TWENTY YEARS AGO, Sofia Márquez was one of the most successful architects in Santa Fe, with some of the city’s biggest projects on her docket.
Then change came – a gender transition, a divorce, and a global recession combined to see many of her clients abandon her. So Sofia returned to the land, the same land her family had known for eleven generations as ganaderos, ranchers at the bottom of the San Luis Valley along the Colorado/New Mexico border.
The land doesn’t judge you. It demands only your work. Sofia went to work, and rediscovered who she was. She’s back with new projects and a sense of purpose that’s deeply rooted in this beautiful place.
What brought you to the San Luis Valley?
Both my folks were from the Valley. I was the architect for the National Hispanic Cultural Center and did quite a bit of research. In eleven generations, I had seven Pueblo grandmothers back in the late 1600s and into the early 1800s. On my mother’s side: Spanish, Mexican, French, and Italian. On my father’s side, Spanish, Mexican, Southern Ute and Northern Apache. If you look at the color of my skin and the shape of my nose, you’ll see some of that inheritance.
But we did not inherit one acre, one cow, one horse, one dollar bill. We bought this place and closed on it in 1993 – we just celebrated our 30th anniversary. We started from scratch and built it up to about 34,000 acres.
You were a successful architect in Santa Fe, focused on residential design. What changed?
After the housing bubble burst back in 2008, when everything collapsed, there was something like 35 or 40 architecture office closures in Santa Fe.
At the time, I was doing an 18,000 square foot house in Las Campanas for a software pioneer. I was doing a huge cabin complex on the Pecos River for a well-known Santa Fe couple. I was doing one of the most beautiful adobe houses I’ve ever done, house and studio and guest house for one of the most famous movie stars in the world and his beautiful wife, who is a painter. I was doing several other projects, including a ranch for another well-known celebrity down in Ruidoso.
All those projects just ended. It was like the faucet got shut off, everything stopped abruptly. It was a tough time. I remember sitting at the bar in La Choza talking to a realtor whose entire business just failed within a year. There were a lot of us in the same boat. Hardware stores closed, suppliers, window companies in Santa Fe that had been in business for years and years, they shut the doors.
Luckily, I had a place to go. I wasn’t going to deal with having to scrape the bottom of the barrel for bad clients and bad projects and try to make it in a way that I wasn’t comfortable with. Instead, I came back here and kept the ranch going. I lived in this little adobe house, built in 1889. For fourteen years, eight months, six days, I had no running water, no electricity, no indoor toilet, no refrigerator, freezer, washer, dryer. I cooked everything on a wood stove, used an outhouse at 20 below zero. You gotta do your business fast.
It was a shelter from the storm, in the true sense of the word. Living in this adobe house with 60-mph winds, snow piled up, I felt like the little piggy who had built his house out of brick. It’s so safe and secure, you feel sheltered and it’s so warm with the wood stove. We raise our own beef. I have neighbors who provide lamb. I have a lot of farmer friends who I bought vegetables from, friends who had chickens. I never lacked for anything to eat and had a safe piece of ground where I could shut the gates at night. Then during the day, a beautiful ranch to run around and ride horses and run cattle and farm hay and finish raising my family.
A person doesn’t know how tough they really are or what they’re willing to endure until you face a number of challenges that come all at once. Amid a perfect storm, you have to decide, am I gonna drive my stake into the ground here and stay, or am I gonna put my tail between my legs and sell out and leave? The one thing I knew was that I wanted to keep this land.
How did you survive those hard years?
I lost the money, I lost most of the land, I lost my marriage, I lost my family as I knew it. I lost most of my friends, part of my extended family, and for religious and other reasons, they wouldn’t speak to me. But the land never judged me and the cattle just wanted to be fed, the horses and the dogs, they were my family again. They didn’t care who I was or what I’d been through, or if I was divorced or if I didn’t have money.
I held on. Built up the cow herd. The ranch got whittled down to about 300 acres. We’ve built it back up now to about 34,000 acres. But during that terrible period, I’ll be honest. I thought about it – checking out.
But I never did that. I never filed for bankruptcy. I never asked for any help financially, I fought back mostly on my own with the support of my parents and my children and the friends that I hung onto.
It gave me something to fight for, to work for, for my children, for myself, for my unborn grandchildren, and it made me stronger than I’ve ever been. It allowed me to endure and stay the person who I always was.
You clearly feel a deep connection to this land.
I’ll tell you the story of how we got this place. The woman who owned it was my father’s first-grade teacher. At the time, she was 93-years-old, and contacted us through my father to see if we wanted to buy this place, because she did not want to sell it to a rich man; she didn’t want to go through a realtor; and she did not want to use a lawyer. She said, If you can do those three things, and promise me you’ll raise your children here, I will sell you my ranch.
When the little old lady first showed us the ranch, she showed us a cemetery in the middle of the property, and said, There’s about 50 or 60 bodies back there. Promise me you’ll never disturb that area. Those are our ancestors.
I said, All these graves are unmarked. She said, I know. A lot of it happened during the fighting back in the 1700s and 1800s when people first started coming in. This became a place where they would bury these people, far from the river, in the middle of nowhere. Promise me you’ll watch over that. I said, Absolutely. We’ve never farmed it, we’ve never hayed it.
There were days when I didn’t know if I was going make it, financially, paying the mortgage, maintaining my own sanity. There’d be three-foot snow drifts outside and the wind going… and me all by myself, no partner, no husband, no wife, no nothing.
I’d get out in the middle of the night sometimes, in the moonlight, or during the day in the summertime, or in a windstorm, and I would go out and I’d pray to the ancestors, I’d pray to all the angels and saints to give me the strength to keep going. I’d stand out by the cemetery. I’d take walks in the meadow. I’d be walking along the river. I’d be on a horse, checking cattle or building fence. I just dropped to my knees at the pure beauty of this place. The beauty is what drew me. The strength of the people that worked this place before me drew me back and kept me going.
I know that sounds a little hokey in some ways, but let me tell you, man, when you wanna draw on your past or draw on the people that came before you, you feel the strength of those people because they had it a lot tougher than I did.
These last couple of years, I got electricity and running water and everything else. But after all those years that I was really working hard to maintain this ranch and still be an architect and maintain my licensure in Colorado and New Mexico — I don’t think there’s anything that I can’t deal with now.
The ranch is beautiful. What’s been the most difficult part of running it?
Aging. I turned 64 in about a month-and-a-half. I work an average, and I kid you not, 14 to 16 hours a day, six days a week. I rest on Sundays. That’s my day off. That day belongs to God. Every day belongs to God, but that day belongs to rest and God, my family, and resting. The hardest part has been aging, because when I was 30, 40, 50, I could outwork most people under the table.
Even young people that would come to the ranch would have to take a beer break at lunch. I’d be standing around and they’d be sweating, like people who are not used to working hard, and I’m tapping my foot, saying, Well, come on, eat your sandwich. We got to get going here. I’ve always loved to work, and the beauty of the ranch has been the balance that it’s provided.
This land saved my life. The ranch literally saved my life.
You’ve kept the architectural practice going as well?
I knew that I would circle back to architecture at some point because the projects kept sort of dribbling in. Nothing fantastic to speak of in that period, but certainly enough to keep going and enough to keep the juices flowing and the wheels greased.
Here I am now building up a new clientele, doing some of the best work of my entire career. I’ve just done three beautiful houses in a row. But I’m gonna change a few things up. I don’t ever want to have an office. I don’t want to have a physical building in Santa Fe anymore. I did that for 25 years. I’m going to get an Airstream trailer and have a mobile architecture studio so that I can take it to job sites. I do a lot of work in Texas. I have work in Colorado and Wyoming, and I’ll just take my studio with me. My home base will be here on the ranch.
The favorite projects of mine now are what I’m doing on the ranch for myself. One of the most beautiful and important buildings is this studio that I’m building. I think it’s going to be a fantastic piece of architecture. It’s inherently humble because the materials are 85% repurposed, salvaged materials from old log cabins, including the doors and the windows, which come from a 1937 farmhouse in North Dakota.
You’ve turned it into this place of safety.
It gave me license. At my age, I gave myself license to create a better life and a better set of circumstances and not just take anything that came through the door. I’ve always loved great clients. Great houses come from great clients. You can be a great architect, but if you don’t have a great client, you have nothing. I love to make people’s dreams come true. I’ve done public buildings, equestrian centers, hunting lodges, all kinds of stuff, but I love doing houses for people because when you do that, you create a venue for their life in a way that they never would’ve expected. I always gave way more to the client than I ever got paid for, because I want them to feel like they got the deal of a lifetime. And I am still, 39 years into my career, friends with most of my clients that are still alive, to this day.
Antoine Predock used to talk about the balance of being a creative soul. He was into motorcycles and road biking and architecture, and he did these beautiful pastels of architectural landmarks around the world.
He said, Always try to create a balance in your creative life –physically, intellectually, architecturally. If you want to make architecture, the best architecture is made by those who are versatile in the rest of their life. I was very conscious of that. The hard work on the ranch balances the intellectual creative work I get to do out of the wind and the rain and the snow. I’m old school. I still draw on a drafting board, I still build physical models. By being a physically active working rancher/hay farmer and architect, I’ve found a beautiful balance. In addition to having a family and children and grandchildren and friends and neighbors that I socialize with, it’s come full circle into now quite fulfilling, beautiful life.
Life’s too short, you know?
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