UNIDAD NORESTE

"In the northeast corner of New Spain, the frontier province of Nueva Vizcaya included the region between the present day city of Torreon and the old provincial capital of Saltillo. It is a region of sandy soil with little precipitation, covered mostly by desert scrub dotted with occasional watering holes and surrounded in three sides by the Sierra Madre and Sierra de Coahuila. Two rivers, the Nazas and the Aguanaval, reach their end in the area, and their flow helps sustain livestock and intensive agriculture, even though their affluent is not yearlong. The area is commonly referred to, rather incongruously, as the Comarca Lagunera (Lagoon March), though the aridity of the surrounding area makes for a jarring comparison between the name and physical reality.
The origins of the term come from colonial times: it was the nucleus of the immense Marquisate of San Miguel de Aguayo, the largest entailed estate in the borderlands (hence the term Comarca, the landed property of a Marquis); secondly, at the time of contact between Spaniards and Indians of the region in the second half of the sixteenth century, the area was a lush lacustrine environment sustaining the largest population of Indians in Mexico’s colonial north, the Lagunero Indians.
This unique lacustrine environment teeming with heathen Indians seemed like a promising area for establishing a mission, but its economic potential also attracted secular Spanish settlement. Within a couple of generations it would be transformed by European agriculture accompanied by an even more dramatic change in the demographic profile of the region. By the end of the seventeenth century, the Parras mission had been secularized into a frontier parish, the Jesuits had changed their mission into a colegio, and the local economy was providing wine to a frontier market that stretched for hundreds of square kilometers. The Jesuits were not the only actors who brought about these changes, but they were the most consequential.
The introduction of European agriculture and livestock transformed the natural and human landscape of the Americas profoundly. In the borderlands of the continent, it was often missionaries who introduced these practices to areas where mobile Indians groups had adapted their cultures to an environment that was irrevocably changed. Transforming a landscape usually doomed a mobile ethnic group to forced adaptation, migration or extinction, but could also prove a catalyst to an ethnogenesis that could not have occurred without the effects the Columbian exchange brought about by the missionaries. The so-called Lagoon March (Comarca Lagunera) of the northeastern borderlands of New Spain experienced perhaps the most dramatic of these episodes in the story of Colonial North America. This region was home to the Lagunero Indians, the most populous pre-contact group in the borderlands, and as late as the last decade of the sixteenth century it was a lush lagoon environment surrounded by wooded mountains. The Jesuits founded the Parras mission there in 1598, and within two generations, the Laguneros had largely disappeared, and the area was transformed into a highly productive oasis surrounded by scrub barely suitable for livestock. Viticulture made the area the richest non-mining region of the entire frontier, and a magnet for population. Tlaxcalan (Nahua) colonist that had lived in the mission and survived the Lagunero extinction became a borderlands community intrinsically attached to viticulture and communal rights to water from the region’s only major spring, giving them a legal status that distinguished them from other Indian groups (including other Tlaxcalans) and underlined a social cohesion that lasted until the Independence period. Thus, the unintended effects of the Jesuit presence transformed the Parras environment and the way Indian identity related to it."

The Lagunero Indians of the Lagoon March of Northeastern New Spain were at the time of contact the most populous Indian group of the Gran Chichimeca. They lived in a lacustrine environment in the middle of the northern deserts that conditioned much of their unique culture.  The estuaries and shores of the lagoons of Nueva Vizcaya were their homeland, where they made a living from fishing, hunting, and gathering wild maize and other plants and cultigens. Semi-nomadic in nature, the Lagunero culture is difficult to reconstruct because of the paucity of written records and the extinction of the Laguneros by the middle of the seventeenth century due to a series of devastating epidemics and the loss of their traditional livelihoods. Most of the surviving sources come from Jesuit missionaries that attempted to “reduce” and convert the Indians. But the relationship between the Laguneros and their environment was inextricably intertwined, so that other Indian groups from the surrounding region (including Coahuila, Guachichil, and Zacateco groups, among others) were easily incorporated into the Laguneros when they moved into their homeland environment. With the introduction of European flora and fauna, and in particular the flourishing of commercial viticulture in the region starting in the second decade of the seventeenth century, a rapid ecolturation destroyed the unique lacustrine environment and with it the Lagunero way of life within a generation. But the relationship between environment and ethnicity remained even as the main demographic component of the region changed to Nahua colonists with a deep attachment to milpa agriculture and especially viticulture, which was an activity usually reserved to Spaniards. These Nahuas in turn helped to acculturate the surviving Laguneros until these were no longer a distinct group by the 1640s.

The Indians of the northeastern borderlands of New Spain were different from those in the Sierra and the Northwest, where some form of agriculture existed together with a rudimentary social stratification and specialization. In the northeast, Indian groups did not have any agriculture and were for the most part mobile. Many of these groups have disappeared, but enough sources exist to sketch a broad history of these nomadic northeastern groups for the colonial period. Indian mobility was an essential part of the identity of these groups, yet it hindered the advance of the missionary frontier. Although groups such as Apaches and Comanches were well known in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, other mobile Indian groups had lived in the area and been the bane of settlers and acculturated Indians since the early part of the seventeenth century. One group in particular seems to have predated and anticipated the Apaches: the Toboso Indians. Not much is known about this group, but in the middle of the seventeenth century they were in the Bolson de Mapimi (modern day Coahuila) harassing the Jesuit missions of the Lagoon March. By the early eighteenth century, they were the scourge of Nuevo Leon, coming close to destroying that province’s precarious settlements. Yet by the beginning of the nineteenth century they were living in the Texas coast close to the Franciscan missions. No Toboso voices have survived, but Spanish accounts emphasize the mobility of the group as a quintessential part of their identity. This paper will sketch the physical trajectory of the Tobosos, how horses transformed native cultures in the northeast, and elucidate whether the Tobosos belonged to the Coahuila family of nations, or were instead the ancestors of the Apaches.

Wine was indispensable in the transplantation and subsequent Creolization of Spanish culture across the Atlantic world. Wine shipped from Seville was one of the main exports native to Spain sent to the colonies and the most important element of the tercio de frutos that mandated a third of all shipments be made from the “fruits of the land.” Yet even in the best of times, exports were not enough to satisfy demand for wine in the American viceroyalties. For social, cultural, and religious reasons, Spanish culture simply could not exist without wine. At first haphazard, Spain’s Atlantic wine trade grew exponentially during the sixteenth century.  Shipments of wine to America transformed the Seville hinterland in a matter of a few decades.  Wine from Andalucía competed with locally made wines in New Spain during that century, but towards the end of his reign, Phillip II prohibited the planting of vineyards in the New World to consolidate the industry (though exceptions were made for ecclesiastics).  A once promising industry in New Spain was snuffed out and wine exported to the Americas soon became a cash cow for the Royal Treasury.  Advances in oenology made the wine exported (a precursor of today’s Sherry) able to withstand the heat and humidity of the transatlantic voyage.  Yet all the wine exports to New Spain and Spain’s circum-Caribbean possessions were never enough to satisfy demand (because of geography, the South American viceroyalties allowed a highly profitable viticulture industry in Peru, Chile, and Argentina).  So things were very different in the borderlands of northern New Spain than in the southern frontier or the central New Spain.  In order to satisfy demand and develop the economy of the northern frontier, the Spanish Crown allowed a viniculture with a distinctive oenology to develop beyond the reach of imported Andalucía wine.  Jesuit missionaries took the initiative, but soon winemaking became the most important economic activity of the northeastern frontier.""

The Society of Jesus was the most active religious corporation in the production and distribution of scientific knowledge in the Early Modern Atlantic world.  The order’s role in circulation of scientific knowledge was particularly important in the Iberian empires’ intellectual life.  Jesuits from the Spanish and Spanish American provinces participated in transatlantic debates on natural history and the nature of human societies during the Early Modern period that transformed the European understanding of the world. These Jesuits are also credited with renovating old scholastic conceptions of nature, mathematics, and astronomy in intellectual circles and school curricula of the Spanish empire and circulating applied science and technological know-how used in practical applications and crafts. This article will examine the bibliography dealing with the contributions of the Jesuits to the history of science and technology in the Early Modern Spanish empire.  These activities have been divided into three categories: Jesuit writings on natural history, and its influence on human events, including ethnography; the history of natural and abstract sciences such as physics, mathematics, geology, botany, and astronomy; and the history of applied science and technology, including architecture, medicine, pharmacopeia, hydrology, agriculture, animal husbandry, oenology, and administrative techniques for organizing labor and economic enterprises.

Around the summer of 1726 the father superior of the Jesuits in Parras, Nueva Vizcaya wrote an impassioned letter to the Audiencia of Guadalajara asking it to rescind an agreement a previous father provincial (the head of a Jesuit province) had made with their neighbors the Marquises of San Miguel de Aguayo, the most powerful family of the northeastern frontier. The Parras superior claimed the Marquis had visited the father provincial in Mexico City with the intention of going over the superior’s own head in seeking approval to a legally-binding agreement, knowing full well the father provincial did not have the intimate details of the situation on the ground. The Parras superior vehemently rejected the agreement as harmful to the interests of his order, and said the Marquis had given a “sinister account of the events that was inconsistent with the truth” in order to convince the Jesuit provincial to approve it. As with the vast majority of conflicts dealing with lands in the northern frontier, this dispute had at its core control over water.
This dispute was not the first clash the Society had with the Marquises over water. For over a century the order had made an alliance of convenience with the Indians of Parras to thwart the powerful frontier dynasty from monopolizing the water supply in the Parras vallley. But it was the first time the Marquises had turned this alliance on its head in the pursuit of their old goal by questioning the very nature of the Jesuit-Indian alliance. This alliance between Jesuits and “naturales de Parras” allowed for the preservation of the Indians’ ethnic space and the Jesuits’ properties in the region even after the secularization of the erstwhile Lagunero mission and the establishment of a parish church in the 1640s.

Susan M. Deeds and Juliana Barr's contributions best exemplify the limits of social control on the edges of Spain's empire. Deeds shows how two women in Nueva Vizcaya undermined the Catholic Church's patriarchal order by choosing to move, adopting maleness, and ...

La frontera norte de la Nueva España tuvo una cadena de misiones jesuitas desde la costa del Pacífico hasta el desierto de Coahuila que estaban orientadas a ‘reducir’ naciones indígenas semi-sedentarias. Esta frontera misionera jesuita incluían las misiones de Baja California, y las de los valles aluviales de Sinaloa y Sonora, y las de la sierra de Chihuahua y Durango. Pero la mas oriental de estas misiones se llamaba Misión de Parras y Laguna Grande de San Pedro, en lo que hoy en día se conoce como la Comarca Lagunera. Esta misión ministraba a los llamados indios laguneros, una serie de grupos semi-sedentarios que tenían influencias de varios grupos indígenas aldeanos y cuya etnografía es de las menos estudiadas en la historia colonial del noreste. Los indios laguneros fueron los mas numerosos de la frontera norte durante la segunda mitad del siglo XVI, pero para fines del siglo XVII ya había desaparecido por completo. Esta misión fue única porque el clima y la geografía particulares dieron las condiciones para la viticultura, que se convertiría en la base económica de la comunidad. Pero también porque solo en la misión de Parras los jesuitas tuvieron como vecinos a una de las familias mas poderosas de la colonia y ministraron a colonos tlaxcaltecas que se asentaron junto a la misión lagunera.
En la historia tradicional el explorador y conquistador vasco Francisco de Urdiñola fue un hombre altruista y con visión que a base de trabajo, buenas intenciones, y sagacidad pudo domar a los indios bárbaros de Parras y la Laguna y asentar las bases para la expansión del colonialismo español en la región. Mucha de esta versión de la historia nos llega a través de los descendientes de Urdiñola, los Marqueses de San Miguel de Aguayo, cuyo mayorazgo colindaba con la misión y con la compartía el agua del arroyo de Parras – lo cual causó una serie de conflictos sobre tierras y aguas con indios y jesuitas que duraría por generaciones. Pero los documentos de los Marqueses son selectivos en su interpretación de los hechos, y aunado a la fortuita desaparición de documentos que contradecían la versión benévola de Urdiñola y su familia, el papel fundamental de los jesuitas e indios tlaxcaltecas en la incorporación de los laguneros a la sociedad fronteriza ha sido olvidado. Esta investigación tiene como propósito balancear la vieja visión de Urdiñola como un Prometeo español trayendo el fuego de la civilización a la frontera con una interpretación basada en documentos jesuitas nunca antes utilizados. En esta versión mas integral de la fundación de Parras y sus primeros años, el papel de Urdiñola y su familia son parte importante pero no decisiva en la incorporación de la Comarca Lagunera y los indios laguneros a la sociedad virreinal.

The introduction of European agriculture and livestock transformed the natural and human landscape of the Americas profoundly. In the borderlands of the continent, it was often missionaries who introduced these practices to areas where mobile Indians groups had adapted their cultures to an environment that was irrevocably changed. Transforming a landscape usually doomed a mobile ethnic group to forced adaptation, migration or extinction, but could also prove a catalyst to an ethnogenesis that could not have occurred without the effects the Columbian Exchange brought about by the missionaries. The so-called Lagoon March (Comarca Lagunera) of the northeastern borderlands of New Spain experienced perhaps the most dramatic of these episodes in this story of Colonial North America. This region was home to the Lagunero Indians, the most populous pre-contact group in the borderlands, and as late as the last decade of the sixteenth century it was a lush lagoon environment surrounded by wooded mountains. The Jesuits founded the Parras mission there in 1598, and within two generations, the Laguneros had largely disappeared, and the area was transformed into an archipelago of highly productive oasis surrounded by scrub barely suitable for livestock. Viticulture made the area the richest non-mining region of the entire frontier, and a magnet for population. Tlaxcalan (Nahua) colonist that had lived in the mission and survived the Lagunero extinction became a borderlands community intrinsically attached to viticulture and communal rights to water from the region’s only major spring,giving them a legal status that distinguished them from other Indian groups (including other Tlaxcalans) and underlining a social cohesion that lasted until the Independence period. Thus, the unintended effects of the Jesuit presence transformed the Parras environment and the way Indian identity related to it.

La Revolución Mexicana de 1910 fue el primer gran conflicto bélico en ser documentado con el nuevo medio cinematográfico desarrollado por los hermanos Auguste y Louis Lumière a fines del siglo XIX. Pero la Revolución también ha sido inspiración para un sinnúmero de películas mexicanas así como extranjeras e incluso algunos de los grandes clásicos de Hollywood tuvieron su inspiración en el conflicto. Este curso dará una panorama de la relación entre la Revolución y el surgimiento y consolidación de este médium, tomando al conflicto tanto como evento histórico en si además de cómo sirvió de inspiración para producciones cinematográficas tanto nacionales así como europeas y estadounidenses. Durante las sesiones se mostrarán segmentos de películas y habrá una bibliografía adicional para aquellos interesados en profundizar su conocimiento en temas específicos.