¡Colores!; 1401; Albuquerque's Historic Neighborhoods; AHN INT Robert Romero 2/Ginger Cover 2

I want to ask you about the Martinez Town and actually, you know what, we've covered this a little bit in talking about the churches, but don't be afraid to repeat yourself, because I'm going to throw some similar questions at you, but I want to ask you, so what brings all parts of Martinez Town together, if anything does? Okay, just think about that one for a second. So what brings all the parts of Martinez Town together, if anything does? Martinez Town is divided into four districts, really, and again, the main district or the main part of Martinez Town started out being the geographical area between Mountain Road and what is now Lomas, and then it expanded here to what is now Santa Barbara, north of Loma, Mountain Road, all the way up to what is now I-20, I-40 that runs through our neighborhood.

Later, south of Lomas, which is now South Martinez Town is now called the, well, South Martinez Town, and it's a really nice urban, urban renewal area. That was the third part of Martinez Town, and then later on in the late 60s and early 70s, the area which is called Francisco Nakers, and it is north of Mountain of I-40, all the way up to what was added to the neighborhood as part of the geographical location. What makes us work together is a need to survive. A need to survive both in terms of services that are necessary, because as we see, we divide it, we don't get all the services that are necessary or that are required to the neighborhood. Together, we stand united and we can actually suggest and demand a more higher delivery of service infrastructure, for example, our lighting of the streets, provisions of social

services that we need for our children and our seniors and, again, for just the families to survive. But the unity is there for the purposes of becoming, again, another, just a new era, if you will, of establishing or re-establishing the village concept. So, what makes Martinez Town different from the rest of Albuquerque? Martinez Town as in any neighborhood has similarities to other neighborhoods, but we have differences as well.

What makes Martinez Town different is that, in my opinion, it was once a viable, attractive place to be, because there were so many people that were attracted here, because it lies at the heart of Albuquerque now, even though it was not in the beginning the heart of Albuquerque, but it had a great geographical location with a background that we had with the Sandhills, with the river just west of us, and, of course, the new town just south west of us. And, of course, the Menal School and the Presbyterian influence that we still have, and that was established back in the 1800s, north of us. So, it was special because it brought together many, many people who from here, from this location, went out into the other parts of the city, and still took the fact that they were once citizens of this village, neighbors of Santa Barbara Martinez Town, and they still

talk about it, even though they don't live here, they still have the memory of when I was in Martinez Town, or they'll say, you know that I was in Martinez Town, or I lived in Martinez Town, or my parents are from Martinez Town, I think it's a, it provides a sense of being proud that you were from this little area that has produced not only judges and professionals such as lawyers and priests, it has produced educators as well. Excellent. Thank you very much. So, why does Martinez Town hold on so fiercely to its independence, or is that, and that's the sense I get, but is that true, and if it is true, talk to me about that. Yeah. Martinez Town has a sense of independence.

I'm talking about Martinez Town and Santa Barbara, I'm talking about the area, the north of Lomas, and the reason for that is because late in the 60s and early in the 70s, there was a move by, of course, the, nationally, of course, through the city of Albuquerque for urban renewal, and Martinez Town was targeted, in my opinion, as an area of expansion of a downtown cultural core, if you will, where the civic auditorium and all these other services were going to be provided, and they started to displace a lot of our people, and mostly down in the south part of Martinez Town, south of Lomas, and that's the area that then decided, no, enough is enough, we're not for sale, we're going to stop this, we're losing our people, and we're not just going to be eliminated, it is a neighborhood, and we stopped it, then the choices came, that part of Martinez Town decided, we're going to renew ourselves with new housing stock, standard stock, and what you see now is

a nice little walled community with really nice houses, well kept, I call it the, the town of Martinez Town, or, you know, because it is walled, just like town of one, you don't have to go through a gate to get into it, but it, it's a great looking plan here, and so that part of the neighborhood chose to be that, to go through urban renewal, and to have that nice standard way of subdividing themselves, and having the traditional subdivision, if you will, north of Lomas, we decided, no, no, no, we don't want that, we want to continue to be independent, we want to continue to have our houses the way they are, but we want to have nice houses as well, houses that are standard, that have the plumbing, that have, of course, a place, a yard, and continue to have the place of, of a feel of a neighborhood, a village, so we then separated, they established themselves,

created their own, a neighborhood association, and we created our own, and we continue with infill projects, matching what we have, and what was established in the past, you know, by no means are we historical in the way we actually build our houses, because our houses were built with whatever kind of material was available at the time, so you might have an influence that might match the Northern Territorial style of New Mexico, or the Territorial style of Santa Fe, or maybe the flat roof, Puebla style, and you have a match, a mix in a match of those kinds of things here, whereas other places in Martinez town you don't, so we decided, that's what we are, so when we infill, we copy what we have to the extent that we copy, so as you see the new houses that we're building now, they're matching the gable roofs that we have that have been in existence for many, many, many years, or

the flat roofs that we have that have been in existence for many, many years, so we wanted to maintain the value, the tradition, of what our forefathers brought to us from Mora, from Taos, from Chile, from Northern New Mexico, they came in from the south, whatever they brought to us, we wanted to maintain that and then duplicate it with our infill project. I want to ask you, I want to shift gears a little bit, so why is there seem to be such a fierce loyalty amongst the people that live in this neighborhood, to the neighborhood, to the community, because you don't see that everywhere, you don't see, you know, that doesn't exist like, for instance, that doesn't exist in Princess Jean, there doesn't seem to be, many, a few people, but it seems to be pretty prevalent here, talking about why is that?

Martinez down continues to exist, instead of Barbara continues to exist with loyalty to the neighborhood, to try and preserve the values that we see that we're handed down to us, only because we still have our seniors who are wanting to have that preserve for us, even though some of them don't have the children that live here anymore, but yet the children come in to visit mom and dad, or grandma and grandpa, and yet these are people who are still continuing to dialogue with us through the church, through our community services, the community centers that we have, and through other venues that we provide for them. So they pass on, and they continue to pass on, the tradition, it's nice to continue to live here, it's nice to have the peace of mind that you own your own property, and that you have continued to then have the values, the cultural value, that the church, and the culture provides, so it's our seniors that provide the tie that we like to the traditional

value that we want to preserve, and then again, people like myself, who I think, I could move out, she's coming in, it's fantastic. So it's people like myself, who I appreciate the value that was handed down to me by my parents, my grandparents, and their parents before them, and I see a sense of a place, of being, I feel like I belong here, I don't belong in another neighborhood, although I could probably adapt to any other part of the city, but I chose to stay here, and my wife actually chose to be with me here, and of course this is where we raised our child, my daughter, and of course she no longer lives here, she's one of the few that moved out as well, and established herself in the newer part of the city, with a little bit more convenience

than we have here, but nonetheless, I think it's people who treasure, value, tradition, and culture. Talking a little bit about the two Martinez town schools, and the role that they play, certainly the law, is it Longfellow? No, is it? Longfellow School is still there. Yeah, yeah, and I guess it's received quite a few, a lot of attention for being, isn't it a magnetic school? Magnetic school? Talk a little bit about what that is. And in our educational opportunity that we had here, again, we had three schools at one time. Of course, the older school being Santa Barbara School, which was a county school at one time, and then Longfellow being the public school that the city through the Obuquerque Public School system provided, provided, of course, educational opportunity for us over at the south end of our neighborhood, Santa Barbara School here in this north end of

the neighborhood. That's another school, the parochial school that was established by a Jesuit priest who came to us from Spain, and he established in the late 40s and finally became a reality in the early 50s, the first parochial school in Martinez town that provided, of course, the Catholic education that he wanted to ask to have. Those two schools, the Santa Barbara School and the Santa Groundsville School are no longer in existence because of the economy and because the way the neighborhood grew and not grew, they were phased out. Longfellow continues, however, and it's a renewed Longfellow. Longfellow, of course, used to be reminiscent of the old Red Brick school building that you still see Albuquerque High School now being converted into law departments as being. That's what Longfellow looked like in the small version of Albuquerque High School. Today, Longfellow is a two-story building, actually a single-story building with a two-story gym, if you will, because the old school was determined to be substandard and was raised,

but there's a history there. Longfellow was going to be phased out because we lost a lot of population in the 50s and 60s. We were going to be bused to other schools surrounding schools and we didn't have an opportunity then to have our own school because, again, the population wasn't there to support the school. But again, in the 60s and early 70s, when the theme Martina's down is not for sale and Urban Renewal was coming in, the people in that area decided, and the people in this area decided, we're going to do something about this. We want our school. We want a school for our children. So we convinced the Board of Education and, of course, the people that are responsible for all these things, that, yeah, we need to reestablish longfellow. And the only way we could actually get longfellow back in establish it as an educational opportunity for our neighborhood was to make it a magnet school. And that in the magnet school in those days was a brand new concept.

Well, we need to provide population for the school. So here is a great location. We're the heart of the city now. People come to work and down town, Albuquerque, they come down. But as now Martin Luther King, Jr. Boulevard, they can leave their children off early in the morning and then on the way back home, pick them up at the end of the day. So the magnet concept was established at longfellow school. That, we accepted because it gave us an opportunity to continue to educate our kids here in the neighborhood so they could walk to the school and I have to be bused to other places. As a child, I was bused just to give you the contrast. From here in Martinez down, for example, down to what used to be called Lincoln, Jr. High, way down south of coal in the southeast area of town. We were bused to go to school there. Jefferson is just up the road from us. So we were not allowed to go there, but we were bused way down south. On the contrast to that, the kids that lived just right above Lincoln, Jr. High, school,

in Clayton Heights were bused to Jefferson. So you see them, I call that them, you know, it's kind of stupid, but I hate to say that. But again, the fight that we went through was we didn't want to go through that. We wanted to have our kids here. So we agreed to the magnet school and it worked out fine. The magnet kids and our kids integrated their learnings, how to speak Spanish and our kids are learning from them. So worked out great. It worked out fabulous. I think I'm good. I'm done. Is there anything you'd like to add? No, I think that without repeating myself, I'm just... I think we've covered everything that... Yeah, I hope it works out for you. I don't know if I gave you what you wanted. No, I should. You were done. Fantastic. No, this is great. Thank you very much. You're welcome. Thank you.

Wonderful. Okay, good. So what we're going to do is we're going to go ahead and break everything down. It looks kind of neat, exactly what you had said. It's very tight. Okay. What do you think? Yeah. Wow. This is neat. It's beautiful. Thank you. For whom? For whom? For whom? For whom? For whom? For whom? For whom? For whom? For whom? For whom? For whom? For whom? For whom? For whom? For whom? For whom? For whom? Well, there's a mastic and it's the mastic and the butt of the backs of each tile and stick it on here and you got to clean it all up and clean because outside it's getting rained on and dirt and it and everything and then grow it and see what's incredible. The kids did some nice work didn't they?

Did they help? Oh yeah. They did most of these tiles. All these flowers. These ones I made. They made all the ones that are drawn on, painted on the kids' names. So now it's going to be easier, you know, what, when you're trying to bother and you know what, how do you call it, waterway, yeah, because I was trying to check them, you know, the other day. I almost flipped, you know, in here? Yeah. Yeah, it's, I think it'll be grippier because it's handmade tile and it's not completely straight. It's got some variation to it so it'll be, it'll be grippy. Yeah. Congratulations. Thank you. Yeah. It was part of the show for tomorrow, right? Mm-hmm. Oh, that's true. Wonderful. Congratulations.

Thank you very much. Thank you. So, hey, could you, I'm going to ask you two, can I step on this stuff, or is it? Yeah. You can step on it down there. Actually, most of it, you can step on to it. I'm going to ask you to do something that is going to be a little bit out of order here. Okay. I'm going to shoot this, because I'm, the way I'm shooting this right here works great if you pretend like she's still standing there and she asked you and you answer her. So, just, just, just, just I'll pick you up here, the shotgun mic. Okay. Talking to her over here. Um, she asked how, how, how I was putting it together. Yeah. So, could you tell her that? Okay. Well, um, take this glue, this mastic, and you have to butter the backs of each tile. And this mastic is a little thin. It's, uh, usually it's a little thicker, it's like a paste.

And then you stick it on, and you set each one, you stick it on, you kind of give it a little twist. Like that. And then each one, I have to clean up around the corners. And then I'll wipe off the tiles in a minute, and keep them clean, because it's tough to dry. And it gets hard, it's, it's like cement. Is it, uh, is it toothed in? No, it's, it's, it's doable. Um, anytime, okay, so I've got to set up a little pattern first, and then when I figure out, where a few of the tiles are going to go, then I take the mastic, hang on one second

please, hang on one second, okay, and go ahead and go through and do that. Okay. Okay. Now, usually what you do is you do the trowel. And you put it down on the cement, and then you set the tiles in on the cement, but started out working that way, and it wasn't working out very well. I was ending up with the mastic, uh, too far up on the tile, so I've had to butter the tiles back, so each one of them, and now that I'm using wood, with my fingers, I'm going to do the trowel, and I'm going to do the trowel, and I'm going to do the trowel.

Okay. Okay. Okay.