LAS TRAMPAS — It’s not a normal weekday in this small village nestled in the mountains on the High Road to Taos.
The doors of San José de Gràcia Church, built in the mid-18th century, are open. This is a welcome but unusual sight.
Workers are running around the site carrying wheelbarrows filled with a mixture of mud and straw. This recipe is centuries old and was created to rebuild a 263-year-old Catholic church. Mud bricks are passed from worker to worker to reinforce the parapets, which show signs of wear even from a distance.
“Everything we put on the walls falls off with the rain and snow,” says Emilio Martinez, the church’s mayor who just pulled up a John Deere. “We take soil from the community and sift it to remove stones. The community prepares everything for us. The people who live here have been doing it for 250 years. .”
You can see that tradition is not neglected here.
Martinez recently gave the mud recipe to Michael Roybal, a Santa Fe contractor who provides labor for church restoration projects.
Martinez said this is the same one used when parishioners began construction of the church in 1760.
At $200,000, the project is the largest ever funded by Nuevo México Profundo, a nonprofit organization dedicated to restoring culturally and historically significant sites in New Mexico, Frank Graziano said. . The author and tour guide founded this organization in 2019 with several others after writing: Historic church in present-day New Mexico.
In January, the group launched the Profundo Heritage Archive, a collection of records, interviews and photographs of such sites, now housed at the University of New Mexico’s Southwest Research Center.
Graziano also preserves the church’s history through tours scheduled through the organization’s website. nuevo-mexico-profundo.com.
The project to restore San José de Gracia, which Graziano considers one of the best-preserved examples of Spanish Colonial architecture in the state, was launched last year in an effort to preserve the church’s mid-19th century artwork. started. After the repaving is completed in November, workers will turn their attention to the windows and reroof the spire, a project approved by the Archdiocese of Santa Fe on Friday.
“Structurally, it’s in great shape for a 250-year-old building,” Roybal said, adding that workers will also carve and replace it. Biga Canalis on a sloping roof.
“Work like this needs to be done slowly at first; you can’t do too much at once,” he says. “That’s the nature of working with mud and straw.”
As workers weave their way through centuries-old graves adjacent to the church, dozens of firefighters gather in the early morning light in the dirt parking lot of an abandoned school and store across the street. , we saw how recent heavy rains weakened the last one. Smoldering embers from the El Valle fire.
The community was evacuated just a week ago as a threatening fire crept up a nearby ridge. However, the crisis passed without causing any damage to the town or the church, and in addition to repairing the sanctuary, preparations are underway for the Fall Harvest Festival, which will be held this weekend in the same dirt parking lot.
Accompanied by music, the bounty of fresh fall gardens, and homemade biscocitos, this gathering is quickly becoming a tradition in this town. The town was founded in 1751 by several families who later built walls to protect themselves from attacks from Utes, Comanches, and Apaches. I volunteered to help build a missionary church.
Today, Las Trampas has fewer than 50 residents, but enough to sustain a church.
“Most of these villages are sparsely populated, and there aren’t enough believers in the villages to support the church,” Graziano said. “This is a missionary church whose mother church is the Holy Family in Chimayo. There are not enough people to attend Mass, so it is held at the mother church.”
Visitors to San José de Gràcia usually find the doors locked 90 percent of the time, except on holy days, funerals and weddings, Graziano said. He is one of the reasons why Nuevo Mexico Profundo was founded.
Martinez’s own history is deeply intertwined with San José de Gràcia. He married his wife here in 1977 and has looked after the church along with other mayors since 1984.
Visitors stop when the church doors open.
Tourists wander in as Martinez describes the hand-carved floors, painted altars, and intricately hand-carved saints.
“No photography is allowed,” he reminded guests, a strict rule of the archdiocese.
A couple from Minnesota enters, then a couple from the South of France, then a couple from Denmark. They are followed by a van full of tourists as they take the high road to Taos.
“I’ve been by this church for 30 years and it’s only been open maybe five times,” tour guide Mark Miller tells guests.
Mr. Miller told the group that the strange patterns on the trees under the choir loft were made by the children to help them concentrate in the event of an attack.
“I heard that from an eighth-generation villager,” he boasts.
However, Graziano quickly objects.
“No one really knows what they are,” he says.
Before long, tourists gather around Martinez, who provides no shortage of stories about the history of the church and the area.
The large floorboards were fabricated on site using hand tools. The stucco walls, ornate paintings, candlesticks and statues were all created by human volunteers, he says. The walls of the church are lined with paintings depicting the Stations of the Cross.
A painting of the Last Supper hangs near the main altar, and two side altars are decorated with ceiling-length paintings. In one work, Our Lady of Mount Carmel is depicted holding Jesus over her soul, who reaches out for salvation from the fiery flames of hell. Another painting depicts the Trinity with a triangular halo, a depiction that is no longer accepted by church standards, Graziano said.
To restore the artwork, Graziano said, two artisans and an apprentice painstakingly replaced the peeling paint using syringes and glue, then cleaned it section by section with cotton balls.
“It was like holding a baby. You have to be very gentle with them,” said Clarence Vigil, who trained with Santero Felix Lopez of Taos and Nicolas Otero of Los Lunas. To tell.
Vigil, who lives next door, says that although he is not an artist, he volunteered to learn about the process. He has been attending church since he was a boy, he says.
“When I was a kid, I used to watch Santero from a distance, but to be able to see Santero up close and actually work on it and see its face…the colors underneath were beautiful,” he said, adding that Santero was He added that when he went to clean the brown stain. I found the original rainbow-like dress under Mary’s dress.
Martinez stands at the main altar and speaks about the traditions of the church.
Martinez said that each year on Good Friday, the image of the impaled Christ on the cross is lowered and carried to the center of the church, where it remains until Easter, during which time the hand-carved image of Mary is dressed in black. It is said that there is.
Parishioners also celebrate the Posada, which celebrates the birth of Jesus, in mid-December.
Martinez said the church didn’t have a priest, so the community relied on the priest’s officiating. hermanos de penitentes To guide your followers.
“When the community was formed, there were no priests here, so how do we perpetuate the faith? When Good Friday, Holy Saturday, and Easter Sunday come, how do we celebrate all of these? ” Martinez said. “When there is a death, how do you celebrate that person’s life? By a group of men leading the community in processions, chants, rosary services, etc.”
Outside, Martinez told visitors that they were walking on the graves of those who had died, the souls who built and maintained the church.
“There are graves everywhere here,” he says. “You are standing over them now, but they have lost their identity, not only where they are, but also their ancestral lineage. When they were given the authority to build a church, they built it on a volunteer basis. They promised the bishop that they would maintain the church, and that promise continues to us.”