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

About this book

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 multi-layered 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.

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 emphasises the economic links between mission communities and Spanish mercantilist policies, the biological consequences of the Spanish policy of forced congregacion, 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.

This study represents a significant shift in the historiography of Northwest New Spain, and opens new vistas for scholars working on the American West and Southwest. Wandering Peoples will be welcomed by students and scholars in the fields of Latin American, subaltern, postcolonial, and borderland studies.

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Biography

Cynthia Radding is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.