Historically witchy New Mexico.

Samhain, the Pagan New Year (for some Pagans, at least) -- aka Halloween -- is coming up at the end of this week. And like clockwork, intrepid local journalists around the country will interview some witch or another. It's all pretty harmless these days -- or it should be, unless somebody takes it upon themselves to declare witches brides of the Devil and try to have them executed, or at least shamed out of the community.

It has happened in the past, as you know if you've ever heard of the Inquisition in Europe, or the Salem witch trials here in the US. And New Mexico had a brush with the Inquisition in the 1760s. It happened in Abiquiú, a village better known now as the site of one of painter Georgia O'Keeffe's homes.

 A peaceful fall picture in Santa Fe.
Heatherms27 | Deposit Photos

And it started with a Franciscan priest named Fray Juan José Toledo, who came to Abiquiú from Mexico City with a manual of ways to spot witchcraft and sorcery -- brujería y hechizería -- and root them out, as missionaries were wont to do, to save the natives from their savagery and bring them to Christ.

I've just begun looking into this; I had a brainstorm yesterday while at Spirit Halloween to offer to portray a bruja during next year's Spirits of New Mexico event at El Rancho de las Golondrinas. The offer's been accepted, so I have a year to study up. But here's what I know so far. 

I talked about Abiquiú here on the blog a couple of weeks back -- about how it was created as a land grant to several families of genízaros. You may recall that genízaros were Native Americans of various tribes who were enslaved by Spanish settlers and eventually set free, after they'd been Hispanized and had lost most of their own tribal traditions. Genízaro communities acted as a buffer between communities of settlers and Native Americans looking to attack them. But the genízaros themselves were different -- and feared by some settlers because of those differences.

Enter Fray Toledo. He accused the local men running the town of being sorcerors (in Spanish, hechicero or brujo) and some of the women of being brujas and causing a horrible illness. The illness was real enough -- it caused a fever and a powerful thirst, blackened teeth, and, in some cases, death. There was also a rumor that the stomachs of some of the dead burst open and insects crawled out.

Fray Toledo made enough noise about it that eventually the territorial governor, Tomas Vélez Cachupin, arrested a group of the accused Abiquiú witches and sent to the office of the Inquisition in Mexico City to see what should be done.

By this point in time, the Catholic Church was winding down the Inquisition, and eventually accused Fray Toledo himself of stirring the pot, saying he should stop with the accusations, learn the natives' languages, and work harder on converting them to Catholicism.

So nobody was burned at the stake here in New Mexico. However, some of those suspected of witchcraft were sentenced to servitude in local Hispanic families. Imagine being a member one of these fine, upstanding Catholic families and being forced to take in someone suspected of being a witch! Not a prescription for sleeping soundly at night.

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As I said, I've just begun researching this. I'll let you know how it goes. For this post, I've relied heavily on this article written by Rob Martinez, the state historian of New Mexico.

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This weekend was the 2025 Spirits event at the ranch, our last of the season. It was, as always, a lot of fun. The ranch buildings are especially spooky at night, with the kiva fireplaces lit and candles everywhere. (These days we use LED candles, but the fires are the real thing. I was stationed in the Cuarto de la Familia -- the ranch owner's family's quarters -- and as the night got chillier, a whole lot of guests were happy to just come in and sit by the fire, warm up, and maybe dream a little.

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These moments of historically witchy blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Happy Halloween! Blessed Samhain!

Why I stayed home from the No Kings rallies again.

Congrats to the millions of Americans who turned out yesterday for No Kings rallies across America. I saw one estimate (but have not confirmed it) that 1 in 50 Americans showed up for one of the approximately 2,700 rallies held in towns big and small around the country.

Once again, I didn't go. Here's why.

Here in Santa Fe, there are two places for political protests and rallies: the State Capitol, also known as the Roundhouse, and the historic plaza downtown. The No Kings rallies and marches typically start at one and march to the other one, or else they start at the Roundhouse and make a circuit to the plaza and back. 

The problem for me is that I work at the Roundhouse. My employer is the Legislative Council Service. We are nonpartisan. We are told when we're hired that our clients are all the legislators, regardless of their political party. We're allowed to have political opinions, of course, but we're supposed to keep them out of the workplace.

Hopefully you see my dilemma. If I participate in a political rally at the Roundhouse, even outside the building on a weekend, it could cause a problem for me at work. 

This isn't the first time I've been in this situation. It may be hard to believe today, when media outlets are routinely assumed to be on one side or the other. But when I was starting out in journalism, reporters were supposed to be unbiased -- or as unbiased as it's possible for a human being to be. After all, we were supposed to cover both sides of every issue, and to be fair to both sides. Can't do that if you're taking a public stance on those issues.

Anyway, there are lots of other people who wish they could be rallying but, for one reason or another, can't be there. Luckily for us, there are other ways to be involved -- and one of them is doing what I'm doing right now: showing support on my blog and on social media.

Alert hearth/myth readers know my political proclivities by now. Y'all know I'm there with you in spirit, if not in person. 

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We know we're getting to them when they start to claim that people marching in inflatable unicorn costumes are terrorists and that yesterday's gatherings were "hate America rallies". We had some relief yesterday as they stayed mostly silent while the marches were going on, although Trump himself posted an AI-generated video of him piloting a fighter jet and dumping poop on rallygoers. But as some commenters have said, an image of Trump taking a dump on America is actually on point.

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These moments of supportive blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Keep the pressure on! It's working!

Indigenous Peoples' Day.

So this weekend, I did a thing I have never done, even though I've lived in Santa Fe for five years and vacationed here for much longer: I checked out a couple of art studio tours. These events are organized by artists who live in a specific location, whether a city, town, or village. Artists who live there agree to open their studios, even if they're in their own homes, and invite the hoi polloi to traipse through, chat with them about their work, and (the gods willing) buy something from them.

Since I rarely do things by halves, I hit two studio tours this weekend: the one in Abiquiu on Saturday and the one in Galisteo yesterday. After I got home, it dawned on me that both Abiquiu and Galisteo were originally pueblos -- that is, they were Native American settlements -- but neither is a pueblo today. So what happened to the Indians? As the saying goes, it's complicated -- and a fitting topic for Indigenous Peoples' Day. 

Let's talk about Galisteo first. This sign is right on State Road 41.

Lynne Cantwell 2025

Here's the gist of the text, with some amplification by me: When the Spanish conquistadores showed up in 1540 in what later became New Mexico, they found a bunch of Tano-speaking settlements in the Galisteo Basin, which is about 25 miles south of Santa Fe. The Spanish called the settlements "pueblos", the Spanish word for "village", which is how the inhabitants became known as Pueblo Indians. The sign says these folks were among the leaders of the Pueblo Revolt in 1680 -- the only time when Native Americans have ever succeeded in pushing the European invaders out. The Spanish came back, though, in 1692. In 1706, 150 Tano-speaking families were resettled (the sign doesn't say by whom, but it was the Spanish) in Galisteo Pueblo, but the pueblo was abandoned by 1788. Drought, famine, disease, and Comanche raids all played a part. The sign says most of the survivors moved to Santo Domingo Pueblo.

Here are more details from galisteo.nmarchaeology.org:

Early Spanish documents frequently mention Pueblo Galisteo, which has been tentatively identified as Pueblo Ximena, which was still occupied in 1540 when visited by Coronado. Castaño de Sosa saw the village in 1590 and called it San Lucas. [Don Juan de] Oñate visited the pueblo in 1598 and renamed it Santa Ana, but the name was changed to Santa Cruz de Galisteo. The pueblo participated in the Pueblo Revolt in 1680 and was abandoned when the populace, fearing reprisals, moved to Santa Fe, where they stayed until 1693, yielding the city to Don Diego de Vargas after a bitter fight. Many were killed or sold into slavery by de Vargas. In 1706 Governor Cuevo y Valdes collected the remnants, then living at Tesuque, and reestablished the pueblo under the name of Santa María de Galisteo. Ninety Tano Indians were moved at that time. In 1782 there were 52 families, but by 1794, smallpox and Comanche raids forced its inhabitants to move to Santo Domingo Pueblo.

I trust you noticed the part about some of them being sold into slavery? I've written here before that slavery worked differently here than it did in the American South. After a period of time, the slaves here were released. But they had lost their tribal identities and had been Catholicized and taught Spanish, so they created their own culture. They became known as genízaros, and they formed communities around northern New Mexico. Here's a link to an NPR story from a few years back about the genízaros in Abiquiu. "Genízaro" is the Spanish word for janissary; NPR says janissaries were war captives in Spain who were conscripted to fight against the Ottoman Sultan, and that some of genízaros in New Mexico gained their freedom by helping to protect their settlements against Indian raids. In the beginning, the word was used as a racial slur, but it has become more of a descriptor now.

Like I said: complicated. The histories of modern Native Americans are as varied as their languages and cultures.

Happy Indigenous People's Day.

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These moments of historical blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Stay safe!

I was dyeing today.

As in dyeing yarn. Don't get any weird ideas.

This weekend was the annual Harvest Festival at El Rancho de las Golondrinas, and I volunteered today at the dye shed. It's only the third or fourth time I've worked out there, and every time I do it, I don't know why I don't do it more often because it's a ton of fun.

Anyway, here are some photos from the day.

Lynne Cantwell | October 2025

My usual volunteer spot is in the weaving rooms, which are pretty close to the entrance. The dye shed is requires a longer walk. 

Lynne Cantwell | October 2025

But it's a pretty walk, so it's hard to complain.

Lynne Cantwell | October 2025

The shed is a sort of lean-to constructed mostly of wood with a stone hearth on one side. I took this photo from inside the dye shed. We had five pots of all-natural dyes going today, the first four in enameled or stainless steel pots: 

• cochineal, a tiny bug that grows on prickly pear cacti. It takes 70,000 bugs, ground up, to make a pound of dye. It makes a brilliant red color -- but it was pricey and had to be imported from Mexico, so it was used sparingly. Today we added lime juice and got some pretty pinks out of it.
• indigo, made from the fermented leaves of the indigo plant. It makes a deep blue. We learned today that several plants around the world can be used to make indigo dye. Alas, none of them grow locally, so this dye also had to be imported.
• madder root, which does grow locally and gave us a lovely orange today. Depending on the mordant (dye fixer) used, you can also get a decent red; it was used for military uniforms for the troops who weren't officers and couldn't afford cochineal red.
• chamisa, a bush that's blooming right now around here. The flowers make a yellow dye. In fact, most growing things make yellow. You'd think they'd make green, but no -- once the chlorophyll is boiled off, only the yellow remains. We get green typically by dyeing the yarn first with chamisa or something else that makes yellow, then overdyeing it with indigo.
• a second pot of chamisa, this one in the cast iron cauldron on the right side of the photo just above. The iron in the pot interacts with the chamisa; today it gave us a very pretty moss green. So that's another way to get a green dye.

I mentioned overdyeing. That's where you dye the yarn (or fabric) with one color, then dye it again with another color. We made purple yarn today by overdyeing some of our pink with indigo. 

Lynne Cantwell | October 2025

We hang the dyed yarn over the fence to dry. As you can see, the runoff from the yarn dyes the fence, too.

Lynne Cantwell | October 2025

With the fires going all day to keep the dye baths hot, my clothes were redolent of smoke -- which Tigs thoroughly appreciated after I got home. 

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These moments of colorful blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Stay safe!