by Molly Boyle on
FOR FREQUENT TRAVELERS of the High Road to Taos, the image of San José de Gracia church is stamped into the mind’s eye in two ways. Heading north on NM 76, the road climbs into the isolated mountain village of Las Trampas, then reveals a welcoming sight: a pair of cross-topped latticed bell towers perched atop two massive earthen buttresses and enclosed by a rectangular compound wall. If you’re descending southward into the steep river valley, the back of the cathedral-size structure appears as an adobe-bolstered citadel.
Both impressions are correct. For the Spanish colonists who annually sculpted straw and mud into bricks and baked them in the summer sun between 1760 and 1776—using the adobes to form church walls six feet thick and 34 feet high—these actual pillars of the earth served as both spiritual sanctuary and quasi-military fortress. Two hundred and fifty years later, San José de Gracia de las Trampas glitters in the sunlight as “probably the best preserved and least altered of the Spanish Colonial pueblo churches built in New Mexico.” (That’s according to the National Park Service, which designated the church a National Historic Landmark in 1970.)
Mayordomo Emilio Martinez, who was raised in nearby Vadito, married a Trampas girl at San José de Gracia. He recalls his very first glimpse, during the wedding rehearsal, of the vibrant interior art. “It was in the evening, in July, and the church door was open, so the sun was hitting the altar screen,” he says. “My first reaction was, Wow, this is beautiful.”
Two summers ago, Martinez and a team including master santeros Victor Goler and Felix López saw the completion of a comprehensive exterior restoration and interior conservation project, which involved shingling steeples, replacing the flat roof’s rainwater canales, remudding the camposanto and exterior building walls, and cleaning and stabilizing the devotional artworks inside. “The way you treat a treasure, you want to watch over it, make sure it doesn’t go away,” Martinez says. “That’s the way the church
is viewed by the people of the community. It’s precious, and it needs to be cared for.” Although San José de Gracia is traditionally only open once a year, for Las Posadas in December, a special mass is scheduled this month to celebrate the 250th anniversary of its completion.
SAN JOSÉ DE GRACIA’S IMPROBABLE RISE and subsequent endurance is rooted in the devotion of the pobladores who built it. Their descendants can be counted among the 40-some individuals who remain in Las Trampas and continue to help replaster the church every summer. Las Trampas, meaning “the traps,” probably references the snares used by fur traders, but it also serves as a metaphor for the mission of those included in the 1751 land grant. Although the original 46,000 acres were designated by Spanish governor Tomás Vélez Cachupín for woodcutting, grazing, and farming, Cachupín’s main purpose was to create a fortified stronghold against Apache, Comanche, and Ute raiders, who would either trap the colonists or be entrapped in the strategic compound settlement that sprouted along the Río de las Trampas.
Trekking into the Sangre de Cristo Mountains wilderness from their former lives in the provincial capital of Santa Fe, the first 12 settlers were led by retired soldier Juan de Arguello (1691–1789), to whom most of them were related. They were far from the elite of the colony. Of mixed Spanish and Mexican Indigenous, Genízaro, and even African ancestry, and hailing from Santa Fe’s poor Barrio de Analco enclave, they were thereby viewed by the crown as an expendable paramilitary force that could help deter nomadic Indian attacks on the San Luis Valley to the north and the capital to the south. As Martinez puts it, “They said, ‘Well, you’re an outcast in Santa Fe, but we’ll give you a land grant, and you go live in Trampas and be a buffer between the Comanches and Santa Fe.’ ”
The Catholic symbolism in their quest is undeniable: Like the 12 apostles, the 12 original migrants grew their families into a workforce that hand-built the adobe lay chapel over the better part of two decades.
In 1776, as the Declaration of Independence was being prepared for signature by British colonists on the northeastern side of the continent, Franciscan priest Fray Francisco Domínguez visited the Spanish borderlands to inspect and report on its mission churches. On his stop at Las Trampas, he counted 63 families with 279 people total, calling them “a ragged lot.” He wrote, “This chapel has been built by alms from the whole kingdom, for the citizens of this place have begged throughout it.”
In fact, the community had done much more than beg, setting aside at least one-sixth of the proceeds from each year’s harvest to help outfit the church, which remains remarkably true to Fray Domínguez’s 250-year-old description of the newly built house of worship. “What there is to say about it is lengthy,” he prefaces his detailed report, which, while sometimes condescending, also clearly seems impressed by the fusion of Pueblo and Spanish building techniques that created the unusually large chapel’s undulating terra-cotta forms and ornamented ponderosa pine lintels.
When I visit the chapel during Holy Week, the first thing Martinez points out is where the bodies are buried. Underneath rough planks that cover the original dirt floor, many parishioners and priests were interred. Then the mayordomo directs my gaze upward to the boards beneath the choir loft. There, the wooden ceiling bears a collection of children’s painted artworks—a roadrunner here, a horse there—that may date to the construction period, when it was said that kids were kept safe and entertained by doodling on small wooden pieces that were then installed in the ceiling. (Coincidentally or not, the proverb “Waste not, want not” originated in the 1770s.)
“Wood was hard to come by, so everything was hand-sawed and hand-adzed,” adds santero and conservator Victor Goler, indicating telltale marks. The oldest vigas have revealed tree rings dating to the 1750s.
ART CONSERVATION EFFORTS STRETCH back to the late 1860s, when itinerant Mexican artist José de Gracia Gonzales was commissioned to restore the early 19th-century wooden altar screens, whose original artist is still unknown. The most recent project began in 2022, funded by $200,000 from Nuevo Mexico Profundo, a nonprofit that helps restore sites of cultural and historic significance. Together, Goler, who is largely a bulto carver, and Felix López, who mostly paints retablos, comprise a dream team that has led recent conservations of artworks in several other northern New Mexico churches. Another aspect of the six-foot-three López’s unique skill set came in particularly handy in the lofty San José de Gracia: “He can reach farther before we have to use stepping stools and ladders,” Goler says with a grin.
They were joined in the centuries-old chapel by santero Nicolas Otero and Trampas resident Clarence Vigil. From October 2022 through March 2023—with a pause during the coldest weeks of winter in the woodstove-heated church—the foursome painstakingly cleaned and stabilized the main and side altar screens, the Stations of the Cross lithographs that hang from handmade wood frames on the walls, and various bultos and statues. Otero concentrated on the lithographs, while everyone relied on Vigil for judgment calls, oral histories, and advice based on his time growing up in the Trampas church. “We called him Snacks,” Goler says fondly, since Vigil frequently brought tangerines, candy, or cookies for the team.
Before-and-after photos of the artworks show a clear difference. Centuries of grime on the main altar were gently removed to reveal lighter, brighter faces of santos rendered in the distinctive style of early Nuevomexicano santeros, where Mexican Baroque and Native influences met for the first time. Cherished details were both restored and uncovered: A painted wooden bulto of San José carved by artist-cartographer Bernardo de Miera y Pacheco had part of its arm missing, which meant the saint couldn’t hold the Baby Jesus that accompanied the carved statue; the Christ Child has since returned to its rightful place, cradled by San José with the help of a newly created left hand. A judicious scrubbing of the Virgin Mary bulto’s overpainted brown skirt revealed a decorative pattern of original colors—blue, red, yellow, green, black, and white—that once and now again provides a flashier wardrobe accent.
Aside from the bones buried beneath it, contemplating the mysteries contained by the church can shiver one’s spine. “A couple times I was alone in the church,” Goler recalls, “and it’s a very strong feeling being in there by yourself.” One of the two bells—called Gracia and Refugio for their respective functions in marking celebrations and passings—went missing sometime in the early 20th century, according to records, and now represents an eerie possible link between Las Trampas and Jeffrey Epstein. According to a report released by the U.S. Department of Justice earlier this year, in 2020, FBI officials said they had “medium confidence” that the stolen “death” bell had been housed at Epstein’s Zorro Ranch, near Stanley, though the bell’s current location remains unknown.
The identity of the main altar-screen artist is also still up in the air. “It was either the Laguna Santero or Pedro Antonio Fresquís who painted the original images,” López says, naming two men who are grouped with the earliest identifiable santeros in the region. “If you open up the tabernacle, you’ll see this flowery pattern that’s totally different from what you see out here, and that gives us an idea that it’s the Laguna Santero,” Goler adds. “But I don’t think anybody has come up with a definitive answer,” López says.
WHEN I LEAVE THE CHURCH, I’M SUFFUSED with both wonder and curiosity at these art history puzzles. I drive slowly to Taos as images of the saints’ plaintive brown eyes continue to slide-project through my mind.
I decide to ask contemporary santero Vicente Telles—who has been researching the name of the artist who was known as the Laguna Santero, based upon his monumental works at the Laguna Pueblo mission—if he has an opinion as to who the San José de Gracia artist was.
He does. But over the course of our conversation about the church’s artworks—which are the most colorful, dramatic, and engaging of any historic santero art I’ve seen—I begin to see that whether the Laguna Santero or Fresquís painted the devotional art in question is not quite the point. Instead, as Telles says, “It’s about understanding that there’s an unbroken lineage of art created by people outside of the Indigenous community in the United States. I’m part of that lineage.”
When he looks at the santos staring back out at him across the centuries, he says, “I feel my community. I understand that face.” I ask if he thinks of them as Hispano, Native, or both. “They just look like New Mexicans to me,” he says.
Managing Editor Molly Boyle learned more at San José de Gracia than she remembers from Catholic school religion classes.