Country of the Cursed and the Driven: Slavery and the Texas Borderlands

Abstract

Paul Barba's Country of the Cursed and the Driven narrates the intertwined development of two systems of bondage—one of Indigenous peoples, the other of people of African descent—in the Texas borderlands from the sixteenth century to the outbreak of the American Civil War. Based on sources in Texas, this longue durée study raises important questions about what defines slavery and how two coercive labor systems shaped one another in a region marked by nearly four centuries of violent contestation.By enslaving Native peoples in war and ransoming captives during peacetime, Spaniards sought to control—and in the process transform—the Texas borderlands. But by the mid-eighteenth century, the Comanche began to threaten Spanish rule in Texas. Incentivized to participate in the slave trade by the Spanish demand for labor, the Comanche kidnapped Apache women and children, selling them into an ever-expanding commercial market in the Southwest. The lucrative trade in stolen horses, mules, and people attracted the attention of traders from the United States, at the same time that Comanche raiding forced Spanish and, later, Mexican officials to recruit Anglo-Americans like Moses Austin to “civilize” Texas. The Anglo-Americans who had settled in Mexican Texas believed that slavery was essential to their enterprise. When the Mexican government abolished slavery and took a more lenient approach to Native peoples, the Anglo-Americans revolted, establishing an independent republic. The number of enslaved African Americans skyrocketed after Texas secured its independence from Mexico. With trading opportunities expanding, Comanche also extended their slaving operations into Mexico but ultimately found themselves threatened by the settler colonial ambitions of white Texans.This book is part of an important trend in United States borderlands history to consider Black and Native peoples together—an approach pioneered by Latin American historians like Rachel O'Toole, Marcela Echeverri, and Yuko Miki, among others. Barba does not simply compare the experiences of Black and Native peoples: he argues that their experiences in bondage and captivity both qualified as slavery. To make this argument, Barba defines slavery “as a personal condition of subjugation that is (1) sustained by the use and threat of violence and by sociocultural stigma and (2) forced upon victims for the purposes of enhancing the disposition (social, psychic, economic, or otherwise) of the slaver” (p. 9; emphasis in original). From this perspective, slavery arose less from structural racism or legal regimes that defined people as property—one of the factors on which scholars have focused—than from diverse economic and cultural factors.Country of the Cursed and the Driven contributes to a long-standing debate among historians over whether, and to what extent, Indigenous peoples practiced slavery. Generally, the debate turns on kin incorporation: captives who retained a marginal or subordinate status are called slaves, while those who were incorporated into Indigenous societies are not. Barba, however, rejects this distinction, arguing that kin incorporation was one of the defining features of both Native and Black slavery. Spaniards “adopted” Native slaves as godchildren. Comanche men married enslaved women though these relationships were founded on and often consummated by violence. Even chattel slavery in the United States was based on the fiction, and occasionally the reality, of kin incorporation. Enslavers not only styled themselves as paternalistic figures but also established more literal family ties with African American women through rape.This expansive definition of slavery reveals interesting connections between Native and Black slavery and the ways in which both systems influenced one another. At the same time, Country of the Cursed and the Driven collapses some important distinctions between casta in New Spain and race in the United States. The book applies the racial categories that developed in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century United States—Black, Indigenous, and white—to Spanish and Mexican Texas. Español, for instance, is translated as white, even though Spaniards were also trigueños, morenos, and even oscuros, as Joanne Rappaport, Christina Sue, and Jorge Delgadillo Núñez have shown (pp. 51, 77). The book might have benefited from greater attention to scholarship on Latin America, particularly by Latin American historians, and from deeper work in Latin American archives. Although Barba has conducted extensive research in Texas repositories, including municipal records that date back to the colonial era and transcriptions of documents from the Archivo General de la Nación in Mexico and the Archivo General de Indias, Spanish and Mexican archives are surprisingly absent for a book that is primarily about Spanish- and Mexican-era Texas. Nonetheless, Country of the Cursed and the Driven is a thought-provoking book whose strengths outweigh its weaknesses.