Historically witchy New Mexico.

Samhain, the Pagan New Year (for some Pagans, at least) -- aka Halloween -- is coming up at the end of this week. And like clockwork, intrepid local journalists around the country will interview some witch or another. It's all pretty harmless these days -- or it should be, unless somebody takes it upon themselves to declare witches brides of the Devil and try to have them executed, or at least shamed out of the community.

It has happened in the past, as you know if you've ever heard of the Inquisition in Europe, or the Salem witch trials here in the US. And New Mexico had a brush with the Inquisition in the 1760s. It happened in Abiquiú, a village better known now as the site of one of painter Georgia O'Keeffe's homes.

 A peaceful fall picture in Santa Fe.
Heatherms27 | Deposit Photos

And it started with a Franciscan priest named Fray Juan José Toledo, who came to Abiquiú from Mexico City with a manual of ways to spot witchcraft and sorcery -- brujería y hechizería -- and root them out, as missionaries were wont to do, to save the natives from their savagery and bring them to Christ.

I've just begun looking into this; I had a brainstorm yesterday while at Spirit Halloween to offer to portray a bruja during next year's Spirits of New Mexico event at El Rancho de las Golondrinas. The offer's been accepted, so I have a year to study up. But here's what I know so far. 

I talked about Abiquiú here on the blog a couple of weeks back -- about how it was created as a land grant to several families of genízaros. You may recall that genízaros were Native Americans of various tribes who were enslaved by Spanish settlers and eventually set free, after they'd been Hispanized and had lost most of their own tribal traditions. Genízaro communities acted as a buffer between communities of settlers and Native Americans looking to attack them. But the genízaros themselves were different -- and feared by some settlers because of those differences.

Enter Fray Toledo. He accused the local men running the town of being sorcerors (in Spanish, hechicero or brujo) and some of the women of being brujas and causing a horrible illness. The illness was real enough -- it caused a fever and a powerful thirst, blackened teeth, and, in some cases, death. There was also a rumor that the stomachs of some of the dead burst open and insects crawled out.

Fray Toledo made enough noise about it that eventually the territorial governor, Tomas Vélez Cachupin, arrested a group of the accused Abiquiú witches and sent to the office of the Inquisition in Mexico City to see what should be done.

By this point in time, the Catholic Church was winding down the Inquisition, and eventually accused Fray Toledo himself of stirring the pot, saying he should stop with the accusations, learn the natives' languages, and work harder on converting them to Catholicism.

So nobody was burned at the stake here in New Mexico. However, some of those suspected of witchcraft were sentenced to servitude in local Hispanic families. Imagine being a member one of these fine, upstanding Catholic families and being forced to take in someone suspected of being a witch! Not a prescription for sleeping soundly at night.

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As I said, I've just begun researching this. I'll let you know how it goes. For this post, I've relied heavily on this article written by Rob Martinez, the state historian of New Mexico.

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This weekend was the 2025 Spirits event at the ranch, our last of the season. It was, as always, a lot of fun. The ranch buildings are especially spooky at night, with the kiva fireplaces lit and candles everywhere. (These days we use LED candles, but the fires are the real thing. I was stationed in the Cuarto de la Familia -- the ranch owner's family's quarters -- and as the night got chillier, a whole lot of guests were happy to just come in and sit by the fire, warm up, and maybe dream a little.

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These moments of historically witchy blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Happy Halloween! Blessed Samhain!

Indigenous Peoples' Day.

So this weekend, I did a thing I have never done, even though I've lived in Santa Fe for five years and vacationed here for much longer: I checked out a couple of art studio tours. These events are organized by artists who live in a specific location, whether a city, town, or village. Artists who live there agree to open their studios, even if they're in their own homes, and invite the hoi polloi to traipse through, chat with them about their work, and (the gods willing) buy something from them.

Since I rarely do things by halves, I hit two studio tours this weekend: the one in Abiquiu on Saturday and the one in Galisteo yesterday. After I got home, it dawned on me that both Abiquiu and Galisteo were originally pueblos -- that is, they were Native American settlements -- but neither is a pueblo today. So what happened to the Indians? As the saying goes, it's complicated -- and a fitting topic for Indigenous Peoples' Day. 

Let's talk about Galisteo first. This sign is right on State Road 41.

Lynne Cantwell 2025

Here's the gist of the text, with some amplification by me: When the Spanish conquistadores showed up in 1540 in what later became New Mexico, they found a bunch of Tano-speaking settlements in the Galisteo Basin, which is about 25 miles south of Santa Fe. The Spanish called the settlements "pueblos", the Spanish word for "village", which is how the inhabitants became known as Pueblo Indians. The sign says these folks were among the leaders of the Pueblo Revolt in 1680 -- the only time when Native Americans have ever succeeded in pushing the European invaders out. The Spanish came back, though, in 1692. In 1706, 150 Tano-speaking families were resettled (the sign doesn't say by whom, but it was the Spanish) in Galisteo Pueblo, but the pueblo was abandoned by 1788. Drought, famine, disease, and Comanche raids all played a part. The sign says most of the survivors moved to Santo Domingo Pueblo.

Here are more details from galisteo.nmarchaeology.org:

Early Spanish documents frequently mention Pueblo Galisteo, which has been tentatively identified as Pueblo Ximena, which was still occupied in 1540 when visited by Coronado. Castaño de Sosa saw the village in 1590 and called it San Lucas. [Don Juan de] Oñate visited the pueblo in 1598 and renamed it Santa Ana, but the name was changed to Santa Cruz de Galisteo. The pueblo participated in the Pueblo Revolt in 1680 and was abandoned when the populace, fearing reprisals, moved to Santa Fe, where they stayed until 1693, yielding the city to Don Diego de Vargas after a bitter fight. Many were killed or sold into slavery by de Vargas. In 1706 Governor Cuevo y Valdes collected the remnants, then living at Tesuque, and reestablished the pueblo under the name of Santa María de Galisteo. Ninety Tano Indians were moved at that time. In 1782 there were 52 families, but by 1794, smallpox and Comanche raids forced its inhabitants to move to Santo Domingo Pueblo.

I trust you noticed the part about some of them being sold into slavery? I've written here before that slavery worked differently here than it did in the American South. After a period of time, the slaves here were released. But they had lost their tribal identities and had been Catholicized and taught Spanish, so they created their own culture. They became known as genízaros, and they formed communities around northern New Mexico. Here's a link to an NPR story from a few years back about the genízaros in Abiquiu. "Genízaro" is the Spanish word for janissary; NPR says janissaries were war captives in Spain who were conscripted to fight against the Ottoman Sultan, and that some of genízaros in New Mexico gained their freedom by helping to protect their settlements against Indian raids. In the beginning, the word was used as a racial slur, but it has become more of a descriptor now.

Like I said: complicated. The histories of modern Native Americans are as varied as their languages and cultures.

Happy Indigenous People's Day.

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These moments of historical blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Stay safe!

Slaves in New Spain.

There's a room in the 17th century placita at El Rancho de las Golondrinas called "el cuarto de cautivos" -- the captives' room. It's a small room that contains a fireplace, a couple of wooden bins, and a Navajo loom. It's meant to depict the sort of accommodations that Spanish settlers would have provided for their captives at the ranch in the 1600s.

The room is usually gated -- that is, you can look in, but there's typically no one inside to explain what it's about. Slavery is difficult to discuss. But here's one fact: the captives held by settlers here, in the northernmost outpost of New Spain, were not Black. They were Native American.

How is it that 17th century Spanish settlers held Native Americans in bondage, but in much of the rest of America, slaves were imported from Africa? 

Tinnakom | Deposit Photos

During volunteer training for our upcoming season, we heard a presentation from Jon Ghahate (Laguna Pueblo/Zuni Pueblo), an educator for the Crow Canyon Archaeological Center in Cortez, CO. Ghahate explained that slavery was not unknown in the Americas before the coming of the Europeans; after all, people are people everywhere, with the same urges to be both bad and good to one another. What was different among the Europeans was the Catholic Church. Christianity teaches us to be kind to other people -- with the emphasis on people. If the creature in front of you isn't a person, then no matter how you treat that creature, it won't keep you from getting into heaven. In essence, the church indemnified those who held slaves. And just as the church allowed Christians to see Africans as less than human, it also gave them the same excuse when it came to Native Americans. (Not-so-fun fact: The United States didn't grant citizenship to Native Americans until 1924.)

The year 1492 was a big one in the history of what was to become Spain. Ferdinand and Isabella married and combined their kingdoms into one, Castile and Aragon. Pretty much immediately, they set about kicking the Moors out of Andalucia in southern Spain and taking the land for themselves. And in that same year, they gave their okay to Christopher Columbus to sail west in search of a more direct, and less fraught, trade route to Asia. But Ferdinand and Isabella didn't grant the funds to Columbus outright -- they gave him a loan that he was supposed to pay back with the spoils he gained from his adventuring. (The later conquistadors got the same deal, which explains why they were so hot to find gold here.)

Columbus never made it to continental North America. His ships landed on the island of Hispaniola, which today is split between Haiti and the Dominican Republic. People were living there when Columbus arrived, but very little of their DNA survives today, for a very good reason: Columbus and his men basically slaughtered them. We know this because among the Spaniards who traveled to the New World with Columbus was Bartolomé de las Casas, who chronicled the treatment of the Natives at the hands of the explorers. De las Casas petitioned Charles V of Spain to grant the Natives some rights. 

But all this meant that there weren't enough workers for the plantations that were beginning to be set up in the West Indies. So de las Casas got a bright idea: why not bring in Africans?

Eventually he realized what a bad idea that was, in terms of human rights, but by then the damage had been done. And that's how the idea was planted to bring Africans to the New World ... by any means necessary.

By the time the Spanish made their way north to New Mexico, they had "perfected" their system of dealing with the Natives. In 1510, the church approved a document that was to be read to any Indians the conquistadors met, advising them that they were now subjects of the Spanish crown and of the Pope, and they had better behave as set forth herein or they could be forced to behave. Of course, this document, the Requeremiento, was in Spanish, which the Natives had no way of understanding. (The text at the link is in English.) 

One begins to understand why the Pueblo Indians rose up and drove the Spaniards out of New Mexico in 1680. It didn't last -- the Spanish returned in 1692 -- but the Pueblo Revolt remains, as stated on the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center's website, "the only successful Native uprising against colonizers in North America."

In practice, Ghahate told us, the Spaniards didn't so much take slaves as they impressed Natives to work for them. But they required tribute -- food and supplies, as well as a guide to show them where that gold was -- and forced the Natives to convert to Christianity. In that sense, the system of slavery here in the Southwest was different than that practiced by plantation owners in the Deep South. Also here, some slaves were more like indentured servants and could eventually buy their freedom. They and other outcast people -- Jews and poor Spaniards who came to the New World to find their fortune but never did -- were known as genizaros and lived apart, in their own villages. Intermarriage with Mexican settlers was common, though. Eventually the Mexican government declared all citizens equal, including the genizaros and others of mixed race -- but in society, as you might expect, prejudice lingered. Even today, Hispanic folks here will say they're Spanish, even if their DNA tells a different story. 

DNA is causing a lot of trouble everywhere, am I right?

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On a completely different topic: The Social Security Administration this week that it's making big changes in the way it claws back overpayments from recipients. This comes after news reports indicated that the existing draconian system was impoverishing some people -- even causing them to lose their homes. The two biggest changes: 1) Instead of taking 100% of a recipient's benefit until the overpayment is satisfied, the reduction will now be capped at 10% per month -- and the SSA is instituting a longer time frame for people to pay the overpayment back; and 2) instead of forcing recipients looking for relief to prove why they need it by providing a boatload of financial information, the burden is now going to be on the government to prove why the recipient needs to make reimbursement.

The changes are coming too late to help me -- I finished my penance this month -- but I'm very glad to see that others won't have to go through the same thing I did.

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One more update, and then I swear I'm done: Surprising absolutely no one, Congress took the latest budget brouhaha down to the wire, approving the final six continuing resolutions yesterday. The approval technically came after the Friday night deadline, but the several-hour delay created no damage (other than to Americans' faith in government working for us and our reputation overseas and all the rest). Immediately after the vote, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (GQP-Georgia) moved to remove Speaker Mike Johnson because he, y'know, had to get help from the Democrats to keep the government running through the end of September. It's unclear whether her motion will go anywhere when the House comes back from yet another freaking recess -- but Johnson, apparently having decided that Greene has done her worst, reportedly plans for the House to take up funding for Ukraine when it returns to work after Easter.

That sound you hear is tens of thousands of pairs of eyes owned by rational Americans rolling so far back into their heads that they can see their brains.

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These moments of indentured blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Stay safe!