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).
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