Shadow of the Reconquest - Culture Shocks

Fifteen years in refugee housing in Guadalupe del Norte must have had some effect on people who were wrenched from what at become a relatively cloistered world and thrown into the more cosmopolitan one nearer the silver mines of México.

After Diego de Vargas resettled New Mexico with recruits from Mexico City and Zacatecas, he and the subsequent Bourbon governors introduced more changes.

Fernando Durán y Chaves, the younger, and his wife, Lucía Hurtado de Salas y Trujillo, were the only members of Angélico Chávez’s family to return. The Franciscan historian says after the Reconquest, men in his family were no longer called into political or military matters as they had been. Such institutions had probably become more professionalized under the Bourbon bureaucrats or perhaps they just required men with different ambitions.

The family response seems to have been retreat. Fernando lapsed into senility. In 1712, he physically attacked the alcalde mayor of Albuquerque, Juan González Bas, as a “perro yndio Griego” and “un perro mulato.” González Bas was the descendant of Juan Griego who owned the Alameda grant north of his Atrisco grant.

In a similar incident in 1759, the ancien regime protested when José López Naranjo’s grandson, José António Naranjo, was made capitán de gente de guerra, They claimed he was only the commander of Indian troops, not the descendant of a conquistador like themselves. At that time, Chávez says, many of his supporters lived in Chimayó.

Chaves and his wife discouraged their children from mingling with newcomers, especially those from Zacatecas. The one who did, their great-grandson Cristóbal Chaves, had to visit his sister at Laguna to secretly marry a woman from Mexico City. The other descendants were reduced to asking the friars for dispensations to marry cousins because of the “paucity in this Kingdom of blood quality.”

One man they would have shunned was Francisco Montes Vigil, the original owner of the Alameda grant. It wasn’t that he was an español. Lucía’s family had had its share of misalliances, especially the marriage of her great-great-grandmother, María de Abendaño, to the bigamous Diego de Vera, a marriage that made her husband her cousin. There was also the more recent involvement of her sister Juana with some Naranjo.

The problem with Vigil was that he represented the new ways seeping north. Chaves was passing on the values of a disenfranchised nobility that had been resisting the power of a centralized government since Juan de Oñate was deposed, while the other was creating a culturally inherited ability to exploit institutional rules, adversity and even subjugation.

Vigil apparently connived with Juan Paéz Hurtado to pad the register of names recruited in Zacatecas and pocket commissions. Historians translating the papers of Vargas say his large family was broken into three units, each presumably paid the 320 peso recruiting fee, minus a kick back. When interrogated later, Vigil admitted he’d enlisted men from gambling halls under false names for Paéz and that Paéz kept 100 pesos for himself.

After he sold the Alameda grant to González Bas, Vigil and his family moved to the villa of Santa Cruz, perhaps because he saw more opportunities in the north, perhaps because it was a less hostile social environment for a restored mestizo raised by a well-connected father in an urban center.

His son, also Juan Montes Vigil, requested land north of the Truchas River in 1754. The land had become available when the alcalde, Juan José Lovato, changed the boundaries of the Truchas Land Grant made to eleven residents from Chimayó and Pueblo Quemado, five Romeros, four Espinosas, Francisco Bernal, and Cristóbal Martín. Vigil was an official witness to that transfer.

This wasn’t the only case of Lovato, the nephew or son of Bartolomé Labota who’d come with Paéz, changing grant boundaries. When Pedro Sánchez couldn’t produce the defining papers for his grant in 1742, Lovato altered the border with San Ildefonso. A Vigil descendant, José Ramón Vigil, bought eight of eleven shares in the grant in 1851 for $20, a yoke of oxen, 36 ewes and one ram.

Francisco, or one of his descendants ended up owning land between that of José López Naranjo and António de Salazar, perhaps after Naranjo died and Vigil survived the Pawnee attack in 1720 or maybe after Naranjo’s only son, José António Naranjo, fled the area in 1731 after killing someone.

No one has said exactly how it happened, only that the land was known as La Vega de los Vigiles when José Ramón’s daughter, Josefita Vigil, married José Benedicto Naranjo. Naranjo sold it to the Denver and Rio Grande, who, in turn, sold some to Frank Bond for his livestock shipping facility.

Benedicto was the great-grandson of José Geronimo Naranjo, the grandson of José López Naranjo. His son, José Alejandrino Naranjo, married Delfinia Vigil. Their son, Emilio Naranjo, was born in Guachupangue, the area abutting the Santa Clara reserve on the north.

Alejandrino had gone to the smelters and mines in Colorado to earn money rather than raise sheep for Bond. He sent his son to secondary school in Santa Fé and college in El Rito. Emilio built the Democratic Party in Rio Arriba county after World War II when Spanish speaking citizens in the area finally felt they were free to vote as they wished.

The railroad, of course, brought men like John Block who married Sofia Vigil Valdez. They adopted Fidel Salazar, the son of José Ramón Salazar and Francisquita de Sales Atencio, to raise as John Block, Junior. José Ramón was 20 years old when he became a father. Sofia was his aunt. Block senior was the prime mover behind building the Santa Cruz dam.

The only men of comparable ambition in the Chaves family were the children of Cristóbal Chaves and María Josefa Núñez. Some migrated to Ceboletta County when the Navajo were removed and others went to Mora County after Fort Union was established to control the Comanche.

Angélico was born to the latter branch. He remembered asking his mother, María Nicolasa Roybal, if any of her family were hermanos. She said “the family had always been such good Catholics that they had no cause for the joining the Penitentes.”

When he asked about the family of his father, Fabián Chávez, they had slipped so far she said “Your father’s people were not even good enough Christians to be Penitentes.”

Genealogies drawn from various sources:
Naranjo:
Alonso > ? > Domingo/? > José López > José Antonio > José Geronimo > António José > José Manuel > José Benedicto > José Alejandrino > Emilio

Vigil to Naranjo:
Francisco Montes > Francisco Montes > Manuel Gregorio > Nicolás António > José Ramón > Josefita who married José Benedicto Naranjo

Durán y Chaves/Chávez:
Pedro > Fernando > Fernando >António > Tomás > Cristóbal > José Mariano > José Encarnación > José Francisco > Eugenío > Fabián > Angélico

Salazar:
Hernán Martín Serrano > María Martín > María ? > Agustín Salazar > António Salazar > Francisco Miguel Salazar > María Salazar who married Julian Lorenzo Salazar > José Julian Salazar > Juan Francisco Estevan Salazar > Pedro Ignacio Salazar y Valdez > José Eutimio Salazar > José Ramón Salazar > Fidel Salazar/John Block Jr

Vigil to Salazar:
Francisco Montes > Juan Bautista Montes > António José Montes > Joe Dolores > María de la Luz who married Lorenzo Valdez > María del Carmel Valdez who married Juan Francisco Estevan Salazar

Notes:
Bowden J. J. “Ramon Vigil Grant,” New Mexico Office of the State Historian website.

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

_____. My Penitente Land, 1974.

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

Kessell, John L., Rick Hendricks, and Meredith D. Dodge. A Settling of Accounts: The Journals of Don Diego De Vargas, 1700-1704, volume 6, 2002.

Shiller, Mark. “The Truchas Grant,” available on-line.