Projecting Possession
This chapter addresses the juridical battles that arose between Spain (and by extension the Jesuit-Guarani missions) and Portugal prior to the 1750 Treaty of Madrid as each sought to claim legal possession of regional lands. It inserts local interethnic relations, governed by territorial conditions, into broader juridical debates to demonstrate the discursive gymnastics that imperial administrators employed as they claimed tolderías as vassals yet shirked responsibility for their actions. Given the tenuous and unenforceable nature of such claims, as well as growing confidence in the precision of geographical explorations and measurement, the two royal courts eventually agreed to combine mapmaking with treaty-making as a means to circumvent Native actors in the determination of possession. The border demarcations did not represent the realization of imperial territorial control, but rather prescriptive claims over space, as tolderías maintained control over most of the region.