More than the forty-six wrought beams without corbels above the nave or the half-dozen purificators in the sacristy, what interested Father Domínguez at the pueblo and mission of San Diego de Jémez in 1776 was the rigid regime that Fray Joaquín de Jesús Ruiz had imposed upon its Towa-speaking natives. The resolute fifty-one-year-old Fray Joaquín marched the Jémez people around like a military drill instructor, so far as that was possible.

So impressed was Domínguez that he ordered the missionary to write down exactly how the system worked, which Ruiz did under the headings Mass, Religious Instruction, Government of Choirboys and Little Sacristans, Kitchen, Wood for Winter, and Harvest. For Mass the bell was rung at sunrise.

The married men enter, each one with his wife, and they kneel together in a row on each side of the nave of the church. Each couple has its own place designated in accordance with the census list. When there are many, the married couples make two rows on each side, the two men in the middle and the women at the sides. This may seem a superficial matter, but it is not, for experience has taught me that when these women are together they spend all the time dedicated to prayer and Mass in gossip, showing one another their glass beads, ribbons, medals, etc., telling who gave them to them or how they obtained them, and other mischief. Therefore the religious who has charge of the administration must have a care in this regard. After all, it is a house of prayer, not of chitchat. [1]

A century and a half before Ruiz and his rule, Fray Alonso de Benavides had characterized the Jémez nation as "one of the most indomitable and belligerent of this whole kingdom." Accused of trafficking with Navajos and clinging tenaciously to their old ways, these "mountain folk" had resisted the reduction of their several pueblos to one or two mission communities. Repeatedly they had dispersed. The formidable stone mission of San José de Giusewa, today a state monument near Jemez Springs, they had deserted by the late 1630s. They had martyred Franciscans in 1680 and 1696 and had scattered again. By 1706, however, three hundred of them were settled on the east bank of the Río Jémez at or near one of their earlier pueblos known as Walatowa, "and others keep coming down from the mountains where they are still in insurrection." By 1706, claimed Custos Juan Álvarez, they were building a church: hardly one worth mentioning, insisted a successor.

If every custos had applied himself as diligently as Fray Francisco de Lepiane, according to Lepiane himself in 1728, the missions of New Mexico would have progressed more rapidly

and the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass would not be celebrated in the corners of convento cloisters as it was celebrated at the mission of San Diego de los Jémez which I took as my charge [between 1724 and 1726]. At it I built a very good church with transept, sacristy, choir loft, and baptistery as well as two upstairs cells, each one with parlor, study, bedroom, kitchen, and storeroom; also an irrigation ditch and kitchen gardens, and all the rest necessary. [2]

Father Lepiane, back in Mexico City defending his administration, may have exaggerated, or perhaps the transept he said he built was closed up in subsequent remodeling. Or his church may have fallen. Whatever the case, Domínguez found no transept in 1776, just one very long continuous room, 46 varas from doorway to altar, with bare earth floor and "its interior not of the worst." Oriented toward the south, the church showed its back to the main cluster of house blocks, just as the present one does. Father Ruiz had built a new sacristy against the east wall and put the two-storied convento in order "by rebuilding the older structure." Thirty years later Fray Isidro Cadelo persuaded some of the local Spaniards to contribute produce toward purchase of a new altar screen. Still, when he handed the mission's inventory to Governor Joaquín del Real Alencaster in 1806, the friar appended a note "humbly imploring him please to bring to the attention of the King Our Lord the want of sacred appurtenances for divine services this mission suffers." [3]

Although Father Domínguez made no mention of the fact, there were evidently two church sites at Jémez even in his day: one where the structure in use stood in 1776—and where the nineteenth-century replacement stands today—due south of the pueblo, and the other 150 yards or so west of that structure in a pronounced bow of the acequia, where the ruins of Lepiane's church, or an earlier one, slowly weathered away.

In 1833, when Rafael García and the Jémez Indians were disputing a remeasurement of the pueblo's "grant" of one league (5,000 varas) in each of the cardinal directions, the two church sites became an issue. Traditionally such measurements were begun from the church door from the cross in the cemetery. García, evidently one of the pueblo's neighbors on the west, wanted to begin from the church in use, which would have given him an advantage of 150 yards or so. The Indians, who had been here longer, wanted to begin "from the first church which was farther down [west] than the present one because it was expedient to move it." Thoroughly confused, the local alcalde wrote to Santa Fe. Which church site was he to choose, or should he split the difference and begin halfway between? The answer was curt. He should consult a lawyer. [4]

155. The pueblo of Jémez in 1849, looking west, by Richard H. Kern. The church, with ruined convento attached, is visible on the far left.

On the way to reconnoiter the Navajo country in 1849, Lieutenant James H. Simpson set down his impressions of the church at Jémez pueblo, by that year in a decrepit state.

Third camp, Jémez, August 21—This afternoon Captain Dodge, the brothers Kern, and myself visited the Roman Catholic church of the village—the governor of the town, Hosta, procuring for us the keys, and acting as cicerone. The church, an adobe structure some one hundred by twenty-eight feet in plan, appeared very old, and was evidently wasting away under the combined influence of neglect and moisture. The swallows, as is to be noticed in the Roman Catholic church at Santa Fe, seemed to be perfectly at home within it, and now, as in the church mentioned, brought home to me the appositeness of those beautiful remarks of the sweet psalmist of Israel to be found in Psalms, 84th, 3d. A pilaster and arch arrangement, with crosses at intervals, characterized the side walls; and a number of paintings, all daubs excepting the central one, the wall back of the chancel. Hosta informed us that this central piece was a representation of San Diego bearing the cross. At present it is considerably defaced, but the touches of a genuine artist are yet visible upon it. None but a true son of the muse could have thrown into the countenance the expression of beautiful sadness with which it is radiant. In addition to the objects of garniture already mentioned, I noticed upon a projecting piece of the side pulpit a human skull and some bones, and in a side room, to which I could only peep in, some images and pictures. [5]

When Lieutenant Bourke and his companions halted their ambulance near the old Jémez church on November 5, 1881, they could see that its roof had fallen. Facade and bell gable still stood like a false front on a movie set. Bourke made a sketch, but admitted that

There is no church; the church fell down about ten days ago—the great amount of rain this summer falling upon earth roof proved too much for the resisting power of the old beams which gave way, falling in a heap of ruins upon the altar, but leaving the facade intact with the steeple in which are hanging two bells of small size. [6]

That, for all practical purposes, was the end of the "Domínguez church." Returning with Judge Prince from Jemez Springs in 1885, C. B. Hayward noticed that the church at the pueblo of Jémez "has tumbled down. Through the energy of Padre — [J. B. Mariller, who served Jémez between 1881 and 1894] a new one is now in process of construction." Completed in 1887 or 1888, this building rose almost on top of its fallen predecessor. It was lower and shorter featuring transept and clerestory, in sum, a flat-roofed adobe traditional. Except for the rude planked balcony that rested on seven choir loft vigas poking through the wall, the simple facade looked just like the previous one, even to stepped bell gable and the same two bells. [7]

156. The church of San Diego de Jémez as rebuilt in the 1880s. Photograph by Vroman 1899.

A renewed Franciscan ministry began at Jémez in 1902 when Archbishop Bourgade called from the Cincinnati province friars with German names. If it lacked the stern regimentation of Father Ruiz's tenure, it nevertheless prospered. From the leaky convento attached to Father Mariller's church, where "the Brother had to wear raincoat and rubbers while preparing the meals," the brown robes moved to a fifteen-acre enclave some five hundred yards west. There they established headquarters for a sprawling parish of more than 3,000 square miles and thirteen mission stations. There, too, as part of a complex that included a large residence for the friars, a school, and a convent for the Franciscan sisters who came to teach, Father Barnabas Meyer blessed a new chapel on the feast of San Diego in November 1919. More or less neo-Gothic, it burned in 1937 and was replaced the following year by a handsome New Mexico mission-style building displaying the best of Jémez carpentry. [8]

The pueblo church, meanwhile, the one erected under the tolerant eye of Father Mariller, had taken on a plain and modern look by the early 1920s. With pitched tin roof and gray stucco exterior it serves today as successor to the one Father Ruiz marched the Jémez people in and out of two centuries ago because, as Domínguez put it, "a certain rebelliousness demands great firmness." [9]

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