El Paso del Norte After the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, the Spanish colonists retreat to El Paso along with members of the Tigua and Piro tribes. A century later, a garrison was founded in San Elizario. After Mexican independence, Juan Maria Ponce de Leon established a hacienda in what…
Luis Lopez The Mexican period community of Luis López first appears in a list of New Mexico settlements compiled by Manuel Armijo in 1840 (Carroll and Haggard 1942:93; Marshall and Walt 1984:278). On 29 July 1846, Wislizenus mentioned a small town named Lopez; on his map he marked it…
Los Chaves The settlement of Los Chávez, on the west bank of the Río Grande, dates to a 1738 grant to Nicolás Durán y Chávez from Atrisco. In 1790 it consisted of six plazas (Julyan 1996:78; Espinosa and Chávez 1967:41- 43). It was included in the 1802 census (Olmsted…
Pajarito A violent dispute over land between the Pueblo of Isleta and the nearby estancia of “Paxarito” was discussed during the 1663 trial of Governor López Mendizábal of New Mexico before the Inquisition in Mexico City (Primera Audiencia de don Bernardo López de Mendizábal, 1663). Juan Candelaria thought that…
Bosque de Pinos Bosque de los Pinos was created in 1769 when floods caused the Río Grande to change course approximately two miles to the west, cutting off pieces of the Sedillo and Gutiérrez grants. The tract eventually came into the hands of Francisco Xavier Chávez, who built a…
Atrisco Richard Greenleaf and Joseph Metzgar point to a 1662 attempt by Governor Peñalosa “to found a villa in the midst of the settled region, in a valley called Atrisco” as the earliest evidence for the existence of this settlement (Greenleaf 1967:5; Metzgar 1977:269). This document went on to…
Chihuahua Trail; Spanish Colonial Period; Trade, commerce, and culture in colonial New Mexico; By William H. Wroth The Chihuahua Trail is the major land route from New Mexico through the state of Chihuahua to points in central Mexico. It is the northernmost portion of the Camino Real which in…
lime, plaster; Use of Lime in Colonial New Mexico; Documentary Evidence for Lime Kilns in El Paso An Essay by Rick Hendricks, PhD Background One of the earliest recorded uses of whitewash or plaster in New Mexico dates from 1583. In Diego Pérez de Luján's account of the…
Valverde Otermín described camping at a point that he called El Contadero. It was on the banks of the river across from the ruins of the pueblo of Senecú (Hackett and Shelby 1942:II.203). That description better fits later descriptions of Valverde and the location of the ruins of the…
La Cienega La Ciénega was a seventeenth- century pueblo that was resettled by Spaniards in the early eighteenth century. Schackel notes that it was also called El Guicú, San José del Guicú, and La Cañada del Guicú in the eighteenth century (Schackel 1979:5-8). In 1777, Juan Candelaria’s 1777 reminiscences…
