The Rio de la Plata from Colony to Nations: Commerce, Society, and Politics 3030603229, 9783030603229

Table of contents :
Foreword
Contents
Notes on Contributors
List of Figures
List of Tables
Chapter 1: An Introduction to Colonial and Nineteenth-Century Rio de la Plata
Chapter 2: Between Ethnonyms and Toponyms: Cartography and Native Pasts in the Eastern Rio de la Plata
Demystifying the Cartographic Corpus
Maps, Migration, and Memory
Chapter 3: Counting Heads: Indigenous Leaders in the Guaraní-Jesuit Missions
Caciques and Cacicazgo Organization
Using Jesuit Censuses
Cacique Succession in Santa Ana and Corpus Christi Missions, 1735 to 1759
Cacique Leadership in Thirty Missions, 1735
Chapter 4: The World Mules Made: Mule Trade in the Colonial Rio de la Plata
Mule “Manufacturing”
The Beginnings and Expansion of Mule Trade in the Rio de la Plata
Repartimientos de Mercancías: The Golden Age of Mule Trade
Ups and Downs of Mule Trade: The Fate of a Mule Trade Company from Jujuy
Finale: Partial Recovery Before the End of Mule Trade
Chapter 5: “A Ship Richly Laden”: Isaac de Brac, Dutch Merchant on the Rio de la Plata, 1655–1665
Chapter 6: Anglo-Portuguese Cooperation in Eighteenth-Century Atlantic South America
The Anglo-Portuguese Alliance in Atlantic South America
British and Portuguese Connections During the British Asiento
The British in Colonia do Sacramento
From Sacramento to Australia
Epilogue
Chapter 7: Trade and Credit on the Ground: Sebastian de Torres’ Regional Credit Networks Across the Rio de la Plata in the Early Nineteenth Century
A Spanish Merchant in the Rio de la Plata
Sebastian de Torres’ Commercial Strategies at Critical Times
Priorities and Partnerships for Success
Conclusion
Chapter 8: African Experiences in the Slave Routes to the Rio de la Plata During the Viceregal Era
Embarkations in the Bight of Biafra, Southeast and West-Central Africa, and Brazil
Deathly Passages
Disembarkation and Quarantine
The Routes to Lima
Slave Rebellions
As a Conclusion
Chapter 9: Beyond Blanqueamiento: Córdoba’s Pardocracia and Black Disappearance 1813–1832
Pardo Is the New Black: Córdoba’s Process of Black Disappearance
1813–1820: Administering Freedom: Gradual Abolition and the Pardo Label
1820–1825: Defining Citizenship
1820–1829: The Role of Education
1829–1831 The Rise of Regionalism
Conclusion
Chapter 10: “Long Live the Low People!”: Popular Politics in Revolutionary Buenos Aires, 1810–1820
Historiography
The Road to Revolution
Factional Struggle and Street Politics
Popular Mobilization and Social Tensions
The Actions of Slaves and Free Blacks
Final Comments
Chapter 11: From Imperial Agents to Revolutionary Intelligentsia: Catholic Orders and Argentine Independence
Atlantic Alliances
The May Revolution and the Asamblea del Año XIII
The Comisaría de Regulares
The End of the Inquisition
Final Considerations
Chapter 12: In the Salons of Mariquita Sánchez: Tertulias, Culture, and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Buenos Aires and Montevideo
Salons and Tertulias as Social Spaces
Mariquita, Paris, and the Salons of Buenos Aires
A National Anthem
Tertulias after Independence
Mariquita’s Salon Becomes More French
Mariquita Sánchez de Mendeville and Juan Manuel de Rosas
Mariquita’s Salon in Exile
Conclusion
Chapter 13: Freeing Slaves to Fight Against Paraguay: Brazilian Freedmen in the War of the Triple Alliance, 1864–1870
The Military Situation
Decision Making
Slaves Owned by the State
Slaves from the Church
Privately Owned Slaves
Comparing Slave Societies
Immediate Political Repercussions of Enlistment
Chapter 14: Facundo Travels to the United States: Mary Mann’s 1868 Translation of Sarmiento’s Civilization and Barbarism
Sarmiento Writes ‘Facundo o Civilización y Barbarie en las Pampas Argentinas’
Ambas Americas
Barbarism, or the Two Souths
Conclusion
Chapter 15: Instability Within: A Microscopic and Often Comical View of “Oligarchic” Politics in Buenos Aires, 1883
Bibliography
Published Primary and Secondary Sources
Archives
Index

Citation preview

The Rio de la Plata from Colony to Nations Commerce, Society, and Politics Edited by Fabrício Prado Viviana L. Grieco · Alex Borucki

The Rio de la Plata from Colony to Nations

Fabrício Prado  •  Viviana L. Grieco Alex Borucki Editors

The Rio de la Plata from Colony to Nations Commerce, Society, and Politics

Editors Fabrício Prado Department of History College of William and Mary Williamsburg, VA, USA

Viviana L. Grieco Department of History University of Missouri Kansas City Kansas City, MO, USA

Alex Borucki Department of History University of California Irvine Irvine, CA, USA

ISBN 978-3-030-60322-9    ISBN 978-3-030-60323-6 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60323-6 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Antiqua Print Gallery / Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

To Susan

Foreword

This collection of essays is published to celebrate the career of our friend and colleague Susan M.  Socolow. Susan has had a long and influential career as a historian of the Rio de la Plata’s colonial and early national periods. Her innovative books and articles have played an essential role in the development of our field, introducing new sources and methods and igniting new interest in the history of the Rio de la Plata. When Susan began her career at Emory University in the early 1970s, the colonial Rio de la Plata was positioned at the far periphery of scholarly interest among Latin American historians. For most scholars of Latin America, the history of this region effectively began with the era of mass immigration at the end of the nineteenth century or, alternatively, with the bloody dictatorship of Juan Manuel de Rosas. Today, as the intellectual quality of the essays collected here demonstrates, young scholars enter this field in full expectation that their research will find a wide audience and influence the broader history of Latin America. Susan’s scholarship has played a key role in elevating the importance of our field. From her time in graduate school Susan sought out topics and utilized historical methods that placed her work at the center of our discipline’s most consequential methodological innovations, interpretive controversies, and debates. Her natural inclination to test the efficacy of received wisdom and to experiment with new sources and new methods is a telling marker of her scholarly ambition and intellectual courage. Her belief that numbers matter as well as her rigorous interrogation of historical method have helped give structure and urgency to the most important debates in our field since the 1970s. vii

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A brief Foreword to an edited volume is not the place to examine Susan’s scholarship in detail, but I hope a focused reminder of her achievement will help to illuminate the connections between Susan’s pioneering scholarship and the new work published in this volume. While summaries of academic careers can be cheerless and dry narrations of bibliography, we know as historians that these achievements are also hard-won markers of intellectual development and influence. Readers who know something of Latin American historiography will easily comprehend the enduring quality of Susan’s publications produced during her career, a career that places her among the most significant scholars of our generation. Together The Merchants of Viceregal Buenos Aires: Family and Commerce, 1776–1810 (Cambridge University Press, 1978) and The Bureaucrats of Buenos Aires, 1769–1810: amor al real servicio (Duke University Press, 1987) created the field of colonial social history for the Rio de la Plata, and nearly every social historical work published since has acknowledged this debt. Her impressive work of synthesis, Women of Colonial Latin America (Cambridge University Press, 2000), has proven to be an essential text in the Latin American history curriculum and stimulated a new generation of historians to enter this dynamic field. Susan’s service to women’s history is perhaps best marked by a survey of her articles and book chapters devoted to the historical role played by gender in the regional experience. This brief summary of academic achievement cannot do full justice to Susan’s influence on Latin American colonial history and, more specifically, the history of the early Rio de la Plata. Taken together, these interpretive works ignited a wave of publications by young Argentine historians and other historians of the Rio de la Plata that has revolutionized gender studies. These successes registered across her career have led, in turn, to a series of prestigious awards, fellowships, and academic offices that signal Susan’s leadership of our field. While our professional lives as researchers and authors are often conducted independently, our work also has a collective and public character. The experience of archival research throws us into contact with other scholars in unpredictable ways. Friendships are forged, ideas shared, and, most importantly, suggestions about previously unexplored sources are generously offered by more experienced historians. Reading rooms, archive elevators, and neighborhood coffee shops and bars are all potential arenas of scholarly exchange. Similarly, conference participation allows us to test our unpublished work with our peers, discover colleagues with related research interests, and locate potential publishers. Collectively

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these venues provide a nurturing context in our efforts to reveal the past and prepare our discipline for the future. Throughout her career Susan has cheerfully committed to sustaining and nourishing this dense web of formal and informal professional settings. I do not know a single historian of the Rio de la Plata who cannot recall interacting with Susan in one of these venues and receiving a spontaneous offer of collegial assistance or collaboration. Susan’s impact on our field and on Latin American colonial history more broadly has always been larger than her impressive scholarship. Susan’s unrivaled success in recruiting talented young historians to our field has been key to elevating the place of the early Rio de la Plata in the larger field of Latin American history. I can think of no other history graduate program that has come close to graduating as many talented and accomplished PhD historians of the early Rio de la Plata history as Emory University. Susan’s scholarship and her reputation for generously mentoring young scholars attracted multiple generations of bright and talented students from the Rio de la Plata to Emory’s history department. At the same time Susan proved reliably eager to sponsor and support graduate students from other programs she met at conferences or archives. The beneficiaries of her generosity and encouragement, many of them now in mid-career, can testify to her tireless support and loyalty. From the beginning of her career Susan recognized the crucial importance of scholarly organizations to the promotion and development of Latin American history in the United States. Even as a young scholar at the beginning of her career Susan committed her remarkable energy to the promotion and success of specialist organizations committed to Latin American history. As her career developed Susan made a similar commitment to the organizations that serve the discipline of history more broadly. Her election as a vice president of the American Historical Association and her service as president of the Conference on Latin American History can be viewed as acknowledgments of this generous service by her colleagues. For me, Susan’s role in the development of two smaller, less well-known organizations, the Carolinas, Virginia, and Georgia Colonial Seminar (now called the Tepaske Seminar) and the Rio de la Plata Workshop, illustrates Susan’s most salient qualities as a Latin American historian and as a mentor of young scholars. Some of you will not know these organizations. The first was founded by William Taylor, then at the University of Virginia, and John Tepaske of Duke University in the 1970s. Their intention was to provide an opportunity for their graduate students to present current

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research to a small audience of peers in a non-threatening environment. Papers were circulated in advance of the meeting and discussions were free-wheeling and uninhibited. I was fortunate to be invited to join this experiment at the beginning of my career. When Bill Taylor left the area, I invited Susan to drive up from Atlanta for an annual meeting. From this first meeting, Susan’s love of historical argument and her ready engagement with young scholars proved transformative. She actively recruited broader participation and gave the group’s discussions a sharper critical character. Within two years the seminar had doubled its participation. For historians of colonial Latin America resident in the southeast, especially for grad students and young scholars, the seminar’s annual meeting quickly became the ideal arena to try out new research, network, and, importantly, have fun. Many of the scholars published in this collection of essays are veterans of this seminar and beneficiaries of Susan’s sponsorship and mentoring. The Rio de la Plata Workshop grew out of this experience, sharing the originating organization’s structure and character. It is now one of the most important scholarly venues for researchers in our field. Fabrício Prado, one of Susan’s students at Emory, was the key to the creation of the seminar. He found the institutional support and funds and provided a guiding hand in the group’s organization. Through the years Fabricio has been supported by other Emory graduates as well as by many other young specialists exposed to the field through Susan’s scholarship or through direct contact with Susan at professional meetings. It is therefore more than appropriate that early versions of these essays were first presented and discussed in this venue. Charlotte, NC 

Lyman Johnson

Contents

1 An Introduction to Colonial and Nineteenth-Century Rio de la Plata  1 Alex Borucki, Viviana L. Grieco, and Fabrício Prado 2 Between Ethnonyms and Toponyms: Cartography and Native Pasts in the Eastern Rio de la Plata  9 Jeffrey A. Erbig Jr. 3 Counting Heads: Indigenous Leaders in the GuaraníJesuit Missions 31 Julia Sarreal 4 The World Mules Made: Mule Trade in the Colonial Rio de la Plata 53 Gustavo L. Paz 5 “A Ship Richly Laden”: Isaac de Brac, Dutch Merchant on the Rio de la Plata, 1655–1665 77 David Freeman

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6 Anglo-Portuguese Cooperation in Eighteenth-Century Atlantic South America 91 Fabrício Prado 7 Trade and Credit on the Ground: Sebastian de Torres’ Regional Credit Networks Across the Rio de la Plata in the Early Nineteenth Century111 Viviana L. Grieco 8 African Experiences in the Slave Routes to the Rio de la Plata During the Viceregal Era133 Alex Borucki 9 Beyond Blanqueamiento: Córdoba’s Pardocracia and Black Disappearance 1813–1832155 Erika Denise Edwards 10 “Long Live the Low People!”: Popular Politics in Revolutionary Buenos Aires, 1810–1820177 Gabriel Di Meglio 11 From Imperial Agents to Revolutionary Intelligentsia: Catholic Orders and Argentine Independence201 Jorge Troisi Melean 12 In the Salons of Mariquita Sánchez: Tertulias, Culture, and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Buenos Aires and Montevideo221 Jeffrey M. Shumway 13 Freeing Slaves to Fight Against Paraguay: Brazilian Freedmen in the War of the Triple Alliance, 1864–1870243 Vitor Izecksohn

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14 Facundo Travels to the United States: Mary Mann’s 1868 Translation of Sarmiento’s Civilization and Barbarism265 Carolina Zumaglini 15 Instability Within: A Microscopic and Often Comical View of “Oligarchic” Politics in Buenos Aires, 1883287 Brian Bockelman Bibliography309 Index331

Notes on Contributors

Brian Bockelman  is an associate professor in the Department of History, Ripon College. Alex  Borucki  is an associate professor in the Department of History, University of California Irvine. Gabriel  Di Meglio  is an associate professor of Argentine History at Universidad de Buenos Aires and researcher at Instituto Ravignani (CONICET-UBA), Argentina. Erika  Denise  Edwards  is an associate professor in the Department of History, University of North Carolina Charlotte. Jeffrey A. Erbig Jr.  is an associate professor in the Department of Latin American and Latino Studies, University of California Santa Cruz. David Freeman  is an associate professor of History & Religious Studies, Department of History, University of Missouri Kansas City. Viviana L. Grieco  is an associate professor of History & Latin American and Latinx Studies, Department of History, University of Missouri, Kansas City. Vitor Izecksohn  is an associate professor in the Department of History, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Lyman Johnson  is a professor emeritus in the Department of History, University of North Carolina Charlotte. xv

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Jorge Troisi Melean  is a profesor adjunto in the Department of History, Universidad Nacional de La Plata, Argentina. Gustavo L. Paz  is professor of Latin American History at Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero and researcher at the Instituto Ravignani (CONICET-UBA), Buenos Aires, Argentina. Fabrício Prado  is an associate professor in the Department of History, College of William and Mary. Julia Sarreal  is an associate professor of Latin American History in the New College of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences, Arizona State University. Jeffrey  M.  Shumway  is an associate professor in the Department of History, Brigham Young University. Carolina  Zumaglini is professor in History, Pontificia Universidad Católica Argentina, Buenos Aires, Argentina.

List of Figures

Fig. 2.1

Fig. 2.2 Fig. 2.3 Fig. 2.4 Fig. 2.5 Fig. 2.6 Fig. 2.7

Diego de Torres’s ethnonym placement. This map is a composite rendering of historic maps that followed Torres’s pattern of ethnonym placement. Ethnonyms are plotted with their original placement and spelling in grey, and overlaid with black labels representing their aggregate placement. Subsequent maps follow the same pattern Luis Ernot’s ethnonym placement Guillaume Delisle’s ethnonym placement Juan Francisco Dávila’s ethnonym placement Jean Baptiste Bourguignon d’Anville’s ethnonym placement Juan de la Cruz Cano y Olmedilla’s ethnonym placement Félix de Azara’s ethnonym placement

14 15 16 17 18 20 21

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List of Tables

Table 3.1 Table 3.2 Table 3.3 Table 9.1 Table 9.2 Table 9.3

Cacicazgo leadership, 1735 to 1759 Succession Patterns, 1735–1759 Caciques of Thirty Guaraní Missions, 1735 Calidad categories in the city of Córdoba in 1813 Calidad categories in the city of Córdoba in 1822 Calidad categories in the city of Córdoba in 1832

40 42 47 161 165 175

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CHAPTER 1

An Introduction to Colonial and NineteenthCentury Rio de la Plata Alex Borucki, Viviana L. Grieco, and Fabrício Prado

In the turn of the twenty-first century, historians of colonial and revolutionary Latin America in general, and the Rio de la Plata specifically, have explored new paradigms and have examined primary sources in new light. In writing the history of the early-modern and nineteenth-century Americas, scholars have found in the Atlantic World paradigm innovative analytical possibilities. Atlantic history provided lenses that reached beyond borders, empires, nations, and continents. Historians of Latin America not only utilized the Atlantic World paradigm to reinterpret traditional historiographical fields such as economic, social, and political

A. Borucki Department of History, University of California Irvine, Irvine, CA, USA e-mail: [email protected] V. L. Grieco Department of History, University of Missouri Kansas City, Kansas City, MO, USA e-mail: [email protected] F. Prado (*) Department of History, College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, VA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 F. Prado et al. (eds.), The Rio de la Plata from Colony to Nations, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60323-6_1

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history, but also engaged in the examination of new relationships between agents of different empires, ethnic origins, and distant geographies. In the Rio de la Plata, the Atlantic World paradigm brought trans-­ imperial networks to the forefront of the scholarly agenda, reinterpreted commerce and imperial administration, and considered foreign powers, such as Portugal and England, to be part and parcel of the history of the region. Additionally, the Atlantic World paradigm allowed for the examination of processes that extended beyond the Atlantic and into the interior of the Americas. Prominently, the studies on commerce (legal and illegal), the slave trade, and slavery emphasized the roles of different agents and their social networks. Furthermore, the Atlantic World paradigm led to a renewed interest in well-studied topics, such as commerce and contraband trade not only from a top-down but also, increasingly, from a bottom-up perspective. While Atlantic history primarily developed at US universities and research centers, in the Rio de la Plata, an established and well-reputed academic community led an independent agenda that advanced the studies of domestic markets and interregional trade. These studies took into consideration the changes in trade policies and commercial agents affecting both Atlantic and Pacific trades. However, they primarily analyzed the dynamics of large domestic markets such as Upper Peru, located far away from seaports, and the redistribution hubs located on the routes connecting Buenos Aires to Potosi, including Salta and Cordoba. These works additionally highlighted the role of trade in integrating regional markets located outside the North-South axis and included regions and commodities produced East and West as well, such as yerba mate in Paraguay, wines and aguardientes from the Cuyo region and the variety of imports entering the Rio de la Plata through Chile. While these US-based and Rio de la Plata-based historiographical traditions advanced the study of trade in all forms, they rarely connected to each other in a comprehensive manner. Yet, a clear picture emerged: trade bound together domestic and external markets, and studying one without the other would only deliver an incomplete picture. This volume brings together works that focus on processes and dynamics unfolding in the Iberian South Atlantic as well as the global linkages they created. If the first generation of historians deploying the Atlantic World paradigm focused too heavily on the North Atlantic empires and colonies, this volume provides three necessary corrections to these imbalances. The chapters in this book epitomize the diversity and the expansive

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reach of the economic, social, and political processes unfolding in the South Atlantic and its connections with North America, Northern Europe, West Central and Southeast Africa, and beyond. Our second important contribution to the Atlantic World paradigm showcases the significance of Spanish American processes alongside Luso-Brazilian dynamics in the South Atlantic. While historians of Brazil and Angola have correctly pointed out the failure of historians of the North Atlantic in fully integrating the South Atlantic in their analyses, the Spanish American colonies have been underrepresented in the histories of the Atlantic below the Equator. From Colony to Nations aims to rectify this perspective by demonstrating that Spanish and Portuguese imperial and colonial dynamics were inherently and inextricably interconnected. Thus, the South Atlantic should not be perceived as a Portuguese mare clausum, but as a space shaped by Iberian colonialism and an area of interest of other European powers that did not necessarily have a direct colonial presence in the region. Finally, in line with this second intervention, the studies of trade included in this volume emphasize the importance of commercial activity beyond the seaports, which speak of the dynamism and capacity for reinvention of the Spanish trading communities operating down South. Beyond highlighting the interconnected histories of European and Iberian colonialism in the Rio de la Plata in particular and more broadly in the South Atlantic, this volume includes  the pivotal contributions of ethno-history and hemispheric studies for transforming the political, economic, and social history of Latin America. By writing Indigenous peoples into mainstream historical analyses, Indigenous studies contribute to the decentering of national boundaries as the unit of inquiry in Rioplatense history. Furthermore, historians of Indigenous peoples have crossed the historiographical borders to explore the worlds and views from the “other” sides of imperial and later national frontiers and provided a counter-­ narrative that expanded the analytical framework beyond imperial perspectives and colonial archives. New techniques and methods, including the geographical information system (GIS) and the examination of Indigenous languages and politics, contributed significantly to the advancement of the field. This volume includes three contributions focused on Afro-descendants that provide new insights on well-studied themes such as the slave trade and slave resistance, gender and racial labels, and black military mobilization. However, in other chapters, people of African ancestry appear in the broader context of commerce and politics. A book (either in Spanish or

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English) that encompasses the slave experience within the different regions of the Rio de la Plata remains to be written. We still wonder to what extent the experience of enslaved people in Buenos Aires, or even slavery as a social relationship, was different there than in Cordoba, Paraguay, or in the Banda Oriental, among other places. Likewise, it is worth asking how slavery in the Rio de la Plata changed from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries (if it did change) and how it was different in the aftermath of the 1810 May Revolution. In other words, future scholarship should examine how time and space within the Rio de la Plata shaped the different generations of slaves’ and freedmen’s experiences. This book should not be seen as a history of “colonial Argentina,” much less of Buenos Aires. The fourteen contributions included in this anthology show how the many regions that made up the Viceroyalty of the Rio de la Plata (1776–1810) had both their own history as well as a history in relation to the viceregal capital. These contributions discuss, from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, networks that connected the Rio de la Plata with Chile, Peru, Upper Peru, Brazil, and across the oceans, to places as far apart as the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Iberia, the Caribbean, West Central and Southeast Africa, and what later became the United States. The emphasis on the seaport of Buenos Aires should be seen in the context of merchant networks and commerce, and later, as a result of the May Revolution and the nineteenth-century politics of the city and its hinterland. Yet, no chapter offers a completely centered analysis on Uruguay or Paraguay, but instead some of the contributions emphasize trans-regional events and trends such as the representation of Indigenous populations, the making of Indian leadership, the traffic of African captives, trans-regional and trans-imperial trade, and the War of the Triple Alliance, among other themes, that did engage the history of both Paraguay and Uruguay. The chapters in this volume span the 1750s–1850s time period in which the region was transformed by the Bourbon Reforms, the creation of the Viceroyalty of the Rio de la Plata (with Buenos Aires as its capital), the fall of the Portuguese Colonia do Sacramento, the wars of independence, and the civil and international wars that followed and altered the region for much of the nineteenth century. These chapters reflect upon the scholarship produced both in the United States and the countries that made up the Rio de la Plata, with an emphasis in the late colonial period and the three decades that followed independence. Contributions covering the pre-1750s examine the Indigenous populations of Uruguay and

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Paraguay through a trans-regional lens, the mule trade connecting the Rio de la Plata with Upper Peru, and the trans-imperial trade with the Dutch, the Portuguese, and the British. The chapters examining this region after 1850 focus on the War of the Triple Alliance, the towering figure of Sarmiento, and the politics of Buenos Aires. Some of the contributions in this book examine the importance of nineteenth-century liberalism and popular politics as understood by both the elites and subaltern Rioplatense sectors. These chapters provide examples of how popular politics, an offspring of late-colonial changes and the revolution of independence, expanded the meanings of equality and citizenship for different social groups and the elites’ reactions to it. Counting on more robust institutions and state apparatus, in the last third of the nineteenth century, local elites in Buenos Aires, Montevideo, and Cordoba brought under their supervision tools of social control, such as education, which expanded their capacity for disciplining popular sectors, and maintaining traditional social hierarchy. This volume additionally invites the reader to reflect upon the Southern Cone in the twenty-first century. As in the past, this region has been transformed by commodity booms and the economic influence of foreign powers, although recently connections have been made across the Global South instead of prioritizing the North-South axis. Repeating a pattern that has been historically pervasive, economic growth did not comprehensively translate into sustainable economic development. Twenty-first-­ century Latin America still struggles with chronic poverty, inflation, unemployment, a high cost of living, growth of the informal sector, high rates of crime, criminal (drug-related) wars, and deep disappointment with politics. On a brighter side, the late-twentieth and early-twenty-first-­ century efforts at integrating national economies into larger trading blocs show that, despite the long-lasting influence of nineteenth-century nationalisms, regional cooperation is possible and capable of yielding not only commercial and financial opportunities but also cultural gains found in vibrant immigrant communities, tourism, and frequent intellectual exchanges. Politically, in the last two decades, the region experienced a new wave of popular mobilization and inclusion. “Pink tide” governments (the English-language term that describes the progressive governments that took office in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, and Uruguay, among other Latin American countries, in the early 2000s) implemented anti-poverty programs, reclaimed control over national resources surrendered to

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foreign owners under the Washington Consensus and expanded human rights to curtail discrimination on the basis of gender, race, and sexual orientation. However, with the exception of Uruguay and Chile (and to a lesser extent Brazil), the executive increased its power and control over the institutions of the republic and narrowed the independent action of the judiciary. As described in the chapters included in this volume, historically, this region has not been able to fully institutionalize the advances of participatory democracy. Nor has it been capable to successfully transition from “big” to “small” state and vice versa. Federal politics (contrary to state politics in smaller countries such as Paraguay and Uruguay) also complicates this panorama in Argentina and Brazil. Consequently, this region faces a new wave of political, social, and ideological polarization. As the countries of the Southern Cone of Latin America grapple with eventful social, economic, and political challenges, historians have looked into the past for answers to old questions. As the region is undergoing new political experiments (to solve old social and economic issues) and the expansion of the concept of human rights, historians of the Rio de la Plata region produced important contributions to debates in Latin American and Atlantic World history. Scholars of the Rio de la Plata incisively contributed to the examination of gender studies, the African diaspora, trans-­ national and trans-imperial dynamics, the intersection of economics and environmental history, and political processes from warfare and state formation to contraband and corruption. The chapters comprising this volume not only attest to the vitality of the field but also serve as an invitation to scholars to pursue new avenues of historical research on the Rio de la Plata. Finally, this volume celebrates the Tenth Anniversary of the Rio de la Plata Workshop (2009–2019) currently hosted by William & Mary and organized every year by Fabrício Prado. Under his leadership, this workshop grew from humble origins at Roosevelt University in Chicago into a large meeting that attracts some of the most prominent scholars of colonial and nineteenth-century Rio de la Plata from both the United States and Latin America. The co-editors of this volume would like to thank the Department of History of William & Mary as well as the Omohundro Institute for Early American History and Culture for supporting this initiative; our colleagues for participating in the seminar and contributing to this volume; and, the University of Missouri-Kansas City’s Inclusive Excellence Funds for funding the index and editorial production of this volume. The Rio de la Plata Workshop and the co-editors of this volume

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built upon the experience, dedication, and legacy of a pioneer scholar in this field: Susan Socolow. Susan not only published pathbreaking and inspiring studies but also formally and informally mentored most of the contributors to this volume. This publication is dedicated to her career, generosity, and friendship.

CHAPTER 2

Between Ethnonyms and Toponyms: Cartography and Native Pasts in the Eastern Rio de la Plata Jeffrey A. Erbig Jr.

During the past three decades, cultural analyses of historic maps have become commonplace among researchers interested in the territorialities of past peoples. Within this broader impetus, ethnohistorians and historians of cartography in the Americas have sought to use colonial-era maps and mapmaking endeavors to make visible spatial practices and I am grateful to the participants in the 2019 Rio de la Plata Workshop and the Congresso Internacional Povos Indígenas da América Latina, as well as Ernesto Bassi, Lisa Brooks, Mary Draper, Max Edelson, Steven Hackel, Margaret Pearce, Jacqueline Reynoso, Elena Schneider, and Heidi Scott, for their insightful comments on this work. I am especially appreciative of Brian Bockelman’s careful readings of multiple drafts and Michael Huner’s guidance on Guaraní-language ethnonyms. J. A. Erbig Jr. (*) Department of Latin American and Latino Studies, University of California Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, CA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 F. Prado et al. (eds.), The Rio de la Plata from Colony to Nations, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60323-6_2

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perspectives of Indigenous Americans.1 Efforts have included scrutinizing imperial maps for evidence of Indigenous settlements and toponyms, analyzing renderings of Native peoples in cartouches and illustrations, identifying and interpreting Native-authored visual sources, and reading textual accounts of imperial mapmaking endeavors to trace the actions of Indigenous agents. These studies have revealed the power of mapping to colonize Native literacies or to define Indigenous peoples in the minds of European readers. Alternatively, they have demonstrated the capacity of Indigenous agents to mediate information appearing in colonial records or to appropriate mapped territorial forms to their advantage. They have also blurred the lines between Indigenous and European agents in the process of cartographic knowledge production. Yet, few systematic assessments exist of one of the most common representations of Native peoples in historic maps: as free-floating ethnic labels, superimposed upon the landscape yet absent of any symbolic point or anchor. Textual ethnonyms were commonly used by European and Euro-­ American mapmakers to geolocate autonomous, mobile Native communities. Unlike Indigenous villages or missions, which often appeared in maps as precise dots, mobile peoples beyond colonial control were marked by ethnic labels that varied widely. Despite their imprecision and 1  Examples include Barbara E. Mundy, The Mapping of New Spain: Indigenous Cartography and the Maps of the Relaciones Geográficas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); Neil L. Whitehead, “Indigenous Cartography in Lowland South America and the Caribbean,” in David Woodward and Lewis G. Malcolm, eds., The History of Cartography: Cartography in the Traditional African, American, Arctic, Australian, and Pacific Societies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); William G. Gartner, “Mapmaking in the Central Andes,” in ibid.; G. Malcolm Lewis, ed., Cartographic Encounters: Perspectives on Native American Mapmaking and Map Use (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); Karl Offen, “Creating Mosquitia: Mapping Amerindian Spatial Practices in Eastern Central America, 1629–1779,” Journal of Historical Geography 33 (2007); David Carrasco and Scott Sessions, eds., Cave, City, and Eagle’s Nest: An Interpretive Journey through the Mapa de Cuauhtinchan no. 2 (Albuquerque, N.Mex.: University of New Mexico Press, 2007); Heidi V.  Scott, Contested Territory: Mapping Peru in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2009); Maria de Fátima Costa, “Viajes en la frontera colonial: Historias de una expedición de límites en la América Meridional (1753–1754),” Anales del Museo de América 16 (2009); Jeffrey A. Erbig, Jr., “Borderline Offerings: Tolderías and Mapmakers in the Eighteenth-Century Rio de la Plata,” Hispanic American Historical Review 96, no. 3 (2016); Surekha Davies, Renaissance Ethnography and the Invention of the Human: New Worlds, Maps, and Monsters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016); S. Max Edelson. The New Map of Empire: How Britain Imagined America before Independence (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2017), 141–95.

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contradictions, these visual records informed colonial imaginings regarding Native peoples and were referenced commonly by post-independence scholars and writers. Maps mattered not for their accuracy, but for the meaning ascribed to them by subsequent readers who sought to construct historical geographies of Indigenous peoples. This tendency is evident in the eastern Rio de la Plata (present-day Uruguay, northeastern Argentina, and southern Brazil), where the geographic positioning of ethnonyms in colonial and early-national maps has played an outsized role in historical memory of interethnic relations. By considering historic maps of the region collectively, this chapter identifies common patterns of ethnonym placement and networks of knowledge production that were simultaneously inaccurate and foundational in the construction of historical memory.

Demystifying the Cartographic Corpus The corpus of maps of the eastern Rio de la Plata is enormous and geographically dispersed. Over 400 maps drawn from the sixteenth through the early nineteenth century, spread across several dozen archives in eight countries, were consulted for this study alone.2 This included manuscript and published maps ranging from large-scale depictions of the Rio de la Plata estuary to small-scale renderings of the Western Hemisphere or the entire globe. 173 of these maps contained ethnonyms, which I coded according to their placement in the region or along its northern and western peripheries. Given the myriad scales, perspectives, projections, distortions, and details appearing in the maps, I coded the ethnonyms according to their positions between the region’s principal waterways. I then grouped the maps  according to their general patterns of ethnonym placement. Many maps presented identical patterns, but many more provided near matches or a portion of the ethnonyms included in others. In the later instances, I prioritized  the ethnonyms most readily associated with the 2  Digital versions of many of the referenced maps are available online via the national libraries of Argentina, Brazil, France, Portugal, and the United States, as well as the Newberry Library, the John Carter Brown Library, the Huntington Library, Stanford Libraries’ Barry Lawrence Ruderman Map Collection, the David Rumsey Map Collection, the Norman B. Leventhal Map Center at the Boston Public Library, the Institut Cartogràfic i Geològic de Catalunya, the Archivo General de Indias (AGI), and Archival General de Simancas. The remaining maps are held at Brazil’s Instituto de Estudos Brasileiros, Instituto Histórico e Geográfico do Rio Grande do Sul, and Arquivo Histórico do Exército; Uruguay’s national archive; and Argentina’s national archive and Museo Mitre.

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region—Bohanes, Charrúas, Guaraníes, Guenoas, Minuanes, and Yaros— over those on its periphery. To verify this tabular coding and sorting, I then manually represented the original ethnonym placement of each historic map with original orthography in composite maps using geographic information system (GIS) software. This final step revealed relationships between map groups that had not been evident in the original spreadsheet, leading to their consolidation in the final form. Historic maps of the region can be broken into ten groups of as many as forty maps apiece.3 Given the pitfalls of toponymic comparison, namely linguistic variation and mistranslations, these groupings derive from a cautious identification of common ethnonyms, shared locations of those ethnonyms, and idiosyncratic elements that are “unambiguously common” to a number of maps. Although the lack of contextual evidence can preclude claims of direct cartographic lineages, ethnogeographic patterns of representation are nonetheless evident.4 Commonalities in representation derived from the sharing of textual sources or the direct copying of engraving plates, while differences tended to dovetail with maps’ publishing houses, empires, dates of publication, or scale. Shared ethnonym patterns tended to correspond with common physical features, as idiosyncratic patterns of representing the region’s waterways, borderlines, and settlements were often consistent within groups. For example, representations of the Lagoa dos Patos alternatively as a river or a lake, the inclusion or omission of the Lagoa Mirim, and the conflation or omission of the Uruguay River and the Rio Negro tended to be consistent within groups. Yet, given that mapmakers sometimes borrowed physical features from one source and ethnic geographies from another, the ten groupings prioritize ethnonym placement over shared topographies. A brief description of the ten groups indicates particular sites and flows of ethnogeographic knowledge production, which operated simultaneously in parallel cartographic traditions. The first cartographic representation of ethnonyms in region was Flemish mapmaker Corneille Wytfliet’s 3  Smaller groupings derive from date or scale, as few maps prior to the mid-seventeenth century placed ethnonyms in the region while hydrological maps focused on small segments of its coastlines. Multiple maps from the same author are counted here as separate publications unless all elements—including scale, physical features, toponyms, ethnonyms, cartouche, and language—were identical. 4  On cartographic comparison and intertextuality, see: James Brian Harley, The New Nature of Maps: Essays in the History of Cartography (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 43, 174–187.

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1597 Plata America Provinciae, which labeled Carios in the north.5 This rendering was soon supplanted by those of Dutch printing houses, which drew upon or directly printed Jesuit sources to produce three discernable ethnic geographies. In 1605, Dutch engraver Petrus Montanus presented a map of Brazil that added Guaraníes, Patos, and Querandíes to the region, while a 1609 map by Jesuit Diego de Torres shuffled Montanus’s ethnonyms and added more in the west (Fig. 2.1).6 Torres’s map was among the first to include Charrúas, which along with Guaraníes was the most commonly referenced ethnonym in the region, and it informed prominent mapmakers in northern Europe.7 Lastly, Jesuit Luis Ernot produced a regional ethnic geography in 1632 that became a principal referent for mapmakers throughout Europe for nearly a century and a half (Fig. 2.2). In Paraqvaria vulgo Paragvay, Ernot centered Charrúas as the principal ethnic community in the region, eliminated Guaraníes, and added Yaros and Tape.8  Corneille Wytfliet, Plata Americae Provincia (1597); José de Acosta, Plata Americae Provincia (1598). 6  Maps in the former group included Petrus Montanus, Brasilia (1605); Frederik de Wit, Littora Brasiliae (1657); Hendrick Doncker, Paskaart yand Zuÿdelÿchste (1670). The latter group included Diego de Torres, “[untitled]” (1609); Joannes de Laet, Paraguay, ó Prov (1625); Henricus Hondius, Americae pars Meridionalis (1629); Willem Janszoon Blaeu, Carta de Tucvman (1634); Joannes Janssonius van Waesberge, Paraguay, ó Prov ([1642]); John Seller, Novissima Totius Terrarum Orbis Tabula (1672); Johannes van Heurs, Novissima et Acuratissima ([1600s]); Joannes Janssonius, Paraguay, ó Prov ([1630−66]); Eberhard Werner Happel, Everhardi Guerneri Happelii Mundus ([1687–1689]). 7  Levinium Hulsium’s 1602 Nova et Exacta Delineatio Americae Partis Avstralis included the ethnonym Zecuruas, often interpreted as Charrúas, in the far south of the region, likely drawing upon the travel account of German mercenary Ulrich Schmidl. On the influence of Laet’s map, see Guillermo Fúrlong Cárdiff, Cartografía jesuítica del Rio de la Plata, vol. 1 (Buenos Aires: Talleres S. A. Casa Jacobo Peuser, 1936), 21–23. 8  Luis Ernot, Paraqvaria vulgo Paragvay (1647); Nicolas Sanson, Amerique meridionale (1650, 1669, 1679, 1691, and 1709); Nicolas Sanson, Le Paragvayr (1656 [i.e. 1659] and 1757); Joan Blaeu, Paraquaria vulgo Paraguay (1662); Joan Blaeu, Mapa de las regiones del Paraguay (1667); Guillaume Sanson, Le Paraguay (1668 and [1700–1750]); Guillaume Sanson, L’Amerique meridionale (1677 and 1687); Nicolas Sanson, A New Mapp (1682); Frederik de Wit, Novissima et Accuratissima (1688); Vicenzo Coronelli, L’Amerique meridionale (1689); Vicenzo Coronelli, Amerique meridionale (1692); Alexis-Hubert Jaillot, L’Amerique meridionale ([1600s], 1694, and 1781); A Map of the Provinces of Paraguay (1698); Joan Blaeu, Paraqvaria vulgo Paragvay (1700); Frederik de Wit, Americae ([ca. 1700]); Herman Moll, The Great Province of the Rio de la Plata (1701); Pieter van der Aa, T Zuider America (1706); L’Amerique meridionale (1706); Nicolas de Fer, Herman van Loon, and Nicolas Guérard, L’Amerique (1717); Matthäus Seutter, America Meridionalis (1735); Johann Baptist Homann, Totius Americae Septentrionalis et Meridionalis ([ca. 1745]). 5

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Fig. 2.1  Diego de Torres’s ethnonym placement. This map is a composite rendering of historic maps that followed Torres’s pattern of ethnonym placement. Ethnonyms are plotted with their original placement and spelling in grey, and overlaid with black labels representing their aggregate placement. Subsequent maps follow the same pattern

By the eighteenth century, French geographers supplanted their Dutch counterparts as the preeminent printers of maps of the eastern Rio de la Plata. Guillaume Delisle, member of the French Royal Academy of Sciences and eventual Royal Geographer, printed a map of South America in 1700 that drew upon yet modified the three Dutch traditions. Delisle’s L’Amerique Meridionale eliminated Charrúas, Yaros, and Tapes, and restored Guaraníes. This print would appear in a half dozen atlases in France and in the Netherlands as late as 1785.9 Delisle also drew a  Guillaume Delisle, L’Amerique meridionale (1700 and 1708); Pieter van der Aa, L’Amerique meridionale (1710); Nouvelle carte de geographie de la parte meridionale (1732); Guillaume Delisle, Carte d’Amérique (1733 and 1774); Jean Baptiste Louis Clouet, Carte d’Amérique (1785). 9

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Fig. 2.2  Luis Ernot’s ethnonym placement

larger-scale map, Carte du Paraguay, in 1703, which presented a different ethnic geography. Drawing upon a manuscript map by Juan Ramón, a chaplain based in Lima, Peru, this regional map placed Charrúas in the southeast of the region, Yaros east of the Uruguay River, and Tapes near the headwaters of the Rio Negro (Fig.  2.3). This family of maps also shared a unique toponym that distinguished them from others: they plotted a “doctrina de Francisco de Ribas,” which likely referred to a Mercedarian mission founded in 1664 and abandoned two years later.10 This work also circulated widely, being printed directly or with slight

10  On the Doctrina de Francisco de Ribas, see Archivo General de la Nación, Argentina (AGN-A),  IX. 6-9-7, (1743-04-30); Gregorio Funes, Ensayo de la historia civil de Buenos Aires, Tucuman y Paraguay, 2nd ed., vol. 1 (Buenos Aires: Imprenta Bonaerense, 1856), 294–295.

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Fig. 2.3  Guillaume Delisle’s ethnonym placement

modifications by the royal geographers or engravers of France, England, and the Holy Roman Empire.11 Two decades after Delisle’s Carte du Paraguay, in 1722, Buenos Aires-­ based Jesuit Juan Francisco Dávila drew Paraquarie provinciae, in which he moved Charrúas and Yaros westward across the Uruguay River and added Bohanes, Manchados, and Martidanes (Fig.  2.4).12 This ethnic geography was adjusted and reprinted by European Jesuits, Portuguese mariners, and Spain’s Postmaster General.13 Eleven years after Dávila’s 11  Juan Ramón, Carta geográfica de las provincias de la gobernación del Rio de la Plata (1683); Guillaume Delisle, Carte du Paraguay (1703, 1710, 1716, 1732, 1733, and 1741); Nicolas de Fer, Le Chili, Le Paraguay (1737); Johann Baptist Homann, Typus Geographicus Chili Paraguay ([ca. 1745]); Emanuel Bowen, A New and Accurate Map of Paraguay (1747, 1752, and 1760); Didier Robert de Vaugondy, Amerique méridionale (1750); Nicolaes Visscher and Elizabeth Verseyl Visscher, Carte du Paraguay ([1702–1726]). 12  A 1688 manuscript map of the region also included Charrúas between the Paraná and Uruguay rivers. AGI, Mapas y Planos, Buenos Aires, 32. 13  H. Juan Francisco Dávila, Paraquarie Provinciae (1722); Matthäus Seutter, Paraquarie Provinciae (1726); Christoph Dietell, Die Landschaft nider Paraguaria (1728); Antonio

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Fig. 2.4  Juan Francisco Dávila’s ethnonym placement

work, French Royal Geographer Jean Baptiste Bourguignon d’Anville printed yet another map of Paraguay, Le Paraguay, in which he attempted to reconcile the differences in earlier patterns of ethnonym placement. D’Anville distinguished “Ancient Charuas” from “Charuas,” thereby purporting a westward migration across the Uruguay River. His map followed Dávila’s work in marking Yaros and Abipones, yet eliminated Bohanes, Manchados, and Martidanes; it also drew upon the work of Portuguese Jesuit Diogo Soares, whose 1731 chart of the Rio de la Plata estuary was the first map to include Minuanes (Fig.  2.5).14 D’Anville’s ethnonym Machoni, Descripción de las provincias del Chaco (1732); Johannes Petroschi, Paraquariae Provinciae (1732 and 1760); [Carte des bassins des Rios Parana Uruguay et Rio Grande de San Pedro] ([1730–1739]), Bibliothèque nationale de France (BNF), Cartes et plans, CPL GE DD-2987 (9449 B); [Carte manuscrite de l’embouchure de Rio da Prata] (1740), BNF, Cartes et plans, CPL GE DD-2987 (9450); Neuste Vorstellung und Beschreibung…Provinz Paraquay (1760); Mapa topográfico que manifiesta las provincias (1770); Martin Dobrizhoffer, Mappa Paraquariae (1784). 14  D’Anville consulted numerous Jesuit maps for the production of Le Paraguay. Júnia Ferreira Furtado, O mapa que inventou o Brasil (Rio de Janeiro: Versal, 2013), 81–82.

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Fig. 2.5  Jean Baptiste Bourguignon d’Anville’s ethnonym placement

placement was the most widely copied of all groups, appearing in his continental-­scale map, L’Amerique Meridionale, and over three dozen others in Europe and the United States.15 Versions of both Dávila’s and 15  Diogo Soares, O grande Rio da Prata (1731); Jean Baptiste Bourguignon d’Anville, Le Paraguay (1733 and 1760); Jean Baptiste Bourguignon d’Anville, El Paraguai (1733); Jean Baptiste Bourguignon d’Anville, Carte de l’Amérique méridionale (1737, 1748, and 1760); O grande Rio da Prata (1740); Jean Baptiste Bourguignon d’Anville, South America (1755, 1772, 1775, and 1787); Jacques Bellin, Carte du Paraguay (1756, 1764, and 1771); Antoine Prevost, Carte du Paraguay (1756); Miguel Ciera, Fos do Rio da Prata (1758); Mapa de los confines de las dos coronas (1760); Tomás López de Vargas Machuca, Parte del Paraguay ([1758]); Isaak Tirion, Kaart van het Onderkoningschap van Peru (1765); Rigobert Bonne, Carte du Paraguay (1771 and 1782); Louis Delarochette, South America (1771); Verem Rossi, Carta esatta rappresentante il corso del fiume Paraguay (1777); Andrea Scacciati, Nuova ed esatta carta della America (1777); Jean Baptiste Bourguignon d’Anville, Carte qui représente la partie méridionale du Brésil (1779, France and Italy); Louis Brion de la Tour, L’Amérique meridionale (1783); Thomas Kitchin, Chart of the Rio de la Plata (1783); Louis Brion de la Tour, Chili, Paraguay (1786); Jean Baptiste Bourguignon d’Anville, Karte von Sud-America (1786); Thomas Kitchin, South America (1787 and 1794); Moithey, Amérique meridionale (1788); Thomas Bowen, An Accurate Map of South

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D’Anville’s maps were used by Portuguese and Spanish royal courts in their 1750 partitioning of South America and cited by Luso-American officials seeking to rectify boundary disputes fifty-three years later.16 The remaining two groups derived from the work of Spanish mapmakers. In 1775, Spanish royal cartographer Juan de la Cruz Cano y Olmedilla, a former student of D’Anville, printed América Meridional, which provided an unprecedented level of toponymic and ethnographic detail. Cruz Cano appears to have consulted a 1749 map drawn by Jesuit Joseph Quiroga, who had been a chaplain for the midcentury boundary demarcations. Quiroga’s map was the first to include the ethnonym Guenoas and the first to place Bohanes east of the Uruguay River, and Cruz Cano built upon it by moving Charrúas to the far southwest of the region and Guenoas to the southeast (Fig.  2.6).17 This print was instrumental in a second round of border negotiations between Portugal and Spain in 1777, and was carried by Luso-Hispanic mapping teams as they traveled the new

America, ([1793]); Jedidiah Morse, A Map of South America (1794); William Guthrie, A Map of South America (1796); A Chart of the Rio de la Plata (1800); Mathew Carey, A Map of South America (1804). 16  Furtado, O mapa que inventou o Brasil, 81–82, 145–167, 324–326; Mário Olímpio Clemente Ferreira, “O Mapa das Cortes e o Tratado de Madrid a cartografia a serviço da diplomacia,” Varia História 23, no. 37 (June 2007); Instituto Histórico e Geográfico Brasileiro (IHGB), Conselho Ultramarino, Arq. 1.3.7, fs. 239–39v; Arquivo Nacional Rio de Janeiro (AN), D9. Vice-Reinado, caixa 494, pac. 1, fs. 3–3v. 17  Juan de la Cruz Cano y Olmedilla, Mapa geográfico de America Meridional (1775), Joseph Quiroga, Mapa de las missiones (1749). Other maps in this group included Rigobert Bonne, Carte de la partie meridionale du Brésil (1780); Rigobert Bonne, Brésil et pays des Amazone (1788); Louis Delarochette, Colombia Prima or South America (1797 and 1807 [i.e. 1816]); Giovanni María Cassini, Il Brasile (1798 [i.e. 1801]); John Pinkerton, South America (1802 [i.e. 1807]); Aaron Arrowsmith, South America (1804); William Kneass, South America (1806); John Pinkerton, Viceroyalty of La Plata (1806 [i.e. 1807]); John Cary, A New Map of South America ([1807] and 1811); Aaron Arrowsmith, Outlines of the Physical and Political Divisions of South America (1811, 1814, and 1817); John Pinkerton and Lewis Hebert, La Plata (1811 [i.e. 1815] and 1818), John Pinkerton and Lewis Hebert, South America (1811 [i.e. 1815] and 1818); William Kneass, South America (1814); John Moffat, South America (1814); William Heather, A New Chart of the Coast of Brazil (1815); Adrien Hubert Brué, Carte encyprotype de l’Amérique méridionale (1816), plate 31 and plates 32–35; Henry Schenck Tanner, South America (1818 [1826]); Jacob Abbot Cummings, South America (1820); John Thomson, South America ([1822]); Henry Schenck Tanner, Chili, La Plata, and Uruguay (1845); Samuel Augustus Mitchell, Chili, La Plata and Uruguay (1847 and 1850 [i.e. 1852]); “Organicación política y administrativa del Virreynato de Buenos Aires,” n.d., AGN-A, Mapas y planos, IV-168.

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Fig. 2.6  Juan de la Cruz Cano y Olmedilla’s ethnonym placement

border the following decade.18 It informed approximately thirty other maps printed through 1850  in Europe and the United States. If Cruz Cano’s map shaped the boundary demarcations, a new map produced by one of the expeditions’ commanding officers would present the final ethnographic rendering of the region. Félix de Azara, a Spanish naval officer, drafted Carte générale du Paraguay in 1800 to accompany his widely circulated travel account, Voyages dans l’Amérique Meridionale. In this map, he scrubbed the regional landscape of nearly all ethnonyms, leaving only Charrúas and Minuanes along the eastern coastline of the Uruguay River (Fig. 2.7). Azara’s rendering influenced Spanish, Portuguese, and Brazilian geographers who sought to map post-independence states in the region as

18  Thomas R. Smith, “Cruz Cano’s Map of South America, Madrid, 1775,” Imago Mundi 20 (1966); André Ferrand de Almeida, “O mapa geográfico de América Meridional, de Juan de la Cruz Cano y Olmedilla,” Anais do Museu Paulista 17, no. 2 (July-December 2009); AN, 86. Secretário de Estado, cod. 104, v. 11, fs. 210–10v.

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Fig. 2.7  Félix de Azara’s ethnonym placement

late as 1868.19 Thereafter, ethnonyms would only appear in historical maps produced by anthropologists and historians, who firmly situated Indigenous peoples in a distant past. These general groupings were not without outliers. British royal engraver Emmanuel Bowen’s 1747 A New and Accurate Map of Paraguay presented nearly the exact ethnonym pattern as Delisle’s Carte du Paraguay (Fig. 2.3), yet shifted Yaros northward to what is now southern Brazil. Similarly, in a 1784 map of Paraguay, Jesuit Martín Dobrizhoffer mirrored the north to south ethnonym pattern of Yaros, Bohanes, 19  Félix de Azara, Carte générale du Paraguay (1800); Agustín Ibáñez y Bojons, Carta geográfica para la precisa intelegencia del papel que acompaña (1804); Agustín Ibáñez y Bojons, Plano que sólo manifiesta lo indispensable (1804); Mapa geografico em que se reprez.ta a repartiçao dos ramos de dizmos da fronteira do Rio Pardo (1806), Arquivo Histórico do Exército, 06.04.3193; Félix de Azara, Partie de la prov. ou Gouv. de Buenos Ayres (1809); José de Espinosa y Tello, Carta esferica de la parte interior (1810); Thunot Duvotenay, Mappa da provincia de San Pedro (1810, 1830, and 1839); Antônio Eleuthério de Camargo, Carta topográfica da provincia de São Pedro do Rio Grande do Sul (1868); Carta corográfica del virreynato (n.d.).

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Martidanes, and Manchados that had emerged in Jesuit maps decades earlier, yet shifted the labels eastward to the Atlantic coast (Fig. 2.4). Several mapmakers plotted ethnonyms in such distinct ways that their works did not fit into any group. Sometimes this deviation derived from more precise knowledge of regional geography or Indigenous spatial practices, as mapmakers labeled not only ethnonyms but particular sites of activity. Jesuit Miguel Marimón marked the Cerro Aceguá as a site where Guenoas buried their dead and the Cerro Ibiti María as a site of ceremony for Guenoa spiritual leaders, while José Cardiel, also of the Society of Jesus, plotted a mission to Guenoas and Yaros near the headwaters of the Rio Negro. Decades later, José de Saldanha, a Portuguese geographer for latter boundary demarcations, marked a “Minuán Village” (Povoação dos Minuanos), near the interimperial borderline.20 In other instances, pejorative identifiers, such as “barbarians” (indios bárbaros) or “infidels” (indios infieles), took the place of ethnonyms, as occurred in a map that accompanied Ruy Díaz de Guzmán’s 1612 chronicle, Historia Argentina, and a 1752 map attributed to Cardiel.21 Remaining outliers tended to be published maps whose idiosyncrasies likely emerged in the process of copying from multiple sources.

Maps, Migration, and Memory Grouping maps according to ethnonym placement reveals genealogies of knowledge production only loosely connected with on-the-ground events or the locations and identities of Native communities. At first glance, this descriptive account of ethnogeographic patterns indicates a straightforward flow of information. Travelers to or administrators in the eastern Rio de la Plata consulted with Indigenous informants or rural inhabitants to produce textual accounts or manuscript maps, which in turn influenced the works of European engravers. Many manuscript maps eventually disappeared, but engraved maps and plates circulated among networks of publishing houses and royal courts in Europe and, later, in the United States.22 While myriad 20  Miguel Marimón, “[Mapa de las estancias]” (1753); José Cardiel, Parte de la America Meridional (1760); José de Saldanha, Mappa corographico da Capitania de S. Pedro (1801). 21  Ruy Díaz de Guzmán, “[Mapa de América del Sur desde el Ecuador hasta el Estrecho de Magallanes] ([1600s]); José Cardiel, Mapa de la Governacion del Paraguay, y la de Buenos Aires (1752). 22  Guaraní from the missions not only informed Jesuit-drawn maps, but authored maps of their own. Artur H. F. Barcelos, “A cartografia indígena no Rio da Prata colonial,” X encon-

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sources informed published maps of the region, chroniclers shaped the earliest maps and Jesuits proved the principal informants through the mideighteenth century, when they were supplanted by Luso-Hispanic boundary commissions. Once in circulation, published maps constituted their own discursive universe, as print houses purchased or copied one another’s plates, reinforcing one another’s renderings in a constant feedback loop. Some mapmakers reprinted the exact physical landscape from earlier plates, excising ethnonyms in favor of more toponyms, while other mapmakers superimposed the exact ethnonym layout of earlier maps upon entirely new plates. This decontextualized production of abstract ethnogeographic knowledge generated numerous incongruities. A single mapmaker might present contradictory ethnonym patterns within a single atlas or prints on various scales. For example, Guillaume Delisle’s L’Amerique Meridionale centered Guaraníes and omitted Charrúas, while his Carte du Paraguay did the opposite. These two prints appeared together in numerous atlases during the first half of the eighteenth century. In some cases, a mapmaker’s continental-­scale print included ethnonyms while their regional map omitted them entirely, as occurred with John Thomson’s South America (Fig. 2.6) and his Peru, Chili and La Plata, which appeared together in an 1822 atlas. Some of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries’ most well-­ known mapmakers, including Frederick de Wit, Johann Baptist Homann, Rigobert Bonne, and Louis Delarochette, produced similar contradictions, and their maps therefore spanned multiple groups. This cartographic corpus presented a fluid relationship between ethnonyms and toponyms, as ethnic labels transformed over time to physical features and vice versa. Patos as an ethnonym often appeared as “Land of the Patos” (Terra dos Patos) and eventually transformed into the toponym “Patos Lake” (Lagoa dos Patos). The ethnonym Ibicuit (Fig. 2.2) eventually became the Ibicuí River, while Carcaraña was represented as a toponym in most maps following the Cruz Cano pattern, only to appear as “Carcarana Indians” (Ind.s Carcacana) in a late colonial map of the Viceroyalty of the Rio de la Plata.23 Sometimes ethnonyms and toponyms tro estadual de história, 2010. For more on ethnonyms in early travel accounts and chronicles of the region, see Darío Arce Asenjo, “Etnónimos indígenas en la historiografía uruguaya: Desensamblando piezas de diferentes puzzles,” Anuario de antropología social y cultural en Uruguay 13 (2015). 23  “Organicación política y administrativa del Virreynato de Buenos Aires,” n.d., AGNA, Mapas y planos, IV-168.

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appeared side by side: an 1811 map by Aaron Arrowsmith included Tapes, TAPES, Serra dos Tapes, and Cordillera de Tape in distinct places and separated by other ethnonyms (Fig. 2.6).24 Yet in other cases mapmakers chose one or the other: the movement of the ethnonym Charrúa to lands west of the Uruguay River coincided with the renaming of the “Charrúa River” (Rio de los Charrúas) as the Gualeguay River in that same space, while the absence of the ethnonym Minuanes coincided with the presence of the Minuanes Stream (Arroio dos Minuanos) or Minuanes Crossing (Paso dos Minuanos) in certain maps. The fluidity between ethnonyms and toponyms was also apparent in mapmakers’ occasional use of a uniform font type or ambiguous terms. Wytfliet’s 1597 map used an identical typeface to label CARIOS, an ethnonym, and MORPION, which referred to purported silver mines and later to lands between Rio de Janeiro and the Rio de la Plata. Numerous seventeenth- and eighteenth-century maps labeled Caapi and Caaguas in the northern part of the region, Guaraní-derived terms that would have likely meant “over/in the forest” (ka’api) and “from the forest” (ka’aguy) (Fig. 2.2).25 That ethnonyms would vary between maps and become conflated with toponyms is unsurprising, given that the shifting nature of Indigenous identification and the mobility of Native communities belied European cartographic conventions. Autonomous Native peoples in the region organized themselves into seasonally itinerant communities of several dozen to several hundred members, known as tolderías. Certain Indigenous leaders, known as caciques, developed long-distance networks of kinship, political authority, and trade along subregional corridors, yet local ties generally superseded ethnic affiliation. Colonial observers interpreted such nodal, dynamic modes of social organization via the language of static ethnic polities within singular spaces, yet such efforts at ethnification proved to be contradictory and incomplete translations. There is little evidence to suggest that the principal ethnic labels deployed in regional maps were meaningful to the people to whom they purported to describe. Moreover, as community identity appeared to have been connected to place, the haphazard plotting of ethnonyms undermined whatever opaque connections they might have had to Indigenous social organization. In the few instances where mapmakers included details beyond an ethnonym, 24  Aaron Arrowsmith, Outlines of the Physical and Political Divisions of South America (1811, 1814, and 1817). 25  The ethnonym Caamo appeared north of Caaguas, but its translation is more unclear.

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they emphasized tolderías mobility to question their humanity: a 1760 version of D’Anville’s L’Amerique Meridionale labeled Minuanes “half human” (Demi-hommes), while Qurioga’s 1749 map claimed that Charrúas were “infidels” who “invoke the Devil.” A vast dissonance thus emerged between the ethnic geographies represented in maps and those evident in manuscript records from the region.26 This breach would only grow over time, a striking development given the increased precision with which mapmakers measured the physical landscape. As European engravers and Jesuits alike consulted earlier maps and texts, they deployed ethnogeographic renderings more consistent with the previous century than their own. The proliferation of print maps during the eighteenth century exacerbated this situation, as many did not refer to Rio de la Plata-based sources of ethnographic information at all. Ultimately, the appearance and disappearance of ethnonyms more closely corresponded with aesthetic choices or with scale than the acquisition of new information. One example of this phenomena is the movement of the ethnonym Charrúas from lands east of the Uruguay River to lands west and then back. Sixteenth-century travel accounts labeled Charrúas, or similarly spelled ethnonyms, along the northern coast of the Rio de la Plata near its confluence with the Paraná and Uruguay rivers (Fig. 2.1), but at the time the Rio de la Plata and the Paraná River were commonly considered a single body of water and the Uruguay River was often omitted from geographical works. As subsequent mapmakers and writers began to distinguish these three rivers, along with the nearby Rio Negro, as meaningful spatial divisions, they interpreted earlier accounts according to their contemporary spatial imagination and positioned the ethnonym accordingly. Notwithstanding their inconsistencies and ambiguities, these maps and their ethnonym patterns were read by travelers, administrators, and others in the eastern Rio de la Plata. The copying of ethnic geographies was not a unidirectional process from text or manuscript map to engraved atlas, as travelers often carried published maps and drew upon them for their texts and drawings. Information on a map’s readership is notoriously elusive, yet several references point to the circulation of the maps in question. For example, Paraguay-based Jesuit Pedro Lozano included a map by Antonio 26  On the use of ethnonyms in manuscript texts, see Jeffrey A.  Erbig, Jr., and Sergio Hernán Latini, “Across Archival Limits: Imperial Records, Changing Ethnonyms, and Geographies of Knowledge,” Ethnohistory 66, no. 2 (2019), 259–264.

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Machoni (Fig. 2.4) in his 1733 chorographic account of the Chaco, while a map drawn by Jacques Bellin (Fig. 2.5) illustrated Jesuit Pierre François Xavier Charlevoix’s 1756 Histoire du Paraguay.27 Likewise, the Luso-­ Hispanic boundary commissions deployed to the region at the eighteenth century’s midpoint consulted maps drawn by Delisle (Fig. 2.3), Quiroga (Fig. 2.6), and Cardiel, some of which they found housed in the archives of nearby Jesuit-Guaraní missions. They carried printed maps along their itinerant campsites and consulted with Indigenous guides to adjust the maps’ errors.28 These scant references most often addressed physical geographies, but several sources indicate that regional readers consulted maps for their ethnonym positionings as well. An anonymous manuscript map printed in 1740 included ethnonym patterns that resembled Dávila’s Paraquarie provinciae, published in Rome in 1722 (Fig.  2.4).29 Félix de Azara was more explicit, suggesting that the fluidity and dynamism of ethnic identities made their representations in maps inconsistent and antiquated: “when reports are made regarding [Indigenous nations], new ones are always discovered but it remains unknown whether older ones have disappeared…[in Jesuit maps of the Chaco] there is hardly enough room to write the names of so many nations…I have no doubt that from the Rio de la Plata [estuary] northward there are no nations beyond those I have described.”30 Rejecting the ethnic geographies of earlier mapmakers, namely Cruz Cano’s 1775 map (Fig.  2.6), Azara took a reductionist approach in his own ethnonym positioning (Fig. 2.7). Other members of the boundary commissions did not directly mention ethnonym locations in earlier maps, but their geographically based ethnographies indicate that

27  Miguel Asúa, Science in the Vanished Arcadia: Knowledge of Nature in the Jesuit Missions of Paraguay and Rio de la Plata (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2014), 173, 183. 28  Rodolfo Garcia, ed., Anais da Biblioteca Nacional do Rio de Janeiro, vol. 52 (Rio de Janeiro: M.E.S.—Serviço Gráfico, 1930), 249; Anais da Biblioteca Nacional do Rio de Janeiro, vol. 53 (Rio de Janeiro: M.E.S.—Serviço Gráfico, 1931), 232, 248, 251, 299, 302, 315–316; AN, 1A. Cisplatina, caixa 494, pac. 1, fs. 2–3; AN, 86. Secretário de Estado, cod. 104, v. 9, fs. 153-153v; Biblioteca Nacional do Brasil (BNB),  I-28,28,18, f. 12v; BNB, 5,4,035 (Rio de Janeiro, 1783-01-01), IHGB, Conselho Ultramarino, Arq. 1.2.1, fs. 30-30v; IHGB, Conselho Ultramarino, Arq. 1.3.7, fs. 239-239v. 29  “[Carte manuscrite de l’embouchure de Rio da Prata]” (1740), BNF, Cartes et plans, CPL GE DD-2987 (9450) 30  Félix de Azara, Viajes por la América del Sur, 2d ed. (Montevideo, Uruguay: Biblioteca del Comercio del Plata, 1850), 36–37, 54, 60, esp. 202.

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they likely read them for this purpose.31 What is less clear is whether colonial maps connected to or translated into meaningful categories for the Indigenous peoples to whom they referred, as the plotting of ethnonyms in maps of the region more readily evinces processes of ethnification than ethnogenesis.32 Post-independence anthropological, historical, and geographical studies in the region provide a more detailed picture of the pervasive influence of historic maps of the region upon imagined ethnic geographies. Beginning in the nineteenth century, but accelerating in the twentieth, writers drew upon the above maps as evidence of historical positionings of ethnic communities. For example, facsimiles of Dávila’s work (Fig. 2.4) appeared in Victor Martin de Moussy’s Description geographique et statistique de la Confederation Argentine in 1873 and in R.B. Cunninghame Graham’s A Vanished Arcadia in 1909.33 More frequently, scholars deployed historic maps alongside published textual sources to present their own ethnic geographies or claims of unidirectional Native migrations, most often across postcolonial borders.34 Uruguayan Jesuit Juan Faustino Sallaberry published Los Charrúas en la Cartografía Colonial in 1932, in which the he drew upon the works of Joannes Janssonius (Fig. 2.1), D’Anville (Fig. 2.5), Quiroga (Fig. 2.6), and others in order to claim that “Charrúa and Uruguayan are the same thing.” Sixty-one years later, Uruguayan anthropologist Renzo Pi Hugarte reprinted Quiroga’s map, referenced other Jesuit maps, and cited D’Anville’s work in narrating complex claims of ethnic migrations across Uruguay’s border with Argentina. Meanwhile, in Brazil, Riograndense historian Aurélio Porto drew upon Ernot’s (Fig.  2.2) and Delisle’s (Fig.  2.3) maps to locate Charrúas and Yaros, while Brazilian ethnohistorian John Monteiro drew upon Quiroga’s map to make demographic claims and stated that Ernot’s map “provides a general idea of the spatial distribution Guaraní, Gualacho,

31  Examples include the works of Portuguese mapmakers Sebastião Xavier da Veiga Cabral da Câmara, Francisco João Roscio, and José Saldanha, as well as Spanish mapmakers Juan Francisco de Aguirre, Diego de Alvear, José María Cabrer, and Andrés de Oyarvide. 32  Erbig and Latini, “Across Archival Limits,” 261–263. 33  Victor Martin de Moussy, Description geographique et statistique de la confederation argentine (Paris: Imprimeurs de l’Institut, 1873), planche 4; Fúrlong Cárdiff, Cartografía jesuítica, 57–58. 34  Jeffrey Alan Erbig, Jr., Where Caciques and Mapmakers Met: Border Making in EighteenthCentury South America (University of North Carolina Press, 2020), 163–74.

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Guanana, and Charrúa peoples.”35 When considering the many works that have drawn upon Sallaberry, Pi Hugarte, Porto, Monteiro, and others as a starting point for imagining ethnic geographies of the past, as well as works whose ethnic geographies mirror patterns of historic maps, a broader genealogy of knowledge becomes apparent.36 These ethnogeographic imaginaries have in turn led to the assignation of ethnic identities in historic records, cartographic and otherwise. One of the few drawings of Indigenous peoples in the Rio de la Plata appeared in a map drawn by French writer Antoine-Joseph Pernety to accompany his account of travels to the Malvinas/Falkland Islands in 1760s. This map included a drawing of an Indigenous person dressed in a quillapi, a garment associated with Native vestment in the region, with the ambiguous label “savage of Montevideo” (Sauvage de Montevideo), an image that has been reprinted myriad times as an illustration in historical and anthropological works. Drawing upon historic maps or readings of historic maps, numerous writers suggested that the image referred to Charrúas, the principal exception being a 2010 compilation of notes and historical

35  Juan Faustino Sallaberry, Los charrúas en la cartografía colonial (Montevideo, Uruguay: Imprenta “El Siglo Ilustrado,” 1932), 3; Renzo Pi Hugarte, Los indios de Uruguay (Madrid: Editorial MAPFRE, 1993), 64–67; Aurélio Porto, História das missões orientais do Uruguai, vol. 1 (Rio de Janeiro: Imprensa Nacional, 1943), 203; John M. Monteiro, “Os guaraní e a história do Brasil Meridional, séculos XVI-XVII,” in História dos índios no Brasil, ed. Manuela Carneiro da Cunha (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1992), 479, 497 n. 4. Other examples include Luis María Torres, Los primitivos habitantes del delta del Paraná, vol. 4 (Buenos Aires: Imprensa de Coni Hermanos, 1911), 3; Carlos Teschauer, História do Rio Grande do Sul dos dois primeiros séculos, vol. 1 (São Leopoldo, Brazil: Editora Unisinos, 2002), 61, 64 n. 7; César Blás Pérez Colman, Historia de Entre Rios: Epoca colonial (1520–1810) vol. 1 (Paraná, Argentina: Imprensa de la Provincia, 1936), 60–61; S. Perea y Alonso, Apuntes para la prehistoria indígena del Rio de la Plata y especialmente de la Banda Oriental del Uruguay (Montevideo, Uruguay: Imprenta de A. Monteverde y Cía., 1937), 8; J. A. L. Tupí Caldas, “Etnologia sul-riograndense: Esboço fundamental,” Revista do Instituto Histórico e Geográfico do Rio Grande do Sul 22, no. 2 (1942): 319; Antonio Serrano, “Los tributarios del Rio Uruguay,” in Historia de la nación argentina, ed. Ricardo Levene, 3d ed., vol. 1 (Buenos Aires: Academia Nacional de la Historia, Editorial El Ateneo, 1961), 293; José Joaquín Figueira, Breviario de etnología y arqueología del Uruguay (Montevideo, Uruguay: Gaceta Comercial, 1965), 34–39. 36  Scholarship drawing upon written manuscripts has notably presented much different visions of Indigenous geographies. See, for example: Diego Bracco, Charrúas, guenoas y guaraníes: Interacción y destrucción, indígenas del Rio de la Plata (Montevideo, Uruguay: Linardi y Risso, 2004); Erbig, Jr., Where Caciques and Mapmakers Met.

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documents on Guenoas and Minuanes, which used the image for its cover.37 Similar gestures of retrospective ethnification of tolderías based upon supposed ethnic geographies have permeated scholarship on the region. These local spatial imaginations have also influenced hemispheric-scale works and present-day activism. In his synthetic account of autonomous Indigenous communities throughout the Americas, the North American scholar David Weber reproduced Azara’s ethnonym pattern (Fig. 2.7) in a map of the northern half of the Viceroyalty of the Rio de la Plata.38 An Austrian-based historical GIS project, HGIS de las Indias, includes a map layer that resembles the regional ethnonym pattern of Cruz Cano’s work (Fig.  2.6), albeit with numerous ethnonyms omitted.39 Meanwhile, Indigenous artists and activists in the United States and Canada have ostensibly drawn upon historical maps in an effort to create composite renderings of the original lands of ethnic communities throughout the Americas, including the eastern Rio de la Plata.40 The meanings inscribed onto ethnonyms via two centuries of scholarly and popular interpretations continue to inform Indigeneity in the region, as reemergent Indigenous communities in Uruguay and southern Brazil have self-identified as Charrúas to emphasize their descendance from tolderías. Regardless of whether Charrúa was a meaningful term for colonial-era tolderías, it has taken upon present-day significance via processes of ethnogenesis.41 Here 37  Samuel Kirkland Lothrop, “Indians of the Paraná Delta, Argentina,” Annals of the New  York Academy of Sciences 33 (1932): 104; Pi Hugarte, Los indios de Uruguay, 105; Rodolfo Maruca Sosa, La nación charrúa (Montevideo, Uruguay: Editorial “Letras,” 1957), 135; Daniel Vidart, El mundo de los charrúas, 3rd ed. (Montevideo, Uruguay: Ediciones de la Banda Oriental, 1996), 12; José M. López Mazz and Diego Bracco, Minuanos: Apuntes y notas para la historia y la arqueología del territorio guenoa-minuán (indígenas de Uruguay, Argentina y Brasil) (Montevideo, Uruguay: Linardi y Risso, 2010). 38  David J. Weber, Bárbaros: Spaniards and Their Savages in the Age of Enlightenment (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2005), 69. 39  Werner Stangl, “HGIS de las Indias: Sistema de información histórico-geográfica de Hispanoamérica para los años 1701–1808,” accessed December 18, 2018, https://www. hgis-indias.net/. To view this layer, navigate to “WEBGIS,” open the tab “Indígenas, rebeliones, colonias extranjeras” under “Capas” and select “Indígenas (grupo).”  To view the website’s disclaimer regarding digital mapping and Indigenous peoples’ territorialities, open the dropdown menu “Inicio” and select “Advertencia general”.  40  Aaron Carapella, “Tribal Nations Maps,” accessed June 10, 2019, http://www.tribalnationsmaps.com/; Native Land Digital, “Native Land,” accessed June 10, 2019, https:// native-land.ca/. 41  For more on Charrúa reemergence and the significance of ethnonyms, see Magalhães de Carvalho, Ana Maria, and Mónica Michelena, “Reflexiones sobre los esencialismos en la

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and elsewhere, postcolonial agents have given the ethnonyms produced in colonial maps renewed meaning. A comprehensive and close reading of the ethnic geographies of historic maps of the eastern Rio de la Plata reveals that they were at once incongruent with patterns of identification apparent in textual records and significant for their having been interpreted as meaningful. Rather than correcting inaccuracies or deconstructing cartographic content as meaningless, this chapter has sought to demonstrate how mapmaking contributed to the production of ethnogeographic imaginations and to consider the legacies of this process. The first step was to demystify the voluminous and contradictory corpus of European cartographic visions of the region and the second was to provide an intertextual reading of maps and, where possible, their readership. The inclusion of ethnic labels was ubiquitous with early modern mapmaking, which rather than uniformly marking Indigenous lands as empty often showed that they were populated by autonomous peoples. Recent works have identified similar deployment and readings of ethnonyms in other parts of the Rio de la Plata, Brazil, and elsewhere, yet more work remains to determine the significance of these renderings not just for postcolonial readers but for colonial-era mapmakers and their contemporaries.42 How did the inclusion of inaccurate and shifting ethnonyms intersect with colonialera mapmakers’ efforts to project authoritative and stable knowledge? Did ethnonyms inform claims of territorial possession, did they affect administrators’ strategies vis-à-vis Native neighbors, and were they meaningful to Indigenous peoples themselves? With increased clarity of the overall patterns and flows of ethnogeographic knowledge evident in historic maps, more contextualized readings of individual maps or mapping endeavors can occur. antropología uruguaya: Una etnografía invertida,” Conversaciones del Cono Sur 3, no. 1 (2017); Andrea Olivera, Devenir charrúa en el Uruguay: Una etnografía junto con colectivos urbanos (Montevideo, Uruguay: Fondation pour l’Université de Lausanne, 2016); Ceres Víctora, “‘A viagem de volta’: O reconhecimento de indígenas no sul do Brasil como um evento crítico,” Sociedade e cultura 14, no. 2 (July–December 2011). 42  Maria de Fátima Costa, “De Xarayes ao Pantanal: A cartografia de um mito geográfico,” Revista do Instituto de Estudos Brasileiros, no. 45 (2007): 23–24, 29–30; Laura Aylén Enrique and María Laura Pensa, “Mapas sobre el Cono Sur americano,” in Entre los datos y los formatos: Indicios para la historia indígena de las fronteras en los archivos coloniales, ed. Lidia R.  Nacuzzi (Buenos Aires: Centro de Antropología Social IDES, 2018), 133–135; Loreley El Jaber, Un país malsano: La conquista del espacio en las crónicas del Rio de la Plata (siglos XVI y XVII) (Buenos Aires: Beatriz Viterbo Editora, 2011), 290–293; Mairton Celestino da Silva, “Índios, africanos e agentes coloniais na Capitania de São José do Piauí, 1720–1800,” Fronteiras & debates 3, no. 1 (2016): 118–119.

CHAPTER 3

Counting Heads: Indigenous Leaders in the Guaraní-Jesuit Missions Julia Sarreal

As an instrument for containing Portuguese expansion and incorporating frontier territory into the Spanish Empire, the missions were founded by Jesuit priests and the Guaraní starting in 1609. They subsequently became important population centers. As of the 1680s, over 50 percent of the Rio de la Plata populace lived in a Guaraní mission and in 1732, the mission population peaked with over 140,000 resident Indians. Because the Jesuits kept census records, we know that the number of Guaraní living in Mission Yapeyú alone in 1745 amounted to more than of half the total population of Buenos Aires a year earlier.1 The impact of the missions on the colonial regional economy was significant. Indeed it has been described as an economic powerhouse. According Juan Carlos Garavaglia, mission production accounted for 60–90 percent of all the cotton textiles, 30–60  Julia Sarreal, The Guaraní and Their Missions: A Socioeconomic History (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014), 1–3. 1

J. Sarreal (*) New College of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences, Arizona State University, Phoenix, AZ, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 F. Prado et al. (eds.), The Rio de la Plata from Colony to Nations, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60323-6_3

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percent of all the sugar, 15–30 percent of all the tobacco, and 15–25 percent of all yerba mate sold in mid-eighteenth-century Buenos Aires and Santa Fe.2 Mission management and oversight of several thousand inhabitants required a complex governing structure. That structure depended upon Indigenous leaders, which included the cabildo (town council) and caciques (hereditary leaders of cacicazgos or native lineage groups). Census data from 1735 and 1759 show cacique succession patterns, or how cacique leadership passed from one generation to the next. This chapter explores the continuities and ruptures in the cacicazgos that preceded the Jesuits and continued throughout the missions’ lifespan. The Spanish ideal of primogeniture succession (from father to eldest son) did not take into account Guaraní values regarding the traits of a good leader. However, the Guaraní pattern compensated for ineffective caciques with an assortment of other Guaraní positions of authority and provided access to leadership roles for non-caciques who possessed desirable qualities, but not the appropriate bloodline. By considering leadership qualities and not just lineal descent, these positions provided more flexible choices that allowed for greater continuity with pre-contact Guaraní ideas about leadership.

Caciques and Cacicazgo Organization The term “cacique” broadly refers to native hereditary leaders in Spanish America. Combining local, pre-Columbian practices and Spanish influences, caciques were natural lords, and benefited from privileges associated with nobility, such as exemption from taxes and use of the honorific “don.”3 Still, the authority, obligations, and privileges of a cacique were not well defined and varied both regionally and over time. Spanish colonial rule meant that throughout the Americas, caciques both gained and lost power.4 Caciques frequently asserted or defended 2  Juan Carlos Garavaglia, Economía, sociedad y regiones (Buenos Aires: Ediciones de la Flor, 1987), 161–165. 3  A royal cédula dated March 12, 1697 and reaffirmed in 1725 and 1766 declared that caciques should enjoy the same rights equal to those of the nobility of Castille. Guillermo Wilde, Religión y poder en las misiones de Guaraníes (Buenos Aires: Editorial Sb, 2009), 57. 4  Yanna Yannakakis both presents a succinct explanation of why scholars thought that caciques lost their political power and summarizes scholarship on successful cacique agency in Mesoamerica. Yanna Yannakakis, The Art of Being In-Between: Native Intermediaries, Indian Identity, and Local Rule in Colonial Oaxaca (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008),

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their rights to the title and its associated privileges by referring to lineage and hereditary concessions.5 Assertions of pure bloodline fit with Spanish expectations of hereditary succession. According to Spanish law, the title of cacique should pass from the father to his eldest son.6 Nonetheless, Spanish officials frequently removed caciques whom they found uncooperative and replaced them with individuals with less legitimate hereditary claims. As ethnohistorians have shown, cacique leadership in the Guaraní missions generally followed the broader Spanish American pattern of hereditary succession. Barbara Ganson argued that the Jesuits utilized caciques and cacicazgos to provide organizational stability and economic prosperity.7 Similarly, Guillermo Wilde asserted that caciques were the foundation of the mission’s political system and were key to its continuity and dynamism.8 Scholars recognize that cacique succession became more hereditary in the Guaraní missions without weakening the institution. Ganson indicated that the Jesuits made the title of cacique a hereditary position. In contrast, both Wilde and Kern acknowledged that cacique succession was often hereditary prior to European contact, but with more flexibility than father-­ to-­son succession.9 According to Guaraní traditional practice, succession was not limited to the biological son of the former cacique; rather, the 149–150. David Garrett provides a succinct summary of scholars’ arguments about caciques’ loss of power in Upper Peru and describes how some caciques in Cusco preserved their authority. David Garrett, Shadows of Empire: The Indian Nobility of Cusco, 1750–1825 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 148–180. 5  Sinclair Thomson, We Alone Will Rule: Native Andean Politics in the Age of Insurgency (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002), 27–35 and 64–105. Yannakakis The Art of Being In-Between, 136. Peter B. “Pure and Noble Indians, Untainted by Inferior Idolatrous Races”: Native Elites and the Discourse of Blood Purity in Late Colonial Mexico. Hispanic American Historical Review 91, no. 4 (2011): 633–663. 6  The Recopilación de leyes de los reynos de las Indias prohibited Spanish officials from removing or replacing caciques and asserted that, following pre-Columbian customs, sons should succeed their fathers as caciques Recopilación de Leyes de los Reynos de las Indias, 1680, Vol. 2. (Madrid: Boix, 1841), Book VI, Title VII, Law iii. 7  Barbara Ganson, The Guaraní Under Spanish Rule in the Rio de la Plata (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 58. 8  Wilde, Religión y poder, 23. 9  Wilde, Religión y poder, 56 and 141–142 and Guillermo Wilde, “Prestigio indígena y nobleza peninsular: La invención de linajes Guaraníes en las misiones del Paraguay,” Jahrbuch Für Geschichte Lateinamerikas 43 (2006), 140–141; Arno Alvarez Kern, Missões: Uma utopia política (Porto Alegre, Brazil: Mercado Aberto, 1982), 38–43.

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most capable leader was chosen from close family members belonging to a specific generation.10 The chosen successor had not only to belong to his predecessor’s lineage, he also needed to possess certain characteristics such as eloquence, generosity, and the prestige gained through warfare.11 Research on cacique succession disputes during the mission regime enables Wilde to argue that the Guaraní continued with this more liberal interpretation of father-to-son succession. But the fact that most of these disputes occurred only when a cacique died without leaving a biological son suggests that male primogeniture succession remained the prevailing practice during Spanish rule.12 Indigenous leaders—caciques and their associated lineage group—were an important organizational tool in the Guaraní missions. Native people generally joined a mission as part of a cacicazgo chiefdom and, although some cacicazgos disappeared, many continued throughout the life of the missions.13 The Guaraní spent a lot of time with other members of the same cacicazgo. They lived in close proximity to each other, generally in the same row (or rows) of houses14 and activities were frequently organized around their lineage group. The Guaraní received plots of land for farming and worked together on communal work projects based on their cacicazgo membership.15 Moreover, the mission population was divided into cacicazgos for counting and control purposes. For example, after mass, men and women went into the plaza and were separated by cacicazgo in order to identify those who did not attend religious services.16 The 10  Wilde refers to the work of Ana María Gorosito Kramer who, over forty years of research, has found that the Mbya (Guaraní in Misiones, Argentina) interpret “sons of the father” not as exclusively the biological sons of a man but rather as “sons of the eldest sister” for the purpose of leadership succession Wilde, “Prestigio indígena,” 140. 11  Wilde, “Prestigio indígena,” 127–137. 12  Wilde, Religión y poder, 137–144; Wilde, “Prestigio indígena,” 139–144. 13  Wilde, Religión y poder, 103; Juan de Escandón to Father Andres Marcos Burriel, Madrid, 18 June 1760. In Juan de Escandón S.J. y su carta a Burriel (1760), ed. Guillermo Furlong Cardiff. (Buenos Aires: Ediciones Theoria, 1965), 107–108. 14  Ramón Gutiérrez, Evolución urbanística y arquitectónica del Paraguay, 1537–1911 (Corrientes, Argentina: Universidad Nacional del Nordeste, 1975), 127. 15  Escandón to Burriel, 107–108; José Cardiel, “Breve relación de las misiones del Paraguay,” 1771, in Las misiones del Paraguay, ed. Héctor Sáinz Ollero (Madrid: Dastin Historia, 1989), 68; José Cardiel, “Costumbres de los Guaraníes,” 1779, in Historia del Paraguay: desde 1747 hasta 1767, trans. Pablo Hernández (Madrid: Librería General de Victoriano Suárez, 1919), 474. 16  Escandón to Burriel, 94.

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Guaraní also received goods distributed from mission supplies based on their cacicazgo. When distributing beef rations to the mission population, a Guaraní secretary called out the name of each family in a cacicazgo.17 Whether the result of Jesuit orders or Guaraní preferences, such frequent identification by cacicazgo likely reinforced an Indian’s sense of identity as belonging to a particular lineage group. Segregating the mission population into cacicazgos also facilitated administration. Over the course of the eighteenth century, an average of between 2500 and 4700 people lived in a single mission. With such large numbers, the mission population had to be broken down into smaller units for managerial purposes. Cacicazgos divided the population into more manageable sub-groups.18 Scholars have diverged regarding the impact of new leadership positions in the missions. In the 1960s, Branislava Susnik argued that they undermined caciques who lost power and authority while the cacicazgos remained important tools for organizing the population.19 By contrast, Arno Alvarez Kern argued that caciques remained important and, instead of declining or disappearing, their political role became increasingly complex in a shifting political reality.20 Wilde went further, claiming that caciques took advantage of these new leadership opportunities—cabildo positions, artisan and trade occupations, and military commands—to advance their prestige and legitimacy.21 Kazuhisa Takeda and others drew attention to new leadership structures based on militias and confraternities.22  Escandón to Burriel, 110; Cardiel, “Costumbres de los Guaraníes,” 484.  I calculated the average population of a mission by dividing the total population of all the missions by thirty. Ernesto J. A. Maeder and Alfredo S. C. Bolsi, “La población Guaraní de las misiones jesuíticas. Evolución y características (1671–1767),” Cuadernos de Geohistoria Regional 4 (1980), 42–44. In various censuses between 1732 and 1764, I only found three missions that recorded populations of less than one thousand. Copies of various censuses of the Guaraní missions, Archivo General de la Nación Argentina (AGN-A), Archivo y Colección de Andrés Lamas, Legajo 2609. 19  Branislava Susnik, El Indio colonial del Paraguay, Vol. 2, Los trece pueblos Guaraníes de las misiones, 1767–1810 (Asunción: Museo Etnográfico “Andrés Barbero,” 1966), 32–34. 20  Kern, Missões, 42. 21  Wilde, Religión y poder, 51. 22  Kazuhisa Takeda, “Las milicias guaraníes en las misiones jesuíticas del Rio de la Plata: Un ejemplo de la transferencia organizativa y tácticas militares de España a su territorio de ultramar en la primera época moderna,” Revista de Historia Social de las Mentalidades 20, no. 2 (2016): 33–72; Kazuhisa Takeda, “The Jesuit-Guaraní Confraternity in the Spanish Missions of South America (1609–1767): A Global Religious Organization for the Colonial Integration of Amerindians. Confraternitas 28, no. 1 (2017): 16–39; María Laura Salinas 17 18

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The findings presented below suggest that although Susnik correctly identified a reduced leadership role for caciques in the missions and she astutely identified cacicazgo as playing a more important organizational function than the cacique, she was wrong to blame cacique decline on the creation of new leadership positions. Abundant evidence indicates that at least some caciques gained access to the new positions and thereby created a more sizeable leadership role for themselves in the missions. Instead I argue that instituting male primogeniture succession weakened the authority and power of the caciques, and as a result, they functioned primarily as figureheads or nominal heads of their particular cacicazgo. Of all the leadership posts in the missions, being a member of the cabildo was the most important. Cabildo members tended to be the main mediators between the Jesuits and the Guaraní. As go-betweens among the two groups, they exercised significant power. In each mission, the Jesuits established a Guaraní cabildo to assist the two resident missionaries. In contrast to the lifetime title of cacique, cabildo membership was designed to rotate every year with the outgoing cabildo members electing their replacements. In practice, the Jesuits intervened in the process of selecting cabildo members by adding or removing names and then presenting the edited list to the Spanish governor of the region for his approval.23 The Jesuits perceived the dozen or so members of the cabildo as the most powerful Guaraní leaders; they treated the head of the cabildo (the corregidor) as their right-hand man and granted him a large degree of authority. His title in Guaraní, poroquaitara, translated as “he who arranges that which has to be done.”24 In addition to his leadership position in the cabildo, the corregidor also formally commanded his mission’s militia unit.25 and Pedro Miguel Omar Svriz Wucherer, “Liderazgo guaraní en tiempos de paz y de guerra. Los caciques en las reducciones franciscanas y jesuíticas, siglo XVII y XVIII,” Revista de Historia Militar 110 (2011): 113–152; Lía Quarleri, Lía, Rebelión y guerra en las fronteras del Plata: Guaraníes, jesuitas e imperios coloniales (Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2009); María Laura Salinas, “Liderazgos indígenas en las misiones jesuíticas. Títulos de capitanes concedidos a los caciques guaraníes en el Siglo XVII,” Folia Histórica del Nordeste 16 (2006): 267–275; and Mercedes Avellaneda. “El ejercito guaraní en las reducciones jesuitas del Paraguay,” História Unisinos 9, no. 1 (2005): 19–34. 23  Cardiel, “Breve relación,” 65–66. 24  Pablo Hernández, Misiones del Paraguay. Organización social de las doctrinas Guaraníes de la compañía de Jesús (Barcelona: Gustavo Gili, 1913), 1:110. 25  Wilde, Religión y poder, 75.

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As well as cabildo members and the corregidor, the Jesuits created a variety of other new leadership positions. Almost every mission activity was supervised by an overseer. In the area of conversion and religious ritual, sacristans helped the missionaries with the administration of the sacraments as well as other religious and church-related functions.26 Each of the artisan trades had its own leader. Work projects were separated by gender and had their own leaders.27 Obviously the political and social structure of the missions changed over time. This chapter explores the role of the caciques in the complex political structure during the mature era of Guaraní missions in the mid-­ eighteenth century. Conflicting pressures existed. On the one hand, the organizational importance of the cacicazgo imply that caciques had a key role. On the other hand, the various other leadership positions and special privileges granted to the cabildo suggest a reduced role for caciques. Information gleaned from mission censuses helps provide some answers.

Using Jesuit Censuses Jesuit missionaries compiled two kinds of records of their Guaraní charges, each with a distinct purpose. The first were the yearly summaries of the mission population and administration of the sacraments with the goal of documenting Catholic practices by the Guaraní converts.28 The second had the entirely different goal of counting the mission population for taxation assessment. Unlike missions elsewhere, the Guaraní missions had to pay the Crown every year tribute of one peso for each male between eighteen and fifty years of age. Caciques and their eldest sons were exempt as were the disabled or habitually ill, fugitives who escaped from the mission, Indians baptized within the last twenty years, and some twelve Guaraní leaders who were mostly church officials. The censuses thus identified each mission inhabitant as either qualifying—or not—for tribute assessment. To that end, missionaries compiled periodic censuses that named every member of the mission population, and categorized all relevant information for calculating tribute obligations, while grouping each person according to their cacicazgo.

 Escandón to Burriel, 90.  Cardiel, “Breve relación,” 67; Escandón to Burriel, 88, 92, and 116. 28  AGN-A, Archivo y Colección de Andrés Lamas, Legajo 2609. 26 27

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The basic census information began by specifying a cacicazgo and identifying the first and last name of the cacique, and frequently his age. The name of the wife of the cacique followed, showing her first name, and frequently her maiden name, but not her age; the names of the cacique’s unmarried children followed, along with the ages of their male offspring. The census noted if a person was a fugitive, habitually ill, had been baptized within the previous twenty years, or had been born at another mission. Following in order and in the same format, the census then listed each family in the cacicazgo. After the family lists, the census had separate categories for male orphans, female orphans, and widows. Each cacicazgo was recorded in a like fashion. Using this procedure, the number of males for which the mission had to pay tribute could easily be calculated. In most cases, the conclusion of the census document summarized all relevant information for taxation purposes. For the researcher, the sheer volume of information recorded in the censuses is daunting. The comprehensive census of 1735 listed the name of every single one of the 110,303 inhabitants of the thirty missions and situated each inhabitant within a nuclear family and cacicazgo. The information pertaining to a single mission was recorded in its own volume, which could run to well over one hundred pages in length. Such comprehensive censuses have been found for all thirty missions for the years 1735, 1772, 1784, 1799, and 1801. In addition, 1759 censuses have been located for the Santa Ana and Corpus Christi missions.29 The fact that individuals and their family members can be tracked over several decades points to the censuses being fairly accurate. For example, the Mbarire family can be traced in the Corpus Christi mission censuses from 1735 to 1801. In 1735, the cacique Marcelino Mbarire (aged 36) and his wife had four children, including their eldest son Rafael (age 14). In 1759, Rafael (at age 38) was now cacique and, with his wife, had two female children. Thirteen years later in 1772, Rafael (now aged 51) retained his cacique title and had two more children with a new wife. They included their oldest son, five-year-old Juan de la Cruz. In 1784, Juan de la Cruz (no age given) was named as cacique. Fifteen years later in 1799, Juan de la Cruz was still the cacique and had one son with his wife. The situation was identical in 1801. As the example of the Mbarire family 29  For the 1735 census see AGN-A IX, 18-8-2, 18-8-3, and 18-8-4; for 1759 see AGN-A IX 17-3-6; for 1772 see AGN-A IX 18-8-5, 18-8-6, and 18-8-7; for 1784 see AGN-A IX 18-7-2; for 1799 see AGN-A IX 18-2-2; for 1801 see AGN-A IX 18-2-6.

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demonstrates, census data enables the tracing of individuals and family lines from generation to generation based on cacicazgo membership and people’s names and ages. The consistency of the data permits a reliable identification of cacicazgo succession patterns. Scholars have only begun to explore the wealth of information contained in the data-rich Jesuit censuses.30 Branislava Susnik used censuses from 1735 to look at demographic trends and offer some conclusions about the cacicazgos. Susnik found that the number of cacicazgos increased in a couple of missions between 1657 and 1735, which she attributed primarily to Jesuit efforts to contain the population of any single mission by sending offshoots of a cacicazgo to another mission. Cacicazgos could also increase due to the new converts who together joined a mission as members of a cacicazgo.31 The present chapter departs from Susnik: it posits that instead of expanding, the number of cacicazgos remained either relatively stable or declined in the period from 1735 to 1759.

Cacique Succession in Santa Ana and Corpus Christi Missions, 1735 to 1759 In the censuses of 1735 and 1759, the Jesuits recorded the entire population of the Santa Ana and Corpus Christi missions. Both the 1730s and 1750s were tumultuous periods. In the 1730s, a series of overlapping hardships pummeled the missions: epidemics, the military draft, drought, and the Comunero Revolt in Paraguay. Between 1732 and 1740 the total mission population shrunk by almost half (from 141,182 to 73,910) due to flight and mortality.32 In the subsequent decade, the seven Guaraní missions east of the Uruguay River were forced to relocate according to the terms of the Treaty of Madrid signed between the Spanish and Portuguese Crowns in 1750. Many of the Guaraní refused to comply with the order. The result was the Guaraní War. Along with a decrease in the number of inhabitants, the missions also lost a significant amount of wealth and resources before the treaty was finally repealed in 1761. Given their location on the left bank of the Uruguay River, the Santa Ana and Corpus Christi missions felt less impact from the Guaraní War than other missions. 30  Until recently, most demographic studies of the Guaraní missions were based on the yearly summaries of the mission population taken from the records of Catholic sacraments. 31  Susnik, El Indio colonial, 113–115. 32  Maeder and Bolsi, “La población Guaraní,” 44.

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Hence, the census records showed fewer disruptions to the cacicazgos of these two missions in 1759 as compared to 1735. In contrast to 1735, both Santa Ana and Corpus Christi missions had a higher percentage of cacicazgos headed by caciques who were adult males (the preferred standard of the Spanish) in 1759 and no cacique or their family were fugitives. The twenty-four-year period between the two censuses is brief enough in many cases to trace cacicazgo leadership and examine how the title of cacique passed from one person to the next. Between 1735 and 1759, cacicazgo leadership remained remarkably constant. About thirty percent of the caciques in 1759 had held the same position in 1735—fourteen of Santa Ana’s thirty-nine caciques and twelve of Corpus Christi Mission’s forty-six caciques (see Table 3.1). Though leadership was fairly stable, the cacicazgos themselves were less so. In addition to the cacicazgos that had existed in 1735, Corpus Christi added two new cacicazgos while Santa Ana Mission eliminated eight. The question arises as to what led Corpus Christi Mission to add two new cacicazgos. While the number of the mission’s inhabitants grew from 2669 to 4753 persons between 1735 and 1759, population increase was not the reason.33 Instead, the new cacicazgos were made up of a small number of newly converted Guañana (also known as Guayaná) who joined the Corpus Christi mission during those years. Between 1722 and 1737, the Jesuits had unsuccessfully attempted to establish a mission among the Gê-speaking Guañana dispersed in the region north of the Guaraní Table 3.1  Cacicazgo leadership, 1735 to 1759

Same cacique as previous census New cacique No cacique New cacicazgo Total cacicazgos Cacicazgos that disappeared from previous period

Santa Ana

Corpus Christi

#

%

#

%

14 25 0 0 39 8

36 64

12 32 0 2 46

26 70 4

Sources: 1735 censuses, AGN IX, 18-8-2; 1759 censuses, AGN IX, 17-3-6

33  1735 figure from Corpus Christi census, AGN-A IX, 18-8-2; 1759 figure from summary census, AGN-A, Archivo y Colección de Andrés Lamas, Legajo 2609.

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missions and along the Paraná River.34 Despite their overall failure, the Jesuit fathers managed to convince some Guañana to join the Corpus Christi mission, at the time the northernmost mission on the right bank of the Paraná River. In 1724, two new Guañana cacicazgos joined the mission. Corpus Christi was one of the very few missions to incorporate cacicazgos of newly converted Indians. Between 1715 and 1735 only four cacicazgos—the two from Corpus Christi mission in addition to two others—joined any of the thirty Guaraní missions. No other cacique had converted to Catholicism and joined a Guaraní mission during the twenty years prior to 1735. The remaining 1102 cacicazgos had already been members of the Guaraní missions for over a generation. The number of Guañana Indians in Corpus Christi stayed small. In 1735, the two Guañana cacicazgos had ten families between them. By 1759, two more Guañana cacicazgos with four families had joined the mission, but they disappeared again in the 1772 census. According to Branislava Susnik, the Guañana population formed a separate barrio at the Corpus Christi mission.35 While this may have been true, censuses also indicate that some Guañana families joined Guaraní cacicazgos, at least initially.36 Furthermore, Guañana women intermarried with Guaraní men and consequently became identified with Guaraní cacicazgos and conversely, Guaraní women married Guañana men and became identified with Guañana cacicazgos.37 Such occurrences, however, were rare. The censuses reveal that relatively few outsiders joined a Guaraní-Jesuit mission in the eighteenth century. Of the 25,165 families in all thirty Guaraní 34  Francisco Machón, La reducción de Guayanas del Alto Paraná San Francisco de Paula (Misiones, Argentina: author’s edition, 1996), 19–28. Various Jesuit letters about their unsuccessful attempts to establish a mission among the Guañana Indians and the incorporation of Guañana Indians into Corpus Christi can be found in Jaime Cortesão, ed. Antecedentes do tratado de Madri: Jesuítas e bandeirantes no Paraguai (1703–1751) (Rio de Janeiro: Biblioteca Nacional, 1955), 247–255. 35  Susnik, El Indio colonial, 136. 36  The 1735 census of Corpus Christi recorded ten Guañana families belonging to preexisting Guaraní cacicazgos. Four of the five Guañana males explicitly identified in Guaraní cacicazgos were listed as part of a single Guañana cacicazgo (Pinchana) in the 1759 census. 37  In 1734, the Jesuit priest assigned to Corpus Christi reported that the thirty-six to forty Guañana Indians who had joined the mission between 1722 and 1725 had married Guaraní spouses. Pedro Ximenes to the Father Superior, Mission Corpus, 1 Aug. 1734 in Cortesão, Antecedentes do tratado de Madri, 253–255. The 1759 census explicitly identifies seven Guañana women married to Guaraní men and the wives of many of the Guañana men had Guaraní surnames.

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­ issions, census takers classified only sixty-four families as being newly m converted Indians baptized between 1715 and 1735. Unlike Corpus Christi, Santa Ana Mission went through a process of eliminating cacicazgos. Instead of creating new cacicazgos with recently converted Indians, Santa Ana merged five newly converted Indian families into existent Guaraní cacicazgos. Even though Santa Ana’s population grew from 4083 to 5147 persons between 1735 and 1759, the mission did not create any new cacicazgos. Instead, Santa Ana extinguished a notable number of its cacicazgos; only thirty-nine of forty-seven cacicazgos remained in 1759. The disappearance of these cacicazgos is perplexing especially given the population increase. Santa Ana Mission’s approach to cacique succession helps explain what happened. Between 1735 and 1759, Santa Ana Mission by and large adhered to the father-to-son hereditary pattern with its cacicazgos (see Table 3.2). Of the twenty-five newly named caciques, nineteen were over twenty-three years of age in 1759, meaning that their relationship to the previous cacique can be established from the 1735 census. All but one of the nineteen caciques were the sons of prior caciques. There were no females who served as caciques in 1759. Only one cacique did not follow the usual father-to-son succession pattern; he was the brother of the previous cacique. The remaining six new caciques were born after 1735, which means that their exact relationship to the former cacique cannot be determined. However, it is likely that they were also offspring of the previous cacique. By way of contrast, in the case of the eight cacicazgos that no longer existed in 1759, their caciques probably died without male offspring. In Table 3.2  Succession Patterns, 1735–1759

Son parent-to-child succession Brother or nephew sibling succession Distant relative Unclear relation Cacique replaced Identifiable succession patterns Cacique too young to identify relationship New cacicazgo Total of newly-named caciques

Santa Ana

Corpus Christi

#

#

%

7 5 3 5 1 21 11 2 34

33 24 14 24 5 100

18 1 0 0 0 19 6 0 25

% 95 5

100

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1735, two of these eight caciques were childless, two had only female children, three had one son, and one had two sons. Given the high mortality rates among the Guaraní, it would be unsurprising if the male bloodline of these caciques had in fact died out and no living daughters were named as caciques. Instead of remaining faithful to the father-to-son hereditary pattern like that of Santa Ana Mission, Corpus Christi took a different approach. By naming leaders other than just the sons of the former caciques, Corpus Christi opted to preserve the integrity of its cacicazgos rather than father-­ to-­son succession. Of thirty-two newly named caciques, twenty-one were over twenty-three years of age in 1759, and consequently their relationship to the previous cacique can be determined from the 1735 census. Only seven of the twenty-one were sons of a former cacique. In contrast to the Santa Ana case, most of the caciques—fourteen of twenty-one— were not the sons of the former cacique. In five of the cacicazgos, appointments followed sibling succession with the position of leader filled by either the brother or nephew of the 1735 cacique. Three caciques were more distantly related to the 1735 cacique and five of the caciques did not have any clear kin relationship to the 1735 cacique. The most remarkable difference was that Corpus Christi Mission had three female caciques in 1759, all born after 1735. Cacicazgos that did not adhere to father-son succession probably did so because the former cacique had died without leaving a male heir. Only one cacique whose cacicazgo passed to a sibling, distant relative, or an unknown person had more than one son in 1735. All the other thirteen caciques had one or no male offspring. The cases of the Aguaiy/Mandagui and Ybape cacicazgos in the Corpus Christi Mission indicate that a person unrelated to the former cacique could become cacique if no relative could be located. In 1735, Bartholome Aguaiy (the cacique of the Aguaiy cacicazgo) was forty-four years old, with one daughter. No one else in the cacicazgo had the same surname. In contrast, ten of the fourteen families went by the family name of Mandagui. In 1759, Santiago Mandagui—of no obvious relation to the previous cacique—became cacique and his cacicazgo took on the Mandagui surname. The case of the Ybape cacicazgo points not only to the practice of naming a successor from outside of the previous cacique’s nuclear family, but also to the possibility of an individual’s removal from the position of cacique. In 1735, thirty-seven-year-old don Gaspar Yeyu Ybape was acted as cacique of the Ybape cacicazgo. The cacicazgo contained only two families—that of the cacique and that of his eldest son. Interestingly, don

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Gaspar’s son (don Manuel Yeyu) did not carry the Ybape family name. In addition to the two families, the cacicazgo also included three male orphans, including fifteen-year-old Simeon Yeyu. In 1759, Gaspar Yeyu Ybape was no longer cacique. Instead, the sixty-one-year-old Gaspar Yeyu was listed as head of the second family in the census. He had been replaced as cacique. None of Gaspar’s sons were listed as cacique in 1759; instead, forty-­ two-­year-old Simeon Ybape took over the position. Given the match of first name and birth date, this Simeon Ybape must have been the same orphaned Simeon Yeyu listed in 1735. It is possible that both Gaspar and Simeon inherited the Ybape cacicazgo through the bloodline of their mother or grandmother. In that case, they took their father’s surname of Yeyu at birth like was the normal practice and then switched to their maternal surname of Ybape upon becoming caciques. The same pattern may have held for the caciques of the Abaro, Aretu, Caitu, and Papa cacicazgos, who were listed in 1759 but had not appeared in their respective cacicazgos as of 1735. Inheritance based on indirect maternal bloodlines diverged from the direct father-to-son succession that the Jesuits promoted. While the 1735 and 1759 censuses show that both the Santa Ana and Corpus Christi missions followed European hereditary practices by transmitting cacicazgo leadership from father to son whenever possible, some flexibility remained. Complications in succession could arise. Similar to European monarchs and nobles, Guaraní caciques frequently died without an adult male heir. At times the heir was a minor. Other times, a cacique had only daughters. In even more complicated circumstances, a Guaraní cacique had no surviving offspring and high mortality rates increased that probability. As with Indigenous peoples throughout the Americas, many Guaraní died from exposure to European-introduced diseases such as smallpox and measles. In cases where a male heir did not exist, the approaches taken by the two missions differed. Santa Ana Mission rarely diverged from father-to-­ son succession (only in one of nineteen cases). In all the other instances, Santa Ana discontinued the cacicazgo rather than name a person not the son of the former cacique. In contrast, Corpus Christi Mission maintained the integrity of all its cacicazgos by appointing caciques who were not necessarily the male offspring of the previous cacique. The different ethnic compositions of the two missions might explain such contrasts. Santa Ana Mission was more homogenous, having been founded with some 6000 Indians and only after 1718 slowly incorporating some Tape Guaraní

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cacicazgos. In contrast, Corpus Christi agglomerated various groups of Guaraní from its inception in addition to the non-Guaraní Guañana.38 Such a mixture of various Indigenous groups may have worked against the social cohesion of Corpus Christi’s population. Consequently it became necessary to preserve cacicazgos even when a cacique died without a son. Despite such differences, male primogeniture succession prevailed in both missions any time a male heir existed. The pattern reveals the missions’ strict adherence to male primogeniture succession, but does not address the issue of cacique leadership roles. Expanding our study to encompass cacique leadership in all thirty Guaraní missions as of 1735 sheds further light on the extent to which caciques were effective leaders or alternatively, intermediaries between the Jesuits and their own people.

Cacique Leadership in Thirty Missions, 1735 Mission scholarship tends to highlight the leadership role of caciques. I propose an alternative view: while cacicazgos played an important role in organizing the mission population, caciques did not exercise equal amounts of power and authority. Rather than strengthening their legitimacy (as scholars have argued for caciques elsewhere in colonial Latin America), hereditary birthright did not automatically bestow legitimacy as a leader. Instead, the practice of hereditary qualification sometimes meant that an individual without the cacicazgo members’ respect was named as cacique. Thus in at least some cases caciques functioned as placeholders or figureheads for purposes of dividing the mission population into more manageable units rather than leading as actual “chiefs.” The 1735 census reveals that male primogeniture succession resulted in the occasional appointment of caciques who did not enjoy the respect of their followers. The Guaraní looked to their leaders for qualities such as eloquence and generosity, in addition to the legitimacy of bloodline. Jesuit cacique appointments in the missions did not allow for such flexibility. The peninsular custom of male primogeniture succession limited transfer to the oldest son regardless of the son’s personal attributes. In cases where there was no male heir, succession tended to go to the closest living relative. Cacique succession in the missions rarely took into account any leadership imperatives other than lineal descent and, as Guillermo Wilde has

 Susnik, El Indio colonial, 136 and 161.

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indicated, the Guaraní at times contested Jesuit authority over successions.39 Adherence to the custom of male primogeniture succession also led to the appointment of individuals not exhibiting leadership qualities for a variety of reasons in addition to their lack of charisma. The candidate’s maturity was one aspect. If a cacique left no adult male heir, the first option was to give the position to the oldest underage son. The mission definition of adulthood for males was eighteen for tribute and seventeen for marriage. In 1735, fifteen percent of all caciques among the thirty missions (170 out of 1102) were males under the age of eighteen (see Table 3.3). Minors, especially young children generally do not possess the ability to command respect and actively lead the members of their cacicazgos. If a cacique left no male heirs, one alternative was to hand the position off to one of his daughters, but this was not always the case. Female succession happened infrequently. In 1735, only three percent of all cacicazgos (34 out of 1102) had passed to the daughter of a cacique. In retrospect, it was not always clear who actually acted as cacique. When the daughter was an unmarried minor (the Jesuits tried to enforce marriage for females at the age of fifteen), the census frequently specified that the cacicazgo be passed on to her. For example, the census of San Cosmé Mission stated that the cacicazgo of the deceased don Christobal Taruima was inherited by his only daughter, Maria Magdalena Apora. In cases where the daughter had reached adulthood, the census could be more ambiguous about who was to assume the leadership role. For example, the entry regarding the cacicazgo of don Poti of the Concepción Mission simply listed its first family as thirty-six-year-old Christobal Guari and his wife, Maria Rosa Cuyabe, daughter of the deceased cacique. The entry did not include “don” or “doña” which would have indicated who was cacique. The significant number of child caciques challenges the idea that the holder of the title was the most powerful person in a cacicazgo and raises questions about the leadership capabilities of such individuals. In San Tomé Mission, one wonders if the ninety-three cacicazgo members followed the orders of three-year-old cacique Damaso Maragua. Could a toddler assign plots of land for agriculture and manage the labor of his fellow Guaraní? Moreover, given the strict gender roles dictated by the Jesuits, along with the pre-contact Guaraní preference for male caciques, it is unclear how much power a female cacique could wield. In Itapua  Wilde, “Prestigio indígena,” 137–144.

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3  COUNTING HEADS: INDIGENOUS LEADERS IN THE GUARANÍ-JESUIT… 

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Table 3.3  Caciques of Thirty Guaraní Missions, 1735 Mission Apóstoles Candelaria Concepción Corpus Christi Itapúa Jesús La Cruz Loreto San Borja San Carlos San Cosme y Damian San Ignacio Guazú San Ignacio Miní San José San Juan Bautista San Lorenzo San Luis San Miguel San Nicolás Santa Ana Santa María de Fé Santa María la Mayor Santa Rosa Santiago Santo Angel Santos Mártires Santo Tomé San Xavier Trinidad Yapeyú All missions % of total

Males 18+ years Males