Missions and the frontiers of Spanish America : a comparative study of the impact of environmental, economic, political, and socio-cultural variations on the missions in the Rio de la Plata Region and on the Northern Frontier of New Spain /

Independent historian Jackson's 10th book is a lengthy, detailed, and insightful look at colonial Spanish missions from California, Texas, and Florida to Paraguay. Almost everything a reader might want to know about missions is covered in the text, maps, photographs, charts, and appendixes. In sharp contrast to older surveys of the mission system, Jackson asks modern questions about the frontier institution, in the process exposing a much darker side to mission history. In an effort to gain an indigenous perspective, Jackson discards the assumption that great and wonderful things happened in the missions. He organizes his work to compare the famous Guarani missions of Rio de la Plata with their more modest counterparts along the northern rim of New Spain. In the process, he uncovers some interesting differences as well as the ultimate failure and disappearance in both cases. Typical of new scholarship, Jackson includes in his book the opportunity to purchase a CD-ROM containing high-quality duplications of his illustrations. It would be illuminating in future comparative works to consider what happened to indigenous frontier populations in areas where missions were absent. ^BSumming Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above. J. A. Lewis Western Carolina University