“La Dama Azul (The Lady in Blue): Spanish Saint or Indian Demon?”

Juliana Barr University of Florida

For the Georgia Workshop in Early American History and Culture, University of Georgia,

April 2008, Athens, Georgia

Please do not cite, quote, or reproduce without author’s permission

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In the 1620s, María de Jesús de Ágreda, a young Franciscan nun living in the hills

northeast of Madrid began experiencing trances, visions, and levitations – all before the avid,

watching eyes of her convent community enthralled by both the pallor and ecstasy revealed when

her veil was pulled away from her face. Her confessor quickly spread the story that while in

these trances, the young woman had been transported in spirit to America by angels where she

appeared to Indians urging them to seek Christian conversion. She was tormented by thoughts of

those whose souls would be lost to damnation through their ignorance, and her anguish led her to

fixate on those regions of the New World where she knew missionaries of her own Franciscan

order labored. As her prayers had become more and more focused, her visions had shown her

Indians whom she seemed to know personally, could move among and converse with easily, and,

thanks to God’s revelation, could give rosaries, instruction in the Faith, and exhortations to seek

baptism. This phenomenon, she confessed, had repeated itself over 500 times between 1620 and

1631 as the young woman became a tool for God’s sacred work.1

The story of Ágreda’s spiritual journeys became more elaborate with each new telling as

it spread across Old and New Spain, culminating in the version retold in the writings of fray

Alonso de Benavides, custodio of the missions of New Mexico. Benavides traveled to Spain to

interview Ágreda, asserted that confirmation of her claims could be found in Franciscans’ reports

from New Mexico, and in 1630 wrote a Memorial to the king of Spain Felipe IV. Four years

later, he revised the Memorial for pope Urban VIII, reporting that numerous tribes and thousands

of Indians in the northern provinces of New Spain had been miraculously converted by this nun,

Sor María de Jesús de Ágreda. Not coincidentally, this miracle secured future funding for the

1 T. D. Kendrick, T. D., Mary of Ágreda: The Life and Legend of a Spanish Nun (London: Routledge

& Kegan Paul, 1967), 14-45.

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missions. Spurred by heartfelt prayer, meditation, and longing to reach the many souls in remote

parts of the world who without help might be lost forever to damnation, Benavides testified that

María had fallen into a trance during which God showed to her the world’s heathen populations,

narrowing in particularly on the Indians of New Mexico for whom God felt a special love.

Directing her to fulfill her holy devotion, God empowered her to speak the truth of the Faith to

these Indians, making her words understood to them despite the language barrier, as she told

them to seek out the missions of Franciscans nearby who could lead them to salvation.2

Such claims would normally have gotten someone hauled before the Inquisition in

seventeenth-century Spain, but evidence of her apparitions soon came from New Spain in the

reports of missionaries who, having heard stories of Ágreda, sought confirmation of her

miraculous journeys wherever they went across the northern provinces in and around New

Mexico. The key account used to prove the miracle of her travels came from New Mexico in

1629, and became the centerpiece of Benavides’ 1634 Memorial. In that year, Benavides

reported, Franciscans had met with Jumanos who had traveled from the east to request that

Spaniards visit their encampments, explaining that they made this petition because a beautiful

young woman dressed in a blue robe had appeared to them, preached in their own tongue, and

directed them to the Fathers for instruction and conversion. As the seventeenth century

progressed, other Indians in other northern regions of New Spain came forward with their own

accounts of the magical appearances of a “Woman in Blue.”3

2 Fray Alonso de Benavides' Revised Memorial of 1634, with Numerous Supplementary Documents

Elaborately Annotated, eds. and trans. Frederick W. Hodge, George P. Hammond and Agapito Rey

(Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1945); A Harvest of Reluctant Souls: The Memorial of Fray

Alonso de Benavides, 1630, ed. Baker H. Morrow (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 1996).

3 Morrow, A Harvest of Reluctant Souls, 79-85; Hammond and Rey, Fray Alonso de Benavides'

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In the spirit of the burgeoning literature on the Virgin of Guadalupe as well as studies of

local religion and the veneration of saints in Old and New Spain, I would like to explore possible

meanings behind the apparitions of María de Jesús de Ágreda. It is striking to note that the

Ágreda phenomenon was limited to the northern provinces of New Spain – where it took on

great significance. From Franciscan and Jesuit missionaries to military and government officials,

all found in her story a unique foundational myth and a divine patroness for Spanish claims to

northern reaches of the empire. Sacred forces had led Ágreda to the northern provinces, and the

miracle of her journeys gave proof and reassurance that Spaniards had arrived in a place

ordained by God. Just as the apparition of the Virgin of Guadalupe marked Mexico City as a

place of sacred significance, so too did Ágreda’s visions offer the first act in a process of

Christianization of the northern landscape. The viceroy who ordered the settlement of Texas

thus claimed to have been inspired to do so because as a child he had read Ágreda’s writings on

her trips to the New World. Franciscans named their missions in her honor, and her later work,

The Mystical City of God – the life of the Virgin Mary as revealed to Ágreda by the Virgin

herself – (though quite controversial in Europe) appears in the inventories of mission libraries

across the northern provinces as well as the libraries of individual Spanish officials and citizens.

Many, including the well known Venerable fray Antonio de Margil and fray Junipero Serra,

Revised Memorial of 1634, 141-44; William H. Donahue, “Mary of Agreda and the Southwest United States,”

The Americas 9 (January 1953): 291-314; John L. Kessell, “Miracles or Mystery: María de Ágreda’s Ministry

to the Jumano Indians of the Southwest in the 1620s,” in Great Mysteries of the West, ed. Ferenc Morton Szasz

(Golden CO: Fulcrum Publishing 1993), 121-44; Nancy P. Hickerson, “The Visits of the ‘Lady in Blue’: An

Episode in the History of the South Plains, 1629,” Journal of Anthropological Research 46 (Spring 1990), 67-

90.

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recorded the personal inspiration – as well as “doctrines” and lessons for their mission work –

gained from her writings.4

The timing and various versions of her apparitions, moreover, suggest that Ágreda served

as an intermediary or transitional icon for Spaniards in the northern provinces – between

sixteenth-century militant imagery of Spanish power embodied in the figure of Our Lady of the

Conquest (La Conquistadora) and the more pacific symbolism that was later ascribed to the

Virgin of Guadalupe in the eighteenth century when she became the preeminent image of a

sympathetic intercessor and advocate for the faithful (be they Spanish or Indian). The Virgin

Mary had first been the guardian of reconquest and conversion in Old Spain and was particularly

powerful as the key icon used to transform Muslim mosques into Christian churches. It was

4 Fray Fernandez de Santa Ana, for example, maintained that he and his colleagues worked “in the

enlightened and exalted spirit of Venerable María de Jesús de Ágreda.” Others recorded that they sought to

follow “the footsteps of the Almighty and the Most Holy Mother through the history of the Venerable Madre

de Ágreda.” Fray Benito Fernández de Santa Ana, “Memorial of Father Benito Fernández Concerning the

Canary Islanders, 1741,” trans. Benedict Leutenegger Southwestern Historical Quarterly 82 (January 1979),

295; Juan Domingo Arricivita, Apostolic Chronicle of Juan Domingo Arricivita: The Franciscan Mission

Frontier in the Eighteenth Century in Arizona, Texas, and the Californias, 2 vols., trans. George P. Hammond

and Agapito Rey, revised trans. by Vivian A. Fisher (Berkeley, CA: Academy of American Franciscan

History, 1996), I: 70, 171, 353, 362, 364, 381, 383; José Antonio Pichardo, Pichardo's Treatise on the Limits

of Louisiana and Texas, 4 vols, ed, and trans. Charles Wilson Hackett (Austin: University of Texas Press,

1931-46), II: 520-21, 523; Benedict Leutenegger, trans. and Marion A. Habig, ed., The San José Papers: The

Primary Sources for the History of Mission San José y San Miguel de Aguayo from its Founding in 1720 to the

Present, 3 vols. (San Antonio: Old Spanish Missions Historical Research Library at San José Mission, 1978-

1983), I: 238; Eleanor B. Adams and France V. Scholes, “Books in New Mexico, 1598-1680,” New Mexico

Historical Review 17 (July 1942), 226-70; Steven W. Hackel, Children of Coyote, Missionaries of Saint

Francis: Indian-Spanish Relations in Colonial California, 1769-1850 (Chapel Hill: University of Carolina

Press for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2005), 133-34; Palóu’s Life of Fray Juníperro

Serra, trans. Maynard J. Geiger (Washington, D.C.: Academy of American Franciscan History, 1955), 110-

112, 125.

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certainly no coincidence that when Hernán Cortés invaded Mexico he did so carrying with him

statues and banners of Nuestra Señora de Remedios, that became known as America’s first La

Conquistadora, with which he replaced native icons with those of the Virgin Mary from

Cozumel to Tenochtitlán. But official imperial policy changed from one of conquest to one of

“pacification” in 1573 with the Royal Order for New Discoveries. In turn, as missionaries

replaced conquistadores at the head of new expeditions in the seventeenth century, they found

that they would have to remake religious imagery in the spirit of the more peaceful approach

now mandated by the Church and Crown.5

Thus timing is everything when we seek an understanding of the Ágreda stories – which

are all from the seventeenth century. On the Spanish side of the equation is the tendency to view

her tales of bilocation as harbinger of the later missionary-driven, pacific Spanish policy, which

5 It was not until 1754 that the pope recognized the Virgin of Guadalupe as the official patroness of

New Spain, and it is interesting to note that Spanish references to the legend of Ágreda seemed to disappear

during the same period that the cult of Guadalupe spread beyond Mexico and became well established in

the northern provinces. The crown’s 1573 Order for New Discoveries prohibited violent conquest and instead

promoted the “pacification” of Indian lands with missionaries at the head of exploration and settlement. Amy

G. Remensnyder, “The Colonization of Sacred Architecture: The Virgin Mary, Mosques, and Temples in

Medieval Spain and Early Sixteenth-Century Mexico,” in Monks and Nuns, Saints and Outcasts: Religious

Expressions and Social Meaning in the Middle Ages, ed. Sharon Farmer and Barbara Rosenwein (Ithaca:

Cornell University Press, 2000), 189-210; D. A. Brading, Mexican Phoenix: Our Lady of Guadalupe: Image

and Tradition Across Five Centuries (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Timothy Matovina,

Guadalupe and Her Faithful: Latino Catholics in San Antonio, from Colonial Origins to the Present

(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005); Stafford Poole, Our Lady of Guadalupe: The Origins and

Sources of a Mexican National Symbol, 1531-1797 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1995); William B.

Taylor, “The Virgin of Guadalupe in New Spain: An Inquiry into the Social History of Marian Devotion,”

American Ethnologist 14 (1987), 9-33; Angelico Chavez, La Conquistadora: The Autobiography of an Ancient

Statue (Santa Fe: Sunstone Press, 1975); J. Manuel Espinosa, “The Virgin of the Reconquest of New Mexico,”

Mid-America 18 (April 1936), 79-87.

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frames her apparitions within the context of religious conversion. Yet the stories about her from

the American side of the Atlantic cannot be viewed outside the genealogy of encounters that

preceded them and provided the context for both Spanish deployment and Indian interpretation

of religions iconography across the north. In these worlds, too much violence had already taken

place in the sixteenth century (and continued to take place in the seventeenth century) under the

watchful gaze of Spanish deities emblazoned on banners, statues, and statues. Christian images

were not seen, interpreted, and used by Indians as part of an exchange or dialogue about religious

faith. Rather, within the context of Spanish slave raiding and invasion, Ágreda’s apparitions

were enmeshed in associations with militarization and violent conquest. As such, Ágreda

appears to have been inseparable to Indian observers from the pantheon of Spanish images of the

Virgin – her female gender and blue robe made the two figures indistinguishable.

One challenge in seeking an understanding of Indian interpretations of stories of Ágreda

is the oft-made mistake of viewing the cross-cultural moments involving the “woman in blue” in

terms of a first encounter. Part of that belief stems from the legend itself, as it is crucial to the

miraculous nature of Ágreda’s apparitions that she made contact with Indians who had never

before met Spaniards. Thus they could know nothing of Christianity, so that when they later

gave testimony and description of Christian ritual and practice to missionaries who inquired

about her visits, that new knowledge served as proof of Ágreda’s prior visitations. No one else

but she could be the source of their information. A second problem arises from the persistent

notion that Indian peoples across the northern provinces lived in isolation from one another, so

that if they were distant from an area of Spanish invasion and expansion, then they remained in

ignorance of them – blissful ignorance that lasted until Spanish expeditions first entered their

own lands. Yet just as Spaniards gained information about the northern lands and peoples from

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the accounts of Cabeza de Vaca, fray Marcos de Niza, Francisco Vásquez de Coronado, and

many others, so too did communication networks carry news and reports about Spaniards over

the vast distances of long-existent native highways and thoroughfares. Indeed, one of the most

striking points made by sixteenth- and seventeenth-century expedition narratives is the speed

with which news traveled across the landscape in advance of the Spaniards, so that, for example,

one arm of the Coronado expedition, sent north along the gulf of California, heard native reports

of their fellow soldiers’ deeds in New Mexico long before they ever rejoined forces.6

So, what had past encounters with Spaniards in the sixteenth century taught Indian

peoples of the northern provinces about the invaders, so that it framed understandings of

Ágreda’s apparitions in the seventeenth century? In striking similarity to the initial invasion of

Mexico, the men whom Indians met carrying religious icons and images remained primarily

those of the military for the first one hundred years of contact across the northern provinces –

men who came seeking wealth, in mineral or human (enslaved) form, and were quite willing to

resort to violence to achieve it. Even if stories reached Indians of missionary efforts taking place

further south, they had no reason to associate the religious emblems of Franciscans and Jesuits

with peaceful exchange as both orders worked hand in hand with mining, ranching, and

agricultural encomienda systems in Nueva Galicia, Nueva Vizcaya, Nuevo León, Coahuila, and

Sinaloa, to coerce Indian labor and souls simultaneously.

6 J. Charles Kelley, “Juan Sabeata and Diffusion in Aboriginal Texas,” American Anthropologist 57

(October 1955), 981-95; Carroll L. Riley, “Early Spanish-Indian Communication in the Greater Southwest,”

New Mexico Historical Review 46 (October 1971), 285-314; Carroll L. Riley, The Frontier People: The

Greater Southwest in the Protohistoric Period, rev. ed. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1987);

Documents of the Coronado Expedition, 1539-1542, ed. and trans. Richard Flint and Shirley Cushing Flint

(Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 2005).

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Yet, in contrast to Cortés and his contemporaries, Spaniards traveling to the northern

provinces appeared to assign different icons to different kinds of exchange and did not initially

attempt to destroy native icons or to replace them with Christian ones. Iconoclasty would await

the establishment of permanent missions in the mid-seventeenth century. As a result, Indians did

not associate the Spaniards’ spiritual icons and statues with religious conversion but rather with

trade, diplomacy, and, as will become clear, warfare. This did not mean, however, that they

failed to recognize that Spaniards imbued such icons with supernatural power. The critical

distinctions they marked across a range of icons came from observing Spanish custom and

behavior that accompanied their appearance. Like native amulets, some objects – for instance

crosses and rosaries – appeared to be bearers of divine forces that Spaniards might share with

Indians in gift and trade exchange. In contrast, the banners, statues and paintings of Christ, the

saints, and especially the ubiquitous Virgin Mary were figurative embodiments of Spanish

deities who made appearances only in times of violence and war – directing and overseeing

Spaniards in battle.7

Such distinctions began simply enough, perhaps as early as the 1530s when Indians

sought to make Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca and his three castaway companions into healers.

Believing the foreigners to possess power, like all things that exist, be they rocks, trees, or

persons, Indians compelled Cabeza de Vaca and the three others – who they came to refer to as

“people from the sky” or “children of the sun” – to heal the sick, first by merely blowing on the

afflicted. But as word of their ability to perform “prodigies and miracles” spread, the men added

their own prayers and the sign of the cross, endowing the sign itself with power, and Indians

7 For comparisons to Mexico, see Serge Gruzinski, Images at War: Mexico from Columbus to Blade

Runner (1492-2019), trans. Heather MacLean (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001).

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responded, demanding the sign of the cross to be made over them. Though another Narváez

expedition chronicler, Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés, and to some degree Cabeza de

Vaca himself attributed the appellation, “children of the sun,” to native belief that the Spaniards

were gods who inspired spiritual devotion, it seems clear from the context that either some

natives believed the men had come down from the sky – not “descended from heaven” – because

the sky was the origin of anything strange or inexplicable, or they invented the persona in order

to impress or inspire fear in a neighboring people. It was their “origin unknown” rather than the

supposedly self-evident superiority of European civilization or Christian faith that imbued

Spaniards and their crosses with supernatural qualities.8

As expeditions traveled through the north in increasing numbers, crosses began to litter

native highways and thoroughfares, sharing space with wayside shrines built by Indians; both

kinds left on hill tops or spaced so that each could be seen from the vantage point of the last one,

the distance representing a day’s travel. Just as Spaniards left crosses along roads as route

makers as well as emblems of divine protection, so too had Pueblos, for example, long set up

stone markers decorated with feathers and painted sticks midway between pueblos. In the first

half of the sixteenth-century, Spaniards also used crosses as a form of communication with other

Spaniards or as a signal of formal possession for other Europeans. In 1539, for instance, fray

Marcos de Niza went north in search of the seven cities of Cíbola with Álvar Núñez Cabeza de

Vaca’s former companion Esteban de Dorantes, and the two men sent crosses to one another as a

form of code, the size of the cross communicating the import of discoveries. The following year,

Coronado and his officers left letters at the site of crosses for trailing units of their expedition to

8 Rolena Adorno and Patrick Charles Pautz, Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca: His Account, His Life, and

the Expedition of Pánfilo de Narváez, 3 vols. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999), I: 251-65, II: 297-

300, 351-58.

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find as they converged on designated locations. The efficacy of such diplomatic signaling fit

well into Indian forms of political communication, and they had no reason as yet to associate

crosses with claims of imperial rule. Spaniards unknowingly echoed native systems by which

parties announced their presence by sending diplomatic objects ahead to the settlement or

encampment to which they traveled. Thus, Melchor Diaz, who led some of the forces of the

Coronado expedition, found he could send a cross ahead to an Indian community with whom he

hoped to lodge as a sign of his coming and as a means of securing welcome. Increasingly, then,

Spaniards utilized crosses to announce the identity, diplomatic intent, and passage of their

expeditions, recording, as did one commander, that “Some crosses were left on the trees for the

Indians as a sign, and on them some leaves of tobacco were hung, in order that, coming to

reconnoiter, they would see that we were Spaniards.”9

As Spanish and Indian political ritual came together, new forms of meaningful exchange

associated with crosses developed quickly. If an Indian village offered Spaniards food, the

visitors erected a cross, seemingly in reciprocal trade. Indians might then scatter feathers and

pinole at the base of the cross in confirmation of the pact. Some Indian groups incorporated

crosses further into their political sign language. They might make the sign of the cross with

their hands as a form of peaceful greeting and paint or wear crosses of colored sticks on their

9 It also seems likely that Esteban lost his life when he sent the wrong message to the city of Cíbola

(the Zuni pueblos) in 1539 by sending ahead a gourd that he had used as passport of other regions of the north

with success but that, to the Zuni Pueblos, may have suggested an enemy identity or hostile intent. Documents

of the Coronado Expedition, ed. Flint and Flint, 40, 48, 65, 68-76, 121, 198-200, 204, 235; The Rediscovery of

New Mexico, ed. and trans. Hammond and Rey, 220; Céliz, Diary of the Alarcón Expedition into Texas, 51.

For discussion of the appropriation of Christian icons and expression in another region of northern Mexico, see

Cynthia Radding, “Crosses, Caves, and Matachinis: Divergent Appropriations of Catholic Discourse in

Northwestern New Spain,” The Americas 55 (October 1998), 177-203.

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foreheads (in place of shells or other decorations they might use with other native groups). With

such markers they identified themselves to Spaniards as “friend,” “ally,” or, at minimum,

someone without hostile intent. As time passed, Indians erected structures at way stations along

trails when news reached them of approaching Spaniards – building decorative arches and

crosses surrounding a ramada which would serve as a place of gift and food exchange as well as

temporary lodging for the visitors.10

The use of crosses as a form of passport and token of peace took on even greater meaning

in the wake of hostile encounters. When Spaniards found only abandoned villages or saw the

backs of Indians fleeing at their approach in fear of Spanish raids, crosses became amulets of

protection against other Spaniards. Part of the problem was that, perhaps unknowingly,

expeditions sent mixed messages of intent. As early as 1539 when fray Marcos de Niza went

north to Cíbola with Esteban, they traveled with Indians who had been among the victims of

Nuño de Guzmán’s slaving operations. So too did the expeditions of Francisco Sánchez

Chamsuscado, Antonio de Espejo, and Gaspar de Castaño de Sosa carry enslaved Indians back to

their own communities. Spaniards employed the captive Indians in hopes that they could serve

as interpreters and thus aid their overtures to northern Indian groups, but the captives’ enslaved

status could not help but convey an implicit threat of potential violence. Therefore Spanish

10 Documents of the Coronado Expedition, ed. Flint and Flint, 66, 68-76, 121, 124, 186-205, 235,

256, 305, 407, 516, 627n.71, 678n.297; The Rediscovery of New Mexico, 1580-1594: The Explorations of

Chamuscado, Espejo, Castaño de Sosa, Morelete, and Leyva de Bonilla and Humaña, ed. and trans. George P.

Hammond and Agapito Rey (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1966), 84, 190-91, 197, 217,

220, 226, 227; Don Juan de Oñate, Colonizer of New Mexico, 1595-1628, 2 vols., eds. and trans. George P.

Hammond and Agapito Rey (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1953), II: 1015. For discussion

of the appropriation of Christian icons and expression in another region of northern Mexico, see Cynthia

Radding, “Crosses, Caves, and Matachinis: Divergent Appropriations of Catholic Discourse in Northwestern

New Spain,” The Americas 55 (October 1998), 177-203.

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commanders found they spent much time trying to temper Indian fears with promises that any

village that allowed them to erect a cross in its midst would then be protected from enslavement

– future raiders would know by the cross’s presence that the villagers were allies of Spaniards.

Or, in the far west, for example, as captain Hernando de Alarcón headed a third arm of

Coronado’s 1540 expedition moving up the Gulf of California, he repeatedly used crosses as a

means of mollification – erecting them with promises of “brotherhood” to distinguish his

expedition from other, warlike divisions of Coronado’s army whose destruction and violence in

Cíbola had been rapidly broadcast through native information networks.11

In contrast, if the cross held out the potential of reciprocal exchange or protection, the

king’s standard emblazoned with the Virgin Mary’s image proclaimed only hostile intent. In

part, this was due to the fact that some Indian nations utilized similar markers of combat. While

on the Gulf of California, Alarcón recorded that he immediately recognized the hostile intent of

one Yuma group that raised banners “like the Indians of Nueva España use during war.” And, to

convince them that his forces did not seek a fight, the captain quickly seized the Spanish

standard and lowered it at the same time laying down his sword and shield. Most often,

however, Spanish actions made clear their own association of flags with military force. In 1583,

when Antonio de Espejo learned that Hopis were awaiting his expedition’s arrival in order to

give battle, he marched his forces on their pueblos “with our flag unfurled.” In 1598, when Juan

de Oñate attacked multiple Pueblo villages that would not accede to his demands, he did so

marching under a banner embroidered with the image of Nuestra Señora de Remedios – the

identical image of the Virgin carried by Cortés’ soldiers in 1519. At Ácoma, when forces under

11 Documents of the Coronado Expedition, ed. Flint and Flint, 198-200; The Rediscovery of New

Mexico, ed. and trans. Hammond and Rey, 186.

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the leadership of captain Juan de Zaldívar destroyed the pueblo and its people in 1599, they

carried out the carnage declaring that Santiago and a “maiden of most wondrous beauty” –

clearly the Virgin Mary – stood by their side throughout. Tellingly, too, when Coronado ordered

the Tiguex pueblo destroyed by “blood and fire,” Pueblos attempted to surrender under the sign

of a cross. Even as the close association of the Virgin’s iconography with violent deeds

imprinted her image in the minds of many Indians only in the violent terms of La Conquistadora,

the cross might still hold out possibility of truce.12

Missionaries were not exempt from using statues and banners of Christ, the Virgin and

the saints as emblems of conquest – they too claimed for themselves an identity as

conquistadores – “conquistadores of the spirit.” Thus they described themselves fighting a battle

for souls, armed with “weapons” of a “manly and zealous spirit” and “heroic virtue” that helped

them to “return victorious from the field and leave the conquered with the satisfaction of seeing

themselves subdued by their force.” And, a battlefield did await them. Strikingly, Spaniards

who went to New Mexico in the seventeenth century with or following Oñate’s establishment of

a settlement there, noted the presence of crosses among native peoples but no sign of Christianity

12 Warriors in pre and post-contact Mesoamerica commonly wore insignias on their back when going

into battle. Documents of the Coronado Expedition, ed. Flint and Flint, 189-90, 645n.33; Jack D. Forbes,

Warriors of the Colorado: The Yumas of the Quechan Nation and Their Neighbors (Norman: University of

Oklahoma Press, 1965), 84-85; “The Expedition of Don Domingo Terán de los Rios into Texas (1691-1692),”

ed. Paul J. Foik, trans. Mattie Austin Hatcher, Preliminary Studies of the Texas Catholic Historical Society 2

(January 1932), 10-47); The Rediscovery of New Mexico, ed. and trans. Hammond and Rey, 186-90; Carroll L.

Riley, Rio del Norte: People of the Upper Rio Grande from Earliest Times to the Pueblo Revolt (Salt Lake

City: University of Utah Press, 1995), 176; Ramón A. Gutiérrez, When Jesus Came, the Cornmothers Went

Away: Marriage, Sexuality and Power in New Mexico, 1500-1846 (Stanford: Stanford University Press,

1991), 48, 53; see also Susan M. Deeds, Defiance and Deference in Mexico’s Colonial North: Indians Under

Spanish Rule in Nueva Vizcaya (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003), 30-36.

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after seventy-five years of interaction, suggesting that the crosses, if of Spanish origin, had been

appropriated for native supernatural ends. When fray Alonso de Benavides arrived in Santa Fe

in 1625, he brought with him his own La Conquistadora, a small wooden statue of the Virgin

Mary dressed in clothes of silk and gold braid that he had found in Mexico City. Ceremonies to

install the statue in the parish church began with the entire garrison marching in procession under

the royal standard, with its embroidered image of Our Lady of Remedies, followed by firing of

endless rounds of gun and cannon salutes – who could misinterpret the Virgin’s association with

Spanish force and imperial rule.13

Despite directives of the 1573 Royal Order for New Discoveries as well as the principles

of the Franciscan and Jesuit orders, moreover, missionaries carried out their own violent deeds in

the name of God and the Virgin. In attempts to eradicate native paganism, they raided homes

and temples, confiscating anything that appeared to be an icon of native belief. Yet in doing so,

Spanish iconoclasty equated Indian “idols” with Christian icons and so sought out primarily

manifestations of deities in figurative form – pieces of wood, clay, or stone carved into the shape

of animals or people – to be destroyed and replaced with statues and images of the saints, Christ,

and the Virgin. Because he believed the Pueblos to hold fire “in high veneration,” for example,

Benavides recorded with special relish that he burned “a thousand idols of wood” in the public

plaza of a Tewa pueblo. Even as all this devastation went on, however, evidence suggests that

crosses fell into a different category from that of figurative, human representations of gods and

saints. Crosses existed in native symbolism and could be more readily appropriated for native

use in their own ceremonies – in a way that (whether purposely or not) was unrecognizable to

13 Arricivita, Apostolic Chronicle of Juan Domingo Arricivita, I: 145; Riley, Rio del Norte, 214; Fray

Angélico Chávez, Our Lady of the Conquest (Santa Fe: Historical Society of New Mexico, 1948), 33-36;

Chavez, La Conquistadora.

15

missionaries who only chose to see veneration of a Christian icon by mission neophytes. Thus

prior to contact with Spaniards, elements of ritual Pueblo motifs periodically included crosses,

most often recognizable as representations of dragonflies, insects and stars. What is more, in the

seventeenth century, Pueblos increasingly used crosses interchangeably or in the place of birds in

a way that may have masked the continued ritual significance of the symbolic design when

viewed by Spanish authorities. Taking a similar tact, Hopis incorporated little or no Christian

symbolism into their rock art except for a handful of crosses that were used as representations of

stars in the sky.14

At the same time, the search for iconographic correspondence between Spanish and

Indian religious items may have delayed Spanish recognition of some native religious objects. It

was only in 1661 that the “kachina wars” erupted, with directives that missionaries seek out and

destroy any and all objects suggestive of “idolatrous” worship, in particular targeting and

prohibiting kachina dances, which resulted in the incineration of 1600 kachina masks worn by

dancers who embodied the spirits while in ritual dress. Significantly, the zealous campaign

began when the new custodio of New Mexico missions, fray Alonso de Posadas, accused the

governor of the province, Bernardo López de Mendizábal, of allowing if not encouraging

Pueblos to maintain ceremonies involving dancers performing in kachina masks. What had set

Posadas off was the discovery of multiple kivas (underground Pueblo temples) filled with “idols,

14 Gruzinski, Images at War; Gutiérrez, When Jesus Came, the Cornmothers Went Away, 71-2, Fray

Alonso de Benavides' Revised Memorial of 1634, 43; Jeannette L. Mobley-Tanaka, “Crossed Cultures, Crossed

Meanings: The Manipulation of Ritual Imagery in Early Historic Pueblo Resistance,” in Archaeologies of the

Pueblo Revolt: Identity, Meaning, and Renewal in the Pueblo World, ed. Robert W. Preucel (Albuquerque:

University of New Mexico Press, 77-84; Kurt E. Dongoske and Cindy K. Dongoske, “History in Stone:

Evaluating Spanish Conversion Efforts through Hopi Rock Art,” in Archaeologies of the Pueblo Revolt, 114-

31.

16

offerings, masks, and other things of the kind which the Indians were accustomed to use in their

heathenism.” Indeed at Isleta, eleven kachina masks hung upon the wall of the mission church

under which were offerings of flower garlands to the kachina spirits represented by the masks.

Apparently, many Spanish mission officials – even after 60 years – had failed to recognize the

spiritual purpose of kivas, seeing their only purpose as “council chambers” or communal housing

for relief against the winter cold. One archaeologist points to evidence that every mission built

between 1610 and 1648 (that has been subjected to archaeological study) has a kiva in the midst

of the convento – built simultaneously and thus with Franciscan approval – within the mission

structure itself. The 1661 assault on kachina ceremonies was soon followed by heightened

violence – “idolaters” beaten and burnt – while Pueblo religious leaders (“sorcerers”) were

harassed, arrested, and in a few cases executed in the 1670s. The delayed destruction unleashed

against Pueblo spiritual practices associated with kachina deities may explain both Pueblo

toleration of Spaniards before the 1660s and the timing of the outbreak of the Pueblo Revolt in

1680.15

Tellingly, when Indians fought back in response to the violence of missionaries and

militia both, they targeted Spanish figurative icons. As tensions mounted in the second half of

the seventeenth century in New Mexico, Jumanos at Abó Pueblo revolted, burning the church,

stripping the missionary, killing him with blows, and leaving his dead body where it fell –

15 Gruzinski, Images at War, 34-9; Edward H. Spicer, Cycles of Conquest: The Impact of Spain,

Mexico, and the United States on the Indians of the Southwest, 1533-1960 (Tucson: University of Arizona

Press, 1962), 160-61; Historical Documents relating to New Mexico, Nueva Vizcaya, and Approaches Thereto,

to 1773, 3 vols., ed. Charles Wilson Hackett (Washington DC: Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1937), III:

166, 179-80; James E. Ivey, “Convento Kivas in the Missions of New Mexico,” New Mexico Historical

Review 73 (April 1998), 121-52, esp. 143-44; France V. Scholes, Troublous Times in New Mexico, 1659-1670

(Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1942), 12.

17

hugging an image of the Virgin Mary. In 1680, Pueblo rebels surrounded the besieged town of

Santa Fe, chanting that “Now the God of the Spaniards, who was their father is dead, and Santa

María, who was their mother, and the saints, . . . were pieces of rotten wood.” To celebrate

victory, Popé and his followers toured villages where they broke up, mutilated, burnt, and even

scalped images of Christ, the Virgin, and the saints. Banning all utterance of their names, Popé

declared “Now God and Santa María were dead.” The kachinas returned to take the place

usurped by Spanish icons, with kivas and masked dances insuring the restoration of balance in

the Pueblo world.16

Twelve years later, Diego de Vargas commanded the reconquest of New Mexico, leading

his men in hymns and vows to La Conquistadora with a much venerated statue of the Virgin

transported before them in a chapel on wheels to be restored to her throne in Santa Fe, thereby

eradicating memories of other statues of the Virgin hacked to pieces by Pueblo macanas (war

clubs). Upon reaching the walls of Santa Fe, he demanded the rebels surrender in the name of

the Blessed Sacrament and Our Lady of the Conquest. Those who opposed him replied with a

shout: “the devil was stronger than God or Mary.” Striking as well, to aid his veneration of the

Virgin, Vargas also carried with him his own copy of Ágreda’s Mystical City of God. Yet when

peace returned to the northern provinces at the end of the seventeenth-century, it did so mediated

by crosses, not the Virgin. Pueblo leaders who eventually sued for peace with Vargas wore

16 Gutiérrez, When Jesus Came, the Cornmothers Went Away, 130, 134, 143-45; Revolt of the Pueblo

Indians of New Mexico and Otermín’s Attempted Reconquest 1680-1682, ed. Charles Wilson Hackett, trans.

Charmion Clair Shelby (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1942), II: 203-04, 225-53, 328-30,

342-46, 359-62.

18

crosses around their necks and carried rosaries sent them by Vargas as safe passport to Santa Fe

where the negotiations took place.17

So now let’s return to the deployment of images and stories of the other “woman in

blue,” María de Jesús de Ágreda. Alonso de Benavides’ narrative – from which the original

stories of Ágreda’s apparitions came – reflected his struggles to redefine the state of Indian-

Spanish relations, especially in the destructive wake of Oñate’s conquest of New Mexico. In that

attempted redefinition, Ágreda played a central role. To make his case for the king’s and the

pope’s greater investment in the missions of New Mexico, Benavides jumbled fact and fable to

create a “divine history” that would reveal the great deeds of an intervening God and his saints as

they aided Franciscan missionary efforts on the northern frontier.18 Yet that meant he had to

reclaim the holy figures of Christianity, especially the Virgin Mary, and put distance between

them and the violence of the past. Thus as he sought to create a story for Franciscan New

Mexico, Ágreda’s claims of mystical journeys offered Benavides just the kind of miracle that

might put his new mission field on the sacred map on par with Mexico City’s legend of the

Virgin of Guadalupe’s appearance to Juan Diego.19

17 Gutiérrez, When Jesus Came, the Cornmothers Went Away, 144; John L. Kessell, Spain in the

Southwest: A Narrative History of Colonial New Mexico, Arizona, Texas, and Coahuila (Norman: University

of Oklahoma Press, 2002), 148, 172-73, 191, 405n.46.

18 Daniel T. Reff, “Contextualizing Missionary Discourse: The Benavides Memorials of 1630 and

1634,” Journal of Anthropological Research 50 (Spring 1994), 52, 57. See also Daniel T. Reff, Plagues,

Priests, and Demons: Sacred Narratives and the Rise of Christianity in the Old World and the New (New

York: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

19 Iconography was central to his mission. Thus, for instance, when Benavides first went to New

Mexico from Mexico City, he brought with him a wooden statue of the Virgin Mary, dressed in silk and braid,

and his first task upon arrival in Santa Fe was to install this new figure which would be known as Our Lady of

19

If we look at the account of the Jumano visit to New Mexico in 1629, it suggests that

Benavides embellished actual events and added the saintly figure of the young nun to reshape the

event into a story worthy of the hagiographic tradition he sought to establish for New Mexico.

The Devil, he claimed, had previously prevented Jumano conversion by drying up their watering

holes and driving away the bison, thus forcing Jumano hunting societies to travel out of the reach

of Franciscans. So, logically, it took divine will, exercised through Ágreda, to orchestrate their

return. Yet, if we take out the part about Ágreda, the narrative follows a pattern far more

reminiscent of past Indian-Spanish interaction. Indeed, it quickly becomes clear that the Jumano

party had gone to the Spaniards seeking cures in response to disease in their encampments

(rather than the santa’s inspiration), and it was crosses, not a female figure in blue, that

predominated in missionary reports of the exchanges that followed. When fray Diego López and

fray Juan de Salas arrived at the encampments, Jumanos greeted their arrival carrying garlands of

flowers and two crosses, and asked insistently for the missionaries’ healing powers to be shared

with them via the crosses they brought with them as well as the sign of the cross to be made over

the infirm (closely echoing the curing rituals of Cabeza de Vaca and his companions one

hundred years before when they had passed through Jumano settlements). Once the missionaries

acceded to their wishes, Jumano households each put crosses at the frontispiece of their hide

lodges, and, in Benavides’ rendering, the cures insured that they “were all so confirmed in their

faith in the holy cross” (italics added).20

the Assumption. He repeated such installments all over the province. Chavez, La Conquistadora, 11-25.

20 A Harvest of Reluctant Souls: The Memorial of Fray Alonso de Benavides, 1630, 82-84; Fray

Alonso de Benavides' Revised Memorial of 1634, 92-95.

20

More telling still, Jumanos never again referenced images of “women in blue,” be they

Virgins or santas, in their dealings with Spaniards. Another Jumano tale of miraculous

apparition did appear in Spanish diplomatic records in 1683, but this time the story focused on a

cross. Since 1650, Spaniards in New Mexico had been sending scheduled trading expeditions,

under military escort, to Jumano settlements in what would become present-day Texas to

exchange Spanish products first for pearls (from river shells) and later for deerskins and bison

hides. A growing Apache presence in the region made the military escort a necessity, and the

need for defense against Apaches had awakened Jumano interest in a potential alliance with

Spaniards, but the Pueblo Revolt had disrupted all contacts between the two. Therefore in 1683,

Jumano leader Juan Sabeata met with officials in El Paso seeking to find out if Spaniards were

capable of resuming their past obligations of trade and alliance. In their meetings, Sabeata

regaled Spanish diplomats with an accounting of a mystical day when, “peaceful in their houses

and fields they saw descending from the sky a cross . . . which was floating in the air but the day

was very calm, and it could not be the wind [to make it dance in the air] because there was none;

the cross looked like something alive and the people were astonished and . . . stopped to admire

the cross until it reached the ground and fell on some sticks where it remained for quite a while

moving like something alive.” Not only had the magical cross marked Jumano settlements with

its power, Sabeata continued, it had also insured a decisive – perhaps the greatest – battle victory

of Jumano warriors over their Apache foes. To extend the cross’s supernatural powers from the

village to individual level, Sabeata had painted or tattooed a reproduction of the cross upon his

hand, which he displayed to his Spanish audience. He then invited the Spaniards to see the

actual cross, but asserted that if they wanted to visit his village, they would have to resume their

trading commitments in order to do so. The cross thus embodied an amulet that insured peaceful

21

exchange, protection from disease, and battlefield success, and, more significantly, Indians might

be favored by the same spirit power Spaniards invoked via such icons.21

Notable as well, even the Apache foes of whom Sabeata spoke took similar lessons from

their years of combat against Spaniards, and they too appropriated crosses for their own mystic

benefit. An expedition led by Juan de Ulibarri out of New Mexico northwest of Jumano lands

encountered Apache men who had preserved religious medals as spiritual sources, not of

Christian salvation, but of Spanish military valor. When Ulibarri asked the warriors why they

wore the crosses, medallions, and rosaries (which they had originally taken off Spanish dead),

they responded simply that they had learned from long commerce with Spaniards, that “because

they [Spaniards] wore crosses and rosaries and images of saints, that they are very valiant.”22

Only a few years after Sabeata’s tale of the mystical cross, the Ágreda legend resurfaced,

both to the east and to the west of New Mexico. First, in 1689, Spaniards sought permanent

settlement in the “land of the Tejas” (that of powerful Caddo confederacies in present-day

Texas), and a missionary who had long treasured the stories of Ágreda’s New World visitations

sought indications of her prior contact with Caddoan peoples as a touchstone upon which to

build diplomatic relations. As well, the expedition led by Alonso de León and fray Damián

Mazanet traveled north in the wake of the Pueblo Revolt and, in response to that violence,

21 For translation of Sabeata’s testimony in El Paso see Maria F. Wade, The Native Americans of the

Texas Edwards Plateau, 1582-1799 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003), 239; Pichardo's Treatise on the

Limits of Louisiana and Texas, II: 350

22 “The Diary of Juan de Ulibarri to El Cuartelejo, 1706,” in After Coronado: Spanish Exploration

Northeast of New Mexico, 1697-1727: Documents from the Archives of Spain, Mexico, and New Mexico, ed.

and trans. Alfred Barnaby Thomas (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1935), 72.

22

Ágreda’s story seems to have played a critical role in precautionary Spanish efforts to convey

and establish peaceful exchange.

The expedition focused on the Caddos in response to reports that Frenchmen under the

leadership of René Robert Cavelier, Sieur de la Salle had been making diplomatic overtures in

the region for the French crown. Spanish officials feared that a French-Caddo alliance would

allow their European rivals to secure a beachhead from which to launch assaults on the silver

mines of northern Mexico just at this moment of Spanish weakness following their expulsion

from New Mexico. Thus while military forces searched for signs of La Salle, fray Mazanet

looked for indications of Ágreda's contact with Caddoan peoples in hopes that she might provide

Spaniards with an inroad to Caddo sympathies. In answer to the Franciscan’s searching

questions about a woman who might have appeared to them from the sky, Mazanet claimed to

hear tales of visits of a “woman in blue” who had descended from the heights and was still

honored in Hasinai Caddo traditions. This mysterious but powerful woman had not appeared in

living memory, but elders still recounted legends about her. To Mazanet, it was “easily to be

seen” that they referred to Madre María de Jesús de Ágreda. Elsewhere, I have argued that the

Hasinais may have heard, in the story of Ágreda, the outlines of their own oral traditions of two

female deities who had long before appeared to their ancestors with lessons in how to live in the

world. In one story, a female deity who resided in the heavens insured the Caddos’ daily

provisions of corn and water by controlling the forces of the sun, moon, thunder, lightning, rain,

frost, and snow. In another account, a divine woman had appeared at the creation of the world

and taught the first Caddos how to feed themselves through hunting and fishing and how to

protect themselves with dress and shelter before she returned to heaven. Thus in their exchanges

23

with Mazanet, they did not confirm the nun’s spiritual travels, they merely responded positively

to the similarity of the missionary’s legend to their own.23

It is equally important to note, however, that the prominent and powerful position of the

Caddo confederacies in the region provided crucial context for the ways in which they chose to

interpret and response to the Spaniards’ inquiries about a “woman in blue.” In fact, Caddos too

had prior knowledge of Spaniards, even though this 1689 meeting was the first time they had

encountered the foreigners in person. Jumanos had long acted as middlemen in trading networks

that linked the Caddo confederacies to native settlements to the west in New Mexico. Moreover,

we know they had shared news and information with Caddo leaders about the Spanish

interlopers. A mere three years earlier, in 1686, Jumano representatives – likely including Juan

Sabeata – had been visiting Hasinai villages when some of La Salle’s men passed through on

their treks in search for a route to Canada along the Mississippi river.

When Jumanos met the Frenchmen, they appear to have recognized another group of

potentially useful allies, marked as they were with amulets of crosses and rosaries. To overcome

23 Juliana Barr, “A Diplomacy of Gender: Rituals of First Contact in the “Land of the Tejas,” The

William and Mary Quarterly 3rd ser, 61 (July 2004), 393-434; Fray Damián Massanet to Don Carlos de

Sigüenza, in Spanish Exploration in the Southwest, 1542-1706, ed. Herbert Eugene Bolton (New York:

Scribner’s Sons, 1916) 354, 379, 387; Fray Damián Mazanet to Viceroy Conde de Galve, September 1690, in

The Presidio and Militia on the Northern Frontier of New Spain: A Documentary History, 332. Alonso de

León and one of his officers, Juan Bautista Chapa also separately recorded that caddís had told them of long

ago visits of a woman who appeared to the Caddos and gave them religious instruction; a story which de León

and Chapa also interpreted as evidence of María de Ágreda’s visits. Alonso de León, “Testimonio de autos de

las diligencias para la segunda entrada que se ha de ejecutar a la provincia de los Tejas y recorrer los parajes

inmediatos a la bahía del Espíritu Santo,” A.G.I. Mexico, as cited in Carlos Seco Serrano, ed., Cartas de Sor

María de Jesús de Ágreda y de Felipe IV, Biblioteca de Autores Españoles, Tomo CVIII, Epistolario Español,

IV (Madrid, 1958), xxxix, fn. 77; Juan Bautista Chapa, Texas and Northeastern Mexico, 1630-1690, ed.

William C. Foster, trans. Ned F. Brierley (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997), 138.

24

a language barrier, they used sign language previously used with Spaniards, making the sign of

the cross, touching their chests in a pattern of motions with one hand, and then raising their arms

to the skies. But when they sought to tell the Frenchmen about the hostile forces against whom

they wished the Frenchmen’s alliance – Spaniards living to the west who they now considered an

enemy – they drew an image on bark of the Virgin Mary and son, depicting a man being tortured

on a post while a woman looked on weeping. Though the Jumanos willingly gave the

Frenchmen directions for locating the Spaniards, drawing again on bark, this time to indicate the

region as a whole, with rivers, landmarks, the location of neighboring nations, and a description

of the foreigners people to the west, they made clear their hostility and anger with the Spaniards.

They had failed to honor trade agreements and commitments of military alliance against Apache

enemies, so they would be happy if the Frenchmen joined forces with them against the

Spaniards. Strikingly, even as Jumanos used Christian signs of the cross as political sign

language with Frenchmen, they chose an image of the Virgin Mary as a distinctive marker with

which both to identify Spaniards as well as, perhaps, to identify them as an enemy.24

24 Anastase Douay, “Narrative of La Salle’s Attempt to Ascend the Mississippi,” in Cox, Isaac Joslin,

ed. The Journeys of Rene Robert Cavelier, Sieur de la Salle, 2 vols., ed. Isaac Joslin Cox (New York: Allerton

Book Co., 1922); The Journal of Jean Cavelier: The Account of a Survivor of La Salle's Texas Expedition,

1684-1688, trans. Jean Delanglez (Chicago: Institute of Jesuit History, 1938); The La Salle Expedition to

Texas: The Journal of Henri Joutel, 1684-1687, ed. William C. Foster, trans. Johanna S. Warren (Austin:

University of Texas Press, 1998); Nancy Parrott Hickerson, The Jumanos: Hunters and Traders of the South

Plains (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994), 120-145.

From Jumano reports, in turn, Spaniards in New Mexico gathered that the “Kingdom of the Tejas”

was a populous and powerful nation with a “king” or “great lord” who ruled with “lieutenants” over a people

so numerous their cities extended for miles, so powerful that their warriors were feared by all neighboring

groups, and so organized that they had a hierarchical governing system. Balancing “civilization” with

strength, Hasinais enjoyed an agricultural economy successful enough to produce surplus grain for their horse

herds, worshipped a single omnipotent deity, and maintained a material trade that supported a well-dressed and

25

Yet if Jumanos conveyed to Caddos a sense that the Spaniards’ female deities were

associated only with war and might represent a threat of military force, Caddo leaders’ response

to Spanish imagery indicated their conviction (which was soon proved quite correct) that they

had little to fear from Spaniards and little reason to expend much energy interpreting the

foreigners’ spiritual imagery. One imagines as well that the Pueblo Revolt suggested to native

observers a real weakness in Spanish military capabilities. Certainly the Spaniards who came in

hopes of winning Caddos as allies over their French foes did not march into Hasinai villages with

banners flying in any manner to suggest militancy. Instead, though they proudly displayed the

royal standard “bearing on one side the picture of Christ crucified and on the other that of the

Virgin of Guadalupe,” they seemed to take particular care in presenting a humble and pacific

face to their Caddo hosts. Thus fray Mazanet insured that banners entered Hasinai villages only

in the hands of four missionaries who went on foot, carrying only their crucifixes and a picture of

“the Blessed Virgin” painted on linen. Caddo leaders asserted their own protocols of diplomatic

exchange and negotiation in response, greeting the figurative female image – as the only woman

in the expedition – in the same manner they would have greeted women in native embassies,

honoring her presence with salutes as an indication of the visiting party’s peaceful intent.

Moreover, the moment Spanish soldiers or missionaries transgressed the terms set by Caddo

leaders for remaining in their lands, the Spaniards were unceremoniously expelled from the

Caddo domain.25

well-housed people. Alonso de Posada Report, 1686: A Description of the Area of the Present Southern United

States in the Seventeenth Century, ed. Alfred Barnaby Thomas (Pensacola: Perdido Bay Press, 1982).

25 One, and only one, foolhardy missionary, fray Francisco Casañas de Jesús María, made a stab at

iconoclastic destruction while in Hasinai villages and nearly lost his life. He darted into the Hasinai temple of

the sacred fire and attempted to throw two icons representing the sacred cononici – revered child spirits who

26

Except for these initial exchanges in 1689-1690 that inspired Franciscans to incorporate

the Virgin’s image into displays of missionary humility before the powerful Caddos, Texas

proved another region where the cross would be the chosen passport and token of peace received

by native peoples in their interactions with Spaniards in the eighteenth century. Only two years

after their first meetings with Caddos, Spaniards encountered other groups with whom Jumanos

traded and interacted – Cantonas, Payayas, Simaomos, Tunosonibis, Yojuanes, and many others

in and around a joint settlement that Spaniards cam to refer to as “Ranchería Grande” – and there

too crosses predominated over women in blue. In rituals enacted in the 1691, for instance, native

leaders greeted Spaniards by gathering together gifts given them in past exchanges – carvings,

paintings, and banners – that they could display to signal peace and assuage Spanish fears about

their possible welcome. Once the Spanish expedition was in sight of the camp, the headmen held

the objects aloft and in clear sight – bamboo and wooden crosses as well as two painted images

and one engraving of a Spanish female deity in blue with light radiating out from all around her.

Though it was a mix of iconography with crosses and images of the Virgin, it is noteworthy that

Juan Sabeata was among those leaders, and it was he who carried the cross of wood. Moreover,

the passage of time proved all too soon that missionaries here also failed to establish the Virgin’s

image as a lasting symbol of peace. The banner with Christ on one side and the Virgin on the

other had been carried into south Texas with slaving raids for mines and ranches and “recruiting” acted as intermediaries between the Caddo xinesí (high priest) and Ayo-Caddi-Aymay (Caddo supreme being)

– into the fire in a bid to replace them with two little images of Christian saints. The apoplectic response of the

xinesí immediately sent Casañas fleeing in fear. Fray Francisco Casañas de Jesús María to the Viceroy, in

Hatcher, “Descriptions of the Tejas or Asinai Indians, 1691-1722,” 292-95, 301. Fray Damián Massanet to

Don Carlos de Sigüenza, in Spanish Exploration in the Southwest, 1542-1706, ed. Herbert Eugene Bolton

(New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1916), 379; Fray Damián Mazanet to Viceroy Conde de Galve, June 14, 1693

and February 17, 1694, in Hadley, Naylor, and Schuetz-Miller, The Presidio and Militia on the Northern

Frontier of New Spain, 344, 353.

27

raids for missions out of Coahuila and Nueva Vizcaya too many times for native memory to

forget. When fray Isidro de Espinosa returned to the region in 1709 he carefully chose and

designed a cross fashioned of paper and painted with ink as his calling card, and in 1716, when

he returned again, five hundred Payayas, Cantonas, Pamayas, Ervipiames, Xarames, Sijames,

and Mescales took the Franciscan and the military officers who accompanied him to their

encampments, where they shared food and trade and marked the site of the peaceful exchange

with a wooden cross. Years of interaction in the eighteenth century would prove that Indians in

the region sought only material exchange not subjection to labor or mission regimes, and

Christian iconography other than the cross could not be separated from the violent associations

of the latter.26

In that spirit, it is a story from the west – told by Yumas in 1699 – that seems to hold the

most potential for relaying an Indian reading of Ágreda’s apparitions. Notably, its source is a

military captain named Juan Mateo Manje rather than a wishful missionary looking for proof of

God’s blessing for his work. Indeed the missionary with whom he traveled, fray Eusebio

Francisco Kino, dismissed the accounts as nonsense, perhaps rejecting the violence that the

Yumas unleashed against Ágreda’s image in their retelling. Manje’s account of the Indian-told

26 “The Expedition of Don Domingo Terán de los Rios into Texas (1691-1692),” ed. Paul J. Foik,

trans. Mattie Austin Hatcher, Preliminary Studies of the Texas Catholic Historical Society 2 (January 1932),

57-8; Isidro de Espinosa, “The Espinosa-Olivares-Aguirre Expedition of 1709: Espinosa’s Diary,” ed. Paul J.

Foik, trans. Gabriel Tous, Preliminary Studies of the Texas Catholic Historical Society 1 (March 1930), 10;

Wade, The Native Americans of the Texas Edwards Plateau, 22, 56, 152-58; Isidro de Espinosa, “Diary of the

1716 Entrada,” in The Presidio and Militia on the Northern Frontier of New Spain: A Documentary History,

Volume 2, Part 2: The Central Corridor and the Texas Corridor, 1700-1765, eds. Diana Hadley, Thomas H.

Naylor, and Mardith K. Schuetz-Miller (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1997), 377-78; Herbert Eugene

Bolton, Rim of Christendom: A Biography of Eusebio Francisco Kino, Pacific Coast Pioneer (New York:

MacMillan Company, 1936), 376.

28

tale came from villages near the junction of the Colorado and Gila rivers in northwestern Sonora

(Arizona). As they had moved through the region, Manje and Kino heard repeated legends,

recounted by different Yuma peoples over many days, of a beautiful woman, robed in white,

brown, and blue who had harangued them endlessly in a language they did not understand until

driven to distraction they had shot her full of arrows, left her for dead, only to have her return to

begin the process anew the following day. Given that this was a region long subject to the far

reaching arm of slave raiding by Spaniards themselves or natives who sought captives for them,

one well imagines the anger behind the tale.27

Yet Yumas did not simply respond to Ágreda’s image with anger over Spanish warfare.

Studies of their cosmology offer suggestive hints for how her legend may have resonated with

their own belief systems and shaped the contours of their militant retelling of the tale. Yuma

religion did not involve much visible ritual, ceremony, or symbolism; rather they emphasized

dream-visions (icama) as the primary means for individuals to bridge the two dimensions of

reality – one material, the other mystical – and thereby acquire spiritual power. If and when they

had originally heard the Ágreda story from the mouths of Spaniards, they may well have

understood her to be of a supernatural world – a dream or a dreamer herself – or perhaps a

female deity like one of their own mythological beings named Ciñacacohola, who lived across

the water on an island or the seacoast and later became known as Queen of the Sky (Qua-kuiña-

haba). At the same time, if Yumas understood Ágreda as a Spanish war deity, their view of

warfare as a mystical testing ground for the spiritual power of their people might make her a key

target for violence. To kill or destroy her by shooting her full of arrows would not only

27 Kino and Manje: Explorers of Sonora and Arizona, ed. Ernest J. Burrus (St. Louis: St. Louis

University, 1971), 395-96, 404, 419-420; Forbes, Warriors of the Colorado, 77, 115-20, 130-36.

29

diminishing an enemies’ supernatural power as a people but also prove the spiritual strength of

Yuma peoples.28

A different political context in New Spain’s northern provinces thus put a different spin

on interpretations of Christian symbolism, images, and icons. Even the seemingly pacific story

of María de Jesús de Ágreda could take a decidedly violent and bloody tone in the mouths of

Indians.29 Instead, Indians found crosses rather than the image of the Virgin Mary to hold

greater promise of supernatural power that might mediate their contacts with Spaniards or be

appropriated to their own ends. For Indians, their earliest exposure to the figures of Christ, the

saints, and especially the Virgin Mary had been in war – war waged by Spanish raiders or

militias who throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth century traveled north bent on capturing

Indian men, women, and children and imprisoning them for work camps or missions, or

destroying their villages by “blood and fire.” When Indian peoples zeroed in on the cross as a

diplomatic symbol to use with Spaniards, they did not choose the iconography of a male Jesus

over a female Mary. Rather, they chose crosses based on their own diplomatic protocols and

experience. Crosses became emblems of peaceful exchange that served as mnemonic icons of

more peaceful previous encounters. In turn, the “woman in blue” whose legacy Franciscan

missionaries so determinedly sought to discover and confirm in their exchanges with Indian

28 Forbes, Warriors of the Colorado, 22, 40, 57, 62-67, 74; Documents of the Coronado Expedition,

ed. Flint and Flint, 199-200.

29 Even Benavides had conceived of no more appropriate end to Ágreda’s travels than that of

martyrdom. In an open letter to the missionaries in New Mexico, Benavides announced that in kingdom of the

Titlas where the nun had directed most of her mystical work, her much wounded spiritual body met its end,

after which heavenly angels themselves laid a martyr’s crown laid upon her head. Fray Alonso de Benavides,

Former Custodian for New Mexico, to the Friars of the Holy Custodia of the Conversion of Saint Paul in the

Said Kingdom, May 15, 1631, in Fray Alonso de Benavides' Revised Memorial of 1634, 142.

30

peoples in the seventeenth century could not be extricated from native understandings of the

militant imagery of that other female figure dressed in blue robes, Our Lady of the Conquest.

María de Jesús de Ágreda may have navigated New Spain’s northern provinces on the wings of

angels, but the Spaniards who followed in her path found welcome and safe passage along native

thoroughfares and in native villages only if they carried a cross and avoided mention of “women

in blue.”