Short Paper #1
Staking out new territory in Southwest borderlands studies, the readings by Brooks and Habicht-Mauche both attempt to reveal the fluidity of labor systems, gender ideology, and interregional interactions that emerged and dissipated on the Southwest/Plains borderlands over five centuries. While each author tackles different aspects of these interactions, both set out to redefine the emergence and maintenance of the borderlands economy.
In Captives and Cousins, Brooks' interdisciplinary approach boldly expands recent historical views of the Southwes borderlands.Indeed, the multiple disciplines utilized in Captives and Cousins--anthropology, archeology, literary and cultural theory, as well as oral, economic and ethnohistory—will cultivate more interdisciplinary scholarship. Incorporating a sweeping time period (16th-19th centuries), and region (extending between California and Missouri) this study follows the trajectory of a borderlands exchange economy shared within the plains, pueblo, desert, and plateau regions. Unlike previous studies that highlight the "clash of cultures," Brooks argues that the similarities between Spanish, Navajo, Pueblo, Comanche, and other communities helped to initiate and maintain a dynamic regional economic system.While significant cultural differences existed, these groups "shared an understanding of the production and distribution of wealth as conditioned by social relations of power" (p. 363).
This "common understanding" served as the basis for the exchange of slaves and captives (primarily women and children), horses, livestock (sheep and cattle), and buffalo. In particular, the exchange of slaves reinforced and expanded the system. Unlike other slave systems at the time, the captives acted as kin and played an influential diplomatic role in the region. Serving as a cultural bridge between potential enemies/allies, captives conversant in the language of both their captors and "outsiders" assisted in important negotiations. According to Brooks, slaves' diplomatic skill ensured that the captive exchange system would thrive for centuries, despite the efforts of "modernizing" state authorities like Spain, Mexico, and the United States.
Despite his “blanket” of interdisciplinary sources, Brooks glosses over and/or overlooks some important factors emerging in the borderlands.While he describes the relative autonomy of women slaves and captives, an analysis of gender fails to adequately permeate his study. Although he peppers some anecdotal accounts illustrating the role of gender, a further investigation into this question would have strengthened his argument. Additionally, his approach also neglects a key set of players involved in many of these exchanges—the pueblos of the Rio Grande.
Addressing these key issues—particularly the role of gender in the borderlands— Judith Habicht-Mauche investigates the dynamic relationship shared between labor and gender that shifted before and after Euroamerican contact. Equally as important, Habicht-Mauche highlights the interaction between Pueblo and Plains technology, goods, and ideological systems. Writing before and after Captives and Cousins,Habicht-Mauche’s articles reveal the important methodological shifts that have occurred in recent years. In “Pottery, Food, Hides, and Women,” she highlights many of these changes as archeologists moved from cultural-ecological and world systems approaches to her (and subsequently Brooks’ approach) model of kin and household-based interactions as the engine of the borderlands economy. Reexamining the archeological record of distributed Puebloan ceramic technology across the Plains, Habicht-Mauche reveals the inadequacy of these older models while advancing a more gender-based approach. Habicht-Mauche shatters the earlier approaches while revealing the importance women in changing the nature of the Pueblo-Plains frontier—a discussion she expands upon in her later article “The Shifting Role of Women and Women’s Labor on the Protohistoric Southern High Plains.”
Before turning to this article, it is important to point out another important contribution that Habicht-Mauche put forward in this earlier study—the shift in gender and labor ideology before the insertion of Euroamericans into the bison economy. As she argues, the protohistoric period ruptured older political and economic systems that preceded later changes in the post-contact period. These changes occurred, she states, at the local level. Habicht-Mauche’s later study, however, she expands on the changing role of women in relation to the expansion of the bison economy. Picking up from her earlier study and responding to some of Brooks’ oversights mentioned above, she identifies the indigenous origins of male-status building and co-option of women’s labor. As she argues, “the development of the bison-oriented, trade-based economy entailed a major shift in the organization of labor, especially along gendered lines.
While Brooks’ study serves primarily as class-based analysis revealing the emerging hierarchical shifts between wealthy sheep/horse/captive holders and poor genizaros/livestock raiders, Habicht-Mauche identifies a gender-based component forming in the rapidly expanding bison economy on the eastern edge of Brooks’ borderlands. Very importantly, though, she points out that changing work roles for women didn’t necessarily mean a complete loss of agency. However, her research suggests that women’s autonomy definitively shrunk during this period.As she argues, “highly specialized bison-hunting lifestyles on the Southern High Plains created new arenas…within which social power and status were negotiated…these new arenas tended to be more open to the actions of individual, ambitious men than to most women” (p. 54).
The readings by both Habicht-Mauche and Brooks reveal that a careful and closer look at borderlands regions quickly reveal many more intricate and dynamic processes than previously assessed. Indeed, while the “core-periphery” lexicon still proves useful, both authors illustrate that more nuanc
