In 1951, a couple of years after our stay at the mining camp Antonio Gonzales found a better paying job working at an Anaconda uranium mine near the town of Grants. He, Senaida and their children left the cabin on Zuni mountain and moved west. Throughout the 1950s we regularly took weekend trips to Grants to visit them. To get there we took old Route 66, a scenic drive of great beauty. This trip became my introduction to nature and to the Southwest’s extraordinary palette of colors. Sitting in the backseat of Dad’s Chevy convertible I had a panoramic view of the endless, rugged landscape.
I saw the gray brown in dusty roads going to isolated houses and hogans where horses, corrals and pickup trucks were sometimes seen but hardly ever any people. White faced cows grazing on faded green and yellow grass. Little used paths scratched into red earth that undulated over hills before disappearing into the mysterious blue distance. A skyline of massive flat topped mesas displaying broad layers of color: pink at their base, white in the middle, red on top. Trains were moving threads of silver, white and black, pulling so many cars Phillip and I could never count them all. The vast sky changed from pale blue, almost white, to deepest ultramarine blue as sun and weather demanded. Sun rays pierced the clouds, vividly spotlighting the landscape, firing the late afternoon sky with hues of gold, red and purple before settling into black black, the color of our drive home to Albuquerque at night.
I felt small within this immense panorama but somehow it also felt familiar and comforting. Spellbound by such raw and powerful beauty I often forgot I was with my family. On one trip to Grants Dad’s voice came over the sound of the wind and the engine, breaking the visual trance I was in. He was commenting on Mt. Taylor, a stark blue jewel rising to the north. “This mountain is sacred,” Dad began and immediately he had my full attention. “It’s where the Navajos say they come from.”
Dad loved telling stories about New Mexico. Although some of what he said was pure invention, through them Phillip and I became aware of our ancestry. Like most Hispanic New Mexicans, ours is a tapestry of many threads and colors and Navajo is one of the strands. I wondered if we had any relatives living in the hogans we sometimes spotted in the distance.
Along Route 66 Indians sold pottery, blankets and food from little family owned stands which were built from old lumber with roofs of thatched juniper branches. We often stopped to buy tamales and freshly baked bread at them. Mom was an excellent cook and quite critical of others' efforts at Mexican cuisine. By watching her tentative first nibbles we’d find out if a Route 66 tamale met with her approval.
Ever since I can remember I've had a keen interest in how people looked, dressed and behaved so I watched these interactions closely. Using my own experiences as a point of comparison I realized there were many similarities to ourselves. Native Americans' cultural shyness toward the outside world reminded me of how reserved we children were around non-Hispanics. The job of speaking to customers and conducting business seemed most often the province of women while the men stayed to the side, much like my Grants grandparents. It was Senaida who always made the effort to communicate with the English speaking world and Antonio who refused to try. As for appearance, Native American women dressed in traditional garb, wearing long skirts and covering their hair with shawls. Their dark skin tones and features were similar to my grandmother Remedios Sanchez who was from Queretaro, Mexico where there are many native peoples. Indian men wore western jeans, shirts and cowboy hats while boys dressed the same as Phillip and me.
It wasn’t until I was older that I realized my observations were part of becoming an artist, yet even as a child I knew I was seeing things differently than others. Colors and images profoundly affected me in ways no one else in my family seemed to experience or even remembered having seen.
As the highway wound its way west the ride was often idyllic, full of stories and sightseeing but the trips were also peppered with my parents’ arguments. They spoke in Spanish to each other believing that if we didn’t understand what they were saying we wouldn’t be affected. But there’s more to language than words and Phillip and I would arrive at relatives’ homes exhausted from the conflict. The arguments became an expected ritual of any given journey and changed my happy, contemplative mood to one of sadness. Without thinking about it I began to lock out what I didn’t want to hear and concentrate on the visual.
As we drew closer to Grants, the landscape of red mesas and sandstone bluffs changed to a starker one of jagged black lava. An unpleasant odor of sulfur filled the air and the wonderment I felt was replaced by a sense of foreboding. In Spanish this unique volcanic area is called el malpais, the badlands and stretches as far as the eye can see. Early travelers to the Southwest feared its heat, difficult passage and lack of water.
Grants in the 1940s and ‘50s was a frontier town, an unattractive, hardscrabble place with hardly any trees, lawns or paving. The houses people bought or built were basic, no frills places but still a definite step up from the dire circumstances so many came from. Our grandparents’ small house was on a dirt road and lacked indoor plumbing. It was this way at all our relatives’ homes in Grants during the fifties. Some houses were built directly below the lava escarpment. Adults constantly warned us not to hike on it because of the rattlesnakes and scorpions there.
By the time I was a teenager I no longer wanted to visit Grants, not because of our relatives who were all generous and caring. It was the town’s dreary look which affected me, and the fact that Phillip and I could not speak Spanish. When we visited Grants the language barrier made me feel isolated and separated from our relatives, as if we were foreigners within our own family.
Of all the places we visited family my favorite was Santa Fe, where Uncle Fred and Aunt Margaret lived with their nine children. Phillip and I always had a great time with our Martinez cousins who were our closest friends for many years. Santa Fe is an hour’s drive north of Albuquerque. Dad liked to gas up the car in the town of Bernalillo, stopping at a grocery store with snow covered mountain caps painted on its roof and life-size plaster polar bears out front. Phillip and I would share an Eskimo pie while we walked around this odd sight.
The Martinez home was situated at the northwest edge of Santa Fe. In those pre-subdivision days we only had to cross St. Francis road to be in the quiet, fragrant piñon and juniper studded hills. But the downtown and its busy plaza weren’t far away and I loved going there. The narrow streets, old adobe homes and medieval style cathedral gave me a sense of being in an ancient place.
The contrast between Santa Fe and Grants was so dramatic I couldn’t help comparing them. Santa Fe was a visually exciting place which the larger world appreciated and traveled long distances to enjoy. Grants had no such visitors. You were in Grants because you lived there, you were visiting relatives, or you were there on business. As a youngster I wondered why my grandparents chose to remain. As an adult I realized how few choices were available to them. Conditions beyond their control forced Antonio and Senaida around 1930 to trade farming in Sena with its life giving river and green fields, for mining. This drastic change was undertaken by many village Hispanics seaching for any other work than farming.
Twenty years later the Gonzales family settled in barren Grants, a faraway place that offered opportunities I as a child could not appreciate. Men who had once been fearful about the future now had full time work. They could feed their families; their children attended school wearing new clothes. They could afford trucks, cars and homes. Mining enabled Antonio and his family to stay in New Mexico and even though it was a hard, hard job, he felt fortunate. So many people he and Senaida knew had left the state in search of work, never to return.
Still, there was a price to pay for this new and better life. Miners suffered from black lung disease, an illness which devastated them and their families. The uranium industry began drying up, leaving the community struggling to survive. Due to time and distance Antonio and Senaida’s historic ties to their village were permanently severed. The link was broken for Dad, as well.
Given by his parents to an elderly and childless couple in the village to raise as their own, Benerito was the only one of all the Gonzales children to grow up there. The rest lived in mining camps while he led a pastoral life with doting parents. Yet Dad rarely took us back to Sena. Instead, visiting family meant going to Grants. As a result, we hardly knew our Sena relatives or their rich village traditions. A generation later my grandparents watched with sadness as many of their children and grandchildren left Grants in search of jobs and those ties were broken, too.