Feast of Souls: Indians and Spaniards in the Seventeenth-Century Missions of Florida and New Mexico.

Feast of Souls: Indians and Spaniards in the Seventeenth-Century Missions of Florida and New Mexico. By Robert C. Galgano. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005. Pp. xii, 212. $37.50, ISBN 0-8263-3648-5.)

The stated purpose of this volume is to compare the two earliest Spanish frontiers in North America, Florida and New Mexico, putting Indians at the center of the story. Eventually, both frontiers would be pulled into the common gravity field of an expanding nation-state, and Herbert E. Bolton would combine the two regions in his 1921 study that launched the field of the Spanish Borderlands. In the seventeenth century, however, Florida and New Mexico showed few similarities. Florida, settled by Spain in 1565 to guard the homeward route of the silver fleet, was a maritime colony with a presidio. Its political economy was based on an annual situado from the Mexico City treasury, which provided support for soldiers, friars, and the caciques who commanded the militia and coordinated the repartimiento of paid labor. New Mexico, settled by residents of New Spain in 1598, was a landlocked colony in the arid north, where agricultural settlement was possible. Its defense was entrusted to knight-like encomenderos, supported by tributes of the Pueblo commoners. The two histories--southeastern and southwestern--ran briefly parallel in the early seventeenth century when Philip III, reducing expenses in peacetime, prepared to pull out of both places. The Franciscans put a stop to his plan by reporting, first, over six thousand baptized natives in Florida, then seven thousand in New Mexico.

Feast of Souls: Indians and Spaniards in the Seventeenth-Century Missions of Florida and New Mexico, well organized and well written, is proof that the Borderlands' bifurcated historiography has reached the point where synthesis is possible. The fact that Florida and New Mexico were founded years before Port Royal, Quebec, or Jamestown makes them the starting point for a more inclusive early America, and Feast of Souls is a natural choice for course adoption. Instructors will applaud the appearance of this compact book on Spanish-Indian relations in seventeenth-century North America; undergraduates will actually read it. Specialists, harder to please, will examine it for original ideas, regional and international context, and evidence that the author has established his credentials with primary research. Here, the results are uneven. The first part of the book is a fine ethnohistorical study of Indian and Spanish religions and spiritual conquests on the mission frontier on the model of James Axtell's The Invasion Within: The Contest of Cultures in Colonial North America (New York, 1985). The chapters that follow, with paired summaries of rebellions, church-state controversies, and the violent collapse of the seventeenth-century missions, are more lightly researched, and the notes contain some curious errors. For instance, the author uses the document numbering system that the Archivo General de Indias retired in 1929. He also attributes to "Fray Genaro Garcia" (p. 27) statements that were actually made by Fray Andres de San Miguel in a sixteenth-century account that Genaro Garcia published in 1902. John H. Hann translated and published it as An Early Florida Adventure Story by Fray Andres de San Miguel (Gainesville, 2001). The author's conclusion that on both frontiers Indians acted to preserve their cultural identities is low-yield.

In growing numbers of history graduate programs, the Spanish Borderlands are being reduced to a subspecialty of early American history, sacrificing their place on the cutting edge of a large and sophisticated literature that British Americanists do not follow. In terms of Spanish American colonial and frontier studies, Feast of Souls could have been written thirty years ago.

AMY TURNER BUSHNELL

John Carter Brown Library