Siting

Just as there were good reasons for founding villages in certain locations, so there were good reasons for siting churches in particular places. In the latter case, however, the logic of the choice was quite simple: parish churches were established as the centers of their communities; mission churches were built where conditions allowed. Site selection was always a compromise, the missionary trying to balance his hope for an imposing site against the realities of the topography and the pueblo's values.

Once the missionary had secured a foothold in the community, he usually tried to acquire permission to build the church and convento on a physically suitable and prestigious site. A central location was conceptually ideal, but acceptable sites were difficult to locate. For pueblos located along the Rio Grande, flat land in proximity to the community was relatively easy to find. This was less the case, however, in villages located on rising land or in the mountains. Where suitably level terrain was in limited supply, friars were forced to accept sites that

were far less than ideal. The series of churches built at Pecos, for example, occupied a narrow slice of the mesilla remaining after the construction of the two segments of the pueblo itself.^[65] The first church at Pecos was erected well outside the pueblo proper, and all four churches built there had to add fill to the ridge so as to level the floor of the nave. Concepción at Quarai rose on the ruins of a prior pueblo. More spectacular was the case of Acoma, where the inhospitability of the rock necessitated the importation of thousands of baskets of earth to level the site and fill the campo santo held within its stone retaining walls, a process that took several decades to complete.

In the Spanish villages the church's position on the (often fortified) plaza was nearly standard; but most missions evidenced little consistency in their placement. In the pueblos several factors mitigated against a single, idealized siting or orientation that would guarantee prominence to the religious edifice. For one, the church arrived in the pueblo long after the physical structure of the village had been determined, and the Indian dance plaza hardly matched the more regularized architectural statement of its Spanish counterpart. The native space represented or suggested instead a locus, rather than an absolute center, and was rarely constructed as a clearly defined architectural entity. Typically, it was already surrounded, however irregularly, with dwellings and kivas by the time the Franciscans arrived. In truth, the native populations probably had little desire to admit the church, which would become the largest structure in the village, into the center of its community. Thus, most churches remained resolutely on the periphery of the pueblo.

Basically, the church occupied whatever site its builder could find where land was sufficient and where the missionary was allowed to build. Although sufficiently elevated to become a focal point for the community when seen from a distance, San José at Laguna stands on a site well behind the plaza. Zia turns its low, massive back on the pueblo and becomes a quiet neighbor. San Esteban at Acoma dominates the village's architecture; its height and mass are almost antagonistic to the adjacent rows of dwellings. Only at Tesuque, Isleta, and the rebuilt San Jerónimo at Taos pueblo do the churches rest squarely on the plaza; and even in these instances, they lack the same sense of conviction about siting displayed by a church in a Spanish town. Kubler offered four possible reasons the separation of church and pueblo might have been desirable: the pueblo's hostility to friars, the friars' mistrust of the pueblo, the function of churches as forts, and the need for ample land for mission buildings, fields, and corrals.^[66] Of these, only the last seems plausible because the "separation" of these churches from the pueblo rarely exceeded fifty yards and because settlers on occasion took refuge within the pueblo from Apache or Comanche attacks. The relegation of the religious sanctuary to land beyond the pueblo and the chronic problems it might occasion were well illustrated by the situation at Picuris. During the late eighteenth century Comanche raids wreaked havoc on the church, ultimately necessitating its removal and reconstruction within the pueblo walls, with Spanish and Pueblo brought together against a common enemy.^[67]

In theory, churches would have followed an eastwest orientation, with the principal facade facing west. But the realities of frontier construction mitigated against a consistent orientation, and New Mexican churches faced in virtually all directions, thereby confounding attempts to utilize the transverse clerestory to its best advantage. Even in Mexico City by the turn of the nineteenth century, the religious reasons for an east-west orientation had been for the most part lost to the building tradesmen. "I have heard it said," the anonymous author of a treatise roughly translated as Architectural Practice in Mexico City confessed, "that a church should be oriented in such a way that the principal door looks toward the west, to satisfy some rite of the church that I do not understand. Where there are no other buildings to obstruct the site one should orient it as prescribed, but if buildings prohibit this, one builds where he can."^[68] Although written fully two centuries after the founding of the Catholic enterprise in New Mexico, this admission of relativity applied almost universally to religious construction in the northern province.