The KiMo Theatre and Pueblo Deco

Oreste Bachechi came from Italy. He arrived in Albuquerque, built a trading business, and by the nineteen twenties had become prosperous enough to build a movie theater on Central Avenue. His wife, Maria Franceschi Bachechi, had an idea about what kind of theater it should be. She wanted it to honor the Native American peoples of New Mexico who had, in her view, welcomed the Bachechi family as their own. She wanted the building itself to be a form of tribute.

They hired architect Carl Boller, who took the assignment seriously. Boller traveled through Navajo Nation territory and visited the Rio Grande pueblos, documenting visual forms, pottery patterns, blanket designs, and architectural elements. He then synthesized what he had seen with the vertical lines and geometric ornamentation of Art Deco, producing a style that writers would later call Pueblo Deco. The KiMo Theatre, which opened on September nineteenth, nineteen twenty-seven, was the most ambitious expression of this style, and it remains the only theater in the United States designed in explicit reference to the Indigenous peoples of the Southwest.

For the theater's name, the Bachechi family held a contest. Pablo Abeita, the former governor of Isleta Pueblo, submitted the winning entry: Kimo, a Tiwa word meaning mountain lion, sometimes translated as king of the beasts. The name was accepted.

The KiMo survived an early nineteen-sixties fire that nearly destroyed its stage, years of neglect, and a serious demolition threat in the nineteen seventies. Albuquerque voters approved a city purchase and restoration plan in nineteen seventy-seven. It now operates as a performing arts venue managed by the city. The neon sign on Central Avenue still glows. The lobby's decorations, which include longhorn skulls and Pueblo iconography, still occupy the building that a woman who wanted to say thank you convinced her husband to build.