Remember the Forgotten Missions of Texas

For decades, each Sunday at daybreak Samuel Trujillo carried his paralyzed father, José, from their home to the doors of the Socorro Mission, about twenty minutes southeast of downtown El Paso. The elder Trujillo insisted on greeting the sun as generations of his Indigenous Piro ancestors had before him. It climbed over the horizon, slowly lighting the white stucco-and-adobe structure and draping both men in reverent calm.Father and son would then enter the church to celebrate mass, recalls Magda Maureira, the white-haired docent of the mission and Samuel’s niece. “[José] always sat under that big honorific beam . . . that runs underneath the choir loft,” she says on a cloudy January day, pointing to the ceiling. That seat was special, “reserved for the elders, the caciques, the…

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