The Coordinated Pueblo Uprising of August 1680 That Drove the Spanish Out of New Mexico for Twelve Years

By 1680 the Spanish colonial province of Nuevo México — established by the 1598 Oñate expedition and centred on the new capital Santa Fe founded in 1610 — had been imposing forced labour (repartimiento) and Christian conversion on the approximately 30,000 Pueblo inhabitants of the upper Rio Grande Valley for eighty years. The Pueblo communities — about thirty independent agricultural villages speaking four distinct language families — had retained partial autonomy under Spanish overlordship but their Indigenous religious practices had been progressively suppressed.

In 1675 the Spanish governor Juan Francisco Treviño arrested 47 Pueblo religious leaders for practising what the Spanish administration classified as witchcraft. Four of the arrested were hanged. Forty-three were publicly whipped in Santa Fe. One of those whipped was a Tewa-speaking priest from San Juan pueblo named Po’pay (“Ripe Squash” in the Tewa language).

After the whippings the survivors were released. Po’pay returned to San Juan, then moved to Taos pueblo at the far northern end of the Pueblo region. From 1675 to 1680 he organised what would become the most successful Indigenous coordinated revolt against any European colonial power in 17th-century North America.

The coordination

The Spanish administration believed that the geographical separation of the Pueblo communities, combined with the linguistic diversity (Tewa, Tiwa, Towa, Keres, Zuni, Hopi), made coordinated revolt impossible. They had been right about this for the preceding eighty years.

Po’pay’s organisation depended on a network of runners between the pueblos. The coordination message was a knotted leather cord — one knot to be untied at sunset each day. When the last knot was untied, the revolt would begin everywhere simultaneously. The cords were sent out from Taos in late July 1680 with the original count set to give every pueblo enough time to receive them, prepare, and untie the corresponding knots.

The Spanish authorities at Santa Fe — under Governor Antonio de Otermín, who had taken office in 1677 — were given partial warning. Two Pueblo runners carrying the cords were captured by Spanish allies at the southern pueblos of Tesuque and Galisteo on 9 August 1680. The captured runners were tortured into revealing the plan. Otermín ordered all Spanish settlers in the outlying districts to evacuate to Santa Fe.

The capture had also alerted the Pueblo leadership. The revolt was advanced by two days. It began on the morning of 10 August 1680, simultaneously, at approximately 24 separate pueblos.

Three weeks

Spanish missionaries were the first specific targets. Approximately 21 of the 33 Franciscan friars working in the New Mexico missions were killed in the first 36 hours, generally inside their own mission churches during the morning Mass. The mission churches were burned.

The outlying Spanish settler households were attacked next. About 400 Spanish colonists — out of an estimated 2,500 Spanish total population of the province — were killed across 10-13 August. Spanish casualties were concentrated in the smaller settlements that had not made it to Santa Fe before the cordon closed.

Governor Otermín consolidated approximately 1,000 surviving Spanish colonists, soldiers, and Indigenous Tlaxcalan allies inside the Casas Reales (the Governor’s Palace) at Santa Fe. The Pueblo forces, eventually approximately 2,500 warriors, besieged the Casas Reales for nine days from 13 to 21 August. The siege was tightening. The Spanish were running short of water — the besiegers had cut the irrigation ditch supplying the palace.

On the evening of 20 August 1680 Otermín led a sortie that broke through the Pueblo lines. The Spanish abandoned Santa Fe overnight on 21 August and marched south down the Rio Grande Valley. The Pueblo forces did not pursue.

The Spanish refugee column reached the southern Spanish settlement of El Paso del Norte (modern Ciudad Juárez/El Paso) on the south bank of the Rio Grande on 3 October 1680. The province of New Mexico had been wholly evacuated by the Spanish administration in seven weeks.

What the Pueblos did with twelve years of independence

From 1680 to 1692 the Pueblo communities governed themselves without Spanish administrative supervision. Po’pay reportedly required the destruction of all material symbols of Spanish religious or political authority — crucifixes, rosaries, mission church bells — and the formal renunciation of Catholic baptismal names. The kiva religious practices that the Spanish had suppressed for eighty years were openly revived.

Po’pay also, contemporary Pueblo and Spanish accounts agree, attempted to establish himself as a paramount leader across the Pueblo region — a level of centralised authority that the historically autonomous individual pueblos had not previously accepted. He was reportedly deposed by approximately 1683 by a coalition of pueblo councils that rejected his attempt at consolidated leadership. He died around 1688, before the Spanish return.

1692

The Spanish governor Diego de Vargas led a reconquest expedition north from El Paso in August 1692. He reached Santa Fe on 13 September 1692 and negotiated, rather than fought, the formal Spanish re-entry. The pueblos surrounding Santa Fe accepted Spanish nominal sovereignty in exchange for substantial concessions: the repartimiento forced-labour system was substantially curtailed, the suppression of kiva religious practices was substantially relaxed, and pueblo land tenure was substantially confirmed under Spanish colonial law.

The substantial concessions resulted from the substantial demonstration the 1680 revolt had provided of Pueblo coordinated capacity. The Spanish administration, having been driven out once, did not try to re-impose the pre-1680 colonial structure intact. The post-1692 New Mexico was, until Mexican independence in 1821, a looser colonial arrangement than the pre-1680 one had been.

The Pueblos retained their kivas, their languages, and most of their pre-Hispanic religious practice. Approximately 21 of the original 24 1680 pueblos are still inhabited by descendant communities in 2026. Po’pay’s statue was placed in the United States Capitol’s National Statuary Hall by the state of New Mexico in 2005 — the only Indigenous American leader represented in the hall.