Barrio de Analco, Santa Fe

The word Analco comes from Nahuatl, the language of the Tlaxcalan settlers, and means the other side of the river. That is exactly what this neighborhood was in the early sixteen hundreds: the working-class district across the Santa Fe River from the Spanish governor's palace, where Tlaxcalan Indian workers, servants, and converted indigenous people lived and built their own chapel. Spanish colonists settled here around sixteen twenty.

The neighborhood was largely destroyed in the Pueblo Revolt of sixteen eighty and rebuilt after the Spanish reconquest in sixteen ninety-two. Two of the surviving buildings are among the oldest colonial structures in the United States: the San Miguel Mission, dating to seventeen ten, and the so-called Oldest House, built partly on an earlier pueblo foundation. The seven adobe buildings of the district now form a National Historic Landmark.