Today, my husband and I visited the city of Santa Fe in New Mexico. It is a city full of amazing colors and beauty and art. All of the people we met were friendly and spoke fondly of the wonderfully vibrant place in which they lived.
During the day, we visited sites around the city, most of them religious, without really thinking about the history behind them. My cousin reminded me that the history was bloody, and I wanted to read up about it. In my very brief research (Google and Wikipedia), I’ve learned a tiny bit about the Pueblo peoples who populated the area who spoke Tanoan and Tewa and the stories of the various Spanish colonizers who invaded that area and ruled with cruelty. In fact, according to the Wikipedia article, as part of the first Spanish effort to colonize the area, Don Juan de Oñate was so cruel to the indigenous population that the Spanish banished him from New Mexico. He was responsible for the horrifying Acoma Massacre, where he murdered 500 Acoma men, and killed 300 women and children. Those who managed to survive the massacre were ordered to have terrible amputations by Onate.
After decades of massacres, forced conversions, and other cruelties, several pueblo tribes gathered together in the Pueblo Revolt of 1680. It was successful in overthrowing the yoke of Spanish rule until repossession by Diego de Vargas in 1692. The Spanish ruled the area until 1821. Mexico did from 1821 to 1846, and then the US ruled from 1846 until now.
A lot of the time, the “history” of a particular place that you can glean from remaining buildings and erected statues is determined by the “victors” of various conflicts. A plaque noting that the Pueblo Revolt razed a church without mentioning the cruelties inflicted upon the indigenous peoples, which led to the revolt in the first place is a plaque with one interpretation, one point of view of a certain set of events. How do you find out the full history of a particular place without being a full-time historian? Are there books about Santa Fe history that you know of and would recommend?
For me, I’m going to start with books about the Pueblo Revolt, an event that I knew absolutely nothing about until doing some amateur research into this area. It seems hard to find a book about this type of history from the indigenous perspective, but I need to start somewhere I suppose.
The next time you see a historical plaque in a historical place, let that be a jumping off point for your learning and investigations. Every place here in the US is complex and multifaceted. I’m sure my initial investigations are clumsy and shallow, but I am learning about something that I otherwise would have just glossed over, and my life is fuller for having done it.
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