1599 Acoma massacre

In January of 1599, Spanish conquistadors launched a punitive campaign against the Acoma Pueblo, an assault that came to be known as the Acoma Massacre. Over three brutal days, roughly 500 Acoma men lost their lives alongside about 300 women and children. Those Acoma who lived through the onslaught did not escape further suffering: many faced twenty years of forced servitude, while 24 individuals endured amputations as punishment.

This violence grew out of hostilities between Spanish colonizers and the Native Americans of the Keres Acoma Nation, in territory now part of New Mexico. The Spanish action was carried out as vengeance for an earlier incident, in which the Acoma had killed 12 Spanish soldiers the year before.

Background

Spain's monarchy set its sights on the lands held by Pueblo peoples starting in the late sixteenth century, launching campaigns meant to bring these territories under its authority as part of a broader push to colonize New Spain. King Philip II authorized the conquistador Don Juan de Oñate in 1595 to establish a colony in what would become Santa Fe de Nuevo México, corresponding to today's New Mexico.

During the initial period of Spanish presence in the region, contact with the Acoma remained limited and largely nonviolent, especially given that the Acoma held a numerical advantage over the newcomers for decades following 1627. That changed in 1598, when Zutacapan, who served as Acoma's cacique and spiritual guide, discovered that Spanish representatives were planning to subdue Acoma Pueblo through military force. He further uncovered a scheme requiring all Pueblo residents to relocate to a newly built settlement in the valley, where Spanish authority would govern their lives and bind them to labor obligations under the encomienda system. Adding to this, the Acoma faced pressure to abandon their spiritual traditions entirely and embrace Catholicism instead. Determined to safeguard both their possessions and their beliefs, Pueblo leaders began organizing a defense against the coming Spanish threat.

Oñate dispatched his nephew, the soldier Juan de Zaldívar, to negotiate directly with Zutacapan at the pueblo. The Spanish delegation reached Acoma on December 4, 1598, where Zaldívar and his sixteen companions demanded provisions and lodging. When the Acoma refused these demands, the soldiers allegedly forced their way into homes, smashing walls and ruining belongings as they seized blankets and maize, leaving Keres women exposed and huddled with their young ones. This provocation triggered armed resistance from the Acoma, culminating in a clash that claimed the lives of Zaldívar and eleven of his soldiers.

News of these deaths reached Oñate, who then commanded Vicente de Zaldívar, brother of the slain Juan, to organize a punitive mission against the Acoma, intending it as a warning to other Pueblo communities. Departing San Juan Pueblo with roughly seventy soldiers sometime between late December and early January, Vicente de Zaldívar's force reached Acoma on January 21, 1599.

Battle

The fighting itself commenced on the morning of January 22, one day after the initial confrontation. Spanish forces found the Acoma capable of holding their ground through two full days of combat, until Zaldívar hit upon a scheme for breaching the pueblo's defenses with a small cannon. By the third day he and a dozen soldiers had climbed the mesa and begun firing the weapon directly into the settlement. Nothing in the Acoma's own arsenal could match such heavy Spanish firepower. Flames spread through numerous dwellings as the confrontation raged, and the conquistadors pressed forward to overrun the community.

Population estimates place roughly 4,000 people living in and around Acoma Pueblo in 1598, with at least 1,000 of them serving as warriors. Roughly 500 men lost their lives in the fighting, joined by approximately 300 women and children among the dead. Spanish forces captured around 500 prisoners, who later faced judgment from Oñate following proceedings held at San Juan Pueblo. His sentence decreed that any male over twenty-five would lose his right foot and endure twenty years of bondage; ultimately two dozen men had limbs amputated under this order. Enslavement for two decades also awaited males aged twelve to twenty-five, as well as every female over twelve.

The bulk of the surviving Acoma people ended up scattered among Franciscan missions or placed in the homes of colonial officials. Sixty of the youngest women, cleared of guilt, were shipped off to Mexico City and, in the words of the time, "parceled out among Catholic convents." Two men from Hopi territory captured at the pueblo each lost a hand before being set free, sent out as living warnings of Spanish power. Fear of further violence left the town deserted in the massacre's aftermath, until Pueblo people rebuilt it in 1599.

Historians continue to debate whether victims actually had their entire feet severed. A 2002 letter to the editor defending El Paso's Oñate statue argued that period documents, properly translated, describe cutting "the ends of their toes" rather than whole feet. A separate letter published in 2017 pointed to Oñate's own journal, where he allegedly used the phrase "las puntas del pie," meaning the points or tips of the foot, the toes themselves. Proponents of this reading contend that practical Spanish colonizers would hardly have crippled slaves whose labor they depended upon by taking their entire feet.