The Other Slavery (26 page)

Otermín, Xavier, and other members of the ruling elite faced a stark decision: comply with the rebels’ demand to release “all classes of Indians held by the Spanish” or resist. The first choice would have been the more sensible, as it would have relieved the Spaniards of the difficult conditions in their stronghold and allowed them to evacuate Santa Fe unencumbered by unwilling prisoners. Perhaps it would have paved the way for further peace negotiations. But the governor was not inclined to compromise. He questioned Chief Juan’s motives, arguing that it was not true that the Apaches were allied with the Pueblos (in this the governor was misinformed) and that “these parleys were intended solely to obtain his wife and children and to gain time for the arrival of the other rebellious nations to join them and besiege us.”
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To understand the unwillingness of Otermín, Xavier, and many other colonists to part with their Indian slaves, one has to examine who the people inside the casas reales were. We do not have a full list, but we have an excellent proxy. A few weeks after the siege of Santa Fe, Governor Otermín conducted a muster “of all the soldiers and persons who are here today . . . so that it may be known how many men bearing arms are here at present who can enter the royal service, and how many people may be dead at the hands of the enemy.” In addition to the thousand people who took refuge in the casas reales, the muster list includes
five hundred survivors from Río Abajo who later joined the contingent from Santa Fe. In other words, the muster list accounts for every surviving “Spaniard” and his or her “dependents,” as well as their animals and weapons. It is an extremely rare and valuable snapshot of frontier society.
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In round numbers, the muster list includes a total of fifteen hundred persons. If we could have observed them standing in line, the first thing that would have caught our attention would have been the children. Perhaps two-thirds of those mustered were minors. We would also have been immediately struck by the groupings. Instead of an undifferentiated line, the survivors would have arranged themselves into extended families. Seven of these clans included dozens of servants/slaves and herds of twenty, thirty, or up to eighty horses. Thomé Domínguez de Mendoza, for instance, reported that the enemy had robbed his cattle, houses, and crops and killed “thirty-eight Spanish persons, all being his daughters, grandchildren, sons-in-law, sisters, nephews, nieces, and sisters-in-law as is common knowledge.” But this New Mexican patriarch still passed muster with fifty-five persons, including his wife, four married sons with eight children in their families, “male and female servants, young and old,” and thirty horses. Governor Otermín’s circumstances were similar. He traveled with an entourage of thirty “servants, Spaniards, negroes, and Indians” and thus passed muster with “thirty attendants and servants.”
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Standing next to these clans, we would have noticed some twenty families not quite as rich as the governor but still well-off—mostly the families of ranchers and military officers—each of which possessed half a dozen to a dozen servants and some horses. The rest were poor New Mexicans: Indians from central Mexico, convicts sent to New Mexico to serve out their sentences, widows with large progenies, rank-and-file soldiers, and others. Yet even some of them had servants. Apolinar Martín passed muster “on foot, naked, and without arms.” The muster secretary thought it appropriate to add that he was “extremely poor.” And yet Martín declared three servants. Similarly, Catalina de Zamora was a widow who passed muster with four grown nieces, “all on foot and extremely poor.” But she reported five servants. And a
convict named Cristóbal de Velasco listed his wife, a small child, and two female servants.

By the time of the muster, the Spanish colonists had already lost two or three hundred servants to the rebellion. Some of these servants had fled in the early days of the insurrection, while others had been carried off by the attackers or had died in battle. But the colonists retained many more. In rough numbers, one thousand Spaniards owned five hundred servants, collectively worth a fortune of about 50,000 pesos. Indeed, it was the Spaniards’ pervasive take in the human loot of New Mexico that had brought them to their bloody stand.
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Back in Santa Fe, Governor Otermín, his close circle of advisers, and many other colonists, defying almost all logic, refused to surrender their captives and prepared for a long fight. But with the passing of each day, their situation became more desperate. Following the ineffective parley, and as the Pueblo warriors began advancing from the south toward the Spanish stronghold, Spaniards and Indians fought in alleyways and adobe houses in the barrios to the south of Santa Fe. Having barely stopped this advance, Spanish soldiers learned on August 17 that another contingent of Indians from Taos and Picurís had entered Santa Fe from the north, setting up camp on a strategic elevation not far from the casas reales. The Indian attackers now numbered about two thousand. “They surrounded us from all parts,” wrote a chronicler, “and set fire to the main church and to other houses and took up positions in several buildings.” The rebellious Indians also managed to cut off the water supply to the casas reales.
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The Spaniards’ situation was becoming untenable, but they held out for a few more days. At last, on August 21, “reduced to the extremity of dying inside or going out to fight,” the Spaniards made their move. A stream of one thousand people flowed out of the casas reales and straggled southward, fleeing for their lives. The adult males bearing arms numbered only about a hundred. They were posted at the front and rear and along the flanks of the crowd of women, children, servants, and animals. The armed men had to not only fend off Indian attacks from the outside but also guard against escape attempts from the inside. The first day, the refugees walked merely one league, or about three miles. They
spent the night in a broad field just outside town where they could easily spot any approaching warriors. The rebels were now in complete control of Santa Fe.

Over the next few weeks of their journey, the Spaniards got their first look at the devastation in the wake of the insurrection. They passed through abandoned pueblos and passed burned churches and ranches with strewn corpses as they moved southward, following the banks of the Rio Grande. The victorious rebels followed the retreating Spaniards but left their way unimpeded. Within two months, the Spanish had abandoned the kingdom of New Mexico and would not be back for twelve years. The Pueblo Revolt of 1680 had succeeded.

Explaining the Insurrection

For more than three centuries, the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 has fascinated churchmen, public officials, booksellers, scholars, and the public at large. This was “the secret rebellion that drove the Spaniards out of the Southwest,” as the subtitle of one book proudly proclaims. But what motivated the Indians to risk their lives in an uncertain insurrection in the first place? What compelled them to bloody their hands torturing and killing?
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Ever since the seventeenth century, religion has been offered as the primary driver of the Indians’ acts. Indeed, Spaniards who lived through the rebellion pointed their fingers at the Devil. We may scoff at such an explanation, but seventeenth-century Christians fervently believed that the Devil roamed in the world and mingled with humans. Satan preyed especially on the weak. In Europe he tempted credulous women and turned them into witches. In fact, witchcraft trials peaked in Europe and North America in the seventeenth century (the famous Salem witch trials took place in 1692). In the New World, the Devil had a field day among unconverted or recently converted Indians. Particularly on remote frontiers, he tricked them into performing human sacrifices, adoring idols, and rejecting Christianity. Throughout the seventeenth century, northern Mexico was rocked by rebellions reportedly inspired
by the Devil. In regard to an anti-Spanish movement that broke out in northwestern Mexico in 1601, one Jesuit wrote, “These old Indians were the principal instigators of the uprising, because by means of a diabolical spell they made their people believe the Christian Spaniards were against them.” At midcentury a priest in Durango similarly declared that Indians “are subject to the influences of shamans, instruments of the devil, who incite their listeners to rebel and commit atrocities.” In such a charged spiritual landscape, Po’pay’s machinations in New Mexico could only have been interpreted as the Devil’s latest ploy to roll back the kingdom of Jesus Christ on earth.
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A much later generation of Anglo-American writers of the Southwest arrived at a different interpretation of the Pueblo Revolt. Historians and authors of the late nineteenth century rejected the preternatural explanations advanced by their colonial predecessors. Yet they continued to place religion at the core of the insurrection. In their view, the fanaticism and zealotry of Spanish church officials drove the Indians of New Mexico to the breaking point. The verdict of L. Bradford Prince, governor of the territory of New Mexico from 1889 to 1893, is quite typical: “Religious feeling was a very strong element among the causes which led to the revolution,” Prince wrote in 1883, “and a bitter hatred of the Christianity of the Spaniards was evinced in every act during the struggle.”
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The most influential articulator of this view was the San Francisco–based collector extraordinaire and entrepreneur Hubert Howe Bancroft. A far cry from a self-effacing historian, Bancroft was the imperious CEO of H. H. Bancroft & Co., the largest bookselling concern in the western United States. This transplanted easterner progressed rapidly from book dealer to collector to author. His approach to history writing was, like much else he did, industrial. He set up a literary workshop that employed more than six hundred individuals. These assistants not only cataloged his vast collection of books and documents but also took notes and assembled data on the known “facts” of a particular area and period, composing preliminary texts of their findings. Bancroft went over these drafts, revised them (sometimes minimally), and published them under his name. Bancroft’s operation published thirty-nine hefty volumes offering a grand historical panorama of Central America, Mexico, the
American Southwest, and the Pacific coast as far north as Alaska. One of his tomes dealt with New Mexico and naturally included a section on the Pueblo Revolt of 1680.
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Using the most formidable array of seventeenth-century documents from New Mexico assembled up to that time, Bancroft surveyed half a century of New Mexico’s history prior to the uprising. He regretted that he could not offer a “continuous and complete narrative” (a mild reproach to his helpers, no doubt). Despite these gaps in his knowledge, Bancroft anchored his narrative firmly on Spanish Christianization efforts and Pueblo resistance. As he summed up the process, the Spanish friars “worked zealously to stamp out every vestige of the native rites; and the authorities had enforced the strictest compliance with Christian regulations, not hesitating to punish the slightest neglect, unbelief, or relapse into paganism.” As for the Pueblos, Bancroft ventured the opinion that they “seem to have been more strongly attached than most American tribes to their aboriginal faith, and they had secretly continued so far as possible the practice of the old forms of worship.” The stage was set and the conclusion inescapable: the clash of 1680 rested, “largely, on religious grounds.”
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Scholars of the past thirty years have revised Bancroft’s interpretation. Their explanations of the Pueblo Revolt combine multiple causes, including short-term disruptions such as famines and epidemics and long-term or structural factors such as religious antagonism. But while all leading explanations are now multicausal, they continue to emphasize the religious character of the revolt. Historian Ramón Gutiérrez has advanced what remains the most convincing formulation of the religious thesis. According to Gutiérrez, in the early decades of New Mexico’s colonization, the Pueblo Indians accepted Christianity peacefully, or at least did not actively oppose it. But starting in the 1640s, they grew disillusioned. As their lives deteriorated markedly due to famine, illness, and intensified raids from Apaches, the Pueblos came to believe that the god of the missionaries was unable to protect them. Gutiérrez writes, “The Franciscans were no longer the supermen they had once seemed. The novelty of their gifts had worn off and their magic had proven ineffectual in producing rain, health, prosperity, and peace.” Pueblo confidence
was further undermined in the late 1660s when the province suffered a four-year famine, followed by an epidemic in 1671. The Natives increasingly shunned Catholicism and turned to traditional shamans for guidance and relief. In turn the missionaries of New Mexico grew alarmed at these developments. For two generations, they had worked hard to Christianize the Pueblos. They had built more than forty churches and chiseled a community of believers out of the desert. Now, suddenly, the entire spiritual enterprise appeared to be in jeopardy. The missionaries felt betrayed and responded “as any father would have with disobedient children,” Gutiérrez tells us. “Punishments began.”
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What makes this picture of the Indians’ disillusionment leading to increased Spanish severity especially convincing is that plenty of evidence of religion-inspired oppression and cruelty exists in the available documentation. Some duress and occasional corporal punishments are to be expected on a remote frontier where a handful of missionaries attempted to enforce religious orthodoxy on recalcitrant communities. The reality, however, was far worse. Near impunity permitted friars to extract unpaid Native labor. Governor Bernardo López de Mendizábal (1659–1661) flatly accused the missionaries of exploiting the Indians under the pretense that it was “for the temples and divine worship” and forcing “all the Indians of the pueblos, men as well as women, to serve them as slaves.” Some of the friars also abused their privileged position to procure sex. Oral traditions from the Hopi villages—which are corroborated at least in part by documentary information—detail how some friars at Oraibi and Shungopovi would send the men to fetch water in distant places so that the friars could be with the women during their absence.
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