Illustrations. Tables. Appendixes (Charts). Notes. Chronology. Glossary. Bibliography. Index. Pp. xx, 342. Cloth. $32.50.
The history of Nueva Vizcaya, colonial Mexico’s most economically productive far northern province, has begged for regional synthesis in English. Those students looking for a compendium which catalogues aspects of administrative, ecclesiastical, and military history from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries will be pleased with Oakah Jones’s examination of the exploration, initial conquest, expansion of settlement, and continuous Indian warfare in this frontier region. Others hoping for an analysis which probes socioeconomic processes and ethnic relations will be disappointed; in fact, recent studies in this vein are mostly unnoticed.
The book’s main conclusions are familiar. Nueva Vizcaya served as the “heartland” of the northern frontier, the experimental ground bridging the settled regions to the south and the remote north, where administrative, ecclesiastical, and cultural practices and institutions were tested and modified, mostly in haphazard fashion. Were these institutions and practices any different from those of central Mexico? Jones concludes that they were: “Nueva Vizcayans were individualistic, fiercely dedicated to protecting their own lives and property, less class conscious, and influenced by the violence and instability that characterized frontier life” (p. 234).
It is difficult to see how the descriptive information presented in the book substantiates all of these conclusions. There is no attempt to apply the concepts of a sizable body of frontier literature to this case. Jones does assert that “people create and maintain institutions, not vice versa.” But in this case, the people examined are almost exclusively Spaniards. For Jones, the lack of class rivalry means the absence of peninsular-creole antagonisms, a doubtful proposition since these two groups share the same class designation. The Indians, subdued or unsubdued, and the growing mestizo/mulatto underclass remain largely silent. Biographical sketches of individual Spaniards, isolated demographic statistics, and descriptions of Spanish towns by official observers all serve to capture only one place at only one time. More detailed examination by case is needed to test these conclusions as well as other generalizations about the dynamic nature of the Bourbon changes and the lack of popular support for independence. Oakah Jones has provided a reference work which compiles a good deal of useful original data and synthesizes older Spanish and English-language secondary works on a significant frontier region.
