Few Hispanics settled the economically stagnant frontier areas on their own initiative. To induce colonization, the Crown provided new arrivals with seeds, tools, land, free transport, and tax exemptions. Late in the colonial period, these incentives virtually halted since the Crown could no longer afford them. Due to the lack of identifiable mineral wealth and readily exploitable Indians, the Crown had always viewed the northern border in terms of defense, not in terms of its economic potential. Trade policy, weak links to major markets, and attacks by Indians also limited settlement in the borderlands.49
Between 1731 and 1760, Texas’s Hispanic population increased from 500 to 1,190, of whom 580 lived in San Antonio. In 1777, the first Texas census enumerated 3,103 Spanish, mixed bloods, and peacefully settled Indians.50
The lack of easily exploitable wealth slowed population growth in New Mexico. Writing to King Felipe III in 1602, Viceroy Gaspar de Zuniga y Acevedo, Conde de Monterrey, observed that New Mexico’s settlers
Have nothing to sell from which they can obtain cash, and poverty is everywhere. It therefore seems to me that these conditions, especially the lack of money, will discourage anyone from going there, or, if already settled, would discourage anyone from remaining there. . . . Neither will the food be lavish nor the clothing dignified.51
in large part to the availability of irrigated land, two centuries after the settlement of New Mexico, its Hispanic population numbered 30,000, more than twice the combined Hispanic population of California, Arizona, and Texas.52
California, after losing its overland access, became in effect an island. It failed to attract settlers since the missions had appropriated the best land and indigenous labor. Even though immigration to colonial California never amounted to more than a trickle, the Hispanics multiplied and incorporated some Indians into their numbers. Between 1791 and 1800—1805, official census figures indicate that California’s population increased from 8,431 to 19,945. (This count excludes the far more numerous population of non-mission Indians.) No Hispanic settlement was further inland than Soledad, thirty miles from the sea.53
Mission work and the 1736 discovery of a silver mine known as the Real de Arizonac, located a few miles southwest of present-day Nogales, attracted a few settlers into the Pimeria Alta. The name of the mine was corrupted into Arizona, yielding the name of the modern state. Given the scant Indian population and desert conditions, in the 1760s the Hispanic population of Sonora barely exceeded 8,000. Fewer than 1,000 Hispanics lived in territory now included in Arizona.54
World History
