“What was it like when you came here?” Charlie aimed the microphone at his great-uncle, Bill Hogrebe.
Listen to the radio documentary Madrid kids made about their town.
“It was a ghost town,” Hogrebe said. Back in the 1970s, he explained, he and 54 others got together to buy this whole town — Madrid, New Mexico — which had been abandoned years earlier by the coal mining company that created it. It was remarkably cheap, he remembered: His own house was just $250 down, and $35 a month.
“Sorry, one second,” Charlie said. “Ah, shoot. Jumping parakeet.”
We were sitting on the front steps of KMRD, the community radio station. Charlie, who is 10, was there for radio camp, interviewing local VIPs he and his fellow campers had selected. Hogrebe ranked high on that list; besides being among Madrid’s longest-running residents, he’s the proud caretaker of a fleet of trained parakeets that often accompanies him to the bar, tucked inside a cloth bag or hidden in his shirt. This morning, six of the birds had been perching politely on the long stick he held — but one had just defected, hopping under a parked car. Charlie pursued it with the microphone. “Always move slow with ’em,” Hogrebe advised.
Madrid, pronounced MAD-rid (“Get rid of your madness in Madrid,” as Hogrebe likes to quip), is 40 minutes south of Santa Fe on scenic Highway 14. In its mining heyday, it had nearly 3,000 residents. Now, 50 years after Bill and company resurrected the town, it’s an unincorporated community of about 300 — an artists’ refuge built around old tailings piles in the sloping, scrub-covered Ortiz Mountains.
My friend Stella Linder Byrne started the radio station here 10 years ago. Under her guidance, KMRD has become a northern New Mexico institution: More than 75 DJs rotate in and out of the turquoise bungalow downtown each week. All of them, however, are adults. Last month, when I came to town to help run the third annual KMRD youth camp, our goal was to find out how Madrid sounded to some of its youngest inhabitants.
Our nine campers, ranging from newly 8 to nearly 12, represented a substantial percentage of the region’s tween contingent. (The program’s popularity stemmed in part from the fact that it offered the area’s only free child care.) DJ Awesome Sauce (known elsewhere as Nikola) and DJ Raccoon King (usually called Myrddin) were camp veterans who collaborated last summer on a radio play about an elfin wizard named Fatigletang. DJ Dogman (“Konrad”) and DJ Sloth (“Frances”) had just finished first grade at the same charter school. Others were still sussing each other out, comparing notes on favorite TikTok genres. Last year, the boys had been into cologne influencers; this year, there was increasing interest in Therians, an online community of people who identify as non-human animals.
On the first day of camp, we’d planned an elaborate icebreaker activity based around making sounds into a collection of electric fans borrowed from neighbors. Unfortunately, Madrid’s power was out. There was also an issue with the town’s water, which transitioned from benignly sulfur-smelling to hyper-chlorinated before it was shut off completely.
Alongside managing the radio station, Linder Byrne moonlights as a member of the town water board and owns the local greengrocer’s. She triaged gracefully — monitoring the station’s back-up battery and the status of frozen meat, writing PSAs with the latest infrastructural updates for DJs to share on the air. The kids, meanwhile, were unfazed: Most of them live off-grid and seldom depend on Madrid’s utilities.
Electricity stayed spotty, and camp moved outside. After learning to use portable recorders, we went on a sonic scavenger hunt. Something fast: the town’s sole Cybertruck going by. Something slow: tourists ambling up the road to Java Junction for a cup of coffee. Something beautiful: the clanging of a metal sculpture rotating in the wind. The crispy seed pods of the Chinese lantern tree outside the station, smashed into the microphone, sounded satisfyingly like Pop Rocks (something loud). DJ Sloth recorded the sound of a creaky tricycle rolling backwards across asphalt — something old.
We spent most of the week, though, on our big project. As DJ Chill Guy (Charlie) informed the adults we passed on the street, “We’re going to do a story about Madrid, basically.”
At the community garden, Marissa Aurora, a former ecologist and current radio DJ, led a tour of the compost system. At the ballpark, the kids looked at photos of Madrid Miners games from the 1920s, when this became the first ballfield west of the Mississippi to be lit with electricity.
“We’re going to do a story about Madrid, basically.”
At the fire station, a volunteer firefighter named Charles Philipp helped three small reporters try on his heavy suit and climb around the truck. In an area without EMS or police, the kids had seen firefighters do a lot more than put out wildfires, and they had ideas on how to help. When Charles said the department was seeking young volunteers to beef up its ranks, DJ Sloth offered to bring snacks to Tuesday night meetings. The group brainstormed a few other capacity-building proposals: Why not consider toddlers for the chimney-cleaning program, or to offer emotional support in the wake of a wildfire? Perhaps raccoons and squirrels could be trained to assist the human volunteers?
Much of what intrigued the kids was the history that preceded them. The coal mines here were among New Mexico’s first, operating from the 1890s into the 1950s. The miners who built Madrid left town decades before any of the campers’ families arrived. But their story is central to local mythology, and their activities continue to shape the land itself.
In the arroyo that runs through town, we met with a man named Leeland Murray, head of a years-long, state-run effort to stop the erosion and flooding caused by the abandoned mine. “Whenever the mines were finished and they didn’t need any more coal, they just left,” he said. “So now we’re doing all the cleanup.”
Murray showed the campers how the miners had reshaped the arroyo, smoothing out its curves. They listened respectfully — but group enthusiasm increased when he walked them over to a saltcedar bush and explained that its leaves actually exuded salt. DJ Sloth licked a handful to confirm, pocketing more to season our lunch. She found a tamarisk leaf beetle on the plant and passed it very gently to DJ Raccoon King, who described it to the microphone as “smaller than a Cheerio.”
Nearby, a team of archaeologists was combing through decades of detritus to help guide the state’s remediation work.
“How do you determine what’s important or not?” asked Zander (alias “DJ DJ DJ”), eyeing the collection of nails, glass and rocks. “That’s a very good question,” the archaeologist responded. He said you had to go in with an open mind — collect everything you could and then consider what you’d uncovered.
Back at the station, sitting on the floor together, we listened to the mountains of tape the kids had gathered. Sure enough, the moments that stood out were small, surprising ones. DJ DJ DJ and DJ Pinball scraped pieces of shimmery coal along the ground like chalk, audibly shaping the classic Superman “S.” At the ballpark, DJ Wolfdog sprinted alongside DJ Chill Guy with the microphone as he ran the bases, creating a collaborative, deafening wall of wind. At the end of each interview, DJ Chill Guy said, with finality, “Well, thank you for your time.”
Much of Santa Fe County will hear the results of these efforts this week: KMRD plans to air the kids’ documentary at 6 pm mountain time on Wednesday, Aug. 27th. You can listen live at kmrd.fm — or find the full audio at the top of this page.
All recordings were made by KMRD campers (Charlie, Emily, Myrddin, Zander, Frances, Nikola, Salome, Konrad and Dean) with moral support from Stella Linder Byrne, Ian Lewis and Annie Rosenthal. Editing and mixing was done by Annie Rosenthal, with editorial assistance from Ian Lewis. Special thanks to our interviewees: Bill Hogrebe, Leeland Murray, Ellen Dietrich, Marissa Aurora, Travis Stroope, Clementine West, Charles Philipp, and the archaeologists. This project was supported by a New Mexico Creative Industries Division grant.
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