Colonial life after the reconquest was different than before; Spanish Bourbons were more interested than the Spanish Hapsburgs had been in making physical claims to their empire against forays by French Bourbons and the English.
Conflicts with Apaches and other hostile groups were no longer seen as acts of the unconverted, but as extensions of European politics. People who weren’t allies could no longer tolerated. Tano speakers were forced from the Santa Cruz area, then out of Chimayó. Land was opened, and people needed to colonize it.
Earlier concerns with the loyalty of Jewish and Moorish converts to the emerging Spanish state transferred to mestizos. A new class was defined, the español, which Angélico Chávez says meant an individual who had been fully acculturated into Spanish life and was restored to trust of the community.
The first man to request land under the new regime was Angélico Chávez’s ancestor, Fernando Durán y Chaves, the younger, who requested 41,533 acres in 1692 north of modern Albuquerque, west of the Río Grande he claimed had been settled by his father before the Pueblo Revolt. However, Diego de Vargas wouldn’t let him move there until he’d completed the Reconquest.
As it was, Chávez says, Vargas had to battle Apache who’d stolen Chaves’ livestock in 1704. He became ill during that campaign and died. The Atrisco Grant wasn’t completely secure until the Tiwa speakers living in Alameda, Puaray and Sandía pueblos moved west to Hopi territory where they joined the Tano speakers who’d refused to resubmit to the Spanish.
In 1710, Francisco Montes Vigil requested more than 100, 000 acres of Tiwa land north of Chaves and west of the Río Grande in return for his services in the Reconquest. He claimed “he was retiring from the army and had acquired a small start of cattle” and so “needed the tract in order to maintain his family, which was large, and also as a pasturage for his animals.”
Vigil and his wife, María Jiménez de Ancizo, had come north in 1695 in the group from Zacatecas led by Juan Paéz Hurtado. Vigil’s grandparents, Juan Montes Vijil and Catalina de Herrera Cantillana, had sufficiently established their ancient hidalgo lineage to be able to migrate from Estremadura to Mexico City in 1611.
His father, Juan Montes Vigil was an unmarried Zacatecan merchant wealthy enough to own at least one mulatto slave woman. He entered some real estate transaction there with Cristóbal Zaldívar, no doubt, some sort of kinsman of Cristóbal de Oñate.
When Francisco and his wife were interviewed by Paéz, they were able to satisfy him they were españols. They arrived in Santa Fé with their five children and a free mulatto servant.
Rather than settle the land, Vigil sold the Alameda Grant in 1712 for 200 pesos to Juan González Bas, a man descended from Juan Griego through his daughter, Isabel Bernal, who had married Sebastián González. Two years later, when he was about 49, Francisco divided 40 head of cattle amongst his children.
He remained active in the military. In 1716 he was with Felix Martínez in his war with the Hopi and in 1720 went with Pedro de Villasur to investigate French influence among the Pawnee. He was one of the few who survived an ambush. He was dead in 1730 at about age 65.
Vigil wouldn’t have been the only one to disguise personal motives in the language expected by a government trying to populate the frontier. Chaves may have said he was reclaiming his father’s land, but in fact he was requesting adjacent land. In 1705 he sold his patrimony to his sister’s husband, Manuel Baca, who owned the land to south.
Notes:
Bowden, J. J. “Town of Alameda Grant,” New Mexico Office of the State Historian website.
Chávez, Angélico. Chávez: A Distinctive American Clan of New Mexico, 1989. Chávez believes the reason Chaves sold the land was his favorite son had been killed there in an accident.
_____. Origins of New Mexico Families, revised 1992 edition.
Hendricks, Rick, John B. Colligan, Charles Martínez y Vigil, José Antonio Esquibel, Stanley M. Hordes, Richard Salazar, and Robert D. Martínez. Research on Monte Vigil published on Genealogía de México Weblog.
No comments:
Post a Comment