Choice, Persuasion and Coercion: Social Control on Spain's North American Frontiers

摘要

This fine collection both bridges the scholarly divide separating work on the Eastern and Western Spanish borderlands and redresses the tendency to leave out the work of Mexican scholars altogether. These essays, initially presented at a conference sponsored by Southern Methodist University's Clements Center for Southwestern Studies and refined at a subsequent gathering, reveal scholars engaging the question of how social control was established and maintained in frontier societies. The strategies devised, to exert control and to counter it, are the subject of these essays. Spaniards faced steep challenges to their attempts to establish order in these regions: hostile Indian groups, European powers threatening inroads into Spanish territory, emergent local societies flexing their political muscles. The essays, examinations ranging from the imperial level through the community level to the individual, reveal the northern frontier as a 'vibrant complex world of negotiated social roles and diverse cultural identities' (p. xx).