Tucked away in a Sonoran valley between the towns of Cumpas and Moctezuma, is one of Sonora’s most interesting historic sites. El real de San Juan Bautista de Sonora was a mining town or real de minas and was occupied between 1657 and 1749. During those years it was also the capitol of Sonora until that function was assumed by the mission community of San Miguel de Horcasitas. It came under increasing Apache pressure, and by 1767 the mines had been abandoned and the shafts flooded. Today San Juan Bautista is a registered historic site, under the protection of the Mexican federal government.
When I visited the site in the 1970s, it was a truly romantic experience. After negotiating a maze of unmarked dirt roads, I finally coaxed my car through a low mountain range, I could see below me the traces of a much older, narrower road. When I reached the crest of the pass, a valley was spread out before me, with the old road running straight to the base of a black, cone-shaped hill. It was a scene right out of one of J. Frank Dobie’s lost mine stories. The town site itself, consisting of low adobe mounds, was easily traceable. I walked around, looking at the small potsherds which were scattered all over the ground.
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On the edges of the town, away from the church, I found undecorated, locally-made native utility ware. Towards the center, however, where the richer folks would have dwelt, this was mixed with painted majolica, made in Mexico in centers like Puebla. In the same part of town I also found a tiny bit of Chinese porcelain. Now there is only one way that scrap of fired clay could have gotten to where it was. It was made in China, shipped across the Pacific to Acapulco, and thence on muleback to the wilds of Sonora, where somebody dropped and broke it.
I was brought up in southern California, and had heard many times about the famous Manila galleons that brought the riches of the East to New Spain. However, when I picked up that bit of porcelain the stories became real in ways that they had never been before.
Surrounding the town was the built landscape of mining: a masonry dam across a creek, arrastres, heaps of blackened slag. And surrounding the entire site was silence. It was that silence, as at Terrenate Presidio, that made up much of the magic of the place, and allowed me to get closer to a particular part of our regional history.
