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Book Review
| James F. Brooks, Captives and Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest Borderlands, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. Pp. 419. $55.00 cloth (ISBN 00807827142); $22.50 paper (ISBN 0807853828).
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| Captives and Cousins provides a bold and sometimes controversial depiction of the Indian-Mestizo slave trade in New Mexico. James Brooks describes a surreptitious trade driven by an eclectic mix of honor, violence, and kinship. Emerging in the Southwest in the late sixteenth century, the Indian-Mestizo slave trade lingered in unconventional forms like dependant term labor arrangements until the early twentieth century. According to Brooks, New Mexican kinship servitude was based on a complex web of interrelated socio-cultural practices grounded in the exchange economies of the Southwestern borderlands (3940, 149, 15455). |
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New Mexican ricos, indigenous traffickers, vecino go-betweens, and sometimes even captives themselves acted in ways that underwrote the Southwestern slave trade. The slave trade was reciprocal in that both New Mexicans and Indians took captives from one another, but strong evidence suggests that New Mexicans were much more aggressive and successful in their raiding activities (230, 241). Captive-taking, reciprocal abductions, and the desire to accrue borderland "capital" in human beings continually fueled Indian-Mestizo servitude (3940). |
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Indian-Mestizo captives were frequently kept as domestic servants by wealthy New Mexicans, but captives were also traded—along with livestock, textiles, and tools—in the streams of borderland commerce (63, 71, 88). Captives were frequently held in isolated and sometimes rapidly changing circumstances. For example, individuals could be abducted in the Sangre de Cristo mountains and kept by traffickers as personal servants. Held captive, slaves might later be sold or traded for sheep or other livestock in adjoining pastoral areas. These same servants might then be trafficked through a maze of shifting borderland markets—perhaps changing hands several times before ending up in a New Mexican household as a domestic servant or as surrogate members of an Indian band. |
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Brooks argues that the New Mexican trade included a powerful kin-based dimension wherein abductees were incorporated into adoptive communities vis-à-vis their host families (3435, 164). Filial rhetoric was often invoked to demarcate real, fictive, or dependent bonds between masters and servants. In fact, James Brooks writes that Indian-Mestizo servitude was different from Black slavery because "captive women and children in this system often found themselves integrated within the host community through kinship systems" (34). If kinship (such as adoption, marriage, concubinage, godparentship) did create genuine ties between masters and servants, this may have mediated some of the harsher aspects of captivity. Brooks concludes that Indian-Mestizo servants may have voluntarily decided to remain within custodial households because these captives had become integrated into New Mexican families via filial conventions. In turn, these adoptive family members helped to expand borderland villages and settlements. |
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Scrutinizing the "voluntariness" of these dependent associations represents one of the chief weaknesses in Brooks's work. Brooks tends to overemphasize his kinship paradigm at the expense of exploring other facts that may help to explain why captives remained in New Mexican households even after being officially liberated by United States authorities. His over reliance on kin-based explanations becomes most evident in his discussion regarding government attempts to emancipate Indian-Mestizo slaves from captivity (35153). |
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In 1868, the federal government tried to extend universal emancipation into the Southwest and abolish the New Mexican slave trade. Tragically, the civilian interdiction teams fielded by the government were much too modest in size and strength to permanently suppress regional slaving practices—leaving a significant number of Indian-Mestizo servants in captivity. In his work, Brooks suggests that captives may have remained dependently associated with households because familial bonds had developed between masters and their servants. Such an assertion raises important questions about Brooks's kinship paradigm: How genuine were kinship bonds in the Indian-Mestizo slave trade? Were these bonds mutual? What role(s) did paternalism play in captivity scenarios? If genuine and mutual, what challenges did such ties present to government officers attempting to liberate Indian-Mestizo captives? |
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State historian Estevan Galvez writes that, while captives and masters may have accepted that paternalism was part of servitude: paternalism may have "taken on radically different interpretations for each." (Estevan Rael-Galvez, "Identifying Captivity and Capturing Identity: Narratives of American Indian Slavery. Colorado and New Mexico, 17761934," [Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 2002], 185.) The surviving evidence is paradoxical—on the one hand, significant numbers of Indian servants fled once informed by federal officers of their right to be free. On the other hand, some Indian servants still remained within custodial households. The fact that some Indians remained in New Mexican households might suggest genuine filial ties, but it might also be that servants feared reprisals from their masters should they flee. Moreover, female Indian servants, who had borne children by their masters, might be reluctant to flee if that meant leaving children behind in the master's possession. Perhaps masters might have even threatened to gift out or sell the child should the servant-mother leave. In some cases, its also possible that servants, often abducted as infants, knew no life other than as a slave. Thus, they chose to remain in captivity rather than face the unpredictability of the New Mexican frontier. In the end, a multitude of motivations, each on its own and collectively, may have made servants reluctant to leave a given household. Tragically, Brooks spends little time rooting out alternative explanations beyond his kinship paradigm. While intriguing and enlightening, Brooks's kinship paradigm has very real explanatory limits to illuminate what was essentially a grim and brutal traffic in human beings. |
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| Robert Francis Castro
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| California State University at Fullerton |
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