Deserts of Plenty, Rivers of Want: Apaches and the Inversion of the Colonial Encounter in the Chihuahuan Borderlands, 1581-1788.

Abstract

“Deserts of Plenty, Rivers of Want” is an environmental history of the Chihuahuan Desert as reflected through Faraon, Natage, and Mescalero Apache mobility, enviro-economy, and inter-ethnic competition, from 1581-1788. It is the story of Apaches who constructed powerful and elastic indigenous landscapes at the same time that they deconstructed sclerotic European landscapes. Methodologically, this dissertation combines critical assessment of Spanish archival documentation, environmental research concerning xeric ecologies, and economic and biological game theory. The two principal questions that direct analysis are: How did Apaches of the southern Great Plains and northern Chihuahuan Desert invert the vectors of imperial domination and directionality? How–when most indigenes experienced European empire through displacement, destruction, and exploitation–did these Apaches counter-invade the northern frontier of New Spain, and thrive within an indigenous territoriality–Apacheria–that was, geopolitically and eco-economically, often more expansive and successful than Spanish provinces?

Apaches inverted the colonial encounter almost as soon as it began, and initiated a two century long project of counter-expansion and counter-colonization. Within a decade of the establishment of New Mexico in the Middle Rio Grande Valley in 1598, Apaches learned to exploit the structural deficiencies of the Spanish riparian colony and had plundered horses, guns, and grains. Control over these tools of empire empowered Apaches to experiment with expanded mobilities and with emergent environmental economies. In the course of their experimentation, Apaches discovered and exploited ecoregions of the Chihuahuan Desert, such as the Trans-Pecos, La Junta de los Rios, and the Bolson de Mapimi. The Spanish had believed these areas to be wastelands and had shunned them, but Apaches found oases and mesopotamias that nourished and grew their transhumant, nomadic societies. From these landscapes Faraones, Natages and Mescaleros developed complex modalities of competition that empowered them to bend imperial economies towards their own indigenous territoriality, and to counter-colonize lands held by regions’ previous indigenous inhabitants. By the beginning of the eighteenth century, Apacheria and the Chihuahuan Desert were fast becoming coterminous, and together the two represented the powerful function that space and place played within borderlands encounters.