Book Review

Methods/Theory

José Rabasa here brings together six essays on different topics of sixteenth-century conquest and cross-cultural encounters in northern New Spain. The introduction and epilogue provide thematic continuity to these historiographical commentaries, which focus on the problem of violence in historical acts and in the texts and images that convey its import for literary, philosophical, and juridical purposes. Four of these essays were published in earlier versions; the two original compositions constitute the second essay on "The Mediation of the Law in the New Mexico Corpus" and the sixth, "Of Massacre and Representation: Painting Hatred and Ceremonies of Possession in Protestant Anti-Spanish Pamphleteering." Together, these six chapters cluster around two geographical nodes of Spain's northern frontier: New Mexico and Florida. Each is an important site of borderlands encounters—New Mexico, because of its enduring Pueblo cultural legacy, and Florida, because it was the scene of early and violent European rivalries among Spanish, French, and British agents—but both remain outside the main arena of colonial formation in northern New Spain, where the mining industry, mission pueblos, and presidios supported a sustained history of settlement and cultural hybridity across multiple, contested frontiers.

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