In May of 2018 I spent a week staying with my mom in Las Cruces. She had a work trip scheduled for Santa Fe and invited me to tag along, enticing me with the use of her car while she was in meetings. I had never spent much time in Santa Fe, and without knowing what I should I do I ended up wandering on Canyon Road.

I met a gray-haired gallery owner with a ponytail who told me about his first time in Santa Fe back in the sixties. He painted such a vivid picture in my mind, of hippies and dirt roads, joints down by the river and general debauchery.

These visions were dispelled when I left his gallery and stumbled out onto the street and the first thing I saw was a Ferrari drive slowly past. I grew up in the oldest part of Las Cruces and yet I was mystified by what I was seeing on Canyon. I recognized the classic Santa Fe Style architecture, but the polish and money didn’t make any sense to me. How could something like this happen in a neighborhood like this?

Captivated, I started arranging interviews with Santa Fe locals who could educate me.

Ana Pacheco, a native Santa Fean and local historian, told me about the seventies. She told me of fences spraypainted with “no vende la Tierra.” Through my conversations with longtime santafesinos, I was beginning to understand the changes to that dusty old road that the tourism guides couldn’t. I was shocked by how recently these stories took place.

I decided I was going to make a film about the history of Canyon Road and move home to New Mexico. Since then I have been busy trying to make friends and rustle up hidden archives, photographs, and stories. I have been humbled by generous homegrown Santa Feans who have helped me fill in the gaps of what I don’t know. I started sharing all this with my artist friends in Albuquerque and Cruces, most of whom, like me, are younger than 40. They, too, seem to have little idea of how recently the changes occurred in Santa Fe. The Canyon Road we know today is about as old as me—a story of transformation from decades-long, rugged artist scene to a polished, multi-million dollar economy in the miniature.

My film series tells overlapping stories of the famous street from the perspective of longtime Santa Feans. I set out to tell a story about art, but at its heart The History of Canyon Road is a story about New Mexico. My audience is our state’s young artist scene who deserve to know that the history of Canyon Road is illustrative of a very common New Mexican story, a cyclical tale of cultural replacement and cultural revitalization.

The Twenties and its association with the Santa Fe School are romantic, for sure, but a similar cycle of cultural replacement and revitalization occurred in the Sixties and the Seventies. New Mexico has always possessed a raw attraction for those individuals looking to flee from the traditional restrictions of American society, and a lot of people who moved here during that time did so because they felt as if they could build something new, free of the mores of mainstream America. They wanted to a be part of something with deep roots but with new offshoots, new growth. They took responsibility for finding their own place among a well established culture—one built on those cycles of revitalization and decay.

Gia Vigil told me a remarkable story about her grandmother, who became good friends with the infamous kook of an artist named Tommy Macaiaone. He would paint in her flower garden frequently, and when he did she would sit with him, feeding him lunch and feeding his menagerie of dogs too. He became a part of the family. He came for Thanksgiving. Ana Rosa Padilla told me a completely unrelated story about her grandmother, who also befriended Tommy and would feed him lunch when he came to paint in her garden.

I thought this was a peculiar coincidence until a scholar from Spain gave me the key to understanding what I was hearing. The old Spanish traditions alive on Canyon Road would not abandon an individual in need (a courtesy not extended by American capitalism). A family would take you in if you really needed it. Tommy’s mother was Italian, and he spent time in Italy as a kid, where there is a similar social safety net within the community. He knew he could bestow an honor upon the matriarch of a family by painting her garden, sometimes giving her that painting, and in return she would take care of him. And, if you know anything about Tommy Macaione, you know he needed to be taken care of.

This is the strongest example I have ever heard of the symbiotic relationship between the old families of Canyon Road and the new artists who came here. The old Spanish families would take care of the artists. They would rent them a home or a studio. This parallels the famous origin story of the Anglo art colony beginning with tuberculosis patients taking refuge in the cool mountain air: Anglos in need came to Santa Fe to be taken care of.

As the road continued to gain a reputation as a place for art, more artists came, often upon the invitation of one who was already here. A simple phone call usually did the trick—“Hey, a spot next to me just opened up, come start a studio gallery!” The artists had a way of taking care of one another, but they missed a critical component of the culture. It didn’t occur to many of them that they may need to stop and help the old Hispano families who had originally helped them.

Somewhere along the way something shifted. To some, it was the Seventies; others, the Eighties. In the series, people tell me different things—each has their own version—but at some point people stopped coming here to be part of a historic culture that they could draw from, and instead arrived with the notion that they could reshape it in their own image. Thankfully for the Canyon Road neighborhood, historic preservation protections have managed to keep remnants of those past iterations of culturemakers alive. Even in the most polished corners of the neighborhood you can find an expression of the exemplary creative traditions that New Mexico has carried for a very, very long time.

Visit the Old Santa Fe Association here:

https://www.oldsantafe.org/