LAS VEGAS, New York – As the raging flames approached the distant mountains, where his family has lived for generations, Miguel Martinez knew he had to move fast and run with only his clothes on his back.
“I left behind 25 goats, 50 rabbits, 10 chickens and two dogs,” said Mr Martinez, 71, who fled his home in the village of El Oro this week to an evacuation shelter. “I have no idea if my house is standing or my animals are alive. We must prepare for the possibility of everything being erased. “
More than a dozen wildfires are raging this month in the southwest as the fire season extends earlier than ever until spring. But the country’s largest active fire, a megafire that has spread to more than 160,000 acres in northern New Mexico, has developed with such ferocity that it threatens the culture of several generations that has lasted for centuries.
Like Mr. Martinez, many who escaped the megafire known as the Calf Canyon / Hermitage Peak fire are descendants of Spanish settlers who arrived in New Mexico long before the United States. They married Indians, perfected the way crops were grown in arid lands, and maintained an archaically influenced form of Spanish that can still be heard on the trails of the local Walmart.
Speaking in a mixture of Spanish and English, Mr Martinez, a retired musician, said his ancestors had settled in the village of Manuelitas so long ago, where he grew up in a home built by his ancestors, that he was not sure exactly when they were. Did you arrive. His wife is from the Aragon family, which has long made nearby El Oro their home, he said.
“It was a bit of a shock to move to El Oro, but now I’m adapted,” Mr Martinez said, reflecting on how closely the bloodlines remain connected to the land in these remote villages, surrounded by pine trees and trout-strewn streams. “I just hope I have a village to return to.”
Shaped by challenges ranging from conquest armies to long economic downturns, these remote Spanish villages have withstood one test after another. But the worst drought of at least 1,200 years, marked by intense and severe fire activity, is something new.
“These fires are burning a way of life that has lasted for hundreds of years,” said Rob Martinez, a New Mexico state historian and native of Albuquerque, whose parents are from Mora and Chacon, two outposts in the fire zone. (He is not related to the retired El Oro musician.)
Las Vegas, New York, a city of about 13,000 people that has long served as a hub for surrounding villages and ranches, has become a nerve center for firefighting. Crews raced to the fire lines this week as ash fell from the sky, changing at times from bright blue to surreal orange.
As the fire continues to spread, it is now the third largest registered in New Mexico, overshadowing the area lost by fires across the state in 2021. Although no lives were lost, the fire destroyed at least 172 forced homes. many families have to be evacuated and only 20 percent remain detained. As the dry weather continues, authorities warn that the fire could spread in different directions in the coming days.
At least six other forest fires are currently burning other parts of New Mexico, according to the National Interdepartmental Fire Center, and this week President Biden approved a disaster declaration for five counties. State fires include Cooks Peak, which grew to 59,000 acres in Mora County, and Cerro Pelado, a 25,000-acre fire within 5.5 miles of the Los Alamos National Laboratory that helps design and maintain stocks. of nuclear weapons in the country.
As the flames of the Calf Canyon / Hermites Peak fire could be seen on Las Vegas ridges in recent days, officials evacuated nearby United World College, a boarding school founded by industrialist Armand Hammer, and emptied the county jail, releasing some inmates. and transfer to others.
Some who were forced to flee gathered at an old high school shelter. Others slept in their vehicles or moved away to the homes of relatives or friends; some who had already been evacuated to Las Vegas had to be evacuated again when the smoke filled the skies over the city.
Diana Trujillo, 63, was raised in a three-room brick home with her seven siblings in Monte Aplanado, near Mora. She said the hereditary structure survived the fire, but the double-width trailer next door, where she lived with her daughter and granddaughter, burned to the ground.
“This is a loss that I can’t even describe in words,” said Ms. Trujillo, assistant manager of the senior center. “The beautiful mountain around us, all these trees, now everything is charcoal.”
Paula Garcia fled Mora, with a population of about 800, first to Las Vegas and then to Santa Fe. She said she helped her 82-year-old father pack his tools before fleeing as the fire approached their close-knit community.
“This is a place where people are called primos and parientes – cousins and relatives,” said 50-year-old Garcia. Some of her ancestors planted stakes in the area in the 1860s, moving from other parts of northern New Mexico.
Ms. Garcia, executive director of the New Mexico Acequia Association, a nonprofit that works to protect about 700 acequias or irrigation canals in the state, said she attributes her community’s persistence to “clean sand.”
“We have lived there for so long because of our querencia,” said Ms. Garcia, a term she described as “a cultural longing, an attraction that keeps us there.”
Such ties to the land date back to the Spanish colonization of New Mexico, which began in 1598, years before the British first settled in the colony of Virginia Jamestown. The colonists and their descendants continued to exist in relative isolation at the northern end of the Spanish Empire.
New Mexico remains the nation’s most Spanish-speaking state, with nearly 48 percent of the population claiming to be of Latin American or Latin American heritage. Small towns, villages and farms in fire-affected counties, where Latinos make up about 80 percent of the population, are still not easy to classify.
So many families have left the area before, mainly for economic reasons, that they see it as a kind of homeland or old country. Unlike other rural areas around the United States, which strongly supported Republicans in the last election, Mr. Biden wore Las Miguel-based San Miguel County with 68 percent of the vote.
Until the fire arrived in late April, one of the main sources of tension in Las Vegas was the recent dispute over a proposed 19th-century museum exhibition for night riders targeting Anglo lands after the United States took control of New Mexico. .
Since then, relations between ethnic groups have developed. But unlike other parts of the United States, where Latinos are seen as newcomers and the British seek to protect their culture from demographic change, roles in northern New Mexico are often reversed.
“We bought our land in 1993, but we are still considered outsiders compared to many of our neighbors,” said Sonia Berg, 79, a retired Texas teacher whose home in Rosiada, a city of several hundred, was destroyed. from the Fire.
However, Ms. Berg said she understood why some families had remained in the area for generations, explaining that their land was so important to her husband, who died in 2019, that his grave was on their burnt property.
“I’m sure we will recover,” she said.
Given the chaotic behavior of the fire, it is unclear when the evacuees will be allowed back. Wendy Mason, a forest fire prevention officer in New Mexico, said that for the first time, at least in recent memory, so many large fires are raging in the state at the same time. Ms. Mason also warned that more fires could break out in the coming weeks.
“We don’t usually expect a lot of moisture until the monsoons arrive, and that’s usually not until July or August,” Ms. Mason said. Even if it rains a little, as happened in parts of the state over the weekend, it could be accompanied by lightning strikes that could ignite other flames, she warned.
“Our climate is changing, which makes the fire season much longer and more intense,” Ms Mason said.
However, Mr Martinez, the state historian, emphasized that such challenges were part of the region’s history. The sea was burned to the ground, he noted, by the invasion of American forces in 1847 during the Mexican-American War. After this episode, the community collected the songs and started again.
“This is not the first fire our families are dealing with,” he said.
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