Apache Adaptation To Hispanic Rule

This book reinterprets Southwestern history before the US-Mexican War through a case study of the poorly understood Apaches de paz and their adaptation to Hispanic rule.

Since the early 1800s, the violent exploits of “El Indio” Rafael through the settlements of northern New Spain have become the stuff of myth and legend. For some, the fabled Apache was a hero, an indigenous Robin Hood who fought oppressive Spaniards to help the dispossessed and downtrodden. For others, he was little more than a merciless killer. In Son of Vengeance, Bradley Folsom sets out to find the real Rafael—to extract the true story from the scant historical record and superabundance of speculation. What he uncovers is that many of the legends about Rafael were true: he was both daring and one of the most prolific serial killers in North American history. Rafael was born into an Apache family, but from a young age he was raised by Spanish chaplain Rafael Nevares, who took his indigenous prodigy out on patrol with local soldiers and taught him to speak Spanish and practice Catholicism. Rafael’s forced assimilation heightened the tension between his ancestry and the Hispanic environment and spurred him to violence. Sifting Spanish military and government documents, church records, contemporary newspapers, and eyewitness accounts, Folsom reveals a three-dimensional historical figure whose brutality was matched and abetted by great ingenuity—and by a deep, long-standing hostility between the Spanish and the Apaches of New Spain. The early years of tutelage under Nevares also, perversely, contributed to Rafael’s brutal success. Rather than leading to a life of Christian piety and Spanish loyalty, the knowledge Rafael gained from his mentor served instead to help him evade his pursuers and the law, at least for a time. In Son of Vengeance, we see the real El Indio Rafael for the first time—the man behind the cultural myth, and the historical forces and circumstances that framed and propelled his feats of violence.

The Apache Diaspora brings to life the stories of displaced Apaches and the kin from whom they were separated. Paul Conrad charts Apaches' efforts to survive or return home from places as far-flung as Cuba and Pennsylvania, Mexico City and Montreal.

This book challenges long-accepted historical orthodoxy about relations between the Spanish and the Indians in the borderlands separating what are now Mexico and the United States. While most scholars describe the decades after 1790 as a period of relative peace between the occupying Spaniards and the Apaches, Mark Santiago sees in the Mescalero Apache attacks on the Spanish beginning in 1795 a sustained, widespread, and bloody conflict. He argues that Commandant General Pedro de Nava’s coordinated campaigns against the Mescaleros were the culmination of the Spanish military’s efforts to contain Apache aggression, constituting one of its largest and most sustained operations in northern New Spain. A Bad Peace and a Good War examines the antecedents, tactics, and consequences of the fighting. This conflict occurred immediately after the Spanish military had succeeded in making an uneasy peace with portions of all Apache groups. The Mescaleros were the first to break the peace, annihilating two Spanish patrols in August 1795. Galvanized by the loss, Commandant General Nava struggled to determine the extent to which Mescaleros residing in “peace establishments” outside Spanish settlements near El Paso, San Elizario, and Presidio del Norte were involved. Santiago looks at the impact of conflicting Spanish military strategies and increasing demands for fiscal efficiency as a result of Spain’s imperial entanglements. He examines Nava’s yearly invasions of Mescalero territory, his divide-and-rule policy using other Apaches to attack the Mescaleros, and his deportation of prisoners from the frontier, preventing the Mescaleros from redeeming their kin. Santiago concludes that the consequences of this war were overwhelmingly negative for Mescaleros and ambiguous for Spaniards. The war’s legacy of bitterness lasted far beyond the end of Spanish rule, and the continued independence of so many Mescaleros and other Apaches in their homeland proved the limits of Spanish military authority. In the words of Viceroy Bernardo de Gálvez, the Spaniards had technically won a “good war” against the Mescaleros and went on to manage a “bad peace.”

Although Spain was never a formal ally of the United States during the American Revolution, its entry into the war definitively tipped the balance against Britain. Led by Bernardo de Galvez, supreme commander of the Spanish forces in North America, their military campaigns against British settlements on the Mississippi River—and later against Mobile and Pensacola—were crucial in preventing Britain from concentrating all its North American military and naval forces on the fight against George Washington's Continental army. In this first comprehensive biography of Galvez (1746@–86), Gonzalo M. Quintero Saravia assesses the commander's considerable historical impact and expands our understanding of Spain's contribution to the war. A man of both empire and the Enlightenment, as viceroy of New Spain (1785@–86), Galvez was also pivotal in the design and implementation of Spanish colonial reforms, which included the reorganization of Spain's Northern Frontier that brought peace to the region for the duration of the Spanish presence in North America. Extensively researched through Spanish, Mexican, and U.S. archives, Quintero Saravia's portrait of Galvez reveals him as central to the histories of the Revolution and late eighteenth-century America and offers a reinterpretation of the international factors involved in the American War for Independence.

Winner, 2022 Frank S. and Elizabeth D. Brewer Prize While the idea that successful missions needed Indigenous revolts and missionary deaths seems counterintuitive, this book illustrates how it became a central logic of frontier colonization in Spanish North America. Missions Begin with Blood argues that martyrdom acted as a ceremony of possession that helped Jesuits understand violence, disease, and death as ways that God inevitably worked to advance Christendom. Whether petitioning superiors for support, preparing to extirpate Native “idolatries,” or protecting their conversions from critics, Jesuits found power in their persecution and victory in their victimization. This book correlates these tales of sacrifice to deep genealogies of redemptive death in Catholic discourse and explains how martyrological idioms worked to rationalize early modern colonialism. Specifically, missionaries invoked an agricultural metaphor that reconfigured suffering into seed that, when watered by sweat and blood, would one day bring a rich harvest of Indigenous Christianity.

This book examines the hemispheric histories of overlooked peoples and places that shaped colonial Spanish America. This volume focuses on the experiences of Native peoples, Africans and Afro-descended peoples, and castas (individuals of mixed ancestry) living in regions perceived as fringe, marginal, or peripheral. It covers a comprehensive geographic range including northern Mexico, Central America, the Circum-Caribbean, and South America, as well as a sweeping chronological period, from the earliest colonization episodes of the sixteenth century to the twilight of Spanish rule in the late eighteenth century. The chapters highlight the diverse peoples, from semisedentary and nonsedentary Native groups and Mosquito captains to free African governors—who lived, labored, fought, ruled, and formed communities across Spanish America. The volume examines how these overlooked peoples navigated colonial processes of conquest, displacement, and relocation, while drawing attention to local factors that influenced these experiences including ecological change, rivalries, diplomacy, contraband, time and distance, and geography. Through their analysis of the local and temporal contexts, the studies in this volume offer new insight into why the protagonists of these places responded contentiously—through resistance or flight—or cooperatively—by accepting treaties or alliances. Non-specialists-undergraduate students, booksellers, and librarians will be drawn to the individuals case studies, while scholars will find this collection to be an indispensable research tool.