Conchita López has made a name for herself with filigree tinwork

Every year as the weather started to get colder, Conchita López would start her annual hunt around town for cans of Prestone antifreeze with snowflake decorations on them. "Those cans were the best for making Christmas ornaments. There was a Chevron gas station at Osage and Cerrillos that always saved them for me," recalls the 78-year-old artisan.

It got to the point back in the 1970s that shopkeepers and others saved their tin cans for Lopez's filigree tin work. "Some days I would come home and there would be a box of tin cans at my front door with no name. I didn't know who had left it, but I knew it was for me," she says. Known as "Conchita de Santa Fe," López was one of the first people in Spanish Market to make filigree tinwork using tin cans. Her work was recognized by the Smithsonian Institution, where she was invited to exhibit at the National Mall in 1972.

Around the same time, Better Homes and Gardens published a three-page story on her work. As her popularity grew, her artwork could be found at museum and gift shops in Santa Fe, Albuquerque and Prescott, Ariz. She was also an exhibitor at the annual Spanish Market in Santa Fe. "Back then the market was still small, so we all fit under the portal at the Palace of the Governors," she says.

"In my heyday, Santa Fe was a small town where everyone knew each other. A couple of months after the article in Better Homes and Gardens came out, I received a call from the bus station. They had received a collect package addressed to 'Conchita de Santa Fe,' with no street address, but the people at the bus depot knew it was me and called me to say that there was $3 due on the package. I didn't know who sent the package, but I was so curious about the contents that I went to the bus station and paid the fee. The box contained several holiday fruitcake tins and a letter from a woman who had read the article in the magazine. She said that her mother had passed away and had been an avid collector of holiday fruitcake tins and she hoped that I could use them."

Conchita Teresa Juanita Ramona Lucero was born in Santa Fe in 1931 with four first names listed on her birth certificate. As she explains, "My mother told my father and my sister and brother that I was going to be the last child, so they all got to pick a name for me." Lopez grew up on Galisteo Street two blocks from the state Capitol, where she lived with her parents, Jacobo Lucero and Petrita Degado, and siblings Jake and Consuelo.

She attended Loretto Academy until the sixth grade, then went to Harrington Junior High and graduated from Santa Fe High in 1949. She has been married twice and has five children, six grandchildren and five great-grandchildren; she travels to visit them often.

In 2008, Lopez was named as a Santa Fe Living Treasure for her volunteer work driving cancer patients to their medical appointments and for working as a kindergarten volunteer at Salazar Elementary. From 1981 through 1992, she and her husband, Carlos López, traveled to Japan, Taiwan, China, Spain, Italy, all 50 U.S. states, all of Canada and drove through the entire country of Mexico. Carlos López, who died in 1995, was the principal of Harvey Junior High for 21 years and then taught Spanish at Santa Fe High.

With the Christmas holidays just around the corner, López thinks back to when PNM held an annual Christmas lighting contest which she was inspired to enter in 1963. Although she didn't win that year, she did receive an honorable mention and was bitten by the creative bug.

López, a resident of El Castillo Retirement community, teaches a class in filigree tin making to her neighbors. López, who has no formal training as an artist, says that her talent is "a gift from above."

Ana Pacheco is at work on the City of Santa Fe's 400th Anniversary Commemorative issue that will be published Feb. 7 in the Santa Fe New Mexican. Her weekly tribute to our community elders appears every Sunday please call her with story suggestions for this column at 505-474-2800.