San Estevan (1629-42). Acoma, New Mexico

The acropolis of Acoma, verily a city on a hill, is the most dramatically situated pueblo in the country. Surveying a terrain of petrified desolation, its height and steep escarpments have offered protection, hence encouraged settlement, for perhaps two millennia, making it probably the oldest continuously inhabited town in the United States (a distinction that the now crumbling and semiabandoned Oraibi pueblo disputes). (Many dwellings have been partially abandoned as inhabitants have moved to farms on the plain and return mainly for summer or for festivals.) Today, it is readily accessible to motorists via good gravel roads, including one to the top, and it welcomes visitors graciously. (However, be certain to get permission—for a fee—to take photographs or videos or to sketch)

Acoma’s soilless sandstone mesa, roughly 70 acres/28 hectares in extent, rises some 357 feet/109 meters above the plains and 7,000 feet/2,134 meters above sea level; it is appropriately called “The Sky City.” The village’s natural defenses are strengthened on the north side by a near-solid lineup of contiguous houses of one to three stories in height that stretch approximately 770 feet/235 meters near the edge of the bluff. These are (or were originally) windowless on the side facing out. Two other rows of stone and adobe cellular dwellings, in roughly parallel lines but more casually dispersed, made up the rest of the urban pattern until 1629.

Then the Spanish, who had taken over the village in 1540, built on its south edge the first church, San Estevan, setting up an antipodal contrast of buildings for conqueror and conquered on opposite sides of an invisible line. The Spaniards did not want their building to impinge upon the village. There is, however, a lack of spatial organization, or even proper plazas for ritual dancing, in the basic layout of Acoma. In addition to the three lanes of houses there are seven rectangular kivas for the men. All material for building, from adobe and stone to the great beams for the church, had to be lugged to the top via precipitous paths, as the mesa itself offers only bare rock, defense, and views to its inhabitants.

As the Native Americans had few tools to dress stone, and lacked the skill (and the wood for formwork) to construct arches and vaults, the churches of the region were thick-walled, narrow, flat-roofed buildings with few side windows (and these, as at Acoma, changed occasionally), and sometimes a high transverse transept window illuminating the sanctuary. The Native Americans’ building procedures were simple: adobe for walls, and trunks, branches, and packed earth for roofs. Arches and domes were never used in early New Mexico or by Native Americans anywhere except with bent reeds. (Compare the much later vaulted churches in Texas and California.)

San Estevan typifies these building characteristics, and, with its front “yard,” its raised cemetery, and its attached convento for resident Franciscan friars, it attains a rough grandeur on the outside and offers a regional treat within. Its nave is long (126 feet/38 meters) and narrow (31 feet/9.4 meters) and without transept, but with a pronounced taper at the chancel, culminating in a painted reredos. As the vigas, here undressed trunks some 37 feet/11 meters long, had to be hauled from forests 20-30 miles/32-48 kilometers away, a restricted nave width was inevitable.

These beams were placed atop the stone and adobe walls—how such weights were lifted is not precisely known—and given added bearing by outsized corbels, often fancifully painted. The wooden beams used for the altar were also brought from faraway forests, and for religious reasons were not to touch the ground—“a sacrilege” (Mary Katrine Sedgwick, Acoma: The Sky City, Harvard University Press, 1927). The walls themselves are of great thickness (up to 7.8 feet/2.4 meters), tapering at the top. The building’s plan was inevitable; San Estevan had the same ancestry and reflected the same rationale as village churches in Mexico, whose tradition was carried by the padres up the Rio Grande to find expression in New Mexican examples. (New Mexico was so called in the sixteenth century; after Florida it bears the oldest state name.)

San Estevan underwent repairs and small changes through the generations (two windows in the apse were at one time put in and then subsequently walled up), but for much of the last hundred years it has needed more attention than it has received. Undoubtedly parts of the first church (1629) are incorporated in the one we see today, for beams and stone brought to place with such travail were not likely to be thrown away. The Pueblo Revolt of 1680-92, during which many churches and Spanish buildings were ransacked and incinerated, seemingly left it largely in peace. In 1924 the Committee for the Preservation and Restoration of New Mexican Mission Churches undertook major repairs, including a hidden concrete roof.

Restoration has been very active of late. One of the great chapters of Native American life and Spanish religious influence, Acoma is, of course, a National Historic Landmark. (George Kubler in his admirable book The Religious Architecture of New Mexico, 1940, reprinted by Rio Grande Press in 1962, offers expert background on all the Hispanic churches in the state. Also recommended is The Missions of New Mexico, 1776, Francesco Atanasio Dominguez, translated by Adams and Chavez, University of New Mexico Press, 1956.)