The Spanish Debates Over Native American Equality, Inclusion

By Richard G. Santos

For the first half century after the first voyage of Cristobal Colón (aka Christopher Columbus), the Spanish Church and State deliberated the nature of the Native Americans. The Native Americans did not speak Spanish, Latin, Chinese, Arabic or Hebrew. They were not Catholic, Moslem or Jewish. Moreover, they were not mentioned in the Bible. So, were the Native Americans human? Did they have a soul? Could they go to heaven? Were they created by the same Creator? These were important questions from 1492 to 1540 as they would be today if earthlings were to encounter intelligent life from a different planet.

As the debates in Spain and the Vatican raged concerning the nature and “humanness” of the Native Americans, the European settlers of the Caribbean Islands took their own course. Due to the absence of European women, the Spanish, Portuguese and Sephardic Jewish settlers unofficially resolved the issue by forming common-law unions with the Native Americans.

As an example Hernán Cortés fathered Catalina Pizzarro with a Carib woman while in Cuba. Later in New Spain, he fathered Martín Cortés with la Malinche and Leonor Cortés with a daughter of Moctezuma and finally Luis Cortés with Antonia de Hermosillo. Cortés recognized each and every single child as his legitimate children. Incidentally, Leonor Cortés (granddaughter of Moctezuma) married Juan Tolosa. Their daughter Isabel Tolosa (de Cortés y Moctezuma) married Juan Pérez de Onate, founder of the city of San Luis Potosí and New Mexico colonizer.

However, between 1492 and 1540, the children of such common law unions of a Spanish citizen and a Native Americans created a serious problem. By law, since the Native American had not yet been declared a human being, the mestizo children could not inherit their father’s estates. The Native Americans were finally declared human with all rights of a Spanish citizen and Las Nuevas Leyes of the 1540’s so informed all citizens of the Empire. The loophole in the law was that any Native American who resisted or rebelled against the Spanish Church and State could be enslaved. Consequently, many North American frontiersmen were enslaving Native Americans declared “hostile” or “rebellious”.

The loophole was closed in 1588 when the King of Spain issued a Royal Cédula forbidding the enslavement of Native Americans under any pretext. As a footnote, Hernan Cortés (New Spain), Nuno Beltran de Guzmán (present Pacific Northwestern Mexico), Francisco Vásquez de Coronado (U.S. Southwest), Juan Pérez de Onate (New Mexico) and Luis de Carvajal y de la Cueva (Nuevo León) were all indicted and tried for “maltreatment of the Indians” and removed from their respective governorships.

Many tribes and clans of various Native American Nations continued to resist the Spanish advancement onto their respective geographic areas. Hence political and trading treaties paved the way for the Evangelization program initiated in the 1680s with the creation of the colegios de propaganda fide (Colleges for the Propagation of the Faith). In areas where the Native Americans lived in communities, the missionaries erected a church, created a city council and declared it a pueblo (township). Where the Native Americans were nomadic like in South and Central Texas, the missionaries founded reducciones (communities where the Indians were “reduced” from a nomadic existence to Church governed and protected townships). In both pueblos and reducciones, a Native American “governor” was elected by the Native Americans themselves. As a footnote, the last Indian Governor of Mission San Francisco de la Espada in San Antonio, Texas was Mariano Tejeda in 1800. He was the father of Francisco, father of Mariano, father of Francisco, father of Mariano and he was the father of the late U.S. Congressman Frank Tejeda. I know this because in the early 1980s I did the Tejeda family tree at the request of then Bexar County Commissioner Robert Tejeda. I thus met, became and have remained a close friend of the Tejeda family.

The bilingual, Spanish monocultural evangelization program plus the October 12, 1837 Resolution of the Republic of Texas (mentioned in last week’s article) were so successful that today there are no Indian reservations for any native Texas Indian Nation. The three reservations that do exist are for cultures that migrated to Texas! This is contrary to what is taught or at best omitted in the U. S. History and Texas textbooks.

Compare the Spanish policy toward the Native American with the U. S. Government to which “the only good Indian was a dead Indian.” The U. S. genocide attitude was recorded by Major William Emory in his “Report on the United Statesand Mexican Boundary Survey: published in two volumes by the U. S. House of Representatives (34th Congress, 1st session) in 1857. Emory was the head of the U. S. Corps of Engineers studying, surveying and mapping the lower Rio Grande from its mouth on the Gulf of Mexico to the Pecos River north of present Del Rio, Texas. He wrote “after studying the character and habits of that class of Indians called wild Indians, I have come to the deliberate conclusion that civilization must halt when in view of the Indian camp, or the Indian must be exterminated.”

Unfortunately, the U. S. Government took his advice and that led to the Indian Wars in the U. S. Southwest after the U. S. Civil War. We stress it was the U. S. Government and not the Spanish colonial or Mexican governments who mounted genocide, ethic-cleansing programs against the Native Americans.

So in reply to the university professor who asked who was the best colonist – the British, Spaniards or Americans – you, the reader answer the question. On one hand you have the Native Americans who preserved some of their culture in the reservations. On the other hand you have the Spanish-Mexican assimilated Native Americans with no idea that they are of Native American ancestry. You have the basic facts, so you judge the actions of our ancestors.

Richard G. Santos is an international research historian and retired university professor who lives in Pearsall, Texas.