Sandia Pueblo's Sixty-Year Exile

The Sandia people call their home Tuf Shur Tia, which means Green Reed Place. They had been living on this stretch of the Rio Grande since at least thirteen hundred, and when Francisco Vásquez de Coronado arrived in fifteen forty, Sandia was one of the largest pueblo communities in the valley, with roughly three thousand people.

By sixteen eighty, after nearly a century of Spanish colonization, the population had been reduced by disease and forced labor. Then Po'pay's runners arrived with the knotted cord, counting down the days to the coordinated uprising. On August tenth, sixteen eighty, the Pueblo Revolt began. The Spanish mission at Sandia, San Francisco de Sandia, was destroyed.

What happened next is specific to this pueblo. As Spanish forces worked to reconquer New Mexico, they destroyed Sandia Pueblo itself. The Sandia people gathered what they could carry and traveled west across the desert to the Hopi mesas in what is now Arizona. There, on the Second Mesa, they built a new village called Payupki. They lived in it for sixty years.

In seventeen forty-two, roughly four hundred forty Sandia people made the journey back to the Rio Grande. They built a new pueblo on the site of the old one. The Spanish mission that replaced the destroyed church, Mission San Antonio de Padua, still stands in the pueblo today, one of the oldest active churches in the United States. The people who worship in it are the descendants of those who burned the first one in revolt, survived the reconquest, lived two generations in Arizona, and walked home.

Sandia Pueblo is a federally recognized tribe with a reservation of about forty square miles. Its traditional ceremonial and cultural practices are not open to the public. The pueblo's name, which the Spanish applied to the mountains to the east, means watermelon in Spanish, probably for the mountains' pink granite. The Tiwa name predates the Spanish word by several centuries.