A SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY INSTANCE OF HOPI CLOWNING?

In 1659 a young Hopi named Juan Suñi was arrested in Santa Fe and placed on trial for allegedly stealing supplies from the Casas Reales. The documentation of his trial—a two-week process that pulled in a host of local witnesses—reveals telling elements of Juan Suñi’s life, tracing a line from the Hopi mesas to the governor’s mansion, from buffoonery to petty theft, from liberty to bondage. My analysis of this episode seeks to uncover the motivations behind Juan Suñi’s actions so as to gain a sharper understanding of Hopi-Spanish relations in the seventeenth century. With support from both the documentary record and anthropological literature, I conclude that some of Juan Suñi’s actions were carried out in the spirit of Hopi clowning, the long-standing Hopi tradition of mockery of one’s self and others, and that they reflect broad-based tensions between Hopis and Spaniards that are often underplayed in the literature on that period.