The Wandering Gene and the Indian Princess

by Jeff Wheelwright

  For geneticists, the story of the creation of New Mexico and New Mexicans is straightforward: Spaniards mated with Native Americans, the result a hybrid people called Hispanos. The snobbish distinction that Marianne’s father-in-law, Joe U. Medina, maintained—that there was a gulf between his people of Spanish ancestry and Native Americans—does not hold water on the level of DNA. A 2009 genetic analysis of Hispanic college students in New Mexico found that the study participants regularly underestimated the proportion of their Native American blood. For centuries Hispanos have told themselves and the outside world they were Spanish; time and again Spanish was the face put forward by the local historians. Since history is written by the victors, as Winston Churchill said, the founding of New Mexico starred bold Spanish conquistadors and toiling Franciscan friars. Watching a Western they never grew tired of, Hispanos saw themselves pass from noble Spanish origins through a brief phase of Mexican rule to a shotgun marriage with Anglo Americans, which turned out happily by the time the credits rolled. The mutely receptive setting, the spare and sunlit stage, was the Indians’.

  Historians in the modern, or postmodern, period have demurred. The assumption is that all the conventional narratives have to be reexamined because they suppress facts and embody prejudices about minority cultures. Thus the edgily titled When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality, and Power in New Mexico, 1500–1846, by Ramon Gutiérrez (1991), a vital work of revisionist scholarship stressing the Indians’ role. For another example, Estevan Rael-Gálvez, recently the state historian of New Mexico, planned a book that he called The Silence of Slavery: Narratives of American Indian and Mexican Servitude and its Legacy. Rael-Gálvez is proud to have uncovered Native Americans in his family tree. He probably speaks for the majority of historians when he says that the story of the United States is that cultural strains are erased, and that indigenous strains are erased most of all.

  The story begins in 1598, when an expedition of several hundred Spanish colonists led by Juan de Oñate crossed the Rio Grande near present-day El Paso. Most were unmarried young soldiers. Some of the officers and civilians had brought along their wives and children. Spearheading the entrada was a tatterdemalion group of friars in gray robes. The first Franciscan missionaries to New Mexico emulated the twelve apostles with a self-conscious but deeply felt zeal. They said a Mass in the desert and thanked God for the new land stretching before them. Unlike earlier conquests in the Americas, whose object was treasure, the northern extension of New Spain was intended to be peaceful and evangelical. Gaspar Pérez de Villagrá, an officer of the expedition who wrote the first history of New Mexico, found it significant that El Paso and Jerusalem lay on the same latitude.

  In this New Jerusalem of the Rio Grande del Norte lived forty-five thousand Pueblo Indians, by modern estimates. (Pueblo means town or village in Spanish.) These first natives to encounter the Spaniards lived in well-developed societies along the river. The Pueblo people hunted, fished, and farmed. The bottomland of the river provided good soil for growing corn, their main crop, and also beans, squash, cotton, and sunflowers. The outsiders would have recognized the sunflower. In that era the well-traveled plants were being cultivated both in Mexico and in Spain. The Indians made use of the sunflower seeds for oil and medicine, the petals for dye, and they set their hunting calendars according to the sunflowers’ growth.

  Pueblos looked something like rectangular Lego constructions, with interlocking apartments and multiple stories. You entered a house not through the ground floor but by a ladder, which could be pulled up afterward for safety. Women were in charge of the houses, while men focused on the kiva, the religious center of the village. The kiva was circular in shape, and it too lacked a ground-level entrance, being accessed through a hole in the roof. Along its walls were altars with various animal fetishes. The floor of the kiva contained a navel, meant to be a passageway for spiritual traffic in and out of the earth.

  The Indians’ landscape was long not only in horizontal dimension but also in vertical thrust. Pueblo women were stationed closer to the earth than men, because they bore fruit like the earth. The domain of males was airborne—in the realm of clouds, lightning, and rain, the tempestuous things that fertilized the earth. The Indian deities, collectively called katsinas, dwelled in the rain clouds, as did the departed ancestors. In their cosmos serpents (culebra to the Spaniards) corresponded to penises, and the snake dance to summon life-giving rain began with men slitting their penises and bleeding onto the dry ground, seeking a religious ecstasy in the pain.

  The Spaniards told the Puebloans they must surrender all of these beliefs. Although the soldiers and friars had come in peace, refusal to convert to Catholicism was not an option. The same determination that had forced Jews and Muslims to knuckle under in Iberia was applied to the Indians, who were (it appeared) a heathenish people in the grip of Satan and a manifestly inferior race. Nonetheless, they were Spanish subjects and must comply. What’s more, they must supply food for the Spaniards and unpaid labor for the building of the missions and the conventos where the friars would live. Quite so, and for the next eighty years the New Mexico pioneers sustained themselves exactly as a parasite does, by affixing themselves to the pueblos and sucking nourishment through the Indian walls.

  The San Luis Valley is treated as something of a footnote in the settlement of New Mexico because the Spaniards never occupied it. Sequestered by mountains, the Valley was a no-man’s-land between the sedentary Pueblo tribes and the nomadic or Plains Indians, who were Navajos, Utes, Jicarilla Apaches, and Comanches. It took much longer for the tribes on the menacing northern fringe of the colony to be brought into the genetic mix and erased.

  An early commentator, the American Josiah Gregg, in his 1845 account of the Santa Fe trade, tersely summarized the Spaniards’ relationship with the Indians, “upon whom they forced baptism and the cross in exchange for the vast possessions of which they robbed them.” When one of the western pueblos, Acoma, balked at the arrangement, Juan de Oñate showed his conquistador’s teeth. Besieging Acoma and defeating the Indians, Oñate ordered that every able-bodied man who was left in the village should have his foot cut off as a lesson to the other pueblos. Acoma’s children then were distributed to the colonists as slaves.

  The Franciscan friars complained about Oñate’s methods, and within a few years he was replaced as governor. Church and state quarreled often in the early years of the colony. For all of their sacerdotal superiority, the friars tried to be kind to the Indians. When the Puebloans brought gifts or donated labor, the brothers reciprocated with livestock, seeds, and clothing—as much as they had, they tried to give away. In the manner of Saint Francis they had sworn themselves to selfless poverty, although, unlike Francis, the friars used their material goods to shape the Indians’ behavior and called on the military to enforce their will. The Indians were encouraged, sternly encouraged, to kiss the friars’ feet.

  The Franciscans were experienced at spiritual warfare from having dealt with native peoples in Mexico. The padres took credit for rainmaking and healing and hunting success—the powers the people ascribed to the katsina spirits. They superimposed their adobe missions on the Indian kiva sites and substituted their icons and relics for the animal fetishes on the Indians’ altars. Because by happy coincidence the Christian cross resembled the Pueblo prayer-stick, the friars made sure to enter an unfamiliar village brandishing their most important symbol. The Catholic saints were arrayed against the pantheon of the katsinas, and the paramount figure of the Virgin Mary, mother of Jesus, supplanted the life-giving Corn Mothers while clothing herself in some of the Corn Mothers’ imagery. Holy days were adjusted so that they fell on Indian feast days. And when the missionaries found out that Pueblo warriors whipped their bodies with cactus in order to toughen up for battle, the Franciscans were pleased to demonstrate their own mortifications, dragging huge crosses through the pueblos, with blood dripping from their ba
re, striped backs.

  So the Christianity that was forged in the Kingdom of New Mexico, and that endures today in little corners of Culebra, was part Indian. A flamboyant, demon-riddled Catholicism from sixteenth-century Spain found a mate in the out-of-body expressionism of Native Americans. Syncretism is what you call it, syncretism meaning religious combination or religious admixture. That time when Marianne snatched the girls from the morada because a ghoul had scared them, a man who was wearing a skeleton outfit? Well, he had jumped out of a trap door in the floor, as if he were entering the world through Earth’s navel. The morada of the penitentes descends partially from the Indians’ sacred kiva. The morada is a sort of katsina clubhouse in Culebra.

  Now as to the syncretism of bodies and blood. During the seventeenth century, there were dozens of Franciscans in New Mexico, who kept their hands off the Indians so far as is known, but there were hundreds of settlers and soldiers who were unrestrained. The conditions around the pueblos might be described as a sexual free-for-all. Uninhibited, the Indians copulated frequently and openly, and women offered their bodies as gifts to the strangers, per the Pueblo custom. The Spanish men naturally accepted, thinking the husbands either dishonorable or dupes. As the settlers began to demand tributes from the Indians and to acquire their children as household slaves, the sexual exploitation found many new avenues. The padres wrung their hands but did not or could not stop it, for they were more concerned with reforming the Indians than their own countrymen. Very soon the mixed-race children, the Hispano mestizos, appeared.

  Thunderstorm and lightning, the sky ejaculating, the airborne ancestors writhing in dark tumult—the kind of weather you might experience at the base of Mount Blanca on a summer afternoon. Upsweeping wind, sudden spatter on the windshield. In the pauses of the storm there comes virga, wispy tendrils of precipitation. Virga doesn’t touch the ground but wicks moisture from the clouds like the fringe on a wet buckskin jacket.

  Early the next morning, when the air is washed and still, Blanca puts on terrycloth clouds, which slip to her midsection as the morning progresses.

  The mestizaje, the racial mixing process, had started even before the conquest of New Mexico. By dint of breeding with the native tribes of Central America, many of the Spaniards already had some Indian blood, and the blood of African slaves had entered their gene pool as well. The move up the Rio Grande brought a major new infusion of Indian DNA.

  More comprehensive than any historical document, DNA writes a record of matings in its four-letter language, although the record isn’t arranged sequentially or chronologically like a family tree. It’s a jumble, like a drawer stuffed full of parking tickets or grocery receipts with the dates snipped off. In each new generation of human beings, the identifying marks of the previous generations are halved and shuffled on the chromosomes to make room for additional markers. But since humans tend to marry their own kind, the same variants of DNA are shuffled in and out. When an admixture takes place, an intense crossing-over between two peoples or races, the event makes a large impression on the DNA. It can be seen long afterward unless it is obscured by more recent admixture.

  A 2004 study showed that the Hispanos in San Luis Valley are about one-third Indian and two-thirds Spanish-European. They have a small portion of African ancestry, averaging 3 percent. The Hispanos generally resemble other Hispanic and Mexican-American groups, while having a somewhat higher proportion of European blood than the rest. Genetic research also has confirmed the harshly one-sided nature of the admixture. By paying special attention to the Y chromosome and the mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA), scientists proved that the genetic exchange in the early years of New Mexico was almost entirely between Spanish males and Indian females.

  The Y chromosome of males, handed down from father to son, was discussed previously; the mitochondrial DNA is a small, separate stash of genes within the cell but outside the nucleus and chromosomes. Inherited through the maternal line with no input from fathers, the mitochondrial DNA provides a narrow but relatively unbroken view of female ancestry. It’s your mother’s ancestry as seen through the floor of a kiva, just as the Y chromosome narrowly reveals a part of a man’s paternity. The Y chromosome of Hispano men is hardly Native American at all, while their mtDNA is about 85 percent Indian. Again, the former represents fatherhood, the latter motherhood. The skew between the two means that mating happened in one direction. It means that Indian men and Spanish women were largely on the sidelines when the admixture between Spanish men and Indian women occurred. Indeed, throughout Central and South America the same DNA pattern is found—the echo of the Big Bang at the formation of the Hispanic universe.

  The intercourse that turned Spaniards into New Mexicans continued for decades, geneticists believe, extending from the Pueblo tribes to the more resistant blood of the Navajos, Apaches, and Utes. But after the Hispanos were formed, mating took place within a closed circle. Europe would send no more of its genes. The historical record indicates that the Kingdom of New Mexico had very little immigration after being established. In fact, many of its colonists left, discouraged, as Juan de Oñate was, by the lack of mineral wealth and by the hostile tribes beyond the pueblos.

  The Puebloans converted to the Catholic faith en masse, or they claimed to, and their children, the mestizo cohort, were ready-made believers. If their fathers acknowledged them as sons and daughters and took them in, they were deemed españole as well. This wasn’t how the Franciscan brothers had imagined their New Jerusalem would go—pagans won over to Christ through a change in their genes rather than in their hearts. Their hearts, in fact, were much slower to change.

  In 1680, the Pueblo tribes of New Mexico revolted. After years of subjugation and months of planning, the Indians rose up simultaneously. Although their numbers had been much reduced by smallpox, a disease unleashed by the Europeans, and by forced relocations of their villages, still the Indians outnumbered the Spaniards and their dependents by ten to one. (The genetic imbalance was less extreme, but in the dichotomous culture of the occupied pueblos, people grouped themselves with one side or the other.)

  A medicine man named Popé led the insurrection. He had learned the black arts of his people illicitly—how to heal with herbs and exorcisms, how to sprinkle eagle’s blood or bear’s blood on secret fetishes. Under the noses of the padres, the medicine man abstained from eating and from sex, growing gaunt and pure, to augment his power. But in 1675, Popé and dozens of other shamans had been arrested in a colony-wide sweep. Three of the Indians were put to death, the rest whipped for practicing heresy and sorcery. Popé decided that enough was enough. He foresaw an apocalypse.

  To get out of reach of the authorities, Popé moved to Taos Pueblo, in the far north. Channeling the katsina gods, he prophesied a golden age of abundance, an end to the Indians’ droughts and misery. Soon the people would return to the fruitful conditions that had prevailed at the beginning of time, but first the Christians and their God must be driven from the land. By communicating in code, the pueblos managed to keep the revolt secret until nearly the last minute. Over several bloody days they killed four hundred Spaniards and mestizos, including twenty-one of the thirty-three Franciscan friars who worked in the province. As the Indians torched the missions and desecrated the Catholic icons with feces, the surviving contingent of two thousand Hispanos fled Santa Fe and retreated to the south.

  For thirteen years the Hispano remnant lived in exile in northern Mexico. Then Spain decided to take back New Mexico, the Indians hardly resisting, for Popé’s earthly paradise had not materialized in the interim. Some of the pueblos were even relieved, so fearful had they been of retribution. They swore allegiance to Jesus and got back into their traces. The Hispanos after all were not total strangers but blood relatives. New colonists from Mexico supplemented the former colonists, and things went on as before. The usual way that historians treat the Pueblo Revolt is as an asterisk, or a watershed dividing seventeenth-centu
ry New Mexico from the more complex, eighteenth-century phase of the society. Continuity is stressed, but still the Pueblo Revolt was the most successful native uprising in American history, Little Big Horn plus Wounded Knee times ten.

  The Kingdom of New Mexico was smaller than previously because the western pueblos, such as Zuni and Hopi, were let go after the reconquest. Cautiously, the Hispano pobladores, the settlers, spread out from the Rio Grande and established their ranchos. They grazed sheep and cattle on the narrow floodplains in winter and moved their animals to the cool, upland benches in the summertime. The Pueblo Indians handled most of the farming and did the menial work. The Hispano villages, called plazas, consisted of small adobe dwellings built side by side like a strip of motel rooms. The typical plaza had two L-shaped banks of houses facing each other across a square. The enclosed area, or patio, served as the communal space of the village, while the outside walls of the housing blocks were left blank and windowless.

  The design was all about defense. During the eighteenth century the free-riding Plains Indians threatened the pueblos and the plazas unceasingly. Navajos, Apaches, and Utes had acquired horses (“magic dogs” to the Utes) from the Spaniards. The indios bárbaros, as they were called, drew strength and poise from being in motion, whereas the stationary pueblo tribes were as tippy as a bicycle at rest. The colony was almost entirely surrounded by a fluid and hostile territory known as Apachería territory. Taos Pueblo got too dangerous for the Spanish to occupy, let alone the San Luis Valley farther north. Marauding, slave-raiding, slave-trading, ransom, and rape were practiced by both sides. According to one historian, the Hispanos were judged to be better at stealing people, the Navajos better at stealing livestock and corn.