Rubí, Marqués de

Marqués de Rubí (Cayetano María Pignatelli Rubí Corbera y San Climent), Spanish inspector (visitador). Rubí arrived in New Spain in November 1764 as part of the Juan de Villalba military mission charged with reorganizing New Spain's defenses. Rubí's assignment was to inspect New Spain's northern presidio system. He left Mexico City in March 1766 with a small entourage that included the expedition's diarist and cartographer, Nicolás de Lafora and draftsman José de Urrutia. Over the next twenty-three months the expedition traveled 7,500 miles from Louisiana to California and visited twenty-three presidio companies. Rubí's report revealed the lamentable condition of the presidio system. His proposals included a realignment of the presidio defenses to reflect New Spain's actual territory rather than its imagined domain. Rubí suggested the creation of a line of fifteen presidios across the frontier with only Santa Fe and San Antonio beyond the line. He also suggested that the danger of Comanche attacks in Texas could best be eliminated by creating alliances with them against the Apache tribes in the area. In response, the king issued the Reglamento of 1772, which incorporated most of Rubí's recommendations.

See alsoNew Spain, Colonization of the Northern Frontier; Presidio.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Max L. Moorhead, The Presidio: Bastion of the Spanish Borderlands (1975), chap. 3.

Luis Navarro García, "The North of New Spain as a Political Problem in the Eighteenth Century," in David J. Weber, ed., New Spain's Far Northern Frontier: Essays on Spain in the American West, 1540–1821 (1979), pp. 201-216.

Oakah Jones, Nueva Vizcaya: Heartland of the Spanish Frontier (1988), pp. 158-161, 169-170.

Additional Bibliography

Chipman, Donald E, and Denise Joseph Harriett. Explorers and Settlers of Spanish Texas. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001.

Pedro de Rivera, Cayetano, María Pignatelli, Rubí Corbera, Marques de, Jack Jackson, and William C. Foster. Imaginary Kingdom: Texas as Seen by the Rivera and Rubí Military Expeditions, 1727 and 1767. Austin: Texas State Historical Association, 1995.

                                   Aaron Paine Mahr