My Taos
The bond of village and history
W HEN I WAS BORN approximately 80 percent of the world’s people still lived in mud houses.
Architecture itself began with locally available materials, and mud is statistically the most obvious, accessible and easiest to use. “Adobe” comes from an old Arabic word “atub,” meaning brick. Adobe has been used in the very dry Middle East for about 6,000 years, resulting in a highly evolved dome and vault technology. Mao Zedong was born in subtropical China in an adobe house – built on a mound with a tiled, overhanging roof protecting the mud walls from the monsoons. Instead of straw the Chinese use rice husks in their plaster. Egyptians of all classes lived in houses of adobe – granite was reserved for gods and the dead.
Except stone, adobe buildings are the oldest surviving structures on the planet. Maintained, they will last indefinitely. Taos Pueblo is the oldest continuously inhabited building in North America.
Better still, when no longer needed it will melt back into the earth – instead of leaving behind the disposal problem of “Pueblo style” wood or steel frame construction – let alone trailers.
This painting is a visual narrative of the bond between a village and the building in which generations have worshiped. It shows the seasonal performance of what is really a ceremony that not only keeps the building alive, but regenerates the bonds that keep the community alive.
All the village characters are here, the kids conscripted into bucket-carrying, the viejito on his cane supervising, the lovers, a lowrider. Trowels, block and tackle, scaffolding and mud boat are the props; the moves, embedded in collective memory, are automatic, like fishes, or birds all turning at the same moment; and in the clouds, ancestors and angels have come to bless the ancient ceremony.
Today the most expensive house you can build is one of adobe. How did that happen? Telescoping 173 years into 800 words: the conquest of 1847 imposed a new system, and among many changes it transformed Taos from the agricultural bread basket and trade center of the region to a fragile economy dependent exclusively on tourism and government jobs.
Commonly held and commonly used land and communal labor are incompatible with capitalism, where labor is sold and land is privately owned. The commercial exploitation of “other” cultures (tourism) always follows colonization, world-wide.
The new construction market also excluded women, once the finishers of the architecture. This, by the way, is also universal. In all adobe-using cultures women are the embellishers and maintenance experts. In New Mexico they are called enjarradoras, and their specialized technology was unknown to “official” historians until, in 1975, I wrote about women’s contribution to North America’s oldest architecture.
Not so long ago we had not only housing outside the cash economy but food sovereignty. There was a lot of barter and trade, and a dense network of intergenerational religious and familial obligations. It was not a perfect paradise but no paradise was more beautiful. And there was a safety net – the community.
If you couldn’t take care of yourself, you could literally go live on Taos Plaza and people would respectfully feed and clothe you, protect you and play along if you were crazy. Don’t believe me? Go ask at the senior center. In still living memory that’s how kind and wise we were. My father had a drugstore on the plaza, and I had a built-in sense of security as a child because I somehow understood that no matter how bad off you got you could go to the plaza.
Food sovereignty, a mortgage-free, self-built house and a social safety net that protected the most vulnerable and treated them with respect were all part of the preconquest cultural ecology that included everybody and excluded nobody. In our most public space, our plaza, there lived an old man in a wheelchair. He sold piñon for a living. My father was one of the many businessmen who sent him a weekly meal. At night the cops wheeled him into the courthouse to keep him warm.
There was a man without legs who shined shoes and pushed himself around on a little cart with roller skates nailed underneath. If you didn’t tip him he would rise up on his stumps and threaten you with his powerful arms. They said he put his cart on his back and swam back to Mexico every winter across the river. Nobody bothered him. The plaza was kind of shabby, but you could leave your children there and someone would wipe their noses and keep them out of trouble.
This small-town wisdom and kindness was still alive and functioning in the 1940s while I was growing up on Taos Plaza – storyteller’s gold mine and stage of our 300-year-old historical drama.