La Cosecha honors 'Lady of the Horno'

Wind swept across the flat fields between Ute Mountain and the mud oven at Rio Costilla Southwest Learning Academy as kids and parents gathered around, anxiously awaiting the moment everyone had been waiting for — opening the horno. La Cosecha is the harvest festival in Costilla, a small community with parents, friends and neighbors who are picking up the mantle of the yearly event to celebrate the area’s agricultural heritage. La Cosecha got its start in the 1990s when Candelaria Torres, a longtime cook at the Costilla school, built an horno right outside of the playground and each year taught her students about the role of corn, hunting, music and neighbors. Though she passed away in 2011, the legacy Torres created continued this year on Oct. 6. Tessa Cordova of Las Pistoleras Instituto Cultural de Arte in El Prado honored Torres with a story, “Lady of the Horno.” A wooden carving of Torres, created by one of her deceased sons, held a tortilla while watching over excited kids and the horno as it was pulled opened to reveal toasted cobs of corn and trays of meat hunted from the florestas of Sangre de Cristo mountains. Bernie Torres, a Questa school board member and the son of the late Torres, usually handles many of the logistics of La Cosecha. Not this year...more