TCHS LECTURE FOR AUGUST 3, 2024 - 2:00 PM
Kit Carson Electric Co-op

"PRESBYTERIAM MISSIONS
OF NORTHERN NEW MEXICO"
by Virginia Dodier

The topic is “‘Our Mexicans’: Nuevomexicano Presbyterian Missionaries in Northern New Mexico, Civil War to Statehood.” The speaker is Virginia Dodier, co-chair (with Paul Figueroa) of the TCHS Archives and Library Committee.

The talk will focus on the lives of Hispano clergy and evangelists including José Yñéz Perea, Gabino Rendón, Vicente Ferrer Romero and John Whitlock, who all founded Presbyterian churches in Northern New Mexico. Their work, as well as that of teachers and evangelists, and the construction of churches, schools and hospitals, was funded by Presbyterian congregations across the United States through the Board of Home Missions. Though the Hispanic people of New Mexico were fellow Americans, the mission organizers back East thought of them as “Our Mexicans.”

The legacy of the missions of 150 years ago is evident in the many Presbyterian churches in towns and villages throughout Northern New Mexico. As Taoseña Carmen Lieurance says, the Presbyterian missionaries left a church structure “like the bones of a strong skeleton.”

Ms. Dodier is a museum professional, archivist, librarian and published author. She holds degrees in fine art, art history, and library and archives science. She retired to Taos, where several of her ancestors were born, in 2018. One of the subjects of her talk, the Rev. John M. Whitlock, was the grandfather of her grandfather, John Whitlock Hernandez.

The Taos County Historical Society is a 501(C)(3) non-profit organization founded in 1952 and dedicated to the recording and preserving of the irreplaceable in Taos County.
Membership is open to anyone upon payment of dues.
For additional information on the programs, activities and history of Taos visit the Society's website at www.taoscountyhistoricalsociety.org

Mil Gracias, A THOUSAND THANKS, does not begin to cover the many, many individuals to whom we owe a debt of gratitude. This debt is not only the living but also to those men and women who long ago began to preserve the journals and documents we now depend upon for knowledge of the past: the chroniclers who accompanied the explorers and settlers and who, dusty, tired and hungry, sat in the light of a candle to record in their journals the events of the day and the Franciscan clerics who made detailed reports of their canonical visits to the mission churches of Nuevo México.

Corina A. Santistevan
Acknowledgements in "Taos: A Topical History"