Contested Ground. Comparative Frontiers on the Northern and Southern Edges of the Spanish Empire (review)

270 Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies expresión poética, el poeta parece percibir una trascendencia más allá del tiempo y espacio terrenal. A través de esta obra las imágenes hacen brillar el campo rural que el poeta describe con un lenguaje preciso. Además del cuidadoso empleo del idioma, el uso de versos heptasÃ-labos y endecasÃ-labos presta cierta elegancia a las varias selecciones del poemario y hace que su lectura sea una experiencia grata para el lector. En la trayectoria poética de José MarÃ-a Mico, Camino de ronda sigue La espera (1992), colección que le ganó el Premio Hiperión de poesÃ-a, y Letras para cantar (1997). En su última aportación, Mico mantiene la alta calidad artÃ-stica vislumbrada en sus obras anteriores y ofrece un poemario sumamente recomendable a cualquier aficionado a la poesÃ-a contemporánea. Joseph Deters University of Puget Sound Contested Ground Comparative Frontiers on the Northern and Southern Edges ofthe Spanish Empire University of Arizona Press, 1998 Edited by Donna Guy and Thomas Sheridan. This volume compares frontier dynamics in Spain's American empire, focusing on northern Mexico and the Southern Cone from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries. Rooted in case studies, these twelve essays provide an historical and empirical perspective often missing in cultural studies approaches to contemporary border issues. The organizing metaphor draws on Richard Slatta's image of borders as membranes variably permeable to goods and people. As the editors state, this metaphor presents frontiers as contested ground, that is, as "zones of historical interaction" whose prevailing characteristics are "power and violence " (10). Within that framework, these essays share the conviction that such interactions must be understood as complex articulations of coercion, accommodation, and resistance among different subaltern populations and between subaltern and dominant groups. All ofthe essays question the assumption that frontiers were consolidated against weak or unorganized indigenous groups. Slatta contradicts the image of indigenous military ineffectiveness, while Kristine Jones argues that nomadic Indians participated in a raiding/trading dialectic that linked colonial outposts; her highly original analysis thus suggests that nomadic Indians were as much catalysts as obstacles to colonial and national consolidation. Daniel Reff, Susan Deeds, Cynthia Radding, and Daniel Nugent examine how frontier communities undeistood their relationship to central power structures. In different ways, these authors demonstrate how social unrest resulted from abridgements of what Radding calls the "colonial pact," that is, the way specific communities understood their relationship to the state. Other essays recuperate marginalized histories. Susan Midgen Socolow establishes the importance of women among Argentinean gauchos, traditionally considered a uniquely masculine subculture. Jeffery Cooney reconstructs the little-known milieu of yerba maté workers in northern Paraguay , while Mary Karash outlines the heterogeneity of subaltern groups in Brazil's Goiás region and evaluates their strategies of resistance and accommodation. Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies 271 Finally, Lyman Johnson and Thomas Hall address major historiographie issues. Johnson uses statistical analysis of Argentinean probate records to question the assumed greater social mobility of frontier regions , while Hall argues that colonial frontier dynamics require modifying the tripartite economic divisions of world system theory. Many issues join these studies, including the importance of ecological sttuctures and change, the problems posed by different types of historical evidence (or the lack of historical evidence), the nature of subaltern agency, and the difficulty of balancing regional and global analyses. In this sense, a more synthetic introduction or conclusion would have been helpful, or a greater degree of dialogue among the contributors, who occasionally present contradictory intetpretations of similar data (e.g., Indian raiding). Furthermore, as the editors recognize, the comparative project of the book contains a structural limit: northern Mexico and the Southern Cone are ultimately more different than similai. The former remains a sparsely populated desert broken by difficult terrain, while the mildet climate and extensive system of navigable waterways in the RÃ-o de la Plata drainage converted the latter region into a major urban center with a strong export economy. Equally important , northern Mexico was drawn into conflict with the United States, a rising industrial power, while the Southern Cone faced territorial competition only from...