In the tiny hamlet of Dulce, New Mexico, population 2,700, there is virtually no one who doesn’t know Jose Eugenio ‘Cheno’ Gomez, Junior. He may be the brightest thread in the fabric of this Lilliputian mountain town.
Mr. Gomez nicknamed ‘Cheno,’ a diminutive for Eugenio, has spent the entirety of his 83-year-long life in Dulce, the hub of north central New Mexico’s Rio Arriba County.
Dulce, Spanish for ‘sweet,’ because of the natural springs that flow across the region, is also home to the Jicarilla Apache nation. But before the Jicarilla settled there, in 1887, the Gomez family was already established and ranching, owning perhaps the largest sheep operations in the region and state.
Born in the spring of 1942, Mr. Gomez was one of eight children of his namesake, Jose Eugenio Gomez, and Lena Gomez de Duran. There were five boys and three girls.
While his family was successful in ranching, it was also cognizant of the importance of education. Though he said, not unlike many families of the time, it was a higher priority for the family’s boys who were shipped away to Santa Fe’s Saint Michael’s College for school each September and returned home in June. Three of the boys would earn college degrees.
Armed with a college sheepskin, Mr. Gomez began his career in education in Fall of 1965 in Gobernador, New Mexico. He would stay for two years before moving on to Tierra Amarilla where he would remain the school’s biology teacher for the next thirty years.
“I taught 5th, 6th, 7th and 8th grade general biology,” he said. It was a five-class per day regime. But as enrollment shrank, he was required to expand his portfolio to teach ecology, physiology, human anatomy, physics and chemistry, he said. But he loved it all.
Over the course of his teaching career, he has seen students go on to amazing careers, including a few doctors, nurses and no surprise, teachers. He has seen students become parents and grandparents, too. But there are few, he said, who don’t stop and chat with him as he runs errands each day in the small town.
Mr. Gomez taught generations of families, including some of his own family. “I taught nieces, nephews and cousins,” all his own. He also taught entire families of brothers, sisters and, later, their children, too. “I taught them all and if a student needed help, I would do individual teaching. I was nice but also a disciplinarian.”
“He was a very wonderful teacher, very respected and we addressed him as Mr. Gomez,” said Emily Chavez. “He was so well respected. When it was time to laugh and have fun, but when it was work, it was work.” Ms. Chavez said he was someone you “could remain friends for life.”
While Mr. Gomez, who never married, is a confirmed ‘small town’ guy, he made the most of the long summer vacations that teaching provided and hit the road with his brother, Leopoldo Luis Gomez, more formally known as Monsignor Gomez.
His brother was ordained a priest in 1963 and in 1973 named Monsignor by Pope Paul IV. Over the course of his calling, he held numerous church titles before retiring in 2006 when he served as Pastor at Saint Mary’s in Farmington, New Mexico.
When he was alive, the Monsignor and Mr. Gomez mixed travel and adventure with missionary work in Europe, Africa and Mexico. Failing health forced the Monsignor to retire to Dulce in 2006 where he shared the same home with Mr. Gomez where they grew up.
Monsignor Gomez died in 2024. But in the ten years prior to his passing, Mr. Gomez took care of his brother in the same home where they grew up.
Mr. Gomez lives alone in Dulce but often receives company. When visitors drop by, they can often expect the offer of a sip of tequila—“the good stuff” —a beer, soda or water. He is a genial host.
In his off time, Mr. Gomez spends time with an extensive collection of books, “mostly spiritual,” he said. His lifelong Catholic faith, he said, has made him “wonder” about a fate we all will meet.
“The Creator,” he said, “made everything, knows everything, including the choices, both good and bad, we’re going to make.” The whole thing, he said, just “makes me curious.”
