Allyson M. Poska's recent book continues to document the saga of the lives of peasant women from Galicia, a story she began in her award-winning book, Women and Authority in Early Modern Spain: The Peasants of Galicia. This time she follows those individuals who engaged in a transatlantic migration to Patagonia, the southern tip of South America. In Gendering Crossings: Women and Migration in the Spanish Empire Poska skilfully examines the intersection between Empire and colonial Spanish families. The book is a compelling account of the difficult journey taken by Galicia's peasant families from the northern port of La Coruña to Patagonia. The movement of these peoples to such an inhospitable region was part of a family colonisation project launched by the Spanish Crown around 1770. These settlements were established to protect the vulnerable fringes of the Empire from British ambitions and the Portuguese ‘imperial agenda’. They were meant to buttress the presence of the Spanish state in America. Leaving the authority of the Empire's fringes to missionaries and soldiers had proved ineffectual, and Enlightenment solutions sought married women as better agents to secure imperial power. These peasant women were tasked with not only making these ‘men into fathers and individuals into families’, but also with taming masculine sexual violence within the confines of the marriage bed, all for the good of the Empire.

To trace the movement of these families Poska draws from abundant primary sources found in the Archivo General de Indias, Seville, Spain, Archivo General de la Nación, Buenos Aires, Argentina, Archivo General de la Nación, Montevideo, Uruguay, parish registers and extensive secondary historical literature. Among the many merits to be found in Poska's study is her ability to apply sex and gender analysis to sources from the predominantly male realms of sailors, soldiers, slaves, adventurers, cannon balls and muskets and to use these sources to write an engrossing story, inhabited by women, romance, pain, suffering, pregnancy, childbirth, children and resilience.

The book chronicles the migratory adventure from its inception in Galicia, through a disastrous attempt to settle in Patagonia, to the resettling of the colonists in towns outside Montevideo and Buenos Aires. Following the families through their travel the reader learns, as did Jorge Astraudi, the royal official in charge of the colonial project, that to mobilise children and women changes in recruitment and standards were crucial. Poska's talents to engage the reader in topics such as the transformation of ships – originally built to transport soldiers, adventurers, sailors and civil servants – into vessels that would satisfy women's needs for privacy and safety are impressive. The presence of women and children led the royal officials to reconfigure most of the ships to provide accommodation for families. Issues of morality led to the provision of separate lodgings for single men and women. Women's reproductive schedules were taken into account, and mothers had time and space to fulfil their daily domestic chores. After several weeks of continuous violent storms interrupted by short periods of calm, the fledgling colonists disembarked in the port of Montevideo in late December 1778. Poska's narrative takes a detour to describe what was occurring south in Patagonia, where an expedition of men sent by the royal authorities had started to build outposts for the arrival of the new settlers. Poska is at her best describing masculinity issues in this environment devoid of women, where competition, rivalry and constant tension between men of different trades and social standing became endemic. Unfortunately, the arrival of women, mostly married, didn't solve the men's problems. The sexual imbalance, lack of water and lands to cultivate, disease and military conflict with Indigenous peoples put an end to this colonial experiment. Poska follows these families after they abandoned Patagonia and were resettled in the countryside outside Buenos Aires, and in scattered towns in the Banda Oriental (modern Uruguay). At this point, the book discusses the success of the family-based colonisation project of Banda Oriental. It also looks at the failure of the alternative frontier military defence model, one in which families were caught in constant confrontation between Indians and soldiers. Her focus on Spanish peasant families landing in a heavily contested frontier zone such as Buenos Aires is welcome. However, she might have focused more on issues related to local socio-racial composition. In contrast with the meticulous account of the new Spanish settlers, the book's description of the local people is vague and confusing with respect to race relations in America (p. 148).

As explained in the book, in sharp contrast with the situation in the frontier region the settlement of Banda Oriental was a total success. Families, as the Crown had intended, rapidly settled in and birth rates increased as expected. Women married early in contrast to traditional Spanish ways, but, as has been confirmed by recent scholarship, much in consonance with colonial Spanish society elsewhere. Men married late, rarely with local girls, and the rate of bachelorhood among them was high. They were the ‘packs of unmarried men’ (p. 160) that wandered the region. Did some of these men, rather than marrying Spanish girls, engage in occasional or permanent consensual unions with mestizas and mulatas, adding to the population increase of the zone, as was the case in other regions of colonial Latin America?

The final chapter of the book documents the different avenues of upward mobility that led to the integration of the settlers into colonial society. Success came in the form of saving enough money to buy slaves to liberate wives from the drudgery of domestic work; working hard to buy a small shop that eventually would be converted into a pulpería (corner store), or getting a farm that later would be transformed into a livestock ranch. But as the author insightfully argues, it was the construction of churches and the arrival of the Franciscans and the daily rituals binding the community that allowed women to create and consolidate strong bonds between themselves and the community at large. With the acquisition of the rights of vecindad men became citizens by their own right, acquiring rights to communal lands, and in some cases becoming ‘independent self-governing citizens’.

This is a fascinating book, about a fascinating topic. It is well written and extensively researched. It will prove a good read for scholars as well as for graduate and undergraduate students.