Good night, dear readers. Tonight’s good night is Chima Altar III (1992), carved and painted wood with metal, glass beads, string, and nails, by Luis Tapia. Tapia has carved the entire dashboard, and view through the windshield of an old pickup truck driving through the stunning landscape near the holy pilgrimage site of Chimayó, and he’s made of it an altar. Orange carved fans crown the two windshield panels like the shell-tops of a colonial retablo, above a scalloped red valance where a lowrider would string its velvet curtains. Through the orange-framed glass a New Mexico highway runs straight out across the high desert — piñon dotting the pale ground, blue mountains waiting at the horizon, a green road sign, a sky scrubbed clean. From the rearview mirror hangs a rosary, and set into the mirror, where a driver would meet his own eyes, is the Eye of God in its triangle, watching the road ahead. Two small santos ride the dashboard, Santa María in rose and San Francisco in blue, keeping watch over the miles. The steering wheel is a crown of thorns, its spikes made of real nails, closed around a cross and a flaming Sacred Heart — the wheel a body must grip in both hands to drive. Tapia was born in 1950 in Agua Fría, a village outside Santa Fe and one of the oldest Hispano communities in this country. He taught himself the four-hundred-year-old art of the santero, the New Mexican maker of saints, and then did the braver thing and refused to let it fossilize, carrying the tradition into jail cells and across borders and onto the dashboards of oldies trocas. The Chima Altars — he made about six — come from a memory of his mother’s car, the little saints she kept on the dash, the rosaries swaying from the mirror. “Chima” is Chimayó, the old town in the northern hills where the faithful still walk for miles to reach a room of holy earth. His santos now stand in the Smithsonian; this one, fittingly, stayed home, in the collection of the Albuquerque Museum. In 2023 the nation named him a National Heritage Fellow. Every drive through New Mexico is a small pilgrimage, and every dashboard an altar to whoever we are asking to see us home. The saints propped on the dash, the beads on the mirror, the burning heart gripped hard in both hands on the wheel — these are the plain equipment of people who have always known the road is dangerous and gone down it anyway, protected by nothing but faith and one another. The way home has never once been safe. Setting out regardless, saints riding shotgun, is close to the whole of the courage available to us. Sleep well. — Alisa 📿
