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  • Twilight of the Mission Frontier: Shifting Interethnic Alliances and Social Organization in Sonora, 1768–1855 by José Refugio de la Torre Curiel
  • Cynthia Radding
Twilight of the Mission Frontier: Shifting Interethnic Alliances and Social Organization in Sonora, 1768–1855. By José Refugio de la Torre Curiel. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press; Berkeley, CA: The Academy of American Franciscan History. 2012. Pp. xxx, 323. $65.00. ISBN 978-0-8047-8504-4.)

Mission history is at the center of the dynamic reshaping of borderlands history in the Americas. Concurrent with the challenges raised in The New Latin American Mission History edited by Erick Langer and Robert Jackson (Lincoln, NE, 1995), a series of monographs published in the ensuing two decades that focus on different mission fields in both North and South America have explored a wide variety of regional archives and articulated new sets of questions relating to the indigenous peoples and the religious orders that built and sustained the missions as colonial communities. Informed by new conceptual frameworks developed through ethno-history, environmental history, art history, and sociolinguistics, the study of colonial societies through the Iberian institution of the mission has opened new perspectives for historical research on Latin America. Twilight of the Mission Frontier provides a sterling example of this creative path for borderlands history. Thoroughly researched in multiple archives found in Spain, Mexico, and the United States, it is supported by an ample bibliography of published primary sources and secondary works in both English and Spanish. This case study set in Sonora, a province of northwestern New Spain, is thus integrated into the principal historiographical currents of Mexican history with selective comparative references to the frontier regions of South America. The author structured this history to bridge the colonial and national periods, recognizing that historical processes evince temporal arcs that span the conventional divisions between the political sequences of colony and nation.

To be sure, José Refugio de la Torre Curiel has deepened the furrows ploughed by historians who have previously been drawn to the richly documented missions of Sonora and Sinaloa in both the Jesuit and Franciscan administrations of northwestern New Spain. He readily acknowledges the historians who have gone [End Page 391] before him in the formulation of his arguments and in the carefully crafted footnotes that support each chapter. The institutional framework for his study derives from the forced exodus of the Jesuits and the arrival of two different cohorts of Franciscans from the Province of Xalisco and the Colegio de Propaganda Fide de la Santa Cruz de Querétaro (1767–68) and extends to the leave-taking of the last of the Franciscan missionaries to serve in Sonora at mid-nineteenth century. De la Torre argues that this period became the “twilight” of the Sonoran mission frontier largely because of social and economic changes in the province at large that altered the social, material, and cultural bases of the missions. These changes are documented in the well-known processes of population decline within communities putatively identified as “indigenous,” the growth of market economies outside the trade networks that once had centered on the missions, and political innovations that elevated citizenship above communal participation in the missions. De la Torre’s innovative use of local commercial records extends previous studies of mission economy into the secular trade circuits of early-nineteenth-century Sonora. In his conclusions, De la Torre characterizes early-nineteenth-century Sonoran economy as “captive” (p. 145), characterized by a chronic lack of currency and marked inequalities. At the same time he argues for increasing degrees of interdependency and cultural brokerage between the indigenous and Hispanic sectors of Sonora’s population. These processes had different subregional profiles, advancing earlier in areas like Pimería Baja and Opatería, in proximity to Hispanic settlements, than in the northern frontier of Pimería Alta, an observation that confirms previous studies of this mission frontier.

Cynthia Radding
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
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