Some people connect with their roots through the food they cook, the clothing they wear, or the names and languages they use. For Dominic Roybal, a classification analyst in the Office of Classification and Controlled Information at Los Alamos National Laboratory, this connection is nurtured by engaging directly with the earth; he combines a variety of soils and plants to create pigments and paints. It’s how he bridges time to connect with his ancestors, who first came to northern New Mexico 400 years ago.
“The Roybal roots date back to the Spaniard, Ignacio Roybal, who settled here after the Pueblo Revolt, around 1680 or 1690,” Roybal says. “I grew up in Española, about 20 miles northeast of the Laboratory, and I live in Española. My roots are here.”
Reconnecting with his roots
Roybal is a member of a small community of artists who work in straw appliqué, a traditional northern New Mexico art form that draws inspiration from the Moorish damascene style in Spain. “It’s sometimes called ‘el oro de los pobres,’ or ‘the gold of the poor,’” Roybal says. “This tradition arose from the use of inlaid gold to decorate objects, but when missionaries arrived in northern New Mexico, there was an absence of gold—so they used straw instead.”
Straw appliqué traditionally involves taking carved wooden objects, applying a base layer of paint derived from gypsum, adding color through ground-up soils and plants, inlaying or applying straw to emulate gold, and then finishing with a pine resin to seal the colored straw in place.
From start to finish, Roybal estimates that it takes four or five days to create each piece of art. The timeline varies, though, based on what he’s making and what form he uses. Straw appliqué comes in two primary forms—traditional depictions of religious imagery and a more expressive form focused on mosaics and patterns.
“When you do more of the traditional side, you’re working with a design that has been passed down and is established and often quicker to work with,” Roybal says. “When you’re doing your own design, that’s where my creative side comes out, but it can take longer because you want to do something different.”
Although Roybal says he believes in the importance of understanding the traditions and history behind straw appliqué art, he also notes that it's important for each artist to leave behind something unique in their work.
“As an artist, you do the traditional things and then you expand from that. I’ve incorporated other art forms or mediums. I’ve used ceramics in my work, and I’ve used sculpture with straw appliqué,” says Roybal, noting that his work has sold at the Traditional Spanish Market in Santa Fe.
Beyond art
Roybal’s connection to northern New Mexico extends beyond art and ancestral ties. His now 96-year-old father, Theodore Roybal, joined the Lab in 1949 and worked there for nearly four decades as a surveyor. “Through my dad, I’ve always known what the Lab does,” says the younger Roybal, who began working at the Lab during the summer of 1985, between his junior and senior years of high school. As a student, he inspected the lightning rods and grounding equipment on buildings and planted trees as part of forestry efforts.
After graduating from New Mexico State with an engineering degree, Roybal briefly worked with the New Mexico Department of Transportation before taking a job as a production engineer at the Pantex Plant in Amarillo, Texas. There, Roybal became a derivative classifier, or DC; DCs are employees who assess the classification level of information in their respective fields. “I understood what to protect as far as our nuclear stockpile is concerned,” Roybal says. “Working at Pantex, a pure production agency, you get to understand the full scope of our stockpile.”
Five years later, Roybal took a job closer to home—in the Detonator Production division at Los Alamos. (Detonators are the small devices that trigger explosives inside nuclear weapons.) In his new role, Roybal continued to work as a DC, and before long, he was offered a permanent position in the Office of Classification.
Roybal started working in the Office of Classification in 2017 and says it’s been a rewarding experience. Much of his work involves determining what information and products—such as this magazine!—are releasable to the public. Through this process, Roybal is able to learn about and appreciate the entire scope of work at the Lab.
“I feel a large sense of pride working in the Lab,” Roybal says. “Over decades, it has helped build up the surrounding communities, and now I feel that—through my work and through my art—I have contributed to this community as well.”
New Mexico through and through
Reflecting on his artistic journey, Roybal is proud of the work he has done and how it has shaped him.
“It’s made me a broader person that I never would have been before,” he says. “I’m an engineer, I’m into science, I love to work with math. When art was introduced to me, it was a different way of looking at things and a different way of saying ‘I can create something from almost nothing.’”
Roybal sees a lot of similarities between the paint production process and a chemistry problem, like when a green plant suddenly turns into hues of blue when crushed. To him, the mixing and production of paints is a form of engineering but with the added freedom of expression that comes with any artistic medium.
With such a small community of artists who produce straw appliqué, Roybal is always looking for ways to share the art and tradition with people. He says he hopes that others take an interest in connecting with the natural world and northern New Mexican history so that traditions like straw appliqué stay alive.
“To go and collect pigments from the soil and the earth, there’s probably not a large percentage of people willing to do that,” Roybal says. “It’s easy to go and buy paint, but making it from scratch, carving wood, pushing your chisel through it, painting—you learn that by doing.” ★