Santa Ana Pueblo, Tamaya
Near Albuquerque, New Mexico
The people of Santa Ana call themselves the Tamayame, and their oral history traces the founding of their village on the south bank of the Río Jemez to ancestors who migrated south from the Mesa Verde region in the twelve hundreds. Spanish contact came in fifteen ninety-eight when Oñate's colonizing expedition arrived and the pueblo accepted a Catholic patron saint. The name Santa Ana dates from that encounter.
When the Pueblo Revolt of sixteen eighty expelled the Spanish from New Mexico, the Tamayame fled to Black Mesa and the Jemez Mountains for safety. After the Spanish reconquest, they established Tamaya at its present location near the Río Grande, where it has stood for more than three hundred years. Today the pueblo's roughly seventy-three thousand acres sit between the river and the sacred Black Mesa, and the Tamayame speak the eastern dialect of Keresan, one of the Southwest's most linguistically distinct language families.
