Genizaros: The Third People

Spanish colonial New Mexico produced three broad social categories: Spanish colonists, Pueblo peoples, and a third group that fit neither category and was never fully claimed by either.

Genizaros were Indigenous people who had been captured in raids, purchased, or received as tribute and brought into Spanish colonial households as servants. The raids targeted Navajo, Apache, Comanche, Ute, and other peoples across the region. Spanish colonial law nominally prohibited enslaving Christians but permitted enslavement of non-Christians captured in "just war," a category that proved flexible in practice.

Genizaros were typically baptized, given Spanish names, raised in Spanish colonial households, and released into the broader colonial society as adults. But they were released into a society that did not recognize them as fully Spanish, and they were no longer recognized by their original tribal communities. They occupied the most precarious social position in colonial New Mexico: too Spanish for one world, too Indigenous for another.

What they built instead were their own communities. The most notable is Abiquiu, in the Rio Arriba hills northwest of Santa Fe. Genizaro settlers received an official land grant there in seventeen fifty-four and established a community that blended Spanish Catholic practice with spiritual and ceremonial knowledge from multiple Indigenous traditions. Georgia O'Keeffe would later make her home in the same village, drawn by the landscape. She presumably did not know she was living in one of the oldest and most historically significant Genizaro communities in North America.

Contemporary scholars of New Mexico colonial history have documented Genizaro genealogies. Families with Hispanic surnames in Northern New Mexico are increasingly finding Genizaro ancestry when they trace their lines back through Spanish colonial administrative records, which tracked the population category with meticulous attention even as colonial society struggled to place it.

The administrative records exist. The Genizaro-authored records do not. The history of this community is visible through the eyes of those who classified them, not through their own words.