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Chapter 4. Colonial Spaces in the Fragmented Communities of Northern New Spain
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chapter 4 Colonial Spaces in the Fragmented Communities of Northern New Spain Cynthia Radding The province of San Ildefonso de Ostimuri, nestled in the foothills and cordilleras of the Sierra Madre Occidental, first emerged in colonial documentation during the mid-seventeenth century. The history of settlement in Ostimuri, with its webs of migration, commerce, and points of exchange, illustrates the production of space and the different meanings ascribed to human geography in the diverse colonial settings of northern New Spain. Ostimuri filtered into colonial nomenclature from indigenous place-names, and Spanish settlements there appeared on maps as small islets surrounded by Yoreme, Tegüima, Rarámuri, and Nevome villages and rancherı́as with deep histories of horticulture, territorial rivalries, and chiefly governance. Colonial mining enterprises and missionary entradas produced new social spaces, adding layers of complexity to indigenous ethnic patterns and bringing new populations to the region. Centered on mining, ranching, and agriculture, Ostimuri exemplified the mosaics of different communities that were integrated unevenly into the commercial and migratory networks that clustered around numerous reales de minas throughout northern New Spain. Ostimuri constitutes an internal borderland within New Spain distant from the centers of viceregal governance and colonial society. Located in the Mexican north, Ostimuri was firmly part of the Spanish imperial sphere of North America through the commercial and labor corridors that connected it with Nueva Vizcaya, as shown by Chantal Cramaussel in this volume. Borderlands, like all regions, are produced historically through 116 Cynthia Radding human labor and social practices, with specific ecological, cultural, economic , and political components; furthermore, their boundaries and distinguishing features change over time. Borderlands encompass contested spaces where different cultural traditions and living peoples meet and at times clash. Two principal questions guide our discussion: How did indigenous and colonial societies intersect with one another in Ostimuri? In what ways did Ostimuri emerge as a province of multiple borderlands through both indigenous and Hispanic patterns of settlement and conflict? In order to respond to these questions, this chapter will focus on the migrations and displacements arising from advancing European colonists, agricultural villages, commercial enterprises, and seminomadic peoples, leading to resettlement in new places and the formation of mixed communities. Colonial documents, including mundane correspondence, formal reports, and maps, provide different temporal and spatial lenses through which to view the mixed populations of indigenous, African, and Hispanic descent in the colonial towns and cities of Mexico’s gran septentrión. These vast northern arid lands of New Spain became strategic for colonial administration because of their mineral wealth and the challenges they presented for territorial defense. This study anchors the discussion of contested spaces in several localities through their historical and geographical linkages. It focuses on the changing boundaries and regional networks of the province of Ostimuri, thus questioning the definition of a given region solely in terms of its geographical features or administrative conventions. This historical portrait focuses on the distinct populations that produced Ostimuri, pluralizing it into spaces with different material uses and symbolic meanings.1 Following the conceptual framework developed by Henri Lefebvre for the social production of space through labor and the representations of space through cultural artifacts, this chapter illustrates the ways in which Ostimuri became a region with ecological, cultural, and historical roots and meanings. The narrative comprehends a broad chronological span from the earliest Spanish encounters with the indigenous peoples to the establishment of the mature colonial economy, but I concentrate on the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The chapter begins with the territorial con- flicts among indigenous peoples and relates this human geography to the major ecological features of the area. It then highlights the early entradas and reversals of Spanish missionaries, militias, and colonist-entrepreneurs, and it proceeds to show how the colonial identities and institutions of [34.230.84.106] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 11:47 GMT) Colonial Spaces 117 Ostimuri developed in this region and linked it to the other major provinces of northern New Spain. It concludes by arguing that the indigenous communities both shaped and contested the colonial missions and, in parallel processes, their labor sustained the migratory and commercial networks that produced these borderlands regions. Andrés Pérez de Ribas, a Jesuit, began book 4 of his Historia de los triunfos de nuestra santa fé with the following explanation of spatial boundaries in reference to the Mayo peoples: ‘‘The word mayo, in their language, means limit or boundary, because this river valley is...