An Enemy With a Memory: How the Land of Our Lady’s Victory May Usher In Our Nation’s Defeat

This weekend, Santa Fe, New Mexico, celebrated its 314th annual fiesta—a tradition forming the longest continual novena honoring Our Lady, prayed in our city since 1692. This year, however, our prayers met with the weight of unsettling timing. As the city sang to La Conquistadora, news broke revealing progress in our governor’s plan to reshape abortion access across the entire country.  

Her strategy is simple and devastating: use Native American sovereignty to build abortion mega-facilities immune to state laws. These facilities would offer abortions without term limits and genital-mutilating surgeries without age restrictions nationwide. If this succeeds, your vote will no longer matter in protecting vulnerable lives.

To understand why this threat is emerging from New Mexico, we must first look back to battles fought long before the United States existed. The crisis progressing now is not merely political; it is spiritual. Further, it is unfolding on land and amid a people where an ancient enemy once suffered catastrophic defeat.

As an 18th-generation Santa Fean, my heritage includes both the Spanish conquerors of Mexico and their native allies, the Tlaxcalan people who lived on the edges of Aztec rule. For all the genuine horrors of colonialism, the fact remains that the Aztec empire imposed a state religion with a widespread requirement of human sacrifice and mutilating blood offerings. Life under the gods served by the Aztec elite was hellish.

The Tlaxcalans were skilled fighters because, considered beneath the Aztec ruling classes, they were continually warred upon to secure “disposable” prisoners for sacrifice. Ultimately, the fall of the Aztec empire could not have come about without the combination of Tlaxcalan cultural and strategic intelligence paired with the tactical advantage of Spanish horses and steel weaponry. 

These same Tlaxcalans became the first Christian converts in the New World. Their conversion was not simply imposed; it was a liberation. They encountered a God who sacrificed Himself for them instead of demanding their blood. This revelation prepared the ground for the most consequential Marian intervention in the Americas: the apparition of Our Lady of Guadalupe.

The floral figures on her image’s garment form a Nahuatl codex, written as clearly as a billboard in the pictographic language of the time—a proclamation that human sacrifice is over. The child in her womb is God Himself, the only sacrifice God will ever accept. Millions converted. A civilization built on death was transformed by a mother who came to save her children.

This was one of the greatest defeats for demonic forces in human history.

My ancestors carried this victory north to New Mexico, where my heritage joins with that of the Pueblo people. The Tlaxcalans dedicated their new home to St. Michael the Archangel, seeing in his patronage a reminder of their win over the demonic gods of their past. The Spanish named the city Santa Fe, recalling the fortress from which the Reconquista won Spain for the Faith.

Sadly, however, triumph bred arrogance. The Tlaxcalans and Spanish mistreated the Native peoples of New Mexico and were expelled in a violent revolt. Still, Our Lady intervened again. Settlers returned bearing the image of La Conquistadora, and Mary’s maternal presence won the conversion of countless souls. The Native peoples of New Mexico became the first to embrace Christianity on a large scale on the land that would become the United States.

Today, the land that witnessed these victories has become a focal point of rage for the demonic. New Mexico leads the nation in late-term abortion and celebrates bodily mutilation. It is as if evil seeks a rematch on the very ground where it once suffered defeat—and even through the descendants of those who helped deliver that defeat. Heartbreakingly, my Hispanic and Native brothers and sisters—while cheering “¡Que viva la fiesta!”—are the Catholic voters whose choices produced the danger we now face.

Our governor—a cousin who shares my heritage and a soul in need of our sincere prayers—has presided over the most extreme aspects of New Mexico’s transformation. After Roe v. Wade was overturned, her office directed out-of-state abortion seekers to the Satanic Temple, which now operates a free telehealth clinic in New Mexico facilitating chemical abortions nationwide. However, a new plan arising under her leadership makes these things seem comparatively minor.

The news over our fiesta was that a site in northern New Mexico had been selected for a second abortion mega-facility. It will replicate the governor’s flagship project in southern New Mexico intended to accommodate “late-term abortion tourism,” where pregnant mothers travel from states with tighter regulations or from across the Mexican border to end their children’s lives. Still, the greatest danger lies in the strategy behind these facilities, and the announcement of a site for the second facility confirms its course.

On CBS’ Face the Nation (including the episode back on April 16, 2023), the governor’s statements reveal that these centers are likely prototypes for a national network built on Native American sovereignty. She has expressed confidence that reservations across the country would host such facilities, making late-term abortion accessible within driving distance for most Americans, regardless of state laws. These same centers could perform genital-mutilating procedures on minors, bypassing state protections.

Why is she confident that so many good nations would agree to a blatantly evil plan—one that calls up images at which even a moderate leftist would have to suppress a private shudder? The answer lies in her heritage. More specifically, it lies in the fact that her heritage implies an arrangement of debt that could enslave our sovereign Native peoples to a force that, like the gods the Aztec elites served, seeks their destruction and ours.

Our Governor is Michelle Lujan Grisham. She doesn’t need to include “Lujan” in her name, but she does, I worry, for a specific reason. New Mexico’s Lujan family, of which I am a member, if not a proud one, has consolidated and wielded political power for generations, seemingly in exchange for the Catholic truth that once freed our ancestors. The ruling Lujans of today, funded by deep-pocketed agenda advocates like the Soros Foundation, have tragically come to resemble the ruling class that once subjected their forbearers to terror. However, the origin of this crisis is older.

My great-uncle, Manuel Lujan Jr., born on the pueblo of San Ildefonso, spent much of his political career working to secure casino gaming rights on tribal lands. His appointment to Secretary of the Interior by George H.W. Bush finally allowed him to achieve this goal nationally. This brought enormous financial benefits to Native communities, many of which previously experienced great need. I, myself, am grateful to rely on casino work in hard times. However, I fear that these benefits may have come at a cost yet unpaid; and, wielding the Lujan name, Michelle is poised to collect it. 

Tribal indebtedness to the Lujans—or, more in truth, to the physical or spiritual overlords to whom they, like the Aztec elite, owe their power—for an economic benefit of such enormous weight as the casinos have generated cannot be simply shrugged off. As her final term as governor ends, Michelle has promised that partnering with Native communities to secure nationwide abortion access will be her priority. If we remain ignorant of her plan and the reason it could succeed, we may find ourselves blindsided by the outcome. 

What can be done? First, please pray for Michelle and for my family. I wish I had a more complete answer. I write, perhaps, to seek one from Crisis readers. While any solution must certainly begin with prayer, fasting, sacrifice, and striving to live faithful Catholic lives, I suspect it must also include some understanding of the dynamics I have attempted to outline. Perhaps an exorcist may read this who knows how to break debts tied to generational or familial agreements. If so, and if my lineage might place me in a position to help renounce those bonds, I am more than willing.

Above all, I trust Our Lady to lead us back to her Divine Son. She has intervened to do so before. Perhaps the time is near for her to intervene again. ¡Que Viva la Conquistadora! ¡Que Viva Cristo Rey!