Oñate.html

In New Mexico, Hispanic Pride Clashes With Indian Anger By JAMES BROOKE © 1998 N.Y. Times News Service ESPANOLA, N.M., Feb. 8, 1998 -- One moonless night in early January, just as Hispanic Mexicans were starting to celebrate the anniversary of the first Spanish settlement in the American West, an American Indian commando group stealthily approached a bronze statue here of the first conquistador, Don Juan de Oñate. With an electric saw, the group slowly severed his right foot -- boot, stirrup, star-shaped spur and all. "We took the liberty of removing Oñate's right foot on behalf of our brothers and sister of Acoma Pueblo,'' read a statement sent by the group, which later sent to news outlets a snapshot of its hostage foot. "We see no glory in celebrating Oñate's fourth centennial, and we do not want our faces rubbed in it.'' The news quickly traveled from this lowland reservoir of Spanish culture 120 miles to the southwest to a mesa, where cheers echoed among the adobe brick houses of Acoma Pueblo. Since 1599, the Acoma had passed from generation to generation the tale of how Juan de Oñate had punished the conquered Acoma by ordering his men to chop off the right feet of 24 captive warriors. "It was funny when it happened to the statue, but it wasn't funny when it happened to the real people,'' said Darrell Chino, an Acoma artisan. At the Oñate Monument and Visitors Center, Estevan Arrellano, the director, supervised the attachment of a new foot to the 12-foot-tall statue in late January. He groaned: "Give me a break -- it was 400 years ago. It's OK to hold a grudge, but for 400 years?'' In recent years, some Americans have smugly rolled their eyes heavenward when Serbs obsessed over their rout in the Battle of Kosovo in 1389, or Irish Catholics griped about their defeat at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690. But here in northern New Mexico, Indian, Hispanic and Anglo residents are discovering that below their bland, homogenized landscape of franchise motels and restaurants, ancient history is exerting a powerful, subterranean pull. Hispanic residents are clinging to Oñate out of insecurities over losing their language, culture and political and demographic dominance. In recent years, Hispanic residents have slipped from majority to minority status as New Mexico has become a Sunbelt magnet for migrants from around the nation. Spanish no longer echoes around Santa Fe as the 10th generation of Spanish descendants has assimilated to the point of losing its ancestral language. The state's political elite is dominated by names like Bingaman, Johnson and Redmond. In Peru and Mexico, Spanish ruling classes bow to Indian sensibilities and keep to a bare minimum statues of their conquistadors, Francisco Pizarro and Hernan Cortes. But, in the American Southwest, while Pueblo Indians complain about the "butcher of Acoma,'' Spanish descendants are raising larger-than-life statues of their conquistador. In one display of conquistador boosterism, El Paso is to erect this fall a $650,000 Oñate statue that is to be the largest bronze equestrian statue in the nation. In a year of anniversaries for Spanish America, the 400th anniversary of the first permanent European settlement in the American West -- a few miles from here -- has become a magnet for Hispanic pride. This year also marks the 100th anniversary of the Spanish-American War, a conflict that stripped Spain of Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines. It is also the 150th anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, a peace treaty that effectively reduced Mexico's territory by one-half and increased U.S. territory by one-third. Outside of academia, Hispanic people are largely ignoring these two anniversaries. "It's natural,'' said Patricia Limerick, a history professor at the University of Colorado. "You want to put the spotlight on the moment when your people look the most successful, enterprising and triumphant. After so many decades of celebrating Plymouth Rock, the Puritans and Jamestown, all this genuflecting at the shrine of English North America must get a little wearing if you are a New Mexican Hispanic.'' Around April 30, the 400th anniversary of the day when Oñate crossed the Rio Grande at El Paso, a Spanish delegation, including an Oñate descendant, is to view a model of the equestrian statue in El Paso, and is then to travel to Santa Fe by helicopter over the old Camino Real, an ox cart track that was the colonial link between Mexico and the new villages. A platoon of Spanish soldiers, dressed in 16th-century uniforms is to hike the trail. In Santa Fe, Spain's vice president, Alvarez Cascos, is to unveil an Oñate statue and a fresco on the Spanish colonization. In Albuquerque, he will break ground for a $25 million, federally financed Hispanic Cultural Center. But in New Mexico, the 400th anniversary celebrations have highlighted the sometimes uneasy coexistence of three cultures here, Hispanic, Anglo and Indian. Stephanie Kearny contrasts Santa Fe's $500,000 yearlong commemoration of Spain's colonization with the official silence in 1996 on the 150th anniversary of the arrival in Santa Fe of her namesake and great great-grandfather, Gen. Stephen Kearny. The American general's bloodless occupation of Santa Fe on Aug. 18, 1846, marked the first seizure of a foreign capital by American troops. On the anniversary, Ms. Kearny, two of her sisters, two historians, and a reporter discreetly gathered in Santa Fe's central plaza and sipped champagne from plastic cups. Ms. Kearny, an Albuquerque financial consultant, said, "We kept the bottle in a paper bag because we were afraid of being thrown in jail.'' While Hispanic New Mexicans tense at the mention of Kearny, they also wince at the mention of the Pueblo hero, a man known only as the Pope. In 1680, Pope organized an American Indian revolt that temporarily drove all Spanish colonists from New Mexico. Last summer, some Hispanic people objected when American Indian representatives suggested that a statue of Pope be erected in the U.S. Capitol. Mr. Arrellano, director of the Oñate Center, said, "Pope tortured and killed 20 priests, and murdered countless numbers of women and children.'' A plea by Mayor Jim Baca of Albuquerque for harmony fell on deaf ears at a city hearing over a plan to erect an Oñate statue this summer near Old Town, the city's historic, Hispanic core. "Don't dishonor those Acoma families who have chosen to live in this city,'' warned Darva Chino, an Acoma Indian opposed to using tax dollars for the statue. Millia Santillanes, a Hispanic organizer of the Oñate festivities shot back, "Acoma has no place in our memorial.'' With design work divided among two Hispanics and an American Indian, the Oñate memorial was approved. But Albuquerque's ethnic gridlock remains so tight that the original site for the statue, Civic Plaza, is to have a Holocaust memorial. Jews account for about 1 percent of Albuquerque's 700,000 inhabitants. At the same time, debate over the 400th anniversary of Spain's founding of New Mexico is degenerating into debate over late 16th-century foot-amputation practices. "When I think of what Oñate did to the Acoma Pueblo, I have a vision of Indian men lined up to have one foot cut off,'' Andres Lauriano, a Sandia tribal council member, wrote in The Albuquerque Journal. "I see the blood pouring from their legs as they crawled or hopped away. I see the bloody pile of feet left behind.'' But the foot-chopping incident should not overshadow Oñate's positive achievements, argued Marc Simmons, author of "The Last Conquistador: Juan de Oñate and the Settling of the Far Southwest'' (University of Oklahoma Press, 1991). "In what is now the Western United States, he was the founder of the livestock industry, the mining industry, and he opened the first major road, the Camino Real,'' Mr. Simmons said of the 16th-century entrepreneur who was married to a granddaughter of Cortes. "He brought Christianity and Western culture.'' One century after the arrival of Christopher Columbus in the Americas, the Acoma were an isolated, unconquered people, living in a mesa that one Spaniard called "the best situated Indian stronghold in all Christendom.'' When the Acoma first saw Oñate's horse-mounted soldiers, they thought that the neighing horses were talking with each other. When Oñate visited the mesa, he was nearly lured into an underground chamber where a dozen warriors awaited him with sharpened knives. A few days later, one of his captains escaped an Acoma ambush, but lost his horse. A few weeks later, in December 1598, Acoma warriors killed 11 Spanish soldiers, including Juan de Zaldivar, Oñate's nephew and field marshal. The Spanish declared war on the tribe, reasoning that if the slayings went unpunished, an American Indian revolt would wipe out their eight-month-old colony. "Oñate was a Spanish military commander in the late 16th century who was struggling to keep a colony from collapsing,'' Mr. Simmons said. "Seventy men went off, climbed hand-over-hand up the mesa, fought for three days and vanquished a pueblo of several thousand people.'' Punishment of prisoners was designed for maximum political effect. First, soldiers amputated one hand from each of two Hopi captives. Turning to the Acoma, the Spanish spaced the foot amputations over several days. Spain's King later punished Oñate for his excesses and banished him from New Mexico. But, four centuries later, the psychic wounds remain fresh among the Acoma. 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