Chiricahua and Janos: Communities of Violence in the Southwestern Borderlands, 1680-1880

Abstract

Lance Blyth revisits the Chihuahua– Arizona– New Mexico area at the center of William B. Griffen’s Apaches at War and Peace: The Janos Presidio, 1750 – 1858 (1988), employing the concept of communities of violence and informed by the work of James Brooks, Pekka Hämäläinen, Brian DeLay, and Juliana Barr, among others. According to Blyth, since “violence is instrumental in establishing, maintaining, and changing relationships both within and between communities,” it can be seen as a tool in the “human survival toolkit” (p. x). Studying how communities used and accommodated violence in the past, the author argues, has merit for understanding how violence fulfills similar purposes today. He consequently attempts to tell the story of Indian and Hispanic communities in a balanced way, and for most of the book he succeeds in that effort.The Janos of the title refers to the presidio community of San Felipe y Santiago de Janos in northern Chihuahua, near the present border with New Mexico and Arizona. In 1580 Franciscans began working with the local Jano and Jocome Indians, but the mission was destroyed in 1680 by Apaches during the Pueblo Revolt. Blyth’s book begins with the establishment of a presidio at the site of the former mission settlement during Spanish efforts to reassert control over the area. Nearby, along the Mimbres and upper Gila Rivers, lived bands of Athapaskan-speaking people who came to be known as Chiricahua. Like the Spanish settlers at Janos, they too were not native to the region, having arrived in the area sometime in the seventeenth century. Also like the Spanish colonials, they incorporated local Janos, Jocomes, and other band peoples into their communities, which led to the disappearance of the aboriginal groups in the course of the eighteenth century.The early part of the book effectively illustrates how violence was used by both Hispanics and Chiricahuas to accomplish their particular economic and social ends. Raiding provided resources that could not be acquired otherwise, particularly human resources in the form of captives. Violence could also serve as a prelude to negotiations that resulted in long-term truces. Among Chiricahuas violence was a necessary aspect of the rite of passage to adulthood and, therefore, the acquisition and maintenance of a family. Similarly, for Hispanic males military service, with its acceptance of violence, provided employment and thereby the ability to support a family.The middle part of the book focuses on how the Spanish colonial state, lacking the necessary resources to eliminate the Chiricahuas, settled on a carrot-and-stick policy of peace establishments. Apaches willing to settle down near Hispanic settlements such as Janos would receive rations and gifts and be given wide latitude; those at war with the state would be persecuted to extermination. In the long run, the policy proved unworkable, and both sides escalated violence to carry out community goals. During the first decades of Mexican independence, the new state government of Chihuahua even attempted a bounty system to deal with noncompliant Apaches that attracted American scalp hunters.In the latter part of the book Blyth introduces a new factor affecting relations between Janeros and Chiricahuas: the creation of a United States– Mexico border that effectively bisected what might be called the Chiricahua homeland. The author does not present Americans as part of a full-fledged community of violence, and that is disappointing, since Blyth makes reference to both Apache raids on American settlements, ranches, and stagecoaches and American campaigns against Chiricahua groups. Analyzing American attitudes toward violence would have provided a clearer understanding of how Apaches came to be caught between Mexican and American national states that between them broke down the Chiricahuas’ ability to resist. As presented, the final chapters of the book become a rushed recitation of Apache movements north and south of the US border and onto and off reservations as Chiricahua leaders attempted to preserve autonomy of action.Built on solid archival research and making good use early on of Chiricahua oral tradition, Chiricahua and Janos adds to the growing body of United States– Mexico border lands studies focused on indigenous autonomy of action. Blyth presents the symbiotic relationship based on violence between the people of Janos and the Chiricahua as both natural and rational. And, he asserts, there lies a lesson for understanding today’s communities of violence in the region: drug cartels. The vengeance and retaliation that drove much Chiricahua and Hispanic violence in previous centuries are at work today among and between narco-syndicates and the Mexican state. Blyth’s communities-of-violence approach thus offers a valuable analytical framework for addressing the tangled interrelationships of sovereign peoples operating in the same geographical space.