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Song for Arroyo Seco
Art, Culture, & Gentrification
Business District Revisited: 1966-2006
April 15, 2006
By Bill Whaley
The First Impression
In the late spring of 1965, some college mates and I were driving along State Route 150, heading toward the Sangre de Cristos and the promise of adventure at Taos Ski Valley. Upon entering Arroyo Seco, we slowed to a crawl between the adobe buildings, between the Mountain View Tavern— now Doug West’s Gallery and school board member Gary Embler’s architecture office—and Abe’s Arroyo Seco Tavern, today known as Abe’s Cantina y Cocina. The adobe houses, verdant-looking fields, and sparkling spring air created a mysterious drumbeat inside me. That memory returns today, as I drive back and forth through Seco on my way to hike in the mountains, or stop at the Taos Cow, leaving my truck in Abe’s lot next to the Rio Lucero and across from the vast buffalo pastures of Taos Pueblo.
While living in Valdez in the fall of 1966, I visited Arroyo Seco to buy Spanish bread at the Martinez store (I think), or an occasional beer from Abe’s, and stoically endured the taunts of the local vatos, who called out, “Gringo, que pasa carbon?” The vatos hung around the parked cars across from Abe’s, next to Rachel Brown’s and Kris Wilson’s Craft House (Arroyo Seco Mercantile, today). One night I tried to drink all the wine in the St. Bernard cellar with a red-haired Chicano who washed dishes there during the winter of 1967. Hence I got to know my first Seco native under the right circumstances, “in vino veritas,” as it were. Unfortunately, I missed the famous doings at the Gay Nineties (formerly the Mountain View Tavern)—the night of the famous shoot out, when the locals fired from the outside in and those inside fired back like a scene out of John Ford’s “Fort Apache.”
Juan Valdez (R.I.P.)
This song about Arroyo Seco and the downtown business district was not my idea. In August or September of 1971, Calvin Trillin from The New Yorker magazine visited Taos. He was traveling cross-country, writing a series of stories under the rubric of “U.S. Journal.” His piece, which was published on Sept. 18, 1971, was called “Arroyo Seco, New Mexico: A Short History of the Business District.” It ran to four or five pages. He interviewed Juan Valdez (R.I.P.), Abe Garcia, Rachel Brown (above-mentioned author and weaver), and Joe Maes of El Salto Lodge.
The Maes descendants recently sold the burned out El Salto across from the Seco school grounds, once a gas station and grocery store, just behind Francesca’s unique shop (where you can dress stylishly for $30 or less). El Salto looks like it will be renovated. Francesca’s is in the old Seco post office, where Abe Garcia served as postmaster for 29 years.
Back in 1971, Trillin’s wide-ranging discussion with the then 76-year-old Juan Valdez, a retired storekeeper, included the subject of vegetables, which were suffering that year, Juan said, due to drought. Valdez told the writer about Seco’s former history as home to more than 10,000 sheep and generations of sheepherders, who traveled up to Wyoming ranches.
Local historian Paul Martinez, of Paul’s Men Store in Taos, recently told me the herders came home at the end of the season to “seed the land and seed the women,” and to pay off the store owners who gave their families months of credit while they were away.
Valdez, whom Trillin called “an accomplished conversationalist in both English and Spanish,” “had closed his store due as much to extending too much credit as to . . . break-ins.” Valdez said he used to take his canned goods home at night so they wouldn’t be stolen. There had been four stores in Seco, but by 1971 there were just two, the (Lavinio) Martinez store and the Joe Maes store (later El Salto Lodge), and the long-enduring Arroyo Seco Tavern, as well. In 1971, Rachel Brown’s Craft House had been joined by two or three other craft and antique merchants and the Gay Nineties Bar.
Trillin was interested in Juan’s take on the hippies, who began arriving around 1968, and in rumors that local Anglo businessmen had called for “hippie baiting.” The boosters evidently thought hippies were bad for the tourist business. Prior to 1968, as Rachel Brown pointed out to Trillin, there was little trouble and much quiet acceptance of Anglo newcomers by the native Spanish. At one point Rachel intervened to save a hippie from a beating and called the police. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, the hippie beaters were neither winos, nor toughs, nor teens. One of the local guys involved was part owner of a store in Seco and the other worked as an assistant manager of a supermarket, according to what Rachel told Trillin.
Valdez told Trillin that the hippie-baiters were hypocrites. “One of them was in here talking against hippies. I told him, ‘You and your brothers have nothing to say about hippies. You brought them here. You sold them land—our best grazing land.’ So this man says, ‘The man who bought the land didn’t look like a hippie.’ ‘Well,’ I said, ‘tell me: did he look like a Spaniard?’”
Abe Garcia
Trillin’s 1971 conversation with Abe Garcia confirmed much of what Juan Valdez had said about the downtown business district. But Abe also told Trillin that relations between hippies and locals had calmed down. Occasionally hippies came in and bought a six-pack, but they didn’t stick around when the locals arrived, according to Abe.
Today, Abe says the former hippies, whose names he doesn’t usually remember, come back and visit. During our noontime conversation at his Cantina, while I drank soda water, 82-year-old Abe knocked back a couple of shots with the local primos, who were eating lunch and quenching their thirst with Bud or Sobe fruit drinks. “They expect me to drink with them,” Abe said, adding that he takes a hazelnut liqueur with his coffee in the morning.
He wears a cap and has a thin, more-salt-than-pepper moustache. I gave him a copy of The New Yorker article, but he said, “I had laser surgery and can’t see so good.”
“What about keeping track of the bar tabs?” I asked, noticing that he wrote down the figures for certain noontime customers.
Tapping his head, he said, “The computer still works pretty good.”
Though Abe mentioned a fire and said he had rebuilt the bar and moved it, not much in the way of inventory has changed since 1971. There were still miniatures for sale along with half pints, pints, and cigarettes. American Sprits had joined the Camels and Marlboros. Jagermeister, a new addition, was nestled among inexpensive bottles of tequila, gin, vodka, and the omnipresent Seagram’s 7, Wild Turkey, and Bacardi. A bottle of Sierra Nevada Pale Ale was squeezed in among cans of Bud and Coors. Despite the seeming jumble of stuff on the back bar, it looked like everything had its place, as Abe moved steadily back and forth, serving customers and responding to greetings of “Tio.”
Trillin wrote back in 1971 that “attentiveness on the part of the bartender amounts to taking the tab off the beer can before he puts it on the counter.” Abe has a little gizmo to grab the tabs and jimmy them open, probably to save his fingers from wear and tear.
Abe also said, “I’m the only Spanish businessman left” in Seco. A local landlord, Ray Martinez, still owns the buildings where Antiquarius Imports, the exotic rug and artifact shop, and Taos Cow are located. Abe opens up each day about 11 and sometimes stays open until 2 a.m. if the guys get a good pool game going. Most of the time he closes about 9 or 10. A friend of his daughter, Lena, helps out, but Abe says, “When I go to bed early, I toss and turn. Can’t sleep. I got nothing else to do. I might as well be here. I open when I get up.”
Abe also says business is better than it was in 1971. He used to go to Mazatlán to do some deep-sea fishing but says now he has trouble finding company. “I started playing golf and quit fishing,” says the octogenarian. “We play nine holes. Sit down, eat lunch. Then we play nine more.”
“What do you shoot?” I ask.
“Heck, I’m not any good. I just enjoy it.”
But somebody else said he hit a hole-in-one during a golf tournament.
“Into the New Millenium”
While doing a bit of research for this piece, my wife Deb and I spent some time in Seco, buying some gifts at the Arroyo Seco Mercantile, Francesca’s, and initiating some negotiations with Jack Leustig, who specializes in giclee prints. On the bench outside John Bradford’s pottery shop, the morning coffee drinkers—including Scott Carlson, who owns and operates his own pottery shop on the main drag, as well as longtime bon vivant and bartender Craig Stagg, who now works at TSV’s Edelweiss—suggested we dine at Abe’s Cocina. So Deb and I sat down to enjoy what the fans call “Northern New Mexico’s best breakfast burritos,” prepared by Abe’s daughters, Olympia and Lena. The café includes a store and sells the staples: Folger’s, TP, paper towels, cereal, and newspapers. Artist and jewelry maker Claire Haye had been bragging to us earlier about her nine years in Seco, and said the tamales at Abe’s and the ice cream at Taos Cow were village highlights.
We had what the Seco crowd calls a healthy lunch, from the round-the-world fusion menu at Gypsy 360, during one of our extended days in Seco. The cafe was recently purchased by Michael Schuetz, whose mother, Daphne, was married to Godie Schuetz of Casa Cordova fame, now the defunct Momentitos de la Vida. So Michael grew up just down the street.
Two more young men who grew up not far away, brothers Subra and Amu Duncan, own The Abominable Snowmansion (formerly the Burch Mercantile), an inexpensive hostel for travelers. Their father, Michael, hosted the hippie communes called Reality Construction Co. and Morning Star. The Snowmansion was well-known as an off-campus outpost and source of coeds from Goddard College during the seventies.
Some 16 artists, restaurateurs, barkeeps, and storekeepers now own and operate their enterprises in Arroyo Seco, which seems like a study in appropriate development, scale, and symmetry; a tonic to the eye and the memory. The B&Bs, the subdivisions, the developments, new construction, and renovations in the Seco area all seem like exemplary models of how best to preserve and conserve the light and the love of the vega and the mountains.
The realtors, in addition to the visitors, are coming to Seco. An acre up the road in the El Salto area can cost more than $100,000. The Taos area was named in the February 2006 issue of Mountain Living as one of the 10 best places to buy real estate. Arroyo Seco itself is featured in the current spring issue of a national B&B magazine. According to Paul Martinez, about 25 families are still holding on to their membership in the Martinez Land Grant, which owns about 900 acres of undeveloped land. Perhaps they are lighting candles to ask for help, in holding on to their land, at La Iglesia de la Santisima Trinidad, the local parish church in Seco.
Tio Abe told me, “I’ll be 83 in 14 days, April 20th.” Then there will be another community celebration, the famous Fourth of July parade. In late summer there’s a bicycle race. And the merchants are talking about celebrating the town’s 200th anniversary on Labor Day weekend. They have much to celebrate. Recently, local resident Palemon Martinez of the Taos Valley Acequia Association, helped settle an historic water rights conflict with Arroyo Seco neighbor, Taos Pueblo. If Abe and his golf partner (not to mention the merchants, whose vitality seems undiminished by drought) are any indication, the water flowing down from the El Salto waterfalls into the Rio Lucero must be damn healthy.
The Seco Website and Community
July 5th, 2007
Policies are charged partially based upon proximity to a fire department as well as fire hydrants. According to my insurance company they first told me I had to get a “statement of reclassification” from our local fire department I did not agree with my agent that I should have to do this. Fortunately the policy was changed without further argument. I do not know if the agent or the insurance company I’m insured through contacted the local fire department or not but the policy change was made and I saved myself $110. It’s worth a call.
Again, thank you to the MDWCA Board for all of your hard work but please talk to us when we contact you, and keep us informed about what is going on even if we do not ask.
Thank you,
Justin De Mello, Arroyo Seco Resident
Roadside Cleanup Days Proposal
Sunday, June 17th, 2007
One of the problems that the ULCNA has had is bad turnout for a pickup day. The problem was getting people to remember to come out for the cleanup on such-and-such a date. People often forgot when the day arrived. This was solved partially by the fact that the ULCNA has email addresses of all the Association members as well as phone numbers. They would email all the members as a reminder of the cleanup day and then make a quick phone call to members as a final reminder. This, of course, is not possible in our community since we do not have a structure for this.
The only thing I can think of at the moment to solve this for our community is to post signs locally as a reminder of the roadside cleanup date. There might be other ideas about this.
Conclusion:
If the community is interested in moving forward with a Seco Hwy. cleanup day, I have contact names and phone numbers for connecting with all necessary parties to bring this about either this fall, next spring, or sometime in the future.
The ULCNA is organized as a member community and I do realize that we are not as “member organized” as they are. So if this proposal is too cumbersome for our area to pursue at this time, that is understandable. I thought I would simply offer the suggestion since Hwy 150 approaching Seco does get trashed regularly. I would not suggest that miles of Hwy 150 be cleaned but only perhaps 1 mile heading toward the village of Arroyo Seco but even that is up for discussion if others have any suggestions.
If nothing else it’s something that we can perhaps do somewhere in the future. The proposal is here, the information and contacts are available. Thanks for listening.
Justin De Mello, Arroyo Seco Resident