If you have not yet made the beautiful drive to the El Rito Public Library, you should. This is the prettiest library I’ve ever seen, inside and out and is surrounded by lush trees and open, grassy fields. The building is a humble adobe that has been added onto through the years, starting in 1930 as a one room middle school then morphing into a library in 1989. Many kind and generous folks have and continue to help create this community space that has so many interesting layers that I am not even scratching the surface of this little gem. I drive the peaceful, mellow road, up 554 to 215 almost any time that I get word of something special going on there. My wife and I have gotten all dolled up to give out candy to the local kids on Halloween, joining the awesome lowriders that show up for the annual “trunk or treat'' in the gravel parking lot. For one of the Friday night movie and potluck events, we cooked up a big batch of pesto filled ravioli in a cream sauce to contribute to the other delicious food people brought, and they even had popcorn! Sometimes I go just to peruse the various, meandering rooms furnished with comfortable chairs and workstations with computers. And, if you ask nicely and have 10 cents, you can use the printers too. In one room, the walls are barely visible through the gorgeous, hand tailored quilts created by the El Rito Quilting Guild. These ladies can sew! The designs and colors are so beautiful and comforting, it can hypnotize you into staying for hours without even noticing time passing. The books are tidily organized and easy to navigate. There are DVD’s and audio books galore. There are so many wonderful activities and events going on here. We look forward to donating something tempting to this year's annual silent auction to do our part in supporting this magical asset that heightens so many lives, young and old. Seeing as you are already in El Rito, try to carve out time to dine at El Farolito. This is a tiny, charmingly ramshackle adobe building nestled in the heart of the other ramshackle buildings that create the business part of El Rito. The cafe opened somewhere around the 1960’s, (it’s a hard fact to find), and was infused with new energy in 1975, when the original owner was joined by her brother and his wife, Dennis and Carmen Trujillo. They added a green chile sauce that has won awards and gotten the attention of many huge foodie magazines and individuals.
When we visited last, Marisol, Dennis and Carmen’s daughter seemed to be running the place along with a very outgoing and pleasant man literally running from the kitchen to the dining room and back, delivering food, to try to keep up with the busy hum of hungry patrons. Walking into the cafe takes a moment to absorb the uncommon vibe. It’s small, I mean small. You will find four mismatched, somewhat communal tables, surrounded by empty cardboard boxes and full cardboard boxes, overflowing with all the prepared or cooked or unseasoned goods that are needed to create the items on the menu. While waiting for our food, a trio of women placed their order at the counter and held up 2 lemons to be added to the bill that she’d helped herself to from one of the glass, stand up refrigerators crammed against the wall. I commented to my wife that Marisol handled that very well, assuming that the lemons weren’t for sale, but that she politely sold them anyway. Wrong! After a bit, when my eyes and brain were able to sift through the unusual clutter surrounding us, I focused on an old white board, with a listing of the refrigerators contents for sale. Aha, those lemons were for sale, as well as avocados, milk, eggs, soda, etc. I’m going to guess that almost any ingredient needed to cook with, is or could be bought from the cold case. Earlier, I held the door open for a woman whose arms were full of her takeout order and noticed a 32 oz container of chili powder tucked under her arm. I now understand that she had just bought it from them. As a former restaurant owner, I admire their generosity in allowing this kind service to the public as it gets pretty hard to plan for supplying a consistent menu when you’re not sure what ingredients you’ll have left at the end of the day. I think the family is still operating under the rules demanded by COVID, as all the cutlery and serving vessels are styrofoam and plastic and the menu is a folded 8x11 piece of paper. Looking back at photos taken by previous patrons and reviewers, I see metal forks, ceramic plates and laminated menus. In light of the health of our planet, I wish they would bring them back, though it’s nearly impossible to imagine fitting a dish washing station into the building. Now, for the food. After confirming that the tortilla chips were house made and the guac too, we ordered them to start. They were delicious. Still slightly warm, perfectly crisp and salty, but not at all oily. The guac was uniquely creamy and had a pleasant hint of garlic leaving us wishing we had more of it. We ordered the Farolito Combo plate, which consisted of a chili relleno, a chicken filled enchilada and a ground beef stuffed hard shell taco. The relleno was very good. A perfectly mildly spiced poblano filled with a flavorful white cheese, smothered in green chile and topped with shredded cheese. The chicken enchilada was a little dry, but flavorful as well. The taco was a generous portion of house seasoned ground beef a little heavy on the cumin and salt. The nicely flavored and plump pintos were yummy. We also ordered the tostada, opting for chicken. The large crunchy blue corn tortilla topped with a lot of shredded chicken, iceberg lettuce, a little pico and some grated cheddar made this a crisp tasty snack that I would definitely order again. Because we tend to stuff our faces on these ventures, and the fact that my wife’s love language is, well, food, almost any food, we also ordered a side of onion rings. Sadly, they were not fantastic, likely just delivered from the food supplier and straight from a frozen bag into hot oil. I’d skip the rings and go for the crinkle cut fries that wafted by our table to almost every person dining in. Don’t mistake this place as having only (New) Mexican fare, there are many other items on the menu that we hope to sample on another day including burgers, quesadillas, steak picado, grilled cheese and cold sandwiches too. Oh right! Again, because of the face stuffing/love language mentioned above, we also ordered a slice of the homemade apple pie, a la mode. Jeez, we can eat! It was very good but could have been much better if it were toasted or warmed in an oven instead of a microwave. Next time, I’ll ask for it at room temp. The flavors were a sweet heaven and, I think, not nuked, the crust would have rivaled my wife’s. There are no alcoholic beverages but a bevy of fun fizzy drinks and coffee are aplenty. The prices here are pre-pandemic and the entire meal with plenty of leftovers was just over $40 with tip and tax. All in all, I think it’s worth “checking out.”
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Reies Lopez Tijerina – even today opinions are divided. Was he a communist agitator or a selfless proponent of the poor and underprivileged? Let’s start at the beginning and explore.
Tierra Amarilla, just a few miles north of Abiquiú on Hwy 84, is a sleepy little town. It almost looks like a ghost town with a number of closed business buildings and abandoned houses. It is somewhat surprising that it has been the Rio Arriba county seat since 1880 when the town got its current name (“Yellow Earth”; before that, it was called “Las Nutrias”). When the Denver and Rio Grande Western Railroad constructed lines that connected Chama to their vast network, the area around T.A. must have experienced a cultural and economic expansion that just as quickly ended when the railroads stopped running.
The current courthouse was built in 1917. I have visited it a few times; once because I was called for jury duty, another time to attend a meeting of the County Commissioners; always totally uneventful trips. I was therefore utterly perplexed when I learned that there had been a raid on the courthouse in 1967, the National Guard was called in, and one person got shot!
About 20 members of a group which was founded in 1963 by Reies Tijerina and which called itself La Alianza Federal de Mercedes (Federal Alliance of Land Grants) assembled at the courthouse on June 5, 1967, in order to place the district attorney Alfonso G. Sanchez under citizen’s arrest. They also wanted to free a few members of the group who had been arrested a day or two earlier. The Alianza had planned a meeting in Coyote, and Sanchez used police force to break up the gathering, and several members were taken into custody. However, the county judge had already freed the imprisoned people, and Sanchez wasn’t in T.A. at all but in Santa Fe mobilizing police forces. When they couldn’t find Sanchez, the Alianza group took a sheriff and a reporter hostage; they also shot and wounded a prison guard and a police officer. The event caused national attention; Governor David Cargo called in the National Guard which descended with tanks and helicopters, state police, and local sheriffs for what probably was the biggest manhunt in New Mexico history. The Alianza members and their leader, Reies Tijerina, fled to the near-by mountains where sympathetic ranchers protected them. Only after Tijerina’s wife (who was pregnant) had been arrested, did they surrender to authorities in Albuquerque.
Photograph of Reies Tijerina around the time of the ""Courthouse Raid"" incident in Tierra Amarilla, NM, in June of 1967. Tijerina was a leader in the fight to restore New Mexican land grants to the descendants of their Mexican American and Spanish owners. Photo by Peter Nabokov, used with permission.
By now, you’re probably curious what this was all about: WHAT did the Alianza want to accomplish? WHY was the district attorney so set to arrest its members?
The name of the group gives a clue: it was all about land grants. An issue that even today can cause heated debates. It goes back to the time when the land here was a colony of Spain. The governors who were accountable to the King of Spain granted the land to people here. A person would petition with the governor or his representative; when the petition was granted, the person would receive a document which would guarantee that the person could occupy and use the land. Actually, that was a condition: the person HAD to occupy and use the land. Something like developers was not allowed. Communities could apply for land grants as well, in order to establish settlements. When Mexico gained independence from Spain, they continued with the customary land grant system. An essential part of this system was the fact that the people didn’t really OWN the land – it was theirs to use and to live on, but if somebody would find gold or some other valuable substance, this would belong to the King. (I learned this from a video produced by New Mexico State Historian Rob Martínez; if you want to learn more, here is the link).
Things changed when New Mexico became part of the United States at the end of the Mexican-American War in 1848. Although the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo confirmed the legitimacy of land grants under Mexican law, in practice many people lost their rights. Americans had a different understanding of land ownership, and communally held ownership was a foreign concept – Ejidos (Community-owned land) were not recognized under U.S. law and fell into private hands. Much of it became National Forest or was assigned to the Bureau of Land Management. People didn’t have their original copies any more, and lost their land. They were not prepared to deal with a complicated legal system and especially with unscrupulous speculators. The Santa Fe Ring, a powerful group of corrupt lawyers, businessmen, and politicians, swindled land grant holders into selling their land. One of them, Thomas B. Catron who became a U.S. Senator, managed to acquire 3,000,000 acres of land. Compared to these individuals who often hired assassins to eliminate their opponents, Reies Tijerina looks almost like a choir boy.
Well, not really. Reies Tijeria was no angel, he wasn’t perfect. Born in 1926 in Fall City, Texas, he experienced from a young age the discriminating treatment of poor, migrant families with Hispanic/Mexican origin. After he became an ordained pentecostal minister, he founded a little community of some 20 families in the southern Arizona desert, The Valley of Peace, in 1955. He moved with his family and a few of his followers to New Mexico in 1957. That’s where he learned about the land grants and the injustice he perceived when he learned about the many families who had been dispossessed of their lands. This became his new passion: to bring justice to people who had lost their land, and to highlight the unequal working conditions that so many Native Americans and Hispanios had to endure. This led to conflicts with lawmakers and the police who branded him as a communist agitator, and eventually to the Tierra Amarilla Courthouse raid. After being convicted of charges related to the raid in 1970, the federal government sent Tijerina to a prison for the mentally deranged where he was forced to take psychotropic drugs. When he was paroled two years later, he was something of a broken man. He died in 2015 in El Paso, Texas.
Here is a corrido about these events performed by Roberto Martínez and his group Los Reyes de Albuquerque who was a friend of Tijerina. It was played on all the local radio stations and was featured in the Smithsonian touring exhibition Corridos sin Fronteras / Ballads Without Borders.
A quick mention has to be made of Tijerina’s involvement in the larger Civil Rights Movement: in March 1968, he was elected to be the leader of the Chicano contingent of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and worked with Dr. Martin Luther King to organize the Poor People’s March on Washington. After Dr. King’s assassination in April, Tijerina continued his work under the leadership of Ralph Abernathy.
When you decide whether Tijerina was a good guy or a bad guy, keep in mind that to stand up for minorities’ rights in the late Sixties meant to put one’s life in jeopardy. Justice seemed to be reserved for the privileged, and the punishment for acts of violence were hugely disproportionate, depending on who was the perpetrator. Maybe Tijerina was sort of in the middle, like most of us.
Poor Peoples’ March – conference at Hawthorne School in Washington, D.C., June 1968. Left to right: Rev. Andrew Young, Reies Tijerina, Rev. Ralph Abernathy, Rodolpho “Corky” Gonzales, Roque Garcia. From: Tijerina and the Land Grants: Mexican Americans in Struggle for Their Heritage, by Patricia Bell Blawis. Open Source.
I wrote about the origin of cats last week, so how about dogs? Well, to me, dogs seem way more varied than cats, both in size and disposition. I’ve seen dogs that barely look like dogs anymore they’ve been bred so much. Again, there’s a discussion in there I’m not willing to touch, at least not today.
We have 3 dogs. I love having dogs and wouldn’t want to live without them. They are all mutts, and strays. They all 3 showed up and adopted us, on different occasions of course. They all 3 have very different personalities, and ways to be annoying. Generally, I think of dogs coming from wolves, originally. Healers were bred from the Australian Dingo, BTW. Just a fun fact. The New York Times had an article describing domesticated dog fossils found in Europe from over 15,000 years ago. There is also speculation that dogs were getting domesticated at roughly the same time, in Asia, and in Europe and the Middle East. There may be DNA evidence supporting that theory. For fairly obvious reasons, at least if you have a dog or are a dog fan, they can be quite useful. They can be trained quite readily, some say, I wouldn’t know, and they can then be helpful in hunting, fighting, and protection. That all makes sense for early mankind. I think they make a fairly good friend and companion, if not a bit needy sometimes. It is speculated that all dogs descend from the Gray Wolf, though likely from two time periods. It is also suggested that it would take 130,000 years for the wolf to be bred into the modern dog, which implies that wolves were cohabitating or at least inter mingling with humans well before they were being directly selectively bred. The genetics of dogs is far less mixed up than you might imagine though. Particularly with Pure Bred species. A great article to look at, if you are interested, is from the PBS, which you can find by clicking here. We finally began to build our long desired screened-in gazebo on the riverbank. We started this project on Wednesday, planning completion on Saturday. Everything was going smoothly and as scheduled. We called ahead to reserve an orbital floor sander for early Friday morning, planning on finishing laying the deck boards and getting the sanding done all in one day.
Being the early bird in our family, my wife set an alarm for 5:30AM, hopped out of bed and gently whispered to ask me if I wouldn’t mind letting the goats out in a bit, as it was still dark and too early to release the beasts safely. I mumbled a grudging “yes” and squeezed in another hour of sleep. When I climbed the ladder down to the living room I was surprised to find her sitting by a roaring fire ablaze in our woodstove. I asked “Why are you still here?” to which she replied, “Look outside.” Holy moly, it was snowing! Real snow! Fat sticking flakes in a dark intimidating sky. Yikes, what’s happening here!? It's almost May and I’m sunburned from yesterday's framework! Realizing it was time for plan B, we called to cancel the rental and decided to go out to eat instead, maybe even catch a movie. We've been wanting to try breakfast at the Artesian Restaurant at Ojo Caliente hot springs. After a quick check online to make sure it was open, we hopped in the car and off we went. We were so entranced with all of the new snow on the Sangre de Cristos that we missed the turn onto Highway 285 by several miles. Oops! We decided to keep going into Espanola to try breakfast, instead, at La Fonda Del Sol at the Delta Inn. This is a fairly new restaurant boasting a no borders approach to Mexican cuisine. We parked in the large, dirt lot and could have used an old school map to find the entrance. Once inside, we found warm, Spanish colonial decor with a soft Saltillo floor and lots of rich, brown wood accents on the walls and above. Tall ceilings and two huge indoor trees make this a special place to dine. There’s a small table piled with fun tchotchkes from Mexico that are also for sale. Our server, Karina, ended up being the sister of Juan, who owns the place and opened only three years ago. Juan boasts being the bringer of quesabirrias to the area, a very unique and delicious dish consisting of a corn tortilla soaked in red chile sauce overnight, then filled with broth cooked beef birria, and grilled to a soft, but crispy perfection. We ordered two of these to start and were not disappointed. They were served with a small cup of consome, aka broth, and two medium spiced, creamy salsas. The habanero green was the most complimentary to this build of beefy cheesy perfection. Intrigued by the Chiles en Nogada and with Karina’s urging, we went out on a limb and ordered that as well. Now, these were a surprise. I still don’t know if I loved it, or if I will never order it again, unless maybe it’s Christmas, and I happen to find myself here on December 25. It was a chile relleno, one of my favorite foods on the planet, but was almost unrecognizable as one. The menu calls it a Pre Hispanic recipe. It’s a large, perfectly tender but al dente Poblano chile stuffed with ground beef slow cooked in apples and smothered in a pecan cream cheese sauce and topped with pomegranate seeds and fresh parsley. It was served with nicely seasoned perfectly tender Spanish rice, a small Mexican style green salad and corn tortillas. I was trepidatious as I took my first bite. My taste buds were overwhelmed by the tart popping pomegranate kernels, smoothly accompanied by the savory cream sauce. The apple soaked beef and the slightly spicy chile were a strange combination at first, but once my brain caught up to my mouth, we made peace with this odd combo and ended up liking it quite a bit! Upon Karina’s suggestion, we also ordered two gorditas of her choosing and a tripe taco, street style. The gorditas come with your choice (in this case, Karina’s choice) of flour, yellow corn or blue corn. The blue corn gordita was stuffed with rajas con queso, an ample serving of green chile strips and a bland, white cheese, which could have been elevated with an over-easy egg on it, and maybe a side of crispy bacon. The flour gordita was filled with asada de rancho, a grilled beef steak in a mild red sauce. Yummy! The street taco with tripitas (deep fried intestine) and onions and cilantro was simple but amazing. It had a fried calamari taste and feel. Crunchy, a little slimy, but flavorful. This was some good, authentic fare from the middle of Mexico, mainly influenced by the cuisines of Jalisco and Zacatecas. We loved the quesabirrias so much that we ordered two more and slammed them right down. As you can imagine, we left quite full and for just under $68 with tax and a generous tip. The Delta is a 10 suite inn that also caters to special events. The grounds are well maintained, the rooms are very large and the buildings are beautiful. Other than the dining room that we ate in, there are two more, much larger dining rooms and a lovely outdoor courtyard available for private bookings. La Fonda de Sol caters these as well as off location events. After our self guided tour, by the time we made our way back to the car, the sun was shining, and the sky was blue. I guess we no longer had an excuse for taking the day off, but decided to do so anyway. We did go home, but, instead of finishing the deck, we simply sat by it and watched the swollen river flow smoothly by. I highly recommend taking the next snow and hot sun day off. It still counts as a snow day! By BD Bondy A while ago I wrote something about a genetically modified something or other. I don’t remember what. But it had to do with how humans have been genetically modifying their food for a long time, basically, since humans have been farming. These genetic modifications weren’t done in a lab, but through evolution, through breeding qualities that were desired. Cultivating the wheat that grew with bigger grain, or breeding cattle that made more desirable milk, or meat. Bigger, or more docile, or better color, or sweeter. Whatever it was, it was cultivated over the millennia to be more what humans wanted. Not everything, of course, but chickens, pigs, cattle; those aren’t natural, they were bred to be what they are today. Same with corn, rice, wheat. The discussion about scientifically messing around with genes in a lab is NOT in this article. Maybe some other time. I’ve got all these feral cats showing up, passing through. They live under our porch for a time. Sometimes for a long time. They most often leave after they’ve been captured and brought in to be fixed. No doubt a traumatic experience for them, if not humiliating. I’m sorry, but it needs to be done. I love the cats under our porch. They kill mice and rats. I know. I’ve seen them. We have a camera under there and I have proof. They’ve also killed birds. Also on camera. Oh yes, that’s what I wrote about before. They are the number one bird killer in the world. By far. Feral and domestic cats account for the top 2 slots of biggest bird killer world wide. Wind turbines are on the list, but not the top 10. Read about that HERE. https://www.fws.gov/library/collections/threats-birds
So, as you can guess by the title, I was wondering where cats came from. They definitely aren’t ‘natural’. Don’t get mad, I’m not disparaging them. I think cats are interesting. They are sometimes adorable, and sometimes horrible, but they are amazing. Astonishing reflexes. Super fast. I asked Google, and this is the short answer: Domesticated cats all come from wildcats called Felis silvestris lybica that originated in the Fertile Crescent in the Near East Neolithic period and in ancient Egypt in the Classical period. Interesting, but not really an explanation. The Library of Congress has quite a bit more to say on the matter HERE. Cat domestication appeared early in civilized humans, and apparently in two major periods, the latter being in Egypt. Also, it seems that a major selective breeding change happened during the medieval period pertaining to the coats of cats, apparently trying to breed them according to their coloring. Cats are supposed to have been taken all over the world via shipping vessels, likely to help with the rodent problems on board. Cats clearly became useful and desired by humans and a symbiotic relationship has kept them going strong. I loved fostering our kitten which was made under our porch. And his father, whom we also caught, was a pleasant fellow. His elusive mother, still fertile, the cleverest of the bunch, remains under the porch. Get your pet cats neutered, please, and try and keep them inside. They will live longer. Zach Hively
Fools Gold As a man with an advanced degree in English, I must say that few literary delights compare to building something tangible with my own two hands. Barring that, because in fairness I use English far more often than I use corded drills, very little compares to getting my dad to build things for me. With me! I mean WITH me. Father and son, drawing up plans, watching instructional YouTube videos, buying carloads of hardware from every home improvement store in the county then returning everything because the hardware they bought was the wrong size hardware—this is as American a pairing as playing catch in the yard. It’s even more American if one of them is playing catch by himself because the other one has a job and responsibilities and doesn’t have TIME to do this right now, Dad. But—I wanted a pergola. It would make me feel more retired, even though I’m not and (being an English major) probably never will be. So unless I can build a pergola out of a comparative analysis of magical realism in the collected works of Isabel Allende and Gabriel García Márquez, for which I would have to read a LOT more of both authors, I needed to suck it up and dedicate some of those endless working hours to helping my actually retired dad get excited about starting a new temp job, only for free. Because I sure can’t research all this lumber by myself. And boy, is there a lot to consider with lumber. Such as: why is a two-by-four actually a one-point-five-by-three-point-five, yet when they say it’s ten feet long it’s actually ten feet long? Did the definition of an inch shift since the invention of lumber, while feet stayed the same? Or is this, as I suspect, a dark conspiracy backed by Big Wood to nullify all my lumbering calculations? Ah, but I’m getting ahead of myself. You see, before we even started with the lumber, we had to set the concrete. The cardboard forms for concrete pillars, as you may know, are round; bags of concrete, on the other hand, are not. This set up Pops and me for doing some math. It being a word problem, I felt qualified to help: “If a pillar is eight inches in diameter,” Pops began, “and we need to bury them thirty inches deep…” “Are these real inches or lumber inches?” I asked helpfully. “And, how many inches equal a pound of concrete?” Like a couple of smart fellas, we budgeted the entire first day of Project Pergola for buying concrete. This disappointed me somewhat; I had visions of pizza and margaritas under the pergola before sundown. But, Pops knows best that some things, like his son, take longer to reach fruition than you bargained for. Day Two, Pops called in to his one-day-a-week volunteer gig, and I had to find a decent bookmark for the novel I was reading, so that we could dedicate ourselves to mixing concrete. You don’t want to half-ass mixing concrete—not if you ever want to use your wheelbarrow as a wheelbarrow again. But you might want to half-ass mixing concrete, if you have any desire to move your body without hurting ever again. It turns out—despite suggestive adjectives to the contrary all over those bags of concrete—that concrete requires a great deal of force to mix. Strangely enough, this might have been the moment that Pops chose to disclose to me, in a moment of male bonding, that he had scheduled surgery for his hernia. “I can handle the hose,” Pops said. “And I can poke the air bubbles out of the concrete after it’s poured. But you get to mix.” So I did. I flexed every muscle in my body mixing concrete. And when those gave out, I flexed the muscles that aren’t actually muscles, like spotting an its when an it’s is needed, just in case they might help. They didn’t. But I mixed the snot out of that concrete, until Pops said, “Let’s call that good enough; we don’t want it to set before we pour it.” He handled smoothing that concrete and setting some brackets with a master’s touch, and I made sure his dialogue included semicolons correctly. And that was the end of Day Two. I’d like to say Day Three saw a pergola. Instead, it saw Pops drive home for some much-deserved R&R and a long session of researching bolt lengths. It saw me gazing proudly, for a great many hours, at the six concrete stumps sticking out of my back yard. Someday, I will have a pergola to enjoy. But even that cannot compare to the pride I feel today. It’s like I am standing taller. Which I am, if you measure in lumber inches. |
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