I hadn’t seen Felipe in over twenty years. After we moved to Portland it took a decade to be able to return to New Mexico. After that we re-established our relationship to the place. I began teaching as a visiting professor at Reed in 2015. We have a fund for travel that would accommodate a long out of state trip. I arranged to reconnect with Felipe and planned to bring my ceramics class to New Mexico during fall break of 2016.
Tracy and I did a preliminary visit during the summer. It was our first time back to La Madera in a long time. Felipe was in his second year of battling cancer. Even still, he looked spry at 65 years old. The adobe house now was fully electrified. The old wood fired cook stove was moved to an outdoor porch and the mud floor of the studio was now finished. The studio had a long dining table for workshop participants. The compound finally had the shape that Felipe was dreaming of and I was meant to help build. In front of the house he had built two newer, smaller hornos. His parents had died years ago, as had Uncle Albert. The post office moved to another village and the building and land were now in private hands. The hills, the buildings and the mountain sky remained the same.
I didn’t know if I would have mattered much to Felipe after all these years. But I did. I returned just a little older than he was when I worked with him. I was no longer the bumbling cub but a father, husband and professor. At that point I had been teaching for sixteen years. In my own pedagogy lurked many lessons picked up in La Madera (even if just in spirit if not form). The summer day we arrived, Felipe was hosting a day long workshop. Tracy and I waited outside while they finished up, noting the dissonance between what was here twenty years before and what wasn’t. Sense memories deeply present. We were invited to join the participants for the lunch. The decades between were stitched into a whole. Felipe asked if I remembered how to use the adobe oven. I told him I had built my own at home. This pleased him.
There was something that felt like a coda during that visit. While the house was more realized in its finish, so much of the village lacked the energy of the old community. Many had left. Felipe, despite appearances was not well. The reconnection was poignant.
In October of that year I brought my ceramics class to New Mexico. We had a visit with the Institute of American Research to look at their collection of prehistoric and historic Pueblo pots. We went to see Much Wider than a Line at SITE Santa Fe which remains one of my favorite all time exhibitions. We went to the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum and then went to the White Place near Abiquiu, one of O’Keeffe’s favorite subjects. The heart of the trip was our visit to La Madera. At this point, Felipe did not have the energy for a full on workshop. Instead he offered a demonstration with a Julia Child like approach so that all aspects of the process could be seen.
As a teacher, my role is to be an elder: to step back and allow space for my students to experience in their own way. I was able to watch it unfold through their eyes. It was magical. Felipe was very generous. As he sat and told stories he effortlessly coiled a bean pot with the soft micaceous clay. He told his own story and spoke of his queerness. He explained the range of genders that exist in traditional Apache culture. For all the students, but especially the queer students, he pointed to hopeful possibilities for being in the world.
I’m bound by teaching in an urban area. The city campus has many rules about firing. Additionally, the infrastructure is modeled on all university ceramic programs. I might be able to pull off a pit firing here or there, but it requires an arduous safety protocol that usually ends in it being shut down. To see the pit firing process in context is crucial to understanding it. Just as when I first worked with Felipe and we fired those pots on that spring night, he lit a fire of piñon branches, placed the dry pot on the fire, said his prayers to the flames and offered it cornmeal. In thirty minutes it was finished, dotted with fire clouds.
During our communal lunch in the old studio there was a bit of ribbing and reminiscing about my time there. My students got to hear about my experiences when I was their age. When you are young you tend to think that you invented youth and so are surprised when an elder was young as well. As we drove along Route 285 back to Santa Fe from La Madera, all were quiet. The watermelon light enfolded the fields, piñon stands and sandstone ridges.
My dear friend Katharine Kagel, owner and founder of Cafe Pasqual’s restaurant in Santa Fe threw me a birthday party. I turned 48 in New Mexico. It was a wonderful high point with all of my students treated to dinner. There was a mirror I felt to the Holy Week, except instead of being at the beginning of spring we were on the other side of the Autumnal Equinox heading into darkness. At our final dinner in Santa Fe, we all talked about the election. In two weeks, it was assumed that we would have our first woman as president. Donald Trump was trending hard but he was so awful we couldn’t conceive that he would actually win. There was so much good will around that table. So much hope. I was awaiting to see if my visiting professorship would be renewed. Even if it wasn’t there was possibilities with this new presidency.
Then in early November, a switch was flipped. Donald Trump eked out a win through the dubiousness of the Electoral College even though Hilary Clinton received four million more votes. The seams ripped out. Protests began immediately. I remember on election day in the ceramic studio listening to students say that Clinton and Trump were both equivalent war criminals. Once the election was decided, those same students were out in the streets protesting. After that’ a pall settled over the next few years. My own sense of unease came with the unraveling of all the signposts I counted on. We entered into an era of uncertainty, rage and sorrow. Even now, my memory of that trip to New Mexico is bittersweet. It was a final moment of conviviality and hope.
The night of my birthday, Katharine gifted me a bean pot by Felipe. I’ve since acquired another larger one as well as other micaceous pots by Felipe’s proteges. I use the pot weekly to make frijoles, soup or chile. It is well seasoned and grows more beautiful with each use. During the earliest, darkest days of Trump’s presidency, making beans, red chile and homemade tortillas grounded me in the sacred everyday.
Felipe died in 2018. As he grew sicker, he withdrew from contact. Katharine gave me the news just after he died. I had the opportunity to memorialize him in a mural at Revolution Hall in Portland. I was commissioned to do a series of murals for the music venue that occupies the former Washington High School in SE Portland. The high school was the alma mater of gourmand James Beard and activist/chemist Linus Pauling. I was given the prompt “Revolution”. I wanted to honor the old high school setting and include all the history that is generally excluded from the story of the US. I think about the revolutionary power of story. It is through the mechanism of narrative that people from vastly different eras and cultures can coexist and know one another. I included Felipe in the second panel called Trade Routes, front and center. He was a conduit of ideas, a person of the crossroads.
As I come to end of this long multi-part essay I ask myself why I need to write it now. What is important to be shared? Where does it bear weight on me? Part of it is remembering myself as a student and apprentice so that I can extend tenderness to my own students. I realize now, that confused and anarchic as some of the experience was, it represents an ideal for me. Whether or not I achieve it in my life, or recognize that it is already present, I don’t know.
Felipe often chided me for looking too far down the road. As a consequence I wouldn’t recognize what is under my feet. It is ironic that I created something called The Ground Beneath Us. I started The Ground Beneath Us ten years ago. First it was a proposal to rethink the study of art in higher education. Then after finding my tether to educational institutions temporarily cut it became a fellowship and independent model to join with other institutions. After the pandemic it became a series of workshops and is now really a guiding pedagogical principle. It was always underfunded, coals starved of enough oxygen to catch.
La Madera was always the model: cross-cultural, place based artistic practice. The days centered around the food we cooked on the wood stove and horno. Felipe brought a mythic dimension into the everyday tasks of chopping wood, gathering water and making pots. None of this is revolutionary and it exists in many forms in many places. It seems this is something the ultra wealthy have taken as a model. That Instagram land grab by the wealthy shouldn’t obscure the importance of this approach. Is it necessary that this intensive learning be the province of big money? Isn’t it possible to create such experiences for a wider group of young people? I can’t help but believe that within such an approach is the antidote to the digital despair that besets young people now despite all the rosy predictions of Silicon Valley gurus.
That Holy Week opened up a breathing hole, one that looks into the rage and out-of-placeness of my fifteen year old self: the bumbling, still forming twenty-two year old and now my role as teacher. It is incumbent on me, in whatever capacity I can, to pass this grace of material and place to my students. This, I suppose, is the initiation realized. Initiation is not only about the wild fire of youth. Sometimes it is the controlled warmth of a heated horno, radiating back its heat. It is the bread on the table in the community center, dipped in homemade red chile. It is the sustenance of a living culture.