Peace Came in the Form of a Woman: Indians and Spaniards in the Texas Borderlands (review)

This book is a superbly crafted contribution to the growing literature that places Native Americans at the center of the struggle for control of eighteenth-century North America. Barr's clear chronological and spatial framework renders the complex history of Spanish-Indian relations in Texas meaningful for borderlands specialists and those new to the field. She examines, in turn, Spaniards' contacts with the Caddos of East Texas during the 1680s, the establishment of settlements and missions in the San Antonio region, and Spaniards' shifting diplomatic and political ties with Comanches, Wichitas, and Apaches during the late eighteenth century.

Barr writes that in each of these historical contexts, contrary to prevailing historiographical wisdom, the Spaniards, not the Native Americans, "had to accommodate, resist, and persevere" (7); Native Americans "dictated the terms of contact, diplomacy, alliance, and enmity" (8). Native Americans brought gendered understandings and practices to all of these relationships. Although indigenous notions of male honor and battlefield valor meshed at least superficially with Spanish values, other concepts did not. For Native Americans, the presence of women and children in a traveling party indicated its peaceful intentions, and women, marriage, and kinship were central to alliances forged among groups. Spanish soldiers, missionaries, traders, and settlers in Texas grasped Native gender codes imperfectly and belatedly, if ever. Only to the extent that they were able to meet indigenous expectations in these and other crucial areas were they able to maintain a presence in Texas. These accommodations often ran counter to directives issued from Mexico City.

Barr's interdisciplinary methodology is broad and effective: She gives her sources a close and critical reading and draws liberally on the insights and findings of archaeology, anthropology, and ethnography, though Latin Americanists might fault her for relying exclusively on sources located in United States repositories. Although she makes extensive use of microfilm copies of major collections from Spanish and Mexican archives, she first looks at English translations of these sources when available. She does, however, consult the Spanish originals whenever a question of interpretation arises, and her work bears careful reading by scholars working from transnational perspectives. Elsewhere, Barr has argued that when viewed from the perspective of eighteenth-century Mexico City—or that of many Latin Americanists of our own time—the borderlands regions were peripheral, but, in fact, "Texas was a core of native political economies, a core within which Spaniards were often the subjects or potential subjects of native institutions of social control."¹ In Peace Came in the Form of a Woman, she meticulously and convincingly shows why and how this was so.

In sum, this finely conceptualized and beautifully executed book easily ranks on a short list of essential reading for scholars of Native American history, alongside such pathbreaking works as Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republic in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (New York, 1991), and James Brooks, Captives and Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest Borderlands (Chapel Hill, 2002).