A Promise Kept: Locals Revive Dance Dedicated to Patron Saint of Captives 

Moises Gonzales says as a child, family and friends would gather for barbecue after Catholic Church on Sunday, and Gonzales’ grandfather “always told a story I thought was fiction.” The story told by his grandfather basically was this: “I was born in La Madera and we were Indians; we were Comanche. Then we became Apaches, and we’d hunt buffalo and bring back all these captives.” Gonzales says he never understood why his grandfather said these things. “I never processed it.” He has since learned that what his grandfather said was true.

The capture and enslavement of children is an aspect of New Mexico history long overlooked, ignored or disbelieved. Confirmed by scholarly research, this history is now coming out of the shadows through a number of articles, including by Gonzales, who pointedly has researched this complicated part of the state’s Spanish colonial history as an assistant professor at the University of New Mexico.

But in recent years, Gonzales – with others for whom this history is truly personal – has gone beyond recounting the story to reviving a ritual dance. The Comanchitos Dance historically was performed to initiate new captives into the community, commemorating them to Santo Niño, the patron saint of captives.

For two years in a row, just before Christmas, Gonzales and others performed have the Comanchitos Dance in the East Mountain community of La Madera, dancing while their cohorts drummed and sang words of prayer to the “niño precioso” (precious child), honoring the spirit of grandparents and others who were captives and slaves. In doing this, Gonzales kept a promise to his great aunt: that he would revive the dance in La Madera, where his grandfather was born.

In 2016, dancers performed on a cold wintry December day near the former plaza of La Madera. This past December, the day was sunny, and the dancers had permission to dance and circle around a now-private home that was once the village church. Some who danced, and a few of the observers (including several EMHS members), later described the experience as, at times, profound. Some attributed this to being on the historic church grounds.

Some, including this writer, noticed that at the end of the hour-long ceremony, as participants took turns asking remembrance of specific family members, a hawk circled continuously overhead, dark against the bright blue sky. As the last remembrance was voiced, the hawk departed. The last time the dance was done in La Madera was probably in the 1940s or ‘50s, Gonzales said. Its practice was fading and, according to Dorela Perea of San Antonito, the Comanchitos was incorporated at this time into one step of the Matachines dances, Gonzales said.

On Dec. 10, six days before the 2017 dance, Gonzales spoke to a large group of EMHS members and friends at the Carnuel Land Grant Hall to explain the history of the ceremony they would be seeing the following weekend. He said his grandmother and great aunt used to sing songs of the Comanchitos Dance, and his great aunt instilled in her nieces and nephews the importance of honoring Santo Niño – the saint of captives. His great aunt said to him, “You know the songs. Promise me you will dance to Santo Niño.”

Gonzales moved to Boston and back before he was able to fulfill his promise. Earlier, when he and his cousins had gotten together to sing, his aunt had said they were “singing it wrong.” After that, Gonzales put much effort into getting the songs and steps right, and those sung at La Madera are a coming together of what Gonzales and his cousins learned as children with what his distant cousins in Placitas perform every year. “Placitas is where (the dance is) strongest in its current form.”

The Comanchitos dance is experiencing a resurgence, attracting new communities and thriving where it has traditionally been performed, according to Gonzales. This past year, a group from the historic Atrisco neighborhood in Albuquerque asked to join Gonzales’ group so they could learn the dance, and they performed it the day before Gonzales’ talk. Bernalillo residents say the dance has protected them since the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, Gonzales said. He showed a slide from Ranchos de Taos, where on New Year’s Day participants dressed as Comanche to do the dance. Kiowa and Comanche captives who came of age and settled in Abiquiu are credited with keeping the dance alive in that village, which has two plazas – Moque (Hopi) and Plaza de Genizaros. The Abiquiu dance is a hybrid of “Hopi mixed with Utes,” Gonzales said. “Because it integrated Spanish elements,” the Matachines Dance is the only indigenous dance allowed by the Catholic Church, he said.

During Gonzales’ talk at the land grant hall, EMHS board member Marie Herrera Dresser said she used to sing some of the Comanchitos songs Gonzales had described. She said they were part of the Catholic rosary she heard at Tecolote, a village south of Sedillo.

The Comanchitos Dance was first done before Christmas, attached to the centuries-old Las Posadas tradition as a way of initiating new captives into the Spanish colonial community. Most of these captives worked as house servants or in the field. Their Spanish “hosts” were responsible for educating, Christening and then freeing them to marry when they became adults. These captives raised in Spanish homes are known as genizaros. Gonzales noted that in colonial times, the men of San Antonio, N.M., the East Mountain village where Gonzales’ mother was born, had to leave for months at a time in order to economically survive, hunting buffalo and trading on colonial New Mexico’s staked eastern plains – the llano estacado. He said the men would return with meat and products from buffalo hides – and slaves. “A lot of captives were brought into families in the East Mountains,” Gonzales said. Spain allowed trade fairs in Taos and Palo Verde (Amarillo, Texas), where Comanche, Ute, Pawnee, Shoshone, pueblo Indians and New Mexico families came together, and “it was actually a slave trade market.” Metal, chile, bread and horses were traded, Gonzales said, and “a young captive was equal (in value) to a mule.” “We don’t want to talk about Native American slavery in our families” but it is the reality, Gonzales said. Mestizos, genizaros, Spanish conquerors and Native Americans make up this comancheria – an ethnic melting pot, he said.

The East Mountain area has its share of this melting pot, where all descendants of the Carnuel and Las Huertas (Placitas) Land Grants who have been tested and have shared that knowledge with each other have been shown to have Native American DNA, Gonzales said. This is what Gonzales’ grandfather was talking about at those Sunday barbecues. Comanche captives became part of the story during the early 1800s, when East Mountain villagers hunted buffalo on the plains; Apache became part of the picture in the late1800s, when Apache raids of East Mountain villages like San Antonio occurred, “before the forced removal of the Apache in the 1860s.” Gonzales said his father was proud of his Native American ancestry. In talking about “we” being Comanche, and “we” becoming Apache, he was speaking not only of his family, but the East Mountain land grant communities as a whole.