What this heading does not tell the reader is that the 31 representative primary sources in part 1 and the 25 in part 2 are presented not only in English translation, but also in orthographically modernized Spanish. To that degree, the books are bilingual, with scholarly apparatus in English only.
This latest yield of the Documentary Relations of the Southwest (DRSW), a project begun in 1975 at the University of Arizona’s forward-looking Arizona State Museum by general editor Charles W. Polzer, Presidio II (in-house tide for the two-part, 1100- page tome) follows the format of Naylor and Polzer’s The Presidio and Militia on the Northern Frontier of New Spain, 1570–1700 (1986) and Pedro de Rivera and the Military Regulations for Northern New Spain, 1724–1729 (1988). Yet to come are similar documentary studies of Seri-Spanish relations and the marqués de Rubí’s pivotal presidiai inspection of 1766–68.
As the heading does suggest, each editor supervised the selection and preparation of documents bearing on one of the four corridors to the north: Polzer for the Californias; Sheridan for Sinaloa-Sonora; Hadley (succeeding Naylor, who died tragically in 1990) for Nueva Vizcaya and New Mexico; and Schuetz-Miller for Texas. Citing the abundance of previously published primary materials for New Mexico (actually, not that great for the period 1700 to 1765), the editors justify giving that colony short shrift.
Introductions and headnotes provide historical context, neither critiquing Spanish colonial policy, according to the editors, nor arguing a particular thesis. But there are hints. Polzer implies, for one, that the example of Jesuit California figured more prominently in Carlos Ill’s decision to suppress the Society of Jesus in Spain and the empire than has been previously recognized.
Because military actions touched every other aspect of life on this contested frontier, so do the documents. Included are pleas and protests, patently self-serving reports and general commentaries, legal proceedings, muster rolls and supply lists, campaign journals, expedition diaries, orders and counterorders. If the seventeenth century was the missionary era on New Spain’s northern frontier and the eighteenth the military one, as some scholars have proposed, this collection hardly justifies the distinction.
“In making the selection,” the editors affirm, “we have attempted to include documents that reveal the disparate points of view of the major interest groups on the northern frontier as they relate to the presidio and its evolution as an institution” (2:3). In this, they succeed admirably well, further directing readers to listen for indigenous peoples between the lines, where “it is still occasionally possible to hear faint echoes of their voices” (2:4).
The people one encounters are as diverse as Luis Siborsa, a shackled Pima Indian POW doing hard labor at Pitic and receiving his token wage in clothing, and the rich and arrogant latifundista don Francisco de Valdivieso y Mier, first conde de San Pedro del Alamo, petitioning the viceroy to raise Indian auxiliaries at two reales a day in support of his private army.
Introducing the especially well-presented Sinaloa-Sonora set, Sheridan opts for people over floor plans or ruins. The term presidio, he suggests, “when used correctly, referred to units of officers and soldiers commissioned by the Spanish crown rather than to fortifications located in a particular spot” (1:254). Personnel and locations changed; the commissions or charters endured.
Sinaloa’s peripatetic garrison, for example, commissioned in the 1590s, began at San Felipe y Santiago on the Río Sinaloa some 420 miles south of the present U.S.- Mexican border, then migrated by stages all the way to Altar, the western pole of Rubí’s 1768 cordon, no more than 60 miles from the border. A similar point might be made about certain Spanish missions, particularly those that floated across eighteenth-century Texas.
Because of current fascination with observations and routes of colonial expeditionaries into Texas, it is understandable that the editors of Presidio II chose to include a couple of their lengthy diaries: Fray Isidro Félix de Espinosa’s of 1716 and Bachiller Juan Antonio de la Peña’s of 1720–22. Judging one earlier translation of the latter sufficiently unavailable to warrant retranslation, they evidently missed other previous translations. Here, the recent works of William C. Foster and Jack Jackson are pertinent.
Equally fascinating is the Jesuits’ balancing act as portrayed in the documents from Baja California. When in the 1690s the Society of Jesus offered to finance the occupation of that daunting peninsula, the Spanish crown conceded to the Jesuits uncustomary superintendence of the presidiai garrison at Loreto. Once it appeared that they had indeed added the precarious colony to the empire, the wily priests convinced the government to pay the soldiers’ salaries, but without surrendering their authority to hire and fire them. Nowhere is the daily tension between missionaries and men-at-arms—I can’t live with you, and I can’t live without you—more poignantly evident.
To colonial Latin Americanists of every stripe with an interest in northern New Spain, these DRSW volumes offer the immediate gratification of critically edited primary sources. A thousand clues beckon us as well into the larger world of archival resources from Spain, Mexico, and the United States identified in the DRSW Master Index of Spanish documents (see Thomas C. Barnes, Thomas H. Naylor, and Charles W. Polzer, Northern New Spain: A Research Guide, Tucson, 1981).
I noted, for example, “Don Manuel de Ossio 325 pesos and 1 ration” (1:57) on the muster roll of the Loreto presidio in 1733. I had already met the irrepressible Manuel de Ossio in Harry W. Crosby’s Antigua California: Mission and Colony on the Peninsular Frontier, 1697–1768 (Albuquerque, 1994). I wondered if there was more information about the rise of this not-so-common enlisted man (of thirty enumerated only four bore the title don) from soldier to foremost non-Jesuit entrepreneur on the peninsula. If I am at all serious, I should look next at the DRSW Master Index on CD-Rom and await impatiently while its creators put Biofile on-line.
But I like the feel, the weight of Presidio II. Resisting the temptation to cast absolutely everything into the swelling digital sea, the editors of the DRSW, the sponsoring National Historical Publications and Records Commission, and the University of Arizona Press have dared provide another eminently useful, handsomely printed documentary collection. May there be no end to their courage.
