by J. Gabriel Martinez-Serna
To be presented at the 2012 Rocky Mountain Council on Latin American Studies Conference on Park City, Utah, March 28-April1, 2012
In the northeast corner of New Spain, the frontier province of Nueva Vizcaya included the region between the present... more
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.
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