Padre Martínez Saw New Mexico Through Many Changes
By Rob Martínez
One of the most fascinating, if not the most fascinating, historical figures in New Mexico’s past is Padre Martínez of Taos.
In fact, Martínez may be the most significant and pivotal person in our state’s history. He lived through three major national periods in New Mexico — Spanish, Mexican and American. They were tumultuous times indeed. Yet, no one shaped and affected the state quite the way he did.
Born Antonio José Martín in 1793 in Abiquiú to Antonio Severino Martín and María Carmen Santistevan, there was nothing in his birth that would have set him apart from his Nuevo Mexicano contemporaries. Of mixed Spanish and Native American background like New Mexican Hispanos of the times, he grew up on a rough and tough frontier, learning the ways of his father and mother. A younger sister, Estefania, was also born in Abiquiú in 1797.
By the early 1800s, Antonio Severino moved his young family to Taos, where he became a powerful landowner and influential politico. He, his wife and seven children were typical of a frontier New Mexican family. Yet, there was nothing typical about the eldest son, though it was not evident at first.
Antonio José married María de la Luz Martín in 1812 and had one child with her in 1813. Tragically, as was common in those days, Antonio’s young bride died. This changed the course of his life in ways he could never imagine.
Though we can’t be sure how it transpired, there likely were conversations between Antonio José and his father and mother that resulted in the decision to send the young man to Durango, Mexico, to study for the priesthood in the Catholic Church. Durango had been the place where New Mexico had been governed as a Roman Catholic entity since the early 1600s.
This was no small thing. Antonio José, if he completed his study and was ordained, would be the first native Nuevo Mexicano priest since Santiago Roybal in the early 1700s. This fact may have been lost on the young man from Taos. We can only guess how he felt upon arriving in a major colonial city like Durango, with stone churches, ornate government buildings and fountains in the plazas that dotted the community.
We can surmise how Antonio José was perceived by his Jesuit professors and fellow seminarians.
No doubt, he was seen as coming from the sticks, from an outlying province where country Spanish was spoken, and country people lived. Compared to the more urbane and cultivated students, Antonio must have seemed downright exotic, if not rough around the edges.
A seminary is a place where a man receives formation to be ordained to the order of Catholic priesthood. Antonio José’s time at Durango was affected by a great change: Mexican nationalism was certainly spreading throughout the land, as well as Enlightenment ideas about the church and the state. As a seminarian, he would have studied theology, Latin, rhetoric, philosophy and canon law.
He left New Mexico a subject of the Spanish monarchy and all that came with such a designation. When he returned, he was a citizen of Mexico, and burned with a nationalism he would take to the high Sangre de Cristo Mountains of his birth.
Padre Martínez got right to work. He was a diligent priest, administering the Catholic sacraments to all his people. But he knew spiritual health was only part of his mission. The mind also was a crucial aspect of what it means to be a complete human.
Education was paramount to the young priest.
Mexico, a nation in its infancy, made public education a priority, even in far-flung regions such as New Mexico. Yet, there was the ideal and the real. Plans for public schools in small towns were talked about, but lack of funding and qualified teachers made the reality beyond reach. Still, Martínez used a printing press to publish a local newspaper in Spanish, plus cuadernos (workbooks) and other materials to promote literacy in a region that lacked formal education for centuries.
Padre Martínez’s first years as a priest in his beloved New Mexico were a time of change for everyone, and there would be more challenges for the man, the priest in the decades that followed, including personal issues, and a confrontation with a bishop. All these many years later, his story remains riveting.
This article first appeared in the Santa Fe New Mexican on February 4, 2022. Published with permission.