by Tony Horwitz
“We didn’t even knock before going in,” he said. Over time, though, Wells’s family had piled clutter on their side. Then their neighbor renovated and put Sheetrock over the door. “I didn’t really think about it at the time, but I miss that sense of doors everywhere, of everyone’s lives opening into each other’s.”
Zuni Pueblo in 1882
Wells’s grandmother had barely spoken English. She washed her long braided hair with yucca root, combing it with broom stalks. “She always smelled of earth,” he said. His father began each day by facing east and saying a prayer while offering cornmeal to the rising sun. “Unfortunately, I didn’t learn his prayers, and now he’s gone.”
Wells wasn’t alone; many young Zuni had drifted from traditional religion. The priesthood and roles in Zuni’s ceremonial societies required a lifelong commitment, rigid adherence to observances and taboos, and periodic abstinence from sex, sleep, commerce, and certain foods. Zuni who worked off the reservation found that employers weren’t always willing to allow weeks away from the job for ritual purposes. Television, consumerism, drugs, and other temptations had also encroached on Zuni life.
But a strong current of traditionalism still ran beneath the town’s modern surface. As we drove to the old pueblo, known locally as the middle village, Wells pointed to the bland new houses and trailers along the main road. “See how they’re clustered? Those are family groupings, and inside most of those homes live several generations. People have left the middle village but they’ve created new nests outside it.”
Marriage also differed from the American norm. Traditionally, families simply exchanged corn and other gifts as a way of confirming a union. That custom had ended, but few Zuni held Christian or courthouse weddings. “If you’re together for six months, you’re considered married,” Wells said. After five years, a couple could go to the tribal headquarters on Valentine’s Day to have their common-law union formally recognized. This was as much ritual as most spouses observed.
Wells parked in a dirt alley beside an adobe and pine-beamed mission church near the center of Idiwan’a, the Middle Place. The mission had first been constructed by the Spanish in 1629, right on top of Zuni kivas, or ceremonial chambers, which one of Coronado’s men described as semi-subterranean lodges, “like the baths which they have in Europe.” European colonists, the world over, often erected churches atop natives’ sacred ground, to displace their practices and enhance Christianity.
But in Zuni the transplant hadn’t taken. An early Spanish missionary complained that it was almost impossible to convert natives, “due to the repugnance that they show for the Divine Law.” Services at the mission church had stopped years ago. The interior walls were now painted with vivid murals of Zuni ceremonial figures, such as “mud-heads” wearing grotesque bulbous masks. Christ also appeared, clad in a blanket and wide pants and carrying a cornmeal pouch.
“We’ve outlasted the Spanish and Zuni-fied what they left,” Wells said. In the mission graveyard, crosses intermingled with bowls holding cornmeal, a traditional offering to the dead. The church was also ringed by restored kivas: square blocks of adobe with ladders leading to a ceiling hatch.
Wells lived just behind the mission, in a house built of purplish stone and wooden beams. He walked me to the door but didn’t invite me in. We stood outside in the dwindling light, watching boys skateboard across the pueblo’s flat rooftops and past beehive ovens used to cook bread, squash, and mutton stew.
“I always see our young people as being figuratively at Idiwan’a, the Middle Place,” Wells said. “We’re trying to be in the traditional world and the outside world at the same time. I work with computers, with Anglos, speaking English, and then come home and speak Zuni and try to keep our family’s ranch going, which is hard when you have another job.” He shrugged. “I’m trying to lead a simple life. But it can be a struggle to keep it that way.”
I thanked Wells and wandered the pueblo until dark, ending up back at the mission graveyard. As soon as I came out its gate, a boy rode up on a bicycle. “When you leave a graveyard, you have to put dust on yourself,” he said.
“Where on myself?”
“All over.”
I scooped up a handful of dust and sprinkled it on my head and clothes. “Why?” I asked.
“It’s the law of the grave,” the boy replied, cycling off into the dark.
Dusty and bewildered, I walked to my pueblo-cum-inn for another night of fitful sleep before leaving Zuni to the Zuni, like so many visitors before me.
CHAPTER 7
THE PLAINS
SEA OF GRASS
I arrived at some plains so without landmarks that it was as if we were in the middle of the sea.
—Coronado, letter to the viceroy
of New Spain, 1541
LATE IN THE summer of 1540, a peace delegation arrived at Zuni from a distant pueblo. Its leaders brought tanned hides, and one of the Indians bore a tattoo on his body of the creatures the skins came from. These “seemed to be cows,” a soldier wrote, “although from the hides this did not seem possible, because the hair was woolly and snarled.”
Twenty of Coronado’s men went to visit the pueblo, called Cicuique, and returned with an Indian slave from a “level country” far to the east, where the strange cows roamed. The Spanish called the slave El Turco, because he was “very dark” and “personable,” qualities they associated with Turks. He said his homeland had large towns and so many riches that the lord of the realm napped beneath a tree hung with golden bells. This enchanted land was called Quivira.
Coronado, one of his men wrote, “felt no slight joy at such good news.” He was likewise heartened by El Turco’s claim that he had proof of Quivira’s riches: gold bracelets that his pueblo masters had seized upon taking him captive. When the people of Cicuique denied this, the Spanish took several of their leaders away in chains, including the head of the peace delegation that had come to Zuni. They later set dogs on the prisoners, badly maiming them.
“This began,” a soldier wrote, “the want of confidence in the word of the Spaniards whenever there was talk of peace from that time on.”
Coronado’s men also aroused fury when they decamped from Zuni and established winter quarters in pueblos along the Rio Grande, near present-day Albuquerque. At first, the inhabitants welcomed the intruders peacefully. And the Spanish wrote admiringly of native men spinning and weaving cloth, women grinding corn while singing to flute music, and native pottery of “extraordinary labor and workmanship.”
But none of this prevented the cold and hungry Spanish from looting food and blankets, and molesting native women. When Indians retaliated by killing Spanish horses, Coronado ordered his men to “make an example” of the pueblo where the rebels took refuge. A hundred or more Indians were burned at the stake.
All along the Rio Grande, natives rose in revolt and fought through the snowy winter. Many hundreds died, and at least a dozen pueblos were destroyed before Coronado achieved what he called la conquista y pacificación of the region. It was a victory so savage that some of his men began to turn against him. By betraying and brutalizing the peaceful pueblo people, one soldier observed, Coronado had made potential allies into vengeful enemies, “as will be seen by what happened afterward.”
THE DRIVE EAST from Zuni carried me through a landscape where the scenery and culture changed by the hour. I passed from Zuni ranchland to a Mormon farm town, its streets shaded by poplars and ringed by fields of rye and alfalfa. Beyond the town stretched a Navajo reservation dotted with log-and-mud hogans. Then the road climbed hills of juniper and piñon pine to the Continental Divide, which was marked by a ridge of black ash: the cinder cone of an extinct volcano. Early Spanish travelers called this El Mal País, the Bad Land, because the jagged lava fields made walking painful.
The Spanish also noted a huge stone headland just east of the divide, which they named El Morro: the Bluff. Visible for miles, with a shaded catch pool at its base, El Morro was a natural oasi
s along the rough, dry trail between Zuni and the Rio Grande. A sandstone cliff beside the pool also afforded an inviting canvas to resting travelers, and centuries of carvings survive to this day.
The oldest artwork, done by Indians about seven hundred years ago, depicts birds, lizards, bighorn sheep, and stick-figure humans. The meaning of these works aren’t known, and the artists are anonymous. Not so the Spanish, who extolled themselves in large, looping script, like subway graffitists. One official etched a verse that loses its rhyme in translation but not its grandiosity. “Here passed I, the Governor Francisco Manuel de Silva Nieto, Who has done the impossible, by his invincible arm and valor, with the wagons of the King our Master, a thing he alone put into effect August 5, 1629, that one may pass to Zuni and carry the faith.”
The first Anglo names don’t appear until 1849, when U.S. soldiers arrived after the Mexican-American War. Later inscriptions record the passage of wagon trains, railroad surveyors, and members of an experimental camel caravan. The American carvings are less florid than the Spanish, often just a name or initials enclosed in a tightly etched box. By the time El Morro became a national monument, in 1906, the centuries of carvings covered almost an acre of rock.
Lingering in the cliff’s shady cool, I tried to decipher the inscriptions and the impulse that prompted so many travelers to carve them. The surrounding landscape lent itself to feelings of isolation and insignificance. In this arid vastness, scratching one’s name or “Here passed I” seemed a small act of bluster, like shouting into a canyon to hear your own echo. Or, perhaps, a gesture of brotherhood with other lonesome travelers. Whatever the urge, El Morro was a stele of bygone America, not yet homogenized by strip malls and mass culture. Here, carved in weather-worn sandstone, the Southwest’s rich heritage remained on display: Indian, Spanish, Mexican, and, belatedly, Anglo-American.
ANOTHER HOUR’S DRIVE, another culture: Acoma Pueblo, also known as Sky City because of its perch atop a 370-foot mesa. When Coronado’s men arrived, the only way to reach the pueblo was by climbing single file, using steep stairs and handholds cut into the rock. Near the top, they had to wedge their hands and feet into a cleft and claw their way onto the summit, like mountaineers. It was, a captain wrote, “such a rough ascent that we repented having gone up.”
Atop the mesa, the climbers found a settlement of tall houses with cisterns and gardens. While the Spanish had only been able to reach the summit by passing their weapons up to one another, natives nimbly ascended bearing jars of water and loads of food on their heads. The rock-top aerie struck one Spaniard as “the strongest place ever seen in the world.”
Acoma appears just as imposing today. The mesa rises like a huge loaf of rock from the surrounding plain, with a crown of stone houses crenellating its flat top. In front of the mesa stand towering slabs of stone, as if keeping guard. From a distance, Acoma evokes another ancient desert citadel, Masada, to whose history the pueblo’s bears a tragic resemblance.
In the half century after Coronado’s men visited, Acoma was a peaceful way station for the occasional Spaniard traveling between Zuni and the Rio Grande. Then, in 1598, a conquistador named Juan de Oñate led four hundred soldiers and settlers north from Mexico to colonize the pueblo country. When Oñate’s nephew visited Acoma at the head of a small party, Indians killed thirteen of them, including one who died while leaping off the mesa.
Oñate—a hard-handed man, even by conquistador standards—sent a force led by his slain nephew’s brother to exact revenge. Oñate’s orders were explicit: “Leave no stone on stone, so that the Indians may never be able again to inhabit it as an impregnable fortress.” The soldiers killed some eight hundred Acomas, a Spaniard wrote, and “the pueblo was completely laid waste and burned.”
About six hundred survivors were rounded up and brought before Oñate, who put them on trial, granting them an attorney and the right to testify. Five did so, stating that Oñate’s nephew and his men were killed because of their excessive demands for food and blankets. The Spanish defense attorney asked Oñate to show mercy on the Acomas, “in view of the fact that they are barbarous”—an ironic characterization, given the conquistador’s verdict.
“Males who are over twenty-five years of age,” Oñate ruled, “I sentence to have one foot cut off and to twenty years of personal servitude”—enslavement to Spanish soldiers. Males between the ages of twelve and twenty-five, and females over twelve, were also enslaved for twenty years. Two Hopis who had joined in the fighting were sentenced to have their right hands cut off and then to be set free, “in order that they may convey to their land the news of this punishment.” As a further warning to natives, the amputations of hands and feet were carried out in public, on different days and at different pueblos.
Oñate would later be tried himself, by Spanish authorities in Mexico, for his cruelty to both Indians and settlers, and he was banished for life from the colony he’d founded. But the conquistador left his mark on New Mexico—literally so, near the base of El Morro. He inscribed the cliff on his way back from a vain search for riches that carried him to the Gulf of California. The engraving reads: “Here passed by the Governor-General Don Juan de Oñate, from the discovery of the South Sea, the 16th of April, 1605.”
Oñate’s is the oldest Spanish inscription at El Morro; he could have carved almost anywhere on the empty sandstone. Instead, the conquistador chose to etch his grand words directly on top of an Indian petroglyph.
MAIMED, ENSLAVED, AND dispersed, the Acomas nonetheless returned and rebuilt their pueblo within a few decades of Oñate’s assault. They have clung to the rock-top ever since: an isolated aerie of pueblo life. Unlike the Zuni, though, Acomas now court visitors, with a Sky City Casino by the interstate and a well-oiled tour business at the mesa’s base. The only way to see the pueblo was to buy a ticket and board a bus for the disappointingly easy climb to the top of the once impregnable mesa.
“You can blame John Wayne,” said our guide, a stout Acoma woman named Dale Sanchez. During production of one of the actor’s Westerns, in the 1960s, a paved road was built, winding up to the pueblo. “After that, we decided we could use it to make money from all of you.”
In recent decades, most Acomas had moved off the rock and into federal housing on the plain below. Thirty people still lived full-time on the mesa top, without electricity or running water. But the pueblo was a hybrid of ancient and modern. On stone foundations, some of which dated to the twelfth century, Acomas had piled upper floors built of cinder block or prefabricated adobe brick from Home Depot. Some families ran TVs off car batteries and installed Porta-Johns beside mud-plaster houses trimmed with turquoise: a traditional talisman against the evil eye.
As we walked down narrow dirt lanes, inhabitants peered from behind curtains and popped out to tend pottery stands. Acomas are famed for their light and delicate pots, decorated with black and white geometric patterns. As soon as we passed, the vendors vanished back inside their homes.
Dale showed us a seventeenth-century mission church, but otherwise said nothing of the Spanish. When I asked about their impact on Acoma, she glared at me, as if warding off the evil eye. “You mean Oñate?” she hissed.
Each year, Dale said, Acomas carried a figure of the martyred St. Stephen through the pueblo’s streets to bless the ground where Indians fell. They also kept an open grave in the mission cemetery, awaiting the returning souls of Acomas killed or enslaved by the Spanish.
“If you want to know more, go to Alcalde,” Dale said, circling a small town on my map of New Mexico. When I asked why, she smiled enigmatically and turned to greet a fresh group of tourists.
ALCALDE STRADDLED THE highway between Santa Fe and Taos, near the center of an old Spanish region first settled by colonists who came with Oñate in 1598. Occupying the northernmost frontier of Spanish America, and isolated in later centuries from the mainstream of American life, the people of El Norte had never fully assimilated. Theirs was a proud, private subculture, a remnant of colonia
l Spain in the rural backwater of northern New Mexico.
During a stopover in Santa Fe, I met a professor from one of El Norte’s old families. He said the region not only retained an antiquated Spanish dialect, but also an attachment to limpieza de sangre, or purity of blood. In Inquisition-era Spain, this had signified lineage untainted by Muslims or Jews. In El Norte, it meant genes that had never crossed with natives.
“You can tell by looking at me and most other people that there are plenty of Indians in our family tree,” the professor said. “But the view is ‘We’re pure, we’re Spanish, and not half-breeds like the dirty Mexicans.’ ”
At first glance, Alcalde seemed an unremarkable farming town, ringed by fields. Then, at its northern edge, I came to an arresting statue perched right beside the highway: a twelve-foot-tall bronze of a helmeted figure astride a muscled steed. A marker identified the heroic-looking horseman as “El Adelantado Don Juan de Oñate.” Set on a high platform, so motorists had to gaze upward at the conquistador, the towering bronze was modeled on the equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius in Rome.
An adjoining “Oñate Monument Center” was closed, so I went across the road to a shed with a sign announcing vegetables for sale. Inside, an old man named Max Martinez sat stringing chilies. When I asked about the statue, he said, in heavily accented English, “Did you look at it closely?”
“Not really. Why?”
He walked me back to the statue and pointed at one of the conquistador’s spurred boots. In 1998, on the four hundredth anniversary of Oñate’s expedition to New Mexico, the foot disappeared. “Someone came in the night and cut it off,” Max said. “Sliced clean through the bronze. Must have used a power grinder.” The job had also required considerable stealth, since a state trooper lived in a trailer beside the monument.
