"Sometime around 1860, Spaniards attacked a Navajo settlement in New Mexico and captured a woman named Ated-bah-Hohzoni, meaning 'happy girl.' As she hid behind a cliff with her one-year-old daughter, she watched them shoot and kill her father, her husband, and her two young sons. Then they came for her and her daughter. The Spaniards marched them to Taos, where they were sold into slavery."
"Father Antonio José Martínez, a well-known priest and civic leader in the New Mexico Territory, purchased the mother for a hundred and fifty pesos. He changed her name to Rosario, by which she was known for the rest of her life. Another family in Taos purchased her daughter, whom they called Soledad, which translates as 'solitude.'"
"When Vásquez first mentions Rosario, she calls her Martínez's 'young Navajo slave' and his 'most outstanding' maidservant. We don't learn anything about Rosario's life before her captivity, but, after she arrived in Taos, Vásquez wrote, Rosario was stubborn in her desire for freedom: 'She went about her duties wishing and watching for a good chance to free herself and go back to her own people.'"
Indigenous slavery persisted for centuries across the Americas under multiple designations, representing a significant but often obscured historical reality. The case of Ated-bah-Hohzoni, a Navajo woman captured around 1860 and renamed Rosario by her enslaver, Father Antonio José Martínez in New Mexico, exemplifies this brutal system. Her story, preserved through family accounts and later published by Martínez's great-granddaughter, reveals how enslavement narratives were often sanitized and reframed to portray enslavers benevolently. Public history initiatives now work to reclaim accurate terminology and documentation, ensuring indigenous slavery is recognized and understood as the systematic oppression it was, rather than through romanticized or euphemistic historical accounts.
Read at The New Yorker
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