Despite
some encroaching development from fast-growing
Taos and its ski areas, the landscape Collier
and Lee captured remains significantly unchanged.
This vista, overlooking the Chavez family ranch,
looks much the same today.
|
Con
Nombre
By
Michael Penn MA'97
Photos courtesy Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs
Division, FSA-OWI Collection
For
all his success in locating the lost souls of the
FSA files, Ketchum was for years frustrated by what
should have been his simplest find. John Collier's
photographs of the rancher's sons had him stumped.
On many fruitless trips along the high road, he began
to wonder if he would ever find that little boy and
decipher his knowing smile.
The
problem, ironically, was that some of the photographs
Collier took were identified. The photo of the boys
indicated that they lived in CŪrdova, in Rio Arriba
County. Another image named their father as Blas S·nchez.
Ketchum went to CŪrdova, a mountain town well south
on the high road, but no one knew the man. Strangely,
no one even recognized the house or the landscape.
He searched the town's cemeteries, but not only did
he not find Blas S·nchez, he encountered very few
S·nchezes at all, certainly not enough to suggest
a large family living there.
It was only in a speck of an outpost off the high
road known as Llano de San Juan that Ketchum caught
a break. A teacher there said the man in the photo
resembled her fourth cousin. "But she said, 'He doesn't
live in CŪrdova. He lives in Los CŪrdovas, way up
north,' " Ketchum says.
He got back in his Matador and drove seventy miles
across the mountains to Los CŪrdovas, seated near
Taos on the desert plateau below the range. It was
there that a man looked at the photograph and pointed
over Ketchum's shoulder toward a house. Although Ketchum
didn't know it, it was the house in which Alicia Ch·vez's
father grew up. The young boy with the devilish smile
was Gabriel, standing next to his big brother Blas,
Jr.
"You can see someone typing away in Washington, D.C.,
saying, 'S·nchez, Ch·vez, what's the difference?'
" says Ketchum. The difference, it turns out, was
the distance between anonymity and the father of a
UW-Madison colleague. The short stroll to Alicia Ch·vez's
office — and to her father's name — might have taken
Ketchum a few minutes at lunch one day. Instead, it
took fifty-eight years.
back,
1, 2,
3, 4,
5, 6, 7,
next
On Wisconsin home
