Where Caciques and Mapmakers Met

Border Making in Eighteenth-Century South America

Jeffrey Alan Erbig Jr.

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781469655048, 9781469655031
• eBook ISBN: 9781469655055
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historical Geography
• Index: History

During the late eighteenth century, Portugal and Spain sent joint mapping expeditions to draw a nearly 10,000-mile border between Brazil and Spanish South America. These boundary commissions were the largest ever sent to the Americas and coincided with broader imperial reforms enacted throughout the hemisphere. Where Caciques and Mapmakers Met considers what these efforts meant to Indigenous peoples whose lands the border crossed. Moving beyond common frameworks that assess mapped borders strictly via colonial law or Native sovereignty, it examines the interplay between imperial and Indigenous spatial imaginaries. What results is an intricate spatial history of border making in southeastern South America (present-day Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay) with global implications.

Drawing upon manuscripts from over two dozen archives in seven countries, Jeffrey Erbig traces on-the-ground interactions between Ibero-American colonists, Jesuit and Guaraní mission-dwellers, and autonomous Indigenous peoples as they responded to ever-changing notions of territorial possession. It reveals that Native agents shaped when and where the border was drawn, and fused it to their own territorial claims. While mapmakers' assertions of Indigenous disappearance or subjugation shaped historiographical imaginations thereafter, Erbig reveals that the formation of a border was contingent upon Native engagement and authority.

CHAPTER ONE

An Archipelago of Settlements and Tolderías

In July 1731, a Jesuit priest named Miguel Ximénez and a Guenoa Indian named Francisco de Borja set out from the San Borja mission. They traveled for nearly a month, waylaid by floods and freezing rain, before arriving at Guenoa encampments (tolderías) near the headwaters of the Río Piraí, where they met Borja’s kin and several prominent chiefs (caciques). Their aim was to broker peace between the Spanish settlement of Montevideo and neighboring Minuán tolderías. If they failed, the fighting that had erupted in the south would engulf the entire region, including their mission and the Guenoa tolderías (map 2).¹ The conflict had begun a year earlier, when one of Montevideo’s inhabitants had killed a Minuán man and fled to the Portuguese settlement of Colônia do Sacramento (hereafter Colônia). When a commission of Minuanes went to collect the body of their fallen kin, Montevideo’s city council (cabildo) offered condolences and gifts but not the perpetrator. The Minuanes were dissatisfied and attacked the city’s ranches, killing nearly two dozen farmhands and cutting off Montevideo’s food supply. Montevideo sought to break the blockade with the force of its militia, but this strategy proved futile. Half of the conscripted fighters deserted to Colônia, and the Minuanes confiscated the militia’s five hundred horses.² By April 1731, the arrival of the rainy season suspended the fighting; Minuanes maintained possession of the countryside, while Montevideo’s residents found themselves trapped within the city’s walls, and their city council contemplated rationing food for the winter. Meanwhile, each side sought to garner allies, as the principal cacique, Yapelman, called on Guenoa tolderías in the north, and Spanish authorities solicited aid from the Jesuit-Guaraní missions.³

Jesuit authorities were wary of involving themselves in a conflict with the tolderías and sent Ximénez and Borja as envoys in a last-ditch effort to avert war. Along with generating bloodshed, war would likely impede the missions’ access to livestock in the countryside. The peacemaking endeavor brought its own risks, however, as a trip by Ximénez to the tolderías the previous year had precipitated infighting and combat among the caciques, while Borja’s decision to abandon the tolderías for Ximénez’s mission had purportedly upset his family. The two men’s return carried the potential of reigniting animosities and undermining the peace efforts. Indeed, both were cudgeled in a surprise attack by a man sent by Borja’s family.⁴ Deliberations between Ximénez, Borja, and the caciques nonetheless proved successful. According to Ximénez’s account, the caciques shared his reticence toward a war that would bring missionary militias to their tolderías and responded magnanimously when the priest bestowed gifts on them.⁵ Once the waters subsided, the caciques sought out other Native leaders from the south, including Yapelman, to whom they owed their allegiance. They returned with Yapelman himself, who received more gifts from Ximénez and accepted the priest’s pleas for peace, promising to instruct other tolderías throughout the region to respect the pact they had made.⁶

MAP 2 Settlements and tolderías of the Río de la Plata, 1675–1750. This map shows the sites of Portuguese, Spanish, and Jesuit-Guaraní settlements and over three hundred locations of tolderías, as reported in manuscript records during these years. Colonial settlements were limited to coastlines and riverine corridors around the region’s perimeter, whereas tolderías collectively controlled the interior. Religious officials attempted to establish small mission hamlets (reducciones) with tolderías, yet these settlements generally did not come to fruition and rarely lasted longer than several months. The data set used to mark tolderías’ reported locations here and in subsequent maps was originally cited in Erbig, “Borderline Offerings,” and has since been updated to include newly identified records. Basemap copyright: 2014 Esri.

The conflict between the Minuán tolderías and Montevideo demonstrates how territorial dynamics structured interethnic relations in the Río de la Plata. Imperial and ecclesiastical settlements—including Montevideo, Colônia, and San Borja—dotted the region’s perimeter, and they depended on peaceful relations with tolderías to obtain natural resources in the interior and sustain their local populations. Since tolderías arbitrated access to the countryside, both Ximénez and Montevideo’s city council approached neighboring caciques with remunerative gifts before considering armed combat. The missions’ militias certainly wielded the collective strength to engage Minuanes and Guenoas, but experience had taught them that the results would be mutually disastrous. For their part, Montevideo’s ragtag militia was entirely ill equipped, and their desertion to Colônia indicates that they were aware of the futility of their campaign. The spatial limits of colonial agents were also evident in their lack of familiarity with the geography of the interior. Ximénez relied on a Guenoa guide, while Montevideo’s militia lost track of the tolderías once they distanced themselves from the walls of the city. Yet despite tolderías’ collective dominance over rural space, the Minuanes and Guenoas in conflict with Montevideo were unable to monopolize access and were keenly aware of their own limitations. Procuring peace would enable them to avoid the costs of war, to protect trade partnerships, and to maintain potential allies in a multipolar world.

The eighteenth-century Río de la Plata was an archipelago of settlements and tolderías. Imperial and ecclesiastical population centers were strung along riverine corridors or coastal enclaves and surrounded by mobile encampments of autonomous Native peoples. Both colonial settlements and Native tolderías constituted local centers of economic, social, and cultural activity. Each exhibited limited territorial control, yet tolderías tended to control much larger stretches of land as their strategic mobility enabled them to arbitrate access to the countryside. In this context, local ties often superseded imperial or ethnic affiliation. Writings and drawings from the region’s settlements often depicted the region as a series of consolidated territories—a tripartite borderland between Portuguese, Spanish, and Jesuit-Guaraní establishments—but neither empire nor the missions possessed contiguous territorial control. Imperial and ecclesiastical spatial visions were simultaneously myopic and ambitious; they projected local relations on the entire region and conflated disparate tolderías via uniform ethnonyms. Placing the spatial imaginations and practices of settlements and tolderías on even ground reveals the local motivations driving broader regional patterns and the interplay between imperial claims and Indigenous actions.⁷

Dotting the Landscape

The Río de la Plata was a region composed of flatlands and fluctuating rivers, divided by several stretches of highlands. Stretching from its eponymous estuary in the south to the Ibicuí and Jacuí river systems in the north, the region was bounded on the west by the Río Paraná and on the east by the Atlantic Ocean (map 2). During the first half of the eighteenth century, its inhabitants developed a multipolar, nodal world organized around settlements and tolderías. Competing imperial and ecclesiastical settlements dotted the region’s perimeter: the Spanish cities of Corrientes and Santa Fe lay to the west; Jesuit-Guaraní missions (subject to the Spanish crown) lined the north; the Portuguese settlements of Rio Grande and São Miguel appeared in the east; and Colônia (Portuguese) was situated between Santo Domingo Soriano and Montevideo (Spanish) in the south. These fixed settlements were superimposed on existing Indigenous geographies. Charrúas, Minuanes, Bohanes, Guenoas, Yaros, and other autonomous Native peoples moved their tolderías throughout the region’s interior, incorporating new settlers into existing networks of tribute, kinship, and trade and arbitrating settlements’ access to the feral livestock that proliferated in the countryside. Geographical positioning was paramount, and local affinities and interests often superseded imperial, ecclesiastical, or ethnic allegiances.

Local Settlements

Unlike modern territorial states, early modern governments relied on contingent, reciprocal relationships to define sovereignty. Viceroyalties were not groups of consolidated provinces but series of horizontally unaligned localities connected by their shared vertical allegiances to a common authority.⁸ The principal territorial designations of the Río de la Plata region—Spanish governorships and Portuguese captaincies—did not exercise complete territorial possession or control but instead constituted collections of discrete settlements tethered to a shared governor and in frequent competition with one another.⁹ Given their location on the fringes of competing empires, each settlement was of strategic importance for its respective governor and therefore wielded significant amounts of leverage in negotiations with him. They also served as important centers for the social, economic, and political lives of colonial settlers, with city or town councils as their principal governing bodies. Simply put, settlements functioned as a series of relatively au...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures, Maps, and Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations in the Text
• Introduction
• Chapter One: An Archipelago of Settlements and Tolderías
• Chapter Two: Projecting Possession
• Chapter Three: Mapping the Tolderías’ Mansion
• Chapter Four: Simultaneous Sovereignties
• Chapter Five: Where the Lines End
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index