Download our Logo
Vol. 31:1 ISSN 0160-8460 March 2003
Twenty Years with don Diego: The Vargas Project at the University of New Mexico
by John L. Kessell
No period in the history of the Southwest was of greater consequence than the generation from 1680 to 1710-a time of revolt, resettlement, and reconciliation that assured the cultural diversity of the region-and no person more prominent than don Diego de Vargas, Spanish nobleman, governor, and recolonizer.
John L. Kessell, Rick Hendricks, Meredith D. Dodge, and Larry D. Miller, editors of The Journals of don Diego de Vargas, October 2002. Photograph courtesy of David Schneider, After Words Books, Albuquerque, New Mexico.
It was best we did not know. Had we foreseen the duration of the enterprise, perhaps none of us would have signed on. At the end, however, we have few regrets. Still, what grew into a two-decade-long documentary editing project enabled by Federal, state, and private funding began innocently.
Former National Park Service historian John L. Kessell, after receiving a doctorate from the University of New Mexico, had spent the 1970s as a researcher for hire. While preparing a history of Pecos Pueblo during the Spanish colonial era, he noted the richness of unpublished primary sources for New Mexico's late-17th-century restoration. Meantime, critics had accused the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC) in Washington, DC, of a funding bias in favor of white Anglo-Saxon founding fathers. Documents written by Spaniards, on the other hand, represented diversity. Soon, at Kessell's bidding, the NHPRC set a place for Hispanic refounding father Diego de Vargas at the table with Adams and Jefferson. Hence, in 1980-81, with a modest start-up grant from the NHPRC and a concurrent Guggenheim Fellowship, the Vargas Project, a trusting, one-man operation tucked away in the cramped, second-story auxiliary map room of UNM's cavernous Zimmerman Library, came to be.
Fortuitously, by the mid-1980s, Meredith D. Dodge (1981), Rick Hendricks (1982), and Larry D. Miller (1984) had joined Kessell. Their training and capabilities in history, literature, and languages proved fundamental. Quite remarkably, this core group of four, aided by a sequence of two dozen gifted research associates and graduate students, held together as the Vargas Project long after each had earned higher degrees and three had moved away from Albuquerque.
From the beginning, our plan was threefold: first, to collect photographic copies of all Vargas' journals, the principal archives of his two administrations beginning at El Paso in 1691 and ending with his death in 1704; second, to transcribe and translate these several thousand manuscript pages; and, third, to publish them in a multivolume scholarly edition. We thought initially to include other contemporary documents, but soon recognized that sacramental records, land grants, wills, and the like would better serve us as material for annotation of the journals. Because standard Spanish colonial practice called for at least three copies-the original retained in Santa Fe, a copy sent to Mexico City, and another rendered there and forwarded to Spain-we had the advantage, when a gap occurred in the Spanish Archives of New Mexico, of seeking the backup at the Archivo General de la Nación in Mexico City, or if that were missing, the third copy at the Archivo General de Indias in Seville. The goal was to make widely available in English translation the public record of this pivotal time in the Hispanic Southwest.
Then an unexpected discovery in Madrid knocked our careful plan into a cocked hat. Here were two previously unknown family collections of don Diego's personal correspondence. Because such a corpus of letters from a mid-level Spanish colonial administrator was not only rare, but also revealing of the man, we set aside temporarily our anticipated first volume and worked to produce Remote Beyond Compare: Letters of don Diego de Vargas to His Family from New Spain and New Mexico, 1675-1706 (1989). Mainly biographical, Remote Beyond Compare cast the central figure of the era in a more human light.
Also in the 1980s, as we labored simultaneously on RBC and what would become By Force of Arms: The Journals of don Diego de Vargas, New Mexico, 1691-93 (1992), the Vargas Project entered, thanks largely to editor Hendricks, the world of computers and word processing. Our handwritten or typed paper inventory cards, preliminary volume outlines, and transcripts gradually gave way to electronic files. Bugs, almost laughable now, stung us from time to time. Yet by capturing the flourishes of the 17th century in the bits and bytes of the 20th, it became easier to produce readable and correctable texts, indices, and even concordances of the Spanish transcripts. We learned to code our manuscripts for UNM Press. Although the number of volumes we projected in grant applications fluctuated from a high of 10 or 12 to a low of 5 or 6, by the 1990s, we had begun publishing the archival record of the Vargas era featuring the people, events, and the cultural give-and-take of New Mexico's restoration. In each case, we took our volume titles from the phrases of don Diego or a contemporary.
Diego de Vargas, the only known portrait. From John L. Kessell, ed., Remote Beyond Compare, 1989.
To the Royal Crown Restored: The Journals of don Diego de Vargas, New Mexico, 1692-94 (1995) chronicled the difficult return to Santa Fe of the colony-in-exile. Fierce fighting and deeply contested accommodation between Spaniards and Pueblo Indians not only characterized Blood on the Boulders: The Journals of don Diego de Vargas, New Mexico, 1694-97 (1998), but also demanded a massive volume of two books and 1,249 pages. That Disturbances Cease: The Journals of don Diego de Vargas, New Mexico, 1697-1700 (2000) shifted the focus, as a recalcitrant Vargas and Pedro Rodríguez Cubero, who replaced him as governor for a term, and their agents traded damning charges and countercharges in Santa Fe, Mexico City, and Madrid. Because of the highly repetitive testimony, That Disturbances Cease required a more careful selection than any of the other volumes. Rodríguez's scantily documented final 3 years and Vargas's brief reappearance and death after a sudden illness cap the series in A Settling of Accounts: The Journals of don Diego de Vargas, New Mexico, 1700-1704 (2002).
Even as our volumes began to appear, we continued, individually or in pairs, to seek complementary records in archives and libraries in the United States, Mexico, and Spain. Documentary trails led from Santa Fe to the Bancroft and Huntington libraries in California, to the William L. Clements Library at the University of Michigan, the Newberry Library in Chicago, the Benson Latin American Collection at the University of Texas, the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, and the Library of Congress in Washington. Spanish repositories in Madrid, Torrelaguna, Simancas, Seville, Cadiz, and elsewhere, as well as the Mexican archives of Mexico City, Zacatecas, Sombrerete, and Parral all yielded relevant materials. Recourse to the incomparable collection of worldwide baptismal, marriage, burial, and census records maintained by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints enabled the extensive genealogical annotation of our volumes. One has only to compare the muster rolls of Vargas's colonists with today's telephone directories-or the innumerable mentions of Native American communities to a modern map-to appreciate New Mexico's vital historical continuity.
Our desire to make available the Spanish transcripts for each volume provided an example of how advancing technology altered our course. In the case of Remote Beyond Compare, since the collection of Vargas' personal correspondence was small and discrete, we published in the volume itself semi-paleographic transcriptions of all the letters. At the same time, Rick Hendricks, guided by Prof. John J. Nitti of the Dictionary of the Old Spanish Language Project at the University of Wisconsin, succeeded in producing a complementary computer-generated microfiche edition that included a concordance and summary vocabulary and frequency list. The sheer quantity of the public record precluded any thought of printing both English and Spanish in further volumes. Thus, for the next two, we prepared corresponding fiche editions, despite the awkwardness of using them. By the time double-sized Blood on the Boulders went to press, we had decided to delay publication of further Spanish transcripts until the end when we could make them available for the entire series on one cumulative and searchable CD-ROM.
A challenge none of us appreciated in the beginning was money, keeping the long-term Vargas Project funded. From start to finish, the NHPRC stuck by us, for which we will be ever grateful. Its mission, however, limits the funding of documentary editions and encourages contributions from others. In 1983, the Translations Program of the National Endowment for the Humanities provided a grant to the Vargas Project and subsequently renewed it for several 3-year periods with large matching components. Thanks to certain enthusiastic UNM administrators and several members of the New Mexico State Legislature, we managed with annual appropriations to raise the required match. Lesser grants along the way came from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the University of New Mexico Foundation, the L. J. Skaggs and Mary C. Skaggs Foundation, and the H. L. Wilson Foundation. Acknowledged in every volume since Remote Beyond Compare, members of our generous friends group, La Compañã de Vargas, demonstrated to government agencies the requisite community support. Without the financial backing and encouragement of each and every one, the Vargas Project would not have lasted.
By placing the present documentary edition of Vargas' journals in the hands of students, scholars, and other interested readers, we hope not only to heighten understanding of this formative period, but also to stimulate further inquiry. To its enduring editors, the Vargas Project has taught much. Still, if asked, What has 20 years with don Diego meant to you? each of us, we know, would answer differently.
John L. Kessell served as project director and editor of The Journals of Diego de Vargas.
