The Tarahumara Rebellion of 1690: Embattled Settlers and Missionaries in Northern New Spain

by Joseph P. Sánchez

Overview

The Tarahumara Rebellion of 1690 examines a seventeenth-century Indigenous uprising in northern Mexico aimed at driving out Spanish miners, missionaries, and settlers from Tarahumara (Rarámuri) and Tepehuanes homelands.

Previous histories have interpreted this revolt, and other borderlands uprisings, as localized and spontaneous events aimed at rectifying specific grievances. Historian Joseph P. Sánchez argues that the revolts of the Tepehuanes and the Tarahumaras in northern New Spain, or Nueva Vizcaya, were well-planned, inspired by outside events, and drew in multiple communities and ethnicities. Drawing on a wealth of primary sources, including Jesuit accounts and archival documents, Sánchez offers a comprehensive narrative that challenges conventional interpretations of colonial Mexican uprisings.

Far from localized, the Indigenous rebellions in the northern Mexican borderlands during the colonial period were part of the overall Indigenous struggle for defense of homeland throughout the Americas. The Tarahumara Rebellion of 1690 brings together a rich history of localized events and broader historical trends and offers a compelling narrative that enriches our understanding of the colonial experience in northern New Spain.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780816555857
Publisher:	University of Arizona Press
Publication date:	09/23/2025
Pages:	146
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Joseph P. Sánchez is founder and former director of the Spanish Colonial Research Center at the University of New Mexico. He retired from the National Park Service (NPS) in 2014 after thirty-five years of service. He is the author of several books, including Pueblos, Plains, and Province New Mexico in the Seventeenth Century.

Editorial Reviews

Sánchez makes use of a breadth of sources, primary and scholarly, to reexamine what we know of the 1690 Tarahumara revolt, and how and why this is important to the history of northern Mexico. Rooted in his own deep research of the larger period, this work demonstrates a familiarity with interpretations of the event, and begs the reader to think beyond common polarities of colonizer and colonized, and to understand nuance and potential for divergent understandings of such events at the time and after.”—Jay T. Harrison, co-editor of At the Heart of the Borderlands: Africans and Afro-Descendants on the Edges of Colonial Spanish America

“This important new study sheds abundant light on a consequential though little-studied uprising among one of the most numerous Native peoples of northern Mexico. It also allows us to witness the unfolding political transformations that swept across the region as Native peoples and imperial agents responded to the cataclysmic Pueblo Revolt of 1680.”—Raphael Brewster Folsom, author of The Yaquis and the Empire: Violence, Spanish Imperial Power, and Native Resilience in Colonial Mexico

From the Publisher