Long before I knew anything about the Indian slave trade in New Mexico, I’d heard Grandma Lillie’s stories about old Juana, the Navajo captive who lived with them and cared for them when they were children. One Memorial Day when I was twelve or thirteen, Grandma Lillie asked me to go with her to take flowers to old Juana’s grave. She told me Juana died around 1920 when she was more than one hundred years old. We filled clean coffee cans with water; then we cut some roses and lilacs from Grandma A’mooh’s yard because those were the only fresh flowers to be found.
Grandma Lillie drove us to the south side of Laguna village and then down the old dirt road near the old bridge across the river. A low wall of black lava rock was partially buried in the pale gray river sand that covered an ancient floodplain; in the corners of the wall, dry weeds, scraps of paper and debris formed drifts. The graves were from the time when the Laguna people didn’t use carved gravestones but flat pieces of sandstone or slate or black lava stones. I seem to remember the remains of a few wooden crosses scattered about.
She hadn’t brought flowers to Juana in a while, but then that year, for some reason, she decided to do it. Grandma Lillie took a little while to get her bearings among the piles of stones and small dunes of sand that shifted in the graveyard with every wind. Then she located the five dark lava stones the size of cantaloupes that marked Juana’s grave. I helped Grandma Lillie clear away the tumbleweeds tangled with other debris, and she talked about old Juana while we worked.
Juana had been captured by Mexican slave-catchers when she was just a little girl. Years later when Lincoln freed the slaves, it was already too late for poor Juana — thirty years or more had passed and she no longer spoke the Navajo language, and she did not know where she had been stolen from. Grandma Lillie gave me the impression Juana came to work for their family when she was an adult after Lincoln’s proclamation because she had no place to go.
Grandma Lillie said Juana was the one who really mothered them, not Great Grandma Helen. In her eighties, old Juana raised my grandma Lillie and all her sisters and brothers because Great Grandma Helen followed the practices of the wealthy Mexican women at the time, which meant she took to her bedroom as soon as she was pregnant, and did not leave her bedroom again until two months after the birth. Grandma Lillie had eleven sisters and brothers and two who did not survive — so Great Grandma Helen seldom left her bedroom. It was Juana who cared for them while their mother awaited another birth. Juana bathed them and fed them, Juana rocked them and held them when they were sick or scared, not their mother. Juana was in her eighties by the time Grandma Lillie was born.
I remember my great grandma Helen vividly; she always wore a long black cardigan over her dress, and she rolled her own cigarettes from a bag of tobacco as she gossiped in Spanish with my grandma and her sisters Lorena and Marie. I don’t remember her greeting us or hugging us; she hardly seemed to notice us great grandchildren. She was so different from our beloved great grandma A’mooh that we children were a little afraid of her.
Great Grandma Helen was born to Josephine Romero whose mother was a Luna, one of the founding families of Los Lunas, New Mexico. The Romeros were another founding family. Josephine Romero had married a Whittington, the son of an English merchant who married a daughter of the Chavez family.
Grandma Lillie always called her grandmother Josephine Romero “Grandma Whip” because she wore a black braided leather belt around her waist which she could remove quickly to use as a whip for naughty children. My father remembers Grandma Whip too. He said they called her Grandma Whip because as children, whenever they visited her, the first thing she did when they came into the house was to warn them not to touch anything in her house by saying “Grandma whip! Grandma whip if you touch!”
The whippings that were part of child-rearing in Grandma Lillie’s family included my father, and finally my sisters and me. The whippings were a legacy from Grandma Whip and her family.
In 2006, I was asked to write a foreword to a book about a corrido or ballad that was composed in 1882 in the Mexican community of Cubero, near Laguna. The corrido is about a Mexican woman, Placida Romero, whose husband was killed and she and her baby kidnapped by a band of Apache raiders.
It is likely the Apaches chose the Cubero area deliberately because Cubero had long been the site of slave markets. Placida Romero was taken back to Chihuahua by the Apache warriors where she was held for forty-nine days and so badly mistreated that the Apache women felt sorry for the Mexican woman and gave her clothing, food and even a burro to aid her escape.
Of course the ballad written afterward made no mention of the compassion and considerable bravery of the Apache women who helped Placida escape. That angered me because at the time they helped her escape, Apache women and children were being murdered by Mexicans and Americans alike for the bounty on their scalps. Yet the Apache women who helped Placida escape did not let the genocide destroy their human decency.
I wanted to put the incident into historical perspective: Placida Romero was a captive for forty-nine days and then she got to go home. Juana was a captive for almost a hundred years, and she never got to go home.
To prepare to write about the captives, I reread L. R. Bailey’s scholarly work Indian Slave Trade in the Southwest, first published in 1964. Though I’d read it before, I’d conveniently forgotten some of the more horrendous details. The Spanish governors of New Mexico encouraged and participated in the Indian slave trade; it was their way of keeping the Pueblos, Navajos and Apaches at war with one another so they would not unite against the Spaniards as they had in 1680.
After the fur trade collapsed, the rendezvous held at river crossings from Taos to Tucson became slave markets where Indian captives were traded for whiskey and gunpowder. The captives were mostly young children, primarily young girls because they were less likely to try to escape. At the slave markets, in drunken exhibitions, the slave traders raped the young Indian girls.
The Catholic Church participated in the slave trade by possessing young Indian “servants” for labor, and by baptizing the captives. Baptismal records show that from 1700 to 1780, eight hundred Apache children were baptized as “servants” to the households of Spaniards in New Mexico. At the Catholic Church at Laguna Pueblo baptismal records revealed that the Spanish rewarded the Pueblos who accompanied them on military actions against the Navajos with young captives.
More money could be made from one slave hunting expedition of two or three weeks than could be made in one year of subsistence farming or ranching in New Mexico. When the U.S. authorities took the New Mexico Territory from Mexico in 1846, the U.S. officials made attempts to stop the Indian slave trade, but the wealthy Mexican families resisted, and even the U.S. authorities kept Indian “servants.”
When I reread Bailey’s book I came across the account of a young Navajo woman released by U.S. soldiers from her captivity with a Mexican family in 1852. The young Navajo woman complained to the U.S. military officer that the Mexican family stripped her naked and whipped her every day. Whipping slaves, it seems, was a common perversion with the founding families of New Mexico.
I happened to mention to my father that I wanted to write about Juana but I wasn’t really sure when or how she came to work for Grandma Lillie’s family. That was when my father told me what Grandma Lillie never told me. My father told me so offhandedly it angered me; I could tell he was ashamed and the off-handed manner was his way to cover up his shame.