Sites of Diplomacy, Violence, and Refuge: Topography and Negotiation in the Mountains of New Spain

Through much of the history of the Americas, political life took place in two spheres: the colonial realm, in which a complex population of Indians, Africans, and Iberians interacted within the civic framework of European institutions; and the extra-colonial realm, in which largely indigenous populations beyond the reach of imperial authority maintained separate political systems. Encounters across this divide were sometimes peaceful and symbiotic, but at other times violent. Many historical discussions of interethnic conflict presume a general and persistent difference in power between these two groups. On Mexico's northern frontier of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, however, the relative advantage enjoyed by colonial versus extra-colonial peoples shifted radically depending on the moment and place of encounter. This article proposes that differences in topography and ecology, often between places not far removed in absolute distance, produced inversions in the relative power enjoyed by indigenous and settler populations. The cultivation of maize was common to the refuge zones of settlers and northern Indians alike: unassimilated Indian bands concealed and protected their crops in difficult-to-find mountain valleys; settler communities, both Spanish and Indian, protected crops close to their respective concentrations of population and militiamen. Both colonial and extra-colonial peoples subsisted on cattle, and the demand for vast pasture spaces produced inevitable conflict. Thus, the geography of the north produced areas of security and vulnerability for all parties.

In this northeastern corner of colonial Mexico, indigenous and settler populations shared a long history of trade, diplomacy, and violence. By the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the region contained an enormous diversity of populations, many modes of economic production, and a high level of both commerce and banditry. This article proposes a framework for understanding the behavior of northern peoples that integrates economic, diplomatic, and military thinking. It suggests that the key to understanding the persistence of violence is to be found in the relationships between human communities and physical terrain at the smallest geographical scales. Built into the psychology and culture of Mexico's colonial north was an understanding that some physical spaces were largely secure from violence while others were not. For Spaniards and for Indians within the pueblos de indios, the densely settled valley floors were zones of safety; for more mobile northern Indians, the high concealed valleys had similar properties. Yet, neither group could survive permanently ensconced in its secure redoubt. The annual vicissitudes of temperature and rainfall meant that cattle-herding peoples shifted their livestock to higher elevations in the summer and lower elevations in the winter. In these valuable seasonal pastures, which were often far from core populations, cattle raids and warfare were consequently inevitable.¹ The rules of trade, diplomacy, and war that developed over centuries of regional cohabitation were all premised on this set of geographical conditions.

Interethnic diplomacy between colonial and extra-colonial communities followed customary rules rooted in a shared understanding of which geographical niches (some natural environments and some built) offered security to the negotiating parties. Towns, haciendas, pueblos de indios, and presidios offered security to colonial peoples, and by the eighteenth century, most of the broad valley floors were secure spaces for colonial populations. In contrast, extra-colonial Indians found refuge in rough highland terrain, especially in canyons and hanging valleys where seasonal agricultural plots and family shelters remained largely invisible to outsiders. A third set of geographical spaces was perpetually contested and not wholly safe for either party: roads, paths, passes, and high-altitude summer pastures (agostaderos). These were the locations of most violent encounters. In addition to naturally occurring spaces, several human environments figured prominently in interethnic diplomacy, among them seasonal trade fairs and mission towns (both of which lay within secure colonial space) and highland mitotes (large assemblies of Indian bands for ritual and political purposes) that constituted extra-colonial spaces where colonial visitors were at risk. The role of geography in battle was consistent and decisive: victory came to those most able to surprise their adversaries in vulnerable locations. In diplomacy, geographical considerations were more complex. At times...