Finding “A House in Taos”

It would be difficult to find a more exciting or unlikely biography than the life of Esteban de Dorantes, the Morocco-born slave who accompanied his master on a 1527 voyage to the New World. After their vessel wrecked off the coast of Florida, he and three other survivors wandered Indigenous lands. Of the castaways, only Esteban—also known as Estevanico—learned Indigenous languages and ways. After they reached a refuge in the Spanish settlement in Mexico, Esteban subsequently led a party of approximately 100 Mexican Natives to Zuni lands, establishing the first contact between the two peoples. History takes strange turns, indeed. “The first White man that our people saw was a Black man,” the late Jemez Pueblo author Joe S. Sando wrote.

Esteban’s legacy still haunts New Mexico, a telling shadow that highlights the irony of a North African becoming the first non-Native explorer to place his footsteps here. His resourceful determination set a worthy precedent for the Blacks who arrived in the late 1800s. These emancipated Blacks believed the Southwest represented an exciting new venture—a place where racism, however poisonous, might be less prevalent than in the former slave states. As tiny Black communities emerged in the territory, these early transplants were a scattered collection of Buffalo Soldiers, ranch hands, and assorted dreamers. “Here and there are Negroes, like straggly but tenacious plants growing,” Silver City poet Anita Scott Coleman wrote in 1926.

The Black imagination of New Mexico is best expressed by the creations of poets and artists. Literary artists who have made themselves a part of New Mexico lore since the early 1900s include Coleman, Hughes, Toomer, and Jay Wright, a 1986 recipient of a MacArthur “Genius Grant” Fellowship and the first African American winner of the Bollingen Prize for Poetry.

I would add a few representatives of the 21st century to the list: Hakim Bellamy, who became the inaugural Albuquerque poet laureate in 2012, and (very humbly) myself, as the sixth poet laureate of Santa Fe (2021–2023). The continuum of Black identity in New Mexico that began in fear and flight carries on, while earlier writers provide the context for unpacking just how that identity has unspooled.

ANITA SCOTT COLEMAN (1890–1960), BORN in Mexico, lived for many years in Silver City, where she was a schoolteacher. Her Southwest-set stories won significant attention in the 1920s. Unusually, for a wordsmith living outside New York City’s Harlem neighborhood, then the literary and artistic center of Black America, Coleman was able to place stories in the major Black journals: Opportunity, Crisis, and Messenger. At the height of her success in 1926, she and her husband moved to Los Angeles, where she scripted silent films. As her career trajectory slowed, Coleman refocused her attention on raising her children and published more poetry. 

Perhaps because her father had been a Buffalo Soldier, Coleman’s main motif concerns the uplifting of her race. Often sentimental, her stories entail overcoming adversity and finding success and love. In “The Little Grey House,” for example, two lonely souls in a small Southwestern town are both fascinated by a house under construction. As they follow its progress, they dream of stability and contentment. By the time the two meet, it seems inevitable that they will marry. On a deeper level, Coleman’s stories provide insights into the day-to-day values of early Black residents, such as the belief in God, the preoccupation with financial security, and the idea of holding your head up against racial slights.

In her 1926 essay “Arizona and New Mexico—The Land of Esperanza,” she laments that Black people have made little impact on New Mexico politics and business. Nonetheless, she writes, “All which the Negro has failed to give to the industry or to the population of Arizona and New Mexico he has made amends for by his contributions to its history,” citing Esteban, Buffalo Soldiers, and Black participation in the Mexican–American War. The essay concludes with an optimistic ode to “the joyous freedom of the West. The unlimited resourcefulness, the boundless space—that either bids them stay—or baffles with its vastness.”

The word esperanza means “hope” in Spanish. Black life may be filled with risks, but Coleman’s New Mexico is full of hope.

IN AN AESTHETIC SENSE, TAOS WAS WORLDS apart from the milieu of Coleman. During the same period, patron of the arts Mabel Dodge Luhan was transforming her property into an artists’ retreat that attracted the likes of Ansel Adams, D.H. and Frieda Lawrence, and Georgia O’Keeffe. However, I find it impossible to imagine a major creative flourishing in America without the presence of Black people. At that time, Paris had the cultural powerhouse that was Josephine Baker, while Harlem and Greenwich Village produced a cohort of jazz musicians along with Langston Hughes. The Black influence manifested, however obliquely, in Taos, too.

In his 1940 autobiography, The Big Sea, Hughes writes that he composed his poem “A House in Taos” while living in Greenwich Village during a heyday of romantic bohemianism. Among friends and at parties, he began hearing stories of an alluring Southwestern vibe, “people talking about New Mexico and Taos, and about writers and artists heading west to the desert and the Indians.”

“I met a lot of exotic and jittery writers of the period,” he writes. “And the more exotic and jittery they were, the more they talked about Taos.” The mystique fascinated him until he put pen to paper to imagine it.

“A House in Taos” describes three mythic presences, Sun, Wind, and Moon, who each have a separate section of dialogue. It can be interpreted in many ways. Perhaps the poem is a hymn to the environmental forces that sculpted New Mexico landscapes, or to the interplay of Native, Spanish, and Anglo cultures that may have shaped Taos as a spiritual and artistic haven.

Or was the poem a spiritual eruption that baffled the author? “It was a strange poem for me to be writing in a period when I was mainly writing blues and spirituals,” he recalls. “I did not know anyone in Taos, nor had I ever been there.” Following its publication, however, he received “gossipy and amusing letters” supposing that the three speakers in “A House in Taos” were Mabel Dodge Luhan; her Taos Pueblo husband, Tony Lujan; and Jean Toomer, the Harlem Renaissance poet.

Luhan herself eventually heard about the poem. Hughes reports that when they met many years later, she promptly said, “My house is not a bit like that,” and extended an invitation to visit her in Taos. It is unclear if he ever took her up on it.

Hughes’s friend Toomer (1894–1967) was indeed a guest at the Luhan estate. He became fascinated with Taos and visited repeatedly from the mid-1920s to the 1940s. His intense emotional response to the town is evidenced in the prose poetry of his Taos diaries, which bears the influences of D.H. Lawrence, and a still-unproduced play, A Drama of the Southwest (1935), which stands as a meditation on Toomer’s evolving philosophy. By the time Toomer came to Taos, he had begun to question all racial classifications. Toomer’s speculations on race in his notebooks prove that the search for identity can lead to post-racial theories and questions: What is Anglo? What is Black? What is race?

AS THE LATE 1960S SHAPED THE ELEVATION of Black pride and liberation, the most important New Mexico poet influenced by the movement is Jay Wright, who stands at the high point of creative expression. He may well be New Mexico’s most undervalued Black writer. Born in Albuquerque in 1934, he briefly attended the University of New Mexico and appears to have maintained connections to the city until his mid-40s. Wright, who today lives in Vermont, used his early work to explore poverty and segregation. His 1976 collection, Soothsayers and Omens, published when Wright was 42, features “Encountering New Mexico” and “The Albuquerque Graveyard.” Both poems powerfully investigate the intersection between race and history in Albuquerque during the seventies.

Generations of Black poets since have embraced the work of social justice, including former Albuquerque poet laureate Hakim Bellamy. He is currently pursuing a law degree, which he calls an extension of “advocating for the unheard and underrepresented” in his poems.

“Being poet laureate raises the profile of Black writers in our state,” Bellamy reflects. “When we walk in and the public sees us, they can’t unsee it. By default, people are forced to reckon with the idea that our people are part of the history and the future of New Mexico.”

Like Bellamy, I look forward to the acceptance that New Mexico has never truly only been a tricultural state. I also hope for a wider appreciation for the variety of subjects and styles collected under the umbrella of “Black literature in New Mexico.” That label already includes more than a century of commentary and identity-defining work, including Coleman’s vision of industrious social uplift, Hughes’s mythic dreams, Toomer’s philosophical cultural investigations, and Wright’s protest poems. New generations will push these themes on.

Read more: In Taos, an exhibition wrangles the hidden stories of the Black cowboys who shaped the modern West.