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    Catholics Along the Rio Grande
    Catholics Along the Rio Grande
    Catholics Along the Rio Grande
    Ebook172 pages52 minutes

    Catholics Along the Rio Grande

    By John Taylor and Richard Melzer

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    About this ebook

    In 1540, Francisco Coronado led a band of soldiers, treasure-seekers, and Franciscan priests and friars into New Mexico, changing the lives of the Native Americans forever. In 1680, less than 100 years after the first Spanish colony imposed disease, serfdom, and zealous religious oversight on the indigenous peoples, the Pueblos rose up, forcing the Spaniards out. The uprising, known as the Pueblo Revolt, lasted for 12 years, but Catholic influence was reinvigorated following the 1692 Diego De Vargas reconquest. Over the next century, the Franciscans were gradually relegated to outlying pueblos while diocesan priests from Mexico and later from France and the United States dominated the Church's expansion in the Rio Grande Valley. Today Catholicism remains strong and vibrant in New Mexico, learning the lessons and building on the foundations from the past 500 years.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArcadia Publishing
    Release dateSep 18, 2012
    ISBN9781439624838
    Catholics Along the Rio Grande
    Author

    John Taylor

    John Taylor (b. 1952) is an American writer, critic, and translator who lives in France. Among his many translations of French, Italian, and Greek literature are books by Philippe Jaccottet, Pierre Chappuis, Pierre-Albert Jourdan, Georges Perros, Jacques Dupin, José-Flore Tappy, Pierre Voélin, Catherine Colomb, Lorenzo Calogero, Franca Mancinelli, Alfredo de Palchi, and Elias Petropoulos. About the latter Greek writer, he has written Harsh Out of Tenderness: The Greek Poet and Urban Folklorist Elias Petropoulos. Taylor's translations have been awarded grants and prizes from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Academy of American Poets, Pro Helvetia, and the Sonia Raiziss Charitable Foundation. He is the author of several volumes of short prose and poetry, most recently The Dark Brightness, Grassy Stairways, Remembrance of Water & Twenty-Five Trees, and a "double book" co-authored with Pierre Chappuis, A Notebook of Clouds & A Notebook of Ridges.

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    • 5/5
      Awesome overview of the Church in New Mexico. Nice photos.

    Book preview

    Catholics Along the Rio Grande - John Taylor

    noted.

    INTRODUCTION

    Bending over his wooden hoe, the young man broke the soft, sandy earth atop the mesa. Then, as his ancestors had for centuries, he carefully pulled the green shoots from around the broadleaf squash and poured some of the precious water from his gourd at the base of the plant, chanting a prayer to bring the moisture that would mean a healthy crop again this year. The river was low, the cisterns were starting to deplete, and the sky was almost cloudless—there would be no rain today, but perhaps tomorrow.

    Suddenly the young man straightened. He had been trained to be acutely aware of changes in his surroundings from the time he was old enough to toddle through the fields with his parents and siblings. An abrupt movement could be a rabbit, meat to enrich the stew of maize and squash, or it could be a rattlesnake, death to the unwary child that crossed its path, but good luck if it were allowed to pass unharmed. This was different, though—a glint to the north that was unlike the morning sun reflecting from the river. This one came and went almost rhythmically.

    The young man stared at the source of the signal for several seconds. Yes, there was definitely something different along the trail that ran north from the pueblo. A small cloud of dust was now visible and something that he had never seen before—a dog the size of five men with a back of silver that caught the morning sun. There were several of these unusual apparitions and behind them, men marched with long sticks and strange silvery heads. Strange sightings had been reported to the south and west—men that rode astride great beasts and carried sticks that flashed and roared and killed men far away. If they were now coming toward his home, the elders must be told. He dropped his hoe and started down the mesa at a dog trot, heading for the village.

    What the young man did not see were the tonsured men that moved in company with the soldiers. They wore sandals and coarse, blue-grey robes and carried long walking sticks. These men, much more than those with the weapons of wood and steel, would change the rhythms of the young man’s village in ways he could not even imagine—Catholicism was coming to the central Rio Grande Valley.

    This book follows the evolution of Catholicism in central New Mexico in an area that is sometimes referred to as the Río Abajo. (In the strictest sense, Río Abajo, a phrase meaning lower river, was a Spanish jurisdictional demarcation for that part of the colony south of the escarpment between Albuquerque and Santa Fe. In current times, it is informally used to designate the area south of Albuquerque.) The missions and parishes in this region form a historical lineage that can be traced to the earliest days of the Spanish colonial period.

    The first European to enter what is now New Mexico was probably Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca (above), a shipwrecked Spaniard who wandered from the Texas coast to the west coast of Mexico in 1536. However, this trek was well to the south of the Río Abajo. Francisco Vásquez de Coronado (below) traveled north in 1540, spurred on by tales of the Seven Cities of Cíbola and the gold of Quivira. Finding harsh conditions, native resistance, and lack of gold, he returned to Mexico in disgrace in 1542. Three Franciscans who had remained behind were soon killed by Native Americans. It would be almost 40 years before explorers would once again come to the land of the pueblos. (Both, Museum of New Mexico, 071390, 20206.)

    Almost 40 years after Coronado, explorers again came north along the Rio Grande—Chamuscado and Rodríguez in 1581, Espejo in 1582, Castaño de Sosa in 1590, and Gutiérrez de Humaña and Leyva de Bonilla in 1593. Each of these expeditions included Franciscans, but none was successful in establishing either a religious or colonial foothold. That task would fall to Juan de Oñate, the son of a Basque mining family, whose wife was the granddaughter of Hernán Cortés and the great-granddaughter of the Aztec emperor Moctezuma II. In January 1598, Oñate started northward with 129 soldiers and an unrecorded number of women, children, servants, and slaves. The group founded a colony near the confluence of the Río del Norte (now known as the Rio Grande) and the Río de Chama. From there the Franciscans fanned out to establish missions to the indigenous people. (Geronimo Springs Museum.)

    In 1680, after nearly a century of oppression and attacks on their traditions and beliefs by the colonists and the Franciscans, the Pueblo Indians united under a San Juan religious leader named Po’pay and drove the Spaniards out of the territory. This event, known as the Pueblo Revolt, was a wrenching development in the progress of Catholicism in the Río Abajo. Haciendas were abandoned, in some cases with much attendant violence, and the churches at Isleta, Socorro, La Joya, Alamillo, and Senecú were captured and were desecrated and severely damaged. The Native Americans managed to keep the Spanish out of their colony for 12 years, but the successful alliance among the Pueblos eventually succumbed to previous rivalries. (Sculpture by Cliff Fragua; National Statuary Hall Collection, U.S. Capitol Building.)

    In August 1692, Don Diego de Vargas Zapata Lujan Ponce de Leon and an army of 200 men mounted a major expedition to recapture north-central New Mexico. Learning from unsuccessful attempts in 1681, 1687, and 1688, this expedition was adequately staffed and provisioned. De Vargas moved north along the Rio Grande, passing burned haciendas and desecrated chapels, but encountering no Native American opposition. On December 20, 1692, De Vargas reported to Mexico City that he had successfully restored Spanish sovereignty in the upstart colony without the loss of a single soldier. However, in December 1693, he returned with colonists who had to fight to regain

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