From Settler to Citizen: New Mexican Economic Development and the Creation of Vecino Society, 1750-1820

Abstract

Ross Frank’s examination of New Mexican society in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries is a welcome addition to the growing body of scholarship on northern Mexico. Frank tells two stories here: one of the economic development of the province in the last decades of the colony, the other of the creation of a distinct “vecino” culture that even today distinguishes the region. From the adversity of the post-1750 period, New Mexican society emerged with a reordered power dynamic and a Hispanic sector that was stronger, more clearly defined, and unquestionably dominant. From the Hispanic perspective, this is a story of renewal and redemption; not so, however, from the perspective of the Pueblo Indians.Eighteenth-century New Mexico was characterized by two distinct economic systems, separated in time by what Frank, borrowing from Oakah Jones, labels the “defensive crisis” of the 1760s and 1770s. The first system, developed in a period of relative Pueblo Indian autonomy, saw Pueblos able to sustain traditional relations of production, withstanding efforts by Spanish officials to reshape the Pueblo economy through repartimiento. The Pueblo world remained relatively unpenetrated, or at least insufficiently penetrated to alter basic relations of production.A period of crisis ensued after midcentury, as New Mexico suffered the “twin afflictions” of raids by Plains Indians and a 1780–81 smallpox epidemic that exacted a disproportionate toll on the Pueblo population. This “defensive crisis” marked the turning point in New Mexico’s economic development. By the mid-1780s, the crisis had passed (at least for the Hispanic sector); peace was achieved with the Plains Indians, the demographic balance shifted in favor of the non-Pueblo population, and the vecino population “emerged … with new economic possibilities and the seeds of a cultural transformation from settlers to citizens” (p. 63). The active engagement of the Bourbon monarchy was critical to the economic revitalization of the province after 1780. Not surprisingly, much of the crown’s interest lay in defense, as both the expansion of a Spanish military presence in the north and the crown’s willingness to negotiate with the Comanches and Apaches in the last decades of the eighteenth century attest. But the Bourbon efforts to foster stability and growth went beyond military solutions; as Frank notes, the Bourbons maintained “an active policy to encourage and aid the growth of a local economy and … integrate it within the larger regional commercial system that emerged” after midcentury (p. 223).Economic development facilitated the transformation of New Mexicans from “settlers laboring for survival on a difficult frontier to citizens living in a social and cultural context they had worked to create” (p. 176). This transformation flattened the racial hierarchy, grouping castas and genízaros together with españoles and in opposition to Pueblo Indians, creating a bipolar world of vecino and “other” in which Pueblos were increasingly marginalized. Vecinos now held the upper hand demographically, socially, and economically. Frank sees a “mature and self-confident vecino generation” emerging after 1780 and moving to assert its role as cultural arbiters of a newly reconfigured New Mexican society. Evidence of this is to be found in the transformations in vecino artisanry—specifically textile weaving, santo production, and furniture making. Frank’s argument stakes out new territory, as he moves away from a narrower reliance on archival sources to look at a society’s production and to “read” it in ways that reveal, far more than can the archival record alone, the growing “sense of self” of the residents of this province.Frank concludes with a treatment of two objects of late-nineteenth-century creation—carved wooden figures representing Santo Jo’ (Saint Job), a conflation of the biblical figures of Job and the suffering Christ. Frank argues that such artifacts reveal how a people have come to define themselves in light of their history. Santo Jo’ tells the story of New Mexico’s late colonial development—a story of adversity and of responses to that adversity when, like the biblical Job, the people of New Mexico were afflicted and then redeemed.This is a fine work of scholarship, marked by its innovative use of material culture to tell a rich and nuanced story of economic and cultural development on the far northern frontier of New Spain. Scholars of the north who have awaited the publication of Frank’s book will not be disappointed.