Miguel Caldera spent a lifetime in the second half of the sixteenth century protecting Spanish efforts to exploit the rich silver deposits discovered in Zacatecas in 1546. It is a record of unrelenting wars against the natives of northern Mexico, the Chichimecas and their allies who, in retaliation, wantonly killed, burned, and pillaged. Ironically, the hero of Spain’s ultimate victory was the son of a Chichimeca mother, a mestizo whose father had arrived in the vanguard of the conquerors of Zacatecas. That paradox enhances the story that Powell tells vividly and convincingly.
But Miguel Caldera is more than just a chronicle of a man’s life. Relying on a wealth of original sources, culled with loving and meticulous care from the archives of Seville and Mexico, Powell, in the first part of the book, paints with broad brush the historical drama that served as a backdrop for the saga of Caldera. For over three decades, Spaniards and Chichimecas faced each other from Guanajuato in the south to north of Zacatecas. As Powell writes, these were the first of the Indian wars in the Western Hemisphere, where the soldiers of Spain, ill-paid and only marginally in touch with Mexico City, battled tough Chichimeca warriors with only the advantage of the horse and primitive weapons of steel. The Chichimecas, who lost little time mastering the horse, proved a valiant and formidable enemy.
Part two takes up Caldera’s life on the wild frontier. He was a jack-of-all-trades. In the beginning a simple soldier, by the time of his death in 1597, Caldera had served as a wilderness diplomat, a frontier justice and peacemaker, labored in the mines, helped to colonize and establish towns, and laid the foundations for the mestizo society of republican Mexico. Yet, although the father of a daughter, he never married, apparently as Powell implies, because as a mestizo the prejudice of Spaniards barred the doors to a union with all but Indian women. He obeyed his king, but the dreams of Spanish women and even the daughters of mixed unions excluded a mestizo captain.
In this clash between “Savagery and Civilization” (p. 254), as this controversial definition of spheres marks out, Powell’s sympathies clearly lie with Spain. All the same, as he eloquently concludes, the peace that emerged to form a Mexican society was the work of men such as Miguel Caldera, one of the first “hombres del norte,” a soldier who, in death almost a pauper, richly deserves, Powell says, a statue someplace in northern Mexico.
