A vividly rendered history of the American Southwest chronicles the events that shaped the region, from the arrival of the Spanish to the American conquest of the region. (History)

Spain in the Southwest
A Narrative History of Colonial New Mexico, Arizona, Texas, and California
By John L. Kessell

UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA PRESS

Copyright © 2002 University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, Publishing Division of the University.
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 0-8061-3407-0

Chapter One

Sons of the Sun

Among all these peoples, it was held for very certain that we came from the sky, because about all the things that they do not understand or have information regarding their origins, they say that such phenomena come from the sky.

?Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, 1542

By the same Indian, he [the cacique] answered him saying that with respect to what he [the governor] said about being the son of the sun, let him dry up the great river [the Mississippi] and he would believe him.

?Cacique Quigaltam's response to Hernando de Soto, 1542

Shorn of every outward sign of his Spanish superiority, unkempt castaway Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca begged to survive. His dreams of fame and domination had collapsed. As he quested for food, water, and shelter, enough to stay alive, scales fell from the former conquistador's eyes. These Native peoples who abused, befriended, or stood in awe of him were not so different from himself. They shared the same emotions: fear, grief, joy. They, too, could be caring and tender, prankish, or falsehearted and hateful.

    Cabeza de Vaca saw analogies between Native societies and his own on every side. He performed tasks for them that he would never have done as a nobleman at home. These people, like Europeans, wanted others to do the work. They had allies and enemies among neighboring nations, carried on seasonal activities, commerce, diplomacy, and warfare.

    It interested don Alvar that some of the Natives conveyed their belief that he and his companions had come down from the sky. To most Spaniards, their arsenals and egos intact, the image was clear. These barbarous peoples, momentarily enlightened by God, were acknowledging the heavenly or divine mission of Christians to convert and uplift them. To Cabeza de Vaca, however, the Natives' expression signaled no such submission. He knew them better. Things beyond their ken simply fell from the sky.

    All the confident, early-sixteenth-century enterprises of Florida began badly and ended worse. Waves from the eruptive Spanish conquest of the Greater Antilles, they washed up on the peninsula every few years for a generation.

    According to the record, robust, red-bearded don Juan Ponce de León, a venturesome knight who never underwent an ordeal like Cabeza de Vaca's, came first. Honoring the season, Ponce de León bestowed on what he mistook for a big island the Spanish adjective for the feast of Easter, la Pascua Florida. By Christian reckoning, it was the Saturday after Easter, April 2, 1513. Next day, he landed.

    No individual better personified the nature and continuity of Spanish expansion at the end of fifteenth century and beginning of the sixteenth than Juan Ponce de León. Illegitimate son of a powerful Andalusian noble, he was born, nevertheless, in the north, in the province of Valladolid, heartland of spare, intolerant Old Castile, in 1474. Apprenticed as page to a great lord while still in his teens, don Juan plunged into the exhilarating final stage of the Reconquista, the Catholic reconquest of Spain from the Moors.

    Directing their artillery, soldiery, and propaganda against the Muslims' last Iberian kingdom in the mountains of Granada, Their Catholic Majesties Isabel and Fernando prevailed as never before. They caught their people up in a popular war that intensified Spaniards' militant Christianity and honed their fighting skills.

    Instead of the Reconquista of reality, which had been on again, off again since the eighth century as Christians, Jews, and Muslims not only tolerated each other but also caroused, Spaniards of the 1480s embraced with fervor the myth of an unbroken, triumphal Christian crusade. It electrified their spirits. Then came 1492.

    Never in Spain was there such a year. Early in January, Granada surrendered. In March, by royal decree, practicing Jews were given four months to convert to Christianity or leave the country; 150,000 would go. In April, after considerable third-party brokering, Columbus?Cristóbal Colón, Genoese navigator and mystic ?signed contracts with Isabel and Fernando enabling him to pursue his "enterprise of the Indies." Also that year, a Spaniard, Rodrigo Borgia, was elected pope, and Antonio de Nebrija compiled a grammar of Castilian, proclaiming it a language of empire.

    On August 3, Columbus sailed westward with three small ships and crews toward the riches of the Orient. At 2:00 A.M. on October 12, after a harrowing but speedy voyage, lookout Rodrigo de Triana sighted an island in the Caribbean. From the Alhambra of Granada to San Salvador, hardly a break had occurred. No mere coincidence to Spaniards, the miracle of 1492 was divine providence.

    On his second voyage, in 1493, with seventeen ships and more than twelve hundred males, including young Juan Ponce de León, Columbus inadvertently exported the Reconquista to the Western Hemisphere. The Genoese had his own commercial and spiritual agenda. When he faltered, however, his royal patrons imposed their own familiar program: acquisition of more riches and territory for Castile and the conversion to Roman Catholicism of subjected peoples.

    Crews and passengers aboard Columbus's fleet in 1493 marveled at the dreamlike string of green mountaintops rising out of placid waters. Shore parties cautiously examining deserted Carib huts shuddered at what seemed to be unmistakable signs of cannibalism.

    After an unintended fight with six reckless Caribs in a canoe, Columbus gave a naked young woman as a slave to his friend Michele de Cuneo, who had captured her. When Cuneo tried to force himself upon her in his cabin, she clawed him and then shrieked while he beat her with a rope. "Finally," he recalled, "we came to an agreement in such manner that I can tell you that she seemed to have been brought up in a school of harlots."

    Coasting a big, mountainous island that Columbus named San Juan Bautista, today's Puerto Rico, the company put into a bay where sweet-water streams allowed them to refill the ships' water casks. The Natives of a large village all disappeared into the jungle. These were Tainos, edgy because painted Carib war parties had been preying upon them. If Juan Ponce de León fancied this island at first sight, he did not say; fifteen years later, however, he would conquer it. By then, some Tainos would welcome the Spaniards.

    The word Europeans heard as Taino meant "good" or "noble" and distinguished these people from the "bad" Caribs. Far the most populous cultural group in the Caribbean, the sedentary, Arawak-speaking Tainos of the Greater Antilles, hundreds of thousands?some said millions?in 1493, lived in chiefdoms of large villages. Their thatched-roof and pole houses...