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©2001
Dunaway Productions
URL: www.unm.edu/~rt66/albusits.html
Modified: July 19, 2001

University of New Mexico

Up and down this road, Route 66 is a hub of redevelopment and rediscovery. In Albuquerque, on East Central Avenue, where the traveler once found motels drawing only hourly trade, the city has begun to turn drug-dealing properties around.

"You could call it a Christmas miracle on East Central," begins the story in today’s Albuquerque Journal. The old Sundowner Motel is being converted into the state’s only housing complex for homeless veterans. Further south, along the old alignment of 66, across the Isleta pueblo, 75 to 80 people live in dug-outs. Most of them are Vietnam veterans, with no resources to draw upon, ill, sick, dirty. So here comes this Christmas miracle and rehabilitation services and veterans programs.

This redevelopment fever extends to its Northern border along Fourth Street. In the sixteenth century, this was the famous Camino Real, a northern outpost on the 1500 mile road joining the Spanish colonial capital of Mexico City and its northern most outpost, San Gabriel, near present day Espanola, New Mexico.

On either sides of Albuquerque, a line of small towns begin--not so extreme as Tucumcari, a city two miles long and two blocks wide, locals joke. What allows these old 66 towns to survive, off of any main highway other than the one their satellite dishes and DSL lines can pull down? Maybe an inverse law applies here. The further from the interstate, the more likely to maintain a downtown shopping district. Without that district, there’s no tax base for the town’s development, to pick up all those services we now expect from localities, rather than the federal government.

Most surviving 66 towns share certain characteristics: they have been market towns before 66 came through; so people were used to driving there, by wagon if not by car, as destinations. (Today the malls threaten these towns by price cutting and by offering more entertainment in one space than in all of the old downtowns.)

Even Christmas here is different. In New Mexico, the old Spanish tradition of miracle plays, performed bilingually, continues: Las Posadas. For 55 years the pueblo of Albuquerque has been performing this outdoor reenactment of the search by Mary and Joseph for a room at an inn. Today it is a procession with three wise men--and children dressed as angels with white wings--walking neighborhood streets, stopping at homes and asking for a place to stay. They are told there is no room. Finally, they are welcomed at the Sacred Heart Catholic Church, in the Barelas district not far from downtown and Route 66. In the old days, each house that rejected these pilgrims was actually open for anyone to eat bizochitos and posole, a pork-and-corn stew, one of those dishes that crosses cultural boundaries of Native and Hispanic cooking.