Carlos Cervantes Heritage Arts Award Acceptance Speech
Almost 50 years after an infamous raid to his home sent him to prison with one of the harshest sentences meted out to anyone at the time, Carlos Cervantes was honored with the mayor's Heritage Arts award.
This is a belated update on a story we have been following for the past two and a half years. With the holidays nearing and the world in complete disarray, we thought it’d be nice to share Carlos Cervantes’s acceptance speech during the 2025 Santa Fe Mayor’s Excellence in the Arts award ceremony.
This touching moment brought, many decades later, some vindication for Cervantes and the entire Santa Fe Chicano movement from the 1960s and 1970s. Among those in attendance from that era were figures like activist and artist Sam Leyba and legendary filmmaker Godfrey Reggio, who was honored in the Arts category.
Almost 50 years after an infamous raid to his home sent him to prison with one of the harshest sentences meted out to anyone at the time, Carlos Cervantes, Barrio de Analco’s gran mero mero, climbed onto the stage of SITE Santa Fe to deliver an acceptance speech for the award the city gave him on Oct. 7.
“Eight months ago I would’ve not believed anyone would recognize me for my artistic work. I’ve been labeled a criminal most of my adult life. Up until February, I was serving my 41st year of a life parole sentence,” Cervantes, 71, told the audience. “I was targeted for being a leader in the Chicano movement and later criminalized for my substance use disorder. But today, I am finally being recognized for who I really am.”
The crowd gave the night's loudest cheer to Cervantes; watch his entire speech at the bottom of this post. Leyba, himself a 2001 Mayor Arts Award recipient, said that the night served to vindicate a movement that fought for the poor people of Santa Fe.
“It’s been a long time coming but I am glad it finally happened, especially for Carlos,” he said. “Because he got in trouble earlier he’s always been put down… …he hasn’t been recognized that much and now people are starting to realize. You saw the applause he got.”
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Reggio, Leyba, Cervantes and many others created La Gente, a Chicano organization that tried to address two of the main concerns people in Santa Fe’s historic Barrio de Analco had: access to healthcare and police brutality.
I wrote the following in my original piece about Carlos Cervantes’ life parole sentence for Prism:
“In 1972, the group opened a clinic that provided medical care to thousands of people. La Gente also addressed police harassment when it decided to ‘police the police,’ Leyba said, with the creation of a cop watch.”
Many believe that police targeted Cervantes, who has been described as a natural-born leader, for his activism and direct actions against police brutality. Reggio, the other honoree that night, said the following in the Prism story:
“‘The police were fucking around in the community,’ Reggio told Prism. ‘They didn’t go to the fancy parts. They were all in the barrios, and they were fucking people up. We had the 10-code, and so we knew what they were saying. We had police radios and we would arrive there before [them], and we had rifles. ‘Don’t fuck with us, we’ll fuck with you.’ And that scared the shit out of them.’”
In 1978, law enforcement targeted Cervantes’ home as part of the largest raid in northern New Mexico history at the time. He would be later judged and sentenced under the indeterminate sentencing laws that expired the following year, but that allowed a judge to mete out one of the harshest sentences I was able to find during my research: 34 and 170 years in prison after a jury found him guilty of five counts of drug trafficking.
He would go on to live a life of constant struggle balancing art, community work, substance use and incarceration. Hence the significance of this award honoring Carlos but also celebrates Santa Fe’s historic designation as one of the world’s first UNESCO Creative Cities of Crafts and Folk Art 20 years ago.
“I cannot even imagine what that journey feels like,” said Santa Fe Mayor Alan Webber. “You start out in life and you’re considered a criminal. And only now toward the end that you get people saying thank you and we honor you and we respect you and all the labels go away. The only label that works anymore is artist and that’s the best label of all.”
I’ll leave it there for now. Just know that I am working on a more substantial update on Carlos’ story for a local publication that should be coming out before the end of the year.