The Mototícachi Massacre: Authorized Pimas and the Specter of the Insurrectionary Indian

On July 29, 1688, the Pima ranchería of Mototícachi went up in flames. All of its residents—without regard to age or gender—were seized and shackled by a group of soldiers from the Sinaloa presidio. The prisoners were taken to the nearby ranchería of Bacoachi, where forty-two men were killed and the rest were transferred to Sinaloa as prisoners of war. The burning, the imprisonment, and the subsequent executions all were ordered by Nicolás de Higuera, a young corporal from the Sinaloa presidio charged with protecting the Teuricachi Valley against the invasions of the Janos, Jocomes, Sumas, and Apaches. Letters written in the days that followed illustrate Spanish fears that the fire at Mototícachi would cast its embers across the then-peaceful Pimería Alta.

The specter of the insurrectionary Indian hovered in Spanish imagination during the late seventeenth century, ever since the Pueblo Revolt of 1680. In August of that year, the seemingly pacified and friendly Pueblo Indians had synchronized a rebellion that succeeded in expelling all Spaniards from Pueblo lands in northern New Mexico. The blood spilled during that unexpected episode fractured the certainties of Spanish officials and fed paranoid concerns across New Spain that any and all Indians could suddenly turn against the Spanish empire and its colonial settlers. Near the Pimería Alta, anxieties were further fueled by the frequent theft of livestock and the sporadic killing of Spanish soldiers and vecinos. Although most of these assaults were attributed to enemy groups such as the Janos and Jocomes, on several occasions the Pimas were accused of being either accomplices or solely responsible for the attacks.¹ The documentary record illustrates that Spanish authorities, religious and military alike, feared that Apache defiance would spread to the Pimas, who might then follow the path blazed by the Pueblos.

In this article I explore a little-known episode among early interactions between Pimas (O’odham, in their language) and Spaniards: the 1688 destruction of the Pima settlement of Mototícachi at the hands of soldiers from the Sinaloa presidio. In statements produced in the aftermath of this event, Spanish vecinos of Sonora simultaneously conveyed two stances vis-à-vis the Pimas. On one hand, these residents represented the Pimas as peaceful. They were horrified, and furiously condemned Higuera for what they considered to be an unwarranted attack on a friendly Pima ranchería. On the other hand, they also represented the Pimas as bellicose. They feared that the numerically superior Pima nation would seek revenge, and in desperation they had requested Higuera’s assistance in preventing an uprising. The massacre of Mototícachi (as the event came to be known in Spanish records) and the judicial investigations that followed elucidate the pervasiveness of the insurrectionary Indian myth on the northern frontier and the ambivalence of inter-ethnic relations among Spaniards and O’odham.

In contemporary Latin America, indigenous people are often represented in dichotomous terms articulated around the dialectic of “authorized” and “insurrectionary” Indians (Hale 2004; Nelson 1999; Richards 2007). The notion of the authorized Indian was originally developed by Hale and Millaman (2006) to explain how neoliberalism—as a cultural project—raises indigenous voices while simultaneously limiting their transformative power. Simply stated, authorized Indians are those who assimilate into the dominant system and do not threaten the integrity of existing production relations, whereas insurrectionary Indians are those who challenge the system by claiming their cultural rights. This framework can be easily applied to the context of the Pimería Alta in the colonial period. Those Pimas who had accepted baptism, settled in pueblos, and labored on the land were classified as authorized Indians, subjects of the Spanish Crown. In contrast, the Apaches, Janos, Jocomes, and Sumas who actively fought the Spanish system epitomized the insurrectionary Indian. This simple dichotomy, however, does not expose the complexity of contemporary and historical inter-ethnic relations—a complexity I explore here.

In his study of the political “imaginaries” of Ladinos² in post–civil war Guatemala, Charles Hale (2007) shows that the insurrectionary Indian is not a...