The Spanish Borderlands of North America: A Historiography

David J. Weber

Reprinted from the OAH Magazine of History14 (Summer 2000) ISSN 0882-228X
Copyright (c) 2000, Organization of American Historians

Until recently, American history gave short shrift to Spain's North American borderlands. Americans saw their nation's colonial past as rolling westward from the Atlantic seaboard, rather than north from the Caribbean or Mexico (2). You can test that proposition in the privacy of your own home. Say silently to yourself "the beginnings of European settlement in America." What comes to mind? St. Augustine, founded in 1563 on the north coast of Florida? Juan de Oñate's settlement of New Mexico in 1598? Or is your default position set at 1607 with the abortive settlement at Jamestown or the more enduring English colony at Plymouth, founded in 1620?

Americans' neglect of their Hispanic past has practical explanations, including the fact that much of our historical knowledge emanated from the New England and mid-Atlantic states. It has also been true, as historian Light Cummins put it, that the Spanish Borderlands has "an orphan history because there is no distinct society or geopolitical entity that in our own time views the entire history of all the Spanish Borderlands as its special story" (3).

In the United States, several generations of scholars tried to adopt that orphan history and make it one of the nation's special stories, but they had scant success until the 1990s. Then, the commemoration of the five-hundredth anniversary of Columbus's discovery of America galvanized writers and publishers, bringing a new burst of interdisciplinary energy to the study of the Spanish Borderlands. One series alone, David Hurst Thomas's three-volume Columbian Consequences, contained nearly one hundred original articles that provided Archaeological and Historical Perspectives on the Spanish Borderlands. Thomas also edited a twenty-seven volume set of Spanish Borderlands Sourcebooks, which reprinted some 450 older articles on a variety of themes and places (4).

These and other Columbus-inspired works on the borderlands appeared at a propitious time. By the 1990s, changing intellectual fashions and shifting demographics had helped make the academically marginal borderlands a central concern of historians of the colonial United States. As Helena Wall, a student of British North America, noted in 1997: "The changing politics, population, and intellectual climate of the United States demand that we rethink our common past, and the rich field of Spanish-American history helps us to do so" (5). The changing population to which Wall alluded saw Latinos becoming more numerous, better educated, and politically more powerful throughout the nation, but particularly along the southern tier of the United States from Florida to California. The story of the Spanish Borderlands was part of their story. At the same time, the population centers of the United States had drifted southward to the Sunbelt, where Anglo Americans discovered that the thirteen colonies and their westward expansion represented only part of the story of America's colonial origins.

A small number of scholars, many of them associated with historian Herbert E. Bolton, had argued that point for decades. Bolton, who first introduced the term "Spanish Borderlands" in the title of a small book published in 1921 (6), had long lamented that "the history of the United States has been written almost solely from the standpoint of the East and of the English colonies" (7). Over his long and distinguished career--most of it spent at the University of California, Berkeley--Bolton insisted that understanding Spain's role in North America was essential to understanding American history, and he made the case through his own voluminous writings and by training 104 Ph.D. and 323 M.A. students.

If we measured scholarship by quantity, Bolton surely succeeded at his self-professed goal of doing for the Spanish Borderlands what Francis Parkman had done for the French in American history. But Bolton lacked Parkman's narrative power. His message, although heard within the borderlands, had little impact on the way in which Americans in other parts of the United States taught and thought about United States history. Indeed, even within states created out of the old Spanish Borderlands, there were historians who explicitly or implicitly dismissed the Spanish past as irrelevant to understanding the present.

In a sense, the Boltonians made themselves irrelevant because they failed to connect the borderlands with larger conversations in American history. Eager to win recognition for Spain's enduring contributions to American history, Bolton and his immediate successors placed Spaniards in such a favorable light that their interpretations often lacked authenticity. Moreover, their emphasis on institutions, and their "let us now praise famous men" approach to the past seemed increasingly quaint as the numbers of social historians grew.

The borderlands did, of course, have historians who wrote outside of the Bolton tradition. Notable among them was Sherburne Cook, who cast a critical eye on Spanish missions in California in 1943 and concluded that they were death traps. Missionaries, he explained, congregated Indians against their will and increased their vulnerability to the ravages of European diseases and to the despair of social dislocation and forced labor (8). Largely overlooked at the time of its publication by the Boltonians and other writers who celebrated missions more than they analyzed them, Cook's work came back into print in 1976. Since then, his view of the negative impact of missions on California Indians, and his use of demographic data to document high Indian death rates, has been corroborated in the work of many scholars, most notably Robert Jackson and Edward Castillo in the 1980s and 1990s (9).

The most direct and compelling argument against the Cook school came from Francis Guest, a Franciscan historian. Guest suggested that missionaries' behavior and world view deserved to be understood in context and analyzed with the same kind of ethnographic detachment that he saw scholars apply to Indians. Published in different journals from the 1970s to the 1990s, many of Guest's essays on missions are conveniently available in a recently published single volume (10).

The current trend in mission studies, exemplified by the work of Steven W. Hackel and James Sandos on California, Gary Anderson on Texas, and Amy Bushnell on Florida, goes beyond defending or attacking missionaries. These writers see missions from the points of view of the missionized, as places that Indians used for their own purposes: to preserve or reconstitute their communities in the face of colonialism, to profit from the colonial economy, and to adopt new religious symbols into a matrix of old beliefs. Anderson describes how some Indians sought refuge from the debilitating effects of disease or warfare in the San Antonio missions. After recovering and regrouping, they fled to "return to a more mobile life in the countryside." Other Indians in the San Antonio missions stayed and they, or their descendants, merged into Hispanic society, as historian Gilberto Hinojosa and anthropologist Anne Fox have explained (11).

Just as historical interpretations of the missionary process moved away from the Hispanophilia of the Boltonians, so too have interpretations of Spanish society and institutions. No book has done so more famously than Ramón Gutiérrez's When Jesus Came The Corn Mothers Went Away (12). In this wide-ranging and theoretically sophisticated social history of colonial New Mexico, Gutiérrez focuses on the ways that the Spanish church, state, and oligarchy used marriage to enforce Spaniards' sense of social order. Gutiérrez explains how elite Spanish males maintained their social distance from poorer Hispanics and Indian slaves, even as they exploited their labor and used the women as objects of sexual gratification. His picture of a prideful, ostentatious, hypocritical, and exploitative Hispanic elite--Franciscan missionaries among them--shattered the Boltonians' rose-colored glasses beyond repair.

Cracks in those glasses began to appear in New Mexico historiography as early as the 1940s when France Scholes, another historian working outside the Bolton tradition, used inquisition records to describe the peccadillos and infighting of representatives of the church and the state in the 1600s (13). But Gutiérrez's book made a bigger splash than Scholes's relatively inaccessible publications. Not only did When Jesus Came appear in the more receptive intellectual climate of the 1990s, but Gutiérrez told more sensational stories, wrote with flair and imagination, and made connections across disciplines and cultures. Gutiérrez's dark interpretation may come to be seen as a selective reading and a product of its time--much as Bolton's has--but Gutiérrez has moved us toward a fuller understanding of the past.

Gutiérrez has not only changed the way that we think about one of the key provinces in the Spanish Borderlands, but he has raised questions about power, sex, and gender that have earned him honors and readers among scholars of Latin America and the United States. Like Laurel Thatcher Ulrich and Inga Clendinnin, he has shown that one can study peripheral places from Maine to Yucatán and make them central to the concerns of scholars. Those who work in the history of the Spanish Borderlands, I suggested over a decade ago, "need not become intellectually marginalized simply because they study the peripheries of empires and states" (14).

Moving beyond the Boltonians, borderlands scholars have entered larger conversations on a number of fronts. They have, for example, portrayed Indians as shapers of events, rather than as violent savages or helpless victims. This is not an innovation. Two of the earliest benchmark works of ethnohistory appeared in 1960 and 1962, respectively: historian Jack Forbes's Apache, Navaho, and Spaniard, and anthropologist Edward Spicer's Cycles of Conquest (15). By the end of the century, however, more Indian-centered reconsiderations of Spanish-Indian relations have become the trend, some of them as favorable to Indians as an earlier generation of scholars were to Europeans (16).

More recently, borderlands scholars have begun to reconstruct the lost history of blacks and black communities. In Black Society in Spanish Florida, published in 1999, Jane Landers brought together years of research on Florida's many people of African descent, including creoles born in both Spanish and French colonies in the Caribbean and former slaves who had fled the British plantations to find haven in Florida. Most of Florida's black population was enslaved, but slaves could win freedom through legal means or by escaping to the Seminoles. Black freedmen, Landers found, provided Florida with a valuable source of militia and skilled labor. When the United States took possession of Florida in 1821, free blacks joined Spaniards in abandoning the colony, for they knew that the Americans would deny them opportunities they had enjoyed under Spain (17).

Recent works on blacks in Louisiana also suggest that free blacks and black slaves enjoyed greater protection under Spain than they previously had under France prior to 1763 or than they would under the United States when it acquired Louisiana in 1803. In a probing book published in 1997, Kimberly Hanger examined free blacks in Spanish New Orleans and described the legal rights, employment opportunities, and social standing that they steadily achieved under Spain (18). Gilbert Din's revisionist examination of Spanish regulations of slavery, which appeared in 1999, argues that Spanish laws offered protections and avenues for freedom for black slaves, although successive Spanish governors enforced the laws unevenly depending on their individual relationships with the planter class that wished to conserve the harsher French system (19).

Although blacks and mulattos could be found throughout the borderlands, African American history has more relevance to the Southeast than to the Southwest. In the Southeast, people and institutions were tied to the slave societies of the Atlantic and the Caribbean; in the Southwest, colonists came chiefly from the mestizo population of the viceroyalty of New Spain, and those colonists enslaved or exploited Indians rather than blacks. Students of southwestern social history, then, have looked at the ways in which Indians acquired by Hispanics through trade or war and taken into Spanish households were exploited yet also merged over generations into the larger society. These detribalized Indians and their descendants, known as genízaros in New Mexico, have garnered more attention from borderlands scholars in recent years. So, too, have cultural brokers--those Hispanics who moved easily between Indian and Spanish worlds, and those Hispanics who renounced their own society to live among Indians or like Indians, or who were captured by Indians (20).

The historiography of the Spanish Borderlands in North America is not, of course, devoted entirely to current scholarly concerns with race, class, gender, identity, community, or marginality. Recent works also address traditional topics in fresh ways, some in styles and formats that are accessible to high school students. These include Marc Simmons's biography of the controversial founder of Spain's first enduring colony in New Mexico, Juan de Oñate; Andrew Knaut's lively narrative account of the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 in New Mexico; Mark Santiago's biography of the military officer Hugo O'Conor, sent to northern New Spain to halt Indian depredations; Jerald Milanich on the rise and decline of Spanish missions in the Southeast—some 150 churches by his count; and John Hann and Bonnie McEwan's handsomely illustrated history of one of those missions, San Luis de Talimali, which is featured in this issue of the Magazine of History (21).

Milanich and Hann-McEwan both use archaeological findings to augment the historical record and documentary sources to inform archaeology. Over the last decade, historians and archaeologists have revisited the elusive trails of Hernando de Soto, Francisco Vázquez de Coronado, and other early explorers. This interdisciplinary sleuthing has resulted in better identifications of explorers' routes and of the Indian peoples they encountered (22).

At the same time, historians and linguists have continued a long tradition of editing and translating primary sources, including the definitive edition of Cabeza de Vaca's classic account; the unusual private correspondence of Diego de Vargas, the ambitious young nobleman who reconquered New Mexico after the Pueblo Revolt of 1680; and the official reports of a military officer like Hugo O'Conor (23).

A brief essay can only suggest the richness of the historiography of the Spanish Borderlands, past and present. I have omitted, for example, exciting work on that part of the Spanish Borderlands that lies today in northern Mexico--the tier of states from Baja California to Tamaulipas. Borderlands scholars see that area as within their purview, as much as they do the former Spanish-controlled regions that are now in the United States (24). I have focused on works published in the 1990s--but by no means done so comprehensively. I have omitted most earlier works, not because they are unimportant but because they are discussed in earlier historiographical essays (25).

Teachers in search of a point of entry into the voluminous literature on the borderlands will find it useful to begin with previous historiographical essays, some of them drawn together in an anthology, The Idea of the Spanish Borderlands (26), and to consult two reference works, The Encyclopedia of the North American Colonies, and The American Historical Association's Guide to Historical Literature (27). Useful, too, are the essays in New Views of Borderlands History, a collection edited by Robert H. Jackson and published in 1998, and two narrative histories that not only synthesize the field but provide guidance to sources: my own Spanish Frontier in North America, and Bernard L. Fontana's Entrada: The Legacy of Spain and Mexico in the United States. Fontana's work is keyed to some four dozen National Park Sites that represent America's Hispanic past. Those sites--like the Cabrillo National Monument on San Diego Bay in California and the Castillo San Marcos National Monument at St. Augustine, Florida--provide students with tangible symbols of past events and processes, and Fontana's text offers the essential historical context (28).

Just as Fontana's book links past and present, so do histories of certain locales. Although the "entire history of all the Spanish Borderlands" has lacked a constituency, as Cummins observed, former Spanish towns, states, and regions have not. As a result, much of the writing on borderlands history has tended to serve that constituency and thus be local. Those who teach in or near places with roots in the Spanish period have solid and up-to-date studies at their disposal. In Texas, for example, the 1990s gave us the first satisfactory single-volume history of the state when it belonged to Spain, by Donald Chipman. San Antonio's already abundant historiography was enriched by Frank de la Teja's San Antonio de Béxar, a study of community formation that explains how three diverse groups that made up early San Antonio--mestizo soldiers and their families, immigrants from the Canary Islands, and mission Indians, came to form a community with a single identity by the late-1700s. This theme also appeared in a fine collection of essays on eighteenth-century San Antonio, edited by Gerald Poyo and Gilberto Hinojosa (29). Similarly, teachers in California can turn to Contested Eden: California Before the Gold Rush, a fine collection of essays edited by Ramón Gutiérrez and Richard Orsi, published in 1998 (30). Several of the contributors, most notably Michael González, Steven Hackel, Douglas Monroy, and James Sandos, see an understanding of Indians as essential to explaining the Hispanic past. Spanish and Mexican California emerge from their essays as the product of cultural interactions, rather than as the result of an imposition of Spanish-Mexican culture on a passive native population.

Studies of Hispanic communities have intrinsic interest to students who live in or near them, but America's Spanish past can be of interest to students who live in regions of the country where England or France once ruled. Historians of all colonial empires have asked similar questions about the nature of society, culture, and institutions, and so the studies of the Spanish Borderlands lend themselves to a comparative history of the colonial origins of the many peoples who make up our national culture--including those once orphaned. Differences can be as revealing as the similarities.

1. In using "frontier" and "borderlands" I am following the useful distinction of Jeremy Adelman and Stephen Aron, "From Borderlands to Borders: Empires, Nation-States, and the Peoples in Between in North American History," American Historical Review 104 (June 1999): 815-41. "By frontier, we understand a meeting place of peoples in which geographic and cultural borders were not clearly defined....We reserve the designation of borderlands for the contested boundaries between colonial domains."

2. James Hijaya, "Why the West Is Lost," William and Mary Quarterly 51 (April 1994): 276-92.

3. Light T. Cummins, "Getting Beyond Bolton: Columbian Consequences and the Spanish Borderlands, Review Essay," New Mexico Historical Review 70 (April 1995): 203.

4. David Hurst Thomas, ed., Columbian Consequences, 3 vols. (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989); and David Hurst Thomas, ed., Spanish Borderlands Sourcebooks, 27 vols. (New York: Garland, 1991).

5. Helena M. Wall, "Confessions of a British North Americanist: Borderlands Historiography and Early American History," Reviews in American History 25 (March 1997): 2.

6. Herbert E. Bolton, The Spanish Borderlands: A Chronicle of Old Florida and the Southwest, foreword by Albert L. Hurtado (1st ed., 1921; Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996), xlv-xlvi.

7. Bolton wrote that in 1911, beginning with the phrase "down to recent times." Bolton, "Need for the Publication of a Comprehensive Body of Documents..." in Bolton and the Spanish Borderlands, ed. John Francis Bannon (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1964), 25.

8. Sherburne F. Cook, The Conflict Between the California Indians and White Civilization (1st ed., 1943-1946; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976).

9. For an introduction to their work, see Robert H. Jackson and Edward Castillo, Indians, Franciscans, and Spanish Colonization: The Impact of the Mission System on California Indians (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995).

10. Francis F. Guest, Hispanic California Revisited, ed. Doyce B. Nunis (Santa Barbara, CA: Santa Barbara Mission Archive Library, 1996).

11. Gary Clayton Anderson, The Indian Southwest, 1580-1830: Ethnogenesis and Reinvention (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999), 67; Steven W. Hackel, "Land, Labor, and Production: The Colonial Economy of Spanish and Mexican California," in Contested Eden: California Before the Gold Rush, ed. Ramón A. Gutiérrez and Richard J. Orsi (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); James A. Sandos, "Between Crucifix and Lance: Indian-White Relations in California, 1769-1848," in Gutiérrez and Orsi, eds., Contested Eden; Amy Turner Bushnell, Situado and Sabana: Spain's Support System for the Presidio and Mission Provinces of Florida, Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History, no. 74 (New York: American Museum of Natural History, 1994); and Gilberto M. Hinojosa and Anne A. Fox, "Indians and Their Culture in San Fernando de Béxar," in Tejano Origins in Eighteenth-Century San Antonio, ed. Gerald E. Poyo and Gilberto Hinojosa (Austin: University of Texas Press for the Institute of Texan Cultures at San Antonio, 1991). See, too, Erick Langer and Robert H. Jackson, eds., The New Latin American Mission History (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995).

12. Ramón A. Gutiérrez, When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality, and Power in New Mexico, 1500-1846 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991).

13. France V. Scholes, Church and State in New Mexico, 1610-1650, Historical Society of New Mexico, Publications in History, vol. 7 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1937); and France V. Scholes, Troublous Times in New Mexico, 1659-1670. Historical Society of New Mexico, Publications in History, vol. 11 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1942).

14. David J. Weber, "John Francis Bannon and the Historiography of the Spanish Borderlands," Journal of the Southwest 29 (Winter 1987): 363; Inga Clendinnen, Ambivalent Conquests: Maya and Spaniard in Yucatán, 1517-1570 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987); and Laura Thatcher Ulrich, A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812 (New York: Knopf, 1990).

15. Jack D. Forbes, Apache, Navaho, and Spaniard, 2nd ed. (1st ed., 1960; Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994); and Edward H. Spicer, Cycles of Conquest: The Impact of Spain, Mexico and the United States on the Indians of the Southwest, 1533-1960 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1962). Other pioneering works on the Spanish era include Oakah L. Jones, Pueblo Warriors & Spanish Conquest (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1966); and Elizabeth A. H. John, Storms Brewed in Other Men's Worlds: The Confrontation of Indians, Spanish, and French in the Southwest, 1540-1795, 2nd ed. (1st ed., 1975; Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1996).

16. A sample of recent titles includes Daniel T. Reff, Disease, Depopulation, and Culture Change in Northwestern New Spain, 1518-1764 (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1991); Jerald T. Milanich, Florida Indians and the Invasion from Europe (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1995); Carroll L. Riley, Rio del Norte: People of the Upper Rio Grande from Earliest Times to the Pueblo Revolt (Salt Lake: University of Utah Press, 1995); F. Todd Smith, The Caddo Indians: Tribes at the Convergence of Empires, 1542-1854 (College Station: Texas A & M University Press, 1995); John H. Hann, A History of the Timucua Indians and Missions (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1996); Thomas W. Kavanagh, Comanche Political History: An Ethnohistorical Perspective, 1706-1875 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996); and Anderson, Indian Southwest.

17. Jane Landers, Black Society in Spanish Florida (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999).

18. Kimberly S. Hanger, Bounded Lives, Bounded Places: Free Black Society in Colonial New Orleans, 1769-1803 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997).

19. Gilbert C. Din, Spaniards, Planters, and Slaves: The Spanish Regulation of Slavery in Louisiana, 1763-1803 (College Station: Texas A & M University Press, 1999). See also Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 1992).

20. Peter Stern, "Marginals and Acculturation in Frontier Society," in New Views of Borderlands History, ed. Robert H. Jackson (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1998); William L. Merrill, "Cultural Creativity and Raiding Bands in Eighteenth-Century Northern New Spain," in Violence, Resistance, and Survival in the Americas: Native Americans and the Legacy of Conquest, ed. William B. Taylor and Franklin Pease G.Y. (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994); Oakah L. Jones, "Rescue and Ransom of Spanish Captives from the indios bárbaros on the Northern Frontier of New Spain," Colonial Latin American Historical Review 4 (Spring 1995); John L. Kessell, "The Ways and Words of the Other: Diego de Vargas and Cultural Brokers in late Seventeenth-Century New Mexico," in Between Indian and White Worlds: The Cultural Broker, ed. Margaret C. Szasz (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994); James F. Brooks, "'This Evil Extends Especially to the Feminine Sex': Captivity and Identity in New Mexico, 1800-1846," in Writing the Range: Race, Class, and Culture in the Women's West, ed. Elizabeth Jameson and Susan Armitage (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997); and James F. Brooks, "Violence, Justice, and State Power in the New Mexican Borderlands, 1780-1880," in Power and Place in the North American West, ed. Richard White and John Findlay (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999), whose forthcoming book pushes farther back into the eighteenth century.

21. Marc Simmons, The Last Conquistador: Juan de Oñate and the Settling of the Far Southwest (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991); Andrew L. Knaut, The Pueblo Revolt of 1680: Conquest and Resistance in Seventeenth-Century New Mexico (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995); Mark Santiago, The Red Captain: The Life of Hugo O'Conor, Commandant Inspector of the Interior Provinces of New Spain (Tucson: Arizona Historical Society, 1994); Jerald T. Milanich, Laboring in the Fields of the Lord: Spanish Missions and Southeastern Indians (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1999); and John H. Hann and Bonnie G. McEwan, The Apalachee Indians and Mission San Luis (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1998).

22. For an introduction, see Jerald T. Milanich and Charles Hudson, Hernando de Soto and the Indians of Florida (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1993); Charles Hudson, Knights of Spain, Warriors of the Sun: Hernando de Soto and the South's Ancient Chiefdoms (Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1997); and Richard Flint and Shirley Cushing Flint, eds., The Coronado Expedition to Tierra Nueva: The 1540-1542 Route Across the Southwest (Niwot, CO: University Press of Colorado, 1997).

23. Rolena Adorno and Patrick Charles Pautz, eds., Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca: His Account, His Life, and the Expedition of Pánfilo de Narváez, 3 vols. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999); John L. Kessell, Rick Hendricks, and Meredith D. Dodge, eds., Letters from the New World: Selected Correspondence of Don Diego de Vargas to His Family, 1675-1706 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1992); and Hugo O'Conor, The Defenses of Northern New Spain: Hugo O'Conor's Report to Teodoro de Croix, July 22, 1777, ed. and trans. Donald C. Cutter (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press/DeGolyer Library, 1994).

24. A sample of recent work in English would include Cynthia Radding, Wandering Peoples: Colonialism, Ethnic Spaces, and Ecological Frontiers in Northwestern Mexico, 1700-1850 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997); Cheryl English Martin, Governance and Society in Colonial Mexico: Chihuahua in the Eighteenth Century (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996); Susan M. Deeds, "Colonial Chihuahua: Peoples and Frontiers in Flux," in New Views of Borderlands History, ed. Robert H. Jackson (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1998); and Susan M. Deeds, "Indigenous Rebellions on the Northern Mexican Mission Frontier: From First-Generation to Later Colonial Responses," in Contested Ground: Comparative Frontiers on the Northern and Southern Edges of the Spanish Empire, ed. Donna J. Guy and Thomas E. Sheridan (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1998).

25. The list of earlier works of enduring value would be long, and would include titles like Max L. Moorhead, The Presidio: Bastion of the Spanish Borderlands (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1975); Oakah L. Jones, Los Paisanos: Spanish Settlers on the Northern Frontier of New Spain (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1979); and Peter Gerhard, The North Frontier of New Spain (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982).

26. David J. Weber, ed. The Idea of Spanish Borderlands (New York: Garland Press, 1991). See also Amy Turner Bushnell, "Historiography of Spanish Florida (1565-1763) and Spanish East Florida (1784-1821)," in A Guide to the History of Florida, ed. Paul George (New York: Greenwood Press, 1989); Antonia I. Castañeda, "Gender, Race and Culture: Spanish-Mexican Women in the Historiography of Frontier California," Frontiers 11 (1990): 8-20; Elizabeth A. H. John, "A View from the Spanish Borderlands," in Writing the History of the American West (Worcester: American Antiquarian Society, 1991), 87-97; Alfredo Jiménez, "El lejano norte Español: cómo escapar del American West y de las Spanish Borderlands," Colonial Latin American Historical Review 5 (Fall 1996): 381-412; James A. Sandos, "From 'Boltonlands' to 'Weberlands': The Borderlands Enter American History," American Quarterly 46 (December 1994): 595-604; and Helena Wall, "Confessions of a British North Americanist," 1-12.

27. Jacob Ernest Cooke, et al., eds., Encyclopedia of the North American Colonies, 3 vols. (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1993); Mary Beth Norton, ed., The American Historical Association's Guide to Historical Literature, 3rd ed., 2 vols. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 1196-98.

28. Robert H. Jackson, ed., New Views of Borderlands History (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1998); David J. Weber, The Spanish Frontier in North America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992); and Bernard L. Fontana, Entrada: The Legacy of Spain and Mexico in the United States (Tucson and Albuquerque: Southwest Parks and Monuments Association and the University of New Mexico Press, 1994).

29. Donald E. Chipman, Spanish Texas, 1519-1821 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992); Jesús F. de la Teja, San Antonio de Béxar: A Community on New Spain's Northern Frontier (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995); and Gerald E. Poyo and Gilberto Hinojosa, eds., Tejano Origins in Eighteenth-Century San Antonio (Austin: University of Texas Press for the Institute of Texan Cultures at San Antonio, 1991).

30. Gutiérrez and Orsi, eds., Contested Eden.

David J. Weber is the Robert and Nancy Dedman Professor of History and director of the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies at Southern Methodist University. He is author of a number of prize-winning books, including The Mexican Frontier, 1821-1846 (1982) and The Spanish Frontier in North America (1992).