Spanish officials not only condoned but even encouraged miscegenation between Indians and New World colonists, recognizing the social and religious benefits entailed in demographic incorporation and believing that the absorption of Native blood into Catholic lineages through the ideology of limpieza de sangre (purity of blood) would more readily foment spiritual conversion and civility.9 Although it continued to sanction the encomienda and remained supportive of settlers who held others in bondage, the crown insisted that such a system not be identified as “slavery” and banned settlers from holding Indians in that capacity. In 1542, the Spanish monarchy outlawed Indian slavery with the New Laws, and leaders reiterated that decree in the 1681 Recopilación de Leyes (a nine-volume set of laws governing all aspects of colonial affairs), which prohibited the ransoming of captives but simultaneously and incongruously encouraged that noncompliant Indians be attacked and subverted.10 Even so, the redemption and exchange of captives occurred frequently throughout Spain’s colonies and effectively counteracted any prohibitory edicts issued from across the Atlantic. Like English colonists in seventeenth-century Virginia, whose statutes-at-large mandated that “all Indians taken in warr [sic] be held and accounted slaves,” New Mexicans easily circumvented antislavery royal cedulas by invoking the “just-war doctrine,” enabling them to take captives during hostile encounters without fear of being reprimanded.11
In 1638, Fray Juan de Prada criticized the encomienda as a system of persecution and ominously predicted that Indians, “oppressed with new impositions and annoyances,” would lash back at the ecclesiastics who collected their tribute.12 Time would ultimately prove him correct. At the onset of the 1680 Pueblo Revolt, an estimated one-half of the approximately two hundred Spanish households in New Mexico held Indians in varying forms of servility. The rebellion occurred because of not only cultural tensions between Natives and newcomers, but also the widespread use of Puebloan peoples as unwilling and uncompensated laborers. The successful Native insurgence ousted colonists from New Mexico for more than a decade and invoked a profound sense of fear among Euro-Americans, with the ripple effect being felt as far away as Seville.13
Following Don Diego de Vargas’s 1692 reconquista and subsequent reestablishment of Spanish rule in New Mexico, settlers came to better appreciate the limits to which the Pueblos could be subverted. Like the 1676 Bacon’s Rebellion in colonial Virginia—which prompted a tactical shift in coerced labor from the predominantly white method of indentured servitude to a race-based chattel system of African slavery—the Pueblo Revolt altered slaving practices in the Southwest. By the early 1700s, enslavement of indigenous peoples began to shift toward nomadic and seminomadic Apaches, Comanches, Navajos, and Utes. Catholic missionaries actively contested the enslavement of Pueblo Indians, hoping instead to convert them to Christianity through conciliatory strategies. Long-standing rivalries between secular and clerical elements stemming from the Inquisition fanned the flames on these already firmly established hegemonic quarrels. Ecclesiastics emerged largely successful in their protestations, although Spanish captive raiding and violence toward slaves perpetuated a process of hostile reciprocation that did not dissipate until the mid-nineteenth century.14
Predicated upon imperial interlopers exerting symbolic psychological power and physical control over Native peoples and the spaces they inhabited, the proliferation of Indian slavery in the Southwest during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries coincided with the development of similar slave systems in the eastern part of the continent. On North America’s Atlantic and Gulf coasts, and throughout its hinterlands, English and French settlers also subjected Indians to comparable forms of denigrating and exploitative bondage. Spaniards acted unintentionally in concert with rival European imperialists in promulgating new systems of involuntary servitude across much of the continent, and in so doing all three of those foreign nations influenced the indigenous forms of labor and exchange that Indian tribes practiced.15
Indigenous captivity continued unhindered in part because of the material and symbolic wealth that slaves represented within frontier societies. Ideally, colonies existed for the benefit of the mother country, with settlers expected to produce tangible goods to augment the monarchy’s riches. Whereas silver and gold could be shipped back to Spain, slaves represented a wholly different type of commodity. New Mexico’s landholders found captives to be a convenient means of retaining a publicly visible form of wealth, a type of symbolic capital.16 Indian slaves served a purpose even greater than precious metals or specie to many New Mexicans in that they not only provided labor, but also could be exchanged as a sort of organic currency in a region where, until the late 1700s, hard coinage remained scarce.17 Spain attempted to impose strictures on colonial slave markets despite its ongoing inability to regulate commerce in human captives, enabling the colonies to retain capital and resources that the crown believed should belong solely to the mother country.
By the late 1700s, lower-class New Mexicans utilized the captive trade to repay their own debts and avoid falling into servitude themselves as peons. Slaves became a medium of exchange, with some people using Indian captives to purchase and barter for merchandise or other inanimate items, creating an economic dynamic that swapped living for nonliving commodities and that dehumanized those held in bondage. Oftentimes, individuals participated in raids on Indian camps and villages for the sole purpose of taking captives and selling them after returning to the Rio Grande settlements. With indigenous women and children in high demand, marauders could accrue handsome profits by providing captives to landowners, some of whom owned dozens of servants.18
Catholic Church records indicate the extent to which Indian slavery flourished in the Southwest during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Spanish priests frequently baptized Indian children, at which point they became accepted members of the adoptive families who initially served as their captors. New Mexico’s clergymen were only too happy to oblige any such request, recognizing anointment in the holy faith as a symbolic means of achieving religious conversion and thereby stripping Indians of their spirituality, tribal identity, and previous kinship associations while simultaneously instilling and broadcasting the mystic power of the Church. Theological conversion served as a secondary form of enslavement, one that priests hoped would bind a person spiritually in addition to their preconceived physical bondage and geographic isolation from their tribe of origin, thus augmenting a psychological state of subjectivity.19
Catholic priests recorded 3,237 Indian baptisms in New Mexico between 1700 and 1849, a calculation that doubtless fell short of the actual figure. Navajos had the most baptisms after Mexican independence, representing 37.5 percent of the total. Apaches comprised 24 percent, Utes represented 16 percent, and Comanches just 5 percent. In a brief period from 1750 to 1754, the Church anointed more than three hundred abductees, indicating a drastic increase in captive taking during that period. A considerable percentage of all baptisms (1,171 of them, or roughly one-third) occurred in the Spanish settlements north of Santa Fe, with a relatively even distribution across other provincial regions as far south as Paso del Norte (modern Ciudad Juárez) on the Rio Grande.20
Church registries from the Spanish colonial era are replete with individual examples of indigenous baptism, each entry giving voice to a human subject that would otherwise remain invisible in the historical record. Priests noted an approximate age—almost invariably under ten years—and assigned a new name to each Indian child, a common practice in slave cultures worldwide that served as a symbolic ascription of hybridized identity.21 Six Comanche children baptized at Santa Clara Pueblo in 1743 became, by virtue of receiving the sacrament, María la Luz, Polonia, Antonia, Josepha, Lorenza, and Cristobal.22 Through the simple and superficial act of Catholic conversion, these Indian youths immediately became less of an “other”