Captain Diego Perez y Romero

 

Almost all family relationships prior to the 1680 Pueblo revolt come from oral traditions. Ironically, during the besiegement  of Santa Fé ,  when the wife of Captain Diego Romero’s brother in law, Francisco Lucero de Godoy,  took the small wooden statue of “La Conquistadora” which is the first Madonna brought to what is now the United States, none of the refugees thought to take with them any of the Catholic Church’s registries of the Christenings, Marriages, or Deaths or even any civil land records.

 In the mid-20th Century a Catholic Priest historian Fray Angelico Chavez tried his best to reconstruct  all the families in the 17th Century in his researched book called, Origins of New Mexico Families in the Spanish Colonial Period.  However all he wrote about Diego Romero was in a few passages.

             Regarding Pedro Lucero de Godoy, he wrote “They had a daughter, Catalina, who married Diego Romero, son of Gaspar Pérez.” 

Mention in the family of Mohedana, “In 1660,Diego Romero, son of Gaspar Pérez  of Flanders and Maria Romero, was accused of having had a child by his first cousin, “La  Mohedana.”  

Regarding Gaspar Perez Angelico Chavez wrote, “He made his  last will in Santa Fé , April 26, 1646,leaving all his possessions to his only son and heir,  Diego Pérez Romero.” In the section about the Romeros he simply wrote “Diego Romero, son of Maria Romero and Gaspar Perez. See Perez””

 

Don Gaspar Perez, an early colonizer and frontiersman, only lasting legacy was his son Capitán  Diego who dropped his father’s name and was known as “Diego Romero”.  Like his father, Diego Romero, led a very “colorful”, unconventional, and in the end a tragic life.

     Capitán Diego Romero was a member of the “Romero-Gómez-Lucero-and Montoya” extended family which represented ten of the 35 men who were granted encomiendas in Nuevo Mexico. An encomienda was a Spanish labor system that rewarded conquerors with the labor of conquered non-Christian peoples.

     Other powerful Nueva Mexico families were the “Anaya Almazán-Domínguez de Mendoza” clan and the “Griego–de la Cruz–González Bernal” kinfolk which held eight and five encomiendas, respectively. These three family groups monopolized 23 of the 35 encomiendas of Nueva Mexico or 63 percent, making them the socially and economically dominant families of seventeenth-century Nuevo Mexico.

             Captain Diego Romero held the encomendera of the Zia and Cochiti Pueblos and the Pueblosilla de Cujamungie  as well as half of the Pueblo San Juan de los Jemez, inherited from his father. The tributes from these encomiendas made him a fairly wealthy individual on the frontier.

Diego Perez y Romero was born circa 1623 in Santa Fé to don Gaspar Perez and doña Maria Romero, the daughter of Capitán Bartolome Romero and doña Luisa Robledo. Diego’s padrinos or godparents at his christening were his uncle Capitán  Bartolomé Romero II and  his aunt doña María del Moral both of Santa Fé.  Capitán  Diego was probably raised in the home of his grandfather Capitán Bartolome Romero and his large extended family of Romero aunts, uncles, and cousins.

 “Nueva Mexico was not an idyllic place to live in the 17th century. Known as tierra de guerra, land of war, the small number of Spanish vecinos (tax-paying citizens) spent much of their time defending their communities and those of the Christianized Pueblo Indians from depredations by hostile bands of nomadic Indians, mainly the Apache, Navajo and Utes.

 A young Diego Romero most likely entered military service by the age of 12, “having served in military campaigns as a cadet like others of his era.” As soon as he was an adolescent he would have been trained as a soldier to ride horses and use weapons. His associates would have been his male kinfolk, learning the art of war against the native inhabitants of the Rio Grande valleys. As an adult,  Capitán Diego Romero was described as being a “large, heavy-set man with curly black hair.”

             Capitán Diego “Perez y Romero” went by his mother’s name “Romero” instead of Perez and was known in most accounts simply as “Diego Romero”.   He told the Holy Office inquisitors in 1663, that he had not taken his father’s last name “because of don Gaspar's unchristian behavior”, who had “left a son” among the Apache Indians.  Since  Capitán  Diego’s own life patterned the morals of his father, that was probably not the real reason. More likely it is that the Romeros were seen as a more prominent and powerful family than that of his father who had married into it and not the other way around.

             Diego Romero led a privileged life as a member of the Bartolome Romero family community which was “a very successful family in early colonial Nuevo México. He was an encomenderos, inheriting his father’s grant and all the tribute owed to it by the Pueblo Indians. Encomenderos were land grants on which owners received tribute from the Pueblo Indians in return for armed military protection. He also was a Capitán  in the Spanish military and  Sargento Mayor as well alcalde ordinario of Santa Fé.” 

             Capitán   Diego Romero was at most a nominal Catholic probably with the same distain many of his extended family had for the Franciscan monopoly of the religious life in the colony. His adult life was spent in the military, during which the power struggle between civil authority and the clergy played out.  It is evident from his actions and from recorded comments, Capitán  Diego was not pious and like many other secular civilian and soldiers was resentful of the Franciscan missionaries claims of their superior authority over both Indians and Spanish  in colonial Nuevo México.

             He also may have also been wary of the Franciscans’ powerful ties to the Inquisition,  as it is

likely he had some relatives who were accused of being “conversos” or  even heretical “crypto-jews”. He would have been keenly aware that his uncle, Governor Francisco Gómez’s family was suspected of  secretly practicing “Judaism”  by his enemies.

            In 1642, Capitán Diego Romero was about 18 and already a soldier when he married 14 year old doña Catalina de Zamora, daughter of don Pedro Lucero de Godoy and doña Petronila de Zamora. When the wedding took place, his uncle Francisco Gómez was the interim governor Nuevo México Province.

 The Montoya and de Zamora Families

Doña Catalina de Zamora’s grandmother was María de Zamora of the “Barrio de San Sebastián in Mexico City. The barrio was one of four indigenous barrios of Mexico City in the sixteenth century, being formed from the older Aztec barrio of Atzacualco (Tzaqualco) of Tenochtitlán. María de Zamora was the daughter of a Spaniard named Pedro de Zamora, who was a resident of that city and former Alcalde Mayor of Oaxaca. His wife’s name was Agustina Abarca who probably Azteca.

 Maria de Zamora moved with her parents to Oaxaca when she was seven years of age and then her family relocated to the Pueblo of Tetzcuco, an indigenous community that quickly developed into a multi-ethnic community, where she married Bartolomé de Montoya, born 1572 a native of Cantillana in the province of Andalucía in Spain. This couple resided in the Barrio de San Lorenzo in the Pueblo de Tezcuco before coming to Nuevo México  as settlers in 1600.  In all likelihood, each of the Montoya-Zamora children were born in the Pueblo de Tetzcuco.

      Don Bartolome Montoya’s son Diego Montoya “attained the privilege of encomendero of the Pueblo of San Pedro in Nuevo México. In 1634 his daughter Ynez de Zamora, married in Santa Fé , 17 February, Sargento Juan Lopez, a native of Cartagena de Levante, who came to Nueva Mexico with Nicolás  Ortiz, as part of the  twelve soldiers recruited at Zacatecas in 1633. Juan Lopez ran into difficulties with the friars at Cuarac when in 1634 it was alleged that Lopez already had a mulatto-mestiza wife in Havana,  Cuba.  “It is not known if this charge of bigamy was proved.”

             Bartolome Montoya and Maria de Zamora’s daughter Lucia de Zamora had married Diego Robledo the son of Pedro Robledo. He was twenty-seven years old in 1598, and a brother in law of Capitán  Bartolome Romero.  The couple would have been Capitán Diego Romero’s great aunt and uncle. Diego Robledo was a soldier and was still living at San Gabriel in 1607 but probably left with his other brothers.

             Bartolome Montoya and Maria de Zamora’s daughter, Petronila de Zamora, married Pedro Lucero de Godoy, “a man of Spanish background and an encomendero in Nuevo México.” “Today, most of the people carrying the Montoya and Lucero surnames are descended of Diego Montoya and his sister Petronila de Zamora, respectively.”

             María de Zamora  was denounced to the Tribunal del Santo Oficio de la Inquisición in 1606 when she was accused of being a "hechiciera y bruja", "bewitcher and witch," for making and sharing potions. Also, there are records that describe two of her grandchildren as being "castizo", meaning one parent was regarded as "Espanol" and another was "Meztiza". These grandchildren were identified as Catalina de Zamora and her brother Juan Lucero de Godoy.

             Bartolome Montoya and Maria de Zamora’s son  Alférez Diego de Montoya married Ana Martin Barba daughter of Alonso Martin Barba, the father of Domingo Martin Barba who married Sebastiana de Mondragon the likely mistress of Captain Diego Romero and mother of Captain Diego Romero’s two children Salvador and Ynez. Domingo Martin Barba’s uncle, Capitán Diego Martin Barba, was beheaded in 1643 as one of the eight Capitáns complicit in the  murder of Governor Rosas by Nicolás  Ortiz. Catalina de Zamora the wife of Diego Romero and Domingo Martin Barba were first cousins, grandchildren of Bartolome Montoya and Maria de Zamora.

 The Marriage of Three Cousins

The Lucero de Godoy Family

Pedro Lucero de Godoy was a native of Mexico City, and had followed the El Camino Real de Tierra Adentro trail accompanying a wagon train of good to trade as well as new settlers into New Mexico. The Spanish government kept strict control over travelers coming into and leaving New Mexico. Very few family groups arrived in New Mexico in this period. They were mainly single men who if tey stayed married the daughters of the old settlers. Lucero de Godoy married  Petronila de Zamora, who married him, she later claimed, when she was eleven years old. To all appearances, she was the Petronila listed as the youngest child of Bartolome Montoya and Maria de Zamora when they came to New Mexico in 1600.

Pedro Lucero de Godoy was involved in most of the Church and Political intrigues in New Mexico of his time, although he managed to steer clear of unpleasant consequences experienced by others. By 1663, when he gave his age as sixty-three, he had attained the rank of Maese de Campo Commanding General of Royal Troops in New Mexico.. In this same year he was Lieutenant Governor of the Kingdom, as well as, Syndic of the Franciscans.  His son in law was Captain Diego Romero son of Gaspar Perez and grandson of Captain Bartolome Romero. Pedro died before the rebellion of 1680 and his second wife Francisca appears to be among the colonists who were massacred; from a statement by Diego Lucero de Godoy.

 Capitán Diego Romero and doña Catalina de Zamora’s wedding in circa 1641 occurred in the Palace of the Villa de Santa Fé, performed by Padre Fray Juan de Vidana. The padrinos or witnesses for the marriage were don  Diego de Guadalajara and his wife doña Josefa de Zamora who was most likely Catalina’s sister.  Doña Josefa de Zamora’s’ daughter, Jacinta de Guadalajara y Quiros married Capitán Diego’s first cousin Capitán  Felipe  Romero de Pedraza the son of don Matias Romero.

At the same wedding ceremony Pedro Lucero de Godoy's second wife was Francisca Gomez Robledo, the daughter of the interim governor of New Mexico, Francisco Gómez who certainly would have attended the weddings. He was uncle to both Captain Diego Romero and doña Luisa Romero who also married that day. 

Doña Luisa Romero the daughter of Matias Romero married don  Juan Lucero de Godoy, son of Pedro Lucero de Godoy as his first wife. She also was a first cousin to both Captain Diego Romero and Francisca Gomez Robledo.  Her husband was brother to Catalina de Zamora

  All these  first cousins married that day into the family of the Lucero de Godoy were grandchildren of Capitán  Bartolome Romero.

 An Unconventional Married Life

Capitán Diego and doña Catalina’s marriage was probably arranged and from what can be deduced,  an unhappy one.  The union of the Romero and Lucero de Godoy families may have been an arrangement as that Catalina was only near 14 years of age which was not unusual.  Marriages were often arranged for economic reasons as well as family bonds as that women were expected to bring a dowery into any marriage.

         As that Capitán  Diego’s cousin, the daughter of the governor, was marrying Pedro Lucero de Godoy, his uncle would have been expected to have furnished a dowery as well as his uncle Matias Romero to Pedro’s son.   It may be that Diego as the only male heir to Gaspar Perez’s estates married Pedro’s daughter for her dowery.

             Since divorce was forbidden by the Catholic Church, spouses in unhappy marriages often found other partners which the social construct of a “machismo culture” was common across Latin American and Spanish culture, which allowed men “a minimal sense of responsibility” and to “disregard consequences.”  In machismo cultures, “men are perceived as superior to women, assuming a dominant role in society.”

             It is not known whether Diego Romero and doña Catalina de Zamora had any children of their own, however if they did, they died young. When he was on trial in 1663, he stated that he and his wife had no children.

  The Two Decades between 1641 and 1661

For much of those twenty years between 1641 and 1661, the colony was embroiled in a power struggle between ecclesiastical authorities and civil authorities over conflicting purposes. The Franciscan missionaries believed the sole purpose of the colony was to establish missions for the conversion of the native people. They had the powerful Holy Office of the  Tribunal del Santo Oficio de la Inquisición to enforce their goals.

 The governors of the province, appointed by the Viceroy of Nuevo España , instead believed the purpose of the colony was to defend the northern frontier, protect the colonists, and seek to enrich España  and themselves.  The governors, as “Capitán General” of the military had control of the soldiers stationed at Santa Fé and the presidios, who protected both the Spaniards and Pueblo Indians from Apache and Navajo raids.

 A Soldier in Nuevo Mexico

While the Franciscans may have had altruistic motives in Nuevo México  Province, most of  the governors, who were appointed by the Reino de Nueva España Viceroys, came to what was viewed as a backwards northern outpost, mainly to enrich themselves. Governors were appointed for only a term of 4 years and served at the discretion of Mexico City.

             For the twenty years after his marriage, Capitán  Diego Romero “rode tall in the saddle”.  He was made el Capitán  of a squadron of Spanish soldiers and held many other military  offices including Sargento Mayor. Sargento Mayor was a military the position in the Spanish Army immediately below the Maestre de Campo. The rank was in charge of teaching tactics, security and lodging of the tercio troops. A “tercio” was an elite military units of the Spanish monarchy.

             Many of Diego’s duties, as a soldier, would have been to be stationed at mission outposts guarding Pueblo Indians from Navajo and Apache warring tribes. He probably was called upon to join any expedition and perhaps went on several expeditions into Texas. While he was instrumenting “cementing trade relations with the Plains Apaches”, he also was involved with capturing Indians as slaves for the Spaniards.

             As a soldier Capitán  Diego Romero probably cared little about the politics of the era except when it affected him and his families’ large “encomendero” estates in “La Canada” and elsewhere.   When not out campaigning he probably spent time at both La Canada as well as at his residence in Santa Fé .

 Governors Luis de Guzmán y Figueroa &  Hernando de Ugarte y la Concha  1647-1652

Diego was a young man in his twenties during the governorship of Luis de Guzmán y Figueroa and  Hernando de Ugarte.  These ggvernors were involved with several "conflicts between the civil and religious authorities." Even the King of Spain attempted to solve in writing these conflicts but without success.

             At midnight on 13 April 1646, two Indians from the Pueblo of Pecos, located in the mountain range to the east of the Villa de Santa Fé , arrived in the capital  in a state of urgency, seeking an audience with Governor Luis de Guzmán y Figueroa. As interpreter general, Capitán Juan Griego  was summoned at that late hour to interpret the words of Cristóbal Chepira, war Capitán  of Pecos, and his companion, Francisco Macha.

             In their Towa language, they explained that on the previous day, the Apache del Anco of the eastern plains approached the Pueblo of Pecos in “warlike array”. The Alcalde of the pueblo, Pedro Meju, and the war Capitáns, sent Cristóbal and Francisco as envoys to request military assistance from Governor Guzmán y Figueroa. He responded by organizing a force of Spanish soldiers and Pueblo Indians.

             “Campaigns such as this, which were frequent, usually consisted of some 30 to 40 Spanish soldiers and 100 to 400 Pueblo Indian warriors, a clear indication of the cooperative relations that existed in defense against common enemies.” In all likelihood,  Capitán  Diego Romero participated in this campaign, serving as a military leader.

             Eventually the Franciscans’ accusations against Governor Figueroa caused him to leave office in 1649, before his term ended. Rumors suggest that Figueroa died in November, 1650, in a duel.

             Figueroa was replaced by Hernando de Ugarte y la Concha  who was governor of Nuevo México   from 1649 until 1652.  Governor Ugarte used his soldiers to put down an uprising among the Jemez Indians, who were allied with the Navajos and some of the Pueblo villages. Nine of the Jemez Indians were hanged as traitors, and others were sold as slaves. Following Ugarte's governorship, the  Pueblo people became increasingly restless, resenting Spanish efforts to resettle them and convert them to Christianity, and eventually leading to an outright revolt.

 The Castillo-Martin Expedition

In 1650, Governor Ugarte dispatched an expedition from Santa Fé, led by Capitán Diego Lopez del Castillo and Hernan Martin to explore what is now north central Texas. It is certainly feasible that Diego Romero, who was in his 20’s, went with the expedition that reached the territory of the Tejas Indians, and reported finding pearls on the Concho River.

             Capitán Diego Lopez del Castillo was 50 years old at the time of the expedition and a son in law of Capitán  Juan Griego. He had first married Capitán  Juan Griego’s  Maria Barragan in Santa Fé , and after her death he received a dispensation to wed her first cousin, Maria Griego, also known as Maria de la Cruz Alemain, daughter of Capitán  Juan Griego  and Juana de la Cruz.  He also was also a brother in law to Blas Griego who would married Capitán  Diego Romero’s natural daughter  Ynez Romero some 25 years later.

             The Castillo and Martin expedition traveled about 520 miles southeast from Santa Fé along the route that had been taken by the Dominican friar Juan de Salas when he visited the Jumano Indians in 1632.  Some members of the expedition went another 130 miles southeast until they came to the boundary of the large and populous territory of the Tejas Indians.  The expedition remained in the region for six months  and collected samples of the freshwater pearls. These were sent to Luis Enríquez de Guzmán, the Viceroy of Nuevo España . They were part of the reason for the subsequent Guadalajara expedition.

 The Guadalajara Expedition

Juan de Samaniego y Jaca replaced Governor Ugarte in 1652 and governed until 1656. Governor Samaniego organized another exploratory expedition to the Nueces River and chose don    Diego de Guadalajara Bernardo de Quirós as its leader. The Guadalajara expedition was launched in 1654 to follow up on Castillo's findings.

 Don Guadalajara and his wife doña  Josefa de Zamora were close relatives to the Lucero de Godoy family and had witnessed the marriages of Capitán Diego Romero and Catalina Zamora. Guadalajara’s was a close ally with Matias Romero, Diego’s uncle. Don Guadalajara’s  daughter had married Diego Romero’s first cousin Félipe  Romero de Pedraza, the son of Matias Romero.

             As that Felipe Romero de Pedraza and Capitán Diego Romero were grown men and soldiers in 1654, more than likely they were with expedition led by Felipe’s father in law and Diego’s wife’s uncle.  The known soldiers of this expedition were don  Juan Domínguez de Mendoza and his son in law Cristobal Anaya. Don Juan Domínguez de Mendoza was also the father in law to Cristobal’s brother Francico Anaya who undoubtedly was a member of the 1654 Guadalajara expedition also. The Anaya brothers Francisco and Cristobal were sons of Francisco de Anaya Almazan and Juana Lopez de Villafuente and seemed to have been close comrades of Diego Romero.

             Francisco de Anaya Almazán, a native of Mexico City born to Spanish parents, settled in Nuevo México  where he married the daughter of early settlers of Nuevo México , Francisco López and María de Villafuerte. María de Villafuerte, born in the latter half of the 1500s, was a highly acculturated Mexican Indian woman from the Pueblo de Cuatitlán, then located just north of Mexico City. Cuatitlán, also spelled Cuautitlán, is popularly known as the birthplace of “San Juan Diego”, the humble Mexican Indian man to whom the “Santísima Virgen de Guadalupe appeared” in 1531. It is not surprising to learn that her grandson, Cristóbal de Anaya Almazán owned a painting of Virgen de Guadalupe, indicating a personal devotion to La Guadalupana on his part. Cristóbal was also an encomendero in Nuevo México.

             According to Cristobal de Anaya, who was arrested along with Capitán  Diego Romero for heresy in 1663, he stated that the Guadalajara expedition traveled 300 leagues east of Santa Fé for nine months through country inhabited by friendly but non-Christian Indians. However the Guadalajara expedition had found far fewer pearls than they had expected, but the Spanish had become interested in the region because of the exploration.

             Don Juan Domínguez de Mendoza, some thirty years after the Guadalajara expedition, lead another expedition into the Texas in 1683-1684 from El Paso de Norte after the Pueblo Revolt. The Spanish eventually built missions and the town of San Angelo where these expeditions first explored.

 Governor Samaniego’s Indian Troubles

During Governor Samaniego’s  administration in  Nuevo México, he had trouble with some Apache warriors who attacked the Jumano pueblo, kidnapping twenty-seven women and local children. To rescue them, Governor Samaniego sent a troop led by Capitán Juan Domínguez de Mendoza to the Apache village. The expedition was successful and the Apaches were punished. As Capitán  Diego Romero admitted he had dealings with the Apache people he may have participated in the rescue.

 The following year, Navajos raided the San Diego Mission and the Jemez Pueblo. The Navajos killed nineteen people and took another thirty-five as captives. Governor Samaniego again sent several troops against them. The Spaniards, led again by Capitán Dominguez de Mendoza, entered the Navajo village while they celebrated a ceremonial ritual, and there they abducted 211 people and killed several more. Then, the Spanish militaries freed the people kidnapped by the Navajos.

   These actions caused Governor Samaniego to be threatened by the Franciscans  with excommunication because he had punished the Navajo without consulting them. The Franciscan Friars filed 17 charges against him with the Holy Order in Mexico City.

 Juan Manso de Contreras’ Administration

Governor Juan de Samaniego y Jaca was replaced by Juan Manso de Contreras in 1656. Juan Manso’s older half-brother was the powerful Padre Fray Tomás Manso. Both had been born in the small Asturian town of Santa Eulalia de Luarca, a port on the Bay of Biscay.

             Juan Manso began his career in Reino de Nueva España  working with his brother Padre Fray Tomás Manso supplying the Nuevo México  missions with goods in 1652. These wagon trains formed the lifeline between the 1500 miles from Mexico City to Santa Fé with supply caravans for the missions and the settlements of the northern provinces in Nuevo España. Agents, acting for the viceroy, purchased supplies and turned them over to the Franciscans for transport to Nuevo México. This system resulted in goods of irregular quality and frequent interruptions in shipments north, usually three times a year. Manso was well known in Nuevo México and in 1656 while he was working with the mission supply train wagons  he was appointment Governor of Nuevo México by Viceroy Francisco Fernandez de La Cueva.

 Governor Juan Manso created many enemies among the Spanish settlers of  Nuevo México during his time in Santa Fé.  Like the other governors, he used his position to enrich himself.  Governor Juan Manso also infamously issued a "death sentence against the entire Apache nation” with whom the Spanish colonists were trying to seek trade.

             In 1656,  23 year old Francisco de Anaya y Almazá, who had occupied several important positions in the military and administrative areas was arrested by Governor Manso and jailed in in Santa Fé. The reasons for his imprisonment are unknown. Although his brother Capitán  Cristóbal de Anaya was arrested in 1662 along with Capitán  Diego Romero on charges of heresy. Francisco  Anaya managed to escape with the help of Diego Romero’s father in law Pedro Lucero de Godoy and his cousin Francisco Gómez Robledo who had been arrested a few years before.

             Governor Manso was involved in a scandal in 1656  himself, which involved the fake burial of an infant so that Manso the natural father of another child could spirited it off to Mexico city to be raised. He was accused of having a sexual affair with a married woman named doña Margarita Márquez, wife,  of Geronimo de Carabajal of Los Cerrillos. Her father Diego Marquez had been one of the eight men beheaded in Santa Fé in 1643 in regards to the murder of Governor Luis de Rosas .

            “The woman became pregnant” while Geronimo de Carabajal was away and “while her husband was out of town or away from his house, she gave birth.” A priest was summoned  and  “poured water on the said child, baptizing him.”   Margarita Marquez “did not inform her husband of the said baptism”, and she  “arranged for the said child to be baptized a second time” so don Juan Manso could act as his godfather,” in order to confute the said husband’s suspicions that the said don    Juan Manso was having an indecent relationship with his wife.”

             Don Juan Manso however at first was reluctant to be the baby’s godfather “while he had an unlawful relationship with the said child’s mother and intended to continue having it.”  He said to the  priest “how might this be, and how, when the said child had already been baptized, were they to baptize it anew?  The priest replied, “Go on, hush, you don ’t understand these things”.

             Don Pedro Lucero de Godoy and Sargento Mayor Francisco Gómez Robledo, who had helped Francisco Anaya escaped, wanted to accompany Manso to the christening in Los Cerrillos 20 miles away, but he sent them away, “saying they should let him go alone, and that he would not get lost.” Pedro Lucero de Godoy’s wife Juana de Carabajal was a kinswoman to Geronimo.

             A man named Toribio de la Huerta, “who resided in the said town”, took Manso  along to the church, “where the said don Juan Manso took the child in his arms, and as he held him in his hands as his godfather, the said Padre Fray Miguel poured water on him a second time and baptized him according to the ritual.”   The baby was passed off as the child of Geronimo de Carabajal. Padre Fray Miguel was so fearful that the Inquisition would find out what he had done and later committed suicide.

             According to some, Manso had a fake burial for Margarita’s child and the baby was hid with Luis Martin Serrano at La Canada, where he allegedly hid an illegitimate child of Governor Manso before it was spirited off to Mexico City.”  Tomas Perez Granillo, was a freed slave, half Negro and half Indian. He was a driver in the wagon-trains to Mexico City.“ His wife took the illegitimate child of Governor Manso to Mexico City in 1656. 

            Margarita Marquez survived the 1680 revolt  and was still living in 1682,when her daughter, Ana Marquez Carvajal, wife of don José de Chaves, attempted to poison her husband with a designedly non-fatal dose.” 

The Downfall 1660-1678

Capitán Diego Romero’s Offsprings

Capitán Diego was often unfaithful to doña Catalina and fathered other children by other women. In 1660 Diego was accused of having a child by his alleged “first cousin”, Juana the wife of Juan Mohedano.

             Mohedano was a native of Mexico who came to Nuevo México with a 1641 wagon supply train from Mexico City.  The woman was simply identified as “La Mohedana,” wife of a certain “Mohedano.”  This would have meant she was a granddaughter of Bartolomé Romero and Luisa Robledo.  Capitán  Diego denied that Juana Romero was a blood relative at all but was an orphaned mestiza raised by his mother, sired perhaps Gaspar Perez?

              Juana Romero was said to have “fallen in with the accused “madam” Catalina Bernal sister of Capitán  Juan Griego  and had slept with the Fray “Guardian of the Santa Fé convento.”  Capitán Diego’s said that the “blond son born to Juana” was not his but the friar's “as the resemblance of father and son would prove”.

             However Capitán Diego Romero did have two “natural” offsprings by a young “Maria Sebastiana Varela de Mondragon” in 1661 and 1662. She was an unmarried daughter of Alférez Juan de Mondragon and his wife Juana Sanchez de Monroy.

             Juan de Mondragon held the encomienda of the Piro pueblo of Senecú which was the southernmost occupied pueblo prior to the Pueblo Revolt of 1680.  These children were perhaps raised in the household  of  their grandfather who was more than eighty years old when he and twenty-four members were refugees in 1680.

             Whether Capitán Diego acknowledged these children or not is unknown as that by the time his daughter Ynez Romero was born in 1662, Capitán Diego Romero had been arrested and sent to Mexico City for trial. He would never have  interacted with these two children as he was banished from returning to Santa Fé .  Sebastiana Mondragon later married Domingo Martín Barba in 1669 who witnessed his stepson  Salvador Romero’s marriage in 1683.

             Salvador Romero married his first cousin Maria de Ocanto, his mother’s niece and daughter of her sister Juana de Mondragon. This marriage between first cousins would have been difficult if impossible without a church dispensation. However as the Martin Barba and Ocanto families were living as refugees in Guadalupe de Paso having been recently driven out of their homes in Nuevo Mexico, it may have been simply easier to claim that Salvador’s mother was a Martin and deceased.

              His mother was very alive not dying until 1728 at the age of 80 in Nuevo Mexico. She and her sister, Melchora de los Reyes were living in Santa Fé  after the Reconquest and claiming land owned by their father.

             Oddly, Maria de Ocanto claimed to not even know who her parents were even though her father Domingo Lopez de Ocanto had survived the Pueblo Revolt  and in 1682 took part in Governor Otermin’s campaign to reclaim Nuevo Mexico. However he died en route to Nuevo Mexico.

Governor don Bernardo López de Mendizábal

 Governor Juan Manso was so incompetent that he was replaced by don Bernardo López de Mendizábal in 1659. Bernardo López de Mendizabal was born about 1620 in the town of Chietla, in Nueva España. Initially intending to pursue a religious career, López de Mendizabal attended Jesuit college in Puebla but finished his course of study at the nearly century-old university in Mexico City. This made him the best educated of Nuevo México’s governors during that era. With his education complete, he led government posts in “Nueva Granada (Columbia), Cuba and Nuevo España .”  While in Cartagena, he met and married Teresa de Aguilar y Roche. In 1658 López de Mendizabal was appointed by Viceroy Juan Leyva de la Cerda to succeed Juan Manso de Contreras as Nuevo México’s governor.

 López de Mendizabal and his wife accompanied the Franciscan supply caravan from Mexico City to Santa Fé late in 1658. Also, in the caravan was Padre Fray Juan Ramírez, who had been serving as procurador general, or chief overseer, of the mission supply for the preceding two years. López de Mendizabal and Ramírez were quickly at each other’s throats, and Mendizabal voiced views that seemed decidedly anti-Franciscan.

  In the 17th century, the secular authorities and the Franciscan missionaries in Nuevo México  were often in conflict as they competed for power, wealth, and the resources and labor of the Indians. “The key issues between the two concerned the limits of civil and religious jurisdiction and the deference each man owed the other.” Governor López de Mendizábal was considered  by the Franciscans as “turbulent and arbitrary and extremely anti-clerical like Luis de Rosas.”

 “As ammunition against the governor, the Franciscans began keeping records of the habits of  López de Mendizabal and his wife and anything that looked suspiciously non-Christian. The Franciscans suspected that  López de Mendizábal and his wife, Teresa, were crypto-Jews. The Inquisition kept records of so called “New Christians” and López de Mendizábal’s maternal great-grandfather, Juan Núñez de León had been penanced “for judaizante in 1603.”

 Almost from the start, the new governor also incurred enemies among the colonists. Nicholas Griego, the son of Capitán  Juan Griego, went to meet  López de Mendizabal and his wife  at  Senecu. Dona Teresa alleged  that “having been cordially received by us, just because of his evil nature, he went back to town” and was critical of the governor. The Griego family turned against the governor completely when Capitán  Juan Griego was dismissed as chief Pueblo Indian interpreter for the province.

 When the new governor arrived in 1659, Santa Fé was the only official colonial villa settlement in northern Nuevo España. “Only about one hundred or so Spanish-speaking people, government officials, soldiers, settlers, and clergy were living there in some forty houses, the royal houses, casas reales, and the church convento. Some two hundred native people in Santa Fé served in the churches, households, and governor’s residence.

 In an effort to make “capital out” of the investigation of the former governor Juan Manso, Governor López de Mendizábal had “stalled and then locked up his predecessor”. After that Manso became Governor Lopez Mendizábal’s bitter enemy and conspired with others whom the new governor offended, especially the family of don  Juan de Griego of La Canada.

 Juan Manso, with the aid of allies, escaped to Mexico City and within four months, he stood before the tribunal of the Inquisition where he was made chief bailiff of the “ Holy Office” for the province of Nueva Mexico.  He had powerful connections within the Inquisition and Manso had brought with him the many complaints of Franciscans and other who felt wronged by Mendizábal.

 Governor López de Mendizábal also had “business operations” that competed with the Franciscans, once he was established in Santa Fe, including  the employ of Indians to “gather, and bring together at storehouses, “piñon, salt, and other commodities, for export by caravan to Parral to be credited there to López de Mendizabal's personal account.”

 Among his activities was also extensive fur and hide trade with the Apaches.  Governor López de Mendizábal wanted to “preserve amity with the Apaches not only for the safety of the settlements, but also for the safety of his own commercial enterprises”.  Capitán Diego Romero became an ally to assist Governor López de Mendizábal in dealing with the Apaches and also with kidnapping Apaches to sell as slaves.

 Sargento Mayor Capitán  Diego Romero Dances  With the Apaches

Capitán  Diego Romero was a 35 years old soldier when Governor López de Mendizábal and his wife doña Teresa Aguilar de Roche arrived in Santa Fe. He was wealthy, owning ranches, estancias and had an encomienda grant, inherited from his father. He also owned a home in Santa Fe where his estranged wife, doña Catalina de Zamora, resided. She would soon be a frequent guest of doña Teresa Aguilar de Roche. However, more than anything else, he was a soldier.

Capitán Diego Romero, because of his military prowess and disdain of the Franciscans, soon became an ally to the new governor.  He earned the gratitude of Governor López de Mendizábal by capturing Indians to be sold as slaves for the Governor and himself, which was a profitable enterprise but was illegal.

In the summer of 1660, at the head of a half-dozen Hispanos, their servants and a pack of supplies and trade knives, Capitán Diego Romero was said to have “rode tall in the saddle”.  He looked forward to “cementing trade relations with the Plains Apaches, have some fun, and turn a profit to boot,” for himself and the governor.

  "Some two hundred leagues" east of Nuevo México, on the "Río Colorado," the Spaniard traders made camp near the Apaches. “Here the heathens feted Romero” as well as a Pecos pueblo Indian leader known as El Carpintero, “with such gusto” that the Inquisitor Fray Alonso de Posada knew about it almost before they reached home. When Capitán Diego Romero was arrested in 1662 one of the charges against him was that he led an illegal expedition to the High Plains, danced with Apaches, and supposedly slept with an Apache woman as a wife.

 On this occasion, a “group of about thirty Apaches appeared at the Spaniards' camp and formed a circle around Romero. They wanted to make him their "capitán grande de toda la Nación apache" or grand captain of the entire Apache nation.  “Four of the heathens left the circle, picked up Romero, and laid him face down on a new buffalo hide spread on the ground. They did the same to El Carpintero. Then they hoisted them shoulder high and began carrying them on the hides in procession "with singing and the sound of reed whistles and flutes, performing their rites."

 Arriving at their camp, “the Apache bearers sat the honored guests on piles of skins in the midst of a circle of two or three hundred Indians. There followed more singing and dancing, during which natives stood on either side of the two men "shaking them." The celebration went on all through the night. “There were orations, a mock battle, the smoking of a peace pipe, and, according to Romero's accusers, a heathen marriage rite.”

 Capitán Diego Romero allegedly had “reminded his hosts that his father Gaspar Pérez had "left a son" among them and he too should have the honor.  “Accordingly, a new tipi was set up and a maiden brought. Inside on a bed of skins Romero deflowered her. Afterwards the heathens daubed his chest, some said his face and beard, with the girl's blood. They presented him with the tipi and the skins as gifts. They tied a white feather on his head. From then on, said an eyewitness, "he always wore that feather stuck in his hatband."

 “Had he not swaggered so much and had the zealous Fray Alonso de Posada not been building his case against the López de Mendizábal regime, Romero's feat on the plains might have been told and retold only around campfires. But because it reached the halls of the Holy Office, it was set down and preserved. Here, thanks to that tribunal, is documentary evidence that by 1660 the Spaniards of Nuevo México  had been using "the French system" for a couple of generations to bind trade connections with Plains Indians.”

 At his trial, Diego Romero, denying that he ever was "married" on the plains, but did admit to trading a knife for sex on two occasions at another encampments  where the party stayed nine days.

 Sebastiana de Mondragon

 It is doubtful that Capitán Diego Romero, now “Sargento Mayor” spent much time in Santa Fe as he was either on patrol, capturing Indians, or even dallying with his mistress Sebastiana de Mondragon by whom  he had two children in 1661 and 1662.  

 One of the complaints filed against him by the Franciscans was that he was advocating that sexual relationships outside of marriage was only a mortal sin for the woman, not the man.  He had made public statements that in a relationship with a mistress it was the woman who took on the mortal sin and not the man. Another was that he committed incest with a cousin which he denied.

 Sebastiana’s parentage was rather a mystery for her son Salvador Romero named her as a “Martin” while his sister Ynez Romero stated she was a “Maestas”.  Instead she was a daughter of don Juan de Mondragon, who held the encomienda of Senecu in 1660 when Diego Romero was in a “concubinage relationship” with Sebastiana, as marriage between them was impossible as that he was still legally married to Catalina de Zamora. He would have been around 36 years old and Sebastiana about 20 years old when her son Salvador Romero was born.

 When Capitán Diego Romero’s son Salvador Romero married in 1683, he named his parents as “Captain Diego Romero” and “Sebastiana Martin”.  At this time, a man named “Domingo Martin Barba”, was a one of the  witnesses who declared there was no impediment for a marriage between Salvador and Maria de Ocanto. Salvador stated his parents were deceased, which was true for his father but not for his mother who actually was married to Domingo Martin Barba, Salvador’s stepfather.

 There was an actual impediment as that Salvador Romero married his first cousin Maria de Ocanto, the daughter of his aunt Juana de Mondragon, which is probably why their relationship was hidden.  Salvador stated his mother was a Martin which she technically was as she was married to Domingo Martin Barba. However she was very much alive. Maria de Ocanto even stated she didn’t know her parents, even though they were also alive.

  Sebastiana de Mondragon was around 20 years old when Salvador Romero was born   followed by Ynez Romero who born in 1662.  The relationship had to have come to an end in 1662 when Diego Romero was arrested by the Inquisition and sent off to Mexico City.  Therefore Sebastiana’s children would never have known their father, although evidently they knew who he was. Diego’ s only known children would have been reared in their Mondragon Grandfather’s household until their mother was married in 1669 to Domingo Martin Barba and had five children by him.

 Don Nicolás de Aguilar

  “In the Nuevo México  colony, the Franciscan missionaries had set up a theocracy among the Pueblo Indians.” When newly appointed governor Bernardo López de Mendizábal arrived in Nuevo México in 1659, during  an inspection of Las Salinas in October 1659, he detected several abuses of Indians by the Franciscans.”  The new governor  then appointed don Nicolás de Aguilar as Alcalde Mayor, the chief civil official, of the region of Las Salinas which consisted of several Indian Pueblos on the eastern border of the Nuevo México colony.

 Don  Nicolás de Aguilar was a mestizo, the descendant of a Spanish soldier and a Purépecha Indian woman. “As a mestizo, ranking low on the social ladder of Spanish society, he may have had a sincere sympathy with the plight of the Indians and resentment of the rule over them by the Catholic priests.”  Don  Nicolás de Aguilar married Catalina Márquez, the daughter of Francisco Marquez.  Her uncle Diego Marquez had been beheaded in 1643. She was also first cousin to Margarita, wife of Geronimo Carvajal, mistress of the former Governor, Juan Manso.

 Governor Lopez de Mendizábal instructed Nicolás de Aguilar to enforce civil law and not permit the Franciscans to punish religious infractions by the Indians. Nicolás de Aguilar carried out this policy so enthusiastically that the Franciscans were soon calling him “Attila.” Don Nicolás de Aguilar detractors labeled him “an illiterate, mestizo, and ex-murderer” from Parral, Nuevo España .

 Nicolás de Aguilar, with the sanction and encouragement of Governor López de Mendizabal, made life as difficult as possible for the friars and “interfered with them continually.  As that the Franciscans often demanded that the Indians work for them without pay, Aguilar enforced a prohibition against Indians working for the Franciscans without being paid. Padre Fray Freitas then “preached a strongly worded sermon, antagonistic to the governor and the Alcalde Mayor who was present” against the new rule. The issue, however, that truly infuriated the missionaries was Governor López de Mendizábal’s permission to allow the Pueblos to practice their traditional dances and ceremonies, believed by the Franciscans to be idolatrous. “This was a direct swipe at the authority of the Church.”

 Governor López de Mendizábal recognized the Pueblo natives’ rights to practice their religions and not to have to assist each Sunday at Mass. He allowed the preservation of the ceremonial kachina dances. In fact, he and his wife Teresa Aguilar de Roche  attended these dances in the Governor's Palace in Santa Fé.

 In 1660, the missionary priests were so angry at Governor López de Mendizábal that they  even threatened to leave the province. They rejected the governor and the difficulty he created for their religious activity because of his new laws in Nuevo México.

 Two priests, Custos Juan Ramírez and Padre Fray Nicolás  de Freitas had left Mexico City for the Nueva Mexico missions within the 1658-59 supply caravan along with Governor Lopez de Mendizábal.  Padre Fray Nicolás  de Freitas came to be a missionary in the Las Salinas District. Once in Nuevo México, Padre Fray Freitas and others complained by letters to Mexico City and in January 1661 Padre Fray Freitas even went to Mexico city himself to complain directly to the authorities, including the Holy Office of Inquisition.

 There evidently he met up with Juan Manso, now the Inquisition’s Bailiff for Nuevo México and possibly others before the matter was put before the Viceroy. The various charges brought against López de Mendizábal by Franciscans and the governor’s enemies brought a premature end to his administration. The Franciscans who had threatened to abandon the colony ended up staying in the province once it was learned that a new governor was being sent to replace López de Mendizábal.

 In 1660, don Diego de Peñalosa was appointed to replace López de Mendizábal. However  he did not arrived to Santa Fe until mid-August 1661. In the meanwhile the Franciscans sought reasons to charged Governor López de Mendizábal, not only with malfeasance in office but also with the more serious charge of heresy. Some of López de Mendizábal’s closest associates like members of the Gomez and Romero families were also ensnared in the Franciscan sweep of so called “heretics”  who were basically the governor’s aliies.

 The Governor’s Wife Doña  Teresa de Aguilera y Roche

 Doña  Teresa de Aguilera y Roche, the wife of the governor,  “was a sophisticated, literate, and cultured woman” and she was not happy that her husband was appointed governor of a frontier outpost.  The capital of Santa Fe was a tiny settlement of no more than 800 people at the most, “only one hundred of whom identified as Spanish” the rest being mestizos or  Indian as well as a few African American slaves.  The capital “was surrounded by countryside dotted with missions and haciendas and was supplied by merchant caravans only three times a year. There was not much to appeal to a woman of Teresa’s stature and education.”

 To make matters worse, doña Teresa and the governor did not have a happy marriage. Don    Bernardo Lopez de Mendizábal regularly cheated on his wife with other women. “Many of the women he slept with were servants and enslaved women who had little power to say no. Angry over her husband’s infidelity but helpless to stop him, Teresa took out her frustrations on the women in her household. She whipped and beat them to discourage them from having sex with her husband.” These actions led to many of her servants providing details to the governor’s enemies alleging suggesting the governor and doña Teresa were crypto-Jews, who observed dietary restrictions and hygiene cleanliness for the Jewish Sabbath.

 Doña Teresa’s husband’s political enemies used this gossip to implicate the governor and her as being crypto-Jews, which she fervently denied after being arrested.  Nevertheless  the Mexico City Inquisition sent Franciscan Custos Alonso de Posada  to Nueva Mexico  to investigate the accusations of Crypto-Jews being among the colonists.

 From her  writings in 1663, when doña Teresa  was arrested on charges of heresy, it is learned that Capitán  Diego Romero and his wife were frequent guests at the governor’s “palace” in Santa Fe. She also compiled a list of enemies, including primarily the Juan Greigo family into which Diego’s “natural” daughter Ynez by his mistress Sebastiana Martin, would eventually  marry.

 Doña Teresa was well acquainted with Capitán  Diego Romero’s estranged wife doña Catalina de Zamora, as she is mentioned often in her writings. Evidently the two resided near each other around the Santa Fe plaza as well as did Capitán Diego’s aunt doña Ana Romero y Robledo, widow of Governor Francisco Gómez. Perhaps the two women commiserated over their faithless husbands as Capitán  Diego Romero was having an affair with Sebastiana Martin as well as probably with other women.

However, evidently they had a falling out, as doña Teresa later considered doña Catalina an enemy from testimony doña Catalina gave at her husband’s investigation held by his replacement, Governor Diego Peñalosa.  Before that however, doña  Catalina de Zamora was mentioned as a frequent guest in the residence of governor. Doña Teresa wrote she would serve a beverage of chocolate to her guests which her husband as a merchant always had a ready supply of cocoa beans instead of coffee or tea.

 Custos Alonso de Posada  and Governor Diego de Peñalosa

 Don Bernardo López de Mendizábal’s governorship only lasted until 1660 as that the Viceroy of Nuevo España, Juan de Leyva de la Cerda, after receiving complaints of malfeasance from both civilians and clergy, appointed Diego Dionisio de Peñalosa to take his place.  The Holy Office appointed Padre Fray Alonso de Posada as “Custos” over the Franciscan friars in Nuevo México to investigate acts of heresy.

 Governor López de Mendizábal wrote to authorities in Mexico City in his own defense and gave the assignment of delivering the missive to Francisco Gómez Robledo and his brother in law Juan Lucero de Godoy. Capitán  Diego Romero as he also was a brothers in law possibly went also as there would have been safety in numbers.  However unfortunately for López de Mendizábal, when the brothers in law reached Zacatecas it was shortly after the northbound caravan of Diego Peñalosa and Fray Posada had already arrived in the town. They were ordered to surrender Governor López de Mendizábal’s dispatch to them thus thereby earning the animas of Governor Peñalosa and Fray Posada. Governor López de Mendizábal’s letters never reached authorities in Mexico City.

 The dispatches seized by newly appointed Governor Diego Peñalosa, according to Teresa Aguilar de Roche, was the source of the vindictiveness of the new governor towards don Bernardo López de Mendizábal. She claimed, “I heard some persons, and at present I do not remember specifically who they were, say that to counter the dispatches seized by Peñalosa, other contrary ones were being drawn up to send to, I do not know which tribunals, because I did not hear this clearly; but it is public knowledge that all the wickedness that has been committed with us has been in retaliation for them; and so that it may be clear,  whether this is a case of vengeful bias and hatred.”

  Custos Alonso de Posada reached Santa Fé in the Spring of 1661 before Diego Peñalosa arrived,  while Governor López de Mendizábal was still was in office. “On May 9, 1661, as agent of the Inquisition, he began hearing formal testimony that quickly opened his eyes.” On May 22, he forbade kachina dances and ordered the missionaries “to seize every mask, prayer stick, and effigy they could lay hands on and burn them. This they did, to sixteen hundred such objects by their own count.”

  Custos Posada managed to stay out of Governor Lopez de Mendizábal reach until Diego Peñalosa arrived three months later. Almost immediately after arriving in August 1661, Governor Peñalosa, together with Custos Posada, “set about to investigate allegations  of corruption and abuse of power by López de Mendizábal.  Custos Posada published an “Edict of the Faith” in Santa Fe of which all were to attend, however the ex-governor stayed away. “He said he was ill.”

 One of the first allies of Governor López de Mendizábal arrested was the hated Nicolás de Aguilar. In 1660, the Franciscans had publicly excommunicated Aguilar who turned his back on the clerical judge and said he did "not care for all the excommunications in the world." The judge resigned "saying he did not wish to proceed with people who had no fear of God or censures." Capitán  Aguilar was arrested on orders of the Holy Office on 29 August 1661.

 Those who felt slighted by former Governor López de Mendizábal or his subordinates immediately supported Governor Peñalosa, especially the Griego and Bernal clan as well as the Franciscans led Custos Posada.

 Governor Peñalosa directly began civil proceedings against López de Mendizábal while Custos Posada interviewed people in order to indict the former governor for heresy, an even more dangerous accusation. The Custos “cast a wide net in which Diego Romero and his Gomez Robledo cousins were be ensnared.” Governor Peñalosa and Custos Posada were not satisfied with punishing the former governor but desired to crush him.

 In September 1661, a proclamation by Governor Peñalosa was announced “that for a period of thirty days any person with complaints or claims, civil or criminal, against former governor López de Mendizábal or his subordinates should appear before the new governor Peñalosa in Santa Fé. Their grievances would be noted, justice would be done, and damages would be compensated.”

 “A parade of individuals added claims of their own” and in all, Governor Peñalosa received more than seventy formal petitions of complaint against his predecessor. Out of all this, Peñalosa drew up a thirty-three-count of malfeasance indictments against the ex-governor. Governor Peñalosa then had López de Mendizábal  arrested and held an investigation in late in 1661.

 One of the complaints against López de Mendizábal  involved the Pecos Pueblo Indians who stated that he still owed them one hundred pesos for "one hundred parchments and fine tanned skins". They claimed he also owed them for seven tents of fine tanned skin, worth eight pesos each, or fifty-six pesos. Nor had he paid them for "a great quantity of piñon nuts." They could not remember exactly how many bushels. “They asked that Sargento Mayor Diego Romero, who had taken delivery of the nuts on López' de Mendizábal account, to state the quantity.”

 Doña  Teresa, after Governor Peñalosa had her husband arrested,  remarked on an event,  “that the night when the said don Diego [Peñalosa] was in her house” and “while doña Catalina de Zamora, wife of Capitán  Diego Romero and resident of Santa Fé, was with her,”  don Diego “walked about the great hall and he said to her, “Ah, my esteemed doña Teresa, if I could help it, I’d give the blood of my veins,  a curse on the duties of office here in the Indies!”  She said that  doña Catalina Zamora said “fairly loudly, so that the said don Diego could have heard it, ‘A curse on you! How is your office to blame for your evil deeds? After you have thought them up and carried them out and been the instigator of them all, now you want to give satisfaction. God give you the punishment you deserve!”

 Don Diego did not reply to this, if perchance he heard it; and she supposes that the said doña  Catalina probably knew the unjust deeds the said don  Diego had done, because her brother, Juan Lucero [de Godoy], was secretary to the said don Diego.”

 While Bernardo López de Mendizábal languished in confinement, “his accusers drew the noose tighter and tighter around his neck”. Governor Peñalosa wanted to ruin his predecessor without assistance from Custos Alonso de Posada, who was “brandishing the terrible authority of the Tribunal del Santo Oficio de la Inquisición.”  However it was Custos Posada who really “brought low the unrepentant former governor by gathering reports from his neighbors and servants who accused López de Mendizábal and his wife of being “crypto-Jews.”

 Doña  Teresa  testified that Padre Fray Posada had told others “several times that my husband would be arrested by the Holy Office. And likewise at this time he [Pedro Manso Valdez lieutenant governor to Peñalosa and nephew to  Juan Manso] ordered her [Josefa Sandoval] husband [Pedro de Arteaga]   not to come to our house, perhaps because he feared that she might tell. And then when he found out that she had been at our house while he was at Moqui, [among the Hopi] he was greatly displeased. And during this time, on the occasions when she [Josefa Sandoval]  came unknown to anyone, if Valdés found out about it he would had had her removed from our house as quickly as possible.”

 Alienation of the Bernal and Griego Families

 Doña Teresa Aguilar de Roche listed the Griego-Bernal family as the main enemies of her husband don Bernardo Lopez de Mendizábal, due to slights Capitán Juan Griego felt the governor imposed on his family. Doña Teresa criticized more than a dozen members of the Bernal-Griego extended family as being enemies of the governor and herself. Doña  Teresa wrote in her  defense a twenty-eight-page document identifying all of her enemies by name, primarily Capitán Juan Griego, his sister Caterina Bernal, and other relatives and laying out exactly why their testimonies were biased.

 “Griego and Bernal, all who are our mortal enemies and especially mine, although I have given them no cause for it and have many complaints against them”.  She claimed that Capitán  Juan Griego  had many reasons to report false information  as “that he was the son of a heretic and therefore not a reliable Christian.” She claimed that Capitán  Juan Griego’s father was a crypto-Jew, the same accusation being made against her.

 She alleged that Capitán Juan Griego was simply angry at don   Bernardo López de Mendizábal because the governor had dismissed him as an Indian interpreter as well as a nephew. Additionally she stated that the family was angry that the governor had  banished  Greigo’s sister Catalina Bernal, after scolding her several times due “for the way she and her daughters lived”  as lewd women.

 Accusations of Being “Judaizante”

 The political enemies of don Bernardo were not content to just have him simply arrested for maleficence as governor, they wanted to also involve his wife doña Teresa so that the pair would come to the attention of the Tribunal del Santo Oficio de la Inquisición in Mexico City.  It was the only way  the Santo Oficio de la Inquisición would involve themselves was with accusations of the pair being Crypto Jews and heresy.

 Custos Posada investigated the accusations of heresy  against  the governor and his wife by interviewing residents, some who were subpoenaed and others who volunteered their accusations.  “It was a time to settle old scores” against don Bernardo and doña  Teresa.

 By the spring of 1662, Custos Posada had orders from the Holy Office, delivered by Juan Manso, now Nuevo Mexico’s chief bailiff for the Inquisition. He was “spoiling for the chance to square accounts with López de Mendizábal.”   Manso was ordered to return to Santa Fé from Mexico City to arrest Bernardo López de Mendizábal and doña Teresa from testimonies gather by Custos Posada.

 The arrest warrant read, “We, Apostolic Inquisitors against heretical depravity and apostasy in this city and archbishopric of the states and provinces of Nuevo España , Guatemala, and the Philippine Islands, by apostolic authority, etc., order you, don Juan Manso, who serve as chief bailiff of this Holy Office in Nuevo México”, ordered to return to “Santa Fé in the provinces of Nuevo México seize doña  Teresa de Aguilera y Roche, don Bernardo López de Mendizábal, bring [them] to the secret prison of this Holy Office sequester all property, chattel and real, commissary the said Father Custodian Padre Fray Alonso de Posada may name; and you shall place [this property] in the possession of dependable lay citizens to the satisfaction of the said treasurer or of the person who may there exercise his powers, and, should the said treasurer have no representative, to the satisfaction of the person named by our said commissary Father Padre Fray Alonso de Posada and offering dependable lay citizens as guarantors on the 22nd day of the month of March of the year 1662.”

 Doña  Teresa was accused of being a crypto-Jew by her husband’s enemies, many who used her servants , Josefa de Sandoval and her husband Pedro de Arteaga’s observations  that the governor and his wife did not attend mass regularly, observed cleansing rituals on Fridays, of not fasting during Lent nor used a rosary. Additionally Pedro de Arteaga reported “that he never saw the governor pray, never heard him speak of a saint, nor carry a rosary, nor say grace before eating.”  He also claimed that governor and his wife kept kosher meals as that he “cleared their table” and  had access to how they lived and ate.

 Doña  Teresa  alleged that Governor Peñalosa had “extreme hostility” towards her “as he showed in persecuting me to the point of depriving me of all communication, as he did when he sent orders for Juana Mohedana, wife of Juan Mohedana, and Josefa de Sandoval to be taken from my house when they were coming from church with me”.  Juana Mohedana was Capitán Diego Romero’s adopted Mestiza sister whom he would be accused of having incest with.

 Additionally she mentioned  doña Catalina de Zamora and  Capitán Diego as being frequent visitors to the governors house and how they were with her when she was observing lent. She commented that regarding  Governor Peñalosa actions, “it would be an endless task to attempt to recount the persecutions with which he showed his enmity; and if need be they could be ascertained.”

 The Arrest of Four New Mexicans Heretics

 In 1661 and 1662 a small group of Governor López de Mendizábal’s closest allies were arrested by local officials of the Holy Office of the Tribunal del Santo Oficio de la Inquisición on charges of heresy. They were Capitán  Nicolás de Aguilar, alcalde mayor of the Salinas district, Sergeant Major Diego Romero, former alcalde ordinario, or municipal magistrate, of Santa Fé and his cousin Sergeant Major Francisco Gómez Robledo were arrested for heresy. The arrest of Cristóbal de Anaya Almazán was left up to the discretion of Custos Posada with what to charge him.

 Capitán  Diego Romero and his Gómez cousin, grandsons of Bartolome Romero, mainly came to the attention of the Holy Office of the Tribunal del Santo Oficio de la Inquisición due to their association with the former governor, who like them, were accused of being crypto-Jews.

 It has been suggested that the “crypto-Jewish identity and practices of early Nuevo México Province colonists were quite well known both to the general populace and to religious officials prior to these arrests. It appeared that both civil and religious were unconcerned about crypto-Jew heresy prior to the effort in the 1660s on the part of the “Franciscans to break down the political power of Governor López de Mendizábal.”

 An example of earlier tolerance is that “Padre Fray Nicolás de Villar, related that during lent of 1657, one of his Franciscan brethren had told him of a young girl, the eldest daughter of Portuguese blacksmith Manuel Jorge, who had confessed to him that ‘she observed the Law of Moses with exquisite rites and ceremonies.’ The priest did not report her heresy to anyone, since the closest Tribunal was 500 leagues distant, in Durango, and he was not aware of the presence of any Tribunal del Santo Oficio de la Inquisición official in the colony.  This was even during the governorship of Juan Manso.

 The Arrest of Nicolás de Aguilar

 Capitán  Nicolás de Aguilar was the first arrested  by the Holy Office on 29 August 1661, shortly after the arrival of the new governor. Aguilar was accused of simple heresy and was charged with “obstructing the missionary program, inciting hostility toward the Franciscan friars and disrespect for the church and its teachings, undermining mission discipline, and encouraging native Kachina dances.”  He lingered in a cell in the secret prison of  Santo Domingo for over a year until . was transported in the 1662 fall convoy to Mexico City to be turned over to the Tribunal del Santo Oficio de la Inquisición authorities.

 The Arrest of Diego Romero

 Capitán  Diego Romero was arrested at Isleta Pueblo on 2 May 1662 as his company of soldiers arrived from a patrol to Moqui in Hopi country. Romero was on escort duty, on which he had only recently gone on,  because other soldiers  were about to set out on an expedition. Capitán  Diego’s company of soldiers was then ordered attached to others because of his arrest on charges of blasphemy.

 Capitán  Diego Romero was brought back to Santa Fé where he was shackled inside a Franciscan cell. Then Custos Posada ordered all his property attached. He was ordered to “designate a person of his choice to assist in the attachment of his property.” Most likely he had his father in law Pedro Lucero de Godoy see to his seized property.  His wife Catalina de Zamora most certainly had to leave her home in Santa Fé to go live with her Lucero de Godoy family.

 The Arrest of Francisco Gómez y Robledo

 In 1662, don  Francisco Gómez y Robledo was the “pater familias of the large Gómez Robledo clan and a “pillar of the Hispanic community”. “A bachelor in his early thirties but the father of two natural children ages five and six years old.” He held the rank of sargento mayor and served as mayordomo of the religious confraternity of Nuestra Señora del Rosario.”

 “ Francisco the younger, a heavy-set individual with straight dark chestnut hair, had begun soldiering at age thirteen and had served as councilman and municipal magistrate of Santa Fé. He had carried out numerous commissions for the governors, and like his father had more than once stepped on the friars' toes. His knowledge of the Indian languages served him well.”

  Nevertheless Francico Gómez Robledo was arrested in Santa Fé on 4 May 1662 accused of being “Judaizante” or living like a Jew. However Gómez Robledo would not learn of these charges against him for more than year. “Yet he must have known that someone had whispered the ugly lie that he was a Jew, just as they had about his father.”

 Several witnesses, who testified against Francisco Gómez y Robledo to the la Inquisición prosecutor, Rodrigo Ruíz, insisted that it was common knowledge in the colony that his father, Governor Francisco Gómez, was a Jew.

 Don Francisco Gómez Robledo declared that he had been baptized by Padre Fray Pedro de Ortega in Santa Fé. His godparents were  Governor Sotelo and doña  Isabel de Bohérquez, wife of don  Pedro Duran y Chaves, the Maese de Campo, of all royal troops in Nuevo México.

 One of the charges leveled against Francisco Gómez y Robledo, was that he had “a tail” supposedly the “mark of a Jew.”  He and his brother Juan both had an abnormal coccyx or a “little tail”. Juan’s “little tail,” had been seen by others while bathing in a stream during an Apache Campaign, hence the nickname of “Las Colitzas” or little tail for the brothers.

 Don Francisco Gómez Robledo real offense was that he had been a close ally of Governor López de Mendizábal. “According to some, it was he who counseled the governor that kachina dances were simply not as diabolical as the missionaries avowed.”

 Writing of his arrest historian John Kessell penned, “It was still dark. The first thin light of dawn barely shown behind the mountains to the east. Francisco Gómez Robledo, like nearly everyone else this early Thursday morning, lay in bed asleep. Then something intruded, a heavy banging. It could not have been later than five. He stumbled to the door. "Open," came the command, "open in the name of the Holy Office!" He did. Outside in the chill air stood Alguacil mayor Juan Manso, his nephew Maese de campo Pedro Manso de Valdés, and Father Posada's zealous notary Fray Salvador de la Guerra. Oh, God.”

 Juan Manso “presented the order for his arrest and entered. After he had put on his clothes, "and with hat and cloak," they led him out of his house "which faces on the corner of the royal plaza of this villa" and across to a cell in the Franciscan convento. Guards were posted at door and window.” He had leg irons and chains placed on him like his cousin Diego Romero.

      Gómez y  Robledo's possessions were attached, “including his Santa Fé house, his estancia of San Nicolás de las Barrancas downriver in the vicinity of today's Belen, and his encomiendas.”

 Pedro Lucero de Godoy inventoried Gómez Robledo's house on the Santa Fé plaza. Diego Romero’s house and inventory was probably very similar. Gómez Robledo's house contained " three rooms, and a patio, with its kitchen garden at the rear." His personal property was listed as "an arquebus, a sword hilt, and a dagger," his weapons, horse gear, his complete set of tools for making gun stocks, his household furnishings, clothing, and papers.

 Among the latter were titles to the Gómez y Robledo’s encomiendas: “All of the pueblo of Pecos, except for twenty-four houses held by Pedro Lucero de Godoy, Two and a half parts of the pueblo of Taos, Half the Hopi pueblo of Shongopovi, Half the pueblo of Ácoma, except for twenty houses, Half the pueblo of Abó, which Gómez Robledo had received in exchange for half of Sandía, All the pueblo of Tesuque, which for more than forty years neither Gómez Robledo nor his father had collected because of service rendered on contract in lieu of tribute. There were in addition estancia grants, not only for San Nicolás de las Barrancas but also for a piece of land one league above San Juan pueblo and another on the Arroyo de Tesuque.”

 When Juan Manso had trouble rounding up and separating out don  Francisco's stock on the estancia of Las Barrancas, he attached it all, with a warning to the other Gómez brothers that they not remove a single head on pain of excommunication and a five-hundred peso fine. The same penalty applied to unauthorized persons collecting the revenue from the prisoners' encomiendas.

 At a public auction on June 30, July 1, and July 2, in the Santa Fé plaza, a variety of Francisco Gómez Robledo's possessions brought in 325 pesos. “He later charged that Governor Peñalosa rigged the bidding and through his agents knocked down whatever he wanted at a fraction of its value.”

 The Brothers Gómez y Robledo

 The enemies of the Gómez y Robledo family accused not only Francisco Gómez Robledo but also his brothers Juan Gómez Robledo and Andrés Gómez Robledo as well as their deceased father, of having “Judaical tendencies.

 The Gómez Robledo brothers Francisco, Juan and Andres were all accused of being circumcised, which was considered by inquisitors as a “certain indication of Judaism”.  One person who testified of seeing that Juan and Andrés were circumcised was Domingo López de Ocanto of La Canada, the future father in law of Diego Romero’s son Salvador. He testified that knowledge of the brothers’ “circumcisions was widespread among the community”.

 Lopez de Ocanto stated that he was the same age as the Gómez Robledo brothers and “when they were young boys used to bathe together, and that it appeared to him that they had their parts circumcised, and that all of the young men of that age know this .”

  The Inquisición prosecutor, Padre Fray Rodrigo Ruíz asked if Ocanto had heard any other person or persons who were circumcised. Domingo Lopez de Ocanto replied that he only knew of  Juan Gómez Robledo and Andrés Gómez Robledo, “sons of Francisco Gómez, deceased, citizens of the Villa of Santa Fé”. 

 Domingo Lopez de Ocanto married Juana de Mondragon in 1669 on the same occasion probably that Domingo Martin Barba married Juana’s sister Sebastiana. The sisters were the daughters of  Juan Alonso de Mondragon who held the encomienda of Senecu.

 As a result of this revelation of the Gómez Robledo brothers  were  circumcised, Padre Fray Rodrigo Ruíz suggested that “Juan and Andrés Gómez, brothers, sons of Francisco Gómez and doña  Ana Romero  be arrested. “With regard to the aforesaid sign of circumcision or cutting, which demonstrates that they are observers of Judaism, as a consequence should be severely castigated by the Holy Office with the penalties established by law.”

 It is unclear whether Juan and Andres were ever brought before the Tribunal del Santo Oficio de la Inquisición tribunal in Mexico City, although their older brother Francisco Gómez was, along with their cousin Diego Romero. It is known that neither Juan nor Andrés were ever prosecuted by the Tribunal del Santo Oficio de la Inquisición and continued to live in Nuevo México Province.

 Andrés Gómez Robledo, in 1665, with his brother Juan,  helped Governor Peñalosa  cheat on sacks of pinon kept at the Gómez estancia of Las Barrancas in the Rio Abajo.“ Juan was mentioned as a young soldier, “when he and his brother Andrés set aside a large quantity of pinon, from Pueblo tributes, for Governor Peñalosa  .”

 Andrés served in the General Council in Santa Fé prior to 1680 Pueblo Revolt in which he was killed. “When the Indians struck he [Andres] was a Maese de Campo, most active in the defense of Santa Fé in which he lost his life, the only officer killed.” Juan did not appear in the 1680-81 Revolt lists, having either died or left Nuevo México Province before this period.

 The Arrest of Cristóbal de Anaya Almazán

 Cristobal de Anaya was born around 1627 having been baptized and confirmed by Fray Alonso Benavides. He had started soldiering at the age of eleven. “ Very much involved in Church and State politics of his time”  he was arrested by the Holy Office in 1662 for an unspecified charge of heresy. From his testimony, however, it appears to have suggested his fear of the charges against him being for practicing Judaism.

 In Mexico City, Cristobal de Anaya “declared that in August of the previous year [1662], he had complied with the order of arrest  brought by the Holy Tribunal,”  and complained that that don Agustín de Cháves, Padre Fray Raphael, and doña  Catalina Vásques, were saying that he was arrested  for practicing Judaism.

 The Arrest of Governor López de Mendizábal and His Wife

 On 27 August 1662, Bernardo López de Mendizábal and doña Teresa Aguilera y Roche were arrested by  bailiff Juan Manso who was the former Nuevo México governor, who López de Mendizábal had replaced. Lopez de Mendizabal and his wife were accused by Custos Alonso de Posada, by information provided by some of their neighbors, as well as by their household staff,  of being Crypto-Jews. Bernardo’s political enemies, with testimony from these servants, convinced the Tribunal del Santo Oficio de la Inquisición Nuevo México prosecutor, Rodrigo Ruíz, that Teresa and Bernardo were heretics.

 “Each accusation was no small matter. It would become a matter of life or death for the accused. Not even the governor or doña Teresa would be spared if they were found guilty.” Also the Tribunal del Santo Oficio de la Inquisición in Mexico City could hold suspects indefinitely. The Holy Order was  also known to torture, maim, and brutally execute people

 “At 4:00, on the morning of August 27, comisarios of the Holy Office burst into the home of Governor Bernardo López de Mendizábal, arresting him, and his wife, Teresa de Aguilera y Roche. charged for “ judaizante” or living like a Jew. He swore that he was of pure of Christian noble origin, and that none of his ancestors had ever been castigated by the Inquisition.” He rather conveniently neglected to mention his great-grandfather, Juan Núñez de León, who had been penanced by Tribunal del Santo Oficio de la Inquisición in 1603.

 After Juan Manso completed  his retaliation on  for don  Bernardo López de Mendizábal and witnessed him hauled off in shackles to be tried in Mexico City, he stayed until the spring of 1663 when he relocated to Parral in Nueva Vizcaya. His vengeful return to Nuevo México in 1662 was disastrous not only for don  Bernardo López de Mendizábal and his wife Teresa Aguilar de Roche, but for  the governors’ closest associates which included Sargento Mayor Diego Romero.

 Detained at Santo Domingo & the Long Journey to Mexico City

 In May 1662, after five days, Santa Fe guards transferred Capitán Diego Romero and his cousin Francisco Gómez y Robledo to a cell at Santa Domingo Mission next to those occupied by other “prisoners of the Holy Office.”  Santo Domingo was located about 35 miles south west of Santa Fe.  “There they stagnated and sweat for five months”, through the entire summer, seeing "neither sun nor moon." After the arrest of the former governor and his wife, those prisoners also  were taken from Santa Fe to the pueblo Santo Domingo where they were detained.

 Meanwhile, in Santa Fe, Padre Fray Posada and Bailiff Manso “embargoed the cousins’ properties and sold off enough of their goods to cover the expenses of their imprisonment, their impending journey to Mexico City, and their trials.”

 On October 5,  Padre Fray Posada and Bailiff Juan Manso turned over the six prisoners,  Diego Romero, Francisco Gómez Robledo, Cristobal Anaya, and Nicolas de Aguilar along with the former governor and his wife, to now “Ensign” Pedro de Arteaga, For one hundred and fifty pesos, Pedro de Arteaga guaranteed to see the prisoners behind bars in Mexico City. “Should he fail to carry out his commission, Ensign Arteaga obligated himself to pay back double his salary and suffer whatever other penalties the Tribunal del Santo Oficio de la Inquisición might impose. Pedro de Arteaga and his wife Juana Sandoval were the bitter enemies of the governor and his wife, once having been their servants and had testified against them being Crypto-Jews.

 On the 6th day of October,  the friars  took doña Teresa out of her chamber, where she had been detained in Santo Domingo, and handed her over to  two guards. One of the guards was 62 year old Francisco Lujan.  He and his brother Juan Lujan had been involved in the  Luis de Rosas murder affair, and with  him “escaped the capital fate of their less fortunate compatriots.”  He would die on the long journey to Mexico City.

Type of Carriage

 

Doña Teresa was brought to a carriage at the “stopping place of the carts” where a guard reported, “I heard her, in the presence of our father commissary and Missionary Father Fray Juan de Palencia, Fray Félipe de la Cruz, and the two guards, call to Heaven for justice against those who had brought her to this pass, and [declared] that she found nothing in her conscience that would reproach her before the Inquisition in Mexico City”

 He added, “Further, when we were in the town of Sandia on the 9th day of October, because our father commissary [Padre Fray Nicolás de Freitas] went to the carts, and in my presence had the girl called Morcona summoned and ordered her to receive 12 lashes, or a few more, because it had been proven that she had gone to don  Bernardo with messages from the said doña Teresa.  As they were whipping the said girl the said doña Teresa de Aguilera came to the step of the carriage and shouted, “Father, Father, listen to me, that girl is not to blame; I’m the guilty one, because I sent her. See they don’t whip her, and I’ll tell the truth.”

 “And when our father answered her, “Shut your mouth, Madam, and get inside,” the aforesaid said, “May God’s justice strike them all, because such scoundrelly behavior is intolerable. God grant they get their whipping in Hell, because no woman in the world has been treated with greater cruelty than I.”

 “And then our father commissary went to the step of  the carriage and very earnestly told the said doña Teresa to realize she was under arrest and that she should not send messages to anyone, because if she did not go very quietly he would have her put in a cart, and that if she was traveling in the way she was, and enjoying the comfort of her carriage it was because he had wanted to show her this kindness in view of her being a woman and frail, and why did she not obey the [order that under pain of] excommunication was given to her at Santo Domingo, not to communicate, by message or in writing, with any person whatsoever except only her two guards.”

 In early October 1663  “the southbound supply train from Santo Domingo carried six unwilling passengers,” the former governor, Diego Romero, Francisco Gomez y Robledo, Nicolás  Aguilar, and Cristobal Anaya shackled in the same cart, followed by doña Teresa. “Like his erstwhile aides, the distraught ex-governor rode fettered in a wagon, doña Teresa, his wife, in a carriage behind”.

 In the cart with the prisoners were “two bales containing three hundred buckskins valued at one peso a piece, wrapped in buffalo or elk skins, worth two pesos each. Each had a single trunk of clothing.” The costs for guards, shackles, food, and incidentals, were “borne by the prisoners and paid for out of the sale of their possessions.” In addition, the Holy Office required three hundred pesos in security to cover prison expenses while imprisoned in Mexico City.

 Doña Teresa complained of the treatment of her husband and  “the way they brought him especially, shackled in a cage like the vilest man in the world, refusing to give him a mattress for so long a journey, or even a blanket with the harsh weather through which we traveled, forcing him to cover himself with the pads with which they harnessed the mules, [and] the friars having given orders that he not be called “general” or “don Bernardo,” but “Bernardo de Mendizábal,” on which they commented.”

 Padre Fray Nicolás de Freitas

 Doña  Teresa also wrote about Padre Fray Nicolás de Freitas who had personally sent reports to the Inquisition authorities on the conditions in Nuevo México and who went back to Mexico City with dispatches from the friars about the conditions in the Province. Doña  Teresa claimed that Padre Fray Nicolás de Freitas who was now traveling in the Mexico City bound caravan, “made it known all along the way that he was coming to have don  Bernardo brought as a prisoner by the Holy Office, and he would see to it that they made him parade with a green candle.”  This was in reference to a public Auto de Fe.

 Padre Fray Nicolás de Freitas according doña Teresa “shortly after Peñalosa came as governor, preached in one of his sermons that God had brought him to free the Church from the power of a heretic, and many other such things, as don Bernardo was told by Capitán Diego Romero and all those who heard that sermon and the others that he preached, because he preached them only to speak badly of him.”  She further alleged that on the journey, “the malice of this friar was so great that he even went so far as to go from house to house to ask people not to prepare a little bread for me.”

 She accused Padre Fray Nicolás de Freitas as “being the instigator of all this [and] knows how to lie about it. She spoke “of the aforesaid, in keeping with his blind hatred, and with respect to the other things they ordered the guards to do this, and, as I said, to call him thus, as Francisco Lujan, one of my guards, who died on the way, told me.”

 The Posada and Peñalosa Quarrel Over Encomiendas

 While the prisoners were on their six months journey to Mexico City, Custos Posada, officiating as agent of the Inquisition, began ordering alcaldes mayores to impound the encomienda revenues of the prisoners without Governor Peñalosa approval. “Without mincing words, he challenged the Franciscan's jurisdiction over encomiendas, which were royal grants, and admonished him for giving orders to alcaldes.”  Relations between “the governor and the prelate degenerated notably” after the prisoners were out of the way.

 “When the friar pointed out that he had ordered the May 1662 tribute collected in full because the prisoners had already earned it, Peñalosa turned a deaf ear.”  Padre Fray Posada asked the angry Governor Peñalosa just what he intended to do with the encomindos of the prisoners, and he replied that since Posada had already collected the tributes in full for May 1662, without waiting for him to name escuderos, or guardians,  to hold in trust for the full proceeds of tribute, he would determine where “all further assets” would be sent.  

 The issue of the revenues was resolved by dividing evenly, half for the Holy Office and half to pay the escuderos.  However Peñalosa set up two of his retainers as dummy escuderos  of the prisoner’s estates so that he could pocket their share of the tribute.

 In the case of Francisco Gómez Robledo, who had the richest encomienda in Nuevo México, Peñalosa  passed over “four able-bodied brothers” to pick Martín Carranza, described by Gómez as "a boy about twelve or fourteen years old, whom he [Peñalosa] brought with him, a criollo from Pátzcuaro." 

Diego Romero, who had once been a wealthy and an important owner of an encomiendas and other property was now impoverished as was his wife Catalina de Zamora, who was now seen as a “poor relation” in the household of her Lucero de Godoy families. Cristobal Duran y Chavez was appointed a trustee of the Zia and Cochiti pueblos and Francico Dominguez de Mendoza was given the encomiendas  in 1665 after Captain Diego had been banished from ever returning .

 Sebastiana de Mondragon certainly knew of the arrest of her lover and the father of her children and would have remained in the household of her father, Juan de Mondragon until she married Domingo Martin Barba. 

 When Captain Diego Romero was arrested and his property seized, Alonso Martin Barba, the brother of Domingo Martin Barba was chosen as guardian of his possessions until Pedro Lucero de Godoy took an inventory of his estate.  Captain Diego Romeros  clothing included a suit of green cloth with two pair  of breeches, all with silver buttons, a pair of yellow silk stockings, a pair of woolen socks, eight pairs of woolen stockings,  two pairs of Cordovan shoes, three pairs of elk skin shoes, six woolen shirts, and five handkerchiefs.

 Mexico City’s  Tribunal del Santo Oficio de la Inquisición

 “The dismal journey to Mexico City lasted from fall through winter to spring.” The prisoners who rode shackled for over six months arrived at the Palace of the Santo Oficio de la Inquisición in April 1663, charged with heresy for being  “crypto-Jews”.

Palace of the Inquisition

 Doña Teresa Aguilar de Roche reportedly said that when,  Capitán Diego Romero came as a prisoner in a cart to Mexico City, he reportedly said “Have you ever seen such a thing, that that friar should come from so far off just to see don Bernardo in shackles?”  She said she recognized Capitán Diego him by his voice, but she didn’t know to what friar he was speaking of. It was probably Padre Fray Nicolás de Freitas.

 Finally the head jailer at the secret prison of the Holy Office checked in six prisoners from Nuevo México .” They were incarcerated in the dungeons, solitary imprisoned in secret cells where they existed in squalid, windowless, and unsanitary conditions when not subjected to prolonged interrogation by Tribunal.

 The Holy Office of the Santo Oficio de la Inquisición considered any one accused, presumed guilty unless proven otherwise. The  Tribunal was required to hear and record all testimony however the “proceedings were to be kept secret, and the identity of witnesses was not known to the accused.” Officials could even apply torture during a trial to get a confession.

      If found guilty the threat of execution for heresy was real, as proven  fourteen years earlier on 11 April 1649, when the largest ever auto-da-fé in Reino de Nueva España occurred. Twelve individuals accused as  “crypto-Jews” were burned after being strangled. One even was burned alive, since he refused to renounce his Jewish faith. Nearly ten years later on 6 November 1658, after a series of denunciations, authorities of the Royal Criminal Court sentenced fourteen men to death by public burning for homosexuality, in accordance to a law passed by Queen Isabella in 1497.

 Those found guilty by the Tribunal were required to undergo  an “auto de fé”, preparations for which began a month in advance, and only occurred when the inquisition authorities believed there were enough condemned prisoners. The prisoners usually had no idea what the outcome of their trial had been, or of their sentencing, only that they were to endure an auto de fé. “The ritual took place in public squares or esplanades and lasted several hours with ecclesiastical and civil authorities in attendance.”

 “The ceremony of public penitence then began with a procession of prisoners, who bore elaborate visual symbols on their garments and bodies usually made of yellow sackcloth. They also worn conical shaped hats that served to identify the specific acts of heresy of the accused, “whose identities were kept secret until the very last moment.” 

 After being paraded, “the prisoners were taken to a place called the quemadero or burning place, where the sentences were read. Prisoners who were acquitted or whose sentence was suspended would fall on their knees in thanksgiving,  but the condemned would be punished such as being whipped through the street or burned at the stake.

 Gómez Robledo Tried and Acquitted

 Don Francisco Gómez Robledo fared better before the inquisitors than any of the others arrested. “In audience after audience, answering forcefully and directly, and utilizing to the best advantage the long and loyal Christian service of his father, Francisco Gómez Robledo earned himself a verdict of unqualified acquittal.”  Even though the case against him included the “ominous accusation of Judaism”, it proved “to be based mainly on hearsay.” Bodily examination by physicians showed that don Francisco had no "little tail," as he and his brother was alleged to have had, “nor could the scars on his penis be positively identified as an attempt at circumcision.” 

From the pounding on his door that early morning of May 4, 1662, until September 17, 1665, when again in Santa Fé, he signed a release of all claims against Father Posada and don Pedro Lucero de Godoy, "content and satisfied entirely and fully,"  the ordeal had cost Francisco Gómez Robledo “three years, four months, and fourteen days of his life. In assets, it had cost him several thousand pesos.”  His personal belongings that had not been sold, and his house on the plaza, his titles to lands and encomiendas, as well as an accumulated 875 units of tribute were returned. As for the value of tribute usurped by Governor Peñalosa, of 831 pesos, Gómez judiciously requested that the sum be collected by the Holy Office and applied to its chapel in Mexico City.

 Nicolás de Aguilar Found Guilty 

  “In 1661, due to complaints about him by the Franciscans, he was arrested, imprisoned in Mexico City, and charged with heresy”.  Ex-alcalde mayor Nicolás de Aguilar “was not intimidated by the much feared Tribunal del Santo Oficio de la Inquisición officials. He was described as a 36-year-old man of “large body, coarse, and somewhat brown.” He dressed in “crudely woven and well-worn flannel trousers and a wool shirt. His total worldly belongings fit into a small box containing an extra set of clothing, several religious books, and a few good luck charms and medicinal herbs.”

Nicolás de Aguilar gave a “spirited defense of himself, denying all charges”. His trial lasted 19 months and he was found guilty on all charges. He was sentenced to appear in an auto-de-fé, in penitential garb in the public procession of Tribunal del Santo Oficio de la Inquisición and  to abjure his errors before the tribunal. As a result of this conviction, his public career ended as he was forbidden for life from holding public office. He was also banished from Nuevo México  for ten years.

 Nothing more is known of the life of Aguilar after the conclusion of his trial. The Salinas Pueblos, of which he had been an Alcalde Mayor, was abandoned in the 1670s as a result of Apache raids, famine, and drought. His wife Catalina Marquez apparently remained in Nuevo México  where his children took their mother’s last name of Marquez.  They had four children: Gerénima, Maria,  Isabel, and Nicolas Marquez who returned to Santa Fe after the Reconquest.

 Don Cristóbal de Anaya Almazán Trial

 Cristóbal de Anaya Almazán repudiated his “errors before the inquisitors” and was released after almost four years in the Santo Domingo Prison in Mexico City prison. Cristóbal de Anaya Almazán was eventually “lightly punished” and as a condition of his sentence, the Holy Office ordered him to take part in a ceremonial auto-de-fé  procession in Mexico City and in Nuevo México where he was to stand up during Mass on a feast day at Sandia and publicly recant his “false doctrine”. “But still he had the boldness to come back home on a white horse and wearing a red burnoose, a long, loose hooded cloak, to prove, as he said, that the Holy Office had dismissed him with honor.’   Unintimidated by all these experiences, he continued in his old mocking ways, for as late as 1669, complaints were being made against him by Fray Juan Bernal.

 In the August 1680 Pueblo Revolt, “death fell suddenly on Cristobal, his wife, six children, and four others of his household, when the Santo Domingo Indians pounced on his estancia at Angostura, leaving their naked bodies across the threshold.“

 Don Bernardo López de Mendizábal  & Doña  Teresa Aguliar de Roche's Trial

 Bernardo López de Mendizábal arrived in Mexico City suffering from an unnamed ailment. He and his wife doña Teresa Aguliar de Roche were charged with several counts of malfeasance and for practicing Judaism. They were jailed separately. Doña  Teresa She repeatedly requested that her case be concluded or that she be allowed to live with her husband, who had become very sick during the journey to Mexico City. All these requests were ignored.

Teresa Aguliar de Roche Testimony 

 Doña   Teresa Aguliar de Roche’s trial before the Tribunal del Santo Oficio de la Inquisición began on 2 May 1663. She was not told what charges had been made against her. Instead, the court demanded that she confess to any and all crimes she may have committed. “Teresa stood her ground, insisting that she was an upstanding Catholic woman and that any charges against her and her husband were lies told by their enemies.” The court tried two more times to force a confession out of her but she stayed firm. After her third appearance on 12  May 1663,  the court left her in her cell to linger for six months.

 On 26 October 1663 doña Teresa was brought before the court to hear the charges against her. She was accused of forty-seven crimes against the Catholic Church, including skipping mass, mocking religious traditions, practicing occult rituals, and secretly being Jewish. Over the next month, doña Teresa responded to every accusation. She explained that she missed mass only when her arthritis was so bad that she couldn’t move. Her “occult rituals” were nothing more than herbal remedies for her many illnesses, which she was forced to use because no better medical treatment was available in Santa Fé. As for the charges of mocking religious traditions or practicing Judaism, they were lies fabricated by her enemies. Doña  Teresa even labeled Capitán  Diego Romero and Catalina de Zamora as unreliable witnesses because of false claims she said they had made against her husband during the investigation and audit of her husband.

 The judgments of the inquisition “dragged on” and the Holy Office pronounced don  Bernardo López de Mendizábal guilty due to his behavior in the province. However, Mendizabal died in prison on 16 September 16, 1664 before the final sentencing was reached. He was buried in “unconsecrated ground in a corral near the Santo Domingo prison as a heretic.

 Three months later, doña  Teresa’s trial was suspended and she was released from prison in December 1664, about the same time Capitán  Diego Romero was released, twenty-eight months after her initial arrest. Her life was essentially ruined by the ordeal and she spent the rest of her days fighting to get all her possessions back from the courts. Doña  Teresa de Aguilar y Roche even pressed for exoneration of her husband, and after seven years, in April 1671, the Holy Office decided not to pursue its case against him. As a result, don    López de Mendizábal’s body was exhumed and reburied at the Santo Domingo Church, not far from the city center, in Mexico City.  She never returned to Nuevo Mexico.

 Capitán  Diego Romero's Arrest

 Capitán Diego Romero’s arrest had him tried in Mexico City for heresy in 1663. He was charged by the Holy Office with “advocating false doctrine” against the Catholic church, plus 22 other charges.  At these hearings, Capitán  Diego Romero said he was forty years old and served as a squadron leader and Capitán. He named his father as Gaspar Pérez, a native of Brussels and employed as an armorer (blacksmith) of Santa Fé who died in Santa Fé in 1646.  His mother was María Romero who was born in San Gabriel. He did not know the name of his father's parents, but he knew his mother's father was Bartolomé Romero, a native of the Archbishopric of Toledo. His grandmother was Lucía Robledo. He named one of his uncles as Gil Pérez, also from Brussell also an armorer who returned to his homeland. He named his maternal uncles as being Matias Romero, Agustin Romero, and Bartolomé Romero.

 Capitán  Diego Romero “made a pathetic showing during his trial. At first he had tried to bluff. Gradually he broke down, implicating his fellow prisoners and admitting what a crude, ignorant, low-life person he was.”  Accused of incest with Juana Romero, allegedly his cousin and the mother of a son, Romero swore that she was no relative at all, but rather "a native of Pecos, of whose issue he does not know, and that his mother raised her from infancy as a mestiza."  If Juana was a mestiza her father would have been a Spaniard.

 Other charges against Capitán Diego Romero stemmed from the  trading excursion he had led to Apaches at the behest of Governor López de Mendizábal. One of Capitán Romero's motives, which he admitted to during his trial, was to have the Apaches install him "as their Capitán ”, as they had done with his father Gaspar Pérez. 

 Capitán Romero, by throwing “his miserable self on the mercy of the inquisitors”, had his harsh sentence of service in the Philippine galleys commuted to banishment from Nuevo México  for ten years which resulted in the loss of his encomiendas. He was ordered to have an auto de fé along with Nicolás de Aguilar and like him, Diego Romero was banished from Nuevo México  for ten years. His arrest and trial before the Tribunal del Santo Oficio de la Inquisición Tribunal in Mexico City had Diego Romero spend nearly two years and a half, incarcerated until his release on 17 Dec 1664. He then wrote to his wife Catalina de Zamora and asked her join him during his exile but she refused.

 Governor de Peñalosa and Custos Posada Clash

 While Capitán  Diego Romero and the others lingered in prison in Mexico City, Governor Diego de Peñalosa had a dispute with Nuevo Mexico’s Inquisitor Alonso de Posada over allowing the Pueblo Indians to keep their cultures, which earned him the enmity of the Franciscan friars. In addition, he prohibited Indian slavery stating they should be paid for their work, like the Spanish settlers. “Peñalosa's administration was notable for its positive treatment of the Pueblo Indians and their religious practices.

 In early 1663, the animosity between the custos and the governor had Padre Fray Posada move from Santa Fé to the mission in Pecos to avoid contact with Peñalosa. In August, Peñalosa ordered a criminal suspect forcibly removed from sanctuary in a church and had him  arrested. Posada excommunicated the governor for violation of the right of asylum in a church, causing Peñalosa to "threaten him with arrest, and deport the custos".

 On 30 September 1663, an armed Peñalosa and several of his followers arrested Posada at his church in Pecos and imprisoned him in Santa Fé. A stand-off between secular and religious authorities ensued until Posada backed off and agreed to withdraw the excommunication of Peñalosa.

 Nevertheless Posada compiled a bill of particulars against the governor that led to his prosecution.  Posada sent a message to the Office of the Tribunal del Santo Oficio de la Inquisición in Mexico City, in which he indicated a list of errors committed by Peñalosa. Among others, he mentioned  Peñalosa’s  desire to take López de Mendizábal's property and also mentioned the many times he had mistreated Indians.

 To avoid being tried by the Inquisition, Peñalosa fled Nuevo México in March 1664, however, Posada’s messages were already in the possession of the Inquisition. Peñalosa was found, prosecuted, and finally arrested by the Tribunal del Santo Oficio de la Inquisición in 1665. He was declared a blasphemer and heretic, by a Holy Office tribunal. The sentence was banishment from all of Reino de Nueva España and the West Indies, a public auto de fé, and exclusion from any future public office

 Diego Romero's Bigamy and Rearrest

 In December 1664, Capitán  Diego Roero was forbidden to return to Nuevo México. Nothing is known regarding his life in exile from 1664 to 1674. What he did for a living was considerably less than that of his previous privileged life. He worked as a majordomo, a term to refer to the manager of an water system for the Hacienda de Canela  owned by the miner of Alferez Damian de Villavicencio near Durango.  As that all his possessions had been forfeited, he may have been supported by some of his cousins or relatives as he had no immediate family in Santa Fe besides his estranged wife, and his two offsprings by Sebastiana. He may have been employed as a guard or soldier as that was the only real skill he had.

 In 1673 he was residing  in the mining town of Guanajuato, in the center of Mexico, northwest of Mexico City, bordering Zacatecas, 1200 miles from Santa Fe. where Diego was using the name of “Diego Pérez de Salazar”. Through the Spanish colonial period, most of the area's wealth came from mining, with much of the agriculture springing up to support the mining communities from the mines in the hills around the city of Guanajuato.

  “Diego Pérez de Salazar” married a mestiza named María Rodríguez, daughter of Lorenzo Rodrigues and his wife Pasquala both deceased and Mestizos. The indigenous were “extremely marginalized and poor, losing both their language and their culture until most eventually intermarried with outsiders to produce mestizos.”  They were married in the parish church of Llanos de Silas near Guanajuato on 13 November 1673.  He had a son by María Rodríguez Maria named Gaspar Perez who died as an infant.

  “Diego Pérez de Salazar” declared he was the widower of doña  Catalina de Zamora, falsely identifying her as a native of Tescuco [Texcoco] near Mexico City and a resident of Pueblo de los Ángeles where he claimed she had died. In actuality, doña Catalina was still alive but had refused to leave Nuevo México  to join him in exile in  Nuevo España .

 Why he chose to marry is unknown. He was about 50 years old at the time and perhaps wanted to settle down as there would not have been a dowery involved. It is possible that he thought that no one would find out that he still had a legal wife, Catalina de Zamora residing in Nuevo México. Unfortunately for Diego Perez de Salzar, Fray Diego Lucero, a priest who was an uncle of Catalina de Zamora, learned that Diego Romero had taken another wife.  Fray Lucero may have accidently discovered this second marriage or perhaps he made it his business to keep track of him for his brother Pedro Lucero de Godoy, Romero’s father in law.

Fray Lucero brought charges against Diego Romero before the Tribunal del Santo Oficio de la Inquisición in May 1674 for having two wives. In his testimony before the tribunal, Fray Diego Lucero declared that he was fifty years old, which was the same age as Captain Romero and may have even known him in Nuevo México although in 1674 he stated that he lived next to the church of Santa Catalina Mártir in Mexico City. Nothing more is known of María Rodríguez, as she was not charged due that she was innocent of Diego Romero’s marital status.

 Capitán Diego Romero was arrested, brought back to Mexico City where he languished incarcerated again in the Inquisition’s prison. The Tribunal del Santo Oficio de la Inquisición requested a copy of the marriage record of Capitán  Diego Romero and doña  Catalina de Zamora. However, the oldest book of marriages for the Santa Fé Convento began on 1 January 1648, and the couple had been married earlier than this date. The actual day of the marriage of the couple is not given by witnesses, but later testimony seems to indicate that the marriages took place in 1641.

 The tribunal had the trial of Captain Diego held in Santa Fé, Nuevo México where testimony could be gathered from various members of the Lucero and Romero families as well as from other witnesses to the marriage of Capitán  Diego Romero and doña Catalina de Zamora.

 A year after he was arrested, on 28 May 1675, in Nuevo México the first to testify at Santa Fé was Catalina de Zamora’s brother Juan Lucero de Godoy, vecino of the jurisdiction of Sandia, age fifty-one (born circa 1624), and now married to doña  Juana de Carbajal (Carvajal). He declared he was first married with Luisa Romero Robledo, cousin of Capitán  Diego Romero and that the wedding occurred in the Palace of the Villa de Santa Fé.

 Other witnesses who testified against Diego Romero, included Catalina de Zamora’s  stepmother, doña  Francisca Gómez Robledo, and even Capitán Juan de Mondragón  “vecino” of Santa Fé”.  Why he was called to testify is unknown. It is doubtful he had witnessed the marriage of Catalina de Zamora.  However he had been the High Sheriff of Santa Fe in 1664 and possibly also held that same office at the time of Diego Romero’s original arrest.

 Don Juan de Mondragón inclusion among those who testified is interesting as that he was the grandfather of both Salvador Romero and Maria de Ocanto who married each other as first cousins in 1683. Don Juan de Mondragón’s daughter Juana de Mondragón married Domingo López de Ocanto, and his daughter Sebastiana, who was the mother of Salvador and Ynez Romero, had married Domingo Martin Barba. 

Others who testified were Maestre de Campo Pedro de Leyba, age sixty, vecino of the jurisdiction of the Tanos,  Diego González Bernal, age forty-nine, blacksmith, vecino of Santa Fé” a nephew of Maestre de Campo Capitán Juan Griego,  and Capitán Hernán Martín age forty-nine all who would have been well acquainted with Diego Romero. Juan Griego’s son Blas Griego was even married to Diego Romero’s daughter Ynez Romero

Sentenced to be a Galley Slave

 Capitán  Diego Romero was found guilty in 1678, by the Mexico City Tribunal del Santo Oficio de la Inquisición of bigamy and giving false testimony.  This time, the inquisitors “were harsh with Diego Romero” and he was sentenced to an  auto de fé’,  consisting of “two hundred lashes to be administered as he was paraded through the streets with a conical hat on his head, an insignia of a man twice married, a rope around his neck, and a wax candle in his hands.”  As well he was sentenced to six years labor as a Spanish galley slave rowing crossing the Atlantic.

 Diego Romero was taken to the Inquisition’s secret prison in Vera Cruz, one of a “broader network of clandestine detention facilities used by the Spanish Inquisition”.  These prisons were often hidden within larger buildings and were used to detain individuals accused of heresy, blasphemy, or other religious crimes. He may have been housed in the “casas de Picazo,” a prison “known for their harsh conditions and the secrecy surrounding their operations.

 Before he could begin his sentence, Diego Romero died of natural causes in cell in a “stinking carceles secretas” in Vera Cruz, Mexico on 23 October 1678, probably about 55 years old “still waiting for his first galley.”  His health probably failed due to the conditions he endured during the four years incarcerated. It is doubtful that he had the means to pay for his incarceration which he had done in 1664, therefore his subsistence was probably meager.  His ignoble death was a far cry from the life he once led in Nuevo México as a  wealthy owner of an encomienda. He most likely was buried in an unconsecrated grave near the prison in Vera Cruz.

Vera Cruz Prison Chamber

 News of his death had not reached Santa Fe for months as that elements of the Bigamy case against Capitán  Diego Romero was still in progress.  On 9 July 1679, Padre Fray Juan Bernal provided a response to be sent to the Tribunal del Santo Oficio de la Inquisición officials, in which he mentioned that don Diego de Guadalajara and his wife doña  Josefa de Zamora, were the padrinos for the marriage of Capitán  Diego Romero and doña  Catalina de Zamora.

 Aftermath

 Drought, famine and pestilence made the 1670s particularly severe for the Spanish vecinos, the Pueblo Indians, and the nomadic tribes. The lack of food supplies and increased raids by confederated bands of Apache and Navajo forced the abandonment of six pueblo communities in 1672. The Spanish vecino population of Nueva Mexico remained small as well. In 1679 there were only 150 men who could bear arms. While the Pueblo Indian population surrounding them was recorded to be about 17,000, with 6,000 men capable of bearing arms.

 In August 1680, the Pueblo tribes rose up against the Spanish occupiers, killing 400 of them and driving the rest into exile at El Paso del Norte. Driven from their homes, the family of the disgraced Capitán  Diego Romero became refugees in El Paso del Norte for the next 13 years.

 El Paso del Norte is the present-day Ciudad Juárez and was founded on the south bank of the Río Bravo del Norte (Rio Grande) in 1659 by Spanish Franciscans. The Mission Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe became its first major settlement.  However in 1680 the area became the home of nearly 2000 refugees.

 Diego Romero’s widow, Catalina de Zamora, escaped death by fleeing with four grown nieces, the daughters of Juan Lucero de Godoy with whom she must having living after her husband was exiled from Nuevo México Province.  Others who escape with her were five servants. However the Indians had killed two of her nephews and more than thirty other of her relatives, including her step mother, Francisca Gómez y Romero, the daughter of Governor Francisco Gomez.  Catalina de Zamora died as a refugee before the 1693 Reconquest.

 Diego Romero’s 19 or 20 year old “natural” son Salvador Romero was of fighting age and was away at the time of the massacre stationed at Casas Grandes in 1680. In 1681 he passed muster the as a native of New Mexico, twenty-one years old and single. He had a good slender build, a long beardless face, and long black hair. Sometime later in January 1683 he married his cousin María López de Ocanto, and both returned with the Reconquest of 1693.

 His sister Ynez Romero, Diego Romero’s “natural” child by Sebastiana Mondragon escaped the 1680 massacre within her husband, Blas Griego, contingency consisting of seventeen persons, which included Blas, “his wife, his “children, and servants.” 

Salvador and Ynez Romero’s grandfather, Juan de Mondragon, escaped with a family of 24 members in his refugee family.  He was more than eighty years old in 1680 and “very poor”. The members of this family would have included his daughter Juana de Mondragon, wife of Domingo Lopez de Ocanto and their children, his daughter Sebastiana de Mondragon, who fled with her husband Domingo Martin Barba and their five children, his unmarried daughter Melchora de los Reyes, and his son Sebastian Sanchez de Mondragon, also known as Sanchez de Monroy and his family.