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The Spanish Borderlands

Albert L. Hurtado

Reprinted from the OAH Magazine of History
14 (Summer 2000). ISSN 0882-228X
Copyright (c) 2000, Organization of American Historians
 

Traditionally, the borderlands story has been seen as an episode in the histories of the Spanish, French, and British American empires and as a chapter in the westward expansion of the United States.  Such a view, however, obscures the contemporary importance and continuing relevance of borderlands history.  In brief, the region is a sort of laboratory for multiculturalism.  Here, the American Indians confronted Spanish intruders and made an uneasy accommodation with them.  Unlike the British colonists and their Anglo American successors, the Spanish government sought to incorporate Indians in Spanish colonial society.  To that end, the crown sent Catholic missionaries to convert the Indians to Christianity and to train them in European trades.  The Indians, of course, had their own strongly held religious traditions and often stoutly resisted missionary efforts and Spanish domination.  The Pueblo Indians in New Mexico, where the processes of Indian resistance and accommodation are best understood, outwardly conformed to Catholic norms but continued to practice their own religion in secret.  But the exchange of cultural traits was also a two-way affair.  Spaniards and Mexicans were influenced by their Indian neighbors as they mingled, traded, and intermarried.  Thus, in the southwestern borderlands, distinctive societies emerged that combined aspects of Hispanic, Mexican, and Indian cultures.

Most of the Anglo Americans who began to move into the southwestern borderlands in the 1820s blended into this interesting population.  From Texas to California, Anglo men married the daughters of the country, took up the Catholic religion, and swore their allegiance to Mexico.  They had many reasons for doing so; marriages and friendships were good foundations for commercial relationships, and new citizens could take advantage of Mexico’s very liberal land laws which provided free grants of thousands of acres on the frontier.  Nevertheless, many of these new immigrants were uneasy with Mexican government and society and clung to familiar religious and social practices.  Thus, Anglos added a share to the borderlands cultural mix which remains vibrant in many borderlands communities today.

The amalgamation of three cultures has not always been easy or peaceful.  The borderlands is not a melting pot, but rather a forge where cultural collisions cause sparks and heat.  That process continues today as new immigrants from Mexico and Central America come to the place that by turns has belonged to Indian nations, Spain, Mexico, and the U.S.

This historical drama has taken place on a stage of incomparable beauty and environmental diversity.  The desert Southwest is stark and full of surprising contrasts; snowcapped mountains may be seen from sun-baked deserts; and rain in the mountains can bring a torrent hurtling down dry washes in the desert many miles away.  Human dwellers have adapted to these conditions for thousands of years.  Irrigation was a feature of desert life one thousand years ago, and it is still so today.

The dramatic nature of the borderlands has captured the attention of historians for more than a century.  The first Anglo historians were primarily interested in demonstrating the inferiority of Spanish and Mexican institutions and justifying the U.S. conquest of the region.  Their biases were influenced by a strong strain of anti-Catholic bigotry which permeated Anglo American society in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries.  This parochial vision started to change when Herbert E. Bolton (1870-1953) began to investigate the region.  Bolton taught at the University of Texas (1901-1909), Stanford University (1909-1911), and the University of California, Berkeley (1911-1943).  While not the first historian to study Spain in America, he was arguably the most influential because he wrote dozens of books and trained more than one hundred Ph.D. and three hundred M.A. students, as well as many elementary and high school teachers.  Bolton’s classic volume, The Spanish Borderlands, gave the field its name, and his interpretation dominated the field long after his death.  Bolton saw the Spanish settlement in North America as a great saga, a continent peopled with venerable explorer-heroes like Franciso Vasquez de Coronado and Juan Bautista de Anza.  He was most impressed with the Catholic missionaries—such as Junipero Serra and Eusebio Kino—who worked among the Indians.  Bolton’s work went a long way toward muting the religious and cultural bigotry of American historians and gaining a wide popular audience for borderlands history.

Bolton, however, had his faults.  While celebrating the missionaries efforts among the Indians, he ignored the negative impact of the Spanish conquest and the missions on them.  Nor did he give any attention to Mexico.  Bolton was happy to present a distant Spanish colonial past that did not directly challenge Anglo legitimacy.  Consequently, in recent years Indian and Mexican scholars have criticized Bolton for presenting a narrow, Hispanophilic view of the borderlands past.  These same scholars have done much to correct the distorted picture that Bolton painted.  Their work includes imaginative histories of Indian societies, women, and families.  They consider not only the Spanish, but the Mexican past as well.  Rather than being presented as pioneers with a God-given license to conquer the West, Anglo immigrants are now set in the context of a long and vibrant history.

Once seen as peripheral to American history, the borderlands are now central to our understanding of the multicultural American West. 

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