John L. Kessell – författare

John L. Kessell's Spain in the Southwest presents a fast-paced, abundantly illustrated history of the Spanish colonies that became the states of New Mexico, Arizona, Texas, and California. With an eye for human interest, Kessell tells the story of New Spain's vast frontier--today's American Southwest and Mexican North--which for two centuries served as a dynamic yet disjoined periphery of the Spanish empire.Chronicling the period of Hispanic activity from the time of Columbus to Mexico's independence from Spain in 1821, Kessell traces the three great swells of Hispanic exploration, encounter, and influence that rolled north from Mexico across the coasts and high deserts of the western borderlands. Throughout this sprawling historical landscape, Kessell treats grand themes through the lives of individuals. He explains the frequent cultural clashes and accommodations in remarkably balanced terms. Stereotypes, the author writes, are of no help. Indians could be arrogant and brutal, Spaniards caring, and vice versa. If we select the facts to fit preconceived notions, we can make the story come out the way we want, but if the peoples of the colonial Southwest are seen as they really were--more alike than diverse, sharing similar inconstant natures--then we need have no favorites.

For more than four hundred years in New Mexico, Pueblo Indians and Spaniards have lived ""together yet apart."" Now the preeminent historian of that region's colonial past offers a fresh, balanced look at the origins of a precarious relationship.John L. Kessell has written the first narrative history devoted to the tumultuous seventeenth century in New Mexico. Setting aside stereotypes of a Native American Eden and the Black Legend of Spanish cruelty, he paints an evenhanded picture of a tense but interwoven coexistence. Beginning with the first permanent Spanish settlement among the Pueblos of the Rio Grande in 1598, he proposes a set of relations more complicated than previous accounts envisioned and then reinterprets the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 and the Spanish reconquest in the 1690s. Kessell clearly describes the Pueblo world encountered by Spanish conquistador Juan de Oñate and portrays important but lesser-known Indian partisans, all while weaving analysis and interpretation into the flow of life in seventeenth-century New Mexico.Brimming with new insights embedded in an engaging narrative, Kessell's work presents a clearer picture than ever before of events leading to the Pueblo Revolt. Pueblos, Spaniards, and the Kingdom of New Mexico is the definitive account of a volatile era.

Remembered today as an early cartographer and prolific religious artist, don Bernardo de Miera y Pacheco (1713-1785) engaged during his lifetime in a surprising array of other pursuits: engineer and militia captain on Indian campaigns, district officer, merchant, debt collector, metallurgist, luckless silver miner, presidial soldier, dam builder, and rancher. This long-overdue, richly illustrated biography recounts Miera's complex life in cinematic detail, from his birth in Cantabria, Spain, to his sudden and unexplained appearance at Janos, Chihuahua, and his death in Santa Fe at age seventy-one.In Miera y Pacheco, John L. Kessell explores each aspect of this Renaissance man's life in the colony. Beginning with his marriage to the young descendant of a once-prominent New Mexican family, we see Miera transformed by his varied experiences into the quintessential Hispanic New Mexican. As he traveled to every corner of the colony and beyond, Miera gathered not only geographical, social, and political data but also invaluable information about the Southwest's indigenous peoples. At the same time, Miera the artist was carving and painting statues and panels of the saints for the altar screens of the colony.Miera's most ambitious surviving map resulted from his five-month ordeal as cartographer on the Domínguez-Escalante expedition to the Great Basin in 1776. Two years later, with the arrival of famed Juan Bautista de Anza as governor of New Mexico, Miera became a trusted member of Anza's inner circle, advising him on civil, military, and Indian affairs.Miera's maps and his religious art, represented here, have long been considered essential to the cultural history of colonial New Mexico. Now Kessell's biography tells the rest of the story. Anyone with an interest in southwestern history, colonial New Mexico, or New Spain will welcome this study of Miera y Pacheco's eventful life and times.

The Mission of Guevavi on the Santa Cruz River in what is now southern Arizona served as a focal point of Jesuit missionary endeavor among the Pima Indians on New Spain's far northwestern frontier.For three-quarters of a century, from the first visit by the renowned Eusebio Francisco Kino in 1691 until the Jesuit Expulsion in 1767, the difficult process of replacing one culture with another—the heart of the Spanish mission system—went on at Guevavi. Yet all but the initial years presided over by Father Kino have been forgotten.Drawing upon archival materials in Mexico, Spain, and the United States—including accounts by the missionaries themselves and the surviving pages of the Guevavi record books—Kessell brings to life those forgotten years and forgotten men who struggled to transform a native ranchería into an ordered mission community.Of the eleven Black Robes who resided at Guevavi between 1701 and 1767, only a few are well known to history. Others—such as Joseph Garrucho, who presided more years at Guevavi than any other Padre; Alexandro Rapicani, son of a favorite of Sweden's Queen Christina; Custodio Zimeno, Guevavi's last Jesuit—have the details of their roles filled in here for the first time.In this in-depth study of a single missionary center, Kessell describes in detail the daily round of the Padres in their activities as missionaries, educators, governors, and intercessors among the often-indifferent and occassionally hostile Pimas. He discusses the Pima uprising of 1751 and the events that led up to it, concluding that it actually continued sporadically for some ten years.The growing ferocity of the Apache, the disastrous results of certain government policies—especially the removal of the Sobaípuri Indians from the San Pedro Valley—and the declining native population due to a combination of enforced culture change and epidemics of European diseases are also carefully explored.The story of Guevavi is one of continuing adversity and triumph. It is the story, finally, of explusion for the Jesuits and, a few short years later, the end of Mission Guevavi at the hands of the Apaches.In Mission of Sorrows Kessell has projected meticulous research into a highly readable narrative to produce an important contribution to the history of the Spanish Borderlands.

In this, the sixth and final volume of the journals of don Diego de Vargas, Kessell and his colleagues continue their exploration of politics and society in the colonial New Mexico of the turn of the eighteenth century. Despite serious charges of malfeasance brought against him by agents of his political enemy Governor Pedro Rodriguez Cubero, Vargas was acquitted after three years of court hearings and legal manoeuvring in the court in Mexico City. With his acquittal came reappointment to the governor's seat in New Mexico. The journals reveal that maintaining peace in New Mexico during Vargas' absence was a difficult task for Rodriguez Cubero. Hispanic colonists and Pueblo Indians were suspicious of one another, and partisans of the deposed Vargas made little effort to hide their loyalty. With the Reconqueror's return, the colony settled back into familiar routines. Not even don Diego's early death in 1704 undid the hard-won recolonisation.

Bernardo de Miera y Pacheco (1713–1785) is remembered today not only as colonial New Mexico’s preeminent religious artist, but also as the cartographer who drew some of the most important early maps of the American West. His “Plano Geographico” of the Colorado Plateau and Great Basin, revised by his hand in 1778, influenced other mapmakers for almost a century. This book places the man and the map in historical context, reminding readers of the enduring significance of Miera y Pacheco. Later Spanish cartographers, as well as Baron Alexander von Humboldt, Captain Zebulon Montgomery Pike, and Henry Schenck Tanner, projected or expanded upon the Santa Fe cartographer’s imagery. By so doing, they perpetuated Miera y Pacheco’s most notable hydrographic misinterpretations. Not until almost seventy years after Miera did John Charles Frémont take the field and see for himself whither the waters ran and whither they didn’t.