New Mexico Town Endures in a Spanish Time Warp
Maxim Kniazkov     [Photo]

ESPAÑOLA, N.M. – A piece of sunny Andalusia lives right here, on a treeless plaza surrounded by flat-roofed adobe homes.

An azure fountain fashioned after an architectural marvel in Granada, Spain, introduces an incongruous Moorish motif to the ascetic sagebrush-and-cottonwood New Mexican landscape.

Never mind the dissonance.

“That’s what they have at the Alhambra,” gestures Mayor Richard Lucero, his eyes alight at the mention of Granada’s main medieval castle. “We had to have one like it.”

His movements quick and decisive even at 70, he embodies the passion that helps this town of 15,000 link its future to its past.

They don’t deliver “mail” here, not even “el correo” as in Mexico. Trucks with the familiar bald eagle on the side bring “la estafeta,” a word carried over from the era in Miguel de Cervantes and his famous Don Quixote.

“We don’t speak Castilian like in today’s Spain,” smiles the mayor. “We speak a language that was used in Spain 400 years ago.”

The San Gabriel mission that was destroyed in a 17th century Indian uprising has been rebuilt as a museum and community center.

Fourteen coats of arms of Spanish noblemen who had battled their way into this valley at the end of the 16th century circle the walls in solemn tribute to a distant past.

Luján, Romero, Márquez, Valencia, Bernal…

Their descendants may not bear the same names, as centuries of intermarriage have thoroughly mixed Spanish, Indian and Anglo-Saxon blood.

But they are still here — and still every bit as passionate about their heritage as the men and women who trudged up El Camino Real, the old king’s highway that crosses the town.

“Here is the birthplace of the Hispanic community of the United States,” asserts Lucero.

Echoes reverberate of the1846-48 Mexican-American War and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which cost Mexico half of its territory and brought New Mexico into the U.S. fold.

“We live under an occupation government, but there is little you can do about it,” fumes 82-year-old Atanacio Romero, who nonetheless worked for this government most of his life and now comfortably retired, runs an antique shop north of Santa Fe.

The forebears of many in this town did cross the Río Grande where the town now stands, but on armor-plated horses — swords at the ready. It was 1598.

Captain John Smith, founder of the Jamestown colony, the first permanent English settlement on U.S. soil, was still sitting in a London pub dreaming sweet dreams of the New World.

Many of the Puritans who would sail on the Mayflower to Plymouth Rock in 1620 were in their infancy when Juan de Oñate, the first successful colonizer of the Southwest, and 400 soldiers, priests and settlers, the latter mostly Spanish Jews fleeing the Inquisition, were already here, sorting out royal land grants. Lucero de Godoy, one of the mayor’s ancestors, was among them.

“We could have walked across the plains to greet the pilgrims with an offering of our beans and tortillas,” laughs the mayor.

“La estafeta” most likely lost the invitation.

Española’s is a heritage that generates much emotion.

Every July 13, its streets host a reenactment of de Oñate’s crossing of the river. There is singing of old religious hymns called penitents. There is dancing and an arts and crafts fair with participation of Indians from nearby pueblos. The present interlocks with the past in a unique way, giving locals a heightened sense of belonging.

Luis Atencio, 79, whose roots in the valley go as deep as the mayor’s, owns El Paragua, a restaurant furnished in the style of royal Spanish castles, A 300-year-old cottonwood tree perseveres next to it....

“That place where McDonald’s now stands used to be part of our ranch,” Atencio says. Still spreading the faith, he motions across the road and recalls, “My uncles gave land for our church. And this house — I was born in it, I’ve lived in it all my life and will probably die in it.”

He used his own money to build a roadside chapel on the edge of Española — and financed the construction of a Catholic church in Zacatecas, Mexico.

There is a past that keeps calling on the present, and a future to reconcile with the past. Still there are things that bother Atencio. His grandchildren, he complains, are no longer fluent in Spanish.

No matter how busy with his more mundane responsibilities, Mayor Lucero believes spreading the faith is part of his job.

He fears the San Gabriel mission, dedicated with great pomp last September, will, in some sense, never be finished.

“Those 14 coats of arms, remember?” he pauses in deep thought. “I wonder if we will ever find out the names of the rest.”

(Maxim Kniazkov, of Washington, D.C., is a free-lance writer. He may be contacted by e-mail at maximkniazkov@msn.com.)

© 2005 Hispanic Link News Service
02/13/05
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