Chimayo: The Pilgrimage That Did Not Decline

On Good Friday each year, approximately thirty thousand people walk to Chimayo. They walk from Santa Fe, from Albuquerque, from Espanola. Some carry wooden crosses. Some have been walking since midnight. The pilgrimage to El Santuario de Chimayo is among the largest in North America, and it is not declining.

The church at Chimayo was completed in eighteen sixteen. It was built around a smaller adobe structure that the local community had maintained for years, which in turn sat on a site that held significance in Tewa Pueblo tradition before the Spanish arrived. The church is dedicated to Our Lord of Esquipulas, a dark-skinned Christ venerated in Guatemala who became associated with healing soil in a tradition that the Chimayo site parallels.

The holy dirt, el pocito, is in a small room off the nave. A hole in the floor, perhaps a foot across, is surrounded by cast-off crutches, photographs, and the accumulated offerings of people who came seeking healing and returned to say that they found it. The dirt is replaced regularly; pilgrims take small amounts of it. The soil's significance predates the church, drawing on a Tewa tradition of earth healing at this location that Spanish Catholic practice incorporated rather than displaced.

The pilgrimage grew substantially after World War Two, partly as a form of prayer for soldiers. After the Gulf War, after Iraq, after Afghanistan: each military engagement brought more families to Chimayo. The crosses carried here have had names written on them for a hundred years.

What has persisted through Spanish colonialism, Mexican independence, American occupation, two world wars, the decline of rural Northern New Mexico's population, and the arrival of interstate highways is not institutional Catholicism but something older and more particular: a community's conviction about a specific place in the earth.