RAY SANDOVAL FUNDAMENTALLY CHANGED a beloved Santa Fe institution: Zozobra. That was twelve years ago and he is still taking a lot of heat for it.
The last few years, I volunteered at Zozobra and saw Ray in action. He’s an eye in the hurricaine who through charm, persistance, and work ethic pulls together hundreds of folks to give up thousands of hours to put on the keystone civic events he manages – Zozobra, Fourth of July, Dia de los Muertos, New Years Eve.
No one I know in Santa Fe has better insight into how to fix what’s broken with our city, or a deeper love of the best things we have. Plus, he’s a riot to hang out with.
Keeping traditions alive takes work, and I don’t know anyone who works harder than Ray.
Zozobra changed when you took charge in 2013. After working as a volunteer last year, I went home and looked on Facebook to see a wave of critical, often nasty, remarks. How do you deal with this kind of vitriol?
We all have feelings, and we all want to be liked. We all want to do something that we feel is moving our community forward. When I took over this role and I started getting that criticism, it was awful. It devastates you. There were times for two weeks afterward, I’d be moping around. So, I decided early on that I needed a better attitude, and the attitude was to flip it around and say, you know what? Isn’t this amazing how much people care about this tradition?
A little bit of that is you’ve got to lick your wounds. But it is true, we get criticism on every aspect of the show. I would be worried if I got no criticism, because then it would say that the community no longer cares. Once you get through some of the hurtful things that people say, they have a point of view. You can’t say that this monster belongs to Santa Fe, but it only belongs to the people who agree with you.
difficulty in getting things accomplished.
Putting on events in the city of Santa Fe is like playing Twister naked over a candle. We owe it to ourselves to make sure that we have events that represent us as a community, these events where we literally come together and see each other — there’s not enough of that. I’m guilty of this too; I go to dinner and I’m on my phone.
That’s what makes it easy to demonize somebody – because when we come together and we interact with one another, then we’re all in the same boat. We’re all human beings. We all want the same thing. We want to be safe, we want to be loved, we want to have shelter. It’s important for us to not get desensitized. Number one is how do you create events that keep people coming together? Zozobra is the biggest tightrope because everybody has in their head what Zozobra is.
I read the same stuff and people hold up the 1980s like this sacred place in Zozobra. Maybe I’m missing something. I’ll go back and watch those shows and, if I presented that right now, I would be thrown out of town.
The only way traditions survive is if they’re in the lifeblood of the community. How do I ensure that young people are going to continue this tradition when I have to compete with 3D-augmented-reality video games?
Is there a ritual to the Zozobra? Absolutely. Are there staples? Yes. But we have the freedom to interpret them in a different way. When I first started in 2013 and we first did our first art contest we had 20 drawings and they all looked the same. This year, it’s 600 entries. Kids started saying, hey, I can dress up Zozobra any way I want to. That’s the magic, that if you can bring Zozobra to them and have it matter to them. Now, the question for everybody is, oh my God, what’s he gonna look like? What’s he gonna wear?
The 100th Anniversary has turned into a big deal.
This is not a criticism of anyone, this is an observation: The city turned 400 years old. We had a small concert at Fort Marcy, and that was it. Even Fiesta’s, a couple of years ago it turned 300 years, and for one of the oldest continuous celebrations in the United States, I don’t feel like we got our due. Indian Market turned 100 last year. They had an amazing display in the History Museum, but I didn’t see that on CNN.
Two years ago, we decided that we would invite the public to come together and help plan the centennial. This is their monster, right? We started out with 27 projects because we wanted to make sure that at the end, we had five or six. I was at our last meeting two days ago. We’re at 25 of 27 completed projects. We probably overdid it.
If you ever read anything about Will Shuster, the Zozobra creator, he loved spectacle and he loves things bigger and better. We have a hot air balloon. We have a 25-foot statue that’s gonna be at the convention center. We’re doing a time capsule with a monument at Fort Marcy. We have painted Zozobra that are now popping up all over. There’s so much love and outpouring for this little monster.
One of the things that the Shuster script calls for is that when Zozobra falls, you play the Fiesta song, and the Fiesta pageantry comes out. As we used to watch the Fiesta Council come out we’d see that they brought out the Spanish flag.
I mean, I’m of Hispanic descent. I’m very proud of my heritage, but I also acknowledge that there is a lot that was done wrong. If we have the Fiesta folks come out and parade after Zozobra falls and they’re waving that Spanish flag, if I am a Native child, what does that say to me?
We won.
Yeah. So we had tough conversations with our Fiesta Council partners to say, listen, the Fiesta song has to play once Zozobra drops, but we don’t have to have that flag. Let’s put in the New Mexico flag. I will tell you when I went to them, they embraced this. What was so awesome about this is that we actually got our Native American dancers back.
I remember Doug Nava, portraying Don Diego de Vargas, invited one of the Native American dancers, he’s like 14-years-old, and handed him the New Mexico flag. He’s at the top of the stairs in all his Native regalia. It’s one of the proudest moments that I have. The whole point is that we are a community. We cannot in any way ignore our history, nor should we. But there are ways to live out our traditions but do it in a way that’s respectful to everybody who’s involved. If traditions don’t change, they die.
You’ll never burn away controversy in Santa Fe. We’re burning gloom. We’re not burning controversy. Zozobra creates controversy. But we are a people that are resilient, that learned how to live together and are still learning how to live together. I hope that we’re still that community where we can make fun of ourselves.
One of the biggest criticisms is that Zozobra is now for tourists.
When we go back and look at the statistics of people who are coming, 43,000 last year were from Santa Fe. Half of our city was at that event. So our community is showing up. Then if you look at the next 30%, it’s Albuquerque and Taos and Española and so forth. This is still a very New Mexico event.
We have the data.
People do not like to see Santa Fe change because they hold a strong idea of it in their hearts.
There is a lot of history in this town. The first thing is, come in and find out why something is the way it is. Sometimes it’s because we’ve always done it this way, and that’s not a good reason to keep doing something. I would never tell somebody, you just got here, you don’t have a point of view. Everybody has a point of view. But if you really want to get things done, you have to put the time and energy to figure out why things are the way they are and where people are willing to change. Are you willing to compromise too on what your vision is?
Our political system is designed all around compromise. That’s the problem – in our political culture, we’re so ‘this is my idea, I want to get this done, and then I want to move on to the next thing.’ The strife comes in when we have an influx of folks who want to come in and move the furniture without figuring out why the furniture is there in that place.
One of the most intractable problems we have is the obelisk.
It’s an embarrassment. When it happened, I would have removed the entire obelisk and left the center of the plaza open. Maybe people would start liking the plaza open. Maybe there’s more room to dance. Maybe you put the Christmas tree or the menorah, or you have, for Indigenous People’s Day, you put something at the center of the plaza. For African American History month, let’s put a memorial at the center of the plaza that talks about our African American community. For June, let’s do something that praises our LGBT+. We should honor veterans.
There is a false narrative that we must pick something that’s there constantly. We don’t. We could find a way so that way all of us in this diverse community are represented at some point throughout the year on the center of the plaza.
We’ve got to compromise, because not everyone’s going to agree on what goes back there, but it can’t be a reason not to act. It becomes a reminder of a bigger issue that just continues to fester. The problem is that we don’t invest time in talking to one another and working on compromises.
One of the things that I tried to do with Zozobra was to get some of our Southside Mexican community involved, and one of the difficulties is that Zozobra’s very strange. If you don’t grow up with it, it’s kind of like, what are these weird people doing? As I learned more about that community, I learned that they felt ostracized from the rest of the city.
For me, the plaza is the heart of our city. It’s what makes us so unique. I was like, how can we make something that would be fitting? So, we started Dia de los Muertos two years ago. This will be our third year. We added a glow-in-the-dark component to it, and it’s been a lot of fun. The Plaza is a special place for all of us. We should never forget the magic that it holds.
You have deep roots in Santa Fe?
My mom’s family was here on the expedition with Peralta. My dad’s family got here a little bit later in 1710. They all grew up downtown, a huge extended family. I have millions of cousins, and that kind of traditional stuff. Santa Fe is home, you know?
As a gay person, was Santa Fe a good place to grow up?
It was amazing. I was exposed to gay people all the time. There weren’t whispers. You had gay partners at picnics and Christmas parties, and it was nothing that was different or strange. I was blessed in a lot of ways to be able to grow up in that environment. It’s still scary coming out because you don’t want to disappoint your parents, but I think that it was an amazing place to grow up.
Do you think that in New Mexico there are still hurdles?
Absolutely. I think that we’re not done until that person who is struggling with their sexual identity does not consider suicide. There’s no way we’re done until that person who’s dealing with transgender issues is not going to be looked down upon, that they’re worried about which bathroom they’re going to use. In a lot of ways New Mexico is miles ahead of other places because of our culture, but I still think that we have quite a bit to do as a community. We’ve come a long way, right? But at the same time, this is nowhere near over. The other thing that we’re seeing is this backlash from the conservative part, which is very, very scary.
Are we getting better or worse?
We got to a place and then we took it for granted. Now we’re at a place where we could be going backwards very quickly. I think that that is going to take a refocus on what equality means, and it needs to be equality for all of us in the LGBTQ+ community.
We need to be a refuge, we need to be a beacon of what we can do. Human beings like to divide and label and put other people in boxes or limit their freedoms based on dogmas. If New Mexico can be that refuge for people, it’s important to do that.
I was thinking, as you asked this question, one of the things is that, from a Hispanic family, you have that machismo, right? I was in high school in the early ‘90s, and people knew I liked guys. There were times that I would hear people be like, oh, Ray’s not gay he just likes guys. What’s so interesting about our community is that people give you an opportunity to show who you are. Once you’re in, it doesn’t matter who you are, you’re part of La Familia, and if somebody talks bad about you, we’re going to defend you.
The trick that conservatives – if you can call them that now – have played on everyone is that they say when you give people rights and access, the pie gets smaller. For me, it doesn’t. When you give people rights and access, the pie gets bigger.
We all have things that make us mad and we all take the time to go onto Facebook and complain. Stop doing that. Run for office, get involved in a nonprofit. When somebody writes me a letter and tells me how much they hate Zozobra, the first thing I do is write back and I say, I really appreciate this perspective. Here’s a membership application.
I love my city. I want to share this. People should be able to live like this. People should have a place where the Plazas are the heart, where you can feel connected.
Learn more at BurnZozobra.com
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Assembling Zozobra, Photos SFM
