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 In New Mexico, genízaros originated with and evolved almost exclusively through the Indian slave trade.42 Spanish officials exploited genízaros for two important purposes. Colonel Don Fernando de la Concha, a onetime governor of New Mexico, explained the first role when writing in 1794 that genízaros served as interpreters during diplomatic meetings between Spaniards and independent Indians.43 The second role involved the protection of New Mexico’s interior settlements. By segregating genízaros on the periphery of Spanish villages, colonial officials established a buffer zone to shield settlers from the raids of nomadic tribes living to the north, west, and east of the province. In 1776, three distinct genízaro communities lived at Santa Fe, Abiquiú, and Los Jarales south of Albuquerque, numbering 137 families.44 Governor Pedro Fermín de Mendinueta believed that these people had a duty to patrol and monitor the frontier because, if left unprotected, New Mexico’s more secluded villages would be “exposed to total ruin.” Independent Indians attempting to raid colonial outposts would first encounter tangential genízaro settlements, which would offer preliminary resistance—“a defensive shield,” in the words of Fray Juan Agustín de Morfí—to thwart hostile invaders.45
As a result of their detribalization, many captives and genízaros acculturated to Spanish (and later Mexican) society and refused opportunities for repatriation later in life. Colonists preferred to obtain Indian children under a certain age to ensure such an outcome. Writing of Apaches in 1789, Commandant General of Interior Provinces Jacobo Ugarte y Loyola observed that many captives who had been taken as youths did not “retain any memory of their Country or [have the] evil intention to return as adults to search for their relatives.” He stressed the importance of acquiring only children under seven years of age, because those would be more likely to develop a sense of dependency and remain with their captors. “Little by little,” Ugarte y Loyola wrote in an explanation of the Spanish assimilation process, these captives would “become instructed in our customs, acquire Christian instruction, and breathe purer air.”46 Over the course of many years, such acculturation tactics proved highly successful, as many abductees attached themselves closely to their new adoptive families.47
The Indian slave trade continued to expand geographically even as Spain’s grasp on the New World loosened during the Age of Revolutions.48 The Enlightenment-era models for these upheavals were the American and French revolutions, the republican ideologies of which not only helped to precipitate the independence of many Latin American countries, but also laid the theoretical groundwork for the eventual emancipation of chattel slaves in the U.S. South—as well as peons and captives in the Southwest—during the mid-1800s.49 Growing Euro-American populations in New Mexico and Alta California during the early nineteenth century increased the demand for servants in both regions.50 In California, hacendados and rancheros subverted mission Indians through a system of debtor servitude in which elites and religious missionaries lent merchandise and then required that it be repaid through labor. Despite California having outlawed the exchange of indigenous servants in 1824, one observer noted as late as 1846 that, with Indians as the primary labor force in the region, “the business of the country could hardly be carried on” without their servitude.51 In contrast to the systems of involuntary labor that prevailed in colonial California, however, slaving mechanisms in New Mexico required greater armed force and coercion to sustain them.
In the late 1700s, the emergence of debt peonage alongside Indian captivity signified the fragmentation of involuntary labor into two systems, both of which revolved around economic dependency. The various semblances that slavery assumed by the early nineteenth century indicate its bifurcation into distinctive forms and demonstrate the strategic maneuvering of authoritarian masters seeking to perpetuate such institutions under misleading guises. Peonage became a transitional phase of dependency—one that lay at the interstices of slavery and wage labor—that characterized Latin America’s agrarian and pastoral areas, most often targeting Indians, mulattos, and mestizos. By the dawn of the nineteenth century, Hispanos had adopted credit extension and debtor servitude as a method of securing cheap labor on estates, or latifundios, throughout Mexico as well as New Mexico.52
Indian slavery and debt peonage were in fact quite similar in operation and remained inextricably linked through kinship bonds and interethnic bloodlines. Not only did captivity and peonage form institutions of involuntary human bondage that would later, in American times, be compared to chattel slavery in the South, but they also bore a cause-and-effect relationship upon one another. Many peons could trace their ancestry back over many generations to Indian slaves who cohabited with and bore offspring to Spanish colonists. Brigadier General James H. Carleton, commanding New Mexico’s military department during the Civil War, wrote that “[Indian] servants … bear children from illicit intercourse [and] the offspring of this intercourse are considered as peons.” Carleton was describing the ethnic interconnectedness of captivity and peonage: Indian slaves gave birth to mixed-blood children who often grew up to become a part of New Mexico’s lower class and incurred debts for subsistence, thus becoming peons after reaching adulthood.53
Conniving members of the upper class and clergy devised methods that guaranteed interminable subjectivity on the part of many New Mexicans. Catholic priests charged exorbitant amounts for marriages, baptisms, and funerals, to the extent that most individuals had to secure a third-party loan to pay for such services. Under those circumstances, a person necessarily went into debtor servitude in order to baptize a child, get married, or bury a deceased family member.54 Price-gouging creditors charged four to five times the wholesale cost of goods, a tactic that worked in tandem with continuously compounding interest to ensure that debts grew larger with time. “The initial debt is truly the tie that binds him to servitude from which he finds it impossible to escape for the rest of his life,” Fray Juan Agustín de Morfí wrote in reference to New Mexican peons. “In this way, a man who yesterday lacked a square of cloth to cover himself, today is forced by necessity to enter domestic service much to his shame,” he concluded.55
The fact that Spain never enacted laws either establishing or regulating this type of coercive labor makes it impossible to determine its precise date of origin. A widespread system of debtor servitude involving sedentary Indians and indigent citizens developed in South and Central America during the seventeenth century, largely as a result of Spain’s abolition of the repartimiento system and the subsequent need to devise new methods of labor acquisition.56 The practice did not spread into New Mexico until much later, due primarily to its localized subsistence economy (as opposed to labor-intensive extractive economies in more southerly portions of the empire), and the availability of captive Indian slaves therefore fulfilled the need for workers in the upper Rio Grande Valley. While there is no discernible moment in time when debt peonage appeared in New Mexican villages, there are hints of its existence as early as 1778, and strictures on the relationship between masters and servants in Mexico’s 1824 constitution indicate that it had become fully developed by that period.57
