Kachina and the Cross (25 page)

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Authors: Carroll L Riley

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Page 125
likely that the early kiva D at Las Humanas (Gran Quivira) and the convento patio kiva at Awatovi excavated by J. Brew were also used for this purpose. It is possible that a number of other early missionized pueblos also had this type of kiva.
Along these lines, it is interesting that the pre-Spanish Pueblo kivas continued more or less in use without mission interference until the furious anti-kiva campaign that followed the López de Mendizábal period. There was a continuous series of attempts by the Pueblo Indians to practice native ceremonials, especially the masked kachina dances. Also, the ceremonial game of
patol
, which I have suggested came from Mexico with Coronado's Mexican Indian allies, was documented for the early seventeenth century as playing a part in baptismal ceremonies. After López de Mendizábal's time, however, there was a concerted attempt to wipe out the more obvious symbols and centers of Pueblo religion. The intolerance of the missionaries became more intense, and it shortly led to the Pueblo Revolt.
If the missionaries in New Mexico constructed pseudo-kivas for instructional purposes, it follows a line of thinking utilized by the Franciscans in central Mexico during the first part of the sixteenth century. For example, Pedro de Gante and his fellow missionaries wrote catechisms using native Nahuatl pictographs. Because of the similarities in certain Aztec religious practices (confession and penance for example) and Christian rituals, the missionaries attempted to use the old practices to effect the new. They also established a college at Tlatelolco based on the pre-Hispanic Aztec
calmecac
schools, the idea being to train noble Aztec youths to the clergy. For a time the Franciscans followed this practice, though there probably was some resistance from the earliest period. Eventually, and perhaps inevitably, given the innovative nature of the program, there was a reaction against this "nativization" of the mission program later in the century. In 1555, for example, the order came from Spain that sermons should not be written in indigenous languages. At the same time, native ceremonial displays of the Christian faith were regulated to guard against any pagan content, and the ordination of Indians was forbidden. By the time New Mexico was colonized, the nativization of religion had ceased to be a normal part of the Franciscan agenda.
Still, one suspects that this tradition, even though subversive, may have maintained itself on the edge of the Franciscan New World. In the province of New Mexico, individual friars may have continued to experiment with it. Certainly, Oñate himself was not hesitant to use the kivas for meetings with members of the Pueblo Indian power structure. If kiva-like structures were built to explain the new religion in a setting reminiscent of the old, the practice had died out (or was felt no longer necessary) by mid-century. After the López de Mendizábal period, it likely would have been totally rejected.
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Chapter Nine
Spanish Society in New Mexico
The colony of New Mexico grew very slowly during the seventeenth century. There were some 560 people with Oñate, counting the families of soldiers and the numerous drivers, herders, personal servants, and slaves (see chapter 4), but this number likely fell during the next few years. It was not until Peralta's time, after the Spanish Crown had made a firm decision to maintain the colony as a mission province, that the new province began to expand. Even then, Hispanic settlement of the area was slow and sporadic with only one chartered town, the villa of Santa Fe. In addition to its permanent population, a certain number of people lived in the villa seasonally. These included the thirty-five encomenderos and their families as well as many of the estancieros, the owners of ranches and farms scattered throughout the region.
Various population figures have been given for the province of New Mexico during the seventeenth century. An estimate by Oakah L. Jones for 1630 suggests "perhaps seven hundred and fifty Spaniards, mestizos and converted Indians living in Santa Fé." This number may be somewhat high unless the author meant that a significant portion of these people were converted Pueblo Indians working for their encomenderos in Santa Fe. In 1638 the Franciscan commissary-general, Juan de Prada, spoke of about fifty homes and some two hundred Spaniards in the town of Santa Fe. In the petition of former governor Francisco Martínez de Baeza the following year, it was noted that from Senecú to Santa Fe there were "ten or twelve farms of Spaniards who plant wheat and maize by irrigating with water which is obtained from the Rio del Norte." In Santa Fe, according to Martínez, there were "a few more than fifty inhabitants.'' However, Martínez de Baeza added that the entire province contained "two hundred persons, Spaniards and
mestizos
, who are able to bear arms.'' Counting families and perhaps servants, this would mean a total population of several hundred people.
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France V. Scholes believed that "during the first three or four decades after the founding of the province the total was probably less than one thousand." In Scholes's view, the province as a whole never exceeded 2,500 and may have been fewer in the revolt year of 1680. According to the
Autos tocantes
documents for 1680-81, there were 1,946 individuals (including at least 500 servants, some who have may have been Pueblo Indians or Apaches) counted at La Salineta just before the party reached Paso del Norte. Scholes added to that number the 401 settlers and friars recorded as being killed and comes up with a figure of 2,347. C. W. Hackett considered this to be an underestimation. He believed that the La Salineta tally was not a full count, and that the earlier estimatethat Governor Otermín had 1,000 people with him and Lt. Governor Garcia from Rio Abajo had 1, 500was more nearly correct. This would make the population in the colony in 1680 around 2,900 individuals, less those Pueblo and Apache Indians who may have been included in the count. The Mexican Indians of Analco were probably listed with the Hispanic settlers, but we cannot be sure of that. The fact is that Spanish population in New Mexico in 1680 still cannot be estimated with any certainty.
The New Mexican Hispanic population was ethnically mixed from the beginning. It is true that the power elite of the colonywhich consisted of the governor and other royal officials, the encomenderos, and the missionarieswere mainly Europeans or
crioles
(American-born individuals of European ancestry). These were primarily of Spanish descent, though there were Portuguese, Flemish, and French foreigners in the group. Probably the most important family in the latter part of the seventeenth century was that of Domínguez de Mendoza. The key member of this kin group, Juan de Domínguez de Mendoza, was an important administrative officer and soldier during this period. A partial list of other leading families includes Baca, Durán y Chávez, Gómez Robledo, Lucero de Godoy, and Márquez.
From Oñate's time, however, there had been
castas:
various mixtures of European, Native American, and African. The numbers of blacks, and diverse combinations of black with Indian and European ancestry, had grown rapidly during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. By 1650 individuals with some African admixture were estimated to form 13 percent of the non-indigenous population in New Spain. In New Mexico, individuals of mixed ancestry seem to have been accepted for the most part, and many became solid citizens. For example, a partly black freedwoman named Isabel Olvera, or Olivera, came to the colony in 1600, and one of her sons, or perhaps a grandson, was sent to bring back Nicolás Ortiz to Nueva Vizcaya in the aftermath of the murder of Governor Rosas. A number of the provincial officials were of mixed blood: captains Diego López Sambrano (called a "half-mulatto"), Alvaro García Holgado, Juan Francisco, and
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Alonso Garcia; and alcaldes mayores Francisco Ortega, Luis López, Juan Luján, and Joseph Nieto. The wife of the Spaniard Juan de la Cruz, who held the rank of
alférez
, was a central Mexican Indian. Nicolás de Aguilar, perhaps López de Mendizábal's most influential lieutenant, and alcalde mayor of the Salinas area, was several times referred to in official documents as a mestizo. These individuals were sometimes highly regarded. In a letter to the Tribunal of the Inquisition on April 1, 1669, the commissary Fray Juan Bernal mentions a number of witnesses in a case against Cristóbal de Anaya Almazán, a former adherent of Governor López in the early 1660s (see chapter 10). In the letter, Bernal lists the mulatto captain, Francisco de Ortega, a man whom Father Juan considered to be "truthful," "honorable," and "entirely satisfactory.'' A second mulatto captain, Joseph Nieto, was in Bernal's opinion, ''a truthful man and a good Christian." A 1689 document from Mexico City, a legal dispute between Governor Jironza and ex-governor Reneros, describes Captain Roque Madrid, head of the El Paso presidio and a soldier of extraordinary importance in the reconquest period, as a mulatto. I have been unable to find any other evidence for this status, though Angelico Chávez describes Roque and several other members of his family as swarthy or dark.
Only in the turbulent Rosas period did chauvinism and race prejudice become strongly overt. In October of 1641, Fray Bartolomé Romero, in a letter to the Franciscan commissary-general, said that the Rosas-packed Santa Fe cabildo contained "four Mestizo dogs." Even more vehement was a November 1643 statement of Alonso Baca (whose brother, Antonio, had just been executed for his part in the murder of ex-governor Rosas). He declared that the governor's followers included mostly "a foreigner, a Portuguese, and mestizos and sambohijos, sons of Indian women and negros and mulattoes."
Ramón Gutiérrez believes that the eighteenth-century documents show a strongly layered society with the Spaniards, among whom personal honor was an important component of social status, forming an elite class. At the top of the social pyramid were the upper-class "white" Spaniards, government officials, owners of estancias, military officers, and other members of the elite group. Below them were the Spanish or largely Spanish freeholders. At the bottom of the pyramid were Pueblo Indians and slaves, the latter mostly genízaros.
Whatever the situation in the eighteenth century, it is clear that such a rigid system did not hold in the seventeenth. As Scholes points out, despite occasional violent denunciations, various people with mixed ancestryIndian, white, and blackheld important offices in seventeenth-century New Mexico. This was inevitable because of the relatively small in-migration to the colony, resulting in an estimated 80 percent born-in-the-colony population in 1680-81. There was a considerable blurring of ethnic lines in part because the castas tended to marry
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outside their groups. Although New Mexico was hardly a paradise of racial harmony, there was a potential for substantially good living for mestizos and mulattos during the seventeenth century. It was, perhaps, a harbinger of the racial and cultural diversity that New Mexicans are proud of today.
Life on the frontier, "remote beyond compare," as Diego de Vargas later called the region, was crude, limited, and introverted. Following the initial colonization by Oñate there was a slow spread of individual families up and down the Rio Grande Valley in isolated farm or ranch steads or estancias. As already mentioned, the only town (
villa
in Spanish) was Santa Fe, where the government had been moved from the original town of San Gabriel near the mouth of the Chama, across the river from present-day San Juan Pueblo. Santa Fe was laid out in regular Spanish cabildo form with government buildings, a church, and as indicated above, homes for the various citizens, which included encomenderos and estancieros. South of the Santa Fe River was a district called Analco where a number of central Mexican Indians were settled under charge of the missionaries. But Santa Fe was not really a city in any realistic use of that term. In 1776, more than a century and a half after its founding, the Canonical Visitor Fray Francisco Atanasio Domínguez was sent from the Franciscan mother province in Mexico to inspect the New Mexico custodia. His comments on Santa Fe are revealing.
This villa . . . lacks everything. Its appearance is mournful because not only are the houses of earth, but they are not adorned by any artifice of brush or construction. To conclude, the Villa of Santa Fe (for the most part) consists of many small ranchos at various distances from one another, with no plan as to their location, for each owner built as he was able, wished to, or found convenient. . . .
In spite of what has been said, there is a semblance of a street in this villa. It begins on the left facing north shortly after one leaves the west gate of the cemetery of the parish church and extends down about 400 or 500 varas [1,100 to 1,375 feet]. Indeed, I point out that this quasi-street not only lacks orderly rows, or blocks, of houses, but at its very beginning, which faces north, it forms one side of a little plaza in front of our church. The other three sides are three houses of settlers with alleys between them. . . . The entrance to the main plaza is down through these. The sides, or borders, of the latter consist of the chapel of Our Lady of Light, which is to the left of the quasi-street mentioned . . . and faces north between two houses of settlers. The other side is the government palace, which, with its barracks, or quarters for the guard, and prison, is opposite the said chapel facing south. The remaining two sides are houses of settlers, and since there is nothing worth noting about them, one can guess what they are like from what has been seen. The government palace is like everything else here, and enough said.

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