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PICTURE CONTENT

Santiago Chavez is only 39, but time long past is as real to him as the present he experiences with so much appreciation and the future he plans with so much optimism.

He lives in Santa Rosa, a town on the banks of the Pecos River where it winds through the llano of north-eastern New Mexico. Santa Rosa is small in population- maybe 2200- but it is very big in Hispano soul.

Rudolfo Anaya set it to his own kind of music in his book, Bless Me, Ultima. Now Santiago Chavez – he and Rudy grew up together – is expressing his own and different version on canvas. Drive with him on the road that wanders among the sage-green mesas and through the bright green valley of the Pecos to the ancient site of Puerto de Luna, and he’ll take you back to 1682 when the Lunas (his mother was a Luna) and the Chavez's and Padilla's and six other families settled Puerto De Luna. He looks at the ruins of buildings, and he sees the thriving farming community of 1500 people that almost became the county seat of Guadalupe County in the 1800’s. But Santa Rosa got the railroad and that was the beginning of the end for Puerto De Luna.

Santiago is painting all the scenes he loves along NM91 from Santa Rosa to Puerto De Luna, a ghost town now. He has a three room studio there in a thick-walled old adobe, cool even in the heat of the day – and quiet. He sees Puerto De Luna’s renaissance as an art center where young people of the area can learn about their culture and develop their talents in a way he did not have the opportunity to do. He had to leave for a long time and return in order to appreciate his land and culture.

But as strong and personable an individual as Santiago is, he must be understood as a member of an old and very large extended family. Ronald, president of Ronald P. Chavez, Inc., is the elder brother. Santiago is vice president of the family business. There are four other brothers and four sisters.

The beginning of their exodus from the small unpromising town is a story like many others in New Mexico. The happy ending is the Chavez's own. All of the brothers left when they finished high school. Ron went first in 1956. Now they are coming back. Ron came first in 1973, when he bought the Club Café in the middle of Santa Rosa.

At a table in the café, the two brothers told their odyssey. Santiago’s paintings hang the wall.

"We were all in Monterey, California, at one time," Ron said. "And we all got the exposure of that kind of world. It was so new to us compared to here."

Santiago learned to paint there and learned also that people would pay for good art. As a boy, he had sketched after farm work was done, but neither his teachers nor his parents encouraged him. In Monterey and Carmel, he visited art galleries and began to paint in addition to his business courses at Monterey Peninsula College and his job waiting tables. He tried an art class, but he couldn’t "get the mood and feeling into it." He felt like a stranger. Not until he returned to Santa Rosa five years ago to help in the family business did it go well.

"We refer to Monterey because we were there so young," Ron said. "I was 20 years old when I went there. And we didn’t have relative one, no nothing. We were completely taken away from our culture our heritage, everything, and thrown into a completely different world. And we all relate to that." Now three of the brothers are back and a fourth will return soon - the four who left in that first wave, as Ron calls it. The other two left later.

Santiago had moved on to a successful interior decorating and contracting business in San Jose before his return to New Mexico. "But it didn’t take me long to get into this slower pace that we have over here. And I began to reacquaint myself with my family. I began to talk a lot with the viejtos and my aunts. And I became enchanted with what I was hearing. All of a sudden I became aware of what my culture and heritage was. New Mexico has been represented in art in many ways. The Indians and their culture, the cowboys – but in our valley over here, there has never been an artist that has represented this part of the country.

"I want to catch the beauty of New Mexico," he went on, "the things a lot of New Mexicans have taken for granted – even I, when I was here. I hope through my art to be able to bring out not only beauty that surrounds this area, but also its people. This valley between Santa Rosa and Puerto De Luna, it dates back to when Coronado went through here. He built a bridge to cross the Pecos at Puerto De Luna. The heritage and culture that started then still exists and has been able to survive all the depressions, all the wars, everything that took place."

"The strange thing is," Ron said, "we really didn’t discover it, you might say, until we came back."

"Here in Santa Rosa and Puerto De Luna," Santiago said, "just about everyone is related to each other. Some way or other there’s a blood line. When we were going to high school, we used to have a real difficult time with girlfriends." He laughed. "And grandmothers were very strict. The first thing they’d ask was, "Who’s that guy?" And then, ‘Nah, nah,’ even if it was a fifth cousin or something. So it was a big problem."

"You better believe it," Ron laughed, "Especially in the culture of the dueña when someone would always chaperone the dances and everything else. We went through that very strongly." It seems surprising in their generation – Ron was a boy during World War II. "We were very isolated," he pointed out. "We only had a little ribbon of 66 going through here. That was our only touch with the world. We used to come over here from Puerto De Luna to gawk at people – just look at ‘em. Standing barefoot in coveralls.

" I remember coming to Santa Rosa to get bubblegum," he went on. "That was a big trip. Because we would come on a horse-drawn wagon with our grandfather. And all you could think of was bubblegum. The most prominent thing in the world was to be able to have a piece of bubblegum."

As all this came back to him, and he to it, Santiago’s style of painting changed completely. "Here the country is very rugged. The colors are much purer than the ones you’ll ever see in California. They’re very clear, they’re vibrant, they’re fluorescent at certain times. Like the cottonwoods in fall when they turn all those beautiful gold hues - Why they just become balls of fire. And to do this, I couldn’t do it with a brush. I tried but I couldn’t get the color.

He began working with palette knives and now uses only one. He no longer sketches on his canvases, and he mixes his colors on the canvas.

In response to his paintings, a program has started to tape record the reminiscences of Santa Rosa’s senior citizens – past events, history, simple things that took place in the culture they knew, things that provide the heritage of the present.

"Santiago’s had in mind," Ron said, "that he was going to awaken our people to our culture. We’re not a cultured people. Because our ancestors came from the plains of Spain, where they were away from anything that had to do with culture. And the same type of terrain and settlement was established here – far away from, the centers. A very ,very sparse type of life. "And when we grew up, we couldn’t appreciate art. There was no way we could because we didn’t know it. There’s no tradition. However, there was an overriding thing that made us feel we were an untalented people. And that’s a bad thing to live with, because it gives you an inferiority complex that shouldn’t be there. And we didn’t learn until later that it was just a lack of exposure. It wasn’t that we were untalented or unintelligent or anything like that. But, believe me, our people grow up with that feeling.

" So what Santiago had in mind" Ron said, "was I’m going to awaken an awareness of this thing. ‘And show these people that a rock on the side of the road is a beautiful thing. And he did it. And 3,000 people came to his Easter show in the Catholic Center at Puerto De Luna, and the comment that overrode everything else was "I never realized how beautiful Puerto De Luna is.’ It was the biggest single event we have ever had in this area."

People came from all over New Mexico, and some from Texas. More people than the population of Santa Rosa. Santiago’s first Exhibit. He is encouraged.

He plans to make 45 paintings of scenes in the area. When they are finished he will take them on tour. Brother Ron and the whole Chavez family – 75 people for Christmas dinner – are behind him.

He will not, of course, sell the paintings, but prints of them are for sale at the Club Café. His paintings are also on display at the Red Rooster Pancake House, another Chavez enterprise. His wife, Lin – who is English and educated in Canada – writes a poem to accompany each painting.

On every table at the Club Café is a map of the art tour to Puerto De Luna, the site of each painting marked by a sketch. To drive it with Santiago is to drive it with a man who is in love – although some things break his heart. The fact that the little church of Santa Rosa De Lima, in Santa Rosa has needlessly become a ruin. A building in Puerto De Luna that used to be the courthouse, the county seat then became a schoolhouse, then a home. "Now it’s just full of pigeons," he said, anger in his voice.

But many things gladden him. This year’s unprecedented moisture has turned the always-green valley especially verdant – the way the Chavez's say it used to be before the Depression. The grass, backlighted by the sun, is fluorescent.

He pulled up to Brush Dam, where water from the Pecos is diverted into a concrete irrigation ditch.

"That’s where you catch the big catfish," he said gleefully. Not all the irrigation ditches are concrete, and there are still spring ditch cleanings supervised by a mayordomo. He pointed out the two cottonwoods near the river where he remembers retreating from the sun at noon with the other boys and the men, swapping stories as they ate lunch. Saturday night dances were always talked about. Saturday night dances were a big thing.

He is intimate with every landmark – recalling an adventure on that mesa, the view from that hill, the half alive cottonwood, the cluster of a friend’s ranch buildings, a ruined adobe, once the scene of birth, life, celebration and death.

There is the big old house with the tin roof, the oldest and grandest in Puerto De Luna, that once had a fine portal. Much is still there, including the basement that once incarcerated Billy the Kid as he was being transported to jail in Las Vegas – Billy the Kid had Christmas dinner there.

Nuestra Senora de Refugio is a small church built by a French priest. Mass is still celebrated there at 6:00 p.m. every Saturday. Couples are still married there and have their wedding receptions across the dirt street at the Catholic Center. The Center is a good, strong, square adobe house with a pyramid-shaped tin roof. The old people hold dances there sometimes, their music a fiddle and a guitar.

Santiago’s studio is nearby, where three friendly dogs overwhelm him with affection. He has a garden by the river.

The land at Puerto De Luna is still owned by the original families. People still farm the valley and some of them live there. Santiago loves the peace and solitude it offers him – and, he believes, could offer other creative people. He would like to see Puerto De Luna alive again as an art center to teach kids things he was not taught, to see families unite and work together to do this. He believes it can and will be done.

"In small villages," said Santiago, "people possess the most precious thing there is – time."