This post is part of a series revealing the table of contents of upcoming Issue Twenty-One. As is our custom, we’ll be discussing one article per weekday in order to give you a taste of what is to come.
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Andrew Gonzales– “Hidden Legacy: Colonial New Mexican Woodcraft”
The legacy of American woodworking begins well before 1776. It’s even earlier than 1676. And 1576. The variety of woodworking traditions represented in this country is staggering, and when one comes to grips with this fact, our assumptions about what “American Colonial” furniture looks like will begin to shift. Few today consider the fact that before the westward expansion of the mid-1800s, there existed a 250-year tradition of furniture making, thriving completely separate from English sensibilities.
One New Mexican woodworker, whose ancestry goes back 500 years in this region, recently decided to dig deeper into his craft heritage. Andrew Gonzales comes from a family of carpenters, weavers, and other craftspeople, and his passion for hand-tool woodworking sent him on a mission to recover and celebrate traditional New Mexican furniture making. In 2025, Gonzales was awarded an M&T Craft Research grant in order to document the historic furniture of that tradition and to replicate one particular piece: a “Valdez” chest. With his scrupulous analysis of tool marks, careful matching of period tooling, and his open-minded experimentation of possible woodworking techniques, the result of Gonzales’ research is astonishing. This conscientious craftsman’s exploration into a tradition that has been hardly noticed sets the bar for serious engagement in hands-on research even higher.
To learn well from the makers of the past, we must learn sympathetically – to put ourselves in their shoes. But this is not as easy as it sounds: “It is hard to imagine what the frontier joiner’s workshop must’ve looked like, but it can be assumed to be quite minimal: a handful of locally made chisels, knives, a handsaw, an adze, a homemade plane, possibly a drawknife, and a few axes, [but] what should not be assumed was that these artisans lacked skill or training in their professions. The frustrating modern impression of New Mexican (aka “Southwestern”) furniture is that it is rustic, chunky, and amateurish.” Gonzales’ faithful and conscientious research dispels such radical misconceptions.
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