Pedro Durán y Chávez

  Noted events in his life were:

• Background Information: ²⁵²
Don Pedro Duran y Chaves II was the second son of the original Chaves and younger brother of Don Fernando I. Still much alive in 1680, he gave his age as seventy. Those who testified against him at Guadalupe del Paso for taking an undue share of the refugees' rations deposed that in 1637 he was still a boy in his mother's care, which also shows that his father was dead by this time. But by 1642 he was already married. As a youth he went on three campaigns, one of them with his uncle, Antonio Baca. In the Governor Rosas affair, he was one of the four masked men who accompanied the assassin, Nicholas Ortiz, and for this complicity he was later banished from New Mexico by Governor Guzman. His arrest, not a political one but over a question of livestock, in the Santo Domingo Church, at which time he held the rank of Sargento Mayor.

His estancia lay four leagues north of Isleta Pueblo on the Rio del Norte. In 1667 he gave his age as forty, giving Santa Fe as his birth place. His wife was Elena Dominguez de Mendoza, the daughter of Captain Tomé Dominguez.

In 1680, his family joined the Rio Abajo settlers in their flight to Guadalupe del Paso. He gave his age as seventy, declaring a son already bearing arms, ten minor children and thirty servants. In 1681 he complained of his poverty, the fact of having serve the King without salary or an encomienda, boasting that his grandparents (the Bacas) had been among "the first conquistadores and pacifiers" of the Kingdom, and that his father, Don Pedro I, and "those others ended their lives there in the royal service". But the other refugees contradicted him by proving that he had not only deprived some families of their rations by taking an undue share, but was also profiteering in stock and textiles; they agreed that his forebears had done great things, but that he himself had been a military slacker as well as a commercial profiteer all his life.

In the years following, he secretly did his best to impede the return of the colonists for the Reconquest and resettlement of New Mexico, and finally the intermarried families of Pedro de Chaves and Tomé Dominguez were allowed to leave the Guadalupe del Paso district and move south into New Spain. This is how the greater portion of the Chaves family failed to repopulate New Mexico after the Reconquest. However, they are the progenitors of old families named Chávez in what is now northern Mexico.

~The Origins of New Mexico Families, p. 21

• He owned land. ²³⁹
Pedro had an estancia four leagues (about 12 miles) north of the Isleta Pueblo on the Rio del Norte. The location of this estancia is very close to where the Albuquerue Zoo is located today.

Pedro married Elena Domínguez de Mendoza, daughter of Tomé Domínguez and Elena Ramirez de Mendoza.²⁵² (Elena Domínguez de Mendoza was born about 1628 in Ciudád de Méjico, Nueva España.)