A Long Time Coming: The 17th-Century Pueblo-Spanish War Santa Fe Fiesta lecture

Noted historian and author John L. Kessell will present the 2009 Santa Fe Fiesta lecture, "A Long Time Coming: The 17th-Century Pueblo-Spanish War," at 6:30 p.m. on Wednesday, Sept. 9, at the New Mexico Museum of Art's St. Francis Auditorium, 107 W. Palace Ave. The event is $5 to the general public, free to Palace Guard members.

The Pueblo Indians had endured for three generations under Spanish rule before they threw off the colonial yoke. What took them so long? Why was war so long in coming?  Was the colonial regime really not so bad after all?  Did the benefits of coexistence repeatedly undermine the urge to revolt?  Or were the Pueblos so deeply divided by pre-Contact grudges, and by the new promise of settling old scores through alliance with Spaniards, that they simply could not rally themselves until 1680?  What did Esteban Clemente get wrong in 1670 that Po'Pay got right in 1680?

"A Long Time Coming" will consider such questions, but with no assurance of conclusive answers.

Ever since the early 1960s when he served with the U.S. National Park Service at Tumacacori National Monument — a Spanish Franciscan mission ruin in southern Arizona — John Kessell has devoted himself to research and teaching about Spain in America.  Recognizing over the past forty years how often we take sides in the encounter of Spaniards and Native Americans, he has sought to be fair to both.  His latest book, Pueblos, Spaniards, and the Kingdom of New Mexico (University of Oklahoma Press, 2008) is an even-handed narrative of the tumultuous seventeenth-century Spanish colony.

No individual Spaniard figured more prominently in New Mexico's long history than Madrid-bred Diego de Vargas (1643-1704), refounding father and twice governor of the kingdom.  Although the Eastern establishment in the United States has long ignored Spanish contributions to the history of North America, Kessell convinced the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Historical Publications and Records Commission, and the National Endowment for the Humanities that Vargas deserved a place at the tertulia of Washington, Jefferson, and Adams.

As a result of their financial support, the long-term Vargas Project at the University of New Mexico, 1980-2002, published in English translation a six-volume scholarly edition of the Journals of Don Diego de Vargas, 1691-1704, thereby making available to students, scholars, teachers, and the interested public the principal archives of Vargas's pivotal government.  Although Kessell initiated and remained involved in the project, he credits his colleagues Rick Hendricks, Meredith D. Dodge, and Larry D. Miller for seeing it through.

Since his retirement from the University of New Mexico in 2000, Kessell has continued to lecture to a variety of groups on topics relating to Spain's presence in the American Southwest.  He has repeatedly offered the Spanish background in seminars for high school teachers under the Teach America Program.  Recently in Santa Fe and Albuquerque, he provided the third complement to the Smithsonian Institution's traveling exhibit "Jamestown, Québec, and Santa Fe: Three North American Beginnings," setting Santa Fe's unique history in its Spanish context.

In 1698, the Spanish crown bestowed upon Vargas the title of Castile marqués de la Nava de Barcinas.  In May 2009, Kessell had the pleasure of presenting in Madrid "Los héroes de bronce no bailan ni cecean: Conocer a Diego de Vargas (Madrid, 1643-Nuevo México, 1704)" to the twelfth marqués de la Nava de Barcinas and his family.

Dr. John L.  Kessell is Professor Emeritus in the Department of History at the University of New Mexico, specializing in Southwestern history and Colonial Latin America. He has received numerous awards for his scholarship and has published widely.

Pueblos, Spaniards and the Kingdom of New Mexico was considered the first narrative history devoted to the tumultuous 17th century in New Mexico. Setting aside stereotypes of a Native American Eden and the Black Legend of Spanish cruelty, he painted an evenhanded picture of a tense but interwoven coexistence. Beginning with the first permanent Spanish settlement among the Pueblos of the Rio Grande in 1598, he proposed a set of relations more complicated than previous accounts envisioned and then reinterpreted the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 and the Spanish reconquest in the 1690s.

This event is sponsored by the Palace Guard and the Santa Fe Fiesta Council.