Wandering Peoples: Colonialism, Ethnic Spaces, and Ecological Frontiers in Northwestern Mexico, 1700-1850

by Cynthia Radding

Wandering Peoples is a chronicle of cultural resiliency, colonial relations, and trespassed frontiers in the borderlands of a changing Spanish empire. Focusing on the native subjects of Sonora in Northwestern Mexico, Cynthia Radding explores the social process of peasant class formation and the cultural persistence of Indian communities during the long transitional period between Spanish colonialism and Mexican national rule. Throughout this anthropological history, Radding presents multilayered meanings of culture, community, and ecology, and discusses both the colonial policies to which peasant communities were subjected and the responses they developed to adapt and resist them.
Radding describes this colonial mission not merely as an instance of Iberian expansion but as a site of cultural and political confrontation. This alternative vision of colonialism emphasizes the economic links between mission communities and Spanish mercantilist policies, the biological consequences of the Spanish policy of forced congregación , and the cultural and ecological displacements set in motion by the practices of discipline and surveillance established by the religious orders. Addressing wider issues pertaining to ethnic identities and to ecological and cultural borders, Radding’s analysis also underscores the parallel production of colonial and subaltern texts during the course of a 150-year struggle for power and survival.

432 pages, Paperback

First published April 30, 1997

Reviews

[Nathan Casebolt · Rating 3 out of 5]

I love all things prehistoric. The shadow of vanished earths fires my imagination like nothing else. That's why it stuck with me when I read that one of the oldest known sites of the Clovis people, complete with remains of butchered prehistoric critters, is in the northwestern Mexican state of Sonora. And it has the coolest possible name for a dig site: El Fin del Mundo, the End of the Earth.

I've never visited Sonora, but I know a little more about it thanks to Cynthia Radding of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Building on techniques used by Gibson and Farriss in their landmark studies of Aztecs and Mayans under colonial rule, she examines indigenous Sonoran responses to the Spanish imperium and the early Mexican Republic.

Radding’s book is not a general history of Sonora, but a narrow study of the ways in which highland tribes accommodated and resisted the encroaching Iberian empire. Peoples such as the Opata and Pima receive the greatest attention, since they held the agricultural uplands which the Spanish most coveted. By contrast, since the Spanish had little economic interest in the desert, nomads such as the O'odham appear only in passing, usually when engaging in hit and run raids.

As an academic monograph, this is not casual bedtime reading. Radding digs deep into the archives with all their census numbers, legal definitions, case histories, and welter of places and names. To the determined reader, though, a clear picture emerges of regional ethnogenesis: a process of cultural evolution by which ethnic communities conserve their identities even as they recreate themselves over and again in the face of what she terms “social ecology,” the shifting cultural environment that conditions the formation of ethnicity and class.

Radding’s granular and technical approach makes for slow reading, but she must have done something right because I came away with a good beginner’s grasp of the topic. What most struck me was how dislocative the colonial experience was for indigenous Sonorans. The Jesuits, shock troops of the empire, started the ball rolling in the 1600s with the “reduccione,” uprooting natives and collecting them into missions the better to instruct them in Christianity, exercise harsh discipline, and use their labor.

This at least had the dubious virtue of rhyming with the communal economy of a tribal village. If the monks got too demanding, mission Indians always had the option of walking away into the hinterland. What changed everything was the influx of soldiers, ranchers, miners, and merchants. These brought with them the values of a global market economy entirely foreign to the subsistence lifeways of the tribes. Increasingly rigorous usurpations of land and labor impoverished the natives, triggering everything from legal challenges (sometimes successful) to outright armed rebellion.

Sonora by the close of the colonial era has the feeling of a border province never fully pacified. The expulsion of the Jesuits in 1769 amidst aggressive Bourbon reforms was especially destabilizing since the monks had most closely structured native life for over a century. Opata and Pima auxiliaries joined Spanish troops in trying to stem raids from western desert nomads as well as to fend off Apaches in the east, who themselves were being pushed into Sonora by the terrifying Comanche war machine.

Through it all, indigenous Sonorans did their best to conserve their identities as they found themselves yanked straight from prehistory into the gunpowder age, from family farm to global market, from chiefdoms to the Crown of Castile and the Mexican Republic. The story of Sonora is the age-old story of the human determination to adapt and persist in the face of unimaginable and unstoppable change.

[Brian · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wandering Peoples looks at the interplay between native populations and Spanish colonists between 1700 and 1850 focusing on how each defined their ethnic and cultural spaces as well as natural resource management. This geographic area covers the Sonoran Desert which encompasses northern Mexico and southwestern United States (Arizona, New Mexico, small parts of California and Texas). The book looks at how not only things like disease and consumption of water and arable land changed the frontiers of where these societies met but also how the interacted and intermixed together to form new ethnic identities. The Spanish Mission system, transitioning to the land-owning Hacienda and mine owners changed the native ways of the economy and eventually steam rolled over much of the way of life people had. While we don’t need many new books to cover exploration under the mission system this book does so with a deftness and a fresh look at the how the cultural was retained and changed as time went on. This book is well written and is aimed at an academic audience. I found her insights to be a new take and brought fresh air into what can sometimes feel like a tired topic in the wider historiography.

[Ed Kohinke · Rating 2 out of 5]

Had to throw in the towel, unfortunately. This book is packed with great information I would find fascinating but it is written for, who, a handful of ultra-academic peers? Way too granular and wordy. I’d love it if someone released an abridged version, or Cliff notes. I’d like to understand Sonoran history more but I don’t have months to dedicate to grinding through one book.

[Samuel · Rating 2 out of 5]

In the borderlands of a changing Spanish empire (Sonora in Northwestern Mexico), Cynthia Radding chronicles "the social process of peasant class formation and the cultural persistence of Indian communities during the long transitional period between Spanish colonialism and Mexican national rule." As an anthropological history, Radding discusses the various meanings of culture, community, and ecology, that the natives were subjected to and resisted. Colonialism may start out as the expansion of one population, but it results in cultural and political confrontation. Radding emphasizes "the economic links between mission communities and Spanish mercantilist policies, the biological consequences of the Spanish policy of forced congregación, and the cultural and ecological displacements set in motion by the practices of discipline and surveillance established by the religious orders." There was a parallel production of colonial and subaltern texts in the 150 years she examines. This is an interesting, exhaustive study of the people of Sonora offering a petri dish study of colonialism occuring all over the Americas (and other places throughout the world) in the 18th and 19th centuries.

[Garn · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really learned a lot about the Native people of the Sonoran desert and Sonoran highlands. Described their cultures and lifeways and how those changed with Spanish colonization and the extension of the Mission system and economy into the region, and then how they changed yet again with Mexican Independence and the emergence of the Mexican State.