As a child, approaching adolescence, I immigrated from Albuquerque’s city life to a quieter Santa Fe. Santa Fe is 50 some odd miles north of Albuquerque along the Camino Rael; the same byways of the original Spanish colonizers. Santa Fe is the town of my formative years. The place where I walked lonesome afternoons on the beaten paths through its arroyos, until I warmed up to the other curious meanderers. Santa Fe became a place where I would rush my homework after school to maximize the day light I had to play pick up basketball, baseball, and football with the barrio kids. The desert mountain refuge that allowed me to ride my tank of a street bike on seemingly endless dirt trails, winding through chamisa fields and piñon tree mazes. It was in hind sight a major blessing because it shrunk my bad influences.
I don’t want to write with a victim mindset, and I want to honor the observations I feel now. The home I knew is tainted. And I understand that what I may find tainted, others obviously find evolved. As I walk through the plaza area, I recognize how it is no longer functional. It isn’t a downtown as much as it is a historic Disney-like playground for touring Texans. I have to be more accurate and share that Santa Fe’s tourists are clearly comprised of so many more populations than Texans, but this hurt I feel resonates through that mild prejudice towards Texans. I think it points to the privileged hypocrisy of legislating against Brown culture in its impoverished form but romanticizing its Southwestern spin. It might be disgust for the best of both worlds they epitomize where they get to despise most immigrant Mexican people and vacation in New Mexican quaint culture sanitized of anything truely New Mexican other than a traditional meal here or there. Santa Fe has grown into a tourist destination.
Of course it is both and. Many state government offices are nearby and the national hot spot is a gold mine for tourist dollars. I am talking about New Mexican functional. I am talking about the New Mexico Rael not the New Mexico True. I cannot see New Mexican faces. Even when I think I am seeing New Mexican faces they are really Mexicano faces. I am writing about this evolution as a way of understanding that the culture and conditions I have aren’t anything I should think I can persist. The New Mexico I was raised in is going away. I am proud of belonging to this fading flavor of humankind.
I come to this conclusion after some small experiences as an adult. I can’t know what Santa Fe was like for adults when I was a child and so maybe New Mexico as I know it isn’t going away, it is possible that I am going away. Regardless I recall this itchy event that sits in my mind.
I walk into a distillery. This distillery is in a renovated part of the city that used to be an empty Rail area. It used to be a shortcut into downtown at the furthest part of south downtown Santa Fe. This place is trendy. It looks like what I remember Denver being. It is decorated with modern everything. The place is nearly empty and I enjoy a pour of a craft gin. After around 2.5 hours of work, I don’t need another gin, but I also find it surprising how I have not been asked if I needed anything. I let this observation simmer as coincidence and chalk up the poor service to bad timing. I rationalize away my typical feelings of being discriminated. And some of it is that a part of me appreciated being left alone.
Then my girlfriend arrives and I note the place has filled with happy hour customers. The wait staff that I encountered are the same people, but entirely different personalities. I walk to get some water from a water station and look around noticing the people who have filled the front area. I stand curiously and scan each face. I gradually have an awareness and some level of feeling stunned. I am socially disoriented because every patron is Anglo. I have a surreal feeling of being a visitor. Not only a visitor but a nuisance because now I have that long lingering self-doubt that lies to me and says mentally that I don’t fit in here.
I had just come off the mountain and I was not matching the implied dress code. I quickly speculate that this must be why I’m ignored and the service sucks. I was in comfortable bottoms, a non-matching mid layer sweater, hat hair, and tennis shoes. I made a second round of rationalization, and I wanted to give the benefit of the doubt. Maybe the wait staff did appreciate how I was so casual. Then a group of scraggly, un-groomed, tennis shoe and torn jean wearing anglos sat at the table next to me and my partner. I note that they now get the attention of 2 servers.
I could no longer do the injustice to myself and realize that it may not be discrimination but the Santa Fe that embraced me is not on this side of town. I could write another couple of hours taking some emotional ownership for what happened to me in this brief encounter with the city of my youth. I save that for another day. I think more importantly I have to continue to see these American refugees as finding a quieter and nourishing place, just like my mom and I back in the 80’s.
Santa Fe the landscape is not very different and Santa Fe the people are being inundated by the afflicted and possibly fatigued American Rat Racer. I understand that being aware of the classism this has and continues to create will likely be something I can only write about because hanging on to a New Mexico that resembles me is my romance ready to be steamed rolled by modernization. I don’t recognize this Santa Fe, and like its gin I am only a recipe derived from its local ingredients, and susceptible to mixing with a variety of ingredients from all over the globe. I grieve the Santa Fe that raised me, and I learn to be hopeful despite the perceive expulsion.
