Taos is the best example of Pueblo Indian life in the southwest today. A collection of meticulously maintained cubic adobe houses the color of the earth, and brightly painted purple and blue doors that remind one of the omnipresence of an azure sky, Taos reflects the pride of people that have maintained a village here for over five hundred years. The village provides a welcome contrast to the chic, commercialized ski town just a mile to the south that shares the pueblo’s name, and very little else. Taos is one part of a larger system of pueblo culture that includes nineteen villages in New Mexico that share a common language, mythology, and political structure. Unlike Indian
tribes living in other regions of the United States that experienced cultural genocide as the result of forced relocation to other areas, the Pueblo Nations live today much as Spanish explorers encountered them in 1539. Visit Taos today and you will see signs of Western cultural influence – the glow of TV inside a living room, air conditioning units resting on window sills – but you will also see sun-dried jalapenos hanging in neat rows beside the laundry, and a modest plot of corn growing to the east of the main village. You are also reminded, standing on one side of a fence that demarcates land designated for pueblo use only, that no matter how long Taos coexists with a ski town to the south, no matter how many come to pay the ten dollars to wander through the village, you will always be considered an outsider here.