Following the formation of independent republics in southeastern South America, travellers, politicians and academics alike used the territorial imaginaries of the Madrid and San Ildefonso boundary commissions to envision national communities devoid of Native peoples. Whether narrating patriotic histories of territorial conquest or using colonial borders to catalogue Indigenous peoples who had routinely traversed them, postcolonial authors simultaneously appropriated Native pasts while denying the existence of their Indigenous contemporaries. Contradictory claims of Indigenous emigration emerged in Uruguay, northeastern Argentina, and southern Brazil, and Charrúas and Minuanes were reduced to bit players in or antecedents to the formation of national or subnational communities. By considering the interplay between territorial imaginaries and identity formation, the conclusion demonstrates how the re-emergence of Charrúas on a regional political scale since the late 1980s not only disrupts national mythmaking but fits within deeper historical patterns.
Native Peoples of South America