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doi: 10.1017/S0009640708001856 Peace Came in the Form of a Woman: Indians and Spaniards in the Texas Borderlands. By Juliana Barr. Published in association with The William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies, Southern Methodist University. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007. xiv + 399 pp. $19.95 paper.
In Peace Came in the Form of a Woman, Juliana Barr describes in fine detail the emergence of the "diplomacy of gender" that shaped Indian and Spanish relations in the Texas borderlands (2). Barr finds in her thorough analysis of colonial records, as well as careful attention to social and cultural patterns in Native communities, that women became key figures and actors in sensitive diplomatic rimais in a region marked by fierce economic competition and military conflict. The celebrated Spanish missions of Texas and the presidios, or Spanish garrisons, that guarded them became prominent sites for negotiation and compromise. Christian institutions contributed modestly, however, to diplomatic arrangements in eighteenth-century Texas.
At the beginning of her book, Barr reconstructs an episode in which a woman carrying a white flag and a cross led a small group of Comanche into the town of San Antonio de Bexar to pursue difficult peace negotiations in the 1770s. The Comanche and Spaniards had become bitter enemies after decades of conflict. Only a woman, Barr explains, could adequately demonstrate peaceful intentions in such a tense environment. In this case, the woman had been a Spanish captive, returned to the Comanche as...