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IN BUILDING HIS BORDER WALL, TRUMP MAY BRING DOWN A 110-YEAR-OLD
CHURCH  
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Jazmine Ulloa
August 24, 2026
The New York Times
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_ A century ago, Mexican American families came together to build an
adobe church near the border in West Texas. Can its bell toll again as
the wall expansion nears? _

The Friends of the Ruidosa Church group has worked to restore the
adobe mission for the last 20 years. Members of the group worry that
border wall construction could damage the site., Paul Ratje

 

 

Out in Far West Texas, a heavy bronze bell once tolled, calling
congregants from both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border to worship at a
small adobe church.

The bell and the Catholic church in Ruidosa are hallmarks of an era
when Mexican and American border communities lived as one. But nearly
three generations ago, parishioners moved away from the tiny town. One
of the church’s twin towers toppled. The bell disappeared.

Local volunteers have begun restoring the church, El Corazón Sagrado
de la Iglesia de Jesús. They view it as one of the last vestiges of a
shared history along a southwestern landscape that is as Indigenous,
Spanish and Mexican as it is American. Fortifying its walls and twin
towers means that perhaps the bell could ring again.

Now their work faces a new danger: President Trump’s border wall.
The church is one of dozens of historical sites across the Southwest
threatened by the construction. In Arizona, portions of a
1,000-year-old etching
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in the earth have been bulldozed. In Texas, work is endangering
ancient cave murals
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on the Underground Railroad
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“If you value a people’s worth and contributions, then you
preserve their history in textbooks and curriculums,” the historian
Trinidad Gonzales said. “You would preserve these physical
markers.”

Trump administration officials say the wall will go up yards away from
the church and help deter violent drug traffickers in one of the most
remote parts of the Chihuahuan desert. Preservationists, though, warn
that the relentless vibrations of the construction threaten the
church’s fragile structural integrity.

To historians and border residents, the administration’s
construction plans, alongside a campaign to deport thousands of
immigrants, amount to uprooting centuries of Mexican and Latino
American history and presence.

The 110-year journey of the church and its bell is a story of
displacement and migration, of being lost and improbably found, and of
artists, historians and community residents who have gone to great
lengths to bake and haul adobe bricks, bail the bell out of a Marfa
jail and reclaim a piece of lost past.

El Corazón Sagrado de la Iglesia de Jesús is in Ruidosa, a hamlet on
the border in Far West Texas. Volunteers gathered at the church in
June to repair the structure.

El Corazón Sagrado arose during the Mexican Revolution. Hundreds of
thousands of Mexicans were migrating north. They opened schools,
theaters and newspapers and, in the borderland, they organized against
U.S. segregation and anti-Mexican discrimination.

In Ruidosa, a tiny settlement southwest of Marfa, the community built
a church. Mexican and Mexican American families from both sides of the
river molded clay bricks to raise its mission-style walls and twin
towers. From a central wooden gable, they hung its bronze bell.

For nearly 40 years, the bell tolled. It brought people together for
weddings, funerals and Sunday masses.

”The church was a center of life,” said Zenaida Maria Nazeri, 77,
who was born in Ruidosa and attended its services.

El Corazón Sagrado de la Iglesia de Jesús in 1963.Credit...Bill
Caudle, via Friends of the Ruidosa Church

But by the 1950s, a New Mexico dam and a drought had choked the river
that sustained Ruidosa’s farmland. Many in the region began to move
again. The post office closed. El Sagrado Corazón fell into
disrepair, and the Catholic Church officially retired the mission in
1956.

Sometime in the 1960s, the bell finally migrated, too. The front
entryway fell after years of winds and rains had eroded its
foundation. The great bell crashed to the earth. A family retrieved it
and gave it to Johnnie Tucker Chambers, a teacher living in a nearby
schoolhouse. She mounted the bell on a wooden stand and used it to
call children from both sides of the border to class.

When she left, she took it to her property in nearby Candelaria, where
she used it to call her ranch hands to dinner.

“If we think of the great cathedral builders, this is our
cathedral,” said Martha Ryan Stafford, a retired teacher now on the
Presidio County Historical Commission.

Without its bell, the Ruidosa church, named for the Sacred Heart,
seemed to lose its own pulse. The building was locked up, its doors
and windows boarded up to prevent vandals from scavenging its wooden
floor and pews.

By the early 1990s, the left tower had collapsed, and the El Paso
Diocese officially ordered the mission demolished.

That stirred something in people.

Historians, church patrons and community residents expressed their
outrage in letters to local newspapers and the diocese. County
commissioners paused the Catholic Church’s demolition request.

"We started a GoFundMe to help us raise the Ruidosa Church bell back
where it belongs"

Restoration efforts regained momentum in 2019, not long after Mr.
Trump was elected on rallying cries to “build the wall.”

In his second term, the Trump administration has pushed those plans
forward, placing El Sagrado Corazón in jeopardy. U.S. Customs and
Border Protection did not respond to questions regarding the community
concerns about preserving the church and other sacred sites. In
federal lawsuits, administration officials argue they have the
authority to waive environmental regulations and other legal claims in
the interest of tackling drug smuggling and illegal immigration.

Across the Southwest, similar projects have already begun. In
California, explosives have blasted Tecate Peak, also known as
Kuuchamaa, a mountain sacred to the Kumeyaay people that is on the
National Register of Historic Places. In Arizona’s Sonoran Desert,
construction crews bulldozed parts of the 1,000-year-old Las Playas
Intaglio, a giant fish-shaped image etched into the earth, disturbed
sacred burial grounds at Monument Hill and threatened Quitobaquito
Springs, a 10,000-year-old desert oasis revered by the Tohono
O’odham and Hia-Ced O’odham nations.

Further east in New Mexico, land seizure efforts are targeting
church-owned land around Mount Cristo Rey
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a 720-foot Catholic pilgrimage site. In Texas, proposed barriers
endanger the 6,000-year-old cave murals of the Lower Pecos Canyonlands
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Underground Railroad sanctuaries such as the Eli Jackson Cemetery and
Jackson Ranch Church, and the 19th-century La Lomita Chapel in
Mission.

In West Texas, protests erupted this month as bulldozers cleared
terrain in Big Bend National Park and near the site of the Porvenir
Massacre
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a force of Texas Rangers, U.S. Cavalry soldiers, and local ranchers
rounded up and shot dead 15 unarmed Mexican men and boys in 1918.

Last week, Rodney Scott, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection
commissioner, paused the construction in Big Bend as he visited the
region. He said only patrol roads and vehicle barriers were planned to
go through the national park and that his agency was “firmly
committed to protecting America, and that includes our national
treasures.”

The preservationists of Ruidosa church say that Mr. Scott’s pause is
not cause for celebration. Construction of a steel wall is still
expected to continue miles up the road, bringing heavy machinery and
excavations within yards of the sanctuary. They and local leaders have
filed federal lawsuits and have been pushing back with the help of
landowners, including some Trump supporters.

The archaeologist David Keller, in the third photo, was among a group
making adobe blocks for El Corazón Sagrado de la Iglesia de Jesús in
June.

For Mike Green, a retired architect who has long lived in West Texas
and helps lead the latest restoration campaign, the construction has
been especially troubling.

He felt a kinship with the church when he first saw its ruins in 1984.
Scavengers had stripped most of its timber, but he was captivated by
its adobe arches — among the tallest still standing in Texas — and
by the history of the 160 farmworkers buried on a hill just above it.

“Presidio and Ojinaga have had this rich history, and it’s a
history of longstanding community cooperation,” he said of the
Mexican and American border cities.

In 2020, after years of negotiation, the diocese deeded the property
to Friends of the Ruidosa Church, a nonprofit founded by Mr. Green and
the archaeologist David Keller. The group resumed the process of
making thousands of sun-dried adobe blocks by hand and has worked with
restoration and engineering experts to build and install a modular
steel tower structure to buttress the church’s right tower.

The group has even found its key missing piece: the bell.

In 2023, Mr. Green happened to lament the lost artifact to his friend,
Betty Gaddis, over lunch. Unbeknown to him, Ms. Gaddis, then 90, had
been a longtime friend of Ms. Chambers and had once seen the old bell
sitting in her Alpine apartment. Within two days, she tracked the bell
down — it was sitting in storage in the Presidio County jail in
Marfa.

On Oct. 28, 2023, members of the nonprofit gathered to “bail out”
the bell. A month later, they trucked it back to Ruidosa for an annual
celebration, displaying it on an altar against an art installation and
before dozens of glowing candles.

Now it sits in Mr. Green’s Marfa home, waiting to chime across the
valley again.

Mountains in the Mexican state of Chihuahua are visible from Ruidosa,
Texas.

_JAZMINE ULLOA_ [[link removed]]_ is
a national reporter covering immigration for The Times._

_Subscribe to the NEW YORK TIMES_ [[link removed]]

* United States
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* Mexico
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* border
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* border wall
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* U.S. history
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* churches
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* Donald Trump
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