Aztlán

By Petra Salazar · Photographs by Gabriela Campos

The City of Española, New Mexico, officially turns one hundred years old this year. But the land and people of the valley tell a deeper story—one that slips past the barbed-wire borders of time, place, and stereotype, refusing to be hemmed in by the bias of public imagination.

The centennial fiestas in September offer more than municipal commemoration—they are an opportunity to honor nuestra querencia: our belonging to the land and lifeways that have sustained valley communities for millennia. As a traditional site of pilgrimage, the Española Valley is uniquely situated as the true beating heart of Aztlán, the mythic Chicano homeland, where Tewa, Spanish, and Mexican-American histories converge in a deeply felt display of defiance, devotion, and style.

I’m a coyote, part-Anglo, part-Indohispano, from Valley Estates, raised in “The Beautiful Española Valley,” as the news anchor Nelson Martinez called it in the ’90s, defying media caricatures. My mixed-race upbringing attuned me to the complexities of our querencia, its tragedies, its resilience, and its long history of being misunderstood. As the Centennial approached, I wondered: How will Española choose to tell its story?

I returned home for Holy Week in April and joined the sorrowful procession of lowriders climbing the hill to Chimayó, offering prayers to the spring wind. I shared stories with people on the road and in kitchens, workshops, and city offices across the valley. I spoke with artists, scholars, lowriders, officials, primos, and friends, asking What does this place mean to you?

Again and again, I was moved to hear about the struggle to pass forward our cultural inheritance. For many of us, querencia continues to be our touchstone, anchoring us to land and to each other. It’s what has allowed us not just to survive, but to thrive in this harsh, beautiful terrain, together, and often against impossible odds.

Nuestra querencia gives us identity, offering existential traction, “a place to stand,” as Santa Fe poet Jimmy Santiago Baca writes, in a society that treats us like “immigrants in our own land.” By claiming our inheritance, we steady ourselves on the shifting sands of zozobra—the affective disequilibrium born of social disintegration, as named by Mexican philosopher Jorge Portilla. Expressing our cultural identity, says sociolinguist Damián Vergara Wilson of Ojo Caliente, “opens up a space for us,” holy ground for recognition and belonging, a way to locate one another in an increasingly-disoriented modern world.

Nothing captures Española more iconically than the lowrider: part car, part human, part spirit. Levi Romero, an Embudo native and preeminent scholar of New Mexican history and culture, says lowriders “formed a shield against the imminent winds of change,” becoming “el resuello y alma of the culture.” And while some feared the tradition was dying, the recent passage of HB 239, commissioning a study for a state lowrider museum in Española, signals its revival.

Our lowriders—pristine and passed down, or rusty and resurrected from arroyos—are living descansos, mobile altars of memory. They embody what Tomás Atencio, another Embudo native and scholar of New Mexican culture, calls “el oro del barrio,” the lived wisdom of our people, the true currency of this lifeworld.

Pilgrimage to Aztlán

After my father Joe Salazar, the valley’s beloved music teacher, died, I sold the house we once shared and moved to North Carolina with my family for work. In the dislocation that followed, I worried I’d lost my footing in the world. But as time passes, I see that I’m not lost, not without a home. I can locate the desert bones of my ancestors on a map. I follow them like a homing beacon to the hearths of primos and El Santuario de Chimayó to remember who I am.

In the Southeast, my identity often feels precarious—scrutinized, misread, or flattened into something it’s not. My Spanglish sing-song is swallowed by a foreign twang, and I feel voiceless. To survive erasure, I carry home with me. Hanging from my rearview mirror is the name of my car, “Espera,” written in Old English script. She’s a dusty old Prius wagon, but I see a redemption arc in her: gold paint, a mural, and dark-tinted windows.

Visions like these sustain me, but it’s only in New Mexico that I feel fully rooted. In the Spanish bullring, querencia is the place where the bull takes its stand, draws its strength, and becomes almost impossible to kill. This is my querencia too—a place where I reclaim my power. When I return home, my voice returns with me—melodic, boisterous, and complicated.

Mine is a contested voice. But walking to Chimayó, I know I’m not alone. Many of my fellow pilgrims from this region carry the same ache. Damián Vergara Wilson describes this as “always having to explain ourselves,” being mocked for our “funny accents,” and targeted by degrading jokes. I still remember the sting of shame I felt in college at UNM when a classmate dismissed my accent as “unintellectual.” I didn’t have the words for it then. I do now.

Gloria Anzaldúa, writing from the Texas borderlands, calls this kind of violence “linguistic terrorism.” 

“I am my language,” she writes. “If you attack my language, you attack me.” Her words give voice to what I had once mistaken for personal failure—shame that was never mine to carry. Anzaldúa reminds us that language is soul-deep, so when it’s silenced or erased, something ancestral is lost.

This is what makes Vergara Wilson’s work all the more vital. His project El Español de Nuevo México is working to provide a publicly accessible archive documenting endangered varieties of New Mexican Spanish. This documentation is resistance, a way of remembering who we are and the lifeways that sustain us. When we lose our language, we don’t just lose words—we lose the dichos, the remedios, the worldview and wisdom encoded in its grammar. We lose the grief rituals—the alabados, descansos, and pláticas that help us mourn and remember.

On the road to Chimayó, I passed my family graves in Pojoaque. These are the graves I cleaned with my father each Memorial Day. We whispered to the dead, left offerings, swept stones. Other days, we visited dying tíos and primos down dusty roads, where the best conversations happened—unguarded, honest, real. There, I learned the warmth of presence in the space that Tomás Atencio calls “la resolana”: those sunny spots, traditionally along the south wall of a building, “where people have gathered across the years … to talk about everyday life, about birth, and about death.”

In New Mexico, grief is not peripheral. It is shared, sung, and built into the landscape. Even the law here protects roadside descansos; in other states building them is illegal. This reverence points to a deeper worldview, one shaped by Latinx and Indigenous traditions, where the sacred is inseparable from the land and still walks with us, mapping the way home.

Our cultural relationship with grief is visible even in car culture. A West Side native whose family ran the Block-Salazar Mortuary for fifty-six years tells me, “Death has been reflected in a whole different way here. We grieve. And we remember. That’s a strong part of our cultural heritage.” For many, the lowrider becomes a vessel of memory: “a living museum,” he calls it. “People who lost a brother, a loved one, have a mural of him painted on the hood of a lowrider. They say, ‘I wanted to carry him with me.’” In this way, our devotion transcends churches and graveyards.

Hospitality, shaped by Tewa lifeways, has long been sacred here. That ethic of care stretches beyond the Pueblos into Indohispano communities rooted in kinship and reciprocity. When I visited relatives this spring, I came away with a turquoise necklace, a woven bag, clothes, banana bread, apricot jam, and chile—like I’d been out shopping, not just catching up with family.

One city official tells me this spirit of generosity is both a gift and a challenge—part of why people experiencing homelessness find refuge in this valley, which still remembers how to care. “It’s the cholo helping the grandma load groceries at Center Market,” he said. Devotion has “always defined this valley … It’s just very special. It’s just something very unique about us being natives of the land.” Devotion—rooted in land, family, and mutual aid—echoes across generations, shaping not only how we treat each other, but how we move through the world.

Aerosol artist Thomas Vigil of El Guache also spoke with me about this ethic, which he calls an “unwritten law” learned young. “We’re raised in a way that’s so caring. We’re the keepers of the land.” His parents modeled right relationship to land and community: where fixing a neighbor’s car or cruising slowly through town isn’t wasting time—it’s devotion.

In communities like ours, where home has always been a collective practice, not merely private property, there is deep concern that our querencia is under threat, fraying under the extractive logics of modern life. I experience this pressure as a kind of susto—a soul sickness I treat by returning home, where remembrance serves as remedio.

In doing so, I become part of the cycle of loss and return characteristic of the Manito Diaspora. Romero explains that “Manito,” from hermanito, was used by Mexican laborers who met New Mexicans far from home. Through the digital archive Following the Manito Trail, Romero and his students at the University of New Mexico map how families survived the collapse of the land grant system and decline of agrarian life by preserving culture through adaptation.

Although Española has long resisted the pressures of modernity, it is increasingly impacted by homelessness, gentrification, and displacement. And yet, my Holy Week pilgrimage left me encouraged because I saw that the people of this land are still dreaming, building, and enacting pathways toward a future rooted in care, memory, and collective resilience.

Our complex cultural and ecological diversity forms a spiritual geography. Few people say they’re from Española proper: we’re from Chimayó, Ranchitos, La Mesilla—an interconnected constellation of llanos and valleys. What unites us are shared threads: Spanglish, acequias, hospitality, devotion. In Bless Me, Ultima, Rudolfo Anaya from Santa Rosa depicts the regional contradictions with the llano symbolizing Márez defiance and the river valley symbolizing Luna care. These aren’t just settings. They are cosmologies shaping nuestra locura—our worldview and style.

Española’s complexity is reflected in its municipal locura. Within city limits, five governing bodies converge: Ohkay Owingeh, Kha’p’o Owingeh, the City, Rio Arriba County, and Santa Fe County. Sovereignty and colonial inheritances are interwoven here, but not seamlessly. From the dissonance, a distinct borderland consciousness emerges. Anzaldúa calls this plural personality “new mestiza consciousness,” a way of transforming ambivalence into beauty. You see it in the matachines dances, in the Catholic echoes within curanderismo—practices that, like the city itself, hold contradictions without simplification. As Vergara Wilson puts it, “We might not be perfect. We might not all perform our identities the same way. But you have to love la raza tal como estamos.”

Española’s layered cultural terrain gives rise to countless “hometactics”: everyday acts of creativity that carve out a sense of belonging in the face of displacement and gentrification. According to Mariana Ortega, Latinx feminist philosopher from Nicaragua, hometactics might include painting walls in colors that recall home or reimagining family through deep bonds with neighbors. In Española, lowriding is one such hometactic—a mobile altar rooted in diaspora. Borrowed from L.A. Chicano lineage and customized through Manito style, lowriders carry memories and faith across distances.

So, it is no accident that the Española Valley, as a sacred site, is also the Lowrider Capital of the World. While this place has long been mischaracterized as dangerous, locals know it as a sanctuary. Our semi-arid steppe, threaded with riparian woodlands, is a cradle of resistance, remembrance, and return. For generations, people have gathered here in ceremony, seeking healing. If Aztlán lives anywhere, it lives here.

Lowriding the Manito Trail

At the Todos Unidos Car Show in Ohkay Owingeh, Claudio Sanchez of the San Luis Valley shared his own pilgrimage story. As a child, his migrant family often passed through Española. He was so moved by the lowriders he saw that he made a vow: one day, he’d own one. Now, each Holy Week, he returns with his grandchildren and his collection of cars.

His story reflects a larger pattern, where migration, memory, and homecomings entwine. The lowrider becomes a traveling descanso: memento mori on wheels, carrying our cultural DNA, our dreams, and our grief in chrome and paint. Murals of loved ones. Tributes on trunks. Each lowrider is a devotional shrine.

After WWII, Chicanos flipped the script of American car culture. Instead of speeding, they cruised with dignity: low and slow. Why race through life when you can cruise through it? Vergara Wilson calls the lowrider “a symbol of defiance to mainstream culture and a symbol of solidarity.” It’s a subversion of form and function: smaller tires, custom hydraulics, bodies lowered almost to the ground. Impractical by design, these cars aren’t built for efficiency—they’re built for ritual, for presence, for beauty. It’s more than resistance. It’s reverence.

Like retablos and alabados, lowriders are devotional art, crafted with sacred attention and labor. “We really are very attentive to what we’re doing,” says Thomas Vigil. “My dad is the perfect example.” Anytime he helps, the job takes twice as long, not from slowness, but care. “He wants to make sure it’s done the right way.”

Lowriders embody the Manito ethos of precision, patience, and pride. Vigil describes cars with full-frame engravings covering the underside, invisible to most. That’s why car shows place mirrors beneath them: to honor what can’t always be seen. It echoes Classic Maya ceramics with bases often engraved not for human eyes, but for the divine. Spirit lives in every surface. The labor becomes prayer.

Aztlán survives through these small, sacred acts. Through care and persistence. “Just talk about faith in action,” Romero tells me, recalling the sight of lowriders being brought back to life from forgotten arroyos. “Seeing something that you think is dying, and there’s that one kernel of life that still exists.” Lowriders carry our querencia forward, restored.

Pam Jaramillo of Chimayó says, “Lowrider culture means family.” She and her husband, Bobby Chacon, raised three daughters, each with her own ride. Together, they build more than cars; they build memory, pride, and place. “The media always brings up drugs,” she says. “That’s not what it’s about. Española is about family and culture. We are rich in history.”

Jaramillo was born into lowriding—into the weekend rhythm of cruising, music, and community. “Nobody gets that anymore,” she says. “Now there’s a lot of challenges with phones and social media.” But she reminds her daughters: “That will pass.” What lasts is the sacred ride—the ’64 convertible her daughter drives, the ’51 Chacon bought with boot camp money—still gleaming.

In his essay “Lowcura,” Romero describes lowriding not just as a vehicle but a worldview—a locura that carries our spirit of defiance and devotion. I’ve always admired the mad-dogging lowrider with sacred heart tattoos and a steady, unflinching gaze, staring down the barrel of erasure, rolling deep with the antepasados. What outsiders read as danger on that face is, in fact, sovereignty—composure on the shaky ground of zozobra, la vida loca.

If you want to understand this locura, go out onto the llano at sunset and repeat after me: “The four directions of the llano meet me, the white sun shines on my soul.” Stay there until a curtain of stars opens up across the sky. Only then might you begin to discern our shared horizon of meaning—the ancestral logic that shapes sustainable lifeways in the harsh, sacred terrain of the Española Valley.

Stay Down

This Holy Week, walking from the morada in Pojoaque to the Santuario, I felt spirit return to my body. I came seeking comfort in my sacred querencia, but as I moved through the tide of modernity, I learned that the sacred doesn’t promise safety. It is la vida loca—a roiling power that demands reverence and courage. The same courage it takes to hold onto hope in a collapsing world. The same courage that rides through the valley, embodied in the lowrider.

The lowrider is a post-colonial Don Quixote, all cabesuda with a laid-back locura, riding forward on a trusty steed with a steady gaze and a holy foolishness, knowing we are tied to the earth. And if the earth is also tied to us, lassoed to our skinny necks, then let us ride together through our sacred, shared fate—low and slow.

Romero tells a story about Anaya’s writing process, which is distinctly New Mexican. Anaya described coming to the page “a pura pala,” a phrase that captures the grit and devotion behind his craft. It’s the same kind of devotion you see when caretakers haul fresh dirt to refill the pocito at El Santuario, or when mayordomos clear the acequias each spring to let the water flow. This approach to labor isn’t performative, it’s rooted. Devotion is how we show up, how we stay down—in care work, in resistance, in passing forward what we love.

Romero reminds us that in a world built to make us doubt our worth, the deepest act of devotion may be belief—belief in our own sacred value, even when others can’t see it. “If no one else believes in us,” he says, “we have to believe in ourselves. Believing in oneself and empowering others to believe in themselves is one of the highest forms of resistance.” I believe in Española—in its beauty, its contradictions, and the fierce, creative power of our locura.

That belief is what brings me here, to sit with you now in la resolana, away from the fluorescent glare of the twenty-four-hour workday, having carved out time, a pura pala, to ask: To whom—and to what—do you devote your sacred attention and labor? Do your days serve your soul or your erasure?  

—
Petra Salazar is a poet, educator, and culture worker from the Española Valley in Northern New Mexico. A former diesel mechanic turned community arts organizer, Salazar holds an MFA in Poetry from UNC Greensboro and an M.Ed from George Washington University. Her writing explores coyote identity, ancestral memory, and sacred geographies of the U.S. Southwest. She moonlights for a creative reuse nonprofit where she works to make art sustainable and accessible. Her debut poetry collection, Harsh Terrain, is forthcoming from FlowerSong Press. Salazar lives with her family in North Carolina, but her heart—and her work—remain rooted in the high desert of Aztlán.

This essay was made possible by conversations with no less than four Vigiles (Española was once called La Vega de los Vigiles), as well as ancestors, primos, curanderos, philosophers, poets, comadres, children, and pets. With support from the N.C. Arts Council, a Division of the Department of Natural and Cultural Resources, the Arts Council of Winston-Salem & Forsyth County, and The Arts Council of Greater Greensboro. Special thanks to José Gallegos and Francisco Gallegos.