Spanish brought with them the ‘requerimiento’ claiming rule
Your highness has put under her yoke many barbarous peoples and nations of alien languages, with defeat they would have to receive the laws the conqueror imposes on the conquered, and with them our language. …
— Grammarian Antonio de Nebrija to Queen Isabel of Castilla
In the early 1500s, Spanish conquerors entering Native American communities brought with them a document called the requerimiento. This document was read to Native people and was a declaration that those people were immediately under the authority of the king of Spain and spiritual rule of the pope in Rome.
The reading of the requerimiento also placed Native people under vassalage to the Spanish — a type of peonage that required payment of tribute in the form of goods and labor in return for protection and conversion to Christianity.
When Juan de Oñate and his expedition entered New Mexico in 1598, the requerimiento was an essential aspect of the first contact that took place between the Spanish and the pueblos. The same can be said of when Diego de Vargas and his soldiers reconquered New Mexico in 1692-93. Technically and in theory, the document was to be translated for the Natives, but in reality, the puebloans likely understood little if any of what was being told to them.
The original document contained a lengthy history of the world, starting with Adam and Eve, and finishing with the then-king of Spain and pope in Rome. It also stated lands the Spanish had entered were the domains of the king of Spain and those Native inhabitants were his loyal subjects. All mineral wealth, fruits of the land and human labor were to be the possession of the king and Spaniards who served him.
Under vassalage, the Spanish could enter the homes of Natives, take food and blankets as tribute, and force them to perform labor.
After 1573 the requerimiento became known as the “acts of obedience and vassalage” and was essentially the requerimiento with a new title. Natives were compelled to
accept Spanish rule and Catholicism under threat of punishment and war.
Under the contract Oñate signed in New Spain (what today is Mexico), he was supposed to provide supplies so the Spanish colonists would not encroach on the pueblo residents’ homes or food supply. This did not happen. The acts of obedience and vassalage gave the Spanish the loophole needed to remove puebloans from their homes so the Spanish would have shelter and also take their food for themselves.
This happened near Ohkay Owingeh in 1600 at a pueblo the Spanish renamed San Gabriel. The Native people were removed, save for a small number, to make room for the soldier colonists, some of whom brought women and children.
In the documentary records, the acts of obedience and vassalage of each pueblo were recorded by the Spanish, from their perspective. The voices of the puebloan people were muted. The formulaic idea that pueblo people accepted vassalage was an afterthought. In truth, the puebloans understood none of what was being mandated, nor would they have agreed to Spanish and Catholic rule over them.
The pueblos likely took a wait-and-see attitude to see what these strange foreign invaders were up to.
A reading of primary documents shows the requerimiento was at the heart of proceedings that were, by all accounts, unidirectional. In other words, the pueblos had no input. This would eventually lead to the imposition of the encomienda system on the pueblos throughout the 1600s, a medieval economic operation born of the Moorish wars in Spain in which conquered people were forced to pay tribute to conquerors as spoils of war.
The requerimiento was used by the Spanish to piece together a world empire. It was a weapon of words that ushered in economic and cultural servitude throughout Spain’s empire, including in New Mexico. The system of vassalage that followed was so intense and unbearable that within three generations, the pueblos would explode in revolution in 1680 to overthrow Spanish domination in New Mexico.