The Art of Chimayó

Northern NM town’s unique blend of the religious and the commercial draws 300,000 visitors a year

CHIMAYÓ — Shawna Chavez has several reasons she enjoys the crush of visitors who descend each Holy Week on her ordinarily quiet village. Some of the estimated 300,000 annual visitors find their way into the tiny shop just up the hill from El Santuario de Chimayó where she and her husband, Patricio, sell their religious artwork.

“I love exposing our art to people who don’t know about it,” said Chavez, 44, who paints retablos and altar screens populated with saints and devotional icons. “It’s a beautiful thing to share with so many people.”

Chimayó takes on a carnival-like atmosphere each year during Holy Week, when throngs descend on the hamlet — some estimates place the number of Holy Week pilgrims at 40,000. The size of the crowd generally peaks on Good Friday and tapers off through

Easter weekend.

Many religious pilgrims walk for miles along roads jammed with cars. Some carry heavy crosses or literally crawl into the 207-year-old sanctuary, a Roman Catholic church where visitors can help themselves to a pinch of “holy dirt,” believed by many to have healing powers.

“I love that people are gathering and praying and speaking to God, whatever they are asking for,” Chavez said.

For many, the pilgrimage is a devotional expression of the Way of the Cross, the last stage of the journey in the life of Jesus, said Abbot Joel Garner of the Norbertine Community of Santa Maria de la Vid Abbey in Albuquerque.

“People have a special intention that they are bringing there in prayer,” he said. “I think people are bringing their lives there in a special way, and the lives of those they love. They go there with intentions in their hearts.”

To serve the more worldly needs of the pilgrims, along the roads and in the village merchants hawk food, drinks, bags of red “holy chile,” hats, canes, weavings, belt buckles and devotional images, both carved and painted.

Vintage car owners show off lowriders emblazoned with the Virgin of Guadalupe and other sacred images.

The Rev. Jim Suntum, pastor at El Santuario de Chimayó, takes a historical view of the chaos that descends on the Santa Cruz River Valley each year, which he calls “disorganized religion.”

With the declining observance of organized religion in America, people seek out places such as Chimayó that offer a freewheeling form of spiritualism, Suntum said.

“Consciously or unconsciously, people have spiritual needs,” he said. “Since they’re not getting it from organized religion, they get it from disorganized religion.”

Chimayó lore holds that in 1810, local merchant and landowner Bernardo Abeyta found a crucifix partly buried at the site on Good Friday. An early member of the Penitente Brotherhood, Abeyta built a small shrine on the hill overlooking the Santa Cruz River for pilgrims who attributed miraculous healing powers to the “holy dirt” found at the site.

But Suntum said Abeyta’s actions were not purely religious.

“He had more than one motive for building the shrine,” Suntum said. “He wanted to use this place for his commercial activity. His devotion and his commercialism dovetailed.”

Abeyta would likely be astonished that the shrine he built not only thrives in the 21st century, but attracts more people each year.

People often complain to Suntum that Chimayó has become too commercialized.

“I tell them, it started that way,” he said. “Commercialism is part of it.”

Today, Chimayó remains an exuberant mix of faith, art and commerce. Almost everyone you meet here makes art in some form.

“You are surrounded by artists here,” said Sharon Candelario, who described Chimayó as an artists’ colony that specializes in devotional art. “For us, it’s all about art and faith.”

Candelario, whose maiden name is Martinez, was born into the family that built the Santo Niño Chapel in 1857, located just up the hill from the Santuario. Some of her ancestors are buried in a small graveyard in front of the chapel.

Today, she and her siblings run a gallery across the street from the chapel where she sells her devotional tinwork.

For Candelario, the annual surge of visitors is as much a part of Chimayó as the “holy dirt” they seek in a small room at the Santuario. As children, Candelario and her brothers sold snow cones to visitors on Good Friday.

“Chimayó is special,” she said. “This is where I feel grounded and rooted, and a sense of peace.”

AT TOP: A rock with a faded image of El Santuario de Chimayó rests in a niche along a main road in the town.

ROBERTO E. ROSALES/JOURNAL Shawna Chavez holds one of the retablos she paints and sells in the small gallery she and her husband own next to their home in Chimayó. Holy Week is the couple’s busiest time of year.

Patricio Chavez holds a wooden carving, or bulto, he makes and sells at his gallery in Chimayó. “We put our blood, sweat and tears in a piece like this,” Chavez said of the work.

ROBERTO E. ROSALES/JOURNAL ABOVE: An angel draped in rosaries atop a hill south of Chimayó beside N.M. 503. Pilgrims en route to the Santuario de Chimayó have made a makeshift shrine here.

LEFT: Merchants sell many kinds of food, crafts and artwork, including “holy chile,” to throngs of visitors to Chimayó, particularly during Holy Week.

ROBERTO E. ROSALES/JOURNAL El Santuario attracts an estimated 300,000 visitors a year, particularly during Holy Week, when throngs fill the streets of the tiny village of Chimayó. The site has been a religious shrine since 1810.

COURTESY OF HOLY FAMILY PARISH ARCHIVES The late Rev. Casimiro Roca-Toscas, in foreground, who pastored El Santuario de Chimayó for more than five decades, greets visitors in 1980.