Grievances, everyday annoyances, unexpected sorrows. A loved one leaves by choice or by a visit from the Grim Reaper. A financial burden turns life upside down. Even a flat tire at the wrong time can send someone over the emotional edge. It’s no wonder we annually feel an urgent need to make New Year’s resolutions, hoping for better outcomes.

What if there were a ritual for releasing the woes, anxieties, and grief that plague us despite our best intentions? Santa Fe, New Mexico, “the City Different,” has such a tradition. Known to locals as the city’s own special New Year, the Burning of Zozobra, the original burning man who predates the Black Rock City effigy by 60 years, is our way to let go of worries and sorrow and make a fresh start.

In 1917, Will Shuster, a Philadelphia artist who worked for the Curtis Publishing Company, answered the World War I call of duty. Sent to France to organize and command an Army Message Center, he endured sleepless nights, emergency rations, and muddy trenches before being mustard gassed for his efforts. Returning home in 1919, Shuster received a diagnosis of tuberculosis, generally considered terminal in that era. His doctor noted that Shuster could stay in Philadelphia and live for perhaps a year, or he could head west to a place where he would “probably die of old age, snake bite or drinking too much bad whiskey.” Shuster took his doctor’s advice, packed up the family and moved to Santa Fe, where he proceeded to live for 50 fulfilling years.

In New Mexico, Shuster became part of a self-titled group known as Los Cinco Pintores (the Five Painters), locally christened as the “five nuts in huts,” a pointed comment on their side-by-side self-built adobe abodes and their financial challenges. When one member of the group sold a painting, all benefited from the proceeds. After one such 1923 sale, Shuster insisted that the group blow the money on a Christmas Eve night out at the new La Fonda hotel bar. Frustrated by listening to his friends’ grousing, Shuster demanded that they write down their gloomy thoughts on paper, then put the papers into a bowl and set them on fire. Though they were promptly tossed out of the bar, the act became a kindling of an idea that ignited the following year after Shuster found inspiration on a trip to Mexico during Easter time.

Accompanied by E. Dana Johnson, a prominent Santa Fe journalist and editor, while traveling Shuster witnessed a Holy Week tradition in which an effigy of Judas was paraded around a village on a donkey as people threw shoes and hissed at it. Shuster was struck by how the crowd united in solidarity against the torment and despair that the Judas figure represented. Recalling how it felt burning his gloom with his friends at La Fonda the year before, he married the two memories into a unique whole. That fall, in September 1924, he built his own 6-foot-tall effigy, filled it with glooms written on paper, and burned it in his back yard. At first, Shuster referred to the effigy as Old Man Groucher, but he and Johnson ultimately settled on naming it Zozobra, a Spanish word denoting anxiety or gloom.

From the start, Shuster was adamant that Zozobra was not a political or religious figure but instead a manifestation of the negativity that humans experience, the sorrows and hurts we inflict upon ourselves and others. By letting those thoughts and feelings be consumed in the flames that consumed Zozobra, he hoped that the tradition would help people cleanse themselves of the gloom, regrets, and sadness they carried.

Zozobra is a relative youngster in the history of Santa Fe, which boasts the oldest U.S. capitol, but the burning of a functional marionette has already become a cherished local cultural tradition, part of the personal story of countless families. Schools create Zozobra lesson plans, and people who have helped with Zozobra’s construction, stuffed it with shredded paper, or performed in the accompanying pageant ignite the same fire for participation in their own children. It’s not unusual to hear kids recite the color of Zozobra’s hair in years before they were born, and on Halloween, it’s common to see a little Zozobra at the door.

In 1964, Shuster gifted the nonprofit Kiwanis Club of Santa Fe with the rights to Zozobra. In keeping with the Kiwanis’ mission, the Santa Fe club donates net proceeds from the event to help fund local organizations that work to make life better for children. A lifelong lover of Zozobra, I’ve served as its event chair since 2012, taking over from Ray Valdez, who oversaw the burning of Old Man Gloom for more than two decades.

Courtesy of Zócalo Public Square.

We’re proud to have over 70,000 people flock to Fort Marcy Park to take part in the annual burning of Zozobra. The narrative plays out the same way every time: Ostensibly invited to a party in his honor, Zozobra, also known as Old Man Gloom, gleefully attends the festivities, intent on robbing Santa Fe of its hope and happiness. Using his dark forces to cloud the minds of Santa Fe’s children, portrayed by local students, he turns these innocents into “Gloomies”—minions he can use to wreak havoc on the city. But as Zozobra and his Gloomies prematurely celebrate his intended triumph, a group of torch bearers representing townsfolk appear to counter the spreading gloom. Zozobra and the Gloomies frighten the torchbearers away. But just when it looks as though all is lost, the watching crowd begins to chant “Burn him, Burn him!”

This impassioned cry summons a Fire Spirit, who materializes to battle with Zozobra for the soul of the city. The annual clash between good and evil ends when the Fire Spirit’s flaming torches signal Zozobra’s demise under a blaze of fireworks, said by Shuster to be his way of painting the sky. United in the spiritual balm of releasing anguish and heartbreak, those witnessing this spectacle celebrate as the 50-foot-tall effigy and their sorrows become glowing embers, clearing the emotional air.

Over the past few years of devastating losses and trauma, the purging of grief that Zozobra provides has meant more than ever. While the wounds we suffer, both external and internal, never really disappear, the fellowship and goodwill that call forth the Fire Spirit serve as a reminder that, as humans, we can help one another heal the emotional burdens we carry.

The return of gloom is inevitable, as is the need to vanquish all that Zozobra represents. Because what is Zozobra but a manifestation of the spiritual struggle between light and darkness, played out in an annual drama?

Inspired by the promise made to Zozobra’s creator to present this pageant in perpetuity, Kiwanis’ commitment to the tradition is unwavering. Our volunteers are already making preparations to get next year’s ritual underway, readying Old Man Gloom to help us with sorrows to come. Zozobra will burn again.

The post How Zozobra, the Original Burning Man, Became Santa Fe’s ‘New Year’ Tradition appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Carvalho was 38 years old and an unknown portrait artist and daguerreotypist when he received an offer from Col. John C. Fremont, the most famous adventurer of the day, to serve as the official photographer of Fremont’s Fifth Westward Expedition. For years, Fremont had been consumed with mapping a route for the transcontinental railroad. He had always included a sketch artist among his crew, but this time he wanted to use photography, a new technology, to document the terrain.

It was a risky proposition. Fremont’s previous foray had ended in disaster when ten men froze to death in the Rockies, and Carvalho was totally unprepared. An urbane city dweller raised in Charleston, S.C., he had never traveled West. In fact, he had never even saddled his own horse. No daguerreotypist had ever attempted anything like this before. Daguerreotopy, which was the earliest form of photography, had only been invented fourteen years earlier, in 1839. It was a cumbersome process involving polished silver-coated copper plates and lots of gear and chemicals, and it was prone to failure. Of the handful of professional daguerreotypists in the United States, nearly all worked indoors, shooting portraits. Capturing wide landscapes in extreme weather conditions was almost unheard of.

Solomon Nunes Carvalho in 1850. Courtesy of Library of Congress.

Yet two weeks after accepting Fremont’s offer, Carvalho set out, with a seasoned group of explorers, teamsters, hunters, and guides. It would be the journey of his lifetime. The team included white Americans, a German, a few Mexicans, ten Delaware Indians, and of course Carvalho, who was an observant Sephardic Jew of Spanish-Portuguese descent. From the very start, the group faced challenges: torrential rains, raging prairie fires, injuries, infighting. Col. Fremont became injured early on, and had to turn back to seek medical attention. After a six-week delay, Fremont rejoined his men in Western Kansas, and then led them, perhaps foolishly, toward the Rocky Mountains just as winter was about to set in.

Along the way, Carvalho dutifully worked at his craft and, against the odds, succeeded in capturing image after image of the landscapes, buffalo, and the expansive terrain of the West.

The expedition encountered the Cheyenne village at Big Timbers in late November, during a supply stop along the Santa Fe Trail. It wasn’t easy photographing the Native Americans, Carvalho found. “I had great difficulty in getting them to sit still, or even submit to having themselves daguerreotyped. I made a picture, first, of their lodges, which I showed them,” he later wrote.

Carvalho’s daguerreotype of Big Timbers shows a pair of teepees nestled up against the edge of a forest of tall pines. Atop a thicket of logs and tree branches, several skins or hides are set out to dry. Two human figures, faded to an almost ghostly pallor, anchor the image in time. Their faces are hard to make out, but one has long braids and both are dressed in traditional native outfits.

An engraving based on Carvalho’s daguerreotypes.

Princeton historian Martha A. Sandweiss, an expert in photography of the American West, credits Carvalho with creating a painstakingly deliberate scene. “Carvalho sensed he needed to preserve a certain amount of information,” she told me, in an interview. “He stepped back from the scene, and he has carefully framed the image. He’s not doing a close up, at least in this picture, of the two people, or of the teepee, or of a piece of meat on the ground. He’s trying to show us something about native life.”

Fremont was thrilled with Carvalho’s work. “We are producing a line of pictures of exquisite beauty, which will admirably illustrate the country,” he wrote to his wife, Jessie Benton Fremont. He described the pictures of Big Timbers as “jewels.”

Sandweiss believes the daguerreotype tells us as much about the photographer as it does the subject. “I think what we see in this picture is evidence of a collaboration. It’s important to remember that Carvalho was working with a camera on a tripod. This is not a snapshot. These Indian subjects knew they were being photographed, and they are looking Carvalho in the eye.”

Of the 300 or so daguerreotypes Carvalho made on the expedition, this image is the only survivor.

After the expedition, photographer Mathew Brady’s New York studio converted Carvalho’s daguerreotypes into hand-drawn printing plates, so they could be turned into etchings and published. At the time, converting photographs to etchings was the only way to reproduce them for large numbers of people to see. It seems inconceivable to us today, but at that early time in photographic history, the daguerreotypes themselves were considered worthless—just a means for carrying back visual information that would be enshrined forever on a steel printing plate. Years later, they ended up in a storage unit belonging to Fremont, and were destroyed in a fire in 1882—gone forever, and barely missed. The Big Timbers daguerreotype somehow, luckily, ended up in Brady’s personal collection, which now resides at the Library of Congress.

Rio Grande, painting by Solomon Nunes Carvalho. Courtesy of Oakland Museum of California.

The sixty-odd surviving etchings made from Carvalho’s daguerreotypes tell a spectacular story of discovery, but the one surviving image does more: It provides a spiritual connection to the past. For most of the years I worked on my documentary film, Carvalho’s Journey, I relied on various reproductions of the Big Timbers image. I finally had a chance to see the real thing during a visit to Washington, D.C. last year.

It is smaller than I had imagined, just four by five inches. In real life, the damage is worse than in reproductions. But holding it in my hands, I was struck by an intense proximity to history. This piece of copper was the same tool that miraculously captured the Cheyennes’ likenesses, their teepees, their hides drying on the line. It was the same bit of metal that an urbane, Southern-Jewish photographer carried thousands of miles on horseback and heated over a fire to develop. The moment captured on the plate, faded as it is, was the exact image Solomon Carvalho saw that day. Native people who had never seen a photograph before—and whose lives would never be the same after their collision with Europeans—would have seen it too. It was the vessel through which an unlikely visitor and a pair of Indians faced each other and forged a quintessentially American encounter.

Daguerreotypes, which are in many ways an art form lost to history, are reflective just like mirrors. On one as faded as Carvalho’s, the mirrored surface makes it almost impossible to see the image detail when you look directly at it. You instead see yourself, peering into it, looking into history.

The post A Jewish Photographer’s Nearly Forgotten ‘Collaboration’ with Cheyenne Indians on the Santa Fe Trail appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

German was her native language; Yiddish as well. Julia Staab was a German Jew from a small village in Prussia. I don’t know how her marriage to my great-great-grandfather Abraham Staab came about—if it was arranged beforehand, or if they chose each other. But I do know that they were in a hurry to begin their married life in Santa Fe—to inhabit their American Dream.

Abraham was, anyway. He had left their village a decade earlier, at 15, to make his fortune. That he did, hauling merchandise—“Hats Boots & Shoes, Hardware, Groceries etc. etc.”—along the Santa Fe Trail between St. Louis and the American Southwest. He became a U.S. citizen on July 10, 1865, only a few weeks after the last shots of the Civil War were fired, and promptly departed for Germany in search of a bride. My great-great-grandparents married on Christmas Day, 1865. Julia was 21 years old, Abraham 26.

Julia and Abraham Staab

They shipped out on the RMS Scotia, a luxury liner that was at the time the fastest ship on the Atlantic, and on January 12, they landed in New York. From there, they climbed onto a train, and then a steamboat, and then rode for two weeks in a stagecoach across the snow-cloaked Great Plains to make a life among New Mexico’s stark and rugged Sangre de Cristo Mountains.

Santa Fe, in 1866, was not yet the elegant city of artists and tourists and well-heeled retirees. It was a rough and unruly town, sandy and treeless. Its central plaza was crowded with carts, wagons, teamsters, roustabouts, soldiers, veterans, fortune-seekers, consumptives, Navajos, Apaches, Jewish merchants, freed slaves, miners, gamblers, prostitutes, shysters, horses, burros, pigs, and goats—a confusion of commerce, a babel of languages. The houses were constructed of mud, the streets clouded with billowing dust. Beyond the town’s edges stretched a bewildering landscape of uncompromising sky and chisel-topped cerritos, so different from anything a young bride from the green and gentle valleys of northwestern Germany would ever have seen. New Mexico was all tans and reds, the ground littered with rocks and reptiles, with hematite-seeped rocks and bleached bones and spiny flora—cactus, greasewood, Spanish bayonet.

This desert was, certainly, an unforgiving land. But it was nonetheless a place that seemed willing to forgive the fact that Julia and Abraham were Jews. In Lügde, the village in which they were raised, local records describe a 1866 cholera outbreak that killed “126 people and one Jew.” That Jew was Julia’s cousin Philipp Schuster—singled out because, in Julia’s time, a Jew in Lügde was not a person but an invasive species, taxed and fined and snubbed at every turn.

Julia Schuster Staab

Not so in Santa Fe. In the New Mexico that Julia encountered in 1866, the newspapers of the territory spoke kindly of the local Jews (“Many of the best residents are of the Jewish faith,” wrote the Santa Fe New Mexican). Perhaps this was because the Jewish merchants were advertisers, or perhaps because there weren’t enough of them to seem threatening. There were, in Santa Fe, no temples, no Hebrew schools, no Jewish ghettos. The stores stayed open on Saturdays; a rabbi traveled from Denver every few years to circumcise the boys. My great-grandmother Bertha’s diaries from those days mention riding parties and sewing circles and teas and Christmas celebrations with gentile and Jewish friends alike—champagne and oysters, boxes at the Albuquerque opera. But not once in the diary did she mention the fact that her family was Jewish. It didn’t seem to matter.

The Staabs were American. They occupied the heart of Santa Fe, with a huge storefront right on the Plaza and a towering family mansion—a mansard-roofed French Second Empire–style brick building—just a few blocks away. The three Staab girls rode sidesaddle and carried gold-headed riding crops. The four boys wore tennis whites and striped sweaters. Abraham was elected county commissioner twice; he helped bring the railroad, the gasworks, and the territorial prison to Santa Fe. He prospered alongside this former Mexican outpost: brick by brick, railroad tie by railroad tie, he worked to transform Santa Fe from a foreign colony into an American city. The town was parched and unkempt and far from the “civilized” world. But Abraham flourished in that hard soil.

Julia did not. She struggled there; indeed, she seemed to wither in the desert. She bore seven children in quick succession, and lost an eighth. She suffered miscarriages and health problems, and from “hysteria,” as they called it then. Whenever she fell into a decline, she traveled to Germany to recover, visiting health spas and German doctors and her many sisters who lived there and tended her when she was unwell. Julia was the only one of the family’s eight girls to leave Germany. She felt terribly unlucky to have done so.

In her last years, Julia shut herself in the upstairs bedroom of the European brick home her husband had built among the adobes, and never left. While the family celebrated weddings on the ground floor, she stayed upstairs in her room, and she died there in 1896. It is said that her ghost still haunts the building. And that she was also haunted: by the life she might have lived in Germany, and all that she had left behind.

Of course we, who came after, know what became of all that she left behind—what became of her nieces and nephews and of her sister Emilie, who lived long enough to die, at the age of 81, in a Nazi concentration camp. We know how it ended. And we are haunted by a ghost life, too—the life that might have been ours, had Abraham not dragged Julia across the ocean and plains to this open desert land.

Abraham Staab

To become American is to accept a staggering loss of self—of the people we once were, in the places we once came from. It may take a generation, perhaps two. But inevitably, it transpires. The surge of conquering culture sweeps down through the generations, much as the spring floods scour the desert arroyos. Washed away, we must lay down new roots.

Julia believed her life in the desert was a curse. But five generations downstream, I find that I can’t agree with her. That sere and serrated Western landscape is the only place I have ever felt at home. My father and grandfather came from there; my great-grandmother too. The high desert is in my blood. And I can only see that it was a blessing.

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