Writing Violence on the Northern Frontier

"Rabasa provides a compelling understanding of the cultural worlds of the Spanish conquerors as they collided violently with Native Americans in the contact zones--in Florida, California, Texas, Chile, and Argentina. In so doing he devastates the rationales underlying violence in sixteenth century Spanish history and fiction, and thus challenges the readers to reconsider the rationales by which English and American settlers inhabited the West, and which they called 'frontier violence.' "--Patricia Seed, Rice University