The nearly 700 people of San Juan welcome visitors to their homes; their undecorated burnished black pottery is particularly distinctive and popular. The pueblo’s annual festival is held in June.
Santa Ana Pueblo
Santa Ana Pueblo lies along the banks of the Rio Jemez, which enters the Rio Grande from the west. The pueblo was visited by Oñate and a mission was built there about 1600, shortly after his visit. The people of Santa Ana joined in the Pueblo Revolt, and since there was no priest serving their church in 1680, they joined with the Indians of Santo Domingo and San Felipe to massacre the padres at San Felipe. In 1687, during one of the Spanish efforts to reconquer New Mexico, Santa Ana was destroyed and her people fled. Later, at the urging of de Vargas, the modern pueblo was established, along with the church now standing there. The population of Santa Ana is nearly 400. Its annual festival takes place in August. It is often difficult to find many of the people at the main pueblo for they spend most of the growing season at El Ranchito, to the east in the Rio Grande Valley.
Santa Clara Pueblo
Santa Clara Pueblo is near the mouth of Santa Clara Creek, a year-round stream flowing out of the Jemez Mountains into the Rio Grande. To the west of the pueblo, on lands owned by Santa Clara, are the famous Puye Cliff Dwellings ruins. The people of Santa Clara claim these natural cliff homes as their ancestral dwelling places, a fact which has been substantiated by archeologists. The Santa Clara Indians represent, then, an important living Indian group in which one can observe institutions and traditions that can be linked to traditions of the cultures that lived in the caves and abandoned cities of Southwest antiquity.
Like most of the pueblo people, Santa Clara joined the Pueblo Revolt, but this action did not seriously harm the pueblo. The real damage was done to Santa Clara in the late eighteenth century when intertribal warfare over witchcraft, plus the ravages of disease, took nearly 500 lives in the village. The current population is about 500.
The church at Santa Clara is quite modern, having been constructed in the twentieth century. The old church, built in 1760, was caught up in the modernization craze that swept through the pueblo world in the early 1900’s. Perhaps one of the most substantial and beautiful of all pueblo churches, the old church collapsed during a storm in 1909 (the same storm that destroyed the church at Nambé); it had been structurally weakened by the removal of the roof for remodeling.
The village has excellent agricultural lands and supplements its income by manufacturing an excellent and distinctive pure black pottery. Its annual festival is in mid-August.
Santo Domingo Pueblo
Santo Domingo is one of the largest of the pueblos, having a population of nearly 1500. It is also the most conservative in retention of its native culture. This makes its dances and dress of particular interest to the visitor to New Mexico. The present pueblo was established after the reconquest in 1692. The Indians of Santo Domingo took a particularly active part in the Pueblo Revolt, killing three padres resident at the pueblo. When de Vargas moved to retake Santo Domingo, he found the people had abandoned the village. They had constructed a village in the Jemez Mountains to the west, and it was there that de Vargas defeated them. Even then, the people of Santo Domingo did not give up the fight, and only after a long series of defeats and serious loss of life did they surrender and again return to the vicinity of their original village.