The Love of Place — Querencia — and the Difference It Makes

Thinking more and more about cities in California, Texas and Arizona these hot and desolate days, I’m realizing that many of the big urban areas with the worst problems have been allowed to metastasize and decay because they aren’t, or really can’t be, loved anymore by those who inhabit them and make choices and decisions about them.

When you love your home and community, you tend to go out of your way to take special care of them. When you love another person, more likely than not you lavish attention and deep kindness upon them. That’s as close to being a human rule of thumb as there is. It’s the basis of the golden rule and all positive morality. But when love isn’t there, things tend to go wrong.

That’s why querencia, a term Rudolfo Anaya defined as “love of place,” is the bedrock source of the wisdom of home and tradition in New Mexico. The great historian, horticulturalist and writer from the Embudo Valley, Juan Estevan Arellano, wrote querencia is “a place where one feels safe, a place from which one’s strength of character is drawn, where one feels at home.”

Being an Anglo newcomer when I arrived at UNM in 1958, querencia was not in my vocabulary at first, having left Southern California, an increasingly unlovable and unloved place swamped by hordes of people looking for a paradise to colonize. But when I started writing about New Mexico in the 1970s, a group of friends who were also mentors — including writer and professor Sabine Ulibarri, political analyst John Cordova and historian Gilberto Espinosa — gave me the sense that querencia was the one word that stood for what I instinctively believed in and was struggling to write about.

For reasons that are still beautifully mysterious to me, the moment I crossed the state line into New Mexico in my old Ford Mainliner, I was overcome by a feeling of exultation, of being “at home at last,” a feeling that I had no words to express. Querencia became immediately a part of my life without me knowing it, and slowly became an idea that I could try to inhabit and understand. I didn’t feel comfortable using the word until several years ago when I had conversations with Levi Romero, Estevan Arellano, Miguel Gandert and Enrique Lamadrid, and only then as a reference point, not a word that belonged to my upbringing, but one that I certainly belonged to now as a person who considers New Mexico his long-lost home.

Last year a beautifully thought out and deeply meaningful book about that word called Querencia: Reflections on the New Mexico Homeland was published by the University of New Mexico Press and edited by Vanessa Fonseca-Chavez, Levi Romero and Spencer R. Herrera. It’s a book that everyone who loves the land, the people, the traditions and state of mind that is New Mexico should read cover to cover.

The book’s introduction, by Levi Romero, is called “Mi Querencia: A Connection between Place and Identity.” Its 15 chapters include “Remapping Patriotic Practices: The Case of the Las Vegas 4^th of July Fiestas,” by Lillian Gorman; “The Long, Wondrous Life of Ventura Chavez,” by Simon Ventura Trujillo; “Deep Roots in Community: Querencia and Salt of the Earth,” by Karen R. Roybal; “Erasing Querencia from Los Alamos: Racist and Sexualized Portrayal of New Mexican Women and Place in the Television Series Manhattan,” by Myrriah Gomez;

“La Querencia: The Genizaro Cultural Landscape Model of Community Land Grants in Northern New Mexico,” by Moises Gonzales and “La Llorona as Querencia: Shared Stories and Sense of Place,” by Kelly Medina-Lopez. The other chapters are equally fascinating and informative.

Reading “Querencia: Reflections on the New Mexican Homeland,” I can see more clearly why some towns and cities in the urban Southwest are more successful than others in struggling with climate change not only to survive but to maintain their identity and sense of place.

Las Vegas, New Mexico, for instance, seems so rich in querencia that droughts, economic booms and busts and the whole range of urban social and behavioral ills have never really broken the city’s sense of community solidarity, inner strength and pervading civility. Granted, I feel particularly at home in Las Vegas, but one of the reasons is that at every turn it conveys even to outsiders like me the feeling that the city and its history are still profoundly and happily loved by its citizens, who in turn warm-heartedly welcome others who feel the same way.

Conversely, one can see how the absence of querencia can lead to horrific environmental abuses and their attendant social disasters. The power elite in the country at large — the military, the corporate rich, and the political upper class, to quote C. Wright Mills — feel no love for the cities they colonize and milk for riches and clout. How could you pollute the groundwater with jet fuel and fire retardant and heaven knows what else, all around the country at all or most all Air Force bases, and have any care, affection or identity simpatico at all for where you are? How could you come into a place and plaster it with your corporate logo at every turn, vandalizing local landscapes just for PR and advertising if you had even a drop of querencia for where you are?

Not only are these unloving acts, they are arrogantly antagonistic. The opposite of querencia it seems to me is bald or disguised hostility. And if that’s the case, localities across each state in the country need to reawaken to the extent of the abuse and exploitation they’ve suffered and find ways to replace their acquiescence with pragmatic resistance and insistence on reparation.

This is particularly true in Albuquerque. We’re a place redeemed by large islands of querencia. But our leaders over the years have often allowed other parts of the city to be culturally overrun by outside commercial colonizers replacing whole sectors of the economy — like office supplies, hardware stores, and book sellers — with companies that care nothing about local culture, values, history or tradition. And these same political and commercial leaders have been unconscionably soft on cleaning up military industrial pollution as well, which seems to me to display a shameful lack of self-respect.

Perhaps we can start thinking out loud again about such matters in this year’s mayoral election. Perhaps we’ll hear from candidates whose love of place goes beyond easy talking points, someone who’s committed to enlisting all of us who love Albuquerque to get involved again, to actively care and participate in solving real problems in real ways, and to make sure love of place guides new growth and is at the heart of our efforts to protect and conserve our water, combat crime, poverty, homelessness, systemic racism and misogyny and the insult and public health dangers of pollution.

*Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it