En la conformidad está la felicidad.
Agreement brings happiness.
We came to Chimayó today without expectations, and we’re dazzled by apricot blossoms glowing brightly against a cracked adobe wall on a small tree near the plaza. This beleaguered tree greets the spring against all odds. No one planted it; it probably sprouted from a discarded pit, and it gets water only at the whim of rainfall. The fruit will bud as the flowers fade, but it will almost certainly freeze in the next few weeks. And the building beside it—no one has plastered it in years, and it may not even be standing next year.
After I take many photographs of the blossoms against the cracked walls, Mom and I stop in at Ortega’s Weaving Shop, right across the road from Grandma’s house. When I stayed in Chimayó in the summers, I would wake every morning to the sound of the big looms banging away as David Ortega and his brother Joe turned out blankets. As a teenager, I worked at the weaving shop, making 26-by-42-inch and, later, 36-by-60-inch rugs. David and his sons Robert and Andrew taught me to weave, although it’s been long in our family. David’s father, Nicasio, was my great-grandfather Reyes’s younger brother. Reyes opened a weaving shop in Chimayó first, in 1900, although he had been weaving for dealers in Santa Fe (principally Jesusito Candelaria) for years. Tío Nicasio followed by opening his own weaving shop across from Reyes’s, and the two competed for the rare tourist who came up the road from Española.
I have many fine pieces from Reyes, and one from his father, José Ramón Ortega y Vigil, that must have been woven in the 1880s—a beautiful striped piece made of hand-spun and -dyed wool. I also have blankets woven by my grandfather Abedón Chávez, who learned from my grandmother how to weave and became one of the best weavers in Chimayó. In fact, David Ortega always said that Abedón was the best weaver he had ever known.
As we’re talking about old family weavings, Robert takes us downstairs to show us one he’s recently acquired, a large rug bearing a thunderbird design in the center, with thunderbolts and swastikas in the borders. It was woven by my grandpa Reyes prior to World War II, before swastikas as symbols became synonymous with evil. In Reyes’s time, the swastika was one of a number of symbols associated with Native American culture, and, like other such symbols, it was used in Hispanic arts to give them a kind of Native American cachet. (The swastika was a sacred symbol in many cultures worldwide before the Nazis appropriated it.) A customer gave the rug to Robert, saying that his grandparents had bought it from Reyes.
After chatting with Robert and his brother Andrew, who owns the Galería Ortega next door, we get back in the car and drive down to “the second arroyo,” not far from the old plaza, on a road Mom knew well in her youth. (“We don’t have street names here; we go by arroyos,” she reminds me.) We want to call on Alicia Martínez, an old family friend whom we haven’t seen for some years, but it’s proving difficult to pick out her house from the maze of newer homes and trailers. Most of the old houses Mom knew as landmarks are gone, and we wouldn’t think of calling Alicia to tell her we were coming or to ask directions; that would be outside of the etiquette of visiting in Chimayó.
This part of Chimayó is known as Los Ranchos, a common moniker among New Mexico place-names that means “the farms.” If a plaza ever stood here, it has long since vanished, although there apparently once was a chapel here dedicated to San Joaquín. A will left by José Antonio Cruz in 1837 mentions a small room, three vigas wide, dedicated to his patron saint, “mi padre mio San Juaquin.” There is a morada still standing here and in use by a handful of Hermanos, but it is dedicated primarily to El Señor de Esquipulas.
Looking in vain in Los Ranchos for Alicia’s home and any sign of the old plaza, we spot someone stepping out of a garage and walking toward a house set back a distance from the road. I flag him down.
“¡Oiga! Ando buscando la casa de Alicia Martínez.—Hey! I’m looking for Alicia Martínez’s house,” I call out.
Morada, Los Ranchos, ca. 1990.
The man turns and calls back, “Queda más por este rumbo.—It’s farther down that way,” pointing down the road.
Then recognition dawns for both of us. I knew Aaron years back, when I interviewed his mother, Cordelia, in 1990 for my first Chimayó book, Sabino’s Map: Life in Chimayó’s Old Plaza. He walks over and leans in the window to greet my mother. The conversation resumes, now in English, as I introduce Aaron.
“Oh, hi. Of course I know who you are, but I don’t know if we’ve met,” Aaron says, assuming a more formal tone when he addresses Mom. “I’m Cordelia and Estevan’s son.”
“Yes, I remember Estevan, from the plaza—José Inez’s son. He was our relative somehow. My mother always called him ‘primo José Inez,’” Mom answers.
“It was through the Ortegas,” Aaron explains.
“The Ortegas? How is that?”
“On my father’s side,” Aaron continues. “My grandfather was second cousin to José Ramón Ortega—”
“My great-grandpa,” Mom interjects.
“Yes, my father’s grandmother, María Antonia Ortega—José Ramón’s sister—was married to Concepción Trujillo, of Río Chiquito,” Aaron continues. “And on the other side, my other grandfather’s father, Crístobal Martínez, married a daughter of Pedro Asencio Ortega.”
“Really? Pedro Asencio was Grabiel Ortega’s son. That goes way back,” my mother offers, alluding to the fact that Grabiel Ortega was the first Ortega to settle in Chimayó, in the early 1700s. “But I remember now we also were related to your mother, Cordelia. Her father, Torbio Trujillo, was brother to Severiano and Nicolás. Severiano married Seniada Ortega, my grandpa’s sister, so we were connected that way, through marriage.”
I am quickly losing track of who is who.
“That’s right,” Aaron goes on, “but it goes back farther on that side, too. María Francisca Ortega, who was born in 1797 to José Manuel Pablo Ortega and Ana María Gonzales, married José del Carmen Trujillo. Their son was José Concepción Trujillo from Rincón—not to be confused with the José Concepción Trujillo from Río Chiquito. Their son Toribio was my mother’s father.
“And actually, Severiano—who, like you said, married your great-aunt, Senaida—was only half brother to Toribio. See, Toribio’s mother was Chonita Coriz; Severiano’s mother was Josefa Pacheco. Chonita came from Santa Fe as a girl to be a servant in Josefa and José Concepción’s house. After Josefa died, Concepción married the servant, Chonita—my grandpa Toribio’s mother.”
“I didn’t know that,” Mom comments, and at this point I am completely lost in the Gordian knot and don’t even know what she doesn’t know. “I just knew we were related to the Trujillos of Rincón through Severiano. We considered Severiano’s brothers, including Toribio, Nicolás, and others, to be tíos. We didn’t know Toribio was a half brother to them,” Mom adds.
“Toribio had ten half brothers in all and only one sister,” Aaron explains. “I found out by studying the genealogy.”
“Anyway,” Mom concludes, “that’s why my mother called your grandfather ‘primo José Inez.’”
“Then for sure we’re cousins,” I finally chime in, making the only statement I’m certain of.
Aaron is restoring a 1952 Ford pickup he keeps in the garage. He swings open the doors to show it to us. It leers from the darkness, a chrome and steel behemoth reeking of gasoline and oil. Aaron tells us this was his father’s truck and that he intends to paint it and overhaul the engine in the coming year. He’s retired from his job in Los Alamos but still lives there. He was in the habit of visiting his mother, Cordelia, in Chimayó. But she’s passed on, and he comes now to maintain the house and fiddle with the old truck. It’s like this with so many people in Chimayó who have moved away, including us with our family land and houses: having property gives us an excuse to visit and, while we’re at it, to reconnect with family roots, to remember the old days, and to retouch the earth—or the old machinery.
Leaving the Second Arroyo and Aaron behind, Mom and I cross through the Plaza del Cerro and then take Baca’s Road up past the Presbyterian cemetery. We’re coming this way so she can confirm for me the location of a landmark mentioned in a document we have, dated April 18, 1766. That paper, a petition by Antonia Lopes for a division of land, refers to a piedra azul (blue rock outcropping) at the edge of the mountains: “por lindero una peña azul que está a la margen del serro de parte de horiente.—for a boundary a blue rock that is on the edge of the hill on the east part.”
Mom was able to connect this description with a place she used to go in her childhood to get a view of the Chimayó Valley, and she wants to show it to me. The rock outcrop stands almost precisely at the boundary between two parcels of land—probably the same parcels divided in Antonia Lopes’s petition. I think it marks the first division of the land grant given by the Spanish Crown to Luis López in 1706, which López sold to Grabiel Ortega.
I park at the Presbyterian cemetery, and Mom points out the rock outcropping. Sure enough, it’s blue, and it sits at the edge of the foothills. Glancing back down toward the plaza along the fence line stretching westward from the rock, I wonder what this view looked like when Antonia Lopes made her claim for land in the sparsely settled valley 245 years ago, almost to the day.
Le entra por un oído y le sale por el otro.
It goes in one ear and comes out the other.
Le está haciendo falta la fiesta del Quemado.
He is missing the feast from Quemado. (Said of someone who was mooching off of other people, but now they cut him off.)
Le falta un real para el peso y la mitad de la semana.
He is a quarter short of a dollar and half of the week. (He is daft.)
Le falta un tornillo.
He’s missing a screw. (He is daft.)
Le ofrecen almohada y quiere colchón.
They offer him a pillow, and he wants a mattress. (They offer him an inch and he wants a mile.)
Lo que sobra reparte.
She shares the leftovers. (She gives only what she doesn’t want anymore; she’s stingy.)
Mal de muchos, consuelo de tontos.
The suffering of many is the consolation of fools.
Más altas están las nubes y el aire las desbarata.
As high as the clouds are, the wind still scatters them. (No matter how high a position you reach in life, you can fall.)
Más hace él que quiere que él que puede.
The person who wants to do something does more than the one who can do it but won’t.
Más sabe el loco en su casa que el sabio en la ajena.
A crazy man knows more in his own house than a wise man in someone else’s.
