The Other Slavery (32 page)

Just below the surface, however, coercion was also a part of the bargain between missionaries and Indians. The mission of Santa María del Pópulo, for example, had originated as a refugee community in the wake of a series of slaving raids in 1662. A posse of Spaniards had cut a swath through the Seri lands, killing most of the adults of one band and distributing the children in the Spanish towns of Sonora. As Father Gilg himself told the story, “Those who survived, following the advice of my predecessor, Father Juan Fernández, decided to congregate themselves in this place of which I am currently its missionary.” Building on this initial nucleus, Father Gilg was able to persuade more Seris to shed their nomadic ways and acquiesce to life under the mission bell. A string of new missions arose, including San Tadeo, San Eustaquio, and Santa María Magdalena de los Tepocas. It is possible that many of the nomads were lured solely by Father Gilg’s exhortations—in German laced with a few Seri words, one would imagine—and by his provisions of corn and beef. But at least some of them made their choice under duress. For example, in 1700 Father Gilg accompanied Sergeant Juan Bautista de Escalante and fifteen soldiers on a military incursion into the lands of the Seris. One of their objectives was to bring back ten Seri families that had absconded from Pópulo, taking some cattle in the process. The soldiers caught up with the fleeing Indians, flogged them, and restored them to the mission. For the next six months, Sergeant Escalante and his soldiers crisscrossed the Seri homeland, catching more than two hundred additional Indians and dispatching them to the missions.
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The Seris themselves were divided over the question of whether to seek accommodation in a mission or some other Spanish community or to flee to some inaccessible spot. According to anthropologist and
historian Thomas E. Sheridan, out of a total population of around three thousand in the early eighteenth century, perhaps ten to twenty percent chose to settle down. The majority pursued the opposite strategy, avoiding contact with Europeans and retreating deep into their environmental refuge. Tiburón, the largest island in Mexico, lies only about a mile and a half from the continent and is clearly visible from much of the central coast of Sonora. But to get to this island, one has to cross the treacherous Strait of Infiernillo. The Spaniards needed good boats to negotiate the strait’s strong currents, but the desert coast of Sonora had no trees and therefore no wood for boats. The closest sources of wood would have been the Sierra de Bacoachi or Cerro Prieto. But hauling logs for even a medium-size vessel would have been a formidable task. The Seris were well aware of the Spaniards’ difficulties in getting to Tiburón and to the even more remote island of San Esteban, and thus headed there to escape their control.
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Negotiating between these two worlds, many Seris chose to straddle them. They would stay in the missions for some time, performing the arduous work of the agriculturalist/stockman, but also frequently flee. Sometimes they would plunder a neighboring mission or nearby ranch, then abscond to the islands. Seri bands also would raid one another’s settlements, “hunt” mission cattle as if they were deer, and plunder corn as if it were a wild plant. Ancient animosities, multigenerational vendettas, and rivalries—exacerbated by the emergence of agricultural/ ranching oases in the middle of the desert—motivated some of these attacks. They also discovered that they could extend their traditional hunting and gathering activities with the resources recently introduced by Europeans.
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The Seri example underscores the weakness of the missionary frontier. After decades of painstaking missionizing, the Jesuits of central Sonora had persuaded only a small share of the Seri nation to settle down and were powerless to prevent them from raiding missions or fleeing from them. A pertinacious pattern of occasional raids and frequent flight became the norm. The padres may have thought that they were “civilizing” the Seris, but the opposite was equally plausible: the Seris
had incorporated the missions into their way of life, as they continued to move, hunt, and gather.

The ineffectiveness of the missions eventually prompted Spanish planners to attempt a more forceful approach. As the eighteenth century unfolded, military garrisons and soldiers superseded the missions as the lynchpins of Spain’s efforts to stabilize the frontier. With the new approach came new forms of coercion. The word “presidio” captures the dual purpose of garrison and prison. Since Roman times, presidios have been both military establishments deployed in unsettled areas and sites where criminals served out their prison sentences. Today the Spanish word
presidiario
means “inmate or prisoner” rather than garrisoned soldier.
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Presidial soldiers were professionals who drew a salary from the crown, but they were underpaid. Thus garrison commanders and soldiers supplemented their earnings by catching Indians and selling them to the Spanish colonists or by turning presidios into supply centers based on coerced labor. These activities were so common that Brigadier General Pedro de Rivera issued a set of military regulations in 1729. Having toured and inspected most of the presidios of northern Mexico (an eight-thousand-mile odyssey through Sonora, Sinaloa, Chihuahua, New Mexico, Texas, and Louisiana), he had plenty of firsthand experience. The very first article of the new regulations forbade governors and presidial commanders “to capture Indians of any sex or age in an expedition of war . . . and to claim said prisoners for themselves or divide them under any motive or pretext.” The practice was quite common, and in fact these regulations did little to change it. Another grand military inspection, conducted by the Marqués de Rubí almost forty years later, found that soldiers still frequently captured Indians. As Rubí put it, “It is an occasion of abuse against all of their humanity and rights as a people if they are turned over to the citizens, who treat them as slaves, even to the point of selling them.”
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The Seri nation was among the first to experience this searing transition from a missionary to a presidial frontier. In 1742 the Spanish government established a presidio just to the east of the Seri homeland named
San Pedro de la Conquista del Pitic. The fifty soldiers deployed to Pitic were supposed to bring security to the region, but they had other priorities in mind. A surprise inspection of the garrison conducted only six years after its founding gives an unusual glimpse into its operations. A Mexico City lawyer appeared unannounced on a Sunday morning in the summer of 1748. The licenciado Rafael Rodríguez Gallardo was an imperious man who enjoyed the full backing of the viceroy. He took possession of a dilapidated office inside the presidio, ordered the soldiers to muster, and warned the presidial commander to “stay within his sight at all times.” Rodríguez Gallardo then proceeded to the most nettlesome part of his assignment, interviewing the Indians held in the garrison and examining the files detailing their crimes, the length of their imprisonment, and the types of work to which they were assigned. One by one the Indians appeared before a committee of three men: Rodríguez Gallardo, an Indian translator, and an
apoderado
(attorney) of the presidio who had in his possession what few documents regarding the inmates existed. A Native from the Pimería Alta named Nicolás was one of the first to be examined. He appeared “with chains on his legs and said that he had been imprisoned by orders of the Indian governor of the town of Caborca on account of an illicit friendship.” When Rodríguez Gallardo asked to see Nicolás’s file, the apoderado responded that there was not one. The Indians continued to file into the office: Juan Reyes, a Pima from the town of Buenavista, had been imprisoned for a year for beating up and killing his wife; Ignacio Mendizabal, a Mayo from Navojoa, had been imprisoned for theft; Agustín Tatabutemea had been in the presidio for six years because he had been a principal leader of a revolt against the Spaniards, and so on. The apoderado did not have files for the vast majority of the inmates. Of the eighty-eight Indians who were at the presidio of Pitic at the time of the inspection, only five had been granted proper criminal proceedings. Tellingly, several inmates had been accused of being hechiceros, or sorcerers, and had been sent to the presidio by express orders of the missionaries.
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Rodríguez Gallardo’s inquest uncovered a microcosm of coercion and enslavement. No matter how serious or light their crimes had been, the Natives, once inside the presidio, were compelled to work from dawn
to dusk. Twenty-two Indians labored in shackles, while the remaining sixty-six did not wear chains but were constantly monitored. Since many of the prisoners were married, their wives and children also lived at the garrison. They made tortillas, ground
pinole
(a course flour made of corn and seeds), and fetched water in return for food and clothes. Discipline was extreme. Minor infractions such as being late for work could result in forty or fifty lashes. Some guards were sadistic, beating Indians to unconsciousness, burning their armpits with hot wax, and hanging them from their feet with their heads dangling over a fire. Three Indians accused of being hechiceros at the pueblo of Onavas died after suffering horrifying head burns as presidial soldiers attempted to extract their confessions.
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Even “free” Indians at Pitic were compelled to work. A Native named Mateo Osimea declared that for six years, he had been sent to work in a nearby mine. The apoderado immediately noted that Mateo was a free Indian who had been paid for his work. But Mateo countered that instead of wages, he had received a work certificate from the mine and later had been forced to give up the certificate on the grounds that he was a prisoner of the presidio rather than a free worker. Similarly, Salvador Barucia declared that for years he had worked in the presidio as a carpenter. The apoderado affirmed that Salvador was not a prisoner but a
sirviente libre
(free servant), to which the Indian replied that “up to now they do not allow me to leave even though I wish to go back to my pueblo.” Salvador received a nominal wage in food and clothes, but he was compelled to stay and work at the presidio. The difference between freedom and slavery at Pitic was deceiving.
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The work performed by the inmates should have been for the public good, beginning with building the presidio itself. Yet the garrison remained half-finished after six years. The jail for dangerous criminals consisted of nothing but a grassy area. In fact, the presidio’s commanders had used the inmates’ labor for private gain. Pitic had been established right next to a large hacienda that belonged to the governor of Sonora and Sinaloa, Agustín de Vildósola. Since the beginning, most of the inmates had been sent to work on his property, building a dam, digging an irrigation ditch, installing fences, and tending the cornfields and
wheat fields. Other prisoners had been hard at work carding, spinning, making cloth on looms, and fermenting mescal from the agave plant. Yet others had toiled in the nearby mines. Clearly, the presidio of San Pedro de la Conquista del Pitic had become something of a labor center that serviced the governor’s hacienda, made products for sale, and funneled coerced workers to various enterprises in the area.
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Rodríguez Gallardo was so repulsed by what he saw that he ordered the immediate closure of the presidio and its relocation to “a more advantageous place.” As it turned out, the site selected for the new presidio was in the heart of the Seri mission area, on the San Miguel River, roughly midway between the missions of Pópulo and Los Ángeles. The presidio’s relocation proved catastrophic for these communities. Within a year, the soldiers of the new presidio of San Miguel de Horcasitas had taken possession of the best land in the floodplain. In the dry season, the San Miguel River diminished to a trickle, at a time when the fields needed to be irrigated the most. The soldiers simply displaced Indian farmers who had direct access to the river. The presidio’s commanders also appropriated the Indians’ labor. They seized about seventy Seris from Pópulo and put them to work digging the foundation for the new garrison and making adobe bricks for it. Even the Seri women were made to carry mud, grass,
carrizo
(a type of thick straw), and other building materials. “They are whipped, beaten, and forced to work as though they were evildoers,” observed Father Tomás Miranda. The Seris of the mission of Los Ángeles fared no better. Soldiers transported about fifty families to the new presidio and made them work “from sunup to sundown,” excepting no one, even pregnant women. There is no reason to assume that these presidios were unusually harsh toward the surrounding Indians. All along the frontier, presidios displaced Natives from well-irrigated lands, appropriated their labor to erect buildings, and seized recalcitrant Indians and turned them into servants, wives, and concubines, occasionally even selling them as slaves.
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The final twist to the Seri story shows the tremendous impact of militarization. Initially abused by the Spanish soldiers, the Seris retaliated in 1748–1749 when a party consisting of both mission and non-mission Seris boldly ran off the entire horse herd of the presidio of San Miguel
de Horcasitas—thus reducing the soldiers’ mobility—and struck half a dozen mining and smelting centers in the area. They unleashed their most serious attack on a mining town called Aguaje, where they killed forty-three residents, burned the houses after looting them, and desecrated the church. According to one priest, they “poured out the holy oils and with infernal fury lanced the painting of Our Great Mother and Lady of Guadalupe nine times, and took the holy vestments, which they burned after having eaten off them.” The indigenous rebels even faced off with the soldiers dispatched to apprehend them and succeeded in seizing their muskets.
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