Mesilla

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Looking for Santa Barbara

Saturday, September 15, 2012 in Mesilla, New Mexico | 2 comments

Yesterday I wrote about the Saint Lady of Mesilla, Francesca de Garcia, who paints retablos which are devotional paintings of the saints and Virgin Mary. A reader asked me to look for a Saint Barbara. “I used to throw a Feast of Saint Barbara party every year because when I was looking for a good time to have a housewarming shortly after Thanksgiving, that was the name on the first Saturday in December,” she wrote.

I should have mentioned that Francesca has a website where you can purchase her retablos (according to her web site, she’s sold some 75,000 “Little Saints” in the past 15 years). She has painted “over 400 different folkart images of Catholic saints, religious icons, angels and name sakes and pre-religion prophets.” I’m not sure what pre-religion prophets are but you can find them at www.saintsandfolkart.com. And, of course, she has a Santa Barbara.

 

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The Saint Lady of Mesilla

Friday, September 14, 2012 in Mesilla, New Mexico | 3 comments

The Saint Lady of Mesilla

Retablos painted by The Saint Lady of Mesilla. Photo by David Lansing.

In the afternoon, I went looking for The Saint Lady. The saint lady is Francesca de Garcia. The last time I was in Mesilla, Garcia had a little shop called Casa de Santiago—House of the Saints—where she sold inexpensive retablos of over 200 saints, many I’d never heard of before.

Garcia had started painting the saints shortly after her husband died, as I remembered. But Casa de Santiago was gone. Or perhaps it had moved. I went into a shop selling bright red ristras not far from the old plaza and asked the woman there if she knew what had happened to The Saint Lady, fearing she had died. The woman said she was still around.

“She usually sets up at the Mercado on Friday afternoons,” she said. “If she’s feeling well.”

I walked over to the Mesilla Square and soon found her retablos. But she wasn’t around. An older gentleman said she was in Las Cruces. Like I said, The Saint Lady painted every saint you could imagine but her specialty seemed to be the Virgin Mary.

There were dozens of them on the table in the plaza. There was Our Lady of Refuge and Our Lady of Sorrows and Our Lady of the Snows. You could buy Our Lady of Czestochowa-Poland or Our Lady the Virgin of Charity (Cuba) or Our Lady of Guadalupe (several versions of this Mexican icon).

Our Lady of Copacabana.

I ended up buying Our Lady of Copacabana, the patron saint of Bolivia. I liked the way she looked. Very, very stylish. Like Madona. The rock star, not the virgin. And I liked that there was a Virgin of the Copacabana. It wasn’t like she was the patron saint of nightclubs or anything, but I didn’t care. I liked the idea anyway.

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La Posta de Mesilla

Thursday, September 13, 2012 in Mesilla, New Mexico | 2 comments

La Posta in Mesilla has been serving up tacos “to eat with your fingers” since 1939. Photo by David Lansing.

I got to Old Mesilla around eleven and realized I hadn’t had dinner last night or breakfast today and I was hungry. I was still thinking about Janine and the guy with the gun but there wasn’t anything I could do about it at this point. I parked near the plaza which was empty except for a couple of kids playing up on the bandstand which had flags of the U.S. and Mexico, crossed, painted on the façade of the roof. I was thinking maybe I’d have lunch at La Posta, if it was still around. It was a good New Mexican restaurant. Not great, but good.

The last time I’d been to La Posta was about 20 years ago, when I was working for Sunset magazine, and I was writing a story about retro highway diners. I’d gotten the idea from a framed copy of a Life magazine article from July 1, 1957, hanging on the wall in La Posta. The article was titled “Roadside Inns and their Fine Foods” and included a story about La Posta as well as The Crab Broiler in Seaside, Oregon; Nepenthe in Big Sur; and the Ojai Valley Inn in Ojai. I’d been to all of them many, many years ago.

It was something to think about Life magazine writing a story about La Posta 55 years ago and how the restaurant was still here, serving up the La Posta Specialty: a starter of chile con queso and corn tortillas, guacamole, red enchiladas, tamale, rolled taco, frijoles, sopaipilla, and, for dessert, an empanada served hot with ice cream, all for just $14.25. That’s what I ordered, even though I knew I would never eat it all.

Just seeing that big platter of food made me nostaligic. I’m not sure for what. Maybe for the day when even something like a taco was just exotic enough to American tastes that the La Posta menu needed to describe what it was and how to eat it: “The taco can best be described as a Mexican sandwich. Eat tacos with your fingers!”

Yes, eat tacos with your fingers. They’re best that way.

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