Photo: Alice Chávez, center, surrounded by her daughter, granddaughter and cousins — several generations of family gathered in love
On August 28, 2026, our dear mother, Alice C. Archuleta y Chavez of Pagosa Springs, celebrates 85 years of life.
This year, she is also being recognized through the Ruby Sisson Memorial Library’s 100 Extraordinary Women Campaign. Her name and story will become part of the permanent 100 Extraordinary Women Wall, which will be unveiled September 11 as the community also celebrates the completion of the new library.
The library is requesting RSVPs by September 1 at foundation@pagosalibrary.org.
How does one summarize a woman whose influence can be found in nine children, generations of grandchildren and great-grandchildren, countless gardens, shared meals, opened doors, preserved traditions, and people who left her presence feeling truly heard?
Our mother’s life is remarkable not because it has been easy or widely publicized, but because she has continually made something sustaining from what she was given.
A daughter of the San Juan Mountains
Alice was born August 28, 1941, the daughter of Mary T. Archuleta Sisneros and Charlie Archuleta. The oldest of nine children, she grew up in McPhee and Pagosa Springs, within the mountains and borderlands of southern Colorado that she still calls home.
She graduated from Pagosa Springs High School with the Class of 1959, but her education was never confined to a classroom.
As a child, Alice devoured Reader’s Digest, collecting new words and ideas. She became a lifelong reader, researcher and library patron, passing that love to her children. Even now, she is rarely without a book or magazine nearby. She reads to understand her health, to help someone she loves or simply because another subject has awakened her curiosity.
As a girl, Alice knew both scarcity and possibility. She grew up with simple food and, at times, too little of it. She remembers the realities of growing up in a segregated timber town. She also remembers how families created belonging and joy when material resources were limited.
She has spoken about Mis Crismes, the old borderlands Christmas tradition in which children visited neighborhood homes and received small treats. What endured in her memory was not the candy itself, but that every door opened. Even families with very little found something to share.
In an earlier Borderlands Health reflection, I described this as community medicine: our people making joy anyway, making community anyway and opening the door anyway.
That way of living became one of our mother’s signatures.
A working life and a family of nine
After relocating to Albuquerque, Alice married Louis Chavez of Peralta, New Mexico, whose family carried agricultural roots in the Rio Grande Valley. Together, Alice and Louis raised nine children. Their family journey carried them through New Mexico, Nebraska and Colorado before Alice eventually returned home to Pagosa Springs.
To call her “the mother of nine” is accurate, but insufficient.
She learned the distinct spirit of each child. She stretched meals and household resources, made a home through changing circumstances and welcomed people who were not born into the family but needed a place at the table. Her care extended to grandchildren, great-grandchildren, siblings, friends, neighbors and people navigating difficult seasons.
Alice also built a long working life while raising that family. She worked for J.D. Graham’s insurance company and later for Judy Graham’s daycare, moving with characteristic adaptability between paperwork, practical responsibility and the care of children.
She went on to work for the U.S. Forest Service for 25 years. Her career unfolded alongside her lifelong attachment to the forests, mountains and public lands surrounding Pagosa Springs.
Twenty years ago, her working life was interrupted by one of the greatest trials she would ever face: a diagnosis of Stage IV colon cancer.
Alice fought for her life — and won.
Two decades later, she stands not only as a cancer survivor but as a woman who continued choosing life after confronting the possibility of death. She kept gardening, walking, traveling, reading, volunteering, feeding people and researching ways to care for her health and the health of those she loves.
Her survival is part of what makes this 85th birthday so precious. These additional years have become gardens planted, meals shared, journeys taken, traditions restored, generations welcomed and love multiplied.
Food as inheritance
Mama has what we lovingly call “champagne taste on a beer budget.” She recognizes beauty, good food and a special experience, then finds a way to create it from what is available.
She can make a humble pot of beans, chile, tortillas, calabacitas, atole, quelites or verdolagas feel like both nourishment and inheritance.
Her recipe collection grew from magazines, experimentation and dishes she wanted to remember. She did not simply preserve recipes; she made them her own. For Mama, food has always been a language of culture, ingenuity, hospitality and love.
In 2022, she was recognized as a local food hero for her work in our Huerta Alegre garden and for sharing traditional foods through community demonstrations. As I wrote then, she begins planning early—imagining the garden, choosing seeds and deciding which new variety to try—before eventually “rattling those pans” and feeding us again.
Her love of growing began with her own childhood wish to participate in 4-H. Later, she learned from Louis’ agricultural roots and from Mrs. Peters, a Nebraska neighbor who became her gardening teacher, friend and confidante.
Mama continued her education through Rodale publications, seed and bulb catalogs, trial and error, and visits to gardens and farms. Her hands have since touched the soil at home and in community spaces including Vista Community Garden, the downtown Pagosa garden and the Geothermal Greenhouse Partnership.
She has planted bulbs, explored medicinal plants, visited lavender farms and delighted in roadside produce stands and farm-to-table experiences. She understands something modern institutions sometimes forget: tending the soil is also a way of tending people.
Service that cannot be counted
Alice’s service throughout Pagosa Springs has taken many forms.
She volunteered at Chimney Rock, supported the Pagosa Senior Center, translated for Spanish-speaking community members through San Juan Basin Health, participated in Audubon activities and contributed to the revitalization of the Pagosa Spanish Fiestas.
She announced bingo, served through the Guadalupanas, offered food demonstrations for Healthy Archuleta and supported local gardens and food projects. At the Ruby Sisson Memorial Library, she read newspapers and books for community members who were blind.
It is especially fitting that her name and story will now become part of the library’s permanent 100 Extraordinary Women Wall: a reader, volunteer and lifelong learner honored in a place devoted to memory, knowledge and possibility.
Yet much of Mama’s service cannot be entered on a volunteer log.
It can be found in the food delivered, the open door, the extra place made at the table and the hours spent listening to someone who needed to be heard.
Perhaps listening is one of her greatest gifts. Mama listens beneath the surface of what someone is saying. Friends and family have brought her their stories, fears, grief and uncertainty because they know she will make room for them. She has often served as witness, confidante and quiet counsel without needing recognition or authority.
A faith lived in practice
Her faith is central to this way of living, but it has never been limited to organized religion.
Alice understands herself first as a daughter of the Creator and a follower of Jesus.
Her faith lives in Scripture studied and memorized, hymns and instrumental worship music, prayers offered for her family, food placed before a guest, seeds entrusted to the earth and her willingness to remain tender in a complicated world.
She shares Bible verses that have strengthened her during difficult seasons and offers those same words when one of us needs them. Her discipleship is expressed less through religious performance than through presence: feeding, welcoming, listening, forgiving, protecting and beginning again.
A woman who knows delight
Mama also knows how to delight.
She loves Pachelbel’s Canon, “Unchained Melody,” jazz, Baroque music, the songs of the 1950s and ’60s, Spanish guitar, hymns and artists ranging from Yanni and Enya to Ana Gabriel and Julieta Venegas.
She enjoys flowers, painting, birdsong, wildlife, trying a new recipe and occasionally sampling a flight of craft beer or wine. She loves window-shopping, roadside produce stands, good meals, long drives and small discoveries.
Although opportunities to travel were limited in her youth, her life eventually carried her across New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming, South Dakota, California, Mexico, Chile and the East Coast. Her children and their families have welcomed her into homes and adventures from Santa Fe and Albuquerque to Denver, Durango, San Diego, San Francisco, Atlanta, New York, Pennsylvania and Tennessee.
Each journey expanded her world. Still, the San Juan Mountains remain the landscape of home.
She has walked and hiked among them, taken her children on picnics at Hershey Ranch, listened for birds, identified plants and found renewal beside the river. The outdoors is not scenery to Mama. It is memory, belonging and relationship.
It would be easy to honor Alice only for what she has given others.
Yet as she turns 85, she has named something important: so much of her life has revolved around other people, and she wants the years ahead to be more fully about Alice while continuing to love her family.
We want that for her, too.
We want her to visit places still on her list, enjoy meals she did not have to cook, plant whatever flowers please her, read, explore, rest, laugh and choose the shape of her own days.
We want to know Alice beyond every role she has faithfully carried—not only mother, grandmother, great-grandmother, wife, sister, employee, volunteer, gardener, cook or caregiver, but Alice herself.
Her recognition as one of Pagosa Springs’ 100 Extraordinary Women belongs to that whole woman.
It honors the girl who wanted to join 4-H.
The oldest sister who learned responsibility early.
The young woman of the PSHS Class of 1959.
The wife who built a life with Louis Chavez.
The mother who raised nine distinct human beings.
The Forest Service employee who gave 25 years of her working life.
The Stage IV cancer survivor who kept choosing life.
The reader who never stopped reaching for new words.
The gardener studying catalogs through winter.
The woman offering tortillas, chile, Scripture, flowers, laughter or a listening ear according to what the moment required.
Her legacy is not only what she accomplished. It is what grew around her.
Gardens grew. Traditions survived. People ate. Children learned. Neighbors felt welcomed. Stories were remembered. Faith endured.
Joy was made anyway.
Happy 85th birthday, Mama. You are precious to your children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren and the community you have helped sustain.
May this next chapter give back to you some of the beauty, care, discovery and freedom you have spent a lifetime giving away.
You are our mother, our elder and our extraordinary woman.
And now, dear Mama, may more of this life belong to Alice.