Tarahumara Rebellion of 1690

Joseph P. Sánchez is founder and former director of the Spanish Colonial Research Center at the University of New Mexico. He retired from the National Park Service (NPS) in 2014 after thirty-five years of service. He is the author of several books, including Pueblos, Plains, and Province New Mexico in the Seventeenth Century.

“Sánchez makes use of a breadth of sources, primary and scholarly, to reexamine what we know of the 1690 Tarahumara revolt, and how and why this is important to the history of northern Mexico. Rooted in his own deep research of the larger period, this work demonstrates a familiarity with interpretations of the event, and begs the reader to think beyond common polarities of colonizer and colonized, and to understand nuance and potential for divergent understandings of such events at the time and after.”—Jay T. Harrison, co-editor of At the Heart of the Borderlands: Africans and Afro-Descendants on the Edges of Colonial Spanish America “This important new study sheds abundant light on a consequential though little-studied uprising among one of the most numerous Native peoples of northern Mexico. It also allows us to witness the unfolding political transformations that swept across the region as Native peoples and imperial agents responded to the cataclysmic Pueblo Revolt of 1680.”—Raphael Brewster Folsom, author of The Yaquis and the Empire: Violence, Spanish Imperial Power, and Native Resilience in Colonial Mexico