January 8, 2024
Up at 6 a.m. catching the light, stopping here and there for a pause to make a few photographs while driving south on CO17 with the enormity of the Baca Grande to the east and the clouded Sangres brooding in the turmoil of an elevated snowy scene.
Along the highway there’s the mosaic of native grasses, sandy dunes, the soaring ramparts of the cloudless Blanca Massif, steeped in thousands of years of human culture – the Utes, Navajo, Hopi, Spaniards, Mexicans, migrants/immigrants from the European Continent – and multiple hundreds of millions of years of natural processes. The drive finds dusty byroads, icy squiggly dryish creek beds, straight narrow irrigation channels, fallow circles taken offline in an effort toward aquifer replenishment.
To the west and above 10,000 feet the promise of snowy San Juan ridges, while nearby the wafty trails of smoke from the chimney of a home in Mosca, imagining kiddos reluctantly readying for school. Now into Alamosa and a breakfast at the All Valley Café, and as an homage to that Blanca Massif, an order of marvelous biscuits and gravy, a scattering of bacon, two over-medium eggs, hash browns, and three cups of coffee before waddling to my car and a meeting with Jason Medina.
I happened upon Jason through my research, especially Costilla County and the Town of San Luis, through his appearances in a Sangre de Cristo National Heritage Area video about, among other topics, the La Vega Commons and the former Culebra commons, within the Sangre de Cristo Land Grant of 1843, including the acequias and the issue of water usage.
Randy Brown: I’m really more interested in the “how you got to now,” and what’s the prequel to your current position as the executive director of the Community Foundation of the San Luis Valley because, especially in the business community here, you’re most likely a well-known individual. However, I’m really interested in something about which you may not be widely known. In that regard, when I think about, from the little bit I know, you came back to the Valley in the early ’90s.
Jason Medina: I left the Valley in 1991, and it’s funny because I left for all of about six months and then ended up coming back right in ’92 and came to Adam State and graduated with a BA in psychology in ’96, and then I went and did the Colorado tour.
RB: Now, what do you mean by the Colorado tour?
JM: Like most kids, I guess growing up in the Valley, you can’t wait until you graduate because then suddenly, the world is out there waiting for you and there’s all these experiences and you hope that opportunities are out there awaiting. And then you find out that the real world isn’t as cool as you thought it was when you were 17. Right?
RB: One of those reality checks?
JM: And so, what I did was, I started working for the state of Colorado in ’97 for the Division of Youth Corrections, actually. I was, let’s see, in ’97, that would’ve made me 23 years old. I still felt like I was connected enough to the kind of teenage generation that was coming through the, most especially in that time, in the judicial system. I felt that I had enough background because I made a lot of mistakes when I was young.
Nothing that was warranting me being locked up or anything like that, but I also felt that I had a lot of advice, a lot of good advice for the kids that were going through the system. I was also fluent in Spanish, so I started working in Greeley where there was a large population of migrant farm workers and their kids who were coming up in kind of an urban/rural area, and in a gang-infested community in Greeley and Brighton and some other areas.
Anyway, I felt that I had enough of a background knowledge and could relate enough to these kids that I might be able to be either somebody that they could confide in or maybe be a good role model that, “Hey, I was probably in your shoes at one time or another, but here I am.”
I learned pretty quickly that youth corrections was not what I wanted to do for very long, much less for the rest of my life.
RB: Because?
JM: Well, unfortunately, I found out that kids even at that age, were already a little bit too far as far as rehabilitation was concerned. It was really sad for the kids that grew up in that area. It was almost a rite of passage for you to go and do something dumb and get thrown in jail, because then you can come back to your neighborhood and you were –
RB: Street Cred?
JM: Absolutely, absolutely. And then for some of these younger kids, most especially the kids maybe who were born in Mexico or that their parents were born in Mexico, and they had just moved there recently, they didn’t know that there was anything different than that. So even though I had this kind of preconceived notion that I was going to go into this thing to try to help kids and maybe save a couple, and maybe I did, had a part in helping kids realize what they were doing was not what they should be doing.
The majority of those kids were already, they were in the gang life. A lot of them were into that for multi-generations already. This was something that they were not going to get out of, because they thought that this was normal, and this was where they should be at that point in life.
Anyway, I came in with these really great notions that I was going to try to help save a couple of kids or maybe save this little community and that’s not really what Youth Corrections was about, most especially at that time.
RB: It’s about incarceration, not about rehab?
JM: Right. Yes.
RB: Even though there’s some sense that incarceration facilities make some attempt at rehabilitation.
JM: Yeah. Even to get a job in there – I was a security officer at one, which is very preliminary, the first gig that you get when you get in there – even though everybody in there, staff, had to have a sociology or psychology degree. I think we all went in there with the feeling that, “Hey, maybe we can help counsel these kids.” Well, your job didn’t have anything to do with counseling. There were counselors that were specific to those populations, but yeah, it was more of a lockdown facility. We went from zero kids to 130 kids in three days.
RB: That’s a bit of an onrush?
JM: Platte Valley Youth Services Center was what we opened in 1997. And it just so happened that there was a facility in Brush where there was a lot of improprieties going on with adults and kids that needed to close down. And they just needed to be somewhere else. So, we moved some kids, some of them were murderers, 16- and 17-year-olds. Some of them were already headed straight to the adult system.
There was no real plan to rehabilitate 100 percent of those kids. The recidivism rate was so incredible. I mean, those kids would get out and they’d be back in a couple of weeks, and they knew that. For some reason, I started believing that this was just this corporate thing to be able to have a facility open. You can’t have a facility without kids. And if we rehabilitate all of them, then we’re not going to have this facility.
RB: Then you’re out of business.
JM: Right.
RB: So, Rebound? Does that name sound familiar?
JM: Yeah, absolutely.
RB: So, I did some work doc work with Rebound at that Brush Facility.
JM: Is that right?
RB: A long time, 25 years ago, a documentary style project for the corporation.
JM: So, I applied for a position at Rebound in Brush the year before they closed, and we ended up moving those kids to Greely.
RB: Okay, let’s go back a little bit further in that. Your family has been in the Valley for how long, and where from previously?
JM: I always say that I am a fourth-generation San Luis native, and that’s because three great-grandparents were the first to come and settle in this area. Both sides of my family just went back to dad’s, dad’s, goes back to 1560s and mom to 1590s, somewhere between what was not even New Mexico at the time, to Santa Fe to what is now the San Luis Valley.
RB: That’s right after Coronado and the Spaniards were kicking around what is now New Mexico?
JM: Right, and so my father’s family, my great-grandfather on dad’s side, Alfonso Medina, used to run a sawmill in Northern New Mexico and my grandfather, whose name was Anselmo, born in New Mexico in about, I think it was 1918.
My great-grandmother, Lucaria, a widow, came on horseback and covered wagon from the Taos area, San Cristobal, to San Luis to visit family that were already there. When Lucaria needed to return to San Cristobal, a he winter storm was so bad that she couldn’t risk taking their baby, Anselmo, my grandfather, back to San Cristobal again. When Lucaria came back in the spring to pick up the baby, the family had already fallen in love with the baby, and they would not let the baby go back .
So that is how my grandpa, Anselmo, on the Medina’s, got to San Luis.
Mom’s side, the Sanchezes, were merchants and owned a lot of mercantile stores among other things, everywhere from Santa Fe up to Taos, what is Taos County now and then ended up moving to San Luis and opening some stores. They also opened some stores in Walsenburg.
RB: Spreading out.
JM: So basically, from Walsenburg to, well, what would’ve been Mexico City, is where my families have been from 1560s or 1590s to now.
RB: That’s quite a trail.
JM: I found out that I was actually, our family, the Medina family, is direct lineage from the progenitor of the Medina name who is a Captain Diego de Medina, who was the firstborn Medina in the New World and he was a capitán, so I’m not sure exactly what he was a captain of, because at any given time he could have been in the same place, it could have been new Spain or it could have been Mexico. Or it could have been the New Mexico territory or the Colorado territory, even before it even became what it is today. Our families were very much in San Luis 25 years plus before it became Colorado.
RB: To San Luis.
JM: Right, so when they say San Luis is the oldest town in Colorado, and the San Acacio Mission, the Catholic Capilla de Viejo San Acacio, is the oldest church. 1851 is when San Luis, originally named San Luis de la Culebra, was christened as a town and in about 1853, there was a church that was built in San Acacio. My three times great-grandparents on my mom’s side are buried in that churchyard.
RB: This was after the Mexican American War, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.
JM: ’48, yeah, ’48 was the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.
RB: So, that’s when this part of the planet which was Mexico became the United States.
Mexico ceded 55 percent of its territory, including parts of present-day California, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, most of Arizona, Colorado. Not to forget, parts of Oklahoma, Wyoming, and Kansas. Texas? That’s another story as it preceded the treaty.
JM: Yeah, that was the start of it. That is when the actual paperwork was signed. It was actually ’49 when it took effect. In 1844 Narciso Beaubien, the son of Carlos Beaubien who was a well-known businessman in the Northern New Mexico territory, along with Stephen Louis Lee, petitioned Gov. Manuel Armijo of New Mexico to see if they could get some land grants. As a result, they were granted three different land grants, which was the Conejos Land Grant, the San Luis de Cristo Land Grant, where San Luis is, and then another one that was over on the other side of the Sangres, basically where Trinidad and that area is right now.
Narciso Beaubien and his friend Stephen Louis Lee were killed in the Taos Revolt in 1847. Because of that, and they had no heirs; the grants were in limbo. Gov. Armijo did agree to the petition that Narciso’s father, Carlos, could acquire those three land grants.
RB: Did Beaubien fund the families who came into San Luis?
JM: He did.
RB: And how did that work? He just provided resources, building materials, foods, those kinds of things?
JM: And animals. So, they were called herencias, which very loosely translates to inheritances. These herencias were vara strips, so these very long and narrow bar strips, which all of them were connected to a river somehow. So, they gave them a vara strip and then they would give them some animals. They were mostly sheep at the time, and then cattle a little bit later on. What they would do is they would give you 50 cattle and a piece of land, and in five years, you’d give them back 50 cattle. Well, if you had 50 cattle and you were running them correctly, in five years, you’d probably have 65. So out of that 65 head, then you give 50 back again, and you get to keep your 15 and that would start your farm there.
Again, it was very fertile land, at the time, it was all this rolling grass. What we didn’t find out until much later is all this sagebrush that exists out there was a product of sheep farmers coming in and taking out this incredible grass that used to be there. Sheep actually pull it directly out of the ground and don’t leave anything left inside. Whereas cows will munch on the top part and leave the other stuff to grow back up again, sheep completely pulled it out. When they pulled it out, it allowed these other, not necessarily noxious weeds, but the unfavorable weeds to come in and kind of take over and that is why our entire landscape is sagebrush. It used to be this great land of tall grass.
RB: Seems like the areas around Capulin have multigenerational families whose history is based on sheep.
JM: Although there were folks, in fact, we just talked to a guy out in Saguache, he, his great-grandfather went down and bought from one of my great-great-great-grandfathers, some sheep to take to the Saguache area. So, they knew that sheep had value; they benefited farmers for a lot of different reasons. They would clean up pastures that other animals didn’t necessarily clean up. You could use the wool and the meat, and it was a pretty viable source for making some money, at one time or another.
RB: You could get meat, dairy, and wool from one animal, which is a fairly significant resource.
JM: Most especially wool that they could take either north or south, they would sell a lot in the Taos area, which would be dyed and used for a lot of different things.
So yeah, so going back to the herencias, then those families were all apparently given the opportunity from the Santa Fe area, “If you would like to help us in this northward expansion, we will give you a piece of land and we’ll give you some animals and we will take care of you as much as possible.”
You’re right, there were some building materials, some of them they would bring all the way from St. Louis, Missouri, which is crazy. The Romero family was one of the very first families to start an actual mercantile in San Luis.
RB: Was that the R&R?
JM: Yeah, it was the Gallegos family first, then came the Salazar family.
RB: It came to be the R&R.
JM: Correct. And it was actually Salazar, no Gallegos family first. They became the Salazar family that became the Romero family. But Dario Gallegos, who was one of the very first settlers who was on the plaque that they dug the People’s Ditch, which is still the very first-hand dug ditch in Colorado and still has the number-one water right, which is really cool.
RB: We’ll talk a little bit about the acequias and the Rio Grande Water Conservation district later. I understand that, was it Gallegos that would go to St. Louis to resupply his store?
JM: That was Dario Gallegos.
RB: With his wagons. It wasn’t really an established route like the Santa Fe Trail. I know there’s the Old Spanish Trail coming up through Northern New Mexico and on to the West Coast, but there wasn’t really an established, at least well known, trade route from the east that came into the San Luis Valley.
JM: Also, a lot of self-organized groups of people. Then later, tribes of people who weren’t crazy about, most especially, European explorers or settlers coming through their lands.
It was a pretty rough trek.
RB: That was the Utes.
JM: Ute in our area, yes. The Ute were the first, I guess, kind of a nomadic tribe that made a settlement in our particular area. At any given time here in what we call the San Luis Valley though, the Diné, Navajo, people were here since way before. Hopi were here, in fact, and Zuni. There is a whole story about the Hopi people saying that their creation story happened right here where the San Luis Lakes are, which is just about five miles south of the Sand Dunes and about four miles west of Mount Blanca. Well, we call it Mount Blanca. Well before it was Mount Blanca, that’s Sis Naajini.
RB: The Diné name.
JM: Which is where their creation story happened. Sis Naajini is the Black Belted Mother, which is why it’s white on top and usually kind of darkish on the bottom. The Navajo believed that once this cataclysm happened, and the Seventh World was safe enough for people to come out, that they came out of the ground at Mount Blanca. So like I say, at any given time… And also Apache. So, you had Apache, Hopi, Diné (Navajo), and Ute that were all in the area. They called this a bloodless valley for a reason. They were all able to trade, hunt, use the land and this was not a place of war, ever.
And then come the folks with the red hair and the green eyes like mine and there was a lot of turmoil that happened. In fact, the whole reason that Fort Massachusetts even existed, and now Fort Garland ever existed, is because the folks around here at the time petitioned the state of Colorado to come and help them out with the Ute, because they were waging war.
RB: Well, it’s interesting, as a bit of an aside, especially in the environment we’re in right now, is that the European migration that came primarily from the east into this part of the world, especially after the Civil War, and now there is the socio/political issue of migration from the Southern Border, some individuals are… let’s say this, let’s just say there’s migration problems.
JM: Fighting immigration. They sure are.
RB: I think it’s kind of … fascinating is not the right word, but it’s interesting that a country built on immigration and migration, taking land from another country, not to mention what the westward expansion did to native cultures, continues to struggle with this issue about closing pathways for others.
JM: Right, and then the only stories that stood or that took hold were the stories that fit the narrative at the time. So, we always believed, and most especially people like me, that are somewhat light-haired, light-skinned, light eyes, believed that we were Spanish, and that was it.
Pretty close.
Then the advent of DNA and family history come up. I knew from a lot of different familial stories, that we did have some indigenous heritage, the mere fact that for the first maybe 60, 70 to a hundred years (European Explorers) those who came over on ships were men. If your family is from the area, then that meant that your grandmother, great grandmother, somehow, was indigenous from that area.
When I was talking about this capitan, Diego de Medina, who was the first, again, born Medina in the New World, married a woman that was named Maria Zapata Telles Jirón, who was very much an indigenous woman, and the reason that we did the DNA is because they had their own children and they adopted children. They adopted children who were Native American. They adopted a couple of French children and some Mexican children.
RB: In considering this issue of immigration, it is human migration, seeking out a life that perhaps is an improvement from the life we have. We are curious, we seek out information, a better place to fish, hunt, more natural resources that are based on survival instincts. Now its jobs, fleeing oppression, danger, seeking asylum. There’s something endemic in human culture that’s in our DNA, this desire to seek out new territory and new opportunities in that we migrate, and it’s been part of human culture, ever since, throughout human history. It’s not a new thing.
JM: Ever since. But very much connected to why we are where we are. There was this grand, in this particular area, the San Luis Valley, this amazing green pasture filled with the most incredible water sources that are guarded by these 7,000-foot walls. Why on earth would we not want to move into that incredible place?
Most especially when we had just learned how to farm and how to raise animals. And the acequia system, which is still being used in our area, which is very special to the rest of the world. I was just in Spain, which is really cool. I turned 50 on the 13th of December and I woke up in Madrid on the 13th of December, something I wanted to do forever. And I started talking to some of the folks about acequias and they still use acequias there. Acequia is an Arabic term and a system that ruled Spain for hundreds of years before 1492, honestly.
RB: And not unlike the Roman aqueducts.
JM: Right. Right. How you get water from where it exists to where you need it. Everybody dug ditches and everybody had systems, but the acequia system in that you have an actual majordomo who is one person or family who really says, this is where the water goes, at what time of the year, who are very savvy about when you get the biggest water yields and when the people down at the end need it and when the people up at the beginning need it. It’s a system, but it’s so unique and we’re still using those systems back home and we depend on it.
RB: OK, so speaking of acequias, and as I alluded to earlier, I know there’s been some conversations between the Rio Grande Water Conservation District, RGWCD, Costilla County and the families who use the acequias to bring those water resources into the fold of the water conservation district, which would, assuming, require some regulation. It seems that is still under consideration and perhaps not going well? The “hands off our water, stay away from our ditch” perspective.
Note: In a call, RGWCD General Manager Cleave Simpson indicated that in 1967, when the water district was formed, Costilla County chose not to be part of it. In that regard there has been a hands-off policy with the door open if the County is interested in joining The District in the future.
JM: Require, yes. You’re right. It’s not going well. I believe that there are still factions of people who will never allow this before system, the acequias, to be regulated by an outside entity or faction, who believes that everything needs a rule. The rules that have been working for the last 500 years have been working just fine, and nobody really needs to change that, in a lot of people’s opinion.
So, for us who already monitor and basically govern our own systems, and it’s been working just fine, there’s no reason to. “If it’s not broke, don’t fix it”, right?
When you’re talking about people who believe that they own this system, they believe they created this system, they believe this is something that their lifestyle would be changed if something else came around, they’re not going to go lightly into having it being governed by any system, government, or otherwise.
In my opinion, it doesn’t need to. It’s really working the way that it is. The whole idea the Rio Grande Water Conservation District is thinking about is augmentation, which is if you’re taking some water out, you’ve got to put it back in somehow. We’ve been doing that for years. We put the water back into the land, it eventually goes back into our aquifers, we’ve been replenishing that forever.
Then the problem becomes, well, then everybody digs a well to be able to put houses up or whatever that happens to be. All the sudden expansion is taking water away from what we’ve been doing naturally without a governing body to tell us how to do it.
RB: Would you say then that part of the argument is that the acequias are sustainable?
JM: Absolutely.
RB: And when you bring in this massive amount of agriculture into the rest of the district, there’s an issue with sustainability.
JM: And I would almost argue that the argument isn’t necessarily agriculture. The argument is expansion. If you are going to open a new subdivision somewhere …
There’s one thing about Costilla County. All of Costilla County, 99 percent of it, is privately owned. There’s one little knuckle that belongs to the National Forest Service, but essentially, we do not have National Forest Service. We do not have BLM Lands. 99 percent of that county is owned by somebody. There are also 80,000 parcels in that one county. 80,000 parcels.
RB: What’s the western border of Costilla County?
JM: Western border is the Rio Grande. The top of Mount Blanca is the northern border, about half of La Veta Pass, then to Wagon Creek, which is Forbes Wagon Creek, and then Forbes Park, Sangre de Cristo Ranches, and all the way down to the New Mexico border. So, the Rio goes all the way up on the west side, basically the top of the Sangre de Cristo mountains on this side, and then the New Mexico border.
It doesn’t seem like a significant amount of land to have 80,000 parcels. They are broken into a lot of five-acre parcels. The problem with five-acre parcels is that, at one time or another, everybody could have a domestic well on every single one of those parcels if you have over an acre of land. They didn’t realize that eventually there would not be enough water to sustain that development.
RB: Yeah, along the Rio Grande, north and south of Lobatos Bridge, hundreds, maybe thousands of three- or four-acre, 10-acre plots and a handful of houses.
JM: It really is that, thousands.
RB: The possibility of those being developed significantly is fairly slim, I would imagine.
JM: Not very desirable. It’s a bunch of rock, sagebrush, which we call chamiso. You see it on the advertisements for Mount Blanca and Sanchez Reservoir, elk running everywhere and these beautiful trees and aspens and coniferous trees. And then you get out there and it’s rock and chamiso.
RB: It appears that most of the San Luis Valley development, aside from agriculture, is along the US160 corridor.
JM: Yeah, definitely.
RB: Getting back to the stress on the two aquifers, does the district sense that if some of that water from acequias came in, that would help meet some of the state’s mandates?
*A phone call to the Rio Grande Water Conservation District for the district’s policy regarding acequias was not returned.
JM: Absolutely.
It’s a system, but it’s so unique and we’re still using those systems back home and we depend on it.
Jason Medina
RB: Is this a conversation that the acequias are sustainable and sort of a “why do we have to pay the price because you are not being sustainable?” That’s likely a simplistic viewpoint. Part of it is drought, and a lot of the water usage rights were granted/established in some of the wettest years. Is that equation based on a false premise?
JM: On a great year that you get once maybe every 30 years now. In fact, they say hundred-year storms now, when they’re talking about storms back home. It’s interesting to see what our snowpack levels are here in the Sangre de Cristo mountains as opposed to the San Juans.
We are just one valley away from each other, but Wolf Creek has the base of 120 inches right now – 10 feet. We didn’t get any snow this year. And they’ve got 10 feet up there. And you would be very lucky to find maybe five or six feet up on our peaks over here. In fact, Mount Blanca isn’t even white anymore, and that’s the norm. That’s not just, we’ve had a couple of bad years. If anything, we will have a good year within 10 or 15.
And when they started making some of the subdivisions, most especially the Sangre de Cristo ranches, which is basically from 159 East all the way up to the top of our hills south and west of Fort Garland, and there are thousands of five-acre parcels. When they first developed that, they did have an augmentation rule that you could only use it for inside your house, and maybe you could have a one-acre plot outside to farm. And even though they were called ranches, they’re not necessarily ranches.
Again, where we’re at the vara strips, most especially if they were connected to the Culebra, or to the San Francisco Creek or to any of those creeks that are down on west side, we would get water out of the creek, but we would absolutely put it back into the aquifer.
Again, that was not a rule that was made, that was not this augmentation plan that was made up, but when you get down to where we were talking about Lobatos Bridge, they did not create that plan, and now some of their water rights are being sold off. That’s been happening for about the last 10 years or so. I was the land use administrator from 2017 until 2020 in Costilla County and learned all of these rules and also learned about a comprehensive plan that just about every county, I believe every county has to have. That’s a mandated thing. What our, Costilla County, comprehensive plan says is that we need to start thinking about expansion, but not explosive or exponential expansion. Moderate expansion.
RB: Expansion and development, a tax base.
JM: Absolutely. We need to be able to keep our county going financially, but we don’t want to become the new metropolis. Well, why would anybody want to come out this way anyway? There’s very little to appeal to corporations that didn’t have anything specifically to do with other than agriculture or maybe outdoor hunting, outdoor recreation.
Another unique thing that happened in the ’60s was that a direct descendant of Zachary Taylor came and fenced 80,000 acres that was the Culebra Commons and claimed it a private property. That word, battle, you mentioned earlier, as far as water rights are concerned was absolutely, and it still is a battle. In fact, it was just in the Supreme Court last year.
What basically happened was there were three parts of our land grant, which is the Sangre de Cristo Land grant, and it was La Sierra, which is the mountain. It was the vara strips that I was talking about, that’s the bottom space, the bottom lands and the La Vega, which is still that one common that works in the United States. (The other is Boston Commons.)
The Sierra portion of it was again, fenced off by a guy named Jack Taylor in the ’60s. The Lovato family who lived right underneath it, took him to court. And since, I think it was ’66 until now, it has been a 56-year-old court battle about who that belongs to. It was granted to the original settlers of the area, which are my people. Now if you’re a landowner, you get a key, but you can only go up there to get firewood or to take your animals at certain times of the year. We cannot hunt or fish, we cannot recreate, we can’t use it in the intended manner when the land grant was given. Which then bled into why are we allowing outsiders, and I will say it, white people, why are we allowing white people to come in and take our land literally the way that it happened?
We still say we’re Spanish. It’s funny, as I said earlier, I was in Spain. I’ve been to Mexico a hundred times and haven’t been to Spain once. And I go to Mexico and people say, “Wow, you speak really great Spanish, where are you from?” And then I tell them where I’m from and they say, “Oh, you’re Spanish.”
It’s funny because in Spain, “Wow, you speak such great Spanish, where are you from?” And I tell them where I’m from.”Oh, you’re Mexican.”
RB: Living in two worlds.
JM: Well, yeah, and it depends on maybe your perspective of who you think people are from a certain area who you might be. So, it was funny because my whole story, and maybe joke, is that I’m Spanish in Mexico, but I’m Mexican in Spain!
RB: Both are true.
JM: They’re both true. I think it’s difficult sometimes for people from the area and who have been here for these 450 years when they say, well, who are you? Right. Well, we’re Americans and we’ve been here for 400-some odd years. However, we still speak Spanish. A lot of our church practices, and really our culture is based from Mexican tradition, and we still hold onto a lot of that old Spanish tradition as well.
A reminder that I am in the Alamosa Depot, as the rumbling diesel engines and blaring horn of a nearby outside locomotive triggers a squealing, screeching, squelching 100-year rewind of the cassette tape of history and rail cars laden with silver ore, timber, cattle, crops from the Valley, passengers disembarking to the welcoming hugs of family and at the same time passengers in embarking, perhaps bittersweet, hugs heading to the east and west for known and unknown adventures – a time warp of sorts, one of appreciation, of how the west was indeed won, at least for the masses. The horn blares again, the impossibly heavy locomotive rumbles onward, self-assured, and me time traveling forward to the present…
RB: Jason, I’d like to do is hit the rewind button a bit more. I’m curious about how you grew up, the back to “how we got to now,” the influences that formed who you are now. And you’re a teenager …
JM: As soon as I graduated, I moved that way, Greely. I was born in Colorado Springs. My parents in the ’60s, left San Luis following the dream. Same dream that we had, that there were bigger and better things. It was true back then. There really wasn’t any industry just like it is nowadays. It hasn’t changed much, but there wasn’t much industry.
So, my parents ended up in Colorado Springs. I had uncles that went all the way off to L.A. I was born in Colorado Springs. We moved back when I was six years old, so from the age of six till I graduated – and I graduated early, I was 17 years old and I graduated – I was in San Luis. I’ve always said that I am from San Luis because indeed I am and my families both are. I took off when I was 17. I was only 18 when I had planned to enroll in the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, UCCS, and I ultimately decided on Adams State and stayed here until ’96. Then I moved to Greeley in ’97, and that’s when I started working for the state as we talked about earlier.
I worked for the state the next five or six years, I worked for youth corrections for a while.
After that I moved to Colorado Springs and I was working for an organization called Chins Up, kids that were coming out of the corrections system. I just always felt that that was my niche, that I knew enough and could relate enough to those kids who were either in the system or coming out of the system to be able to help them out. I eventually moved back to San Luis and started working for the school district.
So how did I get there? Community service? My dad was a fireman in Colorado Springs for 20 plus years from the ’60s until we moved back in 1980. My mom was a social worker for District 11 schools in Colorado Springs. They moved back to open up a little mom-and-pop grocery store in San Luis, and that’s how we got back to San Luis again, where Mrs. Rios is right now, where the only real good Thai food is in San Luis.
RB: Ok, your father as a firefighter and your mother, a social worker, I don’t think I am projecting here, had an impact on your career choices. So, drilling down a little bit more on that influence of your mother and father and their passion to help people, even though they both were in positions where they had salaries, you don’t go into social work or firefighting unless you have something embedded within yourself. How did that manifest itself on a day-to-day basis? Maybe sitting around the dinner table, your mother and father are talking about one of the individuals on her caseload. Did you hear that, just knowing what they did, was that enough of an influence? Did you get some expressions from them, their passion for it, that became embedded into you?
JM: They were also foster parents, and they took in kids from the foster system. Two brothers and sisters that I remember most especially that stayed with us for quite a while, they had a lot of issues. For a set of parents who already had three kids of their own to bring in three kids, who they knew had specific issues, it just shows you the heart they had.
Then moving forward, my parents only had that store for about seven or eight years, and then dad became the executive director of the Housing Authority. So, they ran public housing until my dad passed away in 2007, which was about 20-some odd years after that.
Again, helping people, allowing people places to live rent-free, which is really what that whole system is about in Costilla County.
We have utility allowances, which don’t really exist in a lot of public housing. Which means that even if you were paying zero, we need to know that you’re going to keep the lights on and the heat on, most especially so that we don’t have pipes breaking. They would cut a check to folks for 70 or 80 bucks and that was your rent. We would give you money to be able to live there.
Now, it’s not my mom and dad that figured that out. The USDA Rural Development ran some of that and HUD ran a lot of it. They stayed there because they were in the business of helping people and dad did that till the day that he died.
He looked forward to retiring and never got that gift. Mom stayed in there for a couple of years afterward, and then she retired.
The reality of home life was that we were bringing in kids off the foster care system, and then finding out later that grandmas used to bring in people even from their own neighborhoods who needed the help.
I’ve got one great-great-great aunt that we used to call Grandma because we thought she was the grandma and she was the aunt, because they all lived together. My great-grandmother, a couple of great aunts and my grandma all lived together and raised everybody’s kids.
That was just something that was a way of life and still is.
RB: Family, extended family, extended, extended family…
JM: Right. I have raised three kids who are not biologically mine, and I have never used that term except to express that that’s who they are biologically. My kids are my kids, my three oldest kids are not my biological children. Again, this is something that is, it doesn’t have to be a bloodline and it doesn’t have to be your own family. If you can take care of people, then you take care of people.
RB: A natural career for you became working with people, helping people.
JM: Absolutely. I wanted to focus on either social work or psychology when I went to college.
Looking back at the different things that I’ve done in life and that is community service. After I left Colorado Springs, I came back to the Valley, and I worked for the school district for a while.
Then I started working for public housing, and I worked in public housing for about 10 years, and then I worked in local government for about three or four years, went back to the school district again.
Moving forward, then I was the director for the small business development center, and now I’m running a nonprofit.
My career has been working with people or somehow in the best interest of people, but that’s all because of my background and my foundation with mom and dad just always helping people.
That’s what they did. As I mentioned, they moved back to San Luis, opened a little mom-and-pop store. They used to extend credit to people, which the business world doesn’t do nowadays.
In Costilla County, you work either of two places. You work for the school district and get paid once a month or for Costilla County, paid once a month. Those are long months, 31 days of one paycheck. It’s understanding that my parents used to extend credit to folks, they left so indebted or in debt, I guess. People were indebted to them. When they ended up closing that store, they had this whole bureau full of notes from customers that were never paid.
RB: So, where do you think that came from for them, their sense of service?
JM: Well, on the merchant side again, my mom’s family were merchants forever, all the way from New Spain into New Mexico, into Walsenburg that I mentioned earlier. Dad, he never knew his father who died when he was about six years old because of alcoholism. Dad remembers very few things about his father, and a lot of them were that he would see him drunk a lot and things like that.
My grandmother, Adelia Vigil Medina, raised eight kids all by herself. She worked in the school district, she was the head cook, even to the time when I got to school, which is why I attribute that I love food so much, because she would dig to the bottom and get the big chicken breast to give me when she saw me come through.
RB: To give you the biggest? And your friends were going, what?
JM: Right, and I ended up being the bigger guy. But no reason because of my grandmother, but she was always cooking, she was always taking care of folks. That whole little community, which they call Cuba, which is a little bit different. Cuba is, right? If you’d ask somebody there, and we still call it Cuba, which is just the northeastern part of San Luis itself. Everything that’s east of Main Street on the north hand side would be Cuba. And they still call it Cuba. A lot of different stories why they call it Cuba. The people from Cuba were always pretty militant and revolutionary, and these folks used to like to fight with everybody else. So, a lot of people think that that might have been why they called them Cuba.
RB: A cultural microcosm.
JM: Right, a lot of the families there actually would take care of other people’s kids. If a mother would die and the neighbors would bring in somebody else. It’s funny, when my first biological child was born, she was sick, she was a little bit early, and we were in Children’s Hospital. My parents came to meet her mom for the first time and she’s from back home. When they said who the grandfather was, my dad starts scratching his head and he says, “I think you guys might be related.” And I’m thinking, “Thanks, Dad. You’ve got a little baby that’s sick here, and you could have told us this a long time ago. You knew who I was seeing for the last at least nine months.”
What happened was, the grandfather was actually raised by my grandmother but was a neighbor. My baby’s mother had a grandfather whose father died when he was young. Father marries a new woman, woman really didn’t like the kids from the previous marriage, and this kid ended up growing up with my grandparents.
They were family, for all intents and purposes.
They were not blood-related, but they were family, an example of how in that particular area, people really have always cared for people. That’s who my dad grew up knowing. You take care of people. He and his brother both moved off to Colorado Springs and ended up being firefighters out there. So, long line of people who have just really been in the business of trying to take care of other people.
RB: Yeah. I wonder for your family and others in the town of San Luis, is that we’re running let’s say a small market as in many small towns, I wonder if people go into that, OK, this is going to provide for our family and in the process, you are providing for other people’s families?
JM: Absolutely.
RB: If you extend credit with IOUs, I wonder if they knew that, accepted that going in, they need a couple of pounds of cornmeal or flour or whatever, and are we going to turn them down? You sort of accept that.
JM: Right. I think it really goes back to a barter system that used to exist way before then. I’ve got cows and you’ve got lumber. I might not be able to pay for the lumber this month, but how about maybe you get a cow at the end of the season.
RB: You get a cow. At least I can give you milk for a year.
JM: Absolutely. Some beef or maybe an actual animal. I think that whole barter system really came from New Mexico territory-ish and really from the way that the indigenous people lived forever and ever.
RB: Do you think that barter system still exists in Costilla County?
JM: Oh, yeah, and I think that there are still businesses who extend credit. In fact, I know there is at least one gas – no, both gas stations – in town still extend credit to locals, to families on occasion. Sonya, who is, she is a Mexican native moved from Mexico 20ish years ago, married Mexican man. Her husband ended up passing away and she bought a little grocery store, still runs the place and absolutely they extend credit to folks. You only get paid once a month as we were talking about earlier.
Most people are good for paying off their notes, but yeah, I think it’s a system that you cannot walk into, even here, you can’t walk into a gas station or grocery store in Alamosa and say, “Hey, can I put in $30 in gas and I’ll see you on the first?“ It just doesn’t work.
But it was literally generations and hundreds of years’ worth of this is what’s worked before, this is how we used to do it, and for the most part it still works.
RB: Yeah. So, fast-forwarding back to today and with your organization. Frustrations and successes?
JM: Yeah. We’re in somewhat of a renaissance period with this foundation. It’s existed for about, I think this is nine years now, coming into ’24, but really wasn’t doing anything noteworthy until about 2018, 2019. There was only one executive director prior to my directorship, so I’m kind of the only second director that has ever been in here. We are still trying to find a place.
RB: What do you mean by a place?
JM: Well, about what our community foundation does. Community foundations for the most part have this great big endowment and they have these grant cycles that they can help certain areas that they serve or certain populations. This was based on a feasibility study of whether a community foundation would actually work in the San Luis Valley and maybe what they might be able to do. We got some grant money from El Pomar Foundation, who is a large funder, urban funder.
RB: Is that a yearly grant, is that an ongoing?
JM: No, that was just kind of a one-and-done to create a feasibility study to see if it would work. What they found out was that the San Luis Valley would benefit from a community foundation, but they still didn’t know what that meant. I’ve only been in this position a year now so I’m still trying to figure out what we’re doing and where we’re going.
I came into a very broke organization. With creating and continuing relationships with a lot of urban funders, including Colorado Health Foundation, the Colorado Trust, the Boettcher Foundation, and with a lot of help from Philanthropy Colorado as well as other organizations, we’ve come from a very broke organization to an organization that can be sustained for a few years looking forward, which is awesome.
RB: Because that’s important in developing programming because you want to know that it’s funded out to a certain point and you’re not scrambling. Is Scrambling not the right word?
JM: Oh, scrambling is absolutely the word. Absolutely the word and most especially for the first few months. I came into this organization and wasn’t sure exactly in February (2023) how I was going to even pay myself through about June. Now, we are to the point where I know for the next three years, we have enough to run our organization and we can help other organizations and we can help fund projects that might come up. Again, it’s just finding out, so now who do we help? This year, our first signature project was helping some Guatemalan families who were affected by the closure of the Colorado Mushroom Farm.
So, a little bit of background on that, Colorado Mushroom Farm has existed in one form or another here for at least 20 years, could be close to 30. In about 2019, the owner made some poor choices on how employees were treated and how to run a business, and the business failed in 2020.
There were families that moved specifically from Guatemala because they were mushroom experts in Guatemala and found this opportunity here in Alamosa, Colorado, of all places to come and build their American dream and do things that they were already well-equipped to do.
They’ve been doing this for generations.
A lot of these folks, because of their immigration status or otherwise, didn’t want to look for other jobs, didn’t necessarily either apply for or would qualify for benefits, social benefits, and were living sometimes with an 18-year-old who would have a job at Walmart and was literally fending for their entire family on minimum wage. We’re talking about one person who was maybe living in a house that was multi-generational. I couldn’t think of a better group of people to be able to support.
When I came into this, I was approached by a couple of urban funders, who were working with some people who were trying to start to get something together for these families. This has now, in about eight or nine months, a mushroom cooperative came to fruition, now called the Sand Dunes Mushroom Cooperative, of about seven families originally from Guatemala.
RB: If a job opportunity doesn’t exist, create one of your own.
JM: Yeah, yeah. We’ve contracted with and got a lot of information and education now for these folks from some mushroom growers, experts that have been doing this for a long time, and we discovered that in a small 10-by-10 tent, if you were doing it right, you could make up to about $100,000 worth of specialty mushrooms a year in a 10-by-10 tent.
Those seven families right now have acquired a little piece of land, built a structure and are in the process of getting everything together, where it’s not just a 10-by-10 tent. They will actually have a facility to be able to grow specialty mushrooms. We’ve connected them with distribution channels. That was our first signature project.
Who out there really needs the help that isn’t necessarily getting the help from the other non-profits? So, that’s the first thing that we did and we’ve done pretty well.
My career has been working with people or somehow in the best interest of people, but that’s all because of my background and my foundation with mom and dad just always helping people.
Jason Medina
RB: Can you provide startup funding for those?
JM: We are the pass-through. What we’re doing is, with the connections that we’ve already made with urban funders, we are basically approaching them and saying, “Hey, this is our new project. This is what it’s going to take to be able to do this.”
It’s come out to about $100,000 worth of funding we raised in this first year for them. We are already pushing them through to where they believe that they will be sustainable, self-sustainable in about April, growing mushrooms until they don’t want to do that anymore.
RB: Because you don’t need an enormous facility similar to the Colorado Mushroom Farm.
JM: Colorado Mushroom Farm, yeah, and it was previously Rakhra. I remember being in L.A. and we were in one of the Kroger’s or whatever it was, going in and seeing Rakhra mushrooms shipped from the San Luis Valley all the way out to California at one time or another. This was in the late ’80s. This was a big farm, and it was doing big things for lots of years, and then again, eventually failed.
RB: An indication of the possibilities.
JM: For the organization, the Community Foundation of the San Luis Valley, that’s the greatest success, I think, that I can say in the last year that this foundation was a part of. I don’t want to tout this as we were the only ones that did this.
This was a great group of humanitarians, including urban funders who understood the need of a population that wasn’t getting help from anybody else. We just happened to be that organization that could be local, that could be a pass-through, and that really gave a damn.
Because we did give a damn, we decided that we were going to do this. Most non-profits, if you’re going to be a pass-through, we’d say, “Yeah, but we’re going to take about 10 percent of that for admin fees.” We didn’t ask for a dollar, and we are not charging a dollar to be able to do this.
We want to be the local organization that people could, if they felt like this cause was worthy enough and they wanted to donate and they wanted to invest, that we would be that kind of middle to be able to accept the funds and push it out to the people who really needed it.
Again, Colorado Health Foundation was a big part of this.
RB: Yeah, OK.
JM: Other anonymous funders, who are foundations out there that care and don’t need the notoriety, that we received a good portion of our funding from. We’re still working through it, and so a big shout-out to AJL Foundation, the initials are Amy and John Lawton, basically the family gave their legacy after they passed away to be able to give to non-profit work. Kristi Petrie is a co-executive director, an incredible person from the Denver area who grew up doing community service too, and her family was involved in this. AJL has different grant-making opportunities but started in, I think, 2018 or 2019 to do one specifically in the San Luis Valley. So, $400,000 of their annual contributions they split up into Denver area and into San Luis Valley, and they give $200,000 a piece. Ten grants of $20,000 to 10 different organizations.
These two folks lived the dream. They used to go off to Central America and spend their time helping with different causes that were down there.
RB: Sounds like a great couple and the foundation they established.
JM: Absolutely. They had resources and gave their legacy once they passed away to be able to continue, and so this foundation formed. Alece Montez, is the one that has really been helping us out and all of this, she’s a co-executive director. We are on calls at least every other week to be able to talk about what’s going on with these families, what they need, trying to entice other funders to make investments for this particular program and project.
It’s just come full circle for the mushroom growers, to where they have been empowered enough to understand that they don’t need to wait for somebody to bail them out. Most especially somebody who had no intention to be able to do that. They are the experts in this. They’ve been doing this for generations. All they needed was a leg up, which they wouldn’t have got if it wasn’t for a lot of people who, again, gave a damn.
RB: And so those resources are in the form of? For those individuals?
JM: So, what we’ve been able to do is support mushroom growers who have come to the Valley and provide educational workshops for them. We’ve been able to send them to Fort Morgan, and they were just in Bennett this last weekend going to Mystic Mountain Mushrooms, MMM, and Sherry McGann, and she was the very first one that helped them out, and now, they’re working with another company in Bennett.
But again, these are mushroom growers who have been doing this successfully in Colorado for years. Some of them are donating their time and some of them are being compensated for educating these new growers on how they can come and do it on their own.
A lot of the resources are going to buying pallets and buying mushroom growing kits. We just bought four of those 10-by-10 tents that I was talking about. So, with the education and the empowerment and buying some stuff for them to be able to come and do this, they’re looking at hopefully in April being able to just have this cooperative solidified.
RB: That’s outstanding.
JM: And that they can own a company. They don’t have to wait for someone to hire them, they have people and organizations that have their backs. There are people that are donating to the cause.
RB: So, there are known, established, buyers.
JM: Yes, through the distribution channel.
RB: They don’t necessarily have to use those resources for marketing, there’s a supply chain that’s pretty solid.
JM: Yeah. Mostly restaurants in the urban areas of Colorado. Colorado Springs and Denver being the biggest opportunities. Porcinis and portobello’s for culinary purposes and lion’s mane has been used for medicinal purposes as they can be grown in a climate-controlled area but don’t require a lot of work or a lot of space.
These are specialty mushrooms that are worth a lot of money. The real thing that they found out about is that to be able to inoculate and to get to an area where they can actually start growing them, it has to be like a surgery room. I mean, this place has to be completely free of insects, bacteria. It has to be super clean, and it was nowhere close to where that facility was.
RB: OK. So to wrap up, is there anything else that I missed that you would like to add?
JM: We’re moving forward within our organization as we want to be a hub for resources for other organizations, for other nonprofits. We were fortunate to be able to be the grantor for the DOLA NPI grant. DOLA is the Division of Local Affairs, which is the state division. They gave $33.1 million for an MPI, for nonprofit infrastructure grants to the state of Colorado. There were only eight regional RAPs, Regional Access Partners, and we were given the opportunity to be the RAP for the six counties in the Valley as well as Archuleta County.
So, talk about street cred. That gives us some street cred that people could apply through us for our $1.39 million allocation.
They’re just going out now, and those approved applicants will be able to use it for ’24 and ’25.
To be able to literally put $1.39 million of capital infusion to nonprofits in our area is huge.
Now people see us as that organization that can do that. We are also the regional champion for Colorado Gives Day 365, which used to be Gives Day and now is Gives 365. But basically, we have 27 organizations.
RB: Building the foundation for a foundation.
JM: Some 30 organizations in the Valley who have signed up, we are the regional champion, which means that we are in the middle of helping support organizations.
This is literally how it happened, we had a dream, we were given a little bit of money through Colorado Gives to be able to have a kickoff day for our 30-some odd organizations in the Valley.
One morning, I woke up remembering this dream where we connected with the Boys & Girls Clubs. We served them all breakfast burritos from Tacos Martinez, everybody in the same room with some public support to be able to come in and for these organizations to tell people about what they’re doing and maybe get people to want to invest or donate, donors.
That was literally Sunday morning. On Monday, I came in and talked with Mike Reisinger, “This is what we’re going to go, will you please call these 30-some organizations, tell them that we’re having an event?” I called Aaron Miltenberger who runs the Boys & Girls Clubs. “Can we use the Boys & Girls Clubs on this date?” “Sure. Let’s do it.” Got in here, had Mike start making the phone calls, reached out to Tacos Martinez who was in this dream, and I’m not kidding you.
“Are you available to make 80 burritos this day?” “Yes.” “Great.” We had 19 organizations show up out of the 37, which is incredible because we had over 60 people. In about 10 days’ time, we had 60 people in one room to be able to talk about their 19 organizations. This was a great opportunity for everybody to come in and talk.
RB: The original form of networking.
JM: It happened in 10 days. So again, working to get some street credibility as far as we want to be the organization that can be the hub, and then we were invited into the hub across the street, which is where Aaron Miltenberger bought 13,000 square feet, the corner of Sixth and San Juan, where he created a co-working space for nonprofits where they can buy a subscription to come in, mingle with others, rub elbows with others that are doing have similar interests and use their connectivity and printers and have a space to work in. A lot of nonprofits are actually working out of somebody’s basement.
RB: Those impromptu opportunities are extremely valuable. We can always schedule meetings, but sometimes, if you happen to be in the building and you walk by somebody else with an organization you can bounce ideas off each other.
JM: For-profits have incubator spaces. In fact, Adam was just talking about one that they have out in Monte Vista, Adam Locke, nonprofits rarely have that opportunity, and this is specifically for nonprofits. Bounce ideas off each other, network, like you say.
The Community Foundation was given the opportunity to be able to manage that space. There’s an entire commercial kitchen in there. Southwest Community, Southwest Conservation Corps is moving in and they employ local youth to do projects in the summertime. Originally they had to take their trucks all the way to Salida every night and then come back over a Poncha Pass every day.
RB: A real, viable, community.
JM: Right, now that building, a former car dealership, is being used, transformed into this incredible space that can accommodate a variety of needs, including bringing youth in, giving them stackable credentials, teaching them about a lot of different things with nonprofits and with for-profits.
They’re going to start renting out paddle boats and e-bikes, having the kids run that part and then teaching them how to service an e-bike, so then you can leave this place with an actual certification that says, “I know how to work on e-bikes.”
Great opportunities for the commercial kitchen, there’s only one that I know of in the entire Valley that rents out space, and I can tell you, working with small business for the three years prior to this, there are upwards of 30 or 40 businesses who are this close to having their products inside of a store but for not having access to a commercial kitchen.
RB: Yes, so that’s a county health department requirement.
JM: Absolutely.
RB: If I have a food truck, or want to sell baked goods in a store, the food must be prepared in a commercial kitchen.
JM: Yep, or I make this incredible barbecue sauce, and this is a real story. I make this incredible barbecue. I don’t but there is a company out there and he can’t get it into the stores because he does not prepare it in a commercial kitchen. There are folks who make goat milk and other things, camel milk, and camel fudge in a particular case.
RB: Okay, that’s a new one, I really want to try that!
JM: Look her up. She’s incredible. In fact, The Camel Chick, she’s in Conejos County.
She uses the milk for soaps and lotions, and the fudge is incredible. Is the richest fudge that you’ve ever tasted in your life made with camel milk?
RB: Go figure.
JM: In the Valley. A lot of these folks are this far away from having their stuff in an actual store but for not having an actual commercial kitchen to be able to do that.
RB: And there’s a cost associated to that, too, though.
JM: Absolutely. It’s an entire kitchen that’s wrapped in stainless steel and has a commercial hood and commercial freezers and refrigerators and stoves. People will have the opportunity to use it to build their own businesses. People will have the ability to learn about workforce and workforce development and have stackable credentials when they leave this co-working space for nonprofits. I mean, talk about a win.
Aaron says that he had this dream where Jason and other folks were all working together in the same space and doing great work, and then he made it happen. And so if there’s any wins for our particular opportunity or for our organization, it’s that opportunity and being connected with people who are doing good things.
RB: So wrapping up, so tell me about the fetishes you’re wearing.
JM: Yeah. These were initially Hopi, bear, and buffalo.
RB: Spirit animals.
JM: They would give you these attributes if you believed in them and wear them. The bear is perseverance because the bear goes and hides for a lot of the year and then comes back out and is just as strong as ever. The buffalo for wisdom. The initial one had a fish who was for fluidity. It had the horse who was for speed and strength, the armadillo who was for protection, a badger who was ferocity, and again, it was a Hopi piece, and it had the kachina on the bottom. The kachina is the guardian of the sun or the sun god. The reason I wear turquoise is to honor my indigenous ancestors.
RB: Very powerful indeed.
JM: What I didn’t mention earlier is that I had a grandmother who was born in the Ohkay Owingeh Pueblo in New Mexico. What I know about our genealogy is that my grandmother’s name was Isabel Pedraza, who was born to a Spanish man. No information about her mother, so I know I had a grandma who was Owingeh, but they were not important enough for census records.
Also, on my dad’s side, I have a grandfather who was married to a Chickasaw woman.
That’s all it says, a Chickasaw woman, apparently not even important enough to have a name, much less a date of birth, where she was from, who her parents were, who their parents were, just like all the Spanish goes all the way back to the 1500s.
So anyway, to honor my ancestors who weren’t even important enough for a census record, I wear this.
On October 3rd of 2022, we were involved in a head-on collision in Denver, and it broke my chest. The seat belts completely broke my sternum in half, and I’ve got two metal plates that look like X’s and multiple screws holding my chest together. The only reason that I believe that I survived is because I was wearing the fetish necklace, the green and blue. These didn’t even exist back then, but the green and the blue, I had a big turquoise necklace on.
RB: The green stones are turquoise as well.
JM: It’s turquoise, yeah. That particular one, I found out about the history of that. I bought the blue green in Taos. The other fetish animals I bought here in Alamosa, which is crazy, but it came from a New Mexico shop. The green, that apple green, specifically is only known to come out of one mine in Zacatecas, Mexico. The name of the little town is called Chalchihuitle. The Aztec Nahuatl word for turquoise is chalchihuitle. They named the town after turquoise.
That’s how special this color of turquoise is. In the 1980s, there were some gentlemen from the San Felipe reservation in New Mexico that went all the way down to Zacatecas and brought a whole truckload of this stuff back again and never made anything different out of it, they just left it raw like this. And so yeah, that’s how different and special it is.
RB: Back to the accident, did you have imprints, bruises that were in the shape of the fetishes?
JM: No. So it’s funny, and even still, when I originally put them around my neck, under my shirt, because of their size, it is just a little uncomfortable so now I put them on outside my shirt.
It was the seat belt itself that did its job. It held me back, but it broke that bone in half, which is the hardest bone to break, and of course it would be me that would figure out how to do that.
I believe that that’s what saved me that day, and so I do not take them off since then.
This is the culmination of about four different necklaces that I now wear, but it’s got a cool story.
The Apache most especially believed that if you took turquoise into battle, that you would remain unscathed, that you would come back without a scratch.
And I kind of said, “Well, that’s how I made it out of the accident,” now I will not take it off.
Now driving north on State Avenue and just over the North River Bridge, the frozen Rio presents a powerful foreground to the Blanca Massif and its center point, Sis Naajini, sits profoundly, yet peacefully to the east as maybe a dozen or so honking, low flying the curves of the river Canadians, disappear around a bend.