Changing National Identities at the Frontier: Texas and New Mexico, 1800-1850.

Changing National Identities at the Frontier: Texas and New Mexico, 1800-1850. By Andres Resendez. (New York and other cities: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Pp. xvi, 309. Paper, $23.99, ISBN 0-521-54319-3; cloth, $65.00, ISBN 0-521-83555-0.)

Changing National Identities at the Frontier: Texas and New Mexico, 1800-1850 takes its place among the best works of the new borderlands history. Informed but not burdened by cultural and economic theory, it recasts the history of both sides of the U.S./Mexico/Texas border in the light of transnational developments, including the growth of liberal and scientific thought, the rising influence of Masonic orders, the institutionalization of the state(s), and the growth of international markets. The players include a jostling group of European immigrants, U.S. migrants, Native Americans, and local and federal Mexican and U.S. politicians, as well as a sometimes overlapping group of traders, speculators, lawyers, heavy drinkers, and priests.

Basing his history on a wide variety of archival sources in both the U.S. and Mexico, Resendez points out that "Scores of Mexican-Texans went from Spanish subjects, to Mexican citizens, to Texans, and wound up as Americans, in the short span of a lifetime.... At the frontier, choosing one's identity could constitute an exciting business opportunity, a bold political statement, and at times it was quite simply a matter of survival" (p. 2). Identity issues were imbedded in the politics of state formation that dominated the first half of the nineteenth century for both Mexico and the U.S. Both nations faced struggles between centralized and localized power that resulted in armed conflicts that were enhanced by transnational economic market developments. "[S]ectional disputes," avers Resendez, "were not only endemic to Mexico but also to the United States, as both national projects were headed for destruction in this period" (p. 267).

Among the most novel aspects of Resendez's book is its treatment of indigenous peoples. Where these nations converged on the shifting ground of the "frontier," Resendez points out, they met an expanding Indian world. Resendez claims, "Undoubtedly, the Mexican presence reached deep and wide into North America. But it was the indigenous chief and his people, not the local military commander, who were able to travel freely from San Antonio to Santa Fe" (p. 45). A highly mobile, numerous, and diverse group of Indian peoples populated the area in a mix complicated by the United States policy of removing Indians from east of the Mississippi River to the borders of Texas. By the Fredonia Uprising of 1826, it was possible for many of those indigenous people (particularly the Cherokee) to ally formally with a group of Euro-American insurgents in imagining Texas as divided into two autonomous states labeled "Red People" and "White People" (p. 44).

Fourteen years later, there was still a reality on the ground, as well as a distant metropole. The Kiowa, for example, who brokered a five-nation alliance in 1840 and secured their territory, defeated the Texas expedition to Santa Fe in 1841 (an expedition, Resendez argues, whose press coverage in the United States laid the imaginative groundwork for the Mexican-American War). The Kiowa distinguished between Americans from the North or Kansas (friendly) and Texans who were doing their best to exterminate the Kiowa and their Comanche allies. Similarly, the Pueblo Indians in New Mexico, who in the mid-1830s were the backbone of conscripted New Mexican troops, were forced by Mexican officials to abandon their fields to launch a campaign against the Navajo, with whom they enjoyed commercial and kin as well as raiding ties. Six months later, the Pueblos were major participants in the successful, heavily indigenous Chimayo Rebellion. They would again play a role in 1847, as the United States began to establish its regime.

In lucid and lively prose, Resendez illuminates the similarities as well as the more familiar differences between the United States and Mexico, New Mexico, and Texas. He complicates our understanding of nation building and the role of borderlands and their peoples in state formation. We may have already known that on the frontier, national loyalties of all groups were crosscut by the seduction of liberal ideas and market possibilities (as well as kinship ties--Resendez has a chapter on marriage). But we come away from this book with a very different sense of the possibilities at the time, the players, the shifting alliances and ideas, and the parallel issues of state formation and sectional crisis.

SARAH DEUTSCH

Duke University