{ "id": "benavides-memorial-1630", "type": "entity", "name": "The Memorial of Fray Alonso de Benavides on New Mexico (1630)", "summary": "A report on the missions of New Mexico laid before Philip IV to obtain more friars, and the earliest sustained description of the peoples of that country in print. It records the turquoise mines and painted cotton mantas of the pueblos, names the Apaches de Navajo and explains the name as great sowers of fields, and describes wars fought over an alum quarry. It is a petition, and it argues its case with admissions, ethnography and contempt in the same paragraphs.", "locale": "en", "tags": [ "new-mexico", "americas", "missions", "indigenous-peoples", "ethnography", "spanish-empire", "books", "seventeenth-century" ], "relations": [ { "rel": "related", "target": "villagra-historia-de-la-nueva-mexico-1610" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "relaciones-geograficas-de-indias" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "republica-de-indios" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "mission-oases-of-arid-northern-mexico" } ], "questions": [ "What is the Memorial of Fray Alonso de Benavides?", "What is the earliest written description of the Navajo?", "What did Spanish missionaries report about the Pueblo peoples in the 1620s?", "Where does the name Navajo come from?", "How reliable is the Benavides Memorial as a source on New Mexico?" ], "claims": [ { "id": "c1", "text": "The text read here is the one printed as the second appendix of the edition of Villagra's Historia issued by the Imprenta del Museo Nacional at Mexico in 1900. It is a reset reprint of a seventeenth-century printing, not a facsimile and not an original imprint, and that distance is carried in this object's evidence tier rather than hidden: nothing below rests on having opened the Madrid sheets of 1630, which were not reachable from this instance.", "sources": [ "benavides-memorial-museo-nacional-1900" ], "confidence": 0.9 }, { "id": "c2", "text": "The document opens as a petition, not as a description. Fray Juan de Santander, of the Order of Saint Francis, Comisario General de las Indias, addresses the king: with the relation made to him by Father Fray Alonso de Benavides, custodian of the conversions of New Mexico, on 20 June 1626, concerning the great increases those conversions were making and the lack of religious for their administration, he informed His Majesty, who ordered a royal cedula issued to the Marques de Cerralvo, viceroy of New Spain. Everything that follows was written to get more friars sent.", "sources": [ "benavides-memorial-museo-nacional-1900" ], "confidence": 0.9 }, { "id": "c3", "text": "The same opening concedes what a promotional document would normally leave out. The cedula recites Santander's own relation that religious of his Order began the conversion of New Mexico more than thirty years before, and that they were there more than twelve years without being able to make any fruit in those souls, and that the Province of the Santo Evangelio nonetheless kept sending a commissary and religious to that land. Twelve fruitless years are in the text that asks for reinforcement.", "sources": [ "benavides-memorial-museo-nacional-1900" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c4", "text": "On Acoma the Memorial gives the geography, the population and the cost in one sentence: turning back to the position of the Queres nation and leaving their last pueblo, Santa Ana, twelve leagues to the west one reaches the rock of Acoma, \"que tantas vidas de espanoles e indios amigos ha costado\" - which has cost so many lives of Spaniards and of friendly Indians - both because it is sheer and impregnable rock and because of the valour of its inhabitants, who will be about two thousand souls. It then records that in 1629 they were brought to peace and have a religious catechising and baptising among them.", "sources": [ "benavides-memorial-museo-nacional-1900" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c5", "text": "The evidence the friar himself offers for the value of that mission is a miracle, reported at length: a one-year-old child dying in her mother's arms, the religious telling the mother to let her be baptised so that she might enjoy eternal glory, and the child rising well and whole at the words. The report is given here as what the document says, not as an event; it is stated because it shows the standard of proof the author thought fit to place before the king alongside his numbers.", "sources": [ "benavides-memorial-museo-nacional-1900" ], "confidence": 0.8 }, { "id": "c6", "text": "The ethnography is specific and mostly free of moralising. The people are described as dressing in cotton mantas and skins and adorning themselves as best they can, particularly with necklaces and ear ornaments of turquoise, of which they have mines and which they work, though imperfectly; the women dress with cotton mantas painted and embroidered of the same.", "sources": [ "benavides-memorial-museo-nacional-1900" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c7", "text": "The contempt sits in the same paragraphs and is quoted here rather than dropped. On the page that describes the turquoise, the captain of a pueblo is said to welcome the priests for honouring the pueblos where they had been living like savages; and the section headed \"LO QUE DEBE AQUEL REINO A V. M.\" - what that kingdom owes Your Majesty - opens by asserting that the land and its inhabitants had been subject to the demon and his slaves since God created them, and full of chambers of idolatry.", "sources": [ "benavides-memorial-museo-nacional-1900" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c8", "text": "The Memorial carries a section headed as the conversion of the Apaches de Navajo, and distinguishes them from their neighbours by how they live: leaving the province of the Gila Apache and going more than fifty leagues north, one meets the province of the Apaches de Navajo, of the same Apache nation as the former but subject to another head captain and with a distinct manner of living, because those behind did not sow but sustained themselves by hunting, whereas these of Navajo \"son muy grandes labradores, que eso significa Navajo, sementeras grandes\" - very great farmers, which is what the name means, great sown fields. This is an early printed use of the name and an early statement of its sense.", "sources": [ "benavides-memorial-museo-nacional-1900" ], "confidence": 0.8 }, { "id": "c9", "text": "The war reported around that quarry is put down with its causes. The sierra runs another fifty or sixty leagues and is full of deposits of alum; because the settled Christian nations are given to painting and need alum to paint their clothes, and it is found only in those ranges, two or three thousand Indians gather to go for it, and the Apaches de Navajo come out to meet them in war in defence of their land, with very many deaths; afterwards, knowing that the alum has been taken, they gather deliberately and come to make war on the Christians in revenge for the entry into their lands.", "sources": [ "benavides-memorial-museo-nacional-1900" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c10", "text": "The same page states the Spanish side of that war and its scale without euphemism: in two days more than thirty thousand Indians of bow and arrow gather, and this is a small estimate, because the times the Spaniards went there to fight, in punishment of the many Christian Indians the Apaches kill, though they attacked at dawn and caught them off guard, they always found the fields thick with people beyond number. The friar then reports that in September 1629 he made peace with them, founding a convent and church in the pueblo of Santa Clara of the Teoas nation, Christians who were frontier neighbours and were suffering much damage from these Apaches; it was the tenth he founded.", "sources": [ "benavides-memorial-museo-nacional-1900" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c11", "text": "The best sentence in the document is one its author seems not to have noticed he was writing. Having reported the words of an Apache captain who explained that his people had worshipped the sun and the moon because they knew no greater benefactor, and who had ordered the cross painted above both so that it would not be forgotten that God is adored above all, Benavides remarks that he does not know what better reasons the ancient natural philosophers could have given than this Indian, barbarous in our opinion, gave in persuading himself to adore the true and universal Creator. Respect and condescension are in the same clause.", "sources": [ "benavides-memorial-museo-nacional-1900" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c12", "text": "The volume that carries this text is worth describing because it is three documents, not one. Its first appendix prints papers on the captain Gaspar de Villagra compiled by Jose Fernando Ramirez - appointments and letters issued by Juan de Onate, among them one addressing Villagra as governor of Acoma; its second appendix is this Memorial; its third is headed \"DOCUMENTOS INEDITOS\", unpublished papers taken from a volume of miscellaneous papers held in the library of the Museo Nacional which had belonged to the presbyter Agustin Fischer.", "sources": [ "benavides-memorial-museo-nacional-1900" ], "confidence": 0.85 } ], "takeaways": [], "faqs": [], "evidence_tier": "secondary", "evidence": { "level": "industry_observation", "source_types": [ "paper" ] }, "moat_flag": false, "winning_edge": "Benavides reaches English-language readers in two incompatible summaries: a mission chronicle quoted for its numbers of baptisms, or a colonial tract cited for its language about idolatry. Both are in the document and neither is the interesting part. Read page by page, the Memorial is a petition that argues by conceding - twelve years without fruit, a rock that has cost so many lives of Spaniards and of friendly Indians, an alum quarry whose owners fight for it and are attacked at dawn for it, thirty thousand bowmen assembling in two days - and that stops in the middle of its own case to say that an Apache captain reasoned as well as the ancient natural philosophers. This object puts each of those on the record as its own sourced claim, next to the turquoise mines worked imperfectly and the painted cotton mantas, next to the earliest printed gloss of the name Navajo as great sown fields, and next to the sentence about people living like savages, so that a reader can see the achievement, the motive, the ethnography and the contempt without having to take any of them on trust. It also states what it does not have: this is a 1900 reset reprint, not the Madrid sheets, and the tier says so.", "confidence": 0.8, "last_verified": "2026-08-12", "canonical_url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/k/benavides-memorial-1630", "api_url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/api/k/benavides-memorial-1630.json", "jsonld": { "@context": "https://schema.org", "name": "The Memorial of Fray Alonso de Benavides on New Mexico (1630)", "description": "A report on the missions of New Mexico laid before Philip IV to obtain more friars, and the earliest sustained description of the peoples of that country in print. It records the turquoise mines and painted cotton mantas of the pueblos, names the Apaches de Navajo and explains the name as great sowers of fields, and describes wars fought over an alum quarry. It is a petition, and it argues its case with admissions, ethnography and contempt in the same paragraphs.", "url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/k/benavides-memorial-1630", "license": "https://spdx.org/licenses/CC-BY-4.0.html", "dateModified": "2026-08-12", "citation": [ { "@type": "CreativeWork", "name": "Historia de la Nueva Mexico (Mexico, 1900): appendices printing documents on Gaspar Perez de Villagra compiled by Jose Fernando Ramirez, the Memorial of Fray Alonso de Benavides, and unpublished papers from the Fischer collection", "url": "https://books.google.com/books?id=7rg7AQAAMAAJ" } ], "@type": "Article", "headline": "The Memorial of Fray Alonso de Benavides on New Mexico (1630)" } }