‘The street saint of New Mexico’
Juan Valdez helps people with mental health or drug problems get back on their feet
Twenty years ago, Juan Valdez was running a crack house on West San Francisco Street. Since then, he has turned the same building into what he calls a “sober house” — a safe place where troubled souls can begin their climb to recovery.
Valdez, 66, a former government worker, also is employed full time as an addiction counselor at the Santa Fe Community Guidance Center, which aims to help restore the lives of those beaten down by psychiatric problems, homelessness, and drug and alcohol addiction.
“We take everybody,” Valdez said of the center, operated by Presbyterian Medical Services. “We take people coming out of psychiatric hospitals, jail. We take people who have longterm substance abuse problems, longterm mental health disabilities and people who are just hurting, people who need guidance and direction.”
His job is to help people with mental health or drug problems get back on their feet. He ensures that they resume taking their medications and that they have stable housing away from the arroyos, out from under bridges or even in the baseball dugouts at city parks.
Valdez is known to visit homeless camps, shelters, alleys, arroyos and mental health centers — often at more than a little risk to himself. He moves many of the troubled people he finds to his safe house and lets them stay as long as he can be helpful to them — or until he has to call the police.
“I’ve been stabbed, I’ve been shot at,” said Valdez, who has been selected as one of The New Mexican’s 10 Who Made a Difference honorees for 2017. “One guy broke all the windows in the house. When you are dealing with people who are homeless, or people who are mentally ill or people that have drug addictions, some of them are dangerous or violent,” he said. “I accept that. It’s part of the territory.”
Valdez empathizes with the people he helps, saying, “I once lived that lifestyle.”
Long a Chicano activist advocating for those struggling with poverty, mental illness and homelessness, Valdez had a promising career in public service. He had joined his father, Victor Valdez, and Roman Catholic church leaders in establishing a medical facility for low-income people, La Clinica de la Gente, a predecessor to La Familia Medical Center. The clinic had once been the home of his father’s restaurant, El Monterrey Cafe, on West San Francisco Street, and later became a Christian Brotherhood homeless shelter — the first such shelter in the city.
He later was recruited to serve as a congressional aide to thenU.S. Rep. Bill Richardson and worked as an assistant city manager under former Santa Fe Mayor Sam Pick, establishing a citizens’ complaint office so that the voices of constituents could be heard.
In 1990, Valdez was accused of sexually assaulting an elderly woman, an allegation he denied. A jury acquitted of him of the charge in 1991, but by then, he had been fired from his city job and had filed for bankruptcy.
He declined to discuss the rape allegation. But Valdez admitted that he descended into a pattern of drug abuse and related crimes that landed him in jail.
“I got busted and decided to change my life,” he said. His turnaround wasn’t easy. During his addiction recovery at a rehabilitation center, he recognized the need for a safe house.
“I noticed that a lot of people didn’t have a safe place to go live,” Valdez said, “so I decided to turn my crack house into a sober house. And I’ve been doing that for 21 years.”
Co-worker and psychiatric nurse Luz de Ovalle, one of many people who nominated Valdez for the 10 Who Made a Difference honor, described him as “the street saint of New Mexico.”
Valdez is a “one-man rescue and recovery machine,” she said.
“Following the tenets of Mother Teresa, Juan Valdez has literally picked people up off the pavement and helped them put their lives back together,” Ovalle said.
He also receives calls from strangers, she said: “A mother who is worried about a son just released from jail who needs rehab, a grandma who is worried about a young granddaughter who will go to jail without treatment.”
Valdez has a desk at the Santa Fe Guidance Center, but he seldom confines himself to it.
“Juan can be found all over Santa Fe — in homes, at shelters, at the jail, in court, on the street, in the arroyos, everywhere,” Ovalle said. “… Juan never gives up on those in need.”
Over the years, through his own experiences and those of people he has helped, Valdez has come up with a few words of advice on lifting oneself off the pavement. Among them: Your your ego is not your amigo; believe in something, whether faith-based or something else. The best aids for staying on top, he says: a girlfriend and a dog.
One of the men Valdez has helped, a onetime crack addict and recovering alcoholic — 11 years, four months and five days sober on the day he was interviewed — credits Valdez for pulling him out of his increasingly steep downward slide.
First of all, said the man, who asked that his name not be published, he had to acknowledge that “what I was doing wasn’t working anymore. It took a lot of humility.”
Valdez, he said, “taught me how to let go of the past and … start owning up to everything I do. I used to blame everybody around me, and Juan told me to man up and let go of the past and look forward.
“When I first met Juan,” the man added, “I thought I had picked the easiest guy to sponsor me, but later on, I realized he wasn’t going to be easy on me. … He told me I had to call him every day and meet with him every weekend. … If he wouldn’t have leaned on me, I probably wouldn’t be sober now.”