There has been a flourishing of recent scholarship on the history of Indigenous peoples in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. Such work has shown how Native nations, far from capitulating to imposed forms of colonial rule, preserved degrees of sovereignty and autonomy after colonial contact. Maurice S. Crandall has made a vital contribution to this body of work by focusing on Indigenous electorates and how different groups strategically implemented hybridized forms of local government—at times preserving traditional governance practices and at other times incorporating or adapting colonial practices—to defend the interests of their communities in the face of Spanish, Mexican, and U.S. administrations. In an account both sweeping and granular, Crandall succeeds in offering a nuanced account of power in the borderlands, one that challenges scholars and students alike to reconsider the deeper, tangled roots of postcolonial Native polities that simple narratives of “progress” too often gloss over. For this reason, this book will likely appeal to those who study not only Native American history and the transnational history of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands but also the history of civil rights and citizenship in North America more broadly.
This book is ambitious and has won numerous well-deserved awards. Its chapters contrast the experiences of four nations—the Pueblos in New Mexico, the Hopis in northern Arizona, and the Tohono O’odhams and Yaquis in Arizona—that each navigated the existential challenges to their respective sovereignties posed by successive administrations of colonial rule, beginning with Spanish contact in the sixteenth century and ending with the U.S. period in the twentieth. That these groups each had their own preexisting democratic systems of local governance is the subtext for the creative ways in which they variously implemented, indigenized, and subverted imposed colonial governance structures as they saw fit. A strength of Crandall’s argument lies in his discerning combination of Native oral histories and colonizers’ documents—official correspondence, Indian agent reports, travel accounts, and anthropological works—to reframe events that might at first glance appear as unequivocal submissions to colonial authority. For example, during the Mexican period, all four groups only incorporated colonially imposed elected officials at the village level—no higher—to represent their needs to outside polities while simultaneously preserving traditional governance structures and rejecting Mexican citizenship. In this way, we see not only Mexican conceptions of Indian citizenship, but also, and more importantly, the ways in which Indian nations selectively adapted or rejected such notions to preserve their own sovereignty.
Crandall is quick to emphasize that however many strategies Indigenous peoples shared in their ongoing struggles to retain autonomy and sovereignty, their political circumstances and outcomes varied greatly. One of the book’s many strengths is its granular and frequent comparisons, often in riveting detail within the same chapter, of the vast diversity of strategies that these groups employed. For example, whereas the Yaquis after the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo were forced to flee their homes in Sonora and migrate across the international border to Arizona, losing many of the political advantages afforded them in Mexico, the Tohono O’odhams, whose ancestral territory was bisected by the modern U.S.-Mexican border, essentially disregarded both the U.S. and Mexican governments and continued their own traditional governing councils into the twentieth century. Some of the source material is violent and vivid, and Crandall uses it to great effect. He describes, for instance, how the Spaniards responsible for the 1599 massacre at Acoma cut off the hands of two Hopi witnesses in a demonstration of the Spaniards’ barbaric resolve (60). These many episodes could have extended more seamlessly across chapters, allowing the rich variety of characters and events to lodge themselves more fully in the mind. But this may be too much to ask for a work of such scale and scope. Indeed, there are good reasons for the brevity of these vignettes: the sharp writing mirrors these communities’ fragmentary approach to political participation, offers opportunities for comparison with other vignettes, and is inevitably constrained by the availability of source material.
The vast scope of Crandall’s chronology provides room to compare the continuities and ruptures wrought by each administrative period. By covering these groups through successive Spanish, Mexican, and American administrations, we see how Indigenous negotiations of voting amid colonial constraints in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands were not just U.S.-centric twentieth-century phenomena. Rather, they were rooted in five centuries of struggles. The book opens with the Pueblos, who maintained repúblicas de indios with traditional village governing structures while simultaneously appointing civil officers to advocate for their communities under violent colonial circumstances that forced them to enter Spanish civil society without rights. It closes with the mixed results of Yaqui and Tohono O’odham voting in early twentieth-century Arizona: the Yaquis, as refugees living under constant threat of deportation to Mexico, did not have the option to vote; the Tohono O’odhams, even as citizens, did not vote because they chose not to participate in the U.S. electoral system, preferring instead to retain a hybridized traditional Spanish governance as best they could. “[Arizona’s] entire territorial Indian voting project bore no significant fruit,” Crandall concludes (282).
That so many of the narratives in this study end in ambiguous crossroads does not diminish their importance. It is precisely in the unresolved and lingering contestations for power that Crandall, who is Yavapai-Apache, implores us to bear witness to “the legacy of Indian voting” (289). Indeed, the long arms of these histories extend into the present. In the 2020 U.S. election, for example, the Indigenous vote in Arizona proved decisive. Tribal voters cited threats to sacred sites such as Bears Ears and the border wall’s construction as reasons for voting as they did.Footnote 1 Seen from the vantage point of centuries-long struggles to retain territory amid multiple colonial pressures across Mexico and the United States, tribal participation in a U.S. election appears not as an expression of a linear story of progress but as an extension of past efforts to protect their own rights as sovereign nations. This book fiercely reminds us that the contingency of Native civil rights, and how they are exercised and denied across the continent, is ongoing.
