La Hacienda de los Martínez reflects a By-Gone Era

By Larry Torres, Associate Professor, UNM-Taos

Resting alongside the Río Pueblo as it wends its way south is la Hacienda de los Martínez. This venerable old building is among the last of the great household ranches that used to reflect a kind of feudal-style system of living in the Southwest. It encloses two courtyards that used to serve as living quarters for the family of Don Severino Martínez and their household servants as well as enclosing a chapel, a forge, a granary, a dispensary and a colonial kitchen.

The Hacienda is the annual scene of re-enactment of The Old Taos Trade Fairs that were common to this area after the Spanish-Comanche Alliance settled by Governor Juan Bautista de Anza in the late 1700s. During this time, Mountain Men ply their wares in their camp outside the gates and explain how to hunt, dress hides, make flint arrow heads, load guns and hurl tomahawks. Old-style caravans are met at the two doors of the Hacienda where a detailed explanation of life in the 1800s is given before an audience of eager visitors.

They learn that the larger of the two doors into the Hacienda was used to bring together entire herds of animals on the hoof in case of hostile attacks and unwelcome visitors. The smaller door, called “the eye of the needle,” was the non-taxable door used by members of the household and honored guests.

But a building is merely a collection of adobes if one does not know the history of the people who lived, worked and died there. Severino and María del Carmel Martínez used to live in Abiquiú, New Mexico trying to raise and educate the eldest of their children. On October 3, 1803 Severino acquired 60 varas (rods) of land from Antonio Archuleta. He decided to move his whole household to Taos in 1804. His children Antonio José, María Estefana, Juana María all came with him. José María, José Santiago and Juan Pascual Bailón were born in the Hacienda.

When he came of age, the eldest of the children, Antonio José contracted marriage with María de la Luz of Abiquiú on May 20, 1812. Fourteen months later she died in childbirth and the distraught Antonio went off to Durango, Mexico to study for the priesthood under the guidance of Bishop Don Juan Zubiría. He became well-versed in Canon Law, rubrics and Latin. He thought that he was being groomed for the day when the New Mexico Territory might need its own bishop.

The year 1851 came and with its dawning, the announcement that a certain Jean Baptiste Lamy had been the newly-appointed bishop to Santa Fe by the Apostolic See in Baltimore, Maryland. He brought European and American ideas as to how the Catholic Church was to be run with little regard to New Mexico customs and traditions. Padre Martínez’ ideas and opposition to the bishop’s tithing plans as well as his support for the Penitente Brotherhood soon had him excommunicated by Bishop Lamy himself. It created a wound between the Institutional Church and the Folk or Tribal Church that was to remain unhealed for a hundred years until the Penitentes were brought back into the fold in the mid-1960s. It became the subject of Willa Cather’s classic novel, “Death comes for the Archbishop.”
 
A genuine sense of the past engulfs visitors to the Hacienda as they traipse from room to room, sample local territorial food and walk in the same dusty path as their not-too-distant ancestors. It is a welcome visit to another era.

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