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SITES OF DIPLOMACY, VIOLENCE, AND REFUGE: Topography and Negotiation in the Mountains of New Spain

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 February 2015

Sean F. McEnroe
Sean F. McEnroe*
Affiliation:
Southern Oregon UniversityAshland, Oregon
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Extract

Through much of the history of the Americas, political life took place in two spheres: the colonial realm, in which a complex population of Indians, Africans, and Iberians interacted within the civic framework of European institutions; and the extra-colonial realm, in which largely indigenous populations beyond the reach of imperial authority maintained separate political systems. Encounters across this divide were sometimes peaceful and symbiotic, but at other times violent. Many historical discussions of interethnic conflict presume a general and persistent difference in power between these two groups. On Mexico's northern frontier of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, however, the relative advantage enjoyed by colonial versus extra-colonial peoples shifted radically depending on the moment and place of encounter. This article proposes that differences in topography and ecology, often between places not far removed in absolute distance, produced inversions in the relative power enjoyed by indigenous and settler populations. The cultivation of maize was common to the refuge zones of settlers and northern Indians alike: unassimilated Indian bands concealed and protected their crops in difficult-to-find mountain valleys; settler communities, both Spanish and Indian, protected crops close to their respective concentrations of population and militiamen. Both colonial and extra-colonial peoples subsisted on cattle, and the demand for vast pasture spaces produced inevitable conflict. Thus, the geography of the north produced areas of security and vulnerability for all parties.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Americas , Volume 69 , Issue 2 , October 2012 , pp. 179 - 202
Copyright
Copyright © Academy of American Franciscan History 2012

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References

My thanks to the following people for comments on early drafts of this article: William Taylor, Mary Karasch, Margaret Chowning, James Scott, Susan Deeds, Rafael Folsom, Julia Sarreal, Dana Velasco Murillo, and George Milne. Thanks also to the anonymous peer reviewers for The Americas.

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14. The past two decades have seen an explosion of scholarship on the interactions of sedentary and mobile populations. David J. Weber, Bárbaros: Spaniards and their Savages in the Age of Enlightenment, Radding, Cyn¬thia, Wandering Peoples: Colonialism, Ethnic Spaces, and Ecological Frontiers in Northwestern Mexico, 1700–1850 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997);Google Scholar Nómadas y sedentarios en el norte de México, eds. Hers, Marie-Areti et al. (Mexico: UNAM, Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas et al., 2000);Google Scholar Guy, Donna J. and Sheridan, , Contested Ground: Comparative Frontiers on the Northern and Southern Edges of the Spanish Empire (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1998);Google Scholar Susan Deeds, Defiance and Deference in Colo¬nial Mexico; Adams, David B., “Embattled Borderland: Northern Nuevo León and the Indios Bárbaros, 1686–1870,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 95:2 (1991), pp. 205–220;Google Scholar García, Martha Rodríguez, His-torias de resistencia y exterminio: los indios de Coahuila durante el siglo XIX (Mexico: CIESAS, 1995);Google Scholar Griffen, William, Indian Assimilation in the Franciscan Areas of Nueva Vizcaya (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1979);Google Scholar and García, Rodriguez, La guerra entre bárbaros y civilizados: el exterminio del nómada en Coahuila, 1840–1880 (Saltillo, Coah.: CESHAC,1998).Google Scholar

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18. On the territorialization of Indian political authority under the Spanish colonial regime, see McEn¬roe, , “A Sleeping Army: The Diplomatic and Military Origins of Interethnic Civic Structures on Mexico’s Colonial Frontier,” Ethnohistory 59:1 (Winter 2012), pp. 109–139.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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20. Several of these cyclical resettlement stories are recounted in McEnroe, “A Sleeping Army,” pp. 109–139.

21. Fernández de Jáuregui, pp. 96–100. For a discussion of topography in relation to state control, resistance, and flight in the context of the southeast Asian highlands, see Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed, p. 5.

22. Military reports from the early eighteenth century were attentive to these geographical issues. They took note especially of Indians’ use of mountains and canyons as safe havens: “Expediente sobre la pacificación de los Indios del Nuevo Reino de León, 1718–1722,” Archivo General de Indias (hereafter AGI), Audiencia de Guadalajara legajo 166, fols. 1–243. Tobosos appear in the legal, military, and mission records of the north¬east throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but there is no scholarly consensus on the extent to which the Tobosos who crop up in different periods and regions were a unitary ethnic group, a confeder¬ation of groups, or distinct groups erroneously given the same name by Spanish observers. Maria Luisa Reyes Landa and Arturo Guevara Sánchez describe Tobosos as heterogeneous bands of similar groups subsisting on hunting, gathering, limited agriculture, trading, and raiding. They suspect that the Tobosos who appear early in the records of Nueva Vizcaya, later in the records of Nuevo Santander, and ultimately in the records of the nineteenth-century north were from unrelated ethnic groups, but with very similar practices of war and com¬merce. Reyes Landa, Maria Luisa and Sanchez, Arturo Guevara, El viejo camino a Chiguagua: avances en el estu¬dio de la cultura de tobosos y grupos afines (Chihuahua, Chih.: Instituto Chihuahuense de la Cultura, 2008), pp. 75–157.Google Scholar

23. The documents collected in Hoyo, Eugenio del, Esclavitud y encomienda de los indios en el Huevo Reino de León, siglos XVI y XVII (Monterrey: Archivo General del Estado de Nuevo León, 1985)Google Scholar show that the dangers of engaging with the Spanish were well known to the Indians.

24. Archivo Municipal de Monterrey, Nuevo León: Correspondencia 121, exp. 1, fol. 5.

25. In the context of the South American Chaco region, James S. Saeger has explored the ways that indigenous frontier leaders utilized contacts with the colonial order to elevate their status and influence within their own extra-colonial groups: Saeger, , The Chaco Mission Frontier: The Guaycuruan Experience (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2000).Google Scholar Juliana Barr in “Geographies of Power,” pp. 10–18, encourages us to con¬sider the varied “spaces of control” held by Indians and Spaniards and the diplomatic properties of each. Radding in Landscapes of Power, pp. 186–187, describes the diplomatic properties of certain locations, such as the banks of a river, in providing safety or expressions of good faith.

26. For documentary studies of this type of expedition, see Zavala, Silvio, Entradas, congregas y encomiendas en el Nuevo Reino de León (Seville: Universidad de Sevilla, 1992).Google Scholar On negotiation, translation, and mediated communications, see Metcalf, Alida, Go-Betweens and the Colonization of Brazil, 1500-1600 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005);Google Scholar Townsend, Camilla, Malintzin’s Choices: An Indian Woman in the Conquest of Mexico (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2006);Google Scholar Yannakakis, Yanna, The Art of Being In-Between: Native Intermediaries, Indian Identity, and Local Rule in Colonial Oaxaca (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009);Google Scholar and Barr, Juliana, Peace Came in the Form of a Woman: Indians and Spaniards in the Texas Borderlands. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007).Google Scholar

27. Robles, Vito Alessio, Coahuila y Texas en la epoca colonial [1938], 2nd ed. (Mexico: Biblioteca Porrúa, 1978) chapts. 8,23, 26, and 27;Google Scholar Ríos, Eduardo Enrique, Fray Margil de Jesús: Apóstol de América, 2nd ed. (Mexico: Editorial Jus, 1955).Google Scholar The mitote, as an indigenous institution that became integral to Spanish-indigenous diplomacy, has much in common with the parlamentos that took place in South American frontier environments. The parlamentos of Araucania, like the diplomacy of northern New Spain, over time produced forms of strategic ethnogenesis and further territorialized indigenous authority. Spanish and indigenous inter-locutors held their deliberations on carefully chosen neutral ground and even constructed architectural spaces for such occasions, in order to express parity, security, and status. Méndez Beltrán, Luz Maria, “La organi¬zación de los parlamentos de indios en el siglo XVIII” in Relaciones fronterizas en la Araucanía, eds. Villalobos, Sergio et al. (Santiago: Universidad Católica de Chile, 1982);Google Scholar Jones, Kristine L., “Warfare, Reorganization, and Réadaptation at the Southern Margins of Spanish Rule: The Southern Margin (1573–1883),” Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas, vol. 3, eds. Saloman, Frank and Schwartz, Stuart (New York: Cam¬bridge University Press, 2000), pp. 156–159;Google Scholar and Boceara, Guillaume, “Etnogénesis Mapuche: resistencia y restructuración entre los indígenas del centro-sur de Chile (siglos XVI–XVIII),” Hispanic American Histori¬cal Review, 79:3 (August 1999), pp. 425–61.Google Scholar

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29. Radding, Landscapes of Power and Identity, pp. 166–187.

30. Barr, Peace Came in the Form of a Woman.

31. On indigenous and colonial roads or paths as a site of diplomatic encounter, see Barr, “Geographies of Power,” pp. 11–12.

32. Fernández de Jáuregui describes the long tradition of Spanish estancias employing Indians as long¬distance herders (p. 83). I have found the same practice employed in pueblos de indios and recorded in their mission-town account books, for example, the Hualahuises Mission Accounts and Inventories in the Bancroft Library’s MSS 75/53. On the influence of cattle on northern New Spain, see Melville, Elinor G.K., A Plague of Sheep: Environmental Consequences of the Conquest of Mexico (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge Uni¬versity Press, 1994);CrossRefGoogle Scholar del Hoyo, Eugenio, Señores de ganado: Nuevo Reino de León, siglo XVII (Monterrey: Gobierno del Estado, Archivo General del Estado de Nuevo León [hereafter AGENL], 1987);Google Scholar and Radding, Wandering Peoples. Free-range grazing and feral cattle as a source of conflict are explored in Sarreal, Julia, “Dis¬order, Wild Cattle, and a New Role for the Missions: The Banda Oriental, 1776–1786,” The Americas 67:4 (April 2011), pp. 517–545.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

33. Fernández de Jáuregui, p. 97.

34. On indigenous diplomacy, see Blackhawk, Ned, “The Displacement of Violence: Ute Diplomacy and the Making of New Mexico’s Eighteenth-Century Northern Borderlands,” Ethnohistory 54:4 (Fall 2007), pp.723–755.CrossRefGoogle Scholar For the following century, see Hàmalàinen, The Comanche Empire; Barr, Juliana, “Diplomacy of Gender: Rituals of First Contact in the ‘Land of Tejas,’” William and Mary Quarterly 61:3 (July 2004), pp. 393–434;CrossRefGoogle Scholar Grifïèn, William B., Utmost Good Faith: Patterns of Apache-Mexican Hostilities in Northern Chi¬huahua Border Warfare, 1821–1848 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1988); and Griffen, Apaches at War and Peace.Google Scholar

35. “Fundación de presidios, villas y misiones, Monterrey 3 enero 1741”; “Testimonio de la paz que dio Francisco, Indio Apóstata, Capitán de Varias Nasiones, 9 Jan. 1741,” and “Testimonio de la paz que dio Andrés, Indio Capitán de los Cacalotes, 9 enero 1741,” Salce Arredondo Collection, No. 36, Benson Library.

36. Archivo General de Simancas, Secretaría de Guerra 7027, Exp. 1, folios 8-9. Sara Ortelli has pro¬posed that northern leaders’ reports of escalating Apache attacks in the later eighteenth century are attribut¬able less to an actual escalation of violence than to northern governors’ strategies for securing resources and political autonomy. The same question may yet be explored in relation to the Sierra Tamaulipas and other reportedly high-conflict zones. Trama Ae una guerra conveniente, chapt. 3.

37. Archivo General de Simancas, Secretaría de Guerra 7027, Exp. 1, folio 9. Though these numbers of domestic animals seem unbelievable, they are still far short of the peak densities found by Melville, Elinor in the sixteenth-century Valley of Mezquital: Plague of Sheep: Environmental Consequences of the Conquest of Mexico (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 51.Google Scholar

38. de Guevara, Don Antonio Ladrón, Noticias Ae los poblados Ael Nuevo Reino Ae León (1738), (Mon¬terrey, N.L.: ITESM, 1969), pp. 6–29.Google Scholar

39. Flores, Raúl García, “También acá hubo Pames: Nuevo León, 1770-1830, Actas 2:3 (January 2003), p. 24.Google Scholar Also noted by Martínez Perales, Montemorelos, Nuevo León, p. 30.

40. The importance of these Tlaxcalan trade fairs becomes apparent in the records of the early republi¬can era when Indian communities petitioned for legal recognition of market charters even after the legal dis¬solution of the pueblos de indios. Resolutions of the Ayuntamiento of Montemorelos, No. 113, AGENL, Cor¬respondencia de los Alcaldes de Nuevo León, 1821–1826, box 2.

41. 7 August 1725 Memorial por yndios de Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe, AGI 173, folios 5–6; don Juan de Arellano, May 10, 1724, AGI Audiencia de Guadalajara 173, fol. 6.