My Indigenous Great Grandmother

My father, Pedro Baca y Griego, didn’t talk much about his parents. I don’t think it was because he didn’t love them or think of them but because he had to focus too much on the present. He had to be in order to keep a roof over our heads and food on the table for a family of thirteen. Every day was a work day for him. Nothing was easy for a man with little education. Only his skills that required a man with an attitude of “I can do anything that requires a strong back and a fierce work ethic.”

I can remember his hands. Every inch of them were calloused. There were cracks lining his palms and finger tips. Often those cracks were outlined with the soot of the day’s work. He would scrub them a brush and borax soap to get them clean. It was no wonder they were that way since he had been used for manual labor since he was eight. He was usually very tired and just wanted to rest. So we hardly ever spoke about his parents. He could only think about the now.

However, he was a natural leader of men. Because he was strong, fiercely loyal, commanding and smart he was admired by people. They listened to him and followed his lead. Whomever employed him, recognized that and appointed him as crew leader, manager, mayordomo and Superintendant. In his last job before he retired he was Superintendant of Roads for Bernalillo County. Even then, he dove right in and helped his men with heavy equipment and unloading trucks. That’s how he got hurt at age 61. Unloading concrete culverts, one slipped and he injured his back. He limped as a result. With no benefits he retired and had to take SSI. He couldn’t do heavy labor so he got a job as a crossing guard. After all the dangerous jobs he had had, this was the job that killed him. Crossing children one day, a truck veered off and ran over him. He couldn’t move fast enough to get out of the way of an out of control panel truck. He died at age 62 and we never got to talk about his family.

So I learned very little about my grandparents or great grandparents. I picked up bits of information from passing conversations between him and my mom. It’s only now that I am putting the pieces together. Actually I’ve been working on our genealogy on and off for 30 years. As many of you know, the Baca family lineage in New Mexico goes back 420 years and it is intertwined with many other old Hispanic families. The roots are deep and tangled and not always easy to follow.

The only grandparent I knew were my mom’s dad, Pablo Gonzales, and my step grandmother Isabel Cordova Gonzales. So digging into my family’s roots took some interesting twists and turns. First, my mother was raised by her grandmother, Julianita Griego Apodaca because her mother, Ruperta Apodaca, passed away during childbirth with her second child. My father’s parents, Santos Baca y Torres, and mother, Estanislada Griego y Baca, were solid hardworking people born in the 1860s.

It was rumored that Estanislada was half Indian. I didn’t know her mother’s name or what tribe she came from until I started digging. Looking through microfiche records I found her name on a census role. “Guadalupe, female, Indian servant.” Initially, I thought my grandmother was the daughter of Pablo and Rosalia Griego and on many family trees she is listed as their daughter. But there are no records I could find to verify that. There were records of a Teresa Griego and many family trees named her as Estanislada Teresa Griego but the birth dates were off. That puzzled me but I listed her that way, too.

That is until I found a the baptism record for an adult Indian woman named “Maria Guadalupe” in 1810. She was identified as an Indian from the Apache nation baptized by Francisco Chavez. This was recorded in the parroquia of Belen. Could this be my great grandmother? Later I found a marriage record for Santos Baca y Torres to Estanislada in 1889. This was in the “parroquia de La Joya” and it clearly states “Santos Baca y Torres, viudo de Teresita Griego, hijo de José Antonio Baca y Maria Torres, con Estanislada Griego, soltera hija de Guadalupe Griego”. This was an “aha moment” for me. This made clear that my grandfather had been married to Teresa Griego, daughter of Pablo and Rosalia Griego, but he was widowed from her because “viudo” means widower in Spanish. I couldn’t find any other children from that marriage but I found many (and knew many uncles and aunts) from Santos and Estanislada. However the dates are too far apart for that Guadalupe and to be my great grandmother Guadalupe. The span from 1810 to 1889 was too great for that Guadalupe.

The marriage record clearly states that Estanislada’s mother was Indian. Upon further research I found out that Guadalupe was an a Indian servant to the Ancieto Griego family. By the standards of those time he was a rich man with wealth in the thousands of dollars. Land, homes, servants, livestock. However, he adopted Guadalupe in January of 1875 and later in that year, May to be exact, she gave birth to my grandmother, Estanislada, and was baptized on May 15th, when she was one week old. The baptismal récord notes that Guadalupe was Indian but no father is recorded. I can only speculate who the father might be. A son of Aniceto or maybe Aniceto himself.

Records not yet found or lost in the dust bin of history may provide me more insight but, for now, I’ll continue to tell the stories as I can recollect them.