Hispano Bastion: New Mexican Power in the Age of Manifest Destiny, 1837–1860 by Michael J. Alarid (review)

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• Hispano Bastion: New Mexican Power in the Age of Manifest Destiny, 1837–1860by Michael J. Alarid
• William S. Kiser

Hispano Bastion: New Mexican Power in the Age of Manifest Destiny, 1837–1860. By Michael J. Alarid. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2022. Pp. 288. Illustrations, figures, tables, notes, bibliography, index.).

Hispano Bastionoffers an interesting analysis of New Mexico’s era of American territorialization. Michael J. Alarid argues that “large landholding Hispanos maintained a great deal of political, economic, and social authority in the age of Manifest Destiny . . . [and] embraced American capitalism” (p. 3). The most original contribution involves statistical and narrative coverage of crime—using theories of homicide as one lens of analysis—and the book’s dozens of tables and graphs are enlightening. Five chapters examine patrón-vecinorelationships, larceny and homicide, and criminal punishment under the United States legal system, with a primary focus on Santa Fe County.

The book revolves around an overly simplistic dichotomy of patrónand vecinoas the two social and economic classes outside of American newcomers. Indigenous peoples receive little consideration, and Alarid defines vecinosas “the poor and working populations of New Mexico” (p. 3). Based on this proposed dichotomy and definition, New Mexico’s thousands of debtor servants, or peones, must fall within Alarid’s category of vecinos. But this important dynamic of the patrónsystem in New Mexico—especially as it relates to national debates about slavery and unfree labor during the antebellum era—receives no attention in this book. Debt peonage as a form of unfree labor in the Hispanic Southwest has received considerable scholarly attention over the past decade, but Alarid does not engage with that literature, nor does he even cite recent work on the topic. The terms peonand debt servitude do not appear in the index, and there are just three uses of these words (pp. 18, 56, 153). In places, romanticized terminology distorts the harsh realities of unfree labor in New Mexico. For example, Alarid uses “day laborers” (pp. 16, 18), “working-class vecinos” (p. 13), and “symbiotic—if unequal—coexistence” (pp. 6, 13, 109) to describe a broad category that includes debtor servants, who certainly did not fall into such innocuous groupings and whose bound relationships to masters were often far from “symbiotic.” The author’s brief discussion of antebellum New Mexico slave codes (pp. 140–142) also fails to acknowledge the local contexts of Hispano peonage and Indian captivity, again creating an incomplete portrayal of New Mexico and the Southwest in relation to national discussions on slavery.

This book succeeds in its effort “to amplify the voices of everyday Nuevomexicanos” (p. 174) and it does provide a wealth of information about [End Page 472]the Hispano population of nineteenth-century northern New Mexico. But it falls short in analyzing those voices because it mostly ignores the peonage system of unfree labor that was such a prominent part of the patrón-vecinorelationships upon which this book focuses. The result is a distorted picture of New Mexico society and its place in the broader narrative of antebellum United States history.

William S. Kiser Texas A&M University-San Antonio Copyright © 2022 The Texas State Historical Association