William Chinana went home to Pecos to learn adobe

William Chinana is from Jemez Pueblo. He now works on the adobe at Pecos
National Historical Park — a place whose history is bound up with his own
community's — and he got there through three internships in a row.

William Chinana paints wood slats.

Why Pecos

Two reasons, and the second is the one that decided it. He had always wanted
to work for the National Park Service and was not certain he could. And Pecos
Pueblo's history is deeply connected to Jemez Pueblo. Helping preserve it made
the application an easy decision.

Three internships

He read environmental studies, and after graduating joined the preservation
crew at Pecos. That led to the Park Service's Vanishing Treasures
programme through the Ancestral Lands Conservation Corps,
and then back to Pecos on a
Traditional Trades Advancement Program
placement with the same Corps.

"My first experience at Pecos was intense," he says. He had taken it to serve
his community and to get a foot in the door, and found himself fascinated by
preservation work instead. Vanishing Treasures deepened that — "the people in
that program were some of the most knowledgeable preservationists I've met."
By the time the TTAP placement started he was asking better questions, which
is what improved his technique.

The work itself

Pecos means a large adobe mission church and convent area and an ancestral
pueblo site. Each season the crew plasters adobe walls and sets veneer walls
that protect the original material underneath.

It sounds repetitive and it is not. Every wall is different. Blending new
adobe against earlier preservation work is, in his words, like solving a
puzzle — and finishing a section that both protects the original material and
looks seamless is the part he is proudest of.

William Chinana measures a wood plank.

What he thinks he changed

Not the walls, in the end. "I feel like I've made the biggest difference at
Pecos through my interactions with visitors." Everyone at the park works at
building a relationship with the people who come back regularly, and he
enjoyed teaching new visitors about adobe masonry — a building method that is
becoming less common, and one he thinks is both viable and sustainable.

Sources

Written from the National Park Service's interview with William Chinana in its
New Faces, Bright Futures series, a work of the United States government in
the public domain.