Home at Last

the past’s presence

New Mexico’s historical legacy lives on in the deep-rooted language, architecture, and cultural influences from Spain and North Africa that shape this region’s undeniable mystique.

By Christine Mather

This article first appeared in Autumn 2009 Su Casa

For those of us who have come to New Mexico from elsewhere—a significant portion of our population—life in the Land of Enchantment can be a bit demanding. Once you have adjusted to the lack of moisture, your next challenge lies in pronouncing the name of the street where you live.

Many despair of learning a second language as an adult, for it is a long, arduous, sometimes humiliating, often hilarious journey. Like any task that requires relinquishing the core of control so precious to our grown-up selves, studying a language also opens an entirely new world to the persistent soul who soldiers on through the years. Not only can you communicate with people from another culture in foreign places, but you can also discover a hidden world embedded in the language. Even if you forego the whole enchilada—so to speak—of learning Spanish, you can still savor the richness of the past revealed through many of our everyday New Mexican names and terms.

We are surrounded by Spanish as New Mexicans, not just in the spoken word but in the names that are so much a part of where we live and work. We pass by endless calles and caminos, stare up at the Sangre de Cristos or the Sandias, take the paseo over the Rio Grande, or wander the Camino Real toward Las Cruces. From the Coronado insurance agency to the De Vargas shopping center, a variety of businesses appropriate the names of conquistadores to burnish their contemporary grandeur, perhaps without knowing much about the lives of these very real men—fellows clanking around in hot armor, waving their expensive Toledo blades, riding horses once ferried across the Atlantic on precarious wooden vessels. Figuratively speaking, those fellows were just off the boat from medieval Spain, a country that had finally, after almost eight centuries, ejected its Moorish conquerors.

Despite all the history and lore lost to us, those persistent names continue to intrigue—just why is it “Sangre de Cristo,” and who brought us that poetic name? Is it descriptive or purely religious? We may never know, but we can imagine an armored man staring up at Santa Fe’s mighty mountains and pronouncing that henceforth they shall be called the Blood of Christ.

Besides that speculative drama, an even more impressive lineage lingers with our most elegant place name, el palacio. Now part of the New Mexico History Museum, the Palace of the Governors in Santa Fe is one very old public building. As a palace, it has the distinction of representing the King—and we are not talking about the King of England. The trappings of royalty began here in the 16th century and lasted until 1821 when Mexico and New Mexico took their leave from Spain. Can you think of any other European colonial palaces around with all the baggage that such a term implies? This rich historical legacy is quite literally embodied in a name and in that long and low adobe structure.

The Palace of the Governors is the mother of all homes for New Mexicans and retains its status as the anchor spot for all the buildings that were to follow. Close to the street, defining a plaza, containing an interior courtyard, constructed of adobe with vigas, latillas, and corner fireplaces, the palace is the touchstone of New Mexican architecture. Defining each of its significant characteristics can hardly be done without using the Spanish names of those elements—names intimately familiar to us but foreign to our fellow citizens. Does square really define what we mean by plaza, or does beam get to the essence of a viga? Those of us who live in a cultural and linguistic mix would offer a complex answer to the famous question, what’s in a name?

Not all the Spanish we use is truly Spanish. When the Spanish Muslims were pushed off the Iberian Peninsula, they left behind a few thousand things besides their stunning architecture—namely words that are still going strong more than four centuries after the 1567 royal decree criminalizing the use of Arabic. Either the decree didn’t take or the newly formed country of Spain had conveniently forgotten the contributions of its occupiers. Arabic gave us alcohol and algebra, both of which some of us use today—I prefer my Arabic in liquid form. If you wish to irrigate your land in a Spanish-speaking country, for example, you had better get the permission of the mayordomo before using the acequia.

The architectural styles, materials, construction techniques, and terms of the Spanish Muslims constitute much of what makes New Mexico the unique home we love. Without them, would we live in adobe houses or contemplate building an horno in the backyard, use Talavera tile in the bathroom or seriously consider putting a fountain in our courtyard? These contributions link us to a culture thousands of miles and almost a thousand years away. Along with Arabic contributions and thanks to the Aztecs, we can eat and say, in an approximation of their Nahuatl language, chocolate and tomatoes.

Lucky Spanish speakers in the New World can raise guajolotes (turkeys), eat aguacates (avocados), build jacales (huts), and listen at night to tecolotes (owls), while many of us have mild addictions to equipale furniture, as well as guacamole. The Nahuatl link was forged, as was the Arabic, in the heat of battle and conflict at the expense of millions of lives. Neither these dreadful losses nor royal decrees could extinguish this unique living link to much older cultures, giving New Mexico—in the way it looks, feels, and sounds—its special mystique.

I wish I had known all of this as a callow graduate student when the fancy-pants history of art department I attended felt that Spanish was not worthy enough to satisfy its language requirements. The department required such “useful” languages as Latin, Greek, or French. What they don’t teach you, it seems, is more significant than what they do. Ay, caramba! What did they know?

Christine Mather is a museum curator, as well as an author of Santa Fe Style, Santa Fe Houses, Native America, and True West, volumes that explore design and lifestyle.