Did you know that one family in Questa can trace its New Mexico story back more than three centuries? The Raels are listed by Visit Questa among the earliest family names in the village, alongside Cisneros, Ortiz, Vigil, Trujillo, and Gallegos, and some of those founding families still help lead the village today. In Questa, the Rael story lives in a family market, in a three-inch-thick binder of genealogy, and in cousins who still call one another family generations removed.
Click to see more photos of Questa — its church, streets, and school in earlier days
The family's own records, gathered by Tessie Ortega and her cousin Aaron Rael Sr. and shared with The Taos News, begin with Alonso Rael de Aguilar, who came to New Mexico in 1683 from Lorca, Spain. He was 22 years old, a soldier who, in the family's account, brought 100 soldiers under his command and came to help Don Diego de Vargas reconquer New Mexico. Alonso settled first at El Paso, then part of New Mexico, and married Josefa Ana Garcia Noriega. His son Pedro Marcial Rael was the first Rael born in New Mexico, and the line has continued here ever since. Tessie and Aaron counted themselves the ninth generation of Raels in New Mexico.
The Raels reached Questa in 1861, when Jose Antonio Rael and his wife, Maria Manuela Cisneros, moved to the village then still known as San Antonio del Rio Colorado. The cousins were quick to point out, with pride, that their great-grandmother Maria Manuela was a Navajo captive who had been raised by a family in Chamita, a heritage they learned only after the family began gathering and preserving its genealogical records. In the late 1800s, their grandfather Eliseo Rael bought a plazuela along the main road in Questa, a U-shaped adobe home built like a small fort, with walls about two feet thick, a big gate closing the open end, and every door and window facing inward for protection.
Six Rael families lived in that plazuela, grandparents, aunts, and uncles around the courtyard and children walking to school together. One day, while the husbands were away tending sheep, Aaron's mother, Adonaisa, and Tessie's mother, Esther, decided they had had enough of fortress living. They cut new doors and windows into the outside walls themselves, and the men came home to find holes in the adobe. Life inside the plazuela ran on the lessons of Tessie's father, Jose Praxedes Rael, known as J.P., who had no formal schooling yet read constantly, attended law school at night at age 50 while working in Santa Fe, and hired musicians so his children would learn the old Spanish waltzes. His father's saying became the family's motto: unidos siempre y no los vencen — united you stand, divided you fall.
That unity found a home at Rael's Market, the family's store on Questa's main road. By the time The Taos News visited, the market had already been in the family for 74 years, growing out of a bustling 1927 store that, as Tessie remembered, had everything — dry goods, grains, lumber, coffins, and Questa's first telephone. Cousins still stopped by daily, and across the street stood the last two walls of the old plazuela, a daily reminder of where the family started. Tessie later co-authored Another Time in This Place, the 2003 history of Questa drawn on by the Questa History Trail. Asked what kept her in Questa, she rested her hands on that heavy binder and answered simply: this is where she was born, and these are her roots.