chile Company in Alamosa, garlic, oregano, salt, and a lamb or mutton shank simmered atop a stove all day. When local dishes are sweet—natillas, atoles, buñuelos—that sweetness is subtle, as if it is hard-won, and travels in the company of bitterness from cinnamon or anise. To be of New Mexico is to know that your food tells a fraught, complex story.

And yet anyone who considers themselves of a place would argue all these same things. The 1863 bricks of my current home in Indiana were kilned on site from local clay and its foundation stones were cut from the bedrock strata below. The river that winds past is a stream of long history, change, and conflict. People here are as passionate in their beliefs as my New Mexican family is.

Why, then, is New Mexico different? If you are reading this in Albuquerque, Santa Fe, Abiquiu, Las Cruces, or even across that random and imperceptible bureaucratic line in San Luis, you know that it looks, breathes, and feels different. The air and sun feel as unique as a cool summer evening and as memorable as the incense of a piñon fire. It sneaks up on you like the warm, delicately acrid palate glow of good red chile.

As I write this, I search for the word that describes how New Mexicans, whether transplants or natives, feel about this place. In my photographs I see it in the sharp light of the Jornada del Muerto, the warm colors on the walls of Laguna Pueblo, the open skies above the ruins at Salinas, the dark and miraculous nave at Chimayó, and the ghosts of hundreds of generations who called this home. Is it complexity? Contradiction? Continuity? Many other places can argue the same.

I keep returning to a description of this place coined in 1906 by journalist Lilian Whiting. After a bit of nostalgic, familial, heart-filling consideration, I argue it all comes down to this: To be of New Mexico is to be enchanted. R