2012 - The Chimayo Legacy of Architecture and Archaeology
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NOTE: Notes for this presentation didn't upload. WILL CORRECT!!! Lecture given at the 2012 New Mexico Heritage Preservation Alliance annual meeting. Visit our website www.archinia.com to see more of Firm Principal Rachel Preston Prinz' presentations or like us at https://www.facebook.com/ArchiniaDesign
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2012 - The Chimayo Legacy of Architecture and Archaeology
- 1. The Chimayo Legacy: Archaeology & Architecture 05.04.2012 Rachel Preston Prinz Archinia Taos & Albuquerque, NM
- 8. El Sanctuario circa 1910 El Sanctuario after 1920 “modernization” El Sanctuario Today
- 9. Penitente Chapel 1910 Penitente Chapel 1985 Penitente Chapel 1950 Los Ninos 2012
- 13. Next up: DON USNER
Editor's Notes
- Chimayo is a little town, comprised of 2 large plazas and several more placitas, that is currently home to about 3,000 people and famous for its magic dirt, sanctuario pilgrimage, chiles, and lowriders. Annually, the tiny hamlet gets about 300K visitors, 30k of which converge on the town during the Holy Week pilgrimage. Chimayo’s first plaza - the place where “it all started” - if “it all” is Hispanic culture - is the Plaza del Cerro, and its second plaza is the El Portrero - home of El Sanctuario de Chimayo. But we’ll come back to this… because the story of Chimayo is actually much older than that.
- Once upon a time, there were nomadic indigenous people roaming the New Mexico countryside. They followed watercourses looking for roots, berries, vegetables, treenuts, and herbs – which were all somewhat rare in the desert environment. In the fall, they would hunt game nearby.
- Eventually they, and new people who came into the area, began to settle into their favorite foraging areas. They began to build permanent shelters. They began to integrate new forms of building that responded more favorably to the arid desert environment. They were fans of clay – using different clays to make pots, provide colorful body paints for their ceremonies like these warriors in Africa are shown doing, and some even used clays as a “wash” of sorts to dip their food in. Clay became an important commodity, more precious than gold. It was collected by secret societies and could be used to pay ransom for a kidnapped tribe member. Elders told stories of the times when the Towa eh , who brought the people up from the inside of the earth… when the earth was still new and smouldering with volcanic activity. These sacred characters lived in four different hills – one in each of the sacred directions. To the Okhay Owingeay, one of those hills was Tsi-Mayoh, to the East, sitting right beyond the modern El Sanctuario. From this place, a sacred clay could be found…
- Some thirty-odd pre-historic sites are rumored in the area of Chimayo along what we now call the Santa Cruz River. Bandalier, when touring the area in the 1920’s, noted that the Tewa sites in nearby hills included bordered garden plots and contoured terraces designed for dry land agriculture. Of these pre-historic sites, 14 have been documented. One of those is a 100 meter-wide known prehistoric archaeological site - LA 153, an Anasazi artifact scatter - that is in the parking lot of the Sanctuario – and exactly where they want to build the proposed retreat center. While no known traditional indigenous buildings exist today, the case could easily be made for placing the area on the National Register as a Historic Cultural Landscape. So much of the story of these earlier peoples – the Anasazi, Tewa, and Toma - has been omitted from the Chimayo we see today. And once these sites are built on, the story is lost forever. No statue can make up for the damage that’s already been done to this incredible collection of prehistoric sites, which date up to a millennia, well before the Spanish arrived in 1598, led by Onate and his band of 10 Franciscan friars and priests.
- The next part of the story is more familiar… When the Spanish arrived, they set about building communities up and around the Rio Grande. Chimayo was once such community - an agricultural and pastoral outlier for raising animals and foodstuffs. Being developed under the watchful eye of Franciscan clergy, and later the Penitentes, who both take vows of austerity or simplicity, and being removed from the major centers somewhat, the original architecture of early Hispanic Vernacular buildings in New Mexico… is extraordinarily simple. Using earthen walls, locally harvested timbers for vigas, and flat earthen roofs, the single room structures reflected the familial nature of the culture. Without tools, there was no elaborate wood carving or decoration. The only windows would have been open, grilled, skin covered, or mica-covered as glass was not available. Each family had one room, and rooms were added to the structures as the families grew into multi-generational units. These families would form collectives, or communities, which would be situated around a plaza. These plazas provided some degree of protection, with their “backs” towards the open desert beyond often fortified, and an open space in the center for festivals, processions, and bringing in livestock in the somewhat common raids. Chimayo was a harsh place, characterized by drought, epidemics, and raids by Navahos, Apaches, Comanches, and Utes. Settlers begged to be able to leave, a request that was not granted. Women and children were often stolen, transported great distances, and integrated into other tribes as concubines and slaves.
- Like Taos’s La Lomita and Santa Fe’s Canyon Road… once the town outgrew the first plaza, they built a second one. Most often they were around the agricultural centers of the community so they could get the livestock and harvests out of the merchant and government area. El Portrero – “the pasture”- was one such plaza and home to 19 families. It had a definitively agricultural bent, being near the valley floor for agriculture and so horses and cows could be kept close to graze… but it is also near the canyons where sheep and goats could graze. The plaza has not one but two very early 19 th century churches.
- The private El Sanctuario was a pilgrimage destination from its beginning in 1810, when a enterprising local who knew of the indigenous clay traditions built a chapel to the Christ of Esquipulas, a shrine site in Guatemala also known for its magic dirt. Pilgrims would partake of the “magic dirt” literally and figuratively, as until the 20 th century, it was often eaten, a practice now known as geophagy. You can see edible mud pies as eaten in Haiti today here on the bottom right. The earliest known photos of the shrine are at the top here. When New Mexico became a US territory, then state, architecture around the state was altered by the influence of the railroads and outsiders. With them came tools for elaborate woodworking, the transport of glass allowed for luxuries like windows, and metal was imported for pitched roofs... None changed the New Mexican vernacular more than Bishop Lamy, a late 19 th century French church diplomat who came to Santé Fe to run the archdiocese, and who thought our churches were base and vulgar. He gothicised them, with peaked roofs, arched windows, large glass windows and wood decoration… El Sanctuario remained private until the early 20 th century when preservationists bought it and donated it to the archdiocese, which may be why El Sanctuario was not decorated in the “new style” until approximately 1920. You can see these changed in the center layer of photos here. Another part of the story that has been lost is that Chimi is a great place to raise sheep, whose wool is a critical part of Chimayo’s legacy in weaving, and in fact, to the development of the American West through the story of the Old Spanish Trail, where Chimayo blankets were taken to California to be traded for horses and mules. In fact, sheep were so important to Chimayo that one of its many legends states that the finder of the sacred cross of Esquipulas was a shepherd. This shepp tradition has led to the Ortega and Trujillo weaving traditions!
- The other church at El Portrero was originally a penitente Morada of exquisitely simple massing, seen here at the top left. It was modified slightly in the early-to-mid 20 th century, adding a pitched roof, then again in the 80s to add a double gabled toof at the tower and a gated courtyard. The taste for elaborate decoration introduced by Lamy has been taken to the extreme in the past three years, since the Santo Nino chapel was decorate past the point of recognition, in a Spanish style unlike anything in New Mexico. New buildings alongside the chapel are so highly decorated that they also do not fit in anywhere in New Mexico – there is simply no other place where there is that much decoration on the buildings.
- Nearly every inch of the plaza and Sanctuario surroundings has been commandeered for landscape decoration of so many styles and themes that the place almost starts to look like DisneyLand. The nature of the plaza has been so obscured that in Chris Wilson’s 8-year long documentation project which led to the book “The Plazas of New Mexico”, El Portrero… is not even listed. Nor does El Portrero – the pasture – seen earlier with sheep as it was in the early 20 th century, even really exist today. It too has been obscured for the disneyfication of the area. The history of Chimayo, and El Portero in particular, and the way it illustrates the story of a typical Spanish Colonial village… was just voided.
- In this abbreviated history of Chimayo you’ll notice there is no significant architectural activity in the Territorial period, yet, in this proposed development – which would be the largest footprint building in the entire community, the Territorial period is emphasized, even in the so-called “restoration” of two existing buildings to prettier and more decorated than they ever would have been in the period of significance, threatening to create an ersatz history that doesn’t exist. The landscaping proposed around the building is totally modern, emphasizing this fact.
- Santo Nino chapel, and the Abeyta home, among many other buildings in the area, are known and somewhat intact historic sites that have not been nominated to or listed in the National Register to date, yet, over 40 acres of the area have been recognized as eligible for listing by the National Register and the area has been named one of New Mexico’s most endangered places. Those that care about Chimayo’s legacy could do a district nomination of the historic buildings as well as a cultural landscape nomination to offer some protection for these important cultural and architectural sites. The area of the Santa Cruz river, a rare southwest cottonwood-willow riparian (streamside) environment, sacred to the indigenous peoples of the area for at least 700 years, has been determined by the National Park Service to be “one of the most endangered ecosystems in the United States.” Modern interventions of septic systems at the Sanctuario next to the acequias which feed from and back to this natural watercourse have made it so that the acequias and water are poisoned – which affects irrigation, food supply, groundwater – every aspect of living in the desert. An integrated architectural/archaeological/water/infrastructure management plan would help address these concerns.
- Now I’d like to call up Don Usner, who is going to help us understand what options are available to protect these important resources.