In New Mexico, parishioners keep their church immortal

Tommy Tafoya and his sons were taking a break from building a $400,000 custom adobe home to spend a few days trowelling a thick mixture of mud and straw onto the walls of a 195-year-old Catholic church, and he looked a little weary.

But all things considered, “this is easy,” Tafoya said, pushing back his mud-spattered straw hat to gaze up at the massive rounded buttresses of the San Francisco de Asis Church. “The ones that built it are the ones that had it hard.”

As dozens of volunteers busied themselves around the site, Tafoya said the enjarre — the annual ritual of applying fresh mud to the walls of the adobe church — united the parishioners.

“Getting the whole community together is the best part,” he said.

It was Day Three of the two-week project. Tafoya and sons had already plastered the twin 40-foot bell towers topped with white crosses, and a crane had lifted a crew on a steel platform to reach the higher walls around back.

Nearby, the Rev. Francis Malley inspected the work. The walls need mudding because a season’s worth of rain and snow inevitably erodes their outer surface, he said. The project is organized by mayordomos, church elders responsible for rounding up volunteers from among the 1,200 registered families in the parish.

“I couldn’t survive without them,” said Malley, a native of Scotland who has served at San Francisco de Asis for 5 ½ years.

The mud is mixed onsite. Trucks haul in fine-textured dirt from a nearby area called Tierra Blanca (“white earth”), so named because of its pale cafe-au-lait hue. Workers shovel the dirt through screens to sift out pebbles and bits of vegetation, then mix it with straw and water.

The mud is applied in a half-inch-thick coat and allowed to dry. Later, a thin, straw-free coat of mud called alizo is applied as a sealer and polished smooth with sheepskin.

The enjarre is a living link to a time when adobe buildings all over northern New Mexico were coated in mud, said Larry Torres, an associate professor of languages and culture at the University of New Mexico-Taos.

Most of those buildings today are clad in low-maintenance stucco, but if moisture gets trapped behind the stucco, the earthen walls can’t breathe and will start to crumble, he said. That happened to the San Francisco de Asis Church after concrete stucco was applied in the 1960s. The parishioners stripped off the concrete and reverted to the old ways.

“They kept the integrity of the building as their ancestors themselves had designed it, even if it meant they had to maintain it year after year,” Torres said.

Scholars think the church was completed in 1815, after some 40 years of labor.

The hand-sculpted walls are 10 feet thick in places, and the buttresses provide structural support. When Ansel Adams and Georgia O’Keeffe arrived near Taos in the 1920s, they immortalized the church in photographs and paintings, accounting in large part for the thousands of tourists who visit each year.

But the church is more than a museum. Mass is held every day at 7 a.m., and over the centuries the church has seen countless baptisms and funerals. It recently hosted the memorial service for actor Dennis Hopper, who lived in the village in the 1970s and 1980s.

Gabe Romero, the mayordomo supervising the enjarre, was baptized here 45 years ago. He first joined the mudding crew when he was about 10.

This year, hundreds of parishioners and some out-of-state volunteers signed up to help. “I really feel it’s God’s way of bringing his church community together on a yearly basis,” Romero said. “It brings in people of all faiths — it’s not just Catholics that are here.”

The building is like a living thing, Romero says, subtly changing shape as the elements wear away at its skin and new layers of mud plump up its curves. In the evening, after everyone has gone home, he often walks around the building and takes a moment for reflection.

“It’s like you can almost hear the voices of people have passed on inside the church,” he said. “You can hear the prayer and the shouting of kids. It sounds crazy, but I can hear it.”

Headerle writes for The Times.