Enduring Legacies: Ethnic Histories and Cultures of Colorado

5: Religious Architecture in Colorado’s San Luis Valley

87 This chapter is the culmination of field research work cataloguing religious church architecture in southern Colorado’s San Luis Valley. The building survey fieldwork reinforced the evidence of historical Hispanic roots in Colorado. What began as a cataloguing of small churches, or capillas, became a history of Hispanic migration settlement patterns, a history of the built environment, and a definition of physical spaces before the intervention of North Americans after the Mexican-American War. As Hispanics migrated north from Santa Fe and Taos in the early 1800s and 1900s, establishing settlements in Colorado, every smallvillagebuiltandestablishedplacitas(villagesarrangedaroundsmallplazas), moradas (locally organized, unconsecrated spaces for worship during important religious seasons, such as Easter and Christmas), and capillas. In many ways, the resultant history of built environment and architectural remnants reflects Hispanics’ cultural, political, and social survival. The small village capillas were built to provide divine intervention during the settlement of the land. They also served as symbolic and religious invocations to counter difficult events, such as the aggressive intrusion of North American doctrines like Mormonism. This chapter documents the building of churches parallel to Colorado’s evolving social, political, and physical history. Fieldwork for this project was Religious Architecture in Colorado’s San Luis Valley 5 Phillip Gallegos 88 Religious Architecture in Colorado’s San Luis Valley underwritten by the College of Fellows of the American Institute of Architects (AIA). The AIA supported the historical building survey of the religious architecture of Colorado’s San Luis Valley. Fieldwork was divided along the western and eastern edges of the valley. The southern end of the valley within Colorado represents the earliest settlements by Spanish-speaking inhabitants. The San Luis Valley consists of Conejos County at the western edge of the valley and Costilla County at the eastern end. The survey’s initial architectural purpose was to provide an accurate database of religious architecture, as it exists today. In the case of destroyed churches, an attempt at reconstruction in the form of a drawing was made, using records or field measurements as a guide. Physical Context The Spanish American churches of the San Luis Valley region rest in a high desert valley surrounded by mountains (Figure 5.1). Hispanic settlers arrived in Colorado in the mid-1800s. This migration north resulted first from Spanish and later Mexican governmental policy to settle the frontiers of their borders. The upper region of the Río Grande Valley in Colorado and New Mexico contains enclaves of Spanish-speaking settlements often isolated from eastern and western villages as well as the outside world. Separation between eastern and western settlements is an extension of the isolation imposed across the Río Grande Canyon in New Mexico and the river’s extension in Colorado. Geographically, the entire valley straddles the present-day Colorado–New Mexico border. The valley is called San Luis on the Colorado side of the border and Taos in the New Mexico portion. When the southwestern United States shifted from Spanish and Mexican governance to U.S. governance, the Taos Valley became (and remains) an enclave physically isolated from many outside influences. As an isolated valley, a uniqueness remains in the San Luis/ Taos region’s people and architecture, which is clearly a continuation of the sixteenth-century conquest and settlement of Mexico, the northern frontiers, and present-day New Mexico–Colorado. The U-shape of the enclosing northern mountains provided both a physical terminus to the northern migration of settlements and a physical isolation of the San Luis Valley from North American settlers from the east. Historical Introduction The search for the Hispanic community’s historical roots uncovers sources stretching from Mexico to Spanish settlements in southern Colorado. A continual movement of peoples, families, and genealogies is simultaneously Phillip Gallegos 89 recent and old in Colorado. The historical roots of some families and villages in southern Colorado predate the U.S. political incursion into the Southwest. The continual time line of migrations north from Mexico in the 1800s resulted in the founding of communities, some of which have been abandoned, and ignored the invisible shifting political melodrama of changes wrought by the Mexican-American War. In California, Arizona, Texas, and New Mexico, the routes of settlements can be physically traced and located as the seeds 5.1. San Luis/Taos Valley. 90 Religious Architecture in Colorado’s San Luis Valley of present urbanized centers. As the meeting place of commerce and North American culture...