Indigenous Ancestry and Admixture in the Uruguayan Population

The Amerindian group known as the Charrúas inhabited Uruguay at the timing of European colonial contact. Even though they were extinguished as an ethnic group as a result of a genocide, Charrúan heritage is part of the Uruguayan identity both culturally and genetically. While mitochondrial DNA studies have shown evidence of Amerindian ancestry in living Uruguayans, here we undertake whole-genome sequencing of 10 Uruguayan individuals with self-declared Charruan heritage. We detect chromosomal segments of Amerindian ancestry supporting the presence of indigenous genetic ancestry in living descendants. Specific haplotypes were found to be enriched in “Charrúas” and rare in the rest of the Amerindian groups studied. Some of these we interpret as the result of positive selection, as we identified selection signatures and they were located mostly within genes related to the infectivity of specific viruses. Historical records describe contacts of the Charrúas with other Amerindians, such as Guaraní, and patterns of genomic similarity observed here concur with genomic similarity between these groups. Less expected, we found a high genomic similarity of the Charrúas to Diaguita from Argentinian and Chile, which could be explained by geographically proximity. Finally, by fitting admixture models of Amerindian and European ancestry for the Uruguayan population, we were able to estimate the timing of the first pulse of admixture between European and Uruguayan indigenous peoples in approximately 1658 and the second migration pulse in 1683. Both dates roughly concurring with the Franciscan missions in 1662 and the foundation of the city of Colonia in 1680 by the Spanish.

Indigenous ancestry and admixture in the Uruguayan population

The Amerindian group known as the Charrúas inhabited Uruguay at the timing of European colonial contact. Even though they were extinguished as an ethnic group as a result of a genocide, Charrúan heritage is part of the Uruguayan identity both culturally and genetically. While mitochondrial DNA studies have shown evidence of Amerindian ancestry in living Uruguayans, here we undertake whole-genome sequencing of 10 Uruguayan individuals with Charruan heritage. We detect chromosomal segments of Amerindian ancestry supporting the presence of indigenous genetic ancestry in living descendants. Specific haplotypes were found to be enriched in 'Charrúas' and rare in the rest of the Amerindian groups studied. Some of these we interpret as the result of positive selection, as we identified selection signatures and they were located mostly within genes related to the infectivity of specific viruses. Historical records describe contacts of the Charrúas with other Amerindians, such as Guaraní, and patterns of genomic similarity observed here concur with genomic similarity between these groups. Less expected, we found a high genomic similarity of the Charrúas to Diaguita from Argentinian and Chile, which could be explained by geographically proximity. Finally, by fitting admixture models of Amerindian and European ancestry for the Uruguayan population, we were able to estimate the timing of the first pulse of admixture between European and Uruguayan indigenous peoples in 1658 and the second migration pulse in 1683. Both dates roughly concurring with the Franciscan missions in 1662 and the foundation of the city of Colonia in 1680 by the Spanish.

Scaling Invisible Walls

California’s Franciscan missions were grounded in Indigenous homelands that to this day remain largely undertheorized and trivialized by scholarly and popular understandings of missions as inescapable fortresses of confinement. Narratives that position California’s missions as places of Indigenous imprisonment endure but they are at odds with a growing body of archaeological and documentary evidence demonstrating the persistence of Native lives, activities, and decision-making taking place within and beyond the walls of missions. We argue that interpretations of the missions in scholarly and popular conversation must make Indigenous persistence and resilient relationships to meaningful landscapes the cardinal priorities, not secondary attributes, in the study of Indigenous responses to colonization.

Las encomiendas paraguayas y rioplatenses. Categorías y formas laborales según las fuentes del siglo XVII y XVIII.

Las encomiendas que se implementaron en el espacio paraguayo y rioplatense colonial, presentan sustanciales diferencias en sus características y formas de aplicación en algunos aspectos con otras encomiendas, que tuvieron vigencia en el Perú, en territorios más cercanos como el del Tucumán Colonial o las experiencias de Misiones jesuíticas. Durante muchos años de investigación hemos podido identificar esas particularidades vinculadas al espacio geográfico, los grupos étnicos como así también las lógicas económicas y sociales existentes en el territorio. A partir de dichos estudios podemos afirmar que no existe quizás una conceptualización específica sobre el mundo de la encomienda paraguaya y rioplatense en diálogo con otros espacios, de allí las dificultades para lograr análisis comparativos. En este artículo nos proponemos identificar a la luz de fuentes demográficas, fiscales, judiciales, visitas, registros y listas nominativas las categorías y las formas laborales específicas que se circunscriben al Paraguay y nordeste del espacio rioplatense en los siglos XVII y XVIII, con el fin de comenzar a transitar un sendero que nos conduzca a miradas comparativas. The encomienda that were implemented in the Paraguay and Río de la Plata, present substantial differences in their characteristics and ways of application in some aspects, with other encomiendas that were in force in Peru or in closer territories such as that of the colonial Tucuman or the experiences of Jesuit and Franciscan missions. During many years of research, we have been able to identify those particularities linked to the geographical space, ethnic groups as well as the economic and social logics existing in the territory. From these studies, we can affirm that perhaps there is no specific conceptualization of the world of the Paraguay and Río de la Plata encomienda in dialogue with other spaces, hence the difficulties in achieving comparative analysis. In this article we propose to identify, in light of demographic, fiscal, judicial sources, visits, registers and nominative lists, the fiscal categories and the specifics labor forms that are limited to Paraguay and northeast of Río de la Plata space in the XVII and XVIII.

The Construction of a Frontier Space

This chapter examines the most significant aspects of constructing the frontier in the north of Bolivia in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. We particularly focus on the impact of state policies on ethnolinguistic groups in the department of Beni and on the Guarayos in the department of Santa Cruz, as well as on the inter-ethnic relations that developed between these groups and the rest of Bolivian society. We first analyze the strategies, activities, and institutions of indigenous Benianos with respect to the exercise of their constitutional rights in both the sociopolitical realm, as expressed through local government, and the socioeconomic realm, centered on land ownership. We then analyze the establishment of Franciscan missions among the Guarayos as a basic tool employed by Bolivian governments as a “civilizing vanguard” with the theoretic aim of transforming “savages” into “citizens.”

In Service of Two Masters

By the early 1700s, the vast scale of Spanish empire led crown authorities to rely on local institutions to carry out their political agenda, including religious orders like the Franciscan mission of Santa Rosa de Ocopa in the Peruvian Amazon. This book follows the Ocopa missions throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a period marked by events such as the indigenous Juan Santos Atahualpa Rebellion and the 1746 Lima earthquake. Caught between the directives of the Spanish crown and the challenges of missionary work on the Amazon frontier, the missionaries of Ocopa found themselves at the center of a struggle over the nature of colonial governance. This book examines the changes that Spain’s far-flung empire experienced from borderland Franciscan missions in Peru to the court of the Bourbon monarchy in Madrid, arguing that the Bourbon clerical reforms that broadly sought to bring the empire under greater crown control were shaped in turn by groups throughout the Americas, including Ocopa friars, the Amerindians and Africans in their missions, and bureaucrats in Lima as well as Madrid. Far from isolated local incidents, the book argues, these conflicts were representative of the political struggles over clerical reform occurring throughout Spanish America on the eve of Independence.