No es el león como lo pintan.
The lion is not the way they paint him to be.
I drop into Chimayó and turn off in Potrero, the first plaza of Chimayó encountered when coming from Santa Fe. Here stands the celebrated Santuario de Chimayó, an adobe church built by my great-great-great-great-great-grandfather Bernardo Abeyta.
On occasion I came to Mass here as a child, always impressed by the interior artwork, with a sense of awe bordering on foreboding. These renderings of religious figures conveyed to me a mysterious vision of spirituality, their facial expressions contrasting dark fatalism with ineffable grace. Father Roca’s droning sermons in impenetrable, Catalan-inflected Spanish only added to my feelings of wonderment.
We have close ties to this church. As my mother tells it, our ancestor, Manuel Chávez, came with his father, Rafael Chávez, on a visit to the santuario in about 1815. They were from the community of Los Chávez, close to Bernalillo. (The Chávez family was among the sheep patrones of the Río Abajo in New Mexico, landowners who possessed large estates and generated great wealth in the sheep trade.) Rafael returned to Los Chávez, but Manuel stayed in Chimayó and married Bernardo’s daughter María del Carmen. He was twenty-three years old; she was fifteen. “This started the Chávez clan in Potrero,” my mother explained to me. “Before then there were no Chávezes in Chimayó.”
Rafael Chávez was a leader of Los Hermanos (the Penitentes) in Los Chávez, near Bernalillo. He had come to Chimayó to visit Don Bernardo Abeyta, who was an hermano mayor (elder brother) in the organization and may have been one of the founders of the Hermanos brotherhood when it blossomed in northern New Mexico. Along with the Chávez family name, Manuel brought with him his sheep, which he pastured in the potreros (pastures) of Potrero.
The plaza of Potrero appears for the first time in our documents on a note appended to an 1829 paper authorizing a sale of land near the Plaza del Cerro from Pascual and Nicolás Ortega to their brother, Manuel Pablo. We have many more recent family connections to Potrero. My great-grandfather, Juan Clímaco Chávez, came from Potrero, and my great-grandfather Reyes Ortega’s sister married Juan Clímaco’s grandfather, Manuel Chávez. (This meant my grandmother married her father’s grandnephew, or her first cousin once removed.)
When I was growing up we would load up the car with flowers, real and plastic, as well as hoes and shovels, to visit the campo santo (cemetery) in Potrero each year on Memorial Day. Until the early 1900s, local people (or at least some prominent citizens) were buried inside the santuario; my great-great-grandpa José Ramón Ortega, his mother, María Petrita Ortega, and many other antepasados were laid to rest beneath the hallowed ground of the church, alongside the church’s founder, Bernardo Abeyta. (Because of the practice, by the eighteenth century many churches in New Mexico were overflowing with bodies, sometimes stacked five or six deep beneath the floor.) Longtime efforts to stop church burials finally took effect, though, and all the dead were taken to the “new” cemetery just down the road.
It always seemed to be sunny and hot in late May as we wound our way amid the gravestones to find the markers for our dearly departed. We worked hard to clear the weeds and cactus, mangle the Siberian elms (which always came back with a vengeance), dust off the stones, and decorate them with our humble floral arrangements. Each year I remembered better how to find the family graves among the hodgepodge of stone, wooden, and paper markers. I was proud when I finally could locate all the graves of relatives, although there were only three we tended regularly. The oldest was bordered by a small iron fence and marked with a simple stone commemorating the short life of my great-grandmother Genoveva Archuleta Quintana, who died in childbirth in 1919 at the age of forty-one. Her section of the graveyard was nearly overgrown with weeds. In the newer part we cleared debris from my grandfather Abedón Chávez’s sloping slab of concrete, set in 1949, and from the newer (1968) grave of Mom’s brother, Leo Chávez.
Campo santo visits were by no means entirely somber affairs. They often turned into cheerful social gatherings. We ran into people we hadn’t seen for a long time, met relatives we had never known, and expressed condolences to friends and family at fresh mounds. It made the sweaty work interesting.
After the cleanup at the Catholic campo santo, we would travel across the valley to the Plaza del Cerro to tend to the graves of family members who were buried in the newer, Presbyterian cemetery. This burial ground occupies a hillside on land my great-grandfather Reyes Ortega sold for a nominal sum to the Presbyterian Church. Reyes had drifted from the Catholic Church when he elected to send his daughters to the new Presbyterian mission school, thinking they could get a better education there than that offered in the public school. His split from Catholicism also resulted from the reprimand he endured from a priest on the pulpit, who criticized Reyes for performing marriages of couples outside the Catholic Church. In doing this, Reyes was merely fulfilling his duties as a duly elected justice of the peace, but the activity did not put him in good stead with church authorities—and the public rebuke stung him greatly.
Reyes was not buried near his wife and many other kin in the ancestral cemetery in Potrero. Instead, his headstone stands on a hill overlooking the Plaza del Cerro, surrounded by the graves of three of his daughters, Petrita, Juanita, and Melita, and of his son-in-law Isaías Ortega. They lie in rest beside several dozen others who joined the herejes (heretics), as the Protestants were sometimes called, who came to the valley in 1900. The arrival of the protestantes encumbered Reyes’s descendants with a cross-valley journey of remembrance each spring, as they went from one cemetery to another.
Since those old days, the original campo santo in Potrero has filled up. Deceased Catholics are carted to a still newer Catholic cemetery, isolated from the irrigated valley and surrounded by dramatic barrancas. There we interred Grandma as well as two nieces who died just after birth and a nephew who died tragically young. Our Memorial Day rounds have now expanded to reach this, the third burying ground we must visit.
I’m not stopping at any of those cemeteries today, though. I’m on my way to visit a small chapel that graces a hilltop above Potrero, the Capilla de San Antonio.
Capilla de San Antonio, Potrero, 2009.
The whitewashed San Antonio chapel takes in a spectacular view of the Chimayó Valley. The very site elevates the spirit. In Santa Fe and other places, the wealthy clamor for the right to build on hilltops with prime vistas. Here, for the most part, the prime-view real estate is occupied by shrines, part of a habit of molding the human community to the land. Small clusters of buildings and mobile homes wrap around the hill and its rocky neighbors, following the natural watercourses and acequias. From the vantage of the hilltop at the San Antonio chapel, everything made by people appears clearly subordinate to the landscape. People have fit into the place.
The Pueblos also maintained shrines on high points like these. One of the papers we have mentions a place “donde resavan los originales—where the originals used to pray” as a land boundary. “Originals” may refer to the early Spanish colonists, but it could also refer to Native people. In any case, perhaps this hill, with its bird’s-eye perspective on human endeavors, has been reserved as a place to pray since precolonial times.
I walk up the hill to the capilla, following a well-worn path. A stick holds closed the hasp on the small double doors. This place needs no earthly protection—at least not yet. The concrete slab outside the door bears the inscription “5–22–56, JMS,” recording the date of completion of the chapel by Juan M. Sandoval, its builder, whose grandson maintains the structure and lives nearby. Inside the tiny room, a cluster of statues of saints and other holy figures crowds a small altar festooned with a vase of plastic flowers. A statue of San Antonio takes center stage as the tallest figure in the group, flanked by three or four smaller, nearly identical versions. A bas-relief of the Virgin with child hangs above them all, shadowed by peeled paint dangling from the ceiling. A small textile depicting the Virgin of Guadalupe glows, backlit, in one window, while a crucifix made of barbed wire is silhouetted in another. In a spiral-bound notebook visitors have entered their names and comments and pleas for the intercession of San Antonio.
As a mediator for humankind, San Antonio specializes in helping people find misplaced items, missing persons, and anything else lost, including jobs or lovers. He is one of the most popular saints in Chimayó. There have been many occasions when people in my family have called upon San Antonio, the most dramatic being the time when Grandma’s cousin, Ramón Quintana, went missing. It seems that the three-year-old Ramón disappeared while the family was picking piñón in the Sierra de Pecos, as they then called the Sangre de Cristo Mountains and their foothills. San Antonio answered the family’s long prayers when Ramón showed up at the santuario, shoes in hand, days after he disappeared. Somehow he managed to travel on foot down from the mountains to the holy shrine. He barely had learned to talk, but he described the guide who led him as a woman dressed in blue. Apparently, San Antonio sent the Virgin Mary to do the legwork.
Although I don’t count myself among the true believers in this kind of divine intervention, I have, in desperation, put in a request or two with San Antonio. To my surprise, it seems to work—especially if I have Grandma, my mother, or some other relative with a little more clout than me submit a prayer to him. Grandma was always willing to do this, but she was careful to add the proviso, “Si Dios no quiere, santos no pueden.—If God does not will it, saints can’t do it.”
Of course, this kind of on-demand supplication to San Antonio is strongly discouraged by the faithful as a cheap shortcut. I’m reminded of the dicho about people like me, who call upon divine help only when all else fails: “No se acuerdan de Santa Bárbara hasta que hacen los truenos.—They don’t remember to pray to Santa Bárbara until they find themselves in trouble.” Or another one: “Esperando el bien de Dios sin saber por dónde viene.—Waiting for the grace of God without knowing where it will come from.”
On a lighter note, I learned from Grandma a little rhyme mimicking a prayer from a single woman to San Antonio, asking for help in finding a husband. Grandma used to tell it like this: “There was this woman who wanted to get married real badly, so she called on San Antonio, who is supposed to find things for you. She prayed to him:
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‘San Antonito, San Antonaso |
‘Little Saint Anthony, big old Saint Anthony |
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¿Cuándo me caso? ’ |
When will I marry?’ |
“San Antonio granted the woman’s wish, but the husband turned out to be no good, so she prayed to San Antonio again:
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‘San Antonito, piesitos, manitas, |
‘San Antonito, with your little feet and hands, |
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¿Cuándo me lo quitas? ’ |
When will you get rid of him?’ |
“The moral of the story,” Grandma would say with a wink, “is to watch what you ask for, especially from San Antonio!”
Outside the capilla, I climb higher up the hill to look down on the building against a backdrop of the Chimayó Valley in fall color. Turning around, I notice there is a house higher up on the hill, behind me, and I recall that it belongs to my friend Julian Sandoval, Juan Sandoval’s grandson. So much for my theory about hilltops being reserved for places of worship. Now that technology allows it, high points are fair game for building any kind of structure. I realize there probably would have been homes on the hilltops long ago if people had access to heavy machinery for making roads and to drilling equipment for digging deep wells. People confined themselves to the valleys because they had to. Glancing across the valley, I see several low hills that have been leveled to accommodate double-wide trailers.
The window on the east side of the chapel reflects golden cottonwoods below in a nearly perfect mirror image. I take some photographs of this remarkable phenomenon, then amble back down the pathway to the road, where I encounter Juan Trujillo, cutting weeds by his house. I knew Juan when I lived in Chimayó, and we’re on friendly terms.
“¡Cabrón!” he greets me, in the same manner as Benerito, his neighbor a half-mile down the ditch. “What you doing around here?”
Cabrón (bastard) is one of those malleable words that is fundamentally a profanity but can be used in an inoffensive, even endearing way. It may seem a crude greeting, but coming from Juan in this context, it conveys no malice.
Grandma used to say that people from Potrero spoke “with rough language.” By way of illustration, she told the story about a woman from the Plaza del Cerro, where Grandma lived, who married a man from Potrero and reported to Grandma, “No hay más que picardías y groserías aqui—¡y con tantas capillas cerca!—There’s nothing but mischief and bad language around here—and with all these churches nearby!” (She was referring to the fact that the Santuario de Chimayó, the Capilla del Santo Niño, and the Capilla de San Antonio are all located in Potrero.)
“I was up at the capilla, taking pictures,” I explain to Juan.
“You better be praying up there, too, and not just taking pictures!” he says, emphatically. And he means it, not so much as a warning but as sage counsel. I make a promise to myself to at least pause for a moment of silence the next time I enter the San Antonio chapel or any other.
Juan is trimming the weeds along the public road because, he says, no one else will do it. He’s well into his eighties but still conveys strength and power in his stance and in the casual way he wields the scythe in his hand. He wears a hat emblazoned with the words Chimayoso Orgulloso (Proud Chimayoso).
Juan sits on a rock wall beside the road and proceeds to skewer me with insults, and in this he is as eloquent as he is with profanity. “Me da mucho gusto verlo viniendo, pero me da más gusto verlo salir.—I’m glad to see you coming, but I’ll be happier to see you go,” he says. “Parece muy viejo ya, ¡y ya estás cagando en sus pantalones!—You look really old, and I’m sure you’re already making messes in your pants!” he continues.
Juan tells me about a fight he had recently, when he confronted some youngsters who were drinking and tossing beer cans here. One of them—a good thirty years Juan’s junior—threw a punch that hit Juan in the face. “Pero lo pegé a él dos veces y salió con la cola pa’ adentro de las piernas.—But I hit him back twice, and he ran off with his tail between his legs,” Juan says.
He describes for me another altercation that took place a short time ago, when he bested a neighbor in a fistfight over a disagreement about the right-of-way for the Acequia del Potrero. (He’s the mayordomo of the acequia and has been for years.) “¡Le di un chingadazo!—I gave him a good punch!” he tells me. “¡Y nunca volvió!—And he never came back!”
Juan has always been known as a tough character, a stern taskmaster who keeps the ditch running against difficult odds. Sometimes this requires an iron fist, which has earned him the ire of some people.
The door to Juan’s house opens, and his dog races out, ripping a quick turn past the Beware of Dog sign and lunging toward me. In a single leap, the small Chihuahua is in Juan’s lap, staring into his eyes.
A Chimayó tough guy and his guard dog: neither look so big or bad, as they adore each other. Juan’s gruff demeanor is a thin veil over a gentle and warmhearted soul.
Él que es entendido con una vez que le digan, sobra.
An understanding person only needs to be told only once.
Él que ha de ser barrigón, aunque lo fajan desde chiquito.
He who is meant to be big bellied will be, even if you bind him when he is little. (You can’t change a person’s essential nature.)
Él que luce entre las ollas no luce entre las señoras.
He who shines among the pots doesn’t shine among the ladies. (One who dresses up around the house has no good clothes to wear out on the town.)
Él que mal haga, bien no espere.
One who does something bad should not expect something good in return.
Él que malas mañas tiene, nunca las perderá.
One who has bad habits will never get rid of them.
Él que nada debe nada teme.
One who owes nothing fears nothing. (One is who is not guilty fears nothing.)
Él que no llora no mama.
One who doesn’t cry doesn’t nurse. (He who doesn’t speak up will not get what he wants.)
Él que pronto endienta pronto emparienta.
An infant who starts teething early will soon have another sibling.
Él que se viste de ajeno, en la calle lo desnudan.
One who dresses in borrowed clothes will be undressed in the street. (One who lives under false pretenses will be exposed.)
Él que solo se enoja, solo se contenta.
One who gets mad by himself will have to get over it by himself.
Es como el burro hablando de orejas.
It’s like the burro talking about ears. (Refers to a person talking about what someone else has done when she has committed the same sin.)