Conflict in Colonial Sonora: Indians, Priests, and Settlers

Introduction

1 introduction . / In this book I describe conflicts among three distinct social groups—Indians, religious orders of priests (primarily Jesuits), and settlers (including military personnel)—in the Northwest of Mexico over a period of about one hundred thirty years, beginning in the 1640s. Each side had its own interests and frequently struggled to defend them. Indians were usually aligned with Indians, priests with priests, and settlers and soldiers with settlers and soldiers. At times, however, the sides were riven with internal friction and conflict and sought alliances with their purported adversaries . Priests strove to pacify Indians, who in turn resisted the missionary clergy’s hegemony through a variety of strategies. Sometimes, however, Indians found the missionaries to be their allies. Settlers often encountered opposition from priests to their entradas and operations and found Indians willing to side with them against the clerics. Settlers also sought to dominate Indians, take over their land, and, when convenient, exploit them as servants and laborers. Indians struggled to maintain control of their traditional lands and their cultures and persevere in their ancient enmities with competing indigenous peoples, with whom they often squabbled and fought wars, sometimes allying themselves with priests and settlers against other Indians. The missionaries faced conflicts within their own orders; between orders (Jesuits and Franciscans); and between the orders and secular clergy, and settlers took advantage of this interclerical conflict.1 Some settlers championed Indian rights against the clergy, while others viewed Indians as ongoing impediments to economic development and viewed the priests as obstructionists. Settlers, above all, demanded land. In this they had the strong backing 2 2 introduction of the Crown, which placed a high value on colonizers as carriers of the royal torch. Once colonizers were settled and producing from their farms and ranches (usually with Indians’ labor), they would provide a cheaper security system for opposing foreign expansion and resisting Indian hostilities than expensive presidios staffed with paid soldiery. While settlers were expected to form local militias, their ties to their own land would lead them to establish roots and a permanence more reliable than could be expected from mere soldiers. Both their ethnic heritage as Spaniards and the fact that their land became theirs through the largesse of the king would guarantee loyalty to the Crown.2 Many soldiers, Spanish authorities assumed, would double as settlers and remain as colonizers in the frontiers following their terms of service. Their land and holdings would provide vigorous incentives to defend their property from all takers.3 The short- and long-term interests of all three groups resulted in shifting alliances and changing opponents. Still, at the beginning of the 1630s, when the colonial era takes shape in Sonora, the three groups can conveniently be viewed as roughly univocal forces with mostly clear interests. As long as all three laid claim to the same territory, clashes and conflicts were inevitable. Yet without Indians, Jesuits would be without an assignment. And to some extent only the elimination, ejection, or marginalization of the other two groups could fully satisfy the goals and desires of Indians and settlers. In the end, settlers emerged triumphant. Jesuits and their Franciscan successors disappeared from the religious scene and Indians were for the most part pushed into the background. Each of chapters 1 through 7 is based upon a manuscript, a file of manuscripts , or several folders of manuscripts. I chose these because each permits a distinct glimpse into a conflict pivotal in the social evolution of Mexico’s Northwest, especially the state of Sonora. Each conflict underscores a different perspective and reveals the contradictions inherent in the three viewpoints . I came upon some of these manuscripts during research for an earlier book on the Ópatas. Others I discovered while working my way through microfilm copies of files. Still others I found while leafing through documents housed in the Archivo de Indias in Seville, Spain. The documentary foundation for chapter 3, the conspiracies of 1681, came from Luis Navarro García, who described them in his important book Sonora y Sinaloa en el siglo XVII. Using his references, I located the original documents in the Archivo de Indias and was able to read them closely. In so doing I arrived at conclusions that differed somewhat from those of Navarro García. 3 Introduction 3 These chapters focus mostly on Ópatas, peoples who spoke the Eudeve and Teguima (Ópata) languages and lived in what is...