Captives and Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest Borderlands.

Captives and Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest Borderlands. By James F. Brooks. (Chapel Hill and London: Published by the University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, c. 2002. Pp. [xii], 419. Paper, $22.50, ISBN 0-8078-5382-8; cloth, $55.00, ISBN 0-8078-2714-2.)

James Brooks explores how indigenous and Euramerican practices of capture and servitude came together to form systems of slavery involving Apaches, Comanches, Kiowas, Navajos, Utes, Spaniards, Mexicans, and Anglo-Americans across New Mexico and its hinterlands from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries. In the process, he challenges and complicates conceptions of what constituted American slavery, or better yet American "slaveries." Using source material from history, anthropology, archaeology, folklore, and oral tradition, Brooks paints a detailed and often poetic portrait of New Mexico and its diverse peoples while at the same time linking the region to a captive-exchange complex that stretched from the Southwest across the Plains to the Great Lakes and beyond. In this world, slaves did not represent merely a source of productive labor but also social wealth and prestige, kinship ties, and an interpenetration of cultures that still colors New Mexico's Hispano and Indian cultures today. Brooks depicts a multiethnic slave system in the Southwest that paralleled indigenous customs of servitude across Africa and Latin America--in the lack of a "racial dichotomization" between slaves and owners, the plurality and mutability of "slave" statuses, and the assimilation of captives and slaves into their owners' families and communities (p. 364). Importantly for historians of the South, this portrait of southwestern slave systems gives added weight to scholarly arguments that the racial, chattel slavery that developed in the U.S. South stands alone as an exception not only within the African diaspora but also among slave practices globally conceived.

Brooks grounds his study in three ecological zones--"the buffalo plains, the canyons and mesas west of the Rio Grande, and the mountain ranges that linked them"--within which communities used human beings in social and economic exchanges to suit a multitude of different subsistence practices, settlement patterns, and cultural repertoires (p. 164). Thus, groups of people with economies based on activities as diverse as Comanche horse pastoralism and bison hunting, Navajo sheepherding, and Spanish and Pueblo agricultural cultivation could put enslaved peoples to use to maintain and expand their productivity and wealth. Brooks then charts the evolution of these slave systems as they changed in response to political shifts from Spanish and Mexican to Anglo-American governance in the region and in response to growing links to regional and national markets. For instance, Comanches used war captives in exchange networks to gain agricultural products, guns, ammunition, and material goods in the eighteenth century, but in the nineteenth century kept and adopted an increasingly large number of women and children to replace family members lost in wars and disease epidemics and to meet the labor demands of their growing bison and horse trade. Captive-taking represented neither a remnant of a "tribal" past nor a coping mechanism in the face of demographic disaster, but rather a social and economic innovation by which Comanches expanded their territorial dominion to reach a pinnacle of power in the early nineteenth century.

Slave trade networks flourished despite Spanish and Mexican laws prohibiting the enslavement of Indians (except as prisoners of "just wars"), and they continued through the nineteenth century long after the end of the Civil War and the outlawing of slavery in the United States and its territories, It was not the imposition of U.S. rule that brought slavery in the Southwest to an end; U.S. military policies in the late nineteenth century stressed the ransoming of captives and, in fact, stimulated the slave trade. Rather, the extension of a national capitalist market ultimately subsumed local economic networks and unraveled the web of kin-based customs of both peaceful and violent exchange that had developed over four centuries.

As captive-taking and exchange assimilated violence into mutually productive exchange relations, increased wealth elaborated social distinctions among Navajos, Comanches, and Kiowas as well as Spanish-Mexican populations. Across those communities an elite few owned the majority of slaves, though more than 50 percent might own at least one to two captives. Varying conditions of servitude also created diverse gradations of status and identity among the enslaved, denying any simple dichotomy between enslaved and free. Spanish customs of compadrazgo (godparenthood) gave fictive kinship standing to Indian slaves as adopted children of baptismal godparents or as criados or criadas ("those raised up") who were "civilized" and Christianized by their owners (p. 6). A community of indigenous slaves held by Spaniards came to be known as genizaros, a caste who were both slaves and soldiers, who enjoyed some legal standing to file complaints in court and to apply for land grants, whose children might be born free, and who gradually emerged as a unique subset within the larger Hispano identity group of northern New Mexico. Similarly, the possibility of adoption and marriage for captives taken by Comanches and Kiowas created a spectrum of statuses from kinsmen (if adopted) and blood bondsmen (exchangeable but only within the group) to chattel (alienable property) and, in turn, identities of kin peoples as either "born of Comanche" or "raised as Comanche" (p. 180).

Just as the sexual exploitation of enslaved African American women in the U.S. South created a population of mixed-blood people whose lineages and identities quickly began to confound institutionalized racial categories of "black" and "white," so too did the violent exchanges of women and children through capture and enslavement in the Southwest complicate culturally constructed categories of ethnic and national identity. Slave systems initially might divide people into distinct categories of alien and kin, but native and Euramerican communities assimilated the victims of capture and enslavement in a myriad of ways that broke down distinctions and created ties among their societies. Marriages between captors and captives resulted in not only mestizaje peoples but also hybrid communities, making slave systems a mechanism of community building. Brooks's emphasis on this interpenetration of cultures and interweaving of peoples sometimes distracts from the physical and psychic costs paid by those women and children whose violent capture from their families and coerced incorporation into other societies made them victims as well as mediators of this exchange system, but that is a minor quibble with such a fine book. Though Brooks's compelling characters draw "closer and closer apart" at the end of his narrative, his work should bring our understandings of American slaveries closer and closer together (p. 30).

JULIANA BARR 

Rutgers University