Chavela Trujillo leads a new generation of enterprising young Abiquiu women
By Amy Boaz
The four horses are restive as they wait for the morning arrival of their master and trainer, Chavela Trujillo. They cavort and nip at each other in the open corral under the shadow of the half-burned stable roof on the Trujillo property in Medanales, a village just east of Abiquiu, New Mexico. The 15-acre property, once her uncle’s, lies along the roiling Rio Chama. The unprecedented rains of the summer of 2024 forced the Rio Chama to temporarily change course, leaving behind enormous silt buildups along its banks, forcing Trujillo to reroute the accustomed trails she takes her customers riding along. Her seven-year business, Extreme Horseback LLC, is actually her second full-time job, after her work in property management at Los Alamos National Laboratory, and it is the more stressful one. Nodding to her quarrelsome charges, Trujillo explains, “My coworkers don’t fight in public.”
Horses are in her blood. She has six of them. Trujillo, now 27, was riding on horseback in the lap of her mother since she was a toddler to the vast reaches of her family’s cattle ranch near Abiquiu. She got hooked on rodeo at age 9 and soon after entered her first barrel-racing event. “I like speed events,” she notes. She won all kinds of buckles and was crowned the 2015 Rio Arriba County Rodeo Queen. With her 4-H champion lamb auction, where she pulled in a cool $3,500, she researched online and bought her own barrel-racing horse from Tennessee, Pina—one of the present bickering band. Trujillo’s mother, Isabel War Trujillo, a grant writer and formerly the Abiquiu librarian, notes of her daughter’s early accomplishments: “I haven’t been able to catch up with her since.”
Now, with a dozen or so riding students at any given time, Trujillo teaches those same events she excelled at like Western Pleasure. “People told me I could do this as a lifestyle,” she recalls. She found out that caring and keeping horses could be a write-off. “From the lessons, I could pay for their feed and build a barn,” she notes. A Native Women Lead partial grant from Nusenda Credit Union allowed her to build her training arena in Medalanes in 2021. Her passion became the business, Extreme Horseback LLC.
The baby of the family, eight and ten years younger than her older brothers, Trujillo learned early on how to deal with the reigning male egos, including that of her father, Virgil Trujillo, an outspoken “old-school rancher” and Abiquiu historian who successfully defended the family’s water rights in the State Supreme Court. “Growing up there weren’t a lot of girls up at Abiquiu ranch,” Chavela recalls. “Growing up I had a lot of tias [aunts], but mostly it was boys. It was easy as a kid—that lingo I know, I was a part of it. It gets harder as you get older.” Indeed, of the numerous horse-riding customers she trains, she recalls, “Some men students don’t come back—they can’t take directions from a woman.”
Living in an apartment on her own near her family’s ranch, Trujillo has become a leader in her community. Her résumé is already chock-full, well documented, and impressive: Honor student, 4-H champion, horno builder, petroglyph mapper. Fittingly, in a land where water rights are essential to the life of ranchers, she also worked at mapping acequias since age 18, first with the East Rio Arriba Soil and Water Conservation District’s Youth Conservation Corps, then with the New Mexico Acequia Association for four years. This required walking the entirety of the acequias, taking location points, and inventorying the infrastructure. In 2019, she participated in NMAA’s panel with other young people and woman ranchers to discuss crop models and “restorative initiatives for a changing climate.” At the NMAA conference, with a poise beyond her years, she stated eloquently: “What I am trying to do through my career is to encourage entrepreneurship among our youth, with a focus on agriculture. I hope I can be an example, pushing through all the struggles and tangles I’ve been facing…We need our young people to see that they can make it at home in our rural communities and that we will find a way as a community, all working together, to help them out so we don’t keep losing our youth.”
Dancing since age 3 at the annual Abiquiu Fiesta in the group known as Las Inditas del Pueblo de Abiquiu ensures that the next generation continue to commemorate her community’s genízaro heritage. Abiquiu was founded in 1754 as a buffer between the Spanish settlements and raiding Native tribes, including the Navajo, Ute, and Jicarilla Apache. The families of genízaro—detribalized Native Americans captured by other tribes, particularly the Comanche, who were then sold to Spanish families in New Mexico—were allowed to settle there and given Spanish citizenship in exchange for military defense. The Indita dancers enact a coming-of-age dance called Nanille, while one of the most poignant dances is El Captivo, performed by youth of both sexes with dollar bills tacked to their persons, commemorating the former ransoming of genízaros.
As part of her long involvement in Indita dances, Trujillo and her older sister, Delilah, and mother were invited last year to the National Museum of the American Indian, a unit of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, to speak to students about the traditions and regalia of the dances. Blowup photos of her and her sister dancing at the Abiquiu morada (the village’s Penitente church) greet visitors at the entrance to the museum’s “Colonial Legacies” exhibition. The sisters also appear in Gary Medina Cook’s recent film, The Genízaro Experience.
Trujillo is named after her grandmother Margarita Isabel, but has always been called by the nickname Chavela. She has become a role model for younger girls, not only her young riding students, training for the fiesta royalty and rodeo events she herself competed in, but working with the Indita dancers. Some of her riding students have been with her since they were 8 or 9; Trujillo is pleased to see how the girls gain confidence. As a child Trujillo was present when her uncle Dexter, a ceremonial elder, would meet with the grandparents to talk about old customs, and the elder ladies were brought into the library to teach the young girls about rituals and regalia. She’s learned that the younger generation has lost the sense of the dances as a kind of prayer rather than a show. Trujillo “taught the younger girls to be aware of themselves—to be within yourself.”
The church picks the mayordomos for the fiesta, who then choose which girls will participate. Usually this has been just the girls whose families attend the church. In a pushback—or what the Trujillo daughter and mother delicately call a “workaround”—they encouraged participation of girls who hadn’t been asked before. “It brought the community together,” Chavela remembers. Clunky UGGs were traded for traditional regalia, and as more girls participated, they asked questions and became aware of their grandparents’ stories.
Trujillo is part of the genízaro renaissance and proud history. She has not wanted to leave the place she grew up, barely enduring a semester away at New Mexico State University at Las Cruces, and only then because she had brought her horse. (Since, she has gained an associate degree in science from University of New Mexico at Los Alamos.) “Culture has a big influence on me,” she explains. “I am grateful for what my grandparents and great-grandparents have done. I am proud to say I am from Abiquiu, from generations of people on each side. I am glad to know where I’m from. We have a beautiful culture to be protected.” ning winery’s location as Albuquerque. “We didn’t have the vision Larry had, and he has proved us completely wrong,” Calvin acknowledges now.
From the Summer 2025 issue
