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159 8 From Apostates to Compadres Colonial Ambivalence in a Time of “Unceasing War,” 1687–1692 As the Jemez River exits the southern end of the Jemez Province , its meanders merge with the Rio Salado and fan out across a sun-baked plain to the southeast. The waters warm as they flow over red sands, past the pueblos of Zia and Tamaya (Santa Ana), before merging one last time with the Rio Grande. The land between these two confluences is the territory of the Puname Pueblos, a name meaning “people of the west” in Keresan (White 1962:20; see figure FM.2). When the Spaniards first passed through these lands there were at least five Puname villages in the region,1 but by the 1680s only Zia and Tamaya remained. The mercurial actions of these two Pueblos during the late 1680s-early 1690s remain one of the enduring paradoxes of the Revolt era. In the decade that followed 1680 the Punames first participated in the initial uprising, then offered their allegiance to the Spaniards in 1681. They were twice attacked and resisted, taking up arms against the Spaniards in 1687 and 1689, but then welcomed the colonizers back with open arms in 1692, accepting the waters of baptism and pledging their loyalty to the Crown and Christ. Ultimately they even joined their former enemies in battle, marching side by side with the colonial militia against their Pueblo brethren (chapter 9). In the course of a dozen years, then, the Punames vacillated between hostile resistance and cordial compliance with the Spaniards, transforming repeatedly from hated enemies to loyal allies and back again. Why the Punames chose such radically different courses of action during the various stages of the Pueblo Revolt era is a question that has long beguiled scholars of New Mexican history (Liebmann 2011:201). What led the Zias and Santa Anas to first resist colonial efforts at virtually all costs, only to form an alliance with the Spaniards a few years later? Although Chapter 8 160 the Punames’ repeated oscillations between colonial opposition and alliance might seem at first unusual, such apparent inconsistencies are remarkably common among colonized populations. Postcolonial scholarship of the past two decades has repeatedly emphasized the profound ambivalence inherent in colonial societies, highlighting the simultaneous desire for and repulsion from foreign objects, persons, or actions experienced by parties on all sides of the colonial encounter (Young 1995:161; Bhabha 1985, 1994:110; Prakash 1994:1489). This concurrent appeal of and aversion to colonialism has often been overlooked in romanticized accounts of anticolonial resistance (Abu-Lughod 1990; Liebmann and Murphy 2011:6–8). Since the earliest encounters between Europeans and Native Americans, binary classifications of Indians have served as convenient but often inaccurate shorthand, with entire tribes pigeonholed as friendly or hostile, progressive versus conservative, and savage or civilized. The reality is often far more complicated, however, and many of the seventeenth-century Pueblos were clearly more ambivalent than exclusively opposed to Spanish rule, particularly the Punames. The pueblos of Zia and Tamaya did not exist in isolation, of course, and their actions were enmeshed within the larger web of events and social processes that took place in northern New Spain during this tumultuous period. Between 1687 and 1692 the Spaniards made repeated attempts to reconquer the Pueblos, efforts which coincided with a slow unraveling of the pan-Pueblo fabric that had been woven in the immediate aftermath of the Revolt. The ethnogenesis of the early 1680s proved neither comprehensive nor long-lasting, and after a few years the Pueblos began to fall back into a more familiar—and, it could be argued, more traditional—pattern of rivalries marked by inter- and intra-Pueblo factionalism. By all accounts, this was a time of conflict throughout the northern Rio Grande. In sharp contrast with the preceding era of attempted utopian unification, the latter part of the 1680s saw the Pueblo world torn asunder and rife with bloodshed , with the Pueblos fighting against not only the nomadic Native groups who surrounded them and the returning Spaniards, but also against other Pueblos. It was in this climate that the Punames calculated their actions, allegiances, and ambivalence, both opposing and allying with reconquering colonists and other Pueblos alike. While there are no simple explanations for the Punames’ ambivalence and alliance-switching throughout the 1680s, the roots of those fateful decisions stretch back to the earliest interactions between the Punames and the Spaniards, 140 years before the Pueblo Revolt. [3.137...

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