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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
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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.
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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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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.
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