Historicizing Indigenous Democracy in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands

Abstract

In These People Have Always Been a Republic, Maurice Crandall provides a long history of Indian voting in New Mexico and Arizona, examining voting in Hopi, Pueblo, Tohono O’odham, and Yaqui communities across Spanish, Mexican, and U.S. colonialism. Crandall argues that across these three eras, Indigenous peoples “absorbed and adapted colonially imposed forms of electoral politics and exercised political sovereignty based on localized political, economic, and social needs” (4). Navigating successive colonial regimes, Indigenous communities forged distinct forms of civil governance and electoral processes within colonial structures in order to protect internal citizenship and sovereignty. In the book’s first section, Crandall focuses on the Spanish colonial period, when colonial administrators sought to “‘Hispanicize’ Indians, turning them into taxpaying citizens” (7). The first chapter examines a “commingling” of Pueblo political organization and Spanish town government, resulting in “Pueblo-Spanish repúblicas de indios” (15). In the seventeenth century, Pueblo elections increasingly mixed...