Recognizing Heritage: The Politics of Multiculturalism in New Mexico

4. The Politics of Preservation in Las Trampas

CHAPTER FOUR The Politics of Preservation in Las Trampas One of the paintings in the Española Misión is of the church of San José de Gracia in the mountain village of Las Trampas, which lies along the High Road between Santa Fe and Taos. Las Trampas has captivated the imagination of Anglo-Americans since they began arriving in New Mexico in the nineteenth century. Especially since the 1960s, writers have described the adobe church as one of the finest, most important, and best-preserved Spanish colonial mission churches in the Southwest, a textbook example of eighteenth-century New Mexican ecclesiastical architecture. They have extolled the village and its mountain setting, praising Las Trampas as a typical Spanish American agricultural community , one of the most interesting and least spoiled in northern New Mexico. With fewer than one hundred residents today, the village has no tourist facilities but is nevertheless a popular stop along a well-traveled route. The first time I visited Las Trampas I was like many tourists, driving the High Road (a two-lane highway) and stopping in all the villages along the way: Chimayó, Truchas, Ranchos de Taos. It was the end of August 2000, and I enjoyed the climb into the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, where pigmy forests of piñon and juniper gave way to ponderosa pines and then to firs and aspens. Adobe structures, pasturelands, and hilltop crosses dotted the settled landscape, but the road also cut through spectacular swaths of Bureau of Land Management and Forest Service lands, where the presence of humans was less visible (see fig. 23). “The highlight of Las Trampas 169 the trip,” I wrote in my journal, “was the church of San José de Gracia in Las Trampas” (see figs. 24 and 25). “I was really blown away by the simple and charming beauty of this adobe church,” which was “perfectly picturesque against the blue sky. The inside was light, with an ancient wood floor, painted ceiling beams, and outstanding altar and nave paintings. I spent time reading about the church’s features and history, and in general being awed by its beauty and peacefulness.” Like many who had come before me, I found the church incomparable as an example of Spanish colonial architecture. I knew from my guidebook that Las Trampas was famous, but I did not know that it had been the focus of preservation campaigns by Anglos throughout the twentieth century. In this chapter I analyze how outsiders have represented Las Trampas and their efforts to preserve the church, the village’s architecture and settlement pattern, and village life itself. These cultural conservation campaigns, which began in the 1920s, were part of the larger romantic movement that developed in Santa Fe and guided the restoration of the Palace of the Governors. In Las Trampas, howevFig . 23. The high desert along the High Road. 170 Las Trampas er, we see more clearly the psychological, political, and economic dimensions of Anglo antimodernism. I show how preservationist discourse, as a systematic way of thinking, speaking, and acting, has helped to perpetuate a colonial order. It is easy to find overt colonial activity in northern New Mexico, from the breakup of Hispanic land grants (R. Ortiz 1980; Briggs and Van Ness 1987; Ebright 1994) and the ongoing political and economic marginalization of Nuevomexicanos to missionary and governmental campaigns to Americanize Hispanic villages (Deutsch 1987, 63–86, 107–26). The colonial nature of preservation campaigns in Las Trampas is less obvious, though, since preservationists generally celebrated Nuevomexicanos ’ religious devotion, artistic traditions, communitarian values , and pastoral way of life and had little personal involvement in the economic and political changes that undermined the viability of northern New Mexican villages. Neither their words nor their actions, then, explicitly advanced Anglo-American interests. Quite the contrary, these antimodernists often criticized the cultural foundation of their own society. Fig. 24. San José de Gracia Catholic Church. Las Trampas 171 Yet I argue that preservationist discourse brought together the cultural, economic, and political dimensions of American colonialism . To begin with, outsiders have dominated the representation of Las Trampas, and their patronizing and primitivistic descriptions have influenced Anglo-American engagements with northern New Mexico. Trampaseños are rarely quoted in texts about the village, and seldom have they had the ability to represent themselves in a sustained way to a broad audience. This chapter is inevitably embedded in this politics of representation...