The Toast of the Town

A Young Whiteboy Comes to New Mexico

My mother used to tell about how when she took one-year old me to the park in my pram, I would address everyone who passed by with a hearty greeting and my hand raised in a friendly salute. “Hi, man!,” I’d say, anticipating the popular greeting adopted by the beatniks and hippies flocking to San Francisco a few years later.

And so it was, some seventeen years hence, driving up that twelve mile grade into the tiny town of El Rito for the first time, I knew I had found my home even before I got there. Every car we passed on our way into town for what would be my first extended adventure in New Mexico, the driver waved to us. Just a small flick of two fingers from the top of the steering wheel, or maybe the whole hand raised a bit, a little shake of those two fingers in our direction. This tiny gesture struck me to my infant core. I still remember, now fifty years later, the first time I drove into El Rito. I felt so welcomed.

We still do it, I call it the El Rito salute, though by now it’s a dying cultural remnant of a time when people out here in the hinterlands were a little more connected, a little more dependent on one another, and everyone was a little more up in everyone else’s business. The young people hardly wave at all. It’s another sign that the “community” of El Rito is dissipating.

I couldn’t have known it at the time - what does an eighteen year old boy know about anything? - but the community of El Rito was dissipating at the very time of my arrival in 1973. I started thinking about this many years later, after I had studied human behavior for some years at university, about the major social transformation that was occurring just as I got there. The signs were all around me, and I waded right in, innocent, unaware of the profound march of history and human evolution playing out in this rural backwater town that had been settled by Spanish Mexicans and native Americans in the 1700’s.

The truth is I didn’t jump right into El Rito society from the get-go. I had come to visit a tiny gringo settlement seven miles out of town, up the roughest road I’d ever been on, up in the mountains above town, a place called Potrero Canyon. “Potrero” means a place for grazing in Spanish, and there were indeed lovely grassy high mountain fields ringed by pine forest and tall cottonwoods lining the tiny creek (usually) flowing from its spring source further up into the mountains. This was my second revelation that I had come to the right place, as I’d had recurring dreams as a kid of having a small cabin in a forest of tall pines, and here were all these guys building their dream cabins in this beautiful forest. This place was my dream made manifest.

I was traveling with my grammar school buddy, Jim, whose older brother, Terry, had dropped out of college and taken a bunch of his friends with him to this forsaken outpost where they could build funky houses and drink as much beer as they wanted and carry on without anyone, neither their parents nor the townsfolk, being the wiser. These guys had been at it for several years, alternating between occasional jobs around the area and harvesting firewood to sell, meanwhile gathering resources, cutting and peeling logs for roof members, making mud bricks and stockpiling them, rummaging around the area for salvage windows, sinks, doors, and then launching a community barnraising when the time was right. The key ingredient appeared to be beer, as long as there was beer on site, the Potrero community would show up to help out.

The community being this core group of five or six St. John’s College proto-philosopher dropouts with almost no practical life experience, taking on an incredibly harsh environment at 8,000 feet elevation, where the temperate season lasted mid-May to Mid-October, and the rest of the time it was freezing, with deep snow in winter, and mud pretty much all year round - and let me tell you, this was no ordinary mud, this mud was as slicker than a used car salesman. A modest rain would turn the deep rutted barely-passable steep boulder protruding so-called road into a car and truck-swallowing bog where you’d succumb to gravity and with a sickening sliding kerblump into the ruts and hope like hell you didn’t sink and run aground. Going sideways down the steep part was normal. And if you’ve never tried putting chains on your tires when you’re stuck in mud, I don’t recommend it. Walking the final two miles up was a rational choice anytime the road became dicey, which was much of the time, the only problem being how the mud built up on your soles as you walked, turning them into something a P-Funk strutter in platform boots would look on as a style challenge.

But the community usually, at least during the glorious temperate seasons, also consisted of a crowd of visitors and hangers-on, including me and Jim, so a room-raising - most of these “houses” being built started with a single room or two that would eventually be added on to - would be a few days or week’s work for a gang of gung-ho youths eager to get the big stuff done, and drink a lot of beer. In fact, the guy that Jim and I ended up helping that first summer had come up with a brilliant innovation that combined enthusiastic beer-drinking with clever resource management: he invented (but never patented) a way to use empty upside-down beer cans to insulate his roof. The more we drank, the warmer he’d be in winter. All he had to do was buy the beer.

Ah yes, buying the beer. Certainly there were other supplies needed to keep projects progressing and spirits high in Potrero Canyon, and groceries and hardware were available at Martin’s General Store (since 1916) in town, but there were few trips to town that didn’t involve a stop at the El Rancho Bar, directly across the street from Martin’s Store. This was downtown El Rito, with the 1832 fortress/church (five-foot thick adobe walls to discourage raiding Indians from trying to break through) a little way down the road, and that was it. Downtown El Rito.

The proprietor at El Rancho Bar was a kindly middle-aged man with a very shiny bald head named Perfecto Martinez. Somewhat surprisingly given that this was a town that had survived more than 250 years at a very modest subsistence level, with a racial profile that mixed at least five different regional tribes with already mixed racial strains of European Spanish and indigenous peoples coming up to settle New Mexico from Mexico, and a proudly, perhaps rigidly, Spanish Catholic culture that struggled to co-exist with the radical apostate Penitente sect popular in the area, the El Rito bar scene was congenial, even to this new strain of gringo college dropouts trying to carve out a life in the locals’ traditional grazing lands up in the hills.

As an eighteen-year old growing up in the sixties, I was no stranger to the charms of alcohol. My father, a mostly high-functioning alcoholic, had let me drink an occasional beer since I was big enough to help him cutting brush and firewood, and he’d always kept a well stocked cabinet from which I could furtively sneak drinks when needed. But to be welcomed into this manly den of adult drinking, as Perfecto did, felt like an initiation into manhood. Here in the El Rancho Bar we’d find the denizens of El Rito, young and old, mostly friendly, some a little edgy, almost always just men, hanging out at the bar. With my rudimentary high school Spanish, I managed to impress a few of the old men who hardly spoke English, over a couple of beers and maybe a congenial round of shots. “Arriba, abajo, a centro, y adentro,” the toast for every new round. Eventually we’d leave, sometimes a bit wobbly, with a stack of cases of beer in the back of the truck, hoping they’d last a few days. The problem with stacks of cases of beer is that they tend to promote more beer drinking, leading to a quick downgrading of supply, and then another trip to town on the horrible road, which, itself gave many good reasons to drink more beer.

For five years before I finally moved there, I lived in California learning my trade of carpentry and I came out to El Rito several times each year, bringing friends and staying for weeks at a time. But since that very first time I’d always had in mind that this would be my home. And for every visit, there would be at least one session at the El Rancho Bar to see how Perfecto was doing and check in on the ranchers, rowdy boys, and old grandfathers who frequented the bar in addition to the Potrero crowd.

So it was through these old grandfathers that I got to know the town of El Rito. Most of them spoke passable English, though some of the older ones barely did. It had only been about twenty years since they’d paved the road into El Rito, and same for electricity, so many of these old guys had lived their lives riding horses and working year round to feed their families, farming, hunting and fishing, and only taking temporary jobs to earn cash. They spoke the language of their ancestors, a version of Spanish that still uses expressions that fell out of fashion in Europe in the 19th century. It wasn’t uncommon to see a horse tied up at the hitching post out in front of the bar, stamping at the flies, hoping his owner wouldn’t lose track of him.

Most of these old men were pretty serious alcoholics, they lived to get drunk and they came to get drunk every day they had the money to pay for it. Alcohol played a role in their lives, in their ancestors’ lives and in their children’s lives too, with many through the generations succumbing to alcohol-related diseases like crashing their cars and getting into fights. More than a few younger men I knew died in car crashes while driving reckless and drunk, these older guys had probably survived due to their attenuated relationship with the cash economy, where they didn’t have the money to buy a truck in good enough shape to get much over forty miles an hour and they didn’t have the cash to keep buying liquor to the point of senselessness. They still had to go home to their wives and families. I remember one of my older friends recounting his life in probably the nineteen twenties or thirties when he was a barefoot twelve-year old tending his family’s sheep in the hills above town. Nothing gave him more pleasure than than settling down under a tree with his sheep bleating about him and popping the cork on a pint of cheap sherry wine and drifting off to sleep. His name was Prudencio. Even as an old man, he was the least prudent person I’d ever met. But he was usually too poor to be a good alcoholic.

Before they got blotto, or had to meander back home, some of these old guys would chat with me. I’d try out my crappy Spanish and they’d correct me, and I’d improve, endearing us each to the other. Some of them took me home and introduced me to their wives and I got to know their families on down the line, see them at fiestas in town or out in the forest. But of course, learning a language in a bar full of men can be problematic, as I found when I proudly started deploying some of my newly learned bar words around their sweet old wives, and noticed them blanching and looking shocked.

This is one of the things I really loved about El Rito, is how everybody knows everybody. Getting to know one old farmer/rancher at the bar opened the door to knowing generations of his family, sometimes dozens of people. In my neighborhood in San Francisco when I was a kid we knew a few families in the houses on our block, but there was little sense of community, no multi-generational crowd. Many houses on our block were occupied by complete strangers. In El Rito everyone knows where everyone else lives, who’s related to who, who’s in trouble and who’s been getting better, who’s sick and who just died. El Rito was a real community. An insular community, yes, where no gringo, not even Greg Martin, who was third generation El Rito gringo married to a Hispana, and who ran his general store with kindness and generosity, was fully accepted by the Spanish majority (95% in those days, a little less now). But even now, thirty five years since I lived here full time, a friend will come into town asking where I live, and a random local I barely know will direct them to my house.

I’ve often described this rural traditional culture that I stumbled into as a “culture of poverty,” but that’s a little misleading. It would be better to say it is a culture formed under conditions of scarcity, which is obviously what generations of subsistence farming would yield, a culture that was wary of fickle Nature and thrifty to a fault. Not only that, but El Rito and the rest of the villages ringing the heart of the Spanish colony in Santa Fe were the frontier of a porous defense against Indian attack until the late 1800’s, so in addition to vicissitudes of nature and a generally spare economy (further compromised by inconsistent and inadequate support from the powers in Santa Fe and Mexico City), the people of El Rito had to contend with sporadic warfare and thievery from four indignant tribes contesting their occupancy.

If cash were the only measure of wealth, the people of El Rito had been destitute for centuries before dependable sources of outside income became available, beginning with World War II. A government survey of the region during the Depression, taking measure of communal wealth of the rural towns of northern New Mexico, El Rito was seen as prosperous due mostly to its generous grazing lands (potreros) in the upper canyons along El Rito Creek, and the fertile and comparatively well-irrigated farmlands around which the town was settled. It turned out that until the 1930’s subsistence farming in El Rito had been a pretty good way to get along for a century or two.

But then, the economic depression and a catastrophic years-long drought had brought the entire region to the brink of despondency. The purpose of the 1934 survey was to find out why nearly 80% of the people in the area were receiving “relief,” principally food support. Even with relief, child malnutrition was epidemic. All this to say that Riteño culture had been under considerable stress for a long time.

When the pall of the Depression began (very slowly) lifting in these remote subsistence villages like El Rito, barely thirty years before I got there in 1973, it had done so by introducing an entirely new way of subsistence through wage labor. Working for the Man. Working for the white man. Young men in these subsistence farming communities had left town to earn cash for decades, but it had almost always been to support their family’s farm-based lifestyle. But now young people were beginning to gravitate toward full-time employment and careers in the modern economy, a few adventurous souls at a time. Still, the majority of young men when I arrived in El Rito were earning their cash fighting forest fires in far-away states, getting paid far more than their sheep-herding or potato-harvesting fathers had been when they went out for work, but still trying to eke out a living with catch-as-catch-can employment. They were caught between the traditions of their ancestors and the appeal of the new economic realities brought in by anglo culture, of which I - just another jipe jediondo (stinkin’ hippie, in the local parlance and my favorite alliterative phrase ever) - was a product and a symbol, I suppose.

Not only were the elders’ historic traditions being overturned, but the very language of their ancestors was being lost in the gringo school system, with some parents choosing not to teach their children Spanish for fear of not fitting into the ascendant gringo culture and economy. How could this not be taken as a rebuke to the grandparents’ entire existence? For these old men whose own grandchildren spoke a different language, I imagine that my efforts to communicate in Spanish might have tickled them a bit, a small but meaningful gesture of respect they might have been craving from their own families.

What this city-raised, scraggly-bearded, obscenely wealthy (in comparison) outsider gringo didn’t know as he blithely ingratiated himself to the local elders at the bar was that he had arrived at the very moment of this centuries-old New Mexican traditional culture’s collapse into irrelevance, at least from the perspective of these proud, heartbroken old men. Now at the tail end of their incredibly hard working lives, at the time when they would have been seen in earlier generations as the respected founts of cultural wisdom, they were coming to realize that they were as valuable to their community as the broken down horse-drawn wagons moldering in their back fields. What else did they have to live for, but the pleasure of drinks among their fellow has-beens, the pleasure of forgetting, and maybe a glimpse into the future with this punk white kid fumbling over their language, but having mastered the local toast. Arriba, abajo, a centro, y adentro!