New Mexico's Latinx past, especially its Nuevomexicano history, stretches for centuries yet remains understudied. Michael J. Alarid's new book is a much-needed contribution to the historical study of Nuevomexicanos before and during nineteenth-century US Anglo occupation. In five chapters, Alarid argues that “large landholding Hispanos [Mexican New Mexicans] maintained a great deal of political, economic, and social autonomy in the age of Manifest Destiny,” opening a “Hispano bastion” lens to explore the nuanced classed, racial, and political formations of the region (3). The author maintains that the territory's transition to US occupation was successful, in due in part, to how “large landholding patrones embraced American capitalism, which offered all the class advantages they enjoyed under Mexican rule but with none of the responsibilities of caring for people in need” (3). What readers have, then, is a compelling and exciting study into how collaboration and agency saturated the territory's political milieu, and the surprising political alliances that resulted.
Alarid begins Hispano Bastion with the story of Santa Fe Hispano Manuel Chaves to help make sense of how Nuevomexicanos “projected power in New Mexico territory” (2). When Chaves began to construct a barrier on his land that was in close proximity to Santa Fe's Guadalupe Chapel, the landowner clashed with ecclesiastical authorities. Armed with rifles, he and others entered the chapel to demonstrate Chaves's resistance to the Church's political power (1). The author uses this story as an anchor to grapple with the large landowners’ (patrones) claims to agency, accommodation, and authority in the Southwest. The book follows some of the largest sheep-trading Nuevomexicano families: “Armijo, Chávez, Otero, Perea, and Yrizarri” to show how this group “sought ways to translate their landholdings into various forms of wealth” (8).
The first chapter compares social tensions during the years between the 1837 Chimayo Rebellion and the 1847 Taos Rebellion, and the second and third chapters focus on the compromises Nuevomexicanos made during US occupation. Alarid posits that the increase in economic inequality in New Mexico “led to an increase in vecinos’ larceny,” which has ramifications for how criminology is historicized (12). The remaining three chapters detail Nuevomexicanos’ responses to their own stratified class system, and how they influenced New Mexico's legal system under US rule. In doing so, Hispano Bastion shows readers how “New Mexico resembled a colonized society in some ways and a racist southern society in others,” by exploring racial tensions with whites (Anglos) and between New Mexican Nuevomexicanos and Native Americans (167).
A key contribution to the historiography is the study of New Mexico's diverse inhabitants during the US's colonial takeover of the region, and how some of these residents negotiated society. As Alarid points out, “increased class differences . . . arose in nineteenth-century New Mexico,” as the territory became home to “vecinos, Indios de los pueblos, genízaros, unfree people,” and others (3). The author explains that poor and working-class vecinos not only relied on these landowners for basic needs, but also sought their “defense against Apache, Comanche, Navajo, [and] Pueblo attacks,” while patrones exploited poorer vecinos “for labor and to fill the ranks of their militias when threats to New Mexico arose” (6).
To complicate these social strata, Alarid offers, some Nuevomexicanos “forged treaties with the Comanche, and the Pueblos followed,” showing that political power was anything but stagnant (7). Following the US intervention in 1847, New Mexican patrones “worked alongside older white [Anglo] immigrants to acquire property and increase their influence” (14). The exploration of nineteenth-century New Mexico is an excellent case study for how racialized communities—Nuevomexicanos, not only detribalized Native people, enslaved people, Indigenous nations, and Anglos—negotiated power, security, and land, but also subverted each other.
