Read Kachina and the Cross Online

Authors: Carroll L Riley

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Page 112
Crucifix found in mission ruins, Giusewa Pueblo, Jemez area 
(courtesy of the Museum of New Mexico, neg. no. 15424)

 

Page 113
Zuni towns in the seventeenth century. All of the pueblos except Halona (modern
Zuni) were probably deserted by 1692. (Modified from Riley,
A Zuni Life
, 1998.)
in that direction. There were foundations at Quarai, briefly at Humanas, and probably at Tajique. There were also refoundations at Jemez (San Diego de la Congregación), and at Picurís. For the first time the Spaniards turned to the Piro area, a rather strange oversight considering that the mission supply trainsin fact, all contact with Mexicocame through Piro country. Between 1626 and 1629 Benavides, with the assistance of Fray Martin de Arvide, established missions at Sevilleta, Socorro, and farthest south at Senecú.
The next surge in missionization came in 1629 when the new custodian, Father Perea, returned from New Spain (see also chapter 7). With Perea came thirty friars, but one died on the trip northward and a second shortly after the caravan arrived. A few friars in New Mexico returned to New Spain, but in the
Page 114
fall of 1629 there were forty-six Franciscans in New Mexico: thirty-five priests and eleven lay brothers.
The next few years saw the missionization program extend to its farthest extent in the New Mexican province. Fray Roque Figueredo spearheaded the Zuni mission at Hawikuh, founded in 1629, and that same year Francisco de Porras established a station at Awatovi in Hopi country. The following year a second convent was set up at the Third Mesa village of Oraibi by Fray Bartolomé Romero. The Zuni missionization effort was deserted in 1632 when the missions at Halona (modern Zuni) and Hawikuh were destroyed. Hawikuh was rebuilt in the 1640s, and Halona probably about the same time. The Hopi missions were maintained until the Pueblo Revolt, which effectively ended missionization in Hopi land.
As mentioned in chapter 7, the mission at Taos was burned and the missionary killed in a rebellion of 1639. The pueblo was "pacified" in 1641, but the church was not rebuilt for more than a decade. As of 1638, the Franciscan commissary-general of New Spain, Father Juan de Prada, could report that mission New Mexico extended like a cross from Senecú in the south to Taos in the north, and from Hopi in the west to the Tompiro settlements in the east.
Senecú is a somewhat mysterious place. It was located on the west bank of the Rio Grande, not too far from San Pascual and Qualacú, but even though a mission was built there, the ruins have never been definitely identified. Possibly they are now buried under Rio Grande sediments. In fact, information on the whole southern Piro area is somewhat confused. Testimony taken by a viceregal commission in 1601 indicated that Qualacú (Cuelaqui) was the southernmost pueblo reported by Oñate, although the adelantado himself called it the "second pueblo." It seems probable that the first settlement was San Pascual, which in spite of its size was deserted by the time of Otermín's attempted reconquest of 1681. It seems to me that there may have been a gradual consolidation of the Piro towns just north of Black Mesa, one that was accelerated when a mission station was begun at Senecú.
A few years after Prada's report, the Franciscans began a mission program among the Mansos of the El Paso area. The mission of Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe was occupied in late 1659, and a permanent structure was built between 1662 and 1668. Administratively, the Guadalupe mission was under control of the New Mexico custodia, but the secular situation is not altogether clear. The Rio Grande at El Paso had, during the course of the seventeenth century, become the boundary line between Nueva Vizcaya and the province of New Mexico. As the mission was south (at El Paso, actually more west) of the river, it logically lay within the jurisdiction of the governor of Nueva Vizcaya. This, however, did not seem to be a particular problem during this period.
Page 115
Several families of Indians from the Piro pueblo of Senecú were brought in by the missionary in charge, Fray Garcia de San Francisco, to help with the conversion. A half-dozen young Manso men and women, servants in Spanish households, were also recruited to help with the mission effort. This missionization effort at Guadalupe was not without problems; for example, in 1667 there was a flare-up of rebellion. This was quickly extinguished and it was to a reasonably secure El Paso area that the Spaniards fell back during the dark first weeks of the Pueblo Revolt.
As far as the major New Mexico missions were concerned, the second half of the seventeenth century saw the missionary effort stemmed and a retreat begun. Although the Hopi missions held firm until the revolt, Zuni was a constant problem. The mission at Hawikuh (but not the town) was sacked by the Apaches in 1672 and does not seem to have been reopened. During this period, several of the Zuni towns may have been deserted, and after the Pueblo Revolt, only Halona was left.
The Towa pueblos of Jemez presented a constant problem. This was certainly due in part to the interaction of the Jemez and Navajo to the west and north, creating a volatile situation that kept the Jemez region in turmoil. On the eastern side of the mission area a steady attrition took place. Partly due to the drought conditions of 1667-72, and partly to the increasing pressure of Apache nomads, the entire Tompiro region and part of the Manzano Tiwa region were deserted between 1672 and 1680. The same pressures caused the desertion of the southernmost Piro town, Senecú, during that same period. In the crucial year of 1680 only some thirty-three Franciscans were stationed in New Mexico.
How did one go about the business of missionization? The first missionaries no doubt made do with such housing as their hosts could provide, but the plan from the first was to build churches and convents, the latter serving as both administrative and living quarters for the missionaries. Although the first permanent church was constructed at San Gabriel in 1599-1600, the great period of church building came later. For one thing, until some years after 1610 there simply were not enough missionaries to staff any large mission effort. A serious building program really got under way in the 1620s.
How did the handful of missionaries approach the task of convincing some tens of thousands of Native Americans to give up their traditional and tried-and-true religious methods and embrace a puzzling alien code? They could, of course, use force if necessary. Spanish soldiers led by the civil government and by encomenderos were ready to back up the mission program with armed intervention. This, alone, was not enough because the Spanish forces were small and scattered over a very large area. And in fact, rebellions like those of Jemez, Zuni, and Taos continued to flare up during the course of the century.
Page 116
Hopi pueblos in the seventeenth century. Towns were
originally on the lower slopes of the mesas.
But from the first, the Franciscans seem to have introduced a powerful moral authority that for the most part worked in the seventeenth-century province. Totally certain of the truth of their faith and their own superiority as human beings, the missionaries acted with great boldness and decision. Unfortunately, with this mind-set the friars saw little or nothing good in Pueblo culture. They quickly realized that this culture was a seamless whole, and that the most effective way to attack Pueblo religion was to pull down the whole social edifice. The Franciscans in central Mexico, during the previous century, had concentrated on the young people, especially the young men, producing a cadre of fanatical Christians who were willing to desert parents and family to follow the missionaries. In New Mexico the Franciscans utilized the same strategy and concentrated on the youth. This produced great bitterness on the part of Pueblo Indians, struggling not only for their religion, but for their total culture. This experiment in rapid forced acculturation on the part of the missionaries began to meet a growing resistance on the part of the Indians. Whenever the military and political pressure against native religion relaxed (as it did in the time of López de Mendizábal), such forbidden ceremonies as the kachina dances, practiced in dangerous secrecy, again became public. Their violent sup-
Page 117
pression, especially after López's time, was surely one of the factors that led to the Pueblo Revolt.
In the sixteenth century, Franciscan missionaries in central Mexico had thrown themselves into the learning of the native Aztec or Nahuatl language, and this idea of preaching to converts in their own tongues was quickly extended into other parts of Mexico; for example, the Tarascan region. By the time of the New Mexican missionaries, however, the emphasis was on teaching of Spanish to the native groups. Because New Mexico has several very different languagesZuni, Hopi, Northern and Southern Tiwa, Tewa/Tano, Towa, Piro/Tompiro, and two branches of Keresanand the missionaries moved around quite a bit, it was undoubtedly simpler to concentrate on Spanish. Still, it did mean that interaction between a missionary and a parishioner had to be through an interpreter. In an
auto
, or edictin this case, a questionnaire dated September 4, 1699Governor Pedro Rodriguez Cubero asked a number of old settlers in pre-revolt New Mexico their understanding of the mission effort. There seemed to be a general agreement that, with very few exceptions, the Franciscans depended on Spanish and on interpreters.
What were these New Mexico Franciscans like? It seems probable on the basis of the evidence we have today that most of the missionaries were humane men, dedicated to their Indian neophytes, albeit only on Franciscan terms. There were exceptions, to be sure. For example, a number of individual missionaries were accused of seducing their female Pueblo parishioners. One recent scholar has claimed that the Pueblo women readily made themselves sexually available to the Spaniards in order to ''cool their passions'' and to transform and domesticate them. This sort of female behavior does not really fit the Pueblo pattern, at least not in later historic times. In any case, as far as the missionaries are concerned, the claims of sexual irregularity mostly focused on outlying pueblos like Taos and the Salinas area. The Franciscans emphasized celibacy, and sexual misconduct does not seem to have been a regular thing. Certainly it was not acceptable behavior in the eyes of the provincia officials in Mexico.
More serious was the charge of cruelty. One notorious example was that of Salvador de Guerra at Hopi, who was charged with having a man flogged to death and who administered whippings followed by applications of hot turpentine to boys and girls, often for very flimsy offenses. Guerra was condemned in 1655 to be sent to Mexico City for disciplinary action, although the major chargesfirst, that he was "incorrigible, overbearing and arrogant and a revealer of the secrets of the Order," and second, that he lacked "modesty and decorum"seem to ignore the main issue of the case. It is unclear if Guerra actually went to Mexico. If so, he soon returned to the province, his sadism apparently
Page 118
forgotten or ignored, and in 1661 he was appointed notary to Father Alonso de Posada in the latter man's capacity of Commissary of the Inquisition.
Miracles were the order of the day. In chapter 7 I mentioned the "Lady in Blue" whose mission to the Jumano so fascinated Benavides, but this apparition was only one of many miraculous events. The missionaries healed the sick when challenged by native leaders. They brought rain to drought-stricken areas where the rain-priests had failed. Francisco de Porras at Hopi made a blind boy see.
The Franciscans personalized their enemies in the struggle for Indian hearts and souls. The native weather-control priests, called "sorcerers" by the Franciscans, were considered active agents of the Devil, whose actions could be seen every day in the Pueblos. God occasionally took a direct hand. At Taos, a sorceress gathered a small group of women around her and was attempting to persuade them to give up their Christian marriages when a lightning bolt from a clear sky struck and killed her. The other women were unharmed and, in the minds of the Franciscans, strengthened in their new faith. At Acoma, baptism of a dying baby caused the infant to instantaneously recover her health.
Miracles were a stock in trade, and to recite one was usually to have it accepted at face value. Usually, but not always! The Porras cure of a blind boy at Hopi seems to have met with some skepticism at a higher level. The Franciscan commissary-general Francisco de Apodaca noted that the miracle was not authenticated and discouraged its publication in Mexico. Generally, though, this was a time and a place where the miraculous was commonplace and the struggle to save souls was waged against real and immediate agents of Satan.
One thing the Franciscans faced throughout the mission period in New Mexico, as did the Jesuits in northwestern Mexico, was a general lack of workmen acquainted with European construction. This was perhaps not as serious as might have been expected, at least in the Pueblo area. Pueblo houses were made of stone and mud mortar or, in some towns in the Rio Grande Valley, of coursed adobe. There was considerable use of wood for such things as door lintels and kiva roofs. But something as massive as a church was outside the experience of Pueblo builders.
A second, more serious factor was the shortage of master builders in the Southwest. The fact that one or two missionaries might be alone in an area made it necessary for them to have a variety of skills, not least of which was the construction of churches and convents. By the seventeenth century, church construction in Europe was on a very sophisticated level. From the Romans, medieval Europe had inherited the idea of the barrel vault to roof the nave, the main portion of the church that extends from the entryway to the chancel or altar area. Early in medieval times, church builders had developed what is
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