Women on Top: The Love Magic of the Indian Witches of New Mexico
It was an april night in 1734, recalled María Manuela de Armijo. It must have been eight o'clock or thereabouts. Outside on the streets of Santa Fe, New Mexico, all was still. Inside María's house the day's end had brought a peaceful hush. The evening embers in the hearth had begun to crackle and pop. Already Cayetano Moya, María's husband, had retired, and all the children were safely tucked away. María bolted shut the windows and door to her house. She blessed herself with the sign of the cross, said her evening prayers, and climbed into bed for a night's rest. But there would be very little rest for María that night. Moments before she fell asleep, a witch entered the house. Bellowing like a raging bull, barking like a dog, with yips and yaps and harrowing cries, the witch, whom María recognized as the coyota (a person with a particular proportion of mixed Spanish, Indian, and African ancestry) Nicolasa Romero, kept shouting out in an ugly cry: "Puta! Puta! Gran puta!" (Whore! Whore! Gigantic whore!). María screamed out in terror, but the cords in her throat were mute. "Praised be the Blessed Sacrament," she mumbled. "Glory be to Saint Anthony," she prayed helplessly as the witch fondled María's body, caressed her breasts, and did with her as she pleased. And though María's husband, Cayetano, was in bed beside her, he saw and heard absolutely nothing. Then, just as suddenly as Nicolasa Romero had appeared, she disappeared into the night.1
The Indian witches of New Mexico and the suspicions they provoked in the eighteenth century is the topic of this essay. During the eighteenth century three major issues shaped the tone and tenor of life in this remote frontier colony: the activity of witches, constant attacks on established towns by marauding Indians (namely, by Apache, Comanche, Navajo, and Ute), and economic development spurred by the Bourbon Reforms [End Page 373] in the 1770s to safeguard the province's viability on the Spanish Empire's periphery. The previous century in New Mexico, from 1598 to 1680, had ended in massive bloodshed. In 1680 the sedentary agricultural Pueblo Indians, residing in compact towns mostly along the Rio Grande basin, had revolted against Spanish rule. As the first major successful indigenous rebellion against European colonialism in North America, the uprising had prompted other indigenous groups to similar actions, shaking the very foundations of Spain's imperial project in America. Beginning on 10 August 1680, the Pueblo Indians staged a number of attacks on Spanish villages that lasted for several weeks, leaving 401 settlers and 21 Franciscan friars dead and driving the rest of the colonists from the kingdom. The Franciscan missions were left in ruins, food stock and livestock were left depleted, and, once the rebellion was complete, civil war broke out among several of the independent Pueblo city-states. From El Paso, Texas, founded as a town when the Spanish refugees of the revolt first huddled there to plan their return, they staged several unsuccessful forays into Pueblo country, finally reconquering it in 1693. By then, two-thirds of the world's silver production was being extracted from the mines in northern New Spain. The maintenance of the Kingdom of New Mexico as a defensive colony was deemed absolutely essential by the Spanish Crown for the protection of this vital resource, given the establishment of French and English outposts in the Mississippi Valley established in 1682.
The Spaniards who returned to New Mexico in 1693 came with a much more respectful attitude toward the Pueblo Indians, born of fear, of course, but also with much-reformed governance structures that they hoped would insure a lasting peace. The...
