More than three thousand Indian baptisms in New Mexico resulted in a corresponding 3,302 mixed-ethnicity childbirths. The number of slave baptisms and illicit conceptions through unsanctified exogamous unions remained relatively constant over a period of 150 years and had not begun to wane even after the 1846 American conquest. The frequency of childbearing among captive Indian women, not only in New Mexico but throughout the colonial New World, indicated the extent to which the Spanish—and later the Mexicans—practiced miscegenation as a method for assimilating indigenous peoples. Such intimate relations directly contradicted the teachings of Catholicism regarding sexuality but nonetheless occurred with noticeable regularity.25 The progeny that resulted from such unions bound women to their captors through their shared offspring and, in some instances, also raised the societal status of the mother. Most mixed-blood children spent their entire lives in the Spanish settlements, giving rise to the racial castes that emanated from interethnic relationships between European masters and Indian slaves.26
Very few baptized Indians appeared in church records as slaves, because many ecclesiastics avoided placing that title upon them in an attempt to veil the prevalence of involuntary servitude from the Spanish crown. In mission baptism books, priests recorded ancestry in one of three quasi-euphemistic ways that described the biological origin of the child being baptized and identified blood purity, reiterating the importance that Spaniards placed on genealogical origin. Most eighteenth-century baptisms involved an hijo(a) legítima, meaning a male or female of, literally, legitimate Spanish pedigree. Another notation that friars used was hijo(a) de padre(s) no conocido, indicating that either one or both of the child’s parents remained unknown. This category typically appeared in registries when one of the parents claimed Indian ancestry, in which case the Church only recognized the Spanish parent and disregarded the Native father or mother by recording them as “unknown.” The third and final notation, used primarily for Puebloans and nomadic Indian captives, simply denoted indio/a.27
New Mexicans also went to great lengths to cloak intermarriage and cohabitation with Indian captives. Of 6,613 extant Spanish and Mexican marriage records between 1694 and 1846, a mere twenty-one involved actual slaves, with the more anonymous method of concubinage being substituted in place of formal wedlock.28 Many clergymen convinced themselves that baptism and marriage ceremonies involving Indian captives constituted a form of spiritual salvation, and they therefore believed that they were fulfilling a noble religious project.29 Once baptized, in fact, a captive would no longer be considered a slave in the literal sense. As generations passed and visible genetic distinctions such as skin pigmentation began to coalesce in a single Hispanic ethnicity, ecclesiastics became increasingly lax in notating ancestry in their record books. By the time Mexico achieved independence in 1821, racial differences had indeed become less salient, and census records containing discrepancies in regards to ethnic origins indicated that those in power concealed the true nature of gender and race relations in the province.30
Over the course of two centuries, a multilateral captive network had developed in the Southwest that involved not only Spanish colonists but also numerous peripheral Indian tribes, giving rise to hegemonic rivalries across the region. Through relentless raiding of colonial outposts in New Mexico, Texas, and northern Mexico, the Comanches especially—and to a lesser extent the Apaches, Navajos, and Utes—contributed to the redefinition and repurposing of enslavement and also the redistribution of social power and spatial control, carrying Euro-Americans into captivity and inciting sustained fear and anxiety throughout New Spain’s isolated imperial outposts.31 All of this occurred within a plurality of sovereignty contingent upon a borderlands backdrop, wherein multiple indigenous and Euro-American power brokers coexisted in oscillating conditions of peace and warfare that revolved in large part around processes of enslavement and repatriation.32 The considerable value of slaves in the New Mexican marketplace, as well as the utilitarian uses for captives as both servants and fictive kin among indigenous tribes, also pitted Indian polities against one another, dividing tribal resources and fighting men in multiple directions and thus limiting the capability of individual Native communities to resist colonial violence and predation. Just as Euro-Americans raided Indian camps for captives and Indians in turn confronted colonial settlements, Comanches also marauded Apaches, Apaches pillaged Comanches, Utes plundered Paiutes and Navajos, Navajos attacked Utes and Paiutes, and the processes of intertribal warfare went on ad infinitum.33
As time wore on, slave raiding emerged as a ruthless profession among both New Mexicans and the more powerful equestrian tribes surrounding the province, all of whom preyed upon and exploited weaker groups for their own benefit. While Spanish and Indian intermediaries often assisted in transporting captives to New Mexican masters, the system originated with and was perpetuated by European colonists themselves, whose economic interests and social hierarchies demanded the continuation of involuntary labor systems and concomitant senses of dependency. Weaker groups of people served as a convenient means of obtaining this labor, giving rise to intertribal slave raiding once the more powerful Apaches, Comanches, Navajos, and Utes realized that they could exploit the colonists’ insatiable desire for servants. By attacking weaker tribes for captives and slaves to trade in Spanish markets, some Native groups recast themselves as core societies that dominated socially and economically, while disempowering and denigrating neighboring peoples to the status of weaker and poorer peripheral components of that larger borderlands social system.34
As slave trafficking increased, seasonal trade fairs became common events at Santa Fe, Taos, and Pecos, with hundreds, sometimes thousands, of Indian attendees bringing captives with them to redeem for various goods of Euro-American manufacture.35 These trade fairs marked the emergence of a system of intercultural commercial exchange involving multiparty negotiations in which one of the principal products—human captives—had no input in their ultimate disposition, a characteristic that New Mexico shared with the American South. Pueblo Indians acted as intermediaries in this network, becoming quasi-capitalists as they realized substantial profits in captives and horses, two of the most valuable commodities on the northern New Spain frontier. Fray Andrés Varo observed in 1749 that “these Infidel Indians are accustomed to come in peace to the Pueblos, and bring buffalo and elk skins, and some young Indians from those that they have imprisoned in the wars that they have among themselves.” They traded those captives to Spanish colonists and Pueblo Indians for horses and mules, knives, clothing, beads, and other items of foreign manufacture not otherwise available to them. Colonial settlers hoarded trade items prior to these fairs because, according to Varo, Indian slaves constituted the “gold and silver and the richest treasure of the governors.”36 Fray Miguel de Menchero noticed that the powerful Comanches were especially prone to selling Plains Indian captives to Spanish colonists.37 All of this occurred despite the issuance of orders to the contrary, including a proclamation by Governor Gervasio Cruzat y Gongora forbidding the sale of captives, a toothless order that went unheeded and unenforced.38
Figure 1. New Mexico’s Indian tribes and Pueblos, prior to the U.S. conquest.
An armistice brokered in 1786 between Comanche chief Ecuerecapa and New Mexico governor Juan Bautista de Anza solidified preexisting but porous trade relationships, encouraging greater numbers of Comanches to mingle at the Santa Fe and Taos fairs.39 Following the accord, Anza’s superior authorized him to ransom all captives under the age of fourteen that the Comanches held.40 As many as three thousand captives were redeemed in northern New Mexico between 1700 and 1850, entering society as indios de rescate and genízaros (detribalized captives) through a process that historian James Brooks calls “a thinly disguised slave market.”41