Wandering Peoples
Subtitle: Colonialism, Ethnic Spaces, and Ecological Frontiers in Northwestern Mexico, 1700-1850 (Latin America Otherwise) (Latin America Otherwise)
Publisher: Duke University Press
Published: December 1997
Language: eng
Format: Paperback
Number of pages: 432
ISBN-13: 9780822318996
Subjects: American history; Anthropology; Sonora (State); Social Science; History - General History; Sociology - General; Sociology; Central America; South America; Social change; Anthropology - Cultural; Latin America - Mexico; American Studies; Anthropology/Ethnography; History, Latin American; Ethnicity; Mexico; Social ecology
First sentence: The peoples whose history concerns us occupied an area of approximately 225,000 square miles located between 27 and 34 latitude and 108 and 115 longitude in the north-central portion of Sonora (Mexico) and southern Arizona (U.S.A.).
Description: Wandering Peoples is a chronicle of cultural resiliency, colonial relations, and trespassed frontiers in the borderlands of a changing Spanish empire. Focusing on the native subjects of Sonora in Northwestern Mexico, Cynthia Radding explores the social process of peasant class formation and the cultural persistence of Indian communities during the long transitional period between Spanish colonialism and Mexican national rule.

Throughout this anthropological history, Radding presents multilayered meanings of culture, community, and ecology, and discusses both the colonial policies to which peasant communities were subjected and the responses they developed to adapt and resist them.

Radding describes this colonial mission not merely as an instance of Iberian expansion but as a site of cultural and political confrontation. This alternative vision of colonialism emphasizes the economic links between mission communities and Spanish mercantilist policies, the biological consequences of the Spanish policy of forced congregacion, and the cultural and ecological displacements set in motion by the practices of discipline and surveillance established by the religious orders.

Addressing wider issues pertaining to ethnic identities and to ecological and cultural borders, Radding's analysis also underscores the parallel production of colonial and subaltern texts during the course of a 150-year struggle for power and survival.