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Juan Bautista De Anza
The King's Governor in New Mexico
By Carlos R. Herrera UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA PRESS
Copyright © 2015 University of Oklahoma Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8061-4962-2
CHAPTER 1
Anza's Sonora
IN 1778, JUAN BAUTISTA DE ANZA assumed the office of governor in New Mexico, a post he held for the last nine years of his life and which proved the pinnacle of his military and political career. It was in Sonora, however, in the frontier he called home, that Anza honed the life skills he needed to maneuver successfully through the labyrinth of Spain's imperial bureaucracy, and to secure his place within the pages of Spanish American history. The desert of Anza's youth could be a demanding and cruel teacher, but it always schooled its children on the means of survival in an environment of want. Life's lessons were not lost on Anza, who learned early on that the clash of arms on the arid frontier seemed a necessary evil. Sonorans did not devalue life; in fact they embraced it fully. They understood, however, that one's ability to fight fiercely for the limited resources of this landscape could mean the difference between life and death. This cognition of war and peace served as a common thread that bound all Sonorans to the land and to each other; it was a life view shared by all ethnic groups of the desert.
Anza was reared in this environment of constant war. The daily diet of conflict between ethnic groups that he witnessed as a child gave him insight into the warrior's way. As a frontier soldier, he soon learned how Sonora's landscape influenced the military tactics of the enemy he was expected to hunt down, including guerrilla warfare and raiding. Indians had long conducted raids to acquire supplies, especially during times of crisis when the earth fell short of its promise of food and threatened the people with famine and death. From this tradition of raiding, Anza perhaps learned the most valuable lesson of all: peace, and the resultant preservation of life in the desert, could best be achieved through an exchange of goods rather than bullets. In many ways, Anza's understanding of the interplay between culture and environment made him better suited for New Spain's northern frontier than were Spanish-born newcomers—imported peninsulars who always complained about the harsh setting and unconventional war tactics of the Indians. It is fitting, therefore, that an investigation of the qualities Anza brought to the office of governor in New Mexico be prefaced by an exploration of the physical, ethnic, and political landscape that molded his character in Sonora.
Mother Earth and Her Children
With the exception of the northwestern corner of the province, an arid and barren desert, Anza's Sonora consisted mostly of mountainous terrain with limited sources of water and arable land. This geologic reality made human existence difficult to sustain; it defined life in colonial Sonora as an antagonistic affair in which inhabitants competed for their daily bread. As historians Thomas H. Naylor and Charles W. Polzer have noted, "This was a region of broad, treeless basins with uncertain water and forage; the natives were semi-nomadic, loosely organized, and generally hostile ... in many ways the north remained a terra incognita, defying conquest and exploitation."
Prior to the coming of Europeans, the Pima, Ópata, and Apache Indians, among others, had developed ecological bonds with the parched landscape of Sonora. Here, the environment determined the nature of indigenous societies and their means of sustenance. The Sonorans engaged in cyclical migrations that took them from one resource space to another. They alternated between nomadic, semisedentary, and settled existences depending on environmental conditions. When water was scarce, Indians moved around in search of game and the natural bounty that mother earth provided; when abundant, they settled on river valleys and cultivated a variety of foods.
Whether as nomadic hunters or settled farmers, Sonora's Indians were tied to specific areas of their environment—as well as to the game and arable lands these spaces provided—at different points in time. Cynthia Radding has described these regions as "distinct zones of production." She argues that the spatial relationship between human groups and the environment determined the evolution of culture in Sonora for both indigenous and European groups. For her, this process of social ecology "signifies a living and changing complex of relations that developed historically among diverse human populations and with the land they acquired. It refers both to the social structures through which different ethnic communities recreated their cultures and to the political implications of resource allocation in the region."
Without a doubt, the limited resources of northern Sonora determined the nature of the tribal chieftaincies that evolved among indigenous groups of the region. In the northernmost section of province—the Pimería Alta Trincheras (rock terraces)—cultural groups followed water sources in search of arable land on which to construct temporary rancherías (farming hamlets). At these sites, the Indians cultivated a variety of food products including corn, chili, squash, and beans. Trincheras groups added to their food supply by hunting, gathering, and trade with Indians of today's southern Arizona and northwestern Chihuahua. Further south, in the San Miguel and Bavispe valleys, and along the northern tributaries of the Yaqui and Mayo rivers, Río Sonora cultural groups developed urban centers by the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. These Indians were more settled than their northern counterparts, and their economies and societies were agriculturally based.
All Sonorans competed for the fertile lands and water sources the territory offered. This relationship between mother earth and her children affected relations between groups; it made conflict a constant factor among them. By the sixteenth century, Sonora's Indians also had to compete for limited resources with the developing horse cultures of Arizona and New Mexico. With the adoption of the horse in the 1600s, these nomadic bands, most notably the Apaches, intensified the nature of warfare on the northern frontier and forced the Sonorans to seek alliances with the Spanish newcomers.
As the Spaniards had in Mesoamerica, they came to New Spain's far northern territory in search of precious metals and Indian labor. First encounters were both confusing and disastrous. In the 1530s, Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca had laid a foundation of hope among the Indians he encountered in his travels—a hope that Europeans and Indians could find a way to coexist in the arid deserts of the far north. This ideal was shattered by the slaving activities of Nuño de Guzmán and those Spaniards who believed that the indigenous peoples of the region could best serve them as a labor force. The full-blown exploitation of Sonora's Indians, however, arrived with the settlement of the Mixtón War in the early 1540s and the resultant expansion of New Spain's mining frontier into the far north. The discovery of silver at sites such as Zacatecas proved significant for Sonora, for it was the dream of striking it rich that had first brought Europeans, including Anza's father, to the region.
Ultimately, it was the Spanish crown that assumed responsibility for determining the fate of Sonora's Indians. Since the reign of the Catholic Monarchs Fernando and Isabel in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, Spain had engaged in a process of transatlantic colonialism designed to expand its frontiers and to bring Native Americans into its empire. Spaniards, however, found it difficult to define the nature of this incorporation. While the likes of Bartolomé de Las Casas cried out for a spiritual conquest of American natives, enterprising colonists demanded access to Indian labor if they were to carry out the process of empire building in the so-called New World. Spanish monarchs found themselves caught in the middle of this Indian debate. They could not avoid the process of evangelization; this, after all, had been one of the main arguments used to justify the conquest and colonization of America. Likewise, the crown could not achieve its imperial designs for the New World without the help of adventuring and ambitious subjects. In the end, the kings of Spain set upon a course of exploitation and conversion. As John L. Kessell noted:
Plainly then, the natives of America had to be made over both spiritually and physically; they must become not only orthodox but productive as well. Just how this two-fold transformation was to be accomplished, a transformation seemingly based upon the naïve supposition that you could save a man's soul while you were breaking his back, became the burning issue of the day.
The education, conversion, and assimilation of Sonora's Indians into Spanish society became the domain of Jesuit priests. Loyola's black robes had cut an evangelical path along the Sierra Madre Occidental that ultimately brought the Jesuits to New Spain's northwestern territory. From the 1590s to 1767, clerics such as Eusebio Francisco Kino and Juan María de Salvatierra expanded the Christian fold by completing a mission-building program among the natives of Sonora, Sinaloa, and Baja California. The Jesuit missionary empire differed significantly from the ecclesiastical front attempted by Spain among the more sedentary Pueblo Indians of New Mexico. Among the latter, Franciscan friars utilized Indian labor to construct missions within preexisting Pueblo communities. Although this plan increased ties between Indian and Spaniard, it did little to bring the Pueblos completely into the Christian world. The Indians simply regarded the friars as guests who had come to their homes bearing material goods and religious practices that enhanced their own culture.
In Sonora, the Jesuits employed more practical means to lure natives to Christianity. They rounded up the Indians into artificial mission-communities known as reducciones, and nurtured a reciprocal relationship between themselves and those natives willing to accept them. In return for the Indians' allegiance and conversion, the Jesuits offered material goods that the Indians found attractive and practical, including glass beads, tobacco, food products, textiles, metal tools and weapons, and of course domestic livestock. The Jesuits also introduced European systems of agriculture and a market economy that increased the Indians' ability to procure food and supplies. These mechanisms of production and trade proved significant in defining the missions as well as Indian-Jesuit relations.
For the priests, the reducción was like an artist's clean, new canvas, on which they sought to create a living representation of the mission ideal they had brought with them from Europe. The padres themselves were the brushes that made physical contact with the canvas and made images of Christianity come to life on the desert landscape. The Indians were the raw paint transformed into figures of the converted and saved. And of course, there was God, the supreme artist who had made it all possible.
The Indians were more practical. For them, the mission community represented a secure domain that ensured a food supply and made possible the sale of goods to the Spanish military, civilians, and other Indian tribes. Through the concept of ethnogenesis, "a term that denotes the birth or rebirth of ethnic identities in different historical moments," Radding argues that European systems of agriculture and the market economy altered the traditional ethnic spaces and identities of Sonora's indigenous peoples. "Opatas, Pimas, and Eudeves survived as ethnic entities well into the nineteenth century, but the political, economic, and social dimensions of their cultural identity were radically changed through their relations with the dominant society and through the internal articulation of their communities."
Kessell and Radding suggest that the European presence in Sonora did not obliterate indigenous cultures. Rather, the Indians tried to preserve their way of life and autonomy by adopting aspects of the social, legal, and economic mechanisms Spain had introduced into the region. Sonora natives who accepted the Jesuits did so because the padres shielded them from excessive labor exploitation and offered them assurance that the Spanish government would protect their legal right to work the land for profit. So long as the Jesuits remained in Sonora, mission Indians enjoyed the ability to transform this economic power into the social capital they needed to define the nature of their ethnic spaces, including land use and cultural identity. This strategy of accommodation, however, backfired on those Native Americans who became increasingly dependent on the missions for their daily bread. The Jesuit expulsion from Sonora in 1767 destroyed the reciprocal relationship between priest and Indian. With the Jesuits gone, and the resultant secularization of mission lands, the Indians were left to the mercy of Spanish colonists who transformed them into a peasant labor force.
Not all native Sonorans accepted the Spaniards. For the most resistant—including the Yaquis, Seris, and Apaches—the story of their interaction with Spain is characterized by recurring periods of ethnic violence. At one point or another, even those natives most affected by Spain's presence in Sonora, such as the Pimas and Ópatas, rebelled. In most if not all of these cases, violence represented a breakdown in the mutual ties that had bound Indian and Spaniard to each other in this environment of limited resources. The native Sonorans took up arms against their Spanish neighbors when gifts and material goods stopped flowing, when demands for labor and loyalty proved excessive, and when Europeans resorted to force by military might in their effort to subjugate indigenous peoples.
The Reglamento y Ordenanzas (Regulations and Ordinances) of 1729
Spain's push into Mexico's vast northern territory had unfolded along three geographical corridors: the west coast to Culiacán, Sonora, and later Alta California; the central plateau that ended at New Mexico; and a northeastern route established in earnest in the 1680s to confront French incursions into Texas. To help defend this frontier, Spain established a presidial system that, for all practical purposes, served a role similar to that of the present-day U.S. Border Patrol, which was established more than two hundred years later.
The Spanish border patrol was charged with monitoring and controlling the movement of people between physical spaces. Unlike the U.S. Border Patrol—which attempts to stem the flow of people north from Latin America—the presidios worked to prevent the territorial advancement of Europeans and hostile Indians from the northern fringes of the Provincias Internas (Internal Provinces) into southern settlements. Spain's greatest concern regarding the flow of humans across these northern frontiers focused primarily on the raiding practices of the Apaches and Comanches. The Spaniards feared that these raids would not only disrupt the silver production industry at sites such as Zacatecas but also encourage France's continued incursion onto Spanish lands.
In 1719, the threat of French incursions loomed large in the mind of New Mexico's governor, Antonio de Valverde Cosío. He heard rumors thatFrenchmen were supplying muskets and pistols to Pawnee Indians of what is now Nebraska. Determined to discover the truth, Valverde hunted the alleged gunrunners through October but eventually abandoned the trail. The search continued the following summer under the command of Lieutenant Governor Pedro de Villasur. On the twelfth of August, Villasur and his troops—including Pueblo Indian allies—made camp on a grassy Nebraska plain near the confluence of the Platte and Loup rivers. The next day, at first light, violent screams broke the calm of dawn as a large force of Pawnee and Oto Indians fell upon the slumbering Spanish camp. The Spaniards scrambled into formation only to find themselves completely surrounded by natives, some of whom were brandishing European-made firearms. Villasur may have been the first to fall, but within minutes the battle was over and his blood, along with that of forty-three slain Spanish and Pueblo soldiers, began to stain the dusty Nebraska soil. The remaining troops, about fifty-three in all, retreated to Santa Fe. Here, the story of the Villasur expedition assumed an air of mystery when the survivors could not agree whether Frenchmen had aided the Indians during the attack on the Spanish camp. Governor Valverde lamented the loss of his men but continued to push the notion that heretical French Huguenots had lured the Pawnees and Otos to war. In Spain, King Carlos III overlooked Valverde's claims regarding French provocateurs, but he refused to ignore the fact that in one swift thrust, the Santa Fe presidio had lost a full third of its garrison because of the Villasur affair. The king demanded answers; he wanted to know why the presidial system in his North American domain was not working.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Juan Bautista De Anza by Carlos R. Herrera. Copyright © 2015 University of Oklahoma Press. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA PRESS.
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