Puebloan Nations of New Mexico, 1680: The Revolution That Still Stands
How Nations Revolt — a PUGILIST series
How Nations Revolt is an ongoing PUGILIST series on the revolutions that remade the world — what drove ordinary people to tear down the order they were born into, how they pulled it off, and who walked away with the spoils. Each piece stands on its own and runs the same diagnostic: the five questions every revolution answers, laid out in the opening essay, The Five Questions Every Revolution Answers. Start there if you’re new — it’s the key that unlocks all the rest.
The whole series lives under its own tab — How Nations Revolt— on the main page of The Pugilist.
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The Knotted Cord: New Mexico, 1680
Ninety-six years before thirteen colonies on the Atlantic seaboard declared their independence from England, the indigenous Puebloan people of the area we now know as the U.S. state of New Mexico carried out the first American revolution — and won it. They did it without muskets, without money, without a printing press, without a single ally beyond their own mesas. They coordinated an uprising across nearly four hundred miles of high desert and six mutually unintelligible languages using a cord of knotted fiber, passed from village to village by runners, each knot a day remaining until the appointed morning.
On August 10, 1680, the knots ran out, and the Puebloan people rose up against their oppressors, none other than the colonial Spanish empire at the height of the Spanish Inquisition.
By the end of that month, every Spanish soldier, settler, and priest in the New Spain colony of Nuevo Mexico — every one still living — was walking south toward El Paso del Norte (now El Paso, Texas), and the people they had attempted to brutally colonize for eighty-two years stood on their own land under their own sky, answering to no crown on earth.
Empires like to be overthrown by other empires. It flatters them. What happened in New Mexico in 1680 was something else entirely: the most heavily fortified patriarchal religious and extractive economic order in the American hemisphere was brought down in eleven days by matrilocal farmers with an egalitarian cosmology, people whose weapons were clubs, bows, and a secret uprising plan kept perfectly quiet by thousands of people for years. Before we can understand how they pulled their corner of the New Spain empire down, we have to walk through it — because the Spanish colony of Nuevo Mexico was a structure, and like every structure examined in this series, it had load-bearing walls its owners never inspected until the morning after they gave way.
The house the conquerors built
A spoiled, talentless heir to a New Spain silver mining empire in Zacatecas (in what is now the nation of Mexico), something like the Elon Musk of his day, Juan de Oñate came up the banks of the Rio Grande River into Puebloan lands in 1598 with about five hundred colonists, several thousand head of livestock, and a contract from the Kingdom of Spain. The conquest of the area now called New Mexico was a business arrangement: Oñate, desperate to prove himself back in Spain as only the most shiftless sons of rich conquistadores can be, he financed the expedition personally in exchange for titles, land, tribute rights, and a cut of whatever wealth the province produced. The colony was born as a private venture wearing the crown’s clothes, and its sole aim was to make Oñate, whose father was unimpressed with him, stop feeling so empty inside.
A word about the name Oñate planted, because four centuries of confusion have grown over it. New Mexico was named for a Mexico that had already fallen: Mexico-Tenochtitlan, the island capital of the Mexica people, the empire the world calls Aztec. The modern-day nation of Mexico as we know it today did not yet exist. What we now think of as “Mexico” is much larger than the original city-state of Tenochtitlan, and in Oñate’s time the area we now think of as Mexico was thousands of indigenous regions with their own names, languages and cultures. To Oñate, this would all have been known as New Spain, and it would have included large portions of Central and South America, in addition to the area in North America he was after.
Spanish colonizers pushing north of Tenochtitlan (aka Mexico City) from the 1560s onward carried a specific fantasy — somewhere up that river lay otro México, another Mexico, a second Tenochtitlan heavy with gold and tribute — and the name Nuevo México was on their maps as a dream, decades before Oñate made it official in 1598.
Oñate himself had married into the obsession: his wife, Isabel de Tolosa Cortés de Moctezuma, was the granddaughter of the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés, who toppled the Aztec kingdom of Tenochtitlan. What’s more, Isabel was also the great-granddaughter of the Aztec emperor Moctezuma II. Oñate wanted nothing in this world so much as a conquest to stand beside her grandfather’s — if only because his father admired Cortez and did not see much point to Juan, his loser of a son.
The modern nation of Mexico would eventually take its own name from that same fallen capital — in 1821, two hundred and twenty-three years after the province was christened. There have been, in effect, three Mexicos: the Mexica empire of Tenochtitlan; the province of Nuevo México, named in its honor; and, centuries later, the republic we know as the nation of Mexico today.
The province of New Mexico, then, existed under the name “Mexico” long before the modern nation of Mexico, and both were named after the ancient Aztec Mexica empire that was located in the old city-state of Tenochtitlan. When the United States took vast portions of Mexico in 1848, this included the area still known to Mexico as the province of Nuevo Mexico, and the United States kept the name. Under the delusions of presentism, people on both sides of the border now mostly assume the state name is new, and the state was named after the modern nation of Mexico after the United States took over. But that’s not true, at all.
The province of Nuevo Mexico, named by Oñate in 1598, spent 223 years inside the Kingdom of New Spain — Latin America, in every sense, for longer than the United States has existed — and then roughly a quarter century as part of the modern Mexican nation before the United States swallowed it whole. The name, in other words, is older than the country it is mistaken for. Hold onto that fact; it rearranges the question of who, along that river, counts as newly arrived.
Regardless of what the Spanish thought New Mexico was called, it was inhabited when they got there, by agrarian people in adobe cities, whom the Spanish called “Pueblos,” because pueblo means city. The people in these cities were distinct from one another, speaking many languages, most of them in the Tanoan and Keresan linguistic families, with somewhat similar but not identical cultures. The region was also inhabited by nomadic people — the Navajo and Apache — and would later become home to the Ute and Comanche. The Spaniards were disappointed not to find gold in New Mexico. They took everything else they could find, mostly from the Puebloan people, who were very good at farming, preserving and storing food, as well as at making clothing from fibers and animal leathers.
The Spanish were impressed with the modest clothing, beautiful cities and sophisticated agriculture of the Puebloan peoples. But they were appalled by the matrilocal, egalitarian nature of Puebloan societies, and, finding such practices counter to the wishes of their punishing, misogynistic version of God, set about destroying them.
The Puebloans, meanwhile, struggled to understand the poor hygiene and brutal patriarchal cosmology of the invaders, as their own nature-based cosmology was rooted in empathetic relativism, mutual respect, patience and tolerance — and they bathed at least once, and often twice a day.
One of the many practices the Spanish could not understand, for instance, was the way Puebloan people never yelled at nor struck their children.
And sexual consent, a given in Puebloan culture, meant nothing to the Spanish, who believed males existed to subjugate females. Nowhere was this last value clearer than when Oñate’s nephew raided and stole food from Acoma pueblo, and paused in this act long enough to rape an Acoma woman. He was not alone in this crime. Thirteen Spaniards in total participated in the raid and rape.
The people of Acoma punished the Spaniards as was customary for his crime: With death. Oñate, hearing of his nephew’s demise, sent the dead man’s brother to avenge his death. Oñate’s men stormed the mesa where the Acoma had their city, and killed perhaps eight hundred people. The survivors were tried — the conquerors held trials; the paperwork survives — and the men over twenty-five were sentenced to twenty years of servitude and the amputation of one foot. Children were taken from their parents and handed to the missions. Word of the sentence traveled the length of the river valley, which was its purpose. Terror was the foundation course, laid deliberately, meant to hold the weight of everything built above it.
Above the terror, two extraction systems went up side by side, and it is worth seeing them clearly because they competed for the same resource: Pueblo bodies. Slavery within the borders of what’s now the United States was not limited to the English enslaving Africans; within the same borders, Spaniards were enslaving indigenous Americans all across North, Central and South America. And once Spain began to run out of indigenous people to enslave, it was they who pioneered the African slave trade that Anglo Americans would emulate.
Under the encomienda system of New Spain, favored colonists were granted the right to collect tribute from Indigenous households — a set measure of corn and a woven blanket, every year, drought or plenty. Under the repartimiento, Pueblo people owed labor: building the Spaniards’ houses, herding the Spaniards’ flocks, weaving in the Spaniards’ workshops, planting and harvesting the Spaniards’ fields while their own stood untended.
The Spanish Franciscan missions, meanwhile, were, on paper, the entire reason the colony existed. New Mexico produced no gold and no silver. It ran at a loss every single year of its existence, and the crown covered that loss with a subsidy, because the province’s product was recorded in a different ledger: souls. The mission reports flowed to Mexico City and on to Madrid — so many baptized, so many congregated, so many churches raised — and that ledger of converted souls was the moral collateral of the whole imperial enterprise, the thing Spain showed God and its rivals to justify everything else it was taking. The friars, meanwhile, commanded Pueblo labor on a scale the settlers envied: it was Pueblo hands that quarried, hauled, and raised the massive mission churches whose walls still stand, on rations the builders paid for themselves.
Ask the first question this series always asks — where was the money hedging? — and colonial New Mexico gives a strange, instructive answer.
The money was hedging out of the province entirely. Governors bought their office in Mexico City and recouped the purchase in the four or five years allotted them, and the fastest route to recoupment ran south: hides, salt, piñon, woven goods, and — the trade nobody put on official manifests — captive human beings, sold into the silver mining districts of Nueva Vizcaya. The silver those captives helped wrench out of the ground sailed for Seville and passed almost immediately into the hands of the crown’s foreign bankers, financing Spain’s wars on the far side of an ocean the miners would never see. A starving province at the empire’s edge was being strip-mined of labor and souls to service debts contracted in another world. Every governor knew his time was short, so every governor dug faster. The two franchises — cross and crown, friar and governor — spent decades suing each other, excommunicating each other, and arresting each other’s men, in a jurisdictional brawl over who owned the output of Pueblo hands. Neither ever questioned the ownership itself.
And beneath both franchises, the oldest demand of all: souls. The kachina dances were banned, the kivas raided, the masks and prayer sticks dragged into the plazas and burned. Understand what was actually under assault here, because it was far more than ritual. The Pueblo world was, in much of its deep structure, a woman’s world: descent reckoned through mothers in many of the villages, homes owned by the women who plastered their walls, granaries and seed corn kept in women’s hands — which means the tribute system, with its annual demand of corn and cloth, was a tax levied directly on women’s economy. Creation itself was told as the work of mothers: Corn Mothers, Earth Mother, the people brought up out of the earth and into the light. The friars preached a Father to replace the Mothers, imposed marriage laws written for a world where men owned the houses onto a world where women did, and — the grievance that runs through the survivors’ testimony like a scar — presided over a colony in which the sexual predation of Pueblo women by settlers, soldiers, and more than one man of the cloth went unpunished year after year. The friars understood, correctly, that the Pueblo religion was the institution their own could never fully replace. What they misunderstood was what happens to an institution you drive underground. It does not die down there. It organizes.
Who could no longer be paid
Every revolution this series examines begins with a ledger that stops balancing, and in New Mexico the ledger was written in corn.
The tribute system had always been extractive; in a good year it was merely brutal. Then the good years stopped. Through the 1660s and 1670s, drought settled over the upper Rio Grande and stayed. Harvests failed in succession. Famine came, and with it epidemic disease, stacking losses onto a population already in freefall — the Pueblo world had numbered many tens of thousands when Oñate arrived, and by the late 1670s, thanks to genocide and slavery, perhaps seventeen thousand remained. The river that fed everything shrank in its bed. People who study that period now can read the drought in the tree rings, one starved ring after another, a barcode of catastrophe. Anyone living along that same river today, watching it run dry through the valley in high summer, reservoirs down to single digits, officials reaching for words like dire and record-low while insisting the arrangement can continue — anyone watching that knows something about how the 1670s felt. Scarcity was becoming the baseline, and the institutions built on abundance kept billing as if nothing had changed.
Because here is what the colony did as its subjects starved: it kept collecting. The encomienda demanded its corn from households that had none. The labor drafts kept pulling farmers off their own dying fields. And the protection that was supposed to justify the whole arrangement — Spanish arms shielding the settled villages from Apache and Navajo raiders — collapsed exactly when it was needed most, because the raiders were starving too, and raiding harder, and the colony’s few soldiers could not be everywhere. Whole pueblos on the exposed margins were abandoned. The people watched Spanish power fail at the only task that had ever made it tolerable.
Strip away the theology and the paperwork and the colonial bargain was a protection racket: tribute and labor and obedience, in exchange for security in this world and salvation in the next. By the mid-1670s it was delivering neither. The friars’ God had not brought rain. The governor’s soldiers had not stopped the raids. A racket that stops protecting is already dead; it just hasn’t been told yet. The Pueblos, weighing an empty granary against an unanswered prayer, began quietly returning to the religion that had brought rain for a thousand years before the strangers came. Attendance at the mission churches thinned. In the kivas, the old ceremonies resumed.
The colony’s response to this quiet withdrawal of consent was the single greatest strategic blunder in its history.
Who defected first
In 1675, Governor Juan Francisco Treviño ordered a sweep of the pueblos and arrested forty-seven religious leaders — medicine men, the keepers of the ceremonies — on charges of sorcery. Three were hanged, one from each of three villages, the geography of the executions chosen for maximum instruction. A fourth died by his own hand. The remaining forty-three were publicly whipped and imprisoned in Santa Fe.
Among the flogged was a Tewa religious leader from Ohkay Owingeh whose name was Po’pay.
What happened next should have terrified the colony far more than it did. Roughly seventy Tewa warriors walked into Santa Fe — armed, in daylight, into the capital — and confronted the governor in his own palace with a choice: release the prisoners, or the pueblos would rise, and every Spaniard in the province would learn what the pueblos rising meant. Treviño, whose soldiers were away chasing raiders, looked at the men in front of him and released the prisoners.
Mark that moment, because it answers the second question this series always asks: who defected first? In France it was the lawyers and pamphleteers; in Haiti it was the priests of the old religion gathering in the forest at night. In New Mexico the Spanish colonial power made the choice itself, by taking the one class of indigenous people who held moral authority in every single village — the priesthood of the indigenous religions — and giving them scars, dead colleagues, and a shared experience of the whip. A flogging is a piece of political education. The colony intended it to teach fear. It taught something else: that the men on both ends of the lash now knew exactly what the state was, and that the state, confronted by seventy armed men, had blinked.
Po’pay took his scars north to Taos, the pueblo most distant from Santa Fe’s garrison, and began five years of work, planning the overthrow of colonial Spain.
The vehicle
The third question: what was the vehicle? Every revolution needs a structure that can carry it — the assembly, the committee, the cell. The Pueblo Revolt’s vehicle was the institution the Spanish had spent eighty years trying to burn out of existence: the kiva network itself.
Consider what the friars had actually accomplished by criminalizing the ceremonies. They had taken a public religion and made it clandestine. They had taught its leadership operational security — how to gather unobserved, how to move objects and messages, how to know exactly who could be trusted, because anyone untrustworthy meant the whip. They had, with decades of patient effort, converted a priesthood into an underground. When the one room a people believes is safe stops being safe, the room does not empty. It goes deeper, and it hardens, and everyone inside it now shares a secret, which is the raw material of conspiracy. Any state, in any century, that sends armed men into sanctuaries should first ask what the men who built the sanctuaries will build next.
Through the kivas, Po’pay and leaders from across the province — this was a coalition, coordinated among women and men from Taos, Picuris, San Ildefonso, Tesuque, and beyond — assembled something without precedent in North America: a synchronized rising of more than two dozen independent communities speaking six unrelated languages, spread across a territory it took weeks to cross on foot. The pueblos were not a nation. They had never been a nation; they were villages with distinct languages, trading partners and sometimes old rivalries, and no shared government of any kind. What they shared now was the grievance, and the grievance turned out to be structure enough.
The plan’s final instrument was the cord. Knotted yucca fiber, carried by runners to every participating pueblo, each knot one day until the rising. Untie a knot each morning; when the last knot opens, strike. It was a calendar, a covenant, and a communications system that required no literacy the enemy could intercept and no language the enemy could overhear — and it was kept secret by thousands of people, for years, in a province riddled with informers, where the penalty for what they were planning was death. Ask where a secret like that actually lives. It lives in households, and in the pueblos the household was a woman’s property and domain to rule: her house, her stores, her fire the runners were fed at, her rooms the meetings were held in. The Spanish archive, compiled by soldiers interrogating captured war captains, records a revolution of men, because its authors could only see men when they considered power at all. And so they asked defeated men for the names of men and wrote down what they asked for. The revolution it describes could not have run a single week without the women whose rooms it was planned in, whose corn provisioned it, and whose silence — thousands of women, over years, with everything to lose — held its perimeter. Even so, betrayal came at the last hour: on August 9, two runners, Catua and Omtua of Tesuque, were seized and interrogated, and the plan spilled. Po’pay’s answer was the one every underground learns or dies not learning — he moved the date up. The pueblos rose the next morning, a day early, before the colony could digest what it had been told.
Eleven days
The morning of August 10, 1680 arrived at ranches, mission churches, and haciendas across the province more or less simultaneously, which was the entire point. Settlers who had grown old inside the arrangement discovered in a single hour what the arrangement had actually rested on. Around four hundred colonists were killed in the opening days — and of the province’s thirty-three Franciscan friars, twenty-one died, many at their own altars, in the churches Pueblo labor had built. The revolt was many things; among them, it was an audit, and it went first to the ledger of souls.
The survivors fled to Santa Fe, where Governor Antonio de Otermín found himself commanding a capital under siege by a force that grew daily as contingents arrived from the farther pueblos — five hundred fighters, then a thousand, then more than two thousand. The besiegers did the practical thing: they cut the water. Otermín’s soldiers made their sorties, killed many, and changed nothing; a city without water has a schedule, and everyone inside knew it. On August 21, the governor gathered roughly a thousand parched survivors and marched them out of the capital, south, in retreat.
And then the Pueblo forces did something empires never do: they watched the column go. They let the vast majority of Spaniards leave, alive. Mile after mile, warriors observed from the hillsides and let the defeated walk. The war was for the land and the sky over it, for the right to be governed by their own order — and once that was won, the killing stopped. The entire surviving Spanish colony limped into El Paso del Norte, and behind it, from Taos to Isleta, there was no Spain.
The people washed in the river to dissolve their baptisms. The churches came down or burned. Po’pay ordered everything Spanish rooted out — the names, the marriages, the tools, the crops — though the pueblos, being practical, kept what served them: the horses, the sheep, the fruit trees, the wheat. Horses spread from the pueblos across the plains in the years that followed, into other nations’ hands, and transformed the balance of power across half a continent. The revolt’s shockwave outran its borders by a thousand miles.
Who captured the state
The fifth question is the cruelest, and this series asks it of every revolution without exception: who actually captured the state?
The honest answer in New Mexico is that for a few years, nobody did — and then the old habits found new clothes. The Spanish accounts, which are the only written accounts and should be read with that firmly in mind, say Po’pay began to demand the very things he had risen against: tribute, obedience, deference. What is certain is that the coalition fractured, because it had been built entirely out of a shared enemy, and the enemy was gone. The drought, indifferent to politics, continued. The raids from the plains continued and worsened. The old rivalries between pueblos, suspended for the work of demolition, returned when it came time to build. Po’pay lost his leadership and died before the decade was out, and in 1692, another Spaniard, Diego de Vargas came up the river with soldiers and promises, and over four bloody years — including a second revolt in 1696, crushed hard — Spain retook the province.
A reader could stop there and file the Pueblo Revolt under noble failures. That reader would be making the exact mistake this series exists to correct, because the state Spain recaptured in the 1690s was categorically different from the one it lost in 1680, and the difference was the revolt.
The encomienda — the tribute machine at the center of the old order — was never reimposed in New Mexico. The labor drafts returned in muted, negotiated form. The crown began confirming Pueblo land grants, and those grants, remarkably, held: they were carried through the successor governments, one after another, into the present day. The friars of the new dispensation learned to look away from the kivas; the old religion and the new settled into a wary coexistence, ceremony and Mass sharing the same villages, which they do still. The second colony was built on the memory of what happened to the first, and every party involved knew it. The people of the pueblos had lost the war for independence and won the negotiation that followed, because they had established the one fact that changes every subsequent negotiation: the governed can end the arrangement.
Stand back far enough and the ledger reads differently than any textbook frames it. Nearly every Indigenous nation within the present borders of the United States was, over the following centuries, removed from its land — marched, transported, confined somewhere else. The Pueblo peoples, almost alone, live today where they lived then: the same villages, on the same river, some of them continuously inhabited for close to a thousand years, speaking the languages the friars tried to bury, dancing the ceremonies the governors flogged men for keeping. In the United States Capitol, in the hall where each state places statues of its two greatest figures, New Mexico placed a farmer and priest from Ohkay Owingeh, carved in marble by a sculptor from Jemez Pueblo — the only work in that hall ever made by Native hands. Po’pay stands there holding a knotted cord.
Measured in years, the revolt bought twelve. Measured in centuries, it is arguably the most successful revolution on this continent — the only one whose victors are still standing on the ground they won. I believe this is because the matrilocal Puebloan cultures know something patriarchal cultures do not, and it is this: You do not win by battle victories and domination alone. You also win in the ways natures shows up life always wins: survival of the most adaptable. And to adapt, you must learn not only to survive within your surroundings, but also in spite of them. Silence, secrecy and patience, in New Mexico’s Puebloan societies, have enabled the Puebloan people to outlast the Spanish, and the Americans, both. And they will still be there, in the high deserts of New Mexico, long after both colonizers have been scrubbed from that land by the results of their own greed and violence.
What the Pueblo Revolt teaches
The first American revolution was Indigenous. Ninety-six years before the one in the textbooks, and it asked for no rights within the empire — it removed the empire. Everything afterward on this continent happened in a world where that had been proven possible.
A protection racket that stops protecting is already dead. The colonial bargain traded obedience for security and salvation. When the granaries emptied and the raids went unanswered, the bargain’s corpse stood upright for a few more years out of habit. Watch any arrangement whose ruling class keeps collecting while the river runs dry.
Drive a religion underground and you have built your enemy’s headquarters and taught them to operate in secret. The friars converted a public priesthood into a disciplined clandestine network, then acted surprised when the network produced a revolution. Armed men in sanctuaries do not end resistance; they consecrate it.
Flogging the priesthood is a loan against the future, at ruinous interest. The forty-seven arrested in 1675 became the general staff of 1680. Every scar was a commission.
Unity does not require uniformity. Six languages, two dozen sovereign villages, no shared government — one grievance, one cord, one morning. The oppressor’s greatest comfort is the belief that the people they rule are too divided to coordinate. It is usually false at exactly the moment they rely on it most.
Secrecy at scale is possible when everyone shares the scar. Thousands kept the secret for years under penalty of death, because the secret belonged to all of them. Betrayal, when it finally came, was answered by speed: the plan that can move its date survives its informers.
The Spanish patriarchal archive recorded only the males, the perceived war captains; the revolution was the whole people. The written sources are interrogation transcripts — victors’ questions, put to defeated men, about other men. Read around the parchment: a conspiracy carried in households was carried by the women who owned those households, and after the reconquest it was largely through mothers and grandmothers, household by household, that the languages and ceremonies crossed three more centuries of pressure. Every archive is an instrument. Always ask who was holding it, and what they thought was worth writing down.
The coalition that demolishes is rarely the crew that builds. The shared enemy vanished and the alliance went with it — the fifth question collects its toll here as everywhere. Demolition and construction are different trades.
Losing the war can still win the terms. Spain came back; the tribute machine did not. The revolt’s true product was leverage — the permanently established fact that consent could be withdrawn. Some victories are invisible for a decade and patient enough to be undeniable for three centuries.
The longest victory is presence. The measure of 1680 is not twelve years of independence. It is a thousand-year-old village, still inhabited, still praying in its own language, on its own land, beside its own river. Everything an empire takes, it must hold — forever, against people who have nowhere else to be and no intention of leaving. Empires do not have forever. Peoples sometimes do.
The fires we have visited so far burned in a kingdom, a colony of enslaved millions, and a high desert province at the edge of an empire’s map. The next one ignites in a republic — on paper. We go to a country whose modernizing strongman spent three decades selling its land, rails, and oil to foreign capital while the people who worked that land were pushed off it and told the arrangement was progress. The bill for that arrangement came due all at once. Mexico, 1910, is next.
The Navajo People also helped in this revolt. Our children, women and some leaders were imprisoned by the Spanish. Many Indigenous who were enslaved never came home but joined others who became Genizaros in villages in Northern New Mexico. The ones who did return to our families showed us different skills and brought children, Language terms and practices.
I had just finished Knaut’s “The Pueblo Revolt of 1690: Conquest and Resistance in 17th Century New Mexico.” Your framing adds a lot, makes it even more relevant. His work points out the flaws in much prior historical writing which pretended there had not been years of horrid abuse and suffering and many—often ignored—instances of resistance. Echos of Graeber & Wengrow’s work on Kandiaronk in “The Dawn of Everything” in this powerful essay of yours. If I had an extra copy I’d send you one, comadre. Your writing rocks, as usual! ¡Un gran abrazo!