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Isleta
On the west bank, "about a musket shot and a half"
from the Rio Grande, only 13 miles south of Albuquerque, lies the
Southern Tiwa pueblo and mission of San Agustín de la Isleta. "It
is called Isleta [little island]," Bishop Tamarón explained in
1760, "because it is very close to the Río Grande del Norte, and when
the river is in flood, one branch surrounds it. It is not innundated
because it stands on a little mound." [1]
Today Isleta is the largest of the pueblos on the
river, and probably the best known. Its church, despite a rich history
of alterations, has an excellent claim on the title "oldest in New
Mexico," embodying as it does portions of foundation and walls built in
or about 1613. The pueblo's proximity to Albuquerque has accorded it
maximum exposure. Feast-day ceremonial or hotly contested election,
remodeling of the church or development of a pickle plantsuch
Isleta doings are reported regularly in Albuquerque newspapers. Once
recently, when the Isletas reasserted their ownership of the church in a
most dramatic way, they made news nationwide.
In the penetrating cold of a December night Governor
Antonio de Otermín had advanced on Isleta at the head of seventy
men. He may already have sensed that his attempt to reconquer the
Pueblos only a year after the Revolt of 1680 was ill-timed. At dawn he
could see smoke rising above the houses. At least Isleta was peopled.
After token resistance they let him enter. More than five hundred souls
having assembled, the governorseeing holy temple and convent
burned and ruined, the crosses thrown down throughout the pueblo, and a
cowpen inside the body of the churchwas very indignant, and
ordered the cows turned into the fields and gave the Indians a severe
reprimand." They told him that they were not to blame, that the Northern
Tiwas and the Tewas had come down and desecrated the church. When he
pulled out four weeks later, Otermín took several hundred of
these Isleta people "under his protection" to settle south of El Paso. In
1692 Diego de Vargas found the place desolate and in ruins, "except for
the nave of the church, the walls of which are in good condition." [2]
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180. The mission of San Agustín
de la Isleta, 1867. The priest is likely J. B. Brun. Photograph by
Alexander Gardner or William A. Bell.
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Those same sturdy walls served again when Father
Custos Juan de la Peña, who had gathered up numerous dispersed
Tiwa families, "re-established and refounded the old pueblo and mission
of San Agustín of Isleta with the consent and aid of the governor
at the beginning of January, 1710." Fifty years later Tamarón
dismissed the Isleta church as "single-naved, with an adorned altar." It
looked to the south on a very broad plaza.
Already by 1776 Father Domínguez noted the
scattering of individual dwellings beyond the plaza and as a result the
more Spanish appearance of Isleta. Inside the dim, long, earth-floored
church, Domínguez was reminded of "a rather dark wine cellar." He
must have been tired. Moving on to inspect the large two-storied
convento abutting the east wall, with its unique arched portico giving
on the plaza, the incorruptible Franciscan inspector began to lose his
patience. "The plan," he despaired, "is so intricate that if I describe
it, I shall only cause confusion." Furthermore, it was badly laid out.
Where did the stairway to the convento's entrance begin? In the corral
no less. [3]
Domínguez gave only the barest details of the
facade in 1776: a two-leaved door three varas high by two wide, a window
above looking out from the choir loft, and "on top of each of the front
corners of the church" a turret. Ninety-one years later, a fine
photograph, by famed Civil War photographer Alexander Gardner or by his
companion Dr. William A. Bell (out West on a railroad survey in 1867),
exhibited some changesbut nothing compared to what lay ahead.
Behind an interesting lineup of Isleta people with their handsome,
unidentified priest (who may be the Rev. J. B. Brun), and centered over
the door and choir loft window, rose a high-arched bell gable with one
large bell. On each side, half as tall, was an adobe peak. Outside these
and rising barely higher, on top of buttress-towers flush with and
expanding the facade, sat blocklike structures of adobe, weathered-down
versions, it would seem, of Domínguez's turrets. From the edge of
the tower on the west to the east end of the convento, with its three
heavy arches on the ground floor and its long mirador above, the facade
of the building extended on a single plane. Not many months before, it
had been mud-plastered halfway up across the entire expanse, leaving a
horizontal line that looked like the high-water mark after a flood. [4]
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181. By 1881 the facade of the Isleta
church above the window was completely changed, and the upper story
of the convento was gone.
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By 1881, when Lieutenant John G. Bourke sketched it
and Ben Wittick photographed it, the face of the Isleta church had
changed its expression. Bell gable and peaks, as well as the second
story of the convento wing, were gone. Two boxy, louvered wooden
belfries topped by pyramidal roofs and botonee crosses perched awkwardly
at the corners with only a low pitched pediment and a larger cross
between. Bourke, who thought Isleta looked "very much like a Mexican
town," happened to be here on November 2, All Souls Day, the traditional
time in the pueblos of New Mexico when fruits of the harvest were
offered symbolically to the dead and afterward heaped in the priest's
storeroom for his sustenance. Bourke set the scene.
Went to church; dozens of kneeling women in their
finest raiment in the "campo santo" [cemetery] in front, each with her
offering for the "animas" [souls]: burning candles, baskets of corn,
cakes, fresh bread, "turnovers," pies, apples, grapes and slices of
watermelons, onions and canteloupes. The interior of the church was
resplendent with the light of candles. Upon the steps of the altar and
upon the wooden floor of the nave, there were two or 300 of these
blazing at once which produced an imposing effect, contrasting quaintly
with the four or five scones of Apache baskets, (whose numbers
astonished me) filled with delicacies and substantials of all kinds. At
the moment of our entrance, an organ in the choir was playing a soft
prelude. (This was one of the very few church organs I had heard in New
Mexico.) Shortly afterwards, a woman struck up, in a voice cracked and
feeble, a chant, the purport of which I could not make out: the
antiphone to this was rendered in a murmur of gentle music by the chorus
of kneeling figures about her.
There is something peculiar about the church-music of
the Rio Grande valley: the solos are stridulous and strained, but the
choruses have in them something weird, soft and tender, not to be
described. The hymn finished, the Rosary was recited, the hum of voices
filling the church with the echoes of prayers which these old walls had
given back for so many generations. The priest [the Rev. Clement Peyron,
at Isleta 1880-88] began the service of the Mass, his assistants, two
male Indians in shirt-sleeves, leggings, mocassins, red Pueblo girdles
and hair in queue at back. [5]
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182. The interior of Isleta's church in the
1880s.
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In May of 1891 the amiable, well-fed Rev. Antonine
Docher came to Isleta to stay for thirty-five years. What he did to the
church, a sacrilege to the adobe purist and to the non-purist a
delightful flight of fancy, made the oldest also the most distinctive.
Before Docher's advent the west wall had been punctured by two large
windows and buttressed between. In the late 1890s, as the last two
archesall that was left of the earlier conventomelted down,
the Frenchman began his gradual transfiguration of the facade. First, he
had a couple of truncated buttresses built in front of the towers, as if
to prevent the latter from pitching forward, and between them he had the
thickness of the front wall doubled, up to the height of the door
lintel. These alterations broke up the old single plane and at the same
time provided a platform for a future balcony. A weathered vestige of
the old convento slanting upward from the ground toward the east belfry
and an additional buttress pushing on the west side gave the facade a
new slope-shouldered look. About 1910 the inevitable pitched roof of
corrugated iron went up. After that, there was no stopping the French
priest.
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183. The Rev. Antonine Docher, priest at
Isleta, 1891-1926.
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By October 20, 1919, the grand day King Albert of
Belgium and his queen visited the church, Father Docher was ready. Aside
from the flags and bunting, the facade now featured a broad, roofed
balcony or veranda and two of the most outlandish belfries in all
Christendom. From fancy boxes, displaying now two louvered panels per
face except on the side where they were joined to the pitched roof, rose
one big central spire surrounded by four little ones, each surmounted by
a cross. Counting the cross on the gable at the front and the one on the
auxiliary belfry roosting at the rear, there were now twelve crosses in
all on the roof of the church at Isleta, surely no coincidence. [6]
Time and the elements wore hard on Father Docher's
embellishments. The eight small spires came down first, then the lonely
auxiliary belfry and the elevated veranda with its sloped tin roof.
Straight on, the effect was starkly incongruous. There was no other
facade like it. The weathered wooden superstructure appeared to float
above like a fancy hat on the head of someone whose face had been
heavily packed with white plaster to-make a mask. By the late 1950s,
however, the church was due its periodic restoration, which this time
happened to coincide with the controversial ministry of the outspoken
German-born Msgr. Frederick A. Stadtmueller.
Work commenced in 1959. The Santa Fe architectural
firm of McHugh and Hooker, Bradley P. Kidder, and Associates was called
in by the archdiocese after Stadtmueller had committed himself to major
changes. Off came Father Docher's pitched roof and his fairy-tale
steeples. Once again the light of day shone directly through the
clerestory upon the altar. Gone were the millwork and louvers, and in
their place stood good solid concrete-block belfries much more in
keeping with the massing of the building. In the east one Monsignor
Stadtmueller had a new bell from Cincinnati rigged to ring electrically.
Inside, much of "the nineteenth-century clutter" was removed.
Replastered walls and inconspicuous panel lighting now showed to
advantage the old paintings.
Stout-heartedly, the remodelers confronted another
relic of the placea long-dead but reportedly well-preserved
Franciscan who rose periodically with the high water table. In August
of 1959 the log coffin of Fray Juan José Padilla, which had
worked its way to the surface every generation or so after its burial in
the sanctuary in 1756, was reopened in the presence of a pathologist who
pronounced the remains not at all unusual. Documents to that effect were
added to others of earlier examinations in the coffin and Father Padilla
was put back to rest beneath a substantial concrete floor"this
time for good." [7]
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184. Father Docher's pridethe
Isleta church fairly bristled with spires and crosses in 1922.
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Monsignor Stadtmueller who did not hide his belief
that one could not be both a good Roman Catholic and a pagan, had
angered some of the Isleta people. They charged him with gross
disrespect for "the Indian way of life." By early 1964 a petition for
Stadtmueller's removal was circulating. One visible bone of contention
was the 30-foot circular slab of concrete poured in the churchyard
during the 1959-60 renovation and designated by the priest a dance
platform. The Isletas whose ceremonial dances were meant to take place
on Mother Earth, refused to use it. Matters had come to such a pass by
June of 1965 that the pueblo's Governor Andy Abeita threatened to evict
Stadtmueller if he did not leave. Stadtmueller did not.
The photo of Abeita leading the handcuffed pastor of
Isleta from the rectory on June 27, 1965, appeared in Life. The
following Sunday, July 4, Archbishop James Peter Davis celebrated a
farewell Mass at Isleta and had the church locked up. The night of the
government of an Indian pueblo to determine its own internal
affairswhich included ownership of the church propertyhad
run head-on into a Roman Catholic prelate's right to assign the priest
of his choice to whatever parish. Deep rifts within the pueblo
complicated the issue, as did the efforts of both sides to sort out what
belonged to Caesar and what belonged to God.
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185. Remodeled in 1959-60, the church of
San Agustín at Isleta as it looked in the 1970s.
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Nine years later, in 1974, Archbishop Robert F.
Sánchez reelevated Isleta to parish status, and a resident
priest, the first since Stadtmueller, moved back into the rectory. At
Christmastime the new pastor announced that he was in accord with a
recommendation of the pueblo council. The concrete slab would be
removed.
Except for the walks, the churchyard today is mostly
dirt. Other than that, Stadtmueller's renovation of "the oldest church"
looks as it did in 1960. In that year architectural historian Bainbridge
Bunting had lamented the building's loss of distinctiveness, overstating
his case as is a professor's wont. "Without a blush of embarrassment,"
he wrote, "this new facade might appear on any church in any
neighborhood in any community between the Panhandle and Los Angelesan
interchangeable architecture for an interchangeable man in an
interchangeable society." [8]
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186. Part of Isleta pueblo, March 12, 1979.
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Copyright © 1980 by
the University of New Mexico Press. All rights reserved. Material from
this edition published for the Cultural Properties Review Committee by
the University of New Mexico Press may not be reproduced in any manner
without the written consent of the author and the University of New
Mexico Press.
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