Arriving up in Zacatecas (8,148 feet above sea level) for a visit from the coast one June, my husband and I found all the clichés describing high altitude air—cool, crisp, crystalline, effervescent—to be fresh and new. Blocks of the centro looked to have been imported straight from 16th or 17th century Spain, which of course in a sense they were, but the heavy stones of the cathedral, old government buildings, religious compounds, and palaces are also as weighty with Mexican history. The silver mines of Zacatecas and other locales were so productive that the value of silver crashed in Europe when Spain made its bid to use its colony’s wealth to become the greatest power on the continent. Incidentally, Mexico is still the largest producer of silver in the world.
The Spanish were interested in the area even before the discovery of silver in 1546. The conquistador Nuño de Guzmán was engaged in his attempt to subdue the indigenous people when his lieutenant, Cristóbal de Oñate, established a settlement in 1530. It was named La Villa de Espíritu Santo de Guadalajara after Guzmán’s birthplace, Guadalajara, in Spain where the first part of the name derives from the Arabic wādī—arroyo. By 1542, Indian attacks drove the Spanish to move Guadalajara to its present location. Saludos, Guadalajara! But hold on for a while. I’ll come back to this part of our history…
We settled into our Zacatecas hotel, formerly a bishop’s palace, which had displayed Morelos’s severed head on its tour of Mexico during the Revolution and set out to explore the old town. An unexpected plaza presided over by a tower with slit windows, the Antiguo Templo de San Augustín, the partially ruined nave of the Franciscan monastery… We didn’t miss the aqueduct or the spectacular mask museum or the 20th century art of favorite son, Pedro Coronel, which is shown in an ex-convento.
There, you were to first pass through the monastery’s library, an enormous room that fronts the building, perhaps 70 feet long with 16- or 18-foot ceilings, before visiting the gallery rooms, but we couldn’t tear ourselves away. The upper reaches of shelves packed with leather-bound and gold-tooled volumes were nearly lost in the dim light, but at eye level there were prizes enough, such as first editions of Bernal Díaz’s history of the conquest of Mexico, William H. Prescott’s conquest history in Spanish translation, old volumes of Napoleonic Code.
Our interest was noticed by the guardian librarians and a gentleman approached and offered to show us whatever book we wanted. (It was forbidden to touch.) I would point; he would take the book down, bring it to the lectern beneath the window set in meter-thick stone and turn the pages with his white-gloved hands. After we had sustained our interest through a number of treasures, he offered to show us the rest of the library! A passage led to an even larger room that took up the entire left side of the convento. It contained books from the 15th and 16th centuries, bound in pale parchment, foxed and crinkled, with titles hand-scribed in red and black ink on the spines. We passed into a third room along the back of the monastery. Here were large tables holding books with balsa wood covers and marbled endpapers, dictionaries, atlases, and a facsimile of the Codex Mendoza. What can I say—a codex, even if a copy.
All that was a peak experience, but then this: Write out a solicitud—a request—go to the pharmacy and buy a leftover swine flu mask (this was a while back) and latex gloves, and all this could be yours for the examining. I got equipped. Just another couple of hours are all I need, I assured my husband, but it took an extra day in Zacatecas before I could tear myself away.
I handled a parchment-bound Vulgate Bible decorated with book worm trails. I saw a collection of photos of Mexican churches taken by Frida Kahlo’s father, an engraved map of Mexico City and surrounds when it was in the middle of the lake and reached by causeways, and esoterica such as illustrated 15th century stories of the missionaries who brought Christianity to Ethiopia. The riches went on and on.
But best was the codex. Mendoza had been the first viceroy of colonial New Spain, 1535 to 1550—to Cortés’s chagrin. He had the codex created in 1541 by a surviving Aztec artist/historian to describe the already long-lost civilization. Paintings and pictograms recount the founding of Tenochitlan (eagle, snake, cactus), and the highlights of the reigns of the eight rulers before Montezuma. Next, it lists the towns and provinces that they had conquered to make up the empire. Each town is represented by what looks like a hut with thatched roof askew and flames escaping from within, an image apparently representing destroyed temples—and that would be every last one of them. Beside it was a drawing of the tribute owed by the village: you can make out baskets of cotton, petates, crocodiles, fish nets, decorative plants, salt, shields, jaguar costumes for warriors, mantles, pots, quail, canoes, flowers, arrows, feathers, cochineal… A pictogram also gives the name of the pueblo, transcribed in Spanish above it: Coyoacan, Chalco, Atotonilko, Tepic, Metepec… It shouldn’t be surprising that so little has changed, but you can’t deny the thrill. In the final section, amid rules for birth, marriage, education, and warfare, are hair-raising punishments for children. Children were led in the paths of righteousness with maguey-thorn bloodletting and beatings. They are shown crying and bleeding copiously.
It seems the codex was completed only 10 days before the year’s fleet was to sail for Spain, so a round-the-clock effort was required to transcribe the village names into Spanish and elucidate the story the images were telling. The codex sailed—only to be captured with the rest of the year’s silver and other booty by French privateers. The codex was delivered to the French crown; the name of the cosmologer of Henri II is written in several places, with the date 1553. Later, it made its way to England, purchased for 20 livres. Was that a lot or a little, I wondered, a question not easily answered in an age of unsettled currency values. Here’s this: A peasant’s nag is reported to cost one livre, while a knight’s war horse, a rare beast that could maneuver under all that armor, cost as much as eighty.
Today the codex encounters itself in the Bodleian Library in Oxford. There, or in other great libraries, one isn’t trusted around rare books, or their rare facsimiles, without lofty credentials. In Zacatecas I was reminded of how relaxed and generous a society Mexico can be—putting aside Morelos as well as the Spaniards’ treatment of the original inhabitants.
And that leads me back to Cristóbal de Oñate—and then his son. I lived for thirty years in northern New Mexico before moving across the border. There, “water is for fightin’,” and so is the name Oñate.
Cristóbal de Oñate, of noble Spanish family, was married to a woman with converso ancestors—that is, Jews. In 1492, Her Catholic Majesty, Queen Isabella, was busy. She funded Columbus, expelled the Moors from Spain entirely, and the Jews as well unless they converted to Christianity, becoming conversos. Eventually, the church used the Inquisition to ferret out those who were suspected of being hidden Jews, or crypto-Jews, those who had only pretended to convert. Many fled to New Spain. Was Cristóbal moving his family to a safer place? Getting past the debacle at Guadalajara I, and following the discovery of silver at Zacatecas, by 1550 when his son was born, Cristóbal had become a silver baron. The son, Juan de Oñate, the quintessential silver-spoon-in-the-mouth baby, grew up to marry very well— the granddaughter of Cortés and the great granddaughter of Montezuma. And in 1599 he led an enormous expedition north to what is now New Mexico. It is generally thought that many of the prospective settlers were crypto-Jews, and there is ample evidence that crypto-Jewish families did and do persist in New Mexico. The Inquisition, not content with driving them from Spain, had followed them to the new world. Religious purity demanded that none escape to keep property that could be confiscated by the church after the refiner’s fire was through with them.
Even if Oñate was acting to establish a safe haven for persecuted Jews—an issue perhaps very dear to his family—he found plenty of time in pacifying the territory to win a reputation for utter barbarity in the treatment of the native population, and the settlers as well. Famously, at Acoma Pueblo he slaughtered hundreds, took more hundreds as slaves, and cut off one foot of twenty-four young men. He was eventually recalled to Mexico City, tried and convicted for cruelty, and banished from New Mexico for life and from Mexico City for five years. You have to be some bad conquistador for that!
Not far from where I lived in New Mexico, Hispanic chauvinists funded and erected an enormous bronze equestrian statue of Juan de Oñate in 1994, and a few years later, under cover of darkness, someone hacksawed off one of his booted, spurred bronze feet in its bronze stirrup. Other heels dug in; the statue was repaired and continued to rile the neighborhood until it was removed in 2020. Then last year there was an attempt to install it near the courthouse in the nearby town of Española. Before that happened, a Pueblo Indian protester was shot and wounded by a Hispanic, MAGA hat-wearing Oñate defender. Today, all is on hold. Yet again, history is not even past.
My novel, The Lives of La Escondida, which centers around the history of crypto-Jews in Mexico and New Mexico, can be borrowed from the LCS library or purchased from Amazon.
- A Visit to Don Otavio - December 26, 2024
- Encounters With History - October 29, 2024
- The Treasures Of Cosalá - September 28, 2024
