Los Padillas

Wednesday family lunch included tacos at El Paisa on Bridge just west of the river, and then a drive to the Los Padillas Cemetery in the far south valley.

I love cemeteries because they speak to some deep values, and I’ve taken to using them as a teaching tool for our UNM Water Resources Program class as we think about the value of water in alternative uses.

Why are some cemeteries green, and some not?

My favorite example of the entanglements are Mt. Calvary Cemetery, on Edith NE against the freeway in Albuquerque’s northeast. In 2016 the Catholic Cemetery Association filed a formal plea with the state asking for time to put its paper water rights to “beneficial use,” arguing that, while it wasn’t using the full amount now, people kept dying, and over time they would need more water to keep the additional graves green. (The first well at Mt. Calvary seems to have been dug in 1913.) New Mexico water law is famously silent on what actually counts as “beneficial use,” but the state seemed to agree that irrigating lawns out of reverence for the deceased was OK. The state gave Mt. Calvary a thumbs up. Mt. Calvary pumped 81 acre feet in 2024 in service of this value.

To the north, across the freeway, Sunset Memorial Park is lush (cemeteries, along with golf courses and some of the more affluent neighborhoods with domestic wells, pop out on satellite maps of urban greenness). But Santa Barbara Cemetery, immediately to the south, is brown. It’s my favorite of the three – old graves, rich with Albuquerque history.

Los Padillas is in the middle of that range – more trees than are usual for dry Albuquerque cemeteries, with an irrigation ditch down one side (I think for the alfalfa field to the south, but still, a cemetery with an acequia!), the Gun Club Lateral winding down its western edge, a scattering of trees (the shade was lovely Wednesday), and obviously beloved gravestones. We found some Turrieta family gravestones (a family that makes a brief but important appearance in our forthcoming book Ribbons of Green) and lots of Padillas.

n.b. Al pastor at El Paisa is my favorite Albuquerque taco. Cash only.