Paul Weideman explores Chimayó’s Plaza del Cerro
To come upon flowing water in Northern New Mexico seems such a blessing. One recent afternoon, photographer and writer Don Usner and I paused on a small footbridge over the Acequia de los Ortegas in Chimayó, appreciating the mini-spectacle. He pointed to a place just beyond, indicating where they used to divert water to irrigate inside the Plaza del Cerro. That was back when the plaza was a place of constant activity, both social and agricultural. Today it’s filled with weeds and a few trees, mostly of the weedy variety.
Some weeks ago, young people from a Texas church group cleared a third of an acre of the plaza in front of an old, abandoned home. That parcel and the oneroom house have been purchased by the Chimayó Cultural Preservation Association, on whose board Usner serves. The historic domicile is in the middle of a substantial restoration directed by Cornerstones Community Partnerships, which works with communities to rehabilitate adobe buildings. “We started a building fund two decades ago, but we’re very fortunate that Cornerstones has taken this on as a project and has helped fundraise,” Usner said.
They’re hoping the little house’s rebirth will inspire other improvements in and around the square, which architectural historian Chris Wilson and architect Stefanos Polyzoides call the state’s “most intact fortified plaza” in their 2011 book The Plazas of New
Mexico. The earliest known mention of the Plaza de San Buenaventura de Chimayó, its original name, was in a 1785 baptismal record. The 1.6-acre square was developed with a defensive priority because of threats by raiding Apache, Comache, Navajo, and Ute Indians at that time. Except for openings at two easily defended points, the plaza was surrounded on all four sides by an unbroken line of houses with no outside doors or windows. An oratorio (chapel) was built on the west side of the plaza in about 1830. The altar of the building, which still exists, has panels that were quite possibly painted by José Rafael Aragón, the santero whose work graces the famed Santuario de Chimayó in the neighboring community of Potrero. “The oratorio is wonderful,” Usner said. “It’s mud with gypsum, or yeso. A guy would come through Chimayó with a wagonful of yeso and they’d bake it in an horno and make a powder, mix it with water and put it on the walls.”
As the threat from Indians subsided, people added outside windows and doors and, with new materials available from the Santa Fe Trail in the mid-1800s and from the railroad later that century, residents could fancy up their houses with pedimented lintels and metal roofs. “You could tell where the patrón lived; he had a pitched-roof post office, a general store, and a big piece of land. And on the west side of the plaza, it was all the people who were migrant laborers in Colorado.”
The dynamism of the plaza culture faded after World War II, with too many young men either not returning from the front lines or not caring to go back home. Fewer than 10 people live on the plaza today, but Melita Ortega once showed Usner a paper from 1878 listing more than 40 people who helped maintain the oratorio.
Among the treasures in the Chimayó Museum is a portable reed organ that Ortega, a schoolteacher, played for the children. She was the sister of Usner’s