Santa Fe magical realism

Photo by Jay Dryden. Three Days in Santa Fe.

After my grandpa dies, we are driving near the plaza and my dad points out a bench on the far side of the plaza, near the La Fonda hotel.

"My grandpa used to sit every day on that bench," my dad says. "I never met him but I would walk by here every day on my way to school and see him sitting there." How can you live in a place as small as Santa Fe and not even speak to your own family?

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The plaza is ancient and new. The narrow streets, built in the 1600s are now lined with stores carrying fancy, commodified versions of things we used to wear everyday - turquoise and silver, woven rugs, kachina dolls (the old saints), leather goods and statues or paintings of the old west. The Native Americans still line the Palace of the Governor's thick adobe walls, but only tourists visit them.

Time Life magazine tells me that in the late 1800s the architecture of the Santa Fe Plaza was, at great expense, turned into wood and clapboard house with picket fences. People wanted it to look like every other town they came from. Then, in the early 1900s the state was discovered by artists and those houses were turned back into mud and adobe.

"They painted the town brown and moved all the brown people out," is how the mayor once described it.

As a Latin American studies major it's a trend I learned happens with regularity. Foreign attention turns into national attention. Tango for example, was denigrated and relegated to the poor underclass. Until white Europeans "discovered" it and loved it, only then did Argentineans embrace it.

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"Not a goddamn straight line in the place," my dad says angrily, identifying precisely what I love about Santa Fe - the rounded curves of a brown wall against a stark blue sky. "They've taken everything unique and beautiful about the plaza and turned it into a fucking tourist trap."

I think he's just angry and sad because his father died, but later I notice there are no low riders cruising anymore like they did when I was young. The spots under the trees where old crusty punks and hippies would gather to smoke and drum are blocked off. The streets are dead quiet. Where has everyone gone?

Still I would give anything to have half a million dollars to buy a studio casita on the corner my grandfather grew up on - to wake in the morning and walk to coffee - to hang a cow's skull over my door - to paint my window sills blue and to look as at home in turquoise as the tourists do.

"Santa Fe has an authenticity problem. Millionaires buy homes on the end of dirt roads because they think it's quaint," I tell my boyfriend right before a tumbleweed blows into my legs. "It's all so fucking cliche."

I've fallen in love with the myth of the place. I've fallen in love, but my father makes me look closer. I'd rather get lost in the postcard of my heritage.

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I try to imagine all the changes in the plaza my dad has seen from the times he walked there on his way to school. I try to imagine walking by a family member every day and not ever speaking. "How did you not know your own grandfather?" I ask. My dad tells me: "I knew of him. I had seen him before but I never talked to him. I don't know why."

Later, I find out he was 5 years old when his grandfather died. That’s why they never spoke.

I imagine the plaza has always been filled with our silent, unrecognizing ghosts.

Editor’s note: This piece is a follow to this poem, When Nothing Much Changes.