Felipe Ortega was born in 1951 in La Madera New Mexico. He is of Jicarilla Apache and Hispanic descent. La Madera is one of the small villages that dot Northern New Mexico still connected to the old land grant system. When New Mexico was part of New Spain, the Spanish crown granted large swaths of lands to families living there. Spanish conquistadors led by Juan Oñate made their way up the Rio Grande Valley on a brutal campaign. They were eventually repelled during the Pueblo Revolt of 1680. Some Spanish subjects remained however and eventually, Spanish power returned to the Rio Grande and the surrounding area. What returned was a hybrid culture neither completely Spanish nor completely Indigenous. When the United States forced itself on Mexico to take the lands that now comprise Texas and the Southwest, an agreement was made to leave the land grants intact. It didn’t take long for unscrupulous Americans to begin subverting that system by picking off individuals in families and getting them to sell. By the time Felipe was born, there were still intact settlements but they were frayed and remote. When I arrived in the winter of 1991, it still had a US Post Office and gas station. Both of which are now gone. The post office was a meeting place for all the surrounding villages. There was a taxidermy two headed calf on display. People came to pick up mail and receive the latest gossip.
Felipe was a trickster through and through. Raised in a mainly Catholic culture, he went to seminary to become a priest but was kicked out for admitting to having sex with a fellow seminarian. Felipe liked to tell the story of being called in by the head priest. When asked if he slept with the other man, Felipe said, “If you’re asking me if I slept with him, no, I didn’t stay the night. I did have sex with him though.” He was told to get psychological counseling. The counselor told him that to be a Catholic priest you need to learn how to lie. So he left. When I met him, he was in Albuquerque working with the Diocese. He was fluent in Spanish, English, Apache and Latin plus a good deal of French. He may not be a priest but he knew his stuff and so worked for the church as a consultant. He was also a shaman.
Felipe invited me to be an assistant and caretaker while he was away in Albuquerque. I was overjoyed. This was my escape hatch. I arrived in La Madera with a few things: my dog Bear, my toolbox, bike and a very inaccurate idea of what Nativeness meant. Everything about Felipe went counter to my limited experience and cramped assumptions. Homosexuality was not only not an open topic where I grew up, it was taboo. I grew up in the working class Catholic stew of racism, misogyny and homophobia. When those things are part of your soil, it takes a while to sweat them out.
La Madera is tucked into the Carson National Forest. It is a hilly and mountainous area with pinyon and bristlecone pines. La Madera, the little village is tucked up onto a hill with a cluster of old adobe buildings that have been in the Ortega family for generations. Felipe’s house was his grandmother’s. It was the one house in the village without electricity. Heated by wood stoves with hurricane lamps for light at night, we used the pump out front for water. There was one long extension cord that ran from his mother’s to the studio. For me, it was heaven.
New Mexico is a triad of cultures: Pueblo, Hispanic and Anglo. The power structure that derives from a history of conquest is worn on the sleeve. Felipe’s true tricksterness comes from his in-betweenness. He is Apache and Hispanic, two-spirit, traditional Jicarilla and consultant to the Catholic Church, a member of the Hispanic community. He pushed against and protected all of these traditions. Little did I know that I had my own betweenness that drove me.
I remember that introduction to the house. It is a small adobe house with a front room that has a built in banco or bench made of adobe, a wood stove and potted plants along the front window. A blue Navajo blanket was draped over the banco. The small kitchen held a white enamel wood burning stove and two shelves with micaceous bean pots. The studio had a dirt floor, a long table for workshops and small stairs up to a sleeping loft. The fields on the other side of the street had a few cows and the village was full of a pack of semi-wild dogs, which Bear reluctantly joined.
My first night there, I slept on a sleeping bag on the floor. Bear was nearby. I awoke with an oppressiveness against me. It was definitely not welcoming. A spectral figure that appeared to be in a state of inflating floated over me. Bear was on his feet cowering and barking. There were no specific words, just an admonition to get out. I was not welcome. The spirit of the house wanted me gone. The next day, I told Felipe about it. He suggested we do a cleansing ceremony. I was carrying some dark energy around with me. That weight was on me at all times. After we did that ceremony where Felipe located and pushed out that weight (for a time anyway) my apprenticeship was underway.
The micaceous pottery that Felipe made was currently in a revival. Felipe being one of the principle points for that renewal. Mica is abundant throughout northern New Mexico. Nearby La Madera is a defunct mica mine that was a source of wealth for the region. The mica is embedded in clay deposits throughout the nearby mountains. As far back as the 1300s, pottery with micaceous clay was found throughout the Pueblos. Besides the distinctive glitter the mica imparts on the pots, it includes a built in refractory heat shock protection. The pots are light and incredibly strong, able to withstand direct fire. Over time, like a good cast iron skillet, the pots build up a patina by absorbing the cooking fats and oils.
Felipe likes to tell the story that as a young man he noticed his grandmother’s beans were delicious and his mother’s, as he would tell her to her face were decidedly not. He realized that the secret was the old micaceous bean pot. He apprenticed with Jessica Martinez from Petaca who learned from a long line of Jicarillas from the Ollero clan. As Felipe continued his exploration he visited other relatives and pueblos, scoured museum collections and finally began to teach natives and non-natives alike. Through potters like Felipe and Lonnie Vigil, there is now a strong micaceous tradition throughout the Rio Grande valley.
I knew none of this when I arrived. My expectations of life in La Madera were cartoonish. I only saw vague outlines like a placemat map from a chain restaurant.I quickly learned. I helped Felipe dig clay from his secret spot.We would drive up in his old Chevy pickup and fill five gallon buckets. I processed it by soaking it in a cement mixer until it was a muddy slurry, and then poured it out through a screen onto a frame with a bedsheet. In the dry warm air, the water soaked through the sheet leaving the clay. I then wedged it into workable balls, bagged them and readied them for studio work and workshops.
I learned ceramics at the Hartford Art School. Like most universities, ceramics departments were heavily influenced by industrial ceramics. There was a glaze room, clay mixer with industrially mined clays, gas and electric kilns and electric wheels. One could conceivably make a clay body to any specification: firing temperature, color, plasticity. The idea came first and you bent the materials to fit that idea. In college, pit firing was an interesting demonstration of an old technology but was rarely seen as sustainable. In La Madera, there was a directness to the making. It is holy. It is the flesh of Mother Earth. You work in collaboration with the clay, you don’t treat it as an inert material. Before digging we made an offering and asked for permission to proceed.
The traditional method is to begin with a puki or a shallow bowl. Traditionally this would have been a fired disc of clay. Felipe gathered thrift store porcelain and plastic bowls for the purpose. You start with a round slab of clay on the puki and then begin adding the walls with the coils of clay. Once you have some height you use a “rib” or flat piece of wood with angled edges to blend and shape the walls. Again, my experience before this was in using store bought wooden tools. In La Madera we used a rib made from the dried wall of a gourd. I was a ham-handed lunk at first. I still have my first attempts in my kitchen in Portland. The best and biggest mica pot I made I sent to my parents as a Christmas gift. After their deaths, my brothers and I were cleaning out their trailer home and it was still in pride of place. I took it home and made mole in it for our Christmas Eve dinner. It lacks grace, as I did then. A little lumpy, heavy bottomed and blunt.
My first firing with Felipe was on an early spring night. The stars were out and there was chill in the air. The hill behind the house had a small stone depression. It was not a proper pit as I had been taught. We laid the pots upside down because Felipe said that is how pots need to be born. He laid some piñon pine branches over the top of the ware and lit a fire. He gave a tobacco offering to the fire. Before long, glowing red in the dark night, the pots were done.
In my training, there were all kinds of charts and calculations that were dominated by the rules of ceramics. I always struggled with the macho techno-talk that permeates contemporary ceramics. Much of that is just the process of learning a craft and understanding the materiality of the medium. Like all things divorced from their true dailiness and grit it becomes a dandified ritual of lost machismo. Felipe was all about posturing as well, but it sure was elegant. The entire process of making the pots from digging clay to firing was wrapped up in ritual.
My life in La Madera quickly took on the slow rhythm of the mountains. I dug clay, plastered walls, chopped and stacked wood. I don’t think Felipe got the best part of the deal. I had to learn how to work and how to do tasks. I was on my own adventure and not particularly useful. In fact I was a terribly inefficient worker. Given to daydreaming I could turn a two-hour project into an all day affair. I would have fired me. I remember those mornings with horse’s breath in the early sunlight. Birds and cows waking up, smoke rising across the street from the chimney. I would go out to the frozen handle on the well, bring back water in the blue bucket. Felipe would be cooking homemade tortillas on the wood fire cook stove. We’d have coffee and breakfast as day stepped week over the mountain. At this time my girlfriend Tracy would come up from Albuquerque once a week, switching places with Felipe who went there for his diocese work and to visit his boyfriend. Tracy and I are still together having conducted our courting during those mountain days.
One of Felipe’s roles was to oversee the horno. An horno is a large adobe oven that you heat up by building a fire inside. Once the thick walls are heated through, you pull out the coals and put the loaves of proofed bread to bake. The horno is large enough that many people from the village would bake at one time. The bread oven electrified me. I loved when we would get to bake. The bake I am thinking of was in preparation for Holy Week. A few of my friends from Hartford had written me to tell me they were coming out for spring break. They were going to take the train to Santa Fe. During the week leading up to their arrival I assisted Felipe with the big horno bake, and helped to clean the ox-blood pigmented adobe floor in the morada, the small village chapel.
I was about to learn about the Penitente Brotherhood or Los Hermanos de Nuestro Padre Jesús Nazareno. The Penitentes are a sect of Catholicism in Northern New Mexico and southern Colorado who practice various forms of self-flagellation. I was allowed into an inner sanctum where an altar crowded with bultos and santos or statues and icons of saints going back a hundred years. There as requests for health, fortune and healing; they represented the hopes of the community. At the time I had no context for what I was seeing, other than I recognized the images from my own Catechism, but these had a vitality and life force that the flaccid, bloodless images of my church did not possess. Now all I had to do was await the arrival of my friends from Hartford. Holy Week was about to begin.