Sea to Shining Sea 125INDIGENOUS PEOPLES OF
OCCUPIED NORTHERN MEXICO
Although the Spanish Crown had dispatched explorers such as
Coronado, Cabeza de Baca, and others, and had established trading
and military posts and towns along the North American Atlantic
Coast and in Florida and along the Gulf Coast as far as the Missis
sippi, Spanish settler-colonialist rule did not begin north of the Rio
Grande until 1598. The soldier-settler colonizing mission launched
a brutal military assault on the Pueblo towns in New Mexico and
imposed state and church institutions. The colonizers found a thriv
ing irrigation-based agriculture supporting a population living in
ninety-eight interrelated city-states (pueblos, the Spanish called
them), and within two decades they reduced the towns to twenty
one. 15 Perhaps most provocative, given the Pueblos' extensive rituals
and numerous religious fe ast days, the Franciscan missionaries for
bade Pueblo religious practices and forced Christianity upon them.
As Spanish repression and labor exploitation intensified, the Pueblos
organized a revolution that also was supported by the unconquered
Navajos, Apaches, and Utes, and the Hopi towns to the west in
what is now Arizona. They were joined by the servant and laboring
class of captive Indigenous and Mestizos in the Spanish capital at
Santa Fe. In 1680, they drove the Spanish out of New Mexico, leav
ing the Pueblos free for twelve years before a new and permanent
colonizing mission arrived.1 6 During another l 3 o years of Spanish
rule before Mexico's independence, the Pueblos were strictly con
trolled and forced to provide foot soldiers for Spanish forays against
the Navajos, Apaches, and Utes who were never colonized by the
Spanish. Mexico ousted the Franciscans and left the Pueblos to their
own lives, although much of their territory had been lost to perma -
nent settlers.
The two largest Mexican provinces annexed by the United States,
Coahuila y Tejas (Texas) and California, were more sparsely popu
lated and not as tightly centralized and organized as New Mex
ico. After 1692, as the Spanish Crown sent an army to invade and
reoccupy the Rio Grande Pueblos, it also sought effective control
and settlement of California and Texas, in part to create a large