Anastasia Romero Vigil (1870 - )

“Anastasia Romero Vigil and her sister, Francisgita Romero Trujillo, appear to have been key players in the mass production of rain gods as a commodity around 1898.  For many years, however, oral tradition has held that one or both of the sisters invented rain gods.  In a 1995 interview Priscilla Vigil told School of American Research volunteer Gene Miller that her husband’s grandmother, Francisgita Romero, got the idea for making rain gods.

“The first rain god on record (a micaceous clay god holding a pot) is pictured in the Tammen catalog for 1887, when Vigil would have been seventeen years old—arguably too young to have been the inventor (and certainly too young to have been involved in the production of other clay gods dating back to circa 1880).   A more plausible explanation is that she and her sister were involved in some way with the Gunther Candy promotion that Fay-Cooper Cole said was initiated circa 1898.  At that time Anastasia would have been twenty-eight, and formalized rain gods had been in existence for at least fourteen years.”  Anderson 2002

Anastasia Romero Vigil is from Tesuque Pueblo.

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