The Spanish Borderlands Sourcebooks, a series of 27 volumes, holds as its stated objective to reproduce scholarly materials documenting interactions between Native Americans and Europeans from California to Florida.” The two volumes reviewed here were edited by Charles Polzer, S.J., Thomas Sheridan, and the staff of the Documentary Relations of the Southwest Project of the Arizona State Museum. The books reproduce previously published articles and monographs documenting the history of the Jesuit and Franciscan missions of northern colonial Mexico, primarily Sonora and Chihuahua.
The volume dealing with Jesuit missions is based on a very narrow definition of the concept of the mission, and it focuses principally on the missionaries. The readings here present the Jesuits as the prime movers in mission history. The Indians—99 percent of the mission inhabitants and most of the labor employed in mission development—appear as mere background figures. What’s more, most of the works reproduced (at least 9 out of 16) were composed by twentieth-century Jesuit historians who wrote uncritically of their order’s missionary activities. Fourteen of the works were written before 1960, and some express the Eurocentric, chauvinistic perspective of much of the Borderlands scholarship of the 1910s-1950s period, including references to Indians as “savages” and “uncivilized.” The volume’s introduction does little to place the works into the larger historiographic context, and, together with the section on additional bibliography, it fails to include dissertations, articles, and monographs published over the last decade. This volume does not present a balanced view of the Jesuit missions or Jesuit-Indian relations.
The volume on the Franciscan frontier missions is more balanced, and it contains materials written by historians and anthropologists. The same two criticisms as for the Jesuit volume can be made, however: the introduction provides an inadequate historiographic overview, and works published in the last decade are left out.
For specialists already familiar with the literature in the fields of Borderlands history and frontier missions, these two volumes offer nothing new. For graduate and undergraduate students and nonspecialists, they present a useful beginning point for reviewing the literature, as long as readers recognize the limitations of older church self-history.
