o 1580, Martin Enríquez de Almanza, serving as the Viceroy of Nueva España, decided to establish military outposts along the merchant routes to protect merchants and merchandise passing through the area from Zacatecas to Mexico City. The Viceroy believed that the garrisons would stand as a buffer against the hostile Indians occupying the area. This led to the founding of La Villa de Nuestra Señora de la Asunción de Aguascalientes (The Village of Our Lady of the Assumption of Aguascalientes) on October 22, 1575 by Doñ Gerónimo de Orozco, the President of the Royal Audiencia and Governor of Nueva Galicia. The founding of the villa was approved by King Felipe II, the ruling monarch in Spain.
However, the intensity of the Chichimeca War continued to increase and by 1582, the population of Aguascalientes had dwindled to one military commander, 16 soldiers and two citizen residents. In effect, the small settlement - located in the middle of the war zone - was under siege. But in the late 1580s, the threat of Indian attack diminished steadily, as the Spanish authorities attempted to negotiate a peace with the Indians of the region. The last Indian attack took place in 1593, after which the threat of hostile attack disappeared entirely and the region experienced a new peace.
The new-found peace of the 1590s, according to the historian Peter Gerhard, "brought a tide of Spanish settlers beginning in the 1590s, mostly cattlemen and farmers, together with Indian and Negro retainers." Because epidemics and war had reduced the indigenous population of the area, many slaves were brought into to labor alongside the Indians as the small village of Aguascalientes grew in size and stature.
By 1610, the small town of Aguascalientes had approximately 25 Spanish residents, about fifty families of mestizos, at least 100 mulatos, twenty Black slaves, and ten Indians. Most of these twenty-five Spanish inhabitants are believed to have been
