Post by Vera Marie
Alto Street neighborhood, Santa Fe
“What do you want to know about Quincy? He lived with my family.”
I “discovered” the Eppie Montoya connection in November 2001. Navajo artist Harrison Begay had written a letter to Mark Bahti, an Indian arts dealer in Tucson, in response to questions we had about Tahoma. In that letter, he mentioned Epi (sic) Montoya, a cousin of Gilbert Ortega.
Gilbert Ortega started a chain of Indian jewelry and craft stories, with the main one in Old Town Scottsdale. I called Ortega, and he said that he had met Tahoma a couple of times at Montoya’s home, but didn’t really know him well. I could talk to a daughter of the family, Francis Montoya Olguin, who, when we talked, was working in the Scottsdale store. Maybe she would know something. Or, as I put it in an e-mail to Charnell, “he said that she would know all about the relationship. (Well, hope springs eternal.)”
Francis turned out to be a font of knowledge–even though some of her stories were her own speculation and did not quite check out. I leaned on the glass counter at Gilbert Ortega’s, over the cast silver and various shades of turquoise stones, and frantically scribbled as she talked. Francis said that she was so glad that somebody was researching Tahoma.
That was only the first of many conversations–in person, by phone, and by letter, that I had with Francis. She threw herself into the project, talking to her many brothers and sisters in between our visits to see what they could remember. Eventually I talked to four of her sisters and a brother as well. I discovered the whole life story of Eppie (for Epifano) and his wife Josefina, whom Tahoma called “Mama”.
But the first treat for Charnell and me to discover was that Tahoma was not drifting through Santa Fe without roots. Although he had left the reservation and what family he had there, and claimed that he had no family, the Montoyas became a surrogate family when he needed a place to go and people to care about him.
Barela and Alto Streets, Santa Fe
Florence described in detail the small house, crowded with Montoyas that stood (and still stands) on Alto Street, near the corner of Clossen, on a hill above the Plaza in Santa Fe. On my next trip to Santa Fe, I visited the little house on Alto.
It stands in a pleasant, leafy neighborhood high above an acequea (waterway) that winds down toward the center of town.
Front of former Eppie Montoya home
A large glassed room faces the street, and behind the wooden wall separating the front from the back yard, I could glimpse the separate small adobe room that Tahoma used off and on as a studio and bedroom.
It would be easy walking distance for Quincy to take his paintings down the hill to sell to his clients around the plaza. Tahoma came and went, sometimes for weeks at a time, but he started staying with the family in 1948 and we know that he went to the State Fair with them just a week before he died in 1956. That makes his relationship with this family one of the most stable components of his short, meandering life.
Francis, it later turned out, had been living with other relatives most of the time that Tahoma lived with Eppie (not spelled Epi, as we thought) Montoya, so she had seen the Navajo artist only briefly. But thanks to her sharing, we now had one more location to add to the map of Tahoma’s activities in Santa Fe.
All photos by Charnell Havens. Please do not reproduce without permission.
