A year after pepper spray and an arrest turned the Zozobra crowd into a documented confrontation, the New Mexican sent Veronica Gonzalez back to cover Zozobra 2000, and the story she filed was mostly about fireworks, fire dancers, and forty thousand people watching a forty-two-foot marionette go up in flames. Potter’s House earns only a few sentences in it, but next to the 1999 confrontation already documented on this site, those few sentences are worth reading closely, because this time the story is not about a clash.
Zozobra 2000: the same street, a different tenor
As the crowd flooded Washington Avenue after the burning, a line of Potter’s House Christian Fellowship members was out again, distributing flyers and calling on revelers to give their lives to Jesus. The reception was familiar: some people cursed at them, most simply walked past, and the surrounding crowd kept up its own chanting undisturbed. What was different was how it ended. Santa Fe police officer Charles Ritter, watching the same scene the department had used pepper spray on the year before, offered an unprompted assessment: whatever hard time the crowd gave them, the church members had been very well behaved that night. The article recaps the prior year’s clash in a single line, noting that authorities said church members had assaulted Police Chief John Denko before pepper spray was used to disperse the crowd, the same allegation examined in more detail, and with more care about what was charge versus fact, in this site’s earlier coverage.
Why the calm matters too
An archive built mostly from confrontations risks implying that confrontation is the only mode this group operates in, which is not a fair account of any organization across any stretch of time. This short follow-up belongs in the record for exactly that reason. The broader Fiesta had also grown more careful by 2000, moved to Thursdays and staffed with some 160 officers after a bystander, Carlos Santiago Romero, was killed at the event in 1997, a tragedy unconnected to Potter’s House but part of why the whole evening ran calmer that year. Deputy Police Chief Beverly Lennen called the night largely incident-free, aside from a sprained ankle and someone stepping on a nail, though she was careful not to declare the wider Fiesta weekend problem-free until it was over. Set against that backdrop, a Potter’s House presence that drew nothing worse than curses and a compliment from a police officer is a genuine data point, not a footnote to be skipped past on the way to the next conflict.
Sources and further reading
- Veronica Gonzalez, “Fanning the Flames of Fiesta,” The New Mexican, September 8, 2000; archived in the Cult Education Institute reference files
- On the confrontation the year before, see Pepper Spray at Zozobra: The 1999 Potter’s House Confrontation
