Like an ocean wave riding up the slope of a beach and gradually coming to a halt, its power expended, so the wave of Spanish colonization, about a century after it had exploded from a Spain that had just defeated the Moors, slowed and stilled in the high mountains of northern New Mexico. This farthest edge of the ragged rim of Christendom, a couple of thousand miles from the viceroy's palace in the City of Mexico, finally rested in a land of both natural and cultural beauty.
Those lovely mountains were already the home of civilized Indians, the Pueblos. For centuries they had tilled their fields, dug their acequias (irrigation systems), built their homes, fired their pottery, danced their dances, and carved their kachinas (dolls). But, like that dying wave which finally expended the power built thousands of miles away on the far shores of a great ocean, the Spanish experience in New Mexico held a great, strange, and terrible beauty all its own.
To some degree, this exotic condition arose from the meeting of the two cultures. It was not, as may be thought, that the Hispanics and the Indians synthesized their cultures into a third thing, a new culture born of the previous two. Rather, exactly the opposite, the recalcitrance of the Pueblos to acculturate seems to have heightened Spanish self-definition. The meeting of these two cultures fascinated and enticed such figures of world and national culture as D.H. Lawrence, Marsden Hartley, Willa Cather, and Georgia O'Keeffe. In the rich cultural soup of these primitive and folk peoples, the Brotherhood of Our Father Jesus the Nazarene - the Penitentes - stands out as a particularly dramatic feature. But the brotherhood was, and is, truly akin to the prevailing religion and culture of the Hispanics of New Mexico.
To understand and relish the phenomenon known as the Cofradia, the brotherhood or confraternity, it is necessary to explore some of the region's unique and little-known history.
The colony was founded in 1598, when even Jamestown was only a conjectural policy of Queen Elizabeth's England. Its story had begun more than a half-century earlier when survivors of an ill-fated expedition limped into Culiacan, on the Gulf of California. They brought with them second- and third-hand tales of cities of gold. These were instantly identified with the fabled Seven Cities of Cibola, founded by seven bishops and their flocks who had sailed away to the west during the Moorish invasions centuries before.
A few years later a small expedition, viewing the stone and adobe town of Zuni at a distance, believed they had seen the first of the mythical cities that they had come seeking. They returned to the City of Mexico to prepare a major expedition. During the next years, 1540-1542, Francisco Vasquez de Coronado led a futile expedition in search of golden cities in what is now western Kansas. So disappointed were the Spanish that for fifty-six years they left New Mexico almost completely alone.
When the Spanish finally returned, their intention was to remain. They instituted a version of the European feudal system in their new home. Their soldiers would become the lords of the realm, and the Pueblos were cordially invited to be the serfs. Each officer was given a certain area of the Pueblo world in encomienda, in fealty to the crown. While the Indians would owe their new lord
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