The offspring and descendants of enslaved persons were called genizaros and made up one-third of New Mexico's population in the early 19th century.
In the Spanish caste system genizaros had low status, but were important for frontier defense and cultural contacts with Indian tribes.
After Mexico gained independence from Spain in 1821, all slavery was declared illegal but institutions of involuntary servitude continued.
These stories are evidence that slavery and trade in slaves by the Native American people of New Mexico existed prior to the arrival of the Spaniards.
Many Pueblos quickly became nominal Christians and they were protected from slavery, albeit with their labor exploited and their freedom restricted, by Roman Catholic Franciscan missionaries who were independent of the colony's governor.
The 1659 court case of Juan Suñi, a young Hopi man accused of stealing food and trinkets in the governor's mansion, resulted in a sentence of ten years of enslavement.
In the 17th century, Apaches visited trade fairs in Spanish settlements with Wichita (Quiviran) captives for sale which settlers and Franciscans purchased as slaves.
The Spanish also acquired Indian slaves by capturing Apaches and Utes who lived in areas surrounding the New Mexican settlements.
[10] Enslaving Indians and selling them or exploiting their labor was one of the few ways Spanish governors in New Mexico could profit from their appointment to this remote province of New Spain.
As scholar Frank McNitt wrote, "Governors were a greedy and rapacious lot whose single-minded interest was to wring as much personal wealth from the province as their terms allowed.
Among the promises made by the rebels to encourage men to join the revolt was that for each Spaniard they killed they would receive one woman as a wife.
Early in the 18th century relations between Pueblos and Spaniards improved in response to raids on New Mexico by Apaches, Navajos, and Utes.
[16][17][18] In the words of historian Pekka Hämäläinen, the Comanches "were racially color-blind people who saw in almost every stranger a potential kinsperson, but they nevertheless built the largest slave economy in the colonial Southwest.
The Comanches arrived at the fair with their captive slaves and sold them to the Spanish in exchange for maize, ammunition, tobacco, cloth, and other manufactured goods.
[26] Brooks estimates that 5,000 Indian captives of many different tribes were ransomed or purchased by the Spanish in New Mexico between 1700 and 1880, the Comanches being the largest purveyors of slaves.
[20][27][28] The settlements of Tomé and Belén just south of Albuquerque, were described by Juan Agustin Morfi in 1778: In all the Spanish towns of New Mexico there exists a class of Indians called genizaros.
They are forced to live among the Spaniards, without lands or other means to subsist except the bow and arrow which serves them when they go into the back country to hunt deer for food ...
The 1659 court case of Juan Suñi, a young Hopi man accused of stealing food and trinkets in the governor's mansion, resulted in a sentence of ten years of enslavement.
[30] Because they had few rights under the casta laws of the Spanish, acceptance of land grants and resettlement on the dangerous frontiers of New Mexico was the principal way for genízaros to become landowners.
[31] The 1786 peace treaty with the Comanches permitted the Spanish to expand eastward out of the narrow confines of the Rio Grande Valley onto the Great Plains.
In the period of Mexican and early American rule (1821–1880), most of the genízaros and captive servants in New Mexico were of Navajo ancestry.
This was partially because Territorial Governor William Carr Lane and Chief Justice of the New Mexico Supreme Court Grafton Baker owned black slaves.
[37] Many local citizens had seen the issue in different terms; soon after the Treaty had been signed, a group of prominent New Mexicans went on record in opposition to slavery, in their petition to congress to change the military government to a temporary territorial form.
They were likely motivated by their desire for self-government, and the fact that the slave state of Texas claimed much of New Mexico east of the Rio Grande, and that many believed that it was planning to invade again as it had in 1841 and 1843.
When Special Indian Agent J.K. Graves visited in June 1866, he found that slavery was still widespread, often in the form of peonage.
In cooperation with New Mexico attorney general, Life Link has created the 505 Get Free initiative, which promotes a hotline to report trafficking.