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My sister did our geneology and traced our earliest ancestor to a man who came into what is now New Mexico with Onate in the late 1500’s. .... LatinaGOP

Interesting. Finding genealogy records has proven tough for that side of my family. .....When we went on a tour there, my mom got lots of nasty-gram looks from the tour guide. She finally asked my mom if she was ‘Spanish’ at the end of the tour. ..... Betis70

For Spanish genealogy research, you should try searching at PARES (Portada de Archivos Españoles - Web Portal of the Spanish Archives) run by the Spanish Government.

PARES

At "Búsqueda Avanzada" (Advanced Search) type in a last name in "Buscar" (Search) and you will get hits to the documents catalogued in archives all over Spain including the Spanish colonial archives (Archivo General de Indias).

Remember that search engines are very concrete thinkers and not very smart. You will get lots of hits for "Montalban" but will probably get zero hits for "Manuel Ignacio Francisco de Montalban y Ulloa". Keep the search simple.

A couple of years ago, if you discovered a document of interest to you, you had to order photocopies to be made. (You still can.)

Now, however, many of the documents have been digitized and you can view high quality digital images of them, online. Just click on the camera icon if the document has one.

I have discovered a lot of genealogical data in many of the documents, some dating back to the 1500's.

The good news:

1. There are digital images of over 2 million pages of documents. More digitized documents are being added every day.

The bad news:

1. They are in Spanish. (No problem for me.)
2. They are in OLD Spanish. (Okay, now we start having some problems. Thank goodness for online dictionaries.)
3. They are in handwriting.
4. They are in OLD handwriting.
5. They are sometimes in OLD, BAD handwriting.
6. The style of old handwriting changed from century to century. Once you learn the script from the 1700's, you can be lost in the 1600's. Once you learn the script from the 1600's you can be lost in the 1500's.
7. Even if you learn the script and the old language, the documents are full of abbreviations.

The good news, again:

There is help online.

The Mormons have a web page that gives you a tutorial on old Spanish script and abbreviations:

Spanish Script Tutorial created by the Center for Family History and Genealogy at Brigham Young University.

If you go to Google Books and search for "Paleografia española" you can dowload free digital copies of books witten in the 1800's and even the 1700's that taught Spaniards in the 1800's and 1700's how to read the paleography from the 1600's and before.

(Click to enlarge and go to this particular Google Book: "Anales de la Paleografía Española", 1857.)