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.
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