Prepare for Santa Fe, NDAA 2006 Summer Conference

By Joel Jacobsen, New Mexico Assistant Attorney General

In the dock of Tiger Bay,
On the road to Mandalay.
From Bombay to Santa Fe,
Over hills and far away.
(Ian Dury)

Santa Fe might be the best-known unknown city in America. Everyone recognizes Santa Fe style, or at least the Kokopellis and the coyotes that howl sitting on their haunches with their heads thrown back. It’s a funky Aspen, an ethnic Newport—or maybe just an upmarket roadside attraction. The thing that’s sometimes hard to remember is that there’s a real town there, too. Even some of the people who live on Santa Fe’s too-wealthy east side have forgotten it.

Fanta Se, the old joke calls it. The town encourages you to indulge the fantasy of laid-back poshness. There are fabulous restaurants you don’t have to dress up to patonize. There are rooftop bars where you can sip a margarita while drinking in the sunset coloring of the aspens on the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, the southernmost chain of the Rocky Mountains and the closest most of us prosecutors will ever get to feeling like a millionaire.

There are the galleries around the Plaza and on Canyon Road, the historical sites (you’ll find them listed in the glossy publications stacked beside your hotel telephone), the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, the beautiful Pueblo Revival architecture, the curio shops, all of them just a post-prandial stroll from some of the best restaurants in the country. The theme-park Santa Fe is more than enough for any one vacation.

But there’s a lot more to the place. New Mexico isn’t like anyplace else in America, and it’s different because it’s old. By American standards the Spanish town of La Villa Real de la Santa Fe de San Francisco de Asís, founded in 1607, qualifies as ancient. It was already in its second decade of existence when the Pilgrims invaded Massachusetts. Yet Santa Fe wasn’t even the first Spanish capital of what was once styled the Kingdom of New Mexico. (And how many other states were ever once a kingdom?)

The first Spanish capital was built near the Pueblo usually called San Juan (its Tewa name is O’Ke). The Pueblo was there first. It and many other Pueblos were already old when Vásquez de Coronado made his winter camp on the Rio Grande near present-day Bernalillo, less than half a century after Columbus’s first voyage.

The hauntingly beautiful ruins at Bandelier, Chaco Canyon, Gran Quivira, Mesa Verde and Canyon de Chelly—all within driving distance of Santa Fe—were for many years attributed to a mysterious people called by the Navajo name Anasazi, but are now acknowledged to have been the homes of ancestral Pueblo people. The Pueblo people were living here, and building cities and constructing long-distance trade routes, before William the Conqueror crossed the English Channel. Skeletons of Central American parrots have been found at Chaco.

New Mexico might be compared to one of its red-rock cliffs, the most spectacular specimens of which can be found in the Jemez River valley and around Abiquiu (a-buh-cue, with the first syllable pronounced like the “a” in “back”). Those cliffs are constructed of layers of iron-tinged sediment, the horizontal stripes of the strata plain to see. New Mexico’s culture, too, was built of successive layers. To speak only of recorded history, there were the Pueblos, the Spanish, and then the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, the only entirely successful native retaking of North American territory. That was followed by the return of the Spanish and the merging of cultures that gave us the unique architecture and food. (You’ll notice that more restaurants offer “New Mexican” than “Mexican” food, and if you compare the cuisine of Santa Fe with that of any town in Mexico, you’ll know why.)

Historians and archeologists argue about when the Apaches and their close relatives, the Navajos, reached New Mexico. Some say it was around the same time as the Spanish while others peg it much earlier. The early nineteenth century saw, in quick succession, independence from Spain, the inauguration of the Santa Fe trail, and an invasion of sorts from the Republic of Texas.

A more serious invasion occurred in 1848 with the outbreak of the Mexican-American War, but the first civilian governor of the conquered territory of New Mexico was assassinated in a failed revolt. After the Civil War the territory became a haven for displaced veterans, and the influx of unrooted young men trained in the use of firearms and inured to violent death helped to create the Wild West of legend. (Ask a New Mexico prosecutor if the frontier ever really closed.)

The Buffalo Soldiers, the legendary black cavalry, were stationed in southern New Mexico to deal with the Apaches. They had to deal with some of the more obstreperous Anglo settlers, too, such as Alexander McSween, a lawyer whose Lincoln home was torched under the watchful eye of a (white) cavalry colonel. When McSween ran out of his burning house he was gunned down. But one of his comrades managed to flee the flames and live to fight many another day. That man was Henry McCarty, known to his contemporaries as Bill Bonney but better known to us today as Billy the Kid.

All these layers of New Mexico history remain visible today, if you just look. The superb Museum of New Mexico and Palace of the Governors, just blocks from the conference site, are good places to start. You might then visit the Pueblos—both the ruins and those still-thriving communities that welcome visitors (not all of them; check before you go). Acoma, about an hour’s drive west of Albuquerque, is said to be the oldest continuously-inhabited settlement in the U.S. Certainly it is among the most stunningly beautiful man-made places on the globe.

You can get some inkling of the rural Hispanic culture that still thrives in northern New Mexico by taking the High Road to Taos, through Truchas, making sure to stop often. You might overhear a conversation in the Spanish dialect that is spoken by many in New Mexico but heard nowhere else in the world. After your visit to Taos and the magnificent Taos Pueblo, you might let yourself experience the serenity of the Santuario de Chimayó, and then maybe treat your carnal side to carne adovado at the Rancho de Chimayó Restaurante.

Or you could discover something about more recent New Mexico history by visiting Los Alamos, high up in the cool Jemez Mountains, whose lights you can just see at night from Santa Fe. Los Alamos, like the modern Pueblos, is not just a fascinating monument to history but a living, bustling town.

And if you just have to have the urban experience, there’s always Albuquerque, with its metro area population of 750,000. It’s the Brooklyn to Santa Fe’s Upper East Side, but it has an unpretentious charm of its own. If you poke around its neighborhoods, especially Old Town and Nob Hill, you can find much to like. Now celebrating its 300th birthday, Albuquerque has grown into a sprawling city on the LA / Phoenix model, but you can soar above it on the world’s longest tramway to the top of the Sandia Mountains, two miles above sea level. When evening falls you can even watch the only professional baseball team named after a Simpsons episode, the Triple-A Albuquerque Isotopes.

Finally, a word of practical advice: the relleno plate, green, whole beans, with a sopapilla and honey for dessert.