Barelas Is for the Gente

With a plate of flat red chile blue-corn enchiladas sprinkled with chopped onions and topped with an over-easy egg—a comfort food served just the way my nana made it—I start my Barelas tour here, where stories have been told around the table for more than 90 years.

“The Barelas neighborhood is important now, because it was important in the very, very beginning of Albuquerque,” Hernandez says. “Albuquerque wouldn’t have grown if it wasn’t for Barelas.”

Bordered roughly by Lead Avenue; the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railway; and the Río Grande, the triangular neighborhood was its own village before the railroad fueled its growth during the 1880s. “The railroad workers lived in this area, and all the businesses to support them were in this area,” she says, pointing to the city’s first flower shop, Ives Flower Shop, and the first drugstore, B. Ruppe Drugs.

I recall the first time I saw the Barelas neighborhood. I was in my rockabilly era, obsessed with all things Americana, when I saw the huge bubblegum-pink B. Ruppe sign. It was the first of several well-preserved signs from the area’s midcentury heyday, when the original Route 66 passed through, before being rerouted north along Central Avenue in 1937. 

Unlike Central, where vintage signs get lost among modern chain stores and new development, this stretch of Fourth Street, with its colorful murals, feels like time travel. And yet, it’s exactly that vibrant past that’s fueling this community’s present energy.

Cristina Rogers, executive director of the Barelas Community Coalition, says the history of the neighborhood is “ancient.” She theorizes that before it was a stop along Spanish and American routes, it was located along Indigenous trade paths that later set the course for the Camino Real de Tierra Adentro, the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway, and finally, Historic Route 66, which will celebrate its 100th anniversary in 2026.

“Even the most unassuming buildings have a lot of history,” says Monica Bencomo, creative manager for Homewise, a nonprofit community-development organization. Bencomo created the Barelas Walking Tour in 2023 and has been recording locals’ stories for the past two years as part of the Barelas History Project. “It’s more than just visiting a neighborhood. It’s also taking it in and understanding the history of the area, even speaking to people that live there.”

Like me, Bencomo became captivated by the B. Ruppe drugstore, which had been run as a yerbería by Doña Maclovia Sanchez de Zamora, who offered traditional Hispanic remedies and herbal medicines. When she died, in 2017, Homewise purchased the building and opened the Secret Gallery. One of Bencomo’s first projects with Homewise was the creation of the Micro Museum at B. Ruppe to honor the history of the drugstore and the art of curanderismo.

This month, the building returns to its roots as the home of Solamente Holistic Health, which offers massage and yoga, as well as some practices Doña Zamora might have prescribed, including limpias (spiritual cleanses), herbal consultations, and cacao ceremonies.

“There’s this fusion point that is being expressed here,” says Zack Quintero, executive director of the National Hispanic Cultural Center (NHCC). The 20-acre campus acts as both a cornerstone of the neighborhood and a cultural and economic touchstone. Located in a WPA-era building that was once a schoolhouse, the research library holds archives that go back to Spain and serves as a resource for those exploring their Spanish genealogy.

There are families in the Barelas community who can trace their Spanish last names back 13 generations, Quintero says. But the center also acknowledges the Indigenous heritage that makes the Americas unique. “It’s looking at who we are now,” he says, “the identity that is ‘gente’ that we share as a connection point.”

Quintero prefers using gente, which translates to “the people,” because he feels it’s more inclusive and makes space for different ethnicities and nationalities. The idea unifies people from all over the Americas who share the history of colonization and the Spanish language—even if, as is the case in my family, Spanish was eventually replaced by English.

Overlooking the Plaza Mayor, for example, the main building features ziggurat architecture—a tiered structure inspired by the Teotihuacán pyramid in present-day Mexico. Scholars believe Teotihuacán was a multiethnic site where Zapotec, Mixtec, and Maya people lived. With permission, you can climb the steps and glimpse the river to the west, the mountains to the east, and Barelas to the north, while catching the autumn scent of chile roasting at Bueno Foods to the south. It really doesn’t get more Burque than that.

La gente’s expressions decorate the walls of Barelas and the greater South Valley with murals of Doña Zamora, Dolores Huerta, and La Virgen de Guadalupe. At the NHCC, the first thing you experience is El Torreón tower’s Mundos de Mestizaje fresco. Created over roughly eight years by Frederico Vigil, the 44-foot-high, 4,000-square-foot mural depicts 3,000 years of Hispanic history, from the Iberian Peninsula to the American Southwest.

The tour guides don’t mind if you lie on the floor to take in the monumental fresco, applied in layers of pigmented plaster, a technique Vigil learned from artists who studied with Diego Rivera. As your eyes move from level to level, awe emerges from history: hands reach out to touch strands of DNA, Phoenician boats sail into Spain, lavish crops grow in Mesoamerica, and the fire and bloodshed produced in the Pueblo Revolt, along with more than 200 more scenes from history.

“It’s a place you can come to unpack the scope of Hispanic identity,” says NHCC visual arts program manager Jadira Gurulé, as she leads me through the latest exhibition, Convergence x Crossroads: Street Art from the Southwest.

On display until February, the Rebecca Gomez–curated exhibition showcases street art from artists in New Mexico, Texas, Arizona, California, and Northern Mexico who identify as Chicano/a/x, Latino/a/x, Indigenous, or Native American. Murals and street art are an important part of local storytelling that is accessible to anyone walking or driving by. Taken out of the streets and put into an art museum elevates the form, while transporting the viewer back onto the street.

One of my favorite pieces, titled Chicken Strip by Alonzo Rodriguez, is a small, three-dimensional diorama of a neighborhood with graffiti artists at work alongside the Grim Reaper and paleteros. A room with black lights glows with iridescent art, another displays found objects collected to tell stories of life along the Mexican border, and other rooms sport graffiti, to be painted over when the show ends. “Street art is meant to be ephemeral,” Gurulé says. “It’s an art form that started in public spaces outside of museums, so it’s also accessible.”

Recently the Barelas–South Valley neighborhood was listed by TimeOut alongside LA’s Boyle Heights and Miami’s Little Havana as one of the 10 coolest Latino neighborhoods in America. Like the other spots that made the cut, Barelas gets its magic from the people who inhabit it.

Back on the patio at La Mexicana, Hernandez breaks it down for me. “The difference that I see between the Barelas–South Valley and downtown areas is that these are still very much neighborhoods,” she says. “A lot of places, they’re just houses on a block, and there’s not a connection throughout the entire neighborhood. Here, it’s second, third, and fourth generations that we know the same families.”

Read more: Christmas means something different for Bueno Foods, which celebrates 70 years with a new lineup of salsas.