Kachina and the Cross (20 page)

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Authors: Carroll L Riley

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BOOK: Kachina and the Cross
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Page 94
Musketeer from de Gheyn's arms manual, 1607 
(courtesy of the Museum of New Mexico, neg. no. 20279)

 

Page 95
Peralta had been in New Mexico for hardly more than a year and a half, and was still in the process of setting up his new capital, when events occurred that were to destroy his governorship. In late August of 1612, Fray Isidro Ordóñez arrived from Mexico with a twenty-wagon supply train and a new group of Franciscans. Ordóñez had been sent south the previous year to recruit new clergy. He seemed alreadyfor reasons unknownto have been an enemy of the governor, and once back in New Mexico he moved swiftly. Ordóñez was clearly very much a loose cannon. On his arriving back in the colony, he presented the commissary, Fray Alonso de Peinado, with a letter from the Franciscan commissary-general in Mexico removing Peinado and appointing Ordóñez to the prelacy of the New Mexico custodia. There is a good chance that this letter was forged, making Ordóñez's actions over the next several years totally illegal. His purpose seems to have been the complete subordination of New Mexico's secular authority to Franciscan control.
By a relentless attack on Peralta and by clever manipulation of both the settler contingent and the Indians, Ordóñez managed to undermine Peralta, eventually arresting the governor and holding him prisoner. This situation eventually resolved itself with the arrival of another governor, Bernardino de Ceballos, in 1614 and a new Franciscan prelate, Esteban de Perea, in the winter of 1616-17. Perea had originally come to New Mexico as part of the missionary group that accompanied Peralta in 1609. On his return, the New Mexico mission structure was raised to custodial status, the Custodia of the Conversion of St. Paul. Perea was the first missionary to hold the title of
custos
, or custodian (see chapter 8). It is unclear what happened to Ordóñez, but he seems to have been disciplined in some manner by the order.
Ceballos was not particularly friendly to the Franciscans, but he made relatively few waves. The same could not be said of his successor, Juan de Eulate, who came to New Mexico in 1618 and soon became involved in a violent controversy with Custodian Perea. Partly this was over Eulate's willingness to allow native ceremonials, but in large part it reflected still another chapter in the struggle for authority in the province.
In early 1621 the viceroy issued new decrees, sent both to Governor Eulate and Custodian Perea, that delineated the separate spheres of influence of the lay and religious authorities. Essentially it cautioned the two powers to support each other in appropriate ways but not to intrude on each other's rights and privileges. Probably the Pueblo Indians were the main beneficiaries of these new regulations. The governor and the Franciscans had accused each other of violating Pueblo rights. Now both were forbidden to interfere with Pueblo elections of tribal officers or even to be present when such officers were chosen. Certain
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restrictions were made on tribute and use of Indian labor by both the missionaries and the civil authority. Labor that caused native hardship, labor of women in the houses of Spaniards except under very strict supervision, and labor at the convents except ''with the greatest moderation'' was forbidden. Indians were to be paid a half-real plus their food. If food was not forthcoming, the pay would be one real. The missionaries' egregious habit of cutting the Indians' hair for frivolous reasons was strictly forbidden. Apparently, victims of this treatment were fleeing to the Acoma peñol, where a colony of unconverted natives had been forming for some years.
Long hair was and is of great ceremonial importance in the Pueblo world, and the missionaries obviously were aware of this. Hair cutting was another in the mission arsenal of weapons against Pueblo religion. The viceroy was probably
au fait
of the religious aspect of the practice, but he obviously felt that the disruption caused by hair cutting was not worth it. Forced hair cutting, however, continued, regulation or not.
The period of the 1620s was one of relative quiet. The Franciscan custodian, Miguel de Chavarría, moderated the missionaries' relations to the governor, though the rivalry between church and governor flared up again with Chavarría's successor, Vice-custodian Ascencio de Zárate, who at one point excommunicated Eulate.
The governor was recalled in 1625 and soon faced charges for illegally bringing slaves to Mexico. As I indicated earlier, trafficking in slavery was a major economic factor in seventeenth-century New Mexico, but the slaves were supposed to be taken from Apaches and other nomadic groups in warfare. The friars accused Eulate of raiding neighboring peaceful nomadic groups for slaves, some of whom were shipped off to New Spain. Even worse in Spanish eyes was the habit allegedly practiced by Eulate of seizing orphans from the converted Pueblos and selling them in Mexico. Technically, these youngsters were probably not slaves, but in actuality they functioned as such.
In 1623 a new custodian, Fray Alonso de Benavides, was chosen for New Mexico. He departed Mexico City in early 1625, but because of duties in the Santa Bárbara region, he did not reach the custodia until nearly the end of that year. His traveling companion, the new governor, Felipe de Sotelo Osorio, pushed on ahead to Santa Fe, where Benavides joined him with additional missionaries in late January 1626. With Fray Benavides, the mission agenda intensified. Not only were there additional missionaries to expand the process of conversion, but Benavides himself was designated commissary of the Holy Office of the Inquisition, and so formally introduced that powerful position into New Mexico.
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Benavides did not actually use his Inquisitorial powers against the civil authorities, concentrating instead on witchcraft, demonology, and bigamy, crimes that had no great political implications. There was a period of relative cooperation between the two power structures in the province. Benavides was an ambitious man, determined to promote the Franciscan influence in New Mexico. He was, however, also very much a politician, and one who obviously preferred to work with Governor Sotelo Osorio. Benavides's great dream was the founding of a Franciscan province in New Mexico with diocesan powers and with himself as the first bishop. It was in pursuit of this dream that Benavides, on leaving New Mexico in 1629, wrote his two Memorials (1630 and 1634), with their invaluable, although not totally dependable, information on the colony.
Benavides was replaced by the former custodian, Esteban de Perea, who also became commissary of the Holy Office. With him came twelve soldiers, nineteen missionary priests, and two lay brothers, plus "nine others, at the cost of the said Provincia [the Franciscan Province of the Holy Gospel, mother organization for the New Mexico Missions]." Perea took charge of the New Mexico missions in April 1629 and set about assigning mission stations. There were now forty-six missionaries in New Mexico, and the work of conversion, already enthusiastically promoted by Benavides, continued with new vigor. Perea stayed on in New Mexico, dying there in 1639. Although he was replaced as custodian in 1630, Perea seems to have held the Holy Office title for a number of years, perhaps until his death. He and his successor, Juan de Salas, were instrumental in a new thrust of missionization, expanding the missions to their maximum extent. During this period, mission stations were set up at Zuni and Hopi. A mission was established at the resettled pueblo of Acoma, and the mission effort among the Tompiro towns was upgraded. Under missionary Andrés Suárez (or Juárez), the great mission church at Pecos was completed during this period. Begun in 1621, it was certainly one of the larger European buildings in North America of the time.
Chililí had a mission established in 1613 with Father Peinado stationed there. The mission station at Abó probably dates a handful of years later. In 1627 Benavides made an establishment at Las Humanas (the present Gran Quivira). Benavides had also been very interested in the Jumanos, having determinedat least to his own satisfactionthat a contemporary nun named Maria de Jesús (sometimes called the "Lady in Blue") from the Spanish town of Agreda had miraculously appeared and preached to this group.
Juan de Salas, who would become custodian in 1630, had founded the Isleta mission in 1613 and from there had numerous contacts with the Tompiro and Jumano. The Jumano actually came to Isleta to trade in the midsummer, after
Page 98
Mission ruins, Abó Pueblo (courtesy of the Museum of New Mexico, neg. no. 6395)
probably wintering over in the Tompiro area and before moving out to their hunting territories in the southern Llano Estacado, perhaps in the region around Blanco Canyon where they lived in Coronado's time a century before. In the late summer of 1629, Salas and another missionary, Diego López, made a trip onto the Llano Estacado to missionize the Jumano, presumably at the request of the Indians. Although the Indians were suffering from a drought that affected the southern Plains that year, the missionaries managed to baptize a considerable number of people. The Franciscans were unable to establish a permanent mission in the Llano country, but they seem to have maintained some contact with the Jumano through their mission station at Humanas, which was put on a firmer foundation in the early 1630s.
In Perea's and Salas's time, the Jumanos were increasingly coming under attack by the Apaches and often were finding the long-established trade with their presumed linguistic kinspeople in the Tompiro area disrupted. This Apache threat, which within a few decades would drive the Jumano from their Llano Estacado base, made their association with the newcomers desirable even if it
Page 99
meant accepting the Spanish religion. The Maria de Jesús story must be seen in the context of that political and economic situation.
Governor Francisco Manuel de Silva Nieto (1629-32) cooperated with the Franciscans. In fact, church and state relationships were relatively quiet until the late 1630s, though in 1632 Perea did denounce Governor Francisco de la Mora y Ceballos for going back to Eulate's practice of seizing children as servants and for establishing estancias on both Pueblo and mission lands. The missions had their ups and downs. For example, at Zuni the resident priest was killed in 1632, and a second friar, traveling down the trade route from Zuni to Sonora, was murdered by his Zuni guides. The Zuni fled to the protection of their fortified mesa, Dowa Yalanne, and a punitive Spanish expedition failed to dislodge them. By 1635 the Indians were beginning to trickle back to their towns, and plans were made for remissionization. The following year, the custodian, Friar Cristóbal de Quirós, demanded that the governor of that period, Francisco Martínez de Baeza, use soldiers to escort the missionaries back to Zuni. The governor refused, and the Zuni mission was probably not reestablished until a number of years later (see chapter 8).
In 1637, Luis de Rosas was made governor, and he remained officially in office for the next four years. The Rosas period brought the quarrel between the Franciscans and the governor's party to a boil, with consequences that kept New Mexico in turmoil for the next forty years. It is curious that the Inquisition was relatively little involved during the Rosas period. The reason seems to be that Fray Perea continued to exercise the office of commissary, but he was now old and sick. He was also increasingly taken up with on-the-ground missionization efforts, having been assigned the recently established mission station at Cuarac (Quarai) in the Salinas region.
Governor Luis de Rosas was, in Scholes words, "an outspoken, hard hitting soldier, fearless in action. He made his decisions quickly and executed them ruthlessly." In the ever tense situation of New Mexico, this was a recipe for disaster. Rosas set himself to diminish the power of the Franciscans. This included undercutting their authority among the Pueblo Indians and, with the help of the Santa Fe cabildo, subverting one of the missionaries, Friar Juan de Vidania. Apparently, Rosas and the cabildo had hopes that Vidania would be appointed custodian, thus bringing the missions under more direct control of the civil authorities.
Since the documents on the Rosas period come mainly from the missionaries, it is not always possible to establish the truth behind the various accusations and counter-accusations. Rosas established a workshop in Santa Fe, neither the first nor the last such operation in the seventeenth century. The governor used the

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