Public scandal, hideous paintings on hide, and churches that resembled warehouses—Fray Francisco Atanasio Domínguez's unvarnished recital of conditions in New Mexico so offended his Franciscan superiors that they filed it away and forgot it. Finally "declassified" by the passage of time, translated into English and set in historical context by Eleanor B. Adams and Fray Angelico Chavez, The Missions of New Mexico, 1776 offers us not only the most intimate portrayal ever recorded of life in the eighteenth-century colony but also a marvelously detailed look at its missions and pueblos.

Of the thirty-two sites Domínguez described in 1776, twenty-eight are listed in one form or another on the New Mexico register of cultural properties. This inventory of the state's heritage is maintained by the Cultural Properties Review Committee, a seven-member body created by the legislature in 1969 and composed of persons recognized as professional in the fields of history, anthropology, architecture, or art. Beyond reviewing proposed additions to the list, the Committee's responsibility extends to every aspect of protection and preservation, from the annual inspection of sites to the publication of writings about them.

To mark the Bicentennial of the United States, and of Father Domínguez's visitation, the Cultural Properties Review Committee re-issued in facsimile The Missions of New Mexico, 1776. At the same time, the Committee approved a proposal that a second publication, a companion volume, be prepared in response to the question, What has happened to these establishments since 1776? The present study, sponsored by the Committee, is the result.

Based on the accounts of subsequent ecclesiastical visitors, early Anglo travelers, modernizers, and preservationists, the following pages frequently allow these beholders to have a say in the narrative. Their words, particularly after the mid-nineteenth century, are reinforced by sketches and photographs. Unless otherwise credited, translations are by the author.

The scope of the work was set by Domínguez. Only those missions that he described, the ones extant in 1776, are treated, and in the same order he contrived. Those abandoned before his time—from Abó to Giusewa to Hawikuh and Awátovi—and those built later—from San Miguel at Socorro (which fits in both categories) to the santuario of Chimayó and the church of San Francisco at Ranchos de Taos—fall outside it. In most cases, because of the wholesale destruction wrought in the Pueblo Revolt and its aftermath, their story begins with the Spanish reconquest in the 1690s or later.

Here the word mission is limited neither to its strict sense of a financially dependent congregation as opposed to a self-sufficient parish, nor to the broader sense of a center for the propagation of the Christian faith among non-Christian peoples. Instead it is used as Domínguez did to encompass all the churches of New Mexico, whether at Indian pueblos or Spanish villas, since in his day all were administered by Franciscan missionaries. In physical terms a mission meant not only the church but its attendant buildings as well.

Our concern is less with the mission as a religious manifestation than with the mission complex as architecture, less with Christian gospel and sacraments and preaching and saving souls and more with adobes and timbers and building and tearing down. And, as in the report of Father Domínguez, the builders and destroyers come in for their share of attention.

This book, like Domínguez's mule, stopped and started but finally arrived. For their patience, aid, and encouragement throughout, I thank the members of the Cultural Properties Review Committee: Chairman Albert H. Schroeder, John P. Conron, Myra Ellen Jenkins, George Clayton Pearl, Curtis Schaafsma, Marc Simmons, and Spencer Wilson. I am indebted as well to the directors and photo archivists of the institutions credited in the List of Illustrations. Eleanor B. Adams contributed the Foreword and much more. Lastly, my special thanks to Roland F. Dickey, editor and designer of The Missions of New Mexico, 1776, retained by the Committee to perform similar chores here in cooperation with the University of New Mexico Press. His precision and wit show.

J.L.K.

March 1979

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.