Kachina and the Cross (38 page)

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Authors: Carroll L Riley

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Page 182
and tavern keepers are made Inquisitors, merely because they prove that they are old Christians. But governors have to be gentlemen . . . like myself. By the Virgin Mary, I know I have not erred, either in malice or in ignorance, for I act wisely, being a man of learning and judicious in my actions.
As Scholes remarks, López was no doubt a man very troubled in mind. His remarks can hardly have endeared him to the Inquisitors. Nevertheless, they were insightful as an analysis of the Inquisition. The Tribunal was obsessed with the concept of ''sangre limpio.'' Its members were required to have a genetic purity that could be found more easily in the common people than among the upper classes with their heritage of ethnic mixture with Moors and Jews. And the level of learning among Holy Office personnel may well have been lower than in the nobility.
While at Santo Domingo, López and Doña Teresa were confined separately, in what seemed to be a bit of gratuitous cruelty on the part of the Franciscans, and the governor was frantic with worry over his wife. It was decided by Posada that the important prisoners would be sent to Mexico City with the autumn supply train, which left in October with Ramirez still in charge. López was shackled in a cart, while Doña Teresa was assigned one of the ex-governor's carriages for her personal transport. As he was being chained, López called to Santo Domingo Indians standing nearby, "See my sons, how much the Fathers can do, since they hold me a prisoner." On Posada's protest that it was the Inquisition who held him prisoner, López replied, "Such a thing has never happened except to a God Man and now to me. I swear to Christ that I am a better Christian than all the men in the world. Look, gentlemen [to some Spaniards standing there], there is no longer God or a King, since such a thing could happen to a man like me."
As the caravan rolled southward, López became desperate to get at least a glimpse of his wife. In order to prevent this, Posada had heavy curtains placed at each end of the cart, blocking off the view except for a narrow space in front. Nevertheless, the ex-governor was able to get news of his wife and others of his party in the wagon train. After reaching Mexico, López also managed to get word to members of his own family and to receive replies from them.
It was April 10, 1663, when López and Doña Teresa were formally turned over to the Inquisitors and placed in separate cells at the secret Holy Office prison. Over the next year concurrent trials were held for the two. As per Inquisition custom, the two were allowed attorneys, and they presented vigorous defenses. López, however, was seriously ill. He had long suffered from gout and other physical infirmities, some probably dating from his stay in the tropical lowlands
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of Cartagena. By the beginning of 1664, the ex-governor's life was obviously in danger. In May of 1664 he petitioned the court to put him in the same cell as his wife. The two had been in contact through an assistant jailer, one Juan de Cárdenas, who had been a friend of Teresa's father in Cartagena. This liaison was eventually discovered, and Cárdenas removed from the scene. Although the Inquisitors refused to join the couple, they did allow López to keep the outer door of his cell open during the day to improve ventilation. His condition worsened, however, and López finally died on September 16, 1664, apparently without having seen his wife for the last two years of his life. He was buried in unconsecrated ground in a corral on the prison grounds.
Doña Teresa, meanwhile, was conducting a vigorous defense, accusing various of the colonists and missionaries of the province of lying about herself and her husband. She scornfully tore apart the hearsay evidence of servants and others about her alleged Judaizing, her reading of forbidden books (
Orlando Furioso!
) and her social and religious habits. Finally, in December 1664, after twenty months in prison, her trial was suspended and she was freed.
Teresa de Aguilera returned to live with family and friends in Mexico City. She made a number of attempts to get back some of the goods and property belonging to her and her husband that had been seized by the Inquisition. This economic aspect of the López family litigation stretched on for a quarter century, and the final disposition is not known. Even though the principal was now dead, the trial of López de Mendizábal continued. It was not until April 1671 that the Holy Office decided not to press further action against López. His bones were taken up, and the following month they were reburied in Mexico City, in consecrated earth under the chapel of the church of Santo Domingo.
What can be said of this prickly man, often proud to the point of delusion? Though very much the Spanish grandee, López was sometimes generous, and he seems to have felt a genuine responsibility for his Indian wards. He could sneer at the low-born mestizos in the colony, yet his most trusted and most loyal lieutenant was a mestizo. Probably the best-educated New Mexican of his time, traveled and urbane, López, when in a rage, was also a master of invective. His financial affairs quickly became tangled, and clearly he could be as venal as other governors (though perhaps less so than his predecessor, Manso, and his successor, Peñalosa). His love and worry for his wife can hardly be doubted, especially in the dark last months and years. Still, this did not keep López from a continuing series of sexual adventures, which he seemed to enjoy hugely. López knew Church doctrine, and there is every indication that he was a devout Christian, yet his contempt for the Franciscans grew with each passing month of his governorship. He was a person who took quick action and doggedly followed
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through, even when such actions were unnecessarily confrontational. López knew his own mind and acted on it with vigor.
Those are interesting
personal
characteristics, but did López de Mendizábal as governor also have an effect on the direction of New Mexico colonial policy? Here it can surely be said that he did have an effect, but that it was basically negative. He came to the governorship at a crucial turning point in the history of the colony. The first decades in which the missionaries believed it necessary to cautiously feel their way along, compromising with native religious and social customs, were now over. As of 1659, the Franciscans had educated two generations of Pueblo Indians in the ways of the Spanish and Christian worlds. The Crown policy of encouraging native rule by installing native cabildo-like officers among the Pueblos and making them responsible for a part of the local governance had now been in place for almost forty years. The missionaries had not been enthusiastic about this self-rule because it tended to dilute their own authority, but now they used the native-Spanish-oriented power structure to advance their own program of rapid ruthless religious acculturation.
When López arrived, the second, intolerant phase of the great struggle for the minds and souls of the Pueblo Indians was about to begin. Without meaning to, López hastened this new direction in Spanish-Indian policy. By attempting to lighten the harsh economic burden on the Indians, and especially by sponsoring their native dances, López earned the burning enmity of the friars. The Franciscans quickly demonstrated their power over both the office and person of the governor, and over all those unwise enough to try to advance his policies. Because of that, López's personality probably would have made very little difference in what happened. Had he been the soul of tact, and a paragon of rectitude in fiscal and sexual matters, he would still have been hated. And in trying too much, too fast, López succeeded in intensifying the very trends he sought to reverse. It is not at all clear to me to what extent López de Mendizábal saw a danger in the increasing attack on Pueblo Indian culture by the Franciscans. Perhaps he did not envision an actual rebellion on the horizon, but López was a highly trained administrator and must have sensed the tensions building. The static inbred colony of New Mexico desperately needed Pueblo military help against the steadily rising menace of Apaches, Navajos, and Utes. An attempt to lighten the economic burden of this indispensable Pueblo population would have made both good moral sense and good military sense. And to López, it must have seemed ludicrous to repress the popular dances at a time when the good will of the Pueblos was increasingly important.
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But López failed, and in his failure caused an acceleration of the factors that he saw as dangerous or undesirable. The Franciscans had determined to make an example of the recalcitrant governor, and they did it all too well. None of López's successors were willing to reverse the mission Pueblo policy, increasingly dangerous as it must have seemed. New Mexico was soon spiraling downward to war.
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Chapter Eleven
The Gathering Storm
In one way, the arrival of Diego Dionisio de Peñalosa as governor of New Mexico opened a new era of church-state relationships. The Franciscans had proved their power when it came to their control over, and relationship with, the native peoples. However, the basic economic structure of the province was not changed, and the need, or at least the temptation, for the governor and his party to turn a profit was still as much in evidence as ever.
Diego Dionisio de Peñalosa Bricefio y Berdugo, the man who replaced López, was born in Lima, in the viceroyalty of Peru, sometime in 1621 or 1622, the son of Alonso de Peñalosa, member of a locally important Spanish Creole family. Diego held several offices in the viceroyalty until questions about his conduct of both public and private affairs forced him to flee Peru. Sometime in the early 1650s he made his way to Mexico and served in various military posts. Eventually appointed by Viceroy Fernández de la Cueva to the position of alcalde mayor of the districts of Xiquilpa and Chilchota (in western and northwestern Michoacán), Peñalosa remained in the west for three years. In 1660, the new viceroy, Juan de Leiva, Conde de Baños, made him governor of New Mexico. He left shortly for the province and arrived in Santa Fe in mid-August 1661. Peñalosa immediately and understandably became the rallying point for dissatisfied colonists and, of course, the missionaries. The residencia for ex-governor López was launched at once with Peñalosa and the new custodian, Father Alonso de Posada, working very closely together. Peñalosa's relationship with the Franciscans was very good, and he backed them totally in matters relating to Indian labor. He did fail to get López's new wage scale reversed, in spite of his charge in the residencia that it had beggared the province. Peñalosa accused López of introducing the doubled wage so that he would be the only person able to afford Pueblo Indian labor (for his own trade and manufacturing enterprises). This must have struck the Audiencia officials
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in Mexico City as a bit too Machiavellian to be believable; at any rate, they sustained the new wage rate.
But aside from that rebuff, the Franciscans were well treated. The new governor returned the friars' privilege of free labor from the Pueblos, and generally backed the missionaries in their rights to discipline individual Pueblo Indians. In these things he was following López's residencia ruling. On the other hand, the Audiencia members, sitting in Mexico City, were somewhat equivocal as to the missionaries' right or need to suppress the native kachina ceremonies. Given Peñalosa's firm backing for a policy of repression, however, this was somewhat of a moot point. For the rest of the pre-revolt period there was no serious government interference in the Franciscan war on native religion. The Pueblo religious leaders for the most part went underground, only to reappear with sudden and explosive violence in 1680.
Although perfectly willing to aid the missionaries when it came to dealing with the Indians, Peñalosa had other ideas in terms of finances. For one thing, he saw the possibilities of obtaining all, or at least a good part, of the various monies resulting from the widespread López operations. Peñalosa moved rapidly in that direction, aiding ex-governor Manso in his claims against López but holding on to considerable amounts of López's property, including some three thousand pesos in silver bullion, the proceeds of goods, mainly Apache captives, sold by López in Sonora. Some fifteen hundred pesos worth of skins and textile goods owned by the ex-governor were also impounded by Peñalosa with the excuse that such monies were intended to pay for the expenses of López's trial and imprisonment. A great deal of Lópezs personal possessions, including livestock worth more than a thousand pesos, were seized under the pretext that they were needed to pay for a Mexico City lawsuit. It seems likely that Peñalosa intended to keep as large a percentage as possible of these funds.
The situation became more complicated with the order of arrest by the Inquisition of the López couple, brought on August 18, 1662, by the same messenger who brought the Audiencia sentence in the López residencia. Along with this order from the Holy Office came the instruction to embargo the López property. This sealed document passed through the governor's hands and was delivered to Custodian Posada on August 19.
It is clear that Peñalosa realized the importance of the document, and he may have also been informed of the contents by Father Nicolás de Freitas, who had befriended the governor. This embargo of the López estate caused Peñalosa to move quickly before the Inquisition action could be formally promulgated. On August 24 he tried to persuade Doña Teresa to arrange that all the López goods be turned over to him in order to forestall Father Posada and the Inquisition.

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