Bradley Folsom's study retraces the steps of one of colonial Nueva Vizcaya's most notorious outlaws, the “Apache” Rafael. Rafael was born of mixed Apache (or Ndé) and perhaps Opata lineage. But he grew up in colonial frontier society, spoke Spanish, and attended church before he famously rebelled against that world. Folsom's speculations about Rafael's religious life during this period are some of the most interesting and insightful in the book. It was not long, however, before Rafael ended up on trial in Guajoquilla. He most likely traded and communicated with American Indians at war with Spain. The tribunal acquitted him, but he subsequently abandoned colonial society. He then became an unrepentant frontier raider.
In telling the story of Rafael's conversion, Folsom has a novel take. He emphasizes Rafael's hybridity, his ease with moving between different frontier populations. Folsom surmises that Rafael's cultural fluency enabled him to pull off his killing spree in the northwestern borderlands of New Spain. Rafael was a master of disguise, and he skillfully appropriated the accoutrements of the neighboring cultures—their costumes, clothing, and other effects—to impersonate and pass among the different peoples of the frontier. He even once borrowed the uniforms of royal mail carriers to carry out his deadly mischief—after leaving the original wearers of those outfits behind as corpses.
Rafael's spree of violence lasted for most of a decade, only to come to an end as the Mexican Independence movement commenced. Remarkably, Rafael's capture and gruesome assassination still generated interest and coverage in the national newspaper—despite the tumult that accompanied Hidalgo's Grito de Dolores in 1810. Perhaps Rafael's notoriety was owed to the staggering body count he created. He killed as many as eighteen hundred people according to some contemporary sources. Given the rumors and fears that he generated, Rafael's raids reverberated far outside of his immediate orbit and had unexpected consequences. Folsom even suggests that Nueva Vizcaya's ability to fend off revolutionaries resulted from the war against Rafael. The royal militias, the author claims, were prepared to handle the independence movement after six years of fighting Rafael and his band. This claim, like others in the final chapter, is a bit bold but still credible.
The book has many merits. The histories of captivity standout. Folsom manages to chronicle the lives and circumstances of many of the captive peoples who passed through Rafael's band. Folsom's ruminations on why and how these unfree peoples became culpable in cruel and criminal acts perpetrated against Spanish colonial society make for fascinating reading. In addition, some of these captive people's lives and characters are revealed in surprising detail—including the women who accompanied Rafael at the end. Folsom's focus on female (and, to a lesser extent, male) captives throughout the book allows the author to analyze gendered relations in a sophisticated way. This is remarkable for a book steeped in masculine violence on the frontier.
Folsom's research is impressive at all levels, and the book even includes an extensive appendix. At times, however, Folsom might hew a little too closely to his sources. The “Apaches” who appear in Spanish colonial archives are not always differentiated all that well from one another in the written record, and the author sometimes reproduces this fogginess. In addition, Folsom does a remarkable job naming the many victims of Rafael's crimes, and even comes up with a reliable body count for Rafael (which was significantly lower than rumors would have it). But the names are seldom more than a list. The dead who populate the one hundred and eighty pages of Folsom's narrative rarely receive much of a backstory.
Despite these minor shortcomings, Folsom does an outstanding job throughout the book of centering a general borderlands history around the exploits of Rafael, his boon companion José Antonio, and the many captives who passed in and out of his band. Despite being so deeply integrated with primary sources and conversant with the secondary literature, the book is still remarkably easy to read. It would make for excellent reading material in an undergraduate class on borderlands or frontier history.
