Thread by @reveal

1/ Say “monument controversy” in New Mexico, and you probably won’t hear about the Confederacy.

You’ll hear about Juan de Oñate and the saga of the stolen foot. revealnews.org/episodes/monum…

2/ Who’s Juan de Oñate?

In 1598, he claimed New Mexico for Spain and founded the first European colony west of the Mississippi River.

His most well-known biography dubbed him “The Last Conquistador.”

3/ Today, the name “Oñate” is all over New Mexico. It’s on schools, streets, buildings, statues … and in at least one song:

But he’s also at the center of a decades-long conflict over how the state remembers the violence of its Spanish colonization.

4/ Let’s start in the late 90s, when Millie Santillanes described Juan de Oñate as “the father of the Hispanic culture and our state” and argued Albuquerque should build a new bronze statue in its historic center to honor the 400th anniversary of Oñate’s arrival in New Mexico.

4/ At those same city council hearings, Oñate would be called a butcher and compared to Adolf Hitler for his brutal treatment of New Mexico’s native people.

5/ The most well-documented atrocity Oñate was responsible for occurred at Acoma, an indigenous community atop a 400-foot mesa.

His soldiers killed hundreds of men, women and children.

6/ After that, Juan de Oñate personally tried and sentenced hundreds of surviving Acoma men, women and children.

7/ In his own words (translated by George P. Hammond and Agapito Rey):

“The males who are over twenty-five years of age I sentence to have one foot cut off and to twenty years of personal servitude”

8/ Some who celebrate Oñate deny this history outright. Like Albuquerque resident John Lucero, speaking in favor of an Oñate memorial at a city council hearing:

9/ Yet it’s there in black and white – in documents in the Archivo General de Indias, signed by Juan de Oñate himself.

(Document scan below is courtesy of the Center for Southwest Research, @UNM)

10/ Indeed, Oñate sentenced those under 12 to be taken from their families, those over 12 to be enslaved for 20 years, and men over 25 to have one foot cut off.

And he documented that the sentence was carried out.

11/ Oñate would later be tried and sentenced himself, by the Spanish crown, for crimes including his treatment of the innocent at Acoma.

His punishment: Banishment from New Mexico.

12/ But the reason many New Mexicans know the foot-cutting story today is because of an act of sensational vandalism that took place right as debate over an Oñate memorial in Albuquerque began.

13/ On Jan. 7, 1998, a letter showed up at the @ABQJournal that columnist Larry Calloway described as a “combination of a press release and a ransom note.”

The anonymous “Friends of Acoma” had chopped the foot off a statue of Juan de Oñate that was built years earlier.

14/ This act transformed the debate over a new Oñate statue in Albuquerque and galvanized critics like Aleta “Tweety” Suazo. She’s an Acoma woman who at the time was a public school administrator in the city.

15/ Acoma women and men led the resistance to building an Oñate statue in Albuquerque, but their allies were diverse, including many people who claimed Oñate as an unfortunate part of their own heritage.

16/ Oñate remains a flashpoint in New Mexico.

In 2017, the statue outside Española was vandalized again – this time with paint.

And in 2018, the city of Española withdrew its support for a fiesta honoring Oñate.

17/ To hear the story of what Albuquerque finally decided to build (hint: it wasn’t another statue of Oñate on a horse), listen to this week’s episode, Monumental Lies. revealnews.org/episodes/monum…

18/ And for more about the story of the stolen foot, listen to our partner story with @99piorg, Oñate’s Foot: 99percentinvisible.org/episode/onates…