Global Borderlands

The Indigenous nations of the valley of the Rio Grande that is now centered upon Ojinaga, Chihuahua, and Presidio, Texas—the La Junta valley in colonial times—had a long and unique history with Hispanics during the colonial period. Their valley was the initial route to New Mexico and West Texas explored by Spanish conquistadors in the 1500s. In the mid-1600s, the Juntans began engaging in long-distance migrant labor in Nueva Vizcaya, and in the 1680s they began inviting Franciscan missionaries and serving as important military allies to Hispanic troops. Yet for seventy-five years only the missionaries, without any Hispanic military or civilians, lived among them, due to both the remoteness of their valley from Hispanic settlements and the Juntans' insistence upon their autonomy. This is unique in Spanish colonial annals on the northern frontier of New Spain. This detailed research study adds much new information and many corrections to the rare previous studies.

Utilizing local analysis to make global conclusions, Drama Under the Skin uses ritual as a lens to examine race and identity formation of both free and enslaved people of African descent and Indigenous groups in northern New Spain. Juana Moriel-Payne proposes that Baroque-Catholic ideology, as social culture, incited and promoted the participation of those peoples in religious rituals. Through their involvement in fiestas, cofradías, and capellanías, those groups were able to create and/or recreate socio-cultural identities, while transforming and adapting global Catholic practices and beliefs according to their local realities. Intersecting with research about Latin America, Mexico, the African Diaspora, and Borderlands history, Drama Under the Skin charts the impact of global ideas about slavery, race/casta, and identity in areas where people of African descent have not yet received enough historiographical attention. Heretofore the historiography of northern New Spain has perpetuated an image of an Indigenous-barbarian north under control of the Spaniards. Almost nothing has been said about the active participation of people of African descent, Indigenous groups, and women in cultural affairs. Moriel-Payne highlights the African Diaspora's resistance mechanisms, analyzes the complex dynamics between Indigenous and African groups in cultural-religious activities, and examines the impact on gender, race, and identity formation.

Mexican Americans in West Texas is an essential work investigating the human geography of a key Texas region. Its scope gives primary attention to the counties generally encompassed by the Edwards Plateau and the Trans-Pecos region, which extends from just past the Hill Country counties of Mason, Gillespie, Kerr, and Bandera, to approximately the Pecos River but also embracing the conterminous subregion that geographers identify as the Permian Basin. This book honors the conventional definition of the Trans-Pecos region, treating it as beginning at the Pecos River and heading west to Hudspeth County, the farthest reach of this endeavor. A reliance on secondary works very much dictated the time parameters of the study. For the most part, the many county histories, the several collections of essays, and the numerous articles from venues such as the Journal of Big Bend Studies, the West Texas Historical Association Year Book, and the Southwestern Historical Quarterly decreased their coverage of historical occurrences in the region somewhere around the last decades of the twentieth century. Considered broadly, the book may be deemed a synthesis of published accounts that capture the course of events and the flow of historical currents that transpired in the vast expanse west of the 100th meridian. Mexican Americans in West Texas speaks to the existence of many disparate and disunified secondary sources on West Texas, a region that has been too long overlooked in the history of the Lone Star State.