In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Ethnohistory 47.3-4 (2000) 767-775



[Access article in PDF]

Review Essay

Conquest, Chronicles, and Cultural Encounters:
The Spanish Borderlands of North America

Cynthia Radding, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign


Knights of Spain, Warriors of the Sun: Hernando de Soto and the South’s Ancient Chiefdoms. By Charles Hudson. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997. xxii + 561 pp., preface, maps, illustrations, notes, index. $40.00 cloth.)

The Hernando de Soto Expedition: History, Historiography, and “Discovery” in the Southeast. Edited by Patricia Galloway. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997. xvi + 457 pp., preface, introduction, illustrations, tables, index, notes. $60.00 cloth.)

The Presidio and Militia on the Northern Frontier of New Spain. Vol. 2, part 1, The Californias and Sinaloa-Sonora, 1700–1765. Edited by Charles W. Polzer, S. J., and Thomas E. Sheridan. (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1997. x + 513 pp., introduction, glossary, bibliography, notes, illustrations, maps, index. $65.00 cloth.)

The Presidio and Militia on the Northern Frontier of New Spain. Vol. 2, part 2, The Central Corridor and the Texas Corridor, 1700–1765. Edited by Diana Hadley, Thomas H. Naylor, and Mardith K. Schuetz-Miller. (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1997. x + 555 pp., introduction, glossary, bibliography, notes, illustrations, maps, index. $65.00 cloth.)

The Architecture of the Southwest. By Trend Elwood Sanford. (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1997. xii + 312 pp., prologue, epilogue, maps, illustrations, index, appendixes. $24.95 paper.)

A Frontier Documentary: Sonora and Tucson, 1821–1848. Edited by Kieran McCarty. (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1997. xv + 145 pp., foreword, introduction, notes, index, map. $29.95 cloth.) [End Page 767]

The vast northern borderlands of New Spain were the object of repeated Spanish expeditions of conquest, spurred by the greed for wealth, the ambition to rule over legendary Amerindian kingdoms, and the pressures of British and French piracy and landfalls on the Atlantic coast of North America. During the mid-sixteenth century, after the establishment of institutional Iberian rule in Santo Domingo and Cuba and the conquests of Tenochtitlan and Tawantinsuyu, the Spaniards mounted an impressive series of forays by land and sea to Central America and to the great septentrión north of the imperial and cultural boundaries of Mesoamerica. The Caribbean served as the staging ground for successive expeditions to the Florida peninsula and the interior river valleys ranging from the southern Atlantic coast to the lower Mississippi River valley, extending Spain’s territorial claims northeast of Mexico and the Antilles and broadening the search for slaves and tributary populations. Similarly, Spanish forces in western Mexico carried out numerous expeditions of conquest and exploration, traveling northwest from Compostela through the mountainous corridors of the Sierra Madre Occidental, determined to extract labor and tribute from the chiefdoms they claimed to conquer and to find the elusive cities of Cíbola and Quivira. Spanish interest in the northwestern frontier heightened after the silver mines of Zacatecas came into production in the mid-1540s and focused on prospecting for new veins of precious ores.

Most of these expeditions, dating from the 1530s to the 1560s, were resounding failures in terms of the conquistadors’ stated ambitions and the orders they had received from the Crown. Their leaders, brandishing the titles of governor and adelantado, failed to establish permanent colonies or to discover exploitable sources of wealth; furthermore, they did not find the riches they had so desired, and many of them lost their fortunes and even their lives in the adventure. Even more telling, their destructive impact on the landscapes and cultures through which they passed was irreversible, due to pillage, rape, warfare, enslavement, and disease. Notwithstanding the meager results of their endeavors, and largely because of their failures and excesses, the chronicles, reports, and investigations that Spanish imperial governance generated around these expeditions has excited the interest of scholars from the time of their contemporaries to the present day. As the works under review in this essay demonstrate, the early-contact literature of this period is of compelling interest for both history and historiography. It is historical because the events it records are in themselves moments...

pdf

Share