A Nation Without Borders

Chapter One

Borderlands

Centers and Peripheries

As he rode northward out of San Luis Potos’ at the head of an army of six thousand in early 1836, General Antonio L—pez de Santa Anna intended to crush a rebellion in the state of Coahuila y Tejas and reassert the hold of Mexico's center over the vast stretches of its peripheries, north, east, and south. Born in Veracruz in 1794 to a prosperous creole family, Santa Anna had joined what was then the Spanish army at the age of sixteen and was thereafter embroiled in the convulsive military and political struggles that ushered in Mexican independence and charted the course of a fledgling country.

Santa Anna was haughty, temperamental, and guided chiefly by personal ambitions for power and adulation—he bragged in 1836 that if he found the hand of the U.S. government in the northern unrest, "he could continue the march of his army to Washington and place upon its Capitol the Mexican flag"—and his allegiances swung with the predictability of a weather vane. First a royalist officer battling against the Hidalgo rebellion and its peasant and republican successors, he eventually followed many of his fellow creoles in embracing independence and the constitutional monarchy of Agust’n de Iturbide. In a veritable flash, he sided with liberals and federalists in ousting Iturbide, establishing a republic, and fending off a conservative revolt. In 1829, when Spain attempted a reconquest, Santa Anna led Mexican forces in successfully turning the Spanish back, paving the way for his overwhelming election as the country's president in 1833, still aligned, it seemed, with the liberals. He then quickly, and surprisingly, stepped down, leaving the presidency to his liberal vice president, who pursued a reformist agenda designed to trim the sails of the army and the Catholic Church. This time, Santa Anna heeded the appeals of angry conservatives. He helped them topple the regime he had once headed, repealed the liberal reforms, and tried to set the country on a centralist course. In 1836, he commanded not only the Mexican army but also what there was of the Mexican state.

The challenges newly independent Mexico faced from its borderlands were hardly unique. Forged in the cauldron of imperial crises and revolutionary movements that rocked the Atlantic world from the last third of the eighteenth century, Mexico, like other countries that had just emerged in the hemisphere, had to establish its legitimacy and authority over the diverse populations and territory it claimed to control. Although sparked in 1810 by what became a massive and bloody peasant insurrection (the "Hidalgo revolt"), independence, when ultimately achieved in 1821, saw the peasants largely subdued and, as elsewhere in Latin America, a creole elite of landowners, mine owners, merchants, and army officers steering the transition to nationhood. Stretching from the Yucatán, Tabasco, and Chiapas in the far southeast to Alta California in the far northwest, Mexico had more than twice the landmass of the early United States. And the immense northern regions—perhaps half the size of the entire country—were thinly populated by Spaniards, creoles, and mestizos and defended by a very loose chain of military outposts (presidios) and Catholic missions. There, from the Pacific coast, east across the Great Basin and the Rocky Mountains, and into the southern plains, Native peoples reigned supreme.

From the beginning, Mexican elites, much like their counterparts in the United States, were divided between those who wanted power concentrated in a central state (they were known as centralists in Mexico and federalists in the United States) and those who sought a weaker central state and more regional autonomy (they were known as federalists in Mexico and republicans or anti-federalists in the United States). But unlike the United States, Mexico initially gave rise to a centralist tendency with bases in the army and the Catholic Church, as embodied in the imperious figure of Agust’n de Iturbide, who unveiled a Mexican "empire" with himself as emperor. Within months, Iturbide managed to alienate allies and skeptics alike and was quickly routed by federalists. A republican constitution was then crafted in 1824. Modeled to some extent on the Constitution of the United States—there were three branches of government, including a bicameral legislature and a president selected by state legislatures for a four-year term—it went much further in addressing the civil standing of the country's denizens, proclaiming the equality of all Mexicans regardless of race, ethnicity, or social status (though remaining mute about the enslaved of African descent, who could be found working in mining areas and on coastal sugar plantations).

Of perhaps greatest consequence, the constitution divided the country into nineteen states with their own elected governments and four territories (three in the north, including Alta California and Nuevo México), which came under the jurisdiction of the national legislature. Although the Catholic Church retained its monopoly on Mexico's spiritual life and the country's president could claim extraordinary powers in times of emergency, the forces of centralism in Mexico City were clearly weakened and the impulses toward federalism and local autonomy in the states and territories strengthened. In the Yucatán, Sonora y Sinaloa, and especially silver-mining Zacatecas—not to mention very distant Alta California—the federalist disposition thrived, at times manifest in tax resistance and the creation of civilian militias. And, in an effort to secure the northeastern borderlands, the Mexican government offered a variety of incentives to colonists from the United States, who began settling in Coahuila y Tejas during the early 1820s and whose loyalty to the Mexican state was soon suspect.

The task of establishing stable regimes presented enormous challenges for all the new republics of the Western Hemisphere. Haiti, the second to break colonial ties, was rent by deep conflicts between former slaves and former free people of color. They had cooperated long enough to defeat the French, the Spanish, and the British militarily and to end slavery but almost immediately sank into a political maelstrom of assassinations, coups d'état, rival governments, and domestic rebellions—all exacerbated by the diplomatic isolation that had been imposed by the United States and the European powers. Peru, Bolivia, and Chile, emerging independent from anticolonial struggles with Spain, would nonetheless battle each other for years, sometimes by force of arms, over territorial disputes that often unhinged each of their governments. Venezuela's diverse terrain made national integration difficult and turned the office of the presidency into something of a revolving door.

Long boastful of its comparative stability, the United States also suffered more than its share of political turmoil. For the first half decade of independence, the Articles of Confederation provided a shaky foundation of governance (as Shays's Rebellion in western Massachusetts brought home), and even after the Constitution was ratified, questions of federal authority, territorial integrity, and public policy proved bitterly divisive. The British sought their own reconquest, the French and the Spanish schemed with separatists in the Mississippi Valley borderlands, secessionist movements erupted in several areas including New England, Native Americans organized to resist the encroachments of white settlers, and the election of 1800, pitting Thomas Jefferson's Republicans against John Adams's Federalists, threatened to break the Republic apart—though hardly for the last time.

By the late 1820s, Mexican centralists, especially those in the army, had grown increasingly concerned about the centrifugal forces spinning peripheral regions (particularly in the north) out of the orbit of Mexico City. Small revolts against government officials had already erupted in Alta California and Coahuila y Tejas—one, joining Anglos and Cherokees in the ill-fated Republic of Fredonia near Nacodoches in 1826-27, was crushed. Patterns of trade that had long moved from north to south, to markets in Chihuahua, Durango, and Mexico City, were now turning west to east, as merchants in Louisiana and Missouri began to tap the commerce of Tejas and Nuevo México. Traveling across Tejas in 1829, General Manuel de Mier y Terán, commander of the military jurisdiction of northeastern Mexico, thus worried about the dispositions of the American colonists there as well as about the designs of the U.S. government—"The North Americans have conquered whatever territory adjoins them," he observed—and urged concerted state action. Warning that "either the government occupies Tejas now, or it is lost forever," he recommended fortifying the military presence in the north, expanding the coastal trade between Tejas and the rest of Mexico, and attracting Mexican and European settlers to offset the American influence. Partly to stem the flow of American immigration, the Mexican president, Vicente Guerrero, abolished slavery in 1829, and the next year the Congress banned American immigration to the border areas entirely. Although slaveholders in Tejas won exemption from the emancipation decree and the Congress subsequently lifted the immigration ban, Mexico City seemed intent on bringing the northern regions to heel.

But it was not until Santa Anna returned to the presidency in 1834 at the behest of the centralists that a new framework of governance was imposed. Inspired by the conservative "Plan de Cuernavaca" which demanded the repeal of recent liberal reforms and the punishment of those who had enacted them, Santa Anna, together with a newly elected Congress, began to dismantle the federalist constitution of 1824 and undermine the power of the states. It would not be easy to carry through. Predictably, federalist strongholds in Zacatecas and Coahuila resisted tenaciously and forced Santa Anna to intervene militarily. Yet by 1835 the most serious challenge issued from Tejas, where rebellion had long been brewing and where an ascendant rebel faction had embraced the goal of independence. There Santa Anna headed with his army of six thousand in early 1836, far outnumbering the rebel forces and intending to make easy work of it.

Los Indios Bárbaros

When General Santa Anna gazed toward the northern borderlands, he thought about more than the rebellious Texians (Americans in Tejas) and Tejanos (Mexicans in Tejas). He thought, too, about "the savage tribes" (los indios bárbaros) who had been waging war in the "frontier departments" and making a mockery of the presumed authority of the Mexican state. The Hidalgo revolt and the decade of brutal conflict into which it plunged Mexico seemed to invite Indian raiding in areas shorn of troops and militias. And although newly independent Mexico looked to make peace, the state's depleted treasury made it very difficult to maintain the gifting rituals that underwrote alliances from the 1780s. Indeed, the effort to limit Indian attacks and advances in the north encouraged the Mexican government to attract the very American colonists who were now causing it so much trouble.

What appeared to Santa Anna and other Mexicans as "savage tribes" were, in fact, constellations of Native bands and confederations that raided, traded, exchanged captives, and fashioned alliances all across the Great Plains and the arid Mexican northwest. Farthest east were relatively sedentary horticultural peoples such as the Wichita, Osage, Pawnee, and Omaha; farthest west were Navajos, Pueblos, and Utes who formed part of a sprawling Nuevo Méxican trade network built around horses, slaves, woven goods, maize, metals, and guns. But across the southern plains were to be found the hunting and pastoral Kiowas, Lipan Apaches, and, fiercest and most formidable of all, Comanches.

Nomadic, Uto-Aztecan speaking, and originally Shoshone, those who would emerge as Comanches (they called themselves Numunuu, or "the people") began moving out of the northern reaches of the Great Basin in the sixteenth century toward the central plains. By the early eighteenth century, a faction had broken off, headed farther south, and formed a military and political alliance with the Utes that spread havoc among Navajos and Apaches along the northern perimeter of Nuevo México. Most important, they had taken advantage of the horses that became available from the Spanish sometime in the seventeenth century (aided perhaps by the great Pueblo Revolt of 1680) and transformed themselves into extraordinarily able equestrians. With their mounts, their radius for trading and hunting expanded enormously, and the bison now became central to their way of life. What came to be called La Comanchería stretched from southeastern Nuevo México and northeastern Chihuahua across Tejas to the Arkansas River valley. It was a territory larger than western Europe.

At the heart of La Comanchería and of the Great Plains more generally was a distinctive political economy built around bison hunting. Across the many centuries of its unfolding, this political economy saw ever-shifting participants and showed the marks of encounters not only with many different Native peoples but also with European imperial powers. By the early nineteenth century, it included a variety of trading centers, a vast raiding zone chiefly to the south, growing economic contacts with American merchants to the east, and a complex of alliances. The bison served as the main source of food, clothing, and shelter and as an increasingly important article of trade. The raiding zones enabled the accumulation of horses and human captives, both of which were necessary to the hunting of bison, exchanges with trading partners, and the achievement of social status. The alliances helped organize hunting and trade, recognized territorial claims, and directed raiding with greater force and efficiency; they also consecrated relations of power and dependency.

For all of its geographical reach, La Comanchería was very much a decentered society. Its basic unit, the ranchería, included up to 250 people, mostly tied by kinship (or fictive kin) relations, and it encompassed the most important activities and hierarchies of the Comanche people as a whole. As in most other Native societies of the plains, gender and age served as the markers for the organization of social, economic, and political life. Adult men had the responsibility for hunting and raiding. Teenage boys took on the laborious tasks of herding and breaking the horses. Women—older and younger—raised the children, processed the bison meat, and cooked the food, but as the hunting economy grew, they became more involved with the horse herds and the bison hides. Indeed, the widening scale of economic activity intensified the demand for labor and thereby made polygyny and enslavement (mainly of captive women and children) increasingly important in Comanche communities. Which is to say that the burdens of a vibrant economy fell heavily on the shoulders of women—captive or not—and accordingly led to a deterioration in their circumstances.

The enslavement of captives—like polygyny—had long been practiced by Comanches and other Native peoples of the plains and Great Basin regions. It was the product of raiding and warfare, and although some adult men were taken into captivity, most of the captives were women and children (Mexican and Indian); the men were regarded as unsuitable to enslavement and instead were killed. Many of the captives were then brought to slave markets and traded, but at least among the Comanche most were kept to work with the horse and mule herds, gather food and wood, cook, and carry out the arduous labor of preparing bison meat and hides: all the more so as the bison economy boomed and the labor available on rancher’as proved insufficient. Like enslaved captives the world over, these were immediately stripped of their familial and tribal associations and given new names—a ritual of social death and rebirth—though they were regarded as occupying a status distinct from those "born of Comanche." Even so, and unlike enslaved African captives in the Americas (though more like captives and slaves within western Africa itself), they could be assimilated into Comanche families, becoming wives (sometimes in polygynous arrangements), sons and daughters, and eventually spouses, and could play key roles as cultural intermediaries in economic and diplomatic spheres. Some of the males also became mounted warriors and raiders.