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.