Kachina and the Cross (33 page)

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Authors: Carroll L Riley

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BOOK: Kachina and the Cross
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Page 164
Custodian Ramirez, because of his duties with the pack train, had returned to Mexico in the fall of 1659, leaving vice-custodian, Fray Garcia de San Francisco, in charge. With Ramirez went a document outlining complaints against the governor, some of them having to do with López's moneymaking proclivities at the expense of Indians, missionaries, and settlers. A second petition was sent by Vice-custodian San Francisco in November. Viceroy Fernández de la Cueva does not seem to have taken any action on the petitions, but he did send copies to the Holy Office. The Inquisitors, in turn, interviewed Ramirez and Joseph de Espeleta, the special envoy who carried the second petition. There the matter rested for the time being.
One of the accusations made against López was that he was trying to enrich himself. He was accused of collecting stock to sell in Parral in spite of his criticism of such activity on the part of the missionaries. He was also charged with forcing Indians from the Tompiro area to collect salt for shipment south. He was supposed to have commandeered some two hundred oxen and pressed Indians into his service to build seven wagons for transporting the governor's goods. López was also accused of taking fleeces from the mission station at Socorro and forcing the Indians there to weave woolen socks for him to sell.
The salary given the governors had been static since the days of Peralta, the second governor, and was increasingly inadequate. There is no doubt that the New Mexico governors in the seventeenth century, like those throughout the Spanish New World, expected to make a profit out of their office, and the governmental structure of the province offered a number of possibilities for profit. One of these was trade, and López had entered on the governorship with trade very much in mind. He invested in large amounts of much-desired goodschocolate, shoes, hats, textiles, and sugarand opened a sort of store in the Casa Real when he reached Santa Fe. López collected a variety of goods: cotton and wool cloaks, piñon nuts, antelope and other hides, salt, and slaves. As we saw above, López was also interested in shipping livestock, even though he had criticized the Franciscans for doing the same. It might be said that livestock shipments, though they may have loomed large in the eyes of the colonists, were very much "small potatoes" compared to the vast herds that supplied the central Mexican market from Nueva Vizcaya and other outer provinces of New Spain.
An even more serious accusation concerned López's policy in regard to the Apaches, who flanked the Pueblo country in the high plains to the east. On September 4, 1659, López led a group of forty colonists and approximately eight hundred Indians onto the plains in some sort of punitive raid. This war party collected about seventy captives (worth two thousand to three thousand pesos). According to the claims of the clergy, however, López took the local Indians
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away at harvest time without making arrangements for their crops (and, indeed, those of the missionaries) to be harvested. They also contended that the raid was illegal, being unprovoked, and exposed the outlying districts of the province to hostile counter-raids. According to testimony by Captain Andrés Hurtado in 1661, there were nomadic raids on the Tompiro pueblos, along the Camino Real in Piro territory, and on the more exposed northern pueblos, Jemez and others. Whether these raids were in retaliation to López's activities is unknown. Indeed, the situation is not at all clear. López may have felt that the colony was under threat and that a preemptive strike was the best strategy. Alternatively, he may simply have been inserting himself into the lucrative slave trade.
Whatever the situation, López did a considerable amount of trading with the eastern Apaches. There had been an annual trade fair at Pecos for some time, with Apaches bringing their hides and other goods. At least in rudimentary form, it probably dated to pre-Spanish times. By López's time, Apachean groups had pushed south and west to the Sangre de Cristos and the line of the Pecos River. The pueblo of Humanas, so named because of the Jumano connection of earlier times, now was the center for trade with these southernmost Apaches. It was also the place where nearby Pueblos brought maize and other goods to trade for skins.
One of the first duties for López when he entered the governorship was to hold an investigation, called in colonial Latin America a
residencia.
In the province of New Mexico, this took the form of a trial hearing conducted by each governor on the affairs of his predecessor. Evidence was collected under the current governor's direction and sent to Mexico City, where the actual ruling was given by the Audiencia, the chief judicial body of the viceroyalty. The retiring governor, Juan Manso, had built up a firm support among leading families within the province. López seems to have developed a prejudice against Manso from Captain Francisco de Anaya Almazán, a well-known encomendero, and other members of his family. Anaya had fallen into Manso's bad graces and was in exile in Mexico City when López first met him. In any case, López de Mendizábal confiscated a considerable amount of Manso's property. Attempts by Manso to bribe the new governor fell through, and eventually Manso was arrested. He finally escaped, in September 1660, through the good offices of friends among the settlers and in the clergy. Ironically, López himself suffered in much the same way during his own residencia two years laterand he was unable to flee.
Within a short time after his arrival, López had created bad feelings by removing certain settlers from various positions in order to make way for his own supporters. For example, the lieutenant governor and captain-general, Tomé (or Thomé) Domínguez de Mendoza was replaced with Tomé's brother,
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Juan. This was one case in which a family was split in their loyalties, but for the most part the provincial families lined up on one side or the other. Eventually, this tightly knit, closely intermarried Spanish population of New Mexico became heavily anti-López.
López, however, did have a number of active supporters. For example, the alcalde mayor of the Galisteo pueblos and Pecos regions, Diego González Bernal, enthusiastically backed López's efforts to legalize the ceremonial Indian dances. But when a quarrel developed between the two men, López turned against González, describing him as a "mestizo by birth." Lopéz's change of heart at least had the effect of sparing González the attentions of the Inquisition. Incidentally, this use of ethnic slurs was endemic in seventeenth-century New Mexico, even by such a man as López, whose rather paternal interest in Indians seems to have been sincere and whose main lieutenant, Captain Nicolás de Aguilar, was pretty definitely a mestizo.
The Anaya Almazán family has already been mentioned. The most active López supporter was Cristóbal de Anaya Almazán, who had been a regidor of the Santa Fe cabildo and procurator-general, or city attorney. The death of his father, Francisco, on July 18, 1662, also meant that he was heir to the encomiendas of Cuarac, a part of Picurís and La Ciénega (San Marcos). A second supporter was Francisco Gómez Robledo, son of a Portuguese native named Francisco Gómez who came to New Mexico in 1604. Francisco's mother was Ann Robledo, daughter of Bartolomé Romero, one of Oñate's captains. A third López adherent was Diego Pérez Romero, who had served as
alcalde ordinario
of the Santa Fe cabildo. Diego Romero's father, Captain Gaspar Pérez, was Flemish, originally from Brussels. Diego was actually related to the Romero family through his mother. One of Romero's brothers had an odd physical feature, an abnormal coccyx that produced a "little tail," and which the Inquisitors thought might be an indication of Judaism or diabolism.
An interesting side issue in the Romero trial hearing, discussed below, was the testimony of Fray Nicolás de Freitas in 1661 about a trip to the Plains made by Romero and five others. The group had a commission from López to trade. Reaching the Apaches, Diego Romero reminded the group of his father, who had traded there in the past and who had fathered a son while there. The child was conceived through the agency of a "trader's marriage," probably serving to link the trader firmly with the group. In any event, Diego Romero asked that his hosts arrange the same sort of liaison.
At about four in the afternoon they brought a tent of new leather and set it up in the field; they then brought two bundles, one of antelope skins and the other of
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buffalo skins, which they placed near the tent. Then they brought another large new buffalo skin which they stretched on the ground and put Diego Romero on it, lying on his back. They then began to dance the
catzina
, making turns, singing, and raising up and laying Diego Romero down again on the skin in accordance with the movements of the dance of the
catzina
. When the dance was ended about nightfall, they put him again upon the skin, and taking it by the corners, drew him into the tent, into which they brought him a maiden, which they left with him the entire night. On the next day in the morning the captains of the rancherias [the Apache settlement] came to see whether Diego Romero had known the woman carnally, seeing that he had known her, they anointed Diego Romero's breast with the blood. Then they put a feather on his head, in his hair, and proclaimed him as their captain, giving him the two bundles of skins and the tent.
There are several interesting aspects to this ceremony. Since Romero's father seems to have gone through with it at an earlier date, it probably was some sort of standard procedure to provide a fictive kinship (adoption?) link between given Apache subgroups and individual Spanish traders. Such ties for the purpose of facilitating trade or other kinds of social relationships are fairly common around the world. The girl given to Romero seems to have been a virgin, at least that is the implication of the story. According to Fray Garcia de San Francisco of Senecú, who reported this episode to Fray Nicolás de Freitas, the Apaches called the ceremony a wedding dance, and said that the action of anointing Romero with the girl's blood constituted a contract of marriage. Certainly, it was not a kachina dance, and probably not an Apache marriage ceremony as such. The archaeologist Donald Blakeslee some years ago suggested that the Romero account represented an early historical example of the Calumet ceremony, a Plains Indian ritual used to establish fictive kin relationships between individuals of different ethnic groups. Even though it seems quite circumstantial, there is always the danger that the account might have been embroidered somewhat by Romero and his companionsor, for that matter, by Fray Nicolás, or by the latter man's informant, Fray García de San Francisco. It seems very unlikely, however, that this story was made up out of whole cloth.
Another loyal follower of López, and in some ways the most interesting of all, was Nicolas de Aguilar. It is not certain where López met Aguilar, but it was probably in New Mexico. At any rate, Aguilar quickly became the governor's most active supporter. This new lieutenant was made alcalde mayor over the Salinas region, which contained Tompiro-and Tiwa-speaking towns. Aguilar was a rather enigmatic but, in many ways, a rather appealing individual. Born in the village of Yurirapundaro some fifty miles south of Querétaro in northeastern

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