PrintA Taos Elder Speaks
Taos elder Joe Martinez
photo by Ellise Pierce
“I was born on the north side of the Pueblo. There were three brothers besides me. We were delivered by a midwife. My father was a farmer and my mom was a homemaker. We were just surviving. Corn, beans, and pumpkin. Wheat, also. Alfalfa for the horses.
“The farm was two to three miles from the Pueblo. It was quite a task for us to work in the fields for us young kids. We worked together with our dad. Those were our obligations. It was a hard life. We worked together and without pay.
“Mom would cook for us and we’d take lunch to the fields. We were very poor and Dad used to hunt quite a bit, and we had venison and corn, and she’d make posole out of it. She cooked that over the night and we had pinto beans also, and the next day we’d have it and take it to the fields and warm that up and that’s what we’d have.
“Our summer project was to work in the fields. During the winter you had to go to school. It was walking distance to the [Taos] Pueblo Day School. That’s where I started my education and after that, the Santa Fe Indian School. We stayed in dormitories. We’d go in September and come home at Christmas and somebody would pick us up at the end of the school year.
“I went to Bacone College in Muskogee, Oklahoma, and wanted to be an X-ray technician, but when I saw the blood, I changed my mind. I became a welder and joined the Air Force and joined the welding shop. I was a survey welder in Colorado Springs for the NORAD station in ’64 and ’65, and, of course, I was the only Indian. I used to sleep in my car, a Pontiac four-door hardtop Bonneville. It was white with a black interior.
“As I was growing up, we used to make adobes, so I learned how to do plastering. So when I came back home, I applied for the job to restore the Pueblo. That was 1987. The Pueblo was falling apart. I couldn’t believe how bad it was.
“We started in the spring of ’89 and it took five years. I prayed every morning before I went to work that it would work out all right. Elders would be inspecting the job almost every month.
“It was named a World Heritage Site in ’92. It cost $1 million to restore the Pueblo.
“It felt great because when I was standing there in one of the rooms, I looked up through the skylight and I could see the corner of one of the buildings on the north side, and that was the room that I was born in.”
See more on Taos Pueblo in the June 2010 issue.
