Patricia Trujillo Oviedo
As Patricia Trujillo Oviedo gazes out her window from a hilltop in Centinela, one of Chimayó’s several placitas, she marvels at the 360-degree view she has known since she was a child, and declares, “I’m like a sentinel here, la centinela, watching over the valley, like my antepasados.”
Sweeping her hand across the view, she continues, “When people come here, they say, ‘Look at this! We feel something different here.’ And I tell them, ‘You think you’re in the middle of nowhere, but really, you’re in the center of everywhere.’”
Pat has roamed the hills of Centinela since she was a child, mostly on horseback, and her lifelong affection for the land extends to her close community of neighbors and relatives throughout Chimayó.
“Growing up, my greatest joy was listening to my Grandma Francesquita tell cuentos about Pedro de Urdemalas,” she recalls. “She would tell them in 16th-century Spanish, and at first, I didn’t even understand 20th-century Spanish! But I listened and learned and would say, ‘Otra vez! Otra vez! — Tell it again!’ And I loved it. And then when she told stories about Chimayó in the old days, I could imagine her in the Plaza del Cerro where she was raised, right there in that house where the museo is now.”
Pat also credits another powerful woman as an inspiration—her Aunt Mercedes, whom Pat often stayed with in her house on the next hill. “I would help her feed the pigs and get water from the ditch. She didn’t have plumbing until the ‘70s. And she had a horse that she would put the harness on to go plow or to cut alfalfa— and then put me on it to ride!
“I loved horses from the get-go, and Aunt Mercedes was the one who taught me about them,” Pat says, pointing to a painting above her desk of a young Mercedes on horseback. “This is her when she was 22. She was the first woman around here who wore pants. In fact, those dungarees that she’s wearing were my dad’s, from his time in the Navy.”
Pat’s upbringing with her parents, Jake Trujillo and Isabelle Garcia, working on the family land in Centinela and helping to pick apples and run the family fruit stand, instilled in her a strong work ethic, reinforced by several years working at Rancho de Chimayó. She attended grade school through high school in Los Alamos, where her parents worked and the family stayed during the work week, and went on to earn a bachelor’s degree two master’s degrees—one in microbial ecology from Utah State University, a second in animal toxicology from New Mexico State University.
It was during her time at NMSU that Pat met her future husband, Marco Oviedo. “He was an animal scientist by education, and his specialty was reproductive physiology,” she says. “He saw me working in a corral with an ornery steer and offered to help. We became friends and then decided to work on a little research project together. And then we got married and decided to move to Chimayó in 1985, and he had this idea that we could breed donkeys here, mammoth donkeys. And he thought of offering visitors donkey trail rides.”
“It was kind of a crazy idea, but over the next 40 years, we had over 800 equines here,” she recalls, “including horses from eight breeds, mammoth and standard size donkeys, as well as some Churro sheep, longhorn cattle and other animals.”
Pat’s work with animals demanded dedication and hard work, but she had full time day jobs, too. She worked for the state highway department and Los Alamos National Lab, all the while tending to the ranch, running trail rides—and raising a family with Marco. Finally, in 1995, she quit her outside jobs to devote all her time to managing the family businesses, which by then had expanded to include an inn that she establishedin her parents’ house and a gallery in her and Marcos’ house where they sold Marco’s bronze sculptures, for which he had become well known.
As if she didn’t have enough to do, in 2000 the local priest, Father Julio Gonzalez, invited her to sit on the parish finance council, where she served for 19 years, 17 of them as president. Her dedication to the church led to her involvement in efforts to upgrade the grounds and facilities at the Santuario to accommodate a growing crush of visitors. She also became a docent and official guide at the church.
When the 2008 recession devastated tourism, Pat felt a need to do something to help keep Chimayó afloat and so joined with Flo Jaramillo at the Rancho de Chimayó and other business owners to form the Chimayó Association of Businesses to promote Chimayó. Pat remained a primary mover and shaker of the organization for eight years, until the recession faded.
Pat’s immersion in local and family history led her to write a pictorial history of Chimayó in 2012—a book that remains in print and popular among Chimayosos and visitors alike.
Pat says it’s been a challenge to reorient her life since Marco died nearly two years ago. But her passion for her place and her love of family continues to inspire her. She still offers tours of the Santuario, dazzling visitors with her knowledge of the revered place. She continues to raise and breed mammoth donkeys and receives numerous visitors to her gallery and ranch. “I like to make people feel welcome in this beautiful place that I am blessed to live in,” she says. “And when people ask me, ‘Why don’t you travel and see the world.’ I say, ‘Why do I need to go anywhere? The world comes to me.’”
With a long look out from her sentinel-perch to the snowcapped peaks of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, Pat declares, “I feel that by the grace of God I’ve been blessed with a very full, productive life. And I did it all because I stand on the shoulders of giants—my grandparents, my parents, my aunts and uncles, the priests that I’ve known here. That’s how I became a person. They taught me through their example, through their experiences, through their knowledge and their values. And that’s what has helped me become who I am. That’s how we all become who we are.
“And so that means that we have been placed here to do something. To paraphrase Saint Francis addressing his brothers when he was dying, ‘I’ve done what I came to do. Now it’s your turn. Find out what you’re supposed to do—and do it!’”