Popay and the Pueblo Revolt of Sixteen Eighty

On the morning of August tenth, sixteen eighty, runners carrying knotted cords fanned out across Pueblo country carrying a message: the uprising had begun. The man who sent them was named Popay, a religious leader from Ohkay Owingeh pueblo on the Rio Grande. What he set in motion would become one of the most successful Indigenous revolts against European colonization in North American history.

The Spanish had ruled New Mexico for nearly a century, imposing forced labor, extracting tribute in corn and cloth, and conducting systematic campaigns against Pueblo religion. Kachina masks were burned. Ceremonies were banned.

In sixteen seventy-five, Governor Juan Francisco de Treviño had forty-seven Pueblo religious leaders arrested and publicly flogged on charges of witchcraft. Popay was among them. From that humiliation he built his network in secret, spending five years at Taos Pueblo organizing leaders from dozens of communities across hundreds of miles.

His plan was nearly exposed when two runners were captured and the plot revealed to the Spanish. Popay moved the date up by one day. On August tenth the Pueblo warriors rose simultaneously.

In twelve days of fighting they killed approximately four hundred Spaniards, including twenty-one of the thirty-three Franciscan missionaries in New Mexico. The survivors, nearly two thousand colonists, fled south along the Rio Grande to El Paso del Norte. For the first time in eighty years, New Mexico had no Spanish government.

Popay moved into the Palace of the Governors in Santa Fe. He ordered the destruction of Spanish livestock, tools, and documents. He instructed people to wash off their Christian baptisms in the river.

The Spanish returned in sixteen ninety-two under Diego de Vargas, but they came back on different terms, they never again reimposed the brutal tribute system that had made revolt inevitable. The Pueblo Revolt changed the terms of colonial life in the Southwest, and it was not forgotten.