Laguna Pueblo
New Mexico
Laguna Pueblo, forty-five miles west of Albuquerque along Interstate Forty, is one of the youngest of the New Mexico pueblos, formally established in sixteen ninety-nine when several groups, including Keresan-speaking peoples displaced by the Pueblo Revolt of sixteen eighty, consolidated near a small lake and built the mission of San Jose de la Laguna. The white-walled church, still standing on a mesa above the village, contains Baroque murals and decorations made by Pueblo artists blending Spanish colonial and Indigenous traditions. The Laguna people today number around eight thousand and govern six villages. In the twentieth century, the Jackpile uranium mine, one of the largest open-pit uranium mines in the world, operated on Laguna land from nineteen fifty-two until nineteen eighty-two, leaving a remediation challenge the tribe is still navigating.
