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The Spanish Borderlands, Historiography Redux*

David J. Weber
Southern Methodist University

THE WORD BORDERLANDS has many meanings in North American historiography, but this short overview focuses on the time and place that American historians have long known as the Spanish Borderlands. Historian Herbert Eugene Bolton, the much-studied father of what came to be known as the "Bolton School," popularized the term "Spanish Borderlands" in a little book of the same title, published by Yale in 1921. The University of New Mexico Press reprinted that volume in 1996, with a fine introduction by Al Hurtado, who is completing a biography of Bolton.1 Bolton taught the history of the Americas, South as well as North, and ranged across Latin America in his pioneering transnational work.2 In much of his writing, however, he aimed to add a Spanish dimension to the Anglo-centric history of the United States. That was certainly the case with his little book on the Spanish Borderlands. Bolton defined the Spanish Borderlands as those parts of the United States once claimed by Spain, from California to Florida, thus situating the Borderlands within the framework of United States history. 1
      My own survey of the field, The Spanish Frontier in North America, published in 1992, followed Bolton's anachronistic model of placing a frontier of an empire within the boundaries of a nation that did not then exist.3 My borderlands, like Bolton's, included the region from California to Florida, but today I am going to restrict myself to the western borderlands, from California to Texas, and some of its recent Anglophone historiography. Even with this limitation, this short essay can only be suggestive, not comprehensive.4 2
      In 1986, when I began working on The Spanish Frontier, it seemed clear that Bolton's project of enlarging American history had not come to fruition. Notwithstanding a substantial outpouring of books and articles, the Spanish borderlands had fallen from fashion in university history departments and had failed to win the attention of writers of American history textbooks. United States historians saw the field as part of Latin American history and ignored it. Latin American historians regarded it as belonging to the history of the United States, and likewise gave it short shrift.5 3
      In 2005, nearly twenty years later, historians of the United States have come to find much of interest in America's Spanish past—as have historians of Latin America. The shift, it could be argued, began with Columbus. The 500th anniversary of Columbus's discovery of America in 1992 galvanized writers and publishers, bringing a new burst of interdisciplinary energy to the study of the Spanish Borderlands. One series alone, David Hurst Thomas's three-volume Columbian Consequences, contained nearly 100 original articles that provided Archaeological and Historical Perspectives on the Spanish Borderlands. Thomas also edited a twenty-seven volume set of Spanish Borderlands Sourcebooks, which reprinted some 450 older articles on a variety of themes and places.6 4
      These and other Columbus-inspired works on the Borderlands appeared at a propitious time—no small matter. A text, as the ever-quotable Stanley Fish once observed, takes on meaning in the context of its time—"the temporal dimension in which [the text's] meanings were actualized."7 By the early 1990s, Latinos had become more numerous, better educated, and politically more powerful throughout the nation, but particularly along the southern tier of the United States from Florida to California. The story of the Spanish Borderlands was part of their story. At the same time, the population centers of the United States had drifted southward to the Sunbelt, where Anglo American newcomers discovered that the thirteen colonies represented only part of the story of America's colonial origins. Historians of Early America, who once focused almost exclusively on the planting of English "seeds" in American soil, found themselves in a new biosphere. As Helena Wall, a self-described "British North Americanist," put it in an article published in 1996: "the changing politics, population, and intellectual climate of the United States demand that we rethink our common past."8 5
      Explaining America's multicultural present by writing more inclusive histories of the nation's multiple colonial origins was not new to Early Americanists. A generation earlier, historians of English colonial America had begun to explore what Gary Nash called Red, White, and Black, but they had done so largely within the confines of the East Coast.9 By the 1990s, however, the work of a generation of Early American historians had become transcontinental and merged with the work of the New Western Historians as well as with new scholarship on the borderlands.10 The result is apparent in college textbooks in American history, in encyclopaedias, and in synthetic works such as Edward Countryman's Americans: A Collision of Histories, James Axtell's Indians' New South, and Colin Calloway's One Vast Winter Count: The Native American West Before Lewis and Clark.11 6
      For Early Americanists, Alan Taylor's magisterial American Colonies, published in late 2001, contains the finest summation of the state of the field. Taylor begins by reminding his readers that "To write a history of colonial America used to be easier, because the human cast and the geographic stage were both considered so much smaller."12 His cast includes Africans and Indians as well as Europeans, and his stage sprawls out to the Pacific, embracing the Spanish, French, and Russian colonies as well as the traditional Dutch and English. Bolton would have been pleased. The 1990s, as Fritz Schwaller observed, had seen "A New Dawn for the Borderlands," or, as James Sandos put it, they had seen "the Borderlands enter American history."13 7
      In their day, Bolton and his disciples had been multicultural before multiculturalism was in vogue, yet they had little influence on American historiography beyond the borderlands themselves. One could make a case that the time wasn't right to "actualize" the text. One could also argue that as time went on the Boltonians made themselves irrelevant to new trends in American historiography by continuing to emphasize Spaniards over Mexicans, elites over common folk, exploration and institutions over everyday life, the romantic over the realistic, and narrative over analysis. 8
      Curiously, one of the weaknesses of the Bolton School derived from one of its strengths. It was grounded in documentary ore, often dug directly from archival sources. Bolton and his students devoted themselves to translating, editing, and publishing documents and other primary sources. This seemed entirely appropriate to a new field with a shallow historiographical tradition, and left us with still-valuable collections of documents, such as those translated and edited by Agapito Rey and George P. Hammond on Coronado and Oñate,14 or the volumes of documents that Alfred Barnaby Thomas translated and edited on Spanish-Indian relations in New Mexico.15 9
      The tradition of making documents available to a wider Anglophone readership remains central to borderlands scholarship in the United States. Between 1986 and 1997, a team at the University of Arizona published four volumes of documents on fortifications in the borderlands.16 Between 1989 and 2002, John Kessell and his associates at the University of New Mexico completed a hefty six-volume documentary collection on the era of Diego de Vargas.17 In 1999, Rolena Adorno and Patrick Pautz gave us the definitive three-volume translation and study of Cabeza de Vaca,18 followed by a single-volume paperback edition of Cabeza de Vaca's Narrative. Among the surprisingly large number of English translations of Cabeza de Vaca available for classroom use, some of them recent or recently reprinted, this is the best.19 In 2002, Richard Flint brought to light the records of a 1544 judicial investigation of the Coronado expedition, and in 2005 he and his wife, Shirley Cushing Flint, published a remarkable collection of documents on the Coronado expedition that has made the classic Hammond and Rey edition obsolete.20 These ventures stand out because of their size, but the last twenty years have also seen the publication of translations of many other Spanish documents relating to the borderlands, either in the form of books or articles.21 10
      These new collections may be deficient from the point of view of a philological purist who takes palpable pleasure in pointing out the errors of historians' ways,22 but they represent substantial improvements over earlier works. First, they are more attentive to variant versions of texts, and they provide more faithful transcriptions. Second, they reproduce the original Spanish documents in the form of either facsimiles or meticulous transcriptions. Third, the editors approach the documents with the sensibilities of contemporary American scholars, whose sympathies are as likely to be with Indians as with Spaniards. Finally, the current generation of Borderlands scholars is less prone than were the Boltonians to allow documents to speak for themselves, or to let the documents define the questions.23 11
      The best current work has brought questions to the documents, and those questions have addressed issues of such broad interest that they have attracted scholars outside the field as well as those within it. Ramón Gutiérrez's, When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away, which appeared to great acclaim in 1991, exemplifies the new tendency to connect with larger conversations. As his subtitle promised, Gutiérrez used New Mexico to explore Marriage, Sexuality, and Power. Drawing on the social sciences, literary theory, and comparative history, Gutiérrez turned the romantic view of the Spanish Borderlands on its head. His interpretation of sixteenth-century Pueblo Indian societies has come under harsh criticism, and his dark interpretation of New Mexico may come to be seen as a selective reading and a product of its time—much as Bolton's is seen. Without question, however, Gutiérrez moved us toward a fuller understanding of the relations of power and patriarchy in colonial New Mexico and helped add greater social dimension to the history of the borderlands—a dimension that echoes in other recent work.24 12
      Like Gutiérrez's book, James Brooks' Captives and Cousins, published a decade later, in 2002, won a surfeit of prizes and its subtitle also promised to explore big questions: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest Borderlands.25 It, too, delivered on its promise. With flair and imagination, Brooks shows that Hispanics and independent Indians in New Mexico, whom scholars had relegated to separate spheres, had interdependent raiding economies built on captive women, children, and livestock. (The publication of Brooks' book by the Omohundro Institute for Early American History is, in itself, an indication of the growing acceptance of the Spanish borderlands as a subfield of American history.) 13
      These two bookends of recent borderlands scholarship—When Jesus Came and Captives and Cousins—ignore the political boundaries that delimited the field for the Boltonians. Intent on rehabilitating Spanish institutions and Spanish leaders, the Boltonians tended to confine their inquiries to the years before 1821, when Mexico became independent and Spain disappeared from the borderlands. Social phenomenon, however, like sexuality, marriage, and power, or slavery, kinship and community, do not fit in political boxes; neither Gutiérrez nor Brooks allowed changes of regime to stop them from carrying their stories forward in time. Gutiérrez and Brooks also entered into larger conversations because they spoke to current interests in Indians and in those mixed bloods of the borderlands whose descendents became the first Mexican Americans. Each of these subjects—Native American and Mexican-American history—has come to have its own constituencies and literatures, of course, and each has furthered our understanding of what we once thought of as the Spanish borderlands. 14
      Historians of Mexican Americans have focused primarily on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but some of their work sheds light on the antecedents of the Mexican-American experience in the Spanish-Mexican colonial eras—as does that of the "new" borderlands or transnational historians whose work overlaps with Mexican-American history.26 The relevance of Spanish colonial to Mexican-American history, and the relevance of Mexican-American history to the Spanish colonial past, seems well established.27 Let me, then, briefly explore the question of Native-American history. 15
      The last two decades have seen the publication of numerous studies of distinct Indian peoples who had their own borderlands with Spaniards, and Spaniards with them.28 Gary Anderson's book, The Indian Southwest, 1580–1830. Ethnogenesis and Reinvention, which appeared in 1999, is an outstanding example. Anderson effectively blurs the boundaries between Indians and Spaniards by explaining how Indian groups absorbed Spaniards into their societies, and he adds a new dimension to our understanding of Spanish missions by portraying them as loci of Indian reinvention. He argues that many of the Indians who entered missions, either by force of Spanish arms or as a result of the debilitating effects of disease or intertribal warfare, used missions for temporary refuge, regrouped, and then fled to "return to a more mobile life in the countryside."29 Yet, rather than regard his work as a contribution to borderlands history, Anderson chose to write against a "Bolton school of history" that, he claims, has failed consistently to see Indians "as actors rather than as perpetrators or victims."30 16
      I would have no quarrel with that if he had singled out certain Boltonians of a previous generation, but not his use of the term "school" which Anderson imagines as widespread and extending to the present day. Its members include scholars as various as ethnohistorian Elizabeth John, anthropologist Edward Spicer, and me. If some of the Boltonians caricatured Indians, Anderson often caricatures Spaniards. In his pages, Spaniards encroached or invaded, while Apache newcomers to the region merely "created a place for themselves in the Southwest."31 Spaniards assaulted or ambushed Comanches while, in a characteristic passage, Comanches simply "carried off a dozen farm workers near Pecos," apparently without assault or ambush.32 Spaniards were treacherous, but Comanches who broke the peace or their word were merely "suspicious of Spanish motives," or displayed "political acumen."33 After 1700, Anderson tells us, his heroic, reinvented societies brought Spaniards "to their knees in the Southwest."34 If so, one wonders why Comanches entered into enduringly peaceful arrangements with Spaniards in New Mexico and San Antonio in the 1780s, and why, as the colonial period drew to a close, Comanches and Lipanes entered San Antonio peacefully to trade with the townsfolk, as he himself tells us.35 17
      Where the Boltonians sympathized with Spaniards to a fault, then, some ethnohistorians sympathize excessively with Indians. Either stance makes it difficult to understand the full nature of Indian-Spanish transactions, for the reality was that the invaded and the invaders, the colonized and the colonizers, the captives and the captors, the customers and the merchants, were all locked in an embrace—figuratively and sometimes literally, as James Brooks has shown us. For practical and political reasons, however, we find it difficult to move beyond the circumscribed roles of historians of Spaniards or historians of Indians, to become simply "historians." I recently read, to my dismay, the work of a historian who apparently felt obliged to begin and end her sensitive work on Chiricahua Apaches by apologizing that she, a non-Indian, had written it, and that she had done so in English, the language of the colonizers.36 And so we are divided not only by our point of view, but by our ethnicity and heritage. 18
      The work of Gutiérrez and Brooks, however, suggests that the division between borderlands historians and ethnohistorians is breaking down. So does other recent work on borderlands, including Ross Frank's exceptional study of New Mexico's Spanish-Pueblos economies in the late colonial era,37 and other recent work on missions in Spanish -Mexican California. In 2004 alone, three important books—by Kent Lightfoot, James Sandos, and Richard Street—looked at missions in California with greater attention to the Indians in the missions than to Hispanic missionaries.38 Each of these books breaks new ground in different ways, but in their attempt to understand Indians as active agents within the California missions they follow the lead of earlier scholars like Sherburne F. Cook, and reflect the current trend among students of missions elsewhere in Spanish America.39 19
      One other boundary also seems to be crumbling. Now that United States historians have embraced the colonial borderlands, borderlands historians who have been trained as Latin Americanists can come out of the closet. Some of the most interesting work on the colonial borderlands has been done on regions just south of the present-day border. Among American scholars, one thinks of the work of Cynthia Radding on Sonora, Susan Deeds on Nueva Vizcaya, Cheryl English Martin on Chihuahua, and Leslie Offut on Coahuila.40 Two recent anthologies, New Views of Borderlands History, edited by Robert H. Jackson,41 and Choice Persuasion, and Coercion: Social Control on Spain's North American Frontiers, edited by Frank de la Teja and Ross Frank,42 suggest that we now work in a borderlands that span both sides of the present border—as some of our predecessors hoped we would.43 20
      Within this expanded colonial borderlands we have seen fresh work on traditional borderlands topics—biography, exploration, law, material culture, missions, presidios, and towns. That production seems likely to continue, with much of it interdisciplinary and informed by current interests in Native Americans, the environment, community, class, gender, identity, marginality, and cultural hybridity.44 It may be that the field of the old Spanish Borderlands has also taken a turn toward more explicitly comparative history, within the confines of North America (where Bolton and his followers drew comparisons with English America) and beyond.45 My judgment may be clouded by the fact that I have worked for the last decade on a study of the edges of the Spanish empire where Spanish domains fronted on lands controlled by independent Indians. The results of that work, Bárbaros: Spaniards and Their Savages in the Age of Enlightenment,46 looks at Spanish relations with a variety of Indian peoples, including: Araucanians in Chile; Pampas in Argentina, Chiriguanos in Bolivia; Miskitos in Nicaragua; and Apaches, Comanches, and Creeks in what is now the United States. Its time frame is the late-eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries—when the effects of the Enlightenment were beginning to be felt in Spanish America. Unable to subjugate many of the tribal peoples on its frontiers and borderlands, enlightened Spain experimented with new strategies for co-existing with them. In the end, though, even the streamlined, efficient bureaucracy of an enlightened Spain did not so much create Indian policy as negotiate it with different Indians as local circumstances demanded. 21
      My own effort to understand Spanish Indian policy in North America as part of a larger hemispheric phenomenon is not unique. Articles have appeared in various journals and anthologies, including Contested Ground. Comparative Frontiers on the Northern and Southern Edges of the Spanish Empire, edited by Donna J. Guy and Thomas E. Sheridan.47 In 2004, in a dazzling book, ethnohistorian Daniel Reff compared Christianity's rapid rise in Europe, and its rise in Mexico a thousand years later, and argued that its rapid spread in both areas coincided with the spread of deadly contagious diseases and social dislocation. Crossing disciplines with apparent ease, Reff offered a fresh, erudite, and compelling explanation of how Jesuit missionaries in Mexico advanced their cause by echoing the rhetoric and strategies of early Christians.48 The year 2004 also saw the publication of Kent Lightfoot's book, Indians, Missionaries, and Merchants, in which he compared the impact on California Indians of Russia's mercantile colony to Spain's missionary colony.49 Most recently Cynthia Radding has written a book-length comparison of the Indian communities of northwestern Mexico with those of the eastern lowlands of Bolivia. In each area, Indians found themselves occupying Jesuit provinces on the peripheries of principal mining centers of Spanish America. The Jesuit influence notwithstanding, Radding finds that distinctive Indian cultures and distinctive ecological niches led to divergent historical trajectories.50 22
      Twenty years ago, I concluded an examination of the historiography of the Spanish Borderlands by suggesting that its historians should stop "walking uneasily on the narrow edges of empires ... [and] recognize that they have a secure foothold in both English- and Spanish-speaking America. As the juncture of those two worlds continues to grow in population and in economic and strategic importance, the perspective of Borderlands historians seems likely to become increasingly valued." Today, looking back over the last two decades, it appears to me that it has.51 23


Notes

* I am grateful to María Montoya and Gregory Nobles for suggesting that I prepare this essay for a panel at the 2005 annual meeting of the Organization of American Historians, and to my fellow panelists, Sarah Deutsch and Elliott Young.

1. Herbert E. Bolton, The Spanish Borderlands: A Chronicle of Old Florida and the Southwest, Foreword Albert L. Hurtado (1st ed., 1921; Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996). For a sample of Hurtado's biography to come, see Albert L. Hurtado, "Herbert E. Bolton, Racism, and American History," Pacific Historical Review 62 (May 1993), 127–42; Albert L. Hurtado, "Parkmanizing the Spanish Borderlands: Bolton, Turner, and the Historians' World," Western Historical Quarterly 26 (1995), 149–67; Albert L. Hurtado, "Romancing the West in the Twentieth Century: The Politics of History in a Contested Region," Western Historical Quarterly 32 (Winter 2001), 417–35.

2. Samuel Truett, "Epics of Greater America: Herbert Eugene Bolton's Quest for a Transnational American History," Interpreting Spanish Colonialism: Empires, Nations, and Legends, eds. Schmidt-Nowara and John Nieto-Phillips (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, forthcoming)

3. David J. Weber, The Spanish Frontier in North America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992). John L. Kessell, Spain in the Southwest: A Narrative History of Colonial New Mexico, Arizona, Texas, and California (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2002), a vividly written history of the southwestern borderlands, also follows this convention.

4. See David J. Weber, "John Francis Bannon and the Historiography of the Spanish Borderlands, Retrospect and Prospect," Myth and the History of the Hispanic Southwest: Essays by David J. Weber (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1988), 55–88 (this essay, written in 1986, first appeared in the Journal of the Southwest in 1987), and David J. Weber, "The Spanish Borderlands of North America: A Historiography," Magazine of History 14 (Summer 2000), 3–4, 5–11, for discussions of some works that I either ignore, or gloss over here.

5. Weber, 1988, 78–88.

6. David Hurst Thomas, ed. Columbian Consequences, 3 vols. (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989–1991); David Hurst Thomas, ed. Spanish Borderlands Source Books (27 vols.; New York: Garland, 1991).

7. Stanley Fish, Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980), 2.

8. Helena Wall, "Confessions of a British North Americanist: Borderlands Historiography and Early American History," Reviews in American History 25 (Mar. 1997), 2.

9. Gary B. Nash, Red, White, and Black. The Peoples of Early America (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1974).

10. Some historians fall in both camps, none more famously or effectively than Richard White.

11. Jacob Ernest Cooke, ed. Encyclopedia of the North American Colonies (3 vols. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1993); Edward Countryman, Americans: A Collision of Histories (New York: Hill & Wang, 1996); James Axtell, The Indians' New South: Cultural Change in the Colonial Southeast (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1997); Colin G. Calloway, One Vast Winter Count: The American West Before Lewis and Clark (Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 2003).

12. (New York: Viking, 2001), x.

13. John F. Schwaller, "A New Dawn for the Borderlands," Latin American Research Review 32 (1997), 160–170; James A. Sandos, "From 'Boltonlands' to Weberlands': The Borderlands Enter American History," American Quarterly 46 (Dec. 1994), 595–604.

14. George P. Hammond and Agapito Rey, eds. and trans. Narratives of the Coronado Expedition, 1540–1542 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1940); George P. Hammond and Agapito Rey, eds. and trans. Don Juan de Oñate: Colonizer of New Mexico, 1595–1628 (2 vols.; Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1953).

15. Alfred B. Thomas, ed. and trans. Forgotten Frontiers: A Study of the Spanish Indian Policy of Don Juan Bautista de Anza, Governor of New Mexico, 1777–1787 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1932); Alfred B. Thomas, ed. and trans. After Coronado: Spanish Exploration Northeast of New Mexico, 1696–1727 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1935); Alfred B. Thomas, ed. and trans. The Plains Indians and New Mexico, 1751–1778: A Collection of Documents Illustrative of the History of the Eastern Frontier of New Mexico (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1940). These continue to be consulted by archaeologists, anthropologists, historians, and, in recent years, by scholars interested in recovering or explaining America's Hispanic literary heritage. See, for example, José Rabasa, Writing Violence on the Northern Frontier: The Historiography of Sixteenth-Century New Mexico and Florida and the Legacy of Conquest (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000).

16. Thomas H. Naylor and Charles W. Polzer, eds. The Presidio and Militia on the Northern Frontier of New Spain. A Documentary History. Vol. One: 1570–1700 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1986); Thomas H. Naylor and Charles W. Polzer, eds. Pedro de Rivera and the Military Regulations for Northern New Spain, 1724–1729: A Documentary History of His Frontier Inspection and the Reglamento de 1729 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1988); Charles W. Polzer and Thomas E. Sheridan, eds. The Presidio and Militia on the Northern Frontier of New Spain: A Documentary History. Volume 2, Part 1: The Californias and Sinaloa-Sonora, 1700–1765 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1997); Diana Hadley, Thomas H. Naylor, and Mardith K. Schuetz-Miller, eds. The Presidio and Militia on the Northern Frontier of New Spain: A Documentary History. Volume 2, Part 2: The Central Corridor and the Texas Corridor, 1700–1765 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1997).

17. John L. Kessell, ed. Remote Beyond Compare: Letters of don Diego de Vargas to His Family from New Spain and New Mexico, 1675–1706 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989); John L. Kessell and Rick Hendricks, eds. By Force of Arms: The Journals of Don Diego de Vargas, New Mexico, 1691–93 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1992); John L. Kessell, Rick Hendricks, and Meredith D. Dodge, eds. To the Royal Crown Restored: The Journals of don Diego de Vargas, New Mexico, 1692–1694 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995); John L. Kessell, Rick Hendricks, and Meredith D. Dodge, eds. Blood on the Boulders: The Journals of Don Diego de Vargas, New Mexico, 1694–1697 (2 vols. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1998), John L. Kessell, Rick Hendricks, Meredith D. Dodge, and Larry D. Miller, eds. That Disturbances Cease: The Journals of don Diego de Vargas, New Mexico, 1697–1700 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2000); John L. Kessell, Rick Hendricks, Meredith D. Dodge, and Larry D. Miller, eds. A Settling of Accounts: The Journals of Don Diego de Vargas, New Mexico, 1700–1704 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2002). They also condensed one a volume of Vargas's letters to his family for students and general readers: John L. Kessell, Rick Hendricks, and Meredith D. Dodge, eds. Letters from the New World: Selected Correspondence of don Diego de Vargas to His Family, 1675–1706 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1992).

18. Rolena Adorno and Patrick Charles Pautz, eds. Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca: His Account, His Life, and the Expedition of Pánfilo de Narváez (3 vols. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999).

19. Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, The Narrative of Cabeza de Vaca, eds. and trans. Rolena Adorno and Patrick Charles Pautz (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003). The competition includes Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, Cabeza de Vaca's Adventures in the Unknown Interior of America, ed. and trans. Cyclone Covey (1st ed., 1961; Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1983); Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, The Account: Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca's Relación, ed. and trans. Martin A. Favata and José B. Fernández (Houston: Arte Público Press, 1993); Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, Castaways, eds. and trans. Enrique Pupo-Walker and Frances M. López-Morillas (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993)

20. Richard Flint, Great Cruelties have been Reported: The 1544 Investigation of the Coronado Expedition (Dallas: SMU Press, 2002). Richard Flint and Shirley Cushing Flint, eds. and trans. Documents of the Coronado Expedition, 1539–1542. "They Were Not Familiar with His Majesty, nor Did They Wish to Be His Subjects" (Dallas: SMU Press, 2005).

21. Books alone, not counting article-length publications, include: Juan Domingo Arricivita, Apostolic Chronicle of Juan Domingo Arricivita: The Franciscan Mission Frontier in the Eighteenth Century in Arizona, Texas, and the Californias, eds. Vivian C. Fisher and W. Michael Mathes. trans. George P. Hammond (1st ed 1746; 2 vols.; Berkeley: Academy of American Franciscan History, 1996); Alonso de Benavides, A Harvest of Souls. The Memorial of Fray Alonso de Benavides, 1630, ed. Baker H. Morrow: University Press of Colorado, 1996), Juan Bautista Chapa, Texas & Northeastern Mexico, 1630–1690, ed. William C. Foster. trans. Ned F. Brierley (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997); José Cortés, Views from the Apache Frontier: Report on the Northern Provinces of New Spain by José Cortés, Lieutenant in the Royal Corps of Engineers, 1799, Eds. and trans. Elizabeth A. H. John and John Wheat (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1989); Auguste Duhaut-Cilly, A Voyage to California, the Sandwich Islands, and Around the World in the Years, 1826–1829. eds. and trans. August Frugé and Neal Harlow (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); Brian Imhoff, ed. The Diary of Juan Domínguez de Mendoza's Expedition into Texas, 1683–1684. A Spanish Language Critical Edition with Facsimile (Dallas: Clements Center for Southwest Studies, 2002); Vivian C. Fisher, ed. and trans. Esteban José Martínez: His Voyage in 1779 to Supply Alta California (Berkeley, CA: The Bancroft Library, 2002); Jack Jackson and William C. Foster, eds. Imaginary Kingdom: Texas as Seen by the Rivera and Rubi Military Expeditions, 1727 and 1767 (Austin: Texas State Historical Association, 1995); John Kendrick, ed. The Voyage of the Sutil and Mexicana, 1792: The Last Spanish Exploration of the Northwest Coast of America (Spokane: Arthur H. Clark, 1991), Roque Madrid, The Navajos in 1705: Roque Madrid's Campaign Journal, ed. and trans. Rick Hendricks and John P. Wilson (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996); Donald C. Cutter, ed. and trans. Writings of Mariano Payeras (Santa Barbara: Bellerophon Books, 1995); Andrés Pérez de Ribas, History of the Triumphs of Our Holy Faith amongst the Most Barbarous and Fierce Peoples of the New World [1645], eds. and trans. Daniel T. Reff, Maureen Ahern, and Richard K. Danford (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1999); Gaspar Pérez de Villagrá, Historia de la Nuevo México, 1610. A Critical and Annotated Spanish/English Edition, eds. and trans. Miguel Encinias, Alfred Rodríguez, Joseph P. Sánchez, and Fayette S. Curtis (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1992); Hugo O'Conor, The Defenses of Northern New Spain: Hugo O'Conor's Report to Teodoro de Croix, July 22, 1777, ed. and trans. Donald C. Cutter (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press/DeGolyer Library, 1994).

22. I have in mind Jerry Craddock. See Jerry R. Craddock, "Juan de Oñate in Quivira," Journal of the Southwest 40 (Winter 1998), and his example of the ideal way to reproduce a document.

23. Exceptions in borderlands scholarship abound, and I do not mean to tar all Boltonians with the same brush. It was also the case that some of the most critical work on borderlands topics came from scholars like France V. Scholes and Sherburne F. Cook, who had no direct association with the Bolton tradition.

24. Ramón A. Gutiérrez, When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality, and Power in New Mexico, 1500–1846 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991). Albert L. Hurtado, Intimate Frontiers: Sex, Gender, and Culture in Old California (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999); Dedra S. McDonald, "Incest, Power, and Negotiation in the Spanish Colonial Borderlands: A Tale of Two Families," Colonial Latin American Historical Review 6 (Fall 1997), 525–57; Dedra S. McDonald, "Intimacy and Empire: Indian-African Interaction in Spanish Colonial New Mexico, 1500–1800," American Indian Quarterly 22 (Winter 1998), 134–56; Martina E. Will de Chaparro, "From Body to Corpse. The Treatment of the Dead in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century New Mexico," New Mexico Historical Review 79 (Winter 2004), 1–29.

25. James F. Brooks, Captives and Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest Borderlands (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2002).

26. Gutiérrez, 1991, is considered a work in Chicano history as much as in borderlands history. See, for example, Arnoldo DeLeón's foreword to David J. Weber, ed. Foreigners in Their Native Land: Historical Roots of the Mexican Americans (1st ed., 1973; 30th anniversary edition, Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2003), vii-viii. See, too, Douglas Monroy, Thrown Among Strangers: The Making of Mexican Culture in Frontier California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), Armando C. Alonzo, Tejano Legacy: ancheros and Settlers in South Texas, 1734–1900 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1998), and Samuel Truett and Elliott Young, eds. Continental Crossroads. Remapping U.S.-Mexico Borderlands History (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004).

27. See, for example, the opening chapters of Manuel G. Gonzales, Mexicanos. A History of Mexicans in the United States (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999).

28. Some of those books focus on the Spanish era alone, but most carry the story beyond the Spanish era to look at Indians under Mexico and/or the United States. Writers of these historical accounts include anthropologists, whose work represents a contribution to historiography regardless of their discipline. Books include Gerald Betty, Comanche Society: Before the Reservation (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2002); William B. Griffen, Apaches at War and Peace: The Janos Presidio, 1750–1858 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1988); Peter Iverson, The Navajos (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976), Nancy Parrott Hickerson, The Jumanos: Hunters and Traders of the South Plains (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994); Thomas W. Kavanagh, Comanche Political History: An Ethnohistorical Perspective, 1706–1875 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996); David La Vere, The Caddo Chiefdoms: Caddo Economics and Politics, 700–1835 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998); David La Vere, The Texas Indians (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004); George Harwood Phillips, Indians and Intruders in Central California, 1769–1849 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993), Robert Ricklis, The Karankawa Indians of Texas: An Ecological Study of Cultural Tradition and Change (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996); Carroll L. Riley, Rio del Norte: People of the Upper Rio Grande from Earliest Times to the Pueblo Revolt (Salt Lake: University of Utah Press, 1995); Martín Salinas, Indians of the Rio Grande Delta: Their Role in the History of Southern Texas and Northeastern Mexico (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990); F. Todd Smith, The Caddo Indians: Tribes at the Convergence of Empires, 1542–1854 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1995); F. Todd Smith, The Wichita Indians: Traders of Texas and the Southern Plains, 1540–1845 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2000); H. Henrietta Stockel, On the Bloody Road to Jesus: Christianity and the Chiricahua Apaches (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2004); Maria F Wade, The Native Americans of the Texas Edwards Plateau, 1582–1799 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003).

29. Gary Clayton Anderson, The Indian Southwest, 1580–1830: Ethnogenesis and Reinvention (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999), 67.

30. Ibid., 6–7, 267.

31. Ibid., 106.

32. Ibid., 211.

33. Ibid., 213, 214.

34. Ibid., 104.

35. Ibid., 142.

36. Stockel, 2004.

37. Ross Frank, From Settler to Citizen: New Mexican Economic Development and the Creation of a Vecino Society, 1750–1820 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).

38. Kent G. Lightfoot, Indians, Missionaries, and Merchants. The Legacy of Colonial Encounters on the California Frontiers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004); James A. Sandos, Converting California. Indians and Franciscans in the Missions, 1769–1836 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004); Richard Steven Street, Beasts of the Field. A Narrative of California Farmworkers, 1769–1913 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004). To this list we will soon add Steven W. Hackel, Children of Coyote, Missionaries of St. Francis: Indian-Spanish Relations in Colonial California, 1769–1850 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2005).

39. See, for example, Sherburne F. Cook, The Conflict Between the California Indians and White Civilization (1st ed., 1943–46; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976); Jeannette Henry Costo and Rupert Costo, eds. The Missions of California: A Legacy of Genocide (San Francisco: Indian Historian Press for the American Indian Historical Association, 1987); Robert H. Jackson and Edward Castillo, Indians, Franciscans, and Spanish Colonization: The Impact of the Mission System on California Indians (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995); Randall Milliken, A Time of Little Choice: The Disintegration of Tribal Culture in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1769–1810 (Menlo Park: Ballena Press, 1995); and Erick Langer and Robert Jackson, eds. The New Latin American Mission History (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995).

40. Cynthia Radding, Wandering Peoples: Colonialism, Ethnic Spaces, and Ecological Frontiers in Northwestern Mexico, 1700–1850 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997); Susan M. Deeds, Defiance and Deference in Mexico's Colonial North: Indians Under Spanish Rule in Nueva Vizcaya (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003); Cheryl English Martin, Governance and Society in Colonial Mexico: Chihuahua in the Eighteenth Century (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996); Leslie S. Offutt, Saltillo, 1770–1810. Town and Region in the Mexican North (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2001).

41. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1988).

42. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005).

43. Oakah L. Jones, Jr., in particular, both in word and by example, pushed American historians to broaden their conception of the borderlands to include northern Mexico. See, for example, his Jones, Los Paisanos: Spanish Settlers on the Northern Frontier of New Spain (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1979), and Jones, Nueva Vizcaya: Heartland of the Spanish Frontier (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1988). Recall that I focus in this essay on Anglophone historiography; our Mexican counterparts have illuminated this area far more than we have.

44. As exemplified by the following, published in this decade: Elinore M. Barrett, Conquest and Catastrophe: Changing Rio Grande Pueblo Settlement Patterns in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2002); Virginia Bouvier, Women and the Conquest of California, 1542–1840 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2001); James Early, Presidio, Mission, and Pueblo: Spanish Architecture and Urbanism in the United States (Dallas: SMU Press, 2003); Richard Flint and Shirley Cushing Flint, eds. The Coronado Expedition From the Distance of 460 Years (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2003); Donald T. Garate, Juan Bautista de Anza. Basque Explorer in the New World, 1693–1740 (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2003); Miroslava Chávez García, Negotiating Conquest: Gender and Power in California, 1770s–1880s (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2004); Alex D. Krieger, We Came Naked and Barefoot: The Journey of Cabeza de Vaca Across North America (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002); Steven Silliman, Lost Laborers in Colonial California: Native Americans and the Archaeology of Rancho Petaluma (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2004).

45. Recent works that compare phenomenon within different provinces of Spanish North America include: Rob Galgano, Feast of Souls: Indians and Spaniards in the Seventeenth-Century Missions of Florida and New Mexico (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005) and Amy Meschke, "Women's Lives through Women's Wills in the Spanish and Mexican Borderlands, 1750–1846" (Ph.D. diss., Southern Methodist University, 2004). See, too, Deborah A. Rosen, "Women and Property across Colonial America: A Comparison of Legal Systems in New Mexico and New York," William and Mary Quarterly 60 (Apr. 2003), 355–81, and Andrés Reséndez, Changing National Identities at the Frontier. Texas and New Mexico, 1800–1850 (Cambridge, ENG: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

46. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005).

47. (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1998).

48. Daniel T. Reff, Plagues, Priests, and Demons: Sacred Narratives and the Rise of Christianity in the Old World and the New (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004)

49. Lightfoot, 2004.

50. Cynthia Radding, Landscapes of Power and Identity: Comparative Histories in the Sonoran Desert and the Forests of Amazonia from Colony to Republic (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005).

51. Weber, 1988, 88 (writing in 1986).

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