The Pueblo Revolt, page 12
Yet underneath the apparent acceptance of the cross and the Church, a profound malaise and resentment simmered for eight decades, a bitterness that Popé would tap in 1680. No symbol of the Christian faith was more potently laden with meaning for the Puebloans than the church bell, whose ringing every morning summoned children and adults alike to service. In the Pueblo Revolt, not every mission church would be destroyed, but virtually every bell would be. At San Lázaro, the Galisteo Basin pueblo partly excavated by private owners since the early 1990s, diggers found the church bell smashed into a hundred pieces.
All across the colony of Nuevo México, the Franciscans built churches directly on top of existing pueblos. Usually, the new mission obliterated the villagers’ most important kivas, thus stamping the superiority of the Catholic over the kachina religion into the very architecture. In several state and national monuments, and in one national historic park, the ruins of such missionized pueblos have been stabilized and restored to make the sites accessible to tourists, who stroll through them on designated pathways numbered with posts keyed to edifying passages in the trail guides.
Over several months in the spring of 2003, I visited five such ruins. No more vivid diorama of life in seventeenth-century New Mexico exists today. The churches themselves, built of adobe and stone in the same style as the pueblo rooms, have weathered so handsomely that it is hard to see them as grandiose monuments to oppression. They tower as high as forty feet above the ground. Twentieth-century excavators devoted their efforts, for the most part, to the missions, leaving the surrounding roomblocks unexcavated: today, the buildings in which the Puebloans lived sleep beneath vague earthen ridges covered with grass and cactus.
Three of these ruins—Abó, Gran Quivira, and Quarai—are incorporated into a single unit, as the Salinas Pueblo Missions National Monument. Lying some fifty miles as the crow flies southeast of Albuquerque, more than eighty south of Santa Fe, they are in the middle of nowhere in terms of modern settlement patterns. In consequence, they are relatively little visited. Yet each has a lonely beauty of its own, and each brims with the history of the difficult decades that preceded the Pueblo Revolt.
The “Salinas” of these pueblos’ common name refers to the extensive salt beds nearby. Salt was so valuable a trading commodity in the pre-Columbian Southwest that those beds, as much as anything, were the villages’ original raison d’être. Yet, as the southeasterly-most pueblos in all of New Mexico, they became acutely vulnerable to Apaches and Comanches roaming the plains to the east, who raided more and more boldly as the seventeenth century wore on.
On a cold March day with a fierce wind lashing out of the east, I strolled, the only visitor, through the mission at Abó—a graceful oblong structure made of well-shaped brownish orange stones. Then I meandered out past the humble roomblocks hidden in the ground, and finally, off the tourist track, down a dry wash for half a mile until I found several low cliffs covered with beguiling petroglyphs, probably carved in the fifteenth century. Abó was first occupied around A.D. 1300. The mission was built, we think, in the 162Os. Between 1672 and 1675, having fallen on desperate times, the pueblo was abandoned for good.
A rather heavy-handed excavation and restoration of the Abó mission in the 1930s has left important research questions unanswerable. Yet the single most intriguing puzzle about the place stared back at me as I lingered by a numbered post. At Abó, the Franciscans did not obliterate the kiva of their heathen charges. Instead, it seems, they built (or allowed the building of) a kiva right in the middle of the mission’s west court patio. Was this a sign of an atypical tolerance on the friars’ part? Had they permitted Indian dances and secular meetings right here, in the shadow of the walls of the house of God? The 1930s excavators found that the kiva had never had a roof, and it was full not only of ashes but of kitchen rubbish. This gave rise to the speculation that the Spaniards had allowed the building of the kiva only to treat it as a garbage bin—one more way of heaping humiliation on the benighted pagans whom the friars had come to save.
Like their neighbors to the south, at Gran Quivira, the denizens of Abó were Tompiro. Upon abandoning their villages in the 1670s, they joined the Piro pueblos—most likely, their linguistic cousins—to the west on the Rio Grande. Despite having fiercely resisted the Spanish during Oñate’s time, the warriors of Abó and Gran Quivira would play no part in the Pueblo Revolt. Eventually they drifted south to settle near the El Paso area. Like Piro, Tompiro is a lost language and culture.
On a much warmer day in April, I drove thirty miles from the sleepy town of Mountainair, down an empty road that made four beelines straight south punctuated with three jogs straight east, to arrive at Gran Quivira. The site struck me as the most improbable of any pueblo I had yet visited in New Mexico or Arizona. So flat was the basin stretching away on all sides, I might, I thought, have escaped the mountains and mesas of the Pueblo homeland to creep to the very edge of the Great Plains. Yet a single bulging outcrop of bedrock had allowed the construction of a village here. Gran Quivira, every bit as appealing to the eye as Abó, is made of gray limestone, rather than the warm-toned sandstone otherwise so prevalent all over the Southwest. Though it is a harder stone to work, the builders here had shaped their blocks to fit with cunning precision one against another.
Gran Quivira is also far older than Abó, its roots reaching back to pithouses gouged in the earth around A.D. 800. At peak population, this isolated pueblo was home to between 1,500 and 2,000 natives. A first church was built at Gran Quivira in 1636; a second, never completed, in 1659. Here, uncharacteristically, the friars put up their mission not smack on top of the central roomblocks, but off to the side, on lower ground. The statement of Catholic supremacy is correspondingly muted.
An excellent job of excavation and stabilization was carried out here in the 1970s. Not content simply to rehabilitate the mission, the archaeologists excavated many Puebloan roomblocks as well. As a result, Gran Quivira gives the best picture in all the Southwest of what a missionized pueblo must have looked like. And in the course of their work, the diggers made a fascinating discovery: several ordinary rooms fitted out with all the paraphernalia of a kiva. In the 1660s, apparently, after dutifully attending Catholic Mass in the mission, the Indians would slip into these hidden chambers to commune in earnest with the gods that had never failed them.
Gran Quivira succumbed, around 1670, to the same misfortunes—drought, famine, and disease, as well as Apache raids—that depopulated Abó. After a continuous occupation of almost 900 years, the isolated pueblo on the salt plains was abandoned to the coyotes and the winds.
Later the same day, I drove north to the third Salinas pueblo, Quarai. Sheltered beside a spring-fed stream on the east slope of the Manzano Mountains, Quarai seemed to me more cozy than lonely. The mission, built of a deep red sandstone, looks virtually European in its ruined grandeur. Like the mission at Abó, Quarai’s church encloses a puzzle—a rectangular kiva in the middle of the convent. We know the kiva was built at the same time as the church, in 1630, but everything else about it remains a mystery.
The Puebloans who lived here were Tiwa rather than Tompiro, related thus to such Rio Grande pueblos as Isleta and Sandía. Yet Quarai suffered the same fate as its neighbors to the south. Abandonment came in 1677, only three years before the Pueblo Revolt. A despairing dispatch from the last priest at Quarai, shortly before the dispersal of its last inhabitants, reads like a message in a bottle:
The drought and famine continue. Many are sick, some are dying…. The terror and outrages continue. Some are leaving every day…. We must leave, all two hundred families, and go north to Tajique where there is a mission and a settlement. If that, too, is unprotected, we will go on to Isleta to be with other Tiwa-speakers.
In contrast to the Salinas pueblos, Pecos, which lies just off Interstate 25 between Santa Fe and Las Vegas, is a regular tourist destination. One of the largest and most important of all the pueblos, Pecos was skillfully excavated by Alfred V. Kidder over twelve field seasons after 1915. When Kidder brought nearly all the leading Southwestern archaeologists together for a meeting of minds here in 1927, the Pecos Conference, which still convenes every August, was born. Out of that first conference emerged the classification system for Anasazi-Pueblo prehistory and history that is still in wide use today: Basketmaker II, Basketmaker III, Pueblo I, Pueblo II, Pueblo III, Pueblo IV, Pueblo V. (There was no Basketmaker I, because the Basketmaker II culture, now dated roughly from 1200 B.C. to A.D. 500, seemed so sophisticated to the assembled savants that they felt the need to postulate a prior, as yet undiscovered, Basketmaker I phase. BM I remains undiscovered: instead, Archaic flows seamlessly into BM II.) Kidder so loved the Pecos ruin that he was buried there upon his death in 1963, though out of respect for the wishes of his family, the rangers will not reveal the location of his grave.
Kidder is revered today as one of the giants of Southwestern archaeology. More than any other scholar, he brought rigor to the discipline, insisting on finding proof of prehistoric events in the dirt of excavations themselves, rather than (as was often true before his time) in the uncritical acceptance of Puebloan oral traditions.
At Pecos National Historic Park, another loop trail with numbered posts takes the visitor on a useful tour of the sprawling ruin. Several Puebloan roomblocks have been restored and stabilized, and a reconstructed kiva, complete with modern ladder, serves as a favorite lecture hall for tour guides. What impressed me most on this, my third visit, was none of these prettified showrooms of ancient life, but the sheer volume of the unexcavated buildings stretching from south to north, buried beneath brush and cholla. Kidder had been so moved by the prodigal abundance of Pecos that he chose it for that reason for his life’s work. The pueblo’s midden, shelving off to the east from the principal roomblocks, was, in his words, “the greatest rubbish heap and cemetery that had ever been found in the pueblo region.”
As usual, I found a bevy of serious photographers parked with their tripods on all sides of the towering mission, a marvel of brownish red adobe. This church, however, post-dates the reconquest of 1692, built to replace the larger mission that the Puebloans gleefully razed to the ground during the Revolt. Unlike the Salinas pueblos, Pecos was occupied after the reconquest, until its final abandonment in 1838.
Four successive seventeenth-century missions were erected on the site of the present church, beginning around 1621. The first of them was the grandest in all New Mexico, a veritable cathedral 150 feet long from entrance to altar. Its very existence, however, seemed all but apocryphal, until the original foundations were almost accidentally rediscovered by archaeologist Jean Pinkley in 1967. According to Pecos historian John L. Kessell, this first mission required 300,000 sun-dried adobe blocks to build, each weighing forty pounds. The walls were as thick as twenty-two feet at the maximum. Roof beams were as long as forty-one feet. Six towers and a crenellated parapet made the mission look, in Kessell’s words, “as much like a fortress as a church.” All the labor, of course, was carried out by Puebloans, reduced by the megalomaniac dream of Father Andrés Juárez to virtual slavery.
The fifth of the missionized pueblos I visited in the spring of 2003, called Giusewa, has by far the loveliest setting, tucked in a bend of the Jemez River beside State Highway 4, between forested 1,500-foot-tall slopes that soar toward mesa rims crowned with Ponderosa pines. Compared to Pecos or even Gran Quivira, Giusewa is a diminutive pueblo; there is no room in the small basin formed by a tributary creek joining the Jemez River for a village to grow to more than modest size. The ruined mission of San José de los Jemez is modest, too, and as beautiful as any in New Mexico. Yet no less than the vanished cathedral of Fray Andrés at Pecos, this church represents a monument to oppression.
An original mission was founded here around 1600 by Fray Alonzo de Lugo. Assigned to minister to the Jemez people, the friar faced an impossible task, for these tough, independent mountain dwellers were scattered among at least eleven different villages, some of them on distant mesa tops at altitudes above 7,500 feet. Fray Alonzo dutifully visited eight of these remote pueblos, but chose the most convenient, down in the river valley, as the site for his mission. Then he set about attempting a standard Spanish ecclesiastical practice of the day, called the “reduction” of the natives. Fray Alonzo pleaded with the mesa-top dwellers to give up their villages and congregate at Giusewa. Met with stony refusal, the friar gave up and left in 1601. A succession of later priests likewise failed to reduce the Jemez.
San José Mission, built around 1621, and the partially excavated pueblo surrounding it are incorporated today in Jemez State Monument. A single ranger tends the site from a shack beside the highway. Most visitors, I had noticed on previous stops at Giusewa, spend about five minutes in the ruin, clicking a few snapshots of the church before heading on to more sybaritic venues, such as the hot springs just up valley or the motels and bars of Jemez Springs, just below. Last spring, I stopped by on a Jemez Pueblo holiday. Four young girls and boys, dressed in semitraditional garb, were dancing dispiritedly before the mission, to the beat of a young drummer. The girls, wearing painted cardboard butterfly wings, shook feathers in either hand. The dancers’ parents sat at picnic tables on the periphery, eating snacks and cheering the children on. “You doin’ good, Laura,” I heard a mother call out.
The Anglo tourists, however, were lingering longer than the usual five minutes. They had something other than the church to point their cameras at: real Indians, wearing Indian clothes, dancing Indian dances. Behind the young performers, the crumbling walls of San José nicely framed their portraits.
Exacerbating the already strained relations between church and state in New Mexico, its fourth governor, Juan de Eulate, who came into office in 1618, called a halt to the building of a number of churches—including Fray Andres’s monumental mission at Pecos—on the grounds that the demands on Puebloan labor required to do the building were inhumane. Eulate also encouraged the Puebloans to venerate the “idols” and perform the dances that the friars had done all they could to extinguish.
The governor, however, was no benevolent champion of the Indians. It was a personal antipathy against the Franciscans that motivated his seemingly tolerant reforms. Later Eulate would face charges in Mexico City for having waged slave-taking forays even against peaceful nomadic bands. He was also taxed with having seized Puebloan orphans and selling them on the market in Mexico. As vain and pompous a man in his own way as had been Ordóñez, Eulate no sooner arrived in the colony than he announced that “the King was his ruler and he did not have to acknowledge the authority of the Pope or the Church.”
At El Morro, I had puzzled out a long inscription that, although its author is not named, is attributed to Eulate on the basis of its date. In this windy boast, the governor congratulates himself for having pacified the Zuni pueblos and sworn their inhabitants to vassalage—“all of which he did,” claims Eulate, referring to himself in the third person, “with clemency and zeal and prudence, as a most Christian and great gentleman, a most extraordinary and gallant soldier of imperishable and praised memory.” Some skeptical passerby later saw fit to scratch out the epithet “great gentleman” (“gran caballero”), whose characters can just be discerned in the grazing light of a summer sunset.
In 1626, the Holy Office of the Inquisition was formally introduced to New Mexico. The idea of the Inquisition had been born in A.D. 1231, when Pope Gregory IX had established the office to bring to trial and execution such heretics as the ascetic Cathars, who roamed across Languedoc in southwest France. In its Spanish guise, beginning in the second half of the fifteenth century, the Inquisition became synonymous with persecution, mostly of Jews and Muslims, in the name of Catholic orthodoxy. The very name of the first Spanish grand inquisitor, Tomás de Torquemada, still evokes the terror that issued from his systematic torture and burning at the stake of some 2,000 suspected heretics.
In New Mexico, at first, the Inquisition was used not so much against Puebloans as against settlers. Among the scores of accusations brought against Spaniards in the colony were grave matters of witchcraft and pacts with the devil, but also such seemingly ludicrous charges as the employment by frantic wives of Indian love potions to try to win back the affections of their unfaithful husbands. A number of cases of bigamy were likewise prosecuted. The overall impact of the Inquisition, however, was to give ambitious Franciscans yet another weapon in their struggle to seize power from the colony’s governors.
No Franciscan was more ambitious than Fray Alonso de Benavides, who arrived in New Mexico as the new custodian in 1625, and who became the commissary of the Inquisition the following year. Benavides’s great dream was to elevate the province to the dignity of a diocese, with himself as the first bishop.
To that end, Benavides wrote two versions, in 1630 and 1634, of a work usually called simply the Memorial, though the actual title of the first volume tellingly translates as A Harvest of Reluctant Souls. Scholars have been grateful to Benavides ever since, for if Gaspar Pérez de Villagrá’s fanciful epic poem, Historia de la Nueva Mexico, is the colony’s first history, Benavides’s Memorial represents the first ethnography, however crude and limited by Catholic preconceptions. There are short chapters on a number of the most important pueblos, as well as an attempt to identify and characterize some of the more shadowy nomadic tribes on the outskirts.
Some of Benavides’s descriptions of the customs of the Puebloans are quite bizarre. For instance:
The women who wanted men to crave them would go out into the countryside fat and fine, and raise up a rock or a long stick on the top of a hill. There they would offer up cornmeal, and for eight days, or as long as they could, they would not eat. This sort ofthing certainly upset their stomachs, and provoked them into vomiting. They whipped themselves cruelly. When they couldn’t stand this any more, and had gone from fat to thin, with figures like the devil, they would saunter up confidently to the first man they saw and get him excited. The man would give them blankets, which was their principal aim.
