TUMACACORI Historic Resource Study

¹During his inspection of the northern presidios, the Marqués de Rubí praised Anza for his "activity, valor, devotion, intelligence, and notable disinterest" and described him as a "complete officer." He criticized Anza, however, for incorporating the mules, horses, and cattle of vecinos and the missions into the presidial horseherd. The mules, in particular, inflicted considerable damage to the pastures while the soldiers were pulled away from their duties to act as "herdsmen and servants" (Rubí, Tubac, December 29, 1766, AGI, Guadalajara 511). Rubí allowed communal herding to continue but ordered Anza to make the vecinos and missionaries supply their own cowboys (Rubí, Tubac, December 31, 1766).

²The instructions were issued by the definitory, or council, of the new Franciscan custody of San Carlos de Sonora, but Reyes stacked the definitory with supporters of his reforms, which Franciscan leaders of the old missionary colegios bitterly opposed (Kessell 1976).

³It was called San Rafael de Buenavista because it was supposed to be garrisoned at the abandoned hacienda of Buenavista, roughly halfway between the presidio of Tucson and the presidio of Terrenate at Las Nutrias just below the present international border (Moorhead 1975).

⁴The intendency system was a Bourbon reform introduced into Spain in 1718. In 1770, one of the first intendencies in New Spain was created when Pedro Corbalan was named governor and intendent of Sonora. The system was extended to the entire viceroyalty in 1786. The intendency of Durango encompassed Nueva Vizcaya. The intendency of Arispe incorporated Sinaloa y Sonora. Replacing the office of governor, the intendent enjoyed full civil authority. Military affairs, in contrast, remained in the hands of the commandant general of the Provincias Internas (Barnes, Naylor, and Polzer 1981).

⁵As Radding (1997:178) points out, privatization was accompanied by the "decentralization of the power to distribute landed property." According to her, "In practice, the Spanish monarch delegated the power to award land grants to the Council of the Indies, the Audiencia de México, and the viceroy. As the colonial regime matured, provincial governors and magistrates assumed the function of adjudicating land and water rights and of issuing formal title to property. The Bourbon reforms authorized the Crown's intendants to extend land titles and legalize the composiciones of land previously occupied without benefit of the royal merced. During the final decades of colonial rule in frontier provinces like Sonora, presidial commanders exercised this faculty; and, following the liberal Constitution of Cadíz (passed by the Cortes in 1812 and restored in 1820) town councils began to award land titles." One of García Conde's many titles was "juez privativo de medidas, ventas y composiciones y repartamientos [sic] de tierras" (Senate Executive Document No. 207:3, 46th Congress, 2d. Session, 1886).

⁶Juan Legarra was described as a "Papago" in Father Narciso Gutiérrez's 1801 census of Tumacácori. His companions were Felipe Mendoza, José Domingo Arriola, and Javier Ignacio Medina, all Pimas, and Ramón Pamplona, the son of a Papago father and a Yaqui mother (Kessell 1976:207). Kessell credits Father Gutiérrez with coming up with the idea to petition for a formal grant.

⁷My translation of U.S. 46th Congress, 2d Session, Senate Executive Document (SED) No. 207:3. The transcription is fraught with spelling and grammatical errors. Another transcription of the documents concerning the Tumacácori land grant is the handwritten copy of the Petition to John Wasson, United States Surveyor-General for Arizona, by John Currey and C.P. Sykes. It also contains numerous errors, but in different places. Comparing both helps clarify unclear passages.

⁸According to Radding (1997:176), "Fundo legal comprised the minimal allotment to Indian pueblos and Spanish as municipal property, conventionally one square league." Meyer (1984) also states that the fundo legal for Indian towns in the north generally consisted of one square league (5,000 x 5,000 varas, or 4,338 acres). But as Kessell (1976:208) points out, "If a pueblo did indeed take for its fundo legal one linear league in each direction, which in the arid north was rare, the area came to four square leagues. More often a pueblo took more in the direction that best served it, three and a half along a river for example, and the remainder on each side. While the total area was far less, the pueblo gained more of a watered river bottom."

⁹SED No. 207:4. A sitio de ganado mayor comprised a square league (5,000 x 5,000 varas).

¹⁰SED No. 207:5.

¹¹The Buenavista ranch, whose headquarters was just south of the present international border along the Santa Cruz River.

¹²There were numerous marshy areas along the upper Santa Cruz before modern demands upon the river dried most of them up.

¹³Kessell (1976:209, n. 72) notes that a Manuel Fernández de la Carrera served as the Franciscans' attorney in Arispe during the 1780s and 1790s.

¹⁴SED No. 207:8.

¹⁵Testimony of Juan Nepomuceno Apodaca, December 24, 1806, Tubac. SED No. 207:8-9.

¹⁶The vara castellana was the vara of Burgos, adopted as a standard measure in the late 16th century by royal decree. The vara was equivalent to .8359 meter or 32.909 inches. A fifty-vara cord therefore equalled 41.795 meters or 49.862 yards. It must be noted, however, that the value of the vara varied from region to region in Mexico and Latin America (Barnes, Naylor, and Polzer 1981).

¹⁷Primera diligencia de medidores, Miguel de León, José Miguel de Soto Mayor, January 14, 1806, Tumacácori. SED 207:6.

¹⁸Señalamento del centro. Manuel León, San José de Tumacácori, January 14, 1807. SED No. 207:5.

¹⁹Primer diligencia de medidores. Miguel de León and José Miguel de Soto Mayor, San José de Tumacácori, January 14, 1807. SED No. 207:6.

²⁰Segunda diligencia de medidas. Manuel de León, January 14, 1807. SED No. 207:6.

²¹Diligencias de medida para estancia. Manuel de León and José Miguel de Soto Mayor, January 14, 1807. SED No. 207:7.

²²Segunda diligencia medidas de estancia and auto. Manuel de León, Tubac, January 15, 1807. SED No. 207:7.

²³Escrito. Ignacio Díaz del Carpio, n.p., n.d. SED No. 207:9-10.

²⁴Dictamen, Lic. Tresierra, Arispe, March 31, 1807. SED No. 207:10.

²⁵Auto, Alexo García Conde, Arispe, March 31, 1807. The transcription in SED No. 207:11 is particularly flawed here, so I have based my translation on the handwritten transcription by Currey and Sykes in their petition to Surveyor-General Wasson.

²⁶Ibid.

²⁷Notificación, Alexo García Conde, Arispe, March 31, 1807. SED No. 207:11-12.

²⁸Shaul (n.d.) argues that during the 18th century, O'odham in the missions of the Pimería Alta moved from incipient diglossia—"a stable bilingualism in which everyone ideally kniew both languages but used them in qualitatively different contexts (examples: public vs. at home; formal vs. casual)" (p. 3)—to linguistic compartmentalization. As part of their daily, non-violent resistance to missionization and Spanish colonization, they carefully separated the O'odham language from Spanish, thereby preventing non-O'odham speakers from understanding other domains of their culture.

²⁹This is not Devil worship but rituals and songs for curing sicknesses caused by devils living around ranches and mines. It clearly evolved out of the native O'odham tradition of curing disease, but "devils" were supernatural beings incorporated from Christian cosmology (Bahr 1988).

³⁰It is interesting to note that the O'odham associated "devils" with extractive capitalist activity, i.e. ranching and mining.

³¹Bahr (1988:142) argues that the O'odham "Christianized their paganism, not by centralizing Jesus, but by centralizing a Jesus-like, murdered man-god figure," i.e. I'itoi.

³²O'odham medicinal theory clearly separates diagnosis and curing. Only shamans can diagnose sicknesses, and their ability to do so depends, in part, upon characteristics of the shamans themselves. Spirits seek out shamans and teach them songs the shamans then sing during the diagnosis (dúajida). During the dúajida, they also blow upon the patient to determine the dangerous object that caused the sickness and suck the "strength" of the object out of the patient. The ability of a shaman to do so depends upon his "heart." Ritual curing, on the other hand, is instrumental rather than charismatic. According to Bahr, et al (1974:219), "Briefly, the cures are rationalized as prayers. They do not succeed because of any special potency vested in the curers, but because a spiritual causal agent responds to the curer's actions and rids the patient of his symptoms."

³³For a discussion of the wi:gida, and Julian Hayden's description of the last winter wi:gida held in 1945, see a Special Issue of the Journal of the Southwest entitled "The Vigita Ceremony of the Papago" (Vol. 29, No. 3, August 1987).