Land of (Re)Enchantment: Tourism and Sacred Space at Roswell and Chimayó, New Mexico

The myths and legends of New Mexico spring from its very soil.

—New Mexico Tourist Ad

By 1922, the year he would turn thirty-seven years old, British author and world traveler D. H. Lawrence was exhausted spiritually and emotionally. While he had seen a great deal of the world and appreciated some of the beauty and wonder he had found, he had never experienced what he considered to be a moment of “true transcendence.” Lawrence was feeling the crush of urbanization and industrialization, in which, as he puts it, “there is no mystery left, we’ve been there, we’ve seen it, we know all about it, [and] Peking is just the same as New York.”¹ Lawrence had witnessed it all, felt absolutely nothing, and despaired of ever making a connection with any of the beautiful lands he had seen, or would see. Then he traveled to New Mexico.

Lawrence’s sojourn in New Mexico placed him in a category of revitalization and rebirth with many other spiritual pilgrims who have come to the “Land of Enchantment.” He called his time in New Mexico “the greatest experience of the outside world I have ever had.” The landscape was more than regenerative and aesthetic: “it had a splendid silent terror,” and in a grand flourish he noted, “Ah, yes, in New Mexico the heart is sacrificed to the sun and the human being is left stark, heartless, but undauntedly religious.”² Lawrence was far from the first person to equate the New Mexican landscape with the sacred and transcendent. Before the Spanish conquest, Native Americans venerated the land. In the 1500s, the Spanish arrived and set to work converting Indians, but they also noted the beauty of the desert landscape. Then the United States acquired New Mexico Territory from Mexico in 1848, and Americans began to comment upon the splendor of the landscape, particularly after a rail link to the eastern United States was completed in 1880. The railroad companies, tourism entrepreneurs, and independent artists and writers began a full-blown project of transforming the beauty of New Mexico into a transcendent realm of mythic dimensions. These promoters fashioned the landscape’s “most obvious attributes into a script” that “blurred [the] distinction between mythic and actual.”³ Through the process of mythmaking, the New Mexican landscape became naturalized as sacred, obscuring the cultural labor that went into that formulation.

Chimayó and Roswell, New Mexico, are two potent examples of how sacredness has been embedded within the New Mexico landscape. At first glance, the towns have little in common besides their location in the same state. Chimayó is a small village of a few thousand people just northwest of Santa Fe, while Roswell is a much larger city in southeastern New Mexico.⁴ Chimayó is largely agricultural, whereas Roswell is industrialized. Yet beyond their surface differences, each place attracts hundreds of thousands of pilgrims a year, many of whom believe the land is sacred. A cursory glance at each site’s pilgrims might serve only to underscore their differences. After all, the pilgrims of Chimayó embark on a sojourn to a holy Catholic sanctuary: El Santuario de Chimayó, a place revered for its holy earth which, for believers, carries miraculous healing properties. Those who make the pilgrimage to Roswell go to see where an unidentified flying object (UFO) allegedly crashed. Although the U.S. government first acknowledged and then retracted that admission, the lore of Roswell has only grown, and UFO enthusiasts consider Roswell their mecca. They travel there to see the International UFO Museum and Research Center (IUFOMRC), as well as the multiple crash sites where the flying saucer allegedly shattered into pieces as it fell to earth. Thus, upon cursory inspection, the Chimayó site seems sacred and the Roswell one secular. But through the actions of tourist-pilgrims and others within their interpretive communities, Chimayó and Roswell both straddle a space between the sacred and the profane, and between the commercial and the spiritual. By comparing the two, one can come to understand...