Pueblo Chico is cultural historian Lucy Lippard’s second book on the history of Galisteo, New Mexico and its surrounding areas. As to be regularly expected, the Museum of New Mexico Press did an excellent job in the design and printing of this book with wonderful historical and current photos of the geography, townscape, homes, and people of this “little town.”

Lippard’s research is extremely deep and her writing is eloquent. 1814 is the start of this volume as the year of the first of two land grants by the Spanish governor of the territory to a group of “citizens of this village”, the origin story of the community that came to be – “the Mexican village of Galisteo.” At the time there were nineteen people in residence there. A second grant in 1816, to the same petitioners, made land ownership confusing, and provided fodder for the legal battles later in the 1800s when American interests and the Santa Fe Ring were acquiring as much New Mexico land as possible, legally or not.

The Galisteo basin had been populated by the Tano/Tewa for hundreds of years with several pueblo ruins in the area around what is now the village of Galisteo. Plains Indian raids made pueblo life difficult. Spanish settlement became a buffer for the more established towns (Santa Fe) and the Spanish, Mexican, and finally American military, had outposts in or near Galisteo. General Kearny sent horses to graze at Galisteo following the Army of the West’s possession of Santa Fe, soon followed by a tax collector in the village to charge a toll on the Santa Fe Trail to the capitol city.

In the 1900s we begin to see a recognizable Galisteo, with the land next to the new church, Iglesia Nuestra Señora de Los Remedios, deeded to the Sociedad de San José who used it to build La Sala de San José, a dance hall added to the Historic Santa Fe Foundation Register of Properties Worthy of Preservation in 2015, and a wonderful space now for art exhibits and events.

The 1950s brought drought, and the village began the final change to what we know visually today, as small ranches and farms were sold, ancestral homes abandoned. Ranches were consolidated in the sales, and the village itself attracted “…Anglos ‘of a special kind,’ who began to buy up inexpensive old adobes, a trend that off in the 1960s and has barely faltered since, though prices have risen exponentially.” Rural electricity and water treatment arrived and the village became a magnet for artists/creatives, slanting as time went on towards an older, more affluent population.

The book is a history of the village, but even more so an examination of a cultural landscape where history, geography, and different cultures shaped a home land. Lippard calls this “the vortex of land and lives….” Acequias, as everywhere in Northern New Mexico, were key in ensuring livability, and there were three functioning in the village in the late 1800s. In 1926, severe flooding destroyed the ditches and in an interesting note, Lippard says that there is very little oral history remaining about the ditches, since they were not there for this oldest group of elders born in the nineteen twenties and thirties, “…so their memories do not include working acequias.”

Lippard has done exhaustive research about her adopted village, and written an engaging book. The photographs are exquisite, giving a whole sense of time and place to the present. It is a weighty work of scholarship that creates a living history of Galisteo, but also places it in the greater context of trends and actions in the greater Southwest.

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