Juan de Oñate y Salazar ( ) (1550-1626) was a Spanish conquistador, explorer and viceroy of the province of Santa Fe de Nuevo México in the viceroyalty of New Spain, in the present-day U.S. state of New Mexico. He led early Spanish expeditions to the Great Plains and Lower Colorado River Valley, encountering numerous indigenous tribes in their homelands there. Oñate founded settlements in the province, now in the Southwestern United States.
Oñate is notorious for the 1599 Ácoma Massacre. This series of events transpired after Oñate sent his nephew, Juan de Zaldívar, to ask Acoma Pueblo to submit to the Spanish throne and Catholicism. Accounts of what happened next differ. The majority of accounts include the Spaniards forcefully taking Acoma blankets and food. A fight ensued and many of the Spanish group, including Zaldívar, were killed.Edgar I. Bernal Sevilla, Northern Arizona University, “Acoma Pueblo and the Spanish Arrival to New Mexico,” Intermountain Histories, accessed February 18, 2025, https://www.intermountainhistories.org/items/show/324.
Oñate arrived at Acoma Pueblo on January 21st with an army including cannons and muskets. The Spanish set fire to the Pueblo.Edgar I. Bernal Sevilla, Northern Arizona University, “Acoma Pueblo and the Spanish Arrival to New Mexico,” Intermountain Histories, accessed February 18, 2025, https://www.intermountainhistories.org/items/show/324. Approximately 800–1000 Ácoma were murdered. After this initial attack, on February 12th, Oñate ordered that the right foot be cut off every man over 25.Edgar I. Bernal Sevilla, Northern Arizona University, “Acoma Pueblo and the Spanish Arrival to New Mexico,” Intermountain Histories, accessed February 18, 2025, https://www.intermountainhistories.org/items/show/324.
Today, Oñate remains a controversial figure in New Mexican history: in 1998, the right foot was cut off a statue of the conquistador that stands in Alcalde, New Mexico, in protest of the massacre, and significant controversy arose when a large equestrian statue of Oñate was erected in El Paso, Texas, in 2006. On June 15, 2020, the statue of Oñate in Alcalde, New Mexico was temporarily removed by Rio Arriba County workers at the direction of officials and put into storage. In 2023, The statue was erected again in Española, New Mexico, placed on the grounds of the county annex building.
Early years
Oñate was born in 1550, at Zacatecas in New Spain (colonial México), to the Spanish-Basque conquistador and silver baron Cristóbal de Oñate, a descendant of the noble house of Haro. Oñate's mother, Doña Catalina Salazar y de la Cadena, had among her ancestors Jewish-origin New Christians who "served in the royal court of Spanish monarchs from the late 1300s to the mid-1500s.""Piety and privilege collide in Juan de Oñate’s Jewish-converso lineage". by José Antonio Esquibel, Fall 2016, El Palacio The Magazine of the Museum of New Mexico, http://www.elpalacio.org/2016/09/blood-oaths/ She was of Spanish ancestry and descended from conversos, former Jews, on at least several branches of her family tree.Doña Teresa Confronts the Spanish Inquisition: A Seventeenth-Century New Mexican Drama, Frances Levine, 2016, University of Oklahoma Press Among these converso relatives was her paternal grandfather, the royal physician Doctor Guadalupe de Salazar. Other family members became Christians in the 1390s, around 160 years before Oñate's birth. Her father was Gonzalo de Salazar, leader of several councils that governed New Spain while Hernán Cortés was traveling to Honduras in 1525–26.
Juan de Oñate married Isabel de Tolosa Cortés de Moctezuma, who was the granddaughter of Hernán Cortés, the conqueror of the Mexica, and the great-granddaughter of the Aztec Emperor Moctezuma Xocoyotzin.L. Thrapp, Dan. Encyclopedia of Frontier Biography: G–O, University of Nebraska Press, 1991, p. 1083
They had two children: Cristóbal de Oñate who married María Gutiérrez del Castillo who had issue, Juan Pérez de Narriahondo y Castillo. María de Oñate who married Vicente de Zaldívar who had issue, Nicolás de Zaldívar y Oñate.
Governorship and 1598 New Mexico expedition
In response to a bid by Juan Bautista de Lomas y Colmenares, and subsequently rejected by the King, on September 21, 1595 Philip II's Viceroy Luís de Velasco selected Oñate from two other candidates to organize the resources of the newly acquired territory.
The agreement with Viceroy Velasco tasked Oñate with two goals; the better-known aim was to explore and colonize the unknown lands annexed into the New Kingdom of León y Castilla (present day New Mexico) and the Viceroyalty of New Spain. His second goal was to capture Capt. Francisco Leyva de Bonilla (a traitor to the crown known to be in the region) as he already was transporting other criminals. His stated objective otherwise was to spread Catholicism by establishing new missions in Nuevo México. Oñate is credited with founding the Province of Santa Fe de Nuevo México, and was the province's first colonial governor, acting from 1598 to 1610. He held his colonial government at Ohkay Owingeh, and renamed the pueblo there 'San Juan de los Caballeros'.
In late 1595, the Viceroy Gaspar de Zúñiga followed his predecessor's advice, and in the summer of 1596 delayed Oñate's expedition in order to review the terms of the original agreement, signed before the previous Viceroy had left office. In March 1598, Oñate's expedition moved out and forded the Rio Grande (Río del Norte) south of present-day El Paso and Ciudad Juárez in late April.
On the Catholic calendar day of Ascension, April 30, 1598, the exploration party assembled on the south bank of the Rio Grande. In an Ascension Day ceremony, Oñate led the party in prayer, as he claimed all of the territory across the river for the Spanish Empire. Oñate's original terms would have made this land a separate viceroyalty to the crown in New Spain; this move failed to stand after de Zúñiga reviewed the agreement.
All summer, Oñate's expedition party followed the middle Rio Grande Valley to present-day northern New Mexico, where he engaged with Pueblo Indians. Gaspar Pérez de Villagrá, a captain of the expedition, chronicled Oñate's conquest of New Mexico's indigenous peoples in his epic poem Historia de la Nueva México.
Oñate granted land to colonists on the expedition, and empowered them to demand tribute from Native Americans.Who Was Juan De Oñate? A Look At The Conquistador's Violent Legacy In New Mexico
Ácoma Massacre
In October 1598, a skirmish erupted when a squad of Oñate's men stopped to trade for food supplies at the Acoma Pueblo. The Ácoma themselves needed their stored food to survive the coming winter. The Ácoma resisted and 11 Spaniards were ambushed and killed, including Oñate's nephew, Juan de Zaldívar.= In January 1599, Oñate condemned the conflict as an insurrection and ordered the pueblo destroyed, a mandate carried out by Juan de Zaldívar's brother, Vicente de Zaldívar, in an offensive known as the Ácoma Massacre. An estimated 800–1,000 Ácoma died in the siege of the pueblo. Much later, when King Philip III of Spain heard the news of the massacre, and the punishments, Oñate was banished from New Mexico for his cruelty to the natives, and exiled from Mexico for five years, convicted by the Spanish government of using "excessive force" against the Acoma people. Oñate later returned to Spain to live out the remainder of his life.Simmons, p. 145
Of the 500 or so survivors,Simmons, p. 143 at a trial at Ohkay Owingeh, Oñate sentenced all men and women older than 12 to twenty years of forced "personal servitude". In addition, men older than 25 (24 individuals) were to have a foot amputated. According to recent research, there is no evidence of this happening and that, at most, the prisoners lost some toes. This latter theory makes sense, for losing toes rather than a whole foot left the prisoners useful as servants. In Onate's personal journal, he specifically refers to the punishment of the Acoma warriors as cutting off "las puntas del pie" (the points of the foot, the toes).
Great Plains expedition In 1601, Oñate undertook a large expedition east to the Great Plains region of central North America. The expedition party included 130 Spanish soldiers and 12 Franciscan priests—similar to the expedition of the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire—and a retinue of 130 American Indian soldiers and servants. The expedition possessed 350 horses and mules. Oñate journeyed across the plains eastward from New Mexico in a renewed search for Quivira, the fabled "city of gold." As had the earlier Coronado Expedition in the 1540s, Oñate encountered Apaches in the Texas Panhandle region.
Oñate proceeded eastward, following the Canadian River into the modern state of Oklahoma. Leaving the river behind in a sandy area where his ox carts could not pass, he went across country, and the land became greener, with more water and groves of Black walnut (Juglans nigra) and bur oak (Quercus macrocarpa) trees.Bolton, Herbert Eugene, ed. Spanish Exploration in the Southwest, 1542–1706. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1916, 250–267
Escanjaque people Jusepe probably led the Oñate party on the same route he had taken on the Umana and Leyba expedition six years earlier. They found an encampment of native people that Oñate called the Escanjaques. He estimated the population at more than 5,000 living in 600 houses.Bolton, 257 The Escanjaques lived in round houses as large as in diameter and covered with tanned buffalo robes. They were hunters, according to Oñate, depending upon the buffalo for their subsistence and planting no crops.
The Escanjaques told Oñate that Etzanoa, a large city of their enemies the Rayado Indians, was located only about away. It seems possible that the Escanjaques had gathered together in large numbers either out of fear of the Rayados or to undertake a war against them. They attempted to enlist the assistance of the Spanish and their firearms, alleging that the Rayados were responsible for the deaths of Humana and Leyva a few years before.
The Escanjaques guided Oñate to a large river a few miles away and he became the first European to describe the tallgrass prairie. He spoke of fertile land, much better than that through which he had previously passed, and pastures "so good that in many places the grass was high enough to conceal a horse."Bolton, 253 He found and tasted a fruit of good flavor, possibly the pawpaw.
Rayado people Near the river, Oñate's expedition party and their numerous Escanjaque guides saw three or four hundred Rayados on a hill. The Rayados advanced, throwing dirt into the air as a sign that they were ready for war. Oñate quickly indicated that he did not wish to fight and made peace with this group of Rayados, who proved to be friendly and generous. Oñate liked the Rayados more than he did the Escanjaques. They were "united, peaceful, and settled." They showed deference to their chief, named Caratax, whom Oñate detained as a guide and hostage, although "treating him well."Vehik, Susan C. "Wichita Culture History," Plains Anthropologist, Vol. 37, No. 141, 1992, 327
Caratax led Oñate and the Escanjaques across the river to Etzanoa, a settlement on the eastern bank, one or two miles from the river. The settlement was deserted, the inhabitants having fled. It contained "about twelve hundred houses, all established along the bank of another good-sized river which flowed into the large one [the Arkansas].... the settlement of the Rayados seemed typical of those seen by Coronado in Quivira in the 1540s. The homesteads were dispersed; the houses round, thatched with grass, large enough to sleep ten persons each, and surrounded by large granaries to store the corn, beans, and squash they grew in their fields." With difficulty Oñate restrained the Escanjaques from looting the town and sent them home.