New Mexico Baptisms
Catholic Parishes and Missions in
TAOS

All books Indexed and spiral bound.

Introduction to this series of Taos Baptisms, by Sylvia Rodriquez, Ph.D.
Map

Taos Valley Map by Ernie Jaskolski

The TAOS VALLEY
by Sylvia Rodriguez, Ph.D.

The Taos basin is located in north central New Mexico, just south of the Colorado border. It resides on the eastern edge of an altiplano at an altitude of approximately 7,000 feet, just before where the land rises precipitously into the southern tip of the Rockies. Its three defining geological features are the Sangre de Cristo mountain range, the Río Grande, and the far northern Chihuahuan desert. The mountains run north-south, curling around the eastern perimeter of the valley, roughly parallel to the river. The Río Grande cuts the length of Taos County much as it bisects the state. West of the river, the desert stretches for hundreds miles into Arizona.

On the east, eight tributaries drain out of the mountains into the Río Grande across the fertile plain of Taos Valley. Each of these perennial streams originates in a spring or lake high in the mountains, descends an alpine canyon, flows through a valley, and drops down an arroyo. North to south these rivers are: San Cristóbal Creek, the Río Hondo, the Arroyo Seco Creek, the Río Lucero, the Río Pueblo, the Río Fernando, and the Río Grande del Rancho, which has two upper branches, the Río Chiquito and the Rito de la Olla or Pot Creek. The largest and most central of these rivers is the Río Pueblo, of which all the others except San Cristíbal Creek and the Río Hondo are tributaries. The San Cristíbal watershed lies several miles north of Taos Basin; between them, the Río Hondo joins the Río Grande north of the Río Lucero. Lush meadows fill the delta where the other tributaries come together, at the hydrological "vortex" of the valley. The Río Pueblo drains into the Río Grande gorge a few miles below that, at Pilar.

Greater or metropolitan Taos is a collectivity or "multicommunity" of villages, consisting of an aboriginal Tiwa pueblo and approximately sixteen Hispanic settlements that crystallized around it during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Founded on the banks of the upper Río Pueblo, Taos Pueblo occupies the best farming, hunting, and defensible vantage point in the valley. Its location at the base of Taos Mountain gives easy access to rich mountain resources, including the river itself, as well as to fertile meadows lying immediately to the west and south.

The Pueblo was nearly 200 years old when Coronado's lieutenant Pedro Alvarado first saw it in 1540, and reported it to be the largest and most populous of the Indian villages he visited. After 1598 Oñate assigned a priest to the Taos Mission, which was later named for San Gerónimo.

By the middle of the seventeenth century, Hispanic settlers were moving into the valley and occupying lands on at least two royal grants made to the south (on the Río Grande del Rancho) and immediately west (on the Río Lucero) of Taos Pueblo. Some seventy settlers and two priests were killed in the area during the Pueblo Revolt in 1680, which was planned from a kiva at Taos Pueblo because of its strategic remoteness from Spanish headquarters in Santa Fe, roughly sixty-five miles to the south. Settlers reentered the valley with De Vargas's "bloodless Reconquest," which the Taos Indians actively resisted until 1696.

During the early to middle 1700s Hispanic settlers began to establish a permanent foothold in the Taos valley. From three to five royal grants were made to individuals, although only two of them were continuously occupied. They included the Cristobal de la Serna, made in 1710 and revalidated in 1715, which lies several miles south of the Pueblo and encompasses the upper and middle Río Grande del Rancho watershed and evidently corresponded to the pre-Revolt Duran y Chavez grant. The other was the Francisca Antonia de Gijosa grant, made in 1715, which lies west of La Serna and encompasses much of the lower Río Grande del Rancho watershed. A third, on the site of the old Lucero de Godoy grant west of the Pueblo along the Río Lucero, was issued in 1716 to Antonio Martínez of Sonora, who evidently never occupied it. Yet another, the Antoine Leroux grant, made in 1742, overlapped onto the Martínez grant, as well as onto the Pueblo league. Population growth was held in check during much of the eighteenth century by generally harsh conditions, including devastating Comanche raids into the area. During the 1770's vecinos moved inside the walls of Taos Pueblo for mutual protection. Domínguez reported 306 non-Indian settlers living inside the heavily fortified Pueblo in 1776, when a plaza was under construction in Las Trampas or Ranchos. The first stable settlements seem to have been in the Ranchos area along the middle Río Grande del Rancho watershed. By the 1790's the Comanche threat had subsided and other parts of the valley were being resettled.

The earliest enumeration of distinct plazas for the Taos area was from 1796, the same year the town, or Don Fernando, grant was made to sixty families. The 1796 census reported a non-Indian population of 774, and listed a total of six placitas besides San Gerónimo or Taos Pueblo, each named for its patron saint, in the Taos Valley: San Francisco (present day Ranchos de Taos), Santa Gertrudis, Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe (Don Fernando), La Purísima Concepción (Upper Ranchitos), San Francisco de Paula (Lower Ranchitos), and Nuestra Señora de Dolores (Cañon). All but Santa Gertrudis are easily identifiable communities that still exist today. All of these communities cluster along the banks of the Río Pueblo, the Río Lucero, the Río Fernando, and the Río Grande del Rancho. The town of Don Fernando shared its name with the river it first depended on but never enjoyed exclusive rights to, since upstream sits the placita of Nuestra Señora de Dolores or modern Cañon. On the Río Pueblo, Don Fernando sits downstream from Taos Pueblo. As early as 1797 the citizens of the Don Fernando grant petitioned the governor for sobrante or surplus rights to waters from both the Río Pueblo and Río Lucero, since one river alone could not sustain their expanding needs. All villages in the Taos constellation exist in some kind of upstream-downstream relation-ship to one another. Each community sits in an upper, middle, or lower watershed--and this location dictates its relationship to the neighbors with whom it must share irrigation water.

By the early nineteenth century the Upper Río Lucero near the mouth of the Arroyo Seco, and the Río Hondo watershed a few miles to the northwest, were occupied by population overflow from the town. San Cristóbal was established several miles farther north in its own separate watershed. So in addition to the original six, nearly another dozen placitas came into being, some nucleated, others dispersed. They included Talpa, Llano Quemado, Cordillera, and Los Cordovas (assuming it wasn't once Santa Gertrudis) in the Río Grande del Rancho watershed; Valdez, Arroyo Hondo, and Des Montes in the Río Hondo watershed. Des Montes and Arroyo Seco, plus Las Colonias to their southwest, draw mainly on the Río Lucero.

San Gerónimo was the first parish in the Taos Valley, based at Taos Pueblo until 1826, when Padre José Antonio Martínez became priest of the new Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe parish seated in Don Fernando. By then Don Fernando de Taos was the multicommunity hub, destined ultimately to become known as a tourist town. The Ranchos church, completed by 1815, also belonged originally to the San Gerónimo parish, then to Guadalupe, but finally became a separate parish in 1937. Today the Guadalupe parish extends across the Río Pueblo, Río Fernando, and lower Río Lucero watersheds; the Holy Trinity parish embraces the Arroyo Seco, upper Río Lucero, Río Hondo, and San Cristóbal valleys or watersheds. The Río Grande del Rancho watershed is more or less coextensive with the San Francisco de Assisi parish, whose famous, much-photographed mission church defines the Ranchos plaza. Each parish contains a mother church and several chapels, usually located near camposantos (cemeteries) and occasional moradas (lay chapter houses of the Penitente Brotherhood) that serve the constituent communities. Each community or placita identifies itself as a bounded territorial entity, defined in terms of its chapel and patron saint, morada(s) and camposanto(s), households and families, farmland and acequias (community irrigation ditches).

Sylvia Rodríguez, Ph.D., March 2004

Sylvia Rodriguez was born and raised in Taos. She attended Barnard College, received her Ph.D. from Stanford University, and is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of New Mexico in Alburquerque. Her interest in anthropology developed out of a need to understand the diverse and complex society of Taos and northern New Mexico. She has published a book on the Matachines Dance (available from Amazon books through this web site click here) and has another forthcoming on the acequia system of the Taos Valley.