Mexican American Elites and Pueblo Indians
A central figure in New Mexico politics during both the Mexican and early American periods was Father Antonio José Martínez, who served as the Taos priest from 1826 to 1856. Martínez is a controversial figure whose legacy continues to be contested today. He is idolized by some Mexican Americans, who have recently honored him with a statue in the Taos town plaza.40 Euro-Americans, on the other hand, have long demonized Martínez, whether in historical, religious, or literary circles.41 In her 1927 novel Death Comes for the Archbishop, Willa Cather portrayed Martínez as corrupt and arrogant—perhaps still the most potent of the tropes about him.42
Martínez was born in 1804 into one of the wealthiest families of the region.43 As a young man, he took part in the ideological republican movement that spawned Mexico’s independence from Spain and later served three terms in the new republic’s legislature.44 As a middle-aged man, he initially resisted the U.S. occupation. As early as 1843, Martínez published a manifesto warning of the encroachments of Euro-Americans and portending the future invasion of Mexico by the United States.45 He harbored a special enmity for Charles Bent, the American governor assassinated in 1847.46 Although he was not among those prosecuted for the revolt, Martínez is credited by some as one of its major organizers.47 It is likely that he at least had an indirect leadership role through the large network of youths and young adults who were or had been under his tutelage at the only school in the Taos Valley during the Mexican period.48 Later, Martínez served as a legislator during the American territorial period.
Martínez was a complex figure who in many ways epitomized the dilemma of Mexican elites. On the one hand, he subscribed to the liberal ideology expressed in the Mexican Constitution’s proclamation that all Mexicans were equal under the law, without regard to their racial status, and he specifically sought to incorporate “civilized” Indians and mestizos into the Mexican polity. He worked closely with the Taos Pueblo community as their priest and, at times, advocate before various Spanish, Mexican, and American officials. At the same time, Martínez was an elite Mexican who owned Indian slaves and who has been accused of abusing the trust placed in him by Taos Pueblo. In 1920, Taos Pueblo Governor Porfirio Mirabal charged that Martínez had reneged on a promise to work to obtain leniency for the Taos Pueblo men tried for the 1847 assassination of the first American governor. According to the governor’s testimony, Martínez was given Taos Pueblo land in exchange for brokering leniency with the American officials, and, despite failing to do so, Martínez kept the land.49
Some challenge Mirabal’s account, and we probably will never know what really occurred.50 Perhaps more significant than the truth of the accusations against and defenses on behalf of Martínez is the fact that partisans have continued the debate for so long—a contemporary testament to the allure of one of the most powerful figures in the first generation of Mexican Americans. Historian David Weber describes Martínez as “an oversized figure for his time and place and a contradictory one”:
a village priest of great intellectual gifts and ego; a moralist with illegitimate children; a populist whose broad humanitarian vision and efforts to achieve political and ecclesiastical reform were often offset by arrogance and intolerance; and an ardent Mexican nationalist who led the way toward making New Mexico part of the United States. Whatever his weaknesses, his strengths had made him the most important cultural force in New Mexico in the two decades prior to the Mexican war . . . and a key political figure in both the Mexican and American eras.51
Martínez’s contradictory stance toward Indians (that he both owned Indian slaves and fought for Indian civil rights) reflected a long-standing Janus-like quality in Mexican policy toward “civilized” Indians such as the Pueblo peoples of New Mexico. Despite the Mexican Constitution’s promise of equality, Mexican law in practice likely recognized differences among Pueblo Indians, mestizos, and other racial groups.52 Moreover, it is certain that one motive for granting greater citizenship rights was to facilitate the dispossession of Indian lands by Mexicans.
Martínez’s views also demonstrate the dilemma Mexican American elites faced with respect to the Pueblo Indians under American rule. As the majority of legislators in the postwar period, Mexicans held in their hands the fate of Pueblo Indians, and their actions revealed a deep ambivalence. Martínez was involved in every statehood constitutional convention, frequently holding a leadership position. He was elected president of the first constitutional convention (organized in 1850 prior to congressional declaration of New Mexico as a federal territory). At that gathering, a majority-Mexican body proposed a state constitution for New Mexico that enfranchised Pueblo Indian men alongside Mexican and Euro-American men.53 During the same meeting, Mexican elites denied the franchise to blacks and Afro-mestizos (africanos o descendientes de africanos) and to non-Pueblo Indians (indios bárbaros).54
Mexicans had multiple reasons for wanting to enfranchise Pueblo Indians. First, they had much in common culturally and otherwise. Second, they had been allies in the past, most recently in the Taos Revolt. Making political allies of Pueblo men, as voters, was a natural next step. Yet Mexican elites were hardly consistent in their regard for and treatment of Pueblo Indians. The majority-Mexican legislature in 1849 (operating unofficially, since New Mexico had not yet been given territorial status by Congress) limited the franchise to “free white male inhabitants,” excluding Pueblo Indians. As part of the Compromise of 1850 establishing New Mexico as a federal territory, Congress restricted the right of suffrage to “free white males.”55 Even after Congress and successive territorial legislatures had formally excluded them from the franchise, Pueblo men apparently voted in some elections. In the early years of the American occupation, according to one territorial supreme court justice, Pueblo Indians “not only voted, but held both civil and military offices. In many localities, they, by their numerical strength, controlled the political destinies of [towns and counties].”56
Indeed, Pueblo electoral participation spawned its own cycle of protest and politics. In 1853 a committee of the territorial legislature considered a complaint that more than one hundred Pueblo Indians had voted illegally. The contest at issue involved the most important elected position (for nonvoting delegate to Congress) and a racially polarizing campaign that pit a native, monolingual-Spanish priest, José Manuel Gallegos, against a Missouri politician, William Carr Lane, who had only recently set foot in New Mexico.57 Gallegos won, but Lane contested the results, alleging in part that Pueblo men had voted illegally.58 A committee of the territorial legislature was charged with deciding which law governed: the 1850 extension of voting rights to Pueblo men or Congress’s 1850 restriction of the franchise to white males (including Mexicans, but excluding Pueblo Indians). Not surprisingly given that all their acts were subject to congressional nullification, the legislators followed the congressional mandate. In the end, even without the disputed Pueblo votes, Gallegos was declared the winner.59
During the early years of the American occupation, Mexican elites took a variety of stances toward Pueblo Indians, reflecting material conflicts between the groups (as when Mexican settlers encroached on Pueblo lands) but also their efforts to negotiate a more favorable position in the post-occupation racial order. Mexicans sought to differentiate themselves from Pueblos by claiming whiteness, and thus the rights of full citizenship reserved for white males in American society (including voting and holding office). In this way, Mexicans ensured their second-place position in a four-group racial hierarchy. What ultimately became an anti-Pueblo project of Mexican elites played into the hands of the American colonizers, who sought to divide Mexicans and Pueblos in order to disrupt a potentially powerful alliance among these native groups.
The dynamics of this strategy are illustrated by how the question of Pueblo Indian citizenship played out in the U.S. judicial, legislative, and executive branches. Pueblo Indians became part of the United States because they lived in the lands taken from
Mexico and governed by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. When the war ended a long period of contestation among (and sometimes within) the three branches ensued about the place of Pueblos Indians in the American polity. There were two central questions, both of which led ultimately to the question of how Pueblo lands would be treated and, specifically, whether they could be transferred to Mexican American and Euro-American buyers. The first question was whether Pueblo Indians were federal citizens, like Mexicans, under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. The second was whether Pueblo Indians were really Indians, and thus subject to federal legislation such as the Trade and Intercourse Act of 1834 (which prohibited the sale of Indian lands).60
These issues were at the center of United States v. Lucero, a land dispute between Mexicans and Cochiti Pueblo, southwest of Santa Fe.61 Mexicans had settled near Cochiti Pueblo and claimed ownership of land, against the Pueblo’s assertion that the land in question was part of the Pueblo’s collectively owned property. Perhaps at the Pueblo’s request, U.S. Attorney Stephen B. Elkins initiated the case against the Mexicans under the Indian Trade and Intercourse Act of 1834, seeking to eject them from the land. The Mexican defendants hired several prominent lawyers, including Kirby Benedict, who recently had returned to private practice after serving seventeen years on the territorial supreme court.62 Benedict’s involvement itself testifies to the precedent-setting nature of the case and its potential impact on land sales. While we cannot know what kind of fee arrangement Benedict and his partners had with their Mexican clients, it was common for attorneys in land dispute cases to receive title to a portion of land as a fee.63 As was true throughout the territorial period, New Mexico’s judicial system consisted of a two-tiered federal court, with the same judges acting as trial judges and sitting en banc as an appellate court.64 Thus, the trial judge acted also as an appellate judge, reviewing his own earlier ruling. In this case, Chief Justice John P. Slough, the trial judge who first decided the case, and Chief Justice John S. Watts, who wrote the appellate decision, sided with the Mexican defendants and against the U.S. attorney and Cochiti Pueblo.65 That both judges knew the stakes were high and that the outcome would ripple well beyond these parties was evident from their written opinions.
Both opinions rested on the twin conclusions that Pueblo Indians held Mexican citizenship and so, under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, became federal citizens of the United States, and thus occupied a distinctive position with respect to other Indians; and that Congress did not intend to treat Pueblos like other Indians. The first conclusion was grounded in Mexico’s extension of citizenship rights to “civilized” Indians: “But as a race, we think it impossible to deny that, under the [Mexican] constitution and laws of [that] country, no distinction was made as to the rights of citizenship and the privileges belonging to it, between this [civilized Indian blood] and European or Spanish blood.”66
The rulings on the second question embroiled the New Mexico judges in a multi-decade battle with Indian agents in the executive branch (who advocated treating Pueblos like other Indians), Congress (which in 1910 enacted legislation specifying that “Indian country” included Pueblo lands), and the U.S. Supreme Court (which ruled, first, to uphold Lucero and, later, to overrule it).67 The Lucero opinion essentially argued that Congress did not intend to treat Pueblos like other Indians because it had, on the whole, not done so in the past. Lucero emphasized that Congress had not ratified treaties with any Pueblo nations, had not appointed Indian agents to the Pueblos, and had not specifically mentioned Pueblo Indians in legislation other than that confirming the titles of Spanish land grants to seventeen Pueblos in New Mexico.68 Perhaps reflecting Watts’s former status as a legislator (he had been New Mexico’s congressional delegate), the opinion dared Congress to act if it saw things differently: “If such destiny is in store for a large number of the most law-abiding, sober, and industrious people of New Mexico, it must be the result of the direct legislation of [C]ongress or the mandate of the [S]upreme [C]ourt.”69 At one level, the Lucero opinion reflects a tension between Euro-American outsiders at the national level and Euro-American insiders (that is, those within New Mexico), who asserted a personal knowledge of Pueblo Indians and sought to vouch for their distinctiveness from other Indians.70
The New Mexico–based Euro-American judges, in the Lucero opinion, made two related rhetorical moves in reaching their conclusion that the Trade and Intercourse Act did not apply to Pueblo Indians (and, as a result, that their property could be bought and sold). First, as illustrated above, they portrayed Pueblo Indians in a positive light, emphasizing that they were citizens equal to the “one thousand best Americans” and “one thousand best Mexicans” in New Mexico in terms of their “virtue, honesty and industry.”71 The more dominant strand of this reasoning, however, was the drawing of a bright line between Pueblos as “civilized” and other Indians as “savage.” The court repeatedly asserted that Congress had passed the 1834 legislation to govern the class of Indians who were “wandering savages, given to murder, robbery, and theft, living on the game of the mountains, the forest, and the plains, unaccustomed to the cultivation of the soil, and unwilling to follow the pursuits of civilized man.”72 In contrast, the court found the Pueblos to be “a peaceful, quiet, and industrious people, residing in villages for their protection against the wild Indians, and living by the cultivation of the soil.”73 The judges thus with one hand complimented Pueblo Indians and lifted them above nomadic Indians, while with the other they opened the door for Pueblo lands to be bought (with all that implied in an era of rampant land speculation) by Mexicans and Euro-Americans.
The Lucero court braided an additional strand into its racial narrative. Foreshadowing the progressive view later articulated by Prince, Chief Justice Watts signaled his admiration for “the true Spanish adventurers,” who, he emphasized, had begun colonizing Mexico (and what would become the American Southwest) long before “our timid forefathers, who peeped out into the wilderness from their colony of Plymouth.”74 Watts credited the Spanish colonizers with bringing “civilization” and, especially, the Catholic religion to the Pueblos, but simultaneously chastised them for their “cruelty,” “cupidity,” and “despotic rule” over the Pueblo Indians.75 The final trope in their narrative was the juxtaposition of Spanish despotism with Pueblo victimhood, expressed as “this condition of domineering on the part of the Spaniards, and meek obedience on the part of the pueblo [sic] Indians.”76 A decade earlier, Chief Justice Benedict used a similar narrative when he sided with Acoma Pueblo and against Mexicans accused of encroaching on their lands. Calling Mexicans “the better-instructed and more civilized race,” he admonished them for trying to take advantage of Pueblo Indians. He saw the role of the American courts as leveling the playing field: “It is gratifying to us to be the judicial agents . . . affirming the rights of Pueblo Indians.”77
Read as a narrative about New Mexico’s racial dynamics, the judicial opinion is rich with insights. The Euro-American judges anointed Pueblo Indians as “civilized,” and therefore racially superior to non-Pueblo Indians, while they reinforced the divide between Pueblos and Mexicans, emphasizing the Spanish dominance over the former (rather than, for example, the mestizo character of the latter). At the same time, the representation of Mexicans as the descendants of Spanish ancestors (even within the context of the demonization of Spanish cruelty to Indians) reinforced the basis of Mexicans’ claim to whiteness. Meanwhile the exclusion of Pueblo Indians from whiteness was taken for granted as inevitable. Thus, Mexicans were supposed to feel good about their position relative to Pueblo Indians, who were supposed to feel good relative to other Indians. They and everyone else, meanwhile, understood the devastating material impact of the Lucero decision, which allowed Pueblo lands to be freely alienated in the marketplace, thereby leading directly to the transfer of Pueblo lands to Mexicans and Euro-Americans.
From the vantage point of the American colonizers, the opinion represented and solidified a predictable divide-a
nd-conquer strategy: by allowing Mexican men to claim white status (and therefore vote and hold elected office) while denying such opportunity to Pueblo Indian men, they achieved multiple goals. This strategy allowed for a civilian government (in the dark shadow of military rule) that could not have operated without the cooperation (and perhaps embrace of) natives, given the paucity of Euro-American settlers in the region prior to the occupation. Neither could it have functioned without the interruption of the mestizo Mexican/Pueblo Indian coalition that had resisted the American occupation at Taos and elsewhere. The judicial ruling furthered both goals, even while claiming to be magnanimous to all. Consider the racial positioning that occurred. Euro-Americans positioned themselves as racially generous toward Mexican Americans, allowing them to take a position under the white tent. Meanwhile, in contradiction to this formal legal proclamation, Euro-American writers, newspapermen, and politicians continued to mockingly denounce Mexicans as racially inferior and as unfit for self-government as state citizens. Mexicans mobilized their Indo-Hispano mestizo heritage in a way that emphasized their European roots (hence, whiteness), despite the fact that their racial stock, overall, was far more indigenous than European. Through strategies akin to those demanded under the Spanish-Mexican racial system, mestizos sought both to distance themselves from Pueblo Indians, with whom they shared much in common, and to deny and denigrate their own non-white background.
Manifest Destinies, Second Edition Page 15
