Situational Identities along the Raiding Frontier of Colonial New Mexico by Jun Sunseri (review)

Has the archaeologist Jun Sunseri written a parable for the modern United States? In an age when many citizens fear immigrants and immigrants have reason to distrust any person who crosses their path, Sunseri shows that people from different backgrounds have crisscrossed the American landscape for centuries and befriended, and sometimes aided, one another. Sunseri is too clever a scholar to lecture his audience about tolerance. One can even say he has no interest in meddling in modern controversies (let the reader decide). Nevertheless, Sunseri shows that newcomers and locals often worked together in the past.

Sunseri focuses on the now abandoned town of Casitas Viejas in northern New Mexico. Sitting in one of the most remote spots of the Spanish empire, the settlement defended the provincial capital of Santa Fe from indigenous raiders who posed a threat up through the nineteenth century. The town’s location, while precarious, benefitted the inhabitants. Because many inhabitants came from diverse backgrounds, they were predisposed to exchange knowledge and set aside concerns about racial purity. Some were indigenous people from New Mexico who had been captured in their youth and learned to speak Spanish, while others were descended from Indian groups in central Mexico. Even if the individuals who migrated from Mexico’s interior looked European, a few could have had Muslim ancestors. A good number more would have also had Jews and Africans in the family tree.

Of all these groups, the people who came from an indigenous heritage in New Mexico possessed the skills the other inhabitants in Casitas Viejas used to their advantage. To confirm the point, Sunseri unearths items like ceramic pots made with native techniques and bison bones that suggest some inhabitants traded with indigenous hunters. He says that when they looked to local indigenous groups to improve their existence, the residents of Casitas Viejas practiced “agency,” the decision to employ any method that suited them best (36). Accordingly, the residents did not abide by the casta system, the social categories the colonial regime in Mexico City used to identify racial and ethnic groups. Instead, the “casta system experienced a typological collapse in New Mexico,” and the people of Casitas imagined themselves as they pleased (126). They created a “situational identity” in which they incorporated “variable mixes of partially indigenous and European practices at different scales and in different cultural settings” (127–28).

Sunseri is not clear on whether the residents of Casitas Viejas chose their identities, or cared little about identity. If he is saying that some residents claimed an Indian identity, the reader may be surprised. True enough, Sunseri is correct when he says that from New Mexico to the tip of South America, people from all backgrounds relied on Indian habits during the colonial period. Even in modern times, the fairest, lightest-haired Latinos continue to use native methods—think of people of Mexican and Central American origin using a metate, the stone on which to grind food—to prepare meals. But in the present, as in the past, those who aspire to be considered European would not necessarily claim an Indian persona. Indeed, in some parts of Spanish-speaking America, especially in Mexico, it is an insult to call someone an “indio.”

Still, if anyone is surprised, it would be Sunseri. He uses archaeological evidence to reach his conclusions, and he suggests that the preoccupation with racial identity is a modern concern. Who looks European, and who does not, may matter more to smart-aleck reviewers than it did to people long ago. Thus, as Sunseri seeks to erase boundaries, readers will have to break free from their preconceived notions and consider that the residents of colonial New Mexico embraced and discarded racial and ethnic categories at will, practices others presumably performed throughout the Spanish Borderlands and points beyond. In light of the era we inhabit, Sunseri’s book deserves...