Adobe Churches Face Challenges
SUNBAKED BRICKS OF MUD WERE an easy building material for Spanish colonists, who erected churches atop stone foundations and then plastered the walls with more mud—reapplying it when rains washed it…
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A Church Worth Saving
IN 1986, SERVICES AND PARISHIONERS at Nuestra Señora de la Candelaria, in Doña Ana, moved to the new Our Lady of Purification, across the parking lot. The new church was larger and held amenities like…
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Nuts for Del Valle Pecans
IN 1986, SALLY HARPER DREAMED of turning her family’s newly acquired pecan orchard into an all-organic enterprise. By the early 1990s, she had trucked thousands of pounds of pecans to health-food…
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These Baskets Carry Native History
MADE OF BIRCHBARK, THE CANOE STRETCHES 21 feet from stern to bow. A Dene (Northern Athabaskan) maker, likely from the Upper Yukon in British Columbia, Canada, crafted it around 1900—but not for…
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Building on Sacred Traditions
FATHER ALBERT BRAUN SO LOVED the Mescalero Apache people that he dedicated decades of his life to creating a Romanesque church with rock walls that soar as high as 90 feet. The cornerstone was laid in…
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Celebrating Traditions at Acoma Pueblo
THE 2,000 LUMINARIAS, set and lit by hand, line the road up the mesa to Acoma Pueblo’s 370-foot-high Sky City. Inside the 1629 San Esteban del Rey Mission Church, tribal dancers pound their feet onto…
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Discover a Santo Wonderland
SEPARATED FROM THEIR NEAREST SUPPLY points in Mexico, Spanish colonial–era artists in New Mexico made do with the materials they found here. Cottonwood branches and roots became bultos, or statues…
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Keeping the Faith for New Mexico's Historic Churches
THE LITTLE CHAPEL IN THE PASTORAL Gallinas River Valley had seen decades of cherished rites before it began to crumble. In 2019, historic preservationists undertook lifesaving actions to firm up San…
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What We're Reading: Murder at Sleeping Tiger
AT A FICTIONAL MEDITATION CENTER near Taos, all is not Zen. A record snowstorm closes roads, people fall dead, and Sheriff Ulysses Walker suspects … murrderr. Dixon-based behavioral therapist C.R…
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Manhattan Project Leaders, Frozen in Time
IN THE END, J. ROBERT OPPENHEIMER and Leslie Groves’s time in Los Alamos flitted past quickly. Their legacy, however, lives on—not only in a pair of bronze statues downtown but also in the city’s…
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