Anita Rodriguez and Naomi Love

[00:02] ANITA RODRIGUEZ: Okay. My name is Anita Rodriguez. I'm 82 years old, and today is March 16, 2003, and I'm in Taos, New Mexico, and my interview partner is Naomi.

[00:15] NAOMI LOVE: Hello. My name is Naomi Love. I'm 27 years old. Today is March 16, 2023. We're in Taos, New Mexico, and I'm here with my interview partner, Anita Rodriguez. So, Anita, we were talking a little bit before we started about your childhood. How would you describe your childhood self?

[00:34] ANITA RODRIGUEZ: I was just rebelliously curious, voraciously curious, greedily curious, which got me into a lot of trouble.

[00:44] NAOMI LOVE: Yeah.

[00:46] ANITA RODRIGUEZ: Especially in school.

[00:48] NAOMI LOVE: Gotcha. And what kinds of things did you like to do as a child when you were in school or out of school?

[00:55] ANITA RODRIGUEZ: Well, I liked to make up stories, and I liked to make things. I made all of my dolls clothes, and I dressed them according to characters in books. Right. And so I had, you know, maybe still have them, maybe ten dolls dressed like characters out of books. And then I also built my own doll house out of adobes that I made in an ice tray. And so I liked to work with that kind of material. And my mother was a painter, so there was always paints lying around the house. And so I learned to use pencils and crayons and paints and oils and things like that. And because she was a painter, and Taos at that time was an art colony. I was surrounded by art and by artists. And I remember being. I must have been three, three and a half or four, because my nose was just table height. And my mother took me to a studio that, if I remember, was Burt Phillips. And there was a dollop of orange paint on his palette. And I knew that I couldn't eat it, but I wanted it. And I thought I promised myself, you know, that when I grew up, I would buy all the paint I could, and I kept my promise.

[02:12] NAOMI LOVE: It sounds like it. Because you're a painter yourself now, isn't that right?

[02:15] ANITA RODRIGUEZ: I became a painter at the age of 47.

[02:18] NAOMI LOVE: Interesting. And what made you decide to start at that point in time after, you know, I imagine watching your mother paint as a child.

[02:25] ANITA RODRIGUEZ: Well, long story short, I was a single mother and living in Taos, which is an economically impoverished area. You know, I didn't have a degree, and most of the jobs that were offered to women were really boring or didn't pay anything. So I was watching these guys in the construction business, and I was thinking, well, you know, I'm not a lot dumber than they are. So I took a tape recorder and a camera, and a friend was me who spoke the local Spanish, and we went around to the villages and found the women that we call enjaradoras. And the enjaradoras were at that time, completely unknown, had never been included in all of the fancy coffee table books on architecture, new mexican architecture. But they were the finishers of the entire architecture, of the interior and exterior surfaces, and kept a thousand years of architecture standing without ever being recognized. So I went into the villages because I was kind of thinking about looking for a job because, you know, the opportunities are not that great. And I collected the technology from women in different villages and brought it back and experimented with it and got a contractor's license and became a specialist.

[03:44] NAOMI LOVE: Wow. And what was that experience like at the time? Because it seems like it was unusual for women to be doing that.

[03:49] ANITA RODRIGUEZ: It was unheard of. But I was doing it here in Taos, where there was still a cultural memory of the enharadoras. And most of the working class men were chicano, and they knew about the injaradoras. But the construction business completely changed in 1847 when we were conquered by the United States. You know, a. A collective, communal sharing economy that held a lot of things in common, changed over to a capitalist, competitive economy, and the construction business became a business in which labor was sold and women were automatically excluded. So whereas the men who were the carriers of part of the adobe tradition got jobs, the enharadoras were shunted aside and forgotten about. And so, you know, it was like feast or famine. It was seasonal work, and some of the guys were openly hostile. I ain't going to work with no Aruka and walk off the construction site, and other men would share tools with me and send me jobs. And, you know, so it was a mixed bag, but it was exciting, and it was interesting because I didn't have to wear high heels and hoes anymore, and I went to different places. I mean, a job might last well, but those days, I could build a fireplace in four days with a helper, you know, and we'd go from place to place. So it was more interesting.

[05:11] NAOMI LOVE: Interesting. And I'm curious how that construction work feels different or similar to some of the other art that you've done, because architecture in itself can be an art.

[05:22] ANITA RODRIGUEZ: Of course it is an art. And I. And my. The part that I loved the most was fireplace building. Right. And a fireplace as an art form is almost cheating, because where do people go the minute they come into a room? They go to the fire. Right. So the way in which the fire hits the adobe, the shape of the adobe the shadows that it throws, you know, the shape of the fireplace. All of these things became really fascinating to me. And one of the traditional crafts of the enharadora is using clay slips to cover the walls, and some of these are micaceous, and there are red micaceous slips that look like red satin, you know, so there's just, like, a whole lot to play with. And then I became interested in architectural patterns and how different cultures have different architectural patterns and how those patterns affect relationships and how, like, the american plan of taking a huge piece of land and cutting it up like brownies on a plate and plunking a house in each one of them speaks to a culture of alienation, of separateness, as opposed to, instance, to the pueblo design, which is one building with all the windows and all the doors facing the plaza where everything goes down. So everybody is kind of focused. And so I became interested in that.

[06:47] NAOMI LOVE: Absolutely. And I'm curious how your feelings about architecture have changed over the years, if they've changed at all.

[06:56] ANITA RODRIGUEZ: Well, they have developed in the same direction, because I met Hassan Fathi, who wrote architecture for the poor. He came to the United States under a contract from the Saudis, who were building a village in Abiquiu. And I think the original idea was this was. Oh, my God, when was this? I was in my forties, so it was quite a while ago. And the idea was that they wanted to relocate some of their families because they foresaw trouble in the Middle east. So Hathan Fasi, Hasan Fathi was hired to design this village, which contained a madrasa hospital, you know, women's quarters, men's quarters. And that's where I met him. And I explained to him that I also came from a very old earth building tradition, and he invited me to Egypt, where I was able to work for him. And he was in his nineties, and what he wanted was he wanted a crew of people to travel Egypt and look at all of his old buildings and make estimates on what they needed for repair, how they had held up, so on and so forth. So this was a massively rich opportunity for me because in this team were, you know, architects, interpreters, archaeologists. So I was able to go and look at one of the roots of new mexican adobe architecture, which came from the moors, who occupied Spain for 800 years. And so even the word adobe comes from the Arabic, right?

[08:28] NAOMI LOVE: So much of Spanish does.

[08:29] ANITA RODRIGUEZ: Well, I mean, we go on and on and on. I know Hamas. I mean, everything. And when I lived in Egypt, I said, oh, my God, how they treat the women it's just like my cousins. I know exactly what they're going to do next.

[08:45] NAOMI LOVE: Wow. And so I guess, what was the experience like being in Egypt and thinking back to kind of the ways that it recalled the adobe architecture and your own culture, you know, leaving the US in that way?

[09:00] ANITA RODRIGUEZ: Well, it was like a trip into a collective unconscious, you know, because I saw architectural motifs, and I could now see exactly how they crossed the ocean and how they went through the mind of an enharradora, you know, who was probably a multilingual mestiza, you know, maybe the wife or concubine or slave of a spanish conquistador. And she saw, you know, something from her architectural tradition and something from his archives. Oh, if I put these two things together, I will end up with a fireplace that has a chimney, which I'm sure was invented by women because women were the hearth builders and the hearth owners and the hearth maintainers. So all the cooking things, like the beehive shaped ovens, you know, were filtered through the minds of women, because men didn't do that work, of course.

[10:02] NAOMI LOVE: No. And it's interesting, too, what gets into the historical record and what doesn't, isn't it? Absolutely. And especially the work that's done by women traditionally gets undervalued in that way. So I'm curious what it was like doing this revitalization work of maybe a tradition that was not completely forgotten, but certainly it sounds like was phasing out.

[10:22] ANITA RODRIGUEZ: Yeah, it was on the cusp of extinction. Well, it satisfied me in a whole number of ways. As a feminist, I relished, you know, slugging it out with the machos. I had. One of my friends in the construction business came to me, one of the guys who would send me jobs. He says, I need to don't be nice, and don't get mad, get even. They won't respect you unless you fight back. And I was trying to be really nice and polite because I was facing incredible odds. You know, it was like every time I walked onto a construction site with my daughter, we made ourselves look as ugly as possible. But she was a knockdown, drag out beauty. And the foreman would look around and say, well, don't you guys have anything to do? So, you know, there was that, but it was a challenge. And one of the things I think that was kind of like a cultural characteristic is we're just fighters.

[11:27] NAOMI LOVE: Absolutely. And I'm wondering, I asked you before how you describe your childhood self. How would you describe your present self?

[11:37] ANITA RODRIGUEZ: Well, I'm 82 years old, and I've been through a lot. I have seen a lot, and I have reached a level of deep contentment, satisfaction, and fulfillment that is very profound. And it reminds me of one of the sayings that we have in El Diablo. Savemas por viejo que? Por diablo. The devil knows more from being old than from being the devil. And there's a whole lot that you just don't give a shit about anymore. But life begins at 70, my dear.

[12:20] NAOMI LOVE: Yeah.

[12:21] ANITA RODRIGUEZ: Yeah. That's when it really begins to taste good, and the body starts to give you problems. And finally, you know, like, you just say, okay, I'll leave that. But, yeah.

[12:36] NAOMI LOVE: What feels different after 70 than your life before?

[12:40] ANITA RODRIGUEZ: The calm, the tranquility, the confidence, the compassion. Because I've suffered. And when I see it, I know what people are going through. What else is different? The landscape is far less jagged. The landscape has acquired an atmosphere of tranquility and meaning.

[13:15] NAOMI LOVE: And I'm curious how being in Taos has changed, because it sounds like you've been here for quite a while, and I imagine it might have changed quite a bit.

[13:23] ANITA RODRIGUEZ: Well, where we're sitting right now used to be an open field filled with potsherds and tumbleweeds. And I grew up across the street, halfway between the Pueblo cattle guard and the plaza, halfway between two parallel universes who are totally different, who have totally different views of history. You know, even the landscape has different names. Every mountain has a different mythology attached to it. So I grew up between these two realities. And the house that I built now is in a very exclusive neighborhood right next to the country club and the university. But when I built it, there was nothing there but sagebrush. I paid $6,000 for the land, and it took me five years, but I built it with my hands, with the knowledge that I had gained in the construction business. I subbed out all the, you know, the plumbing and all that stuff. And now I'm surrounded by houses worth a million dollars, a million and a half. And the culture shock is profound. But age gives you the ability to separate yourself from your experiences, and you can look at things. Oh, yeah, I know what he's going to say. I forgot his name, but I know what he's going to do.

[14:44] NAOMI LOVE: Remember the important things.

[14:45] ANITA RODRIGUEZ: Yeah, right. Yeah. And so I have observed how my generation has endured this culture shock and how it has impacted our lives and our future, which is very grim. On this land, where my people have lived for centuries, we're being forced out of here. Land has become so expensive that my grandchild's generation won't be able to buy more land than you can fit in a box. And, yes, we are bitter, and understandably, yes.

[15:24] NAOMI LOVE: And I'm curious what advice you have for your grandchildren's generation here in general, I guess.

[15:32] ANITA RODRIGUEZ: Get serious, kids. Get serious. It's about survival. And my generation is here to support you, because young people who are listening to this, we are your advisors and your protectors, and, you know, we will pass on to you what's good, and we'll do the best we can. But, you know, you've got to get serious. And I have a lot of hope, because I look at this younger generation, and I see how, for instance, they've got the whole gender thing down. They've got it down. Heterosexuality is a construct. Right. You know, and we've had people of every concept of conceivable gender identity with us since the beginning of the human race. So tell me what's sick? Worried about what bathroom people are using?

[16:29] NAOMI LOVE: No. Absolutely.

[16:32] ANITA RODRIGUEZ: And this is like shooting at the very heart of patriarchy. This will bring it down.

[16:38] NAOMI LOVE: I certainly hope so.

[16:40] ANITA RODRIGUEZ: So do I, my dear, passionately.

[16:45] NAOMI LOVE: I'm curious how growing up here and raising your children here in Taos has shaped who you are and maybe has shaped who your children are.

[16:55] ANITA RODRIGUEZ: Well, the cultural diversity here is authentic, and it's real. There are these three parallel universes, and whatever your identity is or your skin color or your personal history or your beliefs, you are going to be locked into one of these ghettos and shut out of the other two. You know, and that's just the way it is, because these are three groups of people who are historical enemies. And there are a lot of really bloody patches that lie between us, a lot of historical trauma. And this affects the way in which everything around here operates. And it's doubled edged because it is both conflict and confluence. So it is incredibly rich. And I don't know how much you might know about Jung, but he talks about archetypes, which are sort of like symbolic images that transcend cultural differences that exist in the collective unconscious of all peoples, regardless of their languages or their belief systems. And living here in Taos, I think reading Jung really helped me understand my environment, and I think that it was enriching. And also it's extremely painful. And there are casualties because we live in a white supremacist society, and racial identity has become a big deal. And if you happen to be, like me, of mixed races, and as an innocent child, you are born into a society in which racial identity determines how long you live. Where you go to school, whether the cops are going to shoot you or not. All these things, you know, it's. You have to master it in order to survive, or it will destroy you. And I know a lot of people that it has destroyed.

[18:57] NAOMI LOVE: No, that is very real. And how did you go about talking about that with your children as well, or your grandchildren, if it was a conversation at the time?

[19:08] ANITA RODRIGUEZ: Well, my grandchild is too young yet for that, but she's smart as a tack and very gifted. And my daughter. My daughter is half black, and I tried to protect her. She was born in the late fifties in Oakland during the burning of watts, and her uncle was the first black newspaper reporter. She had another uncle who was the first black captain in the United States army. Another uncle who. What was he? You know, a lot of firsts, you know, like a really intellectual family who played multiple musical instruments and read poetry in the original greek, right, but worked in a submarine factory his entire life. And suddenly racism came into relief because a white woman with a black man, especially a pregnant white woman, in that situation, there was no way I could deny that. Boy, this is a big deal. And so I thought, you know, I can't raise her here. This is too dangerous. I'm afraid to let her out of the door, and I don't want her to be hurt. So I'm going to take her home, you know, to my poor, dusty little one horse town, where I swore I'd never come back and that I'd never wanted to eat another frijole in my life, but where I had an extended family and a culture on the defensive, but a culture based on collective value sharing, taking care of. And so I brought her back here because it was safer, and then she didn't want to leave.

[20:54] NAOMI LOVE: And what was it like raising a child in this community with your family?

[20:59] ANITA RODRIGUEZ: Well, you get a lot of support, but it's a conflicted community, like I say, and it's a poor community. So economically, that was the biggest hardship. And we were really, really poor. Our house burned down once to the ground, and we lost absolutely everything. I was left with my pickup truck and the dirty laundry that was in the back of it. And I remember sitting there watching my house burn down. My daughter was five years old, and she rubbed my shoulders and says, don't cry, mommy. You're wearing your best earrings. So we moved into a tool shed with three walls and began rebuilding the house. But I didn't have any water on my land, so I would fill up, like, about 450 gallon drums. I'd drive them all the way down to the Rio Grande and fill them up with a bucket once a week. Then I'd drive up to my land and I use that water for everything. For bathing, for cooking, for making mortar and laying a little abyss, and for watering my garden. And then winter came, and I had gotten the walls back up. It was an adobe house, so the walls were still intact, but I had to rebuild some of them. But I hadn't been able to get the roof on. And I knew we weren't going to survive in that shed. So I packed up our stuff and put it all in a backpack and went out to the highway and stuck out my thumb and said, we're going back to California to find your dad, and he'll, you know, he's going to help us out. And so there was this little red jaguar driving in the opposite direction. But the guy stopped and said, where are you going? And I said, California. He says, I'll take you. And he turned around and drove me to California. Long story short, I got a job working on salmon boats. I left my daughter with her father. And at that time, you could make $250 a day. It was brutal, but I was in shape. I'd been unloading semis of adobes and it was like 14 hours. Days. And you sleep in your bloody oil slab and you talk about chauvinism. They thought if I stepped on their boat, it would sink, right? So once again, I was trying to make myself look as ugly as possible. I carried a knife and had some buddies that sort of like, don't get off the boat till we get there because, you know, the boats go to the waterfronts and you don't have a car, so you're stuck on the waterfront. And the waterfronts are really rough. And the only women on the waterfront are the prostitutes. And they thought I was really stupid, you know, like, look at you, honey. Like, God, what are you wearing? You know? So, you know. But I made enough money to come back and rebuild my life after the fire, and I stayed here ever since.

[23:45] NAOMI LOVE: And what brought you back? Did you ever think about staying in California?

[23:49] ANITA RODRIGUEZ: No. No, because it seems safer here. And I began to appreciate the depth of the roots that I had, the roots that I ran away from because I thought it was so backwards. And I wanted the real world and everything we saw on tv, but I had a taste of that. No, no, I was wrong about that. You know, I'm going to go home. And then I expatriated again in 2097, after the war began. And I was just totally disgusted with this country and said, okay, I'm going to get away from this. And so I sold everything and packed up my stuff and rented my house, which was finished, and drove all the way across Mexico down to Belize, where I got really, really sick and met someone by accident. I got a job in a fancy hotel where I was the hostess. And I met someone in the dining room. And I had typhoid, amoebas and parasites all at once. And when you have tropical diseases, you get kind of, oh hum, I'm dying. Oh, well, yum, yum, you know, it just get into this. And so I saw these people sitting at the table and somehow I knew they liked art because Mexico class differences are really conspicuous. And these were people who, they had taste and, you know, so I took them to my studio and they really did like my art and gave me the name of a man who owned a museum in the city of Guanajuato, which is in the center of Mexico, and said, you better get out of here. Turned out he was a doctor. And he said, you know, you're going to die. He said, there's a dengue epidemic going on here and you get dengue, it's over. So I hired someone to drive me to Guanajuato, where I got a beautiful apartment in a part of town. You had to have someone co sign the man whose telephone number I have gave me a one woman show in his museum. And I decided to stay. And I stayed for 15 years.

[25:53] NAOMI LOVE: And how did it compare to Taos? What was different, what was similar?

[25:57] ANITA RODRIGUEZ: It was like Taos. Suddenly the shoe was on the other foot and I was the gringa. And I was living in a community of people who had lived like we had in the same houses for generations. And they didn't like outsiders. And it was closed. And 80% of the streets in the city of Guanajuato, which was built in the 17th century, are inaccessible by car. And excuse me, each little neighborhood has its own plaza. So there's a whole society, generations old, clustered around each one of these things. So if you wander into these one of these places, are you looking for somebody? Even the cops are afraid to go there. So in that way, it was like the villages of northern New Mexico, where outsiders are just, you know, there's a wall, you know. And that was really interesting. But I belong to the generation of new Mexicans who was beaten for speaking Spanish in the schools. And I'm a voracious reader of a 500 pages of book, weak woman. You know, and I ran out of english books, so I had to bite the bullet. And that opened the door to spanish literature, which was like a pig out a gourmet feast. And I got to read mexican history from the other side and get a perspective on american culture from another perspective, which was illuminating. And I also learned a lot about curanderismo because I was bilingual. I could translate for people, and I ended up translating for Curanderos and learning their stories, and they liked art. So you paint me this, you can follow me around and take notes? Yeah, you can take my picture. And so, you know, that was, like, an area. But then I realized that the thing that I was running away from was global and that there's no escape, and that everywhere you go, you're gonna run into it in one form or another. It's about climate change. It's about global wealth inequality. You know, it's about all of the same evil coming through the lenses of different cultures and different economies, but it's basically the same. So, okay, I'm going back to Taos, and I'm going to make my last stand, where I have relatives, where I know the ropes, where I know the code words, where people know me. And I'm going to fight this thing.

[28:19] NAOMI LOVE: And what does that fight look like for you?

[28:23] ANITA RODRIGUEZ: Well, there's a certain joy in battle, and it doesn't matter if you win or not. It's about the pride of being a woman and the pride in my culture and the pride of just doing something because it's right, because it's the right thing, irrespective of the money and anything else. So if you do that, what your heart tells you is right, then you get to a place of satisfaction and inner peace. And whether or not you win is not the point. The point is what you do with the battle, how you fight.

[29:11] NAOMI LOVE: That makes a lot of sense.

[29:13] ANITA RODRIGUEZ: And art can change history without violence. We can reach deep into the subconscious, bypass the Persona.

[29:29] NAOMI LOVE: And so, for you, what is the relationship between your art and your activism?

[29:36] ANITA RODRIGUEZ: They're kind of like aspects of the same thing. You know, some of my paintings are very, very political. They're very narrative, and you can see them on my website. So there's a lot of crossover. I paint in Spanish, and I write in English.

[30:01] NAOMI LOVE: And what does painting in Spanish mean for you?

[30:04] ANITA RODRIGUEZ: I use symbols that are understood by spanish speakers, like I use skeletons, and every mexican style snaps right away. Aha. Yeah. That's been in their history since pre columbian times. It's also deeply democratic, because you can't unless you're a forensic anthropologist, you don't know what gender, what class, what age. Well, age, yes. You know, so all, you know, when you see my skeletons who are making love and dancing and driving around in their lowriders, all you know about them is that they're human.

[30:41] NAOMI LOVE: And so we're coming to the end of our conversation here. Is there anything in particular that you want to add to this recording, to this record of this moment in time?

[30:52] ANITA RODRIGUEZ: Yes. I want the world to know that my culture is on the defensive and that we are a beautiful people and that we have a lot to offer the world and we're worth saving. So I ask people to respect this land and to respect this water, and I would like to see them stop selling it.

[31:15] NAOMI LOVE: It's a powerful message to end on, I think. Well, I so appreciate you coming and sharing your story with me today and with us. It has been absolutely illuminating.

[31:26] ANITA RODRIGUEZ: Well, thank you for inviting me.