A cada capillita se le llega su funcioncita.
Every little church has its little feast day.
For years I’ve admired a small chapel in lower Chimayó, a lovely white building atop a solitary hill near “the last arroyo,” the one that roughly defines the western edge of Chimayó proper. Beyond the arroyo the highway passes through pastures that many years ago belonged to El Güero Mestas, my great-great-great-grandfather (a blond-haired, blue-eyed Irishman who was adopted into a Santa Cruz family in the nineteenth century), and then enters the realm of the next small community in the valley, La Puebla. The capilla is something of a landmark at the margin of Chimayó.
The chapel stands out prominently, despite its small size, and something about its location—so near to the settled valley yet removed, on the hill—gives it an air of particular grace. Like the San Antonio chapel in Potrero, it occupies an ideal spot, with a heavenly view. It’s a place reserved for things of the spirit, humbly claimed by a shrine to a holy figure, in this case Santa Rita.
I remember noticing the capilla when I was a young boy passing by on our drives to Chimayó and wanting to climb up to it. Later, when I first rode my bicycle to Chimayó from Los Alamos, I watched for it to let me know I was nearing the end of the long journey. I’ve never known who owns the capilla, though, or how to get to it. It’s on the periphery of my familiar world in Chimayó, deep in the lowlands among the abajeños, the lowlanders, as Grandma called everyone from lower Chimayó. Today, determined to find a way to reach it, I’m venturing down the valley in the late afternoon, hoping to catch a view of the capilla in the rich sunset light of this winter day.
I drive down Highway 76 past all the parts of Chimayó familiar to me, watching for public roads leading toward the chapel hilltop. Only one points in that direction, and I take it, dipping off the highway into an arroyo. Most roads in Chimayó started out as arroyos, which were the easiest way to traverse the terrain. This is no exception. The dirt track begins in the sandy bed and then climbs out, leading northward. Driveways branch off left and right, ending at trailer homes. I turn up the one closest to the hilltop and knock on the trailer door.
A thirtyish woman cracks open the door. I introduce myself and quickly explain I’m trying to get access to the capilla on the hill. She glances at me and says she’s not sure who owns the chapel, but she invites me inside, smiling and saying, “I’ll call someone to find out.” She offers me a can of Coke and a seat on the couch next to a child who is watching cartoons on TV. A plastic Christmas tree in the corner shimmers with blinking lights. I sit next to the girl, who eyes me with wonder. The woman dials a number and asks a neighbor about the capilla, but gets no information. So she calls her brother.
“Hi sweetheart,” she says with a touching warmth and affection; she’s obviously very close with her sibling, who lives just down the road. But he’s not sure who owns the chapel, either. This surprises me. It’s right there, in their backyard, and it seems like everyone would know. I hear the brother’s voice say, “Pueda que el Dan sepa.—Maybe Dan knows.”
The woman directs me to Dan’s house. Dan used to own a liquor store at “the last arroyo,” so everyone knows him. More significantly for me, he also owned Bernardo Abeyta’s house in Potrero. I’ve watched Bernardo’s house decay slowly over the years, wishing I could intervene to restore it. Bernardo was, after all, the founder of the santuario and my great-great-great-great-grandfather, too, and his house stands on a hill overlooking the church. But Dan didn’t have the resources to repair it and eventually sold the house to the Catholic Church, which has let it slip ever closer to ruin.
I pull up at Dan’s brick house on the highway. Smoke trails from the chimney, and there’s a car parked nearby, but no one answers when I knock. After several minutes, another knock, and a toot of the horn on my truck, I give up. But just behind his house I notice a driveway leading toward the chapel hill. I take it and steer to a house with a car in its carport. It’s a sixties-era house, probably of adobe but modern in its lines, with a pitched roof and a statue of the Virgin in front.
I knock on the door, and immediately a voice calls out from inside, “Come in!” I’m surprised the occupant of the house wouldn’t even ask who I am or have a look at me. Thinking she must assume I’m someone else whom she’s been expecting, I call back, “But you don’t even know who I am.”
“¿Qué importa?—So what?” comes the reply. “Come on in.”
I push open the glass outer door and then the interior door to the kitchen. Two elderly women are seated at the kitchen table, a box of KFC and some giant soft drink cups in front of them. They seem delighted to see me and remain seated, completely relaxed, as if I were a son home from college. I introduce myself, and they tell me their names, Nolia and Elena.
Nolia and Elena are sisters, from out near Tucumcari. Nolia married Leopoldo Martínez from Chimayó, now deceased. This is her house. Before marrying, she and Elena shared the family name Chávez, and the fact that I have Chávez blood arouses considerable curiosity and leads to the foregone conclusion: we’re primos, however distant.
Eventually we get around to the purpose of my visit, although it now seems secondary to just getting to know these warm and friendly women. I ask about the Capilla de Santa Rita, and Nolia says, “Oh, just take that road there, go right up. My niece lives there. She takes care of the chapel.”
“Are you sure it’s all right?” I ask.
“Sure, she won’t mind,” Nolia assures me. So, leaving my truck alongside her car in the carport, I grab my backpack and tripod and head into the fields toward the road leading up the hill. When I’m halfway across the field, a pack of dogs charges out from a neighboring yard by a double-wide trailer. They put on quite a show of ferocity, and, feeling defenseless in the open, I hurry toward a fallen cottonwood, thinking to jump up on the trunk and brandish my tripod to ward the beasts off. But they pull up short, stopped by the deep acequia, now dry, that parallels the fence line in front of me. A few shouts from me, and they run back to their turf beside the double-wide.
The cottonwood log makes a convenient bridge across the ditch, and as I cross, it occurs to me I don’t even know the names of the acequias down here. I’m feeling out of my element. In much of the rest of the valley, I at least know something about who lives where and how the water flows, but here I know not a soul. I’m also still not so sure Nolia has the authority to send me trespassing on the neighbor’s land. So it startles me when I see a young man walking down the road toward me. I prepare to explain myself, but he just walks past me with barely a nod. Flummoxed by his nonchalance, I call after him, “Do you live here?” He stops, turns around, and says yes, he does, offering no further information. So I press him: “I’m trying to get to that chapel on the hill. Nolia said I could come this way. Is it OK?”
He stops and turns to me again, saying, “Sure. You can go either way around this hill and then up.”
“But that way, I’ll run right into a house. I don’t want to bother anyone,” I say, noting that one route leads smack into a house and corrals at the base of the chapel hill. He just shrugs and continues on his way.
Unsure of which way to go, I resolve to split the difference and climb directly up the hill in front of me. This will bring me to a hilltop across from the capilla, an ideal vantage for photographing it in the evening light. Abandoning the roadway, I climb up the steep spine of the hill, scrambling for footing in the sandy soil studded with round river cobbles. It’s my intention to be discrete, to avoid drawing attention, but my efforts are in vain. Stones tumble down from my footsteps, and a blue heeler leaps to attention beside the house and corrals, now directly beneath me. His yapping carries far and wide, and he won’t stop, even when I veer out of his view.
After several minutes of incessant barking, the heeler quiets at the command of a woman emerging from the house. She hollers up to me, “What are you doing up there?”
“I want to take pictures of the chapel. The neighbor over there told me it was OK.”
“Who told you? That’s my place.”
“Nolia did.”
“Well, who are you and what are the pictures for?” she yells, but politely. I explain myself, tell her my name, and mention I used to live by the old plaza. She pauses, then says, “Well, OK. I just like to know who’s on my property. And my name is Alex.”
“I’ll come see you on the way down,” I offer.
“It’s OK,” she says. “Just be careful up there.”
“For sure,” I reply. “But I am going to stop by. I want to meet you.”
I continue to the crest of the hill, hurrying now to catch the golden light flooding the valley. It won’t last long, since the sun is about to drop into a thick bank of clouds hanging over the Jémez Mountains to the west. The view from the top of the hill is everything I imagined: the Santa Rita chapel gleams like a beacon atop the small hill in front of me, behind it the entire valley—barrancas and farm fields and cottonwood bosques—leading up to the deep blue folds of the mountains.
Capilla de Santa Rita, Chimayó Abajo, 2010.
It’s preternaturally warm for a November evening, and I’m sweating from the climb. Managing a few photos before the sun sinks behind the clouds, I linger for a while, turning to the west to notice a crude gash of a road leading up the hilltop behind me. On top, a clutter of wrecked cars and discarded machinery accompanies a beat-up trailer home silhouetted against the sky—another blight that contradicts my theory about hilltops being reserved for places of worship.
I’d much rather not see the mess on the hill to the west, so I turn back to gaze to the east, where the chapel stands. The clouds quickly swallow the sun, and the golden light is gone, so I decide to walk over and ascend to the capilla itself, to have a look at it close up. Packing up my gear, I climb down the slope, heading for a low point to the east. Halfway down I notice, well hidden in the valley between the two hills, a cruciform building with a tall white cross in front. It’s obviously a morada, a meeting place for Los Hermanos.
Descending the final slope of the hill, I circle the morada, staying at a distance out of respect. The front door of the morada is leaning open, and beside it a bit of graffiti stands out on the gray plaster. Instead of profanity, the spray-painted lettering reads: Love Christ.
I’m drawn to a small grave at the foot of the cross in front of the building. The largest marker bears the name Pedro Fresquis. A light bulb goes on in my mind. Grandma spoke often of “mi Fresquis,” referring to her mother’s step-father. She never mentioned his first name; it was always just “mi Fresquis,” but Grandma recalled that Pedro Fresquis was a brother to “mi Fresquis” and that Pedro used to provide her grandmother with firewood. Later, a Pedro Fresquis’s daughter, Bernardita, married my grandmother’s cousin, José Ramón Ortega, better known as Joe. My mom was at the wedding at Don Pedro’s house when she was nine years old, in 1931. I’ve even seen a photo of some of the wedding party at the house, and now I realize that the photo was taken just a short distance from here.
Also, the Fresquis family name crops up several times in our documents. Apparently, the family used to own land in the Plaza del Cerro area. One records a land sale in 1838 from María Antonia Fresquis (“a resident of Chimallo”) to Luis Ortega for fourteen pesos de la tierra. An 1855 document certifying the public right of way around the plaza also names a Fresquis.
A sloping trail leads to the top of the sandy hill. Just as I reach the capilla, the sun bursts out below the cloud bank, and the yellow light of evening floods the valley. The capilla’s white walls glow warmly. The tiny building faces west, into the setting winter sun. Two whitewashed posts hold up a small portal and frame a dark wooden door. The bell of the capilla hangs in an enclosed, plastered belfry. A wooden six-pointed star, marked with Christmas lights, leans against one post; a power cord runs down the hill several hundred feet to the nearest house and electric outlet.
The chapel is a compact, tidy structure, humble but elegant. Inside, an altar-like cabinet, flanked by two archangel figures, holds up rows of statues. Images of the Virgin predominate, presided over by Santa Rita on a central dais, with stems of bright red plastic roses on either side of her. I find few male figures and only one large image of Jesus, a bas-relief of his face hanging on the wall above the santos. A similar bas-relief of the Virgin hangs on the opposite side of the altar. A wood structure for kneeling stands in front of the cabinet, on top of it a notebook where visitors can sign in and record their thoughts and prayers.
Morada, Chimayó Abajo, 2009.
I thumb through the pages of the book to find a blank page. The most recent entry, written in large letters with a blue pen, reads simply, “Help Us!!!”
A broad swath of brilliant light pours through the doorway to fall just below a statue of a reclining baby Jesus. As the sun sinks still lower, it shines more directly on this figure, and I wonder if this is by design. Christmas is just weeks away, and it seems the doorway alignment is perfect for directing the sunset light onto the Christ Child and Santa Rita.
Santa Rita is the patron saint of impossible causes, of damaged wives and children, especially those abused by men in authority. I have no idea why the builder of this capilla (probably Pedro Fresquis) dedicated it to Santa Rita. I’m musing over these thoughts when the sun sets and the light quickly fades. I fold up my tripod and walk down the hill toward Alex’s house, where I can see her in the yard with other people, gathering up goats and shooing them into the corrals for the night. Long before I reach the house, the blue heeler, barking fiercely, darts out to intercept me. I ignore him, which has the desired effect of disarming him.
Alex is visiting with her cousin Andy Apel and his children, who have the responsibility of corralling the chickens and goats for the night. They’re having a tough time with a recalcitrant billy but finally coax him in, with the help of the dog, Azul. The cautious introductions Alex and I started as shouts continue amicably amid the bleating of goats. In no time, it’s clear we are indeed connected in some way through the Fresquis line. I’ll come back with my mother in tow, I tell her, to sort out the tangles in this connection.
A la mala costumbre, quiébrale la pierna.
Break the leg of a bad custom. (No mercy for bad customs.)
A la mala maña, se le corta un brazo.
Cut the arm off a bad habit. (No mercy for bad habits.)
A la tierra que fueres, haz lo que vieres.
When in another country, do what you see. (When in Rome, do as the Romans do.)
A quien te da el capón, dale la pierna y el alón.
To one who gives you a capon, give her the leg and a wing. (Share your gift with the donor.)
A tu tierra, grulla, que esta no es tuya.
Go back to your home, crane, for this land isn’t yours. (You are far out of place.)
Al que madruga, Dios le ayuda.
God helps him who gets up early.
Cada loco con su tema y yo con mi terquedad.
Each nut with his argument and me with my stubbornness. (Said when an argument seems to have no end.)
Carne que crece no puede estar, si no mece.
He can’t be a person who grows if he doesn’t swing. (He can’t be a successful person if he doesn’t take time to have fun.)
Cobra buena fama y échate a dormir.
Earn a good reputation and go to sleep. (No need to praise yourself if you are praiseworthy.)
Con buenas palabras no hay mal entendedor.
With good words, there is no one who misunderstands. (Speak well and you will be understood.)
Con paciencia, se gana el cielo.
With patience, heaven is gained. (Patience is golden.)
Cosa platicada mal echa y desbaratada.
A thing talked about is badly done and wasted. (Talking about what you are planning to do will ruin your plans.)
Cuando estés en la abundancia, acuérdate de la calamidad.
When you are living in plenty, remember about calamity. (Never take abundance for granted.)
Cuidados ajenos matan al burro.
Someone else’s business kills the donkey. (Minding someone else’s business will come to no good.)
De noche todos los gatos son pardos.
At night all cats look gray at night. (Some people dress fancily, others plainly, but they are equal in status.)
Del cielo a la tierra no hay nada oculto.
From heaven to earth, there is nothing hidden. (There are no secrets under heaven.)
Del dicho al hecho hay gran trecho.
There’s a long distance between saying and doing. (Easier said than done.)
Después de conejo huido, piedras al sabinito.
After the rabbit flees, rocks hit the juniper tree. (It’s too late to do anything after you’ve let opportunity pass.)
Después de cuernos, palos.
After horns, sticks. (After deception comes the punishment.)
Después del burro muerto, maíz para el burro, ¿para qué sirve?
After the donkey is dead, what good will feeding him corn do? (It’s too late to fix the damage done.)
Dónde hay letras, callan barbas.
Where there is knowledge, old men hush. (A learned person makes old men fall silent.)
Él que adelante no mira, atrás se queda.
One who doesn’t look ahead is left behind. (Keep your eyes on the road.)
Él que da pan al perro ajeno pierde el pan y pierde el perro.
One who gives bread to someone else’s dog loses the bread and loses the dog. (Don’t waste your time or energy giving help to strangers.)
Él que en el alba se levanta pierde lo mejor del sueño y con su sombra se espanta.
One who gets up at dawn loses the best of sleep and is frightened by his own shadow.)
Él que le duele la muela, que se la saque.
If your tooth hurts, pull it out. (Get rid of what is bothering you.)
Él que sale a bailar pierde su lugar.
One who gets up to dance loses his place. (If you don’t attend to your business, someone else will take it.)
Él que tiene tienda, que la atienda, y si no, que la venda.
One who has a store should either manage it or sell it. (Take care of your own business or give it up.)
El tiempo perdido no se recobra.
Time wasted is never recovered. (Time’s a-wastin’.)
En agua revuelta, ganancia del pescador.
Muddy water is to the fisherman’s advantage. (Take advantage of unfavorable circumstances.)
En boca cerrada no entra mosca.
A fly cannot enter a closed mouth. (You’ll stay out of trouble if you keep quiet.)
En la conformidad está la felicidad.
Agreement brings happiness. (Conformity takes away stress.)
En la ciudad de los ciegos el tuerto es rey.
In the city of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. (A person with even a little knowledge rules among the ignorant.)
Hay moros en la costa.
There are Moors on the coast. (Trouble is on the way.)
Hombre prevenido vale por dos.
One man prepared is worth two.
Hombre prevenido, nunca vencido.
A prepared man is never defeated.
Más vale ser cabeza de ratón que una cola de león.
It’s better to be the head of a mouse than the tail of a lion. (You’re better off as the brightest person among those of your class than as the lowliest among people who outclass you.)
No puede atender a la palma y al guaje.
You cannot attend to the palm and the gourd at the same time. (You lack the skill to do two things at the same time. A reference to Matachines dancers, who use a palm and gourd in some of their dances.)
No se puede repicar la campana y andar en la procesión.
You can’t be tolling the bell and be in the procession. (You can’t be two places at one time.)
No te fijes en culecas, fíjate en las que están poniendo.
Don’t concentrate on the brooding hens; pay attention to those that are laying eggs. (Pick the single girls, not the married ones.)
Un bien con un mal se paga.
A good deed is paid with a bad one. (No good deed goes unpunished.)
Vale más llegar a horas que ser convidado.
Better to come in time than be invited. (Better to show up at mealtime than wait to be invited.)
Vale más mal vendido que mal perdido.
Better to sell it cheap than not to sell it at all.
Vale más tarde que nunca.
Better late than never.
Vale más un pájaro en la mano que cien volando.
A bird in the hand is worth a hundred flying. (A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.)
Ya más claro no canta el gallo.
The rooster can’t crow any more clearly. (The message can’t be any clearer.)