Mission Nuestra Senora de Guadalupe de Zuni

The Mission Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe de Zuñi stands within the Pueblo of Zuni in western New Mexico, west of Gallup. A Franciscan mission was first established at the Zuni village of Hawikuh in the 1620s, transferred after the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, and refounded at the present village of Halona, the Middle Place, in the closing years of the seventeenth century. The current mission church belongs to the eighteenth-century rebuilding of that refounded community.

The structure is a large vernacular adobe of the New Mexico mission type. Its load-bearing walls are sun-dried mud brick laid on stone footings, several feet thick at the base and finished originally in mud plaster. The plan is the long single-nave church with a transept-like sanctuary and a low choir loft, roofed with peeled vigas and split-cedar latillas under earth and, in later years, sheet metal. Twin towers or a single espadaña rise at the entry. The mission was extensively documented by the Historic American Buildings Survey under HABS NM-16-ZUNIP-2, which preserves measured drawings of the church and its associated convento ruins.

The church is particularly significant for the interior murals painted by Zuni artist Alex Seowtewa and his sons, an extended cycle of life-size kachinas depicted along the nave walls. The murals are the largest mural program of its kind in any New Mexico mission and represent a continuing collaboration between Catholic and Pueblo religious practice.

The mission was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1975 under reference 75002066. The church remains in active use by the Zuni community and is intermittently open to visitors under tribal protocols. It stands at the western end of the New Mexico mission adobe corridor that begins at Acoma and runs through Laguna and Zuni to the Arizona line.