Ghost, logging baron, burned-down mill: An enduring, lesser-known craft is keeping Colorado history alive

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The ghost’s name is Manuel, but Josephine Lobato used to call him Eduardo.

Lobato was introduced to the ghost during her tenure as a supervisor at the Fort Garland Museum, a 19th-century military fort on the eastern edge of the San Luis Valley. By Lobato’s telling, certain visitors would exit from the infantry barracks on the historic property and tell her the place was haunted.

There was a Navajo man who was “absolutely positive that someone was in there,” Lobato said. And a woman who emerged from the building white as a sheet.

“There’s someone in there,” the woman told Lobato. “I heard the boots.”

Lobato never actually saw, or heard, any supernatural activity. Still, she figured if she was going to be stuck with a ghost she might as well get to know him. 

During those days, Lobato spent a lot of time digging through historical records, pulling up old stories and researching artifacts about the fort where she worked on a little bit of everything, from curating exhibits, to establishing educational programs, to developing a bookstore. On one trip to the Denver Historical Society, she decided to look into the ghost, and found the story of an infantryman — Manuel — who got into a fight with a fellow infantryman. 

“It looks like they got drunk, it was payday,” Lobato said. The men were locked up in the guard house and released as they sobered up. First Manuel, and then his opponent, who tracked down Manuel and shot him. 

According to the records Lobato found, the man was court-martialed and was supposed to hang, but never did. Later records showed he died of old age. “And Manuel stayed in the infantry barracks, obviously,” Lobato said. 

“So I thought, fine. OK. I guess I’m stuck with Manuel,” Lobato said. “From then on, every night I’d go to the room to lock up and I’d tell him, ‘OK Manuel, you’re on guard duty tonight.’”Now the ghost of Manuel is further immortalized in Lobato’s latest colcha, the embroidered tapestries for which she was named a National Heritage Fellow, as a blur of white yarn wearing a small blue military cap. A lot of the subjects in Lobato’s colcha pieces are a rich blend of history, religion, folklore, fairy tales and her personal experiences.

“My problem is that I’ve got an imagination,” Lobato said. “If (something) wasn’t there, I’ll put it there anyway.”

“The Ghost of Fort Garland,” as she’s calling the piece featuring Manuel, is the only colcha in her home right now, as it’s still a work in progress. The rest have been loaned to the University of Denver, in partnership with the San Luis Valley Colcha Embroidery Project, for the artist’s first retrospective, “Mi Vida en Colcha,” featuring 44 works created over four decades. The full exhibition opened Thursday and will remain on display until Dec. 4. Lobato will give a talk about her life in colcha at 5 p.m. Nov. 12 at the O’Sullivan Art Gallery in Denver.

LEFT: “Buddy and Josie, Married 50 Years,” by Josephine Lobato, 2004. TOP RIGHT: Josephine “Josie” Lobato poses for a portrait at her home, Tuesday, Oct. 1, in Westminster. (Rebecca Slezak, Special to The Colorado Sun) BOTTOM RIGHT: Lobato’s “La Sierra,” 1999.

Josie’s colcha legacy

The history of colcha can be a little hard to pin down, depending on how the craft is defined. Many scholars look for a specific stitch, the colcha stitch, a long stitch, typically of wool yarn, anchored to the ground fabric by a smaller stitch wrapped around it. The colcha stitch is highly adaptable, it can be curved and varied in length, making it fluid and painterly. Lobato said she likes that trees can sway with the stitch.

The presence of this stitch has been used to suggest the craft’s lineage, with the perplexing caveat that it’s mostly absent in Spanish and Mexican textiles considered antecedents to crafts in the Rio Grande region, where colchas are an important cultural artifact.

The history of colcha’s contemporary introduction in the San Luis Valley is easier to trace. It started with Carmen Orrego-Salas, was catalyzed by Tiva Trujillo, commercialized by Rev. Patricio Valdez and continued by Lobato. (There are, of course, many others, but these four really underpin the art form in Colorado.)

In the 1970s, Orrego-Salas, a Chilean artist, visited the San Luis Valley and held colcha workshops through the Virginia Neal Blue Resource Center, a Denver-based work training organization for women. Trujillo attended those workshops and developed a creatively and commercially lucrative embroidery practice. The resource center eventually ran out of resources and discontinued the workshops. 

In 1985, Father Pat, as he is known, arrived in San Luis and took the town’s spiritual and economic revival upon himself. He was approached by Paula Duggan and Orrego-Salas, who wanted to host a colcha embroidery workshop, similar to the ones Orrego-Salas taught a decade earlier. Father Pat recruited a group of local women through the Sangre de Cristo parish to participate in what would later be called the Ladies Sewing Circle, an embroidery workshop led by Orrego-Salas, with the hope of setting up a cottage industry to sell culturally distinct colchas to visitors and art collectors.

Lobato was working for Fort Garland at the time and attended the first workshop on behalf of the Colorado Historical Society, intending to observe from afar and take notes. But Lobato was entranced by a video of Trujillo and enamored with Orrego-Salas’ teaching charisma.

After the workshops, she promptly set off down her own path, inspired by what she’d learned, but unwilling to work with “101 different stitches,” as she put it. In fact there are 29 stitches used by the Ladies Sewing Circle, but Lobato wanted and needed only one. “It’s my magic stitch,” she said. The colcha stitch.

“There are so many ideas and ways to do colcha, that’s kind of what’s so fun about it,” said Trent Segura, an artist and collaborator with the San Luis Valley Colcha Embroidery Project. Segura is also the great-nephew of Tiva Trujillo who, like Lobato, often stitched maps and images culled from memories of her childhood in the valley. “There’s all these conversations, debates about it. Josie is very staunch about doing exclusively the colcha stitch. Any kind of deviation from that she calls embroidery, which is pretty funny.”Segura was taught how to make colcha pieces by Delores Worley, a contemporary of his great-aunt. She made him a personal embroidery kit and met him at the Saguache library, where she taught him the colcha stitch, the blanket stitch, the French knot and the lazy daisy.

“I kind of like using multiple stitches in my own practice,” he said. “I use the blanket stitch a lot. I use every stitch I can, really. I do tend to rely mostly on colcha, but I just can’t limit myself that way.”

Segura’s great-aunt, Tia Tiva as he called her, also used a variety of stitches to compose her tapestries.

“There’s so many things in that artwork that are so interesting,” Segura said, referring to a map of the San Luis Valley that Trujillo stitched in 1979. “She uses the chain stitch to show you the direction that water is flowing in the irrigation of fields. She uses French knots, she uses a bullion knot for the log cabins, she’s just very effective with her stitches.”

The market paradox

The commercialization of the colchas didn’t go as Father Pat hoped for at the time.

“The economy was so bad then, so they were trying to improve the economy in the area,” Lobato said. “And really that didn’t work out great because it’s so hard to sell. How many people have money to pay $300, $400 for one colcha?”

For her part, Lobato wasn’t interested in selling, anyway. She had a steady job at Fort Garland and was simply interested in telling the stories she grew up with, as a way to ensure neither the craft of colcha nor the stories themselves were lost to history.

In “Stitching Rites: Colcha embroidery along the northern Rio Grande,” art historian Suzanne MacAulay noted that there were also social and sentimental reasons why the women had a hard time getting their cottage industry to catch on.

MacAulay describes a marketplace paradox, whereby the more personal colcha embroideries — those with deep cultural roots or autobiographical details — were more valuable in the marketplace. But the more that creators imbued their embroideries with personal detail, the more attached they became to the pieces, and the less willing they’d be to sell.

“Ironically, the spirit of creativity that generated the art work also tended to defy the aims of the marketplace,” MacAulay wrote. 

It takes Lobato six months to a year to stitch a large colcha using the thick wool thread. That’s after she’s already researched the story she wants to tell. Each of her children has received one as a gift, another custom that defies the commercial art market practice, which hinges on a transactional relationship between artist and patron.

“Colcha gift-giving is private,” MacAulay wrote. “By refusing to sell, stitchers can hold onto these objects as personal relics of solitary, contemplative moments, of memories stimulated by the act of stitching, and of their own artistic struggles to create these pieces.” 

The women also had a practical reason to hold their pieces tightly — after the earlier attempt to establish colcha artisanship in the Valley in the 1970s, a number of pieces were loaned out for display and never returned. Dozens of works created during the Virginia Neal Blue workshops went missing in the early 1980s, as Institutions hosted shows and sold the work off without the artists’ knowledge.

An early effort to find the missing works resulted in the return of a 19-panel quilt to Saguache in 1993, but it would be another 30 years before more pieces turned up.

Last year the Arvada Center discovered nine of the original pieces in their storage, with receipts totaling $280 for the collection. The Arvada Center included the nine works in a show, then deaccessioned them and returned them to the artists’ surviving family members.

Art in the Valley

These days, the San Luis Valley is drawing in a new generation of artmakers, attracted by the lower property costs, wider skies, tight-knit artist communities and good old-fashioned inspiration.

“It’s a landscape of extremes in all ways, shapes and forms,” artist Jocelyn Catterson told The Colorado Sun in January. “It attracts a particular type of person. For some creative people, when they step into the valley they are instantly inspired.”

Idyllic valley landscapes, as well as local flora and fauna, make up a large part of the colcha imagery coming out of the 1980s workshops. But Lobato was never interested in just a pretty picture.

In “La Sierra,” for instance, Lobato stitched a conflict from the 1960s between Jack Taylor, a logging baron who bought and fenced a massive swath of land beneath Culebra Peak, and the local communities that grazed and collected wood there. The fight over the property, which is on the Sangre de Cristo land grant, continues to this day.

Lobato’s scene, which she stitched in 1999, is filled with the energy of protest — small groups of people march on the property, a man has chained himself to the gate. In contrast, “La Vega” by Evangeline Salazar, another important stitcher from the valley, depicts the same peak emerging from tranquil, green meadowlands below, without a single human figure.

In her piece “El Molino,” Lobato focuses on the old flour mill that sat on the south end of San Luis throughout her childhood. The piece shows two versions of the mill, or “el molino” in Spanish. One is dated 1860 and stands freshly built, flanked by green foliage on one side and La Culebra River on the other. The second mill is engulfed in flames.

The mill did burn down in 1960, but by then Lobato was living in Denver. To make the colcha in 2018, she talked to her sister Loretta who watched it burn, and spent time in the library looking at photos of burning buildings.

In “La Llorona,” the weeping woman of Mexican folklore known to haunt bodies of water cries on a riverbank as her children float downstream.

In a piece about the annual potato harvest, Lobato stitched a mule that used to chase her through the field whenever it was free of its potato-hauling duties.

The scenes aren’t always so harrowing — she also stitched the annual parade for patron saints in San Luis (“Santa Anna y Santiago”), and the story of her grandmother’s arrival in the Valley (“Queen Victoria Payne Goes West”).

A collection of Lobato’s work. FROM TOP LEFT, CLOCKWISE: (1) “El Molina,” 2018. (2) “La Llorona,” 1994. (3) “Las Papas en Centro en el Valle de San Luis de Colorado,” 2002. (4) “Santa Anna y Santiago,” 2001. (5) “Queen Victoria Payne Goes West,” 2008.

“To me, a piece isn’t really interesting unless it has something going on. Even just something simple, like the trees swaying for ‘La Llorona.’ I don’t know, something dramatic,” she said. “Anything dramatic makes it better.”

So the flour mill in “El Molino” burns.

The community in “La Sierra” protests.

Her grandmother moves West by train and by wagon.

And the ghost of Manuel lounges on the roof at Fort Garland.

Lobato has said that before discovering what she could do with colcha, she wanted to write books about the traditions and folklore of the valley. Now, each of her colcha scenes is an entire story stitched into a single panel.

“I always said that my colchas were a legacy, they were a legacy for my children, because my children were raised in the city,” said Lobato, now 88 years old and living in Westminster. “What happened in my life was totally different from what they were experiencing, and I wanted them to realize that where I come from is interesting, too.”

Where to find colcha today

Colcha has a relatively small but enduring presence throughout the Southwest. Though it isn’t as widely known as other traditional crafts from the region, like weaving, woodcarving and devotional painting, there are an increasing number of places to purchase and practice the craft.

In New Mexico, the annual Traditional Spanish Market in Santa Fe has some of the largest selections of colcha works for sale by contemporary artists. Also in Santa Fe, The Museum of International Folk Art keeps a collection of Rio Grande textiles, including colchas from as early as the 1800s and as recent as 2005.

In Colorado, The Range in Saguache is an art space that regularly hosts colcha and embroidery artists, and is one of the collaborating organizations behind the San Luis Valley Embroidery Project. There are also single pieces on display in public institutions throughout the valley, including a large-scale, collaborative tapestry at the Sacred Heart Church in Alamosa, works by Esther Esquibel at the town of San Luis Visitor Center and a piece by Evangeline Salazar at the San Luis Clinic.

The Sangre de Cristo Heritage Center also houses a significant collection of local colcha embroideries, but it is closed for renovations.

From Jan. 4-Feb. 8, the Wray Museum in eastern Colorado will display works by participants in a colcha embroidery workshop, led by Trent Segura, the artist, researcher and great-nephew of Tiva Trujillo.

And in Denver, Josie Lobato’s first comprehensive retrospective, “Mi Vida en Colcha,” opened Thursday and will be on display until Dec. 4. Lobato will give a talk about her work at 5 p.m. on Nov. 12, at the O’Sullivan Art Gallery in Denver.

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