Captives & Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest Borderlands.

Carson, James Taylor

Captives & Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest Borderlands, by James F. Brooks. Chapel Hill, North Carolina, University of North Carolina Press, 2002. viii, 419 pp. $55.00 US (cloth), $22.50 US. (paper).

In the spring of 1784 a Ute headman named Ignacio caught wind of a party of New Mexicans heading north to build a settlement on land the Utes claimed as their own. One of the New Mexicans, Francisco Manzanares, rode out from the party to meet Ignacio, and the Ute leader was stunned to be greeted in his own tongue. Manzanares had been born a Ute but after his capture Jose Antonio Manzanares had named and raised Francisco as a servant in his own household. A second New Mexican, Jose Salome Jaquez, joined the conversation. He had learned Ute as a captive but his family had ransomed him back into New Mexican society. After much discussion, Ignacio agreed to allow these men and their party to settle on the banks of the San Juan River and welcomed them as kinfolk.

In James F. Brooks' Captives & Cousins the old terms of frontier history--white, Indian, hispanic--make no sense. Such terms, in fact, represent the pervasiveness of a particularly Anglo-American perspective of personhood and history that only reached the borderlands of the southwest in the 1850s. Settlers from New Spain had moved into lands contested by Apaches, Navajos, Comanches, and Kiowas long before the United States arrived on the scene. Rather than conquer the indigenous nations, the settlers worked their way into preexisting networks of warfare, exchange, kinship, and peace. Brooks situates his study in the roughly analagous notions that both settlers and first people shared about honour, family, captivity, and exchange. From early raids against one another, the practice of seizing livestock and humans for either use or exchange emerged as a basic imperative for southwestern society. The commercial pastoral economies of the nineteenth century required such large pools of labour that, in the absence of immigration, the practice of securing unfree laborers either through raids or exchange persisted. Indeed, raids worked as a system parallel to commercial exchange in redistributing wealth, as well as the women and children who were the most sought after captives. Over time the economic ties forged through trading and raiding knitted originally disparate peoples into a cohesive borderlands society that had its own standards, practices, and, Brooks asserts, culture.

The expansion of the United States into the region in the late 1840s presaged the collapse of the borderland society. Whereas the economy that had grown out of Spanish and native contact favoured family relations, prestige goods exchange, and various forms of captivity and unfree labour, the United States government and military as well as their Mexican counterparts sought to create a regional economy premised on individual rights, capitalist acquisition and free labour, particularly after the Civil War. As Brooks puts it, "in subduing the pastoral borderlands, the American and Mexican states sundered long-term connections of kinship and community and superimposed new, 'state-sponsored' ethnic identities upon a complex melange" (p. 368).

Brooks's interpretation of the southwestern borderlands continues Herbert Eugene Bolton's early twentieth-century work on the Spanish in North America, but it owes an equal debt as well to what is popularly known as "middle ground" historiography. Historians such as Richard White, Michael N. McConnell, Daniel H. Usner, Jr., and James Merrell have uncovered places and times where the inhabitants of colonial societies built social and economic networks apart from, and sometimes in opposition to, broader imperial interests. But these frontier exchange economies and middle ground societies always seem to burst against the pressure of either stronger imperial enforcement of metropolitan policies or Anglo-American expansion, as was the case for the southwestern borderlands.

Middle ground historiography has opened up previously unseen worlds of cultural and economic interaction between societies. One of the problems that such a model entails, though, is its reliance on relationships between borders and centres. Typically historians cast the multiethnic societies as the borders and, by implication, the solid nation states like Mexico or the United States hold the centre. The middle ground model thus posits a seemingly inexorable process of the margins yielding to the centre, but the real strength of such works is their exposition of the limits of hegemonic social formations and the contingencies inherent in the expression of imperial and national power. If, however, White's pays en haut or Merrell's Pennsylvania backcountry could stand as full and whole societies in their own right we might be able to resituate the history of North American nation building. Richard Rodriguez's recent book Brown." The Last Discovery of America (2002) suggests, for example, that the world of captives and cousins in the southwest never quite vanished. Instead, it transformed, accommodating the demands of capitalist and nationalist systems while making space for the expression of its own borderland values and practices.

Captives & Cousins is an important book that has the potential to reconfigure the study of slavery, colonialism, trade, violence, and gender and even the language in which such histories are written. Brooks achieves such important contributions because of his prodigious command of sources and his able use of anecdotes to bring this lost past alive. Hopefully the book will mark not so much the next generation of middle ground studies but instead signal a new conceptual direction for American historians to take.

James Taylor Carson

Queen's University