Is Taos Shangri-La, Ramadan or Tenochtitlán?

By Larry Torres, Associate Professor of UNM-Taos

Many people come to Taos every year seeking to get away from ordinary humdrum lives. They hope in Taos they will be able to find themselves through creativity, acceptance or nature. Every new resident who comes to Taos wants to be the last resident who moves to Taos and then shuts the door. But this sentiment isn’t merely a feeling limited only to the latest comers.

In 1923 Mabel Ganson-Evans-Dodge-Sterne was bored with her life of entitlement and glittering friends. She had already tired of Buffalo, NY, Florence, Italy and Paris, France, not to mention Greenwich Village and Provincetown. Seeking sexual and spiritual fulfillment she followed her reporter-journalist-lover Jack Reed to Mexico. From El Paso, via a visit to her friend Mary Austin in Santa Fe, she found her way north to Taos. It was here that she added another last name to the litany of previous husbands. It was Luhan after her Indian husband Tony.

From her salon at “the edge of the desert” Mabel began sending letters to her “movers and shakers” back east. She said, “Please come visit me; I have found Shangri-la amid the savage skyline of Taos.” And come they did.

Thomas Wolfe the writer, Carl Jung the psychologist, Jaime Angulo the linguist, Aldous Huxley the utopian and Georgia O’Keeffe the artist all heeded Mabel’s call. Martha Graham the dancer, Jean Toomer the poet, Leopold Stokowski the composer and Willa Cather the Midwestern pioneer also followed. Somehow Mabel’s drawing room salon held a fascination for the brightest minds of the first half of the 1900s.

Meanwhile, over in England, other free-thinkers on a quest for the sacred on their own terms were toying with the idea of visiting Mabel in Taos. Dorothy Eugenia Brett was the daughter of the Viscount of Escher. She had grown up being babysat by Queen Victoria herself. Her younger sister was the Ranee of---. Dorothy wanted no part of that life. She preferred to hunt and fish and be alone with her deafness and with her ear trumpet “Toby.” She conceived of a plan to form a commune of intelligent people in Taos. It would be called “Ramadan.”

First to join in her literary scheme was David Herbert Lawrence and his wife Frieda Von Richthoven. Lawrence’s spicy novels and “pornographic” paintings had certainly won him an undercover following across Europe and America. But the laws of the day dictated that such material was obscene. Add to this the fact that Frieda was the first cousin to the Red Baron of Germany and that created a tension that called for release. When Mabel invited the Lawrences and Brett to visit her in Taos, the stage had been set for a folk style Eternal City.
 
D.H. Lawrence arrived in Taos where Mabel offered him a parcel of land in San Cristóbal in exchange for the manuscript to “Sons and Lovers.” Pleasant as San Cristóbal was, Lawrence was often found at Mabel’s home working on his “Plumed Serpent” manuscript. His writings led Lawrence to see Taos as a glittering, new Tenochtitlán. The phoenix bird became his personal holy symbol of rebirth.
 
In the mid-1960s another group of free spirits came to Taos. They were the hippies. They came to visit and they stayed and became part of the landscape. The sacred spell of Taos keeps bringing them forward. The sense of the sacred will not be denied.