This ethnohistorical monograph focuses on the aboriginal inhabitants of the Bolsón de Mapimí during Spanish colonial times until their extinction about mid-eighteenth century. In terms of ecological analysis, the arid region remained a refuge for native groups, since Spaniards could not sustain settlement within it. Griffen sketches conflict between two societies in adjacent ecological niches.
Some natives settled at missions, mines, or haciendas peripheral to the Bolsón. Usually they fled, carrying diseases with them to accelerate native depopulation, but some resettled permanently among the Spaniards. Able to escape Spanish control, the Indians chose what they wanted from European technology and customs. Their raids on Spanish settlements around the edge of their refuge generated military retaliation. Warfare wasted the aboriginal population, and by at least the 1650s the Spaniards had instituted a genocidal policy.
In 1722 the King authorized deportation of natives captured in the refuge. Hundreds were sent to Veracruz, furthering local native extirpation. As bands lost members, they amalgamated, so the number of functional ethnic groups decreased. By the 1720s depopulation of the aboriginal inhabitants progressed sufficiently to open the Bolsón to southern Athapascans fleeing south from better-armed Plains Indians. Thereafter the Apaches posed the same kind of threat to the frontier as the original natives, so that annihilation accomplished little or nothing in terms of imperial goals.
Griffen located few sources for the early period prior to 1590, and little more until a 1644 revolt, perhaps set off by an epidemic. Although he mentions other Indian rebellions in 1666 and 1684, Griffen doubts his sources, thinking that these uprisings were simply intensifications of economic raiding. The reader may wonder whether these were nativistic religious movements such as Spanish imperialism generated elsewhere. Since Griffen had difficulty reconciling inconsistent sources and correlating tribal and band labels, his narrative text is at times difficult reading or downright confusing. A chapter on tribal and band distribution fails to provide the reader with the scorecard needed to identify the Indian players, because it follows the narrative section. Without defining a tribe, Griffen decided that there were three: Coahuileños, Chisos, and Tobosos. Yet the many personal names of Indian leaders and other details cited suggest that the Spaniards understood the ethnic situation better than the author. A “general ethnography” section on cultural traits which Griffen identified from the documents is to be consulted, not read, despite the author’s extensive documentary sifting.
