Juan de Oñate y Salazar (Spanish pronunciation: [/ˈxwan de‿oˈɲate/] Huan-de-O-nya-te) (1550-1626) was a Spanish conquistador, explorer and viceroy of the province of Santa Fe de Nuevo México in the viceroyalty of New Spain, in the present-day U.S. state of New Mexico. He led early Spanish expeditions to the Great Plains and Lower Colorado River Valley, encountering numerous indigenous tribes in their homelands there. Oñate founded settlements in the province, now in the Southwestern United States.
Oñate is notorious for the 1599 Ácoma Massacre. This series of events transpired after Oñate sent his nephew, Juan de Zaldívar, to ask Acoma Pueblo to submit to the Spanish throne and Catholicism. Accounts of what happened next differ. The majority of accounts include the Spaniards forcefully taking Acoma blankets and food. A fight ensued and many of the Spanish group, including Zaldívar, were killed.
Oñate arrived at Acoma Pueblo on January 21st with an army including cannons and muskets. The Spanish set fire to the Pueblo. Approximately 800–1000 Ácoma were murdered. After this initial attack, on February 12th, Oñate ordered that the right foot be cut off every man over 25.
Today, Oñate remains a controversial figure in New Mexican history: in 1998, the right foot was cut off a statue of the conquistador that stands in Alcalde, New Mexico, in protest of the massacre, and significant controversy arose when a large equestrian statue of Oñate was erected in El Paso, Texas, in 2006. On June 15, 2020, the statue of Oñate in Alcalde, New Mexico was temporarily removed by Rio Arriba County workers at the direction of officials and put into storage. In 2023, The statue was erected again in Española, New Mexico, placed on the grounds of the county annex building.
Oñate was born in 1550, at Zacatecas in New Spain (colonial México), to the Spanish-Basque conquistador and silver baron Cristóbal de Oñate, a descendant of the noble house of Haro. Oñate's mother, Doña Catalina Salazar y de la Cadena, had among her ancestors Jewish-origin New Christians who "served in the royal court of Spanish monarchs from the late 1300s to the mid-1500s." She was of Spanish ancestry and descended from conversos, former Jews, on at least several branches of her family tree. Among these converso relatives was her paternal grandfather, the royal physician Doctor Guadalupe de Salazar. Other family members became Christians in the 1390s, around 160 years before Oñate's birth. Her father was Gonzalo de Salazar, leader of several councils that governed New Spain while Hernán Cortés was traveling to Honduras in 1525–26.
Juan de Oñate married Isabel de Tolosa Cortés de Moctezuma, who was the granddaughter of Hernán Cortés, the conqueror of the Mexica, and the great-granddaughter of the Aztec Emperor Moctezuma Xocoyotzin.
Cristóbal de Oñate who married María Gutiérrez del Castillo who had issue, Juan Pérez de Narriahondo y Castillo.
María de Oñate who married Vicente de Zaldívar who had issue, Nicolás de Zaldívar y Oñate.
Governorship and 1598 New Mexico expedition
In response to a bid by Juan Bautista de Lomas y Colmenares, and subsequently rejected by the King, on September 21, 1595 Philip II's Viceroy Luís de Velasco selected Oñate from two other candidates to organize the resources of the newly acquired territory.
The agreement with Viceroy Velasco tasked Oñate with two goals; the better-known aim was to explore and colonize the unknown lands annexed into the New Kingdom of León y Castilla (present day New Mexico) and the Viceroyalty of New Spain. His second goal was to capture Capt. Francisco Leyva de Bonilla (a traitor to the crown known to be in the region) as he already was transporting other criminals. His stated objective otherwise was to spread Catholicism by establishing new missions in Nuevo México. Oñate is credited with founding the Province of Santa Fe de Nuevo México, and was the province's first colonial governor, acting from 1598 to 1610. He held his colonial government at Ohkay Owingeh, and renamed the pueblo there 'San Juan de los Caballeros'.
In late 1595, the Viceroy Gaspar de Zúñiga followed his predecessor's advice, and in the summer of 1596 delayed Oñate's expedition in order to review the terms of the original agreement, signed before the previous Viceroy had left office. In March 1598, Oñate's expedition moved out and forded the Rio Grande (Río del Norte) south of present-day El Paso and Ciudad Juárez in late April.
On the Catholic calendar day of Ascension, April 30, 1598, the exploration party assembled on the south bank of the Rio Grande. In an Ascension Day ceremony, Oñate led the party in prayer, as he claimed all of the territory across the river for the Spanish Empire. Oñate's original terms would have made this land a separate viceroyalty to the crown in New Spain; this move failed to stand after de Zúñiga reviewed the agreement.
All summer, Oñate's expedition party followed the middle Rio Grande Valley to present-day northern New Mexico, where he engaged with Pueblo Indians. Gaspar Pérez de Villagrá, a captain of the expedition, chronicled Oñate's conquest of New Mexico's indigenous peoples in his epic poem Historia de la Nueva México.
Oñate granted land to colonists on the expedition, and empowered them to demand tribute from Native Americans.
In October 1598, a skirmish erupted when a squad of Oñate's men stopped to trade for food supplies at the Acoma Pueblo. The Ácoma themselves needed their stored food to survive the coming winter. The Ácoma resisted and 11 Spaniards were ambushed and killed, including Oñate's nephew, Juan de Zaldívar.
In January 1599, Oñate condemned the conflict as an insurrection and ordered the pueblo destroyed, a mandate carried out by Juan de Zaldívar's brother, Vicente de Zaldívar, in an offensive known as the Ácoma Massacre. An estimated 800–1,000 Ácoma died in the siege of the pueblo. Much later, when King Philip III of Spain heard the news of the massacre, and the punishments, Oñate was banished from New Mexico for his cruelty to the natives, and exiled from Mexico for five years, convicted by the Spanish government of using "excessive force" against the Acoma people. Oñate later returned to Spain to live out the remainder of his life.
Of the 500 or so survivors, at a trial at Ohkay Owingeh, Oñate sentenced all men and women older than 12 to twenty years of forced "personal servitude". In addition, men older than 25 (24 individuals) were to have a foot amputated. According to recent research, there is no evidence of this happening and that, at most, the prisoners lost some toes. This latter theory makes sense, for losing toes rather than a whole foot left the prisoners useful as servants. In Onate's personal journal, he specifically refers to the punishment of the Acoma warriors as cutting off "las puntas del pie" (the points of the foot, the toes).