Luis Alberto García-García, a Professor of History at the Universidad de Monterrey, Mexico, has co-translated his 2018 award-winning monograph from the original Spanish, Armed Frontier: Warfare and Military Culture in the Texas-Northeastern Mexico Borderlands, 1686–1845, with the University of New Mexico Press. The book’s focus is four urban areas in the Northeastern borderlands of Spain: San Antonio de Béxar and Laredo in what is now the State of Texas in the United States, and Lampazos and San Miguel in what is now the State of Neuvo León in the Republic of Mexico. The ambitious scope of this work is how centuries of Spanish martial culture (armament, mobility, strategy, social status, economic and urban development) shaped the U.S.-Mexico borderlands.
Armed Frontier begins deep in Spanish history with the Moorish conquest of most of Iberia in the 8th century and the resulting centuries of warfare known as La Reconquista by Christian forces in an ever-evolving array of at first small, shifting kingdoms. This first chapter, mostly drawn from secondary sources, sets the table for the rest of the book’s discussion of how this martial tradition was adapted to the Northeastern Spanish frontier. The concepts of constant guerilla warfare conducted by socially ambitious war captains often unsanctioned (but tacitly accepted) by royal authority, of lightly armored and fast-moving cavalry, of an open borderlands society unencumbered by the formal institutions (missions and presidios) placed there to represent the authority of church and state, and of the heavy use of external allies (from Moorish mercenaries to Indigenous allies), all remained central components of Spanish frontier society from the medieval past to the U.S.-Mexican borderlands. In this continuity Armed Frontier updates the Boltonian interpretive tradition. It is the latest in a long line from Carlos E. Castañeda to John Francis Bannon to David Webber, the author’s dissertation advisor from Southern Methodist University.
Armed Frontier hits its stride with the second chapter in discussing the Spanish medieval origins of New World social and governing practices such as the concepts of vecinidad, an early form of borderlands proto-citizenship (51-52), and the evolution of the encomienda system to the congregas system, a slightly modified version of slavery (59-60). Both concepts extended the medieval borderlands tradition of incentivizing constant private warfare financed by ambitious seekers of wealth and social status. After constructing this medieval borderland martial culture, Armed Frontier then documents its unspooling with the Bourbon Reforms of the 18th century. The importation of Prussian military organization, dependent on a high degree of micro-management by royal authority, weakened borderlands society during critical junctures of Apache and Comanche aggression and fed Independence. The author carries forward this unravelling through the U.S.-Mexican War and the weakness of the early Mexican nation. Despite the long durée approach favored by García-García, he does not ignore those moments on the battlefield when such larger social forces could be arrested or accelerated. For example, regarding the Texas revolt, the author notes it was greatly aided by “one of the most ridiculous actions in Mexican military history” when Santa Anna “ordered his men to stop operations to rest” after cornering the Texan insurrectionists at San Jacinto near the Gulf of Mexico (147).
Armed Frontier: Warfare and Military Culture in the Texas-Northeastern Mexico Borderlands, 1686–1845 is an intriguing and penetrating analysis of the martial culture of the U.S-Mexico borderlands as shaped by centuries of Spanish military experience. Professor Luis Alberto García-García’s scholarship is a useful model for how a war and society approach can extend far beyond traditional approaches of studying war and warfare.
