El Fogón is a work-in-progress documentary project about hispanic Northern New Mexico, my home culture. It was named for a poem by my great-grandfather about a symbolic adobe oven. The horno was both the literal hearth of his childhood home and the figurative cradle of our culture.

From Santa Fe north, we are scattered across a constellation of mountain villages and valley towns, a few of which have managed to become bucolic, cheerful destinations, while most others have descended into abject poverty and despair. One important epicenter is the crossroads town of Española, which the L.A. Times savaged in 2023 as the country’s most drug-infested no-go zone. Of course, this narrative ignores the dynamics that fostered the problems, from the illegal parceling out of land during and after New Mexico’s 1912 statehood, to the destruction and new class dynamics wrought on the area by Project Manhattan and its successor laboratory. More recently, an ongoing series of massive handovers to shadowy corporations operating disingenuously under the guise of native pueblos have obliterated tax rolls, destroying centuries-old agricultural communities and further eroding capacity for social services.

Alas, there is an ambient truth to the dominant narrative, but its causes are misunderstood. The area was devastated first by heroin in the 1990s, followed by methamphetamine, and is currently deep in the throes of the fentanyl crisis. No family remains untouched by addiction, and the dire situation is compounded by cultural insularity and a chronic lack of resources. That grim picture nevertheless misses the larger reality of the place as a rich repository of a beautiful dying language, unique foodways, and among the world’s most vibrant and creative car cultures.

Though we were here before the Mayflower set sail, we remain a culture permanently outside, forgotten even in an era that fancies itself ultra-inclusive. We are thoroughly American, but never quite American enough. We are latino, but entirely ignored by a national narrative that insists upon latinos as a monolith: merely an undifferentiated group of recent immigrants. Entirely forgotten in this mix, we are given little claim to our own past and even less agency over our state and nation’s future. Tourists love our food, love to photograph and paint and imagine the landscapes we have irrigated and cultivated for centuries, and romanticize our names, but they do all they can to ignore our presence as people.

This real New Mexico is a melancholy, breathtaking, singular place. And it is a place that, to this day, has never managed to tell its own story.