Pueblos, Spaniards, and the Kingdom of New Mexico (review)

This is a brisk history of the Kingdom of New Mexico from approximately 1598 to 1700. Penned by a prolific, now retired historian and translator of colonial Southwestern texts, it jollily narrates a linear chronicle of governorships, church-state squabbles, and indigenous alliances and resistance that rarely get connected to the larger structures of imperial power. Absent and much missed here is any analysis of the toxic effects of colonialism, the geopolitics of colonial exploitation, and the brutal methods used by colonials to extract indigenous wealth. Instead of learning how Spain’s empire operated in this marginal zone, readers get a tired, now repudiated American studies exceptionalist framework that was popular in the 1950s.

“Seventeenth century New Mexico was like no place else” (p. xi), the book’s first sentence, is a splendid prolegomenon, exposing the ideological and moral trajectory that organizes this work. “Unfortunately, no one cared to record the ordinary days when Pueblos and Spaniards laughed together, repaired a fallen wall, watered the sheep, or prepared for a buffalo hunt,” the author asserts. “While such mundane happenings went largely unnoticed, accounts of conflict, crime, and punishment filled the archives” (p. 4). Indeed, if archives are ignored, one can conclude that “much of life in the formative seventeenth century moved more quietly toward convivencia, coexistence. . .” (p. 5). The problem with this highly idiosyncratic view is that the Pueblo Revolt occurred in 1680, killing most of Spain’s colonists and almost leading to New Mexico’s abandonment, at the very moment Kessell imputes that the colony was putatively moving along in such a loving and playful fashion.

The kingdom’s settlement formally began in 1598. A party of some 600 under Don Juan de Oñate’s command invaded Ohkay Owingeh Pueblo just north of today’s Santa Fe; they named it San Juan de los Caballeros. Except for the violent opposition to the tribute payments demanded of Acoma Pueblo’s residents, what followed were months of formal submissions to Spanish authority and the acceptance of Christian instruction. Oñate and his men punished Acoma’s women and children with enslavement, and each male rebel had a foot amputated. Kessell questions whether the punishment was executed because “passing mention of a one-footed Acoma slave in the subsequent record would help resolve any doubt, and no such mention is known to exist” (p. 42). However, it is likely that the recipient of such a punishment would not have lived long and thus would not appear in the historical record. The brutality of Acoma’s punishment struck fear in the other indigenous villages, and overt resistance to Spanish rule ceased.

The period from 1598 to the 1660s is narrated as a series of ego-centered conflicts among Franciscans, provincial governors, and colonists, each jockeying for control over native labor and land. The violent suppression of indigenous religious practices, drought, famine, and pestilence took their toll until they started to unravel Spanish control in the 1660s. The Indians bolted in 1680 and massacred most of the colonists. Although many scholars have tried to explain the causes and consequences of the Pueblo Revolt, this one adroitly skirts the causal issues, preferring instead to focus on Don Esteban Clemente and his putative precursor rebellion in 1670. The book ends with an account of Don Diego de Vargas’s re-established Spanish authority in 1693. Here the author is at his empirical best, drawing on his translation of the de Vargas journals to describe the diversity and complexity of the indigenous world and the profound accommodations that had been forged under a century of colonial control.