With a name derived from the Lakota tribe’s historical Tokala Society—a group of warriors who showed bravery and leadership from a young age—Tokala is a photography series spotlighting the next generation of BIPOC climate activists.
In 2022, New Mexico experienced its largest wildfire to date—and it was no accident.
Burning across 300,000 acres of land in northern New Mexico, the destructive blaze ignited when two separate wildfires merged into one. In the first week of April, the US Forest Service lost control of a prescribed burn in the Santa Fe National Forest near Hermit’s Peak, where they had hoped to thin the overgrown forest. A few days later, a fire also rekindled in the Calf Canyon region, after the same Forest Service failed to properly extinguish a pile burn. After a major wind brought them together, the inferno continued for the following four months, reaching Taos, Mora, and Colfax counties in the Sangre de Cristo mountain range.
Over 900 structures were damaged in the wildfire—particularly affecting those living in the smaller communities around the area, like Mora and Rociada. (The fire also burned the upper reaches of the Gallinas River watershed, one of the main drinking water sources for more than 17,000 people in New Mexico, and even as far as Las Vegas.) Climate activist Esperanza “Sole” García—who is based in Denver and whose roots are in Northern New Mexico—still remembers the wildfire like it was just yesterday. “Afterwards, it was so hot: You could feel the heat off the ground,” García says. “Everything was black, gray, and white. My grandparents lost a lot of forest on ancestral land. There are a couple of people that I know in Mora that lost their homes. If you go there now, all that’s left is chimneys.”
The impact on New Mexicans didn’t end with the fires either. Once the flames were extinguished, the surrounding regions were then hit by monsoons and flooding caused by lingering smoke; water began to cascade down the slopes of the Sangre de Cristo mountains onto the waterways, fields, and homes below—causing particular devastation in areas like Mora, which already holds a high poverty rate. “Two years later, a lot of people are still dealing with flooding,” Garcia notes. Many traditional adobe homes in the area were impacted by the ash and sediment, not to mention the severe impact of the floods on the land and cattle owned by local ranchers too. “For a lot of people, their cattle is their livelihood,” García explains. “That’s their college fund or their winter money.”
Two years later, it’s easy for locals to still feel disheartened by the devastating wildfires as they attempt to rebuild their communities—but García remains hopeful and is now taking action, making the incident a key driving force in her work. By day, Garcia works as an architectural designer, with a focus on preserving local culture. (The structures she helps build are made of natural elements such as sand, clay, straw, and water.) She sees power in investing in these culturally significant structures going forward, especially as more environmental wildfires continue to ravage the area. “No matter how much is burned down on this earth, you can’t really burn mud,” García. “I see it as an almost forgotten mode of creating, and that’s where the superpower lies; it’s an ancestral recipe.”
García had roots in climate activism that she can trace all the way back to her high school years, so it was only natural that her work in architecture evolved to have a major environmental focus. “I went to a camp that totally changed my worldview, that reminded me of who I am,” she says. “I started wanting to grow my own plants and food.” She has since worked on various climate actions or marches, with organizations such as the International Indigenous Youth Council and Future Coalition. “My family has been in activism for generations,” García says of her drive to take part in these actions. “We were campesinos and were of the Chicano movement.”
More recently, García has started collaborating with her mentor Ronald Rael—a University of California Berkeley professor, activist, trained architect, and CEO and cofounder of Emerging Objects and Muddy Robots. Rael’s work reintroduces humankind’s most technologically sophisticated material, the ground beneath our feet, as a building material to solve the global climate crisis and housing crisis. The structures were built by combining traditional natural materials with contemporary 3D-printing methods. In 2021, Rael began building a structure named Casa Covida in Colorado, just a two-hour drive from where the wildfires occurred in Mora a year later. “The way that Ron makes them, he combines soil, hay, and water, and sifts it through an industrial sifter,” García explains. “Then it’s prepared inside of a cement roller and printed using software called Grasshopper and Rhino.”
To activists like García and Rael, investing in these types of architectural advancements is a form of grassroots innovation—one that contrasts with a government that often ignores culturally rooted approaches to combatting environmental disasters. After the 2022 New Mexico wildfires, the US Forest Service accepted full liability, and the government threw money at the issue instead of focusing on working directly with the communities to rebuild what was lost. President Joe Biden signed the Hermit’s Peak Fire Assistance Act in September 2022, providing $3.95 billion to compensate New Mexico residents impacted by fires—but for many residents, this financial assistance alone was not entirely helpful. If the investment had come earlier—and the authorities had taken the time to engage with local communities—García says the fires could have been avoided in the first place. “What people can do is listen to the original caretakers of the land, and to the people that your lands are on,” García says. “They went and did this [controlled burn] in a spring drought, on the windiest week of the year. The way my family does them, we do it in the winter when it’s snow-capped.”
As García continues to work toward building a housing revolution through her architecture, she sees traditional adobe homes as a necessity for survival. She also identifies a clear tie between the unbreakable strength of these adobes, and the resiliency of the people and the communities who invented them. “Even in the year 4000, these homes are always going to be as effective and insulating, just like how we’re still always going to be here,” García reflects. “We come from the earth—and no matter how many times we’re bombed, or how many of our forests are burned, we’re still going to be here.”
Additional photo credits:
Photographs: Carlos Jaramillo
Creative direction and styling: Marcus Correa
Production manager; Hair and makeup: Thomas Lopez
Videographer and photo assistant: Edson Reyes
Stylist assistant: Evie Lozano
Production assistant: Leslie Argüelles
*Living editor, *Vogue:_ Liam Hess_
*Visual editor, *Vogue:_ Olivia Horner_
*Senior art director, *Vogue:_ Parker Hubbard_
