Acoma 1599

Acoma Pueblo sits on a mesa seven thousand feet above sea level and about three hundred sixty five feet above the valley floor. It has been continuously inhabited since approximately eleven fifty of the Common Era. The approach requires climbing a series of hand-and-toe holds cut into the sandstone face. The Spanish first reached it in fifteen forty and could not take it. In fifteen ninety-nine, they tried again.

The immediate cause was the killing of thirteen Spanish soldiers, including Juan de Zaldivar, the nephew of New Mexico's colonial governor Juan de Oñate, on December fourth, fifteen ninety-eight. Acoma warriors killed the party during what the Spanish described as a confrontation over supplies. The colonial government organized a retaliatory expedition. Between January twenty-first and January twenty-fourth, fifteen ninety-nine, Spanish forces besieged the pueblo.

Approximately eight hundred Acoma people were killed in the siege. The precise figure comes from Spanish colonial records themselves, documents held in archives at the Bancroft Library at Berkeley and the New Mexico State Records Center in Santa Fe.

What followed was a trial. Oñate's own colonial court convened and passed judgment on the Acoma survivors. The sentence for twenty-four men over the age of twenty-five: one foot amputated, plus twenty-five years of personal servitude. Women and girls over the age of twelve were sentenced to twenty years of servitude. Two Hopi men who had been visiting Acoma when the siege occurred had their right hands amputated and were released.

The records of that trial still exist. They are in the archives.

Oñate himself was later tried by the Spanish colonial government for his conduct in New Mexico, including the Acoma sentence. He was convicted. In sixteen fourteen, the Spanish viceroy formally banished him from New Mexico for life. He never returned.

Acoma Pueblo's mesa has been continuously inhabited through all of it. The people who live there today are the descendants of the people who held that mesa in fifteen ninety-nine.