Socio-Legal Identity Construction in Mid Colonial New Mexico Simon Ruybalid

Within early colonial New Mexico history, there is a period of time in which principally Spanish men legally construct witchcraft in court when accused of adultery (or other crimes related to fidelity or celibacy). These men legally construct witchcraft as a way to freely have sex in a repressive culture that demands marriage and fidelity at the expense of social stigmatization for the former, and death or excommunication for the latter. This construction allows these men to have sex with whomever they wish, consensual or not, which then leads to the creation, imposition, and ossification of gender norms through sexual violence. This is significant because it lays out how gender, sex, and violence areinterconnected and thus how we must understand this topic in our decolonization and resistance techniques.

The intersection of state, religion, and economics created a society amongst Spaniards in New Mexico that practically necessitated fidelity and typically arranged marriage. Further, at the time, New Mexico existed purely as a colony to defend the extremely wealthy silver mines of Zacatecas and Northern Mexico.1 This meant that only a small number of soldiers, clergy, and governors truly lived in New Mexico at this time. Beyond the sporadic interaction with French and American soldiers, the average day-to-day military interactions in New Mexico would have been between Spaniards and semi nomadic indigenous peoples like the Anasazi or Navajo. 2 These groups would raid Spanish settlements, and Spaniards in turn would attack indigenous bands and groups. Because there was not a significant amount of farmers sent by the

Spanish, the Spaniards used indigenous slave labor mainly from the Pueblo peoples. 3 Although slave labor was extracted from other indigenous groups like the Anasazi, it was in a different form because of the militaristic interaction between the Spaniards and these indigenous groups. The Spanish would kill all the men out of an innate mistrust, and they would take the women and use them as household labor. With a low male Spanish population, and a high female slave population, there was a high female to male ratio within this society. The nature of this enslavement meant the Spanish men held power over these women. This labor also included sexual labor. This sexual labor was often adulterous on the part of the Spanish, which is forbidden in their Christian belief, and so the Inquisition would get involved. The Inquisition cannot persecute indigenous peoples, because it is illegal. However, it is legal to persecute Spanish men and potentially torture, murder, or excommunicate them if they did not have a good argument for infidelity. For this reason, men construct an argument that they could not consent because indigenous women used magic to coerce the Spanish men into sex.

There is a power imbalance between Spanish men and indigenous women. This can be seen in Francisco Barretos’ accounts of life in New Mexico:

On the afternoon of the following Sunday there were peace parlays between us and the Corechos. It was agreed that they should return to us one of the Corechos women given to us at Mojose (belonging to one of the companions. Francisco Barreto, although she had fled from us the morning of the skirmish); and that we should give them a girl we had taken from them … the Corechos determined to put over a wicked plan … as they had sent the Indian woman belonging to Francisco Baretto to her land, they took one of their relatives and sent her over, wearing her feathercrest so that we should not recognize her.

With the intention of recovering their own girl and giving us nothing but a discharge of arrows. This was planned with the help of the interpreter who was another Indian woman (belonging to Alonso de Miranda) and who was trying to escape. 5

We see in this excerpt an explicit belief in and practice of human ownership and that relationship always necessitates a power imbalance. Especially when one considers that it is not consensual as seen by these indigenous women’s escape attempts. These escape attempts also reveal that Spanish men are practicing violence to enforce the power differentials. The process of abduction and servitude is a form of practiced violence outside of concepts like consensual sex or physical abuse.

Power differentials expressed through violence can lead to situations where certain men believe they are better than women, deserve whatever they wish, and that women are not people. This is significant because in order for the gender norm of the quiet housewife who never says anything, or the quiet indigenous woman to be constructed as a gender norm, you must first have at least one individual that believes in that myth and who is then willing to enforce it through violence.

If young women were in relative oversupply … women in such societies would have a subjective sense of powerlessness and would feel personally devalued by the society. They would be more likely to be valued as mere sex objects. Unlike the high sex ratio situation, women would find it more difficult to achieve economic mobility through marriage. More men and women would remain single or, if they married, would be more apt to get divorced. Illegitimate births would rise sharply. The divorce rate would be high, but the remarriage rates would be high for men only. 6

This concept of violence causing socialization can be seen with this quote by sociologists Marcia Guttentag and Paul Secord.

In societies like early colonial New Mexico, women are seen as merely sex objects and are thus dehumanized.7 Through self preservation, women attempt to hide themselves or escape the power of violence; the colonizing men. Spanish men act on belief in this power difference through violence. This can be seen with the example of Felipe Ayud:

Felipe Ayudo complained to the Inquisition that Michaela de Cabrera had made him sexually impotent with other women. Reading the extensive documentation on this case, we discover that Felipe had had a long-standing adulterous relationship with Michaela. His affliction and the beating he gave to Michaela, thereby freeing himself from her sexual hex, occurred only after he had tired of his amorous affair with her. 8

Beyond rape and sexual assault (which occurs in the missions and by the soldiers), we see violence in mundane interactions. This entire passage reinforces the message of Marcia Guttentag and Paul Secord in “Too Many Women.” Women were not valued as anything more than sex objects within society and so they were treated with no respect, to the point of mindless violence as the easy solution in detangling oneself from the social implications of an adulterous affair after you got bored.

These acts of violence and this belief system create strict gender norms enforced through sexual violence. Gender roles/norms meaning socialized tasks assigned to the artificial construct of gender. Understanding that these belief systems and acts of violence already influence the thoughts and actions of both men and women, it does not take a leap of logic to see women socialized to be meeker and smaller; to avoid the violence of power. Or, alternatively, to serve that power in positions that the men did not want: “the women, when they worked, were healers, midwives, domestic servants, and vendors of food and alcohol.” 9 The very fact that women’s jobs in society were defined, shows that gender roles existed. Each of these jobs are service jobs, acting in service to men or to society.

The first two jobs, healers and midwives, while community service jobs, also hold a level of social power in their existence. Regardless, a society has a much greater (quantitative) need for household cleaners than for midwives. The majority of women were not in positions of social prestige, but rather in low prestige service jobs, if they even worked at all. This is significant because there must be outside conditions which mean women are disproportionately a part of one job, and disproportionately not in another field of work. These factors are violence, even if it is just the violence of sexism and denial based upon that sexism which these men believe in.

Spaniards legally construct brujeria (witchcraft) to justify and grant social impunity for their violent actions and beliefs which exist outside of the socialized norm. This can be seen above with the Felipe Ayud case, or in the interesting case of Alonso Martin Barba. This case is special in that the major legal constructor of brujeria is not a man trying to get out of trouble, but rather a wife: “Alonso Martin Barba had been married to Marfa Martin, who was allegedly poisoned by a Marfa Bernal, with whom Alonso was having relations.” 10 In this legal case, the Spanish wife maintains that the reason her husband is straying from their marriage and why she is sick is because of magic. In essence, she is constructing a legal argument that brujeria is a problem in that it often makes people act in ways they would not normally act. This means that those people who were coerced never strayed from the light of God and that brujeria is coercive and a bad act that needs to be persecuted. Those who performed witchcraft were most often Indigenous women. The construction of this legal argument also gave the Spanish man an excuse that let him socially save face in the light of adultery. These implications allow us to understand that this legal construction is a form of granting impunity.

There are two lines of thought concerning this impunity and the construction of gendered roles. The first is that impunity emboldens men by making them think that their actions are excusable; or at the very least that they will not be punished for them or for their thoughts. Additionally, impunity frightens women because they must live in a constant state of fear of regular violence around them from these emboldened men. In a piece on the femicide in Guatemala, Diana Russel and Roberta Harmes talk about violence. Whilst not directly connected in that the type of violence we are exploring was not femicide, just as no one wants to be murdered, people do not want to be sexually assaulted or kept against their will. In either case, these forms of violence “... function to define gender lines, enact and bolster male dominance, and to render all women chronically and profoundly unsafe.” 11

The second line of thought is that regardless of impunity, men who believe in the sexist fantasy are going to commit microaggressions regardless. Minor forms of violence, especially when it concerns jobs and things to which life is held in duress (i.e. goods/money to purchase food), still create the same situation, even to a lesser extent, where women must fall into line because of fear of violence or in adherence to systemic denial or blackballing.

The systemic blackballing and denial of women entrance to certain positions within society by men work in conjunction with the thoughts and fears of women who are seen only as sex objects, and who have no recourse to see justice for any violence performed unto them within the system (because of the impunity). This leads to a socialization where women are expected to do certain things: to stay at home; though if they do work, even then they must work only in certain sectors. As noted by Rebolledo, “Word of these incidents spread from one person to another and became embedded in the oral literature in the form of cuentas,” 12 a line that shows these were public events which definitely entered the socializing atmosphere of this society. Thus, these legal constructions which grant impunity create another layer which creates these gender roles. org/10.2307/3491806.

Spaniards construct witchcraft as a means of impunity when it comes to having sex. This impunity often leads to sexual violence and sexual assault which leads in part to the creation of gender norms/ossification of the legality of witchcraft. This is significant because it lays out the roots and history of gender, sex, and violence in the Chicanx community which is important to understand in our decolonization and resistance attempts. This article obviously is not exhaustive and there is a wider field of study to look into concerning witchcraft in New Mexico. Scholarship on this topic can lead to a more poignant understanding of the development of capitalism and colonialism in the Spanish speaking world especially. Specifically, a lot of claims are made that are supported by relatively little actual data — not to say that there is not data there. There are over a dozen case examples, just to point out that is not a lot of data and this is a big claim about a period of over a hundred years for which we have relatively little data. An intensive exploration of legal documents by going through an archive would lead to a more poignant and supported argument. Additionally, scholarship by the wider community into borderland witchcraft, especially that witchcraft which is not the same as as in the European witch hunts, but rather constant as is the case within New Mexico, would greatly add to the body of literature and understanding of protocapitalism, economic and social power dynamics, colonialism, and the creation of gender roles as laid out by figures like Sylvia Federaci.

Behar, Ruth. “Sex and Sin, Witchcraft and the Devil in LateColonial Mexico.” American Ethnologist 14, no. 1 (1987): 34–54. http://www.jstor.org/stable/645632

Gutiérrez, Ramón A. “Women on Top: The Love Magic of the Indian Witches of New Mexico.” Journal of the HistoryofSexuality 16, no. 3 (2007): 373–90. www.jstor. org/stable/30114189.

Victoria Sanford, “From Genocide to Feminicide: Impunity and Human Rights in Twenty-First Century Guatemala,” JournalofHumanRights 7:2 (2008), 104-122.

Liebmann, Matthew, and Robert W. Preucel. “The Archaeology of the Pueblo Revolt and the Formation of the Modern Pueblo World.” Kiva 73, no. 2 (2007): 195–217. www.jstor.org/stable/30246543.

Rebolledo, Tey Diana. “‘¿Y Dónde Estaban Las Mujeres?’: In Pursuit of an Hispana Literary and Historical Heritage in Colonial New Mexico, 1580-1840.” In Reconstructinga Chicano/aLiteraryHeritage:HispanicColonialLiterature of the Southwest , edited by María Herrera-Sobek, 140–57. University of Arizona Press, 1993. doi.org/10.2307/j. ctvss4030.14.

Scholes, France V.. “Troublous Times in New Mexico, 1659–1670.” New Mexico Historical Review 12, 2 (1937). digitalrepository.unm.edu/nmhr/vol12/iss2/3.

Guttentag, Marcia, and Paul F. Secord. TooManyWomen?: TheSexRatioQuestion.SagePublications , 1983.

Casteneda, Antonia. “Sexual Violence in the Politics and Policies of Conquest Amerindian Women and the Spanish Conquest of Alta California.” Berkly Law, n.d. www.law.berkeley.edu.

Twitchell, Ralph Emerson. The Spanish Archives of New Mexico : Compiled and Chronologically Arranged with Historical, Genealogical, Geographical, and Other Annotations, by Authority of the State of New Mexico Cedar Rapids, Iowa: Torch Press, 1914.

Rebolledo, Tey Diana, and María Teresa Márquez. Women’s Tales From the New Mexico WPA: La Diabla a Pie , November 2000, 75–86.

Bibliography

Martínez, María Elena. “The Black Blood of New Spain: Limpieza de Sangre, Racial Violence, and Gendered Power in Early Colonial Mexico.” The William and Mary Quarterly 61, no. 3 (2004): 479–520. doi.