When Jesus Came, The Corn Mothers Went Away

American historian and author Ramon Gutierrez’s When Jesus Came, The Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality, and Power in New Mexico, 1500-1846 (1991) recounts the history of the Pueblo people whose civilization, along with many of its cultural touchstones, were decimated upon the arrival of Spanish colonists in the sixteenth century. The author places particular emphasis on the specific gender roles of Pueblo society and how Spanish settlers upended many of these indispensable qualities of Pueblo culture.

Sometime between 700 and 900 C.E., the Pueblo people began to emerge from their makeshift homes cut into the sides of canyons to set the stage of what would become a flourishing civilization. Evidence suggests that by the year 1050, the Pueblo had begun to erect "villages," each one consisting of a single large building of apartment-style domiciles housing the entire community, constructed out of bricks made from dried clay and mud. These homes were multi-story, and residents used ladders to reach the floors above ground level. Around 1150, construction was completed on Pueblo Bonito, a five-story, 700-unit building that housed 1,000 people. Historians consider it to have been the largest apartment building in all of North America until the erection of larger buildings in New York and Chicago during the nineteenth century.

By the thirteenth century, these towns had evolved to include complex irrigation systems and hillside terraces that allowed agriculture, in particular the production of corn, to flourish among the Pueblo people. In Pueblo culture, corn was considered nothing less than the giver of life itself, therefore, becoming strongly associated with femininity. The corn fetish, an object imbued with mystical power, was given to every Pueblo child at birth.



Meanwhile, the boys of the Pueblo people received an additional gift at birth: the flint arrowhead. This represented more than just a weapon used for hunting and fighting. The Pueblo people also believed that the spark of two flint arrowheads striking one another represented the thunder and lightning that accompanies rain. In this way, the female and male need one another as much as corn and rain do. Gutierrez adds, "Corn plants without rain would shrivel and die; water without corn was no life at all." According to Gutierrez, this statement represents the symbiotic attitudes felt by men and women toward one another in Pueblo culture.

The Spanish explorer Francisco Vasquez de Coronado led the earliest European visitors to New Mexico during the 1540s, but he and his men did not settle in the area. They came looking for the mythical Seven Golden Cities of Cibola, returning home when all they encountered in New Mexico was the impressive but certainly not "Golden" civilization built by the Pueblo. However, around fifty years later, a second Spanish conquistador Juan de Onate arrived and built a settlement in the vicinity of the Pueblo along with 500 Spanish settlers and 7,000 head of livestock. The Pueblo were naturally reluctant to embrace the newcomers' culture. In addition to resisting efforts by missionaries to baptize them, the Pueblo were mystified by European gender roles, as well as the very Christian emphasis on modesty and shame. The author paints a picture of a society that, before the arrival of the Europeans, was highly progressive and permissive from a sexual standpoint, even by today's standards.

While the Spanish no doubt believed they were "civilizing" the Pueblo by encouraging them to hide their sexuality, this clash of cultures resulted in a dampening of female power and agency among the Pueblo, Gutierrez argues. In the Pueblo's sexually egalitarian culture, women were just as important as men. Nevertheless, particularly as the culture clashes turned physical and bloody, men were suddenly elevated in the culture, a consequence of the need to protect the communities from constant raids and reprisals from Europeans, which often resulted in death, rape, or forced slavery.



While the story of European settlers decimating the communities and cultures of indigenous Americans is a common one, When Jesus Came, The Corn Mothers Went Away puts a fascinating twist on this history by focusing on how it impacted gender roles among the Pueblo.