Spanish colonists throughout New Mexico awoke with alarm on August 10, 1680, to find that a previously deeply divided indigenous population had united in a massive and unprecedented revolt, which would ultimately drive Spaniards out of the colony for more than a decade. The Pueblo had organized a unified surprise attack, in which rebels used knotted cord calendars to coordinate the attack among villages. Panicked Spaniards quickly retreated to Santa Fe, where Governor Antonio de Otermin tried to defend the city. He was forced to abandon the colony on September 21 and retreat 300 miles across the Rio Grande to El Paso, accompanied by all the Spaniards in the colony. By this time the Pueblo had killed more than 400 of 3,000 Hispanic residents living in the region. They also desecrated churches and killed 21 of the province’s 33 Franciscans, torturing many in the process. Part of the wave of Indian revolts that swept northern New Spain in the 1680s (among them, revolts by the Suma, Concho, and Pima), this rebellion signaled that a population believed by the Spanish to be “pacified” was anything but.
The events of the summer of 1680 were rooted in 80 years of Spanish colonization that had left the Pueblo communities of the region in a dire state. European colonists had taken advantage of superior firepower and internal divisions in this ethnically diverse region to force Christianity on the indigenous peoples and to relocate many into Franciscan-ruled mission pueblos. The Pueblo Indians became the principal source of wealth for the Europeans, whose demands for LABOR and tribute sparked Indian revolts as early as the 1640s. Simultaneously, because of European pathogens, unregulated exploitation, and intertribal warfare, the Pueblo population fell from 60,000 in 1600 to 30,000 in the 1640s, and was again nearly halved, to 17,000, by 1680. Conflicts over defending Pueblo religious traditions also grew more acute as the colony expanded. Spanish attacks on religious rituals were interpreted by many as an assault on the very existence of the Pueblo community. In addition, the 1670s were a period of severe drought, famine, disease, and intensified Apache raids on Pueblo communities. These factors contributed to a religious revival among many Pueblo, which the Spanish aggressively repressed. As sedentary agriculturalists, the Pueblo were not likely to flee the region, and so by this period a concerted re-volt seemed their best option. In the weeks prior to August 10, a series of leaders, notably the famed leader PoPE of the Tewa-speak-ing Pueblo community of San Juan, traveled the region, garnering support and planning the uprising.
It would be 12 years before a Spanish military force under Diego de Vargas could reconquer the Pueblo. Vargas took advantage of renewed internal divisions to defeat all the Pueblo towns by 1694. Only the Hopi Pueblo in modern-day Arizona were never again subdued. Having regained control, however, the Spanish acted more carefully than they had before the revolt. After 1700 they became more tolerant of Pueblo religious practices and made fewer demands on Pueblo labor. Nonetheless, the following decades continued to see considerable problems for the Pueblo community. Within decades the number of Europeans in the colony surpassed the remaining indigenous peoples, and the loss of land, religion, and customs that many had decried in 1680 accelerated. The number of Indian slaves and detribalized Indians gradually increased, and those seeking to live outside the reach of European hegemony found themselves under pressure not only from Europeans but also from the waves of migration from the Great Plains that followed French and English colonization to the north.
Further reading: Andrew L. Knaut, The Pueblo Revolt of 1680: Conquest and Resistance in Seventeenth-Century New Mexico (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995).
—Alexander Dawson
World History
