New Views of Borderlands History (review)

In the past twenty years, Robert H. Jackson has published an impressive number of articles and books in which he uses the techniques of population history to examine the mission frontier and its impact upon Indian peoples, ever keeping the larger, comparative questions in mind. Beginning with the northwestern frontier of New Spain, he has extended his reach to include Texas and, in an even bolder leap, Cochabamba, Bolivia. In this edited collection of original essays, he and other scholars present their findings on the Spanish Borderlands, an awkward field christened by Herbert Eugene Bolton in 1921 and for eighty years the subject of weighty debate: do the Borderlands run east and west or north and south?

A primary theme of this collection is that the Borderlands are tantamount to the northern frontier of New Spain. The volume begins with an essay by Susan M. Deeds about the silver frontier of Chihuahua, whose Tepehuan and Tarahumara population took to the mountains, and the Spanish settlement of Santa Bárbara, source of settlers and supplies for New Mexico and capital of the Internal Provinces. Her study of Spanish efforts to civilize the elusive "people without reason" and hold the frontier against Apache and Comanche raids shows how little Chihuahua differed from the colonies farther north. Jackson, revisiting a topic that has long interested him, treats the missionizing of northwestern New Spain as a continuous story, commencing in Pimería Alta in 1687 and reaching Alta California in 1769. Peter Stern deals with the subject of marginalization in the frontier societies of New Spain wherever found; for his purposes the frontier is a process, not a place.

A secondary theme is the importance of population to the explanatory model. Each essay in the volume includes population tables and some are population centered. Ross Frank emphasizes the two watersheds of the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 and the Comanche Peace of 1785 in his essay on the demographic history of the Pueblo peoples and settlers in New Mexico from 1598 to 1821. Jesús de la Teja analyzes the disincentives which inhibited civil settlement in Hispanic Texas. A third theme is Indian agency, frequently overlooked by scholars intent upon describing demographic collapse. In a course-correcting essay, Jackson emphasizes the role of native choice in the formation of frontier indigenous communities, comparing the mission of La Purísima in California, which accomplished Spanish goals, with the missions among the Karankawas and the Lipan Apaches in Texas, which were costly failures.

Spanish Florida shoulders its way into this company under protest. Although Jackson acknowledges in his introduction that Florida, like Texas and California, was a strategic borderland where missions were used to establish territorial rights, he is so determined to equate the Borderlands with the expanding northern frontier and so dependent on the methods of demography that a mission frontier of alternate origin, one which flourished and declined before the dawn of surviving mission parish registers, loses its claim to significance, study, and comparison. To write the obligatory chapter on colonial Florida, he turned to a specialist on the Seminoles. While Patricia Wickman's treatment of pre-Seminole Florida is disarmingly original, it offers neither new archival research nor a synthesis of the literature. The table of population estimates in the Florida chapter lacks citations, the terminology departs without ceremony from conventions, the proofreading is even poorer than in the rest of the volume (Granberry emerges as Cranberry, Hatley as Halley, and San Marcos as San Macros), and the map is puerile. Florida sits in quarantine, bracketed by an editorial apology which assigns it to the Spanish Caribbean and a conclusion which ignores it altogether. Despite the bookcover's Florida-derived images, a tattooed Timucuan holding a libation of cassina in a shell chalice and a plan of San Agustín's wooden fort, the Borderlands of this volume...