The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 99, July 1995 - April, 1996 Page: 120

Southwestern Historical Quarterly

expertise of skilled engineers, architects, or mapmakers. The result was a hap-
hazard location and layout of forts and crude shelters that was finally corrected
in the era of John Law's Company by the efforts of a missionary, Francois Le
Maire, and the skilled draftsman Valentin Devin.
This oversized volume, limited to 350 copies, is enhanced throughout with
rare black-and-white maps, as well as fifty plates chronologically arranged from
1519 to 1764. It is a prize to own, especially when provided free of charge to the
reviewer.
University of North Texas DONALD E. CHIPMAN
Entrada: The Legacy of Spain and Mexico in the United States. By Bernard L. Fontana.
(Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1994. Pp. xii+286. Preface,
introduction, maps, notes, references, index. ISBN 0-82631-544-5. $47.50.)
Bernard L. Fontana has written an interesting book about the cultural legacy
of Spain and Mexico in the United States. Commissioned by the Southwest Parks
and Monuments Association, this lavishly illustrated narrative history will appeal
to those interested in this part of our national heritage and in the sixty-eight
units of the National Park System where the remains of this legacy are preserved
and interpreted. The first example of event and site in the book is the Salt River
Bay National Historical Park and Ecological Preserve on St. Croix Island, where
some of Columbus's men probably landed on November 14, 1493. The last
example given the potential visitor is the Vincente Martinez Adobe, built in
1849 and now preserved as part of the John Muir National Historic Site in
California.
While the book is essentially a readable synthesis grounded in the older schol-
arship of historians such as George P. Winship, H. H. Bancroft, H. E. Bolton,
and the more recent works of John Kessell, DavidJ. Weber, Fl1ix D. AlmarizJr.,
and other scholars of the far northern Spanish-Mexican frontier, Fontana tran-
scends the book's "park-related" scope by placing his subject within the context
of the ongoing debate for and against "multiculturalism." Fontana is aware that
history, as distinguished from the immutable past, is often used "either to justify
or to condemn the status quo." Used in this way, United States history has been
and remains "an argument about the present and the future" (p. xi) based upon
a selective interpretation of our national heritage.
Fontana is a talented and honest historian who acknowledges both the posi-
tive and negative consequences of the conquest, settlement, and incorporation
of Indians in the Spanish-Mexican Borderlands. At the same time that he focuses
on the cultural legacy of Spain and Mexico in the United States, he considers
the interrelationships between Indians and other European conquerors and set-
tlers. Whether settlement was by England or Spain, Native Americans were the
losers. Both in Florida and in the Spanish-Mexican Southwest, however, con-
queror and conquered fused and exploitation was balanced by the blending of
peoples and cultures.

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