Latest / Tales From Aztlantis / Episode 68: The Aztec Witches of New Mexico w/ Rob Martinez!

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Episode 68: The Aztec Witches of New Mexico w/ Rob Martinez! · Tales From Aztlantis

0:01
SPEAKER_02: You must excuse me.
0:07
SPEAKER_03: This isn't easy and no.
0:10
SPEAKER_03: But you've learned a lesson.
0:12
SPEAKER_03: A lesson in honesty.
0:15
SPEAKER_03: Honesty to yourself, and honesty to others.
0:19
SPEAKER_03: That lesson will stand you in good step on your life.
0:23
SPEAKER_03: I think we've all learned a good lesson.
0:25
SPEAKER_03: I've always heard that honesty is the best policy.
0:29
SPEAKER_03: Now I'm catching on to why that's so, why that's so, why that's so, why that's so.
0:33
SPEAKER_04: Greetings, dear listeners, and welcome to Tales from Ostlantis, where we take you on a journey through Chicano, Mexicano, and Mesoamerican history and archaeology, and we help to combat the spread of disinformation about these very topics.
0:48
SPEAKER_04: We are your hosts, Curly Tlapoyawa.
0:52
SPEAKER_05: And Ruben Ariano Tlacatekat.
0:54
SPEAKER_04: What is going on, Dr.
0:55
SPEAKER_04: Tlacatecat?
0:57
SPEAKER_05: Well, uh, it's uh beginning to look like fall over here in Dallas.
1:01
SPEAKER_05: Finally getting some cooler temperatures, so that's that's a good thing.
1:04
SPEAKER_05: Fall is my favorite time of year.
1:06
SPEAKER_05: It is also my favorite time of year.
1:09
SPEAKER_05: But isn't it always fall in in New Mexico?
1:12
SPEAKER_04: No.
1:14
SPEAKER_04: I wish we go from uh like literally, it's a joke, but literally in one day you could go through all four seasons and that's the same joke here in Texas.
1:25
SPEAKER_05: Um you'll find that that's true in a lot of places.
1:28
SPEAKER_05: It's it's awful.
1:30
SPEAKER_05: Some people like it, but I really just prefer the fall.
1:34
SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
1:35
SPEAKER_04: So anything new on your end?
1:38
SPEAKER_04: Not much, just uh we had a big uh Halloween-themed party for uh my daughter who just graduated from Boston University.
1:49
SPEAKER_04: Awesome, congratulations.
1:51
SPEAKER_04: Yeah, we're very proud of her.
1:52
SPEAKER_04: And speaking of Halloween themes, we are joined today by the eminent, pre-eminent state historian for New Mexico, Mr.
2:04
SPEAKER_04: Rob Martinez, who is here with us today because we're gonna talk about some brujería here in uh the great state of New Mexico.
2:14
SPEAKER_05: And he is a return guest.
2:15
SPEAKER_05: We've had him before.
2:16
SPEAKER_05: Was it season one or season two?
2:18
SPEAKER_04: Season one.
2:19
SPEAKER_04: Like an early episode, yes.
2:20
SPEAKER_04: It's been a while.
2:21
SPEAKER_04: How are you doing, Rob?
2:22
SPEAKER_04: It's so good to have you back.
2:24
SPEAKER_04: Welcome.
2:26
SPEAKER_02: Thank you guys.
2:26
SPEAKER_02: It's great to be here as usual, talking about our amazing history and culture here in Nuevo Mexico, uh, which is connected definitely to Mexico, to Mesoamerica.
2:39
SPEAKER_02: But before we move on, you know, there's an old saying from the central part of Spain, really hot part of uh La Mancha and Castilla, it says something like Nueve Mesas de Invierno, tres meses de infierno.
2:56
SPEAKER_02: So there's some weather that might kind of apply to New Mexico or at least parts of New Mexico for sure.
3:02
SPEAKER_04: Well, when I was in Belize, the Maya guys on my crew, because it was in the middle of summer while we were there.
3:09
SPEAKER_04: Um, they said, uh well, we call this the punishing time.
3:13
SPEAKER_04: Wow.
3:14
SPEAKER_04: The punishing time because it was so hot, and it was like 95% humidity.
3:21
SPEAKER_04: Oh, you can't breathe there.
3:23
SPEAKER_04: Yeah, it's it was rough, it was rough, but beautifully people live there.
3:27
SPEAKER_05: Seriously, I know.
3:29
SPEAKER_05: I mean, it's bad enough here in Texas, but I can't imagine 95% humidity.
3:34
SPEAKER_05: Wow, so something else.
3:37
SPEAKER_02: Come to New Mexico, we have zero percent humidity all the time.
3:44
SPEAKER_04: Like we could have one percent humidity, and people start freaking out.
3:47
SPEAKER_04: Like, oh, what is that?
3:49
SPEAKER_01: Cancel school, cancel work, yeah.
3:52
SPEAKER_05: Start choking up, I can't breathe.
3:56
SPEAKER_04: So, yeah, yeah, yeah.
3:58
SPEAKER_04: We're gonna talk uh brujeria, and it was a few years ago, I don't remember, was it before COVID or well, you know, what we call before COVID or after COVID.
4:10
SPEAKER_04: Um, my wife and I went and saw you give a talk on brujeria in New Mexico, and it was really fascinating stuff, and it was like standing room only.
4:24
SPEAKER_04: So it was.
4:24
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, that was at Corrales, the old San Isidro Church.
4:28
SPEAKER_02: That was a couple years ago.
4:29
SPEAKER_02: Um, and we had uh 150 people jammed into the little church there, and another 150 who stayed outside of the church just to listen, which I thought was really cool.
4:41
SPEAKER_02: I think it's a subject that resonates with people, and it's not just a Halloween thing either, I don't think.
4:47
SPEAKER_02: I think it's a universal thing, this idea of uh people, women, but also men who have um influence over things that we need help with.
5:03
SPEAKER_02: And sometimes the church or the government uh uh doesn't do what we want them to do or they don't help.
5:10
SPEAKER_02: So um people go to um saludadoras, entenderas, curanderas, people who help, who who help us with our health, our not just our physical health, but our spiritual health.
5:26
SPEAKER_02: And in New Mexico, just like in Manhattan and all over uh Latin America, there's this blending of all of these ideas about spirit, about religion, theology, good and bad, uh, evil, benevolence.
5:45
SPEAKER_02: And from Spain, we get witch tales and sorcery, the European side of things, but also in Spain you get Jewish stories of uh witches, and you get Muslim stories, and they're all blending over there.
5:59
SPEAKER_02: They come over here first to Mexico and they encounter Mesoamerican, Aztec, and Tlazcalan and Cholulan, and all those diverse Mexican native peoples and cultures who have their own stories, their own cosmic vision and spirituality.
6:19
SPEAKER_02: And they blend in the 1500s, and then they're brought by colonists in the late 1500s to Nuevo Mexico, where they're already Pueblo people with their own stories of good spirits and bad spirits and good uh shaman, but also witches.
6:39
SPEAKER_02: And it all blends with Apache, Navajo, Comanche.
6:43
SPEAKER_02: Do you see where I'm going?
6:45
SPEAKER_02: Absolutely.
6:50
SPEAKER_02: It's in our bloodlines, it's in our language and our foods, our cultural expressions, our artistic expressions, but also in our witch beliefs.
7:02
SPEAKER_02: And it all begins to come together in the early 1600s when a Mexican-Indian woman, Maria Zamora, comes to New Mexico as a colonist.
7:14
SPEAKER_02: And she's the wife of a Spaniard, Bartolome Montoya.
7:17
SPEAKER_02: And around 1607, she's accused of brujería for having to try to kill her daughter's husband, giving her a powder to give him.
7:28
SPEAKER_02: And it's amazing when you hear uh what she was doing, you read the documents.
7:33
SPEAKER_02: We have these original documents which are rich in Mexican cultural, ethnic history, but also Spanish colonial with the stories of witches and incantations and hearing knockings on the wall and this the appearance of a strange animal, and Maria supposedly rode her.
7:56
SPEAKER_02: She also supposedly abused Peyote.
7:59
SPEAKER_02: So there's also that that um uh idea of drugs, natural drugs, which are used for in spiritual rituals amongst uh Mexican Indians and different groups.
8:13
SPEAKER_02: Well, that is here in New Mexico in the early 1600s.
8:17
SPEAKER_02: Imagine that.
8:18
SPEAKER_02: Isn't that fascinating?
8:19
SPEAKER_04: It's wild, and that's one of my part of our heritage.
8:22
SPEAKER_04: Absolutely, and and and to touch on that, you know, one of my favorite parts of the story is that she is, you know, when you look at these documents, um, it says that she was born in uh San Sebastian, uh, which is the name that the Spaniards gave to the barrio of Atacualco in Tenochtitlan.
8:42
SPEAKER_04: So she was born in Tenochtitlan and brought, you know, she married um Montoya, and just both of these people are like common ancestors to so many exactly like she's I was gonna say that yeah, yeah, she's my you know, I forget how far back great grandmother, and she's even my wife's uh our great back grandmother.
9:10
SPEAKER_04: And so when I told our daughters, like, you know, your ancestor she got accused of because she was a payotera, and they were like, hell yeah.
9:20
SPEAKER_02: Well, you know, first to your point, and I was gonna make the point, but thank you for making it for me.
9:25
SPEAKER_02: Muchas gracias, senor.
9:27
SPEAKER_02: Lo apprecio mucho.
9:29
SPEAKER_02: Mira, we're she Bartolome Montoya is a Spaniard, he's a common ancestor, and a lot of people just emphasize that.
9:37
SPEAKER_02: You know, he is our ancestor, so is María Zamora, a Mexican Indian, and we know she's mexicana because their children are all listed as mestizos.
9:48
SPEAKER_02: They're mestizos, they're some of the first new Mexicans, and out of the gate, we have Mexican ancestry and Mexican culture, Mesoamerican, Native Mexican.
10:00
SPEAKER_02: Um, a lot of people will argue.
10:02
SPEAKER_02: I've heard people argue with me saying, oh, but we're only part of Mexico from 1821 to 1846, and so we aren't very Mexican.
10:10
SPEAKER_02: It's like, not true at all.
10:12
SPEAKER_02: 20 years later, Beatriz de Los Angeles and her daughter Juana are also accused, and Beatriz is a Mexican-Indian woman, which means she has a similar background.
10:24
SPEAKER_02: And uh, they both learned these things from their uh Native American, Mexican, Indian mothers and grandmothers, and they're really operating uh within a Spanish system, but it's not a purely Spanish system.
10:42
SPEAKER_02: We have to really look close and see they're doing their own thing, and people are coming to them for help and assistance.
10:50
SPEAKER_02: Um, they're accused of brujeria, they're accused of hechicería, sorcery, and they might have been doing these things, or it might have just been native religious expressions that were filtered through Spanish Catholic perspectives.
11:07
SPEAKER_02: So we have to be open to looking at all of these things, but they're also common ancestors.
11:12
SPEAKER_02: So that first colony in the early 1600s, we have already a lot of Mexican Indian in us starting right at the beginning.
11:23
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, right out the gate.
11:25
unknown: Yeah.
11:26
SPEAKER_05: If I may add um to what you were just saying about how people um want to push back on the notion that these uh that there's not that much Mexican influence in in the Southwest or specifically New Mexico, right?
11:39
SPEAKER_05: And I think the reason why they say that is because well, there's two reasons.
11:42
SPEAKER_05: First of all, they don't understand that the Mexican identity is not just the national identity, that it's originally the Mexican identity referred to namely people who were called Aztecs or Tlascalan people, people from Tenochtitlan and surrounding areas, and those people, those people uh were described as speaking uh Mexican language, right?
12:02
SPEAKER_05: Which was Nahuatl, that's what they called it.
12:04
SPEAKER_05: And so when we talk about Mexican culture and Mexican ideas and Mexican uh ways, like life ways and things like that, we're referring to that part of it, and people don't know that, and so they mistakenly conflate the the term Mexican with the current national identity, which is similar to saying I'm an American from the United States, you know, that's national identity, and the same thing in Mexico, there's a national identity for people who are born there, and they don't have to necessarily be people who are indigenous or who descend from indigenous people, they could be people who immigrated to Mexico.
12:38
SPEAKER_05: There's a lot of European immigration in Mexico, especially like in Mexico City and a lot of the major cities that people don't realize that not just the United States has received a lot of European immigrants over the years, especially in the 20th century, but Mexico has as well, right?
12:52
SPEAKER_05: I mean, look at the current president, uh the new president of Mexico.
12:56
SPEAKER_05: She's uh um a Mexican woman of Jewish ancestry, right?
13:00
SPEAKER_05: So so there's a misconception as to these terms, and we've been kind of like talking about this for many years, but I think I think it's it's uh it's one of those things that people just don't really understand the difference between an ethnic identity and a national identity, right?
13:15
SPEAKER_05: And that's kind of what you're getting at, right?
13:16
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I mean look, Plácido Domingo, he identifies as Mexican, but his pat his parents were from Spain.
13:23
SPEAKER_02: And I believe he might have even been born in Spain, but he embraces the mariachi tradition, he embraces his mexicanismo.
13:31
SPEAKER_02: Uh look at Salma Hayek, I think she's part uh Lebanese, uh Middle Eastern, but she's Mexicana.
13:38
SPEAKER_02: Um, and you know, it goes the other direction.
13:40
SPEAKER_02: You know, I look at our New Mexico, Nuevo Mexicano culture as a regional Mexican culture.
13:47
SPEAKER_02: That's how I look at it.
13:49
SPEAKER_02: Um, of course, there's Spanish elements, just like there are in Mexico or Central America and South America, the Philippines and the Caribbean.
13:58
SPEAKER_02: But it's not just Spanish.
14:01
SPEAKER_02: There's heavy elements, and not just from the Valley of Mexico, but even from Sonora and Chihuahua and those native groups of northern Mexico that are also part of our our uh caldo, our caldito of of DNA and bloodlines and culture.
14:22
SPEAKER_02: And so uh that's how I look at it.
14:24
SPEAKER_02: So when I look at these stories of Echiceria, you can find a lot of this in Mexico.
14:31
SPEAKER_02: You can find all these stories of Echisería and Brujeria, you know, La Llorona is a universal story, it's not uh Uro Nuevo Mexicano.
14:39
SPEAKER_02: Uh that story goes to Mexico, probably all over the Spanish-speaking world.
14:44
SPEAKER_02: And you know, this idea of brujas, you know, my grandma believed in brujas.
14:52
SPEAKER_02: She was from Mora, and she said there were many brujas in Mora.
14:55
SPEAKER_02: And there may have been.
14:57
SPEAKER_02: I I'm I'm open to because my grandma was an intelligent person.
15:01
SPEAKER_02: She was also an angel.
15:02
SPEAKER_02: But I also wonder if she also meant curanderas, you know, um, who sometimes the the the fra the word kind of took a twist from curandera to bruja, sometimes when people might have got scared of somebody, or the idea that, well, they're doing good with their curanderismo, but they also seem to know how to cure hexes and curses.
15:26
SPEAKER_02: So maybe they know a little bit about that side of uh the spirit world as well.
15:33
SPEAKER_02: So in these stories, you you always see the native peoples of Mexico and New Mexico or the blacks, they're the scapegoats, they're the culprits of the bad things happening in a community.
15:49
SPEAKER_02: Uh typically they're blamed for these things.
15:52
SPEAKER_02: In the 1760s in New Mexico, at Abiku, where the Genizaros were, those are the children of warfare.
16:00
SPEAKER_02: Um they were Comanche, Ute, Caiwa, Apache, Hopi, all those different native plains groups that went to war uh with the pueblos and the Spanish, and vice versa.
16:11
SPEAKER_02: Everybody was doing it.
16:13
SPEAKER_02: But these genizaros are other, they are different.
16:17
SPEAKER_02: They aren't quite Catholic, they're not quite Hispanicized.
16:22
SPEAKER_02: They're like immigrants coming into the United States now who get scapegoated for things uh happening in our country.
16:30
SPEAKER_02: And so um, there are accusations of hechicería, that there are hechiceros, there are men and women in the 1760s, and it's a Catholic priest who's making most of the accusations.
16:42
SPEAKER_02: But we have this tradition here, and it's not from one culture, it's from all the different cultures, and you definitely see some native cultural attributes, attributes being turned into witchcraft and sorcery um by some of the officials, the both Catholic and uh civil Spanish officials in New Mexico in the colonial period.
17:11
SPEAKER_05: Well, that was a tradition among among especially the missionaries.
17:15
SPEAKER_05: Like uh I studied the missionaries uh here in Texas and what they did with the uh the Coabutecan people and and others in in South Texas and and northern Mexico, and one of the things that they would do is uh immediately demonize everything, right?
17:28
SPEAKER_05: And and anything that that has to do with especially like you going back to what you were saying about the peyote, you know, the the the ritual use, the sacrament that's uh uh um ceremonial tradition, and one of the the few documents that we have from the period of the early colonial period here in Texas comes from a missionary who was translating the language, one of the Quahutechan di uh uh dialects, and and and he was creating a glossary and and sort of a a uh um uh handbook that he could use to communicate with Quabaltecan peoples and the other missionaries after him he could could use.
18:04
SPEAKER_05: And some of the things that they would ask is uh are uh uh in Spanish, right?
18:08
SPEAKER_05: They would ask him, uh, do you consume the the peyote?
18:12
SPEAKER_05: Do you eat human flesh, right?
18:14
SPEAKER_05: Like immediately jumps from peyote to human flesh.
18:17
SPEAKER_05: Are you a cannibal?
18:18
SPEAKER_05: Are you are you a a brujo, a bruja, a witch?
18:21
SPEAKER_05: So immediately, and and so the the ceremony that Coabotecan peoples uh practice back then, and it's stuck, and and you can you still hear people uh who follow the tradition who um refer to it as a mit.
18:34
SPEAKER_05: And the mitote we know is something that goes back to Central Mexico, to the danzas, mitotilisti.
18:39
SPEAKER_05: It means uh uh um uh some kind of celebration that involves dancing, singing.
18:44
SPEAKER_05: And so nowadays, when you talk to two very traditional Coalitic peoples, they say, Yeah, we're gonna have a mitote this weekend.
18:50
SPEAKER_05: And they're not talking about danza azteca or or anything else, they're talking about having a medicine meeting, you know, ceremony and the ceremony.
18:57
SPEAKER_05: And so immediately, like these connections, you can see how the way that they were doing it in Texas is the same kind of pattern that they're they're doing in in Nuevo Mexico and California.
19:06
SPEAKER_05: I'm not so familiar with it, uh, but I'm sure it was probably very, very similar.
21:01
SPEAKER_02: Well, that's interesting.
21:02
SPEAKER_02: This whole uh coming together and clash of religious expressions is what we're also seeing here.
21:10
SPEAKER_02: Look, the the religious orders of the Catholic Church that came to Mexico in the 1500s were the Franciscans.
21:17
SPEAKER_02: Uh later on, there were Augustinians, Dominicans, and then Jesuits, of course.
21:22
SPEAKER_02: But the ones that came to New Mexico were Franciscans.
21:25
SPEAKER_02: The Franciscans looked at Native American religions as uh demonic, not the people, but that the people in the grip of some demonic spirit that the that needed to be uh expelled and the people needed to be um saved, they needed to be liberated from this.
21:43
SPEAKER_02: Whereas the Dominicans would look at the native religions in Mexico or South America and say, these are not uh demonic, they're just in error, like they're like Adam and Eve expelled from the Garden of Eden.
21:56
SPEAKER_02: So they would do that.
21:58
SPEAKER_02: So when the Franciscans first came to New Mexico, they were obviously um alarmed and shaken up when they saw the Pueblo uh religious practices and dances and these things.
22:11
SPEAKER_02: And so they uh did went to great efforts to try to stop them.
22:16
SPEAKER_02: Um but think about this from the 1600s to the 1800s to the mid-1800s, think about the blending of spiritual expressions in New Mexico and cultural uh mixing going on in all directions.
22:33
SPEAKER_02: By the time uh uh Jean-Baptiste Lamy comes as the first bishop of New Mexico in 1850, he looks at us Hispanics.
22:41
SPEAKER_02: He doesn't look at us novomexicanos and say, wow, this is amazing, pure great Catholicism.
22:49
SPEAKER_02: He thinks we have been co-opted by Native American groups and that we need to be uh re-Catholicized.
23:00
SPEAKER_02: So he brings in the Christian brothers, the sisters of Loreto, and the Jesuits, because he looks at our penitentes, he looks at our santos, and he looks at it and says, this is not Christianity, this is not Catholicism, this is not healthy Catholicism.
23:16
SPEAKER_02: So things don't necessarily repeat themselves in history, but uh I can't remember who said it, but they say history doesn't repeat itself, it rhymes.
23:25
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, that's one of my favorite quotes.
23:27
SPEAKER_05: I think that's Clemens who said that.
23:29
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and you can you see that happening here in New Mexico.
23:34
SPEAKER_02: 300 years later, all of a sudden, our Nuevo Mexicano culture, which is a mestizo culture, is all of a sudden being looked at as Native American.
23:46
SPEAKER_02: And so were we, by the way.
23:48
SPEAKER_02: Um, all this.
23:50
SPEAKER_02: Stuff going on in the 1800s and 1860s with civil war battles.
23:55
SPEAKER_02: We were uh looked at for what we were.
23:57
SPEAKER_02: Mexicanos, Mexicans were described as such in the documents.
24:02
SPEAKER_02: We weren't called Spanish or Hispano or anything.
24:06
SPEAKER_02: We were called Mexicans.
24:07
SPEAKER_02: That's what we were.
24:09
SPEAKER_02: So um that, and we were looked down on, by the way, and considered unworthy of statehood.
24:16
SPEAKER_02: Just like a hundred years later, uh, we were looked down on, but we were okay to send to war to fight for the country, you know, just like uh Native Americans who had it even worse off.
24:28
SPEAKER_04: You had mentioned earlier Beatriz de Los Angeles, right?
24:32
SPEAKER_04: Yes.
24:33
SPEAKER_04: And um Juana de la Cruz.
24:35
SPEAKER_04: Can you uh elaborate a little bit on their stories?
24:39
SPEAKER_02: According to the documents, which were taken, written down by the Spanish officials, the Spanish priests and Spanish officials, Beatriz was a uh India Mexicana who who had experimented on two Indians and killed them with her magic.
24:56
SPEAKER_02: Um she was accused of uh having an affair with um with a man, a local man, and poisoning him and killing him.
25:07
SPEAKER_02: And then her daughter, Juana, was also accused of doing the same thing, having an affair with, I think his name was Hernán Marquez Zambrano, that they had in both situations, they had had arguments with the men who were their lovers, and then the men got violent with them, so the women supposedly bewitched them and killed them.
25:28
SPEAKER_02: Um, it's similar to Maria Zamora 20 years earlier, and and in these cases, there's also this idea of them creating potions that would uh control love in men, make them irresistible and be able to control them so that they couldn't be with any other woman.
25:46
SPEAKER_02: So you have these elements going on too.
25:50
SPEAKER_02: And again, you you just have this idea of um where are they getting this magic they're practicing or bad medicine or whatever it is?
26:01
SPEAKER_02: Is it is it in fact witchcraft?
26:04
SPEAKER_02: Is it sorcery?
26:06
SPEAKER_02: Is it cultural expression?
26:08
SPEAKER_02: Is it something that the uh Catholic priest doesn't understand?
26:13
SPEAKER_02: Um we have to keep open minds about these things.
26:17
SPEAKER_02: I know as a historian, um, it's not easy because sometimes we want clear-cut answers, but um, I'm fascinated at the different perspectives.
26:27
SPEAKER_02: I wish we could talk to Beatriz and her daughter Juana.
26:31
SPEAKER_02: By the way, Beatriz also married a Spaniard, Juan de la Cruz, who is a Catalan from the area now Barcelona, that part of Spain.
26:40
SPEAKER_02: Uh, and they're also common ancestors to a lot of Nuevo Mexicanos.
26:45
SPEAKER_02: So this goes back.
26:48
SPEAKER_02: This goes back, and this mixing of religious expression and spiritual um ideals, they're they're coming together through generations and generation and generation and coming into contact with other native peoples.
27:05
SPEAKER_02: So it's there, it's with us, it's in us.
27:09
SPEAKER_04: Well, and when you start, because you were you were talking about how, you know, maybe it was the priest didn't understand what they were doing, maybe it was they were just using herbs for medicine.
27:19
SPEAKER_04: But you also mentioned that, you know, they had been accused of having affairs with cement.
27:25
SPEAKER_04: So when you start mixing in that stuff too, right?
27:27
SPEAKER_04: You start mixing in uh love and affairs and relationships.
27:32
SPEAKER_04: And, you know, if you're a a guy who gets busted uh with this other woman, maybe you say, Oh, I was bewitched, you know, she she uh she cast a spell on me.
27:43
SPEAKER_04: And so women take the brunt of it that way from these uh cheating men who don't want to take responsibility for their actions.
27:51
SPEAKER_02: Very common, very common.
27:53
SPEAKER_02: Uh, one case from the 1750s was Barbara Garcia.
27:58
SPEAKER_02: She is accused of using love magic, she's having an affair with the married man.
28:02
SPEAKER_02: He's not named in the document.
28:05
SPEAKER_02: We don't know who he is, but uh, she's accused.
28:09
SPEAKER_02: Um, and it's interesting because Barbara Garcia, uh, later on, about 20 years later, uh, a young woman named Maria Margarita Garcia, daughter of Barbara Garcia, natural daughter, likely uh the offspring of this love affair, um, married my dad's ancestor, Pedro Antonio Gallegos, uh, near uh San Felipe.
28:32
SPEAKER_02: So, you know, I have that in my ancestor right here in New Mexico, but you're absolutely right.
28:37
SPEAKER_02: And, you know, I have a feeling our ancestors, all of them, tended to be a bit superstitious too.
28:43
SPEAKER_02: There's a lot of gossip, to your point.
28:46
SPEAKER_02: Uh the priests report our ancestors being very gossipy, uh, using these accusations as uh just like you throw rocks at someone, uh just uh and there are affairs going on.
28:58
SPEAKER_02: These are human, our ancestors were human.
29:00
SPEAKER_02: Um, not looking down on them, uh, but you know, um they're human just like we're human today.
29:07
SPEAKER_02: And um, they were doing things like having affairs, being attracted, getting caught, um, and then uh the spouse uh getting angry, and maybe the spouse found out about an affair and ran and told the priest that the woman her husband was having an affair with was a witch.
29:24
SPEAKER_02: That happened too.
29:26
SPEAKER_02: So it's a tool, just like you know, you could tie someone up for a year or two if you accuse them of being a Judaizante, a secret Jew.
29:34
SPEAKER_02: Uh they they would have to uh be uh investigated, all of their goods confiscated, sent to uh Mexico City to face the holy office of the La Inquisición, the Inquisition.
29:46
SPEAKER_02: So that's part of what's going on as well.
29:49
SPEAKER_02: And it's not easy to separate it all out.
29:52
SPEAKER_04: Beatrice's daughter, Juana de la Cruz.
29:56
SPEAKER_04: Uh her story was really interesting.
29:58
SPEAKER_04: I I I pulled up a document.
30:00
SPEAKER_04: Can you can you talk a little bit about her?
30:02
SPEAKER_04: Because there's one one part of her story that I found really fascinating.
30:07
SPEAKER_02: Well, she was she eventually married Juan uh Bernal uh Griego, I believe.
30:14
SPEAKER_02: Uh it's interesting.
30:16
SPEAKER_02: These women were married.
30:17
SPEAKER_02: It's hard to tell whether they were having their affairs when they were married while they were married or if it was before.
30:23
SPEAKER_02: But um the uh by the way, that's interesting.
30:26
SPEAKER_02: The griego family uh were also uh European and mixed Mexican Indian.
30:33
SPEAKER_02: Uh Juan Griego was a Greek who came with the Oneate expedition, and his wife, Pascuala Bernal, was Mexicana, Mexica, India Mexicana from the Valley of Mexico or Zacatecas, that area.
30:48
SPEAKER_04: Um, but so you have all and Bernalillo, just to interrupt you real quick, Bernalio is named after her.
30:55
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, so you have all these people, again, common ancestors in my family, in everyone's family who are Nuevo Mexicano, and all of this uh intrigue is going on.
31:08
SPEAKER_02: Uh, it's almost like a telenovela, you know, all these, all this uh, you know, uh forget witchcraft and sorcery.
31:16
SPEAKER_02: We should just write a story about the love lives of early Nuevo Mexicanos because it's quite fascinating.
31:23
SPEAKER_02: But you know, what I get out of it is just how human our ancestors were.
31:27
SPEAKER_02: You know, I think sometimes uh it's easy to put them all in armor, uh riding horses, wearing royal regalia and clothing, and it's like they're just human beings living their lives, trying their best uh in uh in uh situations and using whatever tools they have at their disposal, cultural and otherwise.
31:49
SPEAKER_02: I mean, aren't our Mexican Indian ancestors didn't stop being Mexican Indian just because they married a Spanish guy?
31:57
SPEAKER_04: Yeah, well, in a lot of these documents, they're described as uh like bien españolizadas, right?
32:04
SPEAKER_04: Like that's supposed to be the you know, the upgrade.
32:08
SPEAKER_04: Like she's a good version.
32:10
SPEAKER_02: Well, well, you know, yeah, the India Ladina.
32:13
SPEAKER_02: Um, you know, you know, and that just meant that they were smart, they were able to really master the Spanish language.
32:21
SPEAKER_02: But let's be clear, or gang the system, right?
32:24
SPEAKER_02: They spoke, yeah, but they spoke it with an accent.
32:27
SPEAKER_02: See, that's another thing.
32:28
SPEAKER_02: They spoke it with their Mexican Indian language accent, and they're passing the culture down to their mestizo kids, so their kids are learning to speak Spanish more like mom than like dad, who's always away.
32:41
SPEAKER_02: Dad's always away fighting wars, uh uh abusing other native peoples, having affairs, having having affairs with other women or brujas in the next town over.
32:52
SPEAKER_02: Who knows?
32:53
SPEAKER_02: But you know, um, that's why I tell people when you hear our Nuevo Mexicano Spanish, especially in the norte, it is not 16th century Castilian.
33:04
SPEAKER_02: It has some words like from that period, but you're hearing Puebloan people speak it, you're hearing uh Nahua speakers speak it.
34:34
SPEAKER_02: There, they have their accents in there, and the Genizaros, their accent is in there, and it's passed down on and on.
34:42
SPEAKER_02: And and even an Espanol from Spain coming to New Mexico in the 1700s is interacting with these people, and he might have kids with a local woman, and their kids are all of a sudden speaking the same way.
34:54
SPEAKER_02: Do you get what I'm saying?
34:56
SPEAKER_02: It all comes down to us.
34:58
SPEAKER_05: You have um do you do you have any books maybe that you could suggest, recommend to to our listeners that talk about the brujas and or maybe the overlap between brujeria and and love affairs, for instance, something that that our audience can sink into for this coming season?
35:16
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, um there's a book by uh Rick Hendricks and Malcolm Ebrach called The Witches of AbbeQ.
35:23
SPEAKER_02: I I had written a master's thesis based on the Abacu, which is in 1997, uh which is at UNM.
35:32
SPEAKER_02: It's the uh Fray Juan José Toledo and the Devil in Spanish New Mexico.
35:38
SPEAKER_02: And then the uh Witches of Abbecu book came out a few years later.
35:42
SPEAKER_02: Uh Mark Simmons has a nice little book that talks about a lot of this called Um, I think it's Witchcraft in the Southwest.
35:51
SPEAKER_02: Um, and these are all good books on the subject.
35:55
SPEAKER_02: If you want to expand into Mexico, there are really fascinating books about the Inquisición, the Inquisition that talks about uh the different uh things native peoples were doing uh that the uh Catholic Church looked at as possibly heretical.
36:14
SPEAKER_02: So that's Inquisition documents are actually fantastic sources of social and ethnic history.
36:22
SPEAKER_05: Right.
36:23
SPEAKER_05: And so I'm I'm asking this because um um it's it's apparently there's a book that was written not that long ago um that talks about so-called um folklore in New Mexico, and and then one of the stories in that book, and maybe Curly can see more about this, but there's a supposedly a reference to the chupacabras going back to the 1700s or it was the 1600s?
36:47
SPEAKER_05: I'm not sure.
36:47
SPEAKER_05: Uh do you know anything about that?
36:49
SPEAKER_02: I don't I don't I don't know about that book, but that would be interesting to find out about the the chupacabra.
36:55
SPEAKER_02: I I didn't hear about that till I was an adult.
36:58
SPEAKER_02: I heard about El Sapo in Mora, the man who would supposedly turn himself into a toad.
37:04
SPEAKER_02: That was the 1940s, it made it into the Taos news newspapers.
37:09
SPEAKER_02: Um, this shape shifting, this idea of shape shifting.
37:12
SPEAKER_02: And you know, I heard about brujas.
37:14
SPEAKER_02: My dad used to tell me and my sister Debbie when we were kids, driving up towards Abiq, he'd say, Look, kids, this is a town of brujas, you know.
37:22
SPEAKER_02: So we were always hearing about this.
37:25
SPEAKER_02: Of course, we heard about La Llorona, who was not a bruja, but uh a woman done wrong, um, and snaps.
37:32
SPEAKER_02: So uh, you know, um we we we've we grow up hearing these things, and um, you know, um Curly, Curly, you had something you I've I don't want to step on what you were saying.
37:44
SPEAKER_02: You had something you wanted to point out about Beatrice de los Angeles, no, um Juana de la Cruz, her sister.
37:50
SPEAKER_02: Um, Juana de la daughter, the daughter.
37:53
SPEAKER_04: Yeah, her daughter, her daughter, not her sister.
37:56
SPEAKER_04: Um, yeah.
37:57
SPEAKER_04: So I found this document uh from the Cebola Project.
38:01
SPEAKER_04: And uh people don't know the Cebola Project is like this treasure trove of historic documents, and you could find like they scan the original documents, and then somebody will do a paleography, and then oftentimes there's a translation, and whoever was behind it, there they do really, really good work.
38:21
SPEAKER_04: It's fantastic, it is, it's great.
38:23
SPEAKER_04: So there's this uh this story about Juana de la Cruz that I just wanted to get your your insight or reaction to because I thought it was great.
38:33
SPEAKER_04: Uh, it says the case of Juana de la Cruz, according to the account of Ana de Bostillos, reporting hearsay from Catalina Bernal.
38:42
SPEAKER_04: So it's already like a game of uh telephone.
38:45
SPEAKER_04: Awesome! Somebody heard this and told me this.
38:48
SPEAKER_04: It says uh late one night, Juana, in bed with her sister-in-law Catalina, as her companion slept, went off to spy on her lover, whom she suspected of being unfaithful.
39:01
SPEAKER_04: When she returned, her bedmate awakened and asked where she had been.
39:06
SPEAKER_04: She explained that she had flown mounted on an egg to La Cañada, six leagues distant, only to find her paramour sleeping innocently by himself.
39:19
SPEAKER_04: And I I'd never heard that before, flying on an egg.
39:23
SPEAKER_04: What is it?
39:24
SPEAKER_02: An egg.
39:25
SPEAKER_02: An egg, yeah.
39:26
SPEAKER_02: I mean, I I don't know how they did it or how that looked.
39:30
SPEAKER_02: I don't know if they shrunk and got on an egg.
39:34
SPEAKER_02: I don't know.
39:34
SPEAKER_02: I have no idea.
39:35
SPEAKER_02: But you know, in the 1760s abbecue case, um, during uh there were exorcisms performed by the priest on five young maidens of the community or of that area.
39:47
SPEAKER_02: And during one of the exorcisms, one of the young ladies, or the spirit in hers supposedly accused about 178 people of being witches from New Mexico all the way down to Sonora.
40:00
SPEAKER_02: And they're listed, they're described.
40:02
SPEAKER_02: It's a fascinating document.
40:04
SPEAKER_02: Um, I I put that in my thesis, but what's interesting is a couple of the ladies, the women, are accused of being able to fly in one night to Mexico City and back on an egg.
40:19
SPEAKER_05: Wow.
40:20
SPEAKER_05: So do do the documents say uh huevo in Spanish?
40:24
SPEAKER_05: Is it is it does it say huevo or this one says caballera and un huevo?
40:29
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, yeah.
40:31
SPEAKER_05: Did the term huevo have a different meaning back then?
40:33
SPEAKER_05: That we don't know.
40:34
SPEAKER_02: Well, yeah, but we can't say it on this radio show, but that would look even weirder, okay?
40:43
SPEAKER_05: Um yeah, no, I'm I'm trying to, I'm trying to, is that like a euphemism for something?
40:48
SPEAKER_05: Like I'm I'm thinking that has to be some kind of like um maybe I think euphemism from the time that meant something that people understood when they heard that term, like they they knew what that meant.
40:58
SPEAKER_05: I mean, I don't know, it just seems kind of strange.
41:00
SPEAKER_02: Well, the well, it it's supposed to be, I think.
41:03
SPEAKER_02: I think it's supposed to be strange.
41:05
SPEAKER_02: I think it's supposed to kind of mess with your thought processes.
41:09
SPEAKER_02: Um, these folks knew what they were doing, you know.
41:12
SPEAKER_02: And I I I suspect a deeper dive into witch beliefs and witch tales.
41:19
SPEAKER_02: Perhaps going back to Spain might reveal something about that, Rubén.
41:24
SPEAKER_02: It might be uh some of these descriptions are clearly Spanish witchcraft uh tales and superstition brought by colonists, then co-opted by uh native peoples.
41:39
SPEAKER_02: Maria Zamora in 1607, during her testimony, said, I learned a lot of this from Mexican Indians in the Valley of Mexico.
41:50
SPEAKER_02: So who knows what the roots are, but that is a very good question.
41:54
SPEAKER_02: I have no idea.
41:55
SPEAKER_02: So what I've heard too is it's not it wasn't necessarily on the egg, it was in the egg.
42:01
SPEAKER_04: Yeah, yeah.
42:02
SPEAKER_02: So that begs even a bigger question how there's definitely some weird spiritual thing going on there.
42:11
SPEAKER_02: We don't know.
42:12
SPEAKER_05: Huh.
42:13
SPEAKER_02: And um it could have even been some form of to your point about a metaphor or a euphemism, it could have been that they went um by-located, maybe using an egg somehow.
42:28
SPEAKER_02: I don't know how.
42:29
SPEAKER_02: I don't want to know, frankly, but you know, that they bi-located, maybe somehow they went spiritually to that place wherever, and then came back.
42:39
SPEAKER_02: Who knows?
42:40
SPEAKER_05: Or maybe, or maybe you're right, maybe it was in their mind the way that they were able to teleport is in some kind of um craft that's shaped like an egg.
42:50
SPEAKER_05: Maybe that's what that was meant by that.
42:52
SPEAKER_04: Well, let me read you the exact so here's what it says it says, uh Le pre pregunto la dicha Catalina Vernal, pues como fuiste, and then she responds, Fui in un huevo.
43:05
SPEAKER_04: There you go.
43:08
SPEAKER_02: There you go.
43:09
SPEAKER_02: I think it's pretty clear, you know.
43:12
SPEAKER_02: But we also know that sometimes Peyote was part of these rituals.
43:18
SPEAKER_02: Um, um, it could have been uh uh in uh induced um imaginary event, it could have been a spiritual thing that was uh helped along with Peyote, quien sabe, quien sabe.
43:33
SPEAKER_02: But um we do know that this is what the testimony says throughout the generations these stories are told.
43:40
SPEAKER_02: But you know, in the Abacu case from the 1760s, there's also testimony that some of the so-called echiceros, echiceras, sorcerers would take their rosaries off and hang them on a bush or a tree.
43:55
SPEAKER_02: That was a sign for the priest of rejecting Christianity, and then they would fly, they'd turn into birds and fly to El Pedernal, that big mountain outside of Abakuew, the flat one that George O'Keefe painted a bunch of times.
44:11
SPEAKER_02: Well, who knows?
44:13
SPEAKER_02: There might have been some peot uh being used in native rituals right then and there.
44:20
SPEAKER_02: That might have been let's take these rosaries off and do our thing, let's do our religion.
44:26
SPEAKER_02: And then when they said what they did, the priest said, uh brujeria, witchcraft, echiceria, sorcery.
44:36
SPEAKER_02: So I don't know, I I find all of it really fascinating.
44:39
SPEAKER_02: And I think, you know, like um a person who says, I'm gonna only study our history from the Spanish perspective, will say clearly it was witchcraft and demons were involved and demonic possession.
44:54
SPEAKER_02: But if you want to look at it, like I like what you guys do, let's say let's look at it from this other perspective, let's go to the other side and see what they were doing here.
45:04
SPEAKER_02: I mean, sometimes these native folks were being put put upon by Spanish political and religious systems, so this might have been a way of getting power in their community or reasserting themselves, if that makes sense.
45:20
SPEAKER_04: Absolutely.
45:22
SPEAKER_04: Do you know anything about uh the story of Domingo Sombrero and his wife uh Francisca, I think her name?
45:32
SPEAKER_04: That one I don't know about.
45:34
SPEAKER_04: So they were both Indios Mexicanos, and I just found it it was in, you know, through the Cebola project.
45:42
SPEAKER_04: Uh it's a document called an edict of faith proclaimed on March 23rd, 1631, in Santa Fe.
45:51
SPEAKER_04: E elicits formal accusations and confessions of sinful behavior.
45:57
SPEAKER_04: Commissary of the Holy Office.
45:59
SPEAKER_02: I wonder if that was uh Esteban the Fray Esteban de Perea, who was doing it by then.
46:05
SPEAKER_04: Yep, that's exactly who it was.
46:07
SPEAKER_02: Well, I've not seen that, but I'm going to look at it because I'm always interested in these sort of esoteric cultural expressions in our history.
46:18
SPEAKER_04: Yeah, uh, so apparently uh Domingo Sombrero, Indio Mexicano, and I guess I wonder if he was named that because he was a hat maker, or if he just like sombrero, yeah, it's sombrerero, actually.
46:34
SPEAKER_04: Uh he's a hat maker, yeah.
46:37
SPEAKER_04: So uh Mexican Indian hat maker apparently was um it says Abia en hechizado, and so his wife got him some peyote, and together with uh another native, he drank the peote, and so it's like he's admitting all of this, right?
46:57
SPEAKER_04: Because they were brought up uh on questioning, and so he was told, Well, if you drink the peyote, you'll be able to find out who bewitched you.
47:07
SPEAKER_04: Um, but apparently it didn't work, and then somebody Somebody narked on him because he had to, he got in trouble.
47:14
SPEAKER_04: Like all of them got in trouble for for this.
47:17
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, for taking some peote.
47:19
SPEAKER_02: Well, you know what?
47:20
SPEAKER_02: That it sounds like, you know, it sounds like kind of like today, you know, where you're not supposed to take certain drugs, right?
47:29
SPEAKER_02: Well, that's what the Spanish were saying.
47:31
SPEAKER_02: You know, in the mid-1700s, there is a case outside of Isleta Puebla where one of the shaman there in Isleta was accused of being a brujo because uh uh a couple, they were I remember their names were Garcia, they were from like the Pajarito area of southern, what's now the south part of Albuquerque.
47:50
SPEAKER_02: Um, they had an encounter with him, and apparently they fell into a stupor, and it turned out he had dosed them with peyotes.
48:00
SPEAKER_02: Oh damn.
48:01
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
48:02
SPEAKER_05: I find it interesting that the the use of the ritual, well, the ritual use of peyota to a certain extent was being um done over in in New Mexico because it's not.
48:13
SPEAKER_05: I mean, New Mexico, I'm uh I know that native people there use it, but they usually come to Texas to acquire the the medicine because it grows naturally in South Texas and northern Mexico.
48:24
SPEAKER_05: But uh, you know, as as I'm as I you know, someone who comes from that tradition, uh I find it interesting that you also find all these stories going back to the colonial period of the how the use of peyote was being done to to uh engage in these sorts of activities, and it was associated with with brujas and brujeria and brujeria and things like that.
48:45
SPEAKER_05: So I don't know, I just find it curious.
48:46
SPEAKER_02: Well, you know, that's interesting you should say that.
48:48
SPEAKER_02: You know, the Camino Real officially brought people, animals, foods, wine, uh, diseases, but it brought other stuff too, um, either legally or illegally.
49:02
SPEAKER_02: You know, I mean, that's human nature, you know.
49:04
SPEAKER_02: Uh, if you were living in the Spanish realms, the borders were closed, you could not trade with those British people to the east or the French or Native Americans outside of the realm.
49:14
SPEAKER_02: But guess what?
49:15
SPEAKER_05: It happened.
49:16
SPEAKER_02: I know it just was illicit, and you know, so I'm sure Peyote, it shows up in the document, so it's here, so it's get it's finding its way here one way or another.
49:27
SPEAKER_04: Another story, just real briefly, is uh Dona Inez.
49:31
SPEAKER_04: She's a Tano, she's Tano Indian, I believe.
49:35
SPEAKER_04: And that she used her personal charms to arouse a strong passion in a blacksmith, Diego de Moraga.
49:42
SPEAKER_04: Do you do you know anything about that?
49:43
SPEAKER_02: Someone needs to do a uh story.
49:45
SPEAKER_02: Maybe I will, or maybe someone else will on Dona Inez.
49:49
SPEAKER_02: It's interesting, she was a Native American from New Mexico, a Tano Indian woman.
49:54
SPEAKER_02: And um, she's given the designation Dona.
49:57
SPEAKER_02: Dona, that's uh that nowadays people throw it around, Don and Doña, but back then you didn't just get that title.
50:06
SPEAKER_02: You had to be esteemed, you know, or earn it to be given uh that that title.
50:11
SPEAKER_02: Um, but my understanding from what I've read is she was uh an amazing person.
50:18
SPEAKER_02: She was taken during the Castaño de Sosa expedition of 1591, taken south into Nueva Spana, New Spain, and then came back north.
50:32
SPEAKER_02: She eventually was uh she she was the mother of at least one son of Hernan Martín Serrano, who was uh from Zacatecas.
50:42
SPEAKER_02: He's he's the founder of the Martinez family of New Mexico, and so their son Hernan was um mestizo, one of the first New Mexicans, who was part Spanish and part New Mexico Native American, and maybe the mom of the brother of the younger Hernán Luis, who's a very common ancestor, all of us, Luis Martín Serrano.
51:06
SPEAKER_02: But being Native American and obviously Muy Ladina meant she spoke Spanish, she was uh she was versed in the ways of the Spanish, and why not?
51:19
SPEAKER_02: She was living amongst them, um, but obviously she was uh quite intelligent, uh, she could maneuver men, and that made her a perfect candidate to be a bruja, you know, because um, you know, look at even someone like Santa Teresa de Ávila, the great Catholic saint from uh Castilla La Vieja, Spain, she was investigated by the Inquisition.
51:45
SPEAKER_02: She she wrote uh treatises, she wrote books on spirituality.
51:49
SPEAKER_02: Uh, they thought she might be possessed by a demon.
51:52
SPEAKER_02: She was investigated by the Inquisition.
51:55
SPEAKER_02: Why?
51:56
SPEAKER_02: Partly because she was a very strong, independent, intelligent woman.
52:03
SPEAKER_02: You see similar challenges of Sor Juana de la Cruz in Mexico City.
52:10
SPEAKER_02: Um, I think Doña Inez is cut from the same cloth, if that makes sense.
52:17
SPEAKER_02: Um, I'm sure she probably, you know, we we like to in our in our male perspective way of looking at things, we look at someone like uh Dona Inez as well, you know, she was with that guy, she was with that guy, she was with that guy.
52:32
SPEAKER_02: But I think she was uh maneuvering the system, you know, Moraga, Martin Serrano, these were local men, uh soldiers who had a certain amount of uh influence, at least in the Nuevo Mexicano communities, the early, early community, and she was definitely, I think, um, a power broker, at least amongst the local population.
53:01
SPEAKER_04: Absolutely.
53:03
SPEAKER_04: Now, when you when you give these talks on on brujeria, like the audience, because the one I went to, like you said, it was just jam-packed.
53:14
SPEAKER_04: Um, so there's obviously a lot of interest in this, but do you ever get people who show up to push back against you?
53:22
SPEAKER_02: Um, yes.
53:26
SPEAKER_02: Yes.
53:26
SPEAKER_02: Um, one time, interestingly enough, I I used to talk a little bit about uh Navajo and Pueblo and witchcraft beliefs.
53:35
SPEAKER_02: I I backed off from that.
53:37
SPEAKER_02: Uh, one time I had a woman from one of the pueblos show up and really lay into me saying, You're you shouldn't be talking about our beliefs and you shouldn't be talking about uh our who was who was and wasn't a witch.
53:52
SPEAKER_02: And I I respect that.
53:53
SPEAKER_02: I think uh the native communities, if they want to talk about that, should talk about it.
53:58
SPEAKER_02: And then on the other side, I was gonna give a talk at one in one community, and a uh um one of the big uh evangelical churches, uh Christian churches, I guess, uh were a little concerned that I might be teaching people how to be Bukhas, how to be witches.
54:19
SPEAKER_02: And I I I I assured them I'm not teaching anybody how to be anything.
54:23
SPEAKER_05: You should have owned it.
54:25
SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
54:25
SPEAKER_05: You should have said, yeah, that's one of my hats that I wear.
54:28
SPEAKER_05: I wear uh a wizard hat.
54:32
SPEAKER_05: Gandalf the Brown.
54:33
SPEAKER_05: The official, the official, the official uh wizard of New Nova Mexico.
54:39
SPEAKER_02: Well, you know, so it it's a topic that I'm fascinated by because I grew up hearing that.
54:46
SPEAKER_02: It's an ambiente that is very common in New Mexico, and it's not just New Mexico.
54:52
SPEAKER_02: That's what I try to point out.
54:53
SPEAKER_02: It's it's a you can find these sort of ideas in Appalachia and Cajun country and all over Europe and Africa and Latin America.
55:01
SPEAKER_02: It it's it's an idea I think that resonates, and I think it's something that we should talk about because some of the ideas really do resonate and reflect where we are right now, with people, you know, saying, Well, what does it mean to be a real American?
55:21
SPEAKER_02: What does it mean to be a true Christian or Catholic versus uh uh watered-down American or a or a traitor, even?
55:32
SPEAKER_02: You know, the same themes are going on 200 years ago.
55:35
SPEAKER_02: It's just the language was a little different, you know.
55:38
SPEAKER_02: Uh edicts were to warn you to not step outside of what it means to be a good Catholic or a good Spanish person.
55:47
SPEAKER_02: When I say Spanish person, I don't mean a person from Spain, I mean a person who lives within the Spanish system, even if you're Native American or mestizo.
55:58
SPEAKER_02: So, you know, once you step out of that, accusations fly, um, demonizing takes place.
56:07
SPEAKER_02: So it matters, it matters, and and it matters because I see it happening today, whether it's our national political uh uh climate or our local debates over statues and monuments and uh what stories get what story whose story is gonna get told?
56:25
SPEAKER_02: How do we study history?
56:27
SPEAKER_02: Whose perspective do we tell?
56:29
SPEAKER_02: What do we say and what can't we say?
56:32
SPEAKER_02: And if we say it, why was it wrong for us to say it?
56:37
SPEAKER_05: Speaking of telling stories, do you have a story for us today?
56:41
SPEAKER_05: What's that?
56:42
SPEAKER_05: Do you have do you do you have a story uh for us today about telling stories about a bruja?
56:49
SPEAKER_02: Oh well, nothing too sensational.
56:53
SPEAKER_02: I I gave this talk a couple uh weeks ago uh at a little town here in New Mexico, and somebody asked me, do they still practice witchcraft in New Mexico?
57:04
SPEAKER_02: And it was a jam-packed room, and I looked around and I said, Are there any witches here?
57:10
SPEAKER_02: And the lady in the back raised her hand, and I looked at the person who asked the question.
57:14
SPEAKER_02: I said, Yes.
57:17
SPEAKER_02: Yes, there are.
57:19
SPEAKER_02: You know, so you know, I I well played.
57:24
SPEAKER_02: I I just do my best to talk about the history and the cultural.
57:31
SPEAKER_02: I don't like the word baggage because it sounds like we're carrying something heavy that we don't want to carry.
57:38
SPEAKER_02: I would say more like cultural luggage.
57:42
SPEAKER_02: How about that?
57:43
SPEAKER_02: Cultural luggage that we have in our lives.
57:46
SPEAKER_02: And I think it's just part of our tradition.
57:50
SPEAKER_02: Because, you know, when you look at the roots of our witch beliefs, they don't go back to one ancestor or one group of ancestors.
57:57
SPEAKER_02: They go back to Mesoamerica, they go back to Pueblo and then Henizaro and Spanish and Catholic and Jewish and Muslim.
58:07
SPEAKER_02: It's it's an amazing mosaic and tapestry of different beliefs that actually show how much we all have in common, how similar we all are, as opposed to how different we are.
58:20
SPEAKER_04: Absolutely.
58:24
SPEAKER_04: One of the things I came across in the documents in the Cebola project was this denunciation by some priests over the playing of Patoli here in New Mexico, and that apparently so it's a Mesoamerican game and it's associated strongly with gambling.
58:43
SPEAKER_04: If nobody knows, it's it's kind of like Parcheese, and it's got, you know, it's ruled over by um Maquil Shochi is the teteo of the games.
58:55
SPEAKER_04: And so the the priests didn't like it because it was, I mean, for a couple of reasons.
59:01
SPEAKER_04: It was associated with uh witchcraft, but also because it was associated with gambling, like people would gamble heavily on this game, and apparently these indios mexicanos were teaching the Pueblo people how to play this game.
59:18
SPEAKER_04: And I found this document.
59:20
SPEAKER_04: Um, and at first the document confused me because it kept talking about how they went into their estufas to play patoli, and I'm like, what?
59:30
SPEAKER_04: And then I it dawned on me, I'm like, oh, they must mean kivas, right?
59:33
SPEAKER_02: Like they yeah, that's their kivas, estufas are their kivas, yeah.
59:37
SPEAKER_04: So they were going into their kivas to play patoli, and I was like, wow, that's amazing.
59:44
SPEAKER_02: Well, you know, gambling is another one of our traditions that goes back to all of our different cultural uh ancestors.
59:51
SPEAKER_02: I mean, you know, when when uh Juan Paez Hurtado um recruited a colonist in uh Zacatecas in 1695, um he he recruited uh people from the Casas de Juegos, the casinos where people were where the men would go gamble.
1:00:14
SPEAKER_02: So we know that that we know that Spanish people also gambled.
1:00:18
SPEAKER_02: My Grandpo in Mora played Monte, and he loved betting on the horses as well.
1:00:23
SPEAKER_02: And you know, this goes back.
1:00:26
SPEAKER_02: And by the way, um um uh that Vargas recruitment at Zacatecas in 1695 brought uh our, if not the first, some of the first tamale makers, tamaleras uh from Zacatecas to New Mexico.
1:00:40
SPEAKER_02: So we've had those here a long time, but but that was probably looked at as demonic, the the game that the the Mexican Indians were teaching the Pueblo Indians, and it was looked down upon because it was from their culture and not the Spanish culture.
1:01:01
SPEAKER_02: And you know, let's be honest, these priests had a superiority complex.
1:01:05
SPEAKER_02: They looked uh down on uh local people and local culture, and let's be clear, they looked down on the Nuevo Mexicanos too.
1:01:15
SPEAKER_02: They looked down on our ancestors because they were mixed blood and they were also doing these things too, by the way.
1:01:22
SPEAKER_02: Um they were doing it too.
1:01:25
SPEAKER_02: That's why it became a problem.
1:01:27
SPEAKER_02: If you want to know what people were doing, just study all the rules and laws that said don't do this in a given time period.
1:01:34
SPEAKER_04: Absolutely.
1:01:35
SPEAKER_04: Uh, Dr.
1:01:36
SPEAKER_04: Tlakateca, you um do you have a story?
1:01:41
SPEAKER_04: No, actually, I have a story.
1:01:44
SPEAKER_04: Can I tell this quick story?
1:01:45
SPEAKER_01: Yes.
1:01:46
SPEAKER_04: So when I was younger, uh we lived down in Peralta, and there was a family member who we we had a falling out with, this uh older woman.
1:01:56
SPEAKER_04: And one day uh we saw her come down to our driveway, and she came to the end of our driveway and she made like a sign in the dirt.
1:02:05
SPEAKER_04: She drew something in the dirt, and she got in her car and she drove away.
1:02:08
SPEAKER_04: And so we were like, oh, what was that all about?
1:02:12
SPEAKER_04: And then uh the next day we're sitting around, we're we're outside, and I remember this distinctly because this owl came in and it flew and it landed on our trailer.
1:02:22
SPEAKER_04: And my dad looked at it and and he called he called out to the owl by her name, right?
1:02:28
SPEAKER_04: Uh, I don't want to say her name.
1:02:30
SPEAKER_04: Yeah, no, don't say her name.
1:02:32
SPEAKER_04: Yeah, so he called out to the owl, and like the owl like turned and looked, and he threw a rock and hit the owl, and the owl flew away.
1:02:42
SPEAKER_04: And I swear, like a few weeks later, we see this woman at the supermarket and she had a broken leg.
1:02:48
SPEAKER_04: And so we were like, oh my god.
1:02:50
SPEAKER_04: I mean, obviously it's a coincidence, but I mean, at the time when you're a kid, talk about like that creeped me out so bad that I was like having nightmares about it.
1:03:03
SPEAKER_05: And um, but aren't you supposed to do that to the lechuosa, not just the the owl?
1:03:07
SPEAKER_05: I mean, the owl is is a symbol uh you know, in some indigenous traditions, a symbol of death or an omen of death, right?
1:03:14
SPEAKER_05: Like like that old Mexican saying how's it go?
1:03:22
SPEAKER_05: And so, but the lechuza is is the shapeshifter that comes, right?
1:03:28
SPEAKER_05: That's the the human person that's shapeshifted into a human-sized owl, so it's not like a old owl.
1:03:36
SPEAKER_04: Yeah, in Nahuatl, it's called the uh tlaca te colot, the owl person.
1:03:42
SPEAKER_04: And um, that was uh the the Franciscans, bring up the Franciscans, that word tlaca te colot is specifically how they refer to demons, right?
1:03:51
SPEAKER_04: The owl person, the owl people.
1:03:53
SPEAKER_02: Well, and even in New Mexico we call owls, owls tecolotes, and there's the the story that uh if you're walking down a uh road and you look in the tree and see an owl, and if you tell the owl, mañana vengas por sal, and then the next day, if somebody knocks at your door and you open it, it's a neighbor, or someone says, I'd like to borrow some salt, then you know they're a brujo or a bruja because they're compelled to reveal themselves to you because you ordered them to.
1:04:25
SPEAKER_02: So these are these are stories that I am fascinated by.
1:04:29
SPEAKER_02: I I look back with respect at our ancestors because they were trying to understand and explain their world and their universe just like we do today with medicine and our own religious expressions.
1:04:44
SPEAKER_02: And um, they were uh very intelligent people, but they had their own tools at their own disposal, and it was a world populated by saints and spirits and brujos and brujas and hechiceras.
1:05:00
SPEAKER_02: And I just think it's fascinating because we still have that stuff today.
1:05:06
SPEAKER_02: There, it's not just in documents or or books, but we're all talking about it now, still.
1:05:12
SPEAKER_02: I'm fascinated by that.
1:05:14
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, me too.
1:05:15
SPEAKER_05: What's Carl Sagan's old book, uh The Demon Haunted World?
1:05:18
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
1:05:20
SPEAKER_05: That's a great book.
1:05:21
SPEAKER_04: Um, so I want to ask a question to both of you because I don't know if this is like a New Mexico thing, southern Colorado, Texas, or is just my family.
1:05:30
SPEAKER_04: But my grandma would always she would make the like these cross symbols with her fingers whenever we were I forget the instance, but whenever something would happen, she would make like this cross symbol with her fingers.
1:05:46
SPEAKER_04: I remember now crucitas.
1:05:48
SPEAKER_05: We used to call them crucitas.
1:05:49
SPEAKER_05: Okay.
1:05:50
SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
1:05:50
SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
1:05:50
SPEAKER_02: And you know, it's it's it's it's folk Catholicism.
1:05:58
SPEAKER_02: That's how I look at that.
1:05:59
SPEAKER_02: Look, um, in the Catholic Church, we have seven sacraments, right?
1:06:03
SPEAKER_02: You know, your baptism, you have confession, uh, communion, priesthood, marriage, uh, uh extreme unction, the the the last rites.
1:06:13
SPEAKER_02: Look, those are sacraments.
1:06:15
SPEAKER_02: Then you have sacramentals.
1:06:17
SPEAKER_02: Sacramentals are like uh you're a blessed rosary or praying of a rosary, or holy water, or exorcism.
1:06:26
SPEAKER_02: These are sacramentals.
1:06:27
SPEAKER_02: Well, things like that are crossing the fingers.
1:06:32
SPEAKER_02: This is a way of blessing oneself and wording off evil.
1:06:37
SPEAKER_02: It's it's almost like a sacramental, or it's in that same realm of protecting oneself against malojo, evil eye, or a curse, or a hex.
1:06:51
SPEAKER_02: Um, it's the same thing as blessing oneself, right?
1:06:54
SPEAKER_02: When you do the sign of the cross.
1:06:56
SPEAKER_02: And our our religion, and you can find it in Mexico too, it's folk Catholicism.
1:07:01
SPEAKER_02: That's why when Lemay came and you know, bishops from Durango, like Zubiria or uh Tamaroni Romera, they came here, they were a little freaked out at us because we we had our own way of doing this.
1:07:16
SPEAKER_02: Uh the late Jesuit priest, uh Father Tom Steele, described it as un mysticismo tosco here in New Messi, New Mexico, a rough-hewn mysticism that evolved through the centuries that uh was made up of ritual and prayer that brought people incredibly close to God because we were so far away from Durango and Mexico City and Toledo and Madrid.
1:07:42
SPEAKER_02: So we were very personally connected, and the saints weren't just statues or people who lived a thousand years ago.
1:07:50
SPEAKER_02: They were like our relatives, you know, like our tio or our tia, you know, they were were close to our saints.
1:07:58
SPEAKER_02: So we did these things, these are our religious expressions, and they helped ward off, you know, right around the corner of an Adobe church could be a bruja or a santo.
1:08:07
SPEAKER_02: We didn't know what we were gonna see.
1:08:09
SPEAKER_02: So that's the the realm of our ancestors.
1:08:13
SPEAKER_05: It's kind of like frontier, like a frontier tradition, right?
1:08:16
SPEAKER_05: It's so far from the metropole and it has to adapt to its environment.
1:08:20
SPEAKER_05: So I I did remember just now a story when when you brought up the the the crucitas curly, my my grandmother it brought back memories, and uh uh when I was a little kid, like that's one of the things that she used to do.
1:08:34
SPEAKER_05: Uh, and I remember distinctly she would do the crucitas.
1:08:37
SPEAKER_05: But one thing that I do remember that I got to witness, and this is a story that that has stuck with me, and and I had forgotten about it uh, but it just came to me right now.
1:08:47
SPEAKER_05: That I remember one time um in my dad's hometown, there was this very bad storm that was uh in the distance, and you could see it headed in the direction of the pueblo.
1:09:00
SPEAKER_05: And I remember she distinctly like gathering some things, like some herbs and some water, and she had a crucifix, but she also grabbed the machete and she went to to the the the because we lived uh well or my or they lived right down the street from a major intersection the the main thoroughfare and through that town so we were like a block and a half away she went to that to that intersection because it's in the shape of a cross right it's an intersection and she and she took out the water and with the yerva and she was like uh you know saying a prayer uh to the four directions I mean I distinctly remember she was going you know north south east west and then she grabbed the machete and she started like doing the same thing with the machete in the directions and then she turned to the direction of the um of the storm and like was Xing it like cutting it to try to get it to go away and lo and behold the storm disappeared and so you know like you were saying you're a young kid and it's like wow that's impressive like she just did something right she she cursed this storm and it just went away and and missed us all together and she she did she had this whole ritual that she that she did and it was something that was very impressive.
1:10:12
SPEAKER_05: It was it was beautiful.
1:10:13
SPEAKER_02: Oh yeah that's amazing so now you're you're making me think now about 15 years ago and I I do a lot of genealogy and I did my DNA genealogy and I wanted my my my padrino uh to to I wanted to do his DNA you know that is swab from the mouth so I went up to the norte uh and I I saw him and I go tio I go uh can I do a DNA test I'll just have to swab inside your cheek it won't hurt or anything and he just said no mijo no mijo no me va anambruhar he said no they'll bewitch me that goes back to the idea of when you cut your hair or your fingernails you're supposed to burn them so they could not be used against you in a in a curse or a hex so I think I think he was on to something you know he he knew he goes no part of me and give it to other people no no wow nice well thank you so much for coming on this has been a great conversation I really enjoyed it um do you have me too thank you for having me yeah do you have anything to anything coming up any talks about brujeria that you would like to uh to plug here or any projects that you're working on I have a video series on YouTube New Mexico history in 10 minutes it's like 70 episodes of 10 minute little bites of our amazing history and culture going back centuries.
1:11:38
SPEAKER_04: Yeah those are great videos by the way I I really enjoy them.
1:11:42
SPEAKER_04: So state historian Rob Martinez thank you so much for being on the show we really appreciated it yeah thank you for coming we hope to have you back again soon to talk more about history and our connections to all these amazing you know places in the past and how they all intersect here in our our beautiful state of New Mexico so thank you very very much for coming on friend.
1:12:08
SPEAKER_02: And remember the truth is like medicine it doesn't always taste good but it is always good for you.
1:12:19
SPEAKER_00: So the supernatural was clearly a reality for a lot of people around this time what w w why were people thinking this way?
1:12:29
SPEAKER_02: We have to remember brujeria ychic witchcraft and sorcery were a form of resistance these were uh ways that people who had no power could get power and it was a way of challenging uh Spanish economic, political and religious systems that um some of these folks felt were oppressing them.
1:12:52
SPEAKER_00: Was it about defining good and evil?
1:12:54
SPEAKER_02: Clearly that was part of it, especially from the Catholic perspective the Franciscan priests that were coming up here in the 1600s and 1700s they felt that there was an imminent battle between God and Satan taking place and that it was their job to root out evil and the devil everywhere they saw it.
1:13:14
SPEAKER_02: So they perceived uh Native American religions as demonic and therefore uh practices that needed to be put down and destroyed and replaced with uh Catholic Christianity.