The Community
The Roswell Museum also functioned as a community center by hosting club meetings and serving as a venue for concerts and other activities, with the objective of infusing art into different social activities. Among the most remarkable performances that occurred at the Roswell Museum during the WPA era was the staging of a mystery play called Los Pastores. Mystery plays are dramatizations of the Bible that first appeared in medieval Europe. Los Pastores is a New Mexican retelling of the Nativity, or the birth of Jesus, from the perspective of the shepherds, and likely developed from Spanish plays that colonists introduced to the New World during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The play follows the shepherds through a series of comedic misadventures, as devils and various temptations try unsuccessfully to keep them from reaching the birth site of the Christ child.
Los Pastores was performed at the Roswell Museum when director Roland Dickey learned about it during a visit to Chihuahita. According to newspaper accounts of the play, it had been performed in the Roswell area since the mid-nineteenth century. Dickey recognized an opportunity to introduce museum visitors to Roswell’s Hispanic culture, and invited the all-male cast to give a special performance on December 27, 1938. Records indicate that it was a success, with 100 people attending the Spanish-language event.
In addition to its own activities, the Roswell Museum supervised other WPA-related projects in town. One of these undertakings included overseeing Roswell’s Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) Camp. As the first of President Roosevelt’s New Deal organizations, the CCC provided young men with employment, and assigned participants to camps around the country to work on tasks such as reforestation, building trails, and developing parks. The CCC camp in Roswell focused on activities such as carpentry, mural painting, and other community-based projects. The Roswell Museum also assisted in the decoration of City Hall, a WPA building that opened in 1940.
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