¡Colores!; 608; A Mi Raza: The Writings of Sabine Ulibarri; Sabine Reyes Ulibarrí Home Interview 1

I think I've got one, that's many people asked for it, so it's probably all over the area. I guess the first question I want to know, and I've been kind of holding off on this a little bit in our own conversations, but who is Sabine Ulilari?

Ulivari, who's a little guy that came out of the mountains of northern New Mexico a long time ago, and he's been looking back in that direction ever since. What are you looking back at? There is a collection of very fond memories of people and events and landscapes from that area. Tell me specifically where you came from? Well, I was born in Las Nutrias. Las Nutrias was not even a village. There were a string of ranches along the stream, and my grandfather and his brothers went there in the latter part of the 19th century, and they established a ranches along the stream.

And I was there until I was about seven years old. And after that time I never played with a child my age. I didn't play with children until we moved to Caramaria, so that I and my brothers and sisters could go to school. So tell me, what was Nutrias like? Well, I think the most pervading reality of Las Nutrias is loneliness and perhaps even melancholy. It's so alone, so far out of the way where nothing ever happened, where no one ever came. It was a looking out to a grove of trees where a dirt road led to the ranch house.

And people were forever looking at that grove of trees to see that just maybe someone would come out of the grove of trees, and there would be some excitement, something different in the ranch house. I said solitude and melancholy, but that was not necessarily sad. There was a tremendous amount of activity going on in the ranch, and there were quite a number of people involved. There were the ranch hands, and then there were the maids and the cooks, and my grandmother and my father and mother and my smaller brothers and sisters. So there was a lot to do.

There was a cattle and sheep and horses. With a few goats thrown in and lots of chickens and turkeys as well, pigs. So you kind of a farm boy? Well I was half a farm boy and half a ranch boy, because the ranch there was a scene of departure. Everything began there. The herds left for the winter range in the fall from there, and they returned in the spring. And the cattle were brought down from the mountains in the fall, and they were kept there at the farm ranch, and they were fed there during the winter. As a kid, what was it like there, was it hard work, or did you have a certain amount of freedom, what was it like for you?

Well I left Las Nutrias before I arrived at the working stage, I was about seven. So I spent my time roaming through the labyrinths, there were squirrels to chase out there, and with my out in the fields, with my police dogs, and out in the woods. Because they were always rabbits to chase, with the dogs, and gofers to us, we call them. I had learned to take a trickle of water from a ditch to a gofahol, and flood the gofahol, and when the animal came out of the hole, I'd clobber him with a stick, with a dog's wood hitting. And I got rid of a lot of hostility and violence that way. I didn't beat my boy or my wife afterwards, I did it all then.

Well tell me, what was your family like, I mean what was it, social, do they have money, or they poor, or can you give me a kind of generic? Well my family was not rich, but they weren't poor. It was my grandmother's ranch, ran some 3,000 head of sheep, and about 500 cattle, and they had a breeding stock of mayors, 45 white mayors with a white stallion. And so there were lamps and calves to be sold in the fall, and wool to be sold in the spring. Not very much cash was involved. My parents did and my grandmother did their shopping

at a general mercantile store, and those accounts were paid in the fall and in the spring, not every month, because that for the cash flow came in. And bank accounts and others were also paid off in those two periods in the fall and in the spring. What do you remember most of the tears in T.A.? What do you think about it? Well, I think my closeness to the earth, because I was very solitary, they were no children to play with. So I didn't miss them. I didn't need them. My dogs were my companions, and I'd roam all over the fields and all over the woods, doing the sort of things that intrigued

me, or even sleeping under a pine tree. And when we moved to Tierra Maria for us to go to school, I was really anti-social. My dogs would accompany me to school, and they weighed outside until recess. And when we came out to play and recess, I played with my dogs, not with the other kids. With the other kids, I fought, and I still bear the scars, there's no many battles of growing up in Tierra Maria. What do you think of the difference between T.A. and Nutris, and how did you like perceived from there? You weren't on the ranch anymore, were you in a different environment? Yes, Tierra Maria was thriving, and rather well-off community, because ranching and stock raising, those are the main industries over there. The summer season is much too short

for much farming. And so there were a lot of old families there that, like ours, were doing the same sort of thing, running sheep and cattle, and sometimes horses. The horses, I said that we had my grandmother had 45 white mares for breeding stock, but the mountains were full of mustangs, wild mustangs. And every year it was necessary to round up those mustangs and castrate the mails, and to put in a good stallion with the mustangs. And through the years, the quality of those mustangs had improved. My father, when I was

a young man, would sell horses to Fort Bliss for the cavalry. There would be a big round up, and they capture all these wild mustangs, but were rather good stock. That unfortunately came to an end when they built the fish hatchery in Los Ojos, right close to Tierra Maria. And people started poaching on the mustangs and selling them to the fish hatchery for food for the fish, and destroyed the wildhards and disappeared. Tell me a little bit more about T.A. growing up there. Well I went to school with Catholic nuns from the first grade to the 12th grade, and most of the time I didn't get along with him, and they didn't get along with me.

Well, let me say that now, looking back, I'm very grateful to those nuns. Back in the 30s, when I was going to high school, every one of my teachers had a master's degree, and the principal had a PhD, and she spoke seven languages. There wasn't a high school in the whole state in New Mexico that had a faculty with those high qualifications. And they were nuns from the Midwest, so they imbued on myself and my generation the values, the American values of the Midwest to the United States. I think that they did a pretty good job of Americanizing us in making us fit in in the mainstream of American society.

I think it's good because we have done that without leaving our own culture behind. I think that Hispanic culture is far more alive than you would expect given the circumstances that people still speak Spanish, still maintain many of the old cultural traditions, still look after the village church the way they did hundreds of years ago. So the culture is alive and alert in New Mexico, and at the same time we are very much a part of the American mainstream. Why did you have trouble with these nuns, I think it was like meeting foreigners, or is

it hard to... Did I have one? Did you have trouble with the nuns at first, you said to them? Well, one of the problems was that I wasn't very social, so I was always getting into fights, and the nuns didn't approve of that. But then I got into trouble with them for religious reasons. The last period in school in class every day was a period of religion, and I would ask very embarrassing questions of the priest. And I ended up being thrown out, and which was a mark of distinction, you know, it was a rebel, it was sort of a character, I didn't mind it. On during Lent they would march the whole school, from the school building to the church

to attend services at the church, and the group would turn in this direction, and I would turn in the other direction, and the nun would be calling me, and I wouldn't answer. And the reason is that my parents were quite liberal and quite free thinkers, and they didn't punish me for these things. And then later in high school I had cousins who attended college in the East, and they came back to Terramarilla when they graduated, and they provided me with books, books on philosophy, science, and I devoured those books, including the origin of species. And when I would go into the religion class, and bring up the subject of evolution, that

sort of thing, that was a no-no, a taboo, so I got into more conflict. I think I would have been thrown out of school, if hadn't been that my uncle was a superintendent school. You somehow, with words, visualized, what you were looking at and seeing as a kid when you were by the stream and the trees and you were exploring and you were alone. I suppose I was very much of a daydreamer, and given the circumstances they lent themselves to that kind of behavior on my part, my father was a heroic figure, who right often is

quite horse, which made me just want to grow up and grow up and be like him. And when I was about six years old, or so, my father would take me out on the range with him, because he held a job there for quite a number of years as an inspector of herds when they changed ranges to see that they didn't bring back diseases or take diseases from one range to another. So he'd be out on the range for two weeks at a time, and when I was a little boy, he bought me a saddle that was not much bigger than a postage stamp, and we'd go off in the early

spring, and that led to a tremendous excitement, a tremendous amount of make-believe, because at night, for example, we'd camp out under the stars and around the campfire in the early spring, the coyotes are hungry. And of course, we had salt pork, sometimes ribs, bacon, that we fry out there, and that smell would float, and we'd be surrounded. First of all, we'd hear the howling of the coyotes, and that would be jibis into me. Then later, they'd creep in, they'd get bolder and bolder, and you could see the rise glowing

out there in the dark, and then my father would throw a bone out at him, and you'd see the wild and fights they had out there. Well, I had a hard time going to sleep, because that scared the bggs out of me, and another thing that scared me, was the rivers were flooded, up there in Tiramaria we have the chama, and it'd be flooded in the spring, well my father would have to cross it, and there would be rocks tumbling down on the water, and there would be trunks of trees, and all kinds of debris, and we'd cross the stream, and the horses would have to swim across. And the water was ice cold, because there were big trunks of ice in there too, and again,

that was frightening. All of that was food for daydream, incidentally, I wasn't strong enough to hold the horse, so my father had to lead my horse. If you could, that's perfect, that's just wonderful, it's trying to find another interpretation of it. You talked about being alone, and I can remember being alone as a kid, and walking along the stream.