The Spanish Frontier in North America

David J. Weber

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

For over thirty years I have taught a college-level history course that examines America's Spanish colonial past, from the earliest explorations by Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, Hernando de Soto, and Francisco Vázquez de Coronado to Spain's loss of Mexico and Florida in 1821. Over the years, the title of the course changed. First it was "The Spanish Borderlands," then "The Spanish-Indian Struggle for the American Southwest," and more recently "The Spanish Frontier in North America." In part, these changing titles reflected my change of focus. Early on, my Spanish Borderlands class included Louisiana and Florida. Later, I excluded the South and concentrated solely on the Southwest. More recently, I have returned to all of the area of the present United States that Spain once claimed or held—an area that embraced not only the Sunbelt, from California to Florida, but the Pacific Coast to Alaska and the Atlantic to New England.

Whatever the title or geographical scope of my course, however, the issues remained the same: Spanish exploration; Indians' discoveries of Spaniards; Spanish efforts to convert Indians and use their labor; Indian resistance, accommodation, or assimilation; Spanish struggles with Indians who refused to submit; the Spanish imperial economy; Spanish competition with England, France, Russia, and the United States for control of the continent and its native populations; and the nature of Spanish frontier institutions and society in comparative perspective.

My students' preconceptions about Spaniards have also remained constant. History teachers at all levels encounter these preconceptions when the subject of Spain in America arises. American students, even those of Hispanic descent, know about Spaniards' extraordinary cruelty toward Indians. But how cruel were Spaniards? By whose standards do we judge them? Which Spaniards, priests or conquistadores? Spaniards of which era, the late medieval conquistadores or the enlightened bureaucrats of the late eighteenth century?

Our students also imagine the Spanish Borderlands as a place where Spanish men came to find gold and silver and to live without work by exploiting Indian labor. Spanish men, according to the conventional wisdom, arrived without women but soon married or cohabited with Indian women. This image contrasts sharply with our students' image of the English-American past, in which Englishmen in search of religious freedom fled to America with their families and took up farming with their own hands rather than exploiting the natives. How much truth do these antipodal stereotypes contain?

Missions also come readily to mind for our students. In southwestern America they constitute one of the most enduring landmarks from the Spanish era, and their style has permeated the architecture of the region and even the nation. In particular, California's twenty-one missions inspired the Mission Revival Style that spread across the nation in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Across the Southwest today, visitors stream through neatly restored or reconstructed missions, which represent themselves as islands of tranquility and civility. As a result, visitors usually suppose that kindly priests once ministered to grateful Indians in such bucolic places. On the other hand, American Indian students and students sympathetic to American Indians see historic missions as sites of enforced acculturation at best, or as concentration camps at worst.

For many of our students, the activities of missionaries and soldiers tell the whole story of Spain in North America. Communities of traders, farmers, and stock raisers characterized the English experience, but not the Spanish. Even students who have visited St. Augustine, San Antonio, Santa Fe, Tucson, or San Diego often fail to imagine that Spaniards replicated the town life they had known in Iberia, or to see the continuities that some present-day communities have with the Spanish past.

Finally, many of our students are surprised to learn that the preponderance of Hispanics in the borderlands were mixed bloods, or mestizos. Why did Spaniards tolerate racial mixture when Anglos did not? How color-blind were Hispanic communities in the borderlands? Did cultures mix as well as blood when Indians and Hispanics came together? How did race and racial mixture affect the roles of women in Hispanic society? In the three decades that I've been teaching, students and professional historians alike have found such questions increasingly compelling.

We are fortunate to have several specialists address some of these questions in this issue of the Magazine of History. Their brief essays are meant to be suggestive, not comprehensive. Two of them, Iris Engstrand's piece on the putative cruelty of Spaniards and Amy Bushnell's examination of missions, draw examples from many parts of the borderlands. The three remaining essays illuminate larger issues by looking at specific locales--Frank de la Teja considers the community of San Antonio; Bonnie McEwan and John Hann explore the mission of San Luis de Talimali near present-day Tallahassee, Florida; and Antonia Castañeda focuses on society in California. Some of the patterns and processes that emerged in these locales might have analogues in other parts of the Spanish Borderlands and, indeed, throughout Spain's American empire. But differences existed along with similarities. Each of Spain's borderland provinces had its own identity, in large part because Spaniards who sought to replicate familiar institutions were forced to accommodate themselves to distinctive Indian peoples, geographies, and climates. (Differences could be as evident as architectural styles or as subtle as the local beverage of choice: cacina, a drink made from yaupon holly, in the Southeast and atole, a corn-based drink, in the Southwest.) So, too, were Spain's North American outposts shaped by the purposes that Spain wished them to serve. Florida, with its Caribbean-Atlantic orientation along the route of the returning silver fleet, played a different role in the imperial design than did landlocked New Mexico.

Along with these articles, this issue contains five lesson plans that touch on some of the same themes addressed in the essays: the team of Frances Levine, Gini Griego, Wendy Leighton, and Dino Roybal look at cultural confluences at Pecos Pueblo in New Mexico; Peter Cowdrey gives us a first-hand description of the Florida missions; Gloria Ricci Lothrop and Michelle Herczog consider life at the California military garrisons; Melinda Blade assesses the alleged cruelty of Spaniards; and Sonia Yvonne Escobedo examines Spanish settlement in Texas.

This issue of the Magazine of History begins with my introduction to the historiography of the Spanish Borderlands. It ends with James Snead's profile of a present-day historical archaeologist, David Hurst Thomas, whose writing, editing, digging, and dusting have helped bridge the communication gap between historians and archaeologists. Historians who examine the politics, economics, and diplomacy of the borderlands have relied almost exclusively on written sources, but in reconstructing the daily lives of the region's many Spaniards, Indians, and blacks (who could neither read nor write), social and cultural historians have needed other kinds of evidence. Much of what historians know about the material culture of the borderlands has come from under the ground, retrieved by archaeologists; and much of historical archaeologists' understanding of the objects they unearth has come from the documentary work of historians. In recognition of our interdependence (so well exemplified by the extraordinary collaboration of Bonnie McEwan and John Hann at Mission San Luis), it seems to me appropriate to feature an archaeologist in the pages of the Magazine of History. Moreover, we who read this magazine already understand the historian's craft, but the increasingly high-tech world of archaeologists, with its side-looking radar and photon magnetrometry, remains a mystery to many of us.

David J. Weber is the Robert and Nancy Dedman Professor of History and director of the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies at Southern Methodist University. He is author of a number of prize-winning books, including The Mexican Frontier, 1821-1846 (1982) and The Spanish Frontier in North America (1992). He would like to thank Andrea Boardman for bringing her expertise to the preparation of the manuscript and illustrations, and the writers who contributed their time and talent to make this such a rich issue of the Magazine.