When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality, and Power in New Mexico,

Gutiérrez, Ramón A. When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality, and Power in New Mexico, 1500-1846. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991.

When Jesus Came, The Corn Mothers Went Away is an intense exploration of the convergence of Spanish, Franciscan and Pueblo Indian cultures in Spain's remote colonial American empire prior to Anglo contact. To form a foundation from which to understand this analysis, Ramon Gutierrez discusses Pueblo Indian life prior to outside contact, Franciscan theology, and the class structure of Spanish communities in the beginning of each of the book's three sections. Then, using the institution of marriage as a window, Gutierrez examines meanings of gift exchange, ownership, trade, sexual rights, labor, kinship, social status, religious beliefs, honor and more as each relates to the interacting cultures. His symbolic analysis and interpretation of the complex cultural meanings of marriage illustrates the ways in which the inhabitants of New Mexico continuously created and recreated their social worlds, the areas in which conflict arose, and how inequalities were maintained between the three cultures. Gutierrez notes that "this book is premised on the assumption that every society is a system of inequality." He continues that "the task is not to explain why inequality exists but to expose the different forms it has taken during a period of rapid social change, specifically the Spanish conquest of the Pueblo Indians beginning in 1539." He draws extensively from historic and archival records, clerical publications, court, baptismal and marriage records, songs, poems, folklore and academic texts on mysticism, marriage, trade, southwestern history, gender, religion and many more. This work is a detailed analysis from the view of the Pueblo Indians of the ways in which the Franciscan ministry first conquered New Mexico's indigenous peoples through force and manipulation of their own spiritual beliefs as well as the challenges that both the friars and the pueblos faced when the Spanish residents and government asserted their supremacy over the region and its peoples. Thus, When Jesus Came, The Corn Mothers Went Away explores the history of rebellion, religious-political conquest, loss and reconquest in New Mexico's cultural landscape between 1500 and 1846. It provides the "historical depth and understanding to the cultural conflicts that would occur in New Mexico in the second half of the nineteenth century--conflicts that are still very much alive in New Mexico to this day." [M. Enloe]

Isaiah 41:10

¹⁰ So do not fear, for I am with you;
   do not be dismayed, for I am your God.
I will strengthen you and help you;
   I will uphold you with my righteous right hand.

El Santuario de Chimayó - New Mexico

I am writing the ethnohistory of El Santuario de Chiamayó. Here are some pictures of it and of Santo Niño de Atocha Chapel next to the Santuario.

Religion in New Spain

Neda Bezerra

Religion in New Spain was a convergence of the institutional Church of Rome, Spanish popular Catholicism, and indigenous religious practices. This paper concerns the different ways in which this amalgam of dogmas, traditions, beliefs, and practices was constructed, using three different studies: Religion in New Spain (2007) edited by historians Susan Schroeder and Stafford Poole; The Penitente Brotherhood: Patriarchy and Hispano Catholicism in New Mexico (2002), written by sociologist Michael Carroll; and When Jesus Came the Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality, and Power in New Mexico, 1500-1846 (1991), written by historian Ramón A. Gutiérrez. The authors and editors of these three books use different approaches to review and analyze cultural, social, and religious traditions in New Spain and present the reader with a rich historiography of the religious arena of an area, which for over three hundred years was occupied by Spaniards, who tried to impose Catholicism the local population.

Religion in New Spain is an anthology of the history of colonial religious culture. The articles in it open a window to the rich and complex society of New Spain and to the several different faces of Catholicism in the region. The works presented by Schroeder and Poole question the “stereotype put forth by some authors who labor to portray the Spanish conquest as Armageddon and the end of indigenous culture” (2007, 2). Instead, Schroeder and Poole contend that the native populations in New Spain were active in shaping colonial religion. The natives selected aspects of Catholicism that they enjoyed and best suited them. In an effort to accommodate to the demands of their conquerors, they sought to integrate those elements of Spanish religious tradition that did not disrupt their own spiritual beliefs. The Indians’ pre-contact religious systems helped them make sense of the world and deal with the uncontrollable forces of nature. They called on a pantheon of deities to order the cosmos on their behalf. Thus, when the Spaniards introduced them to Catholic traditions of divine assistance, such as the cult of the saints, for instance, they were able to understand and accept them.

Even though the Indians embraced some aspects of Christianity, they remained ambivalent in regard to others. Kevin Terraciano, in an article published in Religion in New Spain (2007), writes about the natives’ responses to Catholicism in early colonial Oaxaca, and argues that “accepting a new deity did not entail rejecting all others, nor did the continuation of ancient practices and beliefs signified a rejection of Christianity” (2007, 22). When the Spaniards noticed ambivalence, they would sometimes persecute the natives, who in turn “tried to appease zealous Spaniards by reassuring them that they accepted Christianity” (Terraciano 2007, 23). The Indians would argue that they had given up their idols when they were baptized and at times they would even offer gifts to the Spaniards as a sign that they were good Christians. When pressed to hand in their sacred images, the natives would give their least favorite and tried to keep their most precious ones (Terraciano 2007). The repression imposed by the Spaniards fueled clandestine practices in the early colonial period, when rituals were performed in remote locations and “small, bundled images were worshiped in houses or carried to remote mountains or caves” (Terraciano 2007, 25). Terraciano’s article shows that the natives tried as much as they could to maintain their belief system despite the insurmountable pressure they faced.

The Spanish missionaries used different strategies to attract the natives to Christianity, even allowing ceremonies to be adapted, by letting the natives bring in some of their religious practice into the Catholic rituals. Lisa Sousa, in her article “Tying the Knot: Nahua Nuptials in Colonial Central Mexico”, published in Religion in New Spain (2007), explains how Spaniards sought to change the natives’ practices that they did not consider good and appropriate. They introduced the sacrament of marriage to the natives, but “when grounds for convergence and mutual understanding existed, Nahua customs, beliefs, and institutions survived, and in some cases, flourished” (Sousa 2007, 43). The missionaries allowed the Nahua practices that did not violate Christian principles to be maintained. It was within this context that “hybrid Nahua-Christian marriage rituals developed, which combined European and indigenous traditions” (Sousa 1991, 43). These adaptations of ceremonies, be it of marriage or any other, attracted the natives to church and to the sacraments, but they did not replace their rituals completely. Schroeder and Poole (2007) contend that the natives might be said to be good Christians, but not very good Catholics for they continued to find meaning in their own traditional ceremonies despite the fact that they allowed some aspects of Catholicism to fuse with their beliefs.

Gutiérrez, in his book When Jesus Came the Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality, and Power in New Mexico, 1500-1846, which analyzes the impact of Spanish occupation on the Pueblos Indians, also argues that there was fusion of Catholic and native religious beliefs during the Spanish occupation. He asserts that the Franciscan friars “actively tried to fuse the Indian notion of a scared natural world with the Christian supernatural” (1991, 165). The friars came to accept a syncretic form of Catholicism that incorporated “native and Christian concepts and symbols, regardless of their disparate meanings” because they believed this fusion of beliefs would “satisfy the Indians’ psychological needs” (1991, 165). When the Pueblos, on the other hand, “saw how the friars controlled the sacred, mobilized forces, conjured rain, healed the sick, and provided the community with meat”, they had “little doubt that the missionaries resembled might Inside Chiefs” (1991, 63). It was then that some native chiefs allied themselves with the Franciscans and subordinated their pantheon of gods to the Spaniards.

There are innumerous examples of blending native and Spanish traditions and rituals during colonial time. Gutiérrez (1991) notes, for instance, that the “Franciscans fused the calendric rhythms of Pueblo ceremonialism with Christ’s life cycle” (1991, 84). He explains that Christians start to prepare for the celebration of the birth of Christ on December 16, which coincides with “the four preparatory days the Indians observed before celebrating the winter solstice” (1991, 84). During that time the friars organized a series of autos and dances, which depicted some of the stories about the nativity. For Gutiérrez, the Pueblo Indians most likely did not understand the words they heard, but they were able to understand the story’s plot by what they saw and linked it to their own mythical beliefs, such as the birth of the “Twin War Boys, the sons of Father Sun conceived miraculously when a virgin ate two pine nuts” (1991, 85). The Pueblos celebrated the winter solstice around the same time that the Spaniards celebrated Christmas; thus, the two were easily fused in the Indian mind, according to Gutiérrez (1991). Carroll (2002) supports Gutiérrez’s findings. He says that “Pueblo Indians did participate in the ‘life-cycle’ rituals of the Church and did participate in a number of church festivals throughout the year” and this might not have been entirely the result of coercion; however, they were not “’devout’ in the sense of that term: they had no serious understanding of Catholic doctrine, no strong devotion to Mary or to the saints (and certainly non to Christ)” and they placed no value in some of the Catholic rituals, such as confession and communion (Carroll 2002, 47).

Carroll (2002) reviews the history of the Penitente Brotherhood, a lay confraternity of Catholic men that emerged in New Mexico during the Spanish occupation. Several hypotheses had been put forth to explain the emergence of the Penitentes in New Mexico. Carroll rejects them all. He argues that the Penitentes were not a product of religious traditions, nor did they emerge because of the scarcity of clergy in New Mexico. Scholars have argued that there were so few clergy in northern New Mexico in the late 1700s and early 1800s that the Hispano “laymen took the lead in developing their own forms of Catholic religiosity”, which resulted in the emergence of the Penitentes. Carroll challenges all these findings and contends that “Penitente popularity was in the first instance a response to the crisis of kin-based patriarchal authority facing Hispano communities in the late 1700s” (2002, 119). For Carroll (2002), the emergence of Penitentes reflects a need for the old patriarchal authority that had been eroded by the Bourbon Reforms , which intended to rationalize Catholic practice. Carroll also asserts that the Penitentes became popular because they performed a number of community functions, and he links the performance of these functions to “the changes produced by the Bourbon Reforms in the late 1700s, to the erosion of patriarchal authority occasioned by these reforms and/or to the threat that this posed to the community / cooperative system of agriculture that was in place in northern New Mexico” (2002, 120). Carroll ends his argument by saying that the Penintentes “were the first instance of social response to a socioeconomic crisis that just happened to be dressed in a religious cloak” (2002, 121). According to Carroll, the type of “Catholicism that flourished among the Hispano population of New Mexico during the early nineteenth century” when the Penitentes emerged was different both from the popular Catholicism that developed both in Mexico and Spain and also “from the Catholicism that their own Hispano ancestors had practiced previously in New Mexico itself” (Carroll 2002, 6). In summary, the Penitentes is another hybrid form of Catholic tradition that emerged in the region.

Some scholars have viewed the presence of the Catholic Church in New Spain as a monolithic and unstoppable power. Yet, as we have seen, the Spaniards did not find such an easy terrain to tread as they initially thought. After three hundred years of Spanish presence in the region, Catholic missionaries still had not been able annihilate native religious practices. As late as the eighteenth century, the natives, both in Mexico and in the northern frontiers still practiced some of their religions traditions. They never relinquished their culture completely. Instead, as we have seen, there was an amalgamation of traditions. Yet, one can only say that Catholicism had a very strong impact on the entire region of New Spain. Almost two hundred years after the Spaniards left, the region has the world’s most visited Catholic pilgrimage site outside Rome: The Shrine to the Virgin of Guadalupe. Looking north of the Mexican border, one will find Catholic traditions all throughout the Southeast, such as the devotions to the Crucifix of Our Lord of Esquipulas and to Santo Niño de Atocha, both found in El Santuario de Chimayó, in New Mexico, the most important Catholic pilgrimage site in the United States.

Bibliography
Carroll, Michael P. The Penitente Brotherhood: Patriarchy and Hispano-Catholicism in New México. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002.

Few, Martha. Religion in New Spain. Edited by Susan Schroeder and Stafford Poole. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2007.

Gutiérrez, Ramón A. When Jesus Came the Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality, and Power in New Mexico, 1500-1846. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991.

Schroeder, Susan and Stafford Poole, ed. Religion in New Spain. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2007.

Terraciano, Kevin. Religion in New Spain. Edited by Susan Schroeder and Stafford Poole. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2007.

Amsterdam - November 23rd, 2010

El Santuario de Chimayo

Neda Bezerra.

This study concerns the ethnohistory of El Santuario de Chimayó and the two devotions that came to be identified with it: the Crucifix of Our Lord of Esquipulas and Santo Niño the Atocha. El Santuario de Chimayó is a Catholic shrine, located in Chimayó, on the western side of Sangre de Cristo Mountains, New Mexico, built around 1816. It has become one of the most important Catholic pilgrimage sites in the United States, attracting thousands of pilgrims, from all over the world, every year seeking miracles. They come to pray to Our Lord of Esquipulas, to Santo Niño de Atocha and to visit El Posito, the small adjacent room next to the chapel, which holds a small well on the ground where sacred earth can be found. People have been reporting miraculous healings taken place at Chimayó for almost two hundred years. The earth from El Posito is said to contain great miraculous powers that can cure all types of ailments and people come from everywhere to take a little bit of it in bottles, plastic bags, or handkerchiefs as their last hope for curing their illnesses. Some dissolve it in water and drink it. Some smear it over the part of the body that needs healing. Even though the Catholic Church has not validated any of the miracles attributed to the sacred earth from Chimayó, it acknowledges the accounts of the faithful.


Chimayó is a small town nestled in the foothills of the western slopes of the Sangre de Cristo Range, in Rio Arriba County, 30 miles north of Santa Fe, New Mexico. In ancient times, the Chimayó Valley was inhabited by Indians. Archeological sites show that continuous occupation occurred from 1100 A.D. to 1400 A.D. (Borhegyi 1956). Tewa legends say that an Indian shrine with curative powers existed on the site of present day Santuario de Chimayó. In fact, the Tewa Indians of Pueblos of San Juan, San Ildefonso, and Nambé consider the ground where the village of Chimayó is located to be sacred earth (Gutiérrez 1995). According to Indian legend, in a distant past, when the Twin War Gods slew an enemy giant who roamed the area, fire burst out of the earth in Chimayó, “drying up the hot spring that once existed there and leaving only mud” (Gitiérrez 1995, 72). For the Tewa Indians, the mud found there, which they called nam po’uare (nam, earth; po’uare, blessed), was considered sacred and contained healing powers (Gitiérrez 1995, 72). Given its sacred power, the site became part of the Tewa’s sacral topography, and one of the powerful links with the supernatural world. Chimayó (Tsimajo’onwi in the Tewa language), thus, became a pilgrimage site for the Pueblo Indians who lived in the region (Gutiérrez 1995). The Pueblo Indians believe that once the Franciscan missionaries came and witnessed the power of the earth, they built a church there. According to Gutiérrez, what occurred in Chimayó was actually a process that was repeated all throughout Spanish America. In order to convert the Indians, “Catholic priests frequently ‘baptized the local customs’ by building a church over native religious sites, hoping thereby to fuse architectonically indigenous religious meanings and practices with those of the Christian faith” (Gutiérrez 1995, 75).


Spaniards did not come to the Valley of Chimayó until 1692 and founded a small village named Plaza del Cerro, near to present day Chimayó. According to Borhegyi, in 1813 Don Bernardo Abeyta, a wealthy merchant who lived in the area, sent a petition to Fray Sebastian Alavrez, then priest in Santa Cruz de la Cañada, to build a chapel to house the Crucifix of Our Lord of Esquipulas. His request was forwarded to the Church authorities in Durango and permission was granted to build the sanctuary (Carroll 2002: 117). In 1816 the chapel was completed. There are several legends that involve the location of the Chapel of Our Lord of Esquipulas in Chimayó, but they all tend “to have in common an association between the crucifix and the heaing earth there” (Gutiérrez 1995, 77). One of them says that one day even though Don Bernardo Abeyta was sick, he was out watching the sheep when he saw a miraculous apparition of the Christ of Esquipulas. He knelt and prayed and was immediately cured. He spread the story and many people came to the location in search of healing. In another story, Don Bernardo Abeyta was in the hills of Chimayó practicing his penitential devotions when he saw some light coming out from the ground. He began to dig with his hands and found the miraculous Crucifix of Our Lord Esquipulas, which he took to the Church Santa Cruz in a town nearby. However, the Crucifix disappeared from the church and was found several times in the original place where it had first been found. This was sign that it belonged there and deserved its own chapel (Howarth and Lamadrid 1999). Yet another legend says that in 1800 an unknown traveler carried a very large venerable crucifix and when it came time to cross the river, he fell so seriously ill that he decided to leave it behind in a nearby ravine, hiding under branches, stones, and dirt. He intended to come back to pick up the precious crucifix later, but died without being able to do so. Around that same time, during Holy Week, while the Hermandad de Nuestro Padre Jesús Nazareno celebrated the Passion of Jesus Christ, they approached the foothills and saw a strange light. They approached the place where the light was and found the crucifix where the traveler had left it. They took it to the Church of Santa Cruz. Don Bernardo Abeyta, who was a member of the Hemandad, had a vision that the crucifix had returned to the place where it was found. Almost sleepwalking he went to the place where the crucifix had been found and was stunned to see that indeed the crucifix had returned to its original place. He then convinced the people in the region of the need to build a chapel for the crucifix. Some have suggested that Don Bernardo Abeyta had traveled along the royal road that connected New Mexico to Mexico City and most certainly came across the pilgrims that flocked to the Mexican shrines and how those places had been transformed into commercial centers. Gutiérrez argues that “one suspects that Don Bernardo hoped that by creating a shrine atop Tsimajo’onwi’s sacred hole, Chimayo would become a prosperous trading spot” (1995, 75). Also, it is known that “during the seventeenth century, shrines devoted to the Christ of Esquipulas began to proliferate throughout southern Mexico” (Gutiérrez 1995, 75). One hundred years later there were shrines honoring the Christ of Esquipulas not only in Mexico, but also in Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica. Gutiérrez believes that “the Santuario de Chimayo undoubtedly developed as an extension of this pattern” (Gutiérrez 1995, 76).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Aragón, Ray John. The Penitentes of New Mexico: Hermanos de la Luz/Brothers of the Light. Santa Fe: Sunstone Press, 2006.

Carroll, Michael P. The Penitente Brotherhood: Patriarchy and Hispano-Catholicism in New México. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002.

Few, Martha. Religion in New Spain. Edited by Susan Schroeder and Stafford Poole. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2007.

Gyuérrez, Ramón A. Feasts and Celebration in North American Ethnic Communities. Edit by Ramón A. Gutiérez and Geneviéve Fabre. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995.

Howarth, Sam and Enrique R. Lamadrid. Pilgrimage to Chimayó: Contemporary Portrait of a Living Tradition. Santa Fe: Museum of New Mexico Press, 1999.

Solórzano, Juan Paz. Historia del Señor Crucificado de Esquipulas: De Su Santuario; Romerías; Antigua Província Eclesiástica de Chiquimula de la Sierra y Actual Vicaría Foránea. Guatemala: Imprensa Arenales Hijos: Esquipulas, 1914.

Usner, Don J. Sabino’s Map: Life in Chimayó’s Old Plaza. Santa Fe: Museum of New Mexico Press, 1995.

Weber, David J. The Spanish Frontier in North America. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992.

THE CRUCIFIX OUR LORD OF ESQUIPULAS

Neda Bezerra

The story of the Crucifix or Our Lord of Esquipulas goes back to the early days of the Spanish Conquest in the Americas. During that time, the Spaniards occupied the southeastern region of what is today Guatemala, inhabited by the Maya Indians. The story goes that the Indians had a very wise Chief named Esquipulas, who agreed not to offer any resistance to the Spaniards, who, in turn, established a town and named it Santiago de Esquipulas, in honor of the peaceful chief. Soon the town became a center of trade and religious activities (Borhegyi 1956). According to historical documents, in 1595 the Spaniards commissioned the Portuguese sculptor and painter Quirio Cataño to carve a five-foot image of Christ on the cross. The Maya Indians had already seen enough of the Spanish cruelty and were suspicious of a white Christ. Knowing this, Cataño carved the crucifix out of balsam and orange wood, painted the cross green and decorated it with gold leaf, which made it easier for the Indians to accept it since the color of the wood resembled their skin color, especially after years of being in the altar with burning candles and incense nearby, turning the Christ black (Aragón 2006; Borhegyi 1956). The carved crucifix was then brought to the town of Santiago de Esquipulas and placed in a small chapel built on an indigenous sacred site, where health-giving springs existed. Not long after it came to the chapel, it became famous for its miraculous powers, especially related to healing.


As reported by priest Juan Paz Solórzano (1914), soon after the crucifix was placed in the chapel, people started to give credit to miracles. Ten miracles occurred in the 1600s and seven in the 1700s. According to a legend, the archbishop of Guatemala, Pedro Pardo de Figueroa, had a contagious disease and was cured during his visit to the chapel in 1737. In gratitude, he ordered the construction of a Sanctuary, which was finally completed in 1758 and the Crucifix of Our Lord of Esquipulas was moved from its original location in the small chapel to the new Sanctuary. According to Father Solórzano (1914), records show that from 1800 to the 1870s, only four miracles were recorded. From 1880 to 1911 twenty-eight miracles were attributed to the black Christ of Esquipulas, encouraging Father Solórzano and other priests to petition the archbishop to consecrate and declare Our Christ of Esquipulas to be the Patron saint of the Province of Guatemala. At Sanctuary of Esquipulas, in Guatemala, clay tablets, known as benditos or tierra del Santo, made of white kaolin obtained in the nearby mountains, are sold to the pilgrims. The clay is pressed into small rectangular cakes two inches long, one inch wide, and a quarter inch thick, which are stamped with embossed pictures of the Crucifix of Our Lord of Esquipulas, the Virgin Mary, or other Catholic saints, and then blessed by the priests. It is customary for the faithful to either eat it or dissolve it into water for drinking to cure different ailments, such as fevers, sores, menstruation and childbirth. Pilgrims usually carry several of these blessed clay cakes to give to relatives or friends (Borhegyi 1956; Few 2007). Eating clay and using it in cooking is a widely spread custom found in many parts of the world, including among the Maya Indians and the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico (Borhegyi 1956).


Eating and healing are usually linked to shrines where miraculous healing phenomena develop. The earth at the shrine of Esquipulas, in Guatemala, became known as the “medicine of the poor” and “the healing potion of all the destitute” (Few 2007, 117). According to Few, “that context for believing in miracles in colonial Guatemala and the rest of New Spain included the church’s ongoing campaigns of religious conversion of native peoples” (Few 2007, 222). Thus, these miracles, “set within a Catholic framework, provide evidence of how colonial institution such as the church formally mediated supernatural signs and sought to put its own ideological spin on miraculous healing” (Few 2007, 222). The custom of eating earth is also found in the small village of Chimayó, located in the state of New Mexico, in Southwest region of the United States. At El Santuario de Chimayó thousands of people partake of the blessed earth found in a pit, located in a room to the left of the main altar (Borhegyi 1956). The earth found at the shrine in Chimayó is supposed to contain great healing powers. The pilgrims come in thousands, just as in Guatemala, seeking healing. They also carry the earth home in bottles, plastic bags and handkerchiefs. Just like the faithful of Guatemala, the earth from Chimayó is dissolved in water and drunk or smeared over the ailing part of the body (Borhegyi 1956). Interestingly enough, the shrine of Chimayó is also dedicated to Our Lord of Esquipulas and the six-foot crucifix behind the altar is painted dark green and embellished with painted gold leaves, a rustic replica of the one from Guatemala, except that the Christ at the Chimayó shrine has not been blackened.


BIBLIOGRAPHY
Aragón, Ray John. The Penitentes of New Mexico: Hermanos de la Luz/Brothers of the Light. Santa Fe: Sunstone Press, 2006.

Carroll, Michael P. The Penitente Brotherhood: Patriarchy and Hispano-Catholicism in New México. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002.

Few, Martha. Religion in New Spain. Edited by Susan Schroeder and Stafford Poole. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2007.

Gyuérrez, Ramón A. Feasts and Celebration in North American Ethnic Communities. Edit by Ramón A. Gutiérez and Geneviéve Fabre. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995.

Howarth, Sam and Enrique R. Lamadrid. Pilgrimage to Chimayó: Contemporary Portrait of a Living Tradition. Santa Fe: Museum of New Mexico Press, 1999.

Solórzano, Juan Paz. Historia del Señor Crucificado de Esquipulas: De Su Santuario; Romerías; Antigua Província Eclesiástica de Chiquimula de la Sierra y Actual Vicaría Foránea. Guatemala: Imprensa Arenales Hijos: Esquipulas, 1914.

Usner, Don J. Sabino’s Map: Life in Chimayó’s Old Plaza. Santa Fe: Museum of New Mexico Press, 1995.

Weber, David J. The Spanish Frontier in North America. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992.