A History of the Indo-Hispano Peoples of Northern New Mexico
Don Juan de Oñate y Salazar led the first colonizing expedition into New Mexico and became the first governor in 1598. While predominantly Spanish in their European origins, these initial “Spanish” colonizers and others that followed were themselves a mixed group that included lineages of Indigenous peoples of Mexico, other Europeans, crypto-Jews, and an unknown percentage of Africans.10
Fray Francisco de Zamora quickly established a mission in Taos and, by the early 1600s, it officially became a Spanish village. The accompanying friars attempted to convert the Native peoples to Christianity, exploited their labor, and subjected them to violent punishments if they resisted. Spanish colonizers continued to encroach on Pueblo villages and, after more than eighty years of repression and attempted eradication of Pueblo lifeways and spiritual practices, the Pueblos organized and initiated the 1680 Pueblo Revolt. Though the Revolt was successful and forced the Spanish (and some Christianized Natives) to withdraw and relinquish their stronghold in the region, Don Diego de Vargas Zapata y Luján Ponce de León y Contreras led a reconquest of New Mexico in 1693, bringing back new settlers and soldiers, as well as survivors of the 1680 revolt and their families.11
New Mexico remained a Spanish colony until 1821, when Mexico achieved independence from Spain. The independence movement was imperative for addressing increasing social divisions caused by the Spanish Caste system that placed peninsular-born Spaniards at the top of the hierarchy, followed by descendants of the Spanish born in the Americas, various castas containing different degrees of mixed Spanish, African, and Native American blood, Native Americans, and enslaved Africans and their descendants. By this point, the “Spanish” or “Hispano” population of New Mexico was primarily a mestizo population consisting of a similar mix as the rest of the Viceroyalty of New Spain, but with local Indigenous lineages in that mixture coming from Pueblo and other tribes along with a sizeable segment of the population consisting of enslaved or otherwise detribalized Indigenous peoples (genizaros), who, over the generations were absorbed into the “Spanish” population, hence, the use in this article of the term Indo-Hispano to describe their descendants.12
The final stage for Mexican Independence was the signing of the Plan de Iguala, issued in 1824 by Agustín de Iturbide y Arámburu who was proclaimed Emperor of Mexico. The Plan declared all peoples, regardless of race, equal, at least on paper. Despite the agreed-upon declarations in the Plan, racial and political hierarchies persisted, “expos[ing] the Pueblos to vecino land grabs” and leaving New Mexican Indo-Hispanos in dominant positions over the Pueblo and other Indigenous populations. This was short lived. In March of 1846, the United States declared war on Mexico and promptly set out to seize New Mexico and California. In June 1846, US forces, led by General Stephen Watts Kearney, overtook New Mexico. And under US rule, American trader Charles Bent was named Territorial Governor. In 1847, Bent was killed during the Taos Rebellion, a joint uprising by Indo-Hispano and Pueblo peoples that was promptly quelled by the US military. In a pivotal battle, persons involved in the uprising, primarily those from Taos Pueblo, hid in the church of San Gerónimo at Taos Pueblo, perhaps thinking that US forces would respect the sanctuary of the church. Instead, the US military excavated holes in the adobe walls and unleashed their cannons, destroying the church and killing more than 150 people inside. With the conclusion of the war in 1848, Americanos set about building a new Anglo-American social order that placed Indo-Hispano and Pueblo peoples in inferior positions. Indeed, the displacement of Indo-Hispanos from political and economic power was viewed as central to preparing this newly acquired land for statehood. As the St. Louis Republican put it in an 1876 article, the New Mexico territorial legislature was made up of thirty-five apparently ignorant and intoxicated “Mexicans” and only four “Americans” who were the “representatives of more than 126,000 people who are asking for admission within the sacred circle of the sisterhood of states—superstitious, fanatical, unscrupulous and ignorant, they are unworthy to hold the reins of government.”13
The late nineteenth century ushered in a slew of Anglo Americans to Taos prompted by different motivations— including appropriation of Indo-Hispano and Pueblo lifeways and cultures for artistic gain. After an 1898 surprise stop in Taos, artists Bert Phillips and Ernest Blumenschein eventually developed an artist colony there in 1914. This period marks a significant time when Taos (and later, Santa Fe) became desirable locations for artistic production. The local Indo-Hispano populations were devalued and placed at the bottom of their racial hierarchy while elevating the fetishized Native populations as a spiritually superior other.14
Despite the draw of the Taos valley to this new group of settlers, at the time that Padre Jaramillo moved to Taos, it was still overwhelmingly Indo-Hispano, but was in the midst of a significant demographic shift that has continued into the present decade. Specifically, in 1970, Taos County, which covers an area roughly the size of the State of Delaware, had a population of 17,516 of which 93.7 percent was comprised of Indo-Hispanos plus Taos and Picuris Pueblo peoples. By 1980, the total county population had grown to 19,456, but the Indo-Hispano population had dropped to 69 percent, down from 86 percent in 1970. Today, the county’s population is nearly double what it was in 1970, but the Indo-Hispano population has dropped to just 56.5 percent of that total. Padre Jaramillo arrived in Taos at a point in history in which their community was at the precipice of unprecedented waves of gentrification and the massive demographic shifts brought with it.15
Our Lady of Guadalupe Parish
Starting with the foundation of early missions in the Taos valley, the Catholic Church has played a varying role within the community as a tool for subjugation or empowerment, often dependent on the individual priests who headed it. In 1801, Don Francisco Gabriel de Olivares y Benito, Bishop of Durango, Mexico, authorized the construction of a chapel (capilla) dedicated to Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe in the settlement of Don Fernando de Taos. It’s unclear why the patroness was chosen, but by the mid-1700s, Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe was named patroness of the Americas and was the favored Marian devotion in all of New Spain. Clara Bargellini notes that in 1810, “as a unifying symbol for Mexico, her image was painted in a banner that was used” by the Catholic priest Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla, when, according to officially accepted canons of Mexican history, he rang his church bells and sparked Mexico’s battle for independence from Spain.16
It is unclear when the church building in Taos was completed, but by 1815 it was operating with regular masses as an ayuda (mission) of the parish headquartered at the church of San Gerónimo at Taos Pueblo under the care of Franciscan missionaries. On April 20, 1823, the newly ordained priest, Don Antonio José Martínez y Santistéban, preached his first sermon at Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe upon his return home to Taos from the Tridentine seminary in Durango, Mexico. By 1823, it had been 225 years since Martínez’s ancestors helped establish the first Spanish colony in New Mexico, but Padre Martínez was only the second native New Mexican to be ordained a priest. By 1826, the Taos parish was secularized and the last Franciscan pastor, Fray Mariano José Sánchez Vergara, turned custody over to Padre Martínez. In 1834, with Martínez as pastor, Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe replaced San Gerónimo de Taos as the seat of the parish, making it the first parish in the present-day United States dedicated to the Virgin of Guadalupe.17
Padre Martínez would go on to become one of the most important Indo-Hispano leaders in the nineteenth century, establishing a co-educational primary school in Taos in 1826, a college preparatory school for prospective seminarians in 1833, and, later, expanding the curriculum to teach courses in civil law. In 1835, Padre Martínez acquired the first printing press in New Mexico and printed grammar, mathematics, and law books along with a newspaper. His career as a political leader was equally impressive, serving in various capacities and leadership positions in the territorial legislative assemblies under the governments of Mexico and the United States and presiding over territorial New Mexico constitutional conventions.18
But pastorship of Our Lady of Guadalupe parish by Native New Mexican clergy would be short-lived. After the conquest of New Mexico by United States forces in 1846, the hierarchy of the Catholic Church in the eastern United States began petitioning Rome to establish a vicariate apostolic in New Mexico. In 1850, Pope Pius the X acquiesced and appointed a French missionary, Jean Baptiste Lamy, as bishop, thus permanently severing control of the Catholic Church in New Mexico from the Diocese of Durango, Mexico. As with the political conquest of New Mexico, the change in leadership of the church brought about a seismic cultural shift with Lamy promptly recruiting French and other European priests and suspending native New Mexican clergy after his arrival in 1851.19
The shift in leadership was not just from one ethnic group subordinating another, but one that involved profoundly different forms of Catholicism. Lamy came from a Catholic culture firmly steeped in Romanticism that had arisen in reaction to the industrial revolution and that had strong Jansenist leanings. Jansenism was essentially a current of Calvinism within French Catholicism. As Thomas J. Steele noted, it manifested itself in Lamy as “a tilt toward moral Puritanism, a “holier than thou” authoritarianism that flowed from a covert presumption of human depravity. Martínez and his compatriots were products of a seminary with an older Renaissance culture “dominated by the pre-industrial mercantilist economics of a colony.” More importantly, they had been raised in the “Folk Catholicism” of pre-industrial New Mexico which, according to Dr. Tomás Atencio, was the unique fruit of Indo-Hispano and Indigenous populations having shared the same land for hundreds of years, such that, while each group maintained distinct observances, rites, rituals, and social organizations, their shared experience brought aspects of the two cultural views together to create a unique cultural legacy, central to which were concepts of the sanctity of earth and water. This manifested itself in a religious consciousness that merged “Mexican Indian world views and beliefs, brought to the northern province by Mexican peasant servants, with New Mexico genizaro and Pueblo beliefs that ultimately were integrated with the Catholic Faith.”20
Likely frustrated with Lamy and citing his advanced age and poor health, Padre Martínez offered his resignation as pastor in May of 1856, on the condition that the Bishop appoint a local priest and allow Martínez time to train him. Ignoring the condition, Bishop Lamy promptly replaced Martínez with Fr. Dámaso Taladrid, a “vagrant” Spanish priest, and an ally of Martínez’s political enemies, whom he had brought back with him from Europe in 1854. This kicked off a now-famous chain of events that would eventually result in Martínez’s suspension and eventual pronouncement of excommunication by Lamy after Martínez continued to minister to the Taos population from his home and private chapel. Within a year, Fr. Taladrid was removed, potentially for having provided information to United States officials about an impending rebellion headed by Martínez that proved baseless. He was succeeded by Padre José Eulogio Ortíz, who had been ordained by Lamy in 1854 and had then been chosen by Lamy to accompany him to France and Rome. Ortíz served as pastor for less than two years and after him, with one possible short-lived exception, there appear not to have been any Indo-Hispano pastors for a period of nearly 100 years. Thus, in the 122-year period between the end of Padre Martínez’s pastorship and the arrival of Padre Jaramillo, it seems that Our Lady of Guadalupe had been under the pastorship of native Indo-Hispano priests for no more than ten years.21
Along with the changes in the composition of the clergy in Taos came changes to the physical structure of the church. The original interior of the church was presumably similar to other New Mexican churches built in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, including a large wooden altar screen framing a series of images and sculptural representations of saints. These were either produced locally or, as was the case with the church of our Lady of Guadalupe in Santa Fe, imported from New Spain, sometimes commissioned from prominent painters. By March of 1858, apparently on Lamy’s orders, Padre Eulogio Ortíz was waging a war against the locally-made santos (devotional images of saints, Christ, and other religious themes that were central to Indo-Hispano religious practices) in the Taos valley. Padre Ortíz specifically criticized the depiction of the Virgen de Guadalupe at the Taos church to the point of being accused of “sacrilege” and later being hauled into court for seizing santos from the private oratory of a local resident without permission. By 1903, the parish had a string of pastors that, judging from the names, all appear to have been European, with the exception of a certain J. S. García, who seems to have served only briefly and, judging solely from the surname, may have been a native New Mexican. In 1903, pastorship was vested in Paris-born Fr. Henri-Paul-Marie Le Guillou, who promptly replaced whatever remained of the original altar with a series of 24-foot-tall French Neo-Gothic architectural elements made to house imported sculptures of the saints. This new altar cost $500. This was typical practice in the era as the (mostly) non-native priests replaced locally-made sculptures with imported plaster statues and the traditional altar screens with what historian and former curator at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center at Colorado College (FAC), William Wroth, termed “severe architectural assemblages in the prevailing neoclassical style.” As Wroth noted, this was part of a larger “ideological attack” on the traditional Indo-Hispano religious and social order.22
Fr. Le Guillou’s ideological attack and disrespectful attitude soon mobilized the Indo-Hispano community and the local newspaper responded by publishing articles that severely attacked him. By March 1904, a rally was held that resulted in a series of resolutions, published in newspapers in Taos and other communities, lodging complaints about his overt disdain for the local population and the use of his office to line his pockets. They stated that Le Guillou regarded his parishioners as “a bunch of barbarians, like something left over from the seventeenth century.” As a result, by the end of 1904, the parish was under the care of a new French pastor, Fr. Joseph Giraud, who would serve until 1934.23