Kachina and the Cross (31 page)

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Authors: Carroll L Riley

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BOOK: Kachina and the Cross
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Page 154
paper, each of twenty quires, plus an additional thirteen quires. A quire normally has twenty-five sheets, so the governor was carrying over twenty thousand sheets. Moreover, books in the hands of lay individuals also date from the Oñate period. In the Salazar inspection of late 1597, Captain Alonso de Quesada declared that he was bringing to New Mexico "Seven books, religious and non-religious."
As might be expected, books in New Mexico were largely devotional in character; breviaries, missals, manuals, catechisms,
doctrinas
, books of music, and hagiography. There were virtually no books that might be considered "scientific," but there were several histories, including a history of Charles V. The library of López de Mendizábal and his wife Teresa de Aguilera y Roche did contain some popular writings, including Cervantes's
Don Quixote
and a collection of plays published in seventeenth-century Spain. There was also Ludovico Ariosto's
Orlando Furioso
, presumably an Italian-language edition, brought by Teresa, whose childhood had been spent in Italy. López also had the Spanish-language book on surgery, mentioned above, as well as books in Latin and a Latin-Spanish dictionary. His successor, Governor Peñalosa, had the
Milicia Yndiana
, the first part of Vargas Machuca's large work
Miliciay descripción de las Indias
, Gaspar de Villagrá's
Historia de la Nueva México
, and parts of Fray Juan Torquemada's
Monarquia Indiana
. One of Peñalosa's books, a history of the English civil wars, was published in Madrid in 1658, only three years before Peñalosa took office. In the Rosas period, Fray Juan de Vidania made various references to classical works, including Aristotle's
Topics
, Caesar's
Gallic Wars
, Ovid's
Metamorphoses
, and works by Gregory, Augustine, and Aquinas, among others. These works do not appear on any of the known lists, but Vidania may conceivably have had all or some of these books available in New Mexico.
To sum up, the Spanish settlers of seventeenth-century New Mexico had to give up the sophisticated urban life that they might have found in Europe or even in central Mexico. There were no schools, no regular medical facilities, no coinagein fact, very few of the uses of civilized life. The colonists lived close to the earth, working the estancias for subsistence agriculture and depending on neighboring Pueblos for basic technological needs such as pottery. The extremely small elite group (mainly the governors and their entourages) lived somewhat better. They at least had books to read, their diets were more varied, and some of their personal belongings such as clothing, bedding, and dinner services might have been considered acceptable in high-class circles in Mexico or even in Spain. Such people had servants, although if the problems of the López de Mendizábal family were any guide, the level of service was quite low. It was mainly that of Indian or African slaves or Pueblo Indians serving off minor sentences for misbehavior. The missionaries also lived in reasonably comfortable conventual quarters, eating from
Page 155
majolica ware (
losa de Puebla
), and they, too, had servants, in this case Pueblo Indians. However, all in all, New Mexico was a remote area that developed its own inbred, self-reliant, but woefully undereducated and unsophisticated population. It is no wonder that documents of the time are much concerned with sexualimmorality, especially among the elite group. There was simply not enough to do.
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Chapter Ten
Bernardo López de Mendizábal
By the mid-seventeenth century the Spaniards seemed to be well entrenched in New Mexico. It is true that their numbers were small, and the military force necessary to hold the large Pueblo Indian populations inadequate. However, they depended primarily on the moral power of the missionaries to control the Pueblos, using the military arm in a struggle with the nomadic groups on both the eastern and western borders of the province. More and more the Spaniards were dependent on Pueblo men for military service, acting as auxiliaries in this endless warfare. The Native Americans in this way gradually became acquainted with the uses of war, Spanish style. This does not mean that the auxiliaries were mounted. They generally served as a kind of infantry support force, using native weapons; nevertheless, they slowly became familiar with both horsemanship and with firearms. The Pueblos also learned the rudiments of Spanish tactical and strategic operations.
As Ramón Gutiérrez has pointed out, the Franciscans usurped the functions of Pueblo rain-priests, hunt chiefs, and the medicine societies. In other words, they offered the Pueblo Indians an alternative way of gaining the same supernatural blessings. The icon of the cross, so important to the missionaries, was acceptable because the Pueblos identified it as a star symbol. The liturgical practices of the missionaries, especially those of the Christmas season, fit the ceremonial round of the Indians. Even the lifelong vow of chastity made by each Franciscan would, in Indian eyes, intensify the holiness and spirit power of these strange new holy men.
As pointed out in chapter 8, however, the Franciscans were well aware that their most potent weapon was the indoctrination of children. This "divide and conquer" technique had worked very well a century before in the conquest of Mexico. It became a part of the Franciscan strategy for converting the Pueblos from the very beginning of missionization. As I said in
Rio del Norte
: "For a Pueblo Indian born
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after about 1630in some cases after 1610the mission effort was pervasive. The child attended church services, learned the rites and rituals of Christianity, was taught Spanish, and had constantly drummed into his or her head that the Pueblo fertility and weather-control ceremonies were wicked and depraved."
Still and all, native ceremonies, especially the kachina ceremonies, continued to be practiced. The evidence suggests that repression was sporadic and not particularly effective until the "kachina wars," beginning around 1660. To that extent, it might be said that Spanish occupation of New Mexico could be divided into two periods. During the first sixty years or so, the Franciscans and the Pueblo religious leaders coexisted in a de facto, though rather brittle, truce. There were certainly arrests and attempts to undermine the native ways of doing things, but these tended to be in the less secure outer rings of pueblos, especially Taos, Zuni, and Jemez. In contrast, the last twenty years before the great revolt were marked by explosive attempts to destroy native religion on the part of both missionaries and the secular authorities. There were at least two catalysts for this change in direction (or perhaps one should say "intensification of effort") on the part of the Franciscans. With one or two generations of children with Christian indoctrination having become adults, the Church felt strong enough to be openly hostile toward
any
native religious practice. And, at this very time, a governor, Bernardo López de Mendizábal, appeared; his sympathy for the native religious point of view caused a crisis between the missionaries and their Indian charges. López, though a reasonably devout Christian, believed that the Indian masked dances were "folk dances" best incorporated into the fabric of Christianity. The clerical reaction to López de Mendizábal was swift and violent. Among other things, it signaled the end of the informal uneasy truce between the missionaries and the conservatives among the Pueblos. The various governors before López had developed a working relationship with the church. As discussed in chapter 7, the immediate predecessor to López, Juan Manso de Contreras (1656-59)a brother of a former custodian, Fray Tomás Mansoformed a close, though somewhat scandalous, bond with Fray Miguel Sacristán of the Santa Fe church and convent. The governor's friendship with the missionaries was cemented when Manso threw the governor's office behind the planning of a mission to the Manso Indians in the El Paso area. Manso's lax morals did disturb Inquisition officials, but nothing much was done and ex-governor Manso became
alguacil mayor
, or chief constable of the Holy Office, in New Mexico and later (1664) was made head of the mission supply service. Still, the Inquisition books were not closed on Manso until after his accidental death in 1673.
As mentioned above, the easy relationship between church and state took a decided turn for the worse with the coming of Governor López de Mendizábal.
Page 158
On the face of it, one would not expect such problems, for López belonged to a Spanish family that had been upwardly mobile for several generations and had a series of alliances with the Church. Drawing from statements in the
Inquisición
documents, France V. Scholes admirably sums up the ancestry of López and his family.
[Lopéz's] father's brother was a Knight of the Order of Santiago and had served as
fiscal
and
oidor
of the Audiencia of Guadalajara, and later as a member of the Council of Castile,
asesor de guerra
, and a member of the
junta
of the Suprema. A cousin was married to an official who had served as a member of the Council of the Indies and later in the Council of Castile. His maternal grandfather was a wealthy Spanish-born merchant of Puebla. López's father was an attorney of the jurisdiction of Chietla. One of López's brothers, Don Gregorio, served as an officer in the Spanish army, and later held several administrative posts in New Spain. Another, Don Juan, was
cura
of the mines of Cimapan. The only blot on the family escutcheon was the fact that one of his maternal ancestors had been tried and convicted by the Holy Office as a Jew.
The "Judaizing" ancestor mentioned by Scholes was Juan Nuñez de León, who was condemned by the Inquisition despite vehement denials on Nufiez's part. López's family was in Scholes's words, "fairly distinguished," but unfortunately for López, not distinguished enough to be exempt from the Inquisition. Having a Jewish ancestor probably was not a great handicap, for the upper class in Spain had a considerable amount of Jewish admixture (usually not acknowledged). This had come largely from
conversos
, individuals and their families who had switched from Judaism to Christianity, their conversions often forced by the authorities. The forced Christianization of Jewish populations in Spain had begun long before the settlement of Spanish America and was in part the outgrowth of a period of intermittent pogroms that began in the late fourteenth century. The famous expulsion of Jews from Spain by Ferdinand and Isabella in 1492 was itself an attempt to Christianize the Jewish population and resulted in tens of thousands of new converts. Thus, by the time of the settlement of New Mexico, Jewish ancestry in Spanish and Spanish colonial upper and upper-middle-class families often went back for many generations. For example, ancestors of Vázquez de Coronado's wife, Beatriz de Estrada, and Juan de Oñate's mother, Catalina de Salazar, were Jewish, and there were indeed many others. However, the charge of Judaizing was a very handy one for Inquisition officials and was widely used in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Bernardo López de Mendizábal was born in Chietla, a town southwest of the city of Puebla in New Spain, sometime around 1620. His father, Captain

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