How the 1680 Pueblo Revolt led to Our Lady of Peace
Aug. 10, 1680 was the launch date of the famous so-called Pueblo Indian Revolt, now also called Pueblo Independence Day. And today (Aug. 15) is the observance of the Feast Day of Lady of the Assumption. There is a deep, binding and enduring connection between the two. It is a great, sweeping and intertwined story. Here is a small part of it.
Many people have recently contemplated the centuries-old contentions, fractures and divisions that have been bedeviling our Northern communities, like the controversy over the Santa Fe entrada during that city’s fiestas – which celebrated the resettlement of the town in 1692 by Spaniard Don Diego de Vargas – and the Juan de Oñate conquistador legacy.
May our calmer intelligent minds, wise hearts and greatsouled understanding prevail over these contentions. Many of us have “mingled” blood of Native and Spanish and other, and many of us believe that therefore the “purity” of our blood is multiplied and enhanced and that we are by now far much greater than the “sum of our parts.”
We can even say that perhaps the answer to the so-far implacable simmering historical and cultural divides could in fact be coursing through our very bloodstreams, and in the living light of our prescient, prevailing existence as the special Norteño people that we are, and in our special spirit-filled cultural and geophysical landscape.
Many of us believe that even the landscape terrains of our high-forested mountains and the lakes, streams, and rivers, the volcanic desert plains, the fertile valleys, the wide skies and the living light of the powerful sun are imbued with and emanate a primal spirituality that influences the multiple religious and spiritual traditions of ancient and recent peoples of the North. These forces are often also melded together both naturally and supernaturally, pointing the way to peace and reconciliation.
Our Lady of Peace, who was formerly known as La Conquisadora, visited the Taos Valley in late summer of 2018 to join with the spiritual elders and religious leaders of Taos Valley and others to thank and to bless the living waters of the Taos Pueblo River, which originates from the sacred Blue Lake of Taos Mountain. They prayed for “reconciliation and peace” in this valley of the Río Pueblo de Taos and by extension, in the world.
It has never been “easy” for the people of this area. A tremendous cultural tumult took place in 1680 when the Spaniards who had arrived here to settle in 1598 were forcibly “evicted” by the Pueblo peoples from these lands at great cost of loss of life and anguish, but who yet returned and resettled here from 1692 on.
Since the early 1600s, the Catholic Spaniards were intensely devoted to a small ancient wooden statue of Mary as Lady of the Assumption, and it became a central symbol of their faith and the focus of a Marian confraternity. She was regarded as “Queen of the Kingdom of New Mexico and its Villa of Santa Fe” at that time.
During the 1680 Pueblo Revolt, which had been planned and inculcated at the Pueblo of Taos, this small Marian santo was targeted and threatened with fiery destruction but she was rescued and was carried in the Spanish exodus to the south.
In 1692, the Spanish returned to Taos and Santa Fe and the North, and brought back the Marian statue which symbolized their faith. They referred to her as La Conquistadora since she had helped them overcome their own tragic difficulties, as they saw it.
Yet, great lessons had been learned by all. They achieved mutual accommodations and understandings. The small ancient wooden statue of the Assumption, La Conquistadora, is now recognized as the Lady of Peace, Nuestra Señora de la Páz.
It is now recognized and understood that it was by her attribute as the Queen of Peace that resolution came to hold sway in this land of the North and that her role now is to help heal the grievous wounds of division that afflict the people.