You hear a voice when you reach Roger Montoya’s front door in Velarde that tells you, “I’m up here.”
When you enter, you see Montoya standing in an upper floor using a walker as if elderly and you think, “Whoa, what is wrong with this picture?”
If you have ever met Montoya you know he’s vigorous and energetic. He walks with a determined spring in his step and an undisguised athleticism, not someone you’d expect to find using a walker.
He explains that the day before he underwent knee surgery and they expect the recovery to take six weeks.
You can tell by the look on his face that six weeks of recovery is not on his to-do list. And knowing him, it will be more like two weeks until he’s back moving around briskly and doing what he does best, getting things done in the community.
Montoya’s name is most often used in conjunction with the La Tierra Montessori School, Arts in the Schools and Moving Arts Española, and although not actively involved with Arts in the Schools, the projects that he seems to be known for now are the other two: La Tierra and Moving Arts.
Although not the type of person who you might find standing on a corner handing out leaflets, Montoya is an activist. He says it might be genetic since his grandmother and mother are “doers.” He says their unofficial motto was, “Go directly to the problem now, do good work, and ask questions later.”
It seems to work.
“I feel the needs of children and families in this region are broad,” Montoya said. “The whole (La Tierra Charter School) mission was holistic-based, child-centered education. Bringing a public Montessori school to, now, the Okay Owingeh Pueblo, is rather interesting. It doesn’t really fit with this community’s general understanding of what education is. But when I look at the needs, socially, through health issues, economic issues, education issues, there is a real need for profound systemic change. A paradigm shift if you will. The strongest way I could use my years in the arts in the schools was to develop a broader, more dimensional mechanism that might bring change. Part of that mechanism is La Tierra and I think it’s going well.”
Although Montoya has been affecting and improving lives over the years through the Arts in the School and his after-school programs at Moving Arts Española, he knew he could do more. He knew his past contributions to the community were beneficial but he wanted to take those contributions further, and one of the quickest ways, he thought, was to go from 45 minutes with children at elementary schools to a full-time, year-round, school.
“The initiative of the school is not a farm school but it’s an agriculturally based arts school,” he said. “So that implies a year-round calendar eventually, and a really community school. Not just in slogan but in reality.”
When Montoya said he envisions the school as being inclusive, that implies drawing everyone in, but Montessori is perceived by many as an elitist kind of educational model, on the fringe.
“Montessori is generally known in more Anglo, eastern, upper-affluent communities as private model,” he said. “What we’ve seen on the ground over the last two years, going into the third year is that there is a large group, yes, of students who have come from the Trio School, that a three to five-year model and they fit right in but there is a very lovely contingency of families from all cultures who are really understanding and embracing something they wouldn’t have. So it’s not just a school that’s just… it’s crossed over.”
Montoya said although the perception of Montessori may be of a Connecticut-esque, white bread educational model, they are attracting a broad spectrum of students, from special needs to Pueblo to foster children to people who fancy an agricultural, cultural and arts-related curriculum.
After three years and dealing with the fact that their current home, the Oñate Center, was not originally built to be a school and has a student capacity limit of 85, has prompted a move to the John F. Kennedy Memorial School at Okay Owingeh.
Montoya said he spends time at the school and Moving Arts.
“I’m just looking at that now, trying to balance it,” he said. “I would say about 45 to 50 percent is spent at La Tierra, and Moving Arts takes up another major chunk and they are inextricably intertwined.”
Montoya said the way the charter was written, Moving Arts is a non-profit partner and delivers integrated work. That means they work under the Common Core state and national standards but remain true to the charter, creating thematic units that cross curriculum and cross grade groups.
He sites examples of fourth grade Science, Technology, Engineering and Math-based curriculum and ‘Discovering Mesa Prieta: The Petroglyphs of Northern New Mexico and the People Who Made Them’, is currently taught in about 10 local pueblo and community schools.
Moving Arts Española still delivers cultural pieces to the public school as well.
“We service Los Ninos,” he said. “We did Hernandez Elementary with a really cool project that was culturally based under Rubin Salazar. There was a really huge interest because they really chopped those budgets down. They get like $10k per school now. Which is weird. I’m like, ‘Really? For 300 kids?’”
The after-school program serves students, who at 3:30 p.m., get bused to the Moving Arts program. The program receives students from as far away as Gallina and Mesa Vista. The after school programs are the four art forms, hence the name Moving Arts.
The organization began as Moving People Dance Española. When Montoya left the group, he said he deliberately included drama, visual arts, music and dance.
“In the after school programs we have guitar lessons, we have painting and sculpture, the mural project downtown (the Hunter Bldg),” Montoya said. “We do classical ballet, hip-hop, folklorico, flamenco, contemporary dance, circus arts, gymnastics. The after school programs are offered five days a week, 30 to 35 weeks a year. We do 45 classes a week.”
The eight-week summer program begins this week and runs through the end of July.
“So between that work and the integrated work at La Tierra, and then being active in helping to shape the broader curriculum on many levels, of the charter school as a founder, there is a lot of time that gets sucked up,” he said
Beginnings
Montoya’s mother and father moved from the Valley right after World War II, since employment was scarce. Montoya was born in Denver and graduated high school there at age 16. Because he had hundreds of relatives living in Dixon, Peñasco and Santa Fe), he and his siblings would spend summers in Northern New Mexico.
The years right after graduation were a whirlwind of life experiences for Montoya. His mother and father invested heavily in their children’s interests.
“Particularly, in my case, they saw that I was artistically inclined and they went to great lengths for a poor, Hispanic family to take me to classes or art galleries,” Montoya said. I was exposed and I was able to be nurtured, if you will. I also started to study some dance at the Cleo Parker Robinson Dance Ensemble, which is sort of an Alvin Ailey, smaller sister company in Denver. I started training some but I was still a gymnast. That was in the ‘70s.”
He was a well-regarded gymnast in high school and was recruited by Cal State Long Beach (Calif.) and was awarded a scholarship. In his junior year he was concussed badly in a gymnastics training accident and quit the team, losing his scholarship.
Since he was also an accomplished painter he looked to the visual arts department at Cal State but they had a three-year waiting list. With his dance background in Denver, he auditioned for the dance department and received a scholarship. He thought he would then be able to finish his college education but life had a different plan for him.
“I thought great, I would finish and graduate,” Montoya said. “That same year, the lead teacher (of the dance department) had a heart attack and died, and they brought this amazing teacher from New York. A young woman. And she invited me to join a company of hers in Los Angeles. I was still in school the same year, my brother, Daniel, who graduated form Columbia Law, and the whole family went to New York.”
Montoya had been in the dance group three weeks when Daniel told Roger he needed to go to Broadway and take some classes.
“So I went down to Alvin Ailey and took some classes at 42nd and Broadway,” Roger Montoya said. “It’s a huge company. One of the best in the world. I met teachers and they saw me dance. I took repeated classes. They scouted me and wanted me to audition for their junior company, so I did. I was very athletic. I was a gymnast. That is what they saw. They saw flexibility. They saw the strength. They saw the athleticism. I didn’t have that much dance training but it was a training program. So they gave me a scholarship.”
Montoya has a quizzical look on his face. He puts his hands up like a balance, as if weighing a problem that needs a decision.
“Cal State Long Beach/Broadway?,” he said.
He rocks his hand like a scale, weighing the alternatives. Daniel had a brownstone on New York’s west side, so Roger said it was a done deal.
Montoya moved to New York and started his professional dancing career.
Art Creeps in
However, the move thrust him into the center of the visual arts world in New York City and Europe.
“My life took a funny turn,” he said. “I got into a dance company and we started touring; seven tours of Europe dancing. I went to the Prado and all the Parisian museums and galleries. Unbelievable art throughout Italy and the western European countries.”
Seeing the art in Leon, Paris and Rome made him want to focus on visual art, he said.
“Because way before I started gymnastics I had been introduced to visual arts,” he said.
At age 15 Montoya said his gymnastic coach suggested he tour with the junior Olympic team of Europe and Romania. He had been painting and sold $5,000 worth of paintings that paid for the trip.
“So I knew one day I’d be a painter,” he said. “It just took sort of a funny turn.”
Montoya danced from 1980 until 1989, doing the European tours and things like videos with Madonna and Prince and working with major choreographers. Hip Hop and break dance were on the scene.
But in 1986 HIV entered his life seriously. He lost his first partner in 1980.
“I was probably infected at 18,” Montoya said. “I’ve been HIV positive for 28 years. I have an AIDS diagnosis although I’m asymptomatic.”
Five years later his second partner died. He and his partner, Bob, moved to New Mexico and 1986 and Bob died at Christmas that year.
“We were living in Los Angeles and Bob got very sick very quickly,” he said. “It was horrific how quick he died.”
Montoya said his parents were gracious to Bob and suggested the two move to Velarde and do something behind their house.
Bob’s brain tumor shrunk and he was walking again. Montoya said Bob “had a minute left to live — six or eight months.”
“And he was hell-bent on coming to New Mexico,” Montoya said. “I had to come. So we ended up coming back here because Bob insisted on it.”
The family helped start construction on the house and got as far as the walls and a temporary roof, before Bob died at Christmas 1986.
Meanwhile Daniel was working on Wall Street and told Rogerto come back and live with him in New York, which he did.
He immediately started auditioning with dance companies: Paul Taylor Dance, Twyla Tharp, and the Ailey school. He was accepted by David Parsons and that was his primary company during his professional career, but by now he had lost 100 friends.
“People are dying right and left and I just looked at the world there in New York and the concrete and the people dying I said, ‘I’m going to go back to New Mexico and die.’”
So he returned to New Mexico in 1990 to die.
“That same year (1990) I started something called Youth Gymnastics of Northern New Mexico,” Montoya said. “At that point I wasn’t a painter. I wasn’t a dancer anymore. I was still feeling a little odd. So I went for the thing I do the best, that I could do now, that people here understood.”
Montoya said he went to Northern New Mexico (Community, then) College and worked with continuing education. He started a program that lasted five years.
“We started a non-profit called Youth Gymnastics of Northern New Mexico,” he said. “We had 2,000 children over five years. Unbelievable success.”
At the same time he started painting again, and one of his first showings was at the Española Valley Arts Festival, which was held at Northern at that time and, again, that confluence of life’s events taking over, led him to meet Nora Narranjo Morse.
“And she had been contracted to write a series of children’s books and they needed an illustrator,” he said. “They had hired an illustrator to do her book on Santa Clara and it looked like teepees, so she said no, I want someone else. She recommended me and I ended up getting the job. It led to seven or eight illustration jobs of book jackets in New York, Dallas, San Francisco — Harcourt Brace, Simon and Schuster, so suddenly I was an artist, even though I wasn’t officially an artist.”
But an artist he was. He joined Spanish Market for 20 years, which gave him the money to build the house. He became a painter after coming home to die.
“The decade of the ‘90s was a remarkable decade, really and truly, for me,” he said. “I came here to die, to say goodbye to my parents, and because I started to work with children, I connected to my ancestral land, I began to paint, and I started dancing again, too. I suddenly had this incredible life.”
HELPS
In 1996 he and his mother, Dorothy (Dottie) Montoya, started a non-profit called Española HELPS (HIV, Education, Longevity, Prevention and Support).
Montoya said his mother said, “We have work to do. You’re alive. We have to help other people. You’re here for a reason.”
“Primarily it was an emotional support group because so many Hispanic families with kids that were dying were in denial,” he said. “They didn’t want to talk about it and they were whispering and so there was an organization called People of Color AIDS Foundation and NM AIDS Foundation.”
Montoya jumped into the issue. He said he became “vigorously involved.”
“I produced an art show in Española and New York City called Accentuate the Positive, which became very popular and we got national press out of the New York show,” he said. “I sold a lot of paintings and the money went into this foundation to give support and, more importantly, complementary therapies to over 100 New Mexico men, women and children living with AIDS.”
Montoya said he was thought of as the AIDS poster boy, but he was feeling really well, he was performing, and he felt guilty.
“I thought, ‘I can’t hide behind HIV anymore.’” Montoya confesses. “I needed to do something that was broader.”
Montoya went to the Velarde Elementary School in 1998 and met principal Ruby Montoya. Their meeting resulted in Montoya launching what became the Art in the Schools.
“I wanted to volunteer,” he said. “I was doing very well in art. I was making $90,000 a year through the Market. Two days a year selling. That was my only outlet. I was selling 170 paintings at the Market.”
Teacher Jeanie Cornelius, who is now at Dixon Elementary, asked him to teach a painting class for her students.
“So I met the kids — I remember distinctly taking the paper out and did a mural in the gym, and the principal came in, and one thing led to another and I started gathering artists,” Montoya said. “I thought, I’m a dancer so we can do dance, too. And clay and this and that. Basically for the next three years, we started something called Arts for Children.”
What came out of that came the Arts in the School Initiative. Through grants, over 10 years, they raised over $5 million.
This, Montoya said, gives him a feeling of the strange interconnected trajectory that took him from gymnast in high school to educator/activist.
He laughs when he thinks about it.
“I don’t have a degree in education, maybe one in activism, though, and a lot of experience, just by making it up as I go along,” he said.
Marla and Alvaro Aragonez have known and been involved with Montoya for six years. They have adopted foster children who have been involved in both Moving Arts Española and La Tierra Charter School.
Alvaro said both their adopted sons, Timothy and K.C., were “pretty substantially delayed developmentally.”
“Timothy stuck to my side like Velcro.” Alvaro said. “If a picture was taken, either myself of my wife needed to be by his side. At the Velarde Elementary School, Roger was organizing a play and he got Timothy to wear a donkey costume and get up in front of hundreds of people in the audience. It was amazing.”
Their other son, K.C., also benefitted greatly from Montoya’s programs.
“K.C. got into Moving Arts, and again, the results were wonderful.” Alvaro said. “When we first got him, K.C. couldn’t even sit up by himself. Now he does back handsprings.”
Alvaro said Montoya is a great person, from whom the community benefits greatly.
“Roger is just a great person,” he said. “He really cares about the community and the kids. He cares about what’s going on in his community and he has a strong desire to make the community grow any way he can. It’s been a great experience with him.”
Next?
For someone as involved as he is, having another project or projects lined up doesn’t mean he’s abandoning La Tierra or Moving Arts Española, it just means he piles more on his plate of things to do.
His latest project is centered around the Hunter Ford Building on Paseo de Oñate; Mainstreet, as it is often referred. The official name of this new project is The Hunter Arts and Agricultural Center.
“I feel I’ve reached another layer that’s really going to be about culture in a broad context but the food that we eat and the legacy that we live on today, that we have largely forgotten, is such an important one in a food desert in this economy and this time of change.” Montoya said.
The Hunter Arts and Agricultural Center will ostensibly be a union of three partners. A conservatory of the arts under Moving Arts Española, a community center/community market and a food hub.
The conservatory will have the express purpose of training 25 and 30 children between 13 and 18 who have the talent but who may need remedial training. They’ll have an in-house tutorial, like a technology center so youth can focus on their math and reading scores, but training them in music, dance and the visual arts, to be able to go on. The conservatory will exist upstairs in the 3,800 square foot studio space.
“The building itself will serve a dual function,” Montoya said. “The big garage area and back areas will serve as a community center for indoor markets, performances, meetings, and Moving Arts will manage that kind of use so that groups can really have a space to do cutting edge stuff, centered around food — not taking away car shows or other things. The showroom will house the Española Community Market. In the middle or the heart of the bldg will be a small commercial kitchen and walk in cooler, staging areas and offices and then there will be a portable, rolling containers and counters that will be bistros, a juice bar.”
The whole project sounds grandiose and intimidating considering the environmental issues revolving around the Hunter Building, but if anyone can pull this off, Montoya can.
Motivation
Estevan Rael-Gálvez, who is a former state historian of New Mexico, executive director of the National Hispanic Cultural Center and currently Senior Vice President of Historic Sites at the National Trust for Historic Preservation said Montoya is motivated by challenges and children.
“The challenges that inspire Roger will perhaps always exist in society as a result of a fragility of the human condition,” Galvez said. “As long as there are divisions within society, I am confident that Roger will gently intervene with movement through dance, painting, gardening and activism.”
Founding a charter school and organizing things like Arts in the Schools or Moving Arts Española don’t make Montoya rich, so you wonder why he expends the energy he does.
“In reflecting on the last 30 years of my life, the most important and pivotal experience has been facing mortality at 24 years old by testing positive to HIV/AIDS in 1986,” Montoya said. “I became driven at first by a crippling sense of fear, then a period of restless urgency and finally after 28 years, I have developed a commitment to simply take action. I really believe in this community. I think the children and families are extraordinary.”
The fact that it’s home also moves Montoya to action. He sees the need for education and the part he can play in improving it.
“My ancestral roots are in this area and so I have a vested interest in bringing up the level of life, the quality of life,” Montoya said. “And I think education is obviously a huge piece of that.”
He has a hard time describing himself but recognizes he has talent in many areas.
“It became apparent to me that I have a lot of experience in a lot of different things, but it’s really about taking the resources available now that are not being utilized and making them work,” Montoya said. “Reinventing might be a good word for what I do. Or maybe revisioning.”