The Twilight of the Mission Frontier: Shifting Interethnic Alliances and Social Organization in Sonora, 1768–1855. By José Refugio de la Torre Curiel. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012. xxx + 323 pp. $65.00 cloth.

Abstract

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)The Twilight of the Mission Frontier: Shifting Interethnic Alliances and Social Organization in Sonora, 1768-1855 . By Jose Refugio de la Torre Curiel . Stanford : Stanford University Press , 2012. xxx + 323 pp. $65.00 cloth.Book Reviews and NotesThis latest book on late colonial and early national Sonora is masterful. Piece by piece, de la Torre provides narrative, analysis, and perspective that lends one to classify his effort as synthesis, and yet, given his mastery of the archival sources, it is not a synthesis of secondary literature but rather of archived documents, geographical evidence, demography, and deep knowledge of greater New Spain and its development, all coupled with an eye to integrative thinking regarding the changes undergone in the region within a critical period. In short, it is the new book on later missions in the Opateria and Baja and Alta Pimeria during the end of Spanish hegemony and the beginning of developments in the early Mexican northwest.One must prepare to withstand a methodical approach if one is to digest de la Torre's way of proceeding. Short but thorough chapters begin the book, the first treating the physical and human geographies of what became Sonora, and the second analyzing demographics of Native peoples, Hispanic peoples, and those in between in towns, missions, and refuges in the hinterlands. While this is the dry stuff of social history, investment at this point begets a payoff in the following chapters. De la Torre next engages the myriad influences and changes to local life ways in the Pimerias and the Opateria, and as he does so he raises questions as to meaning of being religious versus living among the religious, indigenous or Hispanic, in greater Sonora. Life ways also include the material culture, or cultures, of localities; merchants, their clienteles, and prices receive attention, as do mobile populations. Within and outside the missions, the author claims to see increased contact between peoples in late colonial Sonora--thus the multiethnic argument he offers. On reaching the fourth chapter, method becomes even clearer as de la Torre immerses the reader in evidence of the changing nature of the Sonoran frontier economy to a developed, captive trade network (145) that precedes the economics of independence in the region. That economy was largely cashless and merchant-led, and enabled leading merchants and governmental allies to use commerce as coercion over the local peoples.The deeper analyses of the preceding elements of life in Sonora all point to the two ending chapters. At the heart of this study is that which occurred following the Jesuits' expulsion from the region in their former missions as those came under the leadership of the Franciscan friars. Here is the crux of the book, in a step-wise look at the crises these missions underwent, for what reasons, and how change happened in each sub region. Following the Jesuit expulsion, interim local administrators attempted to manage the mission assets, with mixed results. When the Franciscans arrived, many missions were in disrepair or had been stripped to support Spanish colonial troops in regional conflicts. This much of the story is familiar. …