As I mentioned in the last post, Albuquerque has a really odd mixture of different subcultures all occupying the same space. It’s something that we haven’t quite encountered in any other area.
One of the examples that really sticks out to me is Robin’s neighborhood alone. Robin lived near a park, in a nice area of faux-adobe houses. Her roommates were, like her, both Americorps volunteers. The guy down the street, outside of whose house we parked the bus, was a shaven-headed, goateed, tattooed chef. Those of Robin’s friends that we met seemed to fit into the hip subculture that we’ve encountered in a lot of cities—it reminded me a lot of being in Austin, in particular.
None of this was unusual or surprising. But when we walked a block down from Robin’s place, we found ourselves in front of a motorcycle shop with the Nazi SS sprayed in various spots on the exterior. The place was closed during the day, but as we drove by at night we caught a glimpse of an aging biker with a scraggly white wizard’s beard reaching down to his chest inside dealing with customers. Robin confirmed our suspicions; this was a genuine neo-Nazi bike shop, operating out in the open.
The oddness of the city got further underscored when we went to go hunting for veggie oil. By 8 pm, it seemed, practically all of the restaurants in the area where we searched were closed. Despite what seemed like a fairly active youth subculture, practically everywhere we turned seemed to have shut down by before sundown. We had been to much smaller towns that were still significantly more active at night.
Little night life and neo-Nazis aside, though, Albuquerque was still a great town. It’s worth visiting for the food alone, not to mention the surrounding natural beauty. And I should add that practically everyone we met was perfectly nice and almost certainly not a white supremacist. Really, the fact that they found their little bigoted niche in Albuquerque indicates more about its strange eclecticism than it does any sort of trend.
