Sigma San Jose del El Rosario Cemetery - Albuquerque

These definitely deserve their own thread. Thank you for cross-posting today. I've been meaning to open this up for days! These are very moving. I agree with you - not morbid, but a salute to that human part of us that remembers our dead as best we can, whether we can afford granite or not.
I'm from the Midwest, spent most of my life in So. IL. Most of the old headstones are limestone out here. They weather, and lichen grows on them, they even crack and fall over. Some are replaced with contemporary granite monuments, some with metal plaques, some just hauled over to a tree or the wall at the edge of the cemetery. There are people who devote themselves to finding veteran's graves and assuring that the government replaces crumbling markers with more permanent ones.
I've never seen wood or concrete markers, but near Elizabethtown, IL, in Hardin County, in the Rose cemetery there were sandstone markers, many looking like they were carved by someone who had never carved in stone before. It was very touching to me to imagine family members unable to purchase (or perhaps to obtain - I don't remember the dates and that's a sparsely settled county even today) "store bought" markers, doing their best for their loved ones.
I get that same sense here. Thank you for recording these images. I look forward to seeing more of them.
 
I've posted both of these in the cemetery thread also, where I've explained my desire to get decent shots of these simple markers that did some justice to how moving I think they are. I doubt these shots are the last word on the matter, but they represent the first time I saw a photographic opportunity while looking at them.

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HI Ruby. Thank you for letting me know your thoughts about the picture. I found the cross fallen from its base, but still held in place by a bit of wire, very moving. I've become not so much a pagan as a heretic (when I was 17, the ideas I shared with a kindly local priest shocked him, and I never looked back), but the symbols and icons one grew up with remain powerful. I certainly remember going to the stations of the cross every Friday through Lent (against my -- even as a little boy -- rebellious will). Rebellious or not, though, the sheer mantra-like incantation of the text becomes seared into one's soul.

What this little, neglected cemetery demonstrates powerfully to me is the need to love one another -- not in some fluffy, whimsical, squishy at the edges sense, but within the hard-scrabble world where time and age -- as well as anger and self-righteousness -- will overcome us. (I don't claim to be especially good at it.) Love may not save us from time, but it does save us from ourselves.
 
HI Ruby. Thank you for letting me know your thoughts about the picture. I found the cross fallen from its base, but still held in place by a bit of wire, very moving. I've become not so much a pagan as a heretic (when I was 17, the ideas I shared with a kindly local priest shocked him, and I never looked back), but the symbols and icons one grew up with remain powerful. I certainly remember going to the stations of the cross every Friday through Lent (against my -- even as a little boy -- rebellious will). Rebellious or not, though, the sheer mantra-like incantation of the text becomes seared into one's soul.

What this little, neglected cemetery demonstrates powerfully to me is the need to love one another -- not in some fluffy, whimsical, squishy at the edges sense, but within the hard-scrabble world where time and age -- as well as anger and self-righteousness -- will overcome us. (I don't claim to be especially good at it.) Love may not save us from time, but it does save us from ourselves.
I'm glad what I said had meaning for you, and I admire your whole response, especially, " Love may not save us from time, but it does save us from ourselves. "
Interestingly, I raised in the Church of Christ. Not as "low church" as you can get, but you can see it from there. I first encountered the Stations of the Cross in high school when a friend of mine a year ahead of me took me to her Epispocal church to show me the paintings she had done for it. Since then, as a half-trained historian and a tourist, I've encountered them in art often enough to have absorbed them as part of my culture if not my belief system. "Symbols and icons" are powerful indeed.

Since I lost my faith (long ago) I've felt like a complete outsider in many situations. This dialog is showing me that I need to get beyond that in my heart and allow myself to connect with the people and culture around me on a level deeper than belief systems - that I've been leaving a door shut because I've assumed "normal people" would slam it in my face "if they really knew me," but that I should open that door and let them take it from there. Thank you.
 
These images are interesting in that they reflect (presumably) the poverty of the people.

At best they are almost like Naïve art, which is surprising (for me) as I would have thought that most would be Catholics, (is that correct?). In Europe, especially, Catholic graves are far more elaborate and expensive structures.

Most seem to just "mark the spot" and (sometimes) record details of the individual rather than being anything else……. or have I misunderstood the situation.
 
No, Bill, I think you have got it right. New Mexico is still one of the poorer states, and when most of these graves were marked, was poorer still. It is, as you suspected, a Catholic cemetery, and many of the markers are homemade -- wire, metal, rebar and concrete. It's one of the things I find so touching about the place, brave even. I suspect it was never a pretty place, even when it was at the city's edge and the highway did not run next to it, but I find these acts of remembrance (many graves still are decorated at times) in the face of obvious adversity very moving, personal in a way that a large, purchased monument isn't.
 
No, Bill, I think you have got it right. New Mexico is still one of the poorer states, and when most of these graves were marked, was poorer still. It is, as you suspected, a Catholic cemetery, and many of the markers are homemade -- wire, metal, rebar and concrete. It's one of the things I find so touching about the place, brave even. I suspect it was never a pretty place, even when it was at the city's edge and the highway did not run next to it, but I find these acts of remembrance (many graves still are decorated at times) in the face of obvious adversity very moving, personal in a way that a large, purchased monument isn't.

Thanks Lawrence, in France up to some years ago you could be buried on your own property which was traditional amongst the "aristocratic" French families. But also amongst the French "peasant" class, (the word does not mean the same as when we use it in English - in French it really means a small farmer or worker on the land, the word dating back to the feudal system in the Middle Ages).
Anyway to get onto my point, there are still quite a few graves in the French countryside effectively "in your garden" or at the side of the road, "in the vines" and the "occupant" wanted to be buried in his garden or looking out on his vineyard/fields. This can shock non French people especially when they buy a "holiday home" in the French Countryside and find a grave in their garden or nearby. The graves can be quite shallow - I have an image of one which I will try to find.
I am not sure when the practice was stopped by French law, I would have to look it up………. but some of the big Chateaux can have many graves in their grounds
 
A mighty fine series, Larry. I spent most of the mornings of my early childhood on a large cemetery, together with my late great grandfather. I still remember a lot from back then, the huge old trees, the morning fog, the burials, our daily chocolate ritual and above all the wonderful human being my great grandfather was. R.I.P. K.L.
 
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This post is for my mother, whose 99th birthday would be tomorrow, March 12, had she not passed February 23. She is buried thousands of miles from where this picture was taken. It might seem like milking sorrow, but in fact, as I've explained above, I find this cemetery a heroic little place, and my mother, facing many difficulties over almost a century and never becoming bitter or plaintive, was a heroic woman, not to mention an exceedingly open and kind one.
 
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