The Magic of Chimayó

No wonder the Tewa Pueblo people, who inhabited this place for centuries before Europeans arrived, revered this landscape. They called the hill Tsi Mayoh, one of four sacred hills circumscribing their world. In their cosmology, supernatural beings dwelt on the hill, and a spring at its base yielded earth said to have curative properties.

The mythologization of the landscape continued after Spanish colonization. The name became Chimayó and referred not only to the hill but also to the colonial town. The supernatural beings, named Kokoman and El Chivato, took on a new shape as scary denizens of the hill. The site of the spring became known as the pocito, a small pit in the ground bearing healing earth located at the place where my fifth great-grandfather Bernardo Abeyta had an epiphany in 1811 that changed his life and the future of Chimayó.

Versions of Abeyta’s story abound, but they all agree that he found a buried crucifix and took it to the nearest church, 10 miles away, only to have it reappear—three times. Seeing this as divine inspiration, he and the community built a church on the site, and word spread of miraculous cures happening there.

The fame of El Santuario de Chimayó grew, and it holds a special place in the hearts of New Mexicans. I remember a few years ago on Good Friday, when 30,000 people arrived in this courtyard, walking in a pilgrimage from miles around. I watched them stagger in, sweaty and worn, some pushing wheelchairs or strollers, some bent under the weight of crosses they’d carried across arid miles. There was a festive atmosphere as people shared in the joy and relief of completing the journey, whether it was 100 miles or one. But near the church’s entrance, the crowd quieted to a murmur as everyone filed inside. 

I followed into the church, shuffling with the throngs in subdued light past painted retablos and carved bultos depicting holy figures made by 19th-century master santeros. We paused before the altar screen bearing a crucifix with a dark-skinned Christ, first revered in Guatemala’s Basilica of Esquipulas, where people also make pilgrimages for healing earth. 

We continued to a small room to the side of the nave where, one by one, the faithful scooped tierra sagrada (holy earth) from the pocito to ingest; spread on their bodies to alleviate physical ailments or moral suffering; or bring back home to loved ones. Some have left mementos in the room—including stacks of crutches and portraits of family members—that tell of personal revelations and outright healing.

As I stroll near the church on a midwinter day to watch the Santa Cruz River rush past grassland fields, I realize you don’t have to believe in miracles to feel inspired at the santuario. 

There’s wonder in simply admiring the 1816 church’s graceful lines and pitched roof, placed over the flat-roofed original in the 1920s; arched adobe entryway; twin bell towers; doors carved by the 19th-century carpenter Pedro Domínguez; and tombstone-filled courtyard. The interior holds some of the most refined folk art pieces to be found in all of New Mexico. 

To see how those art forms exist today, I make a visit to Chavez Gallery, just up an alleyway near the santuario. I zero in on a sign proclaiming “Chimayó Latte—spicy!” and others bearing religious motifs, including a mural of the santuario and one that reads “Retablos, Bultos, Paintings.” This is not your typical tourist shop. Here in what was his grandfather’s home, artists Patricio and Shawna Chavez show their finely crafted retablos and bultos alongside historic family photos. 

“They taught us how to live,” Patricio says of his ancestors. “We do this because we want to keep our traditions alive,” adds Shawna, who, besides turning out exquisite retablos, teaches children the techniques of traditional santero art.

That longstanding tradition also includes commerce. An 1818 inventory of the santuario describes a stockpile of locally produced woven goods for pilgrims, suggesting that Chimayó weavers saw opportunity in the stream of visitors to the church. By 1900, when my great-grandfather Reyes Ortega opened a weaving shop a mile from the santuario, Chimayó’s weavers had already developed a distinctive style using design motifs from Mexican Saltillo weavers combined with striped patterns long familiar in New Mexico. The result was the Chimayó blanket, much sought-after in the tourist trade and among collectors.

Tapping into a burgeoning interest in Southwestern folk art and textiles, Ortega and other weavers transformed their longtime household practice into a livelihood as they shipped out rugs, blankets, and other woven goods across the U.S. They innovated, creating new, more portable products—purses, pillows, jackets, vests, and runners. Weaving enterprises multiplied and, although the number has dwindled, several remain as a mainstay of the local economy.

The eighth-generation Ortega’s Weaving Shop, opened by Reyes’s brother Nicasio, has been around the longest. In my teen years, I wove there as a summer job. Dropping in now, the smell of wool and the sight of stacks of dazzling Chimayó blankets and rugs brings me back. My cousin Robert Ortega is busy closing a deal on some handmade jewelry from Santo Domingo Pueblo, which reminds me that the store is also well stocked with fine Southwestern jewelry and ceramics.

Centinela Traditional Arts, a much younger weaving outlet belonging to another primo of mine, Irvin Trujillo, and his wife, Lisa, riffs on the model for Chimayó weaving establishments. Here, skeins of subtly hued, naturally dyed yarn from Navajo-Churro sheep hang on the backroom wall, and the showroom is filled with colorful weavings, including one-of-a-kind pieces that push traditional styles into a distinctly modern dimension.

In Chimayó, weaving has always been a family affair. At Trujillo’s Weaving Shop, Carlos Trujillo stands at the well-worn, handmade floor loom his grandfather Encarnación built 120 years ago. Carlos recalls when he started working in the family business, which opened in 1950 in the Trujillos’ humble, two-room adobe.

“My dad put me on loom when I was five years old, a little loom strung for pieces just two inches wide,” he says. “When I was weaving, I was doing it on my knees. I was making headbands back in the early ’60s, when the hippie movement was going on, and the hippies from the Hog Farm [commune] would stop here in their buses and buy them.”

As with the weavers, the late 19th-century economic prospects pushed Chimayó chile farmers to turn a subsistence activity into a business. Their chile was a valuable commodity in the barter economy, but growers began to export it outside the region when the Denver and Rio Grande Western Railroad reached Española in 1880. The effort put whole families to work, planting, hoeing, and irrigating, and then tying the red peppers into ristras that each fall draped nearly every Chimayó home. Railcar loads of chiles were shipped out on the Chile Line. Chimayó gained a reputation for growing an exceptionally flavorful variety of chile—so much so that Chimayó chile became synonymous with the good stuff.

While there are many strong opinions about who grows New Mexico’s best chile, I put the question to one of Chimayó’s largest chile dealers, my cousin Raymond Bal, proprietor of El Potrero Trading Post. Opened in 1921 by Bal’s grandmother as a small grocery, El Potrero sells real Chimayó chile, as well as chile imported from elsewhere in New Mexico. His store, once the site of Chimayó’s dance hall, is well stocked with a dizzying potpourri of goods, including milagros, rosaries, tinwork crosses, holy earth, holy water, and just about anything a pilgrim or Southwest folk art enthusiast could want. 

“I haven’t found any chile that tastes better than Chimayó’s,” Bal says while standing in front of stacks of bagged red chile powder. But to meet with demand, he acquires most of his chile from bigger producers in southern New Mexico—and, he avers, it’s “very good chile too.”

Chile lovers can also find their fill at Rancho de Chimayó restaurant, nestled up against the hill just down the road from the santuario. In 1965, Arturo Jaramillo and his wife, Florence, founded the restaurant in his grandparents’ home and quickly developed it into a beloved community institution and popular eatery for residents and visitors. 

“We wanted to make sure the local community felt welcome here,” says Florence, the 94-year-old matriarch and manager of the restaurant, which earned the James Beard Foundation’s America’s Classics Award in 2016. “We wanted to offer traditional New Mexican dishes in a homelike setting.” 

Chimayó is one of the few rural communities in northern New Mexico that has a museum to preserve the region’s rich history and culture. The Chimayó Museum, a project of the nonprofit Chimayó Cultural Preservation Association, is located on the Plaza del Cerro, named in deference to Tsi Mayoh itself. Away from the main thoroughfares, this plaza escapes notice by most visitors, and many Chimayó residents don’t know where to find it. Its unpaved roadway, crumbling buildings, and quiet, off-the-path isolation resonate with an incomparable sense of history unadorned. Historians recognize the rectangular cluster of adjoined homes as the most intact Spanish colonial plaza in the Southwest. 

The plaza is but a shadow of its prosperous past, when every home was occupied, the interior space was lovingly cultivated, and the general store and adjacent post office invited Chimayosos to congregate. The Chimayó Museum recalls this history with a remarkable collection of photos: people at work in fields of wheat and among rows of chile; houses loaded with ristras; schoolchildren lined up in front of a one-room, adobe classroom. The museum also showcases historic textiles and a loom on which they were made, as well as well-worn household and farm tools, books, a piano that was hauled to Chimayó in a wagon in 1900, and historic maps and documents. 

When I was a child at my grandmother’s in Chimayó, just off the plaza, I awoke every day to see the sun rising over the great hill of Tsi Mayoh, a sight that has impressed countless generations of people—and impresses me still. Although I no longer live there, I, like so many New Mexicans, return at every opportunity.  

Read more: The future of Chimayó weaving is in good hands.