The stories fall from Levi Romero’s lips before I get out of the car and take in the sweet air, niblet-sized corn plants and the long porch inviting visitors in to the house whispering welcome and echoing the sound of children’s running feet through the slamming screen door. A breeze rustles the leaves of a crabapple tree, creating a canopy inviting us to sit down, relax, crunch into some fresh pea pods and share some stories.
Photo: Levi Romero. Photo and story by Carolyn Gonzales.
This is Dixon, N.M. – Levi’s home. It was his home as a small child living with abuelos y tíos. It was his home as a lowriding teenager, even when he lived in Albuquerque attending Menaul School. It was still his home when he studied at UNM, or now, when he teaches there. You can go home again, he’ll say, but it can be a hard road.
Levi earned architecture degrees at UNM – a bachelor’s in 1994 and master’s in 2000. Funded by UNM Center for Regional Studies, he is now a visiting research scholar in the UNM School of Architecture and Planning. Designing buildings isn’t much a part of his life any more. He’s more interested in the structure of stories, the building blocks of memory and preserving the cultural landscape through people in New Mexico.
Levi’s family has been in the Embudo River Valley since the 1600s. “My grandparents never had to wonder about identity. They never asked, ‘Are we Hispanos? Chicanos? Mexicanos?’ Nobody asked them if they were from here. Everyone was from here until the 1960s,” Levi said.
The longstanding families who raised corn, chile, radishes, onions, carrots and peas, soon found a crop of newcomers – trust fund babies who had their eyes on the land.
The etiquette on the narrow road has always been for one car or the other to pull to the side to let the other pass, depending upon which had a better place to pull off. “Now the young people are in a hurry. They aren’t polite. They don’t acknowledge when someone pulls over to let them pass,” he said. They don’t want just to get by. They want to get away.
Young people have moved away and fields abandoned. “I always came back to work the land except when I was in grad school. Then the Chinese elms took over the fields. There were never weeds when my grandfather Don Silviares lived here,” he said. Don Silviares was legendary for his trade route and his produce – everything from apples to chile – that he hauled along his route from Embudo to Ratón and Cimarron to Dawson. Levi wrote a story about his grandfather, El Verdolero, the vegetable vendor.
There’s No Place like Home
Levi talks about the two-room adobe and plaster home his grandfather built. “They brought the vigas in from the sierras. In the ‘40s he pitched the roof with corrugated metal. It’s the last, continuously inhabited house in the area without plumbing,” Levi said.
The kitchen features a wood burning stove. “It’s not the original, but it’s similar to the one my grandmother had,” Levi said. The room also sports a more modern 1950’s stove and refrigerator. The kitchen cabinets are old trasteros; one features a flour bin from which many a tortilla had its start. On the wall is a mirror with the silvering wearing off. “Imagine the many souls reflected in that mirror,” Levi said, asking me to look into it, afterwards adding that mine is now among them.
The walls were crude, Levi said, and the kitchen was pink, and the other room green. “I wondered about a pink kitchen, but then my aunt told me that at one time she had the stove moved from one room to the other, completely changing the function of each room. That’s interesting to me architecturally – how the spaces were used and how their function could be changed so efficiently,” he said.
Levi points to windows that offer up potted geraniums to the sun. “From the windowsills you can see that the walls are 23 inches thick and that the windows have tapered openings to maximize the sunlight streaming in,” he said. “My grandmother always had geraniums in coffee cans in the window. I have memories of them. It’s where the story starts. I reach back and recall family, community and place,” he said.
One room blooms with floral wallpaper. He thought about taking it off and restoring the walls. “If I take it down, my memories go with it. So many memories – names of people and things that happened – are triggered by looking at those walls,” he said. Writing in Spanish, he said, helps preserve the memories, too.
He debated with his wife about whether or not to install electricity or plumbing. Ultimately, they decided to install electricity, but they incurred a much greater cost by running the wiring underground so that electrical lines wouldn’t be visible.
Levi the Poet
Levi’s first collection of poetry, “In the Gathering of Silence,” West End Press, published in 1996 features, “Woodstove of My Childhood,” an epic poem based on personal and communal histories. His latest collection, “A Poetry of Remembrance: New and Rejected Works,” with UNM Press in Dec. 2008, sold out within a month of its official publication, which is unheard of in regional Chicano poetry.
Levi drinks from the memory well the house in Dixon serves. He recalls his grandmother playing harmonica while hummingbirds poked their beaks into hollyhocks.
Although he was always at home in Dixon, he didn’t always live there. As was common in Northern New Mexico, many families sent their children to Menaul School in Albuquerque. “The Presbyterians were a big influence in places like Dixon, Mora, Holman. It was a tradition for many families to send their children to school there, until the school no longer offered a sliding scale for tuition,” Levi said.
Levi was a successful student at Menaul and he was offered a scholarship to any New Mexico college. “I hated school and told them to give it to someone who wants to go,” he recalled.
“No one modeled college for me. My cousins hadn’t gone to college – they’d worked trades or in the mines,” he said. Also, his father died when he was 14 and his mother bedridden with rheumatoid arthritis. “I felt like I had to stay close to home. I wanted to come back to Dixon,” he said.
He’d seen the trust funders living as artists, sculptors and musicians while raising some crops. He thought he’d like to become an artist and then live off the land as his grandfather did. He learned that designer Bryan Waldrip needed some drafting help. Levi had no experience, but Waldrip took him on.
“It took more time to train me than he had time for so he suggested I enroll in the community college drafting program in Española. At the end of the first term I went back to work for him. He was also a painter, an artist. We drew and drafted all day and all night,” Levi said.
Levi’s job was to go into the studio early and fire up the wood stove. “He invited me with him to Taos each week where he attended figure drawing courses, which mostly means drawing naked women. My lowrider friends thought that was pretty cool, but it really was all about drawing the forms, the same as if I were drawing this bottle,” he said.
He also realized that he had grown through the world of art and architecture, being surrounded by Waldrip’s labor and library. He told Waldrip he was leaving for San Diego, but since he’d threatened to move many times, Waldrip didn’t believe him. He learned that Waldrip told others that Levi would be fine because “he could get a job as a draftsman anywhere.”
Building a Future
In 1983, Levi’s plan was to go to Albuquerque and save enough money to go to San Diego. He laughs. “It’s 2009 and I’m still not there. Nobody goes to Albuquerque to save money. You make just enough to get by,” he said.
The architectural firms in Albuquerque didn’t have shelves lined with art books, cats in the window and the work wasn’t in beautiful passive solar design as it had been with Waldrip. A few years later he decided, if he wanted to get back to that, he had to go to college.
The UNM architecture program was difficult and demanding. Poetry writing, an outlet in his youth, continued to be a passion. “I’d been writing poetry, but there was no poetry scene yet. Until Jimmy Santiago Baca came along, poetry by young Chicanos had no audience,” he said.
Poetry and writing, activities that had always been a sideline to architecture, began to grow in prominence in his life. Soon, following undergraduate school, and a couple of classes short of a minor in Creative Writing, he wasn’t just writing, but teaching workshops for literary organizations, detention centers and youth mentoring programs.”
He’s also taught in the UNM creative writing program in the English Department. As part of his class, Writers in the Community/Schools, his students have also taken their teaching on the road facilitating semester long workshops at detention centers, charter schools, homeless shelters, senior nursing homes and in the Albuquerque Public Schools. “I am able to get past the veils and obstacles put up by students who don’t feel comfortable in an academic setting because I used to feel like them,” he said. He also developed a spoken word class where the students delved into Native American storytelling, cuentos, dichos and slam poetry.
Following his time in the English Department he came home again – to the School of Architecture and Planning – where he is a visiting research scholar.
He also assists in the Design Planning Assistance Center studio and has worked on various New Mexico community studio design projects, including a design for a field studio and community center based in the old Sala Filantropica dancehall in Dixon/Embudo. This spring, Levi worked with students on a MainStreet project in Deming, N.M. His role was to elicit the dreams and ideas from the town’s Hispanic community since they were unlikely to attend the charrettes to share their thoughts and memories. Those stories were then shared with the students who incorporated those ideas in the designs for everything from streetscapes, youth community centers, to skate parks in the town of the legendary Duck Races.
He is currently exploring the histories and stories of the people in northern New Mexico along the high road to Taos and beyond. He looks at acequias, salas, molinos and gardens, nuestra gente and all that represents the life and people of the region. “I’m doing some cultural cruisin’. It’s not about kicking back, but about the important work that needs to be done. If we don’t gather these stories now, they will be gone forever. “Places, stories and history will be recognized as invaluable informants to architecture study in the future. It will, ultimately, become part of the curriculum,” he said.
He’s laying some new groundwork on well-travelled roads.
Story by Carolyn Gonzales