GENÍZAROS: NEW MEXICO’S OTHER NATIVE PEOPLE
By: Rob Martinez
“Mezcla del Indio del Pueblo, donde salio un Genízaro…”
Cleofes Vigil
The morning sun started to warm the face of the young girl as she awoke, the New Mexico sky blinding her temporarily. Already, her mother was preparing a morning meal of toasted elote (corn) and ground up carne seca de Cíbolo (dried buffalo meat). Her father was washing up, dressed from the waist down as he mentally went over the day’s work of hunting deer for the family. Then the earth rumbled, dust rising up, stinging eyes and lips. It was a hunting party! Not raiding for animals, but for humans. The man was skewered by a lance, blood gushing from his mouth. The girl’s mother let out a terrifying shriek as she was scooped up onto the enemy’s horse. The girl then felt a strong arm wrap her, lifting her onto a galloping horse, the malodorous stench of her captor filling her nostrils. The girl looked back through fire and smoke at her people’s village, never to see it again.
———
Raiding and hunting. Killing and capturing. By the early 1800s, New Mexico’s Genízaro class was a significant and vibrant element of the local population that included mixed blood Españoles and Mestizos, Coyotes and Indios. Español literally means Spanish though in New Mexico and other part of colonial Mexico it meant someone who was mixed with Native American but was mostly Spanish in appearance and culture. Mestizo meant a vibrant mix of Native and Spanish, and Coyote was a person mostly Native with some Spanish. The Pueblos, Diné (Navajo), Comanche, Apache, Ute and Kiowa were Native peoples among others.
Genízaros were a unique class of people born out of a century of warfare and cautiva or captive culture. The term Genízaro comes for the old Janissary system used by the Ottoman Turks, Muslims who would take captured Christian boys and train them to be the warriors class for that empire. They occupied a space in New Mexico somewhere between the Hispano New Mexicans and Pueblos on one side and the nomadic Native communities on the other. They were marginalized yet crucial to the survival of New Mexico in the 1700s. And generations later their cultural contributions would be significant to what is today’s New Mexican Hispano and Native culture and history.
New Mexico in the 1700s was a dangerous place to live for everyone. Nomadic Natives raided Hispano and Puebloan villages, killing men, taking horses, and women and children captives, usually never to be seen again. Hispanos did the same, raiding and killing nomadic Native peoples and taking women and children captive. Native people also raided and killed other Native communities, selling the captives to Hispanos at Taos and Santa Fe through a unique system called a rescate, or ransom, to take captive Natives and place them in Hispano households where they lived in servitude and slavery. This was a loophole, to be sure, as Natives were prohibited from being enslaved in Spanish society. Still, women and children disappeared in an instant because of these traumatic raids.
Certainly, Genízaros were not merely slaves, since once they reached adult age they were emancipated and free to settle in their own communities or even among Hispanos at places such as Taos, Santa Fe, and Albuquerque. They also sometimes made their way into Puebloan communities. By the mid-1700s they had communities at Abiquiu, Belen, and later San Miguel del Bado. It is significant that in the 1750s Governor Tomas Velez Cachupin settled mixed blood people of Native, Black and Spanish background at places such as Las Trampas and Truchas. Genízaros were part of those frontier communities that served as buffers to protect Hispanos and Pueblos from enemy peoples of the mountains and plains. Genizaros were also explorers, taking part in the expeditions of Dominguez and Escalante exploring the Great Basin, and Juan de Rivera’s
Genízaros were also culture brokers. They lived in two worlds, both Hispano and Native, part of both yet not totally accepted by either. There was never chattel slavery such as what could be found in the southern USA. Mexico outlawed slavery in 1829, and the USA in the 1860s. Yet, captive Natives continued to be part of the New Mexican social fabric into the early 20th century. Genízaros disappear from records in the mid 1800s, yet are still with us, as a community and in our bloodlines. Cultural expressions such as Los Comanches and Los Matachines give us a glimpse into this most fascinating and traumatic aspect of our state’s history.
This article originally appeared in the Santa Fe New Mexican June 18, 2022.