Advanced SearchDavid Yubeta has a passion for dirt-and that's not bad. He describes himself as "voracious" in his fervent goal to stabilize every aging, crumbling, adobe building and wall that is in peril.
 David Yubeta, a preservation specialist with the National Park Service, is called "Mr. Adobe." The Tumac‡cori Mission is constructed of adobe. |
In 1998, he was presented with the National Park Service's top award in Washington, D.C., for cultural preservation.
Doubtless, Yubeta is at the right place to hone his adobe-preservation skills. The Tumac�cori park protects Spanish colonial missions on three sites. The largest, with a mission church constructed of adobe, was established in January 1691 by Jesuit Father Eusebio Francisco Kino. The park includes the ruins of the circa-1691 Los Santos �ngeles de Guevavi south of Rio Rico and circa-1756 San Cayetano de Calabazas in Rio Rico.
Since Yubeta came to work at the park in 1985 he has advanced in technical knowledge while training scores of individuals to carry on the cultural and traditional skills of adobe preservation.
That's important because the preservation of historic structures is a specialized skill that's not generally available. He and his teams have stabilized historic buildings in parks throughout Arizona, California, New Mexico, Utah, and Texas, along with work on mission churches in Mexico.
Looking back, Yubeta admits that this was not originally part of his life's plan.
"For me, growing up in an adobe home in Tucson, I never, ever, thought I was going to make a living doing historic preservation," he said. "My degree is in forensic science and criminology."
Yubeta graduated from the University of Washington in Seattle and served in the U.S. Army during Vietnam. He then spent 14 years working in mines in the Green Valley and Sahuarita areas.
"But I grew up in South Tucson in an adobe house, my grandmother's house, and we always knew how to take care of it because we did it annually," he said. "As I was growing up, I knew every year we'd have to stomp the mud, and my uncles would put the mud that we kids stomped on the wall."
Lime plaster
A coat of lime plaster was the finishing touch.
"And my grandmother would always scream, 'Don't touch that because it's going to burn you, because it's lime,'" he recalled.
"You fast-forward into more modern times. One of the things I've always said is that we lived in an adobe because we were poor. Now you have to be rich to live in an adobe, because of what's entailed in an earthen building," Yubeta said.
Although he never aspired to the work, it seems a perfect fit.
"When the mines laid everybody off, I applied here at Tumac�cori in 1985. Lo and behold, what they were doing here on the walls was stuff I had already done as a kid. I found I was very good at it. I could understand dirt, the mud.
"I really felt back then that I could save every adobe in the world," he added. "That was my goal. And I was voracious in that pursuit. I was working on adobes all over the place, just on my own time, fixing adobes for people.
"Now I know that it was an impossible dream because there were just so many things that needed help."
That led Yubeta to find ways to train others. And, in 1998, he was ready when the National Park Service started a program titled "Vanishing Treasures." He and others were in the forefront of advocating for this and showing at their own park sites how it could be accomplished.
"It was not so much the physical resource, but the human resource - the people. We said, when we're gone there's no one left like us - people who have sensitivity to do historic preservation," he explained.
What "Vanishing Treasures" has meant for Yubeta is that he has additional funding to bring on a temporary crew of about eight workers each year from March to September that can travel to other areas and work on short-term preservation projects.
One example is Mills Canyon in remote northeast New Mexico. The work they completed in 2005 won the overall "Windows on the Past" National Forest Service award.
Mills Canyon was a 19th Century fruit orchard ranch acquired by the Forest Service, but the remaining stone and wood buildings were dangerous for the public to visit.
"They were about ready to fall down," Yubeta recalled. "We stabilized all the rock and all the wood so visitors could enjoy it. It was probably one of the best projects we've ever done."
Among the 10-person crew were three of his college students.
"I'm teaching a class in adobe historic preservation at Snow College at Ephraim, Utah," he said. "It's a curriculum where they're teaching students the traditional ways of doing things. They learn wood, plaster, adobe. They bring in instructors from all over the country.
"Mine is a four-day course. I do this every September. Their degree will be an AA in historic preservation. I think I was instrumental in bringing it from a regular industrial kind of degree to historic preservation."
Nick Bleser, a former co-worker of Yubeta's, compliments his abilities. "David is absolutely excellent at everything he does. Of course, now he's Mr. Adobe for the National Park Service," Bleser said. "He's very insistent upon authenticity, accuracy and doing things the old way; the ways that work."
Bleser, who retired in 1990 from the Park Service while remaining active as a volunteer with Southwestern Missions Research Center, also praised him for what he's accomplished in Mexico.
"The coordinated international effort we did at the ruins in Cocospera was really an amazing thing," he said.
Cocospera is in northern Sonora, east of �muris.
"After a lot of meetings, he finally got cooperation from INAH (Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History) to do some stabilization and archaeological work at the ruins at Cocospera," he said.
"There was cooperation among different agencies. I think this was the first time two countries cooperated on anything like that. Since that, INAH and the Mexican government have been paying more attention."
Another example, Bleser said, is the colonial church at San Ignacio north of Magdalena.
"They were having really serious structural problems at San Ignacio," he said. "Using David we began talking with everyone in town and finally got them to form a patronato (support group). We told them, 'We have expertise and we have seed money that's available to you if you wish to call on us for assistance.' We got them to put an elastomeric coating on the roof.
"Then finally David found the money to make available all kinds of tools and taught everybody down there to teach them the way to do it right, in terms of re-plastering. Abby Valenzuela Rivera (a young architect in Sonora) took over the project and got INAH involved. They tore it apart and did it right. It's gorgeous now. But this was all because of David," Bleser said. "He's really done an incredible amount of good will and cooperation work between the two countries."
Valenzuela, the architect, said she met Yubeta through her father, who worked with him on the Cocospera conservation project.
"When I became an architect, David invited me to Tumac�cori to teach me how to work in preservation," she said. Then the park donated money for the work at San Ignacio where she was named to lead the efforts from January to May 2006.
Valenzuela said she's struck by Yubeta's interest in Mexico's missions and their history.
"He's a person who cares about other people and has a great sense of humor and a big heart," she said. "He's been a good leader for me and I wish the work we've been doing will never end."
Yubeta has also been pleased with his accomplishments in Mexico.
"Mexico is the adobe capital of the world. But they've lost that tradition also because they build with cement and concrete," he said.
"Concrete has been the bane of historic preservation since its inception. Traditional materials need traditional treatments. You cannot put cement on adobe because adobe dances and twists and turns. The only way to hurt an adobe is to stiffen it, with cement."
Yubeta and Ray Madril are the only permanent preservation workers at Tumac�cori, although they often bring on co-worker Bobby Jimenez. Other than that, the outside jobs are handled by the temporary teams under Yubeta's supervision.
There's a constant demand for expertise in preservation.
"Right now I could work off this park 100 percent of the time, because everybody needs help," Yubeta said. Properties that are 50 years or older become eligible for historic status if they are considered significant.
"As agencies like Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management started acquiring historic properties as part of their charge, they had to start taking care of them. So they would call me. I would go out and say, 'I'll help you if you will bring in some of your own people, so I can train them,'" he said. "As the word spread that I was a little bit mobile in leaving the park, it just blossomed. Not only was it Forest Service and BLM, but also other National Park Service areas and more recently, California."
Yubeta and his wife, Kim, an artist in beaded jewelry, are the parents of Jake, a sophomore at Rio Rico High School. They also have three adult children.
Their own historic adobe home, across the street from Tumac�cori National Historic Park, burned to the ground in December 2005 and they subsequently bought a home in Tubac. Yubeta will be eligible to retire in 2008 and is planning to even as he takes on new work as a consultant.
It will be heart-wrenching for him to give up his job.
"My energy is to help everyone I can in historic preservation, forever," he said. "If the person who replaces me doesn't have those energies, everything that's happened, all the protocol established in Mexico" could disappear.
"It bothers me that it all goes away when I retire."
But that's discounting the hundreds of men and women to whom he's transferred, both directly and indirectly, his "passion for dirt" and for historic preservation.
Yubeta's enthusiasm and philosophy is certain to endure.
(Editor's Note: Kathleen Vandervoet of Tubac is a freelance writer.)
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