I am Genízaro! I am a Genízaro! Soy lo que soy, I am what I am; I am from the past, heading for the future. Soy Genízaro; I am a Genízaro. And I ask you at this time to proclaim it along with me, Soy Genízaro; I am a Genízaro and I will keep this beautiful secret a secret no more.
– G. Benito Córdova
There’s so much more to Abiquiú than Georgia O’Keeffe.
– Delilah Trujillo, Genízaro
Poet’s Introduction: I’ve always wanted to write about the people of mixed descent from the Abiquiú land grant who came from the multi-directional, primarily Indigenous slavery that my family came from and who eventually dispersed from there. I’ve always tried to imagine what they went through, being captured and traded, all the small children tied up and taken. It’s a poem about a young girl escaping; her name is Inocencia. I also imagine that she is a weaver in the Rio Grande tradition, a prominent theme I’ve threaded through some of my fiction. I am a weaver from a generational family in the Upper Rio Grande and spend time with the weavers, sheepherders, and colcheras who have taught me how to dye wool with some of the local plants that also color this poem.
Inocencia
quarter moon waxing
candle lit by my mother
when the moon is on its back it means the rain is coming
she says pouring river water from a tin pail into a black pot
over open flame porous lava rock glowing
before dawn the men found me where I slept inside a hard chill
inside the boulders inside the blanket torn
rags she wraps my blood-stained feet in warm wet strips
white ice edging the river rushing below me lulling
I didn’t mean to fall asleep
it was not the first time I had run easy to track
still young they’d come to expect this
the men spitting laughter down the embankment
horse hooves pushing basalt sifts
down through the boulders to wake me
lassoed lifted
blanketed bundled
tight roped
rough and cutting ties
me to the saddle behind
my father I could no longer feel
my extremities bare and numb unbridled
velvet steam leading us out
through the sweet scent through the mouth
of the canyon we emerge out of darkness
away from the moon where she lay on her back drowning
boiling rainwater black hollyhock and yarrow
she wraps my feet as the layers of dawn as
we emerge from the canyon I am blinded by
yellow fields wrapped in yellow sun dawning pollen
it was not the first time I had run
babies without
mothers roped tied
slept cried
on the hard surfaces of their own
cold calloused bodies distilling
black pools of night lit by the chains
of dandelions my mother wears in her hair
boils in a pot to immunize herself
to carrying the dead bodies
in her body and the living ones weeping
willow bark seeping into
wounds they carry me back to
my wedding wearing
rose oil peddled she washes
my hair petaled tied
feet wrapped burning
match the color of the white dress and the flowers
she hides in my hair
Karen Vargas is a writer and weaver in the Rio Grande tradition from northern New Mexico. Her poetry has been published in Epoch, Borderlore Journal, Catamaran Journal, La Palabra: The Word is a Woman Series, and others. She is a Sun Valley Writers’ Conference Fellow, a Plain View Fellow, and a Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics Summer Exchange Fellow. She received her MFA in Creative Writing at the Institute of American Indian Arts and lives six miles east of the Rio Grande Gorge with her husband and two dogs.
Header image: A weaving by Karen Vargas, 2025: Gray Wolf at Pre-Dawn on the Rio Chama. Wolf hair and Churro sheep wool dyed with indigo and iron rust, 18 x 22.
