Using a revisionist treatment of the extant bibliography and analysis of both Nahuatl and Spanish-language sources, Jeffres achieves a highly nuanced study of central Mexicans’ participation in New Spain’s colonial expansion. He traces both their voluntary and coerced migrations into the northern frontier from the 1540s to 1693, and focuses on mining centers, frontier settlements, and colonization efforts. Research in peripheral areas of empire is a gargantuan task that Jeffres carries out with determination and zeal. Working in Mexican, Spanish, and US archives, he provides a painstaking and highly readable account of the thousands of Mesoamericans who went north as soldiers, laborers, muleteers, farmers, and settlers. He traces acculturation, community building, and reproduction of corporate identity. Although there are many outstanding works on the borderlands, what is new here is Jeffres’ relative success at finding Nahuatl sources that better reflect Mesoamerican experiences and agency on the Chichimec frontier. His most documented case is that of the Tlaxcalan settlers at San Esteban (Coahuila). Less in evidence are Nahua records for Zacatecas and New Mexico. Jeffres also corrects some historiographical assumptions. Labeling Mesoamericans as allies and auxiliaries paints them as traitors or as unimportant subordinates. Through a Nahua lens, we see them as brave, self-actualizing partners who have their own agendas, and as resistant opponents of coerced migrations and frontier settlements. These groups protected Spanish mining interests, beat back the Chichimeca (large bands of non-sedentary peoples), and secured a peace on the border that paved the way for missionaries and Christianization.
The Chichimeca wars, renamed the “The Toltec-Chichimec War” to honor its mostly Indigenous victims, caused immeasurable damage to the mining economy and threatened to destroy New Spain altogether. Panicked viceregal authorities first declared all-out war, using Mesoamerican armies, and then employed “defensive colonization” through Nahua settlers who would “civilize” the frontier’s nomadic peoples. Jeffres does his best work in a detailed study of San Esteban de la Nueva Tlaxcala, founded in 1591. Through exegesis of Nahuatl sources in both Tlaxcala and Coahuila, he reveals the emotional, socioeconomic, and political experiences of the migrant community. Even though Spanish sources portray the Tlaxcalans as eager and enthusiastic colonists, he describes them as unwilling and fearful. In Coahuila, cabildo membership became a route to elite status, economic resources, and political power over a colony of mostly poor farmers. Using cabildo records, notarial documents, and Kartunnen and Lockhart’s philological approach to Nahua cultural change, Jeffres concludes that San Esteban reproduced itself as a corporate entity for more than two centuries. I question this. Ethnogenesis is a dialogical relationship between reproduction and transformation that results in culturally reconstituted and constantly changing communities. Even Jeffres’ data show this. Elites at San Esteban depended on corporate reproduction to remain in power. However, the commoners were abused by both cabildo members and a growing Spanish population, and experienced tensions that must have resulted in constant change and acculturation. Given the trend toward adopting Spanish surnames and behaviors (such as land expropriation, forced labor extraction, and the employment of extreme patriarchy), even the elites experienced ongoing acculturation that would have curtailed the continuation of a corporate identity. Also problematic is the use of the philological model. In a debate with historians of the Lockhart school (c.1992), the late anthropologist, Thomas Abercrombie, questioned the connection between language and cultural continuity. In the Andes, where there are few Native sources, Indigenous elites wrote official documents in Spanish. Nevertheless, scholars have still been able to uncover the agency and ethnogenesis of hundreds of communities there.
Nahuas accompanied Spanish explorers, missionaries, and settlers to New Mexico, from 1540 to 1693. They were part of an undifferentiated group of Mesoamericans whose ethnic identities were diluted by intermarriage with Spaniards, mestizos, and mulattos. Santa Fe’s archives were destroyed during the Pueblo Revolt; consequently, Jeffres uses Inquisition records to convey histories of its less illustrious settlers. His ingenious analyses lead to colorful tales about extramarital relationships and various forms of sorcery, especially among Indigenous women. New Mexico’s Spaniards used the Inquisition to investigate the underclass and put upwardly mobile “Indians” back in their places. That this ever happened is questionable because Indigenous peoples were considered neophytes in Christianity and could not be tried by the Inquisition. As his data indicate, the New Mexican inquisitors dismissed these cases as being the result of rumor and gossip and pointed out that some addressed situations of gendered abuse. It is often difficult to find women’s stories in “conquest” accounts, but Jeffres has found ways to highlight their lived experiences in both Tlaxcala and Santa Fe.
Though Jeffres’ book is problematic in some areas, he has written an exceptional account of a marginal region of empire that is poorly documented. His is an exhaustively researched examination of understudied Mesoamerican communities on the northern border during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Through analysis of Spanish and Nahuatl sources, he succeeds in recounting the lived experiences of both elite and common Nahuas in the Greater Southwest.
