The Great Pueblo Revolt, or Pueblo Revolt (1680–1696), was a 16-year period in the history of the American southwest when the Pueblo people overthrew the Spanish conquistadors and began to rebuild their communities. The events of that period have been viewed over the years as a failed attempt to permanently expel Europeans from the pueblos, a temporary setback to Spanish colonization, a glorious moment of independence for the Pueblo people of the American southwest, or part of a larger movement to purge the Pueblo world of foreign influence and return to traditional ways of life. It was no doubt a bit of all four.
The Spanish first entered the northern Rio Grande region in 1539 and its control was cemented in place by the 1599 siege of Acoma pueblo by Don Vicente de Zaldivar and a few score of soldier colonists from the expedition of Don Juan de Oñate. At Acoma’s Sky City, Oñate’s forces killed 800 people and captured 500 women and children and 80 men. After a “trial,” everyone over the age of 12 was enslaved; all men over 25 had a foot amputated. Roughly 80 years later, a combination of religious persecution and economic oppression led to a violent uprising in Santa Fe and other communities of what is today northern New Mexico. It was one of the few successful—if temporary—forceful stoppages of the Spanish colonial juggernaut in the New World.
Life Under the Spanish
As they had done in other parts of the Americas, the Spanish installed a combination of military and ecclesiastical leadership in New Mexico. The Spanish established missions of Franciscan friars in several pueblos to specifically break up the Indigenous religious and secular communities, stamp out religious practices and replace them with Christianity. Active efforts to convert the Pueblo people to Christianity involved destroying kivas and other structures, burning ceremonial paraphernalia in public plazas, and using accusations of witchcraft to imprison and execute traditional ceremonial leaders.
The government also established an encomienda system, allowing up to 35 leading Spanish colonists to collect tribute from the households of a particular pueblo. Hopi oral histories report that the reality of the Spanish rule included forced labor, the seduction of Hopi women, raiding of kivas and sacred ceremonies, harsh punishment for failing to attend mass, and several rounds of drought and famine.
Growing Unrest
While the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 was the event that (temporarily) removed the Spanish from the southwest, it was not the first attempt. The Pueblo people had offered resistance throughout the 80-year period following the conquest. Public conversions didn’t (always) lead to people giving up their traditions but rather drove the ceremonies underground. The Jemez (1623), Zuni (1639) and Taos (1639) communities each separately (and unsuccessfully) revolted. There also were multi-village revolts that took place in the 1650s and 1660s, but in each case, the planned revolts were discovered and the leaders executed.
The Pueblos were independent societies before Spanish rule, and fiercely so. What led to the successful revolt was the ability to overcome that independence and coalesce. Some scholars think it was a millenarian movement, and have pointed to a population collapse in the 1670s resulting from a devastating epidemic that killed off an estimated 80% of the Indigenous population, and it became clear that the Spanish were unable to explain or prevent epidemic diseases or calamitous droughts. In some respects, the battle was one of whose god was on whose side: both Pueblo and Spanish sides identified the mythical character of certain events, and both sides believed the events involved supernatural intervention.
Nonetheless, the suppression of Indigenous practices became particularly intense between 1660 and 1680, and one of the main reasons for the successful revolt appears to have occurred in 1675 when then-governor Juan Francisco de Trevino arrested 47 “sorcerers,” one of whom was Po’pay of San Juan Pueblo.
Leadership
Po’Pay (or Popé) was a Tewa religious leader, and he was to become a key leader and perhaps primary organizer of the rebellion. Po’Pay may have been key, but there were plenty of other leaders in the rebellion. Domingo Naranjo, a man of African and Indigeneous heritage, is often cited, and so are El Saca and El Chato of Taos, El Taque of San Juan, Francisco Tanjete of San Ildefonso, and Alonzo Catiti of Santo Domingo.
Under the rule of colonial New Mexico, the Spanish deployed ethnic categories ascribing “Pueblo” to lump linguistically and culturally diverse people into a single group, establishing dual and asymmetric social and economic relationships between the Spanish and Pueblo people. Po’pay and the other leaders appropriated this to mobilize the disparate and decimated villages against their colonizers.
August 10–19, 1680
After eight decades of living under foreign rule, Pueblo leaders fashioned a military alliance that transcended longstanding rivalries. For nine days, together they besieged the capital of Santa Fe and other pueblos. In this initial battle, over 400 Spanish military personnel and colonists and 21 Franciscan missionaries lost their lives: the number of Pueblo people who died is unknown. Governor Antonio de Otermin and his remaining colonists retreated in ignominy to El Paso del Norte (what is today Cuidad Juarez in Mexico).
Witnesses said that during the revolt and afterward, Po’Pay toured the pueblos, preaching a message of nativism and revivalism. He ordered the Pueblo people to break up and burn the images of Christ, the Virgin Mary, and other saints, to burn the temples, smash the bells, and separate from the wives the Christian church had given them.
Revitalization and Reconstruction
Between 1680 and 1692, despite the efforts of the Spanish to recapture the region, the Pueblo people rebuilt their kivas, revived their ceremonies and reconsecrated their shrines. People left their mission pueblos at Cochiti, Santo Domingo and Jemez and built new villages, such as Patokwa (established in 1860 and made up of Jemez, Apache/Navajos and Santo Domingo pueblo people), Kotyiti (1681, Cochiti, San Felipe and San Marcos pueblos), Boletsakwa (1680–1683, Jemez and Santo Domingo), Cerro Colorado (1689, Zia, Santa Ana, Santo Domingo) There were many others.
The architecture and settlement planning at these new villages was a new compact, dual-plaza form, a departure from the scattered layouts of mission villages. Liebmann and Pruecel have argued that this new format is what the builders considered a “traditional” village, based on clan moieties. Some potters worked on reviving traditional motifs on their glaze-ware ceramics, such as the doubled-headed key motif, which originated fro, 1400–1450.
New social identities were created, blurring the traditional linguistic-ethnic boundaries that defined Pueblo villages during the first eight decades of colonization. Inter-Pueblo trade and other ties between Pueblo people were established, such as new trade relationships between Jemez and Tewa people which became stronger during the revolt era than they had been in the 300 years before 1680.
Reconquest Attempts by the Spanish to reconquer the Rio Grande region began as early as 1681 when the former governor Otermin attempted to take back Santa Fe. Others included Pedro Romeros de Posada in 1688 and Domingo Jironza Petris de Cruzate in 1689—Cruzate’s reconquest was particularly bloody, his group destroyed Zia pueblo, killing hundreds of residents. But the uneasy coalition of independent pueblos wasn’t perfect: without a common enemy, the confederation broke into two factions: the Keres, Jemez, Taos and Pecos against the Tewa, Tanos, and Picuris.
The Spanish capitalized on the discord to make several reconquest attempts, and in August of 1692, the new governor of New Mexico Diego de Vargas, initiated his own reconquest, and this time was able to reach Santa Fe and on August 14 proclaimed the “Bloodless Reconquest of New Mexico.” A second abortive revolt occurred in 1696, but after it failed, the Spanish remained in power until 1821 when Mexico declared independence from Spain.
Ysleta del Sur Pueblo
The Tribal community known as “Tigua” established Ysleta del Sur in 1682. After leaving the homelands of Quarai Pueblo due to drought, the Tigua sought refuge at Isleta Pueblo and were later captured by the Spanish during the 1680 Pueblo Revolt and forced to walk south for over 400 miles. The Tigua settled and built the Ysleta del Sur Pueblo and, soon after, the acequia (canal) system that sustained a thriving agricultural-based community.
A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE PUEBLO REVOLT
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That’s within my pay grade and ability. He just kinda randomly decides to pull a management and often I’m sure the dude thinks he’s helping, he makes wurf spontaneous plans like say tonight on that 25 order at the end of busy night 5 of those pizzas had chicken and while we totally had enough he cooked .ore up and had people cook those luzzas and chicken and then I added it in the window, which is dumb as hell, just put it on the pizza before it hits the oven like any other time, it’s a 25 large order and absolutely not the time to experiment. He also kept trying to slow the pace of them down cause he’d get to walk out when the last pizza of the last big order hit the oven and the rest of us had an hour to flip the line and clean up and deal with whatever other bullshit may come and I at least didn’t appreciate our chef suddenly taking a relaxed attitude.towarda work he could have had all damn day to suddenly relax and make the rest of us hurry up and wait on the last thing we needed to do before cleanup. He knows food good but can’t run a kitchen worst shit cause he’s neurotic in like a 90s early childhood TV show character way. Dude is bad at logistics and too afraid of himself to make people do shit right. Honestly. I’m pretty sure I can fix it temporarily with a conversation, but that’s the thing, we get things going well and then everyone eventually goes back to their instincts from like 3 years ago. We change menus twice a year and business has tripled and yet NO ONE makes larger portions of prep or thinks a day ahead at all. I made caramelized onions 3 times last week. Just cut an cook more onions the first fucking time, and it’s the same deal with everything.
That’s some bullshit and so frustrating! sounds like you got the brains to ask for AM on a dif shift or someth. I hate that when people don’t know how to think logistically and get put in a logistics role and don’t listen when someone gotta good idea. Drives me up the fuckin wall. Do you think you could get put in in some kind of inventory/ordering roll where you can mitigate a lot of that bs? sounds like he is a good exec chef and you are a good CDC if you go by brigade terms
I do inventory and ordering as well, I work his days off and he works mine and then we hit on weekends, I basically share sous chef with another dude and for the most part the chef stuff is kinda split 3 ways. But yeah, generally cdc is close enoufh to what I do and that might be a good way to talk about it
Dude that workflow sounds so fucking messy! But I used to work disaster relief and got unitary chain of command drilled into me unhelpfully deep.
Oh, it’s such a fucking mess. Me and someone working their red seal who is now never coming back after maternity leave were co-handling this mess. Some of the looser ways things operate are okay and I’d hate to change but other shit needs to be more regulated, the chef also loves adding weird innefiencies on a whim. He’s gotten really into setting pans up sling the salad line so if he’s on oven he doesn’t have to over and just takes a peel with a pizza on it across the line where people are walking and with the dish pit around the corner cause he thinks it’s a solution to our dish washer who does need to double on salads and watching the oven letting the oven window totally fill without saying anything, moving any and just letting stuff fucking burn instead of doing literally anything and instead of fixing thst behavior this was his solution because conflict avoidance is paramount. This dude has been here almost a year, he needs to get his shit together. He won’t read chits and keeps asking me what salads need doing when it’s written directly in front of him. At a certain point it’s obvious someone isn’t trying
On that note if you come up to someone and say “are you mad at me?” And they say “yes” be prepared for that answer