By Brian D’Ambrosio, excerpted from New Mexico Eccentrics

Golden, New Mexico, population fourteen, is the kind of place you might pass by without a second glance. But if you stop, if you wander off the road and into the acreage claimed by folk artist Leroy Gonzalez, you’ll discover a landscape that looks less like a yard and more like a dream—sometimes a nightmare—built of junk, memory, and imagination.

Plastic dogs spit colored water from jury-rigged fountains. Old mannequins lurk in corners. Swings hang from steel cables. Religious shrines rise out of bicycle frames and car parts. Teddy bears dangle from cottonwoods like odd saints of the roadside. For Gonzalez, this chaotic sprawl is no mess. It is his canvas, his ceiling, his cathedral. “This is my canvas—the ground, the sky, the mountains all the way around,” he said. “It’s got to look as pretty as me.”

A Disorderly Museum

Gonzalez’s grounds are a carnival of contradiction: a “Gold Mine” cantina from the late 1800s sits beside rusting toys and dented Tonka trucks; cast-iron pistols from the 19th century lean against a collection of sewing machines; bricks hauled from Abilene, Texas in 1976 form strange, half-finished structures. Mirrors and frames are nailed to trees, reflecting shards of the land back at itself. “Do you remember Sanford and Son?” Gonzalez asked. “They’ve got nothing on me.”

There’s no logic to the arrangement, at least not one visible to visitors. He gathers what catches his eye—bargains, trades, discards—and then waits until inspiration strikes. “Everything has a job when I get to it,” he insisted. “It has a purpose. If I like it, I keep it. If somebody else likes it, that’s fine. If not, no big deal.”

This “no big deal” ethos disguises a fierce sense of personal obligation. Gonzalez’s mother was born and raised here, and though he left, he returned in middle age, claiming the land as his inheritance. “My ancestry goes back 135 years,” he said. “I’ve done the math.” For him, the debris-strewn lot is not only a folk-art project but a continuation of family roots and community memory.

Stranger Than a Flea Market

People sometimes ask Gonzalez if his treasures are for sale. He shrugs. “You never know,” he said. “But this isn’t a flea market or a garage sale. This is me and my brain and what I do with it.”

That brain is a restless thing. Gonzalez once ran for mayor of Golden—“no one ran against me”—and speaks with equal pride about his lineage, his great-great granddaughter in Texas, or the runoff from the San Pedro Mountains that threatens to wash his art away. “I want it at a slant,” he said, gesturing to a makeshift retaining wall. “I’m keeping it from not washing all away.”

His art brims with this same precariousness, built to withstand neither time nor weather. “I don’t take everything in at night,” he admitted. “It’s going to get weathered. It is going to get weathered.” The elements, he believes, are part of the work.

The Man in the Middle of Golden

At once showman and recluse, Gonzalez seems bemused by the attention he attracts. “People like me,” he said. “I don’t know why. They don’t know me. But they send pictures.” Some admire the audacity, others the resourcefulness, still others the strangeness of a place where discarded teddy bears and Kermit the Frog in a culvert carry the same weight as antique stoves or petrified wood.

“Some people like it more than me,” he admitted. “I don’t know what they see.”

Yet Gonzalez knows exactly where he stands. “I’m in the center of Golden, New Mexico,” he said. “I know this because the satellite puts me there.” That assertion carries both defiance and humor, as if to remind anyone who questions his vision that his work exists firmly in place—even if its meaning slips and mutates.

Disorder as Order

There is a kind of folk logic to Gonzalez’s accumulation, one rooted in improvisation, reuse, and the refusal to throw anything away. Every object is a possibility, every broken toy a seed for transformation. A field of Tonka trucks becomes a meditation on childhood and industry. A collection of old cap guns calls back to the frontier past. Bicycle frames twist into teepees, absurd homages to the Plains Indians’ mobility.

Nothing is polished. Nothing is curated in the museum sense. And that is the point. Gonzalez’s City of Refuse is a folk art environment built on contradiction: it is a museum of rust and ruin, a shrine to both memory and decay, a world where beauty is inseparable from disorder.

“I thought this was a hobby,” Gonzalez said. “Now it’s more than a job.”

More than a job, perhaps even more than art. For him, the project is obligation—family, history, community—and a stubborn insistence on making something out of what others would discard. He doesn’t claim ownership of the style. “I don’t have a patent on shit over here,” he said. “They don’t make this type of brass anymore. They don’t make this type of anything anymore.”

Ask him what it all means, and Gonzalez resists definition. “Haven’t even begun to define myself,” he said. That refusal to settle—to label, to categorize—seems to be the heart of his creation.

In Golden, New Mexico, a town nearly erased by time, Leroy Gonzalez has made a monument out of castoffs, a labyrinth of contradiction. Disorder is his order. Strange is his language. In the City of Refuse, meaning is everywhere and nowhere, flickering in the light off a mirror nailed to a tree.

Brian D’Ambrosio is the author of New Mexico Eccentrics. He may be reached at dambrosiobrian@hotmail.com Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/New-Mexico-Eccentrics-Brian-DAmbrosio/dp/1257192620. Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/

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