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Excerpts from Abe Peña's  Memories of Cibola

All material used with the kind permission of the author, given to me personally.

from THE MOTHER VILLAGE
"Pablo put his foot out to trip Pablita on her way out from the dance hall in 1920. That gesture led to marriage in 1922!
Pablo Ortega Peña first met Pablita Chavez Márquez in 1917, at St. Vincent's Academy in Albuquerque, where she was a student... He and his father, Abelicio, had stopped to visit his sister Eufemia, also a student at the Academy. Eufemia, age twelve was a friend of Pablita, age thirteen, and introduced her to her father and her brother. Pablita used to say, 'We visited in the parlor. We were all very proper and very formal.' She added that 'Don Abelicio was a large imposing man in a dark suit and Pablo, age eighteen, was a handsome young man, also in a suit.' Then she would say, with a telling smile, 'Pablo gave me cuatro reales when they were leaving. I never forgot him!'


Pablita was my mother. Her parents were merchants and stockgrowers in Seboyeta. They had purchased a home on Twelfth Street in Albuquerque to be close to better schooling for their children. Her father, Don Fermín Márquez, spent most of his time in Seboyeta tending to business, and her mother, Beneranda Chávez Márquez stayed in Albuquerque with the children, although she preferred life in the village. Mother said, 'We rode the train from Laguna to Albuquerque. Sometimes my father, whom we called 'Mi Pandín,' took us in his car. He had one of the first cars in the village and the roads were terrible. We more or less followed the wagon tracks to Laguna and the railroad tracks to Albuquerque. La cuesta (the hill) between Paguate and Laguna was a monster. Sometimes we had to push the car going up hill, and sometimes walked when going down hill.'


In her youth the camptenders came with the burros from the sheep camps to pick up groceries at Seboyeta. She had a favorite burro called 'El Pardo,' which she usually rode while the camptender loaded 'las provisiones.' She recalled that one time she kept asking for El Pardo and they told her, 'That's it.' It looked like El Pardo, but she wasn't sure. She didn't think it was, but finally, her friend Anita persuaded her. She mounted the burro and he pitched her over a 4 foot high adobe wall into a cornfield! In a fury she pulled a corn stalk and chased Anita, 'For telling me a lie and laughing when the burro threw me!'


Pablita had four sisters and one brother: Perfilia, Rita, Prudencia, Onofre, and Anastacio. She used to say, 'When we were young we did very little housework. We had servants. I didn't learn to cook until after I got married.'


After the episode of the outstetched foot at the dance hall, the courtship picked up. Pablo often rode his horse over the mountain to Seboyeta. Pablita used to say, 'In the beginning he was dating another Pabla from Moquino. She was a very pretty girl, but in the end... I got him!' Some letters found in Pablo's files show the true grit of this remarkable seventeen-year-old girl. In a letter dated January 29, 1922, she wrote in Spanish, 'You say in your letter you cannot come in February. This is to inform you that if you do not come in February I can no longer wait for you. Therefore, if you want to marry me it has to be right away...'


Twelve days later, on February 10, Don Fermín and Doña Beneranda received a letter from Pablo's mother, Manuelita, and his stepfather, Lizardo Salazar, asking for Pablita's hand, after a most courteous introduction in polished Spanish. It was Pablo's handwriting!...


On February 27, 1922, seventeen days later, they were married by Father Robert Kalt, the legendary Padre Roberto, at Our Lady of Sorrows Catholic Church in Seboyeta. With an inheritance of 225 sheep and a modest house in San Mateo, they started a new life that bound them, for better or for worse, for sixty-four years.


Pablita was a friendly and caring neighbor, and she soon made many friends in San Mateo. She very quickly learned to do housework and became a noted cook and a meticulous housekeeper. Their first child, Benito (Bennie), named after his paternal grandmother Benita, was born in 1924. One day Pablo drove in with a load of firewood from La Mesa del Pino, and Bennie, a toddler imitating his elders, found a little rock to put behind the wagon wheel. Somehow the horses moved, and the wheel caught his little head and hand. It cut him behind the ear and split a thumb and the wounds bled profusely. He recovered but gave his parents a scare.


I followed Bennie in 1926 and was named after my paternal grandfather, Abelicio. Fermín came next, named after our maternal grandfather, then Eduardo (Eddie), followed by Eloy, and after five boys came a little girl, named Lydia. Pablo was a great admirer of the professional singer Lydia Mendoza, who brought many pleasant moments to our isolated villages through radio and the Victrola during the Great Depression. I recall turning the crank on the old phonograph to keep the record going.


On December 4, 1934, when Lydia was born, Pablo took out his Colt 45 and fired several shots into the starry night. It was a happy night for the family and for the whole village, tucked in the shadows of majestic Mount Taylor.


Dorothy, the last one of my brothers and sisters, was also delivered by Doña Virginia. We loved Dorothy. It's fair to say we spoiled her, but still she turned out a beautiful person in every way. She was given the name Dorothy by her sponsors, which shows the trend away from Spanish names, and the proverbial American melting pot at work.


Pablita's other sisters married and went in different directions. Perfilia married Samuel García and moved to Belen, where they raised a family of seven. Rita married Demetrio Chavez; they had eight children, but she died young, and he took the family to California. Mi Tío Demetrio was a hundred years old when he died in 1995. Prudencia married Cornelio Anzures and moved to Winslow, Arizona, where she had four children. Onofre, the youngest, married Manuel Chavez of Seboyeta and died delivering her first child.


Don Fermín passed away in 1930, at the age of fifty-nine, and Doña Beneranda was later laid to rest by his side, at age seventy-one, in the Seboyeta cemetery. I was four years old when my grandfather died, and I vaguely remember a foggy figure in a dark suit.


Anastacio, their only son, continued the family tradition and lived in Seboyeta most of his life. He married Juanita Sandoval and had four boys and a girl. Juanita died when the children were young, and he remarried. From his second marriage, to Elisa Archunde, Leonore, a daughter, was born. All the children moved to Albuquerque except Edwina, but they return from time to time to visit the village of their birth.


Pablita was very religious and followed the tenets and commandments of the Catholic Church with fervent determination. We all bathed religiously on Saturdays, in cajetes en la casa vieja, and never missed Mass on Sundays. Our Franciscan priest came from Grants, and all my brothers and I served as altar boys at one time or another, as did the other boys in the village. We all got a chance to pull the rope and ring the bell and recite the responses in Latin. They called us sacristanes.


For many years Pablita hosted the priest for lunch. Conversation at the table was encouraged, and we all asked questions and discussed religion and other subjects of the day. A glimpse of the outside world beyond our village came to us while breaking bread with a number of priests, including Father Robert, Father Remigius, Father Cecil, Father Godfrey, and others who came from back East.


All during my childhood Pablo was building his flocks and Pablita was his helpmate. She told us, 'In the middle of the Great Depression of the 1930s your father did not know how he was going to pay the taxes on the 640 acre homestead. I had quietly saved coins in a jar for a rainy day. We used them to pay the taxes... and kept on going!' 'Prayer,' she used to say, 'is very important in our lives.' She frequently reminded us, 'Resen hijitos, Dios nos ama mucho' ('Pray my children, God loves us very much'). Our whole village was generally oriented toward prayer. Our ancestors who came to colonize New Mexico survived the tremendous hardships of the colonial days through prayer---and a lot of hard work.


Dances were an important part of our lives. Both my parents liked to dance, as did most of the people in the village. It was one of the few social outlets that gave us an opportunity to enjoy music and where our young people could meet their future spouses!


Pablita helped to organize and lead the church Ladies' Sodality. She also chaired the committee that organized village festivities for the historic Coronado Cuarto Centennial in 1940, the four hundredth anniversary of the arrival of Coronado in New Mexico... When they moved to Grants, in 1962, she joined the Third Order of Saint Francis, and Pablo joined the Knights of Columbus.


In 1945 she was awarded a citation for meritorious service by Governor Thomas J. Mabry, 'In grateful recognition of your outstanding contribution for our victory in 1945. National War Fund.'
Her neighbors, especially Tía Sostena Trujillo and Tía Sostia Baca, helped Pablita raise her seven children. I recall Tía Sostena telling us stories of brujas, but there were no children's books that I can remember. The only stories we heard were oral, and most of them scary ones about witches. She told us the story of the 'mad dog' that came barking to the door of a house in San Mateo one night. The man of the house, after repeated attempts to chase the 'mad dog' away, finally took his gun and shot the menacing creature. The next day came news from San Fidel, 25 miles across the mountain, that a certain lady reputed to be a bruja had died during the night of gunshot wounds!


Mother instructed us not to fight. However, in all humans there does seem to be an innate desire at times to fight, or fight back. Our village was no exception, although fights were rare. I recall being in a fistfight only once. I was being beaten up on the way back from school and I fought back. Policarpio Montaño was the constable, and he locked the three of us in a chicken coop! When word got to mother that I was in Flavio Montaño's coop for fighting, she told the messenger, 'Just leave him there, it will teach him a good lesson!' It was one of the most important lessons I learned in my youth.
Eloy, our youngest brother, was a normal healthy boy until he contracted rheumatic fever. No cure had been found for the disease at that time, but Pablita and Pablo left no stone unturned looking for medical help, as he lost more and more weight and his heart weakened. It seemed that as his body shrank, his 'heart' grew, embracing the whole village. Everyone loved him and cared for him. His classmates rallied round him. The Lord took him in September 1954 at age twenty. Mother, whose own heart was broken, bravely said what all of us were thinking---'He only takes the best.' His picture was on their dresser the rest of their lives...


One of her happiest moments was seeing her daughter Lydia take the sacred vows of a Sister of Loretto in Nerynx, Kentucky. She used to say, 'I pray one of my children will serve God in a religious order.' Her prayers were answered when Lydia left for the convent. Pablo, who had been skeptical when his vivacious daughter announced her intentions to become a nun, six years earlier, was there beaming with pride. He was her greatest champion. It made all of us happy.


Pablita and Pablo traveled to Europe, to Central and South America, to Hawaii, to Mexico---always interested in other peoples and other cultures. Mother made friends wherever she went. Many stopped to visit my parents when they came through the area.


Pablo passed away in 1986, at eight eighty-seven, and was laid to rest at Grants Memorial Cemetery. Pablita ably took the reins of the family, telling us, 'We must remain strong and united.' And she advised us, 'Do not forget to say your prayers and always remember your responsibility to each other, to our community, and to your country.' Pablita passed away in 1991, also at age eighty-seven. She was the last to die of the children of Don Fermín and Doña Beneranda. Six of her children, twenty-four grandchildren, and several great grandchildren survived her. Each one of us was special to her---and she was special to each one of us."