‘The glue of the family’
New Mexicans honor moms as they reflect on hard work, unceasing support
Dos Amigos Sports Mexican Restaurant is a family affair — with owner Elder Guzmán’s cousins working in the front of the house and his mother prepping much of the food.
The chile rellenos. The chile rojo. The rice. The recipes for all of those have gone from Veronica Guzmán’s home straight to the kitchen.
Elder Guzmán opened the Cerrillos Road eatery in October 2020. His family then bought out one of the partners, and he had to create a new menu in a short amount of time. He developed a menu largely inspired by foods from Mexico — he was raised in Chihuahua — but influenced in particular by the home-cooked meals his mother had made for him as he was growing up.
“Most of the things that we make from scratch essentially came from her, and it’s how we’re here,” said Elder Guzmán, the eldest of three sons. “There’s nothing like when somebody cooks with a passion.”
Veronica Guzmán has heard positive feedback from Dos Amigos’ customers on some of her recipes, such as her chile rojo and her natillas, a Spanish custard typically made from eggs and milk.
“It’s just not us that like the food — it’s other people, too,” she said in Spanish.
Veronica Guzmán says it’s hard work coming into the restaurant every day and helping her son run the business, but it’s something she enjoys. Working with her family day in and day out is “very important” to her, she added.
And working with her son?
“As a mother she feels very proud that she can help us sons out,” Elder Guzmán said.
“She’s the heart of the place,” he added. “She for sure keeps everybody together when there’s conflict despite the fact who it is. She can stand outside from it and basically delegate it, fix it piece by piece.”
‘An educator, just like my mom’
When New Mexico Public Education Secretary Arsenio Romero goes back to his hometown of Belen, a chorus of questions and memories seems to follow: “How’s your mom? Where’s she at? I haven’t seen her in so long. Tell her I said hello!”
For many in the Central New Mexico town, Mary Romero — a former first grade teacher at H.T. Jaramillo Elementary School in the 1980s and 1990s — is the preeminent figure in education, not her son.
Often, Arsenio Romero recalled, former students will share one memory in particular: Recollections of brushing his mother’s long, straight, black hair during school.
“Those are the kind of stories that people just really remember about her because she was so inviting and welcoming — and kind of like a motherly figure for everybody,” he said.
Arsenio Romero has fond memories of his mother’s classroom, too. It was one of the places where he grew up, spending early morning and afterschool hours helping his mother with classroom chores.
The experience drove him to become a teacher — and then a principal, superintendent and the state’s Cabinet as secretary of public education.
“From a very early age, I knew what I wanted to do — and it was to be an educator, just like my mom,” Arsenio Romero said.
The two Romeros were in the education business together for one year, in the late 1990s. While Mary Romero completed her last year in the classroom in Belen, a freshly graduated Arsenio headed a second grade classroom in Las Cruces.
From the beginning, he leaned on her for advice. His mother helped him set up his first classroom and develop a system for tracking students’ behavior. She and her network of fellow experienced teachers were a sounding board as he learned to resolve classroom conflict and better reach students.
When Mary Romero retired, her son inherited her classroom library and other materials — possessions he passed on to a new teacher when he became a school principal.
“Even though I was just green as can be way back then, I not only had her network but I also had all of her peers as part of my network,” Arsenio Romero said. “That was just automatic. … I had a lot of people taking care of me.”
‘She never stops working’
One of Paula Garcia’s most vivid childhood memories is hiking with her mother in the forested hills behind their Mora ranch, gleaning medicinal plants along the path to a trickling waterfall.
And although the plant gathering demanded some concentration, Garcia recalls letting her imagination roam in this idyllic setting.
“It was always very special and very magical to be out there,” Garcia recalls.
Those treks with her mother, Angela Garcia, left such an impression on her that now when she’s out hiking, she turns her eyes instinctively to the landscape and can spot healing plants within the vegetation.
Garcia, 52, also came away with an even greater appreciation of her natural surroundings, which strengthened her advocacy for people in traditional communities who have formed deep, generational bonds with the land.
Garcia is executive director of the New Mexico Acequia Association. She also owns a small ranch not far from the one where she grew up. There she manages seven cows and their calves and grows a variety of vegetables. “I followed in the footsteps of my parents,” she said.
Garcia feels a strong kinship with the community she has called home her whole life and where her family has been rooted for six generations.
Her mother, a retired teacher, taught her and her younger sister, Pamela, to not only do a job but to take pride in it, she said.
“It’s part of a work ethic to really put your whole heart into something and do it well, no matter what it is, even if it’s something like cleaning house or making a meal, or your career or education,” Garcia said.
With this, her mother leads by example, and at age 74 has barely slowed down. She helps her husband, Paul, tend their ranch, cooks, cans food and doesn’t shy away from hard labor such as chopping wood, Garcia said. “She never stops working.”
Angela Garcia taught another important lesson to her two daughters: Be strong and self-sufficient.
That tenacity has helped Paula Garcia assist residents who seek compensation for acequias damaged in flooding after the Hermits Peak/Calf Canyon Fire scorched the area’s hillsides, turning them into spillways where stormwater carried ashy debris into ditches and waterways.
Garcia’s mother helped co-parent her son, Joaquin Romero, 21, when he was a child. This support was welcome, Garcia said, adding she never felt like a single mom.
“She’ll do anything for her loved ones,” she said of her mother. “… She’s the glue of the family.”
‘She … took care of everything’
Ask Kristina Ortez about her relationship with her mother, and she might bring up a memory of sobbing in the shower.
No, there wasn’t a mother-daughter spat.
Ortez wasn’t sad about her home life — after a devastating miscarriage and a scare with her most recent pregnancy, she had recently given birth to a baby girl.
But as she stood under the water at her Taos home, hearing the cries of her colic-afflicted child, Ortez said it came to her that her mother, Stella Ortez, would be going home to California soon after her three-month visit.
“I remember crying in the shower thinking, how am I ever gonna, like, be able to shower without my mom here?” Kristina Ortez said. “[My daughter] was crying and crying, and I was just like, how am I ever going to do this? How do women do this?”
In the years since then, Kristina Ortez, now 50, had another child, got divorced and won an election to a seat in the state House of Representatives. Through all the twists and turns, her mom, now 76, was a constant.
That’s been true since Ortez was a girl, growing up in Madera, a town in California’s San Joaquin Valley, where her mom worked as a probation officer. Ortez and her brother weren’t troublemakers — though Ortez does cop to being a know-it-all.
Both siblings ended up in the Ivy League, Ortez at Harvard and her brother at Columbia.
Before settling in New Mexico, Ortez lived in New York City and then Indonesia, where she worked at a publishing company. She ultimately decided she wanted to pursue a career in environmentalism, a path that took her back to her mom’s home in California for a couple of years.
“I have never not felt supported by her,” Ortez said of her mother. “She has always … lifted up my dreams.”
After Ortez was elected to the House District 42 seat, and took office in January 2021, when the coronavirus pandemic was in full swing, she knew she was going to need some help getting through her first legislative session.
“She came in and she just took care of everything,” Ortez said.
It’s become their pattern every year since: Stella Ortez comes out for the session. She helps take care of her granddaughters and her daughter, too, making her breakfast and packing her lunches before she heads to the Capitol.
Stella Ortez was hospitalized with COVID-19 during the session in 2023, which her daughter described as a frightening experience.
“It was really bad,” Kristina Ortez said. “… My brother made me promise that she wouldn’t come out and do this again.”
But when December rolled around, her mother called. She was coming to New Mexico, and there wasn’t anything her daughter could say to change her mind.
“I think about the sacrifice that my children and my mom make for me to serve, and it’s profound,” Kristina Ortez said. “It’s humbling.”