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.

Conclusion

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.

Simultaneous Sovereignties

This chapter demonstrates how the mapping of a Luso-Hispanic border in the Río de la Plata transformed territorial practices. Following the boundary commissions, colonial officials sought to populate the border with migrants from the Azores and Canary Islands or from the Guarani missions. They promoted sedentism, private property rights, and well-regulated commercial practices, which dovetailed with broader Bourbon and Pombaline Reforms. Spanish officials undertook extermination campaigns against tolderías, while Portuguese officials made frequent pacts with Charrúa and Minuán caciques. Tolderías’ experiences of these efforts derived from their territorial positioning. Those furthest from the border found themselves bereft of the economic and political benefits of competing imperial foes, while those closest to the border were able to take advantage of imperial border-making initiatives.

Where the Lines End

This chapter addresses the disappearance of Charrúas and Minuanes from historical records by the 1830s. Rather than marking the end of Charrúas or Minuanes themselves, this discursive shift was due to three factors. First, during the eighteenth century, colonial agents captured and exiled several thousand Charrúas and Minuanes, whose separation from tolderías rendered them ethnically indistinguishable in written records. Second, as Indigenous go-betweens moved between settlements and tolderías, colonial writers disassociated them from the ethnic labels that they reserved for tolderías. Third, the dissolution of the interimperial border via wars of independence in the early nineteenth century made tolderías an untenable living arrangement. The disappearance of tolderías as political entities engendered the discursive erasure of Charrúas and Minuanes altogether.

Mapping the Tolderías’ Mansion

This chapter follows the mapping expeditions commissioned under the treaties of Madrid (1750) and San Ildefonso (1777) and compares the detailed diaries of demarcation officers to the maps they produced. Whereas treaty maps demonstrated stable landscapes and served as templates for future settlement initiatives, the events of the boundary demarcations reveal the continued dominance of tolderías over regional lands. As mapping teams traversed the region to claim territorial possession for their imperial patrons, they found themselves paying tribute to Charrúa and Minuán caciques in exchange for safe passage. The chapter also provides a new reading of the Guarani War – in which Guarani mission-dwellers allied with neighboring tolderías to challenge the location of the borderline and stymied demarcation efforts for five years – by demonstrating how tolderías’ actions shaped its outcome.

Introduction

The introduction considers how autonomous Indigenous peoples in South America responded to the drawing of interimperial borders through their lands. Bringing together borderlands studies and histories of cartography, it argues that imperial border making transformed regional territorialities precisely because Native peoples engaged such efforts. In the Río de la Plata, Portugal’s and Spain’s invention of a border was an attempt to circumvent the territorial authority exercised by Indigenous peoples known Charrúas and Minuanes, whom members of the Luso-Hispanic boundary commissions routinely evaded as they traversed the region. Native responses to subsequent colonial efforts to materialize the imagined border derived from their own territorialities, and some Indigenous leaders leveraged imperial border making to expand their own kinship, tributary, and trading networks. Drawing upon hundreds of fragmented manuscripts dispersed in archives across three continents and representing them together via geographic information systems (GIS), this introduction centers Native ground and actions in the history of the border.

An Archipelago of Settlements and Tolderías

This chapter examines the imperial and Indigenous territorialities that defined the Río de la Plata before the invention of a Luso-Hispanic border. It demonstrates that itinerant Native communities (tolderías) were the principal arbiters of access to and travel across the countryside, where feral livestock roamed. Strings of Spanish, Portuguese, and Jesuit-Guarani settlements, rather than constituting conterminous frontiers or provincial units, were relatively isolated points along fragile corridors or waterways, restricted to the perimeter of the region by neighboring tolderías. Tolderías competed with one another and used colonial settlements for trade or as sites of temporary refuge in moments of duress. In the absence of any singular authority, territorial order governed power relations between settlers and tolderías, and tilted in tolderías’ favor.