This research guide was first conceived to fulfill multiple needs of the research team of the Documentary Relations of the Southwest (DRSW) project at the Arizona State Museum. In performing research tasks, it became evident that reference material was scattered throughout scores of books and monographs. A single complete source book was simply not available. Hence, the editors of the DRSW project compiled this guide. The territory under study comprises all of northern Mexico in colonial times.
Spain's colonial rule rested on a judicial system that resolved conflicts and meted out justice. But just how was this legal order imposed throughout the New World? Re-created here from six hundred civil and criminal cases are the procedural and ethical workings of the law in two of Spain's remote colonies--New Mexico and Texas in the eighteenth century. Professor Cutter challenges the traditional view that the legal system was inherently corrupt and irrelevant to the mass of society, and that local judicial officials were uninformed and inept. Instead he found that even in peripheral areas the lowest-level officials--thealcaldeor town magistrate--had a greater impact on daily life and a keener understanding of the law than previously acknowledged by historians. These local officials exhibited flexibility and sensitivity to frontier conditions, and their rulings generally conformed to community expectations of justice. By examining colonial legal culture, Cutter reveals the attitudes of settlers, their notions of right and wrong, and how they fixed a boundary between proper and improper actions. "A superlative work."--Marc Simmons, author ofSpanish Government in New Mexico
Native and Spanish New Worlds brings together archaeological, ethnohistorical, and anthropological research from sixteenth-century contexts to illustrate interactions during the first century of Native–European contact in what is now the southern United States. The contributors examine the southwestern and southeastern United States and the connections between these regions and explain the global implications of entradas during this formative period in borderlands history.
Winner of the 1993 Western Heritage Award given by the National Cowboy Hall of Fame, here is a definitive history of the Spanish colonial period in North America. Authoritative and colorful, the volume focuses on both the Spaniards' impact on Native Americans and the effect of North Americans on Spanish settlers. "Splendid".--New York Times Book Review.
For millennia friendships have framed the most intimate and public contours of our everyday lives. In this book, Ignacio Martínez tells the multilayered story of how the ideals, logic, rhetoric, and emotions of friendship helped structure an early yet remarkably nuanced, fragile, and sporadic form of civil society (societas civilis) at the furthest edges of the Spanish Empire. Spaniards living in the isolated borderlands region of colonial Sonora were keen to develop an ideologically relevant and socially acceptable form of friendship with Indigenous people that could act as a functional substitute for civil law and governance, thereby regulating Native behavior. But as frontier society grew in complexity and sophistication, Indigenous and mixed-raced people also used the language of friendship and the performance of emotion for their respective purposes, in the process becoming skilled negotiators to meet their own best interests. In northern New Spain, friendships were sincere and authentic when they had to be and cunningly malleable when the circumstances demanded it. The tenuous origins of civil society thus developed within this highly contentious social laboratory in which friendships (authentic and feigned) set the social and ideological parameters for conflict and cooperation. Far from the coffee houses of Restoration London or the lecture halls of the Republic of Letters, the civil society illuminated by Martínez stumbled forward amid the ambiguities and contradictions of colonialism and the obstacles posed by the isolation and violence of the Sonoran Desert.
In this revision of the first edition published by Princeton in 1982, Gerhard traces the advance of the Spaniards up the Gulf and Pacific coasts of Mesoamerica and across the great central plateau of northern Mexico, and their confrontations with the native populations of those areas.
Little has been written about the colonists sent by Spanish authorities to settle the northern frontier of New Spain, to stake Spain’s claim and serve as a buffer against encroaching French explorers. "Los Paisanos," they were called - simple country people who lived by their own labor, isolated, threatened by hostile Indians, and restricted by law from seeking opportunity elsewhere. They built their homes, worked their fields, and became permanent residents - the forebears of United States citizens - as they developed their own society and culture, much of which survives today.
This research guide was first conceived to fulfill multiple needs of the research team of the Documentary Relations of the Southwest (DRSW) project at the Arizona State Museum. In performing research tasks, it became evident that reference material was scattered throughout scores of books and monographs. A single complete source book was simply not available. Hence, the editors of the DRSW project compiled this guide. The territory under study comprises all of northern Mexico in colonial times.
