Pueblos, Plains, and Province

Pueblos, Plains, and Province explores the complexity of the concept of homeland as experienced by the societies that collided and coexisted in colonial New Mexico: Native American sedentary farmers and mobile hunter-gatherers, on the one hand, and Spanish settlers, on the other. Using a wide variety of published primary sources and unpublished documents from principal archives in Mexico, the United States, and Spain, Joseph P. Sánchez offers a chronologically organized overview of the Spanish exploration, settlement, and administration of New Mexico from 1540 to the Pueblo Revolt of 1680.Its 15 chapters trace synthetically the best-known passages of that history—such as the adventures of Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, Marcos de Niza, or Francisco Vázquez de Coronado—but they recount in detail other episodes barely outlined in most general histories of the region. For example, based on Hernán Gallegos's relación published by George Hammond and Agapito Rey in 1966, Sánchez describes the 1581 entrada of Francisco Sánchez Chamuscado and friar Agustín Rodríguez. For the unauthorized settlement of New Mexico by Gaspar Castaño de Sosa in 1590–92, Sánchez follows a soldier's memoir kept at Madrid's Real Academia de la Historia and official reports by Castaño's pursuer preserved in the Archivo General de Indias.Like France V. Scholes, Sánchez centers his seventeenth-century overview of the province on church-state conflict. Unlike Scholes, however, Sánchez does not portray civil government officers as corrupt, greedy rascals opposed to merciful friars fighting to protect exploited, helpless Indians; neither does he draw a picture of homogeneous, ever-opposed Indigenous and Spanish worlds. Instead, he shows that competition between the civil and ecclesiastical orders over control of Indigenous labor and ritual practice molded relations between Spanish settlers, Plains tribes, and Pueblos, and that “although colonial native relationships were often adversarial, they were not exclusively antagonistic” (p. 239). Cross-ethnic intermarriage and compadrazgo were not uncommon, and attitudes of individual Spaniards toward Native peoples often depended on specific economic and political interests. Two appendixes offer, respectively, a descriptive history of the Salinas Pueblo Missions National Monument and a discussion of various Indigenous revolts—primarily in northern New Spain—meant to demonstrate that the Acoma, Pueblo, and Jumano rebellions were not isolated phenomena. Interesting as they are, these essays do not make for good appendixes—they seem to be included in this capacity, and not as chapters, only because they do not fit into the volume's narrative structure.Sánchez's book is apparently designed on the premise that in historical writing, as John L. Kessell prefers, analysis and interpretation should be woven into the narrative flow of events. However, anecdotal details in Sánchez's narration—information about the families of secondary characters, the precise itineraries of friars and officials—often carry more weight than analysis, which makes the reader wonder at times about the relevance of these details. Much of them could have been summarized or, sometimes, even omitted to make the reading more fluid and highlight Sánchez's relevant criticisms of the historiography.Two of these criticisms are worthy of comment. First, Sánchez questions the widespread use of Spanish cruelty and ambition to explain all aspects of New Mexico's colonial past. To achieve a more accurate understanding of that history, he argues, one must compare the Spanish conquest with similar episodes during other European incursions elsewhere in the Americas, like the “starvation period” in Virginia after Jamestown's founding in 1607 and the United States Army massacre of the Lakota Sioux at Wounded Knee in 1890. In Sánchez's opinion, historians should explain attitudes and events according to the values and circumstances of the times when they occurred. Thus the 1599 battle at Acoma and Juan de Oñate's subsequent punishment of the defeated Indians or the Jumano War of 1601–3 cannot only be explained by Spanish brutality; the adverse effects that resource scarcity and cultural differences had on Spanish-Native interaction during “New Mexico's starvation period” (1598–1609) must also be considered.The other important criticism is that what historiography has construed as isolated Indigenous rebellions were, from the Indigenous perspective, continued wars for the defense of territory and the Indigenous way of life, threatened by the European intruders. An associated argument that should have been addressed in more depth is that Indigenous tribes in the Americas, “for thousands of years, prior to European contact,” had carved out boundaries to mark “their separate and distinct homelands” (p. 4). While I agree that “Indigenous territoriality clashed with European notions of sovereignty” (p. 3), it has also been argued that in precolonial times tribal territories did not exist as differentiated areas with defined limits of exclusive property of a certain human group, despite the evidence of intertribal conflicts over land occupation and the appropriation of natural resources. Precisely defined, fixed Pueblo territories emerged through a long process of territorialization linked to the imposition of state domination and the Native peoples' gradual mastering of its legal instruments and procedures

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