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.