In the northern reaches of New Mexico, the law grew faint with distance.
On paper, Spanish officials were clear enough: the unauthorized enslavement of Native people was illegal. Orders were issued and reissued, regulations repeated like prayers. But north of the mining towns, where roads narrowed into trails and authority traveled slowly, those rules often dissolved on contact with reality. Indigenous people continued to be taken, bought, sold, and forced to labor, despite everything Madrid and Mexico City declared from afar.
That contradiction did more than undermine the law. It bred resentment and confusion among Native communities that could not tell where justice ended and exploitation began. Local officials contradicted regional authorities. Clergy argued with governors. The Crown’s intentions fractured into competing interpretations. What remained was a borderland where power felt arbitrary, and where violence flourished in the gaps.
Historian Andy Hernandez examines that history in Chapter Five of Unpacking Silver City, tracing the long arc of Indigenous captivity in and around the region. His interest in the subject began with graduate research focused on an earlier period of trade and movement across the southwest.
“I developed my interest in this for my dissertation because I studied early commerce between Santa Fe and Los Angeles in the 1830s and 1840s, and one of the big pieces of that commerce, one of the fundamental pieces, was trafficking Indian captives,” Hernandez said. “I had worked on a project while I was at UNM on the old Spanish Trail, to get it designated as a national historical trail, and in the process, I learned about Indian slavery, and I cultivated the interest in it, and that's why it became the subject of my dissertation.”
That research, Hernandez said, places Silver City within a much older historical current, one that long predates the town itself.
“It fundamentally ties Silver City into the broader currents of much older New Mexico history, because the enslavement of Indians and sometimes even captives taken by Indians themselves,” he said. “This was something that goes back to the earliest roots of colonial history and something that persisted well into the 20th century. Silver City's founding and emergence itself also became tied into those types of practices.”
A recurring theme in that history is distance: how far authority had to travel, and how much it weakened along the way.
“In colonial New Mexico, enslavement of Indians was illegal under most conditions, and yet it still happened because New Mexico was so far away from the colonial capital of Mexico City,” Hernandez said. “And even after New Mexico becomes a U.S. territory and the 13th Amendment formally abolishes slavery, New Mexico is pretty remote.
“New Mexico and other parts of the southwest are pretty remote from Washington DC, and so this practice then continues, and we have aftershocks from it well into the 20th century. A big piece of what I covered has to deal with how in the periphery you have quite a bit less concentration of political authority, so you have these types of practices still going on.”
Dealing With Separation
Captivity itself was not new. Across civilizations, prisoners of war had long been forced into labor—sometimes for life, sometimes for years before being released or absorbed into new communities. What remained consistent was the rupture: separation from kin, loss of language, renaming, and social invisibility. To be enslaved was to live at the discretion of another.
In New Mexico, captivity took on its own shape. Indigenous captives were often called cautivos or amados, softened terms that masked harsher realities. While forced labor was not always lifelong, alienation was profound. Some captives were sent far from home; others were folded uneasily into households that were never fully theirs. Even when they survived, they lived in between, no longer who they had been, never fully who they were forced to become.
Violence made the system unmistakable.
At Acoma in 1599, Spanish forces crushed resistance with a brutality meant to instruct as much as punish. Hundreds were killed. Survivors were mutilated or sentenced to decades of forced labor. Women deemed “innocent” were removed entirely and sent to convents in Mexico City, severed from place and people alike.
As the seventeenth century wore on, Native labor became a fault line within colonial New Mexico itself. Franciscan missionaries accused governors of enslaving Indigenous people for profit. Governors accused friars of hypocrisy. Each side claimed moral authority. Each relied on Native labor to survive. Entire households in Santa Fe and beyond were built around servants and slaves of Indigenous descent—hundreds of them—whose presence rarely troubled official conscience.
By the late 1600s, resentment had reached a breaking point.
When Pueblo communities rose in revolt in 1680, liberation was among their aims. Survivors later recalled rebels freeing captives, reclaiming kin, and demanding the return of enslaved wives and children. During negotiations at besieged Santa Fe, Native leaders made their demands plain: give back the captives. The governor refused.
“There were so many more pueblos in New Mexico in the 17th century than today,” Hernandez said. “Many of them went extinct during the 17th century and we can still see the ruins of some of those even now. But fundamentally, the Apache saw the weaknesses and infighting in New Mexico's government, but they had also suffered from crop failure, they suffered from disease, they suffered from the seizure of forced labor, and that's what created the conditions that led to the revolt.
“In terms of keeping score, in the very early days of the revolt, when Indians were besieging Santa Fe, there were Apache who were at the front of the siege, who were saying we want our family members back, and you can have peace. They wanted their cousins and their wives, and their children returned to them by New Mexico's officials, and they didn't get that, and the revolt even cascaded further from there. There’s kind of the longer-term peace, but there's the immediate peace where they’re laying siege to the capital itself and demanding their families be returned to them.”
The revolt succeeded, but memory reshaped it. Over time, blame shifted toward the Apache, cast as outside agitators. That narrative made it easier for Spanish authorities to pursue peace with Pueblo people afterward, while redirecting suspicion and violence elsewhere.
Captivity remained central.
By the eighteenth century, Indian slavery in New Mexico had changed form. Forced labor mattered less than removal—what officials called “reduction.” Captives were detached from their tribes and reclassified as genízaros, settled on the edges of colonial society in buffer communities meant to absorb danger so others could feel secure.
Peace treaties followed. Trade expanded. So did exploitation. As traders looked outward for profit, captives again became commodities. Raiding fed demand. Demand fueled more raiding. Each act justified the next.
By the time Mexico gained independence, the system was already unraveling. Anglo-American traders arrived with new markets and new weapons. Slavery hardened. Children were born into it. Wills passed enslaved people across generations, even as those same documents sometimes granted land to former captives, exposing deep contradictions.
By the late nineteenth century, even as the Apache Wars wound down, captivity had not disappeared. Children were taken and “adopted,” feared and misunderstood, written about as curiosities or threats. Some vanished into new lives. Others lingered in rumor and memory.
“The other piece that I wanted to get to is that this is a slavery that's often foreign to our mindset today, because it's too easy for people to think of slavery as a lifelong forced labor on a plantation, passed on to your children, and that kind of thing,” Hernandez said. “And that's really kind of an outlier over time and across the globe in terms of what slavery actually was.
“What I wanted to do is really cement that slavery is what one of the great sociologists called a form of social death, where you're separated from your culture. There may be some assimilation, it’s frequently not a lifelong term of forced labor, but it is a substitute for death. And so, they can be carried out at any point, and I was trying to basically capture the complexity of what slavery is.”
The past, in this place, refused to stay past.
Because many of those taken lived into the modern era, and because their children and grandchildren did too, this history does not sit at a comfortable distance. It stands close enough to be felt.
“Something that I'm still unwrapping and that I think is really cautionary is that the term adoption has some very positive connotations, but I didn't have the privilege of dealing with those,” Hernandez said. “The forms that I dealt with were extremely malignant, where a New Mexican settler might say that they were adopting a young Indian child, but the reality was they were exploiting them for as long as they could. That puts us into a very malignant form of the term that actually continued all the way until 1977, and that doesn't come to an end until the Indian Child Welfare Act.”
That puts these practices within living memory for many readers today.
“The statement attributed to Mark Twain, ‘History doesn't repeat, but it rhymes,’ there's a malignancy still that goes along with that, because when we look at the immigration crisis of the last 20 years, there are persistently cases where the children of people who are deported are themselves put into foster or adoption agencies and are lost, and I think that somebody is going to be coming along in 40 or 50 years and trying to unravel what happened there as well,” Hernandez said. “In this case, we're not dealing with the positive aspects for adoption. That's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about some of the worst forms, and there's a very sinister side of it as well that can be very malignant to those that fall into it.”
