SANTA FE, N.M. — For as long as nearly anyone here can remember, Hispanic residents have donned the garb of conquistadors and European nobility once a year to celebrate the 1692 reconquest of New Mexico from Native Americans who submitted to the Spanish Empire after a grisly revolt.
But after escalating protests by Native Americans who saw the re-enactment as a racist attempt to gloss over atrocities carried out by Spanish colonizers, the annual tradition known as Entrada officially came to an end Friday, replaced by a multidenominational prayer gathering to begin the annual Fiesta de Santa Fe.
The move, aimed at forging reconciliation in the 411-year-old city, was an attempt to avoid the kind of turmoil officials elsewhere in the country are grappling with over Confederate monuments and other symbols of historic brutality, including statues honoring European conquerors.
The end of the Entrada is rekindling debate over how to portray New Mexico’s complex history, marked by centuries of enslavement of Native Americans; military conquest by Spain and the United States; and attempts to depict the state as a place where Hispanics, Native Americans and Anglos, or non-Hispanic whites, peacefully coexist.
“The Entrada grew into a wedge between us, exposing the deep wounds of colonialism,” said former Gov. Regis Pecos of Cochiti Pueblo, one of New Mexico’s 23 federally recognized tribes , who negotiated on behalf of Native American leaders to end the pageant. “We know the reconquest was anything but peaceful. So why celebrate something so divisive?”
The Entrada, which translates roughly to “entry,” portrayed the reassertion of Spanish control in 1692 over New Mexico by the conquistador Don Diego de Vargas as a harmonious feat of colonial rule, in which Native peoples agreed to cease hostilities and yield to European rulers.
But historians have documented that De Vargas grappled for years with protracted resistance from various tribes. Trying to quell such defiance, his forces carried out mass executions of dozens of Native Americans in Santa Fe, not far from where the Entrada was long reenacted.
The struggle for control of what was then one of the Spanish Empire’s most remote colonies still resonates in Santa Fe, where Hispanics account for 54 percent of a population of 84,000. Anglos comprise 40 percent of the population and Native Americans 2 percent, according to Census figures.
Thomas Baca, president of Caballeros de Vargas, the organization which long staged the Entrada, said the decision to end the re-enactment had produced heated discussions with some of his own relatives who oppose any attempt to curb Hispanic traditions.
“We can’t forget our Spanish ancestors, but we also need to understand the reaction that some traditions generate,” said Baca, 35, a school bus driver who portrayed De Vargas in the 2014 Entrada.
Baca contended that issues of ethnicity in New Mexico were often far more complex than outsiders understand, pointing to long traditions of intermarriage between different peoples. This applies to his own family: Baca is Hispanic, but his wife and children are members of Pojoaque Pueblo, one of New Mexico’s six Tewa-speaking peoples, and they live on the pueblo’s lands.
“What if someone got killed protesting the Entrada?” Baca asked, pointing to demonstrations here and deadly violence elsewhere in the United States over symbols of ethnic divisions, including 2017's white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. “That’s not something I felt I could live with.”
During Friday’s observances, Native American leaders recited prayers in the Santa Fe Plaza in the Keres and Tewa languages. A Roman Catholic priest spoke in Spanish and Latin, while Rabbi Neil Amswych, president of Santa Fe’s Interfaith Leadership Alliance, spoke in English about the need for reconciliation.
A handful of observers in the crowd quietly voiced opposition to the change. Richard Polese, a local historian, held aloft a sign proclaiming, “De Vargas Protected Pueblos’ Kiva Faith” and “Viva la Fiesta!”
“Don Diego de Vargas offered genuine respect for Native faith practices,” Polese contended.
Nearby, Rachel Girón, who works in a dental office in California but grew up in Santa Fe, said she was pleased with the changes in the Fiesta. “If this means I can dance and sing with my Native brothers and sisters, then I’m all for it,” said Girón, 54. “The Fiesta is still as beautiful as ever.”
While the Fiesta de Santa Fe bills itself as one of the country’s oldest continuous community celebrations, the pageant honoring De Vargas was neither very old nor as historically precise as some here suggest.
At a time when cities around the United States were in a craze for pageants evoking the feats of early European settlers, Anglo merchants, clergymen and archaeologists created the Entrada in the early decades of the 20th century largely to lure tourists to Santa Fe.
Anglos filled many of the conquistador roles in the celebration’s early years until Hispanics began supplanting them as both participants and organizers, scholar Chris Wilson meticulously documents in his book “The Myth of Santa Fe.”
The pageant historically focused on De Vargas, a conquistador born in Spain to an illustrious family of knights, and an imaginary Spanish queen from a family of monarchs who never set foot in colonial New Mexico. Estevan Rael-Gálvez, a former state historian of New Mexico who advised various parties here during the Entrada negotiations during the past year, described its creation as a “re-imagining that idealized a mythic past, place and people at the expense of the actual complexity of the population and their experiences.”
Still, some have complained that the Entrada’s cancellation is emblematic of the many ways in which Hispanics have ceded economic and political power in Santa Fe to Anglos in recent years, to the point that many families who have hewed for generations to the city’s Hispanic traditions can no longer afford to live here.
“What happened to our city?” asked former City Council member Ron Trujillo in a widely shared Facebook post. “It’s so easy to say any event does not conform to your thinking.”
Joshua Rodriguez, a warehouse manager for the New Mexico Health Department, expressed similar dismay over the end of the Entrada, contending that officials were in danger of simplifying history at the expense of Hispanics in a state where genealogy holds considerable importance to many families.
“Some of my ancestors were beheaded during the Pueblo Revolt,” said Rodriguez, 45, referring to the 1680 uprising by Native Americans in which more than 400 colonists were killed. “War is war, and there’s nothing we can do about the past but learn from it. We don’t go to the Pueblos and protest on their land against their traditions.”
Many Native Americans, however, hold different views. Pecos, the former Cochiti Pueblo governor, said the debate over the Entrada could allow Hispanics to focus less on Spain and more on their ties to indigenous cultures. He pointed to revelations that many Hispanics here have forebears who were Genízaros, Native American slaves sold to Hispanic families from the 16th to the 19th centuries.
“This may be an opportunity for people in New Mexico to be frank and earnest about their ancestry,” Pecos said.
Either way, the pageant’s end may also reflect how political power here is shifting. Tribes in the state are asserting greater economic sway, thanks largely to casino gambling revenues, and Democrat and community activist Deb Haaland is seeking to make history this year in her bid to be the first Native American woman elected to Congress.
Alan Webber, the mayor of Santa Fe and a progressive Democrat, said the city’s approach to ending the Entrada “sets an example of what’s possible,” pointing to similar tensions around the country and unease over Trump administration policies that are viewed by many as divisive.
“After we get past this period of darkness, Americans will be thirsty for a period of reconciliation,” said Webber, emphasizing that “voices were never raised and fingers were never pointed” in the negotiations around the Entrada.
Still, some here wonder what the city could stand to lose. Richard Barela, president of the Union Protectiva de Santa Fe, an organization dedicated to preserving the city’s Hispanic culture, told The Santa Fe New Mexican that the pageant’s end was part of an erosion of traditions that make Santa Fe stand out among U.S. cities.
“You start doing away with those and we just become like Phoenix, Arizona,” Barela said. “No espíritu,” he added. “No spirit.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.