Over Behind Mabel's on Indian Land: Utopia and Thirdspace in Taos

Abstract

In 1979, the Kit Carson Memorial Foundation Museum in Taos announced plans to open to visitors the chapel located inside an old morada (Penitente chapter house) it had purchased two years before from the two remaining Hermanos Penitentes who owned the building. After months of trying unsuccessfully to meet with the museum director, the Brotherhood, or La Fraternidad Piadosa de Nuestro Padre Jesus Nazareno, including Penitentes from other moradas in the Taos area and throughout the state of New Mexico, staged a dramatic public protest over what they considered an imminent sacrilege. According to the Taos News, more than one hundred Hermanos marched in procession from Nuestra Senora de Guadalupe Church, near the plaza, through the heart of town, eastward down the hill toward Canon, and up the road to Las Cruces (the crosses north of the highway), a distance of at least a mile. They carried banners, chanted alabados (hymns of mourning), and were accompanied by four parish priests, one of whom allegedly pronounced a curse at the doorway. Nearly three hundred parishioners joined them (Daigh 1979). This stunning event quashed the museum's plans to open the morada for public display. The museum board and the Brotherhood reached an agreement whereby they would reopen the matter for negotiation in thirty years. For the next three decades the building was used only to store archives, with access restricted to staff and authorized researchers. Then in October 2008, a resolution was achieved whereby the Taos Historic Museums, Inc., successor to the Kit Carson Memorial Foundation as owner of the morada and two