Three cultures, one valley

Taos gets sold as a meeting of three cultures: Native, Hispano, and Anglo. That is true, and it is also a tidy phrase that papers over a lot. So get the order straight, because it explains almost everything about how this town works.

Taos Pueblo people have lived in this valley for more than a thousand years. Spanish-speaking families have farmed these valleys since the colonial era, generations before the United States existed. The Anglo newcomers, meaning the painters and the dropouts and the ski crowd, are the recent arrivals, even the ones whose grandparents got here a century ago.

Everybody shares the valley. Nobody is interchangeable. Taos works precisely because those lines are old, real, and mostly respected.

Taos Pueblo: the thousand-year foundation

Everything else sits on top of this. Taos Pueblo is about 2.6 miles north of Taos Plaza, and the Red Willow people have lived in this valley since around 900 AD. The multistory adobe houses, Hlauuma to the north and Hlaukwima to the south, are estimated to have been built between 1000 and 1450. They looked much as they do now when Spanish soldiers entered the valley in 1540.

Taos Pueblo is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and a National Historic Landmark. It is often described as one of the oldest continuously inhabited communities in the United States.

It is also not a museum. People live there, by choice keeping a way of life going in the old village, which by tradition has no electricity or running water. The language is Northern Tiwa, and it is held close. You may hear it. It was never meant for you to collect.

In 1970, after a 64-year fight, the Pueblo got Blue Lake and 48,000 acres of sacred mountain land back from the federal government. That return matters more than most visitors realize.

Visit, and you should, but on the Pueblo's terms. It is open most of the year, but closes for ceremonies and ceremonial periods, so check before you drive out. Guided tours are offered by the Pueblo when visitor access is open. Buy directly from the makers: micaceous pottery, drums, silver, moccasins, and other works made by hand.

The Hispano roots most visitors miss

Here is what the galleries tend to skip. Long before any painter showed up, Spanish and Mexican families settled these valleys under land grants, and their descendants never left. This is the culture you taste in the green chile, hear in the place names, and see in the church.

San Francisco de Asis, the church in Ranchos de Taos, completed in 1816, is the one you have already seen even if you do not know it. Georgia O'Keeffe painted the back of it. Ansel Adams and Paul Strand photographed it. The famous angle is not the front. It is the massive sculpted adobe buttresses around the back.

What the postcards leave out: every year the parish re-muds the whole building by hand, the enjarre, the same way it has been done for two hundred years. The structure you photograph is literally remade by the people who pray in it.

That hand-built faith runs deeper than one church. The santeros carve and paint the saints, the santos, retablos, and bultos you find in museums and village chapels. Many of those chapels are moradas, the meeting houses of the Penitentes, a lay brotherhood of Catholic men that held these mountain villages together when a priest might be far away.

Then there is the water. The acequias are the communal irrigation ditches that still carry snowmelt to the fields, a system the Spanish brought from Moorish Spain and laid over irrigation the Pueblos were already doing. Each ditch has a mayordomo who runs it and parciantes who hold the water rights. Agua es vida is not a slogan here. It is the law the valley runs on.

The broken wagon wheel that started the art colony

In 1898 two young painters, Ernest Blumenschein and Bert Phillips, were hauling a wagon from Denver toward Mexico when a wheel broke on the rough road north of Taos. Blumenschein loaded the wheel onto a horse and rode into town to find a blacksmith. Phillips stayed for good and spent the rest of his life here.

They had stumbled into the peculiar otherness of Taos, and they told everyone they knew. By 1915 there were enough of them to form the Taos Society of Artists, which ran until 1927 and turned a remote mountain town into an international art destination.

The light was part of the draw. The bigger part was the Pueblo and the Hispano villages, which gave the painters subject matter no one back east had recorded in the same way. Worth being honest about: a lot of that early work romanticized the people in it. The paintings are gorgeous and the gaze behind them was complicated. Both things are true at once.

Mabel, Lawrence, and the famous people

Then came Mabel. Mabel Dodge Luhan was a Buffalo heiress who had run the most talked-about salon in Greenwich Village, got restless, came to Taos in 1917, married Tony Lujan of Taos Pueblo, and built a rambling adobe house called Los Gallos at the edge of Pueblo land.

From there she spent decades bringing writers, painters, photographers, and public figures into Taos. The guest list is genuinely absurd: D.H. Lawrence and Frieda Lawrence, Georgia O'Keeffe, Ansel Adams, Willa Cather, and others.

Lawrence got a ranch north of town, the Kiowa Ranch, where his ashes were eventually placed in a small memorial chapel after he died in 1930. Mabel's house still stands and still hosts writers and artists. She did not create Taos culture. She made the rest of the world pay attention to it.

When the freaks showed up

In 1970, Dennis Hopper, fresh off Easy Rider, bought Mabel's old house and made Taos a base for the counterculture. Communes went up in the hills. Dropouts and back-to-the-landers arrived chasing the same thing the painters had chased: a place that felt real in a country that increasingly did not.

You can still drive out and see where that went. On the mesa northwest of town, past the Rio Grande Gorge Bridge, sits the Greater World community: hundreds of acres of Earthships, off-grid houses architect Michael Reynolds started building out of rammed tires, cans, and glass bottles in the early 1970s.

They make their own power, catch their own water, and grow food inside their own walls. You can tour one or stay the night. The utopia has its cracks and its critics, like every utopia does, but the stubborn off-grid streak it stands for is pure Taos.

Taos culture right now

None of this is past tense. Taos still hosts galleries, museums, studios, theaters, music venues, writing events, and working artists. The Harwood Museum, founded in 1923 and run by the University of New Mexico, holds Taos Society work, Taos Moderns, Hispanic santos, and an Agnes Martin gallery.

The Millicent Rogers Museum has major collections of Native and Hispanic art and jewelry. The Couse-Sharp Historic Site, the Blumenschein Home on Ledoux Street, and the Taos Art Museum at the Fechin House let you stand inside the studios and homes where the work was made.

But the museums are the smallest part. The Taos Center for the Arts screens films and books music and theater. Live music turns up at Taos Mesa Brewing, the Adobe Bar at the Taos Inn, the Sagebrush Inn, and KTAOS Solar Center. SOMOS supports the literary culture. The makers never left.

The food is a three-culture story

You cannot understand Taos without eating here, and the plate tells the same story as the valley: Pueblo corn, beans, and squash, Spanish pork and wheat, and chile over nearly all of it.

Learn one phrase. When a server asks "red or green," they mean chile, and it is the official state question of New Mexico, made official by the legislature in 1996. If you want both, say "Christmas." Red tends to run deeper and sometimes hotter, green brighter. There is no wrong answer. There is a wrong move, which is not having one.

After that it is posole, blue corn, atole, tortillas, pinon nuts, and biscochitos. None of this is restaurant invention. It is what families cook, and it is the most honest culture lesson in town.

The year has a rhythm

If you want to see the culture instead of just reading about it, come for a feast day or a major local gathering. Always confirm dates, access rules, and photography rules before you go.

How to actually experience it

Practical guidance from locals who are tired of watching people do it wrong:

• On Pueblo feast days, leave the camera in the car. You were invited into something sacred, not handed a photo op. Follow the Pueblo's rules exactly.
• Buy from the makers, not the import shops on the highway. The Indian Arts and Crafts Act makes it a federal crime to misrepresent the origin of Native work. Ask who made it.
• Answer "Christmas" when they ask red or green, and know a farolito from a luminaria. These are not interchangeable in northern New Mexico.
• Slow down. The three-culture valley did not get this way by moving fast. Neither will you understand it that way.