The Priest at El Paso del Norte

When the men in my recent novel The Texian Prisoners reach El Paso del Norte (today’s Ciudad Juárez in November 1841, one of the kindest people they meet is local priest, Padre Ramón Ortiz. Prisoner George Wilkins Kendall, who later wrote a book about their trek, says Ortiz had a “benevolent countenance … that at once endeared him to every one.” The priest was also generous, “continually seeking opportunities to do some delicate act of kindness, which, by the manner of its bestowal, showed that he possessed all the more refined feelings of our nature.”

The padre housed, clothed, and gave money to Kendall and other men of the Texas Santa Fe Expedition while they were in El Paso. And his generosity didn’t stop there. When the prisoners headed out on the next leg of their journey, he sent along two or three ox-carts filled with “excellent bread.”

“Seldom have I parted from a friend with more real regret,” Kendall said later. “If ever a noble heart beat in man it was in the breast of this young, generous, and liberal priest. Professing a different religion from mine, and one, too, that I had been taught to believe, at least in Mexico, inculcated a jealous intolerance towards those of any other faith, I [thought I] could expect from him neither favour nor regard. How surprised was I, then, to find him liberal to a fault, constant in his attentions, and striving to make my situation as agreeable as the circumstances would admit.”

One would be tempted to conclude from Kendall’s description that Ramon Ortiz was sympathetic toward the Texians and, by extension, Americans. After all, most of the prisoners had been born in the United States. And the padre may well have felt that way in 1841. But he seems to have changed his mind by the end of the decade.

Padre Ortiz opposed America’s 1846 invasion of Mexico so vociferously that U.S. soldiers arrested him when they reached El Paso. Incarceration doesn’t seem to have curbed his spirit. He continued to voice his opposition and, as a deputy to Mexico’s Congress, fought ratification of its 1848 treaty with the U.S.

Ortiz was concerned about the amount of land the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo proposed to give away, which included today’s California, Arizona, Utah, and New Mexico. But he didn’t give up when he lost that cause. After the treaty was signed, he took on another role: helping New Mexico families who wished to move south across the new border, and thus remain Mexican citizens.

In late 1848, Mexico sent Padre Ortiz north into New Mexico to identify these people and assist them in the transition. His mission was so successful that the new regime in Santa Fe shut it down.

Ortiz arrived in the Santa Fe area in April 1849 and soon had approximately 1,000 families signed up for the trek south. And those were just the ones from San Miguel del Bado. When he then headed north toward Taos, the American administration panicked and started actively discouraging people from leaving while also throwing up bureaucratic obstacles related to signatures, funding, deadlines, and so forth.

Even with these roadblocks, by mid-1850, the padre had successfully assisted 1,552 people to leave their homes in the new American possessions and move across the border to the Mesilla area. He then took on a new role and served as the commissioner responsible for issuing land grants to the new settlers.

If you’re familiar with New Mexico, you’ll know Mesilla is a town in the southern part of the state, on the U.S. side of the border. No, it didn’t move. The land on which the padre settled the newcomers was sold to the Americans in late December 1853. While the emigrants were adjusting to their new location, the U.S. had arranged to pay Mexico another $10 million for a strip of land that would enable a railroad route from Texas to California. Land that included Mesilla.

I haven’t found a record of Padre Ortiz’s response to that exchange of real estate. I doubt he was pleased. But he had plenty of time to adjust to what had happened. He was priest at El Paso del Norte for another forty-two years.

If Kendall’s portrayal of him is accurate, it’s possible that Padre Ortiz, unlike so many of us, was able to distinguish between individuals and the country they came from and continued to be as full of “exceeding liberality” as he’d been in 1841. I don’t think I could have done so.

If you want to learn more about Mesilla’s fascinating history, see https://www.mesillanm.gov/history/ or Erlinda Gonzales-Berry and David R. Maciel’s, The Contested Homeland, A Chicano History of New Mexico. You can find a short review of this book in this month’s newsletter. Sign up here!

Source List: Erlinda Gonzales-Berry and David R. Maciel, The Contested Homeland, A Chicano History of New Mexico, University of New Mexico Press, 2000; George Wilkins Kendall, Narrative of the Texan Santa Fe Expedition, Harper and Brothers, 1847; W.H. Timmons, El Paso, A Borderlands History, Texas Western Press, 2004