UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, IRVINE Fictive Conquest: The Spanish State, State Agents, and Indigenous Forms of Resistance in Eighteenth-Century New Mexico THESIS submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF ARTS in History by Anderson Maxwell Hagler Thesis Committee: Associate Professor Rachel O'Toole, Chair Professor Heidi Tinsman Assistant Professor Alex Borucki 2015 © 2015 Anderson Maxwell Hagler TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS iii ABSTRACT OF THESIS iv INTRODUCTION 1 1 CONQUEST DEFINED 3 CONQUEST INVERTED 10 DISCURSIVE CONQUEST 24 CONCLUSION 33 BIBLIOGRAPHY 36 2 ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to express my sincere gratitude to my committee chair, Professor Rachel O'Toole, who has patiently consulted with me on numerous occasions and provided valuable feedback. Without her guidance and consistent support this thesis would not have been possible. I would also like to thank my committee members Professor Heidi Tinsman and Professor Alex Borucki, whose tutelage throughout the year provided inspiring ideas which hopefully emerge in this thesis. iii ABSTRACT OF THE THESIS Fictive Conquest: The Spanish State, State Agents, and Indigenous Forms of Resistance in Eighteenth-Century New Mexico By Anderson Maxwell Hagler Master of Arts in History University of California, Irvine, 2015 Professor Rachel O'Toole, Chair This thesis maintains that the ongoing conflicts between Spanish and indigenous peoples in the frontier region of the Kingdom of New Mexico in the eighteenth century demonstrated Spaniards' inability to achieve conquest. Spanish colonizers conceptualized a successful conquest in the Americas to include access to land and control over its resources. Nevertheless, analyzing this material mode of conquest on its own reveals an incomplete process. The Spanish state did not fully realize its ambition to occupy New Mexico with Spanish colonizers since the Apache, Comanche, and Pueblo refused to internalize Spanish values in the eighteenth century. Spanish colonizers resorted to discursive forms of conquest as a means to create a legal-religious discourse that justified their presence in the region. The Spanish labeled indigenous peoples such as the Pueblo variously as sodomite, heretic, and adulterer in order to remain in New Mexico. This thesis employs forms of textual analysis, qualitative content analysis, and discourse analysis of the primary sources from New Mexico including, letters, diaries, travelogues, and Inquisition testimonies written by Spanish colonizers in order to illustrate the iv ongoing contestations between the Spanish and indigenous peoples for control over a network of exchange in the frontier region of the Kingdom of New Mexico. v Introduction Spanish colonizers' struggle for control over a material and discursive exchange network frequently reshaped alliances between Spaniards and indigenous peoples in the Kingdom of New Mexico in the eighteenth century. Spanish colonizers used the law to solidify the types of discourse employed to regulate the subjugation of indigenous peoples. Spanish jurists justified conquest through the notion of a just war.1 Spanish state agents employed material and discursive types of evidence to convince the state that they had achieved conquest and to justify their continued presence in the exchange network. However, due to Spaniards' lack of political consolidation in the Kingdom of New Mexico in the eighteenth century, the conflicts in this region illustrate the disparity between theories of conquest and their implementation. The Inquisition cases examined in this essay illustrate how Spanish colonizers labeled indigenous peoples as sodomites, heretics, or adulterers to justify conquest. The perennial conflicts regarding European and indigenous interpretations of conquest demonstrated how European empires claimed vast swathes of territory, but often only exercised direct control over narrow bands, enclaves, and irregular zones.2 Spanish colonizers encountered legal and territorial disputes from the indigenous peoples regarding valid claims to land in the frontier regions of northern New Spain. In the Kingdom of New Mexico, Spaniards could only exercise partial sovereignty due to other 1 James Muldoon, The Americas in the Spanish World Order: The Justification for Conquest in the Seventeenth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), 13. 2 Lauren Benton, A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400-1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 2. 1 competing spheres of influence such as the Pueblo and Comanche peoples.3 The Spanish- Comanche and Spanish-Navajo peace treaties of 1786 highlight the limits of Spanish conquest in New Mexico by acknowledging the political power of indigenous actors.4 This thesis draws on primary sources from frontier areas in northern Mexico. The majority of these sources originated in the eighteenth century. However, this essay also employs some documents from the late seventeenth and early nineteenth centuries in order to demonstrate the long process of colonization and the conquests in the region. The variation of historical accounts including letters, diaries, travelogues, and legal testimonies written by Spanish colonizers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries illustrates the pervasiveness of conquest in frontier regions and the material and discursive methods employed to gain power over exchange networks. This essay also utilizes testimonies from a 1731 Inquisition case in Santa Fe from the Spanish Archives of New Mexico, currently housed in the State of New Mexico Records Center in Santa Fe, to argue that Spanish colonizers employed the language used in sodomy trials to enact conquest. This essay qualitatively analyzes the discourse of state agents in sodomy trials and other correspondence to display the language used against indigenous peoples. These primary accounts illuminate a need for alternative methods in the struggle for control over the exchange network. The discussion of treaties reveals the material and discursive facets of conquest; how empires manifested, and how Spanish and indigenous peoples negotiated political and territorial space either discursively by petitioning state 3 For mention of partial sovereignty see Benton, A Search for Sovereignty, 2; For Comanche dominance in northern Mexico see Pekka Hämäläinen, The Comanche Empire (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009). 4 James F. Brooks, Captives and Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest Borderlands (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 72 and 114. 2 representatives, or materially by rebelling against colonial authorities in the northern Mexican frontier. Documents such as the letters in The Pueblo Indian Revolt of 1696, and contemporary administrative documents in Ralph Emerson Twitchell's The Spanish Archives of New Mexico provide insight into the actions, power struggles, and the everyday discourses of contemporary state agents in their desire to exert control over exchange networks as these documents contain details of petitions for land, resentment over poverty, and pejorative labels such as barbarian and savage. The Spanish Inquisition trial of 1731 supplies evidence for discursive conquest. This section pays particular attention to the language of indigenous and Spanish peoples during the trials, and analyzes the discourses surrounding the trials to demonstrate how the language used in sodomy trials enacted conquest. This study employs a close reading of the discourse in the eighteenth century in order to understand how Spanish colonizers enacted conquest and to what extent everyday discourse played a role in conquest. This essay also considers letters exchanged between the state agents, and focuses on the terminologies used when describing indigenous peoples to prove that the Spanish enacted conquest through language. Conquest Defined Spanish colonizers in eighteenth-century New Spain conceptualized conquest as the ability to maintain exclusive control over an exchange network. Spanish commercial rights and territorial claims to the Americas exemplify material and discursive components of conquest. For example, the Spanish employed the Treaty of Tordesillas and the Requerimiento—through both written and oral declarations—in order to assert their power over the territories of the Americas and the commercial resources they 3 encountered.5 However, as Patricia Seed notes, other European powers such as Portugal and France frequently contested Spanish jurisdiction.6 Consequently, the participants who engaged in conquest created multiple interpretations regarding its meaning. Spanish attempts to establish uncontested territorial and commercial claims in the Americas demonstrate the plurality of conquest accounts—as exemplified through numerous treaties, relations, and diaries—and countered the notion of a unidirectional and terminal conquest in the Americas.7 However, the ongoing nature of conquest creates a facade with respect to the extent of control exerted over the exchange network. Thus, conquest remains context specific. This essay builds on James Brooks's notion of trade networks to define conquest as the ability of Spanish and indigenous actors to exert control over a material and discursive exchange network in eighteenth-century New Spain.8 For example, material exchanges include the transfer of land, livestock, and commodities, and discursive exchanges involve the level of assimilation attributed to languages and