Juanotilla of Cochiti, Vecina and Coyota: Nuevomexicanas in the Eighteenth Century

Juanotilla of Cochiti, Vecina and Coyota: Nuevomexicanas in the Eighteenth Century

Deena J. González

Richard Etulain, Ed. New Mexican Lives: Profiles and Historical Stories (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press),2002.

Pretend to peer, as if out toward a horizon, across landscapes. Imagine history like a play moving along in time, coming alive, even among places or people dating back three or four hundred years. Coming into focus, as if through binoculars, is the fascinating world of the far-northern empire of New Spain, today’s upper New Mexico river valleys. About thirty thousand people made their home there in the late 1700s, occupying an area a few hundred miles wide. Along a stretch of today’s Rio Grande, then known as El Rio Bravo de el (del) Norte, people built towns and villages. In the spring and summer, with the snow thawing high above the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, the river would run full. In the winter, it tended dry and cake, allowing shepherds and horsemen to cross it easily, uniting people rather than separating them. Crops, hides, and tallow (for candles) were loaded unto burros and horses to trade along ancient routes established by the first residents of the area, the indigenous people who had created ways of life as diverse as their cultures.