In Santa Fe: An American Discovering America

Exactly four weeks ago, I left on a trip of discovery.  I wasn’t traveling to another country, but to the American Southwest.  What I found was a part of the country felt somewhat familiar while looking and feeling very foreign in many ways.  Like the artists who came to New Mexico in the first half of the 20^thcentury in search of a distinctly American modernist aesthetic, I realized soon after my arrival in Santa Fe that I was, in the words of artist Marsden Hartley, an American discovering America. 

My trip to New Mexico got off to a less than auspicious start when I took an unexpected tumble down a flight of stairs at home and crash-landed, face first, against the front door.  This happened just as I was leaving for the airport.  But fortunately, I had a crew of helpers (Elisa, Christian, and Sylvie) who mopped up the blood and got me to my feet quite efficiently.  Within fifteen minutes, I was on my way.  I imagine that my traveling companion and I made quite a pair in the airport security line – Eleanor with her electric scooter and me with a big bag of ice held firmly against my battered face.

Within hours, bruises started to emerge, painting my forehead, eyelids, nose and cheeks with an ever-changing array of colors reminiscent of the desert landscape: shades of pistachio, inky blue violet, cranberry, terra cotta, merlot.  There was some pain, of course, but I was determined not to let this accident overshadow the excitement of being in New Mexico, “the land of enchantment.”  

Four days after my fall, the bruises had faded quite a bit. 

Quite fortuitously, Eleanor and I had arranged to arrive a day prior to the beginning of our Road Scholar program and had booked a day of pampering at Ten Thousand Waves, a Japanese spa in the hills above Santa Fe.  The soak in a private hot tub, the head and neck treatment, and the shiatsu massage were just what my poor body needed.  If you go to Santa Fe, I highly recommend that you schedule some time there. 

I would also recommend that you stay, as we did, in the very walkable historic district.  Right outside our door we found streets lined with restaurants, shops, museums, many of which featured beautiful adobe architecture.  The plaza is the focal point of the area.  Along one side of the plaza, under the portal of the Palace of the Governors, you’ll find a daily Native American arts market.  The majority of the vendors are selling jewelry they (or family members) have handcrafted.  I couldn’t resist buying a few pieces made of silver, copper, brass and turquoise. 

A gallery in the historic area

Painted columns outside the Museum of Contemporary Native Arts 

Adobe architecture of the New Mexico Museum of Art

The portal of the Palace of the Governors early in the morning (before the vendors arrived)

Native American crafts for sale in a shop

The Road Scholar program began with a very informative lecture on the history of New Mexico. You may have heard of the Anasazi, who settled in cliff dwellings in the Four Corners region about 2000 years ago. These people were the ancestors of today’s Pueblo people.  Note that “Pueblo” is a name given by the Spanish and that the term “Anasazi” has fallen into disfavor as it is a Navajo word meaning “ancient enemy of my ancestors.” The preferred term for these early indigenous people is ancestral Puebloans.  Remains of their Chaco civilization can be found today in northern New Mexico. 

During the period from 1200 through the 1500s, the Puebloans left the Four Corners area because of drought. They moved south and established villages along the Rio Grande and its tributaries.  Until this trip, I had no idea that the Rio Grande, the same river that forms part of the border between Texas and Mexico, flowed through Santa Fe. 

The arrival of Europeans in the mid-1500s had a powerful impact on the lives of the indigenous people. In 1539, the Spanish, led by Fray Marcos and Estevan, traveled north from Mexico in an unsuccessful search for the legendary seven cities of gold.  A few years later, Coronado and a group of Spanish soldiers marched into New Mexico and subdued several Puebloan villages.  Fighting throughout the area continued for the next several years.  The brutality shown by the Spanish against the native people sowed the seeds for a later Pueblo revolt.

Meanwhile, the Spanish appointed Pedro de Peralta to govern New Mexico.  He established a new capital in Santa Fe in 1609, making it the oldest capital city in the U.S.  The Spanish, who saw the Pueblo people as an important resource, imposed the encomiendasystem of forced labor and heavy taxation on New Mexico, as they did throughout the New World.  In addition, the Spanish sought to convert the Pueblo people to Christianity, by force if necessary.  

Oppressive treatment by the Spanish contributed to the first Pueblo revolt in 1680.  Despite numerous advantages for the Spanish (guns, horses, centralized leadership), the Puebloan people were victorious.  The Spanish withdrew but returned in 1692 and were able to reconquer the area.  This event, known as the Reconquista, is still celebrated every September in Santa Fe and other towns in New Mexico.  As part of the festivities, statues of the Virgin Mary, dubbed La Conquistadoraby the Spanish, are paraded through the streets.  I somehow doubt that today’s Puebloans are enthusiastic participants.  

Following the Reconquista, the number of settlers from Mexico increased.  And despite the conflict between the Spanish and the Puebloans, intermarriage between the two groups was not uncommon. 

At the time that Mexico (including New Mexico) gained its independence from Spain in 1821, the Santa Fe Trail linking New Mexico to the United States was established.  The trail was used by traders and settlers until it was replaced by the railroad in 1880.  At that point, New Mexico was already part of the United States, as a result of the Mexican War (1846-1848).  Under the terms of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, Mexico ceded much of its land to the U.S.  It’s worth noting that the treaty recognized the land ownership rights of the Native Americans in New Mexico.  For this reason, much of the state’s land remains in the hands of the 19 Puebloan tribes today. 

Once New Mexico became part of the U.S., large numbers of Anglos came to settle in the region.  In addition, after 1880, the railroad brought tourists and artists to the area.  New Mexico became the 47^thstate in 1912.  Today, the state remains sparsely populated, with sheep and cattle outnumbering the approximately 2 million people.  The largest city, Albuquerque, has about a population of about 700,000 while Santa Fe has only 70,000. 

The state is a complex mixture of indigenous, Spanish, and Anglo cultures.  (About one third of New Mexicans speak Spanish at home.)  This unique cultural mix is part of New Mexico’s allure to tourists, who represent the major source of revenue for the state.  The otherworldly landscape (so strange to my East Coast eyes) and the 300 days of sunshine every year (so welcome after a very rainy spring in Virginia) also attract tourists.  

While the lecture was certainly interesting, after an hour or so of listening, I was eager to get out of the windowless hotel meeting room and to see Santa Fe for myself.  

On our walk through the historic center of town, we began on Palace Avenue, crossed the plaza, and continued walking along San Francisco Street, which ends at the Cathedral.  Then we made our way a few blocks over to the Loretto Chapel, a building dating back to 1873, whose Gothic style interior was inspired by the Sainte Chapelle in Paris. 

The Cathedral

From there, we strolled up Water Street, lined with more shops and restaurants, until we reached the Blue Corn Café, where we stopped for a typical New Mexican lunch.  I chose blue and yellow corn enchiladas filled with calabacitas, a tasty mixture of zucchini, yellow squash, mild green chiles, and cheese.  

This might be a good time to mention the food we sampled on our trip.  I’ve had limited exposure to Mexican, Tex-Mex and New Mexican cuisine, and I’ve never been a huge fan, primarily because the heat, i.e. spiciness, often scorched my taste buds.  But since I was spending a week in Santa Fe, I was willing to give the local specialties a try.   On the first night of our trip, Eleanor and I ate in the hotel’s restaurant.  I ordered a salad with shrimp, which I assumed was a “safe” choice since there was no mention of heat, spice or chiles in the menu description.  How naïve I was!  After the first bite, I summoned the server and sent the shrimp back to be rinsed off. Even then, a hint of the heat remained. From that point on, I always inquired about the heat level of a particular dish before I ordered it. 

By the way, if you’ve been to New Mexico, you probably know that the official state question, when you order food in a restaurant, is “Red or green?”  This refers to chiles, of which there are numerous varieties.  If you want both colors, you say, “Christmas.” Since I usually didn’t want to commit myself to either variety, I’d ask for chiles on the side. 

One local specialty that I decided to skip was Frito Pie although the two people pictured below assured me that it was quite delicious.  If you care to try it yourself, the recipe for Frito Pie in a Bag is quite simple: prepare a pot of chili, ladle some of it into an individual-sized bag of Frito’s Corn Chips and top with shredded cheese.  Eat with a spoon.  Or don’t. 

Locals enjoying a lunch of Fruit Pie in a Bag

Several of our restaurant meals featured familiar items such as chips and salsa (usually quite hot), enchiladas, tamales, beans, rice, guacamole, and flan.  I especially enjoyed the New Mexican version of crab enchiladas at Gabriel’s, just outside Santa Fe.  But I could only summon an appetite for New Mexican food once a day. Fortunately, we were able to find Greek food at the Plaza Café (the oldest continuously open restaurant in Santa Fe), new American food at the Terra Cotta Wine Bistro, excellent Spanish tapas and paella at La Boca, and French/New Mexican fusion cuisine at Gutiz in Taos. 

The most interesting meal of the entire trip was prepared by a pair of award-winning Native American chefs at Red Mesa Cuisine in Eldorado, a suburb of Santa Fe.  Chef Lois Ellen Frank, of Kiowa and Sephardic Jewish heritage, has a PhD. in culinary anthropology.  Her co-chef, Walter Whitewater, is Diné (Navajo).  Dr. Frank welcomed our Road Scholar group into her home studio where she gave us a very informative lecture on Native American cuisine, beginning with an overview of the native foods prior to contact with the Europeans.  These foods, dubbed the “magic 8, are corn, beans, squash, chiles, tomatoes, potatoes, vanilla and cacao.  I had always assumed that the Native people were locavores.  However, Dr. Frank informed us that seashells found at some sites in New Mexico indicate that the ancestral Puebloans traded extensively with indigenous people in other parts of the country.  

Red Mesa Cuisine in Eldorado 

I also learned that “chile pepper” is a misnomer since there is no botanical connection between the chiles of the New World and the pepper of the Old World.  (I thought back to the Tellicherry pepper plants on the spice plantation in southern India.)  I’m trying to develop a greater tolerance for chiles since learning about their numerous therapeutic properties.  They’re high in vitamin C and other vitamins, and contain capsaicin, a powerful probiotic. Since they act as anti-fungal and anti-bacterial medicine, they are essential ingredients in ceviche, which is made with uncooked fish.  In addition, chiles, like chocolate, cause your brain to release endorphins, which is why you keep eating them even when your mouth is on fire.  Fortunately, even the mildest chiles have medicinal qualities equal to those of the hottest varieties.  Another bit of chile trivia:  they’re hotter at the stem end.  

The arrival of Europeans in the early 1500s brought changes to the diet of the indigenous people. For the first time, Native Americans had access to domesticated animals (cows, pigs, sheep, chickens) and their by-products, especially dairy.  It’s not surprising that the majority of Native Americans were (and are) lactose-intolerant.  The Spanish also introduced wine and wheat, originally used only in religious sacraments, but later incorporated into the everyday diet.  

When the U.S. government relocated most of the native peoples to reservations, the native diet underwent further changes.  Since the people could no longer hunt, gather or grow the healthy food that they had eaten in the past, they became dependent on government handouts of unhealthy products (dried milk powder, sugar, etc.).  As a result, certain diseases, such as diabetes, have reached epidemic-like proportions among today’s Native American population.  Chefs Frank and Whitewater are committed to helping Native Americans reverse this trend through a rediscovery of their native culinary traditions.  To this end, they’ve written several cookbooks, such as Foods of the Southwest Indian Nations, available on Amazon. 

Before we sat down to a delicious dinner reflecting the diet of pre-contact native people, Chef Frank gave us a tour of her garden, where she grows herbs, chokecherries, yucca, piñons, etc.  The meal started with a zucchini squash dish.  A corn soup course followed.  The main course, for the non-vegetarians in the group, was chiles stuffed with bison. (Vegetarians enjoyed a quinoa-based vegetable timbale.)  Dessert was a pair of mildly sweet treats, i.e. a berry crisp and a chocolate-piñon tart. 

Of course, the trip didn’t focus on food alone.  Art was another important aspect of our New Mexico adventure.  The artist I most often associate with the Santa Fe area is Georgia O’Keeffe.  I enjoyed learning a few new facts about her from Road Scholar’s insightful and entertaining lecturer.  For example, although O’Keeffe began making trips to New Mexico in 1929, she didn’t settle permanently in the state until 1949, following the death of her husband, photographer Alfred Stieglitz.  She was 62 years old at the time, a reminder that it’s never too late to change the course of one’s life.  

Santa Fe was already a major art center by the 1920s.  Especially after World War I, artists began flocking to the area, drawn by its landscape and exotic cultures.  Like those other artists, O’Keeffe drew inspiration from the natural setting.  Her abstractions of nature were promoted by Stieglitz, in his New York City gallery, as distinctly feminine expressions. To underscore the supposed sexual nature of O’Keeffe’s work, he exhibited nude photos of her alongside her paintings.  Art critics (males, of course) picked up on this interpretation and, for many years, this was the generally accepted view of O’Keeffe’s art.  In fact, for a number of years, the New Mexico Museum of Art in Santa Fe claimed that her work was too sexual to exhibit.  Fortunately, in recent times, this view has fallen out of favor.  

Following the lecture, we toured Santa Fe’s Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, where we saw paintings made throughout her long career, including some early drawings and paintings from the time she was a young art student in Chicago and New York. 

For a small city, Santa Fe has a surprising number of excellent museums.  The New Mexico Museum of Art in the historic district has an extensive collection housed in a beautiful adobe building.  

Murals line the courtyard of the New Mexico Museum of Art.

And in the Museum Hill area, in a quiet residential area outside the historic district, I spent an enjoyable couple of hours at the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture and the International Folk Art Museum.  At the former, I enjoyed watching a fascinating documentary on how the renowned Pueblo artist Maria Martinez created her distinctive black-on-black pottery. At the latter, I was introduced to a style of art called “Tramp Art.”  The name doesn’t mean that the makers were homeless.  Rather, it refers primarily to a style of woodworking characterized by notches and layers which was practiced from the 1870s through the 1930s by men who were immigrants from northern and eastern Europe.  

Museum of Indian Arts and Culture

Examples of Tramp Art

Art continues to play an important role in Santa Fe’s cultural scene today.  In fact, Santa Fe’s art market ranks 3^rdnationally, after New York City and San Francisco.  A stroll down Canyon Road makes it abundantly clear that the contemporary arts scene in Santa Fe is alive and well.  Both sides of the meandering street are lined with galleries featuring paintings, prints and sculpture.  There’s a great variety in the art market, ranging from work closely tied to the Native American experience to landscape to horses to the non-representational. 

Galleries on Canyon Road

If it’s truly avant-garde art you’re seeking, you can’t miss the Meow Wolf Arts Center, where a collective of over 500 artists has created what they describe as “an immersive interactive art experience” called House of Eternal Return. This 20,000 square foot installation offers a multi-sensory experience that defies description.  

As far as deepening my understanding of Native American culture, the highlight of our stay in New Mexico was a visit to the Taos Pueblo, about an hour and a half north of Santa Fe. Our route to the pueblo ran parallel to the Rio Grande River, and the countryside was noticeably greener as we made our way north. This is an agricultural area, known for its production of fruit, especially grapes.  (I had no idea that New Mexico is known for the production of sparkling wine.)  

The Taos Pueblo is a UNESCO World Heritage Site as well as a National Historic Landmark.  It dates back around 1000 years and includes a number of adobe buildings.  According to our Puebloan guide, the adobe walls are 2-3 feet thick, and must be plastered over with more adobe at least once a year.  The most recognizable structure in the pueblo is the large, multi-story North House, one of the oldest continuously occupied buildings in North America.  

The North House in Taos Pueblo

Today, about 150 members of the Taos tribe still live in the old pueblo, without access to electricity or running water.  Many of the houses and apartments are used as shops.  In one of the bakeries, I bought a turnover (called a “pumpkin pie”) baked in a round beehive shaped hornooven, a legacy from the Spanish.  By the way, the young man who sold me the pie was wearing a Washington Redskins T-shirt. 

About 3000 members of the Pueblo tribe live in modern homes on tribal land, where they practice farming and ranching.  One fascinating thing I learned from our guide is that most of today’s Puebloans practice dual religions, i.e. their native religion and Catholicism.  One example of the combined approach can immediately be seen inside St. Geronimo’s, the pueblo’s church.  (We weren’t allowed to take photos of the interior.)  It’s the practice of dressing statues of saints and the Virgin Mary according to the season:  pink (flowers) for spring, blue (water) for summer, yellow/orange (changing leaves) for fall, and white (snow) for winter.  Our guide also explained that inside the church, the casket represents both the body of Christ and the forced conversion by the Spanish.  Like the statues, it was adorned with a pink cloth. 

In addition, Road Scholar had arranged a unique opportunity for our group to tour the facilities of the School for Advanced Research, a private archaeological institute that studies Native American culture.  In their well-stocked archives, we saw examples of pottery, textiles and other art forms produced by indigenous people from all of the different pueblos over the past 1000 years.  

To get an idea of what life was like for the ancestral Puebloans, I arranged for a private guided visit to Bandelier National Monument.  On the way, we stopped at Overlook Point for a view of the rugged mesa terrain, which was formed by the flow of volcanic ash about 1 million years ago. 

Several sites at Bandelier have been excavated and archaeological work is ongoing.  In Frijoles Canyon, where early Puebloans grew beans, we walked on steep, rocky trails (don’t worry – I was especially careful after my fall) and climbed up ladders to peer into ancient cliff dwellings. 

Large excavated kiva (underground space used for ceremonial purposes)

For a totally different kind of experience after our Road Scholar program ended, Eleanor and I took a drive up through the beautiful landscape of the Pajarito Plateau to the mountain town of Los Alamos, located 33 miles from Santa Fe.  At the small Los Alamos History Museum on Bathtub Row (named for the houses that had the first bathtubs), we learned about the early indigenous population as well as about the lives of those involved with the scientific research leading to the development of the atomic bomb as part of the Manhattan Project during World War II.  The Los Alamos National Laboratory is still a government research center.  

Statues of scientist Dr. Robert Oppenheimer and General Leslie Groves at Los Alamos

As our week in New Mexico came to end, I was sad to leave.  We had covered a lot of territory but I still hadn’t seen Georgia O’Keeffe’s Abiquiu and Ghost Ranch, the Turquoise Trail, and Chaco Canyon, among many other sites.  I wanted to visit more pueblos and to learn more about the native arts.  And I was even hopeful that I’d eventually develop a taste for chiles.  So I’m already planning a return trip to discover more about the Land of Enchantment.