Tradition and Change in Eighteenth-Century Pueblo Indian Communities‪.‬

In 1989, Charles Polzer wrote that "the whole history of the Spanish presence in North America ... must be rewritten, not because it is wrong, but because it is incomplete" (182). Whereas there had been much written on Spanish institutions and conquistadors, Polzer argued, there was little detailed analysis of the changes that were wrought within North American Indian communities as a result of the arrival of the Spanish (183). In the fifteen years since Polzer made these comments, the field of North American Indian ethnohistory has grown at a healthy pace (Deloria 2002, 6-7). However, anthropologists and historians have paid less attention to writing the histories of Indian peoples of those areas of North America once colonized by the Spanish--especially the Pueblo peoples of New Mexico who are the subject of this article. Therefore, Polzer's admonition that "the whole history of the Spanish presence in North America" be rewritten because it does not take into account Indian experiences of contact and colonization still rings true today. (1) In this article, I seek to begin to fill in the gaps of the ethnohistorical record of Pueblo Indian experiences of contact and colonization by focusing upon the issue of ethnic identity construction and manipulation. Up until about 1970, the question of Pueblo ethnic identity construction under Spanish domination was actually quite central to Southwest anthropologists' concerns (see, e.g., Dozier 1970; Reed 1944; Spicer 1954a). The dominant thinking about ethnic identity at that time was that Pueblos lived by an ideology which promoted cultural purity and isolation in response to contact and that this successful resistance to outside influence produced the ethnic identity that we associate with Pueblo peoples today. Anthropologist Edward Spicer introduced the term compartmentalization to define the ways in which Pueblos endured Spanish and then white contact, describing this as "the general pattern of adjustment" to Spanish contact: