Here I'm summarizing from "The Visions of a Guachichil Witch in 1599: A Window on the Subjugation of Mexico's Hunter- Gatherers," by the wonderful feminist anthropologist Ruth Behar (Ethnohistory, Vol. 34, No. 2 (Spring, 1987), pp. 115-138)

She begins by placing the Guachichiles among the foraging warrior tribes known as the Chichimecas, whose country lay to the north of the old Aztec empire. They proved much harder to subdue than the Aztecs had been, holding the Spanish off from 1548 to 1590. They had no standing armies, but were skilled archers, guerilla fighters —and raiders. They availed themselves of the wealth generated by a silver rush in Zacatecas. Indígenas and Diasporic Africans were enslaved in the silver mines by the mid-1500s.

Spanish sources disparaged the Guachichiles as "naked savages," but they feared them, even as they coveted their lands, which Spanish colonials thought they themselves ought to occupy. So they embarked on a "war by fire and blood" to subdue the Chichimecas, who they compared to "wild beasts." They accused them of cannibalizing their captives, but they themselves cut off hands and feet of captives, and hanged, burned, and beheaded others.

Those who advocated the policy of "war by fire and blood" had few qualms about enslaving captured Chichimecas. Underpaid Spanish soldiers often made expeditions into Chichimec territories expressly to provoke native resistance and thereby win legal Indians for themselves (Bakewell 1971: 3z). Slavery, whether legal or not, was in fact widespread from the earliest contact with the Chichimecas. [p 118]

Once again enslavement of Native people is revealed, from a region of Mexico that usually gets little attention. Yet the silver empire of San Luis Potosí was built upon their labor. (It took the name Potosí after another silver mine in Bolivia, on a mountain full of silver, in which tens of thousands of Native men were conscripted to labor, and many of them to die.) The Spanish also advanced their colonization by bribing the Chichimecas with gifts of corn, beef, clothing, and blanets, upon which they became dependent. The other strategy was to bring in christianized Tlaxcalans to assimilate the Guachichiles. Lots of other people were moving around in this period, in the wake of the conquest and the chaos (and disease) it brought. But these immigrant groups kept to their own neighborhoods.

On July 18, 1599, the Spanish witch trial document relates that:

an old Guachichil woman living in the barrio of Tlaxcala entered the churches of the Tlaxcalans and of the Tarascans and "broke the crosses and removed all the images in them, stirring up all the Indians. 

The Spanish were alarmed at the political danger such a rising represented, while the Native converts were more afraid of the old woman's powers. Her name is never mentioned (an omission we see over and over again, not only in European colonial accounts, but in Arab ones). The reason for that is given as "for she is not christian nor has she been baptized." And the colonials did not bother themselves with learning Native names; only their own culture mattered to them. So we will have to call her by the title of the Old Woman. The document continues that she

with the great strength of her sorcery has attracted many of the Indians of that nation, the Chichimecas as much as those who are settled in said pueblo of Tlaxcala . . . the said Indian woman threatening them, insisting that they rise up and follow her in her idolatries, and that if they do not rise up that she will destroy them because she has the ability to do so, and that they should help her go to the pueblo of San Luis where the Spaniards have settled and kill them all and that if they do not go she will kill them. [124]

We have to keep in mind the several layers through which this account is strained. It is written by the Spanish, the targets of the Old Woman's wrath, but also through accounts told to the Spanish by the Tlaxcalans and other Natives who had good reason to fear them. (And apparently their own fears as well, since rumor had it that she magically killed a Tarascan (Puréhpecha) man named Agustín through sorcery, "by grazing his ear with a little stick".)

The first witness Mateo testified he saw the old woman removing the crosses and images from the Tlaxcalan church and later from the Tarascan church, "exciting all the Guachichiles and the Tarascan and Tlaxcalan Indians." Then the woman yelled out "in her tongue that now many people would die, and that even if they saw her dead they should not believe she had died, because many Indians and Christians would have to die before she died"... [124]

The formulation of this call to resistance as "sorcery" is fraught with a tangle of European projections and Native beliefs about the power of medicine people, as well as apocalyptic dreams of the overthrow of colonial power. And hearsay, but it is fair to conclude that the Old Woman was leading an uprising, and that people responded:

He also heard that the day before, Sunday, the woman had told people not to go to mass and that no one had gone. Afterwards she had called for Chichimecas from Agua del Venado, Charcas, Bocas, and San Miguel (Mexquitic) to come to Tlaxcala, and more than 150 of them had heeded her call. She spoke to the Chichimecas congregated around her, telling them to bring their sons"and that no Spaniard was to be left alive, because all would be killed, because the Indians would kill them, and that they should rise up, and that the earth would open with the sorcery that she was going to work." [124]

A Tarascan witness named Juan repeated much the same story, adding that the Old Woman exhorted the Chichimecas to "go live in La Laguna because if not the earth will open and she will kill them all, saying this in shouts and persuading them with her sorcery". [125]

Another Juan, a Guachichil, testified that Native people spoke of the Old Woman turning herself into a coyote and other forms. This man had been sent to tell the Chichimec chief Pedro de Torres that the Old Woman wanted to see him, and he accompanied him back. They found that other groups of Chichimecas had arrived from other villages, who had, in Behar's words, "responded to the call of the old woman." [125]

A Guachachil named Gaspar, not a christian in spite of his name, spoke of her turning men into deer or coyotes, and then changed them back by raising her arms. (Her companion Andres testified that she had done this to him and to her son.) Gaspar also

heard her say that she had taken all the Indians who had died there to La Laguna "and that she had made of them a pueblo of Indians." She had announced that she was waiting for Pedro de Torres to arrive so that he would go with her to San Luis—a purely Spanish pueblo at the time—and that "arriving he should go and make the old become young and resurrect the dead and heal the sick, and that by doing this they would become immortal and never grow old." 

So this prophetess was saying very similar things as anti-colonial movements in South America, among the Guaraní and Shipibo, and there are resemblances to the Ghost Dance prophecies that arose in Nevada and spread across the Great Plains, and in the other directions too, into California, Oregon, and Washington, in response to the trauma of conquest and colonization.

But her companion Andrés foreswore her and so did Pedro de Torres, since the revolt had failed and they were in the hands of the Spanish. Pedro claimed to have given a good christian response to her, at which she fell silent "and began to pound on the ground wth her hands." He said that she had stirred up the Chichemecas and Tlaxcalans.

After the men's testimony, they called the Old Woman to the stand. They estimated she was about sixty years old. She had been living in the Tlaxcalan barrio for about a decade, except for three years when she went east of San Luis. There, apparently in the countryside, she "made the earth open with her sorcery." She described a vision she had of two deer who came to her, who healed her at a time she was ill, and rejuvenated her, and removed her cataracts. They took her into a cave and gave her a horse. Part of her vision involved deer riding on top of a horse. After this, she was no longer crippled.

The Old Woman gave the colonial officials a different explanation for her throwing down the saints and crosses in the churches than her political call to the Native people. She said she had seen her daughter rise from her grave in the churchyard, and chased after her, but the spirit ran under the altar. She said this is why she threw the images to the ground. She denied harming the Tarascan man, and said her deer spirits had shown him he was dying, and she spoke with him and encouraged him , saying that she had recovered when she was just as ill. When he died, she said she sent his heart to the place of resurrection. And that she had settled other spirits of Tlaxcalan dead near her house, "having returned them to life."

The men questioning her thought she was "crazy or drunk," which she of course denied. This was exactly what her defense argued, that she was just a drunkard and a madwoman, but had not killed the Tarascan. And he said that her visions were the result of her heavy drinking, like so many other indios. But the magistrate Fuenmayor was anxious that the Chichimec might revolt, since they had only recently been subjugated, and he overruled the request for a three day extension of her trial—which lasted only a single day. He claimed she was a witch who had hurt god and the king, and acknowledged, though in insulting terms, her political leadership in opposition to colonial rule:

she has all the Guachichiles stirred up and as the proceedings show she has brought together many of her people and has made them come from different parts to the pueblo of Tlaxcala... and being let out of the jail where she now is, all the people who are now at peace would be stirred up. 

He wanted to make an example of the Old Woman, and he did. He sentenced her to be "taken on horseback, with the trumpets blaring and a town crier announcing her crime, to the gallows situated on the road from San Luis to Tlaxcala, and there that her feet be raised from the floor with a rope and that she die naturally by hanging." In other words, they did not hang her in the ordinary way, which broke the neck or at least strangled the victim in a few minutes, but hung her upside down by her feet, a torture-execution to intimidate the Native population.

Behar refers to earlier Spanish repression of Aztec aristocrats on charges of idolatry, sorcery, polygamy and sedition, starting in the 1530s under Juan de Zumárraga, the bishop of Mexico (and previously a witch hunter in the Basque country) and the Inquisition. Their methods varied, from public humiliation to imprisonment to execution:

In 1537 the rainmakers and sorcerers Mixcoatl and Papalatl, who had preached against the friars, were forced to ride on burros while being flogged, have their hair sheared, and abjure their sins in all the towns and villages where they had made anti-Christian statements (Padden 1970: 249). The "seer, prophet, and inciter of rebellion," Don Martin Ucelo (Ocelotl), was condemned in 1537 to life imprisonment in Spain (ibid.: 248-49). Don Carlos Chichimecatecuhtli ["lord of the Chichemecas"] the cacique of Texcoco who was educated in the Franciscan College of Santa Cruz in Tlatelolco, was tried in 1539 for crimes of idolatry, incest, apostasy, and seditious claims made against church and state; he was burned at the stake." [129]

As other Aztecs were in this early period. But the Spanish found that public humiliation was more effective than violence in their efforts to convert and subjugate the Native population. The colonial rulers formally braked the Inquisition's ability to prosecute indios after 1570.

It was the state who tried the Old Woman of the Guachichiles, and its officials were conscious that her religious claims had political power. Behar notes the importance of deer in Indigenous religion in Mexico (as is still true among the Huichol). She points out that the deer riding on top of the horse represents a reversal of power, the horses being animals of the colonists and the dear signifying the Chichimecas. She also notes that the daughter had been converted, or she would not have been buried in a church. The Old Woman refused conversion and urged people not to attend services (and they did stay away, showing her authority was respected. She attacked the symbols of the church in a series of dramatic actions, in more than one church.

The Old Woman called her world of resurrrected Guachichiles, Tlaxcalans and Tarascans "La Laguna,", meaning lake or pool. I think Behar gets this a bit wrong, in saying that the word "carries the Christian association of water with rebirth." [131] This symbolism is far more global, and it is strongly represented in Mexico (for example Chalchiuhtlicue, the goddess of sweet waters, presides over a flow of baby souls coming into being in her stream), in other parts of the Americas, and much further afield, such as in San tradition in South Africa, where the ancestral realm is often spoken of as under water.

Behar recognizes that the Old Woman was not pleading or begging; she was demanding, expressing an imperative need to oust the occupying culture that was in the process of dismembering their way of life. The Indigenous people saw her as a figure with spiritual authority, not the same thing as the Spanish concept of hechicera, "witch, sorceress" even though they used this word in her very short trial. Her leadership is significant, contrasted with the male leadership in targeted in other (known) persecutions:

This forms an interesting contrast with the central Mexican idolatry cases, all of which involved male religious and political leaders.The available sources tell us almost nothing about the political power or religious roles of women among the Guachichiles. The chronicler Gonzalo de Las Casas, writing in 158I, noted the existence of marriage, the pattern of uxorilocal [matrilocal] residence, and the way women were virtually slaves to their husbands, serving them prickly pears all peeled, giving birth as they traveled from one site to another, and bringing back any deer they hunted (Las Casas 1936: I60-6I). He added that when the men got drunk the women would move away from them and hide their husbands' bows and arrows (ibid).

The assumptions of female drudgery (compare with the parallel Anglo disparagement of Native women in North America) need to be examined. Women in all foraging cultures traveled soon after birth, and often brought in the game. Although this, and their processing of all parts of the animals into food and clothing, is often interpreted as servitude, there are other ways of looking at in. In some cultures, as Barbara Mann explains for the Iroquois, women controlled the supply of meat, and distributed it, as well as preserving it. But we do not have much to go on about sexual politics in the Chichemec culture. I'll mention the annoyance of anthropologists' using the word "uxorilocal" instead of matrilocal! I hate that they use that word, based on the latin word for wife, while using "patrilocal" (father, not husband) for men. These are not parallel terms, and the convention unconsciously centers men.

Behar says, rightly, that "Gonzalo de Las Casas probably emphasized the low, even brutal,position of women in order to add color to the portrait of the Chichimecas as wild and savage Indians. Yet the case of the old Guachichil witch clearly indicates that a woman could have supernatural and even political powers attributed to her." [133] She adds,

.With the male Guachichil chiefs all bought off by the Spaniards, perhaps only an old woman, apparently powerless, was left to rise up against the Indian subjugation that, amidst the enticement of the conquerors'"gifts," she so clearly saw. 

In that, the Old Woman had plenty of company, on an international scale. Many medicine women became leaders of insurrections against colonial rule when male leaders faltered. (See my video Rebel Shamans: Women Confront Empire, which is a mini-course here on the Suppressed Histories Portal.) This happened in patriarchal cultures as well as more egalitarian ones.

One striking instance of women rising to leadership under crisis is described in the film The Last Marranos, about a Judaic community that survived the Inquisition persecutions in Portugal. Everyone was forced to convert, and yet the surviving community, though practicing Catholics, are regarded (and hated) as Jews. Marranos is a pejorative meaning "pigs." One little community in Belmonte, NE Portugal, still keeps some Jewish traditions. The rabbis were under seige, and so women took over religious leadership to a large degree. I saw this movie decades ago, but cannot find clips of the leading role of women in the trailers on youtube.

This persistence of Judaic custom is also seen in Mexico, where many conversos fled in the 1500s. The Spanish Inquisition followed them, and the persecution drove them further and further from the colonial centers. Which is how the "hidden Jews" of New Mexico came to be.

Gitlitz, in his book (1996), provides a list of crypto-Judaic customs, based on Inquisition records. According to prisoners' indictments and confessions, these customs included bathing on Fridays and afterward donning clean clothes; ritually disposing of the blood drained from slaughtered fowl; fasting on Yom Kippur; eating tortillas (which are unleavened) during Passover; burning hair and nail clippings; circumcising sons (or merely nicking the penile shaft); and, in one instance, excising a chunk of flesh from the shoulder of a daughter. The Inquisition's punishments for such transgressions ranged from the forced public wearing, for months or even years, of the humiliating sanbenito -- a knee-length yellow-sackcloth gown -- and headgear resembling a dunce cap to years of imprisonment in a monastery to garroting and burning at the stake. By the time the Inquisition was abolished in Mexico, in 1821, it had put to death about a hundred accused crypto-Jews, and many suspected Judaizers still languished behind bars.

...

The particularities of Jewish demography seemed entirely irrelevant as Hordes began his work. Nor were they on anyone's mind when his gossipy visitors began showing up. Hordes has recounted the story in many interviews with various reporters. As he told a magazine produced by the University of New Mexico, "They would come into my office, close the door behind them and whisper over my desk, 'So-and-so ... lights candles on Friday nights.'... 'So-and-so ... doesn't eat pork.'" At first Hordes was mystified by these tales of seemingly Jewish practices among Hispano peasants, and simply dismissed them. Little by little, though, he started wondering, What if the stories involved the same phenomenon he had described in his dissertation? What if crypto-Jews had fled north from colonial Mexico in the seventeenth century to escape the Inquisition? And what if, almost 400 years later, Jews in New Mexico's isolated Hispano villages still secretly managed the feat of preserving their forefathers' faith?

...

By the early 1990s Latinos by the dozens from New Mexico, Texas, Colorado, and Arizona were coming forward with tales of a Jewish past. At conferences and in Internet forums they recalled playing with toys resembling dreidels (the four-sided tops associated with Hanukkah) as children. They reported that their parents had baked a flat, unleavened bread in the spring. They remembered mothers and grandmothers calling out on their deathbeds, "Children, we are really Israelites."

...

As Sandoval listened to Hordes describe unusual customs and gravestone markings, she began rethinking her past. Her family had avoided Catholic mass and shown no interest in the Catholic saints. This made some sense -- although her father was Catholic, her mother was Protestant -- but in addition, the family hardly celebrated Christmas. Sandoval recalled her parents' drinking wine whose label showed people sitting around a table in "funny little hats" -- that is, yarmulkes. She asked why they were drinking Jewish wine. Because it was "clean," she was told. After hearing about the New Mexico crypto-Jews, Sandoval concluded that "clean" meant "kosher."

There have been a lot of good studies of "crypto-Jews," those forced to hide, then flee to another continent, then hide again, and flee again. They arrived in hiding into New Mexico, but also to New Amsterdam, Newport, Charleston, Savannah, and Philadelphia. Many of the Sefardim ("Spanish," from Hebrew Sepharad) fled to the Netherlands, which was under Spanish rule, and as the Inquisition became established there, fled to Dutch colonies (like New Amsterdam, the earlier colonial name for New York) in the Caribbean, as well as to English ones, as explained here.

"By the late 16th century, fully functioning Jewish communities were founded in the Portuguese colony of Brazil, the Dutch Suriname and Curaçao; Spanish Santo Domingo, and the English colonies of Jamaica and Barbados. In addition, there were unorganized communities of Jews in Spanish and Portuguese territories where the Inquisition was active, including Colombia, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Mexico and Peru. Many in such communities were crypto-Jews, who had generally concealed their identity from the authorities. By the mid-17th century, the largest Jewish communities in the Western Hemisphere were located in Suriname and Brazil.

...

"Jewish presence in Bolivia started at the beginning of the Spanish colonial period. Santa Cruz de la Sierra, was founded in 1557 by Ñuflo de Chávez who was accompanied by a small group of pioneers, including several crypto-Jews from Ascuncion and Buenos Aires. The city became known as a safe haven for Jews during the Inquisition in the region.

"The second wave of Conversos came to Santa Cruz de la Sierra after 1570, when the Spanish Inquisition began operating in Lima. Alleged marranos (that is, New Christians whom others rightly or wrongly suspected of crypto-Judaism), settled in Potosi, La Paz and La Plata. After they gained economic success in mining and commerce, they faced suspicion and persecution from the Inquisition and local authorities."

Similar persecutions faced Jews in Argentina, Trinidad and Tobago, and other colonies under Spanish or Portuguese rule. Conversos were among the first arrivals from Iberia because they had compelling reasons to flee the Inquisition in Spain itself. The religious totalitarianism there was mixed with a toxic concept known as limpieza de sangre, "purity of blood," with the Germanic Visigoths who had conquered 1000 years before at the top of the racialized heap, and Moors and Jews (even those whose families had lived in Spain for centuries) at the bottom. (I'll post more about that some other time.)

Ruth Behar summarizes:

We will never know whether the Guachichiles would have been stirred to rebel against the Spaniards had the old woman lived, but one doubts it. The Guachichil woman's appeals and prophecies lit a spark of resistance, but that spark probably would have gone out of its own accord even without her speedy and dramatic execution. The Guachichiles had given up the fighting spirit. They were still receiving the gifts of food and cloth promised them by the Spaniards. They had settled in villages among sedentary Indians from the south or fled to less accessible regions, where they continued their way of life and their resistance for a little longer, raiding Spanish settlements into the eighteenth century (Gerhard 1972: 234).

"But, as the Spanish strategists had predicted, the Guachichiles, like the Chichimecas generally, were eventually effaced completely from the frontier that they had defended so well for so long. ... it was just after the pacification, in 1592, that such rich silver mines were discovered in San Luis that the term "Potosi," after the great mines of Peru, was added to its name. The old Guachichil woman had indeed spoken prophetically when she said that the earth would open and swallow them all if they didn't join her in rebelling against the Spaniards. 

What we know is that the Old Woman had lived through the ten years since the military defeat of her people. She lived under occupation, in the city of San Luis. Her daughter converted to Catholicism and died an untimely death. Who knows what else she survived; but she became very ill and left the city for a less settled region to the east. There, on the land, she had her visions of the sacred deer, and went through a healing process that undoubtedly involved processing the epochal disaster that had dislocated and demoralized her people.

The Old Woman felt an imperative to rouse people out of their trauma and to rise up. She longed for an overthrow of the oppressive new order. We don't know what her ceremonies looked like, or what she really said in her prophecies, as opposed to what the men, at the mercy of the Spanish, told them, or what they left out. But we know that she pounded on the ground, making the Earth resonate, the same Earth that she was able to open, that had received the ancestors which she had seen restored to life. She pounded on the Earth with her hands when Pedro de Torres declined to join her revolt, or so he told the Spanish when the Old Woman was on trial for her life. She was doomed, and his concern was to save his own life, and perhaps that of his community.

But the basis of the Old Woman's vision was a regeneration of the old way of life, of those killed by the Spanish in the process of conquering their lands in central Mexico. It would take the Earth opening up to arrest the colonization already under way, the slavery in the mines, the walling off of well-watered lands for the new creole aristocracy already consolidating its wealth. Her dream was a dream of freedom for her people and other originarios who were already being driven into a caste of impoverished laborers and farmers, who could no longer roam across their lands.

The Deer as a spiritual initiator is prominent in Huichol / Wixárika teachings and visions. "We look for the deer in Wirikuta (the peyote desert), a deer that never dies, a deer who appears out of the air, Kauyumari [brother deer]. And if the gods want us to find him [please note that this language does not have gendered pronouns], we will, we will find our way with this deer, who will teach us many things with the special peyote we find in his tracks.

"Once I found him there. The deer spoke to me and told me things. He said he was going to teach me to be a mara'akame, to cure, and that he was going to teachme all of the nearika (power objects in the form of round discs) he had, to see what ones I liked. He told me that if I could endure, he would show me all o them and teach me what each one of them means.

"Kauyumari speaks with the gods [again, not gendered]; he understands the Fire and the Sun. When the shamans sing, they are speaking with Kauyumari, who is in touch with the rest of the gods. He sendsthe shamans their dreams and power objects."

So the deer is a teacher who comes in dreams and visions, and is a messenger of deities. When the mara'akame are in a state of spiritual ecstasy, they are referred to as Kauyumari. This has tremendous significance for the history of the Old Woman of the Guachichiles; she was following a classic path to spiritual guidance and potency. She may have been one of the "singing shamans" that the Huichol speak of, whose guardian and chief is Deer Brother.

from "MIrrors of the Gods: the Huichol Shaman's Path of Completion," by Susana Valadez (Shaman's Drum, Fall 1986, p 31, 35]

A teaching, from the same article:

"If I conduct myself well, if I don't go around doing bad things, if my soul and heart are good and clean, then the gods will look upon me well. It doesn't matter if my hat is old and my clothes are ragged. If my heart is good, then i become a reflection of the gods, like a mirror." —Arrow Man, Huichol mara'akame (medicine person, please note that this is an ungendered language, so that the translation "the gods" is overlain with associations in English that the Wixárika language does not have.)