Content area
Full Text
IT WAS AN APRIL NIGHT IN 1734, recalled María Manuela de Armijo. It must have been eight o'clock or thereabouts. Outside on the streets of Santa Fe, New Mexico, all was still. Inside María's house the day's end had brought a peaceful hush. The evening embers in the hearth had begun to crackle and pop. Already Cayetano Moya, María's husband, had retired, and all the children were safely tucked away. Maria bolted shut the windows and door to her house. She blessed herself with the sign of the cross, said her evening prayers, and climbed into bed for a night's rest. But there would be very little rest for Maria that night. Moments before she fell asleep, a witch entered the house. Bellowing like a raging bull, barking like a dog, with yips and yaps and harrowing cries, the witch, whom Maria recognized as the coyota (a person with a particular proportion of mixed Spanish, Indian, and African ancestry) Nicolasa Romero, kept shouting out in an ugly cry: "Puta! Puta! Gran puta!" (Whore! Whore! Gigantic whore!). María screamed out in terror, but the cords in her throat were mute. "Praised be the Blessed Sacrament," she mumbled. "Glory be to Saint Anthony," she prayed helplessly as the witch fondled Maria's body, caressed her breasts, and did with her as she pleased. And though Maria's husband, Cayetano, was in bed beside her, he saw and heard absolutely nothing. Then, just as suddenly as Nicolasa Romero had appeared, she disappeared into the night.1
The Indian witches of New Mexico and the suspicions they provoked in the eighteenth century is the topic of this essay. During the eighteenth century three major issues shaped the tone and tenor of life in this remote frontier colony: the activity of witches, constant attacks on established towns by marauding Indians (namely, by Apache, Comanche, Navajo, and Ute), and economic development spurred by the Bourbon Reforms in the 1770s to safeguard the province's viability on the Spanish Empire's periphery. The previous century in New Mexico, from 1598 to 1680, had ended in massive bloodshed. In 1680 the sedentary agricultural Pueblo Indians, residing in compact towns mosdy along the Rio Grande basin, had revolted against Spanish rule. As the first major successful indigenous rebellion against...