be as rigorously erased by

the same. Both Onat
e and Villagra are confronted
with the same dile

mma: how to enact the unnameable conquest of New Mexico. The related enactments of soldier and historian produce a peculiar inversion of normative expectation. The soldier enacts the "new" conquest by performing history, by restoring and restaging the behaviors of those who produced conquest when it was still named and valued as such. Only by repeating and revisiting that past does this conquest come into its own present. The historian, in turn, produces the New Mexican conquest as a conquest for the first time; the writing of the history does not so much record events as discursively activate them in a frame hitherto absent and disallowed. For Villagra, writing history is the practice through which he can name and advance a conquest that has been silenced; for Onate, restoring history is the practice through which he advances a conquest without giving it that name. For both men; nothing less than their coherent social identity is at stake: under the distracted wa