From “An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States” by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
Although the Spanish Crown had dispatched explorers such as Coronado, Cabeza de Baca, and others, and had established trading and military posts and towns along the North American Atlantic Coast and in Florida and along the Gulf Coast as far as the Mississippi, Spanish settler-colonialist rule did not begin north of the Rio Grande until 1598. The soldier-settler colonizing mission launched a brutal military assault on the Pueblo towns in New Mexico and imposed state and church institutions. The colonizers found a thriving irrigation-based agriculture supporting a population living in ninety-eight interrelated city-states (pueblos, the Spanish called them), and within two decades they reduced the towns to twenty-one. Perhaps most provocative, given the Pueblos’ extensive rituals and numerous religious feast days, the Franciscan missionaries forbade Pueblo religious practices and forced Christianity upon them. As Spanish repression and labor exploitation intensified, the Pueblos organized a revolution that also was supported by the unconquered Navajos, Apaches, and Utes, and the Hopi towns to the west in what is now Arizona. They were joined by the servant and laboring class of captive Indigenous and Mestizos in the Spanish capital at Santa Fe. In 1680, they drove the Spanish out of New Mexico, leaving the Pueblos free for twelve years before a new and permanent colonizing mission arrived. During another 130 years of Spanish rule before Mexico’s independence, the Pueblos were strictly controlled and forced to provide foot soldiers for Spanish forays against the Navajos, Apaches, and Utes who were never colonized by the Spanish. Mexico ousted the Franciscans and left the Pueblos to their own lives, although much of their territory had been lost to permanent settlers.
The two largest Mexican provinces annexed by the United States, Coahuila y Tejas (Texas) and California, were more sparsely populated and not as tightly centralized and organized as New Mexico. After 1692, as the Spanish Crown went an army to invade and reoccupy the Rio Grande Pueblos, it also sought effective control and settlement of California and Texas, in part to create a large buffer with competing French, British, and Russian imperialism.