Traders and Raiders: The Indigenous World of the Colorado Basin, 1540-1859

Introduction

Introduction In 1821, millions of subjects became citizens across a vast territory freed from the Spanish empire. In an instant, New Spain transformed into the state of Mexico. Across the country, political leaders from the continent’s largest cities and smallest pueblos grappled with their new national identity . As these citizens began the long and sometimes-bloody struggle to fully realize their independence, Indigenous captors and captives engaged in their own battle over autonomy in a seemingly remote corner of northwest Mexico. Two years after Mexico gained independence, a kidnapped eight-year-old boy from a Quechan village on the Lower Colorado River unwillingly became part of this struggle. His captors, most likely Akimel O’odhams from the Gila River, which flowed west into the larger Colorado, abducted him and possibly several other children during a raid.1 From their farms of cotton, corn, and wheat along the Gila River Valley, these Akimel O’odhams struck out at their Colorado River neighbors during the eighteenth century as the reach of New Spain receded. In the early nineteenth century they also targeted Apachería communities to the east, who themselves raided livestock and people from weakened Spanish settlements during this period. This particular attack on the Quechans may have been reciprocal—a response by the Akimel O’odhams to an earlier raid on one of their own villages. These violent, routine kidnappings enacted a long-standing strategy utilizing interregional captivity networks. Simultaneously, they created territorial buffer zones while also integrating Native communities into yet larger Indigenous continental trading orbits. During this period of Mexican independence, though, these unnamed Akimel O’odhams had also incorporated Indigenous captives into more restrictive, violent, and (for the captors) lucrative slave markets that connected Indian and Spanish/ Mexican landscapes. What once served primarily military objectives for Indigenous captive raiders became by Mexican independence a politicaleconomic means to obtain livestock (usually horses), seeds, and manufactured goods. Through this rapidly expanding and violent market, new and [2] introduction dizzyingly complex alliances emerged and dissolved within local Indian communities and between larger Indigenous (i.e., Ute, Navajo, and Comanche ) polities and Euro-American (i.e., Spanish, French, British, and American) colonies.2 The Quechan boy accompanied his kidnappers on a 100-mile journey east to the northern Sonoran mission La Purísima Concepción de Caborca, where he received the christened name José Serrano. Despite the recent political changes occurring farther south in Mexico City, Caborca survived as a missionary outpost that held onto the old ways of Spanish colonialism in the most northern reaches of Mexico. José Serrano received his baptismal rites from Father Faustino Gonzalez. Like the mostly Akimel O’odham congregation he ostensibly served, Gonzalez was also a survivor, escaping the fate of fellow Sonoran Jesuits forced to leave New Spain in 1767. He remained at Caborca until 1839, and for over thirty years presided over baptisms, weddings, and funerals that stitched together this tiny community isolated from the corridors of power in Mexico City. The majority of his congregation had been captives sold by Maricopa and Akimel/Tohono O’odhamtraderswhosurroundedthesmallchainofMexicansettlements. Kidnapped victims came from all over the region, and included Apaches, Quechans, Southern Paiutes, and Yavapais. Even fellow O’odhams and Maricopas were sold. Gonzalez took part in the trade, purchasing captives with mules and other livestock. José Serrano likely became a criado, or household servant. Criado derives from the verb creer—to raise.3 Spaniards employed this gentler euphemism to justify coercive forms of bondage in towns and missions across New Spain, but Indigenous captors also engaged in similar practices through the language of adoption, kin, and ritual.4 Thus for Quechan children like Serrano, the pain and trauma suffered within a “spectrum of bondage” could look strikingly similar within Native and Spanish worlds. Such practices had existed before and after Europeans arrived and were central to political-economic exchange within Native North America and between Indigenous and European communities. In 1823, the young boy Serrano became yet another unwilling participant in this long-standing network.5 Serrano’s real name is lost, but Gonzalez stated that he belonged to “gentile parents of the Yuma nation” who lived on the Colorado River.6 In the baptismal record, Gonzalez listed Serrano as a nijora, a designation he shared with hundreds of other children sold or kidnapped into bondage across the colonial Southwest during the eighteenth and nineteenth introduction [3] centuries. The precise origin...