The Pueblo Revolt

For more than eighty years the Pueblo peoples of present-day New Mexico had endured Spanish rule, which combined forced labor, heavy tribute, and a relentless campaign by Franciscan missionaries to stamp out their religion. When drought and famine struck in the 1670s and the Spanish responded by publicly punishing Pueblo religious leaders, resentment boiled over. A San Juan religious leader named Popé organized the scattered and linguistically diverse Pueblo towns into a single secret conspiracy—an extraordinary feat of coordination across the region.

In August 1680 the Pueblos rose in a carefully timed rebellion, killing some four hundred colonists and twenty-one of the thirty-three Franciscan missionaries and besieging Santa Fe until the Spanish survivors fled south to El Paso. For twelve years the Pueblos governed themselves free of Spanish control—the most successful Native uprising against a European colonial power in North American history. Although Spain reconquered the province in the 1690s, it never again ruled with the same harshness, tolerating Pueblo religious practice and easing the demands that had provoked the revolt.