This latest book on late colonial and early national Sonora is masterful. Piece by piece, de la Torre provides narrative, analysis, and perspective that lends one to classify his effort as synthesis, and yet, given his mastery of the archival sources, it is not a synthesis of secondary literature but rather of archived documents, geographical evidence, demography, and deep knowledge of greater New Spain and its development, all coupled with an eye to integrative thinking regarding the changes undergone in the region within a critical period. In short, it is the new book on later missions in the Opatería and Baja and Alta Pimería during the end of Spanish hegemony and the beginning of developments in the early Mexican northwest.

One must prepare to withstand a methodical approach if one is to digest de la Torre's way of proceeding. Short but thorough chapters begin the book, the first treating the physical and human geographies of what became Sonora, and the second analyzing demographics of Native peoples, Hispanic peoples, and those in between in towns, missions, and refuges in the hinterlands. While this is the dry stuff of social history, investment at this point begets a payoff in the following chapters. De la Torre next engages the myriad influences and changes to local life ways in the Pimerías and the Opatería, and as he does so he raises questions as to meaning of being religious versus living among the religious, indigenous or Hispanic, in greater Sonora. Life ways also include the material culture, or cultures, of localities; merchants, their clienteles, and prices receive attention, as do mobile populations. Within and outside the missions, the author claims to see increased contact between peoples in late colonial Sonora—thus the multiethnic argument he offers. On reaching the fourth chapter, method becomes even clearer as de la Torre immerses the reader in evidence of the changing nature of the Sonoran frontier economy to a developed, “captive trade network” (145) that precedes the economics of independence in the region. That economy was largely cashless and merchant-led, and enabled leading merchants and governmental allies to use commerce as coercion over the local peoples.

The deeper analyses of the preceding elements of life in Sonora all point to the two ending chapters. At the heart of this study is that which occurred following the Jesuits’ expulsion from the region in their former missions as those came under the leadership of the Franciscan friars. Here is the crux of the book, in a step-wise look at the crises these missions underwent, for what reasons, and how change happened in each sub region. Following the Jesuit expulsion, interim local administrators attempted to manage the mission assets, with mixed results. When the Franciscans arrived, many missions were in disrepair or had been stripped to support Spanish colonial troops in regional conflicts. This much of the story is familiar. De la Torre next assesses the great differences in Franciscan approaches to the missions: in one sub region, we see friars from the province of Santiago de Xalisco attempting to run traditional doctrinas without their former methods of coercion at their disposal. In the other, collegiate friars from the apostolic college at Querétaro moved in to apply their adapted method and missiology. The result is a split trajectory in the resulting history of Sonoran missions in the north versus the more southerly part of the province. Not only that, but the strange case of the creation and dissolution of the Custódia de San Carlos de Sonora demonstrates just how diverse Franciscan approaches could be in late colonial New Spain. In this scenario, the Querétaro friars divided within collegiate ranks, wherein the early friars (relatively speaking in the late eighteenth-century context) remained dedicated to an older missiology while younger and later-arriving friars looked for adaptations to the prior regime.

That generational and intra-collegiate rivalry among Franciscans working in the Pimería Alta is one of the intriguing parts of the study. Within the context its author builds to the beginning of chapter 5, the generational conflicts appear truly modern, perhaps foreshadowing the massive social changes that occurred in the next century as independence struck. Within these collegiate Franciscan arguments over missiology and its applications, de la Torre also speaks to the communication within and between the colleges of Propaganda Fide. While rapidly adapting to the loss of Jesuit manpower, the apostolic colleges also clamored for a working model within new mission fields between Sonora and the recently dictated expansion into Baja, and then Alta, California. There were tensions in both fields, as well as communications between the friars in those fields and older, established locales where the missionaries’ methods were first developed, such as Texas. A generational model that explains the tensions within the Sonoran context qualifies this study as innovative while it reaches new depths of synthesis of historical sources.

With his eye directed to the vast differences in the experiences of peoples and processes of secularization in the Opatería and the Pimería Baja versus the more constrained, isolated environment in the north of Sonora, de la Torre concludes the study with an assessment of the early national period following Mexico's independence movements. In the north, not much changed, but points to the south saw yet more integration of peoples within the multiethnic milieu that is part of the subtitle and a greater theme of the book. One may read de la Torre on Sonora for details from the formative chapters, and one may read this study for its master synthesis in the concluding section. Either way, an innovative perspective derived from finer-grained analysis of the grounding data comes through. As such, de la Torre's effort makes great contributions to historical study of northern New Spain, broadly and within Sonora, and connects Sonora's past with metropolitan concerns in Mexico City and those of the early national Mexican north.