For most of the millions of travelers who make the trek each year, there is no reason to go to Santa Fe except to go to Santa Fe. Just about everything that needs doing can and should be done somewhere else, someplace easier to get to than this tiny city 7,000 feet in the air, whose airport terminal is a fraction of the size of a typical American grocery store. But this town of 90,000 residents strives to ensure that its singularity is reason enough.
Which makes it remarkable that Santa Fe’s most distinctive motif is left inscrutable to outsiders. A towering ghoul points down from a mural on one of the city’s busiest streets with no context. At a local confectionery, a scowling white figure in a cummerbund is rendered in chocolate — why? Even if you clock that the big-eared goblin tattooed on the biceps of a local electrician is the same creature depicted (being consumed by flames) on the cab of a municipal fire truck, you will encounter nowhere an explanation of who or what this monster is — unless you happen to be in Santa Fe on the one evening a year when locals construct a building-size version of this thing and set it on fire.
The explanation is a touch nonsensical: This is Zozobra, a beast who lives in the mountains nearby. The people of Santa Fe invite him into town every year on the pretext of a party in his honor. He arrives at the party dressed in formal attire, thrusts the town into darkness and takes away “the hopes and dreams of Santa Fe’s children,” whom he also kidnaps. The townspeople try and fail to subdue him with torches. But then the Fire Spirit, summoned by an atmosphere of cooperation among the town’s citizens, appears and, flying high off the good vibes, battles Zozobra until he is consumed by fire.
If you are fortunate enough to be around on the exactly right night in late summer — the Friday before Labor Day — you may find yourself surrounded by, and even join in with, the screaming citizens of Santa Fe as they string up this enormous, writhing pale-faced humanoid on a pole on a hill overlooking their homes and burn him while he moans until dead.
“Burn him!” demand the children onstage. “BUUUURN HIIIIIM!” roar the adults from the crowd, a portion of whom are inebriated. Unseen, a local judge howls into a microphone, providing the voice of a gargantuan puppet being cooked alive. It is possible that, one century ago, the forebears of the current population discovered the violent secret to happiness in their high, dry town — and that it is annual, ritualized killing by flames. Just in case that’s right — in fact, proceeding on an assumption that it is — the local citizenry have recommitted the monstrous puppet’s murder every year for 100 years straight, so far. The aim is to incinerate their gloom.
The beast’s name, plucked from a Spanish-language dictionary, derives from the verb “to capsize.” As a noun, zozobra, it conveys a poetic second meaning: “anxiety,” or becoming shipwrecked in a sea of one’s own thoughts. In 2024, of course, this prospect sounds like an indulgence; people pay $100 an hour to do that. These days, we are less likely to become lost in an ocean of our own ruminations than in a whirlpool of alien flotsam: text that resembles news but isn’t; images that resemble photographs but aren’t; and, perhaps most profuse, random strangers’ opinions, once a niche resource rarely obtained except by those who sought it, now an omnipresent element of life. If anxiety is defined by obsessive thoughts, the constant pointless playing out of disastrous scenarios, it is no wonder our age feels excessively anxious: We invite these into our minds constantly.
It is a comforting thought that the burning of a puppet could do away with any one person’s problems, to say nothing of an entire city’s — or country’s. Anxiety has a strong anticipatory element: It is predicated on what might happen, what could go wrong. Once a specific future snaps into place, it survives only by attaching to a new object of rumination. Why not incinerate it before it can spread?
The first time Zozobra burned, in 1924, it was in a backyard. Zozobra was just six feet tall and stuffed with intimate kindling: slips of paper on which the few people assembled had written down the worst things about their lives. One hundred years later, Zozobra towers over 50 feet, and his annual burning has exploded into a must-chug frozen margarita mix of ramshackle small-town picnic and pyrotechnic challenge to God.
The monster is still stuffed with slips of paper bearing woes (“glooms” in event parlance). But these days there are virtually no limits to what the public may cram inside Zozobra’s body and set aflame: wedding albums; medical bills; report cards; loved ones’ ashes; parking tickets; pictures of Osama bin Laden (popular in 2002); a pristine guitar; many varieties of gown (wedding; hospital; according to local lore, a few belonging to Marilyn Monroe that an acquaintance was adamant would never go to auction); etc. The show still follows its original script.
The roots of Zozobra extend to the rural hamlets of northern France. It was in the husk of that once-rich farm country that chemical gas filled the lungs of an aspiring electrical engineer, Will Shuster, in the last year of World War I. Upon returning home to Philadelphia, Shuster was diagnosed with tuberculosis. He blamed the gas. A doctor advised him to relocate “to some high, dry place” and to “sleep outdoors as much as possible.”
Within weeks, Shuster had moved to Santa Fe. He remade himself into a painter and invented a celebration the town would keep celebrating every year for the next century. Depending on whom you ask, it is either a complementary or rival event to another late-summer Santa Fe tradition, Fiestas de Santa Fe, the flamboyantly religious celebration of the reconquest of the city by Spanish colonists in 1692 after a successful uprising by the Pueblo people. Shuster’s revelry, held contemporaneously, was pointedly profane and inclusive of anyone who cared to participate.
Perhaps one reason Shuster’s party survives is that it fulfills a primitive urge. Stephen J. Pyne, one of the few historians who has taken as his focus the unfathomably immense subject of the history of fire, attributes our widespread ceremonial use of fire to early humans’ firsthand observations of how fire works in nature. It eliminates dead vegetation and enriches soil, promoting new growth; it rejuvenates via destruction. “It was a simple matter,” Pyne writes, “to decide that a similar logic governed the cosmos.”
Thus fire became a metaphorical destroyer of evil and promoter of good. And humans, by building rituals around fires they control, give themselves dominion over the cycle of death and rebirth in which their universe is perpetually engaged. When they direct this power at something deemed evil (or unfortunate or otherwise lamentable), the hope is that the application of fire can function as a kind of reset. The flame unites what it does not consume; in a ritual setting, it represents people’s optimism that they can vanquish the undesirable, whether that be the treason of Guy Fawkes (on Guy Fawkes Night), the brutality of winter (at the burning of the Böögg in Switzerland) or, in many corners of the globe, American foreign policy, instantiated in the form of its flag or its uncle (Sam) ablaze.
Or, in the case of Zozobra, the sum of one community’s anxieties.
Santa Fe is a place where you constantly meet people whose last names are on the street signs: Romero, Lucero, Pacheco. The chairman of the entire Zozobra event, Ray Sandoval, shares his name with not only a downtown thoroughfare but also a whole nearby county. Sandoval attended his first Zozobra burning in kindergarten, and since 2013, he has donated an unfathomable portion of his personal time to producing the event. His day job confines him to the corporate office of New Mexico’s largest utility provider, PNM, so he spends hours outside of, and sometimes during, his workday dealing with the complex logistics of Zozobra’s incineration, which is now managed by the local Kiwanis Club.
So committed is Sandoval to his role as the caretaker of Zozobra that in September 2023, his life was overtaken by a yearlong metaphor. The day after the 99th Zozobra burned, a new symbolic flame (representing the light in the hearts of the people who rise up every year to vanquish Zozobra) was lit on the Santa Fe Plaza (by sunlight reflecting off a specially made Nambé silver sun-reflecting bowl). Sandoval transported this flame via candle to his own living room, where, he maintains, he kept it lit 24/7 for the entire year. He burned through hundreds of scented candles in the process — so many scents that he had to store the excess candle supply on his patio, lest his home begin to smell like a tropical sugar-cookie factory in a rose forest by the ocean — but, this way, when it came time to torch Zozobra for the hundredth time, Sandoval could be certain that the flame that destroyed the monster came directly from Santa Fe’s own sun on the plaza one year earlier.
Sandoval is rather small but also rather strapping, and it is one of life’s simple pleasures to attend a meeting led by him, because he arrives prepared and sticks to the agenda he displays for all to see, and knows precisely who has which jurisdiction over what matter, and moves things along at a brisk yet respectful clip, working in one or two jokes (as opposed to seven or eight), so that you cannot help feeling, upon leaving the meeting, that everything is right on track, regardless of whether that’s true.
A large part of Sandoval’s job entails mustering an army of volunteers: to build the massive puppet’s papier-mâché carapace; to source, from offices and people around town, all the shredded paper that fills it; to house its body parts (in vacant territory previously occupied by Boot Barn at the mall); to transport and assemble it in the smallest hours of the morning on Zozobra Day; to run around in the dark during the show yanking cables to make its 300-pound head swerve for the crowd. These troops are a cross-section of Santa Fe society: teachers; accountants; credit-union employees; elementary schoolers; construction workers; auto mechanics; ski bums; engineers from a nearby nuclear laboratory; a sizable and jovial contingent from the city’s parks division; a funeral director; and, of course, retirees.
As congenial as the event appears from within, there is always gloom to be found, of course. Facebook groups and the digital comment sections of local newspaper articles — anywhere people gather online — are reliable sources of misery and paranoia. The event’s increasingly costly ticket prices earned universal condemnation; general admission climbed as high as $40 per ticket. “WHERE DOES THIS MONEY GO?!?” one woman asked on Facebook. “Local charities, the Kiwanis Club doles it out,” another user explained. “I doubt it,” the woman wrote back.
“Ray Sandoval has been catering to everyone EXCEPT locals,” read one remark on Facebook. “Santa Fe should take back OUR Zozobra and keep it out of this pathetic guy’s hands.” (Sandoval’s family has lived in Santa Fe for roughly 400 years.) “It’s turned into a tourist trap”; “we want it to be what it was, a community event”; “these prices are a bunch of BS to bring in tourists and push locals out.” According to event records, 71,069 people attended this year’s burn, of whom a vast majority — 53,440 — were from Santa Fe County.
Sandoval reads “as much” of the online discourse “as I can,” he told me over lunch downtown (which multiple people politely interrupted to greet him), scouring for complaints that are fixable. Sandoval desperately wants participants to feel they got their $40 worth. (New Mexico is the third-poorest state in the nation, painted, on such maps, whichever undesirable color shades Mississippi and Louisiana.) “It’s unfortunate that we have to charge for Zozobra,” he told me. “I wish we didn’t.”
But the hardest and by far the most expensive part of producing Zozobra, Sandoval said, is trying to make it safe. Managing the five-story tower of flame is easy. (They spray down the hill with water before showtime.) Sandoval’s greatest fear, every year, is the same one shared by anyone who plans, or, really, attends, any public gathering in the United States: that someone will hijack the event to hurt people.
For the 100th burn, according to Sandoval, 67 percent of the show’s $1.2 million budget went toward security: guards, metal detectors, a variety of drones (both surveillance and “interceptor” models, built to physically overpower an unauthorized drone loaded with, say, explosives) and radiological detectors that constantly sample the air. For years, Zozobra’s terrorism insurance has been brokered by Lloyd’s of London. But, Sandoval said, the Lloyd’s underwriters “are seriously considering not covering events in the United States, because of how violent the United States is.” (Lloyd’s declined to comment.) When we spoke, he still didn’t know if the 2025 event would be insurable.
I had never heard of Zozobra until the night I saw him set on fire in front of me. My boyfriend and I, who had been making short trips to Santa Fe for years, just happened to be in town on the exactly right Friday night in 2018. We realized something special was happening only after observing that certain public roads were closed. We nearly abandoned our plan to check it out after growing impatient waiting in line for an hour to gain entry to something that neither of us really understood and that no one we asked could describe in a way that made sense. We persevered simply because we were already in line and had nothing better to do. What we saw, once the show began, was bizarre, bewitching and dazzlingly reckless. This postcard-perfect place was much stranger than we realized. Years later, when we moved to Santa Fe, we held our wedding on the weekend before Labor Day and dragged as many of our guests as we could cajole to the field on the edge of town.
The quantity of distinct elements that collide in a burning of Zozobra makes it both easy and impossible to describe. One could simply list random concepts forever; many of these are incorporated in some way into the event. It is difficult enough, I’ve learned, for the uninitiated to comprehend the central action: the combustion of a 50-foot marionette. For whatever reason — perhaps steeling themselves against what they presume is inevitable disappointment — people struggle to understand that when you say “They set a giant puppet on fire,” you mean exactly what you say; that it is not an illusion; that no part of the giant puppet will be left not-on-fire; that it will be transformed, from top to bottom, into a roaring column of brilliant flame.
But that’s only one of one thousand things that happen pretty much simultaneously at a Zozobra burning. At the centennial, for instance, Zozobra was flanked (as he is every year) by waterfalls of light the height of a four-story building that cascaded white-gold sparks into the chilly night air; 70 local children, dressed from head to toe in sheets like ghosts, tripped around the base of Zozobra, windmilling their arms in a kind of interpretive dance; there was “the Fire Spirit,” a woman clad in a glittering red unitard with a perilous four-foot headpiece; there was the Fire Spirit’s 14-minute teasing frolic, which she performed while holding two flaming torches; there were hundreds of drones zooming into the sky to form red and green chile pepper shapes, visible for miles; there were fireworks in the sky concurrently with the drones; there was New Mexico’s Lilliputian governor; there were people dressed like Spanish colonists; there were, all of a sudden, hundreds of beach balls; there was a dance performance by members of neighboring Native nations; there was a Zia sun symbol (also on fire); there was a glowing white orb; there was corn for purchase.
By late afternoon of the 100th burn, Zozobra, lean and gleaming white against his purpose-built giant metal stake, stood out like a bolt of lightning against the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, which were cast into shadow by blue and gray storm clouds. The storm blew east, becoming Texas’ problem, and by early evening the hues were gentler: clouds the pale yellow of corn silk receding into a cornflower sky. A stiff breeze kept Zozobra’s head in perpetual swivel while he hung limp, giving him a slightly flabbergasted, or exasperated, air, deepened by occasional lifts and drops of his gust-blown, refrigerator-size hands as the field filled up with people. The gold of his cuff links winked in the last rays of the sun, until night fell. The crowd demanded that he burn. He did.
Despite the grand talk of excising gloom, for many in the crowd, the burning is essentially a hollow ritual; basically an excuse to drink and witness legal arson. But the beauty of rituals is in their very hollowness. “Ritual actions do not produce a practical result on the external world,” the sociologist George C. Homans wrote in 1941, which “is not to say that ritual has no function.” Ritual, Homans explained, “gives the members of the society confidence; it dispels their anxieties; it disciplines the social organization.”
Setting grievances on fire inside Zozobra does not literally eradicate unhappiness from the life of the submitter; I have tested this magic firsthand and found it wanting. But I can confirm that the bedlam of the pageantry, while not eliminating gloom, presents a rare chance to experience its opposite. Simply by pretending, with straight faces, that such a feat is possible — simply by working toward a common, inane goal — the people of Santa Fe create a space for enthusiastic, widespread madness. The gathering represents the antithesis of the paranoid and anhedonic virtual lives in which many of us, increasingly, are mired. The spectacle — even, or perhaps especially, at its most incomprehensible — offers a crucial break from the drudgery of daily existence.
This is what Ray Sandoval wants for his neighbors — and in a city so small, everyone is his neighbor. He wants them to have an opportunity to encounter one another on neutral ground, for the pure pleasure of doing so, and for no one to get hurt. He worked all year with many of those same neighbors to pull it off. But accomplishing it once, or even a hundred times, was no guarantee it could be accomplished again. As Zozobra’s body smoldered, Sandoval was already considering what would need to be done differently the 101st time.
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