Alta California

Spanish California—with its diverse mix of Indians, soldiers, settlers, and missionaries—provides a fascinating site for the investigation of individual and collective identity in colonial America. Through innovative methodologies and extensive archival research, the nine essays in this volume reshape our understanding of how people in the northernmost Spanish Borderlands viewed themselves and remade their worlds. Essays examine Franciscan identity and missionary tactics in California, Sonora, and the Sierra Gorda; Spanish and Mexican settlers' identity as revealed in the life of Pablo Tac, among the most literate of Alta California's Indians; and mission choral guilds. The last section of the book turns to the historiography of the Spanish Borderlands as it has developed over the last century in North America as well as in Spain.