Indigenous Borderlands, Justice, and Landscapes of Memory on the Spanish Imperial Frontier of North America

This paper is part of a larger project, rooted in historical methods of research, but framed within anthropological and ecological frameworks for interpreting historical processes of change. It seeks to build a historical narrative that is informed by environmental concepts and the evidence of the long-term relationships between human and on-human nature, which can be discerned from archival texts as well as archaeological and geographical evidence. It explores as well the conjunctures of rapid change and strategies of endurance that arise from imperial conquest and the institutions of colonial governance and economy. The specific historical setting for my project is the Salinas Province of southeastern New Mexico, a region that illustrates well intersecting borderlands, beginning with the geographical ecotones of topography and vegetation that extended from the mountainous terrain and streams leading to the Río Grande basin and the grasslands of the southern Great Plains, and continuing with the centuries-long histories of Indigenous borderlands sustained by complex networks of migratory routes, subsistence strategies, trade, and episodic sequences of raiding, captive-taking, and war. Adding yet another layer to this intricate palimpsest of natural and cultural corridors, Spanish military invasions (entradas) of the sixteenth century CE and colonial settlement complicated the production of space in these cultural and ecological borderlands. Spanish colonialism imposed new economic exactions on the Indigenous peoples and demanded fealty to a new god and a distant monarch. The power of Spanish imperialism, however, was never absolute, rather it was contested and negotiated; these tensions structured the history of the Salinas Province as an imperial frontier, with deep historical roots and enduring significance for the Indigenous and Hispanic peoples in present-day northern Mexico and southwestern US.