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THE DEVIL IN DISGUISE

Abstract For generations, Mexican and American Indian populations reciprocally and ritualistically took captives from one another’s societies in what are today the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. These captive-taking wars breached the expansion of the American state into the west (1850s) and tested the ability of the American state to enforce law and policy in a frontier environment. This intriguing history, however, has yet to be addressed in legal and social science research on race. Our goal in this article is two-fold: (1) to determine whether the captive status of individuals taken in these endemic borderland wars is visible within surviving U.S. administrative materials (e.g., census); and (2) to determine whether close analysis of census materials can be used to ascertain whether federal liberators were able to abolish the captive-taking trade relative to their official mandate. The authors analyze a core sample of 1860s-era census materials from the City of Santa Fe, New Mexico—which has a documented history of Indian captivity and enslavement—as well as church records to determine whether these materials indicate the continuance of captivity even after federal liberators had the opportunity to abolish the trade.