Ross Frank, Department of Ethnic Studies, UCSD
In his History of New Mexico and Arizona, Hubert Howe Bancroft wrote: "From 1700 New Mexico settled into that monotonously uneventful career of inert and non-progressive existence which sooner or later is to be noted in the history of every Hispano-American province." I am not sure that this statement will withstand serious scrutiny for any province of Northern Mexico, but it fails miserably as a description of late colonial New Mexico. If the province looked in dire straits in the middle of the 18th century due to isolation enforced by Indian raids, things changed dramatically by the 1790s. I will argue here that a short but intense economic boom in New Mexico from the 1780s to about 1810, led to a redefinition of provincial society and culture. Unlike the situation in the other northern provinces of New Spain, the Franciscan missionaries favored the cultural assertion of the non-Indian, "Vecino" (citizen) population, over the Pueblo Indian communities that they served. As a result, generations of santeros (saint-makers) developed new vocabularies of visual expression and iconographical meaning which reflected a particular New Mexican cultural resonance.
After defending themselves for decades against intense periods of Comanche and Apache raids on Vecino villages and Indian Pueblos along the Río Grande, a Spanish-Pueblo military victory in 1779 over the Comanche leader Cuerno Verde opened the way for a Spanish-Comanche peace six years later. The Comanche connection sprouted into an era of renewed trade with New Mexicans and a military alliance against the most intractable of the Apache bands. New Mexican merchants began to reestablish and expand commercial relations with Chihuahua, the closest substantial market city south of the province, and with the garrisons of the presidios (frontier fortifications) recently established or expanded in northern Sonora and Nueva Vizcaya. Sheep, wool, and finished woven textiles represented the mainstay of new burgeoning commercial enterprises. Further, after the hazards to life brought by warfare and a major smallpox outbreak that reached the province in 1781, the population of New Mexico began to grow rapidly, especially among the non-Pueblo villages. Vecino families holding inadequate farmlands to sustain themselves began to bring new lands under cultivation in the 1780s in areas that had previously been too vulnerable to Comanche attack to use. In sum, by the mid-1790s New Mexican Vecino society felt the rewards of peace, a renewed export trade, increased production of agricultural goods and livestock, and the imported luxuries that such prosperity brought.
The development of devotional religious images called santos represents one aspect of the Vecino cultural expression that accompanied economic growth at the end of the colonial period. The history of santos also demonstrates a close working relationship between the Vecino laity and the Franciscan missionaries that had arisen since mid-century. Due to the difficulty of obtaining religious devotional objects for churches and chapels in New Mexico during the eighteenth century, Spanish missionary/artisans within the province began making santos, carved and painted religious figures of saints, beginning shortly after the reconquest.[1] The first pieces fashioned in New Mexico until approximately mid-century conform to a formal, linear style, modeled after religious paintings and frescoes done in provincial neo-Renaissance style elsewhere in New Spain. Grouped by art-historian E. Boyd into the "Franciscan F" {A1} and "Franciscan B" {B2} styles, missionaries executed these religious works, possibly with Indian assistance, for the decoration of the Pueblo missions, as opposed to the settler dominated churches of Santa Fe, Santa Cruz de la Cañada, and Albuquerque. {A3} {B4}
On the basis of information recorded by Fray Domínguez in 1776 and other documentary sources, the earliest santeros (saint-makers) identified by name to have worked in New Mexico are Fray Andrés García, and Capitan Bernardo Miera y Pacheco, the mapmaker, explorer, and painter from the Presidio in Santa Fe. Both men immigrated to New Mexico in mid-century, Fray García from Puebla in 1747, and Spanish-born Miera y Pacheco around 1754. E. Boyd and other art-historian/curators have attempted to attribute extant pieces of sculpture to each of these men, and have extrapolated from the sculptural style of each artist links to body of work painted in oils on cloth, animal hides, and pine panels. García resided in the missions of Santa Fe, Santa Cruz de la Cañada, Albuquerque, and in many of the pueblos during his thirty-two years of service, dying in Mexico City after 1779.[2] Miera y Pacheco died in Santa Fe in 1785.[3] The attribution of specific surviving santos not withstanding, the body of early santos fit into three recognizable styles, each a provincial rendering of the academic styles of religious painting then prevailing in New Spain.
The late eighteenth century works show considerably more stylistic and iconographic complexity than the simpler, more didactic, early Franciscan styles. Unlike the Franciscan "F" and "B" styles, the artists of the Provincial Academic styles used Baroque painting conventions and techniques to portray naturalistic movement and emotional expression characteristic of devotional images {A5}. {B6} In addition to work done for the Pueblo missions, Vecino patrons commissioned santos attributed to both Miera y Pacheco and Fray García for use in Vecino churches and chapels. The most clearly documented work by Fray García, an almost life-sized figure of Christ in the Holy Sepulchre, resides in the Vecino church at Santa Cruz le la Cañada for which it was crafted. {B7} One of the sculptures and three panels (retablos) attributed to Miera y Pacheco have inscriptions commemorating their Vecino donors.[4] {A8}
Beginning in the 1790s, Vecinos undertook an extensive program of construction, expansion, and redecoration of New Mexican churches and chapels. At the same time, nuevomexicanos increased the availability of santos by generating a new tradition of local craftsmanship based directly on the stylistic and iconographical models of the Provincial Academic Style painters. The pivotal figure in making New Mexican religious art a Vecino occupation, the anonymous Laguna Santero, probably came from provincial Mexico in the early 1790s. He returned to Mexico after his last commission of a reredos (altar screen) for the Laguna mission church, completed in 1808.[5] {A9} {A10} While in New Mexico, the Laguna Santero and his assistants created at least six major reredos, and numerous retablos (single panels). Most of his identified commissions, including altar screens for the chapel of San Miguel in Santa Fe, and the Franciscan mission churches at the Indian pueblos of Laguna, Acoma, Zia, Santa Ana, and Pojoaque sprang from the generosity of one wealthy Vecino patron, Don Antonio José Ortiz.[6] The money that Ortiz lavished on religious donations came from a profitable career as a merchant and public official. One of the earliest Vecino santeros, known as Molleno, may have come from the workshop of the Laguna artist.[7]
The artistic production of the Laguna Santero established a number of stylistic interpretations of the baroque tradition of New Spain that directed the development of a provincial industry, producing religious images for churches, chapels, oratories, and private homes during the succeeding generation.[8] {B11} In general, the Laguna artist translated the complicated architectural structure and exuberant decoration of eighteenth century Mexican religious furnishings into a simplified form carved in the soft woods available in New Mexico (principally pine and cottonwood), or painted on a flat surface in two-dimensional perspective. {A12 AND B12}
The demand for religious images among a growing Vecino population created an indigenous santo industry before the turn of the eighteenth century. The Laguna Santero provided a coherent artistic style adapted to New Mexican conditions, and a workshop of followers with some training gained from the master. The career of santero Pedro Antonio Fresquís also began in the 1790s, making santos in a style independent of influence from the Laguna Santero.[9] Fresquís represented one of the earliest Vecino craftsman catering to popular, rural demand for religious images. {A13 AND B13} His work often drew directly on imagery from popular European prints and engravings imported throughout New Spain. Fresquís painted with thin, flowing lines and the precision of a draftsman. He rendered the conventional perspective found in his printed models to flat, two-dimensional form, using cross-hatching and other techniques borrowed from Spanish and Flemish prints to create the illusion of space.[10] Before the identification of Fresquís as the artist responsible for this style, his technique earned him the name of the "Calligraphic Santero." The wide range of the religious subjects that Fresquís depicted, and the iconography he drew upon, also attest to the influence of imported materials. Another early santero, known as Molleno, worked in the early nineteenth century, and probably received his training as an apprentice of the Laguna Santero.[11] {B14}
Despite the emphasis on an itinerant folk tradition of New Mexican santeros in much of the literature, the beginnings of the Vecino santo industry relied heavily on commissions from wealthy patrons or newly established communities to fashion larger altar screens and individual bultos (sculpture) and retablos for the furnishing of religious buildings.[12] Religious patronage of the arts functioned in a manner similar to that of Mexico City or any provincial capital, albeit on a smaller scale. Pedro Fresquís painted a major altar screen for the church at Truchas around 1818, and received a commission from the family of Antonio José Ortiz for a wooden collateral for the Rosario chapel in Santa Fe.[13] He designed the woodwork built to house the statue of Nuestra Señora del Rosario, known as La Conquistadora in New Mexico, held to have been first brought to the province by Fray Alonso de Benevides in 1623 and again by Governor Vargas during the reconquest.[14] Documents also mention work, no longer extant, executed at the churches of Santa Cruz de la Cañada and Chimayo. Molleno completed the altar screen in the side chapel dedicated to Nuestro Señor de Esquipulas at the Church of San Francisco, Ranchos de Taos, between about 1815 and 1817, and may also have painted the original main altar.[15]
A recently restored reredos (altar screen) on the north nave of the Church of Santa Cruz de la Cañada, about twenty-five miles north of Santa Fe, illustrates the multiple connections between santeros, as well as the patronage of those connected to the new export trade to Chihuahua and Sonora. {A15.0 AND B15.0} {A15} Victor Goler and Felix Lopez, two of the current generation of santeros, led this parish-based conservation project. Two hundred years earlier, Fray José Mariano Rosete had first mentioned this altar screen as one of four in his 1796 report on the most recent renewal of the church and its fabric. On its bicentennial anniversary, the restoration of the top panel containing the image of the Nuestra Señora de la Guadalupe revealed two inscriptions: {B16} "Ce pinto A 8 de Otubre de Ano 1795" (Painted 8 of October on the year of 1795), on the right; and {B17} "Se pinto este Altar deBosion de Sr. Adauto Fresquís" (This Altar was painted in devotion of Mr. Adauto Fresquís), on the left. {A18} The writing and syntax of the inscription matches those painted in 1798 by the Laguna Santero on the retable made for San Miguel Chapel in Santa Fe.[16] In addition, the date, 1795, falls early in the what we know about the career of the Laguna Santero in New Mexico, and before the documented work of any other contemporary santero working in the province {B19}. In addition, stylistic comparison of the face and hands of the panel of Nuestra Señora de la Dolorosa with other work of the Laguna Santero helps to confirm the attribution {A20} {A21}. (A series of pentimenti showing the underlying sketches of the original artist uncovered during conservation also indicates the style of the Laguna Master.)
Like Don Antonio José Ortiz, the primary patron of the Laguna Master, Señor Adauto Fresquís, who according to the inscription commissioned this altarpiece, belonged to a family that benefitted from the new economic oppurtunities generated by the export trade from New Mexico. Tomas Fresquís, a cousin,[17] of Adauto, appears in the alcabala (excise tax) records for 1781 as a merchant accompanying the trade caravan to Chihuahua.[18] Another cousin, the santero Pedro Antonio Fresquís, was born in Santa Cruz and worked on the reredos in the south chapel of the church. The Fresquíz family involvement in the refurbishment of the Santa Cruz Church demonstrates the close connection between late colonial economic growth and the development of Vecino religious art.
Although the Laguna Santero painted the original reredos, other craftsmen had painted over the original work in their own style. The bulk of the images now visible show the hand of Rafael Aragón[19] (active 1820-1862) who worked on the other reredos at Santa Cruz and received commissions for altar screens in religious buildings throughout northern New Mexico (Río Arriba). The conservators of the Santa Cruz north nave altar screen found that Aragón had repainted the same figures in approximately the same positions over the previous versions done by the Laguna Santeros, and in some cases one or two other workers. The images on the top layer show Rafael Aragón's unmistakable style.
During the late 1780s and 1790s, at the moment when demand for New Mexican products blossomed in Chihuahua and the northern presidios, Vecinos responded by taking over the production of textiles from the Pueblo Indians in order to expand the market for exports. In the same vein, Vecino santeros developed the religious art, first improvised by the Franciscan missionaries for the Pueblo missions, into a provincial folk style that fulfilled their need for devotional images and expressed their particular frontier experience. Franciscans provided both the encouragement and prototypes for the Vecino tradition which followed. The missionaries fomented no such tradition on the part of the Pueblos. In contrast, the early Franciscans in Mexico, for example, who trained and facilitated the decoration of the walls of sixteenth century missions by Náhuatl artists.[20] As Lisbeth Haas has suggested here today, Franciscans in Alta California also intended their converted Indians to create religious images for decoration and didactic purposes at the missions. Why did Franciscan interests in New Mexico deviate from the spiritual care of the Pueblo Indians?
By the end of the eighteenth century, conditions in New Mexico had changed in ways that compounded the difficulties faced by the Franciscans and left them increasingly attached to the Vecino settlements in the vicinity of the missions. During the last quarter of the century, the number of Vecinos living in the province grew significantly. By the end of the colonial period the Vecino population of New Mexico numbered over 28,000. The Pueblo Indian population, on the other hand, had remained relatively stable, numbering from 9000 to 10,000 through most of the 1750-1821 period. The cadre of Franciscans available to serve the twenty-two missions and three or so largest Vecino towns fluctuated during the same period, but generally moved between eighteen and twenty-five missionaries. Although the Franciscans had established the missions for the conversion and spiritual care of the Pueblo Indians at the beginning of the century, missionaries in New Mexico also served the spiritual needs of the residents of the neighboring Vecino villages. The marked demographic growth among the Vecinos, and to some extent within the Pueblos as well towards the end of the century, placed increasing demands on the small group of Franciscans residing in the missions.
In theory, the Franciscan missionaries owed their services primarily to the Indians of the Pueblo missions, not to the Vecino communities nearby. In practice, the rapid increase in the Vecino population after 1770, the vigorous economy rejuvenated by the Vecinos beginning in the 1780s, and the Vecino demand for spiritual care not reciprocated to the same degree by the Pueblos, drew the Franciscans more closely to the Vecinos. After the smallpox epidemic in 1780-1781, the missionaries lost the benefit of the personal services provided by Pueblo domestic workers that they had enjoyed. The end of this tradition proceeded from the drastic reduction of the population in many of the missions by smallpox in 1780-81, and the steps that Governor Anza then took to reduce the number of resident missionaries from twenty-three to seventeen. Without a missionary living in each mission, the friars could not expect the pueblo to provide the five to ten people needed weekly to attend the missionary. Only the Indian sacristan continued to aid in the maintenance of the church. The loss of services from the host pueblo caused the missionary to rely more heavily on the obventions of the Vecino communities nearby the pueblos. It also eroded the loyalty that the friar might have felt for his Native American charges. The Franciscan practice of rotating the missionaries throughout the New Mexican missions every few years further exacerbated the forces pulling the friar away from the Pueblo Indians.[21]
The obventions offered to the friars from their Vecino parishioners reflected a need for spiritual care which only the missionaries could provide in New Mexico and, at the same time, an obligation of pastoral care on the part of the missionary that he could only provide at the expense of the Pueblo Indians. The Franciscan missionaries began to view Vecino interests by the mid-1790s within the context of a bond formed by the cultural and economic circumstances that drew them together. In 1794, six friars serving in New Mexico began a concerted attack on the privileges held by the Pueblo Indians, which the missionaries had come to believe hindered the growth of Vecino prosperity against the best interests of the province. They depicted the Pueblos as lacking respect for Christianity, shirking work, and not using their land efficiently for production:[22]
But what is most admirable is that, despite almost two hundred years that these Indians have been under the teaching, they do not obey the Church, but rather one or another very strange (excepting the Genízaros of Abiquíu). Despite their natural laziness for work, rare is he who does not labor on the most festive days of the year, and they even reprimand those who do not, during which one knows that they work with contempt of the precept of God and the Church.
The Pueblo Indians held their functions in the kivas, private underground chambers for religious ceremonies, "which should be demolished," or they held them outside in the field, "since in those days they are very observant, like Jews on the Sabbath, and on which they guard and they order to keep their inviolate secret." When the missionaries tried to correct these failings through punishment by the fiscales, the Indians ignored and made fun of these Pueblo officials. According to the friars, they received little help from the secular authorities, and whenever they tried to enforce their authority, the Pueblos petitioned the Commandant General or other authorities "without any fear of God," against their actions.
The missionaries suggested two remedies for the situation in the pueblos that illustrate how far they had departed from the protective stance of their counterparts in the 1750s and 1760s. They advocated forcing the Pueblo Indians to speak Castillian instead of their native languages, a measure which they proposed to enforce by placing a royal judge in each pueblo to support the friar. Secondly, they recommended following the process used in Sonora of allowing settlers to claim and enclose the communal lands of the native serrano communities.[23] "Where there are surplus lands in the pueblos," wrote the friars, "give them like they do in Sonora to the many Vecinos, poor men of good reputation and customs, that would live in those same pueblos, and with luck they would go discouraging the vain gentile observances and idolatries that every day are on the rise." The missionaries also used the specter of Pueblo Indian economic domination over landless Vecinos to move secular authorities to take action.
The notes to the census of 1794, prepared by Fray Diego Turado and Fray Ramón Gonzalez, explained that although the pueblos "enjoy a good deal and fine lands," they did not work as hard as they could at farming maize, wheat, or vegetables. Instead, "part [of their land] they rent to the Vecinos for whatever serves them, or for an excessive price," purchasing with pottery whatever provisions that they needed from the Vecinos. Cochití and Santo Domingo in particular produced enough to sell outside of the pueblo. According to the friars, these two pueblos had so much extra, fertile land that they could not work it "without having the assistance of many Vecinos, who are obliged from their necessity to serve them, and this service of Vecinos to the Indians also occurs in other missions of the province." In a remarkable display of blaming the victims for their predicament, Fray Turado and Gonzalez suggested that taking away the means of Pueblo production, and giving the land to Vecinos instead, would provide the solution for Pueblo reluctance to produce for a system that coercively extracted goods for the Vecino economy!
The call of the Franciscan hierarchy in 1795 to give Pueblo Indian land to the settlers did not fall on deaf ears, although Vecinos proved not to need much encouragement. Another aspect of the assertion of a Vecino cultural identity, directly related to the economic boom at the end of the eighteenth century, appears in the aggressive manner after 1780 in which Vecinos began to usurp Pueblo lands. In addition to settling new fertile areas that were too dangerous to farm or had previously been vacated due to Comanche and Apache activity, Vecinos began wresting choice lands away from Pueblo communal ownership, repeating a pattern well established in other areas of Bourbon New Spain.[25] Unlike in other areas, however, the Franciscan missionaries in New Mexico did not constitute a voice of opposition to Vecino encroachment on Pueblo lands.
At the turn of the nineteenth century, the Franciscan missions in New Mexico continued to offer spiritual services and the sacraments to the Pueblo Indians, in much the same way as they had during the previous century. The role of the missionaries, however, had changed dramatically during the preceding quarter-century. Increasingly, the Franciscans who worked in New Mexico towards the end of the century identified with the young, dynamically evolving Vecino society, rather than their less receptive Pueblo charges. The cooperation forged between the missionaries and their Vecino parishioners accounts for the lack of interest in secularization or expulsion of the Franciscans throughout the Mexican period. In marked contrast to Alta California or Texas, the mission period in New Mexico ended in 1848 by attrition, when the last friar, Fray Mariano de Jesús López, died at Isleta Pueblo.[26] Franciscan interest in Vecino spiritual affairs also set the stage for santo-making in New Mexico.
[NOTE: Time permitting, I will end with two brief sets of santos contrasting Mexican, New Mexican, and Californian interpretations of the same saint.]