Contested Ground: Comparative Frontiers on the Northern and Southern Edges of the Spanish Empire, and: New Views of Borderlands History (review)

Contested Ground: Comparative Frontiers on the Northern and Southern Edges of the Spanish Empire. Edited by Donna J. Guy and Thomas E. Sheridan. (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1998. xiii + 275 pp., maps, tables, bibliography, index. $50.00 cloth, $24.95 paper.)

New Views of Borderlands History. Edited by Robert H. Jackson. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1998. viii + 242 pp., introduction, illustrations, tables, maps, index. $40.00 cloth, $19.95 paper.)

These two recent collections of essays—twelve in Contested Ground and seven in New Views of Borderlands History—typify their kind and exhibit both the advantages and disadvantages of comparative studies. The first collection evolved by plan from two gatherings of historians and social scientists at the University of Arizona in 1992 and 1993 specifically to compare and contrast vast imperial peripheries. “The Contested Ground project began,” Donna J. Guy and Thomas E. Sheridan admit, “with tantalizing similarities and ended up exploring significant differences. . . . All of us came away with more questions than answers” (15). They suggest more limited comparisons between regions like the pampas and plains in hopes of “tighter contrasts and similarities” (ibid.). Still, with eyes wide open, six authors venture suggestive comparisons of north and south, while half a dozen do not, offering instead more convincing treatises about a part of one or the other and leaving the reader to compare.

In contrast, New Views seems thrown together in haste, which is not to indict any of the individual essays. Editor Robert H. Jackson believes that “an edited volume on the Borderlands has a number of benefits over the writing of a general synthetic history by a single historian” (5). These include each specialist’s greater familiarity with local sources, debates, and interdisciplinary interpretations and the tendency of generalists to be passé. New Views is more of a reference work than Contested Ground. Five of its seven offerings “address common themes: the structure of frontier society, demographic and settlement patterns, and economic development . . . . a synthesis of the current state of historical knowledge for each region” (5). Hence, the reader is left freer to draw whatever comparisons she or he chooses. In neither collection should the reader look for acts of human kindness, however. Frontiers defined as contested grounds are messy places. They writhe about beyond the firm control of central governments. They feature economic, ethnic, male and female, political, and social interests vying to dominate accessible human and natural resources. “The starting point of our analysis, then,” affirm Guy and Sheridan, “is power and violence” (10).

Daniel Nugent, extending his view over the long nineteenth century (1780s–1900s) in Contested Ground’s final chapter, is indignant that peasant descendants of non-Indian military colonists in Chihuahua, privileged by imperial Spain as defenders against Apache “barbarians,” were themselves considered barbarians by the capitalistic land-grabbers of Porfirian Mexico. More calmly, Cynthia Radding describes another undone colonial pact between agents of Spain and the upland native peasants of Sonora. Neither compares Chihuahua with Sonora or the Río de la Plata, however. Would comparative scholarship have been better served, I wonder, had Nugent and Radding collaborated on a single presentation?

A number of Contested Ground’s authors challenge accepted truths. Daniel Reff, for example, sees sedentary agriculturists in Paraguay and northwestern New Spain embracing Jesuits not so much because of the black robes’ cultural superiority, but because Old World diseases were ravaging the native way of life. The Jesuits offered regeneration. Staring another male group straight on, Susan Migden Socolow documents among gauchos the presence of women and children, then asks “whether the gaucho is a valid figure of premodern Argentina or a romanticized creation of a phallocentric culture” (82).

Also focusing on Argentina, Lyman L. Johnson extracts from probate, census, and burial records statistical proof that Buenos Aires province did not stagnate under...