Frontier Missions in South America

This article examines the establishment of frontier missions in South America, with emphasis on the strategies used in the interactions between Jesuit missionaries and indigenous peoples. It explores three foundational aspects of the organization of the missions: impositions, adaptations, and appropriations. Imposition refers to actions undertaken by missionaries within the framework of colonial regulations, in collaboration with members of the indigenous elite. Adaptation refers to adjustments made to the models that were imposed on local settings, through the incorporation of native elements that did not threaten the imposed structure of the reductions. Appropriation refers to indigenous responses to colonial impositions and the development of autonomous native practices. These three factors contributed to the development of new perceptions of space and time, as well as subjectivities that were specific to the frontier missions of South America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Native Informants and the Limits of Portuguese Dominion in Late-Colonial Brazil

Throughout its colonial history, much of Portuguese America’s sparsely populated territory remained incompletely colonized, the province of autonomous and semiautonomous Indians. In a policy shift after 1750, the implications of which remain poorly understood, the Portuguese Crown intensified efforts to control Brazil’s many inland frontiers. This chapter focuses on one of these regions, the rugged mountains separating the captaincies of Rio de Janeiro and Minas Gerais. Exploring relations between Portugal’s centralizing transatlantic state and the zone’s indigenous peoples, it emphasizes the importance of territorial intelligence gathered from the Coroado, Coropó, and other Indians by officials who dispatched a military expedition to counter the flow of contraband gold and diamonds. The chapter argues that the indigenous occupants of this strategic region largely defined the limits of state power while securing their own survival and independence.

Introduction

Borderlands arise where two or more spheres of hegemony that claim jurisdiction over resources and people limit each other and often overlap, where two or more groups of people with different cultures and modes of life intermingle, and where the prevailing ecological conditions challenge particular forms of human life. Drawing on theorists from historical sociology, geography, anthropology, and spatial history, the editors and contributors to this volume understand borderlands as diffuse spaces of contestation, adaptation, and admixture that are produced through historical processes in specific times and places. Providing a broad approach to borderlands applicable to time periods predating the modern nation-state and areas not standing at the limits between two constituted polities, this perspective addresses indigenous America and the character of early Iberian empires. We advance the interrelated notions of successive frontiers and internal borderlands to address these territorial and cultural processes over time and in different continental and maritime regions.

Indigenous Histories in Colonial Brazil

This chapter provides a critical analysis of the concept of ethnogenesis with new perspectives on the processes of conquest and colonization from native American voices, albeit filtered through colonial sources. A growing body of ethnohistorical literature has laid to rest the idea that the impact of contact, conquest, and European expansion can be summed up in the decimation of indigenous societies. One of the key notions prominent in these new perspectives, “ethnogenesis” has been reconfigured in an attempt to capture the articulation between endogenous patterns of change and the exogenous forces introduced by European expansion. In this sense the ethnohistorical mosaic of fixed ethnic groups that covers the post-contact map of Brazil stands in stark contrast to a constantly shifting precolonial configuration that can best be described as a kaleidoscope. This chapter argues further that an intrinsic relation exists between the ethnic and social classifications imposed by the colonial order and the formation of ethnic identities.

Indigenous Trade in Caribbean Central America, 1700s–1800s

This chapter traces the dense web of indigenous trade that crisscrossed Mosquitia, Talamanca, and Darién during the latter part of the colonial period. Most studies have focused on European actors’ geopolitical and economic interests in these regions. Here we concentrate on indigenous populations and their trading networks. Exchange brought together Indians from villages under Spanish control, Indians that remained independent, and a variety of European colonials It also helped cement alliances between some Indians and non-Spanish European powers, and affected Spanish colonizing strategies while increasing the Indians’ ability to retain their independence. Indians played a major role in connecting the Spanish mainland with the non-Spanish commercial hubs that emerged in the Caribbean islands.

Labyrinths of Mestizaje

In the wake of the silver discoveries that fueled New Spain’s early growth, Spain deployed diverse strategies to incorporate the northern borderlands of Nueva Vizcaya. This article elaborates how natives responded to these efforts from the late sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries, and how a multiracial society evolved in the process. Decentering the mission as the primary agent of change, the article examines a larger dynamic of cultural and biological mixing across missions, haciendas, presidios and towns in which ethnic identities, subsistence patterns, cultural beliefs, and gender relations changed over time in conditions of violence and migration. Social and spatial mingling across ethnic groups was rife with possibilities for the subversion of the social separation and compliance that rulers tried to impose. In labyrinths of mestizaje, women and men—Indians, Europeans, Africans, and their progeny—quarreled, battled, procreated, and interacted in work, trade, leisure, sickness, witchcraft and spiritual activity.

Tierra Incognita

This essay analyzes cartographic materials and geographic descriptions of New Spain’s northwestern borderlands elaborated by Jesuit and Franciscan missionaries in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It explains the meaning of these documents as expressions of the aspirations of these religious institutions to extend their projects of territorial occupation toward that frontier; suggesting that far from simple descriptions of regions inhabited by Pima and Yuma Indians and other peoples between the northern region of the province of Sonora and the banks of the Gila and Colorado rivers, these testimonies were inspired by the need to demonstrate the viability of establishing mission towns and Spanish occupation along those frontiers.

Borderlands in the Silver Mines of New Spain, 1540–1660

From the sixteenth century onward, mining towns in New Spain produced more than silver; they also led to the creation of new colonial communities and societies. The founding of mining towns outside of central Mexico served as catalysts for northern exploration, becoming and creating new borderlands in their wake. This chapter considers how mining towns constituted both geographical and social borderlands. It focuses on the roles and experience of indigenous, Spanish, African, and ethnically mixed descent individuals (castas) in Mexico’s northern silver mining district from 1540 to 1660. The colonization of the mining borderlands created new economic, social, and ethnic patterns shaped by population scarcity and instability, the labor needs of production, the incentives of the money economy, the lifeways and practices of indigenous populations, imbalanced sex ratios, and under-developed colonial institutions. Ultimately, the chapter argues that mining towns remained borderlands, sites of fluid cultural exchanges and social boundaries.

“Indian Friends and Allies” in the Spanish Imperial Borderlands of North America

This chapter provides an overview of research produced since the 1950s on Indian allies who actively shaped the successive borderlands north of Mexico-Tenochtitlan after 1521, as well as an in-depth discussion of sixteenth-century instances based on primary sources. The emphasis is placed on Otomí allies in the sixteenth-century conquest of central Mexico and the area that came to be known as the Gran Chichimeca; Nahuas and Purépechas who went to the Tierra Nueva of Cíbola under the command of Francisco Vázquez de Coronado (1540–1542), and the many groups of different ethnic origins who took part in the Mixtón war (1541–1542) and the conquest of Nueva Vizcaya in the early 1560s. The Indians’ mixed motivations to get involved in conquest and colonizing campaigns alongside Spanish individuals, besides the privileges and material benefits they obtained and the threats of Spanish authorities and encomenderos—or the desire to escape Spanish oppression—were also determined by local and regional articulations of native politics that predated the arrival of Europeans. Therefore, their participation as conquerors must be understood as integral to a complex realignment process rather than as a mere reaction to colonial imposition.

Indigenous Diaspora, Bondage, and Freedom in Colonial Cuba

From the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries, thousands of indigenous peoples from a spectrum of cultures embarked, voluntarily and involuntarily, on journeys from their homelands in the continental Americas to the Caribbean: as traders, refugees, immigrants, laborers, and as slaves. Cuba became the principal destination for a massive influx of indigenous peoples from New Spain and, later, the independent republic of Mexico. This chapter explores the fluid, multidimensional dynamic of diasporic indigenous peoples in their attempts to negotiate an existence in a territory to which they were forcibly relocated. It examines the historical, social, political, and intercultural development of forced indigenous labor in Cuba along with the complex and nuanced ways in which freedom and bondage overlapped. It investigates contending spheres of power encompassing states, settler populations, and indigenous and other subaltern peoples to discuss the implications of this Caribbean borderlands dynamic in the context of transitional zones and transculturation.