Summary
The historic Barrio de Analco is the focus of this year's Mother's Day tour sponsored by the Historic Santa Fe Foundation. The barrio, named from a Nahuatl word meaning "other side of the river," is one of the city's oldest residential areas, boasting San Miguel Chapel -- commonly believed to be the United States' oldest active church -- and a number of historic adobe houses. In Spanish times, the barrio was home to Indians who worked for the Spanish colonists, but its roots as a place of human habitation and worship go back much farther.
As distant as 1200 AD, the site of San Miguel Church was part of an Indian pueblo, according to research done by Brother Lester Lewis of Christian Brothers. (Lewis is with the Christian Brothers firm St. Michael's Corporation, which owns the chapel.) Also, an archaeological study conducted in 1955 by Stanley Stubbs, Bruce Ellis, and E. Boyd uncovered an Indian kiva under the chapel floor.See the full content of this document
Extract
San Miguel a Jewel of the Old Barrio
Local legend has it that the first Christian church on the site, the Hermita de San Miguel, was built by Tlaxcalan Indians. Elizabeth Oster, an archaeologist with the New Mexico Historic Preservation Division, wrote in a recent paper that the Tlaxcaltecans (a spelling she says more closely ...
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