Grandma and the Lost Boys

For a class -- I had to make a movie -- I chose to use my grandmother's story -- some of my story in search of her history -- and the pictures I got to take when I peeked inside the main building.
If I figure out how to link the video, I will post it...
Here is the text:

Grandma and the Lost Boys

New Mexico Villages and Cultural Landscape

Digital Story Narrative

May 1, 2012

 

       My father decided I should be the family historian when I was ten.  He told me to talk to his mother, Enriqueta (Varela) Cabrera, to find out about her time at an Indian School in Santa Fe, NM.  We called her Grandma Camarillo, but everyone else called her Katie.  At 10, Grandma Camarillo seemed a formidable woman: stoic, strict, serious.  My mother said about her, "She holds things in."  When I asked my grandma about the Indian school, she said, “I can’t remember.”  Thwarted, I didn't pursue it, and before I knew it, she was gone.

       I took up the search for her history again four years ago.  My parents and I embarked on the needle in a haystack tour.  First we spent a frustrating week digging through death certificates and walking cemeteries in El Paso, trying to piece together how my grandma, and her siblings, went from their family home in Juarez to an Indian school in Santa Fe.  Her father and mother died within a year of each other, leaving five orphans with an “aunt” with five of her own.  My father always said, "Tía Juanita went to the church and told the priest she needed help."  And the orphans ended up in Santa Fe.

      Next, we pulled into the Santa Fe Indian School - months after the original buildings were demolished: their remains in piles around the grounds. It felt like a bad omen – my grandma's story buried under rubble.  The people said it was unlikely she had ever been there.  Just as I began to feel discouraged, a woman suggested my grandma might have been at St. Kate’s – another Indian boarding school up the road. 

St. Kate’s turned out to be St. Catherine Indian School, perched behind two cemeteries, up a curvy street that turns into a dirt road before you reach the front gate.  The next morning, we drove up to that gate.  The sign said no parking, but as my father observed, “It doesn’t say no trespassing” – the unlatched lock seemed to beckon us in. We walked tentatively up the main road.  My mom and I were drawn to the pictures on the walls, and the sandia plant snaking along the building.  Tangles of bushes obscured the landscape as we wandered aimlessly; then my father exclaimed, “This is it! This is my mom’s school.”  I was skeptical.  I saw a bell tower perched atop a three-story adobe building.  “There’s no way that's original,” I thought. 

Some googling revealed St. Kate's was built in 1887 with money from Katharine Drexel, an heiress.  Who built three story adobes back then? Or ever?  My father insisted, "This is my mom's school; I saw a picture of her in front of that building.”  My parents went sight seeing, and I went to the archive.  Sifting through the “vertical file” I read St. Kate's history:  the closing in 1998, Drexel's canonization in 2000, and there it was, that building … the largest adobe structure in North America, built to Drexel’s exacting standards. 

In 1885, Miss Drexel became an orphan, again, when her father died.  Her mother died soon after she was born. Like my grandma, she and her sister were sent to their tíos.   But, she was not your typical orphan: returned to her father and his new bride, she was raised a socialite. At 27, she was unmarried and wealthy, and in that sense unprotected; she understood what it was to be alone in the world.  Miss Drexel became Mother Katharine, founding the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament for Indians and Colored People in 1892, dedicating her fortune to helping those she considered the most needy: Indian and Black children.  St. Catherine, her first school, came to be called St. Kate’s, after her.  I believe they renamed my grandma Katie because they couldn't pronounce Enriqueta. But, I bet she was one of many orphans also baptized Katie: in the naming, symbolically claiming these orphans.

 One cold February morning last year, I was allowed into the main building.  Shut up since the closing, it was said to be inhabited only by “vandals” and pigeons over those ten years.  The workman with the key watched me take pictures of the mural room.  Unwilling to go past the hallway, he looked frightened; so I asked him if he thought the building was haunted.  He shrugged, but his eyes told me that he did.  Undeterred, I plunged into the building.  I had two hours and just my camera’s flash to light my way.  I deliberately walked every hall and room, down the corridors and up the stairs.  The thick adobe walls held ten years of cold.   But I was moving too fast to let it catch me.  I tried to feel its past inhabitants.  Were there restos of my grandma here?  Where had she slept?  I climbed all the way to the bell tower and found cots long forgotten in the eaves. 

       The newspapers told of vandals breaking in and trashing the building.  But it wasn't vandalism I found, instead I discovered people had lovingly lived here, as lovingly as possible in a building with no heat, electricity or running water.  They had left the classroom paintings intact.  No, they hadn't been vandals… I imagine them as young boys… the lost boys… boys without a place to go.  “You can rest here,” I imagine this building beckoned.  “Take what you need, what you can.”  They accepted the refuge of this place created for children in need.  On their bedroom walls, there were messages others might call tagging. These boys had claimed this space, used it as a place to have their say, made it their home.  The building had come full circle a sanctuary built by an orphan for children in need, claimed by boys with no place to go. 

       It is still heartbreaking to not know my grandma's story, but I have learned something about this place that took her in.  St. Kate's has a magic about it and I can imagine her protected there.