Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Von der hinteren Coverseite

"There has been much talk about comparative history but precious little of it in the Spanish colonial period. Cynthia Radding has led the way."-- David J. Weber, Director of the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies, Southern Methodist University

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Landscapes of Power and Identity

Duke University Press

Contents

List of Illustrations.........................................................................................ixAbbreviations.................................................................................................xiiiPreface.......................................................................................................xvAcknowledgments...............................................................................................xxiIntroduction Savannas and Deserts: Two Histories of Cultural Landscapes.......................................1Chapter 1 Ecological and Cultural Frontiers in Sonora and Chiquitos...........................................19Chapter 2 Political Economy: Communities, Missions, and Colonial Markets......................................55Chapter 3 Territory: Community and Conflicting Claims to Property.............................................89Chapter 4 Ethnic Mosaics and Gendered Identities..............................................................117Chapter 5 Power Negotiated, Power Defied: Political Culture, Governance, and Mobilization.....................162Chapter 6 Priests and Shamans: Spiritual Power, Ritual, and Knowledge.........................................196Chapter 7 Postcolonial Landscapes: Transitions from Colony to Republic........................................240Chapter 8 Contested Landscapes in Continental Borderlands.....................................................295Notes.........................................................................................................327Glossary......................................................................................................375Bibliography..................................................................................................385Index.........................................................................................................423

Chapter One

After two days had passed that we were there, we decided to go in search of the maize [corn]. And we did not want to follow the road of the cows [bison] because it is toward the north, and this was for us a very great detour, because we always held it for certain that going the route of the setting sun we would find what we desired. And thus we followed our course and traversed the entire land until coming out at the South Sea.-Alvar Nez Cabeza de Vaca, Relacin, 1542

The year was 1536 by the Christian calendar: Alvar Nez Cabeza de Vaca, his two European companions, Captain Andrs Dorantes and Captain Alonso del Castillo Maldonado, and Estevanico, a Christian, Arabic-speaking slave from northern Africa, entered the final phase of their eight-year odyssey. These four survivors of the failed Pnfilo de Narvez expedition to "La Florida" were near their goal to reunite with "Christians," Spaniards who had extended the dominion of the Castilian crown northwestward from central Mexico. The Cabeza de Vaca company at this point traveled on the Ro Grande river upstream from its confluence with the Ro Conchos. Here they turned southwest along the so-called trail of maize, traversing the Sierra Madre Occidental and approaching what later would become the province of Sonora. Their itinerary, constructed through the journey, itself illustrates the ways in which Sonora was connected to the greater Mexican north-geographically through the Colorado and Grande river systems and culturally through complex trade networks among different nomadic and sedentary peoples.

Mountains and Deserts of Sonora

The four sojourners did not travel alone. Dependent on the native peoples for their physical survival, they were accompanied by indigenous guides and followers-hunters, gatherers, fishers, and cultivators-who supplied the strangers generously with the fruits of their lands, including pion nuts, mesquite flour, bison and deer meat, hides, cotton cloth, and maize. Men, women, and children of unspecified numbers danced, wept, and sang, drawn to the strangers by their reputation as healers. Their territorial and cultural boundaries are inferred, if dimly, in Cabeza de Vaca's recollection of the journey, by the approach and retreat of different groups of people along the way and, in some instances, by his references to native "lords" who distributed food and stolen weapons, tools, and clothing among their followers. Different bands "robbed" or seized one another's possessions as they passed from one village to the next, in what may be interpreted as ritual forms of pillage and exchange closely associated with the strangers' healing powers. When their current guides feared to continue into enemy territory, as occurred in northern Coahuila and Texas, they sent women as messengers, "because women can mediate even when there is war."

Cabeza de Vaca's Relacin and its summary inclusion in Gonzalo Fernndez de Oviedo's Historia general y natural de las Indias have inspired numerous accounts of the expedition featuring sketches of the lands and peoples along the route. These texts provide themes and images that serve as signs for narrations of conquest and cultural encounters in this frontier and in many colonial theaters: the combination of Europeans and Africans in the Iberian expeditions to the Americas; the key participation of indigenous peoples as interlocutors, guides, and followers; practices of captivity and warfare; disease and shamanistic healing rituals. As the following passage illustrates, the Cabeza de Vaca entourage, appearing more like a pilgrimage than an expedition, precipitated far-reaching mobilizations of different peoples and provided the occasion for the invention of new cultural patterns of encounter and exchange.

We went through so many types of people and such diverse languages that memory is insufficient to be able to recount them. And the ones always sacked the others, and thus those who lost, like those who gained, were very content. We carried so great a company that in no manner could we make use of them.... And those who carried bows did not go before us. Rather, they spread out over the sierra to hunt deer. And at night when they returned, they brought for each one of us five or six, and many birds and quail and other game. Everything, finally, that the people killed, they put before us without daring to take one single thing without our first making the sign of the cross over it, even though they might be dying of hunger, because thus they had it as a custom since traveling with us.

Turning southwestward, then, from the Ro Grande, Cabeza de Vaca and his companions followed the trail of maize, passing through distinct climatic zones and cultural domains. They crossed the arid plains of the northern Chihuahua desert for over a month before reaching the pine-and-oak forests of the Sierra Madre Occidental, its slopes, valley floors, and steep barrancas (raised earthworks) carved by deep-cutting streams. As the party advanced "toward the setting sun," the highland cordilleras gave way to the zona serrana (highlands zone), the western foothills of the sierra marked by roughly parallel alluvial valleys separated by ranges and plateaus that reveal a complex geological history of sedimentation and...