Teypana (alternate spelling “Teypama”) was the first pueblo to be called Socorro. This
Piro pueblo
In the Southwestern United States, Pueblo (capitalized) refers to the Native tribes of Puebloans having fixed-location communities with permanent buildings which also are called pueblos (lowercased). The Spanish explorers of northern New Spain ...
was located close to present-day
Socorro, New Mexico. A reference from 1598 suggests Teypana was on the west bank of the
Rio Grande, downriver from the pueblo of Pilabó (the site of modern Socorro). Found in a partly flawed list of Piro pueblos, the reference is somewhat problematic. In 1598,
Juan de Oñate
Juan de Oñate y Salazar (; 1550–1626) was a Spanish conquistador from New Spain, explorer, and colonial governor of the province of Santa Fe de Nuevo México in the viceroyalty of New Spain. He led early Spanish expeditions to the Great ...
and an advance party of his
colonists were given food and water by the people of Teypana. In response, they named the settlement “Socorro”, which means “help” or “aid” in Spanish. By 1626, the name had become associated with the Piro pueblo of
Pilabó, site of the first permanent mission in Piro territory, now buried under the town of Socorro, NM.
It has been claimed that “Teypana” means “village flower” in the Piro language.
[Julyan, Robert, ''The Place Names of New Mexico: Revised Ed.,'' (Albuquerque, University of New Mexico Press, 1998) p. 351.] As the Piro language survives only in fragments, however, the meaning of the name "Teypana", like all 17th-century Piro place names, remains unknown.
Michael Bletzer has done a lot of excavation on a site in the vicinity of
Luis Lopez which he believes to be the Teypana village.
Footnotes
Native American tribes in New Mexico
Colonial New Mexico
Piro Pueblos of Socorro County, New Mexico
Pueblos in New Mexico
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