What Does "Gila Apache" Mean When Names and Nations Change? Part IV

By Ruben Q. Leyva

This essay is part of the ongoing "What Does 'Gila Apache' Mean?" series. This essay builds on the earlier pieces by showing how Apache continuity becomes legible not through fixed names or places, but through repeated actions, relationships, and returns across a shared corridor. Sabinal in this essay refers to a negotiated farm settlement located in Socorro County, New Mexico.

By now, we've learned what to trust. We believe in behavior, like farming at Apache peace settlements, more than we do Spanish administrative spelling. We understand farming is diplomacy, not assimilation.

And we know that the archive isn't a stable thing; not because it is meaningless, but because it was never built to reflect Indigenous belonging. Which leads, of course, to the pose that many a reader inevitably strikes at some point while navigating through Spanish colonial and church records: How do you read a name that refuses to stay the same?

The solution is not to adopt one spelling or get frustrated with the others. It is to appreciate why names change, when they are changed and what kind of record is doing the naming. Apache names were not recorded in colonial documents for linguistic accuracy. Officials wrote anything for treaties, ration lists, censuses, correspondence, and administrative explanation. Names were recorded by people who frequently weren't speaking Apache languages, who needed interpreters and were trying to capture sounds that Spanish just doesn't convey well. Variation was a feature of Spanish documentation, not an error in the system. They couldn't ask the Apache, "How do you spell that?"

Linguists working on Apache languages have demonstrated for decades that Apache sounds do not map cleanly onto Spanish orthography—meaning variation is expected, not exceptional. What seems like contradictions is typically nothing more than the same name being pronounced differently, spelled slightly different or abbreviated for simplicity. In short, variation in spelling does not signify multiple individuals. It's a sign of several different people sounding out a name based on their own experience. This is why Spanish officials tracked leaders less by spelling than by repeated actions, who negotiated, who farmed, and who returned.

Historians approaching the issue from another angle have come to the same conclusion. Matthew Babcock has demonstrated this practice in Spanish records regarding Gila Apache diplomacy, where he found that the Spanish tracked Apache leaders over time and space, despite changes in Spanish leadership (Babcock 2017). To them it did not matter that the writing remained the same, but rather that the same leader kept negotiating peace, relocating their people, organizing farms, and returning to agreed-upon locations. The archive was more about following function than spelling.

My job as a researcher isn't to correct it away, but to be able to read it.

To get there, it is useful to have a method for reading, rather than one "right" name.

One way to read these records without collapsing people into contradictions is to relate memory and history. I will use Josef Antonio Leyva and his various spellings as the example:

*Josef / José*
This is a situational name. Spanish bureaucrats also preferred, when possible, to use a familiar Christian name in routine records, the letters, censuses, and supply lists, especially once an Indigenous leader was familiar. The memoirs of Fray Alonso de Benavides, dating to 1626, described ongoing conversions of Gila Apache along the Rio Grande. Josef's christening as an Indio, in 1742, and position as an Apache headman demonstrates adaptation to new and old spiritual practices without surrendering sovereignty. He appears in the same locations under the name Josef/José between 1778 to 1812. These areas include El Paso, Santa Fe, Janos, Chihuahua and Bavispe, Sonora.

*Jansquiedetcho* (1790 – Governor Negotiates Sabinal Farm Settlement –Santa Fe, NM)
This name appears in the 1790 treaty alongside three others – Hansgesni, Jasquienelte, and Nasbachonil. The spelling Jans-quie-det-cho itself is present in the 1790 Sabinal treaty. It is indicative of how Spanish officials tried to translate an Apache name at one moment of negotiation. An earlier fiscal census from the Presidio of San Buenaventura (1803) appears to abbreviate this same name cluster as Qui-den-chul, a truncated form consistent with Real Hacienda accounting practices in Apaches de Paz records, where prefixes were often dropped while medial and terminal phonetic anchors were retained across the period.

*Asquiedenchol* (1803 to 1822 – San Buenaventura and Janos, Chihuahua/ Bavispe, Sonora)
This is a sound-based rendering. It concerns the direct equivalent Apache phonology, and it occurs somewhat later in documents from the same corridor leadership setting with a similar name to Jansquiedetcho. Located in Bavispe, Sonora.

Later Janos ration records underscore this point by listing "Asquiedenchol" alongside the Apache Feroz, his son, and 37 other Apaches from the Mogollon Mountains of southwestern New Mexico. This group is recorded within the same peace settlement provisioning group—demonstrating that the archive itself, at moments of administrative clarity, preserved relational continuity even when earlier spellings obscured it.

Both these names are correct in their respective place. The error is in treating them as competing identities rather than as record positions, snapshots taken at different times, by other hands, for another purpose. It is worth noting that the year 1803 itself already illustrates why spelling alone cannot anchor identity: in March, a fiscal record at San Buenaventura abbreviates the leader's name as Quidenchul, while in October, a political report at San Elizario records Tanchintijue—two documentary moments, in the same year, produced for different administrative purposes.

*Tanchintijue* (1810 – San Elizario, modern El Paso County, TX)
This is a name alias: another Spanish effort at the same Apache name, and that version shows up once in William Griffen's book, Apaches at War and At Peace as possibly another José (also Tanchintijue), at San Elizario who might be our Josef. The behavior as an instigator is somewhat out of character from other accounts, but this may still provide a clue.

The same reasoning can be applied to last names. Spanish ecclesiastical and civil records adhere to no consistent rule as applied to Indigenous people. Some people are listed under the father's last name. In some cases, the mother's surname is adopted even if the parents were married. Occasionally, last names change without apparent reason or cease to exist. These shifts result from colonial record-keeping and not Indigenous systems of kinship logic. A new last name does not necessarily signal a new family, or a change in identity, it signals the priorities of who holds the pen.

And that is why a behavior, like farming, matters as much as it does.

When this same leader shows up peacemaking in the late 1780's, organizing farming on Sabinal in the early 1790s, receiving tools at Janos in 1810, and is implicated with leadership continuity a bit later at Bavispe, continuity is not conjectural. It is patterned. Names move because people move. Spellings shift because ears differ. Roles remain because responsibility remains.

If you read for spelling alone, the story disintegrates.

If you look for geography, timing and repeated action, the story holds together.

No people need to be collapsed into another nor is proving ancestry needed to learn a name in such fashion. It calls for acknowledging the limits of the archive and not mistaking those limitations for Indigenous reality. Moments of contact were recorded in Spanish and Mexican records. They missed the rich structure of Apache life moving through corridors that far predated such documents.

This is why, so often today, families find themselves wrestling with records that appear to lead in opposing directions. One baptism is shown in Chihuahua. A census may list Janos. Memory may be directed towards the Gila and Mimbres. These are not contradictions. They're different systems of describing the same world from different perspectives. In periods of heightened concern over borders and movement, archives are often reread as instruments of exclusion rather than as partial records of mobility. But, this doesn't mean your story can't be put back together.

Just as Sabinal once appeared in records as a fixed place while Apache families moved through it with intention, today's documents often freeze what was always meant to be relational and mobile. Once you understand that, the archive doesn't look broken anymore.

It begins to look honestly about what it could record, and what it did not, and what permanent and temporary settlement looked like. Your family may have been in Mexico for two or four decades before returning to the homelands in the present U.S. and that's ok from a Gila Apache perspective. When you understand this, you begin developing a skill.

This is the skill that this series has been building toward: not choosing between records and memory but learning to read them together.