This is a study of the founding and early political history of six municipalities in the Spanish Borderlands: San Antonio and Laredo in Texas, Santa Fe and El Paso in Nuevo México, and San José and Los Angeles in Alta California. The author’s thesis is that historians have overemphasized the roles of the presidio and the mission in the colonization of the Borderlands, and that the town figured more importantly in the establishment of Spanish rule. Separate chapters chronicle the circumstances surrounding the founding of each of the municipalities. A subsequent chapter on “The Civilian Settlers” deals almost entirely with San Antonio; the other comparative chapter, on the cabildo, focuses on Santa Fe and San Antonio. As the title suggests, the emphasis is on royal and viceregal policies and their embodiment in town origins. The author takes the point of view of the Spanish monarchs and administration, and often treats local social and political processes as derivative of designs formulated in Spain and Mexico City.
In the end, the book’s thesis is not adequately substantiated. We are told that the frontier town settlements have stood the test of time better than the missions and the presidios, and that the towns had a firmer institutional status in Spanish law. Yet these claims are not convincing in the absence of a sustained comparative discussion of the goals and operations of the three institutions in question. There are also instances in which the analytic distinction among the three effectively dissolved in practice, as in El Paso in the 1680s when the settlement became “a fairly large population center embodying the three major colonial institutions” (p. 45). The significance of such cases for the general argument is not made clear. This book will be most useful to readers with a special interest in San Antonio, by far the most fully documented of the six case studies.
