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Review
| Spain in the Southwest: A Narrative History of Colonial New Mexico, Arizona, Texas, and California, by John L. Kessell. Norman, Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 2002. 480 pages. $19.95, paper.
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| John Kessell's most recent work attempts to provide a narrative overview of the Spanish experience in the Southwest. Ten years have passed since the publication of David Weber's sweeping Spanish Frontier in North America. And so, some of us would argue, it is time for a new overview of the Spanish Southwest, one that will take into account the volumes of research produced over the course of this past decade. Kessell's new volume is not this work. His encyclopedic sweep of the region is impressive, as is the number of pictures and images he was able to include in the volume. Yet his neglect of recent scholarship by women and Indigenous scholars resulted in one-dimensional text that might have been useful two decades ago, but would not be useful in our classrooms today. |
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In producing his text, Kessell attempts to present a "balanced" history, one where "human commonalities" are stressed instead of differences. He argues that today, "we tend to project ethnic differences back into the past at the expense of human commonalities (xi)." Yet in the world of human commonalities he investigates, Kessell fails to acknowledge a critical factor; the time of which he was writing was one of colonization, where indigenous peoples were subjugated by Spaniards, and where the processes through which this was achieved were violent. In his broad and narrative sweep of the Spanish Colonial Southwest, Kessell provides a sympathetic view of Spanish colonizers as they wander onto the North American continent in the fifteenth century, slowly establish missions and presidios, and finally lose their holdings to a new wave of invaders in the mid-nineteenth century. |
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Kessell's pro-Spanish bias is apparent in the very descriptors he employs. Cristóbal de Oñate is "a level headed Basque," while the indigenous peoples of the Guadalajara uprising are "delirious attackers" (47, 51). The Chichimecas are "ferocious, naked, painted wild men," while Captain Juan Martínez de Montoya is a "tall, handsome, black-bearded Castilian" (58, 93). "Mixbloods" are "jovial" (114). Those of us who have worked with documents from the Spanish colonial era know that this is the language the Spaniards used to describe themselves, indigenous peoples, and castas. The reproduction of this language in a contemporary text, especially one that purports to be "balanced," is problematic. |
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Problems with Kessell's text range far beyond his basic descriptive phrases and extend to the belittling of the sexual violence that native peoples suffered under Spanish rule. He writes, "Rapes were common," then in the same paragraph asserts "Doubtless, too, on occasion Native women consented willingly and enjoyed sexual encounters with the invaders" (51). Yet Spanish colonial documents consistently report incidences of soldiers raping not only women but young girls, of some friars violating women while others complain of the unchecked sexual violence of local soldiers. Projecting a "balanced" image of sexual violence and sexual consent onto the violent script of the past does a disservice to the native communities that survived such violence, the communities that did not survive, and to the modern reader attempting to understand the past. In relation, while many authors, including Antonia Castañeda, Albert Hurtado, Deena González, and even the late Sherburne Cooke, have acknowledged the violent and critical role of missionary friars in Spanish colonial processes, Kessell normalizes this role. This is most apparent in his telling of the 1680 Pueblo revolt where he writes, "Everywhere, the Pueblos were killing Hispanic New Mexicans...not even sparing the friars, several of whom had already died horrible deaths" (120). |
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Often, when my students criticize a text, I ask them, "Well, what could the author have done differently?" And so I will close with a discussion of what Kessell could have done differently. He could have consulted texts that address the role of sex and gender in colonial processes. Here the work of Castañeda and González come to mind. Likewise, in the 1990s, indigenous scholars such as Greg Sarris and Devon Abbott Mihesuah have challenged the ways that non-Native academics write about colonial processes, suggesting strategies to bring native perspectives to historical narratives. In today's increasingly diverse society, this is an imperative. Finally, after working with documents produced by the victors, we all need to check ourselves. Are we internalizing their values at the expense of the colonized? Have the colonizers become "levelheaded" and "handsome" and the colonized "wild" and "delirious"? |
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Ten years after the publication of David J. Weber's Spanish Frontier in North America, many of us continue to hope for a new and sweeping narrative that will provide the careful detail and vast, breathtaking imagery that Weber brought us ten years ago—a text that will do all this while integrating more recent indigenous and gendered scholarship into its vast wealth of resources. We continue to wait. |
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| Washington State University |
Linda Heidenreich |
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