The Great Plains are rarely conceived of as part of Spain’s exploration and settlement of its vast northern frontier; instead they are usually thought of as the province of Anglo-American cowboys, German and Scandinavian farmers, or the occasional wandering French trader. It is in order to stake a claim to the Plains as tierra española that Vigil, Kaye, and Wunder have compiled this book of disparate essays. All the book’s authors share a common point of view: that the Plains were the northernmost frontier of New Spain, a frontier antedating the northern European presence in the Americas and a frontier that witnessed acculturation between Iberian, Native America, and African peoples, as well as armed conflict.
However, the divergent nature and uneven focus of the book’s essays do not add up to a coherent whole. Some of the more interesting contributions include that of Vigil who, in the book’s first extended essay, seeks to place the Spanish push northward within the context of the early Columbian era of discovery, which, he argues, was based not in a Renaissance, but in a medieval mind-set. Also highly relevant is the essay by Félix D. Almaráz Jr., who reviews the record of exploration and military expedition in the Llano Estacado and exonerates the Spanish from their supposed “failure” to colonize these bleak, waterless plains. And Russell M. Magnaghi describes how a genízaro population of detribalized Indian captives became a mediary stratum of society between Europeans, Pueblos, and nomadic tribes, serving the Spaniards as artisans, traders, farmers, auxiliaries, and translators, roles they continued to play into the late nineteenth century for the Anglo-Americans.
On the other hand, Waldo R. Wedel’s “Coronado and Quivara,” which retraces the wanderings of the Spanish conquistadores through West Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas is based on fieldwork he did in these states beginning in the 1940s and is essentially an archaeological field report on the location of Quivara. Thomas E. Chávez’s recounting of the disastrous Villasur expeditions of 1720, which were wiped out by Pawnee and Oto Indians in Nebraska, turns into a detective story, tracing the whereabouts of two hide paintings executed by New Mexican artists of the event, and describing how they were located in Switzerland and repatriated to the Governor’s Palace in Santa Fe.
The ultimate point of Spain and the Plains would seem to be to rescue the role of the Spanish empire in the Plains from ignominy as well as ignorance. Vigil, in the book’s last essay (“Epilogue”), defends the Spanish from identification with Black and White Legends, and from assaults from both left and right. From the right comes the usual racist, Eurocentric chauvinism denigrating Mexicans and Mexican-Americans as dirty, ignorant, and inferior to the Anglo-Saxon (Walter Prescott Webb is particularly embarrassing to read 60 years later); from the left emerges a “Chicano-centric” glorification of a mixed Indian-African heritage that casts the Spaniards in the darkest hues of villainy. Vigil makes a strong argument for a restoration of balance and a more levelheaded assessment of the Hispanic heritage of America. Still, the “Epilogue,” as interesting as it is, has nothing to do with the Spanish historical presence in the Great Plains and reinforces the perception that the volume’s individual pieces neither hang together as a coherent whole nor flow easily from one to the next, despite the short introduction that divides the book into sections (“Spanish Exploration: Myth” and “Spanish Settlement: Reality”). There are times when one is compelled to ask the bibliographical equivalent of the old World War II question, “Is this trip necessary?” In the case of Spain and the Plains, the answer would seem to be, “Not particularly.”
