Indigenous Borderlands

In Indigenous Borderlands, Joaquín Rivaya-Martínez brings together 11 scholars from across the United States, Mexico, Argentina, and the United Kingdom: Cynthia Radding, Geoffrey H. Wallace, Robbie Ethridge, Cuauhtémoc Velasco Ávila, Antonio Cruz Zárate, Chantal Cramaussel, Paul Conrad, Guillermo Wilde, Enrique Normando Cruz, Gary Van Valen, and Erick D. Langer. Rivaya-Martínez writes the introduction, a very useful “state of the field” chapter, and the epilogue. Without a doubt, this collective endeavor is an important accomplishment.I was especially impressed by the book's broad geographic and chronological scope. The authors look at a wide variety of “indigenous borderlands,” from the United States south down to (what is now) Paraguay, Bolivia, and Argentina. We read about the Yoreme and neighboring peoples’ interactions with missionaries in New Spain, transfrontier wax trade in the northern Maya lowlands, the encounter between Chief Tascalusa and Hernando de Soto in the Mississippian borderlands, the Lipiyan (also known as Llanero) leader Picax-andé Ins-tisle and his negotiations with Apache and Spanish authorities, the 200-plus names given to “Indians” in the Chihuahuan Desert region, the discursive construction of an ever-looming Apache threat in Nueva Vizcaya and responses to Afro-Indigenous maroon communities in Cuba, mission towns in Guaraní territory, Spanish adaptations to the Chaco Indigenous context in colonial Tucumán, Genízaros’ litigation tactics in New Mexico, and Chiriguano and Caraparirenda communities’ land struggles in the Bolivian lowlands. Between them, they cover from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, with a brief dip into the twentieth.The book pushes forward an ongoing dialogue between anthropology and history, and their many different subfields. Radding's chapter shows how multidisciplinary approaches “deepen the palimpsest of meanings for indigenous borderlands” (p. 51). For a long time now, scholars have been underscoring the push-pull dynamics of borderland life, and the fact that Spanish colonialism took many different forms, as did Indigenous adaptation to and resistance against it. In this sense, the collection does not tell us anything particularly new; the chapters do not rewrite the overriding story. What they do is build on and affirm a well-established scholarly consensus, by guiding us through the detail of what such push-pull dynamics looked like. This is the book's major strength and contribution—the richness of the archival material, the specifics of the social landscapes that lie behind the bigger picture.We are treated to insights from a wealth of primary sources, including diaries, testimonies, correspondence, chronicles, and legal documents. There is a problem here too, though, and it is a problem that Rivaya-Martínez and the contributors highlight from the offset: the scarcity of Indigenous sources. Wallace, for example, calls attention to the “archival fog” that “obscures much of the transfrontier wax trade” in colonial Yucatan (p. 63), and Ethridge writes of having the sixteenth-century Indigenous leader Tascalusa in our “line of sight” but then losing him again (p. 100). There is an welcome openness that this leads to some necessary speculation—Wallace tells us what he “strongly suspect[s]” happened (p. 65); Ethridge “venture[s] to guess” what happened (p. 102). Equally important are contributors’ efforts to analyze the (mainly non-Indigenous-authored) sources we do have “against and across the grain” (p. 51). Multidisciplinary approaches are crucial in such an endeavor. As Radding states, we can start to really probe the “multilayered meanings of the archival texts” if we read them “in conjunction with ethnographic, linguistic, geographic, and ethnohistorical studies, and in light of archaeological research focused on the material remains” (p. 51).In this way, authors are able to tease out multiple histories of Indigenous agency, resilience, and power, while also acknowledging the extensive and transformative ramifications of (violent, capitalist, racist) colonization. Beyond Indigenous victories on the battlefield and the very real existence of Indigenous-controlled territories, we also learn about a colonial wax trade that was largely “built and controlled by Maya hands” (p. 67), the persistence of “native logics” of territory in Paraguay despite the intrusions of Jesuit missions (p. 199), the imposition of Indigenous social organization by clan name in Chaco de Jujuy (p. 214), and—in the last two chapters, by Van Valen and Langer respectively—Indigenous leaders’ successful use of colonial and republican legal mechanisms to defend community lands.Rivaya-Martínez connects the past and the present in a brief epilogue titled “Ongoing Indigenous Struggles.” I would have liked to have seen more substantive reflections here. Contributors to the volume are writing on the histories of living peoples, and there is much to say about the enduring legacies of colonialism, as well as the contemporary relevance of borderlands. The volume would also have benefited from more consideration of what new technologies bring to our historical research. Rivaya-Martínez points to the “immense analytic possibilities” of digital mapping (p. 23), but while many chapters include maps created for the volume using geographic information system software, we rarely get much discussion of what, precisely, it adds to our knowledge and understanding of Indigenous borderlands. Other minor quibbles apart—for example, the fact that chapters are inconsistent in their use of subheadings, and the occasional relegation of sources and voices to the notes rather than bringing them directly into the text—I congratulate the editor for pulling together this valuable collection of essays, which rightly encourage us to appreciate not just the great diversity of Indigenous experiences of and responses to Spanish colonialism but also the many different meanings of borderlands

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