Forgotten Alburquerque

I certify to his majesty: That I have founded a villa on the banks and in the valley of the River of the North in a place of good fields, waters, pastures, and timber, distant from this villa of Santa Fe about twenty-two leagues,... naming it the Villa of Alburquerque... There are now thirty-five families located there, comprising 252 persons, adults and children. The Church has been completed... the government buildings have been begun, and other houses of the settlers are finished with their corrals, irrigation ditches running, fields sowed—all without any expense to the Royal Treasury. – Governor Francisco Cuervo y Valdez


Alburquerque.

Once there was an ‘r’.

Somehow, it faded.

And that is the crux of this site: the essence of that fading ‘r’, a city’s evolution from one form into another, and how it came to pass.

Others have written of it, of course, but the story is Albuquerque’s in the end. It is the story of two cities, once separated by a few miles of barren land, but now interlaced and dependent, though sometimes uneasy, sometimes resentful.

One city was La Villa de Alburquerque, founded on the shores of the Rio Grande in 1709, amid the ruins of the Tiguex pueblos that had fallen to the myriad diseases of the Spanish settlers. It was a quiet place, despite the occasional Comanche raid, and soon it was seemingly forgotten, first by its sponsors far to the east, then by its stewards, far to the south. The settlers lived their own way, and became their own people: Nuevo Mexicanos.

The other city, founded nearly 200 years later: New Town, built beside the river’s modern twin, the AT&SF railroad. It was an American city, an Anglo city, and it rapidly filled with Easterners seeking the healing air of the Southwest.



The New Town grew with industry. La Villa de Alburquerque withered, its citizens seeking jobs elsewhere. Soon, La Villa de Alburquerque seemed dead; for many years it stood all but abandoned, its falling and empty buildings now referred to as the Old Town.

But, something strange happened, because La Villa de Alburquerque did not die, and New Town never took its place. Rather, a peculiar alchemy occurred: the New Town continued to grow in all directions, soon utterly absorbing the Old, but in the meantime the citizens of the Old had moved into the New and changed it from the inside. Suddenly, there was only one town, but it was neither of the ones that had preceded it. It was Albuquerque, a town of synthesis, its name steeped in the Spanish heritage of the Villa, but clumsily pronounced by Anglo tongues, misspelled on maps by Anglo hands. La Villa de Alburquerque and New Town were both gone, and Albuquerque stood in their place.

The ‘r’s absence, then, is one of compromise, of blending, of the way a city changes into something different than the sum of its components, and something more.

And yet, despite its seeming sacrifice, the ‘r’ reappears from time to time like an omen, or a ghost. It is in the speech of the old citizens, a dimly remembered. In Rudolfo Anaya’s book Alburquerque it is a lament for what is gone.

Perhaps the last stronghold of the ‘r’ is in the long-standing nickname of our city, “Burque”. Recently, in a bid to make the city more ‘marketable’, the Mayor announced his intention to brand Albuquerque as “The Q”. An immediate groundswell of contempt met his pronouncement, and now the ‘r’ serves as a rallying cry:
Soy de Burque!