Writing Violence on the Northern Frontier: The Historiography of Sixteenth-Century New Mexico and Florida and the Legacy of Conquest (review)

Writing Violence on the Northern Frontier is an important attempt to rethink a series of moments in the unfolding of European colonialism in North America during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Through studies of various historical accounts of colonizing expeditions, José Rabasa engages in a serious reappraisal of modern historiography’s understanding of the practices and institutional structures that framed Spanish and French actions in the frontier areas of New Spain, particularly in New Mexico and Florida. Specifically, Rabasa questions the convention of seeing writing and violence as discrete terms by analyzing discursive representations of the use of force within the dynamics of colonialism.

In his first chapter Rabasa discusses the figure of Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca and critiques the idealist practice that predominates in modern readings of his writings. He carefully analyzes the Naufragios as a text constructed pragmatically to present Cabeza de Vaca’s own actions in the ill-fated expedition led by Pánfilo de Narváez to the Florida coast as conforming with the norms laid down in the 1596 Ordenanzas sobre el buen tratamiento de los indios (31–43). Considering the text in the light of this framing and Cabeza de Vaca’s subsequent official appointment to the post of adelantado in Paraguay, Rabasa effectively unravels the assumptions of scholars (in particular, Rolena Adorno), a filmmaker (Nicolás Echevarría), and writers (Haniel Long, Guillermo Sheridan) who have cited Cabeza de Vaca’s text as a less rapacious and violent model of conquest (31–38, 59–62). Forcefully demonstrating the merits of analyzing the convergences between reports like the Naufragios and the legal norms that framed their language and thought, Rabasa illustrates how Cabeza de Vaca’s rendering of ethnographic knowledge fits into an unfolding, more refined colonialist practice developed by the Council of the Indies (64–83).

Chapter 2 of Writing Violence further develops the reflection on the discursive relations between the law, violence, and reports of colonizing expeditions, specifically those pertaining to the attempt, during the period 1539–1610, to control and settle the lands that came to be known as New Mexico. Through analysis of accounts written by the viceroy Pedro de Castañeda and by Vicente de Zaldívar, synthesized with careful discussion of the principles formulated and refined through the successive stages of legislation of the Ordenanzas of 1527, the Nuevas leyes of 1542, and the Ordenanzas of 1573, Rabasa tracks how the written descriptions of leadership decisions and encounters with native peoples were shaped by the writers’ consciousness of the legal framework established for such enterprises, particularly as a result of the contributions by Francisco de Vitoria, Domingo de Soto, Melchor Cano, Bartolomé de Las Casas, and Ginés de Sepúlveda to the intellectual debate about Spain’s actions in the Indies (94, 102–3). Rabasa argues that the practices in the field were shaped less by the laws drawn up as imperial policy than by the documentation that would be accumulated to justify the use of violence against native peoples, the establishment of settlements, and the drafting of contracts and requests for grants from the Crown (107). Rabasa thus demonstrates how the oxymoron of “peaceful conquest” unfolds as a discursive resolution of the contradictions of imperial policy, a means to rationalize the recourse to force as a material and symbolic tool of domination.

Rabasa shifts his focus in chapter 3 to the place of epic poetry in Spanish expansion in New Mexico. He analyzes Gaspar de Villagrá’s Historia de la Nueva México as a text that demonstrates a consciousness of the arguments raised by Las Casas in the Brevísima relación. Rabasa convincingly argues that Villagrá’s poem is an astute negotiation with Crown policy, to the extent that through its aestheticization of violent actions taken against the native inhabitants of...