Comparative histories of colonial frontiers are raising provocative new questions for scholars working on the boundaries of British, French, Spanish, and Portuguese America.1 Some of the classic themes of borderlands history are receiving fresh scrutiny from different disciplinary and thematic perspectives, such that military encounters and territorial conquests are recast not as singular events but as conflictive processes conditioned by the environmental and cultural contexts in which they occurred. The religious mission, long a center-piece of Spanish and Portuguese colonial frontiers, is no less an object of critical historical approaches inspired by ethnohistorical readings of both new and familiar texts. Practitioners of the new mission history emphasize the complexity of the institution that gave rise to ethnically mixed communities with layered political, economic, and cultural dimensions.2
This article focuses primarily on mission economy in two different settings, in order to reconstruct the ways in which the labor of...
