The Pueblo Revolt of 1680: Conquest and Resistance in Seventeenth-Century New Mexico by Andrew L. Knaut (review)

286 BOOK REVIEWS The Pueblo Revolt of 1680: Conquest and Resistance in Seventeenth-Century New Mexico. ByAndrew L. Knaut. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. 1995. Pp. xx, 248. $29.95 clothbound.) Concise, lively, and well-crafted, this retelling has much more to say about development of the seventeenth-century Spanish colony than about its stunning climax of 1680. But by what other title would the book grab greater attention? Knaut aspires to reinterpret. Skillfully utilizing available printed primary and most standard secondary sources, he attempts "to glean the Pueblo role in shaping the history of seventeenth-century New Mexico and in carrying out successfully the revolt of 1680" (pp. xiv-xv). The Pueblo Indians were not, he reassures us, passive pawns manipulated for three generations by culturally superior Europeans until, abused beyond endurance, they exploded in 1680. Instead , in diverse ways, they resisted colonization from the beginning, adeptly exploiting dissension within the Hispanic community and subtly influencing its culturally isolated members. These are valid points, but I think Knaut goes too far. The author cannot imagine Pueblo Indians accepting "the bitter pill of conversion " (p. 77) or "the Spanish and Franciscan yoke" (p. 86) for any but practical reasons of food supply or military protection. He approves the natives' defense and continued clandestine practice of their own rich sacred tradition, yet fails to consider where it came from.Who were the kachinas? Earlier, Pueblo peoples had accepted spiritual concepts that worked their way up from Mesoamerica. To exalt their descendants' resistance to Spanish imposition of a further wave of religious ideas denies the Pueblos credit for accepting anything on spiritual grounds. Although their population declined by at least fifty percent during the period 1598 to 1680, the Pueblo Indians still vastly outnumbered the multi-racial Hispanic community. Knaut rightly suggests that the Indian majority had significant influence on the European minority, but he exaggerates the latter's cultural isolation and economic stagnation. Sworn declarations before the Inquisition do offer fascinating evidence of Hispanic recourse to native cures, curses, and customs, but they are neither "countless" (p. 150) nor necessarily normative. Hispanic-Pueblo miscegenation certainly took place, but to what degree? Knaut's claim of its "widespread incidence ... in the colony throughout the seventeenth century" (p. 134) has not been substantiated. Many of the oftmaligned mestizos, linked by detractors in the same breath with mulattoes, came from other parts of New Spain. "As a mestizo," Knaut writes,"Aguilar represented what had become, by the time of his birth in the third decade of the seventeenth century, a large portion of the Hispanic population in the province. Isolated among an overwhelming native population, Hispanics in New Mexico inevitably intermixed with Pueblo Indians" (p. 139). Born in Michoac án, Nicolás de Aguilar had emigrated via Parral to New Mexico where he married a Spanish woman, not a Pueblo. BOOK REVIEWS 287 After Spanish recolonization in the l690's, Knaut concludes,"miscegenation continued to erase the genetic lines separating the land's native inhabitants from the newest set of colonists" (p. 186). What seems more remarkable to me is how the Pueblos, including mixed-blood babies raised by them, and Híspanles kept and still keep their reassuringly separate cultural identities. Having raised these important questions, I hope Andrew Knaut will return to consider them further with the same verve he has demonstrated in this spirited first book. John L. Kessell University ofNew Mexico Indians, Franciscans, and Spanish Colonization: The Impact of the Mission System on California Indians. By Robert H.Jackson and Edward Castillo. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. 1995. Pp. vii, 213. $32.50.) The impact of the Franciscan missions on the Indians of California long has been a subject of intense debate. Even during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when the missions were in their ascendancy, visitors expressed widely different views. The debate continues today as the founder of the California missions, Father Junípero Serra, O.F.M., moves toward canonization as the first saint of the Golden State. Indians, Franciscans, and Spanish Colonization is a major contribution to this ongoing controversy. Historian Robert H. Jackson and anthropologist Edward Castillo (Cahuilla/Luiseño) summarize and advance...