I spent a good chunk of time on Sunday morning trying to sit back down into my research efforts on Anza. Some of the time was spent trying to read a few more pages in the Anza book, and some of the time was also spent transcribing chicken scratch notes written on a legal pad into a digital copy on my laptop. My cursive just ain’t like it used to be.

My reading brought me to a place where Anza was making a new beginning in his life as a statesman and administrator north of Primera Alta, north of his Sonoran home territories, the lands he was familiar with from growing up in the northern area of New Spain. Anza was settling into a new Mexico region, and peculiar to the region were communities of indigenous people who lived in sandstone brick and adobe structures often on or beside rising mesas in the semi-arid terrain. Anza had his experiences living around farming natives in Sonora, and he was all to familiar with the marauding tribes of Indians he spent many years fighting as a Spanish military man. But the people in the multi-roomed adobe apartment villages were a little different.

My parents have befriended a few Native Americans through their interest in local Native pottery and jewelry makers, and they’ve been invited to feasts days and festivals in Jemez homes and Navajo towns. They’ve taken time in recent years to seek out and to enjoy opportunities spent making some new Native friends, and in those experiences, they’ve come to appreciate seeing subtle distinctions between the people- and their artistic products- from differing New Mexico Pueblos.

It is the pueblos that the early Spaniards came across and found interesting as communities and tribal cultural centers. The pueblos were distinct in the new Mexico.

And that is because the Southwestern United States- or more distinctly, Arizona and New Mexico- were pretty much the only place pueblo inhabitants settled, largely by the Rio Grande and Colorado rivers.

Being from New Mexico, I had to check: How many pueblos peoples are there today?

My research led to the suggestion that today there are still 21 pueblos active today.

And where would most of them be?

19 of them are in New Mexico, predominantly north of interstate 40.

It turns out that of the two pueblos that exist outside of New Mexico, one developed as a result of migrations after the Pueblo Revolt against the Spanish in 1680. The Ysleta del Sur Pueblo by El Paso, Texas, was founded when Isleta tribe members fled from their ancestral home south of Albuquerque to resettle in a safer region. The second Pueblo outside of New Mexico, the Hopi Pueblo in northeast Arizona, developed concurrently with the New Mexico communities, but it also was impacted by the Pueblo Revolt. Of those Isleta members who did not go with the majority to resettle in Texas, most ended up relocating in Hopi Pueblo.