The first chapter then continues to talk about the context for cultural exchange in the borderlands and in the Iberian peninsula. Brooks paints a picture wherein survival, both corporeal and cultural, created a system of human trafficking that lead to mixed communities specifically by slaves being adopted into the master culture.īrooks begins his book with an enactment of los Comanches, a sort of festival that Brooks feels encapsulates the themes he intends to touch on. (365) In doing this Brooks re-evaluates the previously accepted model of assimilation that took place in this region, comparing it to the Moors and Spaniards in the Iberian peninsula as well as the relations between other tribes in the South West. (26)īrooks’ stated purpose is to cast “shadows across a tenaciously sunny romanticism” characteristic of the popular conceptions of the relationship between indigenous cultures and Europeans. Brooks argues that the violent nature of the borderland subsistence was mediated by and at the expense of women. Through conquest marriages, slavery and kidnapping women are converted to interchangeable commodities like livestock. He describes the world they created as “a mutually recognizable world of violence and retribution, of loss and redemption that drew the protagonists together while forcing them apart.” (40) This new approach adds gender as a primary factor in the dealings between borderland cultures, especially in Brooks’ understanding of the development of kinship through intermarriage. Brooks argues that the communities on these borderlands established this exchange ostensibly to navigate cohabitation, while simultaneously asserting the power of the men within these communities.

Brooks tackles the cultural exchange that took place on the frontiers of European influence in North America.

Captives & Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest Borderlands by James F.

Brooks captives and cousins