This story was originally published by The Daily Yonder.
Anya Petrone Slepyan
The Daily Yonder
With only three walls and no roof, some might mistake the Pecos Mission Church for a ruin. But the three hundred year old adobe structure is alive with cultural and spiritual significance, according to those who are working to preserve it.
“The church is a monument, a testament to the people that once lived there,” said Christopher Toya, an archeologist and tribal historic preservation officer of the Jemez Pueblo. “These are our ancestors, and they didn’t disappear. We’re still here, the descendants of the Pecos people living in Jemez Pueblo.”
Completed in 1717, the historic church was built by the people of the Pecos Pueblo and overseen by Spanish missionaries in what is now San Miguel County in northern New Mexico. The church and the pueblo were left empty in 1838, when the remaining inhabitants joined the Jemez Pueblo, around 100 miles to the west.
Today, the pueblo and church are both part of the Pecos National Historic Park, administered by the national park service. Visitors can follow interpretive trails through the park, and see the remnants of the pueblo which was once home to over 2,000 people.
But though the church no longer has clergy or a congregation, it remains an important spiritual center for the people of the Jemez Pueblo, according to Toya.
“We practice two forms of faith,” he told the Daily Yonder. “One is the traditional beliefs that had been taught to us by our ancestors. And the second is Catholicism. Our grandmas and grandpas from way back when accepted that faith, and we try our best to continue that as well.”
In addition to the Catholic mission church, the historic park maintains two kivas, ceremonial pits where Puebloan peoples conduct religious rituals. The kivas, in close proximity to the church, represent the religious syncretism found across New Mexico.
Archeologists and leaders from Jemez Pueblo work with the Pecos National Historic Park to plan future archeological projects and design educational materials available to park visitors. Toya says the pueblo appreciates the preservation efforts led by the park, which enable them to return annually to the site for a feast day that includes a Catholic mass and traditional dancing.
“It takes a lot of time and money and effort to do the work that they do, keeping the place stabilized and presentable to the public,” he said. “It’s a great effort to show the people that the place is still there, and it’s still alive.”
Each year from May through October, small crews of seasonal workers are hired by the National Park Service to maintain the adobe and stone structures of the church and pueblo. The teams work with archeologists to open up walls and replace crumbling adobe bricks, with an emphasis on preserving what remains of the original structure.
Tyler Walters leads the masonry preservation crew at Pecos National Historic park. He works year-round to plan and carry out site preservation and maintenance of the adobe structure. Though adobe is well-suited for New Mexico’s arid climate and frequent fluctuations in temperature, the material requires constant upkeep, according to Walters.
“Adobe, exposed to the elements, will eventually just melt into the ground,” he said in an interview with the Daily Yonder.
Adobe has been used as a building material for millenia in New Mexico. Clay and sand are mixed with straw, and then hardened in the sun. Spanish colonizers adapted indigenous methods to produce large bricks, often weighing up to forty pounds, which were used to build massive structures.
The church that stands today is built on the same footprint as a much larger mission, built in 1625 and destroyed in the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 that forced Spanish colonizers to retreat south for over a decade. The area surrounding the church also includes the excavated walls of the convento, which served as a storage area as well as living quarters for missionaries and converts.
This year, Walters and his crew made around 1,700 adobe bricks and used over 900 of them to renovate one of the church buttresses and surrounding walls. Walters emphasized that their goal is stabilization and preservation – rather than rebuilding the church, they focus on maintaining its current form and preventing it from deteriorating further.
Community volunteers are invited to participate in the final step – the enjarre, or ‘re-mudding’ of the structure’s surface. In communities across New Mexico, it is traditional for people to gather annually to apply adobe to the walls of important buildings, to protect them from the elements for another year.
“It’s good to have the community coming together to maintain this structure, because that’s how it would have been in the past,” Walters said. “There would have been many hands on here.”
This year’s volunteers included Keith Westerberg and Kami St. John, a retired couple who also volunteer with the park’s interpretation department, leading tours and working at the visitor’s center.
Westerberg sees the church’s preservation as a duty.
“This is still the heart of the Pecos People that now live in the village of Jemez. So that is part of our responsibility to maintain this, because it’s not a ruin. It’s not an abandoned property. To them it is still a vibrant and living place,” he said.
For St. John, the church also offers a unique opportunity to connect with the past.
“It’s a connection to history that you can see and touch,” she said.
Walters has spent the last two years working on this site, which he says exemplifies the multicultural history of New Mexico and the southwest. The park is situated on the edge of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, an important crossroads for Puebloan, Spanish, and Anglo-American peoples. It was even the location of a decisive Civil War battle.
“It’s an honor to work on a place like this because it has so many stories to tell,” he said. “To understand how all these cultures intersected is pretty special.”
And thanks to the collaboration between the National Park Service and the Jemez Pueblo, the site still has a significant role to play.
“We as Native people believe that the spirits of our ancestors still reside there,” Toya explained. “Every time a ceremony or prayer is said, we believe our ancestors are there blessing the people. Anyone who visits Pecos is taking blessings from there to their own homes, their own communities.”