Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 2,050

Below this church lies the unmarked grave of Diego de Vargas.

Born in 1643 in Madrid, Diego de Vargas Zapata y Luján Ponce de León y Contreras, better known by the slightly shorter name Don Diego de Vargas in the history of New Mexico, came from a noble family of some unclear lineage. His brother was a menino. These were pages in the royal household in Madrid. This was a big job, despite a name that at least to me sounds subservient. But of course by comparison to nearly everyone else in Spain, it was a powerful position. Vargas had bigger plans for himself though. Whether true or not, he was headed to New Spain in 1672 as a royal courier when he presented truth that he was the only surviving son of a Alonso de Vargas, a Spanish conquistador who lived in Guatemala and had left a huge estate. Well, he was granted what was left of that estate, though he had no interest in staying in Guatemala. He wanted conquest of his own.

In 1680, the tribes of New Mexico engaged in a collective revolt against the Spanish. There’s a long debate about precisely why this occurred. It’s likely some combination of Spanish brutality that included forced labor and religious persecution, a prolonged drought that undermined Spanish claims to be able to rule effectively, and growing raids from larger tribes such as the Navajo and various Apache groups. There were actually a number of revolts in North American against European colonialism at this time, including King Philip’s War in New England and growing violence in Virginia that helped lead to Bacon’s Rebellion. But what made the Pueblo Revolt different is that it actually succeeded. For 12 years, the Spanish did not rule in New Mexico. Instead, they were forced back to El Paso to try and figure out what happened. And in fact, the distant Hopi would remain uncontrolled by Europeans all the way until the United States stole half of Mexico to expand slavery in the unjust and evil Mexican War of the 1840s. This was the only successful indigenous revolt in colonial American history and that includes what today we call Latin America.

But of course the Spanish had no intention of staying away. They were licking their wounds and figuring out what the hell happened. But they were going to come back. In 1688, Vargas was named governor of New Mexico. He bought the position, which of course was theoretical. In 1690, the Spanish government decided to activate it and he got to El Paso in 1691. Vargas has one mission–retake New Mexico for the Spanish. It wasn’t that incredibly difficult in the end. The Pueblos were pretty divided after 12 years of self-rule. It seems that one problem was that there were fundamentalists who wanted to return Puebloan culture to what it had been before the Spanish arrived and while there were plenty of people who were happy to kill the priests, getting rid of the livestock was another issue altogether. Plus it’s not as if these different peoples lived in some great alliance before the Spanish anyway. Vargas didn’t even take that huge of a force up to Santa Fe. He announced that to the Pueblos that if they gave their allegiance to the King and again accepted Christianity, that they would be free to go about their business without reprisal. Most did. Truthfully, they could easily have killed him and his small forces and who knows what the Spanish would have done at that point, but these internal divisions led them to open the gates of Santa Fe to him.

Now, for centuries, people called this a bloodless reconquest. That’s a lie. In 1693, Vargas had about 70 people he considered leaders of the Pueblo Revolt rounded up and executed on the plaza in Santa Fe. However, given how bloody the Spanish had been in New Mexico leading up to 1680 and how bloody they had been throughout all of Latin America going back to the conquest of Mexico in 1519, it is a bit surprising how few people he had killed. He also took women and children hostage, destroyed crops, did everything he needed to in order to ensure Spanish power. And yet, this still could have been a lot bloodier. In truth, things had changed for the Spanish. The Franciscans would no longer be able to command the labor they once did. The military soon had a much greater threat to face–the Comanches, who gathered a bunch of the horses the Spanish had left behind after the Pueblo Revolt and would become an empire on the western Plains and into New Mexico far more powerful than the weakened Spanish were by 1700. And that’s part of the point too–Spain in 1692 simply was not the Spain of a century earlier. It was a weakening power.

In fact, many Pecos men joined Vargas in the reconquest by 1693, showing the continued divisions among the Pubelos. In 1694, he went to war with the Jemez, demanding their subservience and it was a quite bloody war. They surrendered and then joined him in the attack on the Tewa and Tano at Black Mesa, part of the deal for him releasing their women and children. That worked, though all three pueblos revolted again in 1696 and killed 21 Spanish. Outside of these wars, Vargas ruled more or less reasonably, by the standards of the time. He appealed to Spain to send colonists and also to give him a lot of money and power. This was more about the needs to survive than out of any generosity–the settlers he wanted didn’t come in numbers anywhere close to what he hoped and so his power and that of the Spanish simply was not what he wanted. Given how long it took for messages to get from Santa Fe to Spain and back (at least a year), he spent most of his time demanding a promotion and more money and also demanding more settlers while also mistrusting anything anyone was doing in Madrid around his retaken colony.

Now, one of the grossest things about the Vargas legacy is the now long-time celebration of the reconquista every year in Santa Fe, focusing on the Entrada, when Vargas returned. This was embraced by both the Hispano community (the preferred term among New Mexicans) and the Anglo community (the general term for white people in New Mexico). Not shockingly, the Pueblos hate seeing their defeat turned into fun historical pageantry. In 2017, indigenous activists protested this. Eight people were arrested and the celebration of the Entrada was ended. In 2020, a state of Vargas was also taken down in Santa Fe. Good.

Vargas died in 1704 in Bernalillo, New Mexico, which is today outside of Albuquerque. He was around 60 years old.

Don Diego de Vargas is buried underneath San Miguel Church, Santa Fe, New Mexico. It was very common across to Europe to bury well known people under the floor of churches and they weren’t often marked, but he’s almost certainly here. It’s a cool church to visit and worth a stop.

If you would like this series to visit other American agents of conquest, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Junipero Serra is in Carmel, California and Auguste Choteau is in St. Louis. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.