Pueblo

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PUEBLO

PUEBLO is a Spanish word meaning "town" that refers to twenty aggregated Native American communities on the Colorado Plateau in northern New Mexico and Arizona. The basic characteristics of Pueblo culture—apartment-like traditional houses, maize agriculture, and pottery-making—have their origins in the Ancestral Puebloan (formally known as the Anasazi) occupation of the Colorado Plateau that extends back 2,000 years. Western Pueblos include Laguna, Acoma, and Zuni in northwestern New Mexico and Hopi in northeastern Arizona. Sixteen eastern Pueblos are clustered along the Rio Grande River valley in northern New Mexico. The eastern Pueblos are the focus of this discussion.

There are many similarities among the eastern Pueblos, but disparate origins are suggested by differences in language, patterns of kinship, and ritual details. Eastern Pueblo languages are divided into two groups. Keresan languages are spoken in Zia, Santa Ana, San Felipe, Santo Domingo, and Cochiti, as well as in Laguna and Acoma. Kiowa-Tanoan languages include Northern Tiwa, spoken at Taos and Picuris; Southern Tiwa, spoken at Isleta and Sandia; Tewa, spoken at San Juan, Santa Clara, San Ildefonso, Nambe, Pojoaque, and Tesuque; and Towa, spoken at Jemez. Numerous ruins along the Rio Grande testify to the antiquity of native occupation. Pueblos such as Pecos, east of Santa Fe, were abandoned in historic times. Traditional architecture, such as that still seen at Taos, consists of multi-storied, apartment-like houses built of sandstone or adobe. Many traditional aspects of life have persisted through Spanish, Mexican, and U.S. domination over the past five centuries.

Puebloan peoples are traditionally farmers, growing maize, beans, squash, melons, and chiles. Trips are taken throughout the year to hunt, to gather plants and resources such as salt, and to visit shrines. Pueblos near the Great Plains, such as Taos and Pecos, traded with Plains tribes for buffalo hides and meat. The Spanish introduced wheat, oats, fruit trees, horses, cattle, pigs, chicken, sheep, and goats. By the latter part of the twentieth century, wage labor had replaced traditional agriculture as the primary source of income. A growing market for Native American arts has fueled the increasing production of arts and crafts for sale, including traditional crafts such as pottery-making, weaving, leatherwork, lapidary work, and carving and more recent introductions such as silver jewelry work.

Social institutions vary among groups. Among the Tewa communities, social structure takes the form of patrilineal, nonexogamous divisions, or moeities, associated with summer and winter. Among the Keresan groups, matrilineal exogamous clans, or clusters of related lineages, are more important, but moeities are also present. Today political control is strong and centralized in the form of a cacique and a tribal council. Strong notions of cyclicity and dualism underlie much eastern Pueblo social organization. Astronomical events such as solstices or equinoxes divide the year in two. There is a complex annual cycle of communal activities involving harvest, construction, and ritual events. Moieties take turns organizing these events. Summer dances tend to revolve around fertility and bringing rain for crops, whereas winter dances emphasize hunting.

Spiritual, ritual, and social order are manifested not only through ceremony and daily life but also in the organization and layout of the physical Pueblo world. Pueblos are oriented around central plazas where daily activities as well as community rituals take place. Subterranean kivas are used for society meetings and ritual events. Puebloans share the belief that people emerged through an opening from a previous world and arrived at their current villages after a series of migrations. The Pueblo is seen as a center place, located in the middle of a series of horizontal and vertical dimensions that have social and ritual meaning. Nested series of shrines and natural landmarks represent these dimensions in the physical world. Today many families dwell primarily in nuclear family residences outside the village center, but they often maintain residences in the old, central pueblo, where they return for ritual and festive occasions.

In 1540, Francisco Vásquez de Coronado led a band of conquistadores into the Rio Grande valley and quartered his men at a group of twelve Tiwa pueblos near modern Bernalillo. The Pueblos initially welcomed the Spanish, offering them food and supplies. Soon Spanish demands began to tax Pueblo resources and hospitality, and they took food and women by force. In 1598, Don Juan de Oñate arrived at the head of a group of settlers who established a colony with headquarters in Santa Fe. Spanish colonists lacked enough resources to work the land and feed their people, so they instituted the encomienda, which gave colonists tribute rights to food and blankets from the Pueblos, and the repartimiento, which forced Puebloans into labor on Spanish farms and haciendas.

Religion was another major point of friction. Spanish missionaries were on a holy quest to convert Native Americans to Christianity, even if the campaign required force. Catholic churches were raised with native labor, and Pueblo peoples were taught European trades. Missionaries had no tolerance for native religious practices. Dances were prohibited, sacred paraphernalia was confiscated, and religious leaders were tortured and executed. Pueblo rituals continued in secret beneath a veneer of Catholicism and did not openly re-emerge until the 1800s. Contemporary Pueblo religion contains Catholic elements. Secrecy continues to surround native beliefs and ceremonies.

Friendly, commercial relationships between the Pueblos and their Apache and Navajo neighbors were disrupted by escalating patterns of raiding involving the Spanish. By the mid-1600s, Pueblo populations had been decimated by disease, famine, raids, and ill-treatment. In 1680, the allied Pueblos under the leadership of Popé evicted the Spanish in the Pueblo Revolt. All Spanish objects and churches were destroyed. The Spanish fled south to El Paso, but respite was short-lived. In 1692, Diego de Vargas led the reconquest of New Mexico. The area remained in Spanish hands until Mexican independence from Spain in 1821. New Mexico became part of the United States in 1848.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Sturtevant, William C. Handbook of North American Indians. Volume 9: Southwest, edited by Alfonso Ortiz. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1979.

Trimble, Stephen. The People. Santa Fe, N.M.: School of American Research Press, 1993.

Ruth M.Van Dyke

Dictionary of American History