| Book Review | The Western Historical Quarterly, 34.4

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| Book Review | The Western Historical Quarterly, 34.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Spain in the Southwest: A Narrative History of Colonial New Mexico, Arizona, Texas, and California. By John L. Kessell. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2002. xviii + 462 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, glossary, bibliography, index. $45.00.)

It is twenty years since I picked up my now-tattered copy of John L. Kessell's Kiva, Cross, and Crown: The Pecos Indians and New Mexico (Washington, DC, 1979) and discovered what a historian well steeped in the sources and gifted with narrative flair could do with the story of a single place in colonial New Mexico. Kessell, of course, went on to achieve distinction as a historian of the Spanish colonial Southwest and to give us the multivolume journals and papers of don Diego de Vargas. In Spain in the Southwest he combines his storyteller's skills and archival experience to offer a mature, spirited, and profusely illustrated survey of the region that will appeal to scholars and popular readers alike. His overarching interpretive premise is that although Spaniards and Native peoples derived from vastly different cultural and geographic worlds, "in human terms ... they understood each other very well" (p. xi). That tension, between difference and commonalty, would produce ghastly interethnic and internecine violence, periods of anxious accommodation, and a few moments of awkward laughter. In the end, says Kessell, if European and Native protagonists shared "similarly inconstant natures, then we need have no favorites" (p. xiii).

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