Signifying Spain, Becoming Comanche, Making Mexicans: Indian Captivity and the History of Chicana/o Popular Performance

Curtis Marez
American Quarterly, Volume 53, Number 2, June 2001, pp. 267-306 (Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: 10.1353/aq.2001.0018

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http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/aq/summary/v053/53.2marez.html

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Signifying Spain, Becoming Comanche, Making Mexicans: Indian Captivity and the History of Chicana/o Popular Performance
CURTIS MAREZ University of California, Santa Cruz

SINCE AT LEAST THE 1960S, MANY CHICANAS/OS HAVE ENGAGED IN A KIND OF ideological archeology, attempting to reconstruct genealogical relationships between their present and a distant pre-Columbian past.1 Just as certain African American nationalists turned toward Egypt for cultural cues, in recent decades Chicana/o intellectuals and cultural producers have looked to ancient Indian civilizations for inspiration.2 One of the most famous examples is the work of Luis Valdez, for both the plays he helped to produce with El Teatro Campesino and his subsequent films such as Zoot Suit and La Bamba are filled with Mayan and Aztec themes and images.3 More recently Gloria Anzalda has employed a related image repertoire in her influential articulation of a new mestiza consciousness.4 Despite their important differences, both Valdez and Anzalda participate in a larger project I would call an indigenismo of the antique. Such discourses generally focus on the Spanish conquest of Mexico, singling out in particular the fall of the Aztec empire as the primal scene of Chicana/o identity and as a paradigm for the subsequent conquest of the territory now known as the U.S. Southwest. By claiming descent from aboriginal inhabitants of the Americas, Chicanas/ os counter the claims of manifest destiny and white nativism. A famous lithograph by Yolanda M. Lpez elegantly makes this case. Selfconsciously recalling U.S. military recruitment posters featuring Uncle Sam, the lithograph depicts an Aztec warrior who points at the viewer and rhetorically asks, Whos the Illegal Alien, Pilgrim?5
Curtis Marez is an assistant professor in the department of American studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
American Quarterly, Vol. 53, No. 2 (June 2001) 2001 American Studies Association 267

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As the preceding example suggests, an indigenismo of the antique has made possible some vital critical work. By constructing ancient ancestors, for instance, this kind of indigenismo counters ideologies that belittle or discount contemporary Chicana/o cultures. A number of Chicana critics, moreover, have reappropriated and critically interrogated indigenist discourses in order to attack misogyny and homophobia in forms of Chicano nationalism clothed in an Aztec warrior ethos.6 Despite their strategic value, however, discussions of Chicana/o culture, history, identity, and community that begin by focusing on ancient Indian civilizations potentially obscure forms of indigenismo whose field of reference includes North American Indians. While representations of Aztec pyramids, warriors, and maidens commonly appear in literature, music, murals, films, and even on T-shirts, so do images of Apaches, Navajos, Sioux, and Comanches.7 Why, we might wonder, do Chicanas/os produce representations of North American Indians, and what do such representations mean? In order to address these questions I propose a provisional shift in focus, taking as my unit of analysis not the Aztec empire and its conquest but rather the Comanchera contact zone named for the Indian bands who unevenly controlled it from the early part of the eighteenth century to around 1875.8 Although the Comanchera was concentrated in the Southern Plains region of the U.S., including significant portions of New Mexico, Texas, Colorado, Kansas, and Oklahoma, Comanche influence extended deep into Northern Mexico as well. For almost a hundred and fifty years the Comanches were a major economic and political force in western North America. And the Comanches certainly left their mark on Chicana/o cultural production and critical discourses in Texas and especially New Mexico. One aspect of Comanche power with profound impact on Chicanas/ os was the practice of taking captives. Comanches kidnapped perhaps thousands of mostly women and children from Texas, New Mexico, and Mexico in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In what follows I analyze a host of nineteenth-century texts and images concerning Mexicans who were kidnapped by and rescued from Comanches, arguing that they are particularly revealing regarding the discourses of race, nation, citizenship, gender, and sexuality that have shaped the formation of Mexican and ultimately Chicana/o cultural politics in the U.S. The captive trade helped to construct new composite subjects, often referred to as Mexicans, who were neither white nor Indian.

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Captivity, in other words, was an important but often overlooked source of mestizaje in the borderlands. Over the course of the nineteenth century, Comanche captivity produced what I would call protoChicanos: Indian-aligned mestizos. Comanches influenced the emergence of Chicana/o cultural politics not only through marriages and heterosexual reproduction but also through forms of transculturation, such as when captives were adopted as Comanches. Resituating Anzalduas phrase, we might say that for centuries the Comanchera helped to produce a new mestiza/o consciousness in the borderlands. The history of the Comanchera, moreover, has implications for Chicana/o studies discussions of gender and sexuality, for the captive trade was part of the larger transcultural traffic in women. Recent feminist rereadings of La Malinche, the Indian woman who mediated between the Spanish and the Aztecs, could be productively compared to the Comanche context, where women also mediated between warring groups. Like the discourses that have historically surrounded La Malinche, popular traditions concerning Comanche captivity have significantly shaped contemporary Chicana/o gender and sex relations. Indeed, nineteenth-century captivity narratives, I would argue, are part of the historical conditions of possibility for a range of discussions within Chicana/o studies and American studies. By opening the field to other histories of conflict, I hope to shed new light on popular representations of Indians other than the ancient Aztecs and Mayans familiar from Chicana/o critical discourse. The nineteenth-century Comanchera multiplied and fractured the possibilities for identification and alliance in the twentieth-century U.S. Southwest. Starting in the last century, many New Mexican mestizos responded to the challenges of Anglo-American domination by selectively drawing upon histories of conflict and captivity. Combining an older, Comanchera-driven fear of miscegenation and transculturation with a more recent desire to avoid the effects of institutionalized AngloAmerican racism against Indians and Mexicans, a number of mestizos styled themselves Spanish or Spanish Americans. By working to preserve and reproduce a pure Spanish Heritage in literature, folklore, and historical pageants, some New Mexicans have revisited the patriarchal notions of Spanish honor and ideological prohibitions on mestizaje that were forged during the Comanchera and remobilized them in the context of Anglo-American white supremacy.

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At the same time, other New Mexicans have reconfigured the fragmentary remains of Comanche conflict and captivity in ways that challenge old and new versions of Spanish Heritage. In contrast to histories and cultural studies that focus only on expressions of New Mexican hispanophilia, I will argue that since at least the start of the twentieth century, partially Comanche-derived models of Mexican identity have circulated in the outlying mestizo villages of New Mexico where Comanche performances are most common. The Comanchera and the popular performances that memorialize it, in other words, have also sustained popular disidentifications9 with Spanishness and the forms of race and class privilege it increasingly came to represent. By embodying fictional Comanche speech, gestures, and dress, some performers not only mark mestizo exclusion from the privileges of Spanish identity but also their symbolic affiliation with the historical forces of transculturation that the Indians represent. Disidentification with Spanishness thus potentially opened up a space for new counteridentifications and/or alliances among working-class mestizos and between mestizos and their Pueblo neighbors, for when village performers played the parts of Comanches, then, they sometimes embraced a working-class Mexican, mestizo, or proto-Chicano affiliation with Indians in opposition to the various so-called Spanish revivals in Santa Fe. Through their revision of the past in the service of the political and cultural exigencies of their present moment, Comanche performers not only foreground Comanche historical agency in the western United States, but also suggest that that the regions contemporary inhabitants remain haunted by Comanche conflict. And I would argue that in a sense the Comanchera remains alive and accessible to encounter in the present, particularly for contemporary Chicanas/os who draw upon it in their popular culture and critical discourse.10 Comanche Captivity and the Construction of Mexicans The highly profitable Comanche traffic in captives, most of whom were girls and women, successfully eluded official Spanish, Mexican, and U.S. efforts to control it for close to two centuries.11 With their domination of the traffic in women, the Comanches had a decisive effect upon various forms of affiliation in the Southwest, including articulations of class, race, gender, nation, and citizenship. I concen-

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trate especially on official U.S. representations of Comanche captivity because they helped to produce and spread influential ideas about Mexicanness that tended to transform older colonial hierarchies of Spaniards and Indians in New Mexico and further framed the emerging meanings of Mexican identity in the U.S.12 Under U.S. rule, Comanche captivity raised immediate, practical questions about the differences between Indians and Mexicans and thus spurred a variety of efforts to define the two as either distinct or overlapping categories. To the extent that Comanche adoption practices redefined Mexicanness, both for concerned commentators and sometimes the captives themselves, we could say that Comanches did not simply capture Mexicans but also helped to construct them. As a means of repopulation after military losses or epidemics, Comanche captive-taking probably preceded European expansion in the Plains but European trade and settlement helped to greatly expand and transform it.13 Comanches in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries took thousands of captives, including Indians, Spaniards, Mexicans, and Anglos.14 Captive taking was rewarding in a number of different ways. Indian captives could be traded back to their people, or effectively sold as slaves, particularly to the Spanish but eventually also to Anglo-Americans. Spanish, Mexican, and Anglo-American captives were ransomed to their peoples, and sometimes traded to other Indians. Finally, some captives were adopted as Comanches. In fact the majority of captives from New Mexico stayed the remainder of their lives with Comanches, even when escape was possible.15 Whether destined for sale on the slave market, incorporation as a Comanche slave, or adoption as Comanche kin, most captives were girls and women. In New Mexico, Comanches tacitly agreed with Spanish, Mexican, and U.S. authorities to treat women and children as objects of exchange.16 These last three groups all took female hostages among the Comanches and other Indians, just as the Comanches took captives from them. The commerce in captives continually reconstituted women as mediums of exchange between different groups. As we shall see, both female captives and Comanche women exercised considerable influence and power, but such demonstrations of female agency occurred within and against competing patriarchies.17 Starting shortly after the Pueblo Revolts of 1680 and the Spanish reconquest in 1692, Comanches severely challenged Spanish authority in New Mexico. Comanches attacked New Mexican villages and

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Pueblos, killing men and taking women, children, and horses.18 And Spanish settlers responded in kind by launching their own war parties that also took captives and horses.19 This was particularly true around Taos, which eventually became the site of Spanish/Comanche/Pueblo trade fairs.20 At the fairs, different peoples could barter for captive relatives, buy slaves, and trade for horses, tools, manufactured goods, and hides.21 Spanish officials tried in vain to limit or at least regulate this traffic, and Spanish demands for horses and slaves, combined with similar demands from French and Anglo-American traders, spurred the eighteenth-century expansion of Comanche raiding and trading activities.22 Some Comanches worked hard to take advantage of the Spanish demand for household slaves.23 As if recalling but revising Comanche captivity conventions, some Spanish settlers engaged in their own adoption practices whereby they incorporated Indian captives, or genzaros, into their households as slaves.24 Genzaros were Indians captured by the Spanish or ransomed from Comanches and others at trade fairs. Although they were often baptized and attached to Spanish families charged with their religious instruction, in practice such adoption was indistinguishable from slavery. Over the years the word genzaro came to refer to any detribalized Indian who was adopted as a slave by a Spanish household.25 Ramon Gutirrez estimates that about a third of New Mexicos population in the late 1790s was made up of genzaros.26 By conservative estimates, from 1700 to 1820 over 2,708 Indians were nominally baptized into mostly wealthy Spanish households and effectively bound to them as slaves.27 In common with Comanches, Spanish captivity and adoption practices particularly targeted women.28 In both contexts men adopted captive women and acted as their fathers or husbands. Spanish slave owners in fact described the institution in patriarchal terms, imagining themselves as fathers and their slaves as children. Male honor among the aristocracy in colonial New Mexico thus depended in part on authority over women and slaves.29 Even though slaves were concentrated among fifteen to twenty wealthy familiesabout 7 percent of New Mexican householdswho (dubiously) claimed to have pure Spanish blood, the very existence of slavery in New Mexico served to validate the Spanish identity of landed peasants, who although they were mestizos also claimed to be Spanish.30 In this regard, according to Gutirrez:

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Even the lowliest Spaniard felt a sense of honor around slaves. Landed peasants shared fully in the benefits of a timocratic culture because, unlike genzaro slaves, they were long-standing members of the Christian community and as such had been given land by the king. Landowners were vecinos or citizens with full voting rights in town councils (cabildos). By owning land Spaniards could earn their own subsistence and were not dependent on others for their livelihood, as were slaves.31

Both the elite and the landed peasantry defined themselves as honorable espaoles or gente de razon (people with reason) in opposition to Pueblo Indians and genzaros, groups that the Spanish called gente sin razon (people without reason), infamous, and dishonorable, particularly when serving as slaves.32 The elite in effect tightened their ties with the landed peasants through their adoption of Indian captives. This alliance between colonial classes and in opposition to Indian slaves presupposed a patriarchal agreement concerning the roles of women. From the perspective of this consensus among Spanish men, the example of female slaves, represented as sexually degraded and promiscuous, constituted the negative, defining pole of honorable Spanish womanhood.33 Slave adoption thus had contradictory consequences for the constitution of Spanish women. On the one hand, slaves helped to materially reproduce Spanish households and ideologically defined, by contrast, the value of Spanish daughters, wives, and mothers. On the other hand, the larger conditions of the Indian slave trade brought women into intimate and, as in the case of Comanche attacks on Spanish villages, dangerous proximity to Indians. The sustaining, definitive proximity to Indians simultaneously produced anxious efforts to protect Spanish women from contact with Indians. The contradictions of Spanish participation in the Comanche captivity trade thereby contributed to the formation of patriarchal ideologies in colonial New Mexico that represented women as what Yolanda Chvez Leyva, following Asuncin Lavrin, has called the guarded guardians, the protected protectors, of marriage and family.34 If in some ways, however, the Comanche captive trade reinforced an alliance between Spanish elite and landed peasantry in contradistinction to adopted Indian slaves, in other ways it undermined the viability of Spanish identity. Claims to Spanish identity depended upon land ownership, but many settlers in New Mexico owned no land. Population increases in the eighteenth century, combined with the historical concentration of the best land in the hands of a relatively small number

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of families, along with Indian activities that checked new settlements and the expansion of agricultural production, severely limited access to arable land and hence also to the privileges of Spanish identity.35 In response, Spanish authorities helped establish separate genzaro communities on the fringes of the territory, not only to siphon off the surplus of slaves from the most populous towns but also to form buffers between Spanish settlements and raiding Comanches, which it was hoped would ultimately enable settlers to bring more land under productive ownership. Eventually, patterns of regional settlement segregation emerged such that genzaro settlement was concentrated in peripheral rural villages and not the larger towns like Albuquerque and Santa Fe.36 Soon Spanish authorities from the towns began referring to the rural villagers in terms of disapproval usually reserved for Indians, such as indolent, crude, independent, and lewd.37 Moving from the centers of Spanish power in Albuquerque and Santa Fe out to its margins in the outlying villages, Spanishness began to shade into Indianness. After some particularly brutal Spanish military campaigns, the Comanche negotiated a tenuous peace with New Mexican villages in 1787. New Mexico gained Comanche cooperation and protection from raids by offering officially controlled access to local markets. The years 17861820 were thus some of the most prosperous in modern Comanche history. Comanche bands raided for horses, slaves, and other captives as far south as Chihuahua and among settlers in New Mexico and Texas. They also fought and took horses, slaves, and captives from Pawnees, Osages, Apaches, Kiowas, Cheyennes, Arapahos, and Navajos, sometimes in joint ventures with New Mexican auxiliaries.38 Comanches sold their war booty at trade fairs in Taos, and a large number were baptized there and at Del Vado. The new Comanche settlers married Pueblo and Spanish husbands and wives and became important parts of their communities.39 Most Comanches, however, continued to raid and trade for captives, but they tended to avoid statecontrolled fairs in favor of trade meetings on the southern Plains with parties of independent mestizo traders from the villages. In order to circumvent state trade regulations, mestizo villagers called Comancheros would depart from their settlements for the Plains, loaded with goods to trade with Comanches. Comancheros in the nineteenth century served as the main intermediaries between Comanches and New Mexican settlements. So closely linked were the two groups that many late

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eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century observers could not tell the difference between them.40 In all of these ways Comanche activity generated third spaces in New Mexico inhabited by people neither simply Spanish nor Indian. With the end of Spanish rule some of these third space people, I would argue, were redescribed as Mexicans. After independence from Spain in 1821, the Mexican state strove in vain to stop Comanche raids and end the Comanchero trade.41 Given its many post-independence preoccupations, Mexico was unable to control opposition to state authority in its distant New Mexican settlements.42 For their part, the Comanches were in a virtual state of war with northern Mexico from the 1820s to the 1840s. Comanche raiders moved livestock and captives from Chihuahua, Durango, and Zacatecas to settlements in Northern New Mexico.43 With no military aid forthcoming from the central government in Mexico City, the states of Sonora, Chihuahua, and Durango revived old scalp-hunting laws directed against Apaches, Comanches, and Navajos.44 The Texas Revolution of 1836 further encouraged Comanche raids in northern Mexico. Texas independence worked to the advantage of the Comanches who could now raid in northern Mexico and evade Mexican pursuit by fleeing into Texas.45 Mexican authorities did, however, make diplomatic efforts to recover Mexican property and persons taken by Comanches. At the end of the war with the U.S., the Mexican officials who negotiated the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo attempted to use their limited diplomatic power to press claims against the U.S. for the loss of Mexican property and citizens. Since the Comanches lived in U.S. territory, Mexican negotiators reasoned that the U.S. should bear partial responsibility for Mexican losses. Article 11 of the Treaty made the U.S. responsible for Indian raids in Mexico, and its third clause bound the U.S. to rescue Mexican captives and return them to their country, or deliver them to the agent or representative of the Mexican Government.46 Following up on the Treaty, the government of Chihuahua, a state heavily hit by Comanche and Apache raids, petitioned the U.S. civil and military governor of New Mexico, John Munroe, for the return of captives.47 At the urging of newly appointed U.S. Indian Agent at Santa Fe and Superintendent of Indian Affairs in New Mexico James S. Calhoun, who claimed to be anxious to help enforce Article 11, Mexico City appointed an official at El Paso in 1851 to receive returned captives.48

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These efforts to reclaim captives were consistent with Mexicos post-Independence Indian policy, whereby Mexican federal and state constitutions imposed formal citizenship on Indians. In the new constitutions of the northern states of Chihuahua and Sonora, for instance, Indians no longer existed politically; they were replaced by an abstract notion of individual citizenship based on formal equality.49 This notion of citizenship, grounded in legal equality and universal adult male suffrage, further presupposed the sanctity of individual property rights, and thus during the course of the nineteenth century new laws required that communal land be redistributed to individuals and that any surplus beyond individual need be sold to others. In response to strong Indian resistance, state officials used military force in an attempt to compel Indian acceptance of Mexican citizenship and the allotment and sale of communal lands that it presupposed.50 Mexican efforts to rescue captives were in keeping with these new Indian policies because, as we shall see, both centered on the production of Mexican citizens. In response to Mexican requests, Indian Agent Calhoun located fifteen Mexican citizens kidnapped from Northern Mexico. Most captives were probably mestizos and Indians who, before Independence, would have been called indios or referred to with casta terms such as mestizo, mulatto, lobo, and coyote.51 Through the act of ransoming these captives, the Mexican government attempted to incorporate Indians and mestizos into the new nation-state by reclassifying them as Mexican citizens. Mexican officials who ransomed captives, in other words, did not relocate pre-existing Mexican citizens but instead helped to create them. This is particularly evident in cases concerning captives from states like Sonora and Chihuahua, where Indian resistance to forced assimilation was particularly fierce. Indian and mestizo captives from these states were returned to their homes as newly designated Mexican citizens. Recalling Spanish forms of adoption, Mexican officials attempted to strengthen national identity by (re)adopting captives as Mexicans. In New Mexico, on the other hand, the Comanchera generated extra- or anti-nationalist networks of adoption and affiliation. Comanche raiding and trading into the northern states of Mexico articulated links between those regions and the llanos of eastern New Mexico. During the Mexican period and for over two decades of U.S. rule, Comanche bands transferred hundredsperhaps thousandsof captives from

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Mexico to the northern territories and dispersed them throughout the Plains and into New Mexico.52 All fifteen of the Mexican captives that Calhoun enumerates, for instance, were taken from northern or northcentral Mexican states and subsequently moved to New Mexico. The movement of captives between Mexico and New Mexico was mediated by Comancheros who ransomed captives independently of and in many cases in opposition to U.S. and Mexican state power. To move between New Mexico and the Indian territory, for instance, Comancheros and Comanches violated laws and evaded military patrols on both sides of the border. Traffic in captives thereby reproduced relationships between Comanches, New Mexican Comancheros, and captives from Northern Mexico that violated state sovereignty in the western borderlands and that were often at odds with official discourses of national belonging. The persistence of such activity in the 1860s and 1870s led to what Charles L. Kerner calls the spontaneous formation of an informal alliance between mestizo traders and Comanches against the Anglo intruders who had occupied the Southwest. The traffic in captives further articulated links between New Mexico and Northern Mexico by forcing inhabitants of both places into similar forms of circulation and exchange. Like captives from northern Mexican states, New Mexican villagers were also drawn into Indian adoption and alliance networks. In addition to the Mexican captives that Calhoun secured for Mexico, he also ransomed three captives who were taken from northern New Mexico (a fourth declined to be rescued).53 In this way the captivity trade rendered northern Mexicans and New Mexicans literally interchangeable. The transnational affiliations forged by the Comanche captive trade helped determine the emerging meanings of Mexicanness in New Mexico. From 1821 to 1846, the adjective Mexican was increasingly used in the territory to describe New Mexican mestizos, particularly in cases involving Comanche raiding. A good example is Donaciano Vigils 22 June 1846 address to the New Mexico Assembly concerning Indian raids. At the time of his address, New Mexicans did not yet know that President James K. Polk had declared war against Mexico nor that over sixteen hundred U.S. troops were already on their way to Santa Fe. In the final weeks of Mexican rule, Vigil complained about the economic and military problems facing New Mexico after Mexican Independence. Vigil argued that any local optimism over the benefits of Independence was quickly dispelled by Indian attacks that the new

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central government failed to control. By concluding that New Mexicans could not rely on the central government for protection from raids but must instead take up arms, he simultaneously distanced himself and his audience from both Indians and Mexicans:
Gentlemen: I have heard reports regarding the barbaric tribes: of the number of Mexican captives, and especially of young Mexican women who serve the bestial pleasures of the barbaric Indians. . . . Those reports have made me tremble with horror, have made me grieve, and have made me ashamed. . . . The more so when I contemplate what the fate will be of many people who I esteem, if timely measures are not taken to guard against such degrading misfortunes.54

By about mid-century Mexican no longer simply signified Mexican citizenship or origin but was increasingly understood as a quasi-racial term that in part described what Vigil calls the shameful relationships between villagers and Indians that threatened the honor of Spanish households. Vigil here uses the words Mejicanos and Mejicanas not as terms of nationality but as if they signified almost Indian by definition. Whereas he refers to captives among the Indians as Mejicanos and Mejicanas, Vigil subsequently addresses the Assembly as fellow members of La rasa Espanola.55 Here and elsewhere elites like Vigil attempted to fortify Spanish identities by distinguishing them from Mexican ones perceived as precariously close to Indians. Similarly, the U.S. expansion into Mexican territory and the simultaneous expansion of Anglo-American racism against Mexicans after 1846, combined with a Comanche raiding trail that linked the southwestern U.S. territories and the northern Mexican states, helped to create official U.S. discourses about a common Mexican identity that embraced peoples on both sides of the new national border. For many Anglo Americans the Comanche exchange of captives between Mexico and New Mexico made the inhabitants of both places seem interchangeably Mexican and hence equally mestizo or mixed, which is to say that Comanche captivity practices provoked and strongly shaped Anglo-American definitions of a racialized Mexicanness that made no distinctions between U.S. and Mexican citizens. Acting as the U.S. Indian agent at Santa Fe, the aforementioned James S. Calhoun helped to formulate official definitions of Mexican identity through his work ransoming captives. Calhoun seems to have

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drawn upon his prior experiences in the U.S.-Mexican War in order to redefine captives, Comancheros, and all New Mexican villagers as de facto Mexican, irrespective of citizenship. An admirer of General Zachary Taylor, Calhoun served as a captain and then lieutenant colonel of a group of Georgia volunteers in the U.S. war with Mexico, and he often acted as if his subsequent position as Indian agent was a continuation of that conflict.56 In one annual report Calhoun wrote in 1849 that we are in a state of war with Indians and argued that raids by Navajos, Apaches, and Comanches could only be stopped by policies of compulsory enlightenment and the imposition of just restraints, both to be enforced at the point of a bayonet. He further presumed Manichean distinctions between Americans and Mexicans that, during and after the war, described racial differences that were irreducible to nationality.57 In contrast to the word American, which he used as a synonym for white or Anglo-Saxon, Calhoun deployed the phrase Mexican captives to describe women and children taken from both New Mexico and the northern states of Mexico. Although he claimed to feel duty bound to enforce Article 11 of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo by ransoming Mexican captives, his official redescription of New Mexican villagers as Mexicans violated the spirit of Articles 8 and 9 that detailed the citizenship rights of former Mexicans remaining in the newly expanded U.S. territory. This puts his concern with enforcing Article 11 in a new light, suggesting that Agent Calhouns efforts to repatriate Mexican captives complemented his practice of erasing the U.S. citizenship of New Mexican residents in his official reports. Both practices served to exclude subjects designated as Mexicans from incorporation as citizens into the U.S.58 Moreover, many Anglos claimed that they could not distinguish between post-war Mexicans and Comanches and tended therefore to lump the two groups together. Indian Agent Thomas Fitzpatrick of Fort Atkinson, Kansas, for example, wrote in his 1853 annual report that Mexican captives had become so intermingled amongst the Comanches, the Apaches, and the Kiowas that it is some what difficult to distinguish them.59 Similarly, according to Anglo- Texan Jeffery D. Smith, himself a captive among the Comanches and Apaches in the late 1860s, the Indians preferred Mexican captives, because . . . no one could tell them from full blood Indians.60 Rumors of cooperation or formal alliances between Comanches and Mexicans were common

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among Anglos in the Southwest. Comanche movements back and forth across the border fueled such fears, feeding suspicions that Mexicans, including New Mexican Comancheros who had recently been redefined as Mexicans, materially supported Indian raids on both sides of the border.61 One of the strongest expressions of concern over such an alliance appears in an 1874 federal report called Depredations on the Frontiers of Texas. The report, which includes depositions concerning both Indian and Mexican raids, ends by rhetorically conjoining the two groups, arguing that the federal government had a responsibility to protect those whose members have been depleted by the arrow of the Indian and the knife and pistol of the Mexican assassin.62 Worries over potential affiliations between Mexicans and Comanches partially motivated the rescue missions of another Indian Agent, Lawrie Tatum, who in 1869 assumed his post at Fort Sill on the newly established Kiowa, Comanche, and Apache Reservation in Oklahoma. After the Civil War, the establishment of the reservation was a response to increased raiding by Comanches, Kiowas, and others for cattle in Texas and Kansas. At first many Comanches avoided the reservation, and those who did live there often used it as a base to launch raids into Texas. Most Comanches, however, were finally driven onto reservations by U.S. military measures that destroyed their economy and made reservation annuities the only means of avoiding starvation.63 Tatum used Comanche hostages and the threat of starvation to force Comanches to give up Anglo captives, but the agent found it more difficult to redeem the Mexicans. Tatum initially suggested that Mexican captives could be distinguished by their waving hair, while the hair of Indians was straight,64 but when the Comanches claimed not to hold any Mexicans, he confessed that although he strongly suspected otherwise he was unable to prove them liars. Finally, he asked God for help. After exhausting my ingenuity and skill, I asked the Lord in some way to make it manifest if there were any Mexicans with the Indians who wished to leave them. . . . He answered my prayer, I believe, by putting the thought into the heart of Martha Day, a Mexican captive, to leave the Indians and come to the agency.65 The captive, according to Tatum, decided to escape from the Indians on the way to the agency for rations. Her owner, whom the agent called Black Beard, supposedly warned her against trying to escape, saying that she would be killed at the fort because white people did not want Mexicans. The Mexican woman persuaded her captor that she was afraid of the whites, but at night she

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ran away to the agency where she made herself known. Tatum records that she had been taken in the vicinity of San Antonio two years ago while on her way to school, and she wanted to go home. He agreed to help, and asked three Anglo women at the fort, including Tatums wife, Mary Ann, to prepare clothes to take the place of the Comanche costume. In the evening, when nicely dressed, he continued, she was a handsome young woman, about eighteen years old, and happy with the thought of returning to her home and people a great contrast from the dirty, slovenly looking squaw that she seemed like in the morning. Tatum sent her back to Texas with the white father of another ransomed captive, concluding that it was the order of the Lord.66 Tatums rescue reads like a conversion ritual that transforms a dirty, slovenly looking squaw into a handsome young [Mexican] woman. Like Calhoun, Tatum redeems Martha Day as a Mexican, canceling out her U.S. citizenship even though she was from San Antonio and ultimately returned there to family and friends. Not only does he construct her as Mexican, but also as a particular kind of Mexican woman, one who is an appropriate object of patriarchal rescue fantasies and therefore a legitimate candidate for civilizing adoption. In the Quaker Indian agents version, the Mexican captive Martha Day is a young school girl, owned by a domineering warrior named Black Beard, recalling the infamous tyrant and wife-killer of European folklore, Blue Beard. Black Beard implicitly endangers her virginity, but through the power of prayer Tatum and God safeguard her virtue. Tatum effectively transfers the young woman from one patriarchal context to another. In this second, patriarchal context she is safely positioned between white men, including Tatum, the Anglo Texan who escorts her back to San Antonio, and a God tacitly understood to be white. Tatum marks her out as Mexican, then, but constructs Mexican women as legitimate objects of incorporation into white, patriarchal civilization. Tatum further constitutes Mexican women as assimilable to Anglo-American patriarchy by juxtaposing them to Comanche women whom he represents as too alien for such adoption. In his description of Martha Days reconversion into a handsome young woman, Tatum contrasts her new identity with her former self, a dirty, slovenly looking squaw, as if to suggest that Comanche women are the antithesis of civilized femininity. By in effect rescuing her from an abject Comanche womanhood, the Indian agent whitens or at least

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anglicizes the Mexican captive, even renaming her Martha Day, for as we learn in her own deposition, the woman in question called herself Martina Diaz. Martina Diazs account of her flight from the Comanches, included as evidence in the federal report Depredations on the Frontiers of Texas, is different from Tatums version in other ways as well. Whereas Tatum minimizes her agency by crediting her escape to divine intervention, in Diazs own account she makes no mention of providence and instead foregrounds her own actions. Negotiating the use of at least three different languages, Diaz diligently worked to effect her own escape. Presumably a native Spanish-speaker, Diaz had learned enough Comanche to overhear vital information that helped her plan her escape and remembered enough English to prevent U.S. military guards from killing her. In her own account, she is rather more worldly than the schoolgirl described by Tatum. Similarly, while Tatum depicts her as a maiden, Marta Diaz notes that she was married before the Comanches killed her husband and that her captor, whom she calls Youngcoust, raped her. The Indian agent includes none of this information, preferring instead to preserve his idealized image of a virginal Martha Day, worthy of white rescue. While Tatums conversion narrative repositions Martha Day between men, in her deposition Diaz also testifies to the importance of relationships between women. One year before her escape, Diazs captor died and she became a slave to his sister, reminding us that although the captive trade was dominated by men, Comanche women could gain control of captives as gifts from men and through their own adoption practices. Tatum himself mentions in passing a Mexican woman who was adopted by a Comanche woman whom the captive now called mother.67 Comanche women may have had numerous motives for adopting girls or womento acquire labor and wealth, to replace daughters killed or kidnapped in war, or to shield girls and women from violence or unwanted sexual advance.68 Comanche women exercised a significant amount of power, including power over captives.69 Diazs deposition centers on her experience of such power. In the place of the dialogue Tatum recounts between Martha Day and Black Beard, Diaz quotes a speech she overhears while listening to a group of Comanche squaws debating the best way to secure the return of Comanche captives recently taken by U.S. military forces:

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Didnt these damned fools, Americans, give us fine things for the few Texas rats we delivered to them? But never mind; our brothers are now getting some more Texan boys and horses, with which we will get our warriors and women back again from them, and then we will rise and leave their reservation, and will show these foolish pavostaibos (white men) how much the Comanche can be coaxed to live in peace with them and eat bacon and salt stuff on their reservation.70

This speech, included in the report as evidence of Comanche depredations and perhaps shaped or distorted by that goal, nonetheless foregrounds Comanche women in ways that are virtually unique in U.S. documents, which generally focus almost exclusively on the threat posed by Comanche warriors. In contrast, Diaz makes visible the margin of power and influence that Comanche women were able to maintain from within the larger cross-cultural trade in captives. Diaz not only effected her own escape, but also made it possible for Tatum to rescue multiple Mexican boys. Diaz pointed out three more Mexican captives, who in turn identified more, until as Tatum puts it, once again subsuming her agency under Gods, through the help of the Lord, I recovered eleven Mexican boys.71 Once again these captivity narratives appeared in contrasting versions in Tatums book and in Depredations on the Frontiers of Texas. This last document depicts Mexicans and Comanches as partners in crime against U.S. state authority. It includes depositions from five of the Mexican captives recovered at Fort Sill. In a footnote to the depositions, the documents authors write that all of the boys suffered from exposure to the elements, hunger, and overwork. They were finally ransomed by the United States Government at Fort Sill, by exchange of a squaw for each boy. They are now living with I. M. Salas, a Mexican at San Antonio, Texas, he having taken them with the consent of the department commander to keep until they may be called for by their relatives.72 The agent in the first sentence is not God, as in Tatums account, but the capitalized Statethe abstract, impersonal United States Government. In the official U.S. version, the State entered the captivity trade by exchanging its own Indian captives for the Mexican boys. The U.S. Governments ransoming of Mexican captives also constructed Mexican identities by grouping together boys taken on both sides of the Rio Grande, redescribing them as interchangeably Mexican, and relocating them with another Mexican, Seor Salas of San Antonio. By ransoming Mexican captives, the state con-

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structed a common, transborder Mexicanness that resisted U.S. incorporation or alliance. The writers of Depredations on the Frontiers of Texas erased the captives possible U.S. citizenship, distinguishing, for instance, between American and Mexican captives irrespective of citizenship. Non- or un-American Mexicans became further entwined with Comanche Indians, since the report collects evidence to prove that the two groups actively conspired to steal persons and property from Texas.73 This context frames the ransomed Mexican boys as enemy others to the U.S. and as allies of Indian raiders in Texas. Depredations on the Frontiers of Texas is thus part of a larger set of discourse and practices that presumed that it was impossible or undesirable for the U.S. to incorporate Mexicans. Tatum also groups together the boys as Mexicans, but unlike the federal report he treats them as apt candidates for assimilation to the civilizing mission. The Quaker Indian agent orchestrates a sort of Pilgrims Progress drama for the captives. After feeding them a good meal (underlining the extent to which punitive U.S. military raids had made hunger common among the Comanches), Tatum solemnly asks them if they wished to go to their parents and kindred or if they preferred to throw away their parents and stay with the Comanches. It was as though he were asking them to choose between salvation and damnation. When one group of three answers that they want to go home, Tatum writes So I took charge of them and had them bathed, their hair cut, and they were dressed in citizens clothes and sent to the school house. When another three pass the test, he has their pictures taken in their Comanche costume, and again a few days afterwards when they were dressed in citizens clothing. One of them, when shown the picture of himself in Indian dress, had no idea who it was.74 These civilizing makeovers are modeled on Tatums understanding of his duty to convert Indians. As both U.S. Indian agent and a good Quaker, Tatum felt bound to befriend the Indians, to teach them the truths of Christianity, and bring them to the enjoyment of the best fruits of Christian civilization.75 He thus redeemed the boys by stripping them of their Comanche costumes, bathing/baptizing them, and redressing them in citizens clothing. Elsewhere Tatum defined citizens clothes, worn by civilized Indians, in contradistinction to the attire of uncivilized blanket Indians. Dressed in their new costume, a uniform from the Agency Indian school, the boys were directly sent to the schoolhouse. By transposing civilizing discourses

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and practices developed for Indians to the Mexican captive context, Tatum suggested that both groups must be similarly remade, their differences from Anglo-American citizens forcibly canceled out in what Gerald McMaster calls the colonial alchemy of transforming the savage into a civilized human being.76 If Mexican captives seemed to require remaking in ways that suggest comparison to Indian adoption practices, this was in part because in the second half of the nineteenth century, the difference between Mexicans and Comanches was a real question. Like Tatum, many AngloAmericans could not tell them apart, and others imagined that the two groups were joined together in a virtual conspiracy against the state. Tatum registers this indecision with staged moments of choice in which he asks captives to decide between citizens clothes and Comanche costumesa choice that he does not record extending to the seven white captives he recovers. The Indian agent is engaged in a sort of custody battle with the Comanches over Mexican bodies, and by the 1870s it is still not clear who will win. Tatum passes over in silence, for example, his failed attempts to convince captives to defect from their Indian captors.77 His successes were modest when compared to the greater number of Mexican captives who remained with Comanches even when offered asylum. The before and after photographs of at least one unnamed captive further call into question the success of Tatums efforts to rescue Mexicans from the Comanches (Fig. 1). In the second photo the boy is tightly buttoned into his thick suit and stiffly posed on an ornate couch, his arms folded on his lap. His hair, clothes, and pose have been altered, but his facial expression remains relatively unchanged, his lips pressed into a flat line across the bottom of his face in both photos. He certainly looks just as uncomfortable and distressed as a civilized boy as he did as a Comanche captive.78 The boys awkward fit in citizens clothes and pose represents the limits of state efforts to produce Mexicans as civilized subjects. The picture of a rescued boy roughly sewn into a new uniform frames a moment in the work of making Mexicans, and the stitches show. Although the before and after sequencing of the photos places them in a progressive narrative that celebrates the triumph of civilization over savagery, the similarities between the two suggest repetition, not progress. The photos, in other words, deconstruct the voluntarist fantasy of Tatums rescue narratives by indicating that state adoption, like its competing Comanche counterpart, presupposed the coercive construction of subjects.

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Fig. 1. Before and after photographs of one rescued captive. National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution.

While U.S. efforts to determine the meanings of Mexican identity were powerful, they did not definitively saturate the field of possibilities to the exclusion of alternatives. Recalling the indeterminate tug of war described above, I would argue that no individual or group was in complete control of the ways in which the Comanchera disseminated Mexicanness. Embracing Spanish, Mexican, U.S., and Indian captive taking and alliance-making practices, the Comanchera was a historically sedimented field of force that circulated conflicting identifications and alliances. The product of discontinuous histories of struggle, the term Mexican is heteroglossic, such that no one has the first or last word on its borderland meanings. Although starting in the 1860s, the U.S. government attempted to destroy the historical alliances between Indians and Mexicans from New Mexico, Comanche raiding and captive taking continued for decades, even after most Comanches had been sent to reservations. Once pushed onto reservations, Comanches continued to maintain alliances with Mexican captives that the U.S. had been at pains to police, as field workers with the Santa Fe Anthropology Laboratory discovered in the 1930s when they interviewed former Mexican captives and their children on the Comanche reservation in

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Oklahoma.79 The conflicted history of the term Mexican left it open to subaltern redefinition. Indeed, working-class mestizos from New Mexico, I will argue, critically reoccupied the space of struggle and violent mixture that the word Mexican often glossed. Revising the long histories of Indian captivity and alliance that helped shape Mexican identity in the U.S. Southwest, modern mestizos raid the Comanchera past for strategies of survival and opposition in the present. Twentieth-Century Comancheros What remains, in the twentieth century, of the Comanchera? In the first place, Anglo-American power borrowed from captivity histories in order to construct Mexicans as a subordinated people. Nineteenthcentury Anglo-American models, in which Mexicans were understood as mixed and therefore linked to stigmatized Indians, intensified and hardened in the early twentieth-century, assuming increasingly solid new shapes. Anglo-American powers endeavored to materially constitute Mexicans as a subordinated class through mechanisms such as land dispossession and a racialized dual-wage system, uneven yet pronounced exclusion from formal political representation, and de jure and de facto segregation in education and public commercial space.80 Recalling the tug-of-war over captives between Agent Tatum and the Comanches, subsequent U.S. constructions of Mexicanness incorporated working-class mestizos into Anglo-American modernity as subordinates, adopted by capitalism and the state. Understanding U.S. domination of mestizo Mexicans as a kind of adoption or neocaptivity helps explain the curious Anglo-American admiration for the Spanish represented in public architecture and pageants that refer to the colonial legacy.81 It is as if members of the Anglo-American ruling classwho obsessively erected colonial-style homes, hotels, and official buildings, and dressed as dons for public paradeshad assumed the imaginary role of Spanish masters and adopted Mexicans as servants or genzaro-like subordinates, which is to suggest that we might productively rethink dominant histories of Mexican assimilation and incorporation into the U.S. as indebted to prior practices of captivity, adoption, rescue, and counter-adoption. Mestizos who returned to the Comanchera in different ways rejected dominant uses of the past to subordinate Mexicans in the

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present. In the first decades of the twentieth century, many mestizos, especially those with property or other wealth, attempted to avoid the imposition of a stigmatized Mexican identity by instead insisting that they were Spanish or even Spanish American. In response to old and new Anglo-American racism against Mexicans and Indians, particularly in the wake of new immigration from Mexico during and after the Revolution, these mestizos attempted to reclaim for themselves a Spanish and hence white status that linked them, however tenuously, to hispanophile Anglo Americans. Spanish Americans, in other words, constituted a comprador class linked to Anglo rulers by a shared interest in mimicking Spanish conquerors.82 This project depended upon fantasies and fears concerning racial purity that were originally generated through long histories of Indian conflict and captivity. The aversion to Mexicans and Indians and the insistence on an unbroken line of descent from pure Spanish ancestors both recall colonial preoccupations with protecting Spanish settlers, particularly women, from shameful or dishonorable contact with Indians. In fact two of the most important modern mestizo performances of Spanishness the so-called De Vargas pageant and the play Los Comanchesboth memorialize successful Spanish military campaigns against Indian rebellions. The pageant, in which self-described Hispanos dress as Spaniards and parade around Santa Fes plaza, celebrates the reconquest of New Mexico led by Don Diego De Vargas after the Pueblo Revolt of 1680. Similarly, Los Comanches is a play that commemorates an eighteenth-century battle in which Spanish settlers defeat their Comanche enemies. In these ways, Spanish Americans borrowed from the Comanche past in order to create collaborative relationships between themselves and hispanophile Anglo authorities. When other mestizos borrowed from the Comanche past, however, they memorialized not Spanishness but rather Comanchera-inflected forms of Mexicanness that, among other things, presupposed histories of mixing and transculturation with Comanches and other Indians. Documents from the 1920 Federal Census indicate that about the same time that more elite mestizos were starting to call themselves Spanish-Americans, many poor mestizos used Mexican instead. For example, Miguel C. Jaramillo, the census taker for the villages of Santa Cruz and Chimayo in Santa Fe County and himself a native of Santa Cruz, wrote in the margins of the census form that the villagers were all Mex. even though most of them (and their parents) were

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born in New Mexico. Similarly, census-taker Andres Valerio of Talpa in Taos County noted that the mother tongue of his neighbors was Mexican.83 The folklorist Arthur Campa argued in 1946 that when speaking Spanish most Nuevo Mexicanos referred to themselves not as nosotros los espaoles but as nosotros los mexicanos.84 And finally writing in 1967, social scientist Nancie L. Gonzlez reported that in modern New Mexico there was a lower-class Mexicano group that disregarded the hierarchical distinction between the Spanish and Mexicans, acknowledged its own mestizo status, and was frequently openly antagonistic to Anglos as a class, as well as to the agringado (or assimilated) group.85 The Comanches had a formidable impact on the kinds of Mexican and other mestizo identities that emerged in modern New Mexico, where older Comanchera constructions were combined with new versions brought to the region by immigrants from Mexico, many of whom retraced nineteenth-century Comanche raiding and trading routes. Documents collected by researchers for the New Mexican branch of the Federal Writers Project (FWP) in the 1930s bring this convergence into view. On the one hand FWP archives for New Mexico are rich with examples of Mexican immigrant popular culture, including folklore, stories, and songs of the Mexican Revolution. On the other hand, these recent, popular cultural fragments from Mexico coexist in the archival record with local testaments to the power of the Comanchera past. Captivity narratives from the 1860s and 1870s remained live events in the 1930s, available for contemporary reencounter in the form of interviews with Indian slaves, villagers held captive by Indians, and Comancheros who were active in the traffic of the 1860s and 1870s.86 The Comanchera was also recalled in numerous songs called Inditas whose music is derived from Pueblo forms and whose lyrics often represent intercultural romance and Indian captivity.87 Which is not to say that New Mexican mestizos have historically identified primarily as Mexicans or even Comanches, for in practice different individuals and groups may use multiple identity categories in complex, heterogeneous ways. As Campa, Gonzlez, and Gutirrez note, for example, the same people who call themselves Spanish when speaking in English to an Anglo, may instead use Mexicano when talking in Spanish with other mestizos. Depending upon social and historical context, mestizos may perform more than one role, and in doing so, they implicitly draw upon Comanchera

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memories of category contradiction and conflict. By calling identities into question, transcultural captivity opened up, within real historical and material limits, new intergroup relationships, mediated by terms like Spanish, Mexican, and Comanche. And as I will demonstrate below, at different times and places New Mexican mestizos have tactically employed other terms such as Indo-Hispano or Comanchero in order to recall and project relationships with tribal peoples. Rather than attempting to determine the proper nomenclature to describe New Mexican identity as such, I would argue that we should instead investigate the specific affiliations that various names, in particular contexts, preclude or invite. That said, if in what follows I pay particular attention to the ways in which mestizo performance art alienates Spanishness and promotes other allegiances, it is because many studies of Nuevo Mexicano history and culture have focused on Spanish identifications to the exclusion of alternatives. Keeping in mind that so-called identities not only mark boundaries but can also invite affiliations, I want to return to the play Los Comanches in order to search for possible alternatives to the Spanish heritage fantasy that has been so central to modern southwestern history. Los Comanches may at first seem an unlikely object for this investigation, for as I suggested earlier, some mestizos may have seen the play as affirming that fantasy. Even working-class performers and audiences may have shared the desire of elite Spanish Americans to distance themselves from Indians and mestizos, especially the new immigrants who entered the U.S. in the wake of the Mexican Revolution. And yet I will argue that Los Comanches also enabled audiences and performers to disidentify with Spanishness and the strategies of accommodation to Anglo-American power that it increasingly represented. Mestizo mimicry of the Comanches often drew them closer to Pueblo Indian neighbors, who had their own Comanche dances and who sometimes joined in performances of Los Comanches. The play potentially helped to link the two groups in opposition to the ruling coalition of Anglos and comprador Spanish Americans who represented their political control of the region in Spanish-style architecture and pageants depicting victorious Spanish conquerors.88 Los Comanches, in other words, also enabled poor mestizos to ritually reproduce antipathies to the ruling coalition of Spanish impersonators. In the first three decades of the twentieth century, moreover, Los

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Comanches was performed in and around the regions defined as predominantly Mexican in the 1920 Census, at Talpa and El Rancho, near Santa Cruz.89 Los Comanches actors entered into the conflicted field of force represented by discourses about Mexican identity and attempted to seize some control over communal identity and transcommunal affiliations. By reenacting the Comanchera, in other words, these players may have simultaneously dissociated themselves from the colonial heritage coalition of Anglo- and Spanish Americans, and articulated historical links to Comanches and Pueblo Indians. Performances of Los Comanches at the village of El Rancho, near the San Ildefonso Pueblo, support these claims. By the end of the eighteenth century, a number of Spanish-speaking families had settled in the region (at El Rancho and on land leased from the San Ildefonso Indians) and had partially intermarried with Pueblo Indians. Although the Pueblo Indians and their mestizo neighbors remained relatively distinct communities, clear boundaries were often blurred by practical alliances between the two. San Ildefonso was internally split and in conflict, but in comparison to other Pueblos and mestizo villages it was marginally more prosperous in the early twentieth century because of a burgeoning collectors market for a distinctive style of Pueblo pottery.90 The surrounding mestizos, however, had less access to the cash economy and were therefore thrown back upon village subsistence resources. Mestizo poverty and unemployment was an effect of the Great Depression compounded by forms of nativism that made labor migration highly dangerous, including police and vigilante harassment, a militia blockade against Mexican workers entering Colorado from New Mexico, and deportation by the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS).91 Economically and politically contained in their villages in this way, mestizos responded by organizing labor unions such as the League of Spanish-Speaking Workers, with eight thousand members in northern New Mexico and about forty on the San Ildefonso grant.92 Formed with help from the International Workers of the World (IWW) in the beet fields of southern Colorado in the 1920s, the League protested antilabor legislation and other forms of union busting, agitated for more state and federal relief for unemployed workers, and pushed for increased taxes on large land holdings. In two celebrated instances, League members forcibly occupied institutions of state power, including the state legislatures gallery and the governors office, in order to

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press their demands.93 These militant forms of political theater complimented contemporary performances of Los Comanches that also, I would argue, indirectly criticized the states ruling coalition of colonial-style Anglos and Spanish Americans in 1930s New Mexico. At the same time that Depression-era labor conditions sparked local labor activism, they also drew mestizo villagers closer to the Pueblo. During the 1930s, many were in fact materially dependent on San Ildefonso for their very survival. With male wage labor rates low, many village women were employed by San Ildefonso women to wash and clean for them. The famous San Ildefonso potter Mara Martinez, for example, employed her mestiza neighbors to clean for her in order to devote more time to pottery. The dearth of jobs for men increased the importance of small livestock holdings as a source of food and clothes, and several families leased grazing land from San Ildefonso Indians. Mestizo subsistence agriculture was also dependent in various ways upon the Pueblo. Small landowners paid Indians for irrigation water, and the landless commonly worked Indian fields on a half-share basis. Local farmers generally borrowed the Pueblos tractor and threshing machine in exchange for 10 percent of their threshed wheat, the most important of village subsistence crops. The bartering was not completely one-sided, however, for the Pueblo borrowed all its horses from the villages. Indian women, moreover, depended upon the services of mestiza midwives. And finally, some members of village and Pueblo courted and married.94 All of these relationships of interdependence and exchange reinforced the intimacy of groups who occupied adjacent and in certain cases overlapping social spaces. In 1936, for example, eight mestizo families lived in the Pueblo itself, while many more lived close by, on the original San Ildefenso land grant.95 These intimate interactions coincided with persistent differences and at times even conflicts. One of the main sources of tension was village use of Indian land and water for farming, livestock grazing, and wood harvesting. Unlike the many mestizos who were U.S. citizens, Pueblo Indians could not vote until 1949.96 The state, moreover, made little effort to integrate the Pueblos into forms of U.S. political representation. But as a result, the Pueblo Indians of northern New Mexico maintained a relatively greater degree of internal political autonomy, and their land could not be taxed.97 Tax exemption, combined with income from the sale of pottery and new federal legislation after 1934 that supported Indian reclamation of alienated lands, gave San Ildefonso

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Indians a more secure land base than their mestizo neighbors.98 At the same time, Pueblo members restricted mestizo use of tribal grazing land and fined farmers for illegally grazing cattle.99 However, an organized backlash against the Pueblo and a scapegoating of Indians did not emerge among the villagers, who instead, through the League of Spanish Speaking Workers, directed their protests at capitalists and the state. The emergence of an anti-Indian backlash was in part precluded by specialized, intermittent affiliations expressed in tool borrowing, land-leasing, share-cropping, and labor relations; courting, intermarriage, child-birthing and god-parenting; and social interactions such as games, religious rituals, and festivals, including performances of Los Comanches. 100 The affiliations between mestizos and Indians, then, were neither absolute nor static; relationships arose from particular practices and corresponded to distinct temporal rhythms. While Indians and villagers maintained separate identities, they could still enter into cooperative ventures on special occasions. The performance of Los Comanches at the nearby village of El Rancho in 1938 was just such an occasion, since it both represented and reproduced relations of practical interdependence between San Ildefonso Indians and surrounding mestizos. A local Federal Writers Project worker named Lorin W. Brown compiled an account of a production directed by Martn Roybal, a Spanishspeaking resident of the San Ildefonso land grant who also leased Pueblo grazing land for two cows.101 The play was staged on 28 December, the feast day of San Antonio de Padua, the patron of the church at El Rancho. In Browns account, both villagers and Indians from San Ildefonso attended the church service. The sermon, however, was interrupted by the jingling of sleigh bells. Many knowing smiles are exchanged by those who are aware of the scene taking place outside the church, where actors dressed as Comanches in fringed buckskin garb, beaded vests, and plumed bonnets were busy raiding the cars and wagons parked near the church and stealing personal articles that their owners can ransom after mass by paying the Indians a quart of wine.102 After mass, the mixed Pueblo and village audience, as well as the actors, join a procession to carry an effigy of the Saint around the church. (O)n their varicolored curveting horses, waving plumed headdresses, silken ribbons and tinkling sleigh bells, the actors playing Comanches lend their jingle to the music of violin and guitar, the ringing of the church bell, and the alabados (hymns) sung by the

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Brotherhood of the Penitentes, as in a group they followed the procession around the church.103 After returning the saint to the chapel, the crowd takes up positions on the sandy banks of a nearby arroyo in order to watch the performance unfold. The actors on their horses face each other in the arroyo, with the Spanish and the Indians about twenty yards apart. Midway between the two sides is a wagon that represents the Spanish camp and which holds a violinist, a guitarist, and two boys. As the musicians strike up a tune, the play begins and the two groups exchange war speeches. Finally the Comanches charge the Spanish camp and take the two boys captive. After some comic business involving the boastful Spanish coward Barriga Dulce, the Spanish forces fight the Indians, recapture the boys, and return to camp. In this final encounter the Comanche are vanquished and the play ends with more mugging from Barriga Dulce, who pompously takes all the credit for their defeat and capture. According to Brown, Barriga Dulces parody of Spanish heroism contributes largely to the success of this play with a native audience.104 Wearing an oversized helmet and carrying an enormous pistol, the Spaniard hyperbolically threatens the Comanches and yet ultimately flees in comic terror. As Brown writes, Dulce is an arrant braggart but an utter coward. . . . He never learns his lines, ad-libbing and distorting the lines which the director feeds to him from the sidelines into impromptu jokes and remarks, of a rather shady character at times but always greatly amusing to the crowd.105 Here the conquering clown fractures the official script and turns authoritative Spanish speech into jokes. If such parodic performances of vain and buffoonish Spaniards were particularly popular in the 1930s, it was partially because in modern New Mexico the corresponding political and economic role was increasing occupied by a new group of actorselite Anglos and Spanish Americans who strove to mimic colonial masters. Popular performances of Los Comanches aggressively deflated such hispanophilia by converting ruling class pretensions into comedy.106 Whereas the play punctures Hispano pretensions it also sanctions acts of symbolic Comanche transgression against order and propriety. As Brown notes, tradition grants the Indians full liberty and protection as they raid the audiences cars and wagons. The Comanche also attack individuals: [A] victim is surrounded by three or four of the Comanches or perhaps by all the band; they perform a brief dance of exultation around him, for he is now their captive and must pay a

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ransom in order to be set at liberty.107 Just as the audience laughs out loud at Dulces mock heroism, they exchange knowing smiles as the Comanches rob them. The parody of Spanish bravery and honor combined with the sanctioning of Indian license represent indirect mestizo opposition to the new colonial-style elites and a practical affiliation with the San Ildefonso Indians in the audience. All of these performance traditions reactivate Comanche alliance histories for novel uses in the present. In these ways, mestizo villagers remobilized Comanchera memories in the service of new communities that overlapped with the adjacent Pueblos. By reenacting the Comanchera, some mestizos and Pueblo Indians memorialized the historical relationships joining them in opposition to the dominant coalition of capitalists, politicians, and military men who ruled New Mexico. While shared Indian and working-class mestizo histories of contact, collaboration, and conflict have influenced the changing twentiethcentury performances of Los Comanches, they have rarely produced traditional political coalitions. One of the closest possible exceptions in recent times is the militant Alianza Federal de Mercedes, or Federal Land Grant Alliance, led by Reies Lopez Tijerina. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Alianza members, who called themselves both Mexicans and Indo-Hispanos, engaged in dramatic acts of political theater in order to publicize their communal claims under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo to federally owned lands. As if indirectly echoing the theatrical performances of Los Comanches, Alianza members even occupied a section of the Carson National Forest called Echo Amphitheater in 1966 and declared themselves the Republic of San Joaquin after the areas San Joaquin land grant. Several interfering forest rangers were arrested by officers of the Republic, tried, convicted of trespassing, and released on suspended sentences. Elsewhere Patsy and Reies Tijerina invited the police and the press to watch as they burned Santa Fe National Forest Service signs with molotov cocktails. For a brief time, the Alianza simultaneously attempted to build coalitions with North American Indians over federal land right treaties and protested the social conservatism of local Spanish pageants.108 Given these similarities, it is possible that prior Los Comanches practices fed the eventual popularity of the land grant movement by intermittently reanimating oppositional structures of feeling. In fact the youth branch of the Alianza was called Los Comancheros.109

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At about the same time as the Alianza established its Los Comancheros youth group, Francisco El Comanche Gonzales of Taos was beginning to revive Comanche dances he had been taught as a child. Starting on New Years Day in 1965 Gonzales and his group, now called Los Comanches de la Serna, celebrated the feast of Emmanuel by dressing in buckskin and feathers, and singing and dancing in honor of the newly born Christ child. Today they also perform for parades and other events in Taos, Talpa, and Llano. Gonzales, who says that he is proud of both Hispano and Native American roots, claims that these performances are legacies of the Comanchera, originating among the eighteenth-century genizaros and Comanches who settled in the Taos area. Meanwhile in Alcalde, some forty miles south of Taos, villagers continue to perform Los Comanches. Two days after Christmas, villagers dress as Comanches, complete with horses and elaborate war bonnets, and reenact the late eighteenth-century battles between Spaniards and Indians. These diverse Comanche performances have been beautifully documented by the New Mexican photographer Miguel Gandert. The artists Los Comanches series is divided into three parts. The first part, six portraits of Talpa Comanches, self-consciously references the Indian photographs of Edward S. Curtis. When Edward S. Curtis passed through New Mexico staging his portraits of the American Indian, writes Gandert, he bypassed these mestizo communities. In his vision of the Noble Savage, there was simply no room for their ignoble Hispanicized brethren.110 The second part of the series is made up of five photos which visually quote and critique the conventions of western landscape photography. As Jennifer A. Gonzalez argues, perceptions of the Comanche as distanced from the viewer by time and culture are subtly undermined by the presence of contemporary material signs such as automobiles parked in the background and power lines that cut across an otherwise expansive sky.111 The final photo in this section depicts a group of dancing Comanches in Taos. On the left is a man positioned beside a truck, taking the groups picture. To the right is Francisco El Comanche Gonzales, who looks directly at the viewer as he keeps time for the dancers with a drum. The final section is composed of three photos shot in Ganderts own documentary style, which, according to Gonzalez, relies on a snapshot aesthetic of contextual placement and medium range that is common in tourist photography and photojournalism.112 One of these photos, Los

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Cautivos, recalls the kinds of Comanche license that Brown saw at El Rancho, for it represents a group of Indians surrounding two spectators and playfully capturing them. Ganderts photos, as well as the practices they represent, suggest that the Comanchera continues to exercise a profound power over contemporary Chicana/o culture. Recalling early twentieth-century performances of Los Comanches which sometimes supported popular disidentifications with Spain, Ganderts work includes compelling images of Comanches but none of Spaniards. While Hispanos in Santa Fe continue to dress as Don Diego de Vargas and his men for Fiesta, the inhabitants of Talpa and Alcade that Gandert photographs seem to prefer their Comanche costumes. Further, Gandert pays particular attention to female Comanches, as if to mark the centrality of the traffic in women to Chicana/o culture in New Mexico.113 In fact the first and perhaps most striking image in the series is a portrait, after the style of Curtis, of Laura Aguilera from Talpa dressed in fur and feathers and staring down the viewer. This opening photo elegantly stages the blurring of identities represented by the series as a whole, for it is impossible to say if Aguilera is costumed as a Comanche or as a Spanish captive of the Indians. In a review of Jack D. Forbess Africans and Native Americans: The Language of Race and the Evolution of Red-Black Peoples, Gayatri Spivak rightly praises its textualist critique of classificatory rationalism. Sifting through dictionaries, legal documents, advertisements, and other documents, Forbes in effect deconstructs the binary opposition Red-Black, demonstrating, for example, that Native Americans have not historically disappeared but have instead often been reclassified as black, mulatto, mestizo, or a host of other terms. According to Spivak, it is as if Forbes concludes that the reality of the body (race as visible mark of human difference) and the soul (ethnos as the felt signature of human identity) is textual, simply by piling empirical example on empirical example to stage the shifting meaning. . . . We are left with the rocking back and forth of the vocabulary of racism until the very confusion mocks the structure of reference.114 Elsewhere, in a book called The Indian in Americas Past, Forbes has engaged in a similar critique that anticipates some of the issues I have discussed. In a chapter called What is an Indian? for example, Forbes implicitly asks the related question, what is the difference between an Indian and a Mexican? The answer is not simply a matter of blood or

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biological lineage, for in the U.S. the term Indian, Forbes argues, variously refers to:
a racial group, a legal concept, a sociocultural group, and a caste. In this connection, it should be pointed out that the greatest reservoir of Native American ancestry in the United States is not contained within the group usually referred to as Indians, but among the perhaps 6,000,000 MexicanAmericans and so-called Spanish-Americans. A high percentage of the latter are of relatively unmixed native ancestry, and yet it is maintained that they are not Indians.115

From this perspective, many Mexicans are Indians who were reclassified. And so Forbes distinguishes between people of native ancestry and those he calls Tribal Americans because they owe their uniqueness to their tribal connections.116 Even though Forbes distinguishes between Mexican-Americans and Tribal-Americans, he nonetheless includes Mexican materials in his book for two reasons: first, any work purporting to deal with all indigenous Americans residing in the United States must include at least some reference to the numerous persons of Mexican origin; and second, one cannot understand the discrimination that has been visited upon Mexican-Americans without taking into account the color of their skin and the fact that they look like Native Americans or part Native Americans.117 Which is not to say that the difference between the two is simply semantic, for the reclassification of Indians as Mexicans has been (and continues to be) a violent and uneven process. Instead, Forbes suggests that differences between Indians and Mexicans are coercive social constructions that reveal the extent to which the two groups histories are inextricably linked. I have attempted a similar critique of classificatory rationality by historicizing a number of terms in relation to the Comanchera, including Spanish, Indian, mestizo, Mexican and Chicano. In order to understand the historical formations of Indianness in the U.S. Southwest, as well as the numerous axes of difference that Indians have been made to anchor, we must attend to the massive movement of slaves and captives between, over, under, and around fixed categories. This traffic in bodies, the reclassification of Indians as Mexicans or Mexicans as Indians, for example, left behind numerous openings where one group seeps into others. Even a category like Chicano, which has only fairly recently entered into wide circulation, has been touched by the Comanchera.

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Its remains can be seen not only in the work of Chicano and Chicana artists that fractures and reframes familiar Comanche imagery, including photo projects by Gandert and Delia Montoya and public sculptures by Luis Jimenez, but also in popular aesthetic practices, including Tshirt art and auto murals that depict war-bonneted Plains Indians on horseback.118 Yet I would draw attention not just to the Comanche content in these popular arts but also to the ways in which the forms of Chicana/o representational politics have been partially shaped by Comanche histories. Norma Alarcn, in her essay Chicana Feminism: In the Tracks of The Native Woman, argues that in the 1960s some people of Mexican descent in the United States recuperated, appropriated, and recodified the term Chicanotraditionally a derogatory term for low-class mestizosto form a new political class. Drawn from working-class oral culture, the reappropriated term was part of a critique of so-called Spanish-Americans and Mexican-Americans: In effect, the new name measured the distance between the excluded and the few who had found a place for themselves in Anglo-America. What is more, the word unsettled all of the identities conferred by previous historical accounts, for it straddled and displaced the binary American/Mexican. As such, the term itself, in body and mind, has become a critical site of political, ideological, and discursive struggle through which the notion of definitiveness and hegemonic tendencies are placed in question.119 To the extent that the early twentieth-century New Mexican mestizos I analyze engaged in similar struggles we might call them Chicanos in Alarcns sense even though they significantly predate the emergence of the Chicano movements in the 1960s. Or to approach the topic from the other temporal end, if the concept Chicana/o has at times and places served to organize struggles that call hegemonies into question, it is in part because it draws upon the powerful precedent of the Comanchera, as well as a host of shared mestizo and Indian histories throughout the Americas.

NOTES
I am grateful to a number of people for their responses to earlier drafts of this essay, including my colleagues James Clifford, Michael Cowan, Dana Frank, and Judy Yung. Special thanks go to Yvette Huginnie, Anne Lan, and Renya Ramiriz, who all asked me tough questions that refocused my thinking. Thanks also to the members of the

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Transnational Latino Popular Cultures research cluster, sponsored by the Chicano/ Latino Research Center, Univ. of California, Santa Cruz, including Herman Gray, Olga Njera-Ramrez, Russell Rodriguez, Isabella Vlez, and Patricia Zavella. And I would like to thank two of my best readers and friends, Rosaura Snchez and Shelley Streeby. Finally, this essay is dedicated to Paul Marez, who was born in Puerto de Luna, New Mexico and who always taught me that the past matters. 1. The term Chicana/o conventionally refers to people of Mexican descent living in the U.S., often with a highly politicized sense of the articulation between histories of domination and individual and collective identity. This definition, however, begs the question of how to define Mexican, a word that in U.S. usage can signify nationality, race, and/or ethnicity. For now I bracket such problems and treat Chicana/o as loosely synonymous with the phrase of Mexican descent, even though in the essay that follows I call into question the historical stability and clarity of Mexican descent as a definitive gloss for Chicana/o. 2. Chicanas/os have in this regard been directly and indirectly influenced by indigenist elements in post-revolutionary Mexican nationalism. See Shifra M. Goldman and Tomas Ybarra-Frausto, The Political and Social Contexts of Chicano Art in Chicano Art: Resistance and Affirmation, 19651985, ed. Richard Griswold del Castillo, Teresa McKenna, and Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano (Los Angeles, Calif.: Wight Art Gallery, 1991), 8395. For a discussion of early twentieth-century attempts by the Mexican state to disseminate indigenismo among Chicanas/os, see George J. Snchez, Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 19001945 (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1993), 11923. 3. See also Valdezs introduction to Aztlan: An Anthology of Mexican American Literature, ed. Luis Valdez and Stan Steiner (New York: Knopf, 1972); Yolanda Gonzlez-Broyles, El Teatro Campesino: Theater in the Chicano Movement (Austin, Tex.: Univ. of Texas, 1994); and Rosa Linda Fregoso, The Bronze Screen: Chicana and Chicano Film Culture (Minneapolis, Minn.: Univ. of Minnesota, 1993), 313, 21 48. 4. Gloria Anzalda, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco, Calif.: Aunt Lute Books, 1987). For my purposes, the Spanish words mestizo and mestiza refer to men and women who are the product of New World miscegenation between Europeans, usually the Spanish, and others, usually Indians but sometimes also members of the African diaspora. Furthermore, I will use the word mestizaje to refer to the historical process whereby mestizos and mestizas are produced. 5. Yolanda M. Lopez, Whos the Illegal Alien, Pilgrim? (1978) in del Castillo, et al., Chicano Art: Resistance and Affirmation, 137. 6. Here I have in mind feminist and queer revisions of Aztlan, the mythical Aztec homeland in the Southwest, and of Malinche, an Indian woman who served as Cortezs translator and concubine. See Norma Alarcn, Chicanas Feminist Literature: A ReVision through Malintzin/or Malintzin: Putting Flesh Back on the Object, in This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, ed. Cherre Moraga and Gloria Anzalda (New York: Kitchen Table Press, 1981), 18290; Anzalda, Borderlands/La Frontera; Ana Castillo, The Ancient Roots of Machismo, and In the Beginning There Was Eva, in Massacre of the Dreamers: Essays on Xicanisma (New York: Plume, 1995), 6384, 10519; Cherre Moraga, Queer Aztlan: The Reformation of Chicano Tribe, The Last Generation (Boston: South End Press, 1993), 14574; Vicki L. Ruiz, La Nueva Chicana: Women and the Movement in From Out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1998), 105110. Moragas essay is particularly relevant to the present

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context, for she articulates links between a pre-Columbian indigenismo and indigenismos forged out of ongoing engagement with contemporary Native American struggles. 7. See Curtis Marez, Brown: The Politics of Working-Class Chicano Style, Social Text 48 (fall 1996): 11032. Goldman and Ybarra-Frausto argue that Chicana/o art and politics in the late 1960s and early 1970s was influenced not only by earlier Indianist discourses in Mexico but also by the contemporary Native American movement, as well as the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century history of Indian warfare in the Southwest (8789). 8. Following Mary Louise Pratt, my use of the term contact zone refers to the space of colonial encounters, the space in which peoples geographically and historically separated come into contact with each other and establish ongoing relations, usually involving conditions of coercion, radical inequality, and intractable conflict. See Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York: Routledge, 1992), 6. 9. For a helpful elaboration of this term in the context of minority performance practices, see Jos Esteban Muoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis, Minn.: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1999). 10. Here I borrow from Avery F. Gordons reading of Walter Benjamin in her Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis, Minn.: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1997), 6566. 11. Morris W. Foster, Being Comanche: A Social History of an American Indian Community (Tucson, Ariz.: Univ. of Arizona Press, 1991), 74. See also Charles L. Kenner, The Comanchero Frontier: A History of New Mexican-Plains Indian Relations (Norman, Okla.: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1994). 12. While I focus on constructions of Mexicanness, the Comanches transformed the lives of many different Indian peoples as well, particularly Apaches, who were captured in large numbers and traded to Spanish households and mines. See Russell M. Magnaghi, The Indian Slave Trade in the Southwest: The Comanche, a Test Case (Ph.D. diss., Univ. of Nebraska, 1979), 2629, 68, 73; and Thomas W. Kavanagh, Comanche Political History: An Ethnohistorical Perspective (Lincoln, Neb.: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1996), 116, 12728, 140, 143, 155. 13. Kavanagh, Comanche Political History, 2789; James F. Brooks, This Evil Extends Especially to the Feminine Sex: Captivity and Identity in New Mexico, 1700 1846, in Elizabeth Jameson and Susan Armitage, eds., Writing the Range: Race, Class, and Culture in the Womens West (Norman, Okla.: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1997), 106; and Magnaghi, Indian Slave Trade, 45, 112. 14. Brooks, This Evil, 98. 15. As an example, Herman Asanap, a Comanche who served as an interpreter and an informant for a Santa Fe Laboratory of Anthropology Field School research party in the summer of 1932, remembers that his father was a Mexican captive who as an adult was given a chance to return to Mexico but refused (Waldo R. Wedel Papers, National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution, box 108, folder 1, 2). For discussions of similar stories of Mexicans adopted by Indians, see Magnaghi, Indian Slave Trade, 6, and Brooks, This Evil, 101. 16. Brooks, This Evil, 9899, 113. 17. Compare Rosaura Snchezs discussion of the patriarchal limits on female dissent among the nineteenth-century Californios in Telling Identities (Minneapolis, Minn.: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1995), 188227. 18. Five hundred eighty-four Spanish settlers were reported killed in Indian raids between 1700 and 1820 (Ramn A. Gutirrez, When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers

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Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality, and Power in New Mexico, 15001846 [Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Univ. Press, 1991], 154). 19. See Gutirrez, When Jesus Came, 152; Kavanagh, Comanche Political History, 1278. 20. In the summer of 1706 there were constant reports of Comanche and Ute raids against Taos Pueblo. And it was reported that three thousand Comanches attacked Taos in 1760 (Magnaghi, Indian Slave Trade, 79, 8283). 21. Gutirrez, When Jesus Came, 151. 22. Foster, Being Comanche, 3841; Gutirrez, When Jesus Came, 146148; Kavanagh, Comanche Political History, 68, 70, 171; and Magnaghi, Indian Slave Trade, 85. 23. Similarly, between 1700 and 1770, Spanish traders in New Mexico sent scores of Indian captives, including Apaches, Utes, Navajos, and Comanches, to the silver mines of New Spain (Magnaghi, Indian Slave Trade, 153154). 24. In addition to ransomed captives, Spanish households also employed servants from the Pueblos. During the eighteenth century, there was a population decline in the Pueblos and an increase in Spanish settlements in large part because of Pueblo migration to Spanish towns. Many Pueblo migrants were women who engaged in repartimiento labor in Spanish households. See Ross Frank, Demographic, Social, Economic Change in New Mexico, New Views of Borderlands History (Albuquerque, N.M.: Univ. of New Mexico Press, 1998), 4950; and Gutirrez, When Jesus Came, 174. 25. Gutirrez, When Jesus Came, 155. 26. According to Gutirrez, New Mexicos total population in 1793 was 29,041, with as many as 9,680 genzaros (Ibid., 171). 27. The largest group was of Navajos, followed by Apaches, Utes, and a small number of Comanches (Gutirrez, When Jesus Came, 154). For the daily work and conditions of household slaves, see Ibid., 18090, and Brooks, This Evil, 1001. 28. In 1776, for example, female Indian slaves between the ages of 12 and 20 were worth about twice as much as male slaves (Kavanagh, Comanche Political History,130). 29. As Gutirrez writes, a patriarchs natural law authority over his family gave him the right to correct and punish an erring wife, child, or slave (185). 30. Gutirrez, When Jesus Came, 150, 172. 31. Ibid., 190. 32. Ibid., 17780. 33. Ibid., 190. 34. Asuncin Lavrin, quoted by Yolanda Chvez Leyva, A Poor Widow Burdened with Children: Widows and Land in Colonial New Mexico in Brooks, Writing the Range, 86. 35. Gutirrez, When Jesus Came, 3036. 36. Brooks, This Evil, 15559; Gutirrez, When Jesus Came, 3046. Ransomed captives made up on average around 10 to 15 percent of the colonial population and in peripheral rural villages as high as 40 percent (Brooks, This Evil, 100, 116). 37. Brooks, This Evil, 108. 38. See Kavanagh, Comanche Political History, esp. 17778. 39. Magnaghi, Indian Slave Trade, 168. 40. Kavanagh, Comanche Political History, 17779; Kenner, Comanchero Frontier,7897; Magnaghi, Indian Slave Trade, 170. 41. Despite Mexican attempts to prohibit the Comanchero trade, during the 1830s Comanches and Navajos made regular raids on small New Mexican villages and took

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hundreds of captives (Kavanagh, Comanche Political History, 205; Foster, Being Comanche, 4445). 42. These post-independence conflicts included: battles for state control between federalists and centralists, a revolution in Texas, a Mayan Indian uprising in the Yucatan, and attacks by Yaquis and Apaches in the north. See Edward H. Spicer, Cycles of Conquest: The Impact of Spain, Mexico, and the United States on the Indians of the Southwest, 15331960 (Tucson, Ariz.: 1962), 6166. 43. Kavanagh, Comanche Political History, 207209. 44. Such laws remained in effect in the 1840s and 1850s ( Ibid. 32930). 45. See Foster, Being Comanche, 45; and Carl Coke Rister, Border Captives: The Traffic in Prisoners by Southern Plains Indians, 18351875 (Norman, Okla.: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1940), 758. 46. Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, in U.S.-Mexico Borderlands: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives, ed. Oscar J. Martnez (Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, 1996), 2627. 47. See Calhoun, The Official Correspondence of James S. Calhoun While Indian Agent at Santa Fe and Superintendent of Indian Affairs in New Mexico, ed. Annie Heloise Abel (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1915), 18586. For references to the Chihuahua petition, see 18687. 48. Calhoun, Official Correspondence, 47, 185. 49. Spicer, Cycles of Conquest, 335. 50. Ibid., 33442. In Spicers account, the Indian policies that the government pursued between 1821 and the 1850s created a most serious threat to the very existence of Mexico as a unified nation. The threat was from actual or possible Indian rebellions featuring Mayans in the Yucatan, Zapotec Indians in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, the Huaxtec and other Indians from the northeast, the Indians of the Sierra Madre Mountains in Nayarit, and Apache, Yaqui and Mayo in the northwestern state of Sonora (334). 51. Rister, Border Captives, 58. 52. In 1840, one band of Comanches brought one hundred fifty captives back to the southern Plains, and one former captive from Mexico estimated in the 1850s that Comanche camps contained at least three hundred Mexican captives (Rister, Border Captives, 4950). 53. Calhoun, Official Correspondence, 2930. 54. Donaciano Vigil, Arms, Indians, and the Mismanagement of New Mexico, ed. and trans. David J. Weber (El Paso, Tex.: 1986), 7, 15. 55. Vigil, Arms, 1115. 56. Annie H. Abel, intro. to Calhoun, Official Correspondence, xii 57. Calhoun, Official Correspondence, 312. 58. Notwithstanding Calhouns efforts to ransom captives, Indian enslavements continued for decades under U.S. rule. In 1859 the New Mexican government passed a black slave code for the territory, the Otero Slave Code, that also legalized Indian slavery dating from the period of Mexican rule (but not instances of post-1848 enslavement). An 1865 U.S. territorial law authorized raiding expeditions against hostile Indians and the taking of captives as slaves. According to Indian agent J.K. Graves, who visited the territorial capital in 1865, almost all Federal officials in Santa Fe held Indians in their service. It is estimated that fifteen hundred to three thousand people, both Mexicans and Indians, were bound in some form of servitude. Before 1867, when it was banned by the U.S. congress, debt peonage was legal in the territory. In practice peonage overlapped with Indian slavery and as Magnaghi writes it was all but impossible to distinguish the two (Magnaghi, Indian Slave Trade, 18485).

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59. Quoted by James Mooney, Calendar History of the Kiowa Indians, Annual Report, Bureau American Ethnology, vol. 17, part 1, 18951896 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1898). 60. Jeffrey D. Smith in J. Marvin Hunter, The Boy Captives: Life Among the Indians (Bandera, Tex.: Frontier Times, 1927), 182. 61. See, for example, Mooney, Kiowa, 165. 62. Depredations on the Frontiers of Texas, Executive Document no. 257, 43rd Congress, first session, 1874, 32. 63. Foster, Being Comanche, 5052; Kavanagh, Comanche Political History, 410 19, 444. 64. Lawrie Tatum, Our Red Brothers and the Peace Policy of President Ulysses S. Grant (1899; Lincoln, Neb.: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1970), 59. 65. Tatum, Our Red Brothers, 14445. 66. Ibid., 14547. 67. Ibid., 60. 68. Brooks, This Evil, 1067. 69. Brooks, for example, describes instances of women-centered status competition, where Comanche women left old husbands for new. In many cases women also had access to horsesnext to captives the most prestigious commodity. Women gained control over horse wealth by marriage to a successful warrior or by performing Shakedown Dances, in which young, unmarried women shame raiders into giving them war spoils. Finally, women also gained status and prestige through the matrilineal transfer of medicine powers (Ibid., 1056). 70. Depredations on the Frontiers of Texas, 26. 71. Tatum, Our Red Brothers, 154. 72. Depredations on the Frontiers of Texas, 24. 73. In the extracts from the evidence following, the commissioners present some of the features of this Indian warfare, and such is the association of the Mexican and Indian raiders that the depositions taken will be found teeming with details of the bloody work carried on by these outlaws. The authors go on to claim that the Mexican government is partly responsible since it protects the illicit trade with the Indians, carried on by its degraded merchants (Depredations on the Frontiers of Texas, 14). 74. Tatum, Our Red Brothers, 151. 75. James E. Rhodes, former member of the Friends Indian Committee, quoted by Tatum, Our Red Brothers, 286. 76. Gerald McMaster, Colonial Alchemy: Reading the Boarding School Experience in Partial Recall: Photographs of Native Americans, ed. Lucy R. Lippard (New York: New Press, 1992), 79. 77. For an account of one such failure, see Jos Andrs Martnez, The MexicanKiowa Captive: A Story of Real Life Among the Indians, as told to J. J. Methvin, ed. James F. Brooks (Albuquerque, N.M.: Univ. of New Mexico Press, 1996). 78. For related readings of photographic Indian resistance to the civilizing mission, see Lippard, ed., Partial Recall, esp. Jimmie Durham, Geronimo!, 5558; Rayna Green, Rosebuds of the Plateau: Frank Matsura and the Fainting Couch Aesthetic, 4757; and McMaster, Colonial Alchemy, 7787. 79. See, for example, the interview with H3kiani, a former Mexican captive who had been adopted as a Comanche, in E. Adamson Hoebel and Ernest Wallace, The Comanches: Lords of the South Plains (Norman, Okla.: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1952), 26063. Also see Waldo R. Wedels interview with Post Oak Jim, 17 July 1933, box 108, folder 4, Waldo R. Wedel Papers, National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution.

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80. Rodolfo Acua, Occupied America: A History of Chicanos (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), 2028, 24142; Mary Austin, Mexicans and New Mexico, America in the Southwest: a Regional Anthology, ed. T.M. Pearce and Telfair Hendon (Albuquerque, N.M.: Univ. of New Mexico Press, 1933), 39; Manuel Gamio, Race Relations in New Mexico in Mexican Immigration to the United States: A Study of Human Migration and Adjustment (1930; New York: Dover, 1971), 20816; Nancie L. Gonzlez, The Spanish-Americans of New Mexico: A Heritage of Pride (Albuquerque, N.M.: Univ. of New Mexico Press, 1967), 2067. 81. See Curtis Marez, The Rough Ride Through Empire: Los Comanches and the New Mexican 1898 in Recovering the Hispanic Literary Heritage, vol. 3 (forthcoming). 82. See Marez, The Rough Ride. 83. See the 1920 U.S. Census records for Santa Fe and Taos Counties, New Mexico State Records Center and Archive, Santa Fe, New Mexico (NMSRCA) Microfilm cabinet 1, drawer 1. 84. Quoted by John R. Chvez, The Lost Land: The Chicano Image of the Southwest (Albuquerque, N.M.: Univ. of New Mexico, 1991), 100. 85. Gonzlez, A Heritage of Pride, 82. 86. The New Mexico FWP papers are housed in two locations: at NMRCA, and the Fray Angelico Chavez History Library (FACHL), both in Santa Fe. See the following documents, listed as WPA files: Simeon Tejadas interview with Josie Maria Mares, a Navajo sold into slavery around Taos in the late 1850s (5552 #58, FACHL); Lou Sage Batchens interviews with Jose Gurule, Benino Archibeque, Mara Chavez, and Jose Trujillo of Las Placitas concerning the captivity of their relative, Jos de Luz (WPA Files #224a, NMSRCA); Robert Luceros account of his great-grandfathers captivity (5522 #1, FACHL); Felipe Padillas story of his own captivity among Apaches in 1880 (5527, #3, FACHL); the narrative of Hilario Romero of Las Vegas, New Mexico, and three Indian slaves (553, #25, FACHL); and Roque Ramos recollections of his 1864 captivity (5527, #1, FACHL). 87. See also Enrique R. Lamadrid and Jack Loeffler, Tesoros del Espritu: A Portrait in Sound of Hispanic New Mexico (Albuquerque, N.M.: Univ. of New Mexico Press, 1994), 1939; Lamadrid, Entre Cibolos Criado: Images of Native Americans in the Popular Culture of Colonial New Mexico, Reconstructing a Chicano/a Literary Heritage: Hispanic Colonial Literature of the Southwest, ed. Mara Herrera-Sobek (Tucson, Ariz.: Univ. of Arizona Press, 1998), 158200; and John Donald Robb, Hispanic Folk Music of the Southwest (Norman, Okla.: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1980), 41819, 6058. 88. For a close reading of the play that supports these conclusions see Marez, The Rough Ride. 89. Blanche C. Grant, Taos Today (Taos, N.M.: privately published, 1925). 90. By 1920, for example, about a third of San Ildefonso families supported themselves by making and selling pottery (Spicer, Cycles of Conquest, 559). 91. D.H. Dinwoodie, Deportation: The Immigration Service and the Chicano Labor Movement in the 1930s, New Mexico Historical Review 52 (July 1977): 193206; Sarah Deutsch, No Separate Refuge: Culture, Class and Gender on an Anglo-Hispanic Frontier in the American Southwest, 18801940 (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1987), 16299; F.O. Mathiessen, The New Mexican Workers Case, The New Republic (8 May 1935): 36163; Harry R. Rubenstein, The Great Gallup Coal Strike of 1933, New Mexico Historical Review 52 (July 1977): 17391; and Political Repression in New Mexico: The Destruction of the National Miners Union in Gallup, Labor in New Mexico: Unions, Strikes, and Social History since 1881, ed. Robert Kern

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(Albuquerque, N.M.: Univ. of New Mexico Press, 1983); Philip Stevenson, Deporting Jesus, The Nation (18 July 1936): 6769. 92. Stevenson, Deporting Jesus, 68; Marta Weigle, ed., Hispanic Villages of Northern New Mexico (1935; Santa Fe, N.M.: Lightning Tree, 1975), 61. 93. Deutsch, No Separate Refuge, 17374; Stevenson, Deporting Jesus, 6869; Tingley Papers, Dispersal of Sit Down Strikers from the Governors Office, Mar. and Apr. 1937, file #272, NMSRCA. 94. The information in this paragraph is drawn from two contemporary sources, Weigle, Hispagic Villages of Northern New Mexico, 5264; and a study based on observations made between 1936 and 1937, William Whitmans The Pueblo Indians of San Ildefonso: A Changing Culture (1946; New York, 1969), 89. For references to Martinez, see Whitman, Pueblo Indians, 105. 95. Whitman, Pueblo Indians, 78. 96. Spicer, Cycles of Conquest, 349. 97. Ibid., 34753, 412, 41516. 98. This was the Wheeler-Howard Act, more commonly known as the Indian Reorganization Act, 18 June 1934. See Francis Paul Prucha, ed., Documents of United States Indian Policy, 2nd ed. (Lincoln, Neb.: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1990), 22224, and Spicer, Cycles of Conquest, 35052. 99. Weigle, Hispanic Villages of Northern New Mexico, 61. 100. Whitman, Pueblo Indians, 78. 101. See Lorin W. Brown, with Charles L. Briggs and Marta Weigle, Hispano Folklife of New Mexico: The Lorin W. Brown Federal Writers Project Manuscripts (Albuquerque, N.M.: Univ. of New Mexico Press, 1978), 4043; and Weigle, Hispanic Villages of Northern New Mexico, 63. 102. Brown, Briggs, and Weigle, Hispano Folklife, 41. 103. Ibid., 41. 104. Lorin W. Brown, Los Comanches, WPA file, FACHL, 3. 105. Brown, Briggs, and Weigle, Hispano Folklife, 423. 106. For a longer discussion of Barriga Dulce in this and other performance contexts see Marez, The Rough Ride. 107. Brown, Briggs, and Weigle, Hispano Folklife, 41. 108. See, for example, the mimeographed handbill that Alianza members passed out at the 1969 Fiesta, quoted in Ronald L. Grimes, Symbol and Conquest: Public Ritual and Drama in Santa Fe (Albuquerque, N.M.: Univ. of New Mexico Press, 1992), 139 40. 109. Unless otherwise stated, all information concerning Tijerina and the Alianza comes form Patricia Bell Blawis, Tijerina and the Land Grants: Mexican Americans in Struggle for their Heritage (New York: International Publishers, 1971); and John R. Chavez, The Lost Land: The Chicano Image of the Southwest (Albuquerque, N.M.: Univ. of New Mexico Press, 1984), 13851. 110. Miguel Gandert, note to the photo series Los Comanches, reproduced in From the West: Chicano Narrative Photography, catalogue for an exhibit at the Mexican Museum, San Francisco, curated by Chon A. Noriega (San Francisco, Calif.: Mexican Museum, 1996), 48. The photos I will describe are included in the catalogue, 4961. 111. Jennifer A. Gonzalez, Negotiating Frontiers in Noriega, From the West, 18. 112. Gonzalez, Negotiating Frontiers, 18. 113. For a longer discussion of gender in twentieth-century Comanche performances see Marez, The Rough Ride.

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114. Gayatri Spivak, Race Before Racism: The Disappearance of the American, boundary 2, Edward Said: A Special Issue, ed. Paul A. Bov 25 (summer 1998): 42 43; Jack D. Forbes, Africans and Native Americans: The Language of Race and the Evolution of Red-Black Peoples (Urbana, Ill.: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1993). 115. Jack D. Forbes, The Indian in Americas Past (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1964), 3. 116. Ibid., 3. 117. Ibid., 4. 118. Delilah Montoya, Shooting the Tourist (1995) in Noriega, From the West, 6270; and Luis Jimnez, Howl: the Artwork of Luis Jimnez (Santa Fe, N.M.: Univ. of New Mexico Press, 1997), and Man on Fire: Luis Jimnez, ex. cat for the Albuquerque Museum, 1994. 119. Norma Alarcn, Chicana Feminism: In the Tracks of The Native Woman in Living Chicana Theory, ed. Carla Trujillo (Berkeley, Calif.: Univ. of California Press, 1998), 37172.