Santa Feans Stand with Orlando

Just 12 days from the planned celebration of Santa Fe Pride at the same spot, hundreds gathered on the Plaza Monday to mourn the victims of the Orlando mass shooting and to band together in solidarity for the LGBT community.

The bandstand was bracketed by rainbow Pride flags, and bright blooms cascaded out of the hanging beds overhead. The sun was setting and voices were low. At most vigils, people hold candles, but here, their hands carried carnations and roses on long stems. Many bowed their heads; some cried. The tragedy hit close to home, even for people over 1,700 miles away.

The flowers the mourners held came from Stephen Jones and Chris Hill, relatively new owners of Barton’s Flowers. The couple moved from Chicago about six months ago and bought the flower shop on St. Michael’s Drive.

Jones says he and Hill were compelled to support their community, to gather. “When we heard about this last night we thought, we can make it 24 hours, we can get here,” he told SFR. The pair say they brought 180 flowers to the vigil. “They went fast,” Hill said.

A substantial crowd packed in around the Plaza obelisk by the time Mayor Javier Gonzales took the stage—mothers held their squirming children, and there were a lot of sun hats and comfort hiking tennis shoes. The Plaza smelled like a church, or a dorm room, as people burned incense. A woman circled, slowly beating a drum. Couples of seemingly every age and race and gender stood arm in arm, and it was the only thing smile-inducing or warm about the event: the obvious presence of love.   

Piper Kapin, a resident of Santa Fe who stood to the side of the stage at the vigil, said her presence at the event was about proving something to herself. “It is to push myself from being really scared,” she said. “It felt like we should.”  

Madison Winston said events like this make the weight of the tragedy more tangible and present. “There is a distance from it when you are reading about it on your iPhone,” she said. “I didn’t really feel anything until I saw all these people sitting in silence together. To not feel anything for it is kind of evil, it’s something that’s lazy.”

Peppered along with recognition of what the mayor said was a gathering to “honor to lives of the victims” were political calls to action for gun-law reform. State Rep. Brian Egolf used the word “terrorist” twice. Others called the shooting a “hate crime.” Rev. Adam Lee Ortega y Ortiz said, “We’re all victims,” and Rev. Talitha Arnold, senior minister at United Church of Santa Fe, reminded the crowd that the dead and wounded had a single, simple plan that night: “All they were doing was wanting to dance.”  

Richard Brethour-Bell, president of the New Mexico chapter of the Human Rights Alliance, warned against Islamophobia and the propensity to avoid “the real conversation.” And he said the mass shooting in Orlando was “a direct result of hate speech and hate teaching.”

“No matter the nature of the terror, it will not deter us,” said Brethour-Bell. “We fight by living our lives openly and authentically.”  

Pride on the Plaza starts Saturday, June 25 with a 1 pm parade at the state Capitol and running north along Old Santa Fe Trail to the Plaza and north along Lincoln Avenue to Federal Place.See more photos from the vigil here. 

Santa Fe Reporter