Most of the time, Fort Marcy Ball Field in Santa Fe, New Mexico, hosts baseball games for its youth leagues and its semipro team, the Fuego. But everyone in the state capital (this writer’s hometown) knows that on every other day of the year, the events are just space holders for Zozobra—the 50-foot marionette that will be set ablaze tonight for the 100th year in a row.
Started in 1924 as a backyard event by artist Will Shuster, Zozobra (whose name in Spanish means anxiety) has become known as Old Man Gloom, a stand-in for the bad vibes and dashed dreams of attendees—more than 64,000 of whom took part in 2023. Over the past century, as Zozobra has grown, so has the pomp and circumstance of the proceedings. A city official reads a death proclamation every year. Since the 1970s, a red-clad “fire dancer”—flanked by local students in white costumes known as “gloomies”—has taunted the puppet before built-in pyrotechnics set the marionette on fire.
At the center of it all is the figure of Zozobra. In stature and design, he looks almost nothing like his initial 6-foot form. But over the course of the past century, Shuster and subsequent designers helped standardize a version of the puppet that is still evolving. Historian Hannah Abelbeck, who cocurated the current New Mexico History Museum exhibit Zozobra: A Fire That Never Goes Out, says that like any sufficiently long tradition, the design has also been influenced by generations of Santa Feans.
The evolution of Zozobra
At its core, Zozobra isn’t much more than a wooden structure, chicken wire “skin” stuffed with shredded paper, and cotton to cover it all up. Pyrotechnics are also now standard. But in the decades since his low-budget debut, Zozobra has inspired artists to take new approaches to transforming those simple materials into something that’s ready for a crowd of thousands.
“When you look at early Zozobras, they were just kind of thrown together,” says Ray Sandoval, the event’s chairman, who has led Zozobra’s design and construction since 2013. After keeping the marionette fairly tame through the 1930s, Shuster embraced scarier features in the 1940s—a permanent scowl, elfin ears, and sunken eyes.
“I call that the Golden Age of Zozobra,” Sandoval says. “If you look at the 1940s and 1950s Zozobras, the attention to detail is beautiful—and he [Shuster] also experimented. There were some with cheetah print or bolo ties.” Not all of the experiments stuck around, and some design changes were short-lived. Some 80 years later, the 1944 Zozobra—a product of the cultural moment—has aged poorly. That year, Zozobra was a mashup of Axis leaders Shuster dubbed “Hirohitlomus.” For the design, Shuster borrowed Hitler’s mustache but gave the puppet caricatured eyes meant to evoke Japan’s Emperor Hirohito.
In 1964, Shuster ceded Zozobra’s organizing duties and rights to the Santa Fe Kiwanis Club. The local chapter of the national service organization still runs the event and claims to have donated $2.1 million to local nonprofits since 1964. Sandoval says the initial run of Zozobras under the Kiwanis leadership was seen as a failure by Shuster, who established design guidelines before his death in 1969. Shuster’s Kiwanis successor, Gus Denninger, used the directives to help standardize the construction process and improve on the structure.
“The early Zozobras varied a lot in form, but when they started doing more consistent blueprinting, they were able to introduce design ideas that they could replicate,” Abelbeck says. “They started to pursue things like animation that was more innovative, the increasing height of Zozobra.”
Sandoval, who has been enamored with Zozobra since he was 6 years old, says that while the design standards helped with consistency, they also brought complacency that he wanted to break out of when he took over the event.
Breathing new life into a tradition
As Zozobra’s event chairman, Sandoval is part Willy Wonka, part Supreme Court justice. He’s putting on an annual event that aims to delight locals and visitors while deciding the extent to which he must hew to its creator’s guidelines. He’s something of an originalist.
“When I took over, I didn’t feel like Shuster’s instructions were a stranglehold on us,” he says. “It was only after two years of awful-looking Zozobras that he gave us those instructions. If the Kiwanians in the ’60s had a little more artistic flair, they probably wouldn’t have gotten these very rigid instructions.”
After two years of dutiful stewardship for the 88th and 89th iterations, Sandoval said for the 90th and the decade-long lead-up to the centennial, he “wanted to blow off some of the shackles and staleness of Zozobra.” And he did it by looking backward.
For the past 10 years, Sandoval has modeled each year’s puppet on a different decade. In 2014, he hearkened back to the 1920s with a design based on Shuster’s original Zozobra. In 2021, he looked to the 1980s, dressing Zozobra in Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” jacket and zombie makeup. It was a far cry from the staid design that defined the Zozobra of Sandoval’s childhood, which often featured a standard ensemble of a bow tie, cummerbund, and cuff links that changed color every year along with his hair and nail polish. For the centennial, Sandoval has brought back the bow tie, but is adding a white-tie tuxedo and a diamond pinky ring.
Sandoval’s “decades project” has coincided with the doubling of Zozobra’s attendance. In 2014, the event crossed 30,000 attendees; in 2023, 64,000-plus people crowded into the ballpark for the main event. That many eyeballs has made organizers up their game.
“When I was a kid, we constructed Zozobra in four nights of two hours—and unfortunately sometimes it looked like it,” Sandoval says. Now construction starts months in advance. It gives builders time to add new adaptations to the structure and materials as New Mexico’s monsoon season has grown more intense. “We’ve had to take more time and energy to reengineer and look at the construction materials we use to make sure it’s safe and combat the effects of climate change,” he says. “The kind of wind that we get now would rip apart some of the fabric that we used to use.”
A cultural force all its own
Since its inception, Zozobra has been held in late August or early September to coincide with the annual Fiesta de Santa Fe. The fraught event has marked Spain’s reconquest of New Mexico in 1692 for more than 300 years, and until 2018 included a pageant called the Entrada, with locals dressed as Spanish conquistadors reenacting Spain’s capture of the capital.
Zozobra’s earliest versions were partially a response to the commercialization of this event, and coincided with a parade that was, in part, “a protest against what Santa Fe’s bohemian artists saw as a commercialization and a weird interpretation of culture that wasn’t very fun,” Abelbeck says. Sandoval says the parades included pigs and goats dressed as conquistadors.
“[Zozobra] is a myth that claims no authenticity,” Abelbeck says. “There’s nothing contradictory about that in terms of its origins. The idea was you would do this and then come up with something colorful to entertain yourself about why it exists. It didn’t really need justification other than it’s fun.”
In the ensuing years, Zozobra and Santa Fe’s Fiesta have become increasingly linked, though Sandoval says he’s been focused on a more inclusive approach that he sees as more in line with the event’s origins. “The idea behind Zozobra was that Fiesta was very Hispanic and very Catholic,” he says. “It excluded our Native American brothers and sisters, as well as Anglos and anyone else.”
When he took over the event, Sandoval said he worked to bring Indigenous performers on board. The Fiesta Council attends Zozobra, parading in front of Zozobra’s remains after the burn, but has stopped carrying a Spanish flag at Sandoval’s request. They are also now joined by Native American dancers. “I was really worried about opening up that can of worms,” he says.
Emphasizing Santa Fe’s multiculturalism, for Sandoval, is part of making Zozobra as inclusive as possible in the interest of keeping it a fundamentally local event, even as it brings in a growing number of outside visitors. Of the event’s 64,000-plus attendees last year, 41,000 were from Santa Fe, with another 15,000 coming from within a 100-mile radius.
Those numbers underscore what Abelbeck says is at the center of her exhibition. “Zozobra really exists not because one person came up with the idea of burning something—which is really not that original an idea,” Abelbeck says. “Zozobra exists because of sustained community investment and reinvestment.”