Kyle Paoletta
speaker
64 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Kyle Paoletta’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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And so when Coronado's party arrives on this exploration, they find, I think it's believed to be about a dozen villages in the area that's now Albuquerque, which is a province known as Tijue. And they go there and they spend a winter there. And it's sort of a classic American story of first contact where initially there is a period of
you know, kind of bartering and friendly relations, trading things. But as the winter sets in, the Spanish army begins just kind of like taking more and more. And there's various sources about exactly what happens if There's a story about a Spanish soldier visiting a Pueblo and literally grabbing the blankets off of people to use. There's one about sexually assaulting a woman.
But there's some kind of violent interaction that leads to the Pueblos to basically close ranks and shut the Spanish out of the actual structures. in the Tihue area, and that leads to a siege.
And this sort of inaugurates this real era of warfare between the Spanish and the Pueblos, which continues from when Coronado was there in the 1540s through when Don Juan de Oñate settles the first permanent colony in 1598, where there's a very famous
between his army and the Pueblo of Acoma, which leads to Oñate ordering that every man from the Pueblo have his foot cut off, which is this kind of touchstone example of the Spanish brutality towards the indigenous people. And so there's that last all the way through 1680 of Spanish kind of bringing the Pueblos to heel.
And then in 1680, you actually have a revolt that's led by this figure known as Pope, who is a religious leader from the Pueblo of Oquehuangue, which is quite close to Santa Fe. And it's really a fascinating story of
indigenous resistance where they are able to basically across this vast landscape that stretches all the way from the area around Santa Fe and New Mexico all the way to what's now western Arizona and the Hopi tribes. And all on the same day, they rise up. The priests are many of them killed very brutally. All these churches are burned down.
They drive the Spanish back to Santa Fe, lay siege on Santa Fe, and actually force the Spanish to retreat back to Mexico. And so there's a period of 12 years in which the Spanish are completely ejected from New Mexico. And then they come back and there's the Reconquista of Pedro de Peralta reclaiming Santa Fe in 1692. But I'd say all that just to illuminate this. Often I think there is a
If you visit Santa Fe today, you'll probably hear about the three cultures of New Mexico, that there's this sort of balance between Anglo culture, Spanish culture, and indigenous culture that goes back to that era, but in fact is a very violent history. Yeah.
No, and even today, there are very emotional battles about New Mexican history where Don Juan de Oñate is still kind of memorialized as a hero by many descendants of the Spanish settlers, and as... the greatest villain by indigenous people. In 2020, there's a massive protest in Albuquerque that leads to a statue of Oñate being removed.
I talk about just two years ago, there's a similar statue in a city called Española where there's a violent confrontation where someone gets shot where this is a very real kind of matter of debate about how we remember this era of Spanish colonialism.
So I think the story is that they were chasing wealth, that there were these seven golden cities of Cibola, which comes from basically there's some earlier voyages where you have the famous journey of Cabeza de Vaca, who is shipwrecked with a bunch of other Spanish and ends up surviving this
I believe it's an eight or nine year trek from Texas through what's now the Southwest to the West Coast of Mexico, where it's him and three other survivors who come back kind of
You know, talking about we encountered all of these tribes, and then that leads to one of the survivors who is an enslaved man named Estabanico or Esteban, who allowed the Spanish to survive because he actually was kind of a polyglot. He was able to communicate with all of these tribes, and because of that skill, he actually
Estabanico ends up leading the next journey north out of Mexico, where he accompanies a friar whose name is Marcos de Niza, who they encounter the Pueblo of Zuni, which is in today's western New Mexico. which is a somewhat... Basically, they kind of expect a certain amount of tribute. The people of Zuni are not impressed with them. They chase them away.
But he comes back telling a story of this city made entirely of gold, that the walls are made of gold. And so there's some thought of like, oh, did he see the Pueblo architecture in the sun and like... It looked kind of golden. But that sort of sets off this rapacious conquest, which you see throughout the history of Spain's colonization of Mexico.
Yeah, absolutely. And I think that sense of people visiting and becoming enraptured with it and then wanting to bring more people, that continues. And after Guadalupe Hidalgo, you have the first wave of Americans coming to the region and realizing it's very ripe for colonization.
You mentioned Jack Swilling, you have the first kind of entrepreneurs who come to Albuquerque and El Paso, and yeah, it follows right through to the 21st century. Exactly. And certainly once you get into Las Vegas, which we can talk about as kind of the ultimate example of this chasing a dream in the desert. Exactly.
Yeah, absolutely. And I think when you get into the last part of the book is when I sort of turn from a very historical eye towards thinking about the world as it is now and how it is changing because of the climate. And I think the Southwest has always had these problems with water scarcity and
but has, because of the extremity of the environment there, has come up with some solutions and some strategies and ways to cope with it. And certainly the construction of massive reservoirs is the primary way that they have been able to build these enormous cities But now we've sort of seen the limit of that, and so we're beginning to have to think about, okay, how do we live more sustainably?
Showing 41–60 of 64 · page 3 of 4
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