Book Review

Canada and the United States

Ross Frank's carefully researched and well-written book covers a crucial period in the history of Spanish New Mexico and makes a substantial and welcome contribution to the growing field of borderlands studies. More thoroughly than any previous scholar, he documents the economic growth that began in New Mexico about 1780 and continued until the beginning of Mexico's War of Independence in 1810. He attributes this dramatic transformation to a number of interrelated causes, chief among them the defeat of Comanche Chief Cuerno Verde and his followers in 1779 and the definitive Spanish-Comanche alliance formalized in 1786. Burgeoning trade with Chihuahua and Sonora, government policies that increased New Mexicans' access to credit and bills of exchange, the provision of goods to the Comanches and other pacified Native groups, and the demands of frontier defense posts all stimulated New Mexico's economy as never before.

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Frank then traces the social and cultural shifts in Hispano villages and in Pueblo communities that resulted from these economic changes. The line between "Spanish" and "Pueblo" sharpened, as the two groups no longer relied so heavily on one another for mutual defense. Pueblo numbers stagnated while those of Hispanos expanded rapidly, and rates of intermarriage between the two groups declined. The relative symbiosis forged against a common enemy during the 1760s and 1770s gave way to intensified competition for resources, as Hispano vecinos founded new communities and steadily encroached on Indian lands. In sum, "social interaction between Pueblo Indians and vecinos became a casualty of the structural changes in the New Mexican economy" (p. 122).

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