Esteban de Perea

Esteban de Perea
Born	Villanueva del Fresno, Spain
Died	1638 or 1639 New Mexico
Nationality	Spanish
Occupation	Friar
Known for	Missionary activity

Esteban de Perea (or Estevan de Peréa) was a Spanish Franciscan monk who undertook missionary work in New Mexico, a province of New Spain between 1610 and 1638. At times he was in conflict with the governors of the province. He has been called the "Father of the New Mexican Church".

Esteban de Perea was born in Villanueva del Fresno, in Extremadura, Spain near the Portuguese border. Both his parents were Portuguese and came from a region that was home to many Jews. The conquest of the Emirate of Granada, with its large populations of Moslems and Jews, had been completed in 1492. Those who refused to convert to Christianity had been deported from Spain. However, the church was suspicious that some converts remained true to Jewish beliefs in private. In 1629 the Mexican Inquisition conducted a thorough inquiry into Perea's "purity of blood". Two witnesses testified that his mother's family was "tainted with new Christian blood", but the Franciscans chose to ignore this evidence.

Fray Esteban de Perea arrived in New Mexico in 1610, and soon after established the mission of Nuestra Señora de los Dolores (Our Lady of Sorrows) at Sandia Pueblo, to the south of Santa Fe. The viceroy received a complaint about the mission at Sandia from the municipality of Santa Fe, which said that the mission had taken so much of the limited supply of iron that there was not enough left for civilian needs. After visiting the Hopi people, Perea wrote enthusiastically about the industrious and moral people, with well-built houses, in a land that resembled Spain.

The church assumed that the main objective in New Mexico was to convert the Indians, and the civil power existed only in order to provide protection and to support this goal. As chief judge and head of the army, the governor had equal powers but different objectives, so clashes were inevitable. On 12 August 1613 the Franciscan leader Fray Isidro Ordóñez and his followers arrested the governor Pedro de Peralta and had him chained and imprisoned in the mission at Sandia. His jailer was Fray Esteban de Perea, who disapproved but obeyed. The Custodia de la Conversion de San Pablo del Nuevo Mexico, a religious province, was set up by Franciscan friars around 1616 or 1617. Perea was elected first custodian, becoming the head of the church in New Mexico. Perea had many disputes with the temporal Governor Juan de Eulate from 1618 to 1626. In 1620 the Viceroy of New Spain heard complaints from the Indians of abuses of power, and sent orders regulating the treatment of Indians to both Perea and Juan de Eulate.

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