UC Davis

In January of 1847, in the northern New Mexico town of Taos, a combined force of Pueblos and Nuevomexicanos assassinated the U.S. territorial governor and marched on Santa Fe to contest the U.S. occupation. The U.S. Army eventually put down most of the resistance, and U.S. officials controversially held treason trials to condemn some of the revolt’s leaders. This paper asks how U.S. soldiers and officials made sense of their occupation of New Mexico during the U.S.-Mexico War (1846-1848), particularly in the wake of the Taos “Revolt” of 1847. It argues that U.S. soldiers and officials ultimately understood the Taos Revolt as a “revolt.” In doing so, they attempted to affirm U.S. sovereignty in New Mexico and to conceive of conquest as a single moment in time rather than as a process—though this understanding was far from stable or uncontested, even within U.S. ranks. Performance, whether in the form of stage plays or treason trials, was critical for constructing U.S. understandings of the occupation both before and after the revolt. This paper therefore asserts that performance was integral to the everyday mechanisms of empire. First, this paper analyzes the conquest-themed plays U.S. soldiers performed in Santa Fe on the eve of the revolt to understand how they grappled with the meanings of occupation and conquest. Then it turns to the Taos Revolt and the subsequent treason trials, in which U.S. officials tried Mexican citizens for treason against the United States. It argues that the trials were intended to act as performances of conquest and to produce a colonial history, but ultimately they underscored the instability and incoherence of “conquest.”