By Ruben Q. Leyva
In southwest New Mexico, a lot of families are like mine: They know where they come from, even if they don't always know what to call it. Others claim their people are from the Gila. Others call out the Mimbres, the Mogollon or the mountain ranges that have formed this place. Others, like me, were told they were "Gila [Hee-la] Apache," though little further explanation was offered beyond that label. Others were asked to name a band — or told they didn't qualify at all.
That confusion did not begin with us. It has a history.
When Spanish settlers started moving north into what would become New Mexico, Arizona and Texas, they encountered multiple peoples who were living across a broad and difficult-to-cross landscape. In time, Spanish officials increasingly invoked the word "Apache" as a sort of catchall for dozens of Native groups, who spoke the same or a similar language, scattered across an enormous area, some never before considering themselves part of any single people. This wasn't because those communities suddenly had grown to become identical, but rather that colonial authorities required a vocabulary to explain resistance, mobility and presence across land they did not command.
Later, Spanish documents broadened the definition of the territory to include "la gran Apachería," all of Apache country. This name signified the size of the land that Apache peoples roamed, not a singular tribe but rather a commonality or shared identity. It was geography before it was anything else.
And within that much larger Apache world, there were regional homelands with histories and connections of their own. One of those homelands was recorded in early documents as Xila (pronounced Tcila [Tci = Chih]). Spanish writers applied this name to Apache groups that were settled across what are now the Gila, Mimbres, Mogollon, and surrounding mountain ranges. Over time, "Apaches de Xila" was abbreviated in colonial records to "Gila Apache."
That shortening matters.
"Gila Apache" was not originally a small, well-bounded group. It was an expansive political and geographic world populated by people linked through movement, family relations and repeated crossings of the earth. The rivers, the valleys and mountain passes, the seasonable pathways were all routes where communities interpenetrated. Life was not just arranged by where people stayed, but where they traveled, who they visited and what spaces bore responsibility or memory.
This is why the notion of a single "band" has never completely accounted for life here. People moved. Families broke apart and reunited. Leadership shifted depending on circumstance. Belonging, meanwhile, was delineated by relationships and place, not paperwork or fixed categories.
Through generations, the name "Gila Apache" stuck even as its original meaning became more tenuous. It was an easier word to say than Xila. It popped up repeatedly in the records. Eventually, it entered common use. Today many people with Apache ancestry in the region use the term "Gila Apache" to describe who they are. And there's nothing wrong with that. Names go places, as people do.
The point is to know where the name originates.
"Gila Apache" emerged as a geographic descriptor that accompanied a corridor of land and movement; it did not start as an identity test. It described the people whose lifeways were shaped by the Gila and the Mimbres, by the Mogollon and the routes between. To know those places, to know where your family went, camped, hunted, gathered (and returned) is not lesser knowledge. It is foundational knowledge.
For many families today, particularly ones that were displaced or moved laterally or pulled away from formal tribal formations in the past (also due to these old laws), this history explains that familiar feeling of knowing your place but not quite knowing how to name it in bureaucratic terms. The confusion is not personal. It was embedded in the processes by which colonial systems named and reorganized Indigenous worlds — be cautious of anyone who tells you differently.
Knowing this history doesn't tell anyone who they are or how to think of themselves. That is not the purpose. The purpose is explanation. Anyway, to say that if you know the corridor your family comes from: if you know the river, and the mountains, and the routes and the neighboring communities, then this knowledge already has meaning.
"Gila Apache" is not only a name. It's an abbreviation for a much older political geography. Recalling that allows us to understand why the name still clings, even as the categories remain fairly shiftless.
A worldview that reduces people to their ancestry may make sense in a place like Grant County, where land, memory and movement are still close to the surface. People have always said more than the records show. Sometimes that history is all that's missing in the story of how these names came to be.
It's not to say you have no identity in that corridor. It is evidence of one.
