In August 1680, the Pueblo peoples of New Mexico, coordinated across dozens of villages speaking different languages by the religious leader Po'pay of Ohkay Owingeh, rose against Spanish colonial rule in a single, carefully timed uprising that killed hundreds of settlers and missionaries and drove every surviving Spaniard out of the province entirely. The Pueblo Revolt succeeded where scattered resistance elsewhere in Spanish America had failed because it was organized specifically around ending forced conversion and the suppression of Pueblo ceremonial life the missions had imposed for eighty years, and it kept New Mexico free of Spanish rule for twelve years until Diego de Vargas's reconquest in 1692. That reconquest did not simply restore the earlier mission system unchanged, Franciscan practice afterward tolerated a degree of continued Pueblo ceremonial life it had previously tried to eliminate outright, a lasting concession historians trace directly to the revolt's success. In 2005 New Mexico placed a statue of Po'pay, carved by the Jemez Pueblo sculptor Cliff Fragua from Tennessee marble, in the United States Capitol's National Statuary Hall, formal federal recognition of a rebellion against federal predecessors.
Santa Fe's mission tradition, refounded after 1692, still anchors the annual pilgrimage to the Santuario de Chimayo today, and the Penitente Brotherhood's lay Catholic Holy Week penance remains active in northern mountain villages. Catholic identification leads the state at twenty seven percent of adults, per Pew's 2023-24 study, ahead of Evangelical Protestant at twenty five.