Christian or Family Symbols? The Drawings on the Ceiling of Las Trampas Chapel, New Mexico

The wooden ceiling of the small Chapel of San José de Gracia de las Trampas, built between 1760 and 1764 in the Santo Tomás Apóstol del Rio de las Trampas Land Grant community, in northern New Mexico, is covered with a series of hand-painted designs that are reminiscent of the Testerian catechisms used by Franciscan missionaries to convert native peoples in sixteenth century New Spain. This type of document used images inspired in the system of indigenous picture writing to depict Christian concepts and passages of the Bible in order to teach Indian converts the Catholic faith. Some authors affirm the drawings in the ceiling of Las Trampas church are “family symbols of the twelve founding families” of the village, who arrived as settlers of a land grant issued in 1751 by the governor of New Mexico to serve as a buffer community against Comanche, Ute, and Apache raids in the region, but they provide no evidence. This paper will present the results of a field survey aimed at explaining the meaning and significance of the Trampas drawings, based on interviews with members of the Trampas community whom I met in different field-work periods since 2004. It will examine the possibility that these drawings can be approached using the Testeriano catechisms as a model for interpretation.