Negotiation within Domination: New Spain's Indian Pueblos Confront the Spanish State

7: Peace Agreements and War Signals: Negotiations with the Apaches and Comanches in the Interior Provinces of New Spain, 1784–1788

173 Negotiation becomes necessary whenever two forces find themselves in relative equilibrium and realize that political agreement is better than the continuation of open conflict. In a paradoxical way, in the last decades of the eighteenth century, just as the Spanish state seemed to be strengthening in America and consolidating its borders, it was developing a policy centered on the search for new alliances and a greater stability. At the same time, the various nomadic peoples in northern New Spain were going through a phase of transformation: some were becoming extinct; others were confronting serious difficulties; while still others were strengthening and feeling more able everyday to stop the Spanish progression onto lands and natural resources they rightfully considered their own. In this chapter, I discuss the contacts and the negotiations led by the Comanches and the Mescalero Apaches with royal authorities in the region that today encompasses the Mexican–New Mexican–Texas border as they tried to reach some form of peace in the decade of the 1780s, a crucial moment as royal policy was being defined about the peoples living on the 7 Negotiations with the Apaches and Comanches in the Interior Provinces of New Spain, 1784–1788 C u a u h t é m o c V e l a s c o Á v i l a Translation by Michel Besson Peace Agreements and War Signals C u a u h t é m o c V e l a s c o Á v i l a 174 borders. I will examine what forms the negotiations took, who the actors were who took part in them, and what those negotiations entailed in terms of political dealings and cultural exchange. We will see the interests and relations that were part and parcel of those negotiations. The contradictions and conflicts that existed between the native peoples coming from varied ethnic and societal backgrounds, as well as the tensions with which they had to deal, will become apparent.1 Times of Reform and Definition The so-called epoch of the Bourbon reforms was a period of modernization for the political machinery of New Spain, a time when a series of mechanisms were set up to make the relation of dependence vis-à-vis the Spanish Crown more efficient, and an age of change in the mentality of politicians and royal administrators. However, as I progressed in my research, I found that the ideal model pursued by the Crown was becoming more shortlived as more and more incoherence appeared between the announced purposes of the king, the attitudes and proposals of the top civil servants in the American possessions, and the activities of lower-level officials in charge of implementing the measures. At the time, a generally rationalist frame of mind dominated, and I think that the feeling of success possessed by the reformers toward the end of the eighteenth century was in large part the result of the triumph of some of the fundamental ideas behind the Enlightenment. Thus, rather than try to identify what the correspondence may have been between the plans of the various ministries and the actual actions of the government, it may be better to seek an understanding of how a few fundamental ideas came to form part of the arguments used by bureaucrats and elites of New Spain. Among those ideas, and for the purpose of the present study, a new concept about territorial expansion and the management of the frontiers seems particularly important. Anthony Pagden shows how, starting with the last years of the seventeenth century, European dominating groups started realizing what great dangers lay in out-of-control territorial expansion. According to him, one of the greatest challenges faced by the European empires in this period was knowing how to harness their own agents in their desire to conquer new territories. Those empires had been built on the basis of a certain vision of military virtue. To change that concept meant thinking anew about the very bases of the empire, since many civil and military servants believed fervently that the best way to serve their kings was to augment their possessions, to open new provinces, or to show themselves capable of great military feats.2 For that reason, one of Peace Agreements and War Signals 175 the arguments repeated in many documents of the time was the need to contain what was called “the spirit of the conquest,” which blinded most men to...