It may have taken a bit longer than he originally planned and a journey with more than a few different offramps, but Dennis Santistevan is finally at home. The Costilla, New Mexico, resident is today right where he not only wants to be but also, he said, right where he belongs.
Santistevan grew up in Kaysville, Utah, a place where his father was stationed while serving in the Air Force. But every summer, he said, his father “would send me to stay in Costilla” to be with his grandmother, Cora. There he would come to love the land along with his family’s ancestral connections to it.
Now home in Costilla, Santistevan runs his own insurance agency, Farmers Insurance. The agency, by his own admission, is modest in size. But what it lacks in size is more than made up in familiarity and fraternity with those it serves.
A smaller agency in a smaller community, he said, allows him to know his clients, many of whom he met years before while going door-to-door and introducing himself to them. Sometimes, he said, he would explain the details of policies and when he was done would sign them up “right there on the hoods of their cars.”
While summers were all New Mexico and Costilla, Kaysville and Utah is where he was educated, ultimately earning a bachelor’s degree in environmental science from Utah State University in nearby Logan.
After college, Santistevan joined the Army where he spent twenty years. Joining first as an enlisted soldier he would later join the officer ranks wearing the gold oak leaf rank of Major. “I went through the ranks,” he said.
Santistevan retired from the military in 2004, exactly 20 years to the day of his first enlistment. Today he jokes, he might have stayed longer, but “no one offered me anything else.”
With feet firmly planted in Costilla, Santistevan divides his time between his office and insurance issues and being one of Costilla’s pillars of goodwill. He owns the town plaza and regularly opens it up free of charge for community events, including the Rio Costilla Studio Arts Tour, a once a year opportunity for local and regional artists to display and sell their art.
In addition to opening the doors to the plaza for the Arts Tour, he also offers it up “just to get people together,” for events that include the Costilla-Amalia Reunion held in 2019 and later celebrated 175 years of settlement in Costilla and Amalia via an anniversary reunion in 2023. Both events drew over 2,000 people, both record-breaking events and were led by Pauline Rivera, publisher of LaVozColorado and former resident of Costilla along with several other former residents who formed a reunion committee, “My role with the reunion,” he jokes, is limited “to lending the place out.” Making it free, Santistevan says, “is just my way of doing something for the community.
While Santistevan’s insurance agency is enough to keep him busy, he makes certain to take the time to help out area veterans who may need a hand navigating a sometimes complex or confusing Veterans Administration labyrinth or who cannot travel. “It’s hard for some of them to get to Albuquerque,” where the state’s VA headquarters are located.
It is hard to pin Santistevan down on a single subject once he starts to speak. He can talk endlessly about his fascination with genealogy and can trace his own family’s roots to 1598, when the first conquistadors led by Juan Oñate ventured north to what today is New Mexico.
Depending on how much time one has, Santistevan can wax endlessly with stories on the various surnames that arrived with the Spaniards and that now dot New Mexico. “Pedro Chavez,” he said, “is my first known relative.” Chavez arrived with the first wave of Europeans.
The names Chavez, Cervantes, of course, Santistevan, along with others just roll off his tongue. “I always go back to before DNA,” he boasts. Incidentally, his own surname, he said, has a Basque origin. Basque is a race of people who originated in Spain and France. But just mention almost any surname associated with New Mexico, he said, “and I can connect them back with their countries of origin.”
Santistevan calls himself “a life-long learner,” and will bury himself in a book every chance he gets. It could be a book on gardening one day, history the next. Either way, he said, he’s never far from something to read.
Santistevan and his wife have raised four children, each now grown and pursuing their own careers. Now with just him and his wife, he mentions no particular plans beyond running his insurance agency and continuing his study of genealogy. A lot of his time is taken with classes on the subject in Albuquerque.
But, he said, if something comes up, if the town wants to host a parade or do something that just brings people together, he’s ready to lend a hand. “Sepa Dios,” he says.
“Only God knows. We’re open to anything.”
