Examines the processes of disappearance during the late 16th and 17th centuries--through assimilation or extermination--of the native Indians encountered by Spaniards in present-day Chihuahua, Mexico.

For centuries conquerors, missionaries, and political movements acting in the name of a single god, nation, or race have sought to remake human identities. Tracing the rise of exclusive forms of identity over the past 1500 years, this innovative book explores both the creation and destruction of exclusive identities, including those based on nationalism and monotheistic religion. Benjamin Lieberman focuses on two critical phases of world history: the age of holy war and conversion, and the age of nationalism and racism. His cases include the rise of Islam, the expansion of medieval Christianity, Spanish conquests in the Americas, Muslim expansion in India, settler expansion in North America, nationalist cleansing in modern Europe and Asia, and Nazi Germany’s efforts to build a racial empire. He convincingly shows that efforts to transplant and expand new identities have paradoxically generated long periods of both stability and explosive violence that remade the human landscape around the world.

In her latest work, H. Henrietta Stockel examines the collision of the ethnocentric Spanish missionaries and the Chiricahua Apaches, including the resulting identity theft through Christian baptism, and the even more destructive creation of a local slave trade. The new information provided in this study offers a sample of the total unknown number of baptized Chiricahua men, women, and children who were sold into slavery by Jesuits and Franciscans. Stockel provides the identity of the priests as well as the names of the purchasers, often identified as "Godfather." Stockel also explores Jesuit and Franciscan attempts to maintain their missions on New Spain's northern frontier during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. She focuses on how international political and economic forces shaped the determination of the priests to mold the Apaches into Christians and tax-paying citizens of the Empire. Diseases, warfare, interpersonal relations, and an overwhelming number of surrendered Chiricahuas at the missions, along with reduced supplies from Mexico City, forced the missionaries to use every means to continue their efforts at conversion, including deporting the Apaches to Cuba and selling others to Christian families on the colonial frontier.

Considered by historian Herbert E. Bolton to be one of the greatest books ever written in the West, AndrŽs PŽrez de Ribas's history of the Jesuit missions provides unusual insight into Spanish and Indian relations during the colonial period in Northern New Spain. First published in Madrid in 1645, it traces the history of the missions from 1591 to 1643 and includes letters from Jesuit annual reports and other correspondence, much of which has never been found or cataloged in historical archives. Daniel T. Reff, Maureen Ahern, and Richard K. Danford have now prepared the first complete, scholarly, and fully annotated edition of this important work in English. PŽrez de Ribas was the first permanent missionary to the Ahome, Zuaque, and Yaqui Indians. After fifteen years on the mission frontier he was recalled to Mexico City, where he held various posts, including Jesuit Provincial. Addressed to novitiates ignorant of the challenges they would face in the field, his Historia was a virtual textbook on missionary work in the New World. Also written to encourage ongoing support of the Jesuit missions, it reflected the author's deep grasp of what rhetorically soothed and moved Church and Crown officials. Perhaps of greatest interest to the modern reader are PŽrez de Ribas's often detailed comments on indigenous beliefs and practices. These firsthand observations provide a rich resource of ethnographic and historical data concerning everything from native subsistence, settlement patterns, and myths to the dynamics of Jesuit-Indian relations. The many cases of conversion that PŽrez de Ribas describes are especially rich in ethnographic data, clarifying the values and beliefs from which the Indians were "rescued." History of the Triumphs is a primary document of great importance, made more valuable here by an exceptionally fluid translation and painstaking annotations. It will be a standard reference for all engaged in research on New Spain and a captivating read for anyone interested in this chapter of American history.

A study of the styles of decoration found on the early southwestern pottery known as White Mountain Redware. The White Mountain Redware tradition, an arbitrary division of the Cibola painted pottery tradition, is composed of those vessels which have a red slip and painted decoration in either black or black and white, which when grouped into pottery types have a geographic locus within or immediately adjacent to the Cibola area, and which share a number of other attributes indicative of close historical relationships.

The Frontier Mission and Social Transformation in Western Honduras deals with the interaction between Mercedarian missionaries and the indigenous Lenca Indian population of western Honduras during the early sixteenth to mid-eighteenth centuries. Using an anthropological perspective, it relies heavily on previously neglected ecclesiastical archival material in conjunction with preliminary archaeological evidence as an integral source of data. A fine-grained description of the local processes of missionization in a frontier region examines the organization, operation and goals of the Mercedarian mission province located in the colonial Audiencia of Guatemala. Summary data concerning aspects of Lenca society and physical environment relevant to investigation of mission activities are provided. The importance of this study lies in its ability to explain mission development in frontier settings as well as to trace transformations within a mission order over almost a 250-year period.