The Other Slavery (33 page)

The Spanish authorities became incensed. In April 1750, they held emergency meetings with colonists and ecclesiastics and formally declared the Seri nation “treacherous, arrogant, incendiary, and apostate” and contemplated a policy of wholesale removal. The principal proponent of “extirpation,” as this policy became known, was none other than Rodríguez Gallardo, the licenciado who had been so thorough in his interrogations at Pitic. He made it clear now that what he had in mind was not merely sending away a few
cabecillas
(ringleaders), as had been done in the past. “In times of Governor Manuel Bernal de Huidobro [in 1737], four
cabecillas
from California were driven in shackles by a detachment of five soldiers,” Rodríguez Gallardo contended, “and three of these criminals were able to escape while killing Corporal Lucas de Espinosa.” Rodríguez Gallardo himself had dispatched a
collera
(chain gang) “of the most famous [Apache and Seri] robbers, arsonists, and killers,” with even more disastrous results. Having reached the town of Sinaloa after a journey of two hundred leagues (more than six hundred miles), nine prisoners got away and within days killed all the residents of a nearby ranch.
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The worst aspect of this piecemeal policy of punishment from the Spaniards’ perspective was that even the Seri captives who had been marched all the way to central Mexico had eventually returned. Their sense of place and direction seemed almost preternatural: “Take a [Seri] Indian into any depths blindfolded, be it mines, dungeons, or intricate labyrinths, and turn him around a thousand times and he will still be able to tell toward what wind or direction he is facing as if he were a
living compass.” Captives who made their way back to Sonora often became
cabecillas,
who used their newfound geographic and social knowledge to exact revenge: “Two Seris dispatched to the textile factories of Querétaro by Governor Huidobro came back to these coasts, and only these two have put themselves at the head of a group of fugitives causing turmoil and at least 20 homicides.”
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Rodríguez Gallardo’s solution was to deport all Seri Indians to a place from which they would never return. It was not the first time Spanish policymakers had removed Indians in significant numbers. At least since the early 1700s, Spanish soldiers had driven long lines of Tobosos and Apaches, tied together in colleras, from Nuevo León and Chihuahua to central and southern Mexico and the Caribbean islands. The military buildup on the frontier now allowed Spanish officials to envision even more ambitious schemes. By midcentury Rodríguez Gallardo believed that it was possible to remove the entire Seri nation of around three thousand people. All male and female Seris over the age of eight would be sent away, preferably by sea, because “once secured in a boat they will only be able to seek their freedom in their own shipwreck and ruin and without seeing the lay of our continent they would not understand how to return.” Given that the textile sweatshops of central Mexico had not been able to keep the Seris from returning home, Spanish officials decided to ship the Indian prisoners to the “ultramarine islands,” a vague formulation that probably meant the Caribbean islands and quite possibly the Philippines, where many Mexican vagrants and convicts were already being sent.
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The only Seris who would not be shipped away—children younger than eight—would be marched to the Apache frontier to be used as reinforcements. Spanish colonists and their Opata allies had been clinging precariously to their communities in the face of Apache raids in places such as the Valley of Bacanuchi, Terrenate, and San Francisco Xavier de Cuchuta along the headwaters of the San Pedro River. The Seri children would add to their numbers. The governor of Sonora predicted that “the Spaniards or people of reason among whom they intend to place the Seri children will not only agree to it but wish for the children to help
them contain the enemy Apaches.” In this case, Indian slavery was intended as a demographic strategy to populate a dangerous frontier.
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The plan of extirpation unfolded swiftly. In April 1750, Sonoran governor Diego Ortíz Parrilla announced plans to launch an expedition to the island of Tiburón. Over the summer, he gathered men and provisions and had seven large boats outfitted in the Yaqui River to get across the Strait of Infiernillo. When the late-summer rains finally arrived, Spanish soldiers began sweeping the coastal area and arresting Seris in the pueblos of Cucurpe, Opodepe, and Pópulo. In September Spanish soldiers and Pima auxiliaries began crossing over to Tiburón. They faced a determined opponent. At the sight of the approaching boats, the Seris dispersed, poisoning and befouling water holes with herbs and rotting carcasses. In the heat of the summer, they leveraged their superior survival skills while forcing the parched intruders to drink from maggot-infested water sources or import casks of the precious liquid from the mainland.
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In spite of the tremendous difficulties, the Spanish-Pima forces prevailed. Adult Seris were led away in ropes and chains, not quite to the Caribbean islands, as originally proposed, but to Guatemala. Even then, some of the men returned. But the women did not come back. An unspecified number of Seri children were also sent to the Apache frontier as planned. The mission records at Tumacácori, in southern Arizona, reveal that some Seris were baptized in the 1750s. The extirpation strategy ultimately failed, however. Many Seris remained in their homeland and had even more reason to rebel. Three years after the expedition to Tiburón, a Seri leader named Chepillo had a frank conversation with a missionary. When the Spanish friar urged the Indian leader to surrender, Chepillo replied, “I know that if we continue fighting we are damning ourselves, but there is no other way. We are accustomed to living with women. We do not know where our wives are, whether they are living or dead. You would not marry us to others, and if we take others, you will order us whipped.” Chepillo’s reasoning was unassailable. The Seri mission program, which had lasted for more than seventy years, had given way to extirpation and enslavement.
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Colleras and Epidemics

In the course of the eighteenth century, presidios transformed the human landscape of northern Mexico, giving rise to sizeable towns, functioning as reservations, and generally giving Spanish officials and military planners the ability to launch remarkably bold social engineering projects.
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The Apaches were notable victims. They drifted southward into the silver-bearing areas of northern Mexico, at first sporadically and then with greater frequency in the 1740s and 1750s. Decades of suspicion and mistrust finally burst into open conflict. To prevent disruptions and to keep the silver flowing, Spanish officials subjected the Apaches to some of the same policies tested earlier on the Seris. According to the estimates of historian Paul Conrad, between 1770 and 1816 some three to five thousand Apaches and other Indians from the north were led away in chains, bound for central and southern Mexico. The most dangerous were shipped to Cuba. The sight of these lines of Indians tied to one another became all too familiar to contemporaries.
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At the start of this cycle of deportations, Viceroy Carlos Francisco de Croix felt the need to write a letter of advice to one of his officers on how to conduct these marches. Croix, who was nearly at the end of his tour of duty in the New World, had commanded the Spanish garrison of Ceuta in northwestern Africa earlier in his career and therefore knew a thing or two about transporting prisoners. He was very concerned about potential escapes, as his advice makes clear: “Start the march under the cloak of night . . . keep the Indian men in shackles and the women and children tied with ropes . . . never reveal the route that the collera will follow to minimize the likelihood of an ambush.” He recommended that when the caravan set up camp in the middle of the wilderness, far from any settlements, two-thirds of the soldiers form a circle around the prisoners and the last third remain as lookouts. Croix also dispensed some words of wisdom about how to treat the prisoners: “Allow them to have a hot meal at least once a day, do not let the provision of water run out, and do not walk during the hottest hours of the day when the sun is at its most intense but instead have them wash the clothes assigned to them at this
time.” In spite of Croix’s insistence on moderation, these marches were generally dreadful. Soldiers had an incentive to give the prisoners as little food as possible, in order to profit from the budget set aside for food. They also forced the Indians to walk for hours on end in order to wear them down and prevent any escape attempts. Terrible abuse arose from the fact that the majority of the prisoners were women and children, at the mercy of male soldiers. On at least one occasion, some prisoners were able to escape when the Spanish soldiers driving the collera took four female prisoners inside a room while leaving only one guard outside.
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Quite apart from the catalog of indignities and abuse during these marches is the incidence of contagious disease. Slavery and epidemics had gone hand in hand since contact. The abundant documentation of the late eighteenth century bears this linkage out. In effect, these drives moved people living in regions of low demographic density to major urban agglomerations such as Mexico City and Veracruz, which were rife with disease. Consider Sergeant José Antonio Uribe’s march of 1797. He started in the middle of November from the garrison of Pilar de Conchos, north of Parral, with seventy-one Apaches: thirteen adult males, fifty-seven women, and one girl of about twelve. Sergeant Uribe was somewhat apprehensive, because among the thirteen males there was one individual named Polito, who had already escaped from an earlier collera, and another one called Garlén, “who enjoyed a reputation among his people for his spirit and past deeds of war.”
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As it turned out, there were no escape attempts. In a little over a month, all but one of the prisoners had reached Mexico City safely; a lone woman had been left at the presidio of San Miguel de Cerro Gordo—now Villa Hidalgo, about sixty miles south of Parral—to receive medical treatment. Other than this medical issue, the drive had been uneventful. The collera reached Mexico City right around Christmastime. The plan was to rest for a few days before resuming the march to Veracruz. On December 26, the thirteen Apache men were escorted into the prison of the Acordada prison, while the fifty-seven females were interned at the Hospice for the Poor.

Disaster struck during this time. Of the fifty-seven Apache females kept at the hospice, fourteen developed skin eruptions characteristic
of smallpox. Smallpox is caused by a virus called
Variola major,
which moves from host to host through direct contact. The virus passes from a sick person to a new host through invisible droplets of bodily fluids or secretions, which enter the new host’s bloodstream via the mouth, nose, or eyes. Alternatively, dried-out scabs from a recent sufferer also can transmit the virus. A hospice teeming with women from all over Mexico City—easily the largest city in the Western Hemisphere—would have offered nearly ideal conditions for contagion. A face-to-face encounter with an infected person would have sufficed, as would contact with dried-out scabs remaining on floors, beds, or clothes. The Apache women must have become infected almost immediately on arrival.
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The incubation period for smallpox is between ten and fourteen days. During this time, only mild discomfort, which could easily be mistaken for a common cold, is apparent. Then the symptoms—high fevers, headaches and backaches, vomiting, and skin eruptions—flare up with frightening rapidity and virulence. Hospice authorities reported the onset of the illness among the Apache women around the middle of January, a little over fourteen days after their initial internment, and on January 17 they wrote that nine of the women had died and five remained gravely ill. Over the next few weeks, the illness continued to spread. Even though the hospice administrators made valiant efforts to contain the outbreak by moving three of the infected Apaches to the Royal Hospital for Indians (where the illness may well have spread even further) and isolating another two who were bedridden and unable to move, other Apaches got sick. By the middle of February, the count had reached thirty-two dead and four infected. The disease had ravaged nearly two-thirds of the Apache women kept at the Hospice for the Poor. They had ended their days with a priest at their bedside offering to baptize them and save their souls from eternal damnation.

The Apache men fared even worse. The Acordada prison, one of the most characteristic buildings of eighteenth-century Mexico City, was still relatively new. But its narrow hallways, dark and damp cells, and extreme crowding offered ideal conditions for the spread of the disease. Not a single Apache inmate was spared. By early February, of fourteen Apache males (thirteen recently arrived in the collera and one more
who was already at the Acordada), five had died, seven had become gravely ill, and the remaining two appeared to be recovering as if by a miracle. The conditions of starvation to which these Apaches had been subjected during their march to Mexico City and possibly during their stay at the Acordada must have made their suffering even worse. Studies have revealed a correlation between malnourishment and some of the worst effects of smallpox, especially blindness. For a people like the Apaches, who had lived all their lives free of the disease, the experience must have been terrifying. After the onset of symptoms, the eruptions proliferate, not only on the skin but also along the mucous membranes in the mouth and throat, making basic functions such as eating, drinking, and talking extremely painful. In the worst cases, the pustules “converge.” Death is not long in coming after the appearance of these oozing wounds. Even the two Apache males who survived their bout with smallpox remained extremely weak for an extended period. When the order came down from the viceroy to resume the march to Veracruz, only twenty-one women were deemed fit to continue.
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