Trail Dust: Gypsies caravanned through early New Mexico

by Marc Simmons


The Gypsies are a colorful, nomadic people numbering about 1 million who roam throughout the world. Originally from India, they speak their own language, called Romany, and specialize in the business of trading and in public entertainment. Holding firmly to their native customs, they refuse to assimilate.

After 1850, Gypsy bands from Mexico began to make periodic excursions into the Southwest. They wore flamboyant costumes. The men, for example, were garbed in loud shirts, baggy trousers and a silk sash. Many men wore an earring, and on their heads, a fez with a long tassel.

Actually, most of the “Mexican” Gypsies had been born in the Near East — hence, their use of the fez. Seeing those distinctive caps, the Hispanic folk of the upper Rio Grande Valley always called their wearers Los Turcos (Turks) or Los Arabes (Arabs).

In the popular mind, the Gypsies were sometimes confused with genuine Arabs, who appeared in New Mexico in the 1890s and became involved in the sheep business.

For reasons I find difficult to understand, folklorists have not paid much attention to New Mexico’s fascinating body of Gypsy lore. It is a subject that has been buried and is now almost forgotten.

Thirty years ago, I began collecting the stories of old-timers who could remember as children the annual coming of the Gypsies. In those days, they traveled, like Spanish Gypsies, either on horseback, with pack mules or in caravans of brightly covered wagons.

The late Samuel Lucero of San José, on the Pecos River, recalled that the wagon trains of the Turcos came to his village each spring when he was a boy early in the 20th century. They always camped along the river where water, firewood and grazing were available.

In those sleepy farming villages where nothing much ever happened, arrival of the Gypsies was eagerly anticipated. The women would fan out through the community, offering to tell fortunes, and the men would parade performing bears and monkeys in the streets. For payment of a dime, they would have the bears dance.

Olibama López Tushar, who grew up in a tiny farming settlement on the New Mexico-Colorado border, says this: “The appearance of the Gypsies was a mixed blessing. They were welcome not only because they broke the monotony, but because they bought many chickens to feed the bears, and they always paid in cash.”

 But she adds that the visitors were feared as well because they stole everything in sight. Some people I interviewed said they remembered that while the Gypsy woman was diverting the family with her fortune telling, her husband would slip around the back and raid the hen house.

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