In Praise of New Mexico Churches
IN HISTORIC CHURCHES OF NEW MEXICO TODAY (Oxford University Press, 2017), Frank Graziano travels throughout the state to detail the history of churches and the people who care for them today…
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Category: History
Tomé's Church Renovation Is No Small Miracle
"PEOPLE ARE DRAWN TO THE MIRACLES Jesus performed,” Father Michael Demkovich tells a dozen parishioners at Tomé’s Immaculate Conception Church during a Wednesday morning Mass. “But that wasn’t why he…
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Vintage T-Bird Lands in T or C
THE TRUTH OR CONSEQUENCES MUNICIPAL AIRPORT guarantees you can see a shooting star. Not the kind from outer space, but a vintage Lockheed T-33 Shooting Star that once zoomed through the skies at 600…
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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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Master Santeros Save the Sacred
MASTER SANTERO FÉLIX LÓPEZ calls the artworks at San Antonio de Padua Church, in Córdova, where his great-grandparents are buried, “a door to the sacred.” St. Anthony’s, as it’s casually known in the…
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San Miguel Chapel's Historic Treasures
LAURIANNE FIORENTINO PULLS OUT HER PHONE and calls up a photo. We’re standing in the 1710 rebuild of San Miguel Chapel, first constructed by Santa Fe’s earliest settlers around a century before then…
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The Mills Grind Slowly
SCATTERED THROUGHOUT NEW MEXICO are many oldfashioned water mills, used for grinding the small crops grown in the valleys along the water courses. Each settlement usually has its own mill to crush…
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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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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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