What I Got Wrong About My Own Family Before Borders
By Ruben Q. Leyva
The archive remembered a name, and I followed it.
For some time, I wrote publicly that the Apache leader known as El Compá, whom Spaniards referred to as the General of the Apaches at peace, was my fifth great-grandfather. The conclusion made sense based on the records available. His name appeared in the Janos documents. Today, the Janos municipality in Chihuahua, Mexico borders the United States. It was one site where Spanish-run peace establishments for Apache communities were maintained. Some Apaches at peace lived near Janos, and others, like the Compá family, lived there. In 1794, El Compá's household was recorded at the moment of his death. The people attached to that household seemed to align with the lineage I was tracing, including my fifth great-grandmother, Guadalupe Ydalgo, who appears in the records as part of the Compá household.
It was a reasonable reading.
It was also incomplete.
What I did not fully account for was how Spanish administrative records do not distinguish between household generations. A single ranchería entry can hold a father, his sons, their wives, and their children under one name. When the Chokonen Apache leader El Compá died, the archive preserved his household as a unit. It did not separate the generations within it. It did not identify which relationships belonged to which moment of authority. It recorded a structure without explaining it.
I read that structure as if it were static.
It is not.
The work I have been developing through Relational Memory Historiography required a correction. Relational Memory Historiography is my method of Indigenous research, grounded in kinship, land, and intergenerational memory as primary sources of historical knowledge. It works with the archive by reading administrative records alongside genealogy, oral testimony, and geography to reconstruct relationships the documents fragment. This is not only a family matter for me. It reflects how Apache history has been read through records in ways that reduce complex kinship into fixed categories.
When the Janos records are read alongside baptismal registers and kinship networks preserved through family memory, a different alignment becomes clear. The woman identified as Guadalupe does not belong to the generation of El Compá. She belongs to the generation that follows him. She is the partner of Juan Diego, his son, not the wife of El Compá.
That shift matters.
It means the lineage does not move from El Compá to an unnamed next generation. It moves through Juan Diego directly. He is not only part of the household recorded at El Compá's death. He is the figure through whom that household continues.
The correction changes the structure of the family itself.
It also changes how we understand identity within that structure.
Guadalupe Ydalgo's husband had taken over his father's Chokonen local group, but she was Mimbreño-Chíhéne Apache. Her identity anchored the household. Through her, the lineage enters a Chíhéne kinship network that connects Janos to the Mimbres and San Francisco River corridor, extending across what is now southern New Mexico and northern Mexico. In a matrilocal system, an alignment that carries political weight.
Juan Diego's position must be understood through that alignment.
He spent forty-two years and eleven months attached to the Janos peace establishment. The archive situates him there. It records his presence as a leader within that system. By that measure, he is often read through the categories associated with that region.
But kinship shifts identity across space.
Through marriage into Guadalupe's family, El Compá's son, Juan Diego enters the Chíhéne world. His authority does not remain fixed in one designation. It moves with the relationships that structure his life. The same man can be located in Janos and also within the Mimbres corridor because those places are connected through kinship.
This is where the archive struggles.
It prefers stable categories. It separates groups into names that appear distinct on paper. Nednai. Bedonkohe. Chíhéne. Chokonen. These labels reflect how colonial systems sorted people, not how people understood themselves in relation to one another.
The family record shows something else.
Juan José Compá, Juan Diego's younger brother, negotiated peace with Mexican officials in 1834 on behalf of Chokonens, Chíhénes, and Mescaleros. His position within those negotiations reflects how leadership moved across connected groups rather than remaining fixed within a single designation. Through marriage, Juan José aligned with his wife's "Gileño" Apache kinship network, and his self-identification followed those relationships. When we read only the documents, we see categories. While many believe the brothers were simply Nednai Apaches associated with the southern group, they self-identified differently. When we follow kinship, we see how those categories were lived and reconfigured.
This same pattern helps explain later leadership transitions. Mangas Coloradas, known earlier in the records as Fuerte, emerges as a leading figure among the Chokonens after the death of General Marcelo, recorded in some sources as Marcelino Maturino Silva and identified through relational and genealogical alignment as Mahko, the Bedonkohe Apache leader. Within the Chíhéne network, leadership also reorganizes through kinship ties. Josécito Durán Leyva, the son-in-law of Juan Diego and Guadalupe, stands in position within the Chíhéne leadership network associated with Cuchillo Negro. These shifts reflect the movement of authority through family alliances that linked communities across the corridor.
This is the point where I need to be clear.
I was wrong to identify Guadalupe as El Compá's wife. I was wrong to place my lineage directly through him without accounting for the generational structure of the household. The records did not correct me. A different method did.
Relational reading made the difference.
It required placing Mexican government records alongside El Paso del Norte Church records. It required following another ancestor, Mariano "Vívora" Rodríguez, a Chíhéne Apache leader at the Janos peace establishment beginning in 1794. That date places him one year after Juan Diego was first documented by name at Janos and connects both men within the same historical moment. Rodríguez had also been documented decades earlier within Guadalupe's baptismal padrino network. It required taking seriously the way families remember their own structure across time. None of these sources alone provides the answer. Together, they do.
As a PhD student, this marks a shift in how I read the archive. Not as a complete account, but as one system among others. Not as a final authority, but as a partial record shaped by the needs of those who created it.
The archive did not lie. It recorded what it was designed to record. The mistake came from treating that record as complete.
The lineage I trace moves through Juan Diego. The household centers on him and Guadalupe. The kinship network that follows carries multiple alignments because that is how families formed and moved across the corridor.
The record often centers on the 1837 Johnson Massacre, which occurred after the Compás relocated from Janos to the Animas Mountains in present-day Hidalgo County, New Mexico. An invitation extended to John Johnson and his men to visit the Apache camp resulted in the deaths of Juan Diego, Juan José, Marcelo, and several others. A member of the Vívora family escaped with Guadalupe and her daughters, Soledad and Refugia, along with Soledad's husband, Josécito, who can be accounted for in the Janos census records. Others, including Mangas Coloradas, carried that history forward, negotiating with Mexico and later with the United States, as earlier Chokonen and Chíhéne leaders had done.
This is what the relationships have preserved. As a descendant of the Compás, knowing Juan Diego is my fifth great-grandfather and El Compá my sixth is not a minor detail. It matters.
