DUANE
Duane's take
Here's what the official marker at Socorro has to say, and I'll do my best to do it justice. Way out in El Paso County, where the Rio Grande has been carving its path longer than any of us can properly reckon, there is a site that carries a story going back to 1683. That's not a typo.
Sixteen eighty-three. We're talking about a time when Texas was barely a word on anyone's map, and yet here, something was being built. Something intended to last.
The site of the mission and pueblo of Nuestra Señora de la Concepción del Pueblo de Socorro — and that name alone tells you the people who established it meant business. This was Don Antonio de Otermin and Father Fray Francisco Ayeta, of the Franciscan Order, and they came here with a purpose. Now, to understand why they were building here, you have to understand who they were building for.
The Piro, the Thano, and the Gemex — these were Indian peoples who had fled. Refugees, the marker calls them plainly, and that word carries weight. They had come south after the pueblo revolt in New Mexico, displaced and looking for something solid to hold onto.
What Otermin and Ayeta gave them was a mission. A pueblo. A place.
And it was the Franciscan missionaries who maintained it, working toward what the marker describes as the civilizing and Christianizing of those peoples. That was the stated mission, in every sense of the word. Three groups, one place, one purpose, planted in 1683 and tended by the Franciscans across the years that followed.
The State of Texas saw fit to erect a marker here in 1936, acknowledging what was set down in this spot centuries before Texas itself existed. Out in El Paso County, the ground holds long memories. Socorro is proof of that.
What the marker says
Site of the mission and pueblo of Nuestra Senora de la Concepcion Del Pueblo de Socorro established by Don Antonio de Otermin and Father Fray Francisco Ayeta, O.F.M. in 1683. Maintained by Franciscan missionaries for the civilizing and Christianizing of the Piro, Thano and Gemex Indians, refugees after the pueblo revolt in New Mexico. Erected by the State of Texas 1936