The horrible title is not the only problem

For the first one hundred pages, the only problem I had with Ramon Gutierrez’s book was its cumbersome and slightly obnoxious title, When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away. I appreciated the author’s thoughtful introduction, which placed indigenous New Mexico in the longue duree and describes how the climate changes of the last 12,000 years in turn shaped the geography and, much later, the demographic and cultural landscapes of would become a far northern corner of Spain’s New World Empire. For the most part, too, his chapter on “The Pueblo India World” served as a useful introduction to me, a non-specialist, on the collective worldview of the Pueblos, although his insistence on Pueblo women’s “voraciousness for semen” was disquieting—not because of the topic, but due to the boilerplate assumption that all Pueblo women were sex addicts.

The Chapter on the Spanish Conquest, too, is valuable: the author rightfully places the Conquest in the larger context of the Reconquista, and his narrative of the various expeditions of Cortes, Coronado, and Onate are detailed, highly readable, and competently addressed. Again, Gutierrez succinctly—brevity being the soul of wit—and memorably incorporates the Spanish way of looking at the world into his narrative. “In death as in life,: he writes, “one’s honor in the community determined where one’s bones would rest in relation to sacred objects” (61). Similarly, his description of the Catholic Mass is informative and (not surprisingly) accurate, and Gutierrez does a fine job, in my view, in describing the institutionalization of the Church into the contours of daily life. His chapter on the political aspects of the Church—the Franciscans as instruments of political conquest as well as religious conversion—was fascinating.

Indeed, when it comes to describing the Spaniards, Gutierrez excels. His chapter on the Re-Conquest of New Mexico, however—that is, when discussing the Pueblos—descends into a maelstrom of unreadable statistics. Although the sentence “A geometric growth rate subjected to regression analysis and plotted on a logarithmic scale was then undertaken,” is doubtless comprehensible to someone, it is not I (172). This would be perfectly acceptable to me, as I make no claim to understand cliometric theory, but one wonders if the author is not simply inserting jargon to show off his vocabulary. Indeed, even at moments where I think I know where the author is going, such as his discussion of honor on page 177, Gutierrez takes the analysis in an unexpected direction. He is quite correct in his attempt to explain the concept of honor; in fact, I would argue it is essential, since it is one of those ambiguous concepts universally applied but only rarely mutually understood. “Honor,” he claims, “was first a value judgment concerning one’s social personality, a reflection.” Fair enough. Then: “Honor ultimately depended on brute force.” It is not far-fetched to accept that “honor” is something not intrinsic, but derives from one’s peers. (The literature on honor in American history is extensive.) But the assertion that honor depended on “brute force” is a dramatic one, and Gutierrez provides not a Pueblo or even Spanish source for justification, but Thomas Hobbes, taken completely out of context.

Perhaps ironically, given his subtitle, his chapters on marriage seem, to this reader at least, to be the weakest in the book. In his detailed descriptions of “dire impediments” to the institution of marriage, such as incest, adultery, and murder, one would not be off-base to conclude that there was no such thing as a Pueblo happy marriage. Furthermore, his “empirical evidence” concerning Pueblo and Spanish relations in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries concerns not written records—the building-blocks with which historians (though not anthropologists, of course) work, but 19 tables and charts, each one less intelligible than the last. Again, statistics have their place, and each scholar must use the evidence available to him or her. However, such a surfeit of statistics strikes me as evidence of laziness. There has got to be a better way of communicating the same information in a written, readable form.

Gutierrez’s work is, to repeat, not without its merits. Much of his stated purpose remains worthy of emulation, or at least consideration. The same, however, cannot be said about the book’s execution.