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4 books match the query 'Northern New Spain'

cover of Bountiful Deserts: Sustaining Indigenous Worlds in Northern New Spain

Bountiful Deserts

Sustaining Indigenous Worlds in Northern New Spain

Cynthia Radding

University of Arizona Press, 2022

Common understandings drawn from biblical references, literature, and art portray deserts as barren places that are far from God and spiritual sustenance. In our own time, attention focuses on the rigors of climate change in arid lands and the perils of the desert in the northern Mexican borderlands for migrants seeking shelter and a new life.

Bountiful Deserts foregrounds the knowledge of Indigenous peoples in the arid lands of northwestern Mexico, for whom the desert was anything but barren or empty. Instead, they nurtured and harvested the desert as a bountiful and sacred space. Drawing together historical texts and oral testimonies, archaeology, and natural history, author Cynthia Radding develops the relationships between people and plants and the ways that Indigenous people sustained their worlds before European contact through the changes set in motion by Spanish encounters, highlighting the long process of colonial conflicts and adaptations over more than two centuries. This work reveals the spiritual power of deserts by weaving together the cultural practices of historical peoples and contemporary living communities, centered especially on the Yaqui/Yoeme and Mayo/Yoreme.

Radding uses the tools of history, anthropology, geography, and ecology to paint an expansive picture of Indigenous worlds before and during colonial encounters. She re-creates the Indigenous worlds in both their spiritual and material realms, bringing together the analytical dimension of scientific research and the wisdom of oral traditions in its exploration of different kinds of knowledge about the natural world.

Published in cooperation with the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies, Southern Methodist University

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cover of Northern New Spain: A Research Guide

Northern New Spain

A Research Guide

Thomas C. Barnes, Thomas H. Naylor, and Charles W. Polzer

University of Arizona Press, 1981

This research guide was first concieved to fulfill multiple needs of the research team of the Documentary Relations of the Southwest (DRSW) project at the Arizona State Museum. In performing research tasks, it became evident that reference material was scattered throughout scores of books and monographs. A single complete source book was simply not available. Hence, the editors of the DRSW project compiled this guide. The territory under study comprises all of northern Mexico in colonial times.
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cover of The Intimate Frontier: Friendship and Civil Society in Northern New Spain

The Intimate Frontier

Friendship and Civil Society in Northern New Spain

Ignacio Martínez

University of Arizona Press, 2019

For millennia friendships have framed the most intimate and public contours of our everyday lives. In this book, Ignacio Martínez tells the multilayered story of how the ideals, logic, rhetoric, and emotions of friendship helped structure an early yet remarkably nuanced, fragile, and sporadic form of civil society (societas civilis) at the furthest edges of the Spanish Empire.

Spaniards living in the isolated borderlands region of colonial Sonora were keen to develop an ideologically relevant and socially acceptable form of friendship with Indigenous people that could act as a functional substitute for civil law and governance, thereby regulating Native behavior. But as frontier society grew in complexity and sophistication, Indigenous and mixed-raced people also used the language of friendship and the performance of emotion for their respective purposes, in the process becoming skilled negotiators to meet their own best interests.

In northern New Spain, friendships were sincere and authentic when they had to be and cunningly malleable when the circumstances demanded it. The tenuous origins of civil society thus developed within this highly contentious social laboratory in which friendships (authentic and feigned) set the social and ideological parameters for conflict and cooperation. Far from the coffee houses of Restoration London or the lecture halls of the Republic of Letters, the civil society illuminated by Martínez stumbled forward amid the ambiguities and contradictions of colonialism and the obstacles posed by the isolation and violence of the Sonoran Desert.


 
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cover of The Tarahumara Rebellion of 1690: Embattled Settlers and Missionaries in Northern New Spain

The Tarahumara Rebellion of 1690

Embattled Settlers and Missionaries in Northern New Spain

Joseph P. Sánchez

University of Arizona Press, 2025

The Tarahumara Rebellion of 1690 examines a seventeenth-century Indigenous uprising in northern Mexico aimed at driving out Spanish miners, missionaries, and settlers from Tarahumara (Rarámuri) and Tepehuanes homelands.

Previous histories have interpreted this revolt, and other borderlands uprisings, as localized and spontaneous events aimed at rectifying specific grievances. Historian Joseph P. Sánchez argues that the revolts of the Tepehuanes and the Tarahumaras in northern New Spain, or Nueva Vizcaya, were well-planned, inspired by outside events, and drew in multiple communities and ethnicities. Drawing on a wealth of primary sources, including Jesuit accounts and archival documents, Sánchez offers a comprehensive narrative that challenges conventional interpretations of colonial Mexican uprisings.

Far from localized, the Indigenous rebellions in the northern Mexican borderlands during the colonial period were part of the overall Indigenous struggle for defense of homeland throughout the Americas. The Tarahumara Rebellion of 1690 brings together a rich history of localized events and broader historical trends and offers a compelling narrative that enriches our understanding of the colonial experience in northern New Spain.
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