The Spanish Colonial Settlement Landscapes of New Mexico, 1598–1680 by Elinore M. Barrett (review)

With this book, Elinore Barrett complements her earlier Conquest and Catastrophe (New Mexico, 2002), with a painstaking reconstruction of early Spanish settlement in what is today New Mexico. Where Conquest and Catastrophe focused on Spanish-colonial impacts on indigenous Pueblo settlements along the Rio Grande, Barrett’s new book looks at the contexts and patterns of the early Spanish colony itself. This undertaking presents quite a historiographical challenge, as the Spanish were infamously driven out of the Rio Grande Valley in 1680 by a coordinated Pueblo uprising that led to the loss or destruction of all colonial records in New Mexico. Despite this challenge, Barrett diligently pieces together the history of the early Spanish colony from “references made in passing that have been gleaned from other documents”(xiv), including records from the Inquisition, from administrative reviews of the colonial governors, and from petitions made to reclaim family lands when the Spanish re-entered New Mexico in 1692. Such fragmentary documentary evidence is then tied to the archaeological record, where available, and to genealogical research about family alliances and dowry-related land transfers.

The result of all this meticulous sifting and sorting is a very detailed study, which Barrett takes pains to characterize as incomplete but which nonetheless provides a meaningful window onto the material, spatial, and demographic contexts of early Spanish settlement. A close reading of this text provides a convincing portrait of a disjointed Spanish colony in which individual colonists and elites vied with the Catholic missions for access to good agricultural land and for proximity to the Pueblos, from which labor was coerced to support small export operations. The difficulties of generating wealth in this far-flung frontier colony were exacerbated by an early mass defection, by epidemics that disproportionately impacted Pueblo communities, and by growing resentment among the Pueblo peoples that eventually led to the Pueblo Revolt. Barrett’s detailed lens shows from numerous angles that the existence and continuation of the dispersed Spanish colony was highly tenuous in a complex cultural context that both enabled and rejected its existence.

The book’s first section, “The Context of Settlement,” offers six short chapters that explain the various physical and cultural landscapes encountered by the Spanish during their 1598 entrada. These chapters also provide a detailed discussion of Spanish governance institutions that guided early colonial efforts to establish settlements and missions, interact with Pueblo communities, and pursue both mineral and agricultural wealth. Although Barrett shows how the colony’s failure to find any viable mines or to engage in economic activities beyond mere subsistence led to a mass defection in 1601 (in which two thirds of the colony, including nearly all women and families fled south back to Mexico), she also emphasizes how even this failed colony had major impacts on the Pueblo communities and landscapes.

The second part of the book, “The Demographic Landscape,” undertakes in two short chapters the very difficult task of trying to verify the numbers of settlers (along with their families, servants, and others) that may or may not have been present in the colonial areas of New Mexico at various times leading up to the Pueblo Revolt. This is done through fastidious cross-checking of multiple documentary sources and some simple math to show where some reports don’t add up or contradict one another. In general, Barrett argues that the Spanish population remained quite small during the entire pre-Revolt period, slowly rebounding after the 1601 defection to levels comparable to the size of the entrada by the 1660s. In this same time period, the total population of the Pueblos shrank by about 75 percent. Perhaps most interesting here is Barrett’s assertion that the racial composition of colonial families underwent significant change in the pre-Revolt era due to intermarriage between Spanish men and Pueblo women. Thus, “it became less and less...