Before the traditions are lost
Poet Sylvia Ernestina Vergara presents Hispanic cultural exhibit
PROCESSIONS, POSADAS, bailes, songs, feast days of the santos and other cultural ways: “Things like this create joy, and a sense of completeness,” explains poet and dancer Sylvia Ernestina Vergara, “and then you feel more ready for the days ahead.”
In a special exhibit and reading she is offering to the public free on Saturday (Oct. 15) from 2-4 p.m. at the Embudo Public Library in Dixon, Vergara highlights the work of local musicians, writers and artists, especially from the Hispanic community of Embudo Valley. A longtime resident herself, she will be reading from her book of poetry “Crest of the Wave,” as well as other works. Her forthcoming book, “Hygiene,” concentrates on how we need to change our ways after the pandemic.
“I was at the library and saw that it was not so easy to find these materials, so I wanted to go through the library and make an index of all materials written by Hispanic people,” Vergara notes of her method. “This small exhibit was influenced by one in the permanent Hispanic wing of the Museum of International Folk Art [Santa Fe], where my family was featured. So many of those things they presented create joy, and I love that idea. So I wanted a book exhibit to feature Hispanic writers from predominately Embudo Valley.”
Some of the outstanding Embudo Valley/Dixon writers she mentions include Estevan Arellano, Tomas Atencio, Levi Romero, Jose Griego, Lucinda Ciddio and Arthur Archuleta, among many others. “I’m excited because you don’t hear about them — how they express and feel about themselves and the lens through which they see the world.”
Vergara’s family hails from the early Spanish colonists who ventured to the southern Colorado area La Plaza de los Leones. Born in Albuquerque, she grew up under the piano of her mother, literally — Maria Casias, a highly accom
plished classical musician trained by the Boston convalescents at the tuberculosis sanitariums in Pueblo and Walsenburg, Colorado, who chose the few select students to study with them. Vergara’s mother became the first public health nurse in Río Arriba County. She died recently at the age of 105.
Vergara also trained as a composer (under France’s great composer Darius Milhaud) and as a dancer at UNM, and eventually came to teach dance and music at Northern New Mexico College in Española. She moved to her ancestral home in Embudo Valley in the 1970s and raised her family there.
Vergara will be reading her poetry as well as presenting “in miniature” the cultural background for important traditional songs, parts of posadas, feast days of the santos and aspects of the Baile de los Cascarones. For example, processions, such as for San Antonio, the patron saint of the Embudo Valley, is June 13: “It means walking through the community in a very special way,” she explains, “and as people join in, the result is a sense of hope … San Antonio is about finding things that are lost, literally and figuratively — and the procession allows you to feel your burden is not so great, that there is something out there in the universe that allows us to be heard.
“We connect with what people have done in the past,” continues Vergara. “Oasis of joy, I call them. When we reach that oasis we can drink and we are OK, and can go on.”
The Baile de los Cascarones (“dance of the eggshells”) has not been done before in the Embudo Valley, she says, unlike the big festive event that usually (before the pandemic) took place in Santa Fe after Easter. Vergara was instrumental in getting the dance to be recognized as the state dance of New Mexico, although it was pocket-vetoed by Gov. Lujan Grisham. “We have all the pieces for that dance here in New Mexico,” Vergara adds, “we have the text.” As a bilingual researcher and scholar, she will explain how the meaning has been lost in most places.
The Oct. 15 event at the Embudo Library is in support of Hispanic Heritage Month and is called “Enlivening Hispanic Traditions, Authors and Poetry.” It promises to be magical and diverse, according to Vergara. “The way libraries work,” she enthuses, “if these things don’t get checked out, they can get culled. So I want to create interest, and try to bring Hispanic writers to more visibility, and to get people to read more.”
‘ENLIVENING HISPANIC TRADITIONS, AUTHORS AND POETRY’ EXHIBIT AND READING BY SYLVIA ERNESTINA VERGARA Saturday (Oct. 15), 2-4 p.m.
Free. Embudo Valley Library, Dixon, NM. 505-579-9181