By Ruben Leyva, Gila Apache
The most confusing aspect of understanding the 'Apache Mansos' identity is that this singular title is used to describe two distinct lifeways of people who are ethnically related and who occupy specific regions at different periods and under various cultural contexts. The first and oldest group of Apache Mansos, also known as 'Apaches de paz' (peaceful Apaches) during the Spanish and Mexican periods, is the subject of Part I of this editorial. Part II will describe the descendants of these people, who are similarly identified by outsiders but are no longer tied to Hispanic presidios as their ancestors, and who are described by American anthropologists using the same terminology after the Apache Wars, a problematic practice.
This is a story about strategy, not surrender — about Apaches who chose survival through Spanish-run peace establishments, not as a pathway to ethnic oblivion, but as a deliberate response to impossible odds. This group should not be confused with the 'Manso Indians,' who are indigenous to the El Paso/Las Cruces region. The 18th-century term Apache Mansos, or "Tame Apaches," was never a self-identifier. It was a colonial category imposed on families who, in the face of Spanish, Mexican, and later American power, navigated a brutal landscape with care and resilience. Whether Pinal, Aravaipa, Yavapai, Chiricahua, Gileño, or Mimbreño, these families accepted, manipulated, or negotiated peace terms, not to disappear, but to endure. This was the so-called original Apache Mansos identity, which differs from the modern identity described by Grenville Goodwin and Morris Opler in the 1930s and 1940s.
Before the time of Geronimo, in the late 1770s and into the 1780s, Apaches entered into peace agreements near presidios and settlements such as Tucson, Bacoachi, Janos, Fronteras, Tubac, San Elizario, and Carrizal — places that became sites of both negotiation and danger. Viceroy Bernardo de Galvez's 1786 plan formalized this uneasy reality: those who avoided the warpath were rewarded with rations, protection, and the right to farm; those who resisted faced brutal reprisals. Historian Matthew Babcock reminds us that these peace establishments were not merely tools for pacification but spaces where Apaches could exercise a measure of autonomy, moving in and out of peace, trading, raiding, and surviving. Santiago shows how the "velvet glove" of peace always concealed the mailed fist of deportations, colleras (chain gangs), and scalp bounties. Even in peace, betrayal lurked nearby.
The Juan José Compa stories of the 1830s are often remembered as the most well-known of the so-called peaceful Apaches, revealing this complexity. Compa's efforts to broker peace, using Spanish he had learned as a child in presidio schools, included treaties with Mexican authorities and non-peaceful Apache groups at Santa Rita del Cobre. These parlays were met with treachery time and again. Presidios, miners, and mercenaries saw contracts of blood and profit even as they parleyed for truce. Juan José's people endured sieges, betrayals, and the horrors of scalp bounty systems that transformed Apache lives into commodities. As Historian David Correia writes, peace was intermittently broken — not only by Apaches, but by the greed and violence of those who claimed to seek accord, but desired control.
My own ancestors lived within this complex world. At Bacoachi, my 5th great-grandfather, El Compa, and his family, including the Ydalgo kin, farmed, sold surplus grain, and participated in diplomacy. They adopted certain agrarian practices, as described by the author H. Henrietta Stockel, but they remained Apache at their core. Pisago chose to live at La Boca rather than directly under presidio watch — a small but telling act of autonomy. He crossed our modern U.S.-Mexico border freely as his ancestors had done, until Spanish troops ended his life during a retaliatory raid. His children continued this borderland existence — what today might be called transnational, but for them was simply life as they had always known it, tied to place and kin.
The names of my family appear in the 1787 Bacoachi rolls: El Compa, Guadalupe Cee, Francisco Ydalgo, Pisago Cabazón, their children, and kin. By 1791, they had moved near Janos, their survival strategy intact, their identity hidden from those who sought to erase it, but alive in their hearts and homelands. I think often of how they taught their children in arroyos and mountains, whispered songs so no one else could hear, and traveled to sacred places to remember. These were acts of quiet sovereignty, invisible to colonial record-keepers but powerful in their persistence.
What some scholars have called a "peaceful pathway to ethnic oblivion" was not, in fact, that. These families never completely blended, but they adapted and persisted. They protected their language, songs, and kinship ties. Sometimes they were hidden from history, but they were not lost. The most notorious figures didn't always lead them, but that was not a sign of defeat; it was a survival strategy.
There is a clear difference between the group described in this editorial, which was concentrated on peace establishments under the threat of deportation. The modern identity is better known for existing quietly within Hispanic communities. Therefore, when the term Apache Mansos is used in the contemporary sense, it refers to non-reservation Apaches living in or near villages and cities with large Hispanic populations. In the following editorial, 'Hidden in Plain Sight, Part II: The Ba̱ch'i — Endurance at the Edge of Empire,' anthropologists Goodwin and Opler offer a modern identity – an Apache Mansos 2.0, if you will — that is distinct in some ways.
I share these reflections, not as final answers, but as connections I have made through research, oral history, and family memory. One of the most telling connections comes from the words of Duncan Balachu, an Eastern Chiricahua elder who, in the 1930s, told Morris Opler of a group south of Tucson — people who, he said, spoke like the Chiricahua, sang the same songs, and were visited by Jim Miller, a Chiricahua living at Mescalero. These families, according to Balachu, had already cut their hair and adopted white men's clothing when he was still a child wearing traditional dress. He described them as "more like Mexicans" and suggested they were no longer recognized as kin by the Central Chiricahua.
Balachu's view, shaped by the sorrow and dislocation of exile, framed these Bá̱ch'i families as people who had drifted too far from the center. Yet in truth, these were families who survived by adopting outward signs of settler life while protecting their Apache identity within. They did not cease to be Chiricahua or Apache. Instead, they safeguarded that identity through quiet means — teaching songs in arroyos, passing down memory, and shielding their children from the terror of removal. The visits of Jim Miller to these families were not simply social calls; they were acts of kinship continuity, unrecorded in official histories but alive in the stories passed down.
In Part II, we will follow these so-called outsiders — the Bá̱ch'i — as they carried forward the survival strategies born in the peace establishments, adapting to the shifting frontiers of empire. Their story is not one of surrender or assimilation, but of resilience at the edge of two worlds. I invite readers to join me in exploring this next chapter, where we listen more closely to those voices at the margins who refused to let history forget them.
