Family matriarch always ready with a smile and a hand
Teresita Maria Romero Sandoval was born the year New Mexico became a state, at a time when houses in Nambé didn’t have electricity or running water, and grew up in an era when life was hard and families got together to do everything from cooking to planting, harvesting and butchering.
Everyone in her family — and she was related to a lot of people in the Pojoaque Valley — recalled she always had a smile on her face and a willingness to lend a hand to whatever task she stumbled upon.
Sandoval died earlier this month at age 104, after a full and well-lived life.
Msgr. Jerome Martinez y Alire said at her funeral Mass at El Sagrado Corazón in Nambé that he had given her the last rites so many times that she was “fully anointed with holy oil and just slipped into heaven,” where there must have been a “bunch of cheering going on” and many congratulating her, saying, “You made it!”
Her niece, Carolina “Carrie” Lujan, 86, recalled this week her aunt’s near daily visits when Lujan was a young mother with a couple of babies in diapers. Sandoval, who never learned to drive, would walk the two and a half miles from her own home, stopping first to visit with Lujan’s mother-in-law, where she would pitch in with the cooking and cleaning.
At Lujan’s house, Sandoval helped rinse diapers by hand and hang them out to dry. Sometimes they would sit together and talk, conversing in Spanish. “She never sat idle, doing nothing,” Lujan said. “But she never looked hurried.”
Sandoval was born in 1912 to Ramona de la Paz Lopez and Vidal Romero. She is descended from Bartolome Romero, who came to what is now New Mexico in 1598 with Juan de Oñate, a conquistador and colonial governor of the province. She was the fifth of 10 children.
She attended school until the end of the sixth grade and helped her family plant trees and vegetables, canned vegetables and dried corn. She recalled traveling in a horse-drawn wagon to Santa Fe to sell the crops, including chiles, sometimes spending the night before the arduous return trip.
Her daughter, Marcella Sandoval, said her mother told her many
stories of the old days, including how they used to grind up animal bones to make a paste to protect themselves from the sun before the invention of sunscreen.
She also told about how the people in the valle would bury their alcohol stills and cover them with dirt, then go back to plowing when they got word that federal agents were around searching for illegal moonshine.
In 1936, Teresita Sandoval married Jose Dolores Sandoval, and they built a house on his family’s land in Nambé. They made the adobes, plastered the walls and stripped the felled trees for the vigas.
During World War II, Jose Sandoval worked at Los Alamos.
Teresita Sandoval was always religious and faithfully attended Mass, first in Santa Cruz and then in Nambé after her marriage. When the church burned in 1945, she and Jose helped rebuild it.
They were members of a committee that traveled to southern Colorado and commissioned a new altar that is still used in the church.
Marcella Sandoval said there was a gigantic apricot tree on the property where they hung a pulley to use when butchering an animal.
She recalled big tubs full of blood and organs because “everything was processed,” and there were big bonfires to boil the water to clean up the animals.
After her husband died in 1965, Teresita Sandoval went to work as a house cleaner, gardener, cook and plasterer.
She never remarried and laughed off questions about novios, or boyfriends, saying, “Oh, what for?” or that she didn’t want to bring trouble to her family.
Granddaughter Leah Sanchez saw Sandoval nearly every day during her childhood because they lived only a few hundred yards away. Her grandmother was there for her first Holy Communion, her high school graduation and her wedding. “She was always present,” Sanchez told the mourners at her grandmother’s funeral.
Because of her grandmother, Sanchez said she learned to speak Spanish and make biscochitos, although the recipe was not quite exact.
“Use what feels about right,” Sandoval said.
Sheila Vigil, the daughter of Sandoval’s youngest brother, said she was often dropped off at her aunt’s house, where her tia “did everything for us,” including cooking and making sure the children were cleaned up after playing outside.
Sometimes the whole family would go camping along the Rio de los Fijolitos and cook the fish they had caught for dinner, she said.
Or they would go pick a wild plant similar to parsley that Sandoval used to treat aches and pains, a skill she had learned from her mother.
“I never saw her lose her temper,” Vigil said.
And Vigil, who owns a winery with her husband, said, “She sure did like her little glasses of wine.”
Lujan’s son, Alfredo, recalled sitting at Sandoval’s kitchen table and having long conversations about the family and goings-on in the valley.
He often came upon her gardening.
When he turned his camera on her at her 99th birthday, she was her usual playful self, telling him, “No te vayas acer ojo,” or something like, “Don’t cast a bad spell on me.”
Sandoval is survived by three of her five children, as well as nine grandchildren and numerous great- and great-great grandchildren.