Cultural geographer Richard Nostrand presents the thesis that an ethnically distinct Hispanic population occupies a “homeland” in the upper Rio Grande Valley and adjoining uplands. He identifies eight processes that formed this homeland between 1598 and 1990, and recognizes that Hispanos shaped and reshaped their homeland “in interplay with Pueblo Indians, nomad Indians, Anglos, and Mexican Americans” (p. xi). Focusing on “Hispanos,” Nostrand understates the actual native Pueblan role through time.
Nostrand summarizes pioneer Spanish colonial intrusion into Pueblo territory under the conceptual rubric of “formative colonization.” In his distinctively demographic analysis, he devotes undue attention to the abortive 1598-1680 European invasion, relative to the 1694 and subsequent enduring Hispano peopling. A chapter on “Indian articulation” summarizes Pueblo and other native enclavement physically within Nostrand’s Hispano homeland, yet artificially separates natives from newcomers.
Once Hispano colonists achieved an enduring domination over Pueblo peoples, their biological vigor furnished the numbers for “contiguous expansion” from an initially tiny, riverine oasis into the adjoining uplands. The Hispano frontier became a ranching frontier.
Then “Anglo intrusion” fundamentally altered ethnic group and other relationships in the homeland. Hispanos became sociopolitically enclaved within the United States and New Mexico. Hispano migration to labor in sawmills, mining, and railroad enterprises constituted what Nostrand calls “peripheral expansion.” In other words, a rapidly growing industrial economy provided a much greater diversity of occupations than had colonial ranching, farming, and gathering. “Peripheral expansion does accurately label Hispano migration to California in search of employment. Hispano “adaptive radiation” into industrial jobs in the homeland and elsewhere occurred in competition with “Mexican immigration” into both the homeland and the greater Southwest, from Texas to California. Nostrand also describes “village depopulation” and then “urbanization” within the homeland. Between 1930 and 1990, these complementary processes again fundamentally altered the Hispano lifestyle and relative preponderance of occupations.
Beneath these topical analyses lies the book’s principal contribution: Nostrand’s personal analysis of the 1850 national census schedules for New Mexico Territory, more than one million names recorded in the 1900 census, and a specially purchased computer tabulation of ancestry data collected for the 1990 census. This reviewer dislikes faulting a scholar who has carried out so daunting an analytical task. It is but fair to observe, though, that for all Nostrand’s diligence in analyzing census data, he fails to face critically the many inherent inaccuracies in all three U.S. census enumerations for the ethnically diverse Southwest. So he errs. Sonorans, not Hispanos, colonized the upper Gila River (p. 95). Moreover, Nostrand fails to place this study in hemispheric perspective. Precisely the processes that transformed the Hispano “homeland” simultaneously transformed Latin American and Luso-American society.
