La Cañada - Land Use

The actual land use patterns in the La Cañada settlement before the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 are difficult to determine for two reasons. It’s not clear if differences in treatment of one man’s land from another’s resulted from actual differences or differences in reporting by Luis Pérez Granillo as his entries became repetitive. Second, it doesn’t appear the translators were consistent in their uses of English and Spanish words.

Still, Granillo seems to have described a settlement that was an embryo of what would emerge after the reconquest when the colony regulated the land allocations of community land grants. Alvar Carlson has described that in some detail in The Spanish-American Homeland.

According to him, land would come to be allocated in strips 420' wide running between highlands and irrigation ditches, so each farmer had access to bottom lands where he could grow chile, beans and corn on the heavier, more fertile soils, upper lands where he could grow fruit trees on the coarser soils, and grazing lands without irrigation. Houses were built between the farm land and the fruit land, and roads were up land on non-productive soil.

The average width was probably less a matter of legal precedent, than the amount of land that could effectively be watered by an irrigation branch. Carlson said the fields could be any length, depending on the topography.

The most important difference between La Cañada and the later long lots is there was no acequia system with a main ditch above the settlement with laterals distributing water downslope to settlers. Instead, Granillo suggested there was a single canal with homesteads of both sides.

No matter how level the land, those on the down stream side to the north would have had more moisture, especially since they were also closer to the Santa Cruz river from whence moisture could migrate under ground. They would also have had potentially more fertile land.

As it happens, Granillo indicates most of those people had suertes or agricultural lands or irrigation. The three terms were synonymous, and referred to land that could grow corn, wheat or other crops that required water. The people on the other side of the canal were said to have had lands that could support a family.

If the settlement was between the mound and the Río Grande as I suspect, it was a triangular area with the apex to the east. Men on both sides of the canal at the west end were said to have pastures or vegas. Again the two terms were synonymous. They may all have been on the less productive, more recent quaternary soils next to the Santa Cruz and Río Grande rivers where animals could forage the scrub.

The houses that were damaged by water were at the narrow end on the mound or south side. It’s likely, the men didn’t have long enough lots to build out of harm’s way. I have no idea if the use of house and houses implied more than one dwelling, or more than one building on a holding.

Carlson believes long lots developed from the rigors of farming in an arid environment and that the earlier development of such lots by the French in the 1630's in Quebec was an independent invention.

There is much to be said for that view. When Granillo was saying the larger holdings could be subdivided, it’s clear he meant they should be split lengthwise.

However, when this land use pattern is compared to that of the later Americans who came and dammed rivers to keep the water to themselves and starved those downriver or fenced common pasture lands, it’s also clear there was a cultural component in the development of long lots.

The La Cañada settlers did not believe every man in the settlement should have an equal amount of land - some had enough frontage for three along the canal, and some had barely enough for one. Some had land elsewhere and weren’t dependent on just this acreage, and some were truly yeomen.

After the reconquest, the colony would make two kinds of grants - large land grants to men like the Martín Serranos and regulated community grants described by Carlson for settlers without resources. In a sense, the latter continued Santa Fé’s early promise that every settler should be given two lots for a house and garden, two suertes for crops, and four large caballerias for grazing.

The important difference between the two periods is that the government of Spain transferred to the French Bourbons soon after the reconquest and French bureaucratic values were probably filtering through, at least in the written protocols for the community grants.

The La Cañada settlers did not have a strong sense of community or common cause, although they did care about some of their kin and their children married neighbors. They probably owed their views of equal access to water to the Moors. However, like the French, they did create a settlement where every family had access to water and every type of land needed to grow food.

Land descriptions (Name, number of families the land would support, buildings that had existed, irrigated land, unirrigated land):

North side, from west to east
* Miguel Luján - 1 - houses - lands for agriculture and irrigation - pastures
* Marcos de Herrera - 1 - no dwelling - suerte, agricultural fields
* Nicolás de la Cruz - 1 - dwelling - lot, agricultural fields - pastures
* Melchor de Archuleta - 1 - house - agricultural field - pastures
* Juan Griego - 2 - no mention - suerte - pastures
* Sebastián González - 3 - no mention - lands
* Francisco Xavier - 2 - houses, torreón - ample lands
* Pedro de la Cruz - 1- house - lands

South side, from east to west
* Bartolomé Montoya 1- house, arroyo damage - lands
* Diego López - 1 - house, torreón - lands
* Marcos de Herrera - 1 - house, destroyed by arroyo - land
* Convento of Santa Clara pueblo - suerte
* Francisco Gómez Robledo - 1 - house
* Ambrosio Sáez - 3 - dwellings - land planted by natives - vega
* Agustín Romero - 1 - not mention - fields - middle of vega

Notes:
Carlson, Alvar W. The Spanish-American Homeland, 1990.

Granillo, Luis. Report for 12 March 1695 describing the settlement of La Cañada, included in Blood on the Boulders: The Journals of Don Diego De Vargas, New Mexico, 1694-97, volume 2, 1998, edited by John L. Kessell, Rick Hendricks, and Meredith D. Dodge.

Photographs:
1. Simple irrigation system in Cundiyo valley, 23 March 2012; the Río Frijoles is flowing across the photograph (you can just see some water in the center back) and irrigation channels have been dug to both sides (marked by taller vegetation). The land hasn’t been leveled; it’s used for pasturage. Horses were there last week.

2. Long lot near La Puebla, 23 March 2012. The Santa Cruz river is at the back, before the Tertiary mound, where the cottonwoods are growing. There is probably a ditch to the right, marked by the red branches of sandbar willow.

La Cañada - Location

Ever since I read Luis Pérez Granillo’s survey of the settlement of La Cañada as it existed in 1680, I’ve wondered where it was, beyond south of the Santa Cruz river.

As near as I can tell, the distance between the Río Grande and the badlands that enclose the Española valley on the east is about 2.6 miles that can be broken into three sections.

One runs from the main river to the great mound. Daniel Koning’s geological map of the area shows that while the immediate river bank is recent quaternary (Qay2), most of the land is older quaternary (Qay1). The modern village of San Pedro lies ninety degrees south of this area along the Río Grande in the older quaternary zone.

A second section runs directly between the north end of the mound and the Santa Cruz, south of the modern church. Koning says this land is also modern quaternary. Most of this land is now vacant.

Third, there’s a wide expanse of land northeast of the mound that runs east along the river to the badlands. Koning identifies this as modern quaternary. Sombrillo exists in patches of older quaternary land on the southeast margins of the area.

If one assumes for the moment, that a suerte, the unit of irrigated land for growing produce, was roughly 420' wide, then there could have been twelve to the mile.

Granillo indicated there were eleven units on the north side of the arroyo and nine on the south with some unusable land near the east end of the south side.

This would mean the community stretched about a mile along the river, somewhere in the 2.6 miles available.

It’s easy to think it was immediately south of the current church, which would mean it ran from the badlands west.

However, it’s just as easy to think the new villa of Santa Cruz was sited to the west, expanded east in the 1700's until there was no more usable land, then moved north to its current location.

The real problem with considering the location of the original settlement is the meaning of the word cañada in 1695. Today, Rubén Cobos defines it as “a dry riverbed; a small canyon in the sierra.” Others simply say it means an arroyo.

The Sangre de Cristo are too far for there to be a canyon on this side of the river, and they wouldn’t have settled along a dry riverbed unless they could have converted it into an irrigation ditch.

Some comments made by Francisco Domínguez after he reviewed the Franciscan missions in 1776 are more suggestive. After noting Santa Clara pueblo was “established on a fairly good plain almost like the one that extends from the Villa de la Cañada to San Juan,” he added:

“Toward the west of the plain mentioned here, there is a cañada that comes from the said sierra, runs to the east, and ends near the north side of the church, with its mouth at a distance from the pueblo.”

He then indicates the agricultural lands were “watered by a small river that runs through the middle of the cañada.”

He’s using the word plain to describe the older quaternary flat lands between the badlands and the Río Grande, and so a cañada can’t be that land. Instead, it sounds like he’s referring to the dry banks of a perennial river. They are distinct from the land between the church and the Río Grande, which might have been bosque or recent quaternary, and from wet banks that would have been called ciénega.

This leads me to think the original settlement was a little east of the Río Grande in the area now buried by 84/285 and the road over the Griego Bridge. Granillo says that after “crossing the Río del Norte to the right, I saw and found the hacienda that belonged to Miguel Luján.” In contrast he noted the Santa Cruz river was “about three-quarters of a league” from Santa Clara where he began, a distance of roughly 2.5 miles.

Today it’s difficult to distinguish any older settlement patterns from the overlay that accumlated along the Santa Fé-Taos highway that crosses the area at an angle. There probably are no houses earlier that the late nineteenth century; adobe was replaced when more durable materials became available.

Perhaps the best evidence of older land uses are the ditches that come directly from the Santa Cruz through commercial land, cross under the road and disappear in the hodgepodge of housing that’s developed in recent decades.

One goes along the parking lot of the Shell Station.

Another goes along the parking lot of the Zia Credit Union.

Although, they probably are also recent, they suggest a different orientation of settlement vis a vis the river than has existed since the highway was built.

The identity of the arroyo is a puzzle. I’ve seen no arroyos in the area north and east of Arroyo Seco. If could be something that ran off the mound that’s since been filled and blocked. Or, it could be something from the badlands.

It’s also possible it was the irrigation system that ran through the center of the settlement. Granillo doesn’t describe any ditches, and so he, or his translator, may have been using that term for the main canal. Like the modern ditches, it may have been too irregular to be called an acequia.

The houses that were destroyed then may have been too near the upstream end of the ditch and been destroyed when a surge of water came through. While the area was vacated after the Pueblo Revolt no preventive maintenance would have been done to any barrier or dam that would have protected the first buildings.

One can think of two reasons for settling somewhere south along the Santa Cruz rather than on the larger tract of early quaternary land north of the river that was developed in the 1700's. The mound would have provided some protection from both southern winds and unexpected visitors.

More important, a poorly constructed cart going north from Tesuque or San Ildefonso would have had to traverse a number of arroyos, including Arroyo Seco, to get to La Cañada but it wouldn’t have had to cross a running river. The route Domínguez described in 1776 was probably much older, and its fragments probably still exist.

“Going north from San Ildefonso, the road leads for a while among broken hills, with a little mesa halfway (it is called the mesilla de San Ildefonso) which stands on the left side of the road. It always runs upriver and in sight of the Río del Norte and finally comes out on the plain, where, 2 leagues from San Ildefonso, the Mission of the Villa Nueva de Santa Cruz de la Cañada lies.”

Notes:
Cobos, Rubén. A Dictionary of New Mexico and Southern Colorado Spanish, 1983.

Domínguez, Francisco Atansio. Republished 1956 as The Missions of New Mexico, 1776, translated and edited by Eleanor B. Adams and Angélico Chávez.

Granillo, Luis. Report for 12 March 1695 describing the settlement of La Cañada, included in Blood on the Boulders: The Journals of Don Diego De Vargas, New Mexico, 1694-97, volume 2, 1998, edited by John L. Kessell, Rick Hendricks, and Meredith D. Dodge.

Photographs:
1. USGS map for Española quandrangle showing Santa Cruz river between the badlands to the right (east) and Río Grande to the left (west). The county line goes through the mound. The red line is 84/285.

2. Fallow field back from 84/285 with the mound in back, 17 January 2012; it’s about a half mile due south of the river, and a quarter mile south of the boundary between lower and upper quaternary zones.

3. Land between the mound and Iglesia de la Santa Cruz de la Cañada, 27 January 2012; the white buildings are on the other side of the river.

4. Land east of the mound, south of Santa Cruz, north and west of badlands, 29 March 2012.

5. Ditch along side of Shell station parking lot, 20 January 2012.

6. Ditch along side of Zia Credit Union parking lot before it goes under 84/285, 20 January 2012.

7. Road going back to the Black Mesa looking south toward San Ildefonso, 22 February 2012. It meets the road in the middle which skirts a well-maintained fence protecting the mesa from trespassers. Someday, I may follow that road, but I don’t expect to get any closer to what is considered sacred ground.

La Cañada - The Romeros

La Cañada may have been hours from Santa Fé, but it wasn’t allowed to remain isolated. The Inquisition reached wherever there was a friar. Its few persecutions coupled with memories from Spain and México City were enough. Fear of suspicion kept society fragmented, even in times of crises.

The life of Bartolomé Romero and his family illustrates the many ways a cultural heritage of intimidation and informing was perpetuated.

He was born in Corral de Almaguer near Toledo to Bartolomé Romero and María de [Ad]eva. Stanley Hordes thinks the half obliterated name on his baptismal certificate may originally have been Benavedas. In 1574, the Inquisition in México City argued Diego de Ocaña was Jewish because his mother was a Benadeves and “the Xuárez de Benadeva family, Jews of Sevilla, is widely recognized in being of the generation of Jews.”

While still in México Bartolomé married Luisa López Robledo, daughter of Catalina López and Pedro Robledo. Robledo had been born in La Carmena, then moved to nearby Toledo where he sought confirmation of his pure Christian ancestry by becoming a lay collaborator, a familiar, of the Inquisition at a time when the Robledo name was still associated with conversos.

Whether or not they had any Jewish ancestry, Romero and Robledo were among the first to enlist with Juan de Oñate. Later, Romero and members of his family were called by the Inquisition to provide evidence against their neighbors and in-laws. Whether they cooperated because they were true supporters of the Franciscans, or because they adopted that role to deflect suspicion is a question best left to those who study human behavior under extreme situations.

In 1632 Bartolomé made his first recorded report. Alameda pueblo was performing “strange rites.”

Bartolomé Romero and his wife had three sons and two daughters. Ana married Francisco Gómez and María married Gaspar Pérez, a Flemish armorer who had close relations with the Apache.

María’s son, Diego Romero, is the one who was indicted with Gómez’s son Francisco, and prosecuted separately by the Inquisition for meeting with the Apache while leading the supply train that brought López de Mendizábal north. He was banished to Parral. His wife, Catalina de Zamora refused to follow. She was the daughter of Pedro Lucero de Godoy which made her María’s niece. When Diego remarried in exile, the Inquisition arrested him for bigamy. He died in jail in Veracruz.

María Romero gave evidence against Beatriz de los Ángeles and Juana de la Cruz, wife of Juan Griego’s son.

Bartolomé’s son Bartolomé and grandson Diego had been with another of the indicted conspirators, Nicolas de Aguilar when he was arrested. The others in the group were Andrés López Sambrano and Juan Luján. Andrés brother, Hernán, had died when he betrayed Beatriz and was bewitched.

Antonio López Zambrano testified against Francisco Gómez Robledo. Chávez doesn’t mention Antonio, but says Andrés’s daughter, Josefa López de Grijalva, was married to Lucero’s son, which made Gómez’s sister, Francisca, his mother-in-law.

Bartolomé Romero, the oldest son of Bartolomé who was with Aguilar at Isleta, married María Granillo del Moral, daughter of Francisco Pérez Granillo. A son and a daughter moved to the mining area of Sonora. His other son, Bartolomé Romero, married Josefa de Archuleta, then disappeared from the public record. She was the daughter of Juan de Archuleta.

He gave evidence against his daughter-in-law’s neighbors, Beatriz de los Ángeles and Juana de la Cruz.

Her father, Francisco Pérez Granillo, appeared as a government clerk in 1617. The livelihood of her brothers came from the supply trains after they were run by civilian contractors. Alonso Pérez Granillo had an estancia near Alamillo, but moved to Nueva Vizcaya by 1680 where he was the alcalde mayor of the wagon trains and Janos.

Francisco Pérez Granillo the younger was in charge of the wagon trains in 1661 and 1664. He was married to Sebastiana Romero, whose parents weren’t identified by Chávez. Their son was Luis, who was alcalde mayor of Jémez and Queres pueblos in 1680 and escaped from Jémez. He returned as Diego de Varga’s lieutenant and made the survey of La Cañada. He was childless; his wife didn’t return.

Tomás Pérez Granillo had African and Indian parents in Santa Fé and worked as a driver on the wagon trains. He resettled in México after he and his wife smuggled out the child of Juan Manso de Contreras. His relation to Luis isn’t known.

What is known is that he was an Inquisition witness against Ana Romero’s son, Francisco Gómez Robledo.

Bartolomé senior’s second son, Matías Romero, married Isabel de Pedraza, a cousin of María de Archuleta, daughter of Asencio de Arechuleta. He refused to testify against Gaspar Pérez, claiming ignorance of the situation, but María de Archuleta did testify against Beatriz and Juana.

The third son, Agustín, married Luisa Díaz. He died young and was buried at the pueblo of San Diego. He can’t have been the owner of the land in La Cañada that Luis Pérez Granillo described after passing the meadow of Ambrosio Sáez in 1695: “in the middle of that vega is the hacienda where Agustín Romero was settled at planting time, because he had fields there. One citizen with his family can live very well there.”

One can only assume Agustín was the illegitimate child of one of the Romero sons, perhaps even the dead Agustín.

He wouldn’t have been the only one. Louisa Romero married Juan Lucero y Godoy, while Pedro Romero married Juan’s sister, Petronila de Salas. Chávez didn’t place either in the extended Romero family, but also didn’t indicate others with the common name Romero had moved north.

The daughter of Francisca Romero and Matías Luján was involved with either Antonio or Bartolomé Gómez Robledo, the illegitimate sons of Francisco and Bartolomé. Chávez doesn’t identify Francisca’s parents.

Alonso Romero was a servant on the hacienda of Felipe Romero. Chávez says he was really Alonso Cadimo, and was probably a child of Francisco Cadimo, who came with Oñate. The boy was ransomed from the plains Indians and settled on Felipe’s estancia with his wife María de Tapia. Juan de Tapia had married Bartolomé senior’s daughter Francisca.

Domingo Romero was one of the mestizo leaders of the Pueblo Revolt at Tesuque pueblo.

The only man who was with Aguilar when he was arrested who did not witness against any of the accused was Juan Luján. His kin in the río abajo were already supporting the Franciscans.

Notes:
Chávez, Angélico. Origins of New Mexico Families, revised 1992 edition.

Esquibel, José Antonio. “The Rodríguez Bellido Family,” La Herencia, summer 2009.

Granillo, Luis. Report for 12 March 1695 describing the settlement of La Cañada, included in Blood on the Boulders: The Journals of Don Diego De Vargas, New Mexico, 1694-97, volume 2, 1998, edited by John L. Kessell, Rick Hendricks, and Meredith D. Dodge.

Hordes, Stanley M. To the End of the Earth, 2005.

Kessell, John L. Spain in the Southwest, a Narrative History of Colonial New Mexico, Arizona, Texas, and California, 2002; on Diego Romero.

Scholes, France V. “The First Decade of the Inquisition in New Mexico,” New Mexico Historical Review 10:195-241:1935.

La Cañada - Society

The picture that emerges of the society that enmeshed La Cañada before the Pueblo Revolt in 1680 is of one with barely functioning institutions and a primitive economy, torn by feuds and jealousies, segregated into isolated pockets.

The church was absent. Mass probably wasn’t available in La Cañada. The nearest friars were across the Río Grande at Santa Clara, but assigned to meet the needs of baptized Tewa speakers. The La Cañada convento that Luis Pérez Granillo said was on land owned by that pueblo is a mystery.

Any records the church kept of baptisms, marriages and deaths were destroyed in the rebellion. What little Angélico Chávez has pieced together suggests without formal rites of marriage, sexual relations began early and weren’t supervised by parents. Indeed, fathers were often setting examples by associating with native and mestizo servants. Beatriz de los Ángeles was probably more important in enforcing mores than the friars.

The government only existed as a source of income for those who received patronage. The usual civic responsibilities devolved to others. Irrigation and roads would have been the primary infrastructure projects and were probably done with native labor. Lead for ammunition was mined at Cerrilos and Tecolate north of the Sandía mountains.

The primary function of governors and overseers of the friars was to make their charges, the colony and the missions, self sufficient, if not contributors to the overall Mexican economy. Each, desirous of promotion when he returned to México, fought for control of exports and the cheap Christianized Indian labor that subsidized them. In 1630, Franciscan Alonso de Benavides had reported a large quantity of piñon and noted:

“A fanega of these is worth twenty-three or twenty-four pesos in Mexico City. People who customarily sell them earn a lot.”

In 1635, the new governor, Francisco Martínez de Baeza, ordered mission converts to collect nuts for him to ship in the returning supply wagons.

In 1658, the governor, Bernardo López de Mendizábal, criticized the friars for wanting to ship livestock to México during a famine. He gave permission to send 1,000 head; the Franciscans sent 3,000 because they needed the money to buy “to buy images, organs, richer vestments, and other church furnishings.”

Most men came to the colony on military assignments, but only a few remained active. What they did the rest of their lives wasn’t recorded. Angélico Chávez says his ancestor, Pedro Durán y Chaves came with the contingent of 1600 and settled in Santa Fé. By 1622, when the río abajo had become safe for settlement, he had an estancia in an area now controlled by Sandía and Santa Ana with “vast grazing grounds” and mestizo and mulatto herders and laborers managed by his wife, Isabel de Bohórques Vaca, when he was called away.

The only trades mentioned in any of the biographies were blacksmiths and translators. The first were the armorers who kept weapons functional and, according to John Kessell, were the only paid military men. The appointment was eventually monopolized by the kin of Pedro Lucero de Godoy. The translators like Juan Griego and Juan Ruiz de Cárceres often had pueblo or Mexican Indian ancestors.

Servants and muleteers weren’t named in the families recorded by Chávez. He does suggest the first were Indians brought from Tlascala by Juan de Oñate in 1598 who settled in Analco, across the river from Santa Fé, and that local mestizos slowly replaced them. The men who drove the wagons and returning livestock were probably mulattos, who left their patrimony behind.

Medicine was left to women like Pascula Bernal and Beatriz de los Ángeles. With wills and marriage certificates destroyed, it’s impossible to know how many women died in childbirth, how many widows and widowers remarried, or how many children died young.

The well documented life of Lucero may or may not have been typical. He married at least twice, and each woman bore a child nearly every year. The first, Petronila de Zamora, died sometime after the birth of the third. She was about 30 at the last known birth. There are gaps to suggest others may not have lived long enough to leave a record. In contrast, the second wife, Francisca Gómez bore six children we know, again with gaps, and lived until the Pueblo Revolt with her mother, Ana Robledo.

Of the men mentioned in these postings who made it to Guadalupe del Paso, the largest number were in their 20's. The number drops for men in their 30's and 40's and again for those in their 50's. However, if a man could survive the rigors of middle age, he would likely have lived for years. Diego López del Castillo and Hernán Martín Serrano II were both in their 80's when they arrived. Juan Luis, who was in his mid-60's then, was still being called to testify in his 80's.

From many of the confused genealogies, it’s obvious many men like the Lujáns were willing to take responsibility for the widows and orphans left by friends and relatives, a social patterns Alice Games found in Barbados in the early years when men died young and few were able to marry.

The local community was part of Santa Fé’s hinterland, though it doesn’t seem to have provided any special commodities to it. The men who were part of the economic network had encomiendas and estancias elsewhere. Francisco Gómez Robledo gathered piñon from his encomienda at Pecos for López de Mendizábal in 1660 and was using Tabira to send salt to his San Nicolás de las Barrancas estancia near Belen. Juan Luján had his land in Taos where Francisco was an encomendero.

If La Cañada wasn’t important to Santa Fé, like any frontier, it attracted people who wished to live away from the scrutiny of governors and friars. The most prominent were ones like Juan Griego, Francisco Gómez Robledo, and possibly Sebastían González, with suspected Jewish ancestors.

Perhaps more important were the many wives and consorts who were Mexican Indians: Juan Griego’s wife, Pascula Bernal; his son’s wife Juana de la Cruz and her mother Beatriz de los Ángeles; Andrés Gómez Reblodo’s wife Juana Ortiz; and the women who came with the Lujáns, Francisca Jiménez, Magdalena and Maríana.

Under the veneer of large estates owned by men like the Martín Serranos and Juan Luis, this was an Indian village where women from different cultures sometimes feuded but probably all spoke some form of Nahuatl.

It was around this group that first-generation mestizos gathered on their small plots, confident they wouldn’t experience the humiliations they would face in Santa Fé. Chávez could only guess their identity, but like the crypto-Jews, anonymity may have been what they were seeking in La Cañada.

Notes:
Benavides, Alonso de. Memorial, 1630, edited and translated by Baker H. Morrow as A Harvest of Reluctant Souls, 1996.

Chávez, Angélico. Chávez: A Distinctive American Clan of New Mexico, 1989.

_____. Origins of New Mexico Families, revised 1992 edition.

Games, Alison. Migration and the Origins of the English Atlantic World, 1999.

Granillo, Luis. Report for 12 March 1695 describing the settlement of La Cañada, included in Blood on the Boulders: The Journals of Don Diego De Vargas, New Mexico, 1694-97, volume 2, 1998, edited by John L. Kessell, Rick Hendricks, and Meredith D. Dodge.

Kessell, John L. Spain in the Southwest, a Narrative History of Colonial New Mexico, Arizona, Texas, and California, 2002.

Scholes, France V. Troublous Times in New Mexico 1659-1670, 1942.

Scurlock, Dan. From the Rio to the Sierra: An Environmental History of the Middle Rio Grande Basin, 1998; includes chronologies that summarize research of others.

La Cañada - The Lujáns

The Lujáns who settled in La Cañada created their own stratified social network of men with affluence, common folk, and those on the cultural margins.

Angélico Chávez believes the nucleus was Juan Luján, son of Francisco Rodríguez; Pedro Rodríguez, and Juan Ruiz Cárceres, son of Pedro Ruiz. He suspects, in this case, Ruiz was an abbreviation for Rodríguez and that they may have been cousins and brothers.

Juan Luján came with an Indian servant, Francisca Jiménez, and acknowledged three children. However, Chávez believes the girl, Maríana Luján, was really the illegitimate Maríana who arrived in the entourage of fellow Canary Islander Juan López de Medel. Her mother María was from Tecpeaca near Tenochtitlán. Maríana married Juan de Perramos, who escorted the 1616 supply train, and had a daughter María Ramos.

Juan’s son, Francisco, first married Lucía Rodríguez, perhaps some relation of Pedro Rodríguez and his Indian servant, Magdalena. Next he married María Ramos. Since he was associated with the murder of Luis de Rosas, critics of the Franciscans accused the friars of granting him an illegal dispensation to marry his “blood niece.” Most of his activities were around Santo Domingo and Cochití.

Chávez believes Francisco’s probable son, Domingo Luján, was the one who smuggled gunpowder to his half-brother at Cochití during the retreat to Guadalupe del Paso. His wife and children spent the exile years as captives in the pueblos.

There was also a Francisco Jiménez who was associated with the Griegos in 1663. Chávez suggests he was either the son or nephew of Francisca Jiménez. He and his family were killed at Pojoaque in 1680.

Juan’s other son, Juan Luján was the one who created whatever fortune the family enjoyed. He became alcalde mayor of Taos-Picurís and owned an estancia in the Taos valley. His wife more than likely was one of the unnamed daughters of Pedro Lucero de Godoy and Francisca Gómez Robledo, since Francisca’s brother owned part of the Taos encomienda. Their daughter, María, married Juan de Archuleta.

One of his sons was probably Matías Luján, who escaped the revolt. He had been born in the La Cañada area and married Francisca Romero. His son Miguel was married to Catalina Valdés whom he later murdered.

There was also a girl described as the child of Matías Luján and an Indian servant who married José López Naranjo. Although, Chávez notes, there was more than one Matías Luján at the time, the implicit behavior was similar to that of his cousin Domingo. Naranjo was the brother of Domingo Naranjo, the mulatto leader of the rebellion at Santa Clara.

Juan’s more respectable son, Juan Luján, was the Juan Luis who owned the land the Tanos accepted in place of La Cañada in 1696. Its size was commiserate with that controlled by his father.

For a while, he was distinguished from his father by the phrase El Viejo. By the time the pueblos rebelled in 1680, he may also have needed to separate himself from his siblings and cousins. At Guadalupe del Paso, he used the names Juan Luis, Juan Luis Luján, and Juan Ruiz Luján. Chávez is sure they’re the same because he was 66 years old in 1689 when he reported a wife, grown son and three small children.

One time he was called to identify himself in the refuge camp was when Silvestre Pacheco murdered his sister’s husband, José Baca, son of Cristóbal Baca.

His grandfather’s kinsman, Juan Ruiz Cárceres had married Isabel Baca. She was probably the daughter of Alonso Baca and sister or stepsister of José Baca’s father. Alonso was the son of Cristóbal Baca and Ana Ortiz. She was the daughter of Francisco Pacheco, and they were married in México before than came north in the same group of 1600 recruits. Nothing more is known about his personal life.

Politically he defied the governor in 1643 when he allied himself with the Franciscans at San Domingo pueblo. Alonso de Pacheco de Herédia executed his brother, Antonio Baca, who was the ringleader. After that he remained less active in the río abajo.

Ruiz Cárceres also supported the friars, but less dramatically. After he died, Irene became the Franciscan’s cook at Tajique. Their daughter, Juana Ruiz Cárceres married Antonio de Avalos.

His son, Juan Ruiz de Cárceres, was in the military escort for the supply train in 1652. His likely grandson, also Juan Ruiz de Cárceres, was with Domingo and Miguel Luján during the exile and reconquest, when he acted as an interpreter with the Tewa and Tano speakers. After the grandson helped Luis Pérez Granillo survey La Cañada, he acquired the land of Alonso del Río.

Alonso del Río had come with Oñate in 1598. In the intervening years, Diego del Río de Losa had been a secretary for the cabildo and involved with the murder of Luis de Rosas. The Alonso who had land in La Cañada was already at Guadalupe el Paso when the rebellion broke out, and stayed there after the reconquest.

As for Miguel Luján, Chávez can’t decide who he was, except the possible brother or brother-in-law of Juan Ruiz de Cárceres. During the reconquest, he was on guard duty at the chapel in Santa Fé when the Tano speakers resumed fighting. He and his sons, Agustín and Cristóbal, survived, but he was killed in a campaign against Cochití in 1694.

When Granillo surveyed his hacienda, he noted: “Its houses still exist. Only he and his family had lived there, because the lands for agriculture and irrigation were sufficient for only one family, with pastures for a few livestock of any kind he might have had.”

Notes:
Chávez, Angélico. Origins of New Mexico Families, revised 1992 edition.

Granillo, Luis. Report for 12 March 1695 describing the settlement of La Cañada, included in Blood on the Boulders: The Journals of Don Diego De Vargas, New Mexico, 1694-97, volume 2, 1998, edited by John L. Kessell, Rick Hendricks, and Meredith D. Dodge.

La Cañada - Kinship

If you ever spent much time in a small town, you know the ways sociologists measure prestige are irrelevant. You soon learn kinship networks are far more important indicators for who will be elected mayor or student council president than wealth or profession, and that the important ties may be buried several generations back.

By this measure, the most important man in La Cañada before the Pueblo Revolt wasn’t Luis Martín Serrano, but Juan Griego. The one was connected by marriage to four of the other fifteen landholders mentioned by Luis Pérez Granillo in his survey of area in 1695, while the other was tied to seven.

The men who would be ranked highly by sociologists, Melchor de Archuleta, Sebastían González and Ambrosio Sáez, each had three, while Francisco Gómez Robledo had only one kinship tie mentioned in these postings.

The ones who fell low in the kinship rankings were often men who were the first generation to bear a name, the half-acknowledged sons of better known families like Bartolomé Montoya, Marcos de Herrera and Agustín Romero, or the completely unacknowledged like Pedro de la Cruz.

Employees were non-existent in the social fabric, whether they held high positions like Francisco Xavier with one connection, or lowly ones like Nicolás de la Cruz and Alonso del Río with none.

The other men like Griego of relatively obscure birth and wide connections were Diego López, with three ties to the local community, and Miguel Luján, whose ties were through undocumented mestizos and sub rosa relatives in the pueblos. It happens both names represent clusters of men related by blood rather than individuals.

Angélico Chávez believes Luján is descended from the one of the contingent of men born in the Canary Islands that was commanded by Bernabé de Las Casas López in 1600, but didn’t speculate on why so many were available.

The Canaries had been visited by Portuguese explorers in 1340, but assigned to Castile by Pope Clement VI in 1344. Jean de Béthencourt began taking possession of them under the authority of Henry III of Castile in 1403. Alberto de Las Casas became their bishop.

After Béthencourt and Las Casas died, Béthencourt’s nephew, Maciot, sold the islands. They changed hands, before passing to Guillen de Las Casas Hurtado in 1430, and from him to Fernán Peraza through his wife Inés de Las Casas. After Portugal again showed interest, Spain began asserting direct control in 1477.

Soon after, the Portuguese introduced sugar cane, and large land holdings followed. Smaller settlers may have been forced to emigrate, like they would be when sugar was introduced on Barbados in the mid-1600's. Meantime, Santa Cruz de Palma became a major port, both for exporting sugar and as a layover station for ships bound for the Americas. French pirates sacked the city in 1535. Francis Drake attacked on behalf of England in 1585.

The effect of the Inquisition is hard to determine. Gustav Henningsen has estimated that while about 1,500 were tried in the tribunal at La Palma between 1540 and 1700, none were found guilty.

However, Alonso de Benavides claims he had been a lay familiar there before he moved to México in 1598 and joined the Franciscans in 1603 when he was about 25 years old. After he arrived in Santa Fé in 1627, he claimed to remember Francisco de Soto had been penanced and was now calling himself Juan Donayre de las Misas. The man, who said he’d been born in Cordoba to Francisco Rodríguez de las Misas and Catalina Donayre, was forced to call himself Juan Pecador, the sinner.

Guillen Las Casas Hurtado was the great-great-grandfather of Bernabé, who was born on Tenerife. Guillen’s brother Francisco was the father of Bartolomé de Las Casas, the bishop who first complained about the abuses of encomiendas in Hispañola in 1515.

Bernabé was with Juan de Oñate in 1598, and earned his respect during the ill-fated expedition to Ácoma. Oñate sent him to México City to help prepare the reinforcements who were to be commanded by Gaspar de Villagrá. However, the viceroy, still angry over Oñate’s contract, replaced Villagrá with Las Casas.

I have no idea if Las Casas was responsible for recruiting the large number of men in the expedition who were from the Canary Islands, and if so, if relics of feudal obligations nearly as important as kinship were involved.

Several of the men brought Indian servants. The assumption has always been that these were common law wives, rather than the retainers of well-to-do men. If so, their presence in Las Casa’s reinforcements suggest that they were men who could not or would not marry daughters of Spanish settlers or local mestizos. They also suggest men who might have had a stronger interest in migration than silver.

Among those who stayed, at least for a few years, were Juan López de Medel, who Chávez thinks became Mederos. He brought María, her daughter Mariana, her sister Catalina who was married to Francisco, and Augustina. Juan Luján brought Francisca Jiménez.

Juan Bautista Ruato came with a mulatto slave, Mateo. Chávez believes he was the same man as Juan Bautista Suazo. One possible descendant, Juan de Suazo, was married to Ana María Bernal, a likely descendant of Juan Griego’s son Francisco Bernal. They returned from exile and lived at Senecú. Another was María Suazo who married Diego López Sambrano, a man banned from the reconquest for his treatment of natives before the rebellion.

He was the only one from the island of Tenerife to last; the others were from La Palma.

One man who brought a servant who didn’t appear again in the record was Pedro Rodríguez. He came with Magdalena. Another was Cristobal de Brito who was responsible for Beatriz de los Ángeles and Juan Tarasco. However, his last name persisted after the reconquest among people of mixed race backgrounds.

Of the men who didn’t bring a servant, only one stayed in the area, Juan Ruiz Cárceres. Domingo Gutierrez left no record, beyond his last name. Both were from La Palma.

Luis Moreno and Francisco Suarez never appeared again in the public record in any way. They were from Tenerfire.

Notes: I only counted kinship ties I mentioned; there would be a great many more in Chávez’s book if you followed all the children through all their marriages and in-laws.

Chávez, Angélico. Origins of New Mexico Families, revised 1992 edition.

Granillo, Luis. Report for 12 March 1695 describing the settlement of La Cañada, included in Blood on the Boulders: The Journals of Don Diego De Vargas, New Mexico, 1694-97, volume 2, 1998, edited by John L. Kessell, Rick Hendricks, and Meredith D. Dodge.

Gray, Vikki and Angela Lewis. “Partial List of People Who Came to New Mexico in 1600,” GenWeb site; has more detail than Chávez on people who came and didn’t stay, including servants.

Henningsen, Gustav. “The Database of the Spanish Inquisition. The Relaciones De Causas Project Revisited” in Heinz Mohnhaupt and Dieter Simon, Vorträge zur Justizforschung, 1992, cited by Wikipedia.

La Cañada - Francisco Gómez Robledo’s Mistress

When Francisco Gómez Robledo was being investigated by the Inquisition, neither his hacienda in La Cañada nor his illegitimate children were mentioned. All that was impounded in 1662 was his house in Santa Fé and his río abajo estancia, San Nicolás de las Barrancas.

He may have acquired the property after he returned from the Inquisition jail in México City in 1665. Luis Pérez Granillo had no doubts about the ownership in 1695. He said “the hacienda belonged to the maestre de campo, Francisco Gómez, follows. Only signs of the foundation the house had can be seen. Only one citizen can live comfortably in it.”

His natural son, Antonio, however, was in existence when Francisco was being examined. When the family reached Guadalupe del Paso in 1680, he gave his age as 28. That means he would have been born around 1652, probably to a woman who called herself López del Castillo, according to Angélico Chávez.

The first man with that name in the colony, Matías López del Castillo was in Santa Fé in 1626 where he married Ana de Bustillo. Their daughter, Ana López del Castillo married Juan de Herrera who had the encomiendas of Santa Clara and Jémez. One of their daughters, Ana María, had several children out of wedlock who took the Herrera name.

Ana de Bustillo was the daughter of Asencio de Arechuleta and Ana Pérez de Bustillo. One of her sisters, Gregoria de Archuleta, married Diego de Santa Cruz. He was born in Zacatecas to Juan Pérez de Bustillo and María de la Cruz. In 1662, the Inquisition suggested Gregoria, in fact, was the daughter of his sister Ana. More likely, based on his mother’s name, Chávez thinks he was adopted or illegitimate.

Her other sister, Josefa, married Bartolomé Romero, grandson of the original Bartolomé.

One of Ana’s brothers, Juan de Archuleta, was executed for his role in the murder of Luis de Rosas. His son, also Juan de Archuleta, lived in La Cañada where he married María Luján, and worked for Bernardo López de Mendizábal and his successor, Diego Dionisio de Peñalosa Briceño y Berdugo.

After the reconquest, his grandson, Juan de Archuleta, received grants for land in Santa Fé and San Juan as a reward from Diego de Vargas’ successor, Pedro Rodríguez Cubero. He later bought land in the villa of Santa Cruz and married Isabel González, who was probably a descendant of Sebastián González and Isabel Bernal. After her husband died, she expanded his San Juan and Santa Cruz holdings.

His granddaughter, Antonia de Archuleta, married Miguel de Herrera.

Ana’s other brother, Melchor de Archuleta, is the one who had the land next to Juan Griego which Luis Pérez Granillo said had an “agricultural field” but that “only the ruins of his house exist and can be seen. These is almost the same amount of land for one family, and the pastures are in the same condition.”

Chávez thinks the other man with the López del Castillo name, Diego, must have been a younger brother of Matías who arrived sometime around 1634. His first wife was María Barragán, the daughter of Juan Gómez Barragán, an Indian interpreter, and María Bernal, daughter of the first Juan Griego. After she died, he married María Griego, the daughter of Juan’s son Juan. Chávez says she was also known as María de la Cruz Alemán.

At the time of the reconquest, Diego was in his 80's with a wife and two daughters. In 1695, Granillo said “the torreón next to the house remains” at his hacienda. “There are only enough lands for one citizen with his family.”

Torreóns were small, stone defensive towers. There were two in the settlement, one at each end of the settlement. One was on land of Francisco Javier. If this López del Castillo was the one whose daughter was involved with Francisco, then the other tower was also on land controlled by a military man.

Chávez didn’t hazard which of the daughters of Matías and Diego could have been the mother of Antonio Gómez, only noted that after the reconquest, several illegitimate children of Juana Luján conceived at Guadalupe del Paso were living near San Ildefonso and calling themselves Gómez del Castillo.

She was the daughter of Matías Luján and Francisca Romero. Chávez could only guess he was a son of Juan Luján, who lived in La Cañada. He made no mention of Francisca among the known, acknowledged Romero children. He couldn’t even decided if Juana was involved with Antonio or his cousin Bartolomé, the illegitimate son of Francisco’s brother Bartolomé.

Notes:
Chávez, Angélico. Origins of New Mexico Families, revised 1992 edition.

Granillo, Luis. Report for 12 March 1695 describing the settlement of La Cañada, included in Blood on the Boulders: The Journals of Don Diego De Vargas, New Mexico, 1694-97, volume 2, 1998, edited by John L. Kessell, Rick Hendricks, and Meredith D. Dodge.

La Cañada - Francisco Gómez Robledo’s Family

Francisco Gómez Robledo came from a family of five boys and two girls. The only ones who left records of marriages were Andrés, husband of Juana Ortiz, and Francisca, second wife of Pedro Lucero de Godoy.

Two brothers, Juan and José, simply disappeared from the record, and Angélico Chávez thinks they may have returned to México sometime after Francisco was released by the Inquisition.

Francisco and his brother Bartolomé weren’t celibate military men. The one had a son called Antonio, the other a son named Bartolomé. When he appeared at Guadalupe el Paso, Francisco claimed another natural child, María. At the time he said he was married with six other young children.

The reasons Ana María and Bartolomé never married, and Francisco married a woman whose name wasn’t reported are unknown. The whiff of Jewishness may have been a factor, especially after Francisco’s trial.

Francisca’s husband’s name first appeared as a military escort for the supply train in 1616. Donald Lucero believes her father was responsible for Pedro coming north, and that he may have acted as a family representative. Angélico Chávez says he also worked the wagon trains in 1621 and 1631, which would have put him in a position to keep an eye on anything of special import in the return wagons.

He probably didn’t marry for another eight years. LaDeane Miller thinks his first wife, Petronilia de Zamora, gave birth in 1625, 1627 and 1628. She thinks Francisca had children in 1642, 1643, 1644, 1645, 1647, 1648, 1650, 1656 and 1665.

Petronilia’s son, Francisco Lucero de Godoy, became an armorer who married the daughter of Andrés López Sambrano, Josefa López de Grijalva, and inherited his property in Santa Fé. He made it to Guadalupe del Paso with a party of 22 that included his wife, children and servants. The couple returned with Diego de Vargas, but Josefa died soon after and he remarried.

After his marriage to Francisca, Pedro may have continued as a family agent. He had a share in Francisco’s tribute from Pecos in 1662, but lived in the Taos valley where Francisco had a share in encomienda of the local pueblo and an estancia. When the pueblo rebelled in 1680, Francisca, her mother Ana Robledo, and three of her daughters were killed there.

That land may be the same 61,000 acres Francisca’s son, Diego Lucero de Godoy, had north and west of the Pueblo between Arroyo Hondo and Ranchito. He was in Guadalupe del Paso on business when Taos Indians killed 32 people there. He didn’t return with the reconquest, and the grant was transferred to Antonio Martínez in 1716.

Francisco’s brother Andrés married Juana Ortiz. She was the granddaughter of Diego de Vera, a Canary Islander who had an encomienda before he was prosecuted by the Inquisition for a bigamous marriage to María de Abendaño. Her parents were Simón de Abendaño and María Ortiz, who, in turn, was the daughter of Cristóbal Baca and Ana Ortiz.

Chávez says the grandmother was also called María de Villanueva, which probably makes her a native of one of the encomiendas, dependencies or estancias granted to Alonso de Villanueva (Ocelotepec), Fernando and Pedro de Villanueva (parts of Quechula and Tecamachalco), or Juan de Villanueva (Tanzuy) in México.

After Vera was deported and the marriage annulled, María married Antonio de Salas, who, in fact, was described as the stepson of Pedro Lucero de Godoy. Chávez says the identity of his mother was a mystery. Petronilia de Zamora liked to say she had married when she was 11, which may have been less a statement of fact, that a covert way of disowning the boy who was raised with her children.

While Francisco was in jail in México City, Antonio was accused by the Inquisition of improper relations with María’s daughter, Petronila de Salas, who was married to Pedro Romero. He must have been elsewhere in 1680 when María and eight to ten of her children were killed at Pojoaque where he was the encomendero. He registered at Guadalupe del Paso, then disappeared from the record.

María’s other daughter, María Ortiz de Vera, married blacksmith Manuel Jorge, son of Juan Jorge Griego. He became the official armorer of the colony after his marriage. When she later married Diego Montoya, who was encomendero of San Pedro pueblo, she had three daughters using the Ortiz name. It was her daughter Juana who married Andrés Gómez Robledo.

Notes:
Chávez, Angélico. Origins of New Mexico Families, revised 1992 edition.

Himmerich y Valencia, Robert. The Encomenderos of New Spain, 1521-1555, 1991.

Lucero, Donald L. The Adobe Kingdom: New Mexico, 1598-1958, as Experienced by the Families Lucero de Godoy y Baca, 2009 edition.

Miller, LaDeane. “Descendants of Juan de Leon,” 2002, available on line.

La Cañada - Francisco Gómez Robledo

Francisco Gómez Robledo’s encounter with the Inquisition arose from the feud between the Franciscans and Bernardo López de Mendizábal. Not content with having the governor removed from office in 1660, Alonso de Posada began collecting information on him and his wife, mainly from disgruntled servants and political allies of the friars.

In 1662 the Inquisition ordered the arrest of López, his wife, and his four closest aides: Gómez, Nicholas de Aguilar, Cristóbal de Anaya Almazán, and Diego Romero. The last three were accused of heresy, but charges against Gómez escalated for reasons far removed from the squabbles for power in Santa Fé.

He had the misfortune of being Portuguese at a time when anyone Portuguese was suspect. Spain had taken control of the country in 1580 and Portugal had successfully rebelled in 1640.

After some years of uneasy truce, the Spanish began attacking Portugal in 1659 and lost each time. In 1661, Charles the II of England married the sister of the Portugese king, reopening that conflict. Anxieties ran high among those attuned to the interests of the royal court until 1665, when Spain lost to Portugal one final time.

In 1662, Francisco’s sister’s husband, Pedro Lucero de Godoy, wrote his brother, Diego Lucero de Godoy in Mexico City, that one of the Franciscans, Juan Ramírez “was supported by royal provisions from the viceroy of New Spain, hinting at political connections within the viceregal court.” Diego was a lay priest there.

Gómez’s father, Francisco Gómez, was born about 1587 near Lisbon and orphaned at an early age. Angélico Chávez says his brother, a Franciscan friar, placed him with the family of Alonso de Oñate y Salazar, who brought him to México around 1604 when he was about 17.

Alonso was the son of Cristóbal Pérez de Oñate, who had gone to México City when he was 20, and later married Catalina de Salazar, daughter of México’s treasury officer. There is some consensus that Catalina was the descendant of a prominent Burgos Jewish family.

Whether Juan or Alonso knew anything about their mother’s family or that of Gómez is speculation, but Juan apparently wasn’t concerned about excluding potential conversos or marranos when he recruited men to go north with him. Indeed that may have been implicit in his demand that he be able to enlist man from any part of the kingdom of Spain.

Young Gómez may have been brought north by Juan de Oñate’s son, Cristóbal de Oñate, on one of his many trips between the México and the colony before he took over as governor in 1608. The names of people in the Oñates’ personal entourages weren’t included in official manifests.

He maintained close ties with the governors and México City. He was the military leader of the supply train escorts in 1616 and 1625, and was the designated governor when Luis de Rosas’ replacement died in 1641. By then, Francisco had married Ana Robledo, the daughter of Bartolomé Romero and Luisa López Robledo.

The evidence against Francisco junior came from Tomás Pérez Granillo, a servant of Juan Manso de Contreras, who once heard his father was a Jew. Diego de Melgarego, a servant of López de Mendizábal, claimed he’d heard López say his dad had “died with his face turned to the wall.”

Many of the charges against Francisco himself came from Franciscans. Antonio de Ybargaray, report a suspected Jew, Manuel Gómez, had stayed with him 28 years before, while Nicolas de Chaves claimed he’d been called a Jewish dog for years.

The most serious charge came from Domingo López de Ocanto, who said the boys with whom he’d bathed as a teenager all knew Francisco and his brothers had been circumcised. He added Goméz had a little tail protruding from his buttocks.

López de Ocanto bore a particular grudge against López de Mendizábal: the ex-governor had revoked the encomiendas for Nambé and Jémez he’d inherited from his father, on the grounds they should have gone to his older sister.

The inquisition ordered a medical examination of Francisco which confirmed the circumcision. He claimed the scar came from some small ulcers and requested a second examination in better light. That also suggested deliberate incision.

Meantime, his brother, Bartolomé Gómez Robledo was in México with Francisco’s horses and mules, as well as tribute from Ácoma, to provide necessary help. The accused brothers, Juan and Andrés, weren’t examined. For reasons unknown, Gómez was released in 1664. For whatever reason, the Inquisition in México had lost interest.

At the time of the Pueblo Revolt, he was still on active military duty, and involved in the response by the governor, Antonio de Otermin. He died in exile at Guadalupe del Paso.

Notes:
Chávez, Angélico. Origins of New Mexico Families, revised 1992 edition.

Esquibel. José Antonio Esquibel. “Esta Gran Familia: The Genealogy of the Lucero de Godoy Family of Mexico City,” El Farolito, winter 2003, paraphrase from a genealogical website.

Granillo, Luis. Report for 12 March 1695 describing the settlement of La Cañada, included in Blood on the Boulders: The Journals of Don Diego De Vargas, New Mexico, 1694-97, volume 2, 1998, edited by John L. Kessell, Rick Hendricks, and Meredith D. Dodge.

Hordes, Stanley M. To the End of the Earth, 2005.

La Cañada - Encomiendas

Encomiendas evolved in the Caribbean from medieval Castilian roots. According to Robert Himmerich y Valencia, they began as rights to labor, repartimiento, but were expanded to include commodities in México where Aztec traditions of tribute were perpetuated.

By the time Juan de Oñate was proposing his contract for conquest, Himmerich y Valencia says encomiendas were declining in importance in México. Still Oñate asked for the right to grant them for three generations. At the time the viceroy controlled all grants made in México, including those transferred through death and marriage. He was only willing to allow Oñate the right of encomienda, if he agreed to submit all names of grantees to México City for his approval.

If any governors followed that stipulation, no one has found the documents generated by the approval process in the Mexican archives. The only sources on encomenderos seem to be Angélico Chávez’s Origins of New Mexico Families and Inquisition records published by early scholars.

Oñate is only known to have granted one encomienda, the Santiago de Jémez, to his new lieutenant, Juan Martínez de Montoya, in 1606. The reason may be the pueblos, unlike the Indians dominated by the Aztec in México, had no concept of tribute. Chávez says the governor in 1613, Pedro de Peralta, sent his immigrant ancestor, Pedro Gómez Durán y Chaves, to collect from Taos and he failed.

It’s possible the reporting requirement fell into abeyance when a new viceroy replaced the one who’d distrusted Oñate in the period before governors were able to execute their right of conferment. When they began is unknown, but Chávez says his ancestor had an encomienda by 1621 for the area around Sandía and Santa Ana.

It may also be the viceroys lost interest, once repartimiento and tribute were replaced by debt peonage on the large agricultural plantations that developed to supply food for México City and the mining town of Zacatecas. The transition was well underway by the time Oñate came north, according to Peter Bakewell.

The Mexican economy was then suffering from an increase in food prices and a decline in the supply of mine labor, factors which may have influenced adventurous men to enlist to avoid hard labor to eat. Oñate, after all, was offering men the opportunity to revive the success of the original conquistadors in a time of economic stagnation.

The number of encomiendas in New Mexico was officially limited to 35, the number of pueblos that might need military protection. David Snow has compiled a list of 41 men and women associated with 26 native communities through two generations.

One reason the number of encomenderos proliferated relative to the number of encomiendas is simple inheritance. Taos may have been granted to Pedro Robledo, who came with Oñate in 1598. All we know is Juan de Tapia, the husband of his daughter, Francesca Robledo, claimed a quarter share, and Francisco Gómez Robledo, his great-grandson through another daughter, Luisa Robledo, had 2 ½ shares. No one has mentioned the owners of the other share or shares.

Another reason for the increase in the number of encomenderos through time is grants were used by governors to reward or punish men who did or did not support them. Luis de Rosas and Bernardo López de Mendizábal were both accused of exercising the right of revocation.

In 1661, Andrés Hurtado, a young man of 31 from Zacatecas, had the encomienda for Santa Ana and neighboring pueblos. Chávez doesn’t mention how it transferred from his ancestor to Hurtado, but does say the latter fell into disfavor with López, who ordered him to move his young family from the Sandía pueblo area to Santa Fé in December.

In contrast, Gómez Robledo became one of the more dependable military leaders, serving governor after governor. He told the Inquisition in 1662 he’d been “undertaking many risks and enterprises, bearing the costs himself, without receiving any salary, serving as royal ensign of the aforesaid town of Santa Fé, captain of the infantry, sergeant major, and commander of the companies of New Mexico, and maestre del campo of the company.”

By then, he’d accumulated an interest in at least seven encomiendas that had to have been granted at different times. The first would have been Tesuque and Taos. Next might have been Pecos and Sandía. The other pueblos, Abó, Ácoma, and the Hopi villages, were pacified later.

A more important reason for the increase in encomenderos is that, through time, the grants came to be seen as commodities to be traded, not feudal contracts requiring military service in return for pay. As the Apache became a greater menace in the later 1600's, Allen Anderson says many men were less willing to take time from their ranches to provide military service. Some argued they were only required to attend the governing council in Santa Fé, the cabildo.

Sales of encomienda in México in the first generation were rare, but not illegal, as they were in Peru. However, they had to be approved by the viceroy. Himmerich y Valencia says the changing attitude toward transfers came from a 1536 royal instruction, the Law of Succession, which defined encomiendas as property that could be inherited.

There was no way the viceroy could have foreseen how that concept of property would evolve in the northern province. When Gómez Robledo was arrested in 1662, the description of his rights to tribute was made more precise. They included:

* All of the pueblo of Pecos, excepting for twenty-four houses held by his brother-in-law, Pedro Lucero de Godoy
* Two and a half parts of the pueblo of Taos
* Half of the Hopi pueblo of Shungopovi
* Half of the pueblo of Ácoma, except for twenty houses
* Half of the pueblo of Abó, which he had received in exchange for half of Sandía
* All of the pueblo of Tesuque, which for more than forty years neither he nor his father had collected because of services rendered on contract in lieu of tribute.

The value of the rights to tribute depended on the number of people living in a pueblo who could pay. In México, Himmerich y Valencia said a man needed at least two to survive. According to John Kessell, the most valuable here was Pecos. Gómez Robledo could have collected corn and blankets from 340 households there, but only from 110 in Taos, 80 from Shongopovi, 50 from Ácoma, and 30 from Abó.

The association of encomiendas with wealth came from the right to repartimiento which was sometimes exercised in place of tribute, and sometimes, extralegally, in addition. Many encomenderos acquired large land holdings next to pueblos, then coerced local men, women, and children to work for substandard pay. In some cases, they also meddled in intertribal trade with plains Indians for goods like hides that could be resold in México.

It was López’s attempt to reform repartimiento, not the encomiendas, that united the colony against him. On his journey north to take command in 1659, the new governor heard reports of abuses and sensed growing unrest among the southern pueblos. When he arrived, France Scholes says he decreed the daily wage would double from half a real to a real and would include meals.

In 1661, estancia owners claimed “they had suffered heavy losses because they had been obliged to do without Indian laborers in harvesting crops and herding livestock” while nine of the Franciscan missions said they “had suffered a loss of more than six thousand head of stock because they had been deprived of the labor of Indians as herdsmen.”

As an aside, Bakewell says the economic problems in México began, not with the conversion to wage labor, but with the epidemic of 1576-1579 that contributed to the need to pay higher prices for scarcer Indian labor. Here men were blaming the governor for a loss of income which probably was caused by dry weather that was leading to famine, epidemics and raids by nomadic Indians on the pueblos. When the native population began dropping, the available labor would have decreased, leading to the unrest López detected. The arid conditions would have affected crop and herd sizes, while the value of encomienda tribute also would have fallen with the population.

The association of encomiendas with status probably arose in the second and third generations of the colony when their economic value was declining, but new settlers, like Hurtado, were coming north with the supply trains and mestizo children of the first generation, like the son of Juan Griego, were rising. Then it was not enough to be the son or grandson of a conquistador, but one needed to have been signaled out as a conquistador of the first order.

And so, vague claims have been handed down. Chávez’s family knows that Pedro’s son, Fernando Durán y Chaves, “inherited Don Pedro’s estancia of El Tunque and his encomienda.” They know the location of Fernando’s later land holdings, but all they know of the encomienda is that they had inherited it from the first generation, they didn’t have to earn it like Gómez Robledo.

They were hereditary encomenderos.

Notes:
Anderson, H. Allen. “The Encomienda in New Mexico, 1598-1680,” New Mexico Historical Review 60:353-377:1985.

Bakewell, Peter John. Silver Mining and Society in Colonial Mexico: Zacatecas, 1546-1700, 1971. The pathogenic cause of the matlazahuatal pandemic is not known; it affected pure blooded Indians, not mestizos or Spaniards.

Chávez, Angélico. Chávez: A Distinctive American Clan of New Mexico, 1989; the descendants’ claim to the Santa Ana encomienda was consolidated when Hurtado’s daughter, Lucía de Salazar, married Fernando’s son, also Fernando Durán y Chaves.

_____. Origins of New Mexico Families, revised 1992 edition.

Himmerich y Valencia, Robert. The Encomenderos of New Spain, 1521-1555, 1991.

Hordes, Stanley M. To the End of the Earth, 2005; the quotation from Gómez Robledo had a different purpose than indicated here.

Kessell, John L. Kiva, Cross and Crown, 1995,

Scholes, France V. Troublous Times in New Mexico 1659-1670, 1942.

Snow, David H. “A Note on Encomienda Economics in Seventeenth-Century New Mexico” in Marta Weigle, Hispanic Arts and Ethnohistory in the Southwest, 1983.

La Cañada - Encomenderos

An encomienda was more important to defining a family’s social status than land. Its owner, an encomendero, was required to be a citizen of Santa Fé where he was usually on the governing council, the cabildo. He was also required to provide military service, which made him part of the officer corps. They became the functioning shadow government that ruled the colony through the triennial changes in governors sent from México City. Indian labor, tribute, land and wealth followed.

Juan de Herrera came with the reinforcements sent in 1600 when he was twenty, and lived in Santa Fé where he married Ana López del Castillo, a granddaughter of Asencio de Arechuleta. He was granted the encomienda of Santa Clara pueblo for his lifetime.

When Luis Pérez Granillo surveyed La Cañada in 1695 he noted Marcos de Herrera had a hacienda with “only enough land for one citizen with his family” and across the arroyo he had “another suerte and some agricultural fields.” Not only was the land separated but the location may have been less than prime. Granillo said the “house, because it was next to the arroyo or stream, was carried away by a great flood that occurred.”

The most important thing about his land was that it was next to ‘another suerte of agricultural lands follows that the convento of Santa Clara Pueblo owned and held.”

Angélico Chávez could find no tie between Marcos and Juan or his children. From the location, one may guess Marcos was an agent of the family who lived near the Santa Clara pueblo to collect tribute and otherwise oversee family interests.

Chávez noted in his own family, that the family name was often given to Indian servants or their children. He recognized some were illegitimate babies the family was willing to raise and give some position as adults.

Marcos married Francisca Gutiérrez, whose origins are equally obscure. She could be descended from Domingo Gutiérrez, one the Canary Islanders in the 1600 group, or related to Gonzalo Hernández de Benhumea who came at the same time. He brought his wife, Juana Gutiérrez, daughter, Isabel Gutiérrez, and a mulatto named Isabel. Juana’s father, Hernán Gutiérrez, lived in Morón, now part of Tamaulipas which wasn’t conquered until 1554.

The Montoya family is another with encomiendas and obscure descendants. Granillo said the “hacienda that belonged to Bartolomé Montoya is next to the arroyo. Only the ruins of the house in which he lived can be seen. It also has lands for only one citizen.”

Bartolomé Montoya arrived with the reinforcements that arrived in 1600. He had been born near Sevilla and married María de Zamora, whose father, Pedro de Zamora, had been alcalde mayor of Oaxaca. They had two daughters, three sons, and servants.

His son, Diego de Montoya lived in Santa Fé where he married Ana Martín. Her mother was supposedly poisoned by her father’s mistress, María Bernal, a granddaughter of Juan Griego. They had three children, before she died, and he remarried a widow with three girls who sometimes took his name.

Diego’s son Bartolomé inherited the encomienda of San Pedro Pueblo. Chávez believes he’s the same Bartolomé Montoya who escaped the revolt and was described as destitute in 1680. He had seven children, but Chávez couldn’t trace them from there.

The only Montoya he finds associated with the villa of Santa Cruz after the reconquest is Felipe Montoya who settled in Bernalillo after the reconquest. His daughter, María, married Cristóbal Martín Serrano, son of Hernán Martín Serrano and nephew of Luis.

Felipe’s son, Clemente, married Josefa de Herrera (Luján) in Santa Cruz in 1701 and died in 1753. The only Josefa de Herrera he mentions is the daughter of Juan de Herrera, who married Domingo Martín Serrano, the probable brother of María’s husband.

Notes:
Chávez, Angélico. Chávez: A Distinctive American Clan of New Mexico, 1989.

_____. Origins of New Mexico Families, revised 1992 edition.

Gordejuela, Juan de. “Women Who Joined Don Juan de Oñate’s New Mexican Settlement; The Gordejuela Inspection, 1600,” available on Southwest Crossroads website.

Granillo, Luis. Report for 12 March 1695 describing the settlement of La Cañada, included in Blood on the Boulders: The Journals of Don Diego De Vargas, New Mexico, 1694-97, volume 2, 1998, edited by John L. Kessell, Rick Hendricks, and Meredith D. Dodge.

La Cañada - Juan Griego’s Children

The most important thing about Juan Griego’s children is that they were mestizos and legitimate in a generation when mestizos were primarily servants or unacknowledged bastards. As a result, their marital choices were limited. After Isabel Bernal married Sebastián González, their cousins referred to their descendants “for generations” as “los Griegos” according to Angélico Chávez.

One son of Griego and Pascula Bernal, Francisco Bernal, married Bernardina Morán, who married Pedro de la Cruz when Francisco died. Catalina Bernal married Juan Durán, also called Juan de la Cruz, while Juan Griego married Pedro’s sister, Juana de la Cruz. María Bernal married Juan Gómez Barragán, who served as a Tewa interpreter, and Juana Bernal wed Diego de Moraga, a jailor whose house was near a spring by the Santa Fé swamp. The other son, Lázaro Griego, left no record.

If you took this list of names literally, you might think the Griegos were close to the Cruz family, especially since Luis Pérez Granillo says in 1695 Pedro La Cruz had a house that “is found to consist of only one room. It has lands for only one citizen and his family” while Nicolás de la Cruz had a surviving dwelling “and the lands are only those necessary to maintain his family, with pastures of the same quality.”

You may even think Juan Griego had accumulated a larger than normal estate to help support his extended family because Granillo said there “is a larger suerte of land than any of the others and is very extensive. Thus, two families will be able to live here, dividing the agricultural land and pastures between them.”

You would be right and wrong. When Angélico Chávez was researching his own family, who first settled in the area of the modern Santa Ana pueblo, he discovered when the father of an illegitimate child had some status, the baptismal certificate said parentage unknown. In many cases, the infant was baptized as de la Cruz, from the cross.

The usage preceded Oñate. One of the men in his expedition, Juan de la Cruz, was described as the quadroon son of Juan Rodríguez born in the valley of Toluca.

The only Nicolás de la Cruz Chávez could identify was the governor’s town crier and he may actually have been Sebastian Rodríguez, a Loandan referred to as “de nación Angola.” He returned with Diego de Vargas from Guadalupe del Paso, settled in Santa Fé and married Juana de la Cruz in 1697. Only she may have been Juana Apodaca and was accused of sorcery in Santa Fé in 1712.

The association of the Juana de la Cruz name with witchcraft goes back to the wife of Juan Griego junior. Her mother was Beatriz de los Ángeles, who came with Oñate in 1595, as the Indian servant of Cristóbal de Brito, a man from the Canary islands. She married the Juan de la Cruz from Catalonia and was in demand as someone who knew herbal medicines.

When the Inquisition first became active in 1626 as the result of a Franciscan, Esteban de Perea, feuding with the governors, one of Perea’s complaints was that the current governor, Felipe de Sotelo Osorio, had brought some one from San Juan “versed in magic and black art to Santa Fé to try to save the life of a soldier who had been bewitched."

The soldier was Juan Diego Bellido, the lover of the widowed Beatriz who had beaten her. It was said she had given him a potion that ultimately killed him. During the investigation, the Inquisition representative, Alonso de Benavides, was told many women consulted her because their husbands were unfaithful, that she had magically cured María Granillo, in 1628, that Bartolomé Romeo claimed his wife and her daughter, María Pérez Granillo del Moral, had been bewitched by Beatriz’s daughter Juana, and that Hernando Márquez Sambrano had been bewitched by Juana when he beat her and that Beatriz had killed him.

When Perea reviewed the evidence years later and found it didn’t implicate a governor or raise serious issues of faith, he chose not to pursue the charges. He noted many of the witnesses were simple women, mulattos and mestizos, whose testimony could not be trusted to reveal anything more than jealousies and intrigues existed at every level of the small society of northern New México.

Juan junior knew both Tewa and Nahuatl, and served the governors and army as an interpreter. His family had acquired some social status. His mother-in-law’s husband had had the encomienda of Cuquina. His sister Isobel’s husband had the right to tribute from Humanas. By 1628, José Antonio Esquibel says he had a home in the capital, the place in La Cañada, and inherited land in Mexico City, as well as commercial contacts there.

Juan and Juana’s children should have had more marital opportunities than they had had, but their children still seem to have stayed within the neighborhood. Graciana married Francisco Xavier, Nicolás married Antonia Martín, Juan married the sister of Francisco Sáez, Juliana, Agustín married Josefa Luján and María de la Cruz Alemán married her cousin María Barragán’s widower, Diego López del Castillo.

After the reconquest, Agustín’s widow returned, remarried and feuded with her children over rights to Griego land. His son Pedro married Juana Mestas and was living in Santa Cruz in 1726.

Juan Griego the grandson and Juliana Sáez started over in Albuquerque where their son Joaquín Griego married Francisca de la Luz Candelaria. Los Griegos is now a neighborhood of the North Valley.

Notes:
Chávez, Angélico. Chávez: A Distinctive American Clan of New Mexico, 1989.

_____. Origins of New Mexico Families, revised 1992 edition.

Esquibel, José Antonio. “The Griego-Bernal Family,” La Herencia, Fall 2008

Granillo, Luis. Report for 12 March 1695, included in Blood on the Boulders: The Journals of Don Diego De Vargas, New Mexico, 1694-97, volume 2, 1998, edited by John L. Kessell, Rick Hendricks, and Meredith D. Dodge.

Scholes, France V. “The First Decade of the Inquisition in New Mexico,” New Mexico Historical Review 10:195-241:1935.

La Cañada - Juan Griego

The fourth of the larger hacienda owners, Juan Griego, is the most enigmatic. We know nothing about him, except that he once said he was from Candia on the island of Crete, that he came with Juan de Oñate in 1595 as a married man, and that he said he was the son of Lazarus.

Stanley Hordes has speculated he may have been a covert Jew, based on an accusation made by Teresa de Aguilera y Roche, wife of Bernardo López de Mendizábal, when she was being tried by the Inquisition in Mexico City for Judaizing. She claimed he “died with a çapote in his mouth, and with his face against the wall, without desiring to reconcile himself, or to be a Christian, even in this hour and as a consequence, they say that he was buried in the hills of Santa Ana.”

David Gitlitz suggests that when Jews in Spain and Portugal were forced to convert, many were able to live with the subsequence compromises until they faced death. Then, many believed “the deathbed reaffirmation of Judaism assured their place in the continuum of the ancestral tradition.” For this reason, the Inquisition was especially mindful of the behavior of the dead, and in the Edicto de Fe issued by the Inquisition in Mexico City in 1639 proscribed these customs.

Gitlitz says “one of the most common and most persistent” rites was turning the heads of the dying towards the wall. Schulamith Halevy found the tradition has persisted among those living in México today. The underlying reference is to Hezekiah, king of Judah, who, when the prophet Isaiah came to warn him to prepare to die, turned his face to the wall to speak directly to God.

As with many things about Griego, so little is known you can draw any conclusion.

When Ferdinand expelled the Jews from Spain in 1492, some went to Candia, a city the Venetians had heavily fortified. In 1574, when Griego was about nine years old, they sent Giacomo Foscarini to reorganize the city. As head of the Inquisition, he was particularly hard on Jews and Greeks who did not accept the Roman Catholic church.

A blogger calling himself Iaonas proposes a different historic background. He notes that when the Turks took Constantinople in 1453, many Greeks joined the Spanish army where they were skilled artillerymen. Among the ones he names were Theodoro Griego who served in Pánfilo de Narváez’s attempt to sabotage Cortés in México, Pedro de Candia and Jorge Griego who joined Pizarro in Peru, and a different Juan Griego who was awarded a small encomienda in México for supporting Cortés.

They could both be right, one right, or both wrong. You’re still left with only two facts. Griego was apparently a commonly accepted nom de combat and, unlike many of the men who came with Oñate, he had “complete armor for himself.”

The most extraordinary thing about him is that, when he was in México, he married an Indian rather than treated her as a mistress to be brought north as a servant. No more is known about Pascula Bernal than she spoke Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs and the tribes of the central valley.

Her name may have come from living in an area assigned to Francisco Bernal or Juan Bernal. Both had come to México with Narváez in 1520 and both were officially citizens (vecino) of Puebla. Francisco had encomiendas for Tanchinamol, Mecatlán and Heusco. Juan had the encomienda of Acatlán south of Puebla, according to Robert Himmerich y Valencia.

The natives in Puebla weren’t Aztec, but groups that had been conquered by them who spoke their language and supported Cortés. According to Wikipedia, Mixtecs were found in Acatlán, Popolocas in Tepexi, the Olmec-Xicalancas and Nahuas in the central part of the modern state, and the Totonacas, Mazatecos and Otomi in the north.

The Huastec of the Indian town of Tanchinamol split from the Maya and migrated to northern Veracruz around 1200bc. The Acatlán shared pottery techniques with the Olmec. Mecatlán is a Xicotepec ranchería in modern Puebla.

Pascula’s cultural heritage could have been that of any of the conquered people, or a mix. However, the fact that it probably was derived from the Puebla-Veracruz border area may explain the presence of çapote. Casimiroa edulis is a subtropical tree with a perishable, sweet fruit that wouldn’t grow here or survive transport by wagon train. More likely it was the large pit Teresa heard about.

About thirty years before the Oñate expedition, Spanish botanist Francisco Hernández found cochiztzaputl fruit produced drowsiness and the seeds were poisonous. In the same years, Florentine Codex compiler Bernardino de Sahagún was told by the Aztec they used it as a sedative and that “it brings, it lowers the star of the night.”

White sapote commonly has been used to treat rheumatism and arthritis in Mesoamerica. The Mayo used the leaves to lower blood pressure, while Costa Ricans used them to treat diabetes.

Griego may have been suffering from any of these ailments and been treated by Pascula, or he may have been in such pain she gave him something to sleep, or, acceding to his request, may have prepared him to die and given him a toxic dose.

Gitlitz says it was common for Spanish conversos “to ease the journey of the deceased with offerings of food and money.” The Mayan placed corn and stone beads in the mouths of the dead for the same reason.

You may take Griego at face value, as have descendants who have identified ancestors for both him and his wife, or you may take his reference to his father as a sign he spoke in riddles. He could have been a Spanish Jew in exile or a Greek. She may have had Mayan ancestors or not.

All we know is that they both died far from their native homes, strangers in a strange, strange land.

Notes: Hezekiah is found in Isaiah 38:2-3 and Kings 20:2.

Chávez, Angélico. Origins of New Mexico Families, revised 1992 edition.

Gitlitz, David M. Secrecy and Deceit: The Religion of the Crypto-Jews, 1996; he mentions a twentieth century Portuguese legend that Jews, to avoid contamination by the last rites, asphyxiated a dying relative so he would be dead before the priest arrived.

Halevy, Schulamith Chava. Descendants of the Anusim (Crypto-Jews) in Contemporary Mexico, 2009.

Hernández, Francisco. Rerum Medicarum Novae Hispaniae, published in 1651 and cited by Morton.

Himmerich y Valencia, Robert. The Encomenderos of New Spain, 1521-1555, 1991. Juan Bernal had three sons, one who became a priest, a second Juan who lived on a government pension, and a third who died young. Nothing more is known about Francisco.

Hordes, Stanley M. To the End of the Earth, 2005.

Iaonas. “Greek Conquistadors and Explorers in the Spanish Army,” Blogspot website, 11 December 2011.

Morton, Julia F. Fruits of Warm Climates, 1987.

Sahagún, Bernardino de. Historia Universal de las Cosas de Nueva España, c.1577, translated as Florentine Codex: General History of the Things of New Spain, Book XI - Earthly Things by Charles E. Dibble and Arthur J. O. Anderson, 1963.

Wikipedia. “Puebla” downloaded 5 March 2012.

Yetman, David and Thomas R. Van Devender. Mayo Ethnobotany, 2002.

La Cañada - Francisco Xavier

Another of the large landowners, Francisco Xavier, came with as an escort for the supply train that brought governor Bernardo López de Mendizábal north in 1658. He married Graciana Griego, granddaughter of Juan Griego, and rose as a military aide to the subsequent governors.

When he arrived, droughts were leading to famine among local peoples who were already turning to new gods, but the governor and the Franciscans spent their time feuding over who should receive tribute from the pueblos and how much laborers should be paid. Piñon nuts, food that fed people in bad times, were being shipped to México. Friars were more incensed by the governor not punishing the Chrsitian pueblos for kachina dances, than they were by heathen Apaches selling their children into slavery for food.

After López was arrested by the Inquisition, the governorship continued through men who were rarely allowed to finish their terms unmolested. Severe drought returned in 1666, which brought more raids by hungry Apache. Supply trains brought less food. The Piro and Salinas pueblos pillaged the conventos and their leaders were hung or sold into slavery.

Juan Bernal wrote his Franciscan superiors:

“For three years no crop has been harvested. Last year, 1668, a great many Indians perished of hunger, lying dead along the roads, in the ravines, and in their hovels...The same calamity still prevails, for, because there is no money, there is not a fanega of maize or wheat in the kingdom. As a result the Spaniards, men as well as women, have sustained themselves for two years on the cowhides they have in their houses to sit on. They roast them and eat them. And the greatest woe of all is that they no longer can find a bit of leather to eat, for their livestock is dying off.”

No relief was sent and Xavier became Secretary of Government and War, responsible for fighting the Apache. Volcanic activity and more sunspots led to warmer temperatures. Epidemics followed malnutrition. Pueblo Indians, whose religion is centered on ritual appeals to rain gods to ensure plentiful harvests, began to question the power of the Spanish god.

The year Juan Francisco Treviño arrived as governor, 1675, one Franciscan, Francisco de Ayeta, sent a message to México City warning the colony was doomed without relief. Another, Andrés Durán, claimed he’d been bewitched at San Ildefonso. Treviño sent Xavier and a cadre of men to arrest 47 religious leaders. He hung three. Others were sentenced to the lash and slavery.

While they were awaiting punishment, Xavier "gathered up many idols, powders, and other things which he took from the houses of the sorcerers and from the countryside." Armed men from the Tewa speaking pueblos forced Treviño to free their leaders.

Relief finally came in 1679 with the new governor, Antonio de Otermin. Heavy snows that winter promised more relief. But it was too late. Otermin needed Xavier as his military commander.

When the pueblos erupted on August 10, Picuris killed Francisco Blanco de la Vega and her son, mulattos belonging to Xavier.

By the fifth day, many of the houses in Santa Fé had been burned and water stopped from flowing through the acequia. Soldiers had been fighting warriors through the streets. Otermin wrote his superiors, that that evening “we directed our course toward the house of the maese de campo, Francisco Xavier, which was the place where (apparently) there were the most people and where they had been most active and boldest.”

Xavier managed to get to Guadalupe del Paso with his five children. The 54-year-old widower was allowed to return to México for health reasons. His son, Francisco Xavier, also returned south leaving his daughter, Josefa Xavier, with relatives. She returned with them as an orphan.

By the time Diego de Vargas entered Santa Fé in 1695, the Tano had heard Xavier was with him. They said "Give us Francisco Xavier, who is the reason we have risen, and we will remain in peace as before."

When Luis Pérez Granillo got to La Cañada, he saw his “houses are in ruins, though there is a small torreón standing. Although he lived on it alone, the site has ample lands for two families.”

Notes:
Chávez, Angélico. Origins of New Mexico Families, revised 1992 edition.

Granillo, Luis. Report for 12 March 1695, included in Blood on the Boulders: The Journals of Don Diego De Vargas, New Mexico, 1694-97, volume 2, 1998, edited by John L. Kessell, Rick Hendricks, and Meredith D. Dodge.

Kessell, John L. Spain in the Southwest, a Narrative History of Colonial New Mexico, Arizona, Texas, and California, 2002, quotation from Bernal.

_____. Kiva, Cross and Crown, 1995, other quotations.

Otermin, Antonio de. Report, 13 September 1680, in C. W. Hackett, Historical Documents Relating to New Mexico, Nueva Vizcaya, and Approaches Thereto, to 1773, vol. 3 , 1937.

Scurlock, Dan. From the Rio to the Sierra: An Environmental History of the Middle Rio Grande Basin, 1998, on Apache selling their children.