Friday night in Santa Fe, New Mexico, thousands of people will gather to burn a towering 50-foot marionette called Zozobra. It’s stuffed with slips of paper onto which people have written their problems — their “glooms.” When the whole thing goes up in flames, the crowd cheers.
It’s a uniquely Santa Fe event that serves as a sort of collective catharsis — a farewell to summer and the city’s anxieties. And a moment of hope for a better future.
This year is its 101st event, though the festival’s origins are murky, according to Hannah Abelbeck.
Abelbeck is curator of photographs and archival collections at the New Mexico History Museum. She’s put together an exhibition showing there now called "Zozobra: A Fire That Never Goes Out."
Full conversation
HANNAH ABELBECK: So Zozobra is a 50-foot tall marionette. He usually wears white and he does like to dress formally. So it often involves buttons and a cummerbund, though that changes and has changed over time. You know, he has big eyes that move. He has large arms and large hands, and he just towers over people.
LAUREN GILGER: Yes, this thing is very huge. And it's created every year to burn it.
ABELBECK: Right, correct. Yeah, it only exists to be burned.
GILGER: And it's not just that it's burned, but it's symbolic of something. And this goes back to the history. So let's take a few minutes and talk about how this all began, right? This was 100 years ago, and it began in someone's backyard.
ABELBECK: Well that's interesting. That is often a story that is told that it started in the backyard, but we couldn't really find any documented evidence that that's true.
One of the things we learned is that the people who started Zozobra didn't think they were doing anything particularly historic when they started it. And so lots of people contributed ideas to this Zozobra and participated in different early iterations of it.
Sometimes they were drunk. They disagreed with each other about who did what. And it was actually kind of challenging to pinpoint the exact origins. What we definitely were able to confirm is that in 1924, they had a Zozobra predecessor in a public parade.
GILGER: OK.
ABELECK: And we believe that after that public parade, they buried him and possibly burned. Like fire was definitely involved. I'm not sure if they burned him and then buried him or just buried him in an empty lot downtown. So was it someone's backyard? Not sure. It might have even been a public space.
GILGER: So Zozobra is kind of supposed to be Old Man Gloom, right? Like, this is not rooted in any particular cultural history, but it does represent something.
ABELBECK: Yeah. So, you know, because a lot of people were contributing ideas, we know that there are a lot of other events or things that existed in the 1920s that people were drawing upon and referencing.
So this is why this Zozobra resembles, you know, other major burnings. But it's also like nothing else. And yeah, even from the very beginning, that idea that this was a figure of gloom and negative feelings and bad stuff that was there from the beginning, and that was what made this Zozobra powerful at the onset. And still today.
GILGER: OK, so it's a symbolic thing, but it's become a really big kind of cultural moment for Santa Fe and for all of New Mexico, in a way, over the last century. Tell us why and what it looks like today.
ABELBECK: Yeah, I think one of the reasons people have such a powerful connection to Zozobra is that they themselves are invited to write about the things that are bothering them.
Those are called glooms.
And part of the idea of Zozobra is that you can take these glooms, you know, physically manifest them on paper, but also, you know, just put your feelings into this marionette and then burn them so that, that negativity, that weight, those problems, all those things that are holding you down can, you know, go up in flames and, and have a sense of renewal, right? That there is a new possibility that next year doesn't have to have unresolved problems or that you could move on or that things could be better.
GILGER: Yeah. So there's an end of summer, beginning of the next season kind of moment there. And you've got I mean, hundreds, thousands of people will come out for this today.
ABELBECK: Yes, thousands of people.
GILGER: OK. So I want to ask you about the gloomies, as these are kind of part of the show that gets put on with the burning of Zozobra every year. Tell us about them.
ABELBECK: Zozobra through the community participation around it kind of developed into a play of sorts over the years. And so gloomies are characters that are often portrayed by children, and one of the sort of symbolic resonances of Zozobra is about the role of the gloomies, right.
This is about the future of children in Santa Fe, and in particular, like part of the dramatic reenactment is Zozobra's interaction with the gloomies who he would love to grab these children and bring him into like his vale of misery.
GILGER: So if you're a kid in Santa Fe, like, this is something you might do when you turn 11 or 12.
ABELBECK: Yeah, and, for a good portion of Zozobra history, it was often Boy Scouts and children of Kiwanis members. But it is broader, and a lot of people have participated. In fact, one of the security staff at the museum, in fact …
GILGER: So this is so uniquely Santa Fe, which has kind of quirky things about it and is a very artistic community kind of rooted in its own traditions.
That's what it makes me think about, having been there many times. Does, this feels very unique to you, to this place.
ABELBECK: I do, I think, in the exhibit we focused on community, creativity and collaboration, primarily, because we thought it was a really important story for Zozobra, and we thought it was a really important story for Santa Fe.
It really is the community that has kept it alive. So we think the best parts of this Zozobra are when you bring all of that community-focused care for the community along with creativity and, you know, build it out in a collaborative way, that's when you can get something like Zozobra.
GILGER: Yeah, yeah. OK, so tell us before I let you go, you know, do you know what gloom you will be writing on a slip of paper this year to to be burned in effigy here?
ABELBECK: I do know already. Yes.
GILGER: Can you tell us?
ABELBECK: Part of it is you're not supposed to.
GILGER: Oh. No way. OK, so this is a secret that goes in and then is burned up.
ABELBECK: Exactly, no, exactly. Yeah, you know, other people have shared, people who have survived cancer and, you know, burned the gown they wore during chemotherapy or, have left a bad relationship and burned mementos or a wedding dress that is no longer meaningful to them.
But other people have smaller cares and concerns and Zozobra it doesn't matter how big or small your gloom is, it's a chance to start over.
GILGER: It's this community catharsis.
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