The Oxford Handbook of Borderlands of the Iberian World (Oxford Handbooks) 019934177X, 9780199341771

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t h e ox f o r d h a n d b o o k o f

BOR DE R L A N DS OF T H E I BE R I A N WOR L D

the oxford handbook of

BORDERLANDS OF THE IBERIAN WORLD Edited by

DANNA A. LEVIN ROJO and

CYNTHIA RADDING

1

1 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America. © Oxford University Press and the Americas Research Network 2019 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. Library of Congress Control Number: 2019950993 ISBN: 978–0–19–934177–1 1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2 Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America

Table of Contents

Acknowledgmentsix Contributorsxi Abbreviationsxxi

Introduction: Borderlands, A Working Definition

1

Danna A. Levin Rojo and Cynthia Radding

PA RT I   I N DIG E N OU S B OR DE R L A N D S , C U LT U R A L L A N D S C A P E S , A N D SP H E R E S OF   P OW E R I N T H E A M E R IC A S 1. Patterns of Food Security in the Pre-Hispanic Americas

31

Amy Turner Bushnell

2. Crafting Landscapes in the Iberian Borderlands of the Americas

57

Cynthia Radding

3. Fluctuating Frontiers in the Borderlands of Mesoamerica

83

Fernando Berrojalbiz and Marie-Areti Hers

4. Population and Epidemics North of Zacatecas

107

Chantal Cramaussel

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

131

Danna A. Levin Rojo

6. The Indian Garrison Colonies of New Spain and Central America

163

Sean F. McEnroe

7. Inter-Ethnic War in Sonora: Indigenous Captains General and Cultural Change, 1740–1832 José Marcos Medina Bustos and Ignacio Almada Bay

183

vi   table of contents

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

209

Hal Langfur

PA RT I I   T R A N S C ON T I N E N TA L B OR DE R L A N D S I N I B E RO - A M E R IC A Internal Trade Networks: Commercial and Migratory Labor Circuits 9. Indigenous Trade in Caribbean Central America, 1700s–1800s

239

Alejandra Boza and Juan Carlos Solórzano Fonseca

10. Connections and Circulation in the Southern Andes From Colony to Republic

267

Viviana E. Conti

11. The Royal Road of the Interior in New Spain: Indigenous Commerce and Political Action

295

Tatiana Seijas

Shifting Identities in Relation to Gender, Demography, Ethnicity, and Mestizaje 12. Indigenous autonomy and the Blurring of Spanish Sovereignty in the Calchaquí Valley, Sixteenth to Seventeenth Century

317

Christophe Giudicelli

13. Labyrinths of Mestizaje: Understanding Cultural Persistence and Transformation in Nueva Vizcaya

343

Susan M. Deeds

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

371

Dana Velasco Murillo

15. Indigenous Histories in Colonial Brazil: Between Ethnocide and Ethnogenesis

397

John M. Monteiro

16. Colonization, Mediation, and Mestizaje in the Borderlands of Nineteenth-Century Minas Gerais, Brazil Izabel Missagia de Mattos

413

table of contents   vii

The Production of Knowledge: Science and Cartography, Art, Religion, and Music 17. Borderlands of Knowledge in the Estado da Índia (Sixteenth–Eighteenth Centuries)

443

Ines G. Županov

18. Tierra Incognita: Cartography and Projects of Territorial Expansion in Sonora and Arizona, Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

463

José Refugio de la Torre Curiel

19. The Virgin of El Zape and Jesuit Missions in Nueva Vizcaya

489

Clara Bargellini

20. Franciscan Mysticism on the Northern Frontier of New Spain

509

Cecilia Sheridan Prieto

21. Musical Cultures of the Ibero-American Borderlands

525

Kristin Dutcher Mann and Drew Edward Davies

22. Frontier Missions in South America: Impositions, Adaptations, and Appropriations

545

Guillermo Wilde

Shifting Territories and Enduring Peoples in the Iberian American Borderlands 23. Borderlands of Bondage

571

Andrés Reséndez

24. Riverine Borderlands and Multicultural Contacts in Central Brazil, 1775–1835

591

Mary Karasch

25. Conflict, Alliance, Mobility, and Place in the Evolution of Identity in Portuguese Amazonia

613

Barbara A. Sommer

26. Autonomous Indian Nations and Peacemaking in Colonial Brazil Heather F. Roller

641

viii   table of contents

PA RT I I I   I M P E R IA L B OR DE R L A N D S A N D T R A N S - O C E A N IC E XC HA N G E S : S OM E P E R SP E C T I V E S 27. Trans-Imperial Interaction and the Río de la Plata as an Atlantic Borderland669 Fabrício Prado

28. The Construction of a Frontier Space: Inter-Ethnic Relations in Northern Bolivia

691

Pilar García Jordán and Anna Guiteras Mombiola

29. The Spanish Empire’s Southernmost Frontiers: From Arauco to the Strait of Magellan

717

Elizabeth Montanez-Sanabria and María Ximena Urbina Carrasco

30. Shaping an Inter-Imperial Exchange Zone: Smugglers, Runaway Slaves, and Itinerant Priests in the Southern Caribbean

741

Linda M. Rupert

31. The Pacific Borderlands of the Spanish Empire

765

Catherine Tracy Goode

32. Converting the Pacific: Jesuit Networks Between New Spain and Asia

789

Brandon Bayne

33. Indigenous Diaspora, Bondage, and Freedom in Colonial Cuba

817

Jason M. Yaremko

34. Impact on the Spanish Empire of the Russian Incursion into the North Pacific, 1741–1821

841

Martha Ortega Soto

Glossary Index

863 867

Acknowledgments

The editors of The Oxford Handbook of Borderlands of the Iberian World gratefully express our appreciation to the institutions and colleagues whose support has made possible the publication of this deeply satisfying collective work. The coordination of ideas, themes, and research that went into each chapter was achieved through two International Authors’ Colloquia, organized as a series of workshops to discuss chapter drafts capped by plenary sessions for the full group of participants and the public, in Mexico City (2014) and Chapel Hill, North Carolina (2015). These colloquia proved to be essential for integrating the chapters into a unified volume and for building community among the forty authors, who come from different nationalities, languages, and academic traditions. Their realization was made possible through the institutional support of the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, Azcapotzalco, the Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social, the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, the Consulado General de México in Raleigh, North Carolina, the Council of American Overseas Research Centers, and the Americas Research Network, which also contributed resources for chapter translations from the generous donation of the Betty Meggers Fund. We are particularly grateful to the staff and student support of the host institutions who helped us coordinate these events: Greta de León, Beatriz Riefkohl, the late Shelley Clarke, Hannah Gil, Justin Blanton, Angélica Castillo, Marissa García, Michael Williams, Joyce Loftin, Armando Égido, and Julio César Villar Segura. We also want to thank Romualdo López Zárate, Dean of UAM Azcapotzalco for his enthusiastic support and the address he pronounced in the opening of the colloquium held in Mexico City; and the people who took part in the Forum on Migration and Cultural Re-Creation across Borders organized to open the second Colloquium in Chapel Hill: Honorable Javier Díaz de León from the Mexican Consulate delivered the main address of the Inauguration. Fabrício Prado moderated the forum and Linda M. Rupert, Danna A. Levin Rojo, and Altha Cravey made scholarly presentations on relevant topics relating to borderlands, community, and migration. Chapter 15, “Indigenous Histories in Colonial Brazil: Between Ethnocide and Ethnogenesis,” is authored by the late John M. Monteiro (1956–2013). John had accepted our invitation to participate in the handbook with enthusiasm, but his untimely death in April 2013 precluded the completion of the chapter that he had proposed for our book. The chapter here included fits our thematic emphasis; it is previously inedited, but portions of the text had been published in his essay, “Rethinking Amerindian Resistance and Persistence in Colonial Portuguese America,” in New Approaches to Resistance in Brazil and Mexico, edited by John Gledhill and Patience A. Schell (Durham, NC: Duke

x   acknowledgments University Press, 2012, 25–43). We thank Duke University Press for allowing us to publish “Indigenous Histories in Colonial Brazil” in this volume and we are especially grateful to John’s literary executors Maria Helena Machado and Thomas Monteiro for graciously permitting us to publish this chapter. We are equally indebted to Hal Langfur, who first brought this text to our attention and assisted Cynthia Radding in the work of editing and adapting the essay for publication. It is an honor to include it in this book on borderlands. The volume came together over a four-year period through different stages of research, writing, and rewriting, thanks to the hard work of all the authors. In the full process of editing and formatting the texts and preparing the front and back matter, we were assisted in very important ways by Michelle Aguilar Vera, Catherine Tracy Goode, and José Manuel Moreno Vega in addition to the translators for eleven of the individual chapters, who are named together with the authors at the beginning of their respective chapters. We gratefully acknowledge the professional assistance we received from Nancy Toff and the editorial staff of the Oxford University Press. Finally, we express our deep appreciation to the authors, our colleagues and friends, who agreed to join us in this adventure of thinking about borderlands in ways that connect different imperial spheres and cross national and disciplinary borders.

Contributors

Ignacio Almada Bay, Research Professor at the Colegio de Sonora and member of the Mexican Sistema Nacional de Investigadores and of the Academia Mexicana de la Historia. His research areas include historiography and the political, social, and cultural history of Sonora. Almada Bay’s recent publications include: with Amparo Angélica Reyes Gutiérrez and David Contreras Tónari, “Medidas ofensivas y defensivas de los vecinos de Sonora en respuesta a las incursiones apaches, 1854–1890,” Historia Mexicana (2016), and with Norma de León Figueroa, “Las gratificaciones por cabelleras. Una táctica del gobierno del Estado de Sonora en el combate a los apaches, 1830–1880,” Intersticios Sociales. Revista Semestral de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades (2016). He coedited with José Marcos Medina Bustos the book De los márgenes al centro. Sonora en la independencia y la revolución: cambios y continuidades (2011). Clara Bargellini received her PhD in Art History from Harvard University. She is Senior Research Fellow and Professor at the Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas (UNAM). She has taught at the Universities of Chicago and Pennsylvania, the Institute of Fine Arts of New York University, and various Mexican and South American universities. She received the 2005 UNAM prize for Research in the Arts. Her publications include numerous articles on Jesuit and Franciscan missions, painting and sculpture in New Spain, as well as the books La arquitectura de la plata: iglesias monumentales del centronorte de México, 1640–1750 (1991), and La catedral de Saltillo y sus imágenes (2005). Bargellini has collaborated with local communities and helped to found the Laboratorio de Diagnóstico de Obras de Arte at the Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas. Brandon Bayne, Associate Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he teaches courses on Religion in the Americas, Borderlands, Indigenous Christianities, and Religion and Violence. His forthcoming book, Missions Begin with Blood: Salvation and Suffering in Northern New Spain, unpacks the rhetoric and rituals that helped Jesuits and indigenous communities make sense of suffering in the frontier missions of New Spain. He has published on the twentieth-century borderlands healer Teresa Urrea as well as trans-national efforts to memorialize and mobilize the legacy of Jesuit missionary Francisco Eusebio Kino in Mexico, the United States, and Europe. Fernando Berrojalbiz, Researcher at the Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas (UNAM) in Oaxaca City. His research centers on cultural landscapes, pre-contact and colonial rock art of the north of Mexico (with emphasis on Durango and the Isthmus of

xii   contributors Tehuantepec), and processes of decolonization. His recent publications include: the edited volume La vitalidad de las voces indígenas: arte rupestre del contacto y en sociedades coloniales (2015), the book Paisajes y fronteras de Durango Prehispánico (2012), and “The Impact of a Colonial Road on the Rock Art of Northern Mexico,” article published in the Australian journal Rock Art Research (2014). Alejandra Boza, Associate Professor of history at the Universidad de Costa Rica. Her field of research is the political, cultural, and socioeconomic interaction between states, Catholic missionaries, and indigenous communities in Costa Rica and Colombia. She holds BA and MA degrees from the Universidad de Costa Rica, and a PhD from the University of Pittsburgh. Her book La frontera indígena de la Gran Talamanca, 1840–1930 (2014) was awarded with the Premio Áncora en Historia 2013–2014 in Costa Rica. Her recent article, “Indigenous Citizenship Between Borderlands and Enclaves. Elections in Talamanca, Costa Rica, 1880–1913,” was published in the Hispanic American Historical Review (2016). Amy Turner Bushnell, now retired, enjoys courtesy appointments as Adjunct Associate Professor of History at Brown University and Researcher in Residence at the John Carter Brown Library. Best known as a historian of the Iberian Borderlands, her books include The King’s Coffer: Proprietors of the Spanish Florida Treasury, 1565–1702 (1981), and Situado and Sabana: Spain’s Support System for the Presidio and Mission Provinces of Florida (1995). Her most-cited shorter piece is the chapter “Indigenous America and the Limits of the Atlantic World, 1493–1825,” in Atlantic History: A Critical Appraisal, ed. Jack P. Greene and Philip Morgan (2009). Her current projects include a collection of her essays on comparative colonization, a new edition of God’s Protecting Providence: Jonathan Dickinson’s Journal, and a book with the working title of “The Indomitable Nations: Patterns of Security, Autonomy, and Domain in the Indian Americas.” Viviana E. Conti, Researcher with the Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas (CONICET) in Argentina and the Unidad de Investigación en Historia Regional is also a Senior Professor at the Facultad de Humanidades y Ciencias Sociales of the Universidad Nacional de Jujuy, Argentina. She received her doctorate in history from the Universidad Nacional de La Plata. Her research deals with the economic and social history of the south Andean space. Her recent publications include El éxodo de 1812 (2012); Jujuy de la Revolución de Mayo a nuestros días. 1810–1910–2010 (2010); and the article “El puerto de La Mar en el Pacífico Sur. Vinculaciones con el interior del espacio surandino. Flujos y redes mercantiles 1827–1850,” Anuario de Estudios Bolivianos, Archivísticos y Bibliográficos (2014). Chantal Cramaussel, Research Professor at the Colegio de Michoacán, Mexico and member of the Mexican Sistema Nacional de Investigadores. She is a founding member of the Red de Historia Demográfica (Mexico). Her research focuses on the settlement of the city of Chihuahua (1709–1851) and the history and anthropology of the Sierra Tepehuana. She is the author of Poblar la frontera. La provincia de Santa Bárbara durante los siglos XVI y XVII (2006) and has published many articles on the settlement

contributors   xiii of the north of New Spain. Recently, she co-edited a book about smallpox epidemics (2010) and another about measles epidemics (2017). She has been guest researcher at the Clements Center of the Southern Methodist University (2007), the University of Bremen, Germany (2012), and the Institut National de Démographie Historique, France (2014). Drew Edward Davies, a music historian specializing in the Spanish world of the sixteenth through early nineteenth centuries, is Associate Professor of Musicology and Director of Graduate Music Studies at Northwestern University’s Bienen School of Music, as well as Academic Coordinator of the Seminario de Música en la Nueva España y el México Independiente in Mexico City. Among his publications are Santiago Billoni: Complete Works (2011), Catálogo de la Colección de Música del Archivo Histórico de la Arquidiócesis de Durango (2013), articles in Music and Urban Society in Colonial Latin America (2011), and Catálogo de las obras de música del Archivo del Cabildo Catedral Metropolitano de México, co-authored with Lucero Enríquez and Analía Cherñavsky (2014). Susan M. Deeds, Professor Emeritus, Northern Arizona University, received her PhD in history from the University of Arizona. She is the author of Defiance and Deference in Colonial Mexico: Indians under Spanish Rule in Nueva Vizcaya (2003), and co-author with Michael C. Meyer and William L. Sherman of The Course of Mexican History, 6th-11th editions (1998–2018). She has published over 30 articles in professional journals and scholarly anthologies on the colonial history and ethnohistory of northern Mexico in the thematic areas of ethnic, gender, socioeconomic, and cultural history. Her current book project is entitled “No Fear of Flying: Mischief, Gender, and Interethnic Relations in a Northern Frontier Community of New Spain.” José Refugio de la Torre Curiel, Professor in the Department of History at the Universidad de Guadalajara, Mexico received his PhD in History from the University of California, Berkeley. His research focuses on interethnic contacts in northwest New Spain, the Franciscan order in colonial Mexico, and the connections between male religious orders and the history of cartography. He has published articles in academic journals and chapters in collective volumes. He is the author of Vicarios en entredicho. Crisis y desestructuración de la provincia franciscana de Santiago de Xalisco, 1749–1860 (2001); Twilight of the Mission Frontier: Shifting Interethnic Alliances and Social Organization in Sonora, 1768–1855 (2012); and editor of Expansión territorial y formación de espacios de poder en la Nueva España (2016). Pilar García Jordán, Professor of History of the Americas at the Universidad de Barcelona is the director of the Taller de Estudios e Investigaciones Andino-Amazónicos (TEIAA). She has also served as a visiting professor in various European and Latin American Universities. Her research focuses on the construction of the Latin American nation-state, nationalization policies in the lowlands of Peru and Bolivia, the functions played by Catholic missions (in particular in Guarayos), and representations of the eastern regions of Bolivia. Among other monographs, she is the author of El Estado propone, los carai disponen y los guarayos devienen ciudadanos, 1939–1953. El impacto de

xiv   contributors la secularización en Guarayos (2015); “Yo soy libre y no indio: soy guarayo.” Para una historia de Guarayos, 1790–1948 (2006), and Cruz y arado, fusiles y discursos. La construcción de los Orientes en el Perú y Bolivia, 1820-1940 (2001). Christophe Giudicelli studied at the École Normale Supérieure (Paris). Once a member of the CEMCA (Mexico) and the Casa de Velázquez (Madrid), he is now Researcher at the CNRS and Professor at the Rennes 2 University (France). He is Director of the Nuevo Mundo. Mundos Nuevos journal and specializes on the Hispanic American colonial frontiers, particularly Tucumán and Nueva Vizcaya. His research deals with warfare, indigenous autonomy and colonial classifications. Author of Pour une géopolitique de la guerre des Tepehuán (1616–1619) (2003), he edited Fronteras movedizas. Clasificaciones coloniales y dinámicas socioculturales en las fronteras americanas (2010) and coedited (with Gilles Havard and Salvador Bernabéu) La indianización. Cautivos, renegados, misioneros y «hommes libres» en los confines americanos (Siglos XVI–XVIII) (2012), and (with Paula López Caballero) Régimes nationaux d’altérité. États-nation et altérités autochtones en Amérique latine, 1810–1950 (2016). Catherine Tracy Goode graduated from the University of Arizona with a dissertation on the central role of New Spain (Mexico) in the world economy of the early modern period. Her “Merchant-Bureaucrats, Unwritten Contracts, and Fraud in the Manila Galleon Trade,” was published by the University of New Mexico Press in the volume Greedy Officials, Whiny Subjects, and Atlantic Networks. Currently she is preparing the manuscript “Family, Fraud, and Fortunes: Extended Family Networks in the EighteenthCentury Global Economy.” As an independent consultant and research advisor with archival experience in Spain, Mexico, the United States, and the Philippines, she works in libraries and manuscript collections dating from the sixteenth to twentieth centuries. Anna Guiteras Mombiola is currently a postdoctoral researcher at Universitat Pompeu Fabra. She holds a PhD in History from Universitat de Barcelona, and in 2014–2016 she was a postdoctoral fellow at Universität zu Köln. Her research focuses on the colonization of the Bolivian Amazon, the changes that occurred in native societies perceived as civilized due to their insertion into the new liberal and republican order, and educational projects designed to promote the incorporation of certain ethnic groups into national society. Author of the book De los llanos de Mojos a las cachuelas del Beni, 1842–1938. Conflictos locales, recursos naturales y participación indígena en la Amazonía boliviana (2012), she has also published articles in specialized journals and chapters in collective works. Marie-Areti Hers received a PhD in Archaeology and Art History from the Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium. She is Researcher at the Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas (UNAM) and Professor at the Posgrado en Historia del Arte (UNAM), specialized on the north of Mesoamerica. She has contributed research on archaeology and rock art to several interdisciplinary projects. Currently she coordinates the project Arte rupestre y la voz de las comunidades. Among her most recent publications are “De perros pelones, buzos y Spondylus. Una historia continental” (2016), and “De

contributors   xv Teotihuacan al cañón de Chaco: nueva perspectiva sobre las relaciones entre Mesoamérica y el suroeste de los Estados Unidos” (2011), both in Anales del Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas. She also co-edited with José Luis Punzo Historia de Durango, vol. 1: Época antigua (2010). Mary Karasch, Professor of History emerita at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan where she taught until 2010, received her doctorate from the University of Wisconsin. She also taught at Catholic University, Washington, DC (1981–1983), Universidade de Brasília (1977–1978), and Universidade Federal de Goiás (1993, 1996). Her principal publication is Slave Life in Rio de Janeiro, 1808–1850 (A vida dos escravos no Rio de Janeiro, 1808–1850) (1987). Her new book, Before Brasília: Frontier Life in Central Brazil (2016), traces the social evolution of the states of Goiàs and Tocantins from a colonial society characterized by enslavement and conquest to one integrated by a predominantly free population of color along with autonomous indigenous nations. Hal Langfur, Associate Professor of history at the University at Buffalo (SUNY), completed his PhD at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of The Forbidden Lands: Colonial Identity, Frontier Violence, and the Persistence of Brazil’s Eastern Indians, 1750–1830 (2006) and the editor of Native Brazil: Beyond the Convert and the Cannibal, 1500–1900 (2014). His current research focuses on wilderness expeditions and the projection of Portuguese power in the Brazilian interior during the late colonial period. Danna A. Levin Rojo, Research Professor at the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, Campus Azcapotzalco, México, received a BA degree in history from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and a PhD in social anthropology from the London School of Economics and Political Science, United Kingdom. Her research interests include transculturation in the Spanish American colonial borderlands and interethnic relations in the United States Southwest, with emphasis on contemporary New Mexico. She is the author of Return to Aztlan: Indians, Spaniards, and the Invention of Nuevo México (2014) and coeditor, among other books, of Las vías del noroeste III: genealogías, transversalidades y convergencias (2011) and Los grupos nativos del septentrión novohispano ante la independencia de México, 1810–1847 (2010). Kristin Dutcher Mann, Professor of History and Social Studies Education Coordinator at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, is the author of The Power of Song: Music and Dance in the Mission Communities of Northern New Spain, 1590–1810 (2010). She has also published articles on music and teaching, colonial celebrations for Easter and Christmas, and music in the Franciscan and Jesuit orders. Sean F. McEnroe, Associate Professor at Southern Oregon University specializes in the history of religion, ideology, and state formation in the Atlantic world. He is the author of From Colony to Nationhood in Mexico: Laying the Foundations, 1560–1840 (2012), a work which describes the gradual integration of European and indigenous governance, and the origins of Mexican citizenship. His publications have explored the culture and politics of violence in the frontier spaces of Mexico, the United States, and the

xvi   contributors Philippines. He is currently writing a comparative history of indigenous leadership within Europe’s multi-ethnic American empires. José Marcos Medina Bustos, Research Professor at the Colegio de Sonora is a member of the Red Nacional de Historia Demográfica, the Red de Estudios Históricos del Noroeste, and the Sistema Nacional de Investigadores, México. His research interests include historiography and the political, social, and demographic history of Sonora from 1750 to 1850. Editor of the book Violencia interétnica en la frontera norte novohispana y mexicana. Siglos XVII–XIX (2015), he recently published “De las elecciones a la rebelión. Respuestas de los indígenas de Sonora al liberalismo, 1812-1836,” in Pueblos indígenas de Latinoamérica. Incorporación, conflicto, ciudadanía y representación. Siglo XIX (2015), and “Entre el informe moderno y el discurso tradicional. Representaciones sobre la población en la intendencia de Arizpe, 1792,” in Expansión territorial y formación de espacios de poder en la Nueva España (2016). Izabel Missagia de Mattos, Associate Professor of Anthropology at the Universidade Federal Rural do Rio de Janeiro, teaches graduate and postgraduate courses in the fields of History and Social Sciences. She has authored a book titled Civilização e Revolta: Os Botocudos e a Catequese na Província de Minas (2004). This work, awarded by the National Association of Post-graduation and Research in Social Sciences (ANPOCS, 2003), is the fruit of her doctoral research at the Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Brazil. She is presently investigating, with a grant from the Rio de Janeiro Foundation for Research Support (Fundação de Apoio à Pesquisa do Rio de Janeiro), processes related to social memory, cultural heritage and landscapes of the indigenous peoples of Minas Gerais. Elizabeth Montanez-Sanabria is a historian by the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, also holding an MA and PhD in history by the University of California, Davis. She specializes in colonial Latin American history, transatlantic networks and empires in early modern times. She was recipient of several fellowships, including the University of California Pacific Rim Research Program, the Grant for Research in Atlantic History from Harvard University, and the Reed-Smith Dissertation Year Fellowship to the most promising dissertation at UC Davis History Department. She was AhmansonGetty Postdoctoral Fellow at the UCLA Center for 17th & 18th Century Studies and was postdoctoral researcher at the Instituto de Historia of the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso, Chile. John M. Monteiro was, until his untimely death in 2013, Professor of Anthropology at the Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Brazil. He authored Negros da Terra: Índios e Bandeirantes nas Origens de São Paulo (1994), a seminal contribution to Brazilian indigenous history, and Guia de Fontes para a História Indígena e do Indigenismo em Arquivos Brasileiros: Acervos das Capitais (1994). A leading authority on the lowland Indians of South America, he published dozens of articles and chapters in Brazilian, Portuguese, U.S., and British journals and edited collections. Generous in his s­ ervice to the field and his mentoring of students, he directed his university’s Instituto de Filosofia

contributors   xvii e Ciências Humanas and chaired its Anthropology Department while supervising more than two dozen doctoral dissertations and masters’ theses. Martha Ortega Soto received her PhD in Humanities-History from Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, Campus Iztapalapa, México. Since 1989 she is Research Professor at the same University. Ortega has researched the colonization of Northwestern America and the frontiers of the Spanish and Russian empires in that region. From 2000 she has conducted research in the history of science and technology, having participated in the organization of Manuel Sandoval Vallarta’s personal archive housed at the campus of UAM-Iztapalapa. Her scholarship is oriented to world history, over long time periods and in extended regions. Her published books and articles cover Spanish and Russian colonization in northwestern America and the history of physics. Fabrício Prado, Associate Professor of History at the College of William and Mary, teaches classes on Colonial Latin America and the Atlantic World. His research focuses on cross-border dynamics, social networks, commerce, contraband trade, and corruption in the South American Cono Sur. He is the author of Colonia do Sacramento: o extremo sul da América portuguesa (2002), and Edge of Empire: Atlantic Networks and Revolution in Bourbon Rio de la Plata (2015). Prado has been a research fellow at the Instituto de Historia Nacional y Americana Emilio Ravignani, Buenos Aires, Argentina; a member of the International Seminar for the History of the Atlantic World at Harvard University, and has held fellowships at the School of History of the University of Saint Andrews, Scotland; the Lilly Library, and the John Carter Brown Library. Cynthia Radding is the Gussenhoven Distinguished Professor of Latin American Studies and History at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Her research and teaching on Iberoamerican frontiers during the colonial and early national periods focus on the intersection of environmental and social history through interdisciplinary methodologies. Her publications include Landscapes of Power and Identity: Comparative Histories in the Sonoran Desert and the Forests of Amazonia from Colony to Republic (2005); she is co-editor with Paul Readman and Chad Bryant of Borderlands in World History (Palgrave, 2014). Radding has published articles in Hispanic American Historical Review, The Americas, Boletín Americanista, and Latin American Research Review as well as numerous chapters in collaborative publications in Mexico, Bolivia, the U.S., and Europe. Andrés Reséndez, Professor of History at the University of California, Davis earned his BA in International Relations at El Colegio de México in Mexico City and his MA and PhD in History at the University of Chicago. His books include Changing National Identities at the Frontier (2005), A Land So Strange (2007), and most recently The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America (2016). Heather F. Roller, Associate Professor of History at Colgate University is currently writing a book on the political choices and motivations of independent Indians in the interior of Brazil during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Her first book,

xviii   contributors Amazonian Routes: Indigenous Mobility and Colonial Communities in Northern Brazil (2014), won the Howard  F.  Cline Memorial Prize from the Conference on Latin American History and the Roberto Reis Book Award from the Brazilian Studies Association. Linda M. Rupert, Associate Professor of History at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, teaches courses on the Atlantic World and Caribbean history. She is the author of Creolization and Contraband: Curaçao in the Early Modern Atlantic World (2012), and has published articles in, among others, Itinerario, Slavery and Abolition, and numerous edited volumes. She is the recipient of fellowships at the John Carter Brown Library and the National Humanities Center. Tatiana Seijas, Associate Professor of History at Rutgers University received her PhD from Yale University. Her first monograph, Asian Slaves in Colonial Mexico: From Chinos to Indians (2014) won the Berkshire Conference Book Prize for 2014. She is currently working on a book project about indigenous trade routes in early North America. Her specializations include: Mexican history, early modern economics, global Spanish empire, seventeenth-century Philippine Islands, slavery, borderlands, and nineteenthcentury US Mexico relations. Cecilia Sheridan Prieto, Senior Researcher at the Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social, Northeast Region, Mexico received her doctorate in  history from the Colegio de México. Her research focus is on colonization and indigenous territorialities in the northeast of New Spain. She has published numerous articles and chapters in edited volumes as well as two books: Anónimos y desterrados. La contienda por el “sitio que llaman de Quauyla” (2000), and Fronterización del espacio hacia el norte de la Nueva España (2015). She is a member of the Academia Mexicana de Ciencias and the Mexican Sistema Nacional de Investigadores. In 2016 she received the Premio Atanasio G. Sarabia, granted by the Fundación Cultural Banamex for the best professional research on regional history. Juan Carlos Solórzano Fonseca, Research Professor retired from the Escuela de Historia and the Centro de Investigaciones Históricas de América Central, Universidad de Costa Rica, is a member of the Academia de Geografía e Historia de Costa Rica. He received his doctorate from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Université de Paris and was later a Fulbright scholar at Tulane University. His research interests include the economic history of Costa Rica (1570–1821), indigenous populations of the Costa Rican borderlands, and the borderlands of Central America. The following books are among his most recent publications: Los indígenas en la frontera de la colonización: Costa Rica 1502–1930 (2013), and América Antigua: los pueblos precolombinos desde el poblamiento original hasta los inicios de la conquista española (2010). Barbara A. Sommer, Professor of History and Johnson Distinguished Professor in the Humanities at Gettysburg College, has published on Amazonian history in the following journals: Slavery & Abolition; The Americas: A Quarterly Review of Latin

contributors   xix American History; Journal of Latin American Studies, and Colonial Latin American Historical Review. Her essays in edited collections include “The Amazonian Native Nobility in Late-Colonial Pará,” in Native Brazil: Beyond the Convert and the Cannibal (2014), and “Wigs, Weapons, Tattoos, and Shoes: Getting Dressed in Colonial Amazonia and Brazil,” in The Politics of Dress in Asia and the Americas (2007). She received a PhD in History with an Anthropology minor from the University of New Mexico and has been awarded research fellowships by the Fundação Luso-Americana, the John Carter Brown Library, and the Fulbright Commission. María Ximena Urbina Carrasco received her doctorate from the Universidad de Sevilla and is now Professor at the Instituto de Historia of the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso, Chile. She conducts research on the southern borderlands of Chile in the colonial period. Besides her more than 30 articles and chapters in edited volumes, she has published La frontera “de arriba” en Chile Colonial. Interacción hispano-indígena en el territorio entre Valdivia y Chiloé, e imaginario de sus bordes geográficos, 1600–1800 (2009), and Fuentes para la Historia de la Patagonia Occidental, siglos XVI y XVII (2014). She has received the Miguel Cruchaga Tocornal Prize, from the Academia Chilena de la Historia, and the Historia Colonial Silvio Zavala Prize, from the Instituto Panamericano de Geografía e Historia. Dana Velasco Murillo, Associate Professor of History at the University of California, San Diego focuses her research on recovering the voices of native peoples and women in colonial northern Mexico. She is the author of Urban Indians in a Silver City: Zacatecas, Mexico, 1546–1810 (2016), and the co-editor of City Indians in Spain’s American Empire: Urban Indigenous Society in Colonial Mesoamerica and Andean South America, 1530–1810 (2014). Velasco Murillo’s published work also appears in the Hispanic American Historical Review and Ethnohistory. Her current research project considers New Spain’s sixteenth century frontier wars and peacemaking campaigns from the perspectives of nonsedentary native peoples. Guillermo Wilde, researcher of the Consejo Nacional de Investigación Científica (CONICET), Argentina, is Associate Professor at the Universidad Nacional de San Martín, Buenos Aires. He obtained his PhD in Anthropology from the Universidad de Buenos Aires. His book Religión y poder en las misiones guaraníes (2009) garnered the Latin American Association Studies Premio Iberoamericano Book Award (2010). Wilde edited Saberes de la conversión. Jesuitas, indígenas e imperios coloniales en las fronteras de la cristiandad (2011), and has published articles on indigenous history, colonial art and music, and Jesuit missions in South America. He has received fellowships from the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, the National Museum of Rio de Janeiro (Brazil), the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (Germany), and the National Museum of Ethnology (Japan). Jason M. Yaremko, professor of history who teaches in the Department of History and in the Faculty of Education Access program at the University of Winnipeg. His scholarship focuses on ethnohistory with a strong interest in comparative colonization, borderlands,

xx   contributors and indigenous and cultural history in the Americas. His current work engages several lines of research including indigenous diaspora and transculturation, extinction tropes, and indigenous identity, sovereignty, and cultural persistence. He is author of Indigenous Passages to Cuba, 1515–1900 (2016) and a number of publications on colonization and indigenous peoples in North America, Cuba, and the Circum-Caribbean. Ines  G.  Županov, Senior Research Fellow at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris is the current director of the Centre d’études de l’Inde/l’Asie du Sud (CNRS-EHESS). She is a social/cultural historian of Catholic missions in South Asia and has also worked on other topics related to Portuguese empire. Her latest monograph co-written with Ângela Barreto Xavier is Catholic Orientalism; Portuguese Empire, Indian Knowledge, 16th–18th Centuries (2015). She has coedited six books and her articles in various languages are published in edited books and journals like Indian Economic and Social History Review, Archives de sciences sociales des religions, Journal of Early Modern History, or RES: Anthropology and Esthetics. Editorial assistant: Michelle Aguilar Vera, independent photographer and researcher. She recently coauthored with Danna Levin Rojo “El registro audiovisual del Poema urbano de Grupo Março: las posibilidades de la práctica estética como micropolítica y etnografía,” in  Variaciones sobre cine etnográfico: entre la documentación antropológica y la experimentación estética (2017).

Abbreviations

ABNB AECI AGN AGNA AHA AHILA AMS ANH ANPOCS ANPUH-SP APCOB ASUR

BUAP CBC CEADUC CEDEAM CEDEFES CEGRAF-UFG CEH-Colmex

Archivo y Biblioteca Nacionales de Bolivia, Sucre (Bolivia) Agencia de Española de Cooperación Internacional, Madrid (Spain) Archivo General de la Nación, Mexico City (Mexico) Archivo General de la Nación, Buenos Aires (Argentina) American Historical Association, Washington (United States) Asociación de Historiadores Latinoamericanistas Europeos (Spain) Archivo Municipal de Saltillo, Saltillo (Mexico) Academia Nacional de la Historia de la República Argentina, Buenos Aires (Argentina) Associação Nacional de Pós-Graduação e Pesquisa em Ciências Sociais, São Paulo (Brazil) Associação Nacional de História Seção São Paulo, São Paulo (Brazil) Apoyo para el Campesino Indígena de Oriente, Santa Cruz de la Sierra (Bolivia) Fundación para la Investigación Antropológica y el Etnodesarrollo “Antropólogos del Sur Andino,” Sucre (Bolivia) Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla, Puebla (Mexico) Centro de Estudios Regionales Andinos “Bartolomé de Las Casas,” Cuzco (Peru) Centro de Estudios Antropológicos de la Universidad Católica, Asunción (Paraguay) Comissão de Documentação e Estudos da Amazônia (Brazil) Centro de documentação Eloy Ferreira da Silva, Belo Horizonte (Brazil) Centro Editorial e Gráfico–Universidade Federal de Goiás, Goânia (Brazil) Centro de Estudios Históricos del Colegio de México, Mexico City (Mexico)

xxii   Abbreviations CEIC CEMCA CEPAG CEPC CIDDEBENI CIESAS CIPCA CIRMA CISINAH CMN Chile CNCDP CONACULTA CONARTE CONICET CRAEC CSIC DESCO DIBAM EDUFPA EDUFRN EDUSC EDUSP EEHA

Centro de Estudios Indígenas y Coloniales, Jujuy (Argentina) Centro de Estudios Mexicanos y Centroamericanos, Mexico City (Mexico) Centro de Estudios Paraguayos Antonio Guasch, Asunción (Paraguay) Centro de Estudios Políticos y Constitucionales, Madrid (Spain) Centro de Investigación y Documentación para el Desarrollo del Beni, Trinidad (Bolivia) Centro de Investigación y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social (Mexico) Centro de Investigación y Promoción del Campesinado, La Paz (Bolivia) Centro de Investigaciones Regionales de Mesoamérica, Antigua (Guatemala) Centro de Investigaciones Superiores del Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, Mexico City (Mexico) Consejo de Monumentos Nacionales de Chile, Santiago (Chile) Comissão Nacional para as Comemorações dos Descobrimentos Portugueses, Lisbon (Portugal) Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, Mexico City (Mexico) Consejo para la Cultura y las Artes de Nuevo León, Monterrey (Mexico) Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas (Argentina) Centre de Recherche sur l’ Amérique Espagnole Coloniale, Paris (France) Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, Seville (Spain) Centro de Estudios y Promoción del Desarrollo, Arequipa (Peru) Dirección de Bibliotecas, Archivos y Museos de Chile, Santiago (Chile) Editora da Universidade Federal do Pará, Pará (Brazil) Editora da Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte, Nata (Brazil) Episcopal Diocese of Upper South Carolina, South Carolina (United States) Editora da Universidade de São Paulo, São Paulo (Brazil) Escuela de Estudios Hispanoamericanos, Seville (Spain)

Abbreviations   xxiii EHESS EUC EUCR EUNA EUNED FAPESP FUNAI IA-UNAM IEHC IEHS

IEP IFCH-UNICAMP IFEA IHGB IHGES IHGMS IHGU IHSI IIAP IIA-UNAM

IICT IIE-UNAM IIGHI-CONICET

École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris (France) Ediciones Universidad Católica de Chile, Santiago (Chile) Editorial de la Universidad de Costa Rica, San José (Costa Rica) Editora Universidad Estatal, Heredia (Costa Rica) Editorial de la Universidad Estatal a Distancia, San José (Costa Rica) Fundaçao de Amparo a Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo, São Paulo (Brazil) Fundação Nacional do Índio, Brasília (Brazil) Instituto de Astronomía de la Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Mexico City (Mexico) Instituto de Estudios Hispánicos de Canarias, Tenerife (Spain) Instituto de Estudios Histórico Sociales de la Universidad Nacional del Centro de la Provincia de Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires, Tandil (Argentina) Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, Lima (Peru) Instituto de Filosofia e Ciências Humanas da Universidade Estadual de Campinas (Brazil) Instituto Francés de Estudios Andinos, Lima (Peru) Brazilian Geographical and Historical Institute, Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) Instituto Histórico e Geográfico do Espírito Santo, Espírito Santo (Brazil) Instituto Histórico e Geográfico do Mato Grosso do Sul (Brazil) Instituto Histórico y Geográfico del Uruguay, Montevideo (Uruguay) Institutum Historicum Societatis Iesu, Rome (Italy) Instituto de Investigaciones de la Amazonía Peruana, Iquitos (Peru) Instituto de Investigaciones Antropológicas de la Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Mexico City (Mexico) Instituto de Investigação Científica Tropical, Lisbon (Portugal) Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas de la Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Mexico City (Mexico) Instituto de Investigaciones Geohistóricas del Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas (Argentina)

xxiv   Abbreviations IIH-UMSNH IIH-UJED IIH-UNAM IIS-UNAM IJAH ILAM IMSS INAH INBA INI IOMP IPHG IRD ITESM IUNA IWGIA JHU LACED LSU MI MIT MSH MUNAL NHII OECD PIEB

Instituto de Investigaciones Históricas de la Universidad Michoacana de San Nicolás de Hidalgo, Morelia (Mexico) Instituto de Investigaciones Históricas de la Universidad Juárez del Estado de Durango, Durango (Mexico) Instituto de Investigaciones Históricas de la Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Mexico City (Mexico) Instituto de Investigaciones Sociales de la Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Mexico City (Mexico) Instituto Jaliciense de Antropología e Historia, Guadalajara (Mexico) Instituto Latinoamericano de Museos y Parques, San José (Costa Rica) Instituto Mexicano del Seguro Social, Mexico City (Mexico) Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia (Mexico) Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes, Mexico City (Mexico) Instituto Nacional Indigenista, Mexico City (Mexico) Imprensa Oficial do Estado de Minas Gerais, Minas Gerais (Brazil) Instituto Panamericano de Geografia e Historia, Mexico City (Mexico) Instituto de Investigación para el Desarrollo (France) Instituto Tecnológico de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey, Monterrey (Mexico) Instituto Universitario Nacional de Artes, Buenos Aires (Argentina). International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore (United States) Laboratório de Pesquisas em Etnicidade, Cultura e Desenvolvimento (Brazil) Louisiana State University, Louisiana (United States) Museo do Índio, Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, Cambridge (United States) Éditions de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, Paris (France) Museo Nacional de Arte, Mexico City (Mexico) Núcleo de História Indígena e do IndigenismoUniversidade de São Paulo (Brazil) Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development Programa de Investigación Estratégica en Bolivia (Bolivia)

Abbreviations   xxv PUC PUCP PUCV PUMS PUPS PUR SAR SBH SEP SGAE SMGE SRE SUNY TEIAA UABC UABCS UACJ UAEM UAGRM UAM UAT UAZ UBA UCA UCE UcG UCG UCN UdG UERJ

Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Santiago (Chile) Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, Lima (Peru) Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso, Valparaíso (Chile) Presses Universitaires de Marne-la-Vallée (France) Presses de l’université Paris-Sorbonne, Paris (France) Presses Universitaires de Rennes (France) School of American Research (now School for Advanced Research), Santa Fe (United States) Sociedad Boliviana de Historia (Bolivia) Secretaría de Educación Pública, Mexico City (Mexico) Sociedad General de Autores y Editores, Madrid (Spain) Sociedad Mexicana de Geografía y Estadística, Mexico City (Mexico) Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores, Mexico City (Mexico) State University of New York, New York (United States) Taller de Estudios e Investigaciones Andino-Amazónicos (Spain) Universidad Autónoma de Baja California, Baja California (Mexico) Universidad Autónoma de Baja California Sur, La Paz (Mexico) Universidad Autónoma de Ciudad Juárez, Ciudad Juárez (Mexico) Universidad Autónoma del Estado de México, Toluca (Mexico) Universidad Autónoma Gabriel René Moreno, Santa Cruz de la Sierra (Bolivia) Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, Mexico City (Mexico) Universidad Autónoma de Tlaxcala, Tlaxcala (Mexico) Universidad Autónoma de Zacatecas, Zacatecas (Mexico) Universidad de Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires (Argentina) Universidad Católica Nuestra Señora de la Asunción, Asunción (Paraguay) Universidade Católica Editora, Lisbon (Portugal) Unidade Central Gestora, Brasília (Brazil) Universidade Catolica de Goiás, Goiânia (Brazil) Universidad Católica del Norte, Antofagasta (Chile) Universidad de Guadalajara, Guadalajara (Mexico) Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro (Brazil)

xxvi   Abbreviations UFBA UFG UFMG UFMT UFPB UFRO UGA UJED UMSA UMSNH UNAM UnB UNC UNCPBA UNCUYO UNESP UNICAMP UNICEN UNISINOS UNIVALE UNM UNNE UNQ UNS UPB USP

Universidade Federal da Bahia, Salvador (Brazil) Universidade Federal de Goiás, Goiânia (Brazil). Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Minas Gerais (Brazil) Universidade Federal de Mato Grosso, Cuiabá​​(Brazil) Universidade Federal da Paraíba, Paraíba (Brazil) Universidad de La Frontera, Temuco (Chile) University of Georgia Press, Athens (United States) Universidad Juárez del Estado de Durango, Durango (Mexico) Universidad del Museo Social Argentino, Buenos Aires (Argentina) Universidad Michoacana de San Nicolás de Hidalgo, Morelia (Mexico) Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Mexico City (Mexico) Editora Universidade de Brasília, Brasília (Brazil) University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill (United States) Universidad Nacional del Centro de la Provincia de Buenos Aires, Tandil (Argentina) Universidad Nacional de Cuyo, Mendoza (Argentina) Universidade Estadual Paulista “Júlio de Mesquita Filho,” São Paulo (Brazil) Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Campinas (Brazil) Universidad Nacional del Centro de la Provincia de Buenos Aires, Tandil (Argentina) Universidade Vale do Rio dos Sinos, San Leopoldo/Rs (Brazil) Universidade Vale do Rio Doce (Brazil) University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque (United States) Universidad Nacional del Nordeste, Corrientes (Argentina) Universidad Nacional de Quilmes, Quilmes (Argentina) Universidad Nacional del Sur, Bahía Blanca (Argentina) Editorial Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana, Bogotá (Colombia) Universidade de São Paulo, São Paulo (Brazil)

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Map 2.  Native ethnic groups of North America, 16th to 18th centuries

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Map 4.  Native ethnic groups of South America, 16th to 18th centuries

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I n troduction Borderlands, A Working Definition Danna A. Levin Rojo and Cynthia Radding

The field of study known commonly as borderlands has developed over a century with a wide range of meanings applied to cultural and societal differences as well as to the political economy of empires. Innovative work on borderlands in different geographical regions in recent decades conceives of borderlands as lived spaces rather than boundaries dividing social, economic, or political entities. This concept of borderlands transcends the notion of demarcation lines between territories that are subjected to particular political sovereignties and, therefore, primarily defined in regard to “issues of access, mobility and belonging,” as framed by Alexander  C.  Diener and Joshua Hagen.1 Borderlands have been historically unstable and indeterminate zones where no clear demarcations exist, not simply areas adjacent to frontiers that signpost clear-cut jurisdictional limits, which are often thought of in terms of the effects of border-crossing regulations or fixed rights and identities within the framework of modernity and the state.2 In this sense, borderlands are best understood as diffuse spaces produced through historical processes of contestation, adaptation and admixture among different peoples, within specific temporal and geographical frameworks. These spaces become borderlands in three important ways: where two or more spheres of hegemony, claiming rights to the resources available and the control of people, limit each other and frequently overlap; where two or more groups of people with different cultures and modes of life intermingle; and where the prevailing ecological conditions represent a challenge to particular forms of human habitation thereby conditioning the way in which people organize their livelihood, or where the natural environments are undergoing modifications resulting from the productive and settlement practices of the peoples who inhabit them, as with the introduction of animals and plants in many regions in the Americas both before and after European intrusion. Such a perspective allows for a broad approach to borderlands as it can be applied to time

2   Borderlands of the Iberian World periods predating the modern nation-state as well as to areas not standing at the limits between two political states or imperial spheres. It is therefore better fitted to the Amerindian world and to the era and character of dynastic realms and early Iberian empires than the concept of national boundaries or limits, with all their implications.3 Drawing on theorists from historical sociology, cultural geography, and anthropology, the vision of borderlands offered here is fundamentally grounded in the rich and growing body of historical and cross-disciplinary studies for the Americas. Historians working in both North and South America provide important insights for the definition of Iberian borderlands and the analysis of the social and economic phenomena that characterize them, such as weak law enforcement, widespread contraband, enslavement and other forms of forced labor, ambivalent and negotiated political loyalties, and the emergence of new identities among both indigenous and European subjects as well as the persistence of ethnic enclaves within or on the peripheries of colonial societies.4 As a recognized field in North American scholarship, borderlands has its origin in Herbert E. Bolton’s 1921 work on the United States frontier region with Mexico that was once Spanish: mainly New Mexico, Texas, Arizona, California, and Florida. Other contemporaries of Bolton and historians of later generations followed this line; like Hubert H. Bancroft at the end of the nineteenth century, they all stressed the character of this region as a fringe area close to the extreme limit of the Spanish empire in North America.5 They saw this as a peripheral territory over which the hold of imperial economic and political control advanced from the late sixteenth to the early nineteenth century; yet it was always weak and constantly contested as it was far removed geographically from cosmopolitan seats of viceregal power.6 Among Hispanophone scholars in Latin America, historian Silvio Zavala and sociologist Hebe Clementi developed the concept of borderlands as frontera, a frontier that transcended the modern nation-state.7 Current scholarship on borderlands history has evolved for areas elsewhere in the continent, encompassing what Pekka Hämäläinen and Benjamin  H.  Johnson have outlined as the subject matter of North American borderlands history: zones of ­everyday “interaction between different peoples, empires and nations.” Thus, borderlands studies do not focus on discrete nations, ethnic groups or people, but on places of encounter “that exist in between colonial empires and indigenous territories, literate and non-literate societies, nation-states and non-state societies.”8 From this abundant literature it can be concluded that borderlands arise historically with a strong environmental component, as in the arctic tundra, the arid lands of the North American Great Plains and deserts, the tropical lowlands of Amazonia, or the grasslands of the South American pampas and Patagonia. Natural conditions of climate, topography, and hydrology are integral components of borderlands, but they do not create borderlands in and of themselves. Like any other space, understood not only in the physical level as the empirical disposition of things and human relations within a certain area, but also in the abstract level of discursive representation about people’s placement in the world, borderlands are socially produced.9 They emerge and take shape with historical variability, both through the strategies devised by discrete human societies for their cultural and physical survival or for their economic and territorial

Introduction   3 aggrandizement, and through the representations constructed by the different ethnic groups that come into contact as a result of such processes. In 1976, the anthropologist Roberto Cardoso de Oliveira coined the term “contact culture” for this kind of ideological construct, in terms of which peoples immersed in a contact situation classify themselves and the others, and act accordingly.10 Cardoso studied this phenomenon for late modern times, in ways that are not exclusive to the borderlands since inter-ethnic contact occurs in other contexts such as diasporas or even in contiguous spaces like urban settlements. Nevertheless, the concepts of contact culture and borderlands fit each other, because contact culture did evolve among actors from different ethnic groups that first encountered one another at the geographical edges of early colonial empires in the Americas. Moreover, it regularly furnished policymaking with legitimizing arguments, planning assumptions, and guiding principles, both for the borderlands themselves and for regions not yet subdued that stood as colonizing targets in the horizon ahead. In a dramatic but widespread example, as Andrés Reséndez and Izabel Missagia de Mattos have shown, Indian slavery was predicated on the alleged cannibalism of whole native peoples, contacted but mostly unknown in scarcely explored or sparsely settled areas.11 If a borderland is frequently understood as the region in one nation significantly affected by an international border—whether the area at one or both sides of the demarcation line is taken as the object of study—for the lengthy period predating the birth of independent nations in the Americas, unbounded regions where the claims to exclusive power of competing imperial states met have been perceived as borderlands par excellence. In both instances, power relations between regional elites, local peoples, and the state, or cross-border economic activities and the familial and political networks that sustained them are privileged subjects. Two cases in point are the north and south bank of the Río de la Plata (River Plate area) and the southern Caribbean; as Fabrício Prado and Linda Rupert have demonstrated, these regions illustrate in powerful ways trans-boundary legal and illegal transactions and social formations in very different geographical contexts.12 The southern Andean trade routes provide another clear example of how borderlands are historically produced. Research by Erick Langer, as well as that represented by brief studies compiled in 2002 by Viviana Conti and Marcelo Lagos show that entire regions once within the core of colonial Iberian societies, featuring intense commercial activities through overlapping economic and social networks, became borderlands through the territorial demarcation of modern states, a process that started in Europe and nurtured Latin American independence movements in the early nineteenth century.13 Historical narratives of borderlands before the consolidation of the modern nationstate convey a sense of peripheral marginality and remoteness in relation to a normative center of power. Therefore, they are associated with notions of autonomy, liberty, ­unruliness, violence, and cultural imposition or incorporation. Sociologist Edward Shils provided a useful theoretical tool for establishing how these elements relate to one another regardless of the geographic position of a fixed frontier, in his seminal 1961 essay on centers and peripheries, masterfully appropriated by Jack P. Greene and Amy Turner

4   Borderlands of the Iberian World Bushnell in their introduction to Negotiated Empires.14 In Shils’s formulation neither centrality nor peripherality—or their mutual relationship—have an intrinsic geographical character implying long distances, although the whole complex may have a spatial translation. In his treatment centrality refers to settings where a certain order of symbols and beliefs structures the activities and interrelations of a large proportion of the population of a society through the radiation of their authority by means of institutional networks, while peripheries are social areas over which centers exercise authority through a symbiotic but uneasy relationship. Thus, at an abstract level, peripheries have a “vertical (sociostructural)” as well as a “horizontal (geographical) dimension” and may coexist with centers in the same space.15 Adapting this theoretical framework to understand spaces in the Americas “that Europeans represented as under their jurisdiction” throughout the early modern era, Amy Turner Bushnell proposed a territorial model of concentric zones: “The immediate area over which an urban settlement of European origin asserted political and economic control” she called an ecumene or zone of mastery that, in Spanish America, usually comprised a hinterland of native provinces and formed a colonial core region when grouped with other settled areas in supporting a colonial center. Beyond this core stood the colonial periphery or zone of marginality, “the most remote area where the authority of a particular colonial center was recognized.” Colonial peripheries, she contends, were frontiers only when characterized by “cultural interaction or interpenetration among previously distinct societies.” Further beyond the periphery Bushnell identified the “sphere of influence,” an intermediate zone of exchange dissolving into what she called pure “claim”; that is, the “cartographic expanse to which an early modern monarch held title under European international law.” Based on these considerations and “using nation in the old sense of a group sharing a language and customs,” she advanced an ethnically neutral definition of the early modern frontier that aptly describes the meaning of borderlands: “A geographic area contested by two or more nations, each of which is engaged in a process of polity formation in which control is tenuous and continuously negotiated, and each of which tries to extend its negotiating mechanisms to include the others.”16 The concept of borderlands, like Bushnell’s formulation, exceeds the legal meanings normally attached to the term frontier as related to the exercise of sovereignty over a given territory by a constituted polity. It emphasizes processes of cultural adaptation and appropriation of mores and symbols across cultures, as in Mary Louise Pratt’s open ended and heterogeneous contact zones.17 These may be better understood in terms of Fernando Ortiz’s concept of transculturation.18 However, borderlands are historically related, indeed, to territorial claims and effective territorial occupation, particularly when their production, as in the case of the Americas, is contingent on processes of imperial expansion. To address the major issues that are intrinsic to these territorial and cultural processes one can fruitfully apply the interrelated notions of successive frontiers and internal borderlands.19 As the Spanish and Portuguese incorporated new lands and peoples into their domains, successive frontiers emerged as contact zones or

Introduction   5 borderlands, “social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power.”20 In such spaces new methods for the acquisition of knowledge, new institutions, and new strategies of political and economic control were devised and put to the test. European systems of law, patterns of land occupation, and cultural practices were molded according to local circumstances, as historians have shown for the key roles of Indian allies in the formation of successive frontiers in northern New Spain or to explain the parallel processes of cultural impositions, adaptations, and appropriations in the South American frontier missions.21 Unlike Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis, so deeply seated on the European settler perspective, this idea of successive frontiers appeals to the imperial subject’s point of view, but it takes into account the concentric webs of contesting agencies. As Guy and Sheridan note in their introduction to Contested Ground, the geographical landscape of the Americas had been occupied by human societies for thousands of years, such that by the time of European arrival “American Indians had contended for and laid claim to both North and South America.”22 Spaces where successive Spanish and Portuguese frontiers were established, like the Gran Chichimeca of North America or the savannas and pampas east of the South American Andean cordillera, frequently overlapped with areas previously constituting mutually understood but unstable limits between native societies and, in turn, they often represented zones of ecological ­transition or environmental contrast. This phenomenon has been well documented for the territory extending north of Mesoamerica, where the arid lands of the Chichimeca, gradually engulfed in the processes of colonial expansion, had sustained corridors of cross-cultural contact and social entanglement long before the European arrival.23 As such these spaces may be treated as internal borderlands in relation to the spheres of Iberian imperial control. Borderlands, in accordance with Guy and Sheridan’s notion of frontier, should not be understood as peripheries of empires or nation-states, neither as areas where civilization—as in Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis—faces wilderness or barbarism; these are notions that reflect the “value judgements of the conquerors.”24 Rather, they are zones of socio-historical interface where people with different cultural backgrounds, economic and political interests interact thereby creating new forms of resource appropriation, production, and distribution as well as new ways of understanding and representing the world and new modalities of inter-subjective relations, while reproducing and imposing at the same time elements of their own worldview and structures of power. As Renato Rosaldo and Nestor García Canclini have shown, this understanding of borderlands turns away from the objectivist representation of cultures posed in classical ethnography prior to the late 1960s, which followed the romantic German tradition that views cultures as self-contained, organic, and coherent wholes. Culture is always under construction through confrontation, adaptation, and appropriation among subjects immersed in different societies with different rules, power structures, material cultures, and routine practices. Although developed from the

6   Borderlands of the Iberian World examination of contemporary contexts, Rosaldo’s view of culture as a “porous array of intersections” is instructive for the present discussion.25 García Canclini’s notion of hybridity as a social phenomenon characterized by the simultaneity of diverse cultural traditions and practices acting upon one another, even frequently involving coercion, helps us to understand the historical circumstances from which borderlands emerge.26 The phrase “Iberian World” in relation to early modern borderlands establishes a capacious framework for the historical themes and geographical regions comprehended within the Portuguese and Spanish imperial spheres that initiated transoceanic expeditions to the Atlantic islands, the western coast of Africa, and the Americas in the late fifteenth century. Although Iberian in its etymological origins refers to a specific stratum of population in the Iberian Peninsula (inhabitants of the lands watered by the Ebro River), the generally accepted usage of the word in the contexts of early modern imperialism and world history, means broadly the continents and peoples that were touched and connected through the colonial projects emanating from the Iberian peninsula. At the same time, Iberian comprehends much more than “Spanish,” “Galician,” “Catalán,” “Basque,” or “Portuguese,” because it evokes the complex mixtures and interweaving of languages, religions, and cultures that had gestated in the different provinces south of the Pyrenees for centuries before the Portuguese, Castilian, and Aragonese undertook the transoceanic voyages that would bring them to portions of Africa and Asia and to the hitherto unknown peoples and continents of the Americas. As an integral part of this process, and notwithstanding the violence of conquest encounters, through the resilience of the African, Asian, and Amerindian peoples who confronted the Iberian invaders, and their intermingling, new societies and cultures were born, thus creating the Iberian borderlands of the early modern world. The literature on Iberian borderlands in the Americas generally focuses in the first instance on the terrestrial borderlands of the northern and southern continents of the Americas, including the connecting geographies and peoples of Central America. This spatial framework, broadened by innovative research on indigenous trade networks and colonial commercial circuits, extends to the maritime spaces that surround the tierra firme; that is, the Caribbean basin, the Gulf of Mexico, the Gulf of California, and the fluvial inlets such as Nootka Sound that became the scene of Russian, Spanish, and indigenous encounters in the North Pacific.27 Similar transoceanic networks linked the central and southern Pacific ports of Spanish America, including Callao and Acapulco, through the commercial routes of the Manila galleon. Even further south, at the tip of South America, the Magellan Strait became a waterway over which Spanish hegemony was challenged by British, Dutch, and other European powers as well as by privateers who sought maritime passage through the continent.28 Together with the riverine networks that flow through the American continents—the Mississippi and Colorado drainages, the greater Amazon, and the Río de la Plata with their multiple tributaries— these watery spaces functioned as borderlands in much the same way that Fernand Braudel demonstrated that the Mediterranean Sea defined the cultural and economic borderlands of southern Europe and northern Africa for centuries. The Caribbean with

Introduction   7 its island archipelagoes became a borderland traversed by sailors, privateers, and enslaved peoples seeking freedom, who crossed the imperial boundaries of Spanish, French, English, and Dutch port cities and colonies.29 Furthermore, recently published works by Mary Karasch, Barbara Sommer, Hal Langfur, and Heather Roller on the vast river systems of the interior of South America have shown their importance for the histories of inter-ethnic frontiers and colonial settlement.30 Transoceanic trade networks developed historically from antiquity to the modern era, encompassing areas as diverse as the Indian Ocean that linked South Asia and eastern Africa, the Straits of Melaka that communicated portions of India and China with the island polities of Sumatra, or Oceania and the island archipelago of Indonesia. These networks developed through overlapping or concentric circuits of interregional and long-distance migration and exchange across the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, thereby connecting the hemispheric borderlands of the Americas to spheres of political power, nodes of cultural influence, and foci of economic production and exchange in portions of Europe, Asia and Africa. For this reason, they may also be conceived as borderlands that brought imperial spheres closer to one another through the assertion of territorial claims to dominion over peoples, lands, waterways, and resources of particular areas of the globe. Scholars working in different disciplines and intellectual traditions have demonstrated the complex webs of commercial and religious relationships that brought the Philippines, South Asia, and East Asia under the aegis of the Iberian world and pointed to the histories of armed conflicts and negotiated boundaries at the frontiers of imperial domains.31 These contested spaces became borderlands that imperfectly delineated rival colonial projects. More profoundly, however, they emerged and took shape through the actions taken by indigenous peoples and transported migrants—indentured and enslaved laborers—to challenge the power of their imperial administrators and overlords. The expanded view of borderlands herein proposed requires a brief discussion of the polysemic character of the Spanish and Portuguese terms frontera/fronteira, usually translated into English as frontier and borderland. Besides connoting border, boundary, and limit as discussed for contemporary borderlands by A. Diener and J. Hagen,32 they are used in historical records produced in colonial Latin America when referring to unpopulated lands, uncultivated wilderness in both temperate and tropical climates, and colonial peripheries. Other terms in these languages were also applied to such spaces, like despoblado and tierra incógnita (unpopulated or deserted, and unexplored lands respectively) in Spanish, or campanha (thinly populated rural areas) and sertões (backlands) in Portuguese. Eighteenth to twentieth century Spanish and Portuguese dictionaries provide definitions of frontera/fronteira as the geopolitical notion of the limit between territorial states, a region where different ethnic groups interact, or the most distant dominions of the kingdom.33 These understandings of “frontera/fronteira” complement Amy Turner Bushnell’s distinction between ecumene and sphere of influence, bringing the concept closer to modern definitions of frontier in English. These linguistic palimpsests enrich the cultural meanings of borderlands for historians and scholars from sister disciplines.

8   Borderlands of the Iberian World

Historiography: Frontiers to Borderlands The field of borderlands studies has opened new dimensions of interdisciplinary research in the last quarter century at the same time that ethnohistorical approaches to imperialism and colonialism have produced critical analyses of European imperial spheres in several world regions. Comparative research on areas affected by early European expansionism has enriched the conceptual frameworks that define borderlands, expanding its theoretical significance since its inception in geopolitical imperial histories. The field of borderlands history showcases a wide range of themes like environmental change; ethnogenesis and the formation of powerful indigenous federations in the Americas; gendered histories in the mixed and volatile social fabrics of frontier regions; enslavement, captivity, and the complex degrees of difference between freedom and bondage across ethnic lines; Afro-descendant populations in the Spanish and Portuguese domains; the role of different religions in the creation of spiritual borderlands and the production of knowledge through the sciences and the arts. The innovative contributions of borderlands studies have emerged from research in archaeology, history, and cultural geography as well as new currents in literature, Native American studies, the African diaspora, and gender and sexuality studies. Histories of displacements and migrations have shown the complexity in defining the identities of peoples as diverse as the Latino/a communities of North America, the mixed populations of the Caribbean basin, and the cultural mosaics of highland and lowland South America. The chronological depth and spatial breadth of the imperial spheres forged by Portuguese and Spanish ambitions created transcontinental borderlands of vast geographical and temporal proportions. These hegemonic networks and the heterogeneous populations they gradually engulfed provide a fecund and creative field for further reflection on the historical significance of the concept. Several major turning points in the literatures and scholarly traditions of Latin America, North America, and Europe underscore the shifts in focus from frontiers to borderlands and from European views of expanding frontiers to wider perspectives on the formation of maritime and continental “contact zones” by indigenous and diasporic populations through trade, labor, and migration. This broad field of study has evolved into three major lines of inquiry: the narrative traditions of discovery, encounter, and imperial expansion; the social and cultural processes of confrontation, adaptation, and commingling among different societies and peoples; and the transformation of knowledge that revolutionized early modern technologies in navigation, cartography, medicine, botany, agriculture, and livestock domestication.34 No less importantly, it gave rise to aesthetic innovations in music, literature, and the visual arts.35 The sixteenth century produced a series of richly textured epic narratives that traced the outlines of the borderlands in the Americas. Their content, thick with ethnographic descriptions, identified topographical features and reported encounters with myriad

Introduction   9 groups of indigenous peoples, thus creating the conceptual basis on which the diverse cultural geographies of both North and South America have been conceived thereafter. Four classic sources for this period of contact serve to highlight how those discursive representations were built and how their constructed memories shaped historical concepts of borderlands: Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca describing explorations and encounters in northern Mexico and the Paraguay River basin; Jean de Léry, survivor of a Huguenot colony in the Guanabara province of Brazil; Alonso de Ercilla in the Araucanía of southern Chile; and Gaspar Pérez de Villagrá, early seventeenth-century chronicler of Spanish entradas in New Mexico. Their writings illustrate the production of intersecting ethnic and imperial frontiers through narratives that describe violent encounters, cultural commingling, and spatial orientations for diverse regions of the Americas distant from major European settlements. Six years after Hernán Cortés’s brazen invasion of the Mexica tributary empire, one of Cortés’s bitter rivals, Pánfilo de Narváez, led an ill-starred expedition of six hundred men to La Florida in 1527. Their ambition was to conquer new lands and peoples for the Spanish monarch and, at the same time, build their own fortunes and regional bases of power. The expedition met with disaster shortly after its first landing, due to tropical storms, shipwreck, and staunch resistance from the powerful chiefdoms of Florida. As the adventurers scattered, many of them died and others were taken captive. Only four known survivors—one of them an African—managed to reunite and begin a slow journey westward across the rim of the Gulf of Mexico, seeking “Christians.” Their survival depended on foraging with the indigenous peoples among whom they traveled, starving along with them in seasons of scarcity. From enslaved captives they became peddlers and healers, evincing a source of spiritual power that enabled them to move from one group to another. Eventually they turned southwestward through the Sierra Madre Occidental, where they found agricultural villages and an abundance of maize. In 1536 they emerged in the Villa de Culiacán (in present-day Sinaloa), where they encountered Spaniards and witnessed the destructive consequences of Nuño de Guzmán’s wars and slaving expeditions. Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca became the narrator of their remarkable odyssey, through a report authored by himself and the other Spanish survivors and delivered to the newly appointed Viceroy Antonio de Mendoza in Mexico City, and his Relación (1542), presented to King Charles I in Spain to support his petition to lead his own expedition and obtain a governorship in the Americas.36 Armed with a royal appointment as adelantado (captain charged with advancing the imperial frontier) and governor of the province of Río de la Plata, Cabeza de Vaca arrived in the river port of Asunción de Paraguay in 1542 with several hundred crew members, after his ocean voyage and an overland journey from the island of Santa Catalina, off the Brazilian Atlantic coast. In Asunción, previously established Spanish colonists acknowledged his governorship, but over the next two years Spanish officials and soldiers challenged his authority. Rivalries among different groups of aspiring conquistadores—who guarded jealously the trading privileges, grants of Indian labor, and “gifts” of indigenous wives and concubines—became all the more acute because of the precarious situation they faced in this struggling outpost amidst a sea of different

10   Borderlands of the Iberian World indigenous chiefdoms loosely grouped among the Guaraní and Guaycurú ethnic and linguistic families.37 Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca led two expeditions northward along the river’s course, following his mandate to consolidate Asunción and found new settlements upstream in the Paraguayan basin. He explored as far as the Chaco Boreal and the wetlands of the pantanal, which today constitutes a vast ecological borderland between Bolivia and Brazil. His progress inland was thwarted when the rivulets and lagoons of the upper Paraguay river were no longer navigable, and the alliances he had attempted to form with different indigenous groups faltered, depriving the expedition of food and guides. The adelantado was forced to retreat to Puerto de los Reyes, where he faced an indigenous insurrection, and downstream to Asunción, where he was confronted with a mutiny and arrested by royal officials, held prisoner. He was then sent to Spain, where he pled his case as a prisoner of the royal court. In 1547 he successfully appealed to the Council of the Indies and secured his release.38 For his defense, Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca produced his own account of his truncated governorship in Río de la Plata, the Comentarios, which were either dictated to or written with the aid of his secretary, Pero [Pedro] de Hernández.39 In this account Cabeza de Vaca provided detailed geographic and ethnographic observations and presented himself as a scrupulous governor who sought, above all else, to fulfill the king’s directive for an orderly conquest and to assure the proper treatment of indigenous peoples. In the eyes of his accusers, however, Cabeza de Vaca’s measures to restrict commerce between the Spaniards and the Indians, even forbidding the men under his command to take indigenous wives, together with his failure to forge alliances with natives living beyond the Guaraní sphere of influence, spelled the adelantado’s undoing and curtailed his attempt to consolidate Spanish imperial rule in the Río de la Plata. The Relación and the Comentarios each reflect the author’s reconstruction of critical episodes in his own military career; together they narrate a vision of peaceful engagement in the enterprise of conquest, and they provide verbal portraits of borderlandsin-formation in two very different geographic settings.40 Yet, did Cabeza de Vaca’s narratives of the arid steppes of northern Mexico (and the future southwestern United States) and the meandering streams of the Paraguayan River basin constitute a coherent vision of borderlands and, if so, in relation to what? There were no imperial centers against which to measure the disparate lands and ­peoples through which Cabeza de Vaca and his three companions passed in North America. The Mesoamerican city states and political domains were far distant, and when Cabeza de Vaca observed Mesoamerican influences along the “trail of maize” among the agricultural villages of northwestern Mexico, he could not relate what he  saw to the centuries of cultural appropriations and exchanges between the Mesoamerican core and its successive northern peripheries. Spanish presence in these northern regions at the time was tenuous, not yet capable of exercising institutional control over the region. Turning to the Río de la Plata, the Guaraní clusters of villages and their prowess in fishing and navigating the lower streams of the Paraguay River could be considered a

Introduction   11 settled cultural region that exercised influence for a considerable distance northward along this basin. The complex mosaic of tribal groups that Cabeza de Vaca encountered— often at war with one another and with the Guaraní—did not, however, constitute a clearly defined periphery. Furthermore, the fractious divisions among the Spanish settlers and officials of Asunción, made evident in their opposition to Cabeza de Vaca, revealed that the port was an outpost of empire only in name, lacking the economic and political resources to govern effectively or to expand the colonial enterprise. These same questions arise for a discussion of borderlands turning westward, crossing the Andean cordillera to the southernmost Spanish frontier in South America. In Alonso de Ercilla’s chronicle entitled La Araucana, epic poetry and historical narrative intersect to produce a sixteenth-century account of military encounters, imperial ambitions, and indigenous spaces. Alonso de Ercilla (1533–1594) was both protagonist and observer of the events that he recorded in verse and published in three volumes (1569, 1578, 1589) under a simple but encompassing title that seemed to impart a single ethnonym—Araucanía—to the entire region that covers portions of central and southern Chile and southwestern Argentina. Yet, the indigenous peoples who mounted determined resistance to Spanish imperial inroads into their territories spoke a variety of languages and formed effective but shifting alliances among different groups and  chiefdoms, including the Picunches, Mapuches (Moluches, Nguluches), and Huilliches.41 Spanish attempts to found settlements, discover riches, and open a riverine or land route between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans south of the Bío-Bío river produced a fraught and ill-defined borderland that became known as la frontera de arriba— the “frontier above.” Alonso de Ercilla’s epic account was devoted principally to the Arauco, the peoples and lands generally associated with the Reche or Mapuche between the Itata and Toltén rivers.42 Ercilla’s career followed the major themes of his extended epic drama. His verses extolled the Hapsburg Empire and the Spanish monarchy even as they described the potential mineral wealth and fertile lands of Chile, yet they acknowledged the bravery and prowess of indigenous defenses in the successive frontiers that defied Spanish colonization. Ercilla first traveled to South America in 1554, at age twenty-one, entering Peru through Panama and arriving in Chile with Governor García Hurtado de Mendoza in 1556—the same year that Philip ascended to the throne of Spain, following his father, Charles I. Ercilla participated in several battles in which Araucano forces were defeated, and he witnessed the torture and execution of the indigenous leader Toqui Caupolicán. He was briefly imprisoned and exiled to Lima, Peru (1558), experiencing firsthand the factionalism among Spaniards who vied for power and wealth in these southern borderlands. Although he was offered a repartimiento (forced recruitment of indigenous peoples to labor in haciendas and mines), he turned it down and returned to Spain in 1562. During the following two decades Ercilla dedicated himself to commerce and oversaw the three editions of La Araucana. He traveled to Portugal and participated in the conquest of the Azores islands in 1582, soon after the unification of the Spanish and Portuguese Crowns under King Philip II. Twelve years later, in 1594, Ercilla died in Madrid, the city of his birth.

12   Borderlands of the Iberian World Pedro de Valdivia began the conquest of Chile in 1540, two years before the appointment of the first viceroy of Peru. He founded the colonial outposts of Santiago de la Nueva Extremadura and La Serena, in northern Chile, during the years that a faction of encomenderos led by Gonzalo Pizarro rebelled in Peru against the New Laws governing the use of Indian labor and the inheritance of encomiendas, a grant of Indian towns for tribute or service with the requirement of Christianizing them. Valdivia became governor of Chile in 1548, and led military expeditions southward to found Concepción, La Imperial, Valdivia, and a series of forts in the heart of Mapuche territory. In 1553 he was killed in the Battle of Tucapel, where the Spaniards suffered a decisive defeat that Ercilla and other contemporary chroniclers attributed to Valdivia’s greed for gold.43 The destruction of Concepción by indigenous forces in 1554 truncated the Spanish frontier and reasserted the autonomy of Araucano space. Even though Concepción was refounded four years later and Spaniards reached the Chiloé archipelago in the following decade, Iberian settlements south of the Itata River remained precarious in these largely indigenous borderlands. Ercilla commented thus on Valdivia’s demise: But he left the advantageous road, / carelessly, took a turn in the route, Placing himself on another road of avarice, / where there was a gold mine; And on seeing the tribute and beautiful gift / its rich veins offered, Full of greed he stopped, / cutting the prosperous thread of destiny. The city of fertile gold is lost / it was where more population inhabited, Where more wealth and treasures / are enclosed within its boundaries.44

The theme of frontier pervaded Ercilla’s poetic narrative, presented in terms of Chile’s perceived distance from the Peruvian viceroyalty, centered in Lima, the landscapes of the Araucanía, and the moral qualities that he ascribed to the peoples of these southern continental borderlands. In a memorable stanza Ercilla brought together Chile’s natural fertility and the pride of the Araucanos. Chile, fertile and eminent province / in the famous Antarctic region, By remote nations respected / as strong, principal and powerful; The people it produces are so great, / so arrogant, gallant, and warlike, They have never been ruled by a king / nor submitted to the reign of a foreigner.45

The juxtaposition of imperial ambition, indomitable native polities, and the landscapes of southern Chile—stretching to the “famous Antarctic region”—projected the physical and moral qualities of the Araucana frontier. Through his powerful descriptions interwoven with Renaissance tropes, Ercilla’s poem created a structure for epic ­narratives of Iberian borderlands in different regions of the Americas. During the same year that Alonso de Ercilla entered Chile, Jean de Léry (1534–1611) encountered the Tupí peoples of the Atlantic coast of Brazil under very different circumstances.46 In Léry’s Histoire the theme of empire is muted, in contrast to Ercilla’s epic narrative, because he arrived in the Guanabara Bay in 1556 as part of a colony of French Huguenots seeking refuge from the religious wars that wracked their country, not to

Introduction   13 advance the dominions of the Portuguese crown or to rule peoples and territories. Léry described in admirable detail the landscapes and material cultures of the Tupí villages that surrounded his fledgling colony in Brazil. His narrative was rooted in his experiences of living among the Tupí for nearly two years but reconstructed and written in biographical form more than two decades after the events. For this reason, Léry’s history recalls Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca’s Relación. Both accounts reveal the rigors of survival that their authors endured and the political skills they needed to negotiate across different linguistic and ethnic boundaries. Léry placed the Tupí cultural practices at the center of his narrative and served as inspiration for modern scholars, in particular anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss and historian Warren Dean.47 Léry’s narrative was not unique, and it is commonly paired with the written testimonies of Germans Hans Staden and Ulrich Schmidl as well as his countryman André Thevet.48 At the same time Léry’s Histoire introduced the themes of cannibalism and barbarity—le sauvage—that have complicated borderlands studies for generations. Léry’s reflections on the anthropophagy and warfare of the Tupinamba were tempered by his deeply personal story and the tragedy that awaited him upon his return to France. In 1573, he witnessed the savagery of European religious wars, when the siege of Sancerre took the lives of his kinsmen and he emerged as one of barely five hundred survivors, some of whom had eaten human flesh. Léry’s bitter meditation on the futility of European wars, contrasted with Tupí practices of ritual cannibalism, was reworked by Michel de Montaigne in his political essays.49 Alonso de Ercilla’s poetic rendering of the Araucanian borderlands inspired some of the chronicles devoted to Spanish entradas in the frontier regions of North America. Gaspar Pérez de Villagrá (1555–1620) in his Historia de la Nueva México, first published in 1610 in Alcalá de Henares, Spain, rendered in verse the spatial landscapes of New  Mexico, indigenous legendary migrations that linked this northern borderland to Mesoamerica, and the encounters—both violent and negotiated—between the native peoples known today as Pueblos and Spanish expeditions.50 This epic poem takes into account various entradas that followed Francisco Vázquez de Coronado’s first foray into New Mexico in 1540–1542, but it highlights the expedition led by Juan de Oñate (c.1550–1626) at the end of the century, in which Villagrá participated as Procurador general (paymaster) and a member of the adelantado’s war council. Both Oñate and Pérez de Villagrá were born in Mexico, members of a self-conscious Spanish-American elite whose ambitions were rooted in the colony. Juan de Oñate, son of Cristóbal de Oñate, one of the founders of the great mining real of Zacatecas, sought the governorship of New Mexico based on the wealth his family had garnered in northern New Spain. Villagrá was born in Puebla de los Ángeles, a Spanish town in the heart of Mesoamerica; he was educated at the University of Salamanca in Spain, returning to New Spain in 1576. By 1595, when Juan de Oñate received his appointment as adelantado of New Mexico, Villagrá lived in the mining district of Sombrerete and joined Oñate’s mixed Spanish and Indian forces in Santa Barbara, Nueva Vizcaya, in the spring of 1598.51 Villagrá reported with admiration the geographical knowledge that the Indians of New Mexico had demonstrated to the Oñate expedition. One of their guides, whom

14   Borderlands of the Iberian World Villagrá called Mómpil, drew a map on the ground, identifying the Río del Norte that would lead them to the walled settlements of the Pueblos. He painted for us the neighboring lands/ And the location of the mighty stream For which so many toils were borne, / And all the water holes and day’s marches That one must needs make on the way /To have their turbid waters to drink in. There he drew, too, the villages / Of our New Mexico, its lands, Making us understand it all / As he were a most learned guide.52

Villagrá’s Historia culminated in the dramatic confrontation between Spanish forces and the Keresan Pueblo of Acoma, beginning in January 1599. Villagrá participated in the assault on the mesa—peñón soberbio–from where the pueblo overlooked the plains west of the Río Grande, led by Sergeant Vicente de Zaldívar to avenge the deaths of his brother, Juan de Zaldívar and twelve other members of the expedition. To accentuate the danger of this mission, Villagrá described the terrain in ways that augmented the challenges that Spaniards faced. Thus, marching in order, we did arrive / Before the mighty fort, which consisted Of two great, lofty rocks upraised, / The terrible, unconquered sites Divided by more than three hundred feet, / And from one to the other was a neck Of rocks so lofty they equaled / The outsized peaks, such as were never seen.53

After the pueblo of Acoma was defeated, Oñate ordered the mutilation and enslavement of scores of prisoners, both men and women. This cruelty was compounded only months later when Zaldívar and Oñate attacked the Jumano pueblos east of the Río Grande for refusing the Spaniards’ demand for maize. Over the next five years Oñate led expeditions northward to the bison plains and westward in an attempt to find the “southern sea” and navigable ports. In 1606, however, King Philip III recalled Oñate and converted the proprietary colony of New Mexico into a royal governorship with the appointment of Pedro de Peralta as governor in 1609. Juan de Oñate faced criminal charges that implicated Pérez de Villagrá stemming from the violent retaliation at Acoma; both men were convicted in 1614, after the publication of the Historia. They successfully appealed their sentences but died without returning to the northern borderlands they had once claimed as “our new Mexico.”54 Modern narratives of the Iberian borderlands in the Americas have echoed the major themes that flow through these four representative examples of primary-source chronicles, but they have applied analytical approaches to the institutional and social histories of the peoples who shaped these imperial frontiers. At mid-twentieth century Philip Wayne Powell upheld the narrative tradition for the Spanish borderlands of North America with pioneering archival research and a flair for writing broadly based histories and focused biographies. In a series of well-placed journal articles and two major book-length studies Powell explored the successive frontiers of Spanish silver prospecting and mining north of Zacatecas and the complex issues surrounding indigenous enslavement and the sixteenth-century Chichimec wars.55 For South America, the

Introduction   15 Chilean bibliographer and historian José Toribio Medina (1852–1930) contributed thematic narratives and the publication of primary sources to different currents of institutional and regional history. His monograph Los aborígenes de Chile—among many other titles—is especially relevant to the historiography of the borderlands.56 The transition to historical treatments of the borderlands within the framework of social and cultural processes of encounter and change began with institutional histories informed by sensitive readings of primary sources. Building on the work of the early generations of borderlands scholars, the shift to reworking the histories of missions and presidios replaced such notions as the “rim of Christendom,” coined by Berkeley ­historian Herbert E. Bolton, and binary divisions between “Indians” and “Spaniards” with a recognition of multiple ethnic divisions and shifting alliances among different groups of Native Americans, Europeans, and mixed populations of African, Asian, and Indo-European descent. Informed by the anthropological concepts of contact cultures and ethnogenesis and by the methodologies for reconstructing “histories from below,” the contributors to these new currents of borderlands studies have combed local and regional archives as well as the better known national and imperial repositories to bring to light new documents and demonstrate new ways of reading them for ethnohistorical, environmental, and gendered content. In Seville, the Escuela de Estudios Hispanoamericanos with its proximity to the Archivo General de Indias has contributed to the narrative and institutional histories of the borderlands with the work of Luis Navarro García on northern New Spain, followed by the historiographical and editorial leadership of Salvador Bernabéu Albert.57 The Documentary Relations of the Southwest, an innovative program based at the Arizona State Museum (University of Arizona, Tucson) beginning in 1974, and subsequently renamed the Office of Ethnohistorical Research, has contributed in important ways to archival preservation, research, and primary source publication as well as to ethnohistorical and interdisciplinary approaches to borderlands and colonial frontiers. Employing the technologies of microfilming and digitalization, the DRSW and OHR established collaborative agreements with a number of key archives in Spain and Mexico to reproduce documentary collections and create detailed precis of their content that serve as important guides for research on a wide range of topics. The team assembled under the leadership of Charles W. Polzer, Thomas Sheridan, Diane Hadley, and Dale Brenneman has published numerous volumes in thematic sequences of transcribed and translated documents with meticulously researched annotations. Over the last decade their work has emphasized collaboration with Hopi and O’odham elders and cultural specialists to produce culturally sensitive renderings of historical materials.58 Mexican scholars turned their attention to the north during this same period. The Instituto de Investigaciones Históricas of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (IIH-UNAM) established a permanent graduate seminar dedicated to the colonial history of northern Mexico in the early 1970s. Collaborating with state universities and research centers in the region, the Instituto trained several generations of graduate students and produced original works focused on social and economic history and on the enduring presence of indigenous peoples.59 The foundations for borderlands

16   Borderlands of the Iberian World research that were created by these efforts at the DRSW-OHR in the United States and UNAM-IIH in Mexico helped to support doctoral dissertations and published monographs that reoriented the institutional histories of the colonial missions in the direction of ethnohistorical studies, informed by historical methods of research and anthropological frameworks for understanding processes of transculturation over time and space.60 The fluvial environments of South America provide a fecund instance of internal borderlands, as exemplified by the lowlands of Chiquitos, the Gran Chaco of eastern Bolivia and northern Paraguay, and the savannas of Mato Grosso in western Brazil. Ethnohistorical approaches to the shifting contours and identities of these overlapping frontiers have grown out of institutional histories focused on the Jesuit missions to illustrate the economic, aesthetic, and religious dimensions of the reducciones (mission towns). The rich archival sources compiled and catalogued in Bolivia, Argentina, and Brazil for the greater Paraguayan basin are further augmented by critical editions of detailed nineteenth-century scientific publications and travelers’ reports, in particular, the four-volume Viaje a la América meridional (“Voyage to South America”), first published in 1835 by the French naturalist Alcides d’Orbigny.61 Working out of the linguistic and cultural traditions of mission studies for this region, Roberto Tomichá Charupá, OFMConv., has published a deeply researched and anthropologically ­sensitive history of the Chiquitos province. He has continued to produce scholarly publications of primary documents that contribute new empirical content and interpretive insights for the region and its diverse indigenous and mixed cultures.62 Anthropologist Isabelle Combès has published thoroughly researched historical and ethnographic work on the Isoso of the Chaco Boreal and coordinated a number of multi-authored volumes on the Bolivian and Paraguayan lowlands.63 Closely related to the ethnohistorical contributions of Tomichá and Combès, Pilar García Jordán has explored the lowland peoples of the piedmont slopes and forested valleys east of the Andes in the Peruvian selva and in the Guarayo corridor extending between Chiquitos and Mojos (the Department of Beni) in Bolivia, bringing the Guarayo missions into the modern period as inter-ethnic spaces.64 The greater Río de la Plata and lower Paraguayan River basins—where Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca first approached his governorship in 1541—sustained dense populations of riverine and agricultural peoples known as the Guaraní, whose villages and hunting, farming, and fishing practices, in turn, shaped these borderlands. Jesuit missions among the Guaraní were populous and economically productive, and native leaders famously defied imperial orders to transfer their pueblos to Portuguese rule following the Treaty of Madrid of 1750, thus generating substantial interest among historians, anthropologists, and scholars of built space and visual culture. Among scholars who have published recently on the region, Barbara Ganson and Julia Sarreal have analyzed Guaraní economy and political culture in the missions; Ramón Gutiérrez has studied the urban architecture of the Guaraní reducciones; and Guillermo Wilde has demonstrated the multivalent meanings to be found in the aesthetic and religious qualities of cultural adaptation in the missions.65

Introduction   17 Each of these histories tells its own story, and many of them follow regional patterns of inquiry as they are shaped by geography, indigenous cultures, and the circumstances of colonial encounters. Taken together, however, the historiographical developments for borderlands studies in recent decades have shown that the indigenous cultures and political formations in the different frontiers of North and South America were widely varied, evolving historically both before and after European encounters. Revisionist currents in borderlands studies have revealed that imperial institutions, in particular, the missions and the frontier presidios, were not blueprints imposed on the indigenous peoples, rather they were shaped by the contested claims to power, labor, and livelihood asserted by colonial authorities, civil colonists, and indigenous leaders. Two recent studies that illustrate these points powerfully are Brian DeLay’s War of a Thousand Deserts and Pekka Hämäläinen’s The Comanche Empire.66 The fruits of innovative research on the borderlands have been gathered into a number of collective publications; among the many works that could be cited, the following have served as benchmarks for the field. The New Latin American Mission History (1995) opened a critical vision of the role of religious missions in ethnohistorical encounters in both North and South America, and it brought mission history into the national period. Contested Ground. Comparative Frontiers on the Northern and Southern Edges of the Spanish Empire (1998) presaged the innovative and comparative work on borderlands that has shaped the field over the last two decades with broad regional views of Spanish, Portuguese, and indigenous frontiers. Choice, Persuasion, and Coercion. Social Control on Spain’s North American Frontiers (2005), presented broad comparative views of the northern Mexican borderlands, extending from California to Florida that were integrated by the central theme of social control. Contested Spaces in the Early Americas (2013), dedicated to the memory of David J. Weber, brought together a diverse group of authors from the Americas and Europe specialized in different regional ­borderlands who focused on the notion of native American autonomy and the ways in which colonial territories remained contested spaces among different groups of historical actors.67 These syntheses produced under the auspices of North American institutions mirror equally important interdisciplinary developments in borderlands research published in Spanish and Portuguese. The seminal collective works cited in the bibliography stand out especially for their interdisciplinary quality, combining insights from archaeology, cultural anthropology and history. Nómadas y sedentarios (2000) brings together archaeologists, anthropologists, linguists, and historians to explore the widely varied cultural patterns of settled and nomadic peoples across northern Mexico. Las vías del noroeste (2006–2011), in three volumes, integrates anthropological conceptual frameworks with specific ethnographic and historical studies to illustrate the complex ­relations between Mesoamerica and the northern borderlands. For South America Colonización, resistencia y mestizaje en las Américas (2002), and Fronteras movedizas (2010), overturn traditional views of European colonization and indigenous nomadism to show the interdependent and contingent quality of Iberian colonization. Innovative studies for Portuguese America are represented by Estudos sobre os Chiquitanos no Brazil e na Bolívia (2008), and Native Brasil. Beyond the Convert and the Cannibal (2014).68

18   Borderlands of the Iberian World David  J.  Weber (1940–2010) historian, teacher, and mentor, was pivotal for the cross-regional and interdisciplinary network of institutions and scholars that has revitalized and reshaped the field of Iberian frontiers and borderlands studies. Weber’s book-length publications and collections of essays provided an important transition from the classical narrative traditions of borderlands history to the thematic and analytical studies that define the field today. For most of his career, Weber’s scholarship was focused on southwestern United States and portions of northwestern Mexico; however, his final book project, Bárbaros: Spaniards and their Savages in the Age of Enlightenment (2005), carried his research to South America, where he fostered a number of collaborative symposia and publications.69 The ethnohistorical dimension of borderlands research has been further enriched by the conceptual frameworks developed by scholars of gender and feminist studies in history and anthropology. James F. Brooks’s influential work, Captives and Cousins (2002) centered his history of New Mexico on explaining the bonds of kinship and violence that sustained the economy of captive labor through gender and honor. Juliana Barr’s Peace Came in the Form of a Woman (2007) approached similar themes from a different angle, focused on the Caddoan peoples of eastern Texas, where Spanish rule was tenuous, and a mosaic of indigenous peoples maintained autonomous territories throughout the Spanish colonial period. Ned Blackhawk’s Violence over the Land (2006) and Jennifer Nez Denetdale, in Reclaiming Diné History (2007) conjoined family history, tribal traditions, and the regional dimensions of the US Southwest and the Great Basin to produce powerful histories through interwoven oral testimonies and archival research.70

Rethinking Borderlands The conceptual frameworks and historiographies presented here illustrate the historical processes that produced borderlands in the Americas through the interface between Spanish and Portuguese imperial spheres and connected them to global circuits of exchange and migration in the early modern world. This exciting field of studies replaces the conventional view of empire as a European-centered dominion with histories of overlapping and competing spheres of power. Major themes that have shaped the notion of borderlands for both the pre-contact and early colonial periods include food security, the natural environment and humanly crafted landscapes, pre-Hispanic frontiers, and the demographic and cultural consequences of disease episodes for the physical and cultural survival of native peoples. Military histories have turned to exploring the negotiated relationships among different indigenous cadres and groups and imperial agents in both Spanish and Portuguese America: “friends and allies” in the sixteenth-century expeditions leading north of the Valley of Mexico, indigenous militias and colonies in northern New Spain and Central America, cultural change through military service in northwestern Mexico, and the significant roles of native informants in late colonial Brazil. Research on borderlands economies has moved from the familiar theme of

Introduction   19 colonial silver mining to bring to light indigenous trade in Central America, long-distance trade by multiple social strata and ethnic groups in the southern Andes and along the Camino Real de Tierra Adentro (Inland Royal Road) in New Spain, emphasizing the Indians’ participation in colonial routes and markets. Social histories of frontier regions address issues of identity, power, and cultural change as well as the gendered processes of ethnic commingling and the paired concepts of ethnogenesis and ethnocide, as presented by John Monteiro for Brazil.71 Issues of bondage, territorial conflict, and the practices of peacemaking focus on both indigenous and African-descended populations, linking the Americas to transoceanic borderlands in Africa and Asia.72 The production of knowledge, art, and music in Iberian borderlands has enriched this field of study, including the compiling of medicinal knowledge, cartography, religious iconography, and musical cultures that flourished in both the North and South American borderlands through cultural adaptations and appropriations. The dynamic growth of borderlands studies will continue to inspire innovative research on the frontier regions and peoples of the Americas and on the inter-imperial networks that shaped the early modern world, transforming power relations in every continent of the globe.

Notes 1. Alexander C. Diener and Joshua Hagen, Borders: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 1–18. 2. James Clifford in “Diasporas,” Cultural Anthropology 9, no. 3 (1994): 304, asserts that borderlands “presuppose a territory defined by a geopolitical line: two sides arbitrarily separated and policed, but also joined by legal and illegal practices of crossing and communication.” Similarly, Michiel Baud and Willem van Schendel, “A comparative approach to Borderlands,” in Major Problems in the History of North American Borderlands, ed. Pekka Hämäläinen and Benjamin H. Johnson (Boston: Wadsworth Cengage Learning, 2012), 7, 1–13, define borderlands as areas “bisected by a state border” that in turn can be divided and internally classified according to the proximity of each subdivision to the demarcation line and its effects. 3. See the discussion on the differences between the nation state and the dynastic realm as imagined communities by Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London and New York: Verso, 2006). 4. Influential authors who have shaped the field of borderlands, as cited in the notes and bibliography, include David  J.  Weber, Samuel Truett, Donna  J.  Guy, James  F.  Brooks, Thomas  E.  Sheridan, Cynthia Radding, Christophe Giudicelli, Amy Turner Bushnell, Jack  P.  Greene, John TePaske, Susan  M.  Deeds, Pekka Hämäläinen, Brian DeLay, Sara Ortelli, Guillaume Boccara, Jorge Pinto Rodríguez, and Raúl Mandrini. 5. These include historians of successive generations like John F. Bannon, Charles W. Polzer, David  J.  Weber, Robert  H.  Jackson, John  L.  Kessell, Carroll Riley, and Richard and Shirley Flint. 6. John Jay TePaske, “Integral to Empire. The Vital Peripheries of Colonial Spanish America,” in Negotiated Empires. Centers and Peripheries in the Americas, 1500–1820, ed. Christine Daniels and Michael  V.  Kennedy (New York: Routledge, 2002), 30–33; David  J.  Weber,

20   Borderlands of the Iberian World Spanish Frontiers in North America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992); Robert H. Jackson, ed., New Views of Borderlands History (Albuquerque: UNM, 1998), see the introduction and Jackson’s own chapter. 7. Silvio Zavala, Orígenes de la colonización en el Río de la Plata (Mexico: El Colegio Nacional, 1978); Hebe Clementi, La frontera en América: una clave interpretativa de la historia americana, 4 vols. (Buenos Aires: Editorial Leviatán, 1985–1988). 8. Pekka Hämäläinen and Benjamin H. Johnson, ed. Major Problems in the History of North American Borderlands (Boston: Wadsworth Cengage Learning, 2012), 1. 9. See Henri Lefevre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson Smith (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991). 10. Roberto Cardoso de Oliveira, “Identidad étnica, identificación y manipulación,” in Etnicidad y estructura social (Mexico: CIESAS, UAM, Universidad Iberoamericana, 1992), 79–83. The book was first published in Portuguese in 1976. 11. Andrés Reséndez, The Other Slavery. The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016); Izabel Missagia de Mattos, Civilização e Revolta: os Botocudos e a catequese na provincial de Minas (Baurú and São Paulo: EDUSC and ANPOCS, 2004). 12. Fabrício Prado, Edge of Empire. Atlantic Networks and Revolution in Bourbon Río de la Plata (Oakland: University of California Press, 2016); Linda  M.  Rupert, Creolization and Contraband: Curaçao in the Early Modern Atlantic (Athens: UGA, 2012). 13. Erick D. Langer, Expecting Pears from an Elm Tree: Franciscan Missions on the Chiriguano Frontier in the Heart of South America, 1830–1949 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009; Viviana Conti and Marcelo Lagos, eds., Una tierra y tres naciones: el litoral salitrero entre 1830 y 1930 (San Salvador de Jujuy: Universidad Nacional de Jujuy, 2002). 14. Edward Shils, “Center and Periphery,” in The Logic of Personal Knowledge: Essays in Honor of Michael Polanyi (Glencoe: Free Press, 1961), 117–130. 15. Amy Turner Bushnell and Jack P. Greene, “Peripheries, Centers, and the Construction of Early Modern American Empires. An Introduction,” in Negotiated Empires. Centers and Peripheries in the Americas, 1500–1820, ed. Christine Daniels and Michael  V.  Kennedy (New York: Routledge, 2002), 3–4. 16. Amy Turner Bushnell, “Gates, Patterns, and Peripheries. The Field of Frontier Latin America,” in Negotiated Empires. Centers and Peripheries in the Americas, 1500–1820, ed. Christine Daniels and Michael V. Kennedy (New York: Routledge, 2002), 19–20. 17. See Mary Louise Pratt, “Arts of the Contact Zone,” in Ways of reading, ed. David Batholomae and Anthony Petrotsky (New York: Bedford, St Martin’s, 1999), 37. The term was intended as a criticism of the notion of speech communities as “discrete, self defined and coherent entities” that constitute the locus where languages exist and are held together by “a homogeneous competence or grammar shared identically and equally among the members,” but has been fruitfully applied to geographical areas where cultures juxtapose, interact, and modify each other. 18. The concept was coined by Fernando Ortiz in 1940, Cuban Counterpoint, Tobacco and  Sugar (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995 [1940]) as an alternative to the term “acculturation” in order to explain the process of forming a new culture from the Amerindian, European, and African cultures that mutually influenced each other on the island of Cuba. It highlights the creation of new cultural phenomena that occurs when groups of different cultures come into daily and sustained contact through the adaptation and mutual appropriation of one another’s beliefs and practices. 19. Clementi developed a similar proposal in La frontera en América, vol. 1, 21–29.

Introduction   21 2 0.  Pratt, “Arts of the Contact Zone,” 34. 21. For example Laura Matthew and Michel R. Oudijk, ed. Indian Conquistadors: Indigenous Allies in the Conquest of Mesoamerica (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2007); Danna A. Levin-Rojo, Return to Aztlan: Indians, Spaniard, and the Invention of Nuevo México (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2014); Jaime Valenzuela Márquez, “Indígenas andinos en Chile colonial: inmigración, inserción espacial, integración económica y movilidad social (Santiago siglos XVI–XVII),” Revista de Indias LXX, 250 (2010): 749–778; Guillermo Wilde, Religión y poder en las misiones de guaraníes (Buenos Aires: Editorial SB, 2009). 22. Donna J. Guy and Thomas E. Sheridan, “On Frontiers. The Northern and Southern Edges of the Spanish Empire in the Americas,” in Contested Ground: Comparative Frontiers on the Northern and Southern Edges of the Spanish Empire, ed. Donna  J.  Guy and Thomas E. Sheridan (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1998), 8. 23. See, for example, Beatriz Braniff, Linda  S.  Cordell, María de la Luz Gutiérrez, Elisa Villalpando, and Marie-Areti Hers, La gran chichimeca: el lugar de las rocas secas (Mexico: CONACULTA, Jaca Book, 2001); Emiliano Ricardo Melgar Tísoc, “una relectura del comercio de la turquesa: entre yacimientos, talleres y consumidores,” in Caminos y mercados de México, ed. Janet Long Towell and Amalia Atolini Lecón (Mexico: UNAM, 2010), 153–168. 24. Guy and Sheridan, “On Frontiers,” 10. 25. Renato Rosaldo, Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993), 20–21, 29–34. 26. Néstor García Canclini, Culturas híbridas. Estrategias para entrar y salir de la modernidad, (Buenos Aires, Barcelona, Mexico: Paidós, 2001). 27. Ignacio Gallup-Diaz, The Door of the Seas and Key to the Universe: Indian Politics and Imperial Rivalry in the Darién, 1640–1750 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008); Kent  G.  Lightfoot, “Russian Colonization: The Implications of Mercantile Colonial Practices in the North Pacific,” Historical Archaeology 37, 4 (2003): 14–28; Martha Ortega, “Un siglo de colonización rusa en el Pacífico,” in La inserción de México en la Cuenca del Pacífico, coord. Alejandro Álvarez and John Borrego (Mexico: Facultad de Economía, UNAM, 1990), vol. 1, 108–124. 28. Carmen Yuste López, Emporios transpacíficos: comerciantes mexicanos en Manila, 1710–1815 (Mexico: UNAM, 2007); Javier Oyarzun, Expediciones españolas al estrecho de Magallanes y Tierra del Fuego (Madrid: AECI, Ediciones de Cultura Hispánica, 1999). 29. Rupert, Creolization and Contraband; Jason  M.  Yaremko, Indigenous Passages to Cuba, 1515–1900 (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2017). 30. Mary C. Karasch, Before Brasília: frontier life in central Brazil (Albuquerque: UNM, 2016); Hal Langfur, The Forbidden Lands: Colonial Identity, Frontier Violence, and the Persistence of Brazil’s Eastern Indians, 1750–1830 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006); Heather F. Roller, Amazonian Routes: Indigenous Mobility and Colonial Communities in Northern Brazil (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014); Barbara Sommer, “Colony of the Sertão: Amazonian Expeditions and the Indian Slave Trade,” in Rethinking Bandeirismo. Studies in Colonial Brazil, ed. John Russell-Wood, Special Issue: The Americas 61, no. 3 (2005): 401–428. 31. Jacques Bertin, Serge Bonin, Pierre Chaunu, Les Philippines et le Pacifique des Ibériques XVIe, XVIIe, XVIIIe siècles, Construction graphique (Paris: Editions Jean Tousot, 1966); Alfonso Alfaro, “Hombres paradójicos: la experiencia de alteridad,” Artes de México: misiones jesuitas 65 (2003): 8–27; Ines  G.  Županov, Disputed Mission: Jesuit Experiments and Brahmanical

22   Borderlands of the Iberian World Knowledge in Seventeenth-Century India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999); Catherine Tracy Goode, “Merchant-Bureaucrats, Unwritten Contracts, and Fraud in the Manila Galleon Trade,” in Corruption in the Iberian Empires: Greed, Custom, and Colonial Networks, ed. Christoph Rosenmüller (Albuquerque: UNM, 2017), 171–195. 32. Diener and Hagen, Borders: A Very Short Introduction. 33. Real Academia Española, Diccionario de la Lengua Española A 1732, 801, no. 1. Accessed March 20, 2010, http://buscon.rae.es/draeI/; Rafael Bluteau, Vocabulario Portuguez e Latino, 1712–1728 (Coimbra: Collegio das Artes da Companhia de Jesu, 1728), 219. 34. Alfred W. Crosby, The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003); Daniela Bleichmar, Paula De Vos, Kristin Huffine, and Kevin Sheehan, ed., Science in the Spanish and Portuguese Empires, 1500–1800 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009). 35. Ralph Bauer, The Cultural Geography of Colonial American Literature. Empire, Travel, Modernity (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Clara Bargellini and Michael K. Komanecky, eds. and curators, The Arts of the Missions of Northern New Spain, 1600–1821 (Mexico: Antiguo Colegio de San Ildefonso, UNAM, CONACYT, Secretaría de Cultura, 2009). 36. Rolena Adorno and Patrick Charles Pautz, Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca. His Account, His Life, and the Expedition of Pánfilo de Narváez, vol. I (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999), 372–381. The first report, presumably authored by the three European survivors, has been lost, although it was referenced by sixteenth-century historian Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo; thus, Núñez Cabeza de Vaca’s Relación remains the primary source for this history. See Basil C. Hedrick and Carroll L. Riley, eds. and trans., The Journey of the Vaca Party: the Account of the Narváez expedition, 1528–1536, as related by Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés (Carbondale: University Museum, Southern Illinois University, 1974). 37. Cynthia Radding, Landscapes of Power and Identity. Comparative Histories in the Sonoran Desert and the Forests of Amazonia from Colony to Republic (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 45–52. 38. Adorno and Pautz, Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, v. 1., 387–395. 39. Comentarios de Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, adelantado y governador del Río de la Plata, escritos por Pedro Hernández, escribano y secretario de la provincia (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1971); Adorno and Pautz, Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, v. 1., 395–406; vol. 3, 97–102. Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés spoke with Cabeza de Vaca during his imprisonment in Spain and wrote a narrative of the Río de la Plata episode in the Historia general y natural de las Indias, islas y tierra firme del mar océano [1525-48], ed. José Amador de los Ríos, 4 vols. (Madrid: Real Academia de la Historia, 1851–1855). This same work included portions of the Joint Report that Cabeza de Vaca and two of his companions penned for Viceroy Antonio de Mendoza, for which the original document has been lost. See also Manuel Serrano y Sanz, ed., Relación de los naufragios y comentarios de Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, Colección de libros y documentos referentes a la historia de América, vols. 5–6 (Madrid: Victoriano Suárez, 1906). 40. Ralph Bauer, “Mythos and Epos: Cabeza de Vaca’s Empire of Peace,” in The Cultural Geography of Colonial American Literature, 29–76. 41. Celia López-Chávez, Epics of Empire and Frontier. Alonso de Ercilla and Gaspar de Villagrá as Spanish Colonial Chroniclers (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2016), 237. Much of the summary offered here is based on López-Chávez’s excellent comparative study.

Introduction   23 42. See the Tabla Geographica del Reyno de Chile c. 1646 (AGI, Seville, Mapas y Planos, Perú-Chile, 271). For ethnohistories of the southern Chilean borderlands, see Guillaume Boccara, Guerre et ethnogenèse mapuche dans le Chili colonial: l’invention du soi (Paris: L’Armattan, 1998), and Los vencedores. Historia del pueblo mapuche en la época colonial, pref. Nathan Wachtel, trans. Diego Milos (San Pedro de Atacama: Instituto de Investigaciones Arqueológicas y Museo-UCN, 2007); Jorge Pinto Rodríguez, La formación del Estado y de la nación y el pueblo mapuche: de la inclusión a la exclusión (Santiago de Chile: DIBAM, 2003); Pinto Rodríguez, ed., Araucanía y Pampas: un mundo fronterizo en América del sur (Temuco: Ediciones Universidad de la Frontera, 1996); María Ximena Urbina Carrasco, Fuentes para la historia de la Patagonia occidental en el periodo colonial (Valparaíso: Ediciones Universitarias de Valparaíso, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso, 2014). 43. Alonso de Góngora Marmolejo, Historia de Chile desde su descubrimiento hasta el año de 1575 (Santiago de Chile: Editorial Universitaria, 1969). 44. Ercilla, La Araucana [1569, 1578, 1589], 2.92, 1–8; 7.56, 1–4, quoted in López-Chávez, Epics of Empire and Frontier, 44–45, 228–229. “Pero dejó el camino provechoso y, descuidado dél, torció la vía, metiéndose con otro, codiciosos, que era donde una mina de oro había; y de ver el tributo y don hermoso de sus ricas venas ofrecía, paró de la codicia embarazado, cortando el hilo próspero del hado. Piérdese la ciudad más fértil de oro que estaba en lo poblado de la tierra, y adonde más riquezas y tesoro según fama en sus términos se encierra.” 45. Ercilla, La Araucana 1.6, 1–8, quoted in López-Chávez, Epics of Empire and Frontier, 149–150. “Chile, fértil provincial y señalada en la región antártica famosa, de remotas naciones respetada por fuerte, principal y poderosa; la gente que produce es tan granada, tan soberbia, gallarda, y belicosa, que no ha sido por rey jamás regida ni a extranjero dominio sometida.” 46. Jean de Léry, Histoire d’un voyage fait en la terre du Brésil, 1557, ed. Frank Lestringant (Montpellier, VT: M. Challeil, 1992); Léry, History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil, otherwise Called America, trans. Janet Whatley (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). 47. Claude Lévi-Strauss, We Are All Cannibals, and Other Essays, trans. Jane Marie Todd (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016); Warren Dean, With Broadax and Firebrand. The Destruction of the Brazilian Atlantic Forest (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). 48. Hans Staden, The captivity of Hans Stade of Hesse, in A.D. 1547–1555 Among the Wild Tribes of Eastern Brazil, trans. Albert Tootal (London, 1874); Eve M. Duffy and Alida C. Metcalf, The Return of Hans Staden: A Go-Between in the Atlantic World (Baltimore: JHU, 2012); Ulrich Schmidl, Wahrhaftige Historie einer wunderbaren Schiffart (Frankfurt, 1567; London, 1889); André Thevet, Les Singularités de la France Antarctique (Paris, 1558); see John Monteiro, “The Crises and Transformations of Invaded Societies: Coastal Brazil in the Sixteenth Century,” in The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas, vol. III South America, part 1, ed. Frank Salomon and Stuart B. Schwartz (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 973–1023. See also María de Fátima Costa, História de um país inexistente. O Pantanal entre os séculos XVI e XVIII (São Paulo: Livraria Kosmos Editora, 1999). 49. Sabine MacCormack, “Ethnography in South America: The First Two Hundred Years,” in The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas, vol. 3 South America, part 1, ed. Frank Salomon and Stuart B. Schwartz (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 96–187; Frank Lestringant, Jean de Léry, ou, L’invention du sauvage: essai sur l’Histoire d’un voyage faict en la terre du Brésil (Paris: H.  Champion, 2005); Michel de

24   Borderlands of the Iberian World Montaigne, Le Brésil de Montaigne. Le Nouveau Monde des “Essais” (1580–1592), choix de Textes, intro. and notes by Frank Lestringant (Paris: Editions Chandeignes, Libraire Portugase, 2005). 50. On the incorporation of Nahua myths into what the Spanish expeditionaries learned about these northern regions, see López-Chávez, Epics of Empire and Frontier, 155–159; Levin-Rojo, Return to Aztlan, 179. For more on Villagrá see Danna Levin Rojo, “Gaspar Pérez De Villagrá (Ca. 1551/1555 - 1620 o 1621),” in Historiografía Mexicana, vol. II. La Creación de una Imagen Propia. La Tradición Española (Tomo  I.  Historiografía civil), coord. Patricia Escandón and Rosa Camelo (Mexico: IIH-UNAM, 2012), 453–477. 51. John  L.  Kessell, Spain in the Southwest. A Narrative History of Colonial New Mexico, Arizona, Texas,and California (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2002), 73–75; López-Chávez, Epics of Empire and Frontier, 228–234. 52. Gaspar Pérez de Villagrá, Historia de la nueva México [1610], quoted in López-Chávez, Epics of Empire and Frontier, 158–159. “Pintónos la circunvezina tierra y el asiento del caudaloso Río por quien tantos trabajos se sufrieron, y todos los aguages y jornadas que era fuera tener en el camino por aber de beber su turbias aguas. Allí pintó también las poblaciones de nuestra nueva México y sus tierras, poniendo y dándose a entender en todo como si muy sagaz piloto fuera.” 53. Villagrá, Historia, 117–24, quoted in López-Chávez, Epics of Empire and Frontier, 186. “Y assí, marchando en orden, nos llegamos al poderoso fuerte, el cuál constaba de dos grandes peñoles levantados, Más de trescientos passos devididos/los terribles assientos no domados, Y estaba un passamán del uno al otro, De riscos tan soberbios que ygualaban/ Con las disformes cumbres nunca vistas.” 54. López-Chávez, Epics of Empire and Frontier, 234–236; Kessell, Spain in the Southwest, 82–96. 55. Philip Wayne Powell, Soldiers, Indians and Silver: The Northward Advance of New Spain, 1550–1600 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1952) and Mexico’s Miguel Caldera. The Taming of America’s First Frontier, 1548–1597 (Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 1977). 56. José Toribio Medina, Los aborígenes de Chile (Santiago de Chile: Fondo Histórico y Bibliográfico José Toribio Medina, 1952). 57. Luis Navarro García, La conquista de Nuevo México (Madrid: Ediciones de Cultura Hispánica del Centro Iberoamericano de Cooperación, 1978) and Las reformas borbónicas en América: el plan de intendencias y su aplicación (Seville: Universidad de Sevilla, 1995); Salvador Bernabéu Albert, Expulsados del infierno: el exilio de los misioneros Jesuitas de la península Californiana, 1767–1768 (Madrid: CSIC, 2008); Bernabéu Albert, ed., El Septentrión novohispano: ecohistoria, sociedades e imágenes de frontera (Madrid: CSIC, 2000). 58. The DRSW and OHR publications include: Thomas H. Naylor and Charles W. Polzer, S.J., ed., The Presidio and Militia on the Northern Frontier of New Spain, 1570–1700, vols. I and II (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1986); Thomas E. Sheridan, ed., Empire of Sand. The Seri Indians and the Struggle for Spanish Sonora, 1645–1803 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1999); Thomas E. Sheridan, Stewart B. Koyiyumptewa, Anton Daughters, Dale S. Brenneman, T. J. Ferguson, Leigh Kuwanwisiwma, and Lee Wayne Lomayestewa, ed., Moquis and Kastiilam. Hopis, Spaniards, and the Trauma of History, 1540–1679, vol. 1 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2015). 59. Ignacio del Río, El Noroeste del México colonial. Estudios históricos sobre Sonora, Sinaloa y Baja California (Mexico: UNAM, 2007); Sergio Ortega Noriega, Un ensayo de historia regional. El Noroeste de México, 1530–1880 (Mexico: UNAM, 1993); Sergio Ortega Noriega

Introduction   25 and Ignacio del Río, Historia General de Sonora, t. 2, De la Conquista el Estado Libre y Soberano de Sonora (Hermosillo: Gobierno del Estado de Sonora, 1985). 60. Cynthia Radding, Wandering Peoples: Colonialism, Ethnic Spaces and Ecological Frontiers in Northwestern Mexico (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997) and Landscapes of Power and Identity; Susan M. Deeds, Defiance and Deference in Mexico’s Colonial North. Indians under Spanish Rule in Nueva Vizcaya (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003); Cecilia Sheridan, Fronterización del espacio hacia el norte de la Nueva España (Mexico: CIESAS, 2015); José Refugio De la Torre Curiel, Twilight of the Mission Frontier: Shifting Interethnic Alliances and Social Organization in Sonora, 1768–1855 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012). 61. Alcides d’Orbigny, Viaje a la América meridional . . . realizado de 1826–1833, trans. Alfredo Cepeda (Buenos Aires: Editorial Futuro, 1945 [1845]); D’Orbigny, Viaje a la América meridional, version by Alfredo Cepeda, rev. Edgardo Rivera Martínez and Anne-Marie Brougère (La Paz: IFEA, Plural editores, 2002), 2nd ed. 62. Roberto Tomichá Charupá, La primera evangelización en las reducciones de Chiquitos, Bolivia (1691–1767). Protagonistas y método misional (Cochabamba: Editorial Verbo Divino, 2002). In collaboration with anthropologist Isabelle Combès, Dr. Tomichá has developed a publication series for transcribed documents and original studies through the Instituto de Misionología. See Tomichá’s work on interculturality, “Mission Spirituality and Intercultural Dialogue” (paper presented to the International Mission Congress OFM Conv, in Kerala, India, 2006). Accessed January 2, 2017, http://www2.ofmconv.pcn.net/docs/en/ general/miscon06_india/Mission%20Spirituality%20and%20Intercultural%20Dialogue.pdf. 63. Isabelle Combûs, Etno-Historias del Isoso. Chané y chiriguanos en el Chaco boliviano (siglos XVI a XX) (La Paz: PIEB, IFEA, 2005); Thierry Saignes, Historia del pueblo chiriguano, comp., intro, and notes by Isabelle Combès (Lima and La Paz: IFEA, Embajada de Francia en Bolivia, 2007.) See also James Schofield Saeger, The Chaco Mission Frontier: The Guaycurúan Experience (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2000). 64. Pilar García Jordán, Cruz y arado, fusiles y discursos: la Constitución de los orientes en el Perú y Bolivia (Lima: IFEA, IEP, 2001) and “Yo soy libre y no indio: soy guarayo.” Para una historia de Guarayos, 1790–1948 (Lima: TEIAA, 2006). 65. Barbara Ganson, The Guaraní under Spanish Rule in the Río de la Plata (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003); Julia Sarreal, The Guarani and Their Missions on the South American Frontier (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014); Ramón Gutiérrez, Evolución urbanística y arquitectónica del Paraguay, 1537–1911 (Corrientes: UNNE, 1974); Ernesto  J.  A.  Maeder, and Ramón Gutiérrez, Atlas del desarrollo urbano del nordeste argentino (Resistencia and Chaco: IIGHI-CONICET, UNNE, 2003); Wilde, Religión y poder en las misiones de guaraníes. 66. Brian DeLay, War of a Thousand Deserts (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008); Pekka Hämäläinen, The Comanche Empire (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008). 67. Erick Langer and Robert  H.  Jackson, ed., The New Latin American Mission History (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995); Guy and Sheridan, ed., Contested Ground. Comparative Frontiers on the Northern and Southern Edges of the Spanish Empire; Jesus F. De la Teja and Ross Frank, ed., Choice, Persuasion, and Coercion. Social Control on Spain’s North American Frontiers (Albuquerque: UNM, 2005); Juliana Barr and Edward Countryman, ed., Contested Spaces in the Early Americas (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013).

26   Borderlands of the Iberian World 68. Marie-Areti Hers, José Luis Mirafuentes, María de los Dolores Soto, and Miguel Vallebueno, ed., Nómadas y sedentarios en el norte de México. Homenaje a Beatriz Braniff (Mexico: UNAM 2000); Carlo Bonfiglioli, Arturo Gutiérrez, and María Eugenia Olavarría, ed., Las vías del Noroeste, t. 1: Una macroregión indígena americana (Mexico: IIA-UNAM, 2006); Carlo Bonfiglioli, Arturo Gutiérrez, María Eugenia Olavarría, and Marie-Areti Hers, ed. Las vías del Noroeste, t. 2: Propuesta para una perspectiva sistémica e interdisciplinaria (Mexico: IIA-UNAM, 2008); Carlo Bonfiglioli, Arturo Gutiérrez, Marie-Areti Hers, and Danna Levin, ed. Las vías del Noroeste, t. 3: Geneologías, transversalidades y convergencias (Mexico: IIA-UNAM, 2011); Guillaume Boccara, ed., Colonización, resistencia y mestizaje en las Américas, siglos XVI–XX (Quito and Lima: Abya-Yala, IFEA, 2002); Christophe Giudicelli, ed., Fronteras movedizas: clasificaciones y dinámicas socioculturales en las fronteras americanas (Zamora: El Colegio de Michoacán, 2010); Joana A. Fernandes Silva, ed., Estudos sobre os Chiquitanos no Brasil e na Bolívia: histórica, língua, cultura e territorialidade (Goiânia: UCG, 2008); Hal Langfur, Native Brasil. Beyond the Convert and the Cannibal (Albuquerque: UNM, 2014). Other collective books in Spanish and Portuguese that deserve to be mentioned are Raúl Mandrini, ed., Vivir entre dos mundos. Conflicto y convivencia en las fronteras del sur de la Argentina. Siglos XVIII y XIX (Buenos Aires: Taurus, 2006); Raúl Mandrini and Carlos D. Paz, ed., Las fronteras hispanocriollas del mundo indígena latinoamericano en los siglos XVIII–XIX. Un estudio comparativo (Tandil: Universidad Nacional del Comahue, Centro de Estudios de Historia Regional, 2003); Raúl Mandrini, Antonio Escobar Ohmstede and Sara Ortelli, ed., Pueblos indígenas en América Latina, siglo XIX: sociedades en movimiento. Anuario del Instituto de Estudios Histórico Sociales (Tandil: Facultad de Ciencias Humanas, UNICEN, 2007); María Regina Celestino de Almeida, ed., Os índios na História: abordagens interdisciplinares. Dossier, Tempo 12, 23 (2007); Flávio Leonel Abreu da Silveira and Cristina Donza Cancela, Paisagem e cultura. Dinâmicas do patrimônio e da memória na atualidade (Belém: Editora Universitaria 2009); Berenice Alcántara Rojas and Federico Navarrete Linares, ed., Los pueblos amerindios más allá del estado (Mexico: UNAM, 2011); Ingrid De Jong and Antonio Escobar Ohmstede, ed., Las poblaciones indígenas en la conformación de las naciones y los Estados en la América Latina decimonónica (Zamora: CIESAS, El Colegio de México, El Colegio de Michoacán, 2016). 69. Two of his most influential publications are: David J. Weber, Bárbaros: Spaniards and their Savages in the Age of Enlightenment (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), and The Spanish Frontier in North America. 70. James F. Brooks, Captives and Cousins. Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest Borderlands (Chapel Hill: UNC, 2002); Juliana Barr, Peace Came in the Form of a Woman: Indians and Spaniards in the Texas Borderlands (Chapel Hill: UNC, 2007); Ned Blackhawk, Violence over the Land. Indians and Empires in the Early American West (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006); Jennifer Nez Denetdale, Reclaiming Diné History. The Legacies of Navajo Chief Manuelito and Juanita (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2007). 7 1. John M. Monteiro, “Tupis, Tapuias e historiadores. Estudos da história indígena e do indigenismo,” (Departamento de Antropologia, Universidad de Campinas, Tese Apresentada para o Concurso de Livre Docência, Área de Etnologia, Subárea História Indígena e do Indigenismo, 2001). 72. Tatiana Seijas, Asian Slaves in Colonial Mexico. From Chinos to Indians (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2014); Reséndez, The Other Slavery.

Introduction   27

Bibliography Adorno, Rolena, and Patrick Charles Pautz. Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca. His Account, His Life, and the Expedition of Pánfilo de Narváez, vol. I. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999. Bauer, Ralph. The Cultural Geography of Colonial American Literature. Empire, Travel, Modernity. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Clementi, Hebe. La frontera en América: una clave interpretativa de la historia americana, 4 vols. Buenos Aires: Editorial Leviatán, 1985–1988. Diener, Alexander  C., and Joshua Hagen. Borders: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. Guy, Donna J., and Thomas E. Sheridan, ed. Contested Ground. Comparative Frontiers on the Northern and Southern Edges of the Spanish Empire. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1998. Kessell, John. Spain in the Southwest. A Narrative History of Colonial New Mexico, Arizona, Texas and California. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2002. Levin-Rojo, Danna A. Return to Aztlan: Indians, Spaniards, and the Invention of Nuevo México. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2014. López-Chávez, Celia. Epics of Empire and Frontier. Alonso de Ercilla and Gaspar de Villagrá as Spanish Colonial Chroniclers. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2016. Pratt, Mary Louise. “Arts of the Contact Zone.” In Ways of Reading, edited by David Batholomae and Anthony Petrotsky, 33–40. New York: Bedford St Martin’s, 1999. Radding, Cynthia. Landscapes of Power and Identity. Comparative Histories in the Sonoran Desert and the Forests of Amazonia from Colony to Republic. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005. Reséndez, Andrés. The Other Slavery. The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016. Rupert, Linda M. Creolization and Contraband: Curaçao in the Early Modern Atlantic. Athens: UGA, 2012. Weber, David J. Spanish Frontiers in North America. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992. Wilde, Guillermo. Religión y poder en las misiones de guaraníes. Buenos Aires: Editorial SB, 2009.

pa rt I

I N DIGE NOUS BOR DE R L A N DS , C U LT U R A L L A N DS C A PE S , A N D SPH E R E S OF P OW E R I N T H E A M E R IC A S

chapter 1

Pat ter ns of Food Secu r it y i n th e Pr e-Hispa n ic A m er icas Amy Turner Bushnell

Pragmatically defined, food security is the state of being in equilibrium with one’s resources, that is, of having enough food to guarantee a nutritionally adequate diet year-round to enough members of a given group to keep its numbers constant. In terms of political economy, it is the sustainable balance of available foods, available technology, and optimal population. But it is more than that. A quest for food security is also a quest for independence. By choosing to live where it could pursue a mixture of subsistence routines, such as hunting, gathering, and shifting cultivation, a group determined that if its normal foods should fail, a cycle of back-up foods could take their place. No primary subsistence system, however productive, was allowed to undermine the secondary system designed to sustain it through hard times. Over time, the technologies of intensive agriculture would lend themselves to centralized management, monoculture, larger populations, and labor-pooling, granary-guarding states; but a non-state society whose food security was firmly based upon a variety of subsistence strategies could resist the threats and blandishments of the tributary state and preserve its autonomy. The subsistence skills essential to the resistant peoples of the Iberian borderlands were perfected in the varying climates and geographical settings of the Americas long before the advent of overseas empires, or of the native empires that preceded them, and an understanding of them requires a close study of seasonal resource harvesting, the rise of extensive agriculture, the technologies of intensive agriculture, and the stratagems of societies under stress. Exploring the subsistence strategies practiced by non-state peoples begins with the peopling of the hemisphere. Specialists differ on when the first band of Eurasians arrived in the Americas, but a comparison of artifact assemblages suggests that they were a small band of cold-adapted hunters who came from eastern Siberia by way of the Kamchatka Peninsula as early as thirteen thousand bc.1 DNA testing of their

32   Borderlands of the Iberian World Amerindian descendants traces them all back to four maternal lines.2 If they crossed the Bering Strait on foot during the final stage of the Pleistocene, when Beringia was a grassy plain 1500 kilometers wide, the biggest obstacle to their moving southward was the ice sheet that covered much of North America. It was once a truism that no Paleoindian site could be more than twelve thousand years old, because the Clovis-type fluted projectile point found in Clovis, New Mexico, a marker for the “mother culture” of the big game hunter, was no older. Recent geological evidence, however, suggests that the icefree McKenzie Basin corridor between the Laurentide and Cordilleran glaciers did not open until 11,500 years ago, giving the children of the four Eves insufficient time to leave their calling card at every known Clovis site. An alternative explanation is that the band crossed the Bering Strait by water when a period of deglaciation invited seafarers to follow a “kelp highway” rich in marine resources from Siberia to the Aleutian Islands and down the Pacific littoral, with a break in the tropics for mangroves to take the place of kelp. Inasmuch as multiple coastal sites from the Channel Islands of California to Monte Verde in southern Chile show signs of pre-Clovis occupation, the maritime migration model put forward by archaeologist Jon Erlandson and others is, as it were, gaining ground.3 The question of whether there was one migration or several has been answered by studies of languages, blood types, and teeth. Amerindian, Na-Dené, and Eskaleutian languages derive from three unrelated linguistic stocks. Immunoglobulin allotyping reveals that only Inuit-Aleuts have B-type blood and that Athabaskans and Amerindians differ slightly in their cellular biology.4 Dental morphology shows that although all three groups have Sinodont traits such as shovel-shaped incisors, they constitute three subsets of the Sinodont strain.5 The data are consonant with three major migrations: the Amerindians before 13000 bc; the Na-Dené speakers (ancestors of the Athabaskans) around 8000 bc; and lastly, around 2500 bc, the Eskimo-Aleuts (ancestors of the Inuits).6 The earliest humans to enter the hemisphere came with the tool kit of Paleolithic eastern Siberians. Rising post-Pleistocene sea levels have left their camp sites far from existing shorelines.7 Yet it seems clear that they arrived with fire, needles and fish hooks of bone, and the spear throwers, spear points, and stone clubs to fight off predators and kill mammoths. Between such exciting events, they ate what the environment had to offer, subsisting in places that modern urban dwellers who lack their skills and plant lore would judge unlivable and equipping themselves with fuel, shelter, clothing, and transport. Exploring the possibilities of two continents, the first people often found the fuel they required for light, cooking, and warmth in the deadfall of trees, but even a forest’s will to live could be checked by a relentless demand for firewood, and many habitats were treeless. On the coasts of Brazil and Florida, they learned to pollard mangroves; on the Great Plains and the Andean puna, their fuel of choice was dry dung. In the Arctic, they burned the oil of marine mammals in stone bowls, with a wick, and used knives of bone to cut blocks of snow and construct the easily heated

Patterns of Food Security   33 igloo. Below the northern tree line, they lashed mats to poles to produce the collapsible longhouse, and in the grasslands they stretched pliable skins over a framework of wood or bone to erect the lightweight, water-resistant shelter called a tipi on the Plains and a toldo on the Pampas.8 Eastern Siberians wore garments of fur and leather, preparing the skins with stone scrapers and knives and sewing them with bone or ivory needles and awls; so did their descendants who lived in cold climates. The Kashaya Pomo of the Pacific coast recounted how the foolish Undersea People died when their clothing was accidentally soaked, whereas the wise Kashaya wore bearskins next to their bodies and stayed warm and dry.9 The right footwear was equally vital: in the rough terrain of an oyster bed or an old lava flow, leather moccasins had to be replaced every few days.10 In northern New England, snowshoes enabled Algonkian hunters and fishers to track animals and reach fishing holes cut in the ice.11 To repel biting insects, the indigenes of North America’s Atlantic forest coated themselves with bear grease; those of the Texas coast daubed themselves with mud and herbs.12 Almost everywhere, smoke was used to keep mosquitos at bay. Peoples of the Caribbean and of Brazil’s Atlantic forest slept in hammocks over smoky fires and painted their bodies with grease and herbs—genipap for black, annato for red.13 Like eastern Siberians, the first Americans had the capacity to cross open water in skin boats. These may have been as crude and disposable as the round bullboats used on the Missouri River, or as elegant as the baidarka, umiak, and kayak of the Arctic icepack and the lakes and bays of the Subarctic tundra.14 Equally portable were the canoes of birch bark, sewn with split wattabe, or spruce roots, and caulked with spruce gum, developed in the paper birch’s habitat for the waterways and portages of the Northeast.15 Natives of the Ecuadorian coast made seagoing rafts of balsa wood. Those living on the shores of Lake Titicaca made rafts, boats, and houseboats from the totora reeds that lined the lake.16 Elsewhere in the Americas, from the Pacific Northwest to Tierra del Fuego and from the Mississippi River to the Amazon and Orinoco Rivers, connected by the natural Casiquiare Canal, wooden dugouts filled the need for water transport. Made from a single tree and fire-hollowed, these watercraft could be sizable; Columbus described a canoa with seventeen benches for oarsmen.17 Dugouts enabled the amphibious Guaxarapos to hunt for the four months of the year that the Paraguay River was in flood, visiting the islands that served as game preserves and cooking on platforms of clay in the boat bottoms.18 Land transport was a more difficult problem. The camelids of the puna and grassy páramos of the Andes would carry a burden, but they were too small to serve as mounts.19 The only draft animals were dogs, harnessed to travois on the Great Plains and to sleds in the Arctic. Most overland loads traveled on human backs, and only the guild of tlamemes in late pre-conquest Central Mexico was exclusively male.20 The wheel was unknown, although it would have been useful in a dry, flat place like the Yucatan peninsula, the environs of Chaco Canyon, or Nazca, Peru, all of which had kilometers of fine, straight roads.

34   Borderlands of the Iberian World

Hunting and Gathering Hunting is predation plus weapons; gathering is foraging plus tools and containers. Hunting, which called for hours of walking or silent waiting, followed by a sudden burst of energy, was generally done by men, who made their own weapons. Gathering, which included fishing, shell fishing, birding, and insect collecting, was done by children and women, who fashioned snares, fishnets, and net bags from the plant fibers of each new environment. According to the theorem of net energy, the energy expended to obtain a food cannot exceed the energy generated metabolically. Net energy, or cost-yield, is the principle anthropologists use to define the limits of a human catchment area. A round trip of ten kilometers is as far as a collector could walk in a day, carrying a child plus a container gradually filling with nuts, berries, lichens, and waste-absorbing moss, and break even in terms of energy expenditure–assuming she did not forage along the way and use the contents of the container to feed her family.21 Hunters and gatherers generally moved about a familiar landscape as seasonal resources become available. A rare first-person account of such a schedule survives in the joint Relación of Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca and Andrés Dorantes, who spent six years with the marine-adapted Coahuiltecans of the Texas coast in the late 1520s and early 1530s. These bands of hunter-gatherer-fishers spent the spring and early summer on the salt marshes, where they collected oysters, berries, and underwater roots, and on the upland prairies, where they used fire to hunt the American buffalo (Bison bison) and venados, either deer or antelope. When the Colorado River was in flood, they caught fish with weirs and nets, and if they had dugouts, with lines. In summer, the various bands gathered for a month and a half to gather tuna, or prickly pear, the fruit of two kinds of cactus, the broad-leafed nopal (Opuntia sp.) and the columnar pitahaya (Hylocereus sp). They met again when the pecans ripened and fell. In fall and winter, they retired to their fishing camps on the estuaries and barrier islands. When food ran short, they used poles to dig more underwater roots and ate snakes, rats, and large spiders. Cabeza de Vaca spent a hungry winter with the Avavares, a group without access to fishing streams, and observed that their children had potbellies like toads—to nutritionists a sign of the protein-deficiency disease kwashiorkor.22 If the Coahuiltecans’ territory was inadequate to their needs, it may be that their numbers exceeded their resources, or that they had stronger neighbors. The relative ease of harvesting marine and lacustrine resources may have kept most bands close to rivers, lakes, and coasts, where signs of early occupation take the form of stone net sinkers, fiber nets, bone hooks, and traps. The Mississippi Valley, with its many oxbow lakes abounding in aquatic vegetation, was a major flyway for migrating ducks, geese, and other aquatic species. When the water was high, freshwater fish fed and spawned in the inundated areas; when it fell, they were trapped in shallow pools and easily caught.23 In Amazonia, peoples of the rivers and floodplains modified the wetlands when they moved from fishing and turtle-egg gathering to aquaculture, keeping fish in

Patterns of Food Security   35 ponds and turtles in corrals.24 When game was scarce on the tundra and in the boreal forests of the far north, people lived on dried or salted fish and waterbirds such as geese. On Hudson Bay, tending nets was a woman’s job, as was splitting and drying whitefish. Across the Rockies, the fish put by was the spawning salmon. West of Lake Superior, Ojibwa women harvested wild rice from the marshy shores of lakes and rivers, shaking the ripe heads into their canoes, then parching the grain and storing it in fawn skins.25 William Cronon, who has reconstructed the subsistence calendar for northern New England, suggests that more than half of the Algonkians’ yearly food supply came from the rivers and seashore. After a snowfall, hunters could follow the tracks of deer and caribou, but winter protein was hard won, and the cold months were hungry ones. As soon as the ice broke, the natives repaired their nets, weirs, and birch bark canoes and headed for the coast and the spawning runs: first the smelt, then the alewives, sturgeon, and salmon. With the alewives came the first migratory birds, large ducks. Women and children clubbed them and collected their eggs. In summer, they picked berries and thinned the flocks of passenger pigeons that also came to feed on them.26 Although flightless birds were even more vulnerable, first peoples were not the ones who hunted the great auk, North America’s penguin, to extinction, for at the time of contact, the coast of Newfoundland and the Gulf of St. Lawrence had sizeable great auk rookeries.27 In the Pampas and Patagonia, the rhea, or American ostrich, was hunted for its feathers, meat, and eggs with a weapon the Spanish called a bola: two stones connected by a leather cord, swung for momentum and thrown to wrap around the bird’s long legs.28 The great shell middens that still mark the riverbanks, estuaries, and seashores of the Americas, after centuries of pothunter rifling and the harvesting of shells for lime and gravel, are evidence of the richness and renewability of marine resources. On the Atlantic coast of Brazil alone, hundreds of sambaquis, or shell middens, demonstrate that shell fishing was a constant on that seacoast from 6000 bc to ad 1100, over seven thousand years.29 Gatherers carried the molluscs in a lightweight container—a gourd, basket, animal skin, or net bag—from the clam bed, oyster bar, or mangrove swamp to the campsite, where the shells piled up. The problem of supplying the camp with fresh water was solved by digging a pit down to the water table.30 The Americas offered a broad array of edibles unfamiliar to Europeans: insects in every stage of metamorphosis, algae and seaweed, lichens, lizards and their caiman cousins, snakes, the tiny periwinkle, making a delicious broth, land crabs, rodents, monkeys, guinea pigs, and hairless dogs. Many foods that have fallen out of use are exceptionally nutritious. Ethnographers report that in the Valley of Mexico, blue-green algae tecuitlatl (Spirulina geitlerii), 70 percent protein and rich in minerals, grew on the surface of salty Lake Texcoco. Dried and sold in the form of small loaves, it tasted like cheese and could be kept for a year.31 Aztecs also enjoyed the eggs, ahuauhtli, of the corixid water beetle, axayacatl, which they mashed into balls and cooked in maize husks like tamales. In the markets one could buy toasted and salted maguey worms, ants, grasshoppers, and other delicacies. In protein content, these insects ranked higher than dog, rabbit, iguana, or armadillo, and only a little lower than the tiny fish charal, rich in

36   Borderlands of the Iberian World calcium and eaten whole.32 Nor were Aztec tastes unusual. The Yukpa Indians of eastern Colombia consumed some twenty-five species of insects, roasting and eating swarming termites like peanuts. In other parts of South America, natives induced wood-boring beetles to lay their eggs in specially prepared palm tree trunks and harvested the larvae when they reached optimal size.33 In the southern Chaco, Mocobi women and children drove swarms of locusts toward a pile of straw, then cooked them by setting it on fire.34 Hallucinogens had the imprimatur of shamanism, whose transfer to the Americas is revealed in the persistence of red-ochre burials.35 A widespread belief in animal helpers, dreams, and trances was also shamanic. Healers looking for plants with psychoactive properties found, in their respective environments, the San Pedro cactus (Echinopsis pachanoi), peyotl (peyote, Lophophora williamsii), ololiuqui (morning glory seeds, Rivea corymbosa), teonanacatl (magic mushroom, Psilocybe mexicana), toloache (jimson weed, Datura sp.), and ayahuasca (Banisteriopsis caapi).36 Plants with stimulant properties were cacao (Theobroma cacao), tobacco (Nicotiana sp.), coca (Erythroxylum coca), the caffeine-rich teas of yerba mate (Ilex paraguariensis A.) and cassina (yaupon, Ilex vomitoria), and the fermentable agave and maize.37 Pre-ceramic peoples cooked their food by grilling or roasting it over coals, searing it on a hot stone griddle, wrapping it in leaves or husks and putting it in the embers, baking it in a dry pit with hot stones, or simmering it in a pit below the water table with boiling stones, a method said to be capable of bringing seventy gallons of water to boil in half an hour. With boiling stones or balls of fired clay, liquids could be cooked in skin bags, birchbark and wooden buckets, or the watertight baskets made by the Chumash, Kashaya, and other Indians of California. Earthenware pottery may have been invented when a cook coated her basket with clay to make it fireproof. The simplest cooking container, of course, was an internal organ. Cauls, stomachs, bladders, and intestines were impermeable, elastic, stuffable, and edible, and they weighed next to nothing.38 As Marshall Sahlins observed, the “original affluent society” of hunters and gatherers came with the constraint of population control, for their numbers could not be allowed to outstrip available resources.39 As a result, they spaced their children over twice as far apart as farmers did—four to five years instead of two—for the good reason that a mother gathering food, shifting camps, or fleeing an enemy could carry only one child. They decreased their fertility by sexual taboos and prolonged lactation. They increased their mortality by means of abortion, infanticide (usually female), and benign neglect, diverting calories from a sickly child to produce a runt, with the lower height and smaller body weight that nutritionists call marasmus. They reduced their longevity by engaging in warfare and “cull killing,” a term broad enough to cover human sacrifice, lethal witchcraft, homicide, suicide, and senilicide.40 Finally, they believed that hardihood was related to fasting and that they should be able to make it through to spring on little food. As William Cronon reminds us, “The ecological principle known as Liebig’s Law states that biological populations are limited not by the total annual resources available to them but by the minimum amount that can be found at the scarcest time of the year.”41 Many hunter-gatherers could have preserved enough food to carry the entire

Patterns of Food Security   37 group through the year, yet they endured an annual stretch of semi-starvation, winnowing the band of those unfit to travel. Political anthropologist Pierre Clastres once stated as axiomatic that in the America of 1500 (South America), “wherever agriculture was ecologically and technologically possible, it was present.”42 All the same, in the Americas two kinds of hunter-gatherers resisted the impulse to tend plants and grow crops, although they were willing enough to modify their environments. The first kind harvested marine resources, and the second, the bounty of trees. In both cases, the food supply was sufficient to attach them to permanent settlements, weakening the supposed connection between a sedentary way of life and agriculture. Marine resources were abundant enough to produce complex hunter-gatherer populations in unexpected places. Sites in the extreme south of Patagonia, among the Fuegian channels, reveal six thousand years of stable occupation by hunters harpooning sea lions.43 The non-agricultural Calusas of southern Florida, with the resources of the Gulf of Mexico and the Everglades at their disposal, lasted into the historic period to reject Spanish hoes in person.44 The cold Peruvian Current that makes the coast of northern Chile and southern Peru one of the driest places in the world is also responsible for its rich offshore fishing grounds. In that region, sedentarism was based squarely on marine resources. Archaeologists studying the middens of Aspero, an Archaic site near the coast, find that anchovies made up 90 percent, by weight, of animal remains.45 Farther up the coast, the assured protein of a marine diet offered the sedentary inhabitants of better-watered Archaic sites the security to branch out into agriculture.46 Most surprisingly, pottery cultures appeared in Amazonia more than three thousand years earlier than in the Peruvian highlands, proving that the aquatic foraging of the lowlands supported sedentary occupation to the point of making heavy, breakable, pottery cookware and containers utilitarian.47 California, with its rare Mediterranean climate duplicated only in Chile, had stands of seed-bearing trees: oaks (Quercus sp.) in the central valley and pinyon pines (Pinus sp.) on the eastern slopes of the mountains. Acorn meal and pinyon flour were so rich in proteins, fats, and carbohydrates, and so storable, that native Californians were able to develop populous sedentary societies without agriculture. Each society having all that it required, there was little need for interaction, and their seven major linguistic groupings evolved into a kaleidoscope of languages and dialects. If they did not cultivate crops, they did know how to manage a landscape, with practices such as setting a fire to encourage redbud shoots or removing obstacles in the soil so that the rhizomes of sedge could grow straight for basketmaking.48 Other trees invaluable in a seasonally arid environment were the mesquite of the Southwest (Prosopis glandulosa), related to the carob, or algarrobo (Prosopis alba), of the Gran Chaco, whose chocolate-flavored seed pods served the Guaycuruans as a staple, and the many varieties of palm. The peoples of southern Florida ate the heart of the cabbage palm (Sabal palmetto) and the fruit of the saw palmetto (Serenoa repens), while the Mbayás of the northern Chaco called themselves simply “the people of the palm.”49

38   Borderlands of the Iberian World

Extensive Agriculture Agriculture in the Americas is seven thousand years old. Signs of cultivation appear as early as 5000 bc in the Tehuacan Valley of southern Mexico, with the remains of avocados (Persea americana), chiles (Capsicum sp.), maize (Zea mays, developed from the grass teosinte, Zea mays ssp. parviglumis), and bottle gourd (Lagenaria siceraria). Tepary beans (Phaseolus acutifolius), amaranth (Amaranthus cruentus), and squash (Cucurbita pepo) followed, and by 3500 bc, maize, beans, and squash were being intercropped.50 The great advantage of maize is that, like amaranth, sorghum, and sugarcane, it is a C4 plant with high glucose content, thriving in an environment of intense sunlight, high daytime temperatures, and irregular rainfall. Maize agriculture probably spread north of Mexico through group-to-group diffusion rather than the long-distance migration of farmers.51 South Americans were acquainted with maize, but used it mainly to make chicha, much as Mesoamericans made the nutritious pulque from agave. In the forests of South America, a different system of agriculture developed, based upon tropical root crops. Archaeologists have been slow to identify and date Archaic sites in the lowlands, but it is possible that root cultivation began there, with manioc (Manihot sp.) and other roots, being spread to the Caribbean and the montaña, or Amazon slopes of the Andes, during the Archaic period by fisher-forager-gardeners.52 In the first millennium bc root cultivation reached the high Andes, where the archaeological record is more complete. There, cold-adapted tubers like the potato (Solanum sp.), ulluco (Ullucus tyberosus), and oca (Oxalis tuberosa), added to protein-rich seeds like quinoa and cañihua (Chenopodium sp.), produced the nutritionally balanced Cordilleran complex, which spread throughout the altiplano.53 Agriculture developed independently in eastern North America between 2500 and 1500 bc, with numerous cultivars, of which we now use only the sunflower and acorn squash. The seeds of sumpweed, goosefoot (a chenopodium), pigweed (an amaranth), knotweed, maygrass, and little barley were high in protein, but their fat content varied, and their carbohydrate content was too low for them to function as staples. Not until maize-centered agricultural societies emerged in the East between ad 800 and ad 1100 would farming be more than part of a mixed subsistence routine. In places where the growing season was short, farmers planted the 8-row flint variety.54 Agricultural systems are either intensive, with no need to lie fallow, or extensive (also called “swiddening”), with a fallow that can be either long or short. In the Americas, long-fallow agriculture took the form of shifting cultivation, also known as agroforestry or forest colonizing. Inasmuch as the most fertile soils not renewed by silt are found in regions with a tree cover, the first task was to create a clearing. In tropical Brazil, seasonal rains dictated when to clear. Near the end of the dry season, the natives went to a chosen patch of forest, girdled the trees with stone axes, and slashed the underbrush to let it dry. Before the rains, they set the area on fire, producing ashes that the rains washed into the soil, neutralizing and fertilizing it. They then planted their manioc with a

Patterns of Food Security   39 digging stick. A crop ripening underground required little weeding or hoeing and no fencing, and the plot returned to forest after two or three seasons, if leaf-cutting ants did not discover it earlier. Since most manioc takes eighteen months to mature, several plots would have been in service at the same time, and the root could be left in the soil long past maturation. Farmers did not return to an “old field” until the successional forest had reclaimed it, twenty to forty years later.55 While the field lay fallow, it produced berries and attracted game, enabling the farmers to continue to hunt and gather, spreading their risks and increasing the amount of animal protein in their diet. Long fallow was appropriate for a place of low population and abundant land, like Brazil’s Atlantic forest. In the tierra templada of Mesoamerica, where population density was higher and land more scarce, the swidden process was more commonly short fallow, sometimes called “slash-and-burn.”56 In the traditional milpa system, the farmer cleared a small patch of ground and “made milpa” with a digging stick, or coa, intercropping maize, beans, and squash. The field was left to go fallow after a few crops.57 In Europe, the short-fallow system, sometimes called infield-outfield, called for fields lying fallow to be manured by turning animals onto them. In the Americas, the only domestic animals were dogs, guinea pigs, turkeys, and birds kept for their plumage.58 Manuring was rare, found mainly in the Andean highlands, thanks to herds of camelids, and in the oases and valleys of the Peruvian coast, fertilized by offshore guano.59 Of the two swidden systems, short fallow required up to six times as much land as intensive agriculture, and long fallow, twelve times.60 But this is not what the imperial peoples most objected to about them. The self-sufficiency that swiddening allowed put the cultivators at odds with societies intent upon building cities and making a name for themselves. Swidden farmers, like hunter-gatherers and nomadic pastoralists, were of little use to a state, and their independence was viewed as an affront. An expanding state lacking the manpower or the economic incentive to overrun and seize their habitats might try to capture the swiddeners themselves and move them to fixed settlements where they could be “civilized” and their productivity channeled.61 This, in due time, would also be the logic of the mission reduction. Knowing how to process a wild food or crop was as important as knowing how to gather or grow it. Indians knew how to preserve food, stopping bacterial growth and enzyme activity, in a number of ways, among them drying, dehydrating, heating, freezing, fermenting (to lower the pH), curing, salting, and smoking.62 First, however, they had to make the food palatable and non-toxic. Acorns, the staple of native Californians, were first ground, then leached in water to remove their bitter tannins. Pinyon seeds needed only to be ground. Both meals were rich in oils as well as carbohydrates and would have been less perishable in the cool mountains than on the warm coast. Cold-climate potatoes, the staple of altiplano Andeans, were freeze-dried into chuñu, altering their texture, taste, and storability as thoroughly as the similar process that converted llama and guanaco meat into charqui.63 Most manioc varieties contain prussic acid, which protects the tubers from being dug up and eaten by animals. This “bitter” manioc was detoxified in a complicated process that called for peeling and washing the roots, shredding them on a board with teeth of stone or coral, soaking the mass in water, squeezing out the

40   Borderlands of the Iberian World cyanide-containing juice by suspending the mass in a woven compression tube, drying it into a coarse meal, and storing it in that form to be mixed with water and baked on a round stone or ceramic griddle (burén or budar) into cassava, a high-calorie flatbread that would last a year.64 Maize, the Americas’ premier carbohydrate, is an imperfect staple, being deficient in the usable niacin necessary to prevent the deficiency disease pellagra, as well as in three essential amino acids—lysine, tryptophan, and leucine. The phytate that it does contain inhibits the absorption of iron and can lead to anemia.65 In Mesoamerica, the addition of beans, squash, and chiles made a maize-centered diet nutritionally adequate. There and in the Andes, calcium was added and the niacin in maize converted into a utilizable form by the alkalinizing process of nixtamalization, which turns dried maize into hominy by boiling it in a weak solution of potash, lime, or alkaline salts to remove the pericarp.66 In Mesoamerica and South America, women ground the treated maize into masa with a stone mano y metate, baked it as a thin tortilla or a thicker arepa on a ceramic or stone griddle sometimes called a comal, steamed it in maize husks as a tamal, or stewed it in a pozole. In the Eastern Woodlands, they used a wooden mortar and pestle to grind the maize into meal, simmering it in an earthenware pot to make sofkee. In the Andes, maize not grown for chicha was served toasted as cancha, popped as mote, in a soup as choclo, or sweetened as mazamorra.67 On the Upper Missouri River, where the growing season was short, Mandan women dried the popping maize; parched and shelled the sweet maize; blanched, dried, and shelled the green maize; and dried the ripe maize to grind into meal for cornballs and mush. They braided the dried ears by their husks and stored them with the shelled maize and dried squash in underground pits or caches.68 Missouri River storage pits were ladder-deep and shaped like a narrow-necked bottle. It took two women with bone tools the better part of three days to dig just one, hiding the dirt. Before filling the pit, they covered the floor with a buffalo hide and lined the sides with dry grass. When the cache was full, they covered it with planks, dry grass, another buffalo hide, and earth.69 A magnetic gradiometry survey of a single fifteenthcentury Mandan site, occupied for barely a generation, reveals a combined cache capacity of seventy thousand bushels. The surplus maize and squash that these northern farmers produced, they exchanged for buffalo robes and charqui with the nomads of the Great Plains, who required a source of carbohydrates to protect them from the protein poisoning of an all-meat diet.70 Unlike the Mandan, the Omagua of the Río Negro, largest tributary of the Amazon, stored their maize in raised granaries and kept their manioc meal in underground silos.71 Many societies developed a lightweight road food. Pemmican, a variable mixture of dried buffalo meat, marrow fat, and dried fruit potted in taureaux, or flat sacks of buffalo hide, traveled in the packs of fur traders. For their expeditions onto the northern Plains, the Arikara carried rations of squash, sliced to have a center hole, dried on willow rods, and packed into parfleche bags of hide with the hair removed.72 Hunters in New England carried emergency rations of nocake, a flour made of parched maize. Florida travelers carried a mixture of parched maize, dried medlars and berries, and nuts, plus the parched leaves of the yaupon holly to brew their tea.73 Pinole was a Mesoamerican road

Patterns of Food Security   41 food: dried, ground, and roasted corn meal, consumed as a drink or a porridge. Ross Hassig posits, from the small number of comales at Teotihuacán, that the tortilla originated as a re-toastable food for military forays as early as 200 bc and suggests that the Maya of the same period, who lacked the comal, may have been less warlike. From linguistic and pictographic evidence, archaeologist Sarah Newman counters that the Maya on campaign may well have carried tamales and reheated them on potsherds.74 The Tupi of Brazil carried smoked mullet and roasted manioc meal, which the chroniclers called farinha de guerra. With these military stores they could penetrate “a hundred leagues” into the interior on expeditions lasting weeks or even months. When the Tupinamba buried a warrior, seated, they buried with him all that he would need on his journey “to dance beyond the mountains”: his bow and arrows, axes, fishing hooks, fire, water, meat, and manioc meal.75 The bow and arrow was brought by Eskimos from Siberia to Alaska some forty-five hundred years ago and used in 500 bc by their descendants, Inuit hunters contending with Athabaskans and Amerindians over hunting territories in the Subarctic.76 It did not diffuse south of the boreal forests until ad 200, when Athabaskan caribou hunters began hunting bison on the Northern Plains of Saskatchewan and Alberta. These hunters carried the technology to the Pacific Northwest, California, and the Southwest, and by ad 500 it had passed to the northernmost Uto-Aztecan speakers, the Shoshones of the Great Basin. Curiously, the bow and arrow did not spread across the Arctic itself until after ad 900, carried eastward by the Thule Eskimo expansion.77 Where game was available, the new technology improved the effectiveness of the hunt; the greater amount of animal protein in a group’s diet led to an increase in population, and intensified agriculture was the result—at least this is how some scholars explain the simultaneous appearance in the Eastern Woodlands of bows and arrows, larger settlements, and maize fields in the bottomlands.78 Prolonged drought in the arid lands of today’s US Southwest (c. 1150–1350) spurred migrations southward to the peripheries of Mesoamerica, where agricultural city-states also suffered from reduced rainfall. During this period of upheaval, several huntergatherer-farmer groups came to be known as Chichimecs, identified in the codices by their bows and arrows. One band, the Mexica, came to rest in the Valley of Mexico, where they parlayed their fighting skills into a tributary empire.79 The advantages of the bow and arrow, more accurate and with a longer range than a spear or spear-thrower, were obvious, and soon every Mesoamerican army had its cadre of bowmen. The technology spread to South America, where the powerful Tapajós chiefdom that flourished on the lower Amazon until ad 1600 reportedly had sixty thousand bowmen in a population of 250,000.80

Intensive Agriculture In the Americas, the techniques of intensive agriculture, permitting fields to recover their fertility without lying fallow, were in use long before people who aspired to renown built Teotihuacán, Monte Albán, Chichen Itzá, Tiwanaku, Cahokia, Casas Grandes, or

42   Borderlands of the Iberian World the roads radiating from Chaco Canyon, and well before the Inkas and Aztecs arose to claim descent from the Ancients.81 Lands ideal for agriculture—fertile, flat, having a long growing season, and neither too wet nor too dry—were never plentiful, and early farmers learned by trial and error how to modify their environments in order to survive drought, control flooding, and divert runoff. Old technologies that the imperial peoples would adopt and put to new use were the artificial island, the terrace, the raised or ridged field, irrigation, and dry farming. The chinampa was an artificial island built in the shallow freshwater lakes of Xochimilco and Chalco in the Valley of Mexico. The island was constructed by driving posts into the lake bottom, creating an underwater enclosure with branches and fronds, and filling it with earth. Its surface was less than a meter above the surface of the lake. Fertility was maintained by regular applications of nightsoil and of mud dredged from the canals between the islands. The Uto-Aztecan peoples who arrived in the valley by the mid-twelfth century and built the lakeside cities of the Triple Alliance, dominated after ad 1428 by Tenochtitlán, built so many chinampas that they virtually covered the two freshwater lakes and solved the problem of distribution by organizing brigades of canoes to bring provisions across saline Lake Texcoco, a one-man canoe being able to carry as much as forty tlamemes.82 In the late sixteenth century, the Uru Indians of northern Lake Titicaca planted their potatoes on floating gardens consisting of totorareed rafts and lake-bottom muck.83 Terraces, often constructed with levels of clay and sand to ensure proper drainage, increased the amount of level land in hills and highlands from Central Mexico to the Andes and in the montaña region facing Amazonia.84 The Inkas who turned Cusco into a maizeproducing area with specialty terraces and, throughout their far-flung empire, applied a system combining directed terracing and state storehouses, inherited the terrace system from the Wari, their precursors in the Ayacucho-Huantla Basin.85 Mixtecan farmers using the lama y bordo system that made a virtue of erosion, erected stone and rubble dikes or check dams across ravines to trap the red earth (lama) of the hills, more fertile than the volcanic soils of the valley, and create terraces (bordos) on which to plant their maize.86 The area involved could be immense. In the Río Bec region of the Maya lowlands, near the large site of Uaxactun, terraces covered ten thousand square kilometers.87 Raised fields solved the problem of irregular precipitation—too little water followed by too much—by making it possible to cultivate swampy or seasonally flooded land (várzea) while maintaining its fertility. The mounds, or camellones, were orderly rows of elevated soil, one to three meters high and five to fifteen meters wide, with swales for drainage. In flood season, they stood well above the water level; when the water went down, a second crop could be grown in the swales.88 This highly productive system of land reclamation was widely used in South America in places like the Guayas River Basin of coastal Ecuador, the Sabana de Bogotá and the San Jorge River floodplain in Colombia, the Guianas coast, the Llanos de Moxos, and Lake Titicaca.89 Without it, manioc, “a long-maturing crop sensitive to flooding and waterlogging,” could not have been grown near rivers, nor on a delta island such as Marajó.90 Beside the western Great Lakes of North America, the ridged field with its narrower mounds tempered the effects of frost and extended the growing season on Oneota maize fields.91

Patterns of Food Security   43 In regions of low rainfall, canals, aqueducts, and reservoirs managed surface and subsurface water for irrigation. The opposite of the raised field was the sunken field or garden (mahama or hoyo) of the Peruvian coast, produced by removing enough soil to approach the water table. In the Nasca area, underground canals (pukios), or filtration galleries, were developed to tap the groundwater in the dry season when most rivers stopped flowing. Sites in the Tucson Basin of southern Arizona document networks of canals as early as 1250 bc, well before irrigation was adopted in Mesoamerica.92 Some hydraulic works were built on a heroic scale. In Oaxaca, the massive wall constructed at Monte Albán between 300 and 100 bc dammed a sizable reservoir.93 A single canal that the Mochica built on the Peruvian coast around ad 500 was 45 kilometers long.94 And the Hohokam of the Sonoran Desert, who diverted water from the Salt and Gila Rivers between the 6th and 15th centuries ad, left 560 kilometers of main canals and 1,600 kilometers of lateral and distribution canals in the Salt River Valley alone. Archaeologists disagree as to why, by 1450, the Hohokam had abandoned their canals, the largest irrigation system in North America. It may be that, as in Mesopotamia, the rivers lost their ability to flush away salts and the land was poisoned by alkalis, or it may be that conditions of drought had turned the northern frontier into a desert and driven its inhabitants to oases. In western Chihuahua, multistoried Casas Grandes (Paquimé) was in ruins by the late 1400s, even as the Aztecs extended their tributary empire to the Gulf Coast.95 In the Sonoran Desert, techniques of dry farming enabled the Tohono O’odham to produce food in a riverless region, planting on their temporales, or rainfall-dependent plots, only after a rain. Among their techniques were the diversion dike, a palo y tierra weir spreading the water or checking its rush through a field; the wing dike, diverting the rainfall of hundreds of acres onto a few acres of good soil; the ‘ak-ciñ, or “mouth of a wash” dam, forcing the floodwaters of an arroyo, or drybed stream, to spread out and create a fertile delta; the earthen levee, containing rain or flood water until it could soak into the soil; the charco, or earthen pond, for subsurface irrigation; and the tinaja, or silt-lined basin, for storing storm waters.96 Farmers of the San Miguel River watershed, in the present state of Sonora, Mexico, planted rows of willow and cottonwood in the riverbed when the water was low. These living fencerows kept floodwaters from eroding the fields, added arable land by trapping sediment, sheltered insect-eating birds, and provided kindling.97 The Hohokam cultivated agave on bajadas, or valley slopes, in fields with rockpiles to slow evaporation and protect the plants against rodents.98

Survival Stratagems Intensive agriculture was notoriously at the mercy of natural disasters. As the imperial peoples increased in number and urbanized, advanced agricultural technologies, together with improvements in distribution and storage, helped them to ward off hunger, yet as late as the mid-15th century, central Mexico suffered a famine so severe that in order to buy maize from the Totonacs of Cempoala, people reportedly sold their children.99

44   Borderlands of the Iberian World Taking seriously their commitment to the crops, agricultural peoples did their best to influence rainfall, the swidden farmers of the forests by enlisting the powers of a shaman and the intensive agriculturalists of the coastal and lacustrine civilizations by propitiating the gods. A Choctaw shaman was expected to be a rainmaker, and the Tupi told the Portuguese that a pagé, their word for a shaman, could be a manda-chuvas, a sender or disposer of rain.100 A seashell called the mullu (Spondylus princeps), available at depths of fifteen to fifty meters in the tropical waters off the Ecuadorian coast, was believed to be the food of water-giving gods. The object of long-distance trade to western Mexico and coastal Peru from 3000 bc to ad 1500, this coral-rimmed shell was especially prominent as an inlay in Mochica art during a sixth-century drought.101 But a shifting ocean current was not a rain god to be placated. In the last third of the sixth century, sand invaded Moche and its canals, and the Mochicas moved north to a new capital. Ice core samples drilled from the glacier of Quelccaya south of Cusco reveal a thirty-two year drought from ad 562 to 594.102 At Lake Titicaca, where rainfall over the same period was 30 percent below normal, the lake people took out their tools and built more raised fields, the people of the puna guarded their stocks of guanaco and vicuña, and Tiwanaku became a power to reckon with in the highlands.103 Volcanic activity brought cultivation to a sudden stop in the Valley of Mexico around 3000 bc, leaving the Basin covered in pumitic ash for five centuries. Eruptions of Xitle volcano in the southern part of the Basin from 100 bc to ad 300 buried the city of Cuicuilco, with its twelve pyramids and its irrigation canals, under lava and forced its population into exile.104 The eruption of Ilopango volcano in central El Salvador around ad 250 must have seemed like the end of the world to the southern Maya. All life was destroyed within twenty or thirty kilometers of the volcano; ash fall made a zone with a hundred-kilometer radius around the caldera uninhabitable for two centuries; and wholesale emigration brought trade to a standstill.105 Natural calamities may not have been getting worse, but with intensive agriculture supporting more people and concentrating them in cities, a disaster could inflict more damage. In ad 1150, Cahokia, capital of a Mississippian chiefdom and reputedly “the most complex pre-Columbian polity north of Mexico,” was the largest city in North America and boasted the third highest pyramid in the hemisphere. Strategically located near the confluence of three rivers, Cahokia rose to prominence during the Medieval Warm Period (ad 800–1300) and was abandoned during the Little Ice Age (ad 1350–1850), but climate is seldom advanced as the reason why by ad 1400 it was a ghost town.106 A more common explanation for the Cahokian decline is deforestation. Two centuries into the city’s existence, its inhabitants erected a palisade around their central mounds that was three kilometers long and required fifteen thousand logs the size of telephone poles that would have to be replaced regularly. Being able to float the logs down river increased the size of the catchment area, but when timber was exhausted for a radius of ten to fifteen kilometers, the “lower sort” of Cahokians who did the manual labor may have decided that sustaining a city was more trouble than it was worth and drifted away, disenchanted.107 Bioarchaeology offers further reasons for why a civilization might decline; bones and teeth yield telling evidence. Changes in bone strontium levels expose the changing

Patterns of Food Security   45 composition of the diet over time in terms of the ratio of animal food to vegetable and show incontrovertibly who was getting the most protein. Transverse “Harris lines” on a femur indicate that the individual survived episodes of disease or starvation when young; transverse markings on the teeth, or enamel hypoplasia, is another sign of developmental arrest, and so forth.108 Anecdotal evidence suggests that the Indians of the New World were better physical specimens than the Europeans they greeted. Columbus marveled in his diary that the Taíno were “all of a good height, very handsome people,” and their legs were “very straight, none are bow-legged.”109 Not all Indians were this well nourished. The same maize-rich diet that could make a people numerous enough to support a high civilization could also make them unhealthy. According to paleonutritionists Elizabeth Wing and Antoinette Brown: “The hypothesis that inadequate nutrition accompanied the shift from a hunting and a gathering subsistence pattern to an intensive agricultural way of life is [. . .] supported by dental and bone abnormalities associated with malnutrition,” which “point to a diet deficient in protein, vitamins, and minerals, and high in carbohydrates.” Burials at an eighth-century Classic Maya city indicate that urban working people were shorter and more subject to deficiency diseases than either elites or farmers.110 Perhaps the city went into decline because, little by little, the workers put down their tools and headed for zones of refuge where they too could make milpa, eat well, and answer to nobody.111 In his important book examining the relationships of Choctaws, Pawnees, and Navajos to their environments, Richard White observes: “No people survive by virtue of their best years; it is the worst years which create the limits of their subsistence system.”112 Every native society has had its “famine foods” to resort to when normal foods failed.113 In times of hunger, Florida Indians dug kunti (sago palm, Zamia floridana), a cycad that was processed like bitter manioc, and china root (sarsaparilla, Smilax auriculata); Pawnees dug the Indian potato (Glycine apios). Navajos ate prairie dogs.114 And Mayan people ate the carbohydrate-rich seeds of the ramon, or common breadnut tree (Brosimum alicastrum).115 The Franciscan Motolinía noted in the 1530s that Indians could “endure barren years better and more easily than other races” because they consumed roots and herbs.116 What White discerned was that the mixed, or diversified, subsistence system combining farming with hunting and gathering and, if necessary, a higher expenditure of energy for the same or fewer food calories, was not a transitional state on the road to marketoriented agriculture and civilization. Its diversity preserved a secondary subsistence system, an essential back-up cycle for the years of scarcity when the primary subsistence system failed.117 When drought destroyed their crops and dried up their streams and ponds, the Choctaws could leave their villages and decamp to the woods on their borders to hunt deer and bison; make “bread” from beechnuts, chestnuts, and chinquapin; dig Indian potatoes and china root; dry persimmons, plums, and berries; and catch lizards, snakes, frogs, and insects. For the Choctaws to have produced and stored agricultural surpluses sufficient to survive several bad years in a row, White concluded, “would have involved greater population, more land brought into production, more pressure on the limited arable lands, and far more labor.” For them, “an easier security could be gained not from expanding agriculture but from limiting it.”118

46   Borderlands of the Iberian World In his intriguing book about anarchy in upland Southeast Asia, James C. Scott writes that a “society that is physically mobile, widely dispersed, and likely to fission into new and smaller units is relatively impervious to state capture.” The society’s “state-repelling features” are a function of its “choice of subsistence routines,” namely, foraging, hunting, land-based gathering, maritime gathering, swiddening, and nomadic pastoralism, all of which necessitate an “open, common-property frontier.” That safety valve largely ­disappeared in the Americas at the end of the nineteenth century, and the indomitable nations lost their domain, or power over other people, but not their autonomy, not even today if they can retire to a remote place and stay there, protected by the “frictionof-terrain” that makes their refuge virtually inaccessible and the secondary subsistence system that enables them to live off the land.119 The same Cabeza de Vaca who spent six miserable years with the hunter-gatherers of the Texas coast was later appointed governor of Paraguay. It was he who observed that the Guaxarapos took to their canoes while the river was in flood, riding the currents and going ashore to hunt deer and tapirs. Knowing what it was to be hungry, Cabeza de Vaca was glad to report that the canoe people had plenty of food. “And they enjoy this good life, dancing and singing all day and all night,” he said, “for they are a people whose livelihood is assured.”120 The societies that Europeans would categorize as “indomitable” had been making adjustments to their patterns of security and autonomy for millennia before the Spanish and Portuguese burst into the Americas. Some of them had endured periods of compulsory partnership with one of the native states or empires that had come and gone, but over time, the freedom-loving societies had learned what Scott calls “the art of not being governed” and become what Clastres calls “societies against the state.” Their egalitarian organization, high mobility levels, and ability to hive or break into bands, scattering and re-combining like quicksilver, gave them the advantage of limited governance, and their ability to control their numbers kept them in balance with their environments, yet it was ultimately their mixture of subsistence routines that guaranteed their autonomy, for unlike the biblical hunter Esau, who traded his birthright for a mess of pottage, they were immune to avaricious neighbors, and unlike the sons of Jacob, who during a famine were sent to Egypt to buy grain, they were secure against the lure of imperial granaries.121

Notes 1. Dean R. Snow, “The First Americans and the Differentiation of Hunter-Gatherer Cultures,” in The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas, vol. 1: North America, part 1, ed. Bruce G. Trigger and Wilcomb E. Washburn (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 130–131. 2. Thomas F. Lynch, “The Earliest South American Lifeways,” in The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas, vol. 3: South America, part  1, ed. Frank Salomon and Stuart B. Schwartz (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 213–215. 3. Robert  N.  Zeitlin and Judith Francis Zeitlin, “The Paleoindian and Archaic Cultures of Mesoamerica,” in The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas, vol. 2:

Patterns of Food Security   47 Mesoamerica, part 1, ed. Richard E. W. Adams and Murdo J. MacLeod (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 51–56; Kent G. Lightfoot and Otis Parrish, California Indians and Their Environment (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 41–43; Jon M. Erlandson, Madonna L. Moss, and Matthew Des Lauriers, “Life on the Edge: Early Maritime Cultures of the Pacific Coast of North America,” Quaternary Science Reviews 27 (2008): 2232–2245. 4. Snow, “The First Americans,” 129, 132, 187. 5. Zeitlin and Zeitlin, “The Paleoindian and Archaic Cultures,” 53; Lynch, “The Earliest South American Lifeways,” 215. 6. Keith F. Otterbein, How War Began (College Station: Texas A&M Press, 2004), 58–59. 7. Steven  W.  Hackel, Children of Coyote, Missionaries of Saint Francis: Indian-Spanish Relations in Colonial California, 1769–1850 (Chapel Hill: UNC, 2005), 17. 8. Carl Ortwin Sauer, Sixteenth Century North America: The Land and the People as Seen by the Europeans (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 112; Snow, “The First Americans,” 189. 9. Kent G. Lightfoot, Indians, Missionaries, and Merchants: The Legacy of Colonial Encounters on the California Frontiers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 162–163. 10. Sylvia Van Kirk, Many Tender Ties: Women in Fur-Trade Society, 1670–1870 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1980), 55. 11. William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983), 47. 12. Sauer, Sixteenth Century North America, 285; Juliana Barr, Peace Came in the Form of a Woman: Indians and Spaniards in the Texas Borderlands (Chapel Hill: UNC, 2007), 149; Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, “1542 Relación,” in Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca: His Account, His Life, and the Expedition of Pánfilo de Narváez, 3 vols., trans. Rolena Adorno and Patrick Charles Pautz (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999), I: 13–279. The smoky fires kindled to keep the Texas coast’s three kinds of mosquitos at bay are described on pages 142–145. 13. Philip  P.  Boucher, France and the American Tropics to 1700: Tropics of Discontent? (Baltimore: JHU, 2008), 22; Warren Dean, With Broadax and Firebrand: The Destruction of the Brazilian Atlantic Forest (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 28. 14. Snow, “The First Americans,” 190. 15. Van Kirk, Many Tender Ties, 61. 16. Izumi Shimada, “The Evolution of Andean Diversity: Regional Formations (500 B.C.E.-C.E. 600),” in The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas, vol. 3: South America, part  1, ed. Frank Salomon and Stuart  B.  Schwartz (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 433. 17. Kathleen Deagan and José María Cruxent, Columbus’s Outpost Among the Taínos: Spain and America at La Isabela, 1493–1498 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), 37–38. 18. Sabine MacCormack, “Ethnography in South America: The First Two Hundred Years,” in The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas, vol. 3: South America, part 1, ed. Frank Salomon and Stuart B. Schwartz (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 104. 19. Anna  C.  Roosevelt, “The Maritime, Highland, Forest Dynamic and the Origins of Complex Culture,” in The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas, vol. 3: South America, part 1, ed. Frank Salomon and Stuart B. Schwartz (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 271; Luis Lumbreras, “Andean Urbanism and Statecraft (C.E. 550-1450),” in The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas,

48   Borderlands of the Iberian World vol. 3: South America, part 1, ed. Frank Salomon and Stuart B. Schwartz (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 524–528; Shimada, “The Evolution of Andean Diversity,” 368. 20. Ross Hassig, Trade, Tribute, and Transportation: The Sixteenth-Century Political Economy of the Valley of Mexico (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1985), 128–129. 21. Elizabeth  S.  Wing and Antoinette  B.  Brown, Paleonutrition: Method and Theory in Prehistoric Foodways (New York: Academic Press, 1979), 162. 22. Cabeza de Vaca, “1542 Relación”; Barr, Peace Came in the Form of a Woman, 116–117; Sauer, Sixteenth Century North America, 112–114, 117; for kwashiorkor, see Wing and Brown, Paleonutrition, 35. 23. Bruce D. Smith, “Agricultural Chiefdoms of the Eastern Woodlands,” in The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas, ed. Bruce  G.  Trigger and Wilcomb E.  Washburn, vol. 1: North America, part  1 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 273. 24. Sauer, Sixteenth Century North America, 27; MacCormack, “Ethnography in South America,” 145. 25. Van Kirk, Many Tender Ties, 56–57. 26. Cronon, Changes in the Land, 39–40; Snow, “The First Americans,” 154–156. 27. Sauer, Sixteenth Century North America, 284. 28. Mario  A.  Rivera, “Prehistory of the Southern Cone,” in The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas, vol. 3: South America, part  1, ed. Frank Salomon and Stuart B. Schwartz (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 747. 29. Wing and Brown, Paleonutrition, 94; Dean, With Broadax and Firebrand, 24. 30. Sauer, Sixteenth Century North America, 30, 44. 31. Bernard R. Ortiz de Montellano, Aztec Medicine, Health, and Nutrition (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990), 100–106. 32. Hassig, Trade, Tribute, and Transportation, 129; John  C.  Super, Food, Conquest, and Colonization in Sixteenth-Century Spanish America (Albuquerque: UNM, 1988), 69; Wing and Brown, Paleonutrition, 136; Ortiz de Montellano, Aztec Medicine, Health, and Nutrition, 115–119. 33. Wing and Brown, Paleonutrition, 136. 34. James Schofield Saeger, The Chaco Mission Frontier: The Guaycuruan Experience (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2000), 53. 35. Lynch, “The Earliest South American Lifeways,” 189. 36. Shimada, “The Evolution of Andean Diversity,” 381; Lightfoot, Indians, Missionaries, and Merchants, 43; Amy Bushnell, “The Peyote Cults: Historical Examples of Non-White Adaptation to White Dominance, by Resistance and Withdrawal, Syncretization, and Conciliation” (MA diss., University of Florida, 1971), 32–40, for historic-period peyote rites among indigenous peoples of northern Mexico, including the Huichols. 37. Wing and Brown, Paleonutrition, 141. 38. Snow, “The First Americans,” 154–156; Lightfoot, Indians, Missionaries, and Merchants, 167; Roosevelt, “The Maritime, Highland, Forest Dynamic,” 316, 319; and Felipe FernándezArmesto, Near a Thousand Tables: A History of Food (New York: Free Press, 2002), 12–16. 39. Marshall Sahlins, Stone Age Economics (New York: Aldine, 1972), 33–34. 40. Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (New York: W.  W.  Norton, 1999), 89; Wing and Brown, Paleonutrition, 35, 170–171; Mark Nathan

Patterns of Food Security   49 Cohen, “Prehistoric Patterns of Hunger,” in Hunger in History: Food Shortage, Poverty, and Deprivation, ed. Lucile F. Newman (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1992), 56–97. 41. Cronon, Changes in the Land, 40–41. 42. Pierre Clastres, Society Against the State, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Zone Books, 1989), 85. 43. Rivera, “Prehistory of the Southern Cone,” 756. 44. Snow, “The First Americans,” 182–183; Sauer, Sixteenth Century North America, 152–153; Lightfoot, Indians, Missionaries, and Merchants, 42. 45. Roosevelt, “The Maritime, Highland, Forest Dynamic,” 270, 283, 285. 46. Lynch, “Earliest South American Lifeways,” 249. 47. Roosevelt, “The Maritime, Highland, Forest Dynamic,” 315–319. 48. Lightfoot and Parrish, California Indians, 2–140; M.  Kat Anderson et al., “A World of Balance and Plenty: Land, Plants, Animals, and Humans in a Pre-European California,” in Contested Eden: California Before the Gold Rush, ed. Ramón A. Gutiérrez and Richard J. Orsi (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 14–15, 26, 31; Hackel, Children of Coyote, 18, 25; Sauer, Sixteenth Century North America, 284. 49. Cynthia Radding, Wandering Peoples: Colonialism, Ethnic Spaces, and Ecological Frontiers in Northwestern Mexico, 1700–1850 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 149; Saeger, The Chaco Mission Frontier, 53–54; Ortiz de Montellano, Aztec Medicine, Health, and Nutrition, 108–109; Amy Turner Bushnell, “Living at Liberty: The Ungovernable Yamasees of Spanish Florida,” in The Yamasee Indians: From Florida to South Carolina, ed. Denise L. Bossy (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2018) 27-53. 50. Snow, “The First Americans,” 173; Norman Hammond, “The Maya Lowlands: Pioneer Farmers to Merchant Princes,” in The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas, vol. 2: Mesoamerica, part  1, ed. Adams and MacLeod (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 220–221. 51. William L. Merrill et al., “The Diffusion of Maize to the Southwestern United States and Its Impact,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 106, 50 (2009): 21024–21025. 52. Lee A. Newsom, “Caribbean Maize: First Farmers to Columbus,” in Histories of Maize: Multidisciplinary Approaches to the Prehistory, Linguistics, Biogeography, Domestication, and Evolution of Maize, ed. John Staller et al. (Burlington, VT: Academic Press, 2006), 325–335. 53. Super, Food, Conquest, and Colonization, 68, 72, 77. 54. Linda S. Cordell and Bruce D. Smith, “Indigenous Farmers,” in The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas, ed. Bruce G. Trigger and Wilcomb E. Washburn, vol. 1: North America, part 1 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 247. 55. Dean, With Broadax and Firebrand, 27. Philippe Descola, The Spears of Twilight: Life and Death in the Amazon Jungle, trans. Janet Lloyd (New York: The New Press, 1996), 84–102, describes gardening in the 1990s by the Achuar, a Jívaro group on the Upper Amazon. 56. Hassig, Trade, Tribute, and Transportation, 15–17. 57. Thomas M. Whitmore and B. L. Turner II, Cultivated Landscapes of Middle America on the Eve of Conquest (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 114–123; Nancy M. Farriss, Maya Society under Colonial Rule: The Collective Enterprise of Survival (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 125–127, 208–210. 58. MacCormack, “Ethnography in South America,” 104.

50   Borderlands of the Iberian World 59. Simon R. Poulson et al., “Paleodiet in Northern Chile Through the Holocene: Extremely Heavy δ15N Values in Dental Calculus Suggest a Guano-Derived Signature?” Journal of Archaeological Science 40 (2013): 4576–4585. 60. Hassig, Trade, Tribute, and Transportation, 15–17. 61. James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 195, 206. 62. Wing and Brown, Paleonutrition, 64. 63. Shimada, “The Evolution of Andean Diversity,” 373. 64. Deagan and Cruxent, Columbus’s Outpost among the Taínos, 36; Wing and Brown, Paleonutrition, 69–71. Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés, Historia general y natural de las Indias, vol.1, ed. José Amador de los Ríos, 3 vols (Madrid: Impr. de la Real Academia de la Historia, 1851), 264–272, described early sixteenth-century maize and manioc ­cultivation and preparation in the Caribbean, calling the manioc plant yuca, the manioc bread, caçabi, and the fields with small earthen mounds on which manioc and maize were planted, conucos. 65. Clark Spencer Larsen, Dale L. Hutchinson, Margaret J. Schoeninger, and Lynette Norr, “Food and Stable Isotopes in La Florida: Diet and Nutrition Before and After Contact,” in Bioarchaeology of Spanish Florida: The Impact of Colonialism, ed. Clark Spencer Larsen (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2001), 74. 66. Sauer, Sixteenth Century North America, 138; Wing and Brown, Paleonutrition, 52, 64; Thomas P. Myers, “Hominy Technology and the Emergence of Mississippian Societies,” in Histories of Maize: Multidisciplinary Approaches to the Prehistory, Linguistics, Biogeography, Domestication, and Evolution of Maize, ed. Robert Staller et al. (Burlington, VT: Academic Press, 2006), 511–520. 67. Super, Food, Conquest, and Colonization, 66–67, 104–106. 68. Virginia Bergman Peters, Women of the Earth Lodges: Tribal Life on the Plains (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995), 109, 117–119; Elizabeth A. Fenn, Encounters at the Heart of the World: A History of the Mandan People (New York: Macmillan, 2014), 241. 69. Peters, Women of the Earth Lodges, 121. 70. Fenn, Encounters at the Heart of the World, 234, 242–243. 7 1. Juan and Judith Villamarín, “Chiefdoms: The Prevalence and Persistence of ‘Señoríos Naturales’ 1400 to European Conquest,” in The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas, vol. 3: South America, part  1, ed. Frank Salomon and Stuart  B.  Schwartz (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 616–617. 72. Van Kirk, Many Tender Ties, 56–57; Fenn, Encounters at the Heart of the World, 242; and Peters, Women of the Earth Lodges, 117. 73. Cronon, Changes in the Land, 47; Amy Turner Bushnell, “Patricio de Hinachuba: Defender of the Word of God, the Crown of the King, and the Little Children of Ivitachuco,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 3 (1979): 8. 74. Ross Hassig, War and Society in Ancient Mesoamerica (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 55, 74, 130; Sarah Newman, personal communication, January 30, 2015. 75. Dean, With Broadax and Firebrand, 34–35; Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed, 206; Clastres, Society Against the State, 88; and MacCormack, “Ethnography in South America,” 115. 76. Snow, “The First Americans,” 186–193. 77. Snow, “The First Americans,” 171–174, 190–192; John  H.  Blitz, “Adoption of the Bow in Prehistoric North America,” North American Archaeology 9 (1988): 21.

Patterns of Food Security   51 78. Cordell and Smith, “Indigenous Farmers,” 245–246; Richard A. Yarnell, “The Importance of Native Crops During the Late Archaic and Woodland Periods,” in Foraging and Farming in the Eastern Woodlands, ed. C. Margaret Scarry (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1993), 22–23. 79. Hassig, War and Society, 118–121. 80. David Frye, “The Native Peoples of Northeastern Mexico,” in The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas, vol. 2: Mesoamerica, part  1, ed. Adams and MacLeod (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 96; Hassig, War and Society, 119, 123, 137–138, 155; Roosevelt, “The Maritime, Highland, Forest Dynamic,” 336. 81. The Aztec and Inka Empires endured less than a hundred years. Thomas  H.  Charlton, “The Aztecs and Their Contemporaries: The Central and Eastern Mexican Highlands,” in The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas, vol. 2: Mesoamerica, part 1, ed. Richard  E.  W.  Adams and Murdo  J.  MacLeod (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 528; María Rostworowski and Craig Morris, “The Fourfold Domain: Inka Power and Its Social Foundations,” in The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas, vol. 3: South America, part  1, ed. Frank Salomon and  Stuart  B.  Schwartz (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 777–778. 82. Hassig, Trade, Tribute, and Transportation, 47–50, 133; Charlton, “The Aztecs and Their Contemporaries,” 521, 528. 83. William M. Denevan, Cultivated Landscapes of Native Amazonia and the Andes (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 217, 273. 84. Hammond, “The Maya Lowlands,” 223–224; Shimada, “The Evolution of Andean Diversity,” 362, 381. 85. Rostworowski and Morris, “The Fourfold Domain,” 838–839. 86. Joyce Marcus and Kent V. Flannery, “Cultural Evolution in Oaxaca: The Origins of the Zapotec and Mixtec Civilizations,” in The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas, vol. 2: Mesoamerica, part 1, edited by Richard E.W. Adams, and Murdo J. MacLeod (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 394–396. 87. Richard E. W. Adams, “Introduction,” in The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas, vol. 2: Mesoamerica, part 1, ed. Richard E.W. Adams, and Murdo J. MacLeod (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 22. 88. Roosevelt, “The Maritime, Highland, Forest Dynamic,” 330; Shimada, “The Evolution of Andean Diversity,” 370–371, 373–374; Lumbreras, “Andean Urbanism and Statecraft,” 527; Villamarín and Villamarín, “Chiefdoms,” 608, 619–620. 89. Denevan, Cultivated Landscapes; James J. Parsons and William A. Bowen, “Ancient Ridged Fields of the San Jorge River Floodplain, Colombia,” The Geographical Review 56 (1966): 317–343 (Reprinted as no. 253 in the Latin American Series. Berkeley: University of California, n.d.). Arawaks colonized the Moxos region, moving up the tributaries of the Amazon before 500 bc. See David Block, Mission Culture on the Upper Amazon: Native Tradition, Jesuit Enterprise, and Secular Policy in Moxos, 1660–1880 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994), 14. 90. Anna  C.  Roosevelt, Moundbuilders of the Amazon: Geophysical Archaeology on Marajo Island, Brazil (San Diego: Academic Press, 1991), 26. 91. Cordell and Smith, “Indigenous Farmers,” 248–249. 92. Merrill et al., “The Diffusion of Maize,” 21024–21025. 93. Marcus and Flannery, “Cultural Evolution in Oaxaca,” 383. 94. Shimada, “The Evolution of Andean Diversity,” 365–367.

52   Borderlands of the Iberian World 95. Shepard Krech III, The Ecological Indian: Myth and History (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999), 45–72; Thomas E. Sheridan, “The Limits of Power: The Political Ecology of the Spanish Empire in the Greater Southwest,” Antiquity 66 (1992): 156–157; Cynthia Radding, Landscapes of Power and Identity: Comparative Histories in the Sonoran Desert and the Forests of Amazonia from Colony to Republic (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 22. 96. Gary Nabhan, “Papago Indian Desert Agriculture and Water Control in the Sonoran Desert, 1697–1934,” Applied Geography 6, 1 (1986): 43–59. 97. Gary Paul Nabhan and Thomas Edward Sheridan, “Living Fencerows of the Rio San Miguel, Sonora, Mexico: Traditional Technology for Floodplain Management,” Human Ecology 5 (1977): 97–111. 98. Suzanne K. Fish, Paul R. Fish, Charles Miksicek, and John Madsen, “Prehistoric Agave Cultivation in Southern Arizona,” Desert Plants 7, no. 2 (1985), 107–112, 100. 99. Richard  A.  Diehl, “The Precolumbian Cultures of the Gulf Coast,” in The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas, vol. 2: Mesoamerica, part  1, ed. Richard E.W. Adams and Murdo J. MacLeod (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 185–187. 100. Richard White, The Roots of Dependency: Subsistence, Environment, and Social Change Among the Choctaws, Pawnees, and Navajos (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983), 29; Dean, With Broadax and Firebrand, 37. 101. Shimada, “The Evolution of Andean Diversity,” 432–433; Villamarín and Villamarín, “Chiefdoms,” 609, 612. 102. Shimada, “The Evolution of Andean Diversity,” 434, 488–490. 103. Lumbreras, “Andean Urbanism and Statecraft,” 518–521. 104. David C. Grove, “The Preclassic Societies of the Central Highlands of Mesoamerica,” in The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas, vol. 2: Mesoamerica, part 1 ed. Richard E. W. Adams and Murdo J. MacLeod (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 126, 149–151; Lourdes Marquez Morfin, Robert McCaa, Rebecca Storey, and Andres Del Angel, “Health and Nutrition in Pre-Hispanic Mesoamerica,” in The Backbone of History: Health and Nutrition in the Western Hemisphere, ed. Richard H. Steckel and Jerome C. Rose (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 314–315. 105. Robert J. Sharer, “The Maya Highlands and the Adjacent Pacific Coast,” The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas, vol. 2: Mesoamerica, part 1, ed. Richard E.W. Adams and Murdo J. MacLeod (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 452–453, 480. 106. Smith, “Agricultural Chiefdoms of the Eastern Woodlands,” 300–308. 107. Neal H. Lopinot and William I. Woods, “Wood Overexploitation and the Collapse of Cahokia,” in Foraging and Farming in the Eastern Woodlands, ed. C. Margaret Scarry (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1993), 209–210, 230. 108. Wing and Brown, Paleonutrition, 80–83, 89–91; Roosevelt, Moundbuilders of the Amazon, 384–395. 109. Deagan and Cruxent, Columbus’s Outpost among the Taínos, 28. 110. Wing and Brown, Paleonutrition, 172–173. 111. Farriss, Maya Society Under Colonial Rule, 199–210; Grant D. Jones, “The Lowland Maya, from the Conquest to the Present,” in The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas, vol. 2: Mesoamerica, part 2, ed. Richard E. W. Adams and Murdo J. MacLeod (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 367.

Patterns of Food Security   53 White, The Roots of Dependency, 28. Super, Food, Conquest, and Colonization, 68. White, The Roots of Dependency, 165–166, 256, 263. Hammond, “The Maya Lowlands,” 222. Super, Food, Conquest, and Colonization, 68. White, The Roots of Dependency, 18. For a discussion of resource intensification by California Indians, see Lightfoot and Parrish, California Indians, 86–88. 118. White, The Roots of Dependency, 31–32. For more on Choctaw foodways, see Kathleen DuVal, The Native Ground: Indians and Colonists in the Heart of the Continent (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 13–21. 119. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed, 211, 279. 120. MacCormack, “Ethnography in South America,” 104. 121. Genesis 2 5:29–34; 42:1–7.

112. 113. 114.  115. 116. 117.

Bibliography Barr, Juliana. Peace Came in the Form of a Woman: Indians and Spaniards in the Texas Borderlands. Chapel Hill: UNC, 2007. Cabeza de Vaca, Álvar Núñez. “1542 Relación.” In Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca: His Account, His Life, and the Expedition of Pánfilo de Narváez, 3 vols., translated by Rolena Adorno and Patrick Charles Pautz, vol. I: 13–279. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999. Charlton, Thomas  H. “The Aztecs and Their Contemporaries: The Central and Eastern Mexican Highlands.” In The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas, vol. 2: Mesoamerica, part 1, edited by Richard  E.  W.  Adams, and Murdo  J.  MacLeod, 500–557. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Clastres, Pierre. Society Against the State. Translated by Robert Hurley. New York: Zone Books, 1989. Cordell, Linda S., and Bruce D. Smith. “Indigenous Farmers.” In The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas, vol. 1: North America, part 1, edited by Bruce G. Trigger and Wilcomb  E.  Washburn, 206–266. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Cronon, William. Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England. New York: Hill and Wang, 1983. Deagan, Kathleen, and José María Cruxent. Columbus’s Outpost among the Taínos: Spain and America at La Isabela, 1493–1498. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002. Dean, Warren. With Broadax and Firebrand: The Destruction of the Brazilian Atlantic Forest. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. Denevan, William M. Cultivated Landscapes of Native Amazonia and the Andes. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. Farriss, Nancy  M. Maya Society under Colonial Rule: The Collective Enterprise of Survival. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984. Fenn, Elizabeth A. Encounters at the Heart of the World: A History of the Mandan People. New York: Macmillan, 2014. Hackel, Steven W. Children of Coyote, Missionaries of Saint Francis: Indian-Spanish Relations in Colonial California, 1769–1850. Chapel Hill: UNC, 2005. Hammond, Norman. “The Maya Lowlands: Pioneer Farmers to Merchant Princes.” In The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas, vol. 2: Mesoamerica, Part 1, edited

54   Borderlands of the Iberian World by Richard E. W. Adams, and Murdo J. MacLeod, 197–249. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Hassig, Ross. Trade, Tribute, and Transportation: The Sixteenth-Century Political Economy of the Valley of Mexico. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1985. Hassig, Ross. War and Society in Ancient Mesoamerica. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. Lightfoot, Kent G. Indians, Missionaries, and Merchants: The Legacy of Colonial Encounters on the California Frontiers. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. Lightfoot, Kent  G., and Otis Parrish. California Indians and Their Environment. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009. Lumbreras, Luis. “Andean Urbanism and Statecraft (C.E. 550-1450).” In The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas, vol. 3: South America, part 1, edited by Frank Salomon and Stuart B. Schwartz, 518–576. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Lynch, Thomas F. “The Earliest South American Lifeways.” In The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas, vol. 3: South America, part 1, edited by Frank Salomon and Stuart B. Schwartz, 188–263. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. MacCormack, Sabine. “Ethnography in South America: The First Two Hundred Years.” In The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas, vol. 3: South America, part 1, edited by Frank Salomon and Stuart B. Schwartz, 96–187. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Marcus, Joyce and Kent  V.  Flannery. “Cultural Evolution in Oaxaca: The Origins of the Zapotec and Mixtec Civilizations.” In The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas, vol. 2: Mesoamerica, part 1, edited by Richard E.W. Adams and Murdo J. MacLeod, 358–406. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Merrill, William L., Robert J. Hard, Jonathan B. Mabry, et al. “The Diffusion of Maize to the Southwestern United States and Its Impact.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 106, no. 50 (2009): 21024–21025. Ortiz de Montellano, Bernard R. Aztec Medicine, Health, and Nutrition. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990. Peters, Virginia Bergman. Women of the Earth Lodges: Tribal Life on the Plains. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995. Rivera, Mario A. “Prehistory of the Southern Cone.” In The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas, vol. 3: South America, part 1, edited by Frank Salomon and Stuart B. Schwartz, 734–768. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Roosevelt, Anna C. “The Maritime, Highland, Forest Dynamic and the Origins of Complex Culture.” In The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas, vol. 3: South America, part 1, edited by Frank Salomon and Stuart B. Schwartz, 264–349. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Roosevelt, Anna Curtenius. Moundbuilders of the Amazon: Geophysical Archaeology on Marajo Island, Brazil. San Diego: Academic Press, 1991. Rostworowski, María, and Craig Morris. “The Fourfold Domain: Inka Power and Its Social Foundations.” In The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas, vol. 3: South America, part 1, edited by Frank Salomon and Stuart B. Schwartz, 769–863. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Saeger, James Schofield. The Chaco Mission Frontier: The Guaycuruan Experience. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2000.

Patterns of Food Security   55 Sauer, Carl Ortwin. Sixteenth Century North America: The Land and the People as Seen by the Europeans. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971. Scott, James C. The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009. Shimada, Izumi. “The Evolution of Andean Diversity: Regional Formations (500 B.C.E.-C.E. 600).” In The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas, vol. 3: South America, part 1, edited by Frank Salomon and Stuart B. Schwartz, 350–517. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Smith, Bruce  D. “Agricultural Chiefdoms of the Eastern Woodlands.” In The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas, vol. 1: North America, part 1, edited by Bruce  G.  Trigger and Wilcomb  E.  Washburn, 267–323. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Snow, Dean R. “The First Americans and the Differentiation of Hunter-Gatherer Cultures.” In The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas, vol. 1: North America, part 1, edited by Bruce G. Trigger and Wilcomb E. Washburn, 125–199. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Super, John  C. Food, Conquest, and Colonization in Sixteenth-Century Spanish America. Albuquerque: UNM, 1988. Van Kirk, Sylvia. Many Tender Ties: Women in Fur-Trade Society, 1670–1870. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1980. Villamarín, Juan, and Judith Villamarín. “Chiefdoms: The Prevalence and Persistence of ‘Señoríos Naturales’ 1400 to European Conquest.” In The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas, vol. 3: South America, part 1, edited by Frank Salomon and Stuart B. Schwartz, 577–667. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. White, Richard. The Roots of Dependency: Subsistence, Environment, and Social Change among the Choctaws, Pawnees, and Navajos. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983. Wing, Elizabeth S. and Antoinette B. Brown. Paleonutrition: Method and Theory in Prehistoric Foodways. New York: Academic Press, 1979. Zeitlin, Robert  N., and Judith Francis Zeitlin. “The Paleoindian and Archaic Cultures of Mesoamerica.” In The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas, vol. 2: Mesoamerica, part 1, edited by Richard  E.  W.  Adams and Murdo  J.  MacLeod, 45–121. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

chapter 2

Cr a fti ng L a n dsca pes i n the Iber i a n Bor der l a n ds of the A m er icas Cynthia Radding

The twin columns of environmental history and cultural geography have supported interdisciplinary scholarship on the changing environments of North and South America. Its conceptual frameworks are centered in the production of social space and the crafting of cultural landscapes by both indigenous and colonial societies in the Iberian borderlands of the Americas. In these regions diverse human communities confronted a multitude of contrasting environments in deserts, forests, grasslands, river valleys, and mountain ranges; over centuries, distinct cultures and communities created new versions of “nature” in the landscapes of their construction through different modes of appropriation and production. The salient processes of landscape creation, destruction, and renewal through horticulture, hunting, gathering, industry, and evolving settlement patterns become especially meaningful through late pre-conquest and colonial developments. Landscapes are understood as lived spaces created by human labor that hold both material and symbolic significance for their inhabitants. In this sense, landscape histories necessarily highlight both temporal and spatial continuity and periods of change linked to demography, climatic patterns, and resource use, arising from the introduction of metal tools, large domestic livestock, new labor demands, and resource extraction. Woven throughout these themes of material culture, the meanings ascribed to landscapes and natural features by indigenous and colonial actors underscore the close association of nature and culture in the historical development of colonial environments in the borderlands.

58   Borderlands of the Iberian World

Historians of the Environment Environmental history is relatively new for Latin America as a discrete field of scholarship. Yet, it has deep roots in the natural histories and cartographies that were produced in the region itself by both native and Iberian chroniclers under pre-Hispanic, colonial, and national regimes.1 Environmental history developed out of the conceptual frameworks and interdisciplinary research practices that have informed archival research and shaped fieldwork in anthropology, archaeology, and geography. Focused largely on the long-term reciprocal relations between distinct human communities and the natural settings in which their histories have evolved, it is centered in the materiality of these relationships as seen in changing soils textures, stream flow, and the distribution of vegetation and wild life which, in turn, are linked to settlement patterns, technologies, and cultural practices. Environmental historians seek to relate the material and cultural realms of human endeavors to the transformation of nature, the production of lived spaces, and the meanings that different social groups ascribe to those spaces.2 Environmental historians working in Latin America have developed their ideas in concert with scholars researching similar questions for Europe, the Americas, Africa, Asia, and the Pacific Rim. Arising from common themes dealing with agrarian systems, the construction of rural and urban spaces, water management, cultural adaptations to both tropical and arid climates, and forest destruction and regrowth, these questions open the way for comparing the specific cultural and technological adaptations that evolve in different times and places. They intersect with central themes concerning the exercise of power, the production and distribution of wealth, and the cultural realms of knowledge that we associate with social, economic, and political history. The explanatory power of environmental history arises, precisely, from the successful weaving together of nature and culture, power and accommodation, negotiation and confrontation, to explore the ways in which different human societies craft the landscapes in which they live in the course of recurring conflicts and successive adaptations.3 Environmental histories of the Americas share common roots, but they have evolved from different points of departure. Notwithstanding classic works like William Cronon’s Changes in the Land that focused on colonial New England, North American environmental history developed largely in those regions of the South, Midwest, and West that were considered moving frontiers where Anglo-American settlers clashed with indigenous communities, extended slave economies in some areas, and often misread the landscape in their efforts to clear forests, open mines, breed livestock, and plant commercial crops.4 Entwined with the conservation movement of the early twentieth century, US environmental history became associated with notions of wilderness, nature preserves, soil conservation, and forestry. Environmental historians have more recently turned away from ideas of “pristine” natural settings and “balanced” ecosystems to emphasize disruption and change in ecological patterns and humanly crafted landscapes through the interaction of historical societies and nature.5

Crafting Landscapes   59 In Latin America, by way of contrast, environmental histories have radiated outward from the areas of dense pre-contact populations and centers of Iberian settlement toward the borderlands on the fringes of empire. Scholars working across Latin America and the Caribbean have developed creative avenues of research in collaboration with anthropologists, archaeologists, and cultural geographers. Environmental histories of the Andean and Mesoamerican regions and their respective borderlands are grounded in these sister disciplines, focused in large measure on indigenous systems of food production and water management. Noteworthy features like the chinampas of the Valley of Mexico—akin to the raised fields that William Deneven identified throughout the Andes and the interior lowlands of South America—have marked in important ways the imprint of sophisticated human societies on the physical environments they inhabited. Similar interpretative frameworks emphasizing the production of space and enduring cultural landscapes have guided archaeological research on the interface between the Mesoamerican frontier of Chalchihuites and the Tepehuán or Udami communities in the modern state of Durango in northern Mexico.6 Indigenous systems for gathering and cultivating a wide variety of plants, soil enrichment, water harvesting, terracing, and canal irrigation constitute dominant themes of environmental history, extending from pre-conquest and more recent pasts to the ­present. Historians, botanists, and anthropologists have advanced research on the origins and distribution of domesticated cultigens, taking as their point of departure the evolution of maize (Zea maiz), manioc (Manihot sp. or casava), and quinoa (Chenopodium quinoa) in different varieties and locations.7 Environmental historians and ecologists recognize the cultural and botanical significance of plant species and varieties that have evolved together with human communities. These include amaranthus, agaves, pitahayas, nopales, tepary beans, and a host of other plants that occur in both wild and cultivated forms.8 Within the Mesoamerican world the richly documented antiquity of horticultural traditions in Oaxaca has captured the attention of environmental scholars.9 Research on the colonial transformations of space through land tenure, commerce, and labor in central Guerrero relates these themes to the southern extension of the Nahua world, where the Balsas River valley was a principal hearth of maize domestication.10 Mesoamerica is commonly identified by its agricultural traditions, centered on maize in different scales of planting ranging from the milpa—a household plot in which maize was intercropped with other cultigens—to the lacustrian chinampas and larger fields sustained by irrigation. It is well to remember, however, that hunting remained an important part of Mesoamerican cultures as an essential component of their subsistence economies and as a ritualized activity that marked different spheres of power and sustained religious sacrifices. The symbolic meanings of large animals like deer, jaguars, and eagles, at times depicted with coyotes, emerge from the richly varied pictorial codices relating to hunting and ritual sacrifice as well as the cosmologies and mythologized histories that sustained the identities of distinct ethnic peoples in different regions extending from Central America to northern Mexico. In the southern Great Plains bison were central to both the material environment and the hunting cultures of the peoples who shaped these grasslands and cut wide migratory corridors through them.11

60   Borderlands of the Iberian World Terracing, cultivation, and the defense of community savannas and forests for hunting and gathering constitute three important poles for understanding the production of space in the heartland of Mesoamerica and its borderlands. These themes extend to water management and distribution as necessary components of both indigenous and colonial agrarian landscapes. William  E.  Doolittle’s in-depth field research, culling archaeological, geographical, and historical evidence for the hydraulic systems of the northern borderlands, other regions of Mexico, and southwestern United States, has identified distinct techniques for accessing water that distinguish canal irrigation from other methods of capturing or altering stream flow.12 In Cultivated Landscapes, Doolittle brought together over a half-century of environmental scholarship to show how rural peoples altered their surroundings to produce cultivated spaces. These local adaptations created chains of knowledge that reflect communication and transference of technologies across considerable distances from one region to another. For the Andean highlands of South America anthropologist John V. Murra established the concept of an archipelago of ecological niches distinguished by altitude and the dominant subsistence lifeways identified with each level: grains, tubers, and camelid grazing.13 While the archipelago was based firmly in pre-Hispanic indigenous modes of land use, ethnohistorical research seemed to verify the resilience of these patterns through the centuries since European contact and even into the present. Andean scholars coupled Carl O. Sauer’s classic formulation of the man-land relationship with Murra’s altitudinal archipelago to develop a notion of cultural ecology related to the geography of the cordilleras and altiplanos of the western vertebrae of South America.14 More recently, Karl Zimmerer has complicated the notion of a vertical archipelago with his geographical and ethnographic observations of horizontal patterns of land use and crop variability in the Bolivian Andes.15 Spreading eastward from the Andean cordilleras, the South American lowlands constituted a series of overlapping riverine borderlands that followed the major tributaries of the Paraguay and Río de la Plata river basins. Over time they became an extended transitional zone between the Portuguese and Spanish imperial spheres. The lowlands covered marshlands like the Pantanal, which spans a vast borderland covering portions of Paraguay, Brazil, and Bolivia.16 Constituting an ecotone among the biomes of the Amazonian rain forest, the deciduous dry forests of the Chaco and Chiquitanía, and the savannas of the Cerrado, the Pantanal extended to different tropical and temperate latitudes in which widely varied indigenous groups and mixed-race settlements of both free and unfree laborers created shifting frontiers with uncertain boundaries.17 These internal borderlands combined the riverine resources of their networks of streams and lagoons with the grasslands and subtropical forests that supported sustainable foraging and horticultural economies, which were complicated by European livestock pastoralism and long-distance trade. Here diverse ethnic groups and confederations created territorial claims that were contested on many fronts at times in the shadow of Luso-Hispanic boundaries and at other times independently of the European powers and their colonial subjects.18 Ethnic groups that have persisted in these regions include Guaraní, Bauré, Chiriguano, Guarayo, Kadiwéu, Guató, Bororó, Chiquitano, Minuano and Charrúa

Crafting Landscapes   61 among others. Their competing claims to resources along the river channels and in the savannas and forests remained intimately tied to natural environments and humanly crafted cultural landscapes. These material and spatial expressions of their ethnic identities supported extended kin networks that were enlarged further through the enslavement of captives, leaving an important imprint on the land.19 The Amazon basin, a vast lowland river system spanning both Portuguese and Spanish South America, has inspired ecological research in anthropology, history, geography, and literature. Beginning with foundational studies in cultural ecology and controversies over the estimated size of contact-era native populations, histories of the Amazon have documented an array of extractive industries, including rubber, timber, and mining, and their consequences for natural and social conditions in the region.20 It has captivated an intellectual community of scholars and activists with concerns for soil conservation, livestock, and the sustainability of Amazonian rainforests.21 Representing the largest rain forest in the continent, the great Amazonian tropical basin is not entirely “natural,” because indigenous peoples have nurtured its soils and vegetation, transplanting different specimens and stands of plants, and opened gardens by clearing vegetation and fallowing around their shifting village sites.22 Ethnohistories of the colonial peoples of the South American lowlands have produced valuable studies for the equestrian tribal captaincies that dominated the vast grasslands of the Pampas extending into Patagonia, and for the mission pueblos built and maintained by a wide diversity of indigenous peoples in the forested areas that supported swidden agriculture. These literatures for the most part have dealt with the evolving political structures, economic strategies, and cultural values evinced by native peoples who dealt with Iberian imperial designs by asserting their spatial autonomy and claiming their status as colonial subjects through the governing councils (cabildos) and livelihoods that were afforded them in the missions.23 The environment frames these carefully documented regional studies, but it does not constitute the principal avenue of research. Two foundational works, published in the 1990s, demonstrated the methodology for centering Latin American histories in the environment. Set in different regions of North and South America and working in different spatial scales, they established the terms of debate that shaped the field for over a decade. Warren Dean’s With Broadax and Firebrand took as its dramatic subject the destruction of the Brazilian Atlantic rain forest of over nearly five centuries, spanning distinct phases of economic exploitation, colonization, urban development, the energy demands of modern industries, and the uneven gains and losses of scientific research that too often marginalized local sources of knowledge. Dean’s research methods incorporated the familiar themes of slavery, plantation economies of sugar and coffee, the spread of livestock, and the demand for fuel in ways that made the forest itself the subject of this work and set the tone for environmental histories that emphasized the impoverishment of natural habitats by colonialism and commercial capitalism. It inspired similarly environmentally focused histories of tropical plantations in Brazil and the Caribbean, with their economic rationale and labor systems, for both the colonial and national periods.24

62   Borderlands of the Iberian World Elinor  G.  K.  Melville’s A Plague of Sheep established a similar benchmark for e­ nvironmental history in Mexico. Structured more modestly than Dean’s study in its spatial and temporal dimensions, nevertheless Melville’s history of the transformation of the Valle del Mezquital in the first century following Spanish conquest articulated a powerful thesis that influenced environmentally informed histories even as it invited debate and revisionist studies. Melville employed quantitative analysis of the data she methodically compiled from archival sources in Spain and Mexico relating to early colonial land grants to argue that the consequences of Spanish conquest, due in large measure to the exponential growth of European livestock, transformed the subtropical agrarian landscapes that had been managed for centuries by indigenous horticulturalists into a semi-arid region dominated by mesquites and other xerophytic species. The Mesoamerican region that Melville researched constituted a kind of internal borderland on the fringes of the Valley of Mexico, leading northward to Querétaro, the camino real, and the mining frontiers of New Spain.25 Both of these pioneering works addressed issues of soil erosion, deforestation, and desiccation through the destruction or impoverishment of the “natural” vegetation on the heels of Spanish and Portuguese colonization, bringing with it Old World systems of resource exploitation for commercial profit. Revisionist histories have questioned the general applicability of Melville’s regional study focused on the Mezquital regarding the ecologically destructive impacts of European livestock. Andrew Sluyter’s study of the Veracruz lowlands has shown that Iberian practices of livestock management following seasonal migratory patterns between lowland marshes and highland pastures, allowed the grasslands to recover from grazing herds and may even have contributed to the diversity of vegetational communities. Insofar as these traditions were practiced in Spanish America, as Karl and Elizabeth Butzer have suggested, the introduction of large domestic quadrupeds may have been sustainable in some regions.26 Furthermore, indigenous communities living within the colonial sphere and nomadic bands that dominated the great plains of North and South America as well as African-descendant laborers (enslaved and free) became skilled herders who brought livestock into their economies and cultural patterns.27 In a similar vein, Dean’s portrayal of Portuguese, and then Brazilian, seemingly wanton destruction of the Atlantic rain forest—and the botanical knowledge that its inhabitants had gathered—has been met with nuanced criticism.28 It would seem that if North American environmental histories were burdened with recovering a mythical wilderness, the field in Latin America may have projected a long-term course of decline after the European invasions of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Yet, this judgment simplifies the depth of Latin American interdisciplinary scholarship that links environmental themes with histories of empire. Alfred B. Crosby rewrote the history of the conquest over a generation ago with his Columbian Exchange. This classic work set forth in clear terms the argument that the most telling consequences of European landings in the Americas were not military or political, but that for both the Old and New Worlds the encounters beginning in 1492 put into motion exchanges of commodities, seeds, and pathogens with botanical

Crafting Landscapes   63 and ecological reverberations that reached across the globe. His subsequent major publications, Ecological Imperialism and Germs, Seeds, and Animals, developed similar environmental themes directed to European transcontinental expansion and the nonhuman, unintended consequences of imperialist expeditions of conquest and resource appropriation. Crosby’s work has been challenged and complemented by scholarship in anthropology and geography that highlights the original contributions of indigenous peoples and African laborers (enslaved and free) to the global exchange of cultigens like maize, manioc (cassava), and rice.29 Crosby’s biological view of history influenced Elinor Melville’s interpretation of the changes in land tenure, indigenous economies, and the evolving landscapes of the Valle del Mezquital. In her discussion of the long-term causes and pace of soil erosion in the region, Melville addressed the debates surrounding the linkages between soil erosion in central Mexico and cycles of population growth and decline.30 Melville argued that even if population densities and slope terracing had created intensive patterns of cropping, indigenous agricultural systems were sustainable. It was European livestock, she maintained, first bovine cattle, then sheep, that brought about a rapid and irreversible transformation, turning a verdant well-watered valley into a semi-arid landscape dominated by thorn forest brush species. The parallel decline in the indigenous population and the rise in livestock herds changed the physical landscape and modes of land tenure, altering as well the Spanish perception of the worth of the region, which—by the early seventeenth century—was declared good only for sheep. Research on health and population intersects with environmental history in important ways. Historical demography has developed a formative literature linking the sciences of medicine and epidemiology with the archival skills and textual analyses that are the historian’s stock-in-trade. Alfred Crosby contributed to the development of this field, along with the famous “Berkeley school” led by Sherburne F. Cook, Lesley Byrd Simpson, and Woodrow Borah. Working as a team, these scholars produced a series of monographs employing quantitative analysis of tribute records and other materials that permitted them to make demographic inferences regarding the relative size of indigenous populations in different regions and periods. Their work culminated in a three-volume set of Essays in Population History that reviewed their methods and the significance they drew from their results.31 N. David Cook undertook similar kinds of studies for the Andean region to establish the linkages between disease, population decline, and the broad outlines of Spanish colonialism in Peru; Adam Warren brought together population movements, medicine, and Bourbon policies for the eighteenth-century Andean region.32 Historical demographers who work at the micro level of individual parishes produce fine-grained social histories, placing them in broader regional frameworks according to the nature of their sources.33 Mission censuses and sacramental registers constitute productive sources for the analyses of demographic movements in the Hispanic American borderlands.34 As this field has matured, it has shown that numerical analyses provide a first step for interpreting the social, cultural, and environmental implications of shifts over time in the concentration and dispersion of different communities and their reconstitution within colonial settlements or in zones of refuge.

64   Borderlands of the Iberian World What then is historical about environmental history in the Iberian borderlands of the Americas? The answer is at least threefold. First, environmental historians emphasize process; that is, changes in the land over time that are inexorably connected to human habitation and to specific societal groups in geographically centered places. Secondly, environmental history in the borderlands (and elsewhere) employs a highly varied toolkit to work with different sets of data derived from documentary research, geography, biology, and direct field observation. Even as historians rely heavily on the expertise of archaeologists and ethnographers to reconstruct and analyze material culture, so do anthropologists require the historians’ command of the archives to complete these analyses and place cultural phenomena in historical perspective. Thirdly, the historian’s emphasis on identifying differences allows scholars to locate periods of significant change, integrating the material substance of environmental change with the intellectual heritage of ideas about nature that emerges from texts and visual imagery. The following case studies illustrate these components of environmental history for the Iberian borderlands of America.

Land Tenure and Environmental Change in the Borderlands Research on land tenure and resource use has contributed to social, economic, and environmental history by bringing together the legal, technological, and cultural dimensions of territorial claims to the possession and usufruct of land. Debates regarding the “feudal” nature of landholding in Latin America, fueled by François Chevalier’s pioneering work on northeastern Mexico, gave way to regionally focused studies that emphasized the commercial uses of property by colonial settlers and institutions.35 Research on conflicts between native communities and colonial subjects over arable land, water, and woodlands has evolved from a view that pitted the indigenous defense of communal resources against the aggrandizement of private landowners to show the complex motivations of Indian pueblos who took up the burden of litigation over land and the divided interests of both indigenous and colonial parties to these disputes.36 The historical sources that lend themselves to reconstructing changes in land tenure patterns vary greatly for different regions. Mesoamerican painted histories and títulos primordiales—purported original titles—provide intriguing mapped chronicles that link indigenous territorial claims and water rights to ancestral noble lineages.37 Pictorial narratives produced by the Tlaxcalan, Otomí, Tarascan, Zapotec, and other groups who accompanied (or led) Spanish expeditions to the northern and southern borderlands of the defeated Mexica Empire staked territorial claims on the basis of their services to Crown and church.38 These intricately detailed documents, crafted by indigenous artists in response to the legal and fiscal demands of the colonial system, expressed their spatial boundaries and the fluvial resources that comprised their patrimony. Codices of this

Crafting Landscapes   65 type are not available for the borderlands of New Spain or most of South America; however, the documents generated in Spanish to meet the requirements of the Iberian judiciary provide meaningful descriptions of contested parcels of land and their environmental significance for both native communities and colonial entrepreneurs. Historians of northern New Spain have mined the land titles and descriptive reports produced by ecclesiastical, military, and civil authorities to explore changing patterns of landholding. They have narrated multiple conflicts for Nueva Vizcaya, including the principal mining districts north of Zacatecas in Durango and Chihuahua; New Mexico; Coahuila, Texas, Nuevo León, and Nueva Santander in the northeastern portion of the Chihuahuan Desert.39 Equally fecund research has focused on the northwestern provinces that extended from the cordilleras of the Sierra Madre Occidental into the Sonoran Desert and beyond to the Californias.40 Their work has centered on the distribution of land and water rights across different communities and private estates as well as colonization projects undertaken in Nueva Santander, Texas, and Alta California.41 Many of these histories underscore the transference of resources from indigenous pueblos to colonial proprietors—especially for the western and central corridors of Nueva Vizcaya— and document the endurance of different forms of forced labor.42 The abundance of notarial and judicial records generated by conflicts over territorial boundaries and the resources associated with specific parcels of land afford environmental historians a challenging opportunity to experiment with new methodologies for reading these documents to identify clues regarding the physical conditions of disputed properties and the values ascribed to the land. At stake were not only the valley floodplains and terraces prized for indigenous milpas dedicated to maize, other native food crops, and European grain production but also the uncultivated monte that comprised grasslands, affording pasture for livestock, and forested ranges for hunting and gathering, which served as natural reservoirs for food, clothing, building materials, fuel, and medicines. Elinor Melville and Alfred Siemens set instructive examples for assessing the impact of European livestock and cultigens on indigenous agrarian landscapes through their skillful combination of geographical training and archival research for different biomes in the Mezquital of the central altiplano and in the subtropical savannas of Veracruz.43 Their work has shown ways of analyzing land titles and litigated disputes in order to identify landholdings by name, proprietor, and approximate location over time and, thus, project the spatial advance of private ranches and haciendas amidst communal holdings and the untitled royal lands (realengos) available for adjudication. The language of colonial documents provides rich descriptive material, but lends itself less readily to the exact quantification that would be desired by modern ecological studies of transformations in vegetation communities and climatic conditions. While landholdings were measured according to the legally prescribed standards for different categories of property related to livestock, these measurements were rarely exact—leading to longterm disputes—nor were the sizes of herds regularly specified. In the unfenced thorn forests and grasslands of the arid north, furthermore, uncounted portions of domestic herds became feral, augmenting the environmental impacts of grazing and soil compaction to an undetermined degree. Even so, like archaeologists sifting through shards and

66   Borderlands of the Iberian World lithic fragments, historians can find clues to ecological conditions marked by vegetation, stream flow, and topography in the documents that record in written transcripts the verbal and spatial processes of measuring and awarding titles to the land. One illustrative example comes to us from the early eighteenth-century Province of Ostimuri in northwestern Mexico, where colonial mining and ranching settlements were recorded beginning in the 1660s surrounded by numerous indigenous villages and shifting or seasonal rancherías with deep histories of horticultural practices, foraging, and territorial rivalries. Extending from the cordilleras and canyons of the Sierra Madre Occidental to the river valleys of the coastal plain, the vegetation of Ostimuri ranged from arid-lands cactae and succulents to thorn and short-tree forests. Its mixed quality evolved from the highly varied conditions of climate, topography, and soils within a region further modified by the cultural practices of cultivation and appropriation. Cycles of planting milpas and leaving them to fallow opened spaces for the redistribution of herbaceous plants, trees, and shrubs, both restoring and changing the composition of the monte. Land disputes arose in Ostimuri from the intersection of the mining and Jesuit mission frontiers that intensified labor demands and hastened the encroachments of Hispanic colonization on village lands. In 1715, the pueblo of Macoyagüi opened a legal suit against Don Matheo Gil Samaniego, a miner and land owner in Ostimuri and the neighboring Province of Sinaloa. One of four villages that comprised the mission of San Andrés de Conicari, Macoyagüi brought together numerous highland rancherías from the piedmont surrounding the main tributaries of the Mayo River.44 During the seventeenth century, some twenty rural properties were registered for the province, ranging in size from one to nine sitios.45 A number of agricultural plots susceptible to irrigation and grazing lands in the monte had been adjudicated to entire missions or indigenous pueblos, and others to Hispanic landholders; over time their possession changed hands across these colonial sectors. Indian and Spanish smallholders planted their fields seasonally, letting some of their plots fallow from one year to the next, and both villagers and individual ranchers grazed herds of bovines, sheep, goats, horses, and mules. Land use arrangements that at one time may have been mutually negotiated gave rise to conflicting claims to pastures, cropland, and water as herds increased, water tables fell, and biomes became more xerophytic. Disputes of this kind motivated the legal suit that the Pueblo of Macoyagüi brought against Captain Gil Samaniego, denouncing his occupation of two pieces of land, Yoricarichi and Los Camotes, to which they held title. Together they measured approximately 776 hectares, where sixteen indigenous families had planted their milpas.46 Working through an interpreter and the Protector of Indians, a Spanish official named for the case, the village leaders of Macoyagüi pursued their case over the summer and fall of 1715 in local magistracies located in the principal mining centers of the provinces of Ostimuri and Sinaloa. The Indians demanded that Gil Samaniego cease planting in their lands and take his cattle out of both Yoricarichi and Los Camotes. Their urgency became acute, since 1715 was a year of drought and, because Gil Samaniego’s herds had fully occupied the site and compacted the soil, the Indians had not planted their crops and, “in this calamitous year, because of this, they had lost their harvests.”47

Crafting Landscapes   67 The terms in which this case was argued provide clues for understanding what was at stake for the litigants of Macoyagüi and the values that underlay their testimonies. The legal summary offers very little description of these two plots of land, but we can infer from it some of the ways in which their occupation and use were conditioned by the ecology of the region. Los Camotes may have comprised a number of gardens in different stages of cultivation and fallow, which would have supplied the Indians with firewood, small game, and a variety of gathered plants for food, medicine, and fiber as well as the crops they had planted and tended in any one year. The Indians’ milpas in Los Camotes yielded maize and native legumes and squashes, including amaranthus, beans, cucurbits, chilies, tobacco, cotton and camotes, a root crop for which the site was named, as well as some European vegetables and legumes that the Indians learned to cultivate in their mission. Such a diversity of plants would have germinated and ripened at different times of the year, requiring seasonal labor to plant, tend, water, guard against predators, gather, and store their harvests. In addition, these plots of land contained wild stands of agaves, torotes (elephant tree), mesquite, acacias, and cactae and harbored animals and birds of prey. Gil Samaniego’s usurpation of them deprived the Macoyahuis of cropland and monte for hunting and gathering; both kinds of resources were essential for their survival, especially in years of drought and scarcity. This brief narrative of one native community’s legal struggle to regain control over two portions of land in the highlands of northwestern Mexico connects the material conditions of land, water, and biotic communities to deeply ingrained notions of territoriality, local governance, and reciprocal labor. Even though the documents do not provide detailed descriptions of the resources at stake for the litigants, they do offer historians the opportunity to interpret their content in the light of environmental issues and information gathered from complementary sources. The structured content of judicial disputes over land tenure and of the procedures for adjudicating land titles, including the physical inspection of the territories in question, calling of witnesses, and placement of boundary markers, occurs less frequently in the archives for the interior borderlands of tropical South America. Warren Dean’s research on the Brazilian Atlantic forest showed that the legal category of possession (posse) permitted the growth of livestock herds, sugar fields, and coffee plantations largely without formal title. Practices rooted in the extensive occupation of land, with little attention to soil or vegetation recovery, meant that large swaths of forested hillsides were burned and cleared for commercial crops; once the soil grew “tired,” the de facto landowners would move on to new possessions where they would repeat the process.48 Similarly destructive cycles of clearing, exploitation, and abandonment of cultivated land established the rhythm of colonization along the northward flowing Araguaia and Tocantins tributaries of the Amazon basin in central Brazil. During the colonial era enslaved African and indigenous laborers toiled at felling forests and opening agricultural fields (roças) and extensive fazendas in tandem with the mining frontiers of Minas Gerais and Goiás as Mary Karasch has shown in Before Brasília. In more recent times, impoverished and indebted laborers, often in entire family units, cleared forest and open fields only to be dispossessed by colonists (colonos), who claimed title to the land, and were thus impelled to cut down and burn new forested areas.49

68   Borderlands of the Iberian World Brazil’s modern states of Mato Grosso and Mato Grosso Sur, named for the savanna grasslands and cerrado (low-canopy forests) that defined their landscapes, developed through the extensive economies of livestock grazing and herding. As Robert Wilcox has argued, different ecological conditions relating to soils, vegetation, and relative aridity within this vast frontier region shaped land tenure patterns and conditioned the commercial expansion of the local ranching industry.50 Further west, in the Pantanal and Chiquitanía deciduous forests of lowland Bolivia, documented references to the land from both colonial and early national periods describe the region both ecologically and economically in terms of the vegetation cover, the livestock it supported, and hunting and extractive products (animals skins, bird feathers, and medicinal plants).51 Large private cattle holdings in the Pantanal crossed the international borders that were contested by Mato Grosso, Bolivia, and Paraguay, creating networks of labor migration and commerce.52 Bolivian authorities in the Prefectura of Santa Cruz de la Sierra ordered the privatization of mission herds in Chiquitos, not the land itself, giving rise to indigenous protests and the gradual erosion of their communal patrimony. By the midnineteenth century, the western frontier of Chiquitanía, lying between the Andean foothills and Santa Cruz, held a mixed population of Indians and non-Indians who practiced small-scale swidden agriculture and stock raising. Government attempts to establish taxable land rentals in this region generated a heated correspondence between provincial officials and local clerics, who protested these proposals on the grounds of ecological conditions, migratory practices, and traditions of communal labor.53 Comparing these testimonies with the litigation summarized above for Ostimuri suggests that the practices for marking spatial measurements and establishing effective occupation operated differently in the subtropical forested zones of the interfluvial plains of South America than in the agrarian landscapes of the Andes and Mesoamerica or in the arid monte and river valleys of northern New Spain. Water was as vital a resource as land. In documented land cases, often the value of the land estimated for either sale or tabulating the royal fees for securing title was determined by the availability of natural springs and streams or wells for irrigating crops and watering livestock.54 Long-standing Iberian traditions with roots in medieval Spanish law treated water rights for domestic and agricultural uses separately from land ownership. Michael C. Meyer’s foundational work, Water in the Southwest, laid out these principles, and Leslie Offut, Cecilia Sheridan Prieto, and Susan M. Deeds have shown how they operated in water disputes for northern New Spain.55 Long before irrigation water was measured in cubic feet or meters, it was distributed according to the days or hours that water would flow from communally maintained canals and derivation ditches onto individual plots of land. Irrigation systems documented in historical records and partially recovered through archaeological remains reflect the adaptation of Iberian conventions and techniques of water management—based on Roman and Arabic methods—to the natural environments and cultural landscapes of the Americas. These technologies included the maintenance of earthen canals for gravitational flow, the positioning of sluice gates for the apportionment of water to individual users, and the opening of canals and ditches to serve ever

Crafting Landscapes   69 increasing numbers of colonial land grants. Research for New Mexico focused on the Puebloan and Hispanic communities during the colonial and national periods has illuminated the intricate engineering of webs of irrigation canals and the historical conflicts related to local governance of the acequia systems that for over three centuries sustained rural livelihoods in this northern borderland of Spanish America. The acequia madre, or principal canal, channeled water from the closest stream or river to Hispanic settlements, dug at an angle that would facilitate the flow of liquid to agricultural fields and return it to the river downstream. Its distribution to Pueblos and Hispanic settlements was governed by local agreements and enforced by alcaldes, officials appointed or elected with authority for this purpose.56 Even as New Mexico Hispanos followed the conventions of Spanish colonial law regarding the placement of settlements and the distribution of water, they repurposed Pueblo irrigation ditches and entered into agreements for sharing this precious resource along the Río Grande del Norte and its tributary streams. The acequia system created a different set of landscapes in northwestern Mexico, where the gravitational flows of water for irrigation in portions of present-day Chihuahua, Durango, Sonora, and Sinaloa developed from both indigenous and Hispanic hydraulic systems. Planting living fence rows and building earthen dams and weirs that traverse river beds serve to fill irrigation ditches that direct the stream flow to planted fields in these arid lands. Geographers, anthropologists, and historians have observed these locally managed irrigation systems and noted descriptions of their acequias and fence rows in missionary accounts and land titles.57 The combination of weirs and fence rows controls flooding during the summer rainy season and captures silt carried by the rivers to create layers of soil that over several seasons can be turned into cultivable milpas. To the south, the Lerma River in western Mexico became a culturally managed watershed under both pre-Hispanic Purépecha control and colonial administration. Known as “Mexico’s breakbasket,” the area’s production of both indigenous and European grains depended on the management of its hydraulic resources. The technological innovations developed here to capture and store seasonal rainfall included dams, irrigation canals, and cajas de agua, tanks that were built in naturally occurring basins and enhanced by artificial embankments. These tanks permitted landowners to practice a controlled form of flood farming by which fields were flooded during the rainy season, benefiting from the organic materials contained in rainwater runoff, and then drained in order to plant crops. Derived from water harvesting methods originating in ancient Egypt, these practices were documented for the Lerma River basin and the Comarca Lagunera in north central Mexico.58 Archaeological evidence for similar kinds of basins to store water and channel it through canals for domestic use and small-scale garden irrigation appeared independently in the pre-contact Salinas Province of southeastern New Mexico. The complex of villages known to Spaniards as Gran Quivira or Humanas, probably inhabited by both Piro and Jumano peoples, were built with stone construction, including residential blocks and ceremonial plazas with kivas, semi-subterranean rooms used for rituals. Located on an arid plateau, Quivira was supplied with water by a series of tanks placed at successive elevations that emptied into canals leading into the villages. Adolph Bandelier, who first

70   Borderlands of the Iberian World reported systematically on the existence of these tanks or artificial ponds, hypothesized that the tanks permitted agricultural peoples to thrive in a location distant from permanently flowing streams and sustain populations of over a thousand inhabitants.59 Even in regions where fresh water was abundant, as in the lowland river basins and savannas of South America, seasonal agriculture and permanent settlement required technological interventions in the natural environment. The raised fields were especially characteristic of the Mojos region of northwestern Bolivia (present-day Department of Beni), whose rivers flow into the Amazonian drainage basin. Indigenous peoples of the region combined fishing, gathering, hunting, and horticulture and managed the pluvial rhythms of sharply demarcated wet and dry seasons by building earthen mounds that served for planting root crops that could benefit from the flooded bottomlands without rotting during the rainy season. The creation and maintenance of these adaptive systems depended on communally organized labor in both pre-Hispanic and colonial times; in the latter period the Mojos towns became Jesuit missions governed largely by their indigenous leaders.60

Industry, Urbanization, and Landscape Transformations Rural environments related to agrarian systems and the cultural and ecological significance of uncultivated lands are essential for understanding the survival of both indigenous and colonial societies. It is important, however, to recognize the contributions of environmental research for urban settings, viewed as historically produced spaces, with emphasis on the health of their populations and the ways in which urban industries effect ecological changes and transform landscapes within the cities and in the surrounding countryside. A recent collective volume illustrates the versatile themes of urban environmental history regarding housing and domestic spaces, architecture, disease episodes, and popular beliefs regarding health and illness.61 Mexico City became a dramatic scenario of changing urban landscapes through the long-term drainage public works—the great desagüe—that over more than two centuries transformed the lacustrian environment of this unique Mesoamerican center for trade, governance, and ceremonialism into a land-based city. When the Spaniards made the Mexicas’ capital city the center of their imperial rule in mainland North America, they failed to maintain indigenous systems of water management that had controlled for salinity and flooding in a basin that had no natural external drainage. Motivated by a series of catastrophic floods that caused physical damage and spread epidemic diseases, in the early seventeenth century viceregal authorities experimented with a number of different engineering projects to drain the lakes. Many of these projects failed, and public works dedicated to ridding Mexico City of dangerous floods continued into the early twentieth century. Recent histories of the desagüe emphasize the environmental challenges and follies of the

Crafting Landscapes   71 endeavor, the intellectual legacies of early modern science, and the dangers that awaited the thousands of laborers who were drafted to dig channels and build dikes.62 The importance of this drainage project bears directly on Mexico City, but its environmental significance illustrates the issues of urban growth, topography, labor, disease, water supply, and waste discharge that plagued many of the mining centers in the borderlands of northern Mexico, the Andean cordilleras, and the interior of Brazil. Research on the ecological problems of colonial mining has addressed the spatial dimensions of mining centers following rapid growth and precipitous or gradual decline, the structural problems of mining shafts and pillars that put workers’ lives at peril, deforestation due to the consumption of timber for construction and fuel, and contamination of soil and water by the use of mercury and nitrates for refining silver ores. The Real del Parral in Nueva Vizcaya illustrates the environmental and economic impacts of the mining industry in northern Mexico.63 Founded in 1630 as a second major bonanza in the Province of Santa Bárbara, where mining had begun in the 1560s, Parral boasted smelters, amalgamation patios, municipal offices, and merchant houses. The urban nucleus and its labor force were supported by agriculture and stock raising, salt mining, timber, and charcoal production in the surrounding area. By the midseventeenth century, production in Parral was imperiled by the lack of charcoal to supply its foundries.64 Ore processing demanded shipments of reagents, lead oxides, copper pyrite and salt, supplied from New Mexico, Mapimí, and Nuevo León, in addition to the mercury that was imported through royal monopolies and shipped from Mexico to Parral along the camino real in protected convoys.65 Santa Bárbara and Parral were linked to entrepreneurial capital in Zacatecas and, in turn, these mining centers fueled the expanding webs of Spanish dominion in the western provinces of Sinaloa and Ostimuri through their consumption of fuel, grains, hides, meat, and reagents and their everexpanding webs of labor recruitment on both sides of the Sierra Madre Occidental.66 Estimates of biomass consumption for the ore processing foundries radiating from central Mexico, in Taxco, Sultepec, and Ixmiquilpan, to Zacatecas, Guanajuato, and San Luis Potosí, and north to Nueva Vizcaya and Sonora show that the industry exhausted local woodlands at a rate far greater than domestic uses of charcoal and timber.67 Each of these mining centers represented clusters of mines and foundries—the haciendas de beneficio—with differential impacts on their surrounding landscapes. Rates of forest destruction have been calculated from the economic data available for total silver and gold production in New Spain. These rates seem to corroborate the warnings about vegetation depletion that were reported by colonial authorities. Based on the amount of heat needed at each stage of refining the ore, it has been estimated that 6,332 m2 of forest were cleared to produce one kilogram of silver; applying this ratio to the figures for silver production that were registered and taxed yields a projection of over 315,000 km2 of felled woodland to supply New Spain’s colonial mining industry (1550 to 1810). Furthermore, taking into account the silver refined by artisanal producers in the informal economy, which did not pass through the royal treasury, raises the estimate of cleared forests to over 391,000 km2 for the same period.68 Charcoal production became an important ancillary industry to the reales de minas, largely in the hands of small indigenous

72   Borderlands of the Iberian World and mixed-race producers. As such, it is important for both the environmental and social histories of colonial mining, with different configurations in distinct regions.69 In the area surrounding San Luis Potosí, where indigenous communities produced charcoal and sold it to the haciendas de beneficio, they protested the operations of competing carboneros whom they accused of trespassing their thorn forest monte and grasslands and of usurping village resources. In 1652 the combined Otomí and Guachichil community of Santa María del Río successfully petitioned the alcalde mayor of San Luis Potosí to have a rival carbonero removed from their lands.70 Research on the long-term impacts of mining on the landscapes and societies of Latin America remains compelling, even though the specific figures for mineral production and the estimates for biomass consumption may be questioned. Formulas like the one cited above used to convert registered quantities of silver into cleared stands of timber are, at best, estimates that may be conditioned by forest regrowth or replacement vegetation corresponding to grasslands and scrub forest. In addition, the environmental consequences of soil and water contamination due to mercury and other reagents as well as to the livestock and tanning industries that served the mining sector compounded the problems raised by deforestation.71 Research on mercury and other chemical contaminants in the soils and in surface streams or underground aquifers brings the history of colonial mining to contemporary concerns in Latin America. Two case studies focused on Zacatecas, Mexico, and on Guancavelica, the great mercury mine in highland Peru, have trained a sharp lens on the problem and its implications for the environment and the health of human populations today.72 The main threads of environmental history for the borderland regions of Spanish and Portuguese America emerge from a review of the historiography and the literature from cultural geography, historical demography, and anthropology as well as direct archival references from current research. The most significant findings for selected environmental themes point to the documentation for land tenure and the clues it provides to landscape transformations and to the environmental impacts of colonial urbanization, mining, and related industries. Framing the environment in terms of the cultural formation of landscapes, necessarily links nature, society, technology, and culture. In the borderlands of North and South America, the salient geographic features that shaped the interaction between different human societies and the environment constituted the contrasting climates and vegetation of the Sonoran and Chihuahuan deserts, the sierras of northern New Spain, and the tropical wetlands and fluvial systems of the Amazonian and Paraguayan basins with their vast networks of tributaries flowing out of the Andean highlands. These contrasts of aridity and tropicality do not represent polar opposites; rather, they express the degrees of variation in the natural conditions of precipitation, land formations, stream flow, and soil composition that were molded into historical landscapes. The environmental history of these regions exemplifies continuities found in the relationships between nature and both indigenous and colonial societies while pointing to periods and places of significant ecological change. These parallel themes appear with

Crafting Landscapes   73 special force in the histories of horticultural systems, water management, contrasting traditions of pastoralism relating to Andean camelids and European livestock, the skills and rituals of hunting and gathering, and the industries that had transformative impacts in Latin American environments, especially sugar plantations and their mills and silver and gold mines with their processing plants and foundries. The research on mining ­presented here emphasized the destructive aspects of deforestation, soil and water contamination, and conflicting claims to resources; nevertheless, these histories fit within a larger narrative of landscape creation and the regenerative adaptations of nature and human societies even in the midst of destructive processes of vegetation removal, desiccation, and accumulation of industrial wastes.73 Ecological borderlands, or ecotones, and historical borderlands on the margins of imperial dominions mark truly significant scenarios in which to observe the historical contests over resources and the dual ­processes of degradation and regeneration that continue to shape debates over environmental policies in the Americas and other world regions to the present day.

Notes Archives AGN: AASC: AMSLP:

Archivo General de la Nación, Mexico City (Mexico). Archivo del Arzobispado de Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz de la Sierra (Bolivia). Archivo Histórico del Estado de San Luis Potosí—Alcaldía Mayor, San Luis Potosí (Mexico). AHJ: Archivo Histórico de Jalisco, Guadalajara (Mexico). AGHES: Archivo Histórico de Sonora, Hermosillo (Mexico). UGRM, MH: Universidad Gabriel René-Moreno, Museo de Historia, Santa Cruz de la Sierra (Bolivia). 1. Antonio Barrera-Osorio, “Knowledge and Empiricism in the Sixteenth-Century Spanish Atlantic World,” in Science in the Spanish and Portuguese Empires, 1500–1800, ed. D. Bleichmar et al. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), 219–232. 2. Jordana Dym and Karl Offe, Mapping Latin America: A Cartographic Reader (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011); Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. D.  Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Basil-Blackwell, 1991); Carolyn Merchant, The Death of  Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1980). 3. Richard  H.  Grove, Ecology, Climate and Empire: Colonialism and Global Environmental History, 1400–1940 (Knapwell, Cambridge, UK: White Horse Press, 1997); Ramachandra Guha, Environmentalism. A Global History (New York: Longman, 2000); Donald Crummey, Land and Society in the Christian Kingdom of Ethiopia: From the Thirteenth to the Twentieth Century (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000); Donald Crummey and Thomas J. Bassett, ed., African Savannas: Global Narratives and Local Knowledge of Environmental Change (Oxford and Portsmouth: James Curry, Heinemann, 2003); Richard H. Drayton,

74   Borderlands of the Iberian World Nature’s Government: Science, Imperial Britain, and the “Improvement” of the World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000); J. R. McNeill, Mosquito Empire. Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean, 1620–1914 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Geoffrey Parker, Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013); Richard  P.  Tucker and Harold K.  Steen, ed., Changing Tropical Forests: Historical Perspectives on Today’s Challenges in Central & South America (Durham, NC: Forest History Society, 1992). 4. William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England, rev. ed. (New York: Hill and Wang, 2003); Max S. Edelson, Plantation Enterprise in South Carolina (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006); Andrew  C.  Isenberg, The  Destruction of the Bison. An Environmental History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Patricia N. Limerick, Something in the Soil: Legacies and Reckonings in the New West (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000); Daniel H., Usner Jr., Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in a Frontier Exchange Economy: The Lower Mississippi Valley before 1783 (Chapel Hill: UNC, 1992); Richard White, The Roots of Dependency: Subsistence, Environment, and Social Change Among the Choctaws, Pawnees, and Navajos (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983); Richard White, “It’s Your Misfortune and None of my Own”: A New History of the American West (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991); Donald Worster, Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Donald Worster, Dust Bowl: the Southern Plains in the 1930s, rev. ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). On “misreading the landscape,” see James Fairhead and Melissa Leach, Misreading the African Landscape: Society and Ecology in a Forest-Savanna Mosaic (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 5. William Cronon, Uncommon Ground. Toward Re-inventing Nature (New York: W.W. Norton, 1995); Richard White, “From Wilderness to Hybrid Landscapes: The Cultural Turn in Environmental History,” The Historian 66, 3 (2004): 557–564; Emily Wakild, Revolutionary Parks: Conservation, Social Justice, and Mexico’s National Parks, 1910–1940 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2011). 6. William M. Deneven, Cultivated Landscapes of Native Amazonia and the Andes: Triumph Over the Soil (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); Teresa Rojas Rabiela, ed., La agricultura chinampera (Chapingo: Universidad Autónoma Chapingo, 1983); Fernando Berrojalbiz, Paisajes y fronteras del Durango prehispánico (Mexico: IIE, IIA- UNAM 2012). 7. John Staller, et al., ed., Histories of Maize. Multidisciplinary Approaches to the Prehistory, Linguistics, Biogeography, Domestication, and Evolution of Maize (Burlington and San Diego: Elsevier, Academic Press, 2006); Arturo Warman, Corn and Capitalism: How a Botanical Bastard Grew to Global Dominance (Chapel Hill: UNC, 2003 [La historia de un bastardo: maíz y capitalismo. Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1988]). 8. Robert Bye and Edelmira Linares, “Botanical Symmetry and Asymmetry in the Mapa de Cuauhtinchan No. 2,” in Cave, City, and Eagle’s Nest. An Interpretive Journey through the Mapa de Cuauhtinchan No. 2, ed. David Carrasco and Scott Sessions (Albuquerque: UNM, 2007), 255–280. 9. Kent Flannery, “Precolumbian Farming in the Valleys of Oaxaca, Nochistlán, Tehuacán and Cuicatlán: A Comparative Study,” in The Cloud People: Divergent Evolution of the Zapotec and Mixtec Civilizations, ed. Kent Flannery and Joyce Marcus (New York: Academic Press, 1983), 323–339; Ronald Spores, The Mixtecs in Ancient and Modern Times (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1984); Abisaí Josué García Mendoza, “Geografía del mezcal,” Artes de México: Mezcal. Arte Tradicional 98 (2010): 8–15.

Crafting Landscapes   75 10. Staller et al., ed., Histories of Maize, xxii; Jonathan D. Amith, The Möbius Strip: A Spatial History of Colonial Society in Guerrero, Mexico (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005). 11. Guilhem Olivier, Cacería, sacrificio y poder en Mesoamérica. Tras las huellas de Mixcóatl, “Serpiente de Nube” (Mexico: UNAM, Fondo de Cultura Económica, CEMCA, Fideicomiso Felipe Teixidor y Montserrat Alfau de Teixidor, 2015); Isenberg, The Destruction of the Bison; Pekka Hämäläinen, The Comanche Empire (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), 31–34, 100–103. 12. William E. Doolittle, Pre-Hispanic Occupance in the Valley of Sonora, Mexico: Archaeological Confirmation of Early Spanish Reports (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1988), Canal Irrigation in Prehistoric Mexico: The Sequence of Technological Change (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990), and Cultivated Landscapes of Native North America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 13. John V. Murra, El mundo andino: Población, medio ambiente y economía (Lima: IEP, 2002). 14. John Leighly, ed., Land and Life. A Selection from the Writings of Carl Ortwin Sauer (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967); David Lehmann, ed., Ecology and Exchange in the Andes (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1982). 15. Karl S. Zimmerer, Changing Fortunes: Biodiversity and Peasant Livelihood in the Peruvian Andes (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996). 16. Jason B. Kauffman, “The Unknown Lands: Nature, Knowledge, and Society in the Pantanal Wetlands of Brazil and Bolivia” (PhD diss., University of North Carolina, 2015). 17. Lachlan  H.  Fraser and Paul  A.  Keddy, ed., The World’s Largest Wetlands: Ecology and Conservation (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Hal Langfur, The Forbidden Lands: Colonial Identity, Frontier Violence, and the Persistence of Brazil’s Eastern Indians, 1750–1830 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006). 18. Pilar García Jordán, Para una historia de los Sirionó (Cochabamba: Instituto Misionología, Editorial Itinerarios, 2011); Jeffrey Alan Erbig Jr., “Imperial Lines, Indigenous Lands: Transforming Territorialities of the Río de la Plata, 1680–1805” (PhD diss., University of North Carolina, 2015). 19. Juan Carlos Garavaglia, Pastores y labradores de Buenos Aires. Una historia agraria de la campaña bonaerense, 1700–1830 (Buenos Aires: Ediciones de la Flor, 1999); Thomas Whigham, Lo que el río se llevó: Estado y comercio en Paraguay y Corrientes, 1776–1870 (Asunción, Paraguay: UCA, 2009); Cynthia Radding, Landscapes of Power and Identity. Comparative Histories in the Sonoran Desert and the Forests of Amazonia from Colony to Republic (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005); Isabelle Combès, ed., Definiciones étnicas, organización social y estrategias políticas en el Chaco y la Chiquitanía (Santa Cruz de la Sierra: Editorial El País, SNV, IFEA, Actes Memoires 11, 2006); Oscar Tonelli Justiniano, El Peabirú chiquitano: Ensayo sobre el ramal chiquitano de una ruta interoceánica prehistórica (Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia: Editorial El País, 2007). 20. Betty  J.  Meggers, Prehistoric America: An Ecological Perspective (New Brunswick, NJ: Aldine Transaction, 2010); Anna C. Roosevelt, Parmana: Prehistoric Maize and Manioc Subsistence along the Amazon and Orinoco (New York: Academic Press, 1980); Warren Dean, Brazil and the Struggle for Rubber: A Study in Environmental History (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Barbara Weinstein, The Amazon Rubber Boom, 1850–1920 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1983). 21. Marianne Schmink and Charles  H.  Wood, Contested Frontiers in Amazonia (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992); Candace Slater, Entangled Edens: Visions of the Amazon

76   Borderlands of the Iberian World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); Susanna Hecht and Alexander Cockburn, The Fate of the Forest: Developers, Destroyers, and Defenders of the Amazon (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2010); William F. Balée, Cultural Forests of the Amazon: A Historical Ecology of People and their Landscapes (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2013); Seth Garfield, In Search of the Amazon: Brazil, the United States, and the Nature of a Region (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013); and Susanna Hecht, The Scramble for the Amazon and the “Lost Paradise” of Euclides da Cunha (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2013). 22. Emilio F. Moran, Through Amazonian Eyes: the Human Ecology of Amazonian Populations (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1993); Emilio F. Moran, Environmental Social Science: Human-environment Interactions and Sustainability (Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010); Peter Gow, An Amazonian Myth and its History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). 23. David Block, Mission Culture on the Upper Amazon: Native Tradition, Jesuit Enterprise & Secular Policy in Moxos, 1660–1880 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994); Barbara A. Ganson, The Guaraní under Spanish Rule in the Río de la Plata (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003); Raúl J. Mandrini, ed., Vivir entre dos mundos. Las fronteras del sur de la Argentina. Siglos XVIII y XIX (Buenos Aires: Taurus, Aguilar, Altea, Alfaguara Salvador, 2006); Salvador Bernabéu Albert, Christophe Giudicelli, and Gilles Havard, coords., La indianización: cautivos, renegados, “hommes libres” y misioneros en los confines americanos (s. XVI–XIX) (Madrid and Paris: Ediciones doce Calles, Ècole des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, 2012); Julia Sarreal, The Guaraní and Their Missions: A Socioeconomic History (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014). 24. Warren Dean, With Broadax and Firebrand: The Destruction of the Brazilian Atlantic Forest (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Reinaldo Funes Monzote, From Rainforest to Cane Field in Cuba: An Environmental History since 1492 (Chapel Hill: UNC, 2008); and Thomas D. Rogers, The Deepest Wounds: A Labor and Environmental History of Sugar in Northeast Brazil (Chapel Hill: UNC, 2010). 25. Elinor G. K. Melville, A Plague of Sheep: Environmental Consequences of the Conquest of Mexico (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 26. Karl  W.  Butzer and Elizabeth  K.  Butzer, “Transfer of the Mediterranean Livestock Economy to New Spain: Adaptation and Ecological Consequences,” in Global Land Use Change: A Perspective from the Columbian Encounter, ed. B. L. Turner II, Antonio Gómez Sal, Fernando González Bernáldez, and Francesco di Castri (Madrid: CSIC, 1995), 151–193; Andrew Sluyter, “The Ecological Origins and Consequences of Cattle Ranching in Sixteenth-Century New Spain,” Geographical Review 86 (1996): 161–77; and Andrew Sluyter, Colonialism and Landscape: Postcolonial Theory and Applications (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002). 27. Raúl J. Mandrini, Carlos D. Paz, ed., Las fronteras hispanocriollas del mundo indígena latinoamericano en los siglos XVIII-XIX. Un estudio comparativo (Neuquén, Argentina: Universidad Nacional del Comahue, Centro de Estudios de la Historia Regional, 2003); Radding, Landscapes of Power and Identity; Hämäläinen, The Comanche Empire; Brian DeLay, War of a Thousand Deserts: Indian Raids and the U.S.-Mexican War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008); Andrew Sluyter, Black Ranching Frontiers: African Cattle Herders of the Atlantic world, 1500–1900 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012). 28. Mark Carey, “Latin American Environmental History: Current Trends, Interdisciplinary Insights, and Future Directions,” Latin American Research Review 14, no. 2 (2009): 221–252.

Crafting Landscapes   77 29. Alfred B. Crosby, The Columbian Exchange. Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1972), Ecological Imperialism. The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1986), and Germs, Seeds, and Animals. Studies in Ecological History (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1994); and Judith  A.  Carney and Richard Nicholas Rosomoff, In the Shadow of Slavery: Africa’s Botanical Legacy in the Atlantic world (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009). 30. Sherburne F. Cook, Soil Erosion and Population in Central Mexico (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1949), Ibero-Americana, 34. 31. Sherburne  F.  Cook and Woodrow Borah, Essays in Population History: Mexico and the Caribbean (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971–1979). 32. N.  David Cook, Demographic Collapse: Indian Peru, 1520–1620 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1981), The People of the Colca Valley: A Population Study (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1982), and Born to Die: Disease and New World Conquest, 1492–1650 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Adam Warren, Medicine and Politics in Colonial Peru: Population Growth and the Bourbon Reforms (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010). 33. Thomas Calvo, Acatzingo: demografía de una parroquia mexicana (Mexico: INAH, 1973); Cecilia Andrea Rabell Romero, La población novohispana a la luz de los registros parroquiales: avances y perspectivas de investigación (Mexico: IIS-UNAM, 1990); Elsa Malvido, “La epidemiología. Una propuesta para explicar la despoblación americana,” Revista de Indias 63, no. 227 (2003): 65–78, and “El camino de la primera viruela en el nuevo mundo: del Caribe a Tenochtitlan, 1493–1521,” Revista Cultura y Religión 2, 3 (2008): 1–12; Chantal Cramaussel, Poblar la frontera: La provincia de Santa Bárbara en Nueva Vizcaya durante los siglos XVI y XVII (Zamora: El Colegio de Michoacán, 2006). 34. Block, Mission Culture; Cynthia Radding, Wandering Peoples. Colonialism, Ethnic Spaces, and Ecological Frontiers in Northwestern Mexico, 1700–1850 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997); Robert  H.  Jackson, Missions and the Frontiers of Spanish America: A Comparative Study of the Impact of Environmental, Economic, Political, and Socio-Cultural Variations on the Missions in the Rio de la Plata Region and on the Northern Frontier of New Spain (Scottsdale, AZ: Pentacle Press, 2005); Susan M. Deeds, Defiance and Deference in Colonial Mexico: Indians under Spanish Rule in Nueva Vizcaya (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003); Steven  W.  Hackel, Children of Coyote, Missionaries of Saint Francis: Indian-Spanish Relations in Colonial California, 1769–1850 (Chapel Hill: UNC, 2005); Mario Alberto Magaña Mancillas, ed., Epidemias y rutas de propagación en la Nueva España y México (siglos XVIII-XIX) (Mexicali and La Paz, Mexico: UABC, Instituto Sudcaliforniano de Cultura, Archivo Histórico Pablo L. Martínez, 2013). 35. These representative works shaped the historiography for Mexico, Peru, and Brazil. François Chevalier, Land and Society in Colonial Mexico: the Great Hacienda (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963 [1952]); Bernardo García Martínez, El Marquesado del Valle; tres siglos de régimen señorial en Nueva España (Mexico: El Colegio de México, 1969); David A. Brading, Haciendas and Ranchos in the Mexican Bajío (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1979); Eric Van Young, Hacienda and Market in EighteenthCentury Mexico: The Rural Economy of the Guadalajara Region, 1675–1820 (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006 [1981]); John Tutino, From Insurrection to Revolution in Mexico: Social Bases of Agrarian Violence, 1750–1940 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986); Susan E. Ramírez, Provincial Patriarchs: Land Tenure and the Economics of

78   Borderlands of the Iberian World Power in Colonial Peru (Albuquerque: UNM, 1986); Stuart B. Schwartz, Sugar Plantations in the Formation of Brazilian Society: Bahia, 1550–1835 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1985). 36. Charles Gibson, The Aztecs Under Spanish Rule: A History of the Indians of the Valley of Mexico, 1519–1810 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1964); William  B.  Taylor, Landlord and Peasant in Colonial Oaxaca (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1972); Nancy M. Farriss, Maya Society Under Colonial Rule: The Collective Enterprise of Survival (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984); Nancy Spalding, Huarochirí: An Andean Society Under Inca and Spanish Rule (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1984); Frank Salomon, Native Lords of Quito in the Age of the Incas: The Political Economy of North-Andean Chiefdoms (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Brooke Larson, Cochabamba, 1550–1900: Colonialism and Agrarian Transformation in Bolivia. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998); Luis Alberto Arrioja Díaz Viruell, Pueblos de indios y tierras comunales. Villa Alta, Oaxaca: 1742–1856 (Zamora: El Colegio de Michoacán, Fideicomiso “Felipe Teixidor y Monserrat Alfau de Teixidor,” 2011). 37. James Lockhart, The Nahuas after the Conquest: A Social and Cultural History of the Indians of Central Mexico, Sixteenth Through Eighteenth Centuries (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992); Kevin Terraciano, The Mixtecs of Colonial Oaxaca: Ñudzahui History, Sixteenth Through Eighteenth Centuries (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001); Barbara  E.  Mundy, The Mapping of New Spain: Indigenous Cartography and the Maps of the Relaciones Geográficas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); and Ethelia Ruiz Medrano, Mexico’s Indigenous Communities: Their Lands and Histories, 1500–2010, trans. Russ Davidson (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2010). 38. Laura E. Matthews, and Michel R. Oudijk, ed., Indian Conquistadors: Indigenous Allies in the Conquest of Mesoamerica (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2007); Danna A. Levin Rojo, Return to Aztlán. Indians, Spaniards, and the Invention of Nuevo México (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2014). 39. Deeds, Defiance and Deference; Cramaussel, Poblar la frontera; Salvador Álvarez, El indio y la sociedad colonial norteña, siglos XVI-XVIII (Durango: UJED, El Colegio de Michoacán, 2009); Michael  C.  Meyer, Water in the Hispanic Southwest: A Social and Legal History, 1550–1850 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1984); John L. Kessell, Kiva, Cross, and Crown: The Pecos Indians and New Mexico, 1540–1840 (Washington, DC: Department of the Interior, National Park Service, 1979); Ross Frank, From Settler to Citizen: New Mexican Economic Development and the Creation of Vecino Society, 1750–1820 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); Malcolm Ebright, Land Grants and Lawsuits in Northern New Mexico (Albuquerque: UNM, 1994); and Advocates for the Oppressed: Hispanos, Indians, Genízaros, and their Land in New Mexico (Albuquerque: UNM, 2014); Leslie S. Offut, Saltillo, 1770–1810: Town and Region in the Mexican North (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2001); Carlos Manuel Valdés, La gente del mesquite: los nómadas del noreste en la colonia (Mexico: CIESAS, INI, 1995); Sean F. McEnroe, From Colony to Nationhood in Mexico: Laying the Foundations, 1560–1840 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 40. Cynthia Radding, “Colonial Spaces in the Fragmented Communities of Northern New Spain,” in Contested Spaces of Early America, ed. Juliana Barr and Edward Countryman (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), 115–141; Gilberto López Castillo, El  poblamiento en tierra de indios cáhitas (Mexico: Siglo XXI Editores, El Colegio de Sinaloa, 2010); Harry W. Crosby, Antigua California: Mission and Colony on the Peninsular Frontier, 1697–1768 (Albuquerque: UNM, 1994); Ignacio Del Río, Conquista y aculturación

Crafting Landscapes   79 en la California Jesuítica, 1697–1768 (Mexico: IIH-UNAM, 1998); Hackel, Children of Coyote; and José Refugio De la Torre Curiel, Twilight of the Mission Frontier. Shifting Interethnic Alliances and Social Organization in Sonora, 1768–1855 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012). 41. Patricia Osante, Orígenes del Nuevo Santander, 1748–1772 (Mexico: UNAM, 1997); Frank De la Teja, San Antonio de Béxar: A Community on New Spain’s Northern Frontier (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995). 42. Cecilia Sheridan, Anónimos y desterrados. La contienda por el “sitio que llaman de Quauyla,” siglos XVI–XVIII (Mexico: CIESAS, 2000); James F. Brooks, Captives and Cousins. Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest Borderlands (Chapel Hill: UNC, 2002); Sara Ortelli, Trama de una guerra conveniente: Nueva Vizcaya y la sombra de los apaches (1748–1790) (Mexico: El Colegio de México, 2007); Chantal Cramaussel, “The Forced Transfer of Indians in Nueva Vizcaya and Sinaloa: A Hispanic Method of Colonization,” in Contested Spaces of Early America, ed. Juliana Barr and Edward Countryman (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), 184–207. 43. Melville, A Plague of Sheep; Alfred Siemens, “Extrayendo ecología de algunos documentos novohispanos de la época temprana,” in Estudios sobre historia y ambiente en América I: Argentina, Bolivia, México, Paraguay, ed. Bernardo García Martínez and Alba González Jácome (Mexico: IPGH, 1999), 219–264. 44. Ernest J. Burrus, S.J. and Félix Zubillaga, S.J., El noroeste de México. Documentos sobre las misiones jesuíticas, 1600–1769 (México: UNAM, 1986), 100–101, 384–385; Andrés Pérez de Ribas, Historia de los triumphos de nuestra santa fee entre gentes las más bárbaras, y fieras del nueuo Orbe (Madrid: Alonso de Paredes, 1645), Libro VI, Cap VI, 253–254. 45. López Castillo, Poblamiento, Anexo 2, 225–228. A sitio, one of the most commonly used land measurements, corresponded to 1,747 hectares (4,316 acres) for bovine cattle and to 776 hectares (1,918 acres) for sheep or goats. 46. López Castillo, Poblamiento, 227–228, 235. Taymuco y Cerro Colorado, with 2 sitios and 2 caballerías, Archivo Histórico de Sonora T LX-800; Yoricarichi y Camotes, with 1 sitio de ganado menor, Archivo Histórico de Jalisco, L 14–17, Archivo Histórico de Sonora TXXI-286. 47. Archivo General de la Nación, Indiferente Virreinal, Caja 5907, exp. 77, f. 1r. 48. Dean, With Broadax and Firebrand. 49. Mary C. Karasch, Before Brasília. Frontier Life in Central Brazil (Albuquerque: UNM, 2016); Schmink and Wood, Contested Frontiers. 50. Robert Wilcox, Cattle in the Backlands. Mato Grosso and the Evolution of Ranching in the Brazilian Tropics (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2017). 51. Radding, Landscapes of Power and Identity; Kauffman, “The Unknown Lands.” 52. Kauffman, “The Unknown Lands,” 79; Gary Van Valen, Indigenous Agency in the Amazon: the Mojos in Liberal and Rubber-Boom Bolivia, 1842–1932 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2013). 53. Universidad Autónoma “Gabriel René-Moreno,” Museo de Historia (UGRM, MH), Prefectural 1/6 (1826), José Lorenzo Suárez al Obispo de Santa Cruz; Archivo del Arzobispado de Santa Cruz (AASC) Provisorato, 2–7. 54. Radding, Wandering Peoples, 171–248. 55. Meyer, Water in the Southwest; Offut, Saltillo; Cecilia Sheridan Prieto, “La construcción de territorialidades hídricas en el espacio noreste novohispano,” in Usos y desusos del agua en cuencas del Norte de México, ed. Cecilia Sheridan Prieto and Mario Cerutti, (Mexico:

80   Borderlands of the Iberian World CIESAS, 2011) 67–98; Susan M. Deeds, “Escasez y conflicto: la historia del agua en el noreste de la Nueva España,” in Usos y desusos del agua en cuencas del Norte de México, ed. Cecilia Sheridan Prieto and Mario Cerutti (Mexico: CIESAS, 2011), 43–66. 56. José A.  Rivera, Acequia Culture. Water, Land and Community in the Southwest (Albuquerque: UNM, 1998); Sylvia Rodríguez, Acequia. Water, Sharing, Sanctity, and Place (Santa Fe: SAR, 2006). 57. Radding, Wandering Peoples, 48–54; Gary Nabhan and Thomas  E.  Sheridan, “Living Fencerows of the Río San Miguel, Sonora, Mexico: Traditional Technology for Floodplain Management,” Human Ecology 5, 2 (1977): 97–111; William E. Doolittle, “Channel Changes and Living Fencerows in Eastern Sonora, Mexico: Myopia in Traditional Resource Management?,” Geography Annals 85, A, 3–4 (2003): 247–261. 58. Martín Sánchez Rodríguez, “Mexico’s Breadbasket: Agriculture and the Environment in the Bajío,” in A Land between Waters Environmental Histories of Modern Mexico, ed. Christopher R. Boyer (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2012), 50–72; Leticia González Arratia, Historia y etnohistoria del norte de México y la Comarca Lagunera (Mexico: INAH, 2007). 59. Adolph Bandelier, Final Report of Investigations among the Indians of the Southwestern United States, carried on mainly in the years from 1880 to 1885, part I (Cambridge: John Wilson & Son, University Press, 1890), 286–289. Papers of the Archaeological Institute of America. American Series, III. 60. Deneven, Cultivated Landscapes; Block, Mission Culture. 61. Rosalva Loreto López, coord., Perfiles habitacionales y condiciones ambientales: historia urbana de Latinoamérica, siglos XVII-XX (Puebla, Mexico, and Munich: BUAP, CONACYT and Deutsches Museum, 2007). 62. Vera S. Candiani, Dreaming of Dry Land: Environmental Transformation in Colonial Mexico City (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014); Matthew Vitz, A City on a Lake: Urban Political Ecology and the Growth of Mexico City (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018). 63. Robert  C.  West, The Mining Community in Northern New Spain: The Parral District (New York: AMS Press [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1949], 1980); Chantal Cramaussel, “Sociedad colonial y depredación ecológica: Parral en el siglo XVII,” in Estudios sobre historia y ambiente en America I: Argentina, Bolivia, Mexico, Paraguay, ed. Bernardo García Martínez and Alba González Jácome (Mexico: Colegio de Mexico, IPHG, 1999). 64. Cramaussel, “Sociedad colonial y depredación ecológica,” 98. 65. West, Mining Community, 12–14, 36–44, Map 5, “Sources of Reagents Used in the Parral Mines,” 28. 66. Cramaussel, Poblar la frontera; Cramaussel, “The Forced Transfer of Indians.” 67. For estimates of deforestation due to timber consumption and the production of charcoal for fuel see Daviken Studnicki-Gizbert and David Schecter, “The Environmental Dynamics of a Colonial Fuel-Rush: Silver Mining and Deforestation in New Spain, 1522 to 1810,” Environmental History 15 (2010): 94–119. 68. Studnicki-Gizbert and Schecter, “The Environmental Dynamics of a Colonial Fuel-Rush,” 99–100, Figure 1, and Appendix 1. For silver mining in New Spain and Peru, see Richard L. Garner, “Long-Term Silver Mining Trends in Spanish America: A Comparative Analysis of Peru and Mexico,” American Historical Review 93, 4 (1988): 898–935; on credit and finances, Eduardo Flores Clair, coord., Crédito y financiamiento a la industria minera: siglos XVI–XX (Mexico: Plaza y Valdés, 2006).

Crafting Landscapes   81 69. Studinicki-Gizbert and Schecter, “The Environmental Dynamics of a Colonial Fuel-Rush,” 102–109; Alejandro Montoya, “Población y Sociedad en un Real de Minas de la Frontera Norte Novohispana. San Luis Potosí, de finales del siglo XVI a 1810 (PhD diss., Université de Montreal, 2003); Carlos Rubén Ruiz Medrano, “El Real de Minas de Bolaños, Jalisco en el siglo XVIII: transformaciones territoriales y cambios sociales,” Región y sociedad XXVI, 60 (2014): 191–227. 70. Archivo Histórico del Estado de San Luis Potosí—Alcaldía Mayor (AMSLP) 1652.2, Exp. 11, fojas 1–6. Simón López de Castro, defensor general de los indios y por lo que toca a Don Miguel de Avalos, Gobernador de la Frontera de Santa María del Río de Atononilco y Juan Miguel, alcalde, contra Miguel de Silva. For similar documented disputes in Nueva Vizcaya, see Deeds, Defiance and Deference, 61–62, 128–129, 162–164. 7 1. Elinor  G.  K.  Melville, “Global Developments and Latin American Environments,” in Ecology and Empire: Environmental History of Settler Societies, ed., Tom Griffiths and Libby Robin (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997) 185–196; Elinor G. K. Melville and Bradley Skopyk, “Disease, Ecology, and the Environment,” in The Oxford History of Mexico, ed., William H. Beezley and Michael C. Meyer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010) 203–234. 72. Tetsuya Ogura, Jorge Ramírez-Ortiz, Zenaida María Arroyo-Villaseñor, Sergio Hernández Martínez, Jesús Pablo Palafox-Hernández, Luis Hugo García de Alba, and Quintus Fernando, “Zacatecas (Mexico) Companies Extract Hg from Surface Soil Contaminated by Ancient Mining Industries,” Water, Air, and Soil Pollution 148 (2003): 167–77; Nicholas A. Robins, Mercury, Mining, and Empire: The Human and Ecological Cost of Colonial Silver Mining in the Andes (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011); Jerome O.  Nriagu, “Mercury Pollution from the Past Mining of Gold and Silver in the Americas,” The Science of the Total Environment 149 (1994): 167–81. 73. Luis Aboites, Demografía histórica y conflictos por el agua; dos estudios sobre 40 kilómetros de historia del Río San Pedro, Chihuahua (Mexico: CIESAS, 2000).

Bibliography Block, David. Mission Culture on the Upper Amazon: Native Tradition, Jesuit Enterprise & Secular Policy in Moxos, 1660–1880. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994. Cramaussel, Chantal. “Sociedad colonial y depredación ecológica: Parral en el siglo XVII.” In Estudios sobre historia y ambiente en América I: Argentina, Bolivia, México, Paraguay, edited by Bernardo García Martínez and Alba González Jácome. Mexico: El Colegio de México, IPHG, 1999. Cramaussel, Chantal. Poblar la frontera: La provincia de Santa Bárbara en Nueva Vizcaya durante los siglos XVI y XVII. Zamora: El Colegio de Michoacán, 2006. Cramaussel, Chantal. “The Forced Transfer of Indians in Nueva Vizcaya and Sinaloa: A Hispanic Method of Colonization.” In Contested Spaces of Early America, edited by Juliana Barr and Edward Countryman, 184–207. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014. Dean, Warren. With Broadax and Firebrand: The Destruction of the Brazilian Atlantic Forest. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. Deneven, William M. Cultivated Landscapes of Native Amazonia and the Andes: Triumph over the Soil. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.

82   Borderlands of the Iberian World Hackel, Steven W. Children of Coyote, Missionaries of Saint Francis: Indian-Spanish Relations in Colonial California, 1769–1850. Chapel Hill: UNC, 2005. Hämäläinen, Pekka. The Comanche Empire. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008. Isenberg, Andrew C. The Destruction of the Bison. An Environmental History. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Kauffman, Jason B. “The Unknown Lands: Nature, Knowledge, and Society in the Pantanal Wetlands of Brazil and Bolivia.” PhD diss., University of North Carolina, 2015. López Castillo, Gilberto. El poblamiento en tierra de indios cáhitas. Mexico: Siglo XXI Editores, El Colegio de Sinaloa, 2010. Melville, Elinor  G.  K. A Plague of Sheep: Environmental Consequences of the Conquest of Mexico. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Offut, Leslie S. Saltillo, 1770–1810: Town and Region in the Mexican North. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2001. Radding, Cynthia. Wandering Peoples. Colonialism, Ethnic Spaces, and Ecological Frontiers in Northwestern Mexico, 1700–1850. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997. Radding, Cynthia. Landscapes of Power and Identity. Comparative Histories in the Sonoran Desert and the Forests of Amazonia from Colony to Republic, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005. Schmink, Marianne, and Charles  H.  Wood. Contested Frontiers in Amazonia. New York: Columbia University Press, 1992. Staller, John, Robert Tykot, and Bruce Benz, ed. Histories of Maize. Multidisciplinary Approaches to the Prehistory, Linguistics, Biogeography, Domestication, and Evolution of Maize. Burlington and San Diego: Elsevier, Academic Press, 2006. Studnicki-Gizbert, Daviken, and David Schecter. “The Environmental Dynamics of a Colonial Fuel-Rush: Silver Mining and Deforestation in New Spain, 1522 to 1810.” Environmental History 15 (2010): 94–119. West, Robert C. The Mining Community in Northern New Spain: The Parral District. New York: AMS Press, 1980. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1949.

chapter 3

Fluctuati ng Fron tiers i n the Bor der l a n ds of M esoa m er ica Fernando Berrojalbiz and Marie-Areti Hers Translated by David Frye

The Mirror of the Past The complex formative history of northern New Spain is characterized by two striking phenomena that can only be explained in relation to its pre-Hispanic past: the decisive participation of Mesoamerican groups in the sixteenth-century conquest and colonization of the region, and the remarkable cultural diversity of the local indigenous groups. Both can be viewed from a longue durée perspective through representative cases of the multiple fluctuations of northern Mesoamerica and the complex and still poorly documented historical development of the populations whom the Spanish colonizers and their indigenous allies encountered in the North. Recent collective works that take an interdisciplinary, macro-regional approach have shown the great variety of indigenous ways of life that have existed in the region straddling the current Mexico–US international border, with the resulting complexity in interethnic relations and transforming identities.1 When the Spanish arrived in the early sixteenth century, Mesoamerican groups occupied only a portion of what now is the country of Mexico. The northern limit of these groups followed a giant U shape, corresponding roughly to the Tula-MoctezumaPánuco river basin in the east and the Lerma-Santiago river basin in the west. This was the northern limit that Paul Kirchhoff proposed in his classic definition of Mesoamerica,

84   Borderlands of the Iberian World adding that it was only valid for the end of the pre-Hispanic period. The regional boundary that the Spanish found here was determining in their colonial enterprise.2 South of the line, the sociopolitical structure of Mesoamerican groups, with thousands of years of tradition of sedentary agrarian and urban life, integrated relatively easily into the colonial process. North of it, incompatibility reigned between the colonizers’ way of life and that of the local populations, which differed greatly among themselves but were generally averse to full sedentarization and submission to state power. Under these circumstances, the widespread participation of Mesoamerican allies in the conquest and colonization of northern New Spain proved indispensable and decisive. It would be misleading to draw a precise boundary line for this North, whether for the pre-Hispanic or the colonial period; the continual shifts in its sociocultural composition would make it a false image. It is still common in the archaeological literature to speak of a distinction between Aridamerica and Mesoamerica, though the North was actually not a geographical entity but a vast space with tremendously varying climates and geographical profiles. In this construct of the imaginary, the North is equated to aridity and the people who lived there to nomads wandering through the desert, when in reality they did not all live completely nomadic existences, nor did they all live in deserts, but rather in such varied habitats as high mountain ranges and lowland river basins. Under these circumstances, it is better to avoid tracing the societies here analyzed on maps; turning instead from physical space to the complex and multifaceted processes of cultural, social, and political contact as the basic concepts for understanding them.3 Wars, conquests, and invasions unquestionably took place in the pre-Hispanic past of this immense North, but there were also other processes of contact, mixing, exchange, migration, the transmission and creation of symbolic systems, and the emergence of new identities. The absence in the North of large, consolidated political and territorial configurations suggests that political and physical struggles were not the predominant elements in these contact processes, as they were during the Spanish colonial expansion.4 North of sixteenth-century Mesoamerica everything seems to dissolve in the vastness of the geography and the endless variety of cultures. In addition to the difficulty of pinning down the regions and identities that make up the North, there is a serious problem of chronology, even for the Spanish conquest. Unlike the center of New Spain, where the colonial system was well established within a few decades, the North presented considerable obstacles to establishing colonial institutions, due to the size of the territory, the inhospitable geography for the conquerors, the low population density, and the pronounced mobility of its inhabitants. Given the important participation of indigenous Mesoamerican groups in the colonization of northern New Spain, the traditional distinction between pre-Hispanic and colonial is inadequate, because it marginalizes indigenous agency in these colonial processes. At the same time, the term “indigenous” lumps together highly diverse, even antagonistic groups that played different roles in the history of the North. For these reasons, the widespread participation of Mesoamerican groups in the process of European colonization must be analyzed as one in a series of profound changes in the North, rather than as either a point of departure or a sharp

Fluctuating Frontiers in Mesoamerica   85 break with the pre-Hispanic past, as it has traditionally been conceptualized. In this sense, the process that gave rise to groups that continually reinvented themselves, and the complexity of their widely underestimated historical development can be profitably illustrated by examining the Tepiman tradition, and the Tepehuan people in particular.

The Confused Term, Chichimeca From the first Spanish incursions north of Mesoamerica’s former limits—Nuño de Guzmán’s entrada, the Mixtón War, Francisco Vázquez de Coronado’s expedition, the first formal Spanish settlements—the participation of Mesoamerican warriors, explorers, settlers, and merchants (Otomí, Nahua, Purépecha, and others) was fundamental. Written sources fail to mention the names of almost all these actors, and more traditional historians have often ignored their relevance despite their obvious numerical importance as allies of the Spanish. Nevertheless, beyond the simple quantitative factor, the role of Mesoamerican groups in this history can be considered decisive. As documented by Levin Rojo they influenced not only the facts on the ground but also the imaginary about this unknown and as yet unconquered territory when it was being constructed over the course of the sixteenth century.5 Using the tools of archaeology to understand what the North may have meant to sixteenth-century Mesoamericans, based on what it had been centuries before the Spanish arrival, is a good way to picture how northern New Spain was a recovery of northern Mesoamerica. Indeed, these communities did not experience the change from preHispanic to colonial periods as a decisive break; rather from their point of view they were resuming an epic, age-old effort to colonize the North. In the sixteenth century these groups still preserved the memories of ancestors who had settled in those distant territories, abandoning the region to return to their respective homelands after a long occupation. These ancestors were known in the sixteenth century as “Chichimecas,” originally from the legendary Chicomoztoc, “the place of the seven caves”: it was the motherland, the point of departure for peoples that recognized a common kinship. Ancient “Chichimecas” were culturally quite distinct from the largely nomadic “Chichimeca” groups that confronted the Spanish as the latter moved northward. Their complex history, marked by migration from the first to the thirteenth century ce, is generally described as a series of fluctuations in the northern borderland of Mesoamerica, which cannot therefore be thought of as a precise, fixed territory but as the uneven development of very diverse groups of Mesoamerican origin that settled different regions of the greater North and later abandoned it, several generations before the Spanish arrival. The details of this history remain largely unknown. There are few written records to compare with the archaeological research that is gradually documenting the variety of cultures that flourished in the North.6 Essentially, what the sources show is the northern, “Chichimeca” origin of various prominent peoples in the political panorama of Central

86   Borderlands of the Iberian World and Western Mesoamerica at the time of the Spanish invasion, such as the Mexicas and their Toltec ancestors, the Tlaxcaltecas, Otomís, and Purépechas or Tarascans, among others. In the sixteenth century, an image (both visual and mental) arose to refer to this past, to the adverse fate shared by diverse groups, when for reasons that remain unclear they were forced to leave what had been their land for centuries and become acquainted with the harsh circumstances of migration until they could forge a new home in the country of their distant ancestors to the South.7 This image made it possible both to unify discourse on what were probably very different experiences of exile and to transform a series of obvious setbacks and defeats into something luminous: a portrait of birth. Such is the powerful image of Chicomoztoc, the cave-womb from which a whole set of peoples were mythically born, linked in their northern origins but jealously guarding their differences.8 The list of people who emerged from Chicomoztoc may change from one written source to the next, but what remains constant is the visual reference to “northernness.” Culhuacan, the mountain that contains Chicomoztoc (“Seven Caves”), is covered with vegetation that suggests an arid landscape, and the people pictured in the images dress in animal skins and carry bows and arrows. These details point to the confusion that existed in the sixteenth century, splendidly illustrated in colonial codices like the Historia Tolteca-Chichimeca and the Mapas de Cuauhtinchán, between a northern origin dating back to the time before the ancient collapse of northern Mesoamerica and the new reality that came about when the North was populated only by groups with highly different ways of life, which can be described generically as nomadic.9 The traditional but no less enigmatic image of Chicomoztoc contained a paradox that indigenous historians as widely learned as the collaborators of Fray Bernardino de Sahagún attempted to resolve: tradition proudly conserved a memory of Chichimeca origins, whereas in the latter third of the sixteenth century Chichimeca groups were held in deep contempt, as they were at war with the Spanish and their Mesoamerican allies.10 These historians left a succinct but accurate idea of the migrations that characterized their ancestors’ movements over the course of several centuries, in agreement with recent archaeological findings. As for Chicomoztoc, they insist that it was not a place of origin, given that according to their version of the past, in remote times different peoples migrated north from the center and, centuries later, left that region and returned to their original home. According to this view, Chicomoztoc was only a shrine (though supremely important) where many groups went to communicate with the gods, who ordered them to embark on their return. Sahagún’s highly educated indigenous collaborators probably had their interest in the North piqued by the importance the region acquired in the latter half of the sixteenth century, due to the opportunities for a better life it offered to people who migrated there as the Spanish pushed inland in search of mineral wealth. Indeed, as Levin Rojo has documented, the memory of this remote origin in the legendary North was revived when these peoples saw their alliance with the Spanish as a way to resume their history, reopen ancient trade routes, and return to places known to them out of legend. This Mesoamerican allies’ interest, sustained over many generations, seems to have been

Fluctuating Frontiers in Mesoamerica   87 fundamental in keeping up the Spanish colonizers’ own interest, given the countless obstacles and disillusionments the North offered them. The colonizers could see this past in the ruins of ancient cities that contrasted with the camps and makeshift settlements of the non-Mesoamerican peoples then inhabiting the North. Thus, from the first expeditions led by Spaniards, their Mesoamerican allies found material evidence that confirmed their traditions. For example, in the Bajío region, the Otomís who took part in founding the city of Santiago de Querétaro (1531) regained the imposing Toltec shrine of El Cerrito, already in ruins, to worship a deity that over time was transformed into the Virgin of El Pueblito.11 Farther north, in what is now the state of Zacatecas, during Nuño de Guzmán’s early expedition of 1530, the indigenous expeditionary soldiers connected the imposing ruins of the site known today as La Quemada and the ruins of Teúl (near modern Teúl de González Ortega) to the migrations of their ancestors. This interest in identifying the vestiges of ancient settlements with the stages of legendary migrations throughout the greater North did not wane, and it was taken up by the Spanish conquerors, being recorded in several chronicles from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century.12 Archaeologists have now lost interest in identifying a particular archaeological site as mythical Chicomoztoc. Following the arguments of Sahagún’s informants, it was likely one or more of the great panregional shrines that flourished in the Mesoamerican North during the first millennium, and in some places up until the thirteenth century. Recent archaeological findings provide a more detailed picture of the complex chronology and remarkable cultural variety in the history of northern Mesoamerica. They all lead to a single general conclusion, however: the term “Chichimeca” cannot be confused with the name of a particular ethnic group or way of life; it simply designates an origin in an undefined space north of central Mesoamerica. The image of the Chichimeca as a “savage” dressed in animal skins is probably a product of an imaginary created in the social world of central New Spain. It has no antecedent in pre-Hispanic art, in which animal-skin clothing is, to the contrary, emblematic of powerful figures in religious and military hierarchies. However, the image tends to be interpreted literally. Even today there is persistent confusion about the term Chichimeca. Many present-day studies on indigenous sources from central Mexico that mention the origin in Chicomoztoc still view them as “savages,” as “nomads” who, in a process of vertiginous change transformed themselves into “civilized people” when they became part of nuclear Mesoamerica.13 Aside exceptional historians who recognize that those who emerged from Chicomoztoc were not nomads, the persistence of this confusion is astonishing, for it means accepting the notion of a sociocultural transformation that has no parallel in the most extreme evolutionist models.14 The confusion has been reinforced by poor communication between the historians of these sources and the archaeologists conducting research in the North, who have documented a complex Mesoamerican presence. Historians tend to think of the broad area north of the conventional border of Mesoamerica as a wasteland without a history or ancient civilizations, discounting the documentary validity of the version put forward by Sahagún’s informants of their northern origins.15

88   Borderlands of the Iberian World

The Fluctuations of Northern Mesoamerica Archaeological findings that make it possible to begin reconstructing the history of the Mesoamerican cultures that flourished in the North permit to compile a general sketch of the successive migratory waves that punctuated Mesoamerican development in parts of the modern states of Tamaulipas, San Luis Potosí, Querétaro, Guanajuato, Aguascalientes, Jalisco, Zacatecas, Durango, and Sinaloa.16 An early expansion occurred around the year 100 ce, parallel to the flourishing of Teotihuacán, though the impact of that major metropolis varied according to the specifics of the cultures that began to differentiate from then on in northern Mesoamerica. The second stage began around 600 ce and seems to have been largely influenced by the destruction of the great city and the diaspora of its multiethnic population. This gave rise to a broad territorial expansion, extensive exchange networks, and intense construction activity, as seen in the buildings at the sites of La Quemada and Téul. Around the ninth century, for reasons still not well understood, a considerable portion of this greater North was abandoned, coinciding with the arrival in Central and Western Mesoamerica of a series of groups that had a profound influence on the establishment of some of the great political units of the Postclassic (900–1521), including Tula, the powerful city of the Toltecs; their Mexica heirs in Mexico-Tenochtitlan; and the Tarascan Empire in Michoacán. Early in this period, there were new migrations northward from Tula. Military incursions partially recovered some lost territories, as in the case of El Cerrito near the modern city of Querétaro. By the thirteenth century, this North was also lost, left to be occupied by “Chichimecas” with different ways of life characterized by mobility, as found there by the Spanish. This same period saw the development of what archaeologists have termed the Aztatlan Complex, which covered a large portion of present-day Western Mexico. It can be succinctly summed up with a series of concomitant phenomena: a degree of cultural unification among formerly very diverse entities; strong relations with central Mexico as well as with Central America and its metallurgical expertise; and the spread of Mesoamerican elements along the coast of Sinaloa as far north as the Fuerte River.17 Although this cultural flourishing had come to an end by the late fourteenth century and the Mesoamerican range along the Sinaloa coast had retreated to Culiacán, the Aztatlan Complex can be considered the clear antecedent of the coastal route followed by the first colonial incursions into the North, such as those led by Nuño de Guzmán, Marcos de Niza, and Francisco Vázquez de Coronado. Turning to the Sierra Madre Occidental in the modern states of Jalisco, Zacatecas, and Durango, where the Chalchihuites culture flourished, a distinction between the highlands and the valleys flanking the eastern slopes of this mountain range is necessary. In the sierra, the Mesoamerican presence persisted among the nowadays disappeared

Fluctuating Frontiers in Mesoamerica   89 Acaxee and Xixime peoples, and among modern-day Coras, Huicholes, and Mexicaneros.18 In the eastern valleys, meanwhile, the Mesoamericans abandoned the southern portion of the region in the ninth century but remained in what is now the state of Durango until the thirteenth century, not long before the arrival there of the first groups of Tepehuanes.19 Northern Mesoamerica’s complex history is marked by deep breaks and remarkable demographic rearrangements. The history of Chalchihuites culture and the Aztatlan Complex are good examples of these ruptures. Both had particular relevance in the relations between Mesoamerica and the ancestors of the modern Pueblo groups; they also lay the groundwork for the flourishing of the great trade routes—the Tierra Adentro road and the Pacific Coast road—that would play a central role in colonial New Spain.

Chalchihuites Culture as an Ancient Tierra Adentro Road Chalchihuites culture flourished throughout the southern half of the Sierra Madre Occidental, corresponding to the modern states of Zacatecas, Jalisco, and Durango. Its history is marked by the same major stages noted for the North in general. In the first stage, from 100 to 550 ce, it appears largely the product of groups arriving from the south, particularly from the Valley of Mexico and the Tlaxcala-Puebla region, where a violent eruption of the Popocatépetl volcano caused profound changes in the environment, cut short the development of a vast area, and apparently led to the rise of Teotihuacán as a great pan-regional ceremonial center.20 It has been proposed that the great city’s interest in acquiring certain goods gave rise to the development of Chalchihuites culture, by stimulating intense mining activity in regions such as Alta Vista in Zacatecas and by consolidating a “turquoise road.”21 This hypothesis, applying a colonial expansionist model to this distant periphery, could not be confirmed, since the question of what the mines would have produced has not yet been clarified and turquoise exchange networks arose after Teotihuacán had passed its zenith. They developed in the North during the Epiclassic (between 600 and 900 ce) and elsewhere in Mesoamerica after 900 ce. Paradoxically, the Teotihuacán presence grew in the Chalchihuites territory precisely after the great city itself was destroyed at the end of the sixth century, as new research has established.22 Therefore, its growth does not indicate an imperial expansion but quite the contrary, it was the result of a diaspora of part of the multiethnic population of the city, where a Western Mexican barrio has been identified.23 Excavation on the lake region of Michoacán shows that these “Western” residents of Teotihuacán were bearers of the Loma Alta culture, properly defined and dated only recently.24 Probably in direct relation to the serious conflict that occasioned the destruction of Teotihuacán, Michoacán also experienced a profound religious, political, and artistic crisis that led to

90   Borderlands of the Iberian World the emigration of a sizeable group to the North. These people, the Tarascans or Purépechas who would return to their ancestral lands centuries later, brought along a distinctive figurative art that allows their tracks to be followed. Their participation was key to the development of the second stage of Chalchihuites culture and to the creation of the route underlying the Tierra Adentro road of colonial New Spain. With the arrival of this new group and probably others, Chalchihuites culture underwent profound transformations. The population grew and the territory expanded some four hundred kilometers north, roughly along the modern border between the states of Durango and Chihuahua, reaching some two hundred kilometers into the mountains themselves. Throughout this extensive territory a series of monumental sites such as El Teúl, La Quemada, Alta Vista, and La Ferrería still stand, besides countless other documented settlements.25 Considering the expanse of this settlement process and the length of time over which it occurred, it most likely took forms as varied as the much later colonization of northern New Spain by Mesoamerican allies, some spontaneous efforts by isolated groups, others clearly organized. In the latter cases, high-ranking people can be identified at the head of formal groups. These leaders, probably members of the old Western Mexico barrio of Teotihuacán, left signs that they had been trained in the astronomical knowledge of the metropolis.26 Regional variations in archaeological remains and between the highland peoples that might be called Chalchihuites cultural heirs—Acaxees, Xiximes, Mexicaneros, Coras, and Huicholes—suggest this culture was shared by groups that spoke widely varying languages, were distinct in origin, and underwent continual transformations. Along with them, a couple of additional groups have been identified that abandoned the area around the year 900 ce and returned to their original homelands: the Tolteca Chichimeca, who joined the powerful city of Tula, and the Uacúsechas, who formed the Tarascan state in stages over the course of five centuries. They can be recognized through a series of elements developed in the North and brought south when they resettled there. These new Northern elements belong to the material culture of everyday life and have profound implications for the way in which these immigrants prevailed among local populations and influenced the new ideology that marked Postclassic Mesoamerica. They include architectural forms, sculptures, and ceremonial spaces associated with a particular way of making war—the so-called Flower Wars used to procure victims for human sacrifice, with the accompanying public display of human trophies; a way of doing politics in large assemblies of warriors, and a method of consulting oracles or God-Men.27 Thus, among the Mesoamericans who began to return from legendary Chicomoztoc, at least some were aggressive and successful immigrants who remained a source of great pride for their descendants centuries later. This was true, for example, of the Mexicas who copied and recovered Toltec objects and spaces.28 Whatever the exact origins of the Mexicas or the location of legendary Aztlan, whether in the ancient Toltec Empire or in the Aztatlan Complex, claiming these roots led them to look with interest toward the North and ally themselves with the Spanish.29 Likewise, the Tarascan political leaders in Michoacán were extremely

Fluctuating Frontiers in Mesoamerica   91 interested in establishing symbolic links with the distant Loma Alta culture of the ancient settlers of the North, considering them their ancestors, and in the sixteenth century they returned on a northward trek under the sign of the cross.30 Note that Chalchihuites culture occupied a surprisingly extensive territory, including a new fully settled area in the Sierra Madre Occidental but also more distant lands where important ties to the ancestors of the modern Pueblo peoples had evolved. Indeed, the Chalchihuites people established significant and long-lasting relations with the arid lands of present-day Arizona that were decisive in the development of Hohokam culture during its Preclassic Period (750–1150 ce). There is broad recognition of a set of images, ideas, and practices in this culture that originally came from Mesoamerica, more specifically from Western Mexico.31 Recent archaeological work in Michoacán and the Sierra Madre Occidental has provided strong evidence that these elements were derived from the Purépecha migration to Chalchihuites territory, as mentioned above. The images and material objects attesting to these contacts show features harking back to the Loma Alta culture that settlers from Michoacán brought north, and others that were created in the Chalchihuites culture era. Ceramics, rock art, and sculptures amply document the density of these relationships, overcoming the tremendous distances involved, along a corridor that also supplied people in the northern Sonora Desert with two types of highly valued ritual objects: pyrite mosaic mirrors and copper bells.32 Pyrite mirrors have a long tradition, associated with high-ranking individuals during the most solemn moments in Teotihuacán ritual life and a complex symbolism.33 Their use persisted for centuries after the fall of the great city, especially along the old Tierra Adentro route north.34 Copper bells, apparently associated with certain dances, appeared early in Chalchihuites culture before the partial collapse of its territory in the ninth century, and it was apparently through Chalchihuites that the first bells of this type entered the ancient US Southwest. These northwestern routes thus gave rise to an intense exchange of ideas and practices that integrated a largely shared worldview. Among the characters appearing on images, two types evoke those whose explorations created this ancient trade route and traversed it in both directions: the tumpline porter (mecapalero) and the flute player, both linked to the exchange of goods and to sacred knowledge. These elements do not seem to indicate unequal relations between the ancient Southwest and Mesoamerica, as has often been suggested, but rather exchanges between populations with similar social organizations: highly developed and hierarchical but without state formations, powerful rulers, or palaces. These were societies dispersed in fairly modest settlements intensely connected to one another by market and pilgrimage networks associated with ball courts. In the early 1900s, Carl Lumholtz described in detail the merchants who traveled great distances in Michoacán, alone or in groups, porting heavy loads in wooden crates (huacales) using tumplines. The photograph he published of this figure is very similar to the image of the tumpline porter painted on Hohokam pottery, distinct from the idea of the Pochteca merchant usually evoked, because trade along this route did not rest on the power of a developed polity that could have controlled it.35

92   Borderlands of the Iberian World The other figure that may have played a key role in this history is the flute player. From the arid lands of Arizona to the Four Corners region and the Rio Grande Valley, this image has been present in the rock art and pottery of widely differing cultures since at least the seventh century, and it lives on today in oral traditions and ritual life. Given this figure’s universality and continuous presence, it can be considered particularly emblematic of the long history of Pueblo traditions in all its facets.36 In Chalchihuites rock art, the same figure apparently held a symbolic value as complex as that in the Southwest: leading migrations, traversing the world as a merchant, or dominating ritual.37

The Uneven Development of a Cultural Legacy and the Coastal Road Analyzing the details of these ancient routes in the Northwest, in particular the relevance along them of the sacred rain serpent, underscores the force of historical memory. There is profound agreement between archaeological data and the oral tradition among the Hopi, a Pueblo group that inherited much of this ancient legacy.38 But the remarkable presence of the rain serpent foregrounds a notable absence: along the Tierra Adentro route there are no images of the divinity that had dominated rainmaking ceremonies in Mesoamerica since the time of Teotihuacán, the one the Mexica would call Tláloc. Experts on the Southwest have claimed to recognize Tláloc’s characteristic goggle eyes in certain rock art figures and have associated him with the emergence of the kachina cult, thus giving an extremely late date to the period of closest relations between Mesoamerica and its northern borderlands.39 Certainly some of the oldest copper bells discovered so far in this context bear schematic representations of a face with large goggle eyes, indicating that this powerful divinity may have been associated with some particular dance in the Southwest. But if this cult really spread to the distant Pueblos, this must have occurred after the ancient Tierra Adentro road was profoundly modified, from the tenth century on. The southern part of the route had been cut off when Mesoamerican settlements were abandoned in present-day Zacatecas and Jalisco, during the general collapse of Mesoamerican occupation in the North as mentioned above; meanwhile, a new coastal route was being consolidated in the context of the Aztatlan Complex, bringing the Mesoamerican presence north, hundreds of kilometers beyond the border formerly set by the Piaxtla River, as far as the Fuerte River Valley. The Chalchihuites enclave that survived several centuries in the Durango section of the Sierra Madre probably linked up to this new road. Momentous changes occurred in the Southwest during this same period. Treasured ritual objects like the copper bell and the pyrite mirror spread as far as the Chaco Canyon, probably via Hohokam groups. But it seems that the Chacoan priestly elites carefully screened the elements from Mesoamerica that they were interested in incorporating in

Fluctuating Frontiers in Mesoamerica   93 their rituals. Thus unlike the versatile flute-player, a figure present in Chacoan rock art, neither the image of the rain serpent or the schematic representations of what appears to be the characteristic google eyes of Tlaloc provide clear evidence of the ties between Chalchihuites and Chacoan peoples. However, monumental architecture and cliff carvings in Chaco culture sites are marked by elements that had been present for centuries in Chalchihuites culture, particularly at La Quemada: colonnades, a remarkable degree of astronomical knowledge, and a unique road network. The different features of likely Mesoamerican origin respectively found in Hohokam and Chacoan cultures apparently correspond to the distinct strategies of each region’s rulers. Unlike the less hierarchical Hohokam people, the elite at Chaco Canyon adopted aspects from politically more hierarchical Chalchihuites groups—like those who built La Quemada—and over the course of several generations they undertook a building program of unheard-of dimensions for that region.40 In this case, the Mesoamerican legacy was used to consolidate the power of an elite, unlike the more egalitarian social relations observed in societies such as the Preclassic Hohokam and most of the Chalchihuites groups.41 In the uneven development of Southwest peoples, images from the legacy of the south continued; to some degree these were inherited by the great pottery artists of New Mexico’s Classical Mimbres culture. By this period (950–1150 ce) a new southern element, probably arrived from the coastal route, had also been incorporated into the ritual life of many peoples: parrots and macaws, which began to be raised locally for their feathers and figured in painted and carved images on pottery and rock art. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries—a period of radical transformations and considerable demographic reshuffling throughout the Southwest owing largely to climatic change—both the ancient Mesoamerican legacy and a set of new southern elements were highly valued by new elites that founded settlements in which families from diverse origins often regrouped. This legacy was employed as part of a deliberate policy at sites like Paquimé (Casas Grandes), a large and probably multiethnic urban settlement, where the elite staked their legitimacy on the history of a significant portion of its population who had come from Mimbres territory. The pottery developed in Paquimé combined novel forms with an iconography inspired to all appearances by a tradition abandoned more than a century before the city’s founding.42 In architecture, the elite clearly adapted a legacy from Chaco Canyon, with the use of the T-shaped doorway, while the I-shaped ball courts are undeniably Mesoamerican in form.43 The pyrite mirror, a ceremonial object from Paquimé, is especially interesting for noting the important role of prestige goods from the south in consolidating power and reclaiming the past.44 Decorated with turquoise mosaics, pyrite mirrors formed part of the regalia of powerful Toltec warriors, proud of their origins in the North, but in Central Mexico they fell into disuse after the fall of Tula, replaced by the obsidian mirror, the symbol of Tezcatlipoca. However, in Michoacán the Tarascans continued to produce and use pyrite-mosaic mirrors, though set in frames fashioned from copper given the importance of metallurgy among them. Thus the mirrors of Paquimé, which were also set in copper, reveal centuries-long migrations, encounters, and exchanges, a history with a continual eye on the past as an anchor in an uncertain world and a fluid space.

94   Borderlands of the Iberian World Finally, this interweaving of many paths in defiance of time and space continues to nurture the heirs of this mobile world today. A few years ago, in a seminar on Las Vías del Noroeste, an astonishing paradox emerged from the research discussed: the deepest kinship in worldview and rituals can be found between the most widely separated peoples of the broad Northwest/Southwest, that is the Huichols and the Hopis. Many images created along the ancient Tierra Adentro road more than a millennium ago can be read equally well through Huichol or Hopi myths and practices.45 The strength of these linkages is striking, not only because of the vast territorial expanse over which they were woven and the long time frame during which they were transformed without disappearing but also because of the remarkable variety in ways of life, languages, and ethnic groups that have characterized the North far beyond the nomadic/sedentary opposition so often used to conceptualize the region.

Tepima Expansion: Another World in Flux It is difficult to make the non-Mesoamerican groups in the North fit the traditional labels of nomadic, sedentary, hunter-gatherers, incipient agriculturalists, bands, tribes, and chiefdoms. Even within a single language family, as in the case of the Tepiman peoples, differentiating features make it impossible to group them in any meaningful way.46 These peoples had (and still have) diverse means of subsistence and adaptive strategies for dealing with the availability of plant and animal resources in the physical environment, given the diverse ecological niches where they may live from year to year, from the mountains and valleys of the Sierra Madre Occidental to the Pinacate desert between Sonora and Arizona. As Hackenberg notes, at different periods all Pima peoples made use of the main forms of subsistence: hunting and gathering, herding domesticated cattle, and agriculture.47 Though they share a common language and aspects of social organization and religion, they can be distinguished by the selective intensification of certain subsistence ­alternatives.48 But these differences do not imply a rigid separation between different ethnic groups; instead, as they perceive themselves, they all belong to a great Pima nation, called O’odham or Odami among the modern-day communities.49 Something similar may have happened with the Tepehuanes and Tepecanos, the southernmost Tepiman peoples, at least during the two centuries before the conquest and at the beginning of the early colonial period. Analyzing the Tepiman tradition, starting with the Tepehuanes, will show other aspects of the complex past in the pre-Hispanic and colonial North. Until two decades ago there were two opposing views on the nature of Tepehuan culture. One proposed continuity with Mesoamerican groups; the other saw a clear break with that tradition. The first position, sustained by archaeologist J. C. Kelley had been established by US anthropologists in the 1960s.50 According to this view, the

Fluctuating Frontiers in Mesoamerica   95 Tepehuanes were descendants of the local autochthonous Loma San Gabriel culture, which was deeply acculturated by Mesoamerican Chalchihuites peoples when they arrived in the area. After the Chalchihuites world disappeared this local culture gave rise to the Tepehuanes. However, the existence of a Loma San Gabriel culture has never been seriously demonstrated.51 Furthermore, this view projected an image of immobility and lack of historical agency on the peoples in the North, who were already encumbered with the pejorative label of Chichimecas and the assumption that their cultural development was inferior to that achieved in Mesoamerica and the US Southwest. The other interpretation was first proposed by D. Brand in a meticulous work on the region of Zape in northern Durango. He argued that the archaeological remains he found on the hills and mesas near the river could not be attributed to the Tepehuanes, because they did not match the information left by missionaries during the contact ­period or the ethnographic data from writers such as Lumholtz, Hrdlička, and Basauri.52 However, Brand did not carry out additional archaeological research on the Tepehuan culture or attempt to define it. Archaeological work completed over the past two decades confirms Brand’s hypothesis and expands upon it.53 This research shows that great population changes took place in Durango over the two or three centuries preceding the arrival of Europeans. New settlers with very different origins and cultural backgrounds arrived from the Northwest, apparently not long after the Chalchihuites Mesoamericans abandoned those territories. Arguably they became the historical Tepehuanes the Spanish encountered. These new settlers lived in groups of thirty to forty people who established nonpermanent settlements, building houses from perishable materials without first modifying the terrain. Compared to Mesoamericans, their subsistence pattern relied less on agriculture; hunting, gathering, and fishing were equally important. Their tools, in accordance with their way of life, differed from those used by their Mesoamerican predecessors. There was a notable dearth of grinding tools, and their pottery was scarce and rarely decorated. Their flexible livelihood allowed them to cope with sudden environmental changes, bad harvests, scarcity of fish or fruits, or pressures caused by group conflict. Their capacity for moving easily and quickly to new territories reinforced their ability to rebalance the mix of subsistence strategies. They could move between settings as different as the sierra, the eastern valleys, and the arid high plateau. Therefore, they lived in scattered settlements and did not gather in large groups or come together in specific areas. Tepehuanes buried their dead far from living quarters and avoided them; this was in sharp contrast to Mesoamericans, who lived with them buried under the floors of their houses. Another noteworthy aspect is the size of the territory they occupied. As Chantal Cramaussel has observed, theirs was the most extensive territory of any group in the North.54 In addition to the former Chalchihuites culture territories—the eastern valleys and the sierra—Tepehuanes also occupied the arid lands around the Laguna de Mayrán to the east. This way of life and conception of space were quite different from those of the Chalchihuites people. The cultural landscapes created by the Tepehuanes were characterized by mobility and dispersal in an open space that had no strict territorial borders.

96   Borderlands of the Iberian World This flexible strategy was successful, since they were well adapted to the terrain when the Spanish arrived and helped them survive the brunt of the conquest and continue developing as a culture, or set of cultures, in zones of refuge in the sierra, becoming the Tepehuan-language communities of today. Intensive research recently conducted in a small valley north of Durango provided the clearest evidence of this difference: a single area, the upper valley of the Ramos River, was successively occupied by the Chalchihuites people, and later the Tepehuanes.55 The former brought a southern Mesoamerican tradition; the latter came with a cultural background from the broad region of Arizona and Sonora. The profound contrast between these two traditions that succeeded one another in a single space, apparently with no intervening climate change, can be seen in each of the fields of archaeology: regarding settlement patterns, the Chalchihuites people gathered in compact villages organized around a series of courtyards, whereas the Tepehuanes lived scattered in isolated family camps; the former generally chose defensive sites for their settlements, while the latter had open sites; Chalchihuites buildings were constructed with stone foundations and adobe, with mud walls built on platforms and terraces, whereas Tepehuan houses were built directly on unprepared ground and, with few exceptions, were made from perishable materials that usually left no traces. As for material culture, the Chalchihuites lithic technology frequently employed materials obtained from outside the area, with a profusion of projectile points and grinding stones, while the Tepehuan lithic industry used stones obtained directly from the settlement site, with distinct chaînes opératoires and a notable scarcity of projectile points and grinding stones; Chalchihuites sites show abundant and varied pottery production as well as sumptuary goods of distant origin brought through the sort of long-distance exchange networks typically established by Mesoamerican communities, in contrast to the notable austerity of Tepehuan domestic furnishings; and, as mentioned above, the traditional Mesoamerican proximity to the dead, laid to rest below the house floor and accompanied by offerings, contrasts with the isolation of Tepehuan burials, far from living quarters. Finally, the agriculture of the Chalchihuites people relied to some degree on a variety of irrigation techniques, whereas the Tepehuanes chose fields suitable for rain-fed cultivation, or directly adjacent to river beds, taking advantage of the damp soil, though at the risk of having their crops frequently swept away by swollen rivers. These elements reveal diametrically opposed modes of subsistence, of social and territorial organization, of mobility, of thinking about space and about the time of life and death, all of which can be explained by the distinct origins of the two traditions: the former from Mesoamerica, the latter from the North.

What Kind of Borderland The vast region the Tepehuanes occupied did not constitute a closed unit with welldefined borders. Given their mobility and dispersal over a far-flung region, they did not have a notion of strict control over a fixed territory. Moreover, early sources indicate that

Fluctuating Frontiers in Mesoamerica   97 peoples speaking other languages could inhabit areas within this expanse. This was, therefore, a space where peoples of diverse languages and traditions lived together: Mesoamericans in the highlands, and others from the North in the high plateau and the mountain valleys.56 Reports on the great rebellion of 1616 lend weight to this idea. The chroniclers note that the Tepehuanes were able to form alliances with a large number of groups, some of which spoke their language while others did not, over a huge territory (approximately 450 kilometers from northwest to southeast and 200 from southwest to northeast) in order to check the colonizers’ power.57 To understand their social and political organization as well as their tremendous capacity for calling allies, organization, and action as seen in the Tepehuan rebellion, one should avoid simplistic notions of Tepehuan political organization, which also helps understanding the fluidity of their borderlands and interethnic relations. The impetus of the Tepehuan expansion altered the established order in the region and created a new equilibrium of peoples and cultures. One of the most important consequences of this new order is that the north-south route connecting Mesoamerica and the US Southwest, called the old Tierra Adentro road, was cut off in the eastern valleys and seriously affected in the upper reaches of the sierra. Yet other types of linkages were being formed between the Mexican North and the US Southwest. Among the most prominent was the spread of the Tepiman family from Arizona to the north of Jalisco, though it was interrupted and cut short by the spread of other peoples, such as the speakers of Cáhitan languages, who also had their own movements and migrations.58 Linguistics, archaeology, and ethnohistory indicate that the arrival of the Tepehuanes in Durango resulted from the southward expansion of the Tepiman linguistic group, displaying common cultural aspects that arose in the border region of Sonora, Arizona, and Chihuahua. This research points to another turn of the screw in the historical development of the North, since Arizona was the homeland of the Hohokam, who disappeared as a culture around the mid-fifteenth century. There is no agreement on the fate of these people or who their descendants were. One hypothesis suggests that they migrated and were incorporated into various Pueblo communities, like the Hopi. Another is that their descendants were the Tepima groups encountered in that area by the first European colonizers; at the time their way of life differed from that of the original Hohokam.59 These two scenarios most likely simplify a more complicated history. Linguists David Shaul and Jane Hill propose that the Hohokam were a multiethnic community and that Proto-Tepiman speakers were involved in the Hohokam tradition from the beginning.60 In this hypothesis, the Tepehuanes and the Tepecanos, Tepiman peoples related to the Hohokam, migrated south and relocated alongside the Acaxees, Xiximes, Coras, and Huichols, descendants of the Chalchihuites peoples who had been in contact with the Hohokam centuries before. Once again, as in that earlier era, an intercultural exchange took place, with the transmission, adoption, and reworking of diverse aspects of life and thought. The archaeology of Durango provides evidence for the adoption by Tepehuanes of elements from their Mesoamerican neighbors in the sierra, such as stone sculpture, while they reutilized sacred spaces that the Chalchihuites peoples had recently abandoned in the valleys as well as objects they found in those ruins.61

98   Borderlands of the Iberian World Placing the origins of the Tepehuanes in the area where Sonora adjoins Arizona and Chihuahua would mean recognizing a migration akin to other population movements by peoples in the Tepiman tradition: one covering a considerable distance, crossing deserts, semi-desert landscapes, and the Sierra Madre Occidental over a short time and leaving groups of people scattered over a vast territory. It was undoubtedly one singular event that requires more research, as is the case with the histories of many other northern peoples at times represented as immobile in time and space due to a dearth of material remains and monumental ruins.62 Moreover, the oral traditions of these Tepiman peoples have been scarcely recorded and studied, unlike those of neighboring peoples in the Sierra Madre Occidental. Thus, the memory of these epic pre-Hispanic events has not been preserved, except in the case of the Tepecanos. A few traces of their oral traditions supporting the idea that they originated farther north and traveled south have been recorded. Those stories confirm they originally belonged to a people they themselves termed “barbarian,” which could be interpreted as their having a culture unlike that of the Huichols or the descendants of Tlaxcaltecas among whom they were immersed when this tradition was compiled in the early twentieth century.63

The Longue Durée and Indigenous Agency When the singularities and challenges presented by the history of the borderland of what would become northern New Spain are seen from a longue durée perspective, it becomes clear that this frontier region could never be considered a precise territorial border. On the contrary, it was an extremely large and geographically varied space where different communities lived together and intermingled, crossed by networks in a constant process of transformation. From this perspective, the Spanish conquest does not appear as a decisive process carried out over a specific, limited period either but rather as one more in a series of profound changes, each as radical as the European invasion: time and again over this immense territory, people forged a history of explorations, migrations, pilgrimage, colonizations, abandonments, and reconfigurations of their own identities and territories. In these troubled and eventful transformations, historical memory often became the sure anchor and the reliable motor for adapting to a world in perpetual change. It is revealing, in this regard, that Mesoamerican groups with prior histories in the region took part in the settlement of northern New Spain. Thus, over the centuries, people from the South embarked repeatedly on the northward trek, interacting with likewise mobile northerners and finding themselves among the descendants of people their ancestors had met.

Fluctuating Frontiers in Mesoamerica   99 The peoples of the North, in turn, undertook southward migrations just as epic as the journeys of Mesoamericans, making contact anew with the heirs of cultures that in the past had ventured north, closing the circle of encounters and interactions. In so fluid a world, the idea of “Indians” or indigenous people versus Spaniards is an illusory distinction. From the beginning, the Spanish were particularly defenseless in this vast region, dependent upon their Mesoamerican allies to blaze trails, travel over existing roads, get information from distant places and about the distant past, so that ultimately the Mesoamericans took part in the reconquest of the Mesoamerican North. Aztlan, Culhuacan and Chicomoztoc, and all the legendary northern lands of Mesoamerica are simply another facet of an infinitely diverse cultural borderland in which the term “Indian” has no precise meaning. When crossing the lines that traditionally divide archaeology, history, and anthropology, and the pre-Hispanic, colonial, and modern periods, rewarding new perspectives open up, as shown in J. Brooks’s recent study comparing the political and religious phenomena that marked the history of the Southwest from the eighth century to the eighteenth.64 In approaching the past of the Borderlands of the Iberian World, the longue durée perspective reveals the importance of indigenous participation in a history that often left slight documentary indications of their presence, yet significant enough to set the imagination soaring and allow a better appreciation of the astonishing mobility that characterized this territory’s development. Take, for example, the case of two young Tarascan men who walked thousands of kilometers between 1540 and 1543, an odyssey that could as easily be written into the histories of the ancient Mesoamerican North, with its explorers and merchants, as into that of the Spanish conquest in search of riches and dominion. Lucas and Sebastián left Michoacán with the Vázquez de Coronado expedition, and in their capacity as “lay brothers” (donados) they remained in Quivira, Kansas to assist the Franciscan missionary Juan de Padilla.65 They did not stay long. After the death of the martyred friar, they returned with a Portuguese explorer named Campo, tracing with apparent ease a trail that had probably been blazed long before, which brought them to Pánuco. Perhaps they tracked down the route of the merchants from Oxitipa who traded the lush plumage of the Huasteca Potosina to the inhabitants of the distant north, about which Nuño de Guzmán had been informed a decade earlier.66 Those young indigenous lay brothers were fully at home in the space between the two worlds. Before they undertook that journey, would they not have consulted their kinsmen, the Michoacán merchants descended from those who had traveled the roads north a few generations earlier and traded goods in Paquimé and other fabled cities? And when they returned to Michoacán three years later, full of experiences and memories, how many stories might they have told about their trek, the countless peoples they met, their skill in finding their way and establishing communication, and the precious bits of information that had allowed them to resume the links to the traditions of their ancestors who had created the Mesoamerican North. An odyssey in the northern vast expanses buried in the oblivion of a colonized history.

100   Borderlands of the Iberian World

Notes 1. Carlo Bonfiglioli et al., eds., Las vías del noroeste I: una macrorregión indígena americana (Mexico: IIA-UNAM, 2006); Carlo Bonfiglioli et al., eds., Las vías del noroeste II: propuestas para una perspectiva sistémica e interdisciplinaria (Mexico: IIA-UNAM, 2008); Carlo Bonfiglioli et al., coords., Las vías del noroeste III: genealogías, transversalidades y convergencias (Mexico: IIA-UNAM, IIE-UNAM, 2011); Marie-Areti Hers et al., eds., Nómadas y sedentarios en el norte de México. Homenaje a Beatriz Braniff (Mexico: IIA-UNAM, IIEUNAM, IIH- UNAM, 2000). For a regional synthesis focused on the prehispanic period, see Beatriz Braniff, coord., La Gran Chichimeca: el lugar de las rocas secas (Mexico and Milan: CONACULTA, 2001). These studies have drawn on diverse concepts of the border and borderlands, adapting them in each case to the historical circumstances peculiar to the North while avoiding illusory territorial divisions and notions of fixed ethnic groups. 2. Paul Kirchhoff, “Mesoamérica,” in Una definición de Mesoamérica, ed. Jorge A. Vivó et al. (Mexico: IIA-UNAM, 1992), 28–45. 3. See Guillaume Boccara, “Antropología política en los márgenes del Nuevo Mundo. Categorías coloniales, tipologías antropológicas y producción de la diferencia,” in Fronteras movedizas. Clasificaciones coloniales y dinámicas socioculturales en las fronteras americanas, ed. Christophe Giudicelli, 103–129 (Mexico: CEMCA, El Colegio de Michoacán, 2010), 104–105. 4. Walter Mignolo, La idea de América Latina: La herida colonial y la opción decolonial (Barcelona: Gedisa, 2007), 24; Serge Gruzinski, La guerre des images: de Cristobal Colón à ‘Blade Runner’ (1492–2019) (Paris: Librairie Arthème Fayard, 1990). 5. Danna A. Levin Rojo, Return to Aztlan: Indians, Spaniards, and the Invention of Nuevo México (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2014), 7, 60–88. 6. Braniff et al., La Gran Chichimeca. 7. In contrast to findings in the archaeology of southwestern United States, the factors underlying both the expansions and the contractions of northern Mesoamerica have not been satisfactorily determined. Though the results of several paleoenvironmental studies are now available in print, significant climate changes have not yet been detected in the fauna and flora. This does not necessarily mean that such changes had no influence on the human scale. See Fernando Berrojalbiz, Paisajes y fronteras del Durango prehispánico (Mexico: IIA-UNAM, IIE-UNAM, 2012), 47. 8. Federico Navarrete Linares, Los orígenes de los pueblos indígenas del valle de México: Los altépetl y sus historias (Mexico: IIH-UNAM, 2011), 93–170. 9. Paul Kirchhoff, Lina Odena Güemes, and Luis Reyes García, Historia Tolteca-Chichimeca (Mexico: Centro de Investigaciones Superiores-INAH, SEP, 1976); Luis Reyes García, Cuauhtinchan del siglo XII al XVI. Formación y desarrollo histórico de un señorío prehispánco (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica, CIESAS, Estado de Puebla, 1988); and David Carrasco and Scott Sessions, eds., Cave, City and Eagle’s Nest: An Interpretative Journey Through the Mapa de Cuauhtinchan No.2 (Albuquerque: UNM, 2007). 10. Fray Bernardino de Sahagún, Historia general de las cosas de Nueva España (Mexico: Porrúa, 1969), book 10, chapter 29, 207–214. 11. Daniel Valencia Cruz and Alicia Bocanegra Islas, El Cerrito: Santuario prehispánico de Querétaro (Mexico: Poder Ejecutivo del Estado de Querétaro, Dirección General de Archivos, 2013).

Fluctuating Frontiers in Mesoamerica   101 12. For example, in the sixteenth century, Baltasar de Obregón on the expedition of Francisco de Ibarra or Gaspar de Villagrá on Juan de Oñate’s expedition to Nuevo México; the Franciscans Juan de Torquemada and Antonio Tello in the seventeenth century, and Jesuits such as Francisco Javier Clavijero in the eighteenth. See Levin Rojo, Return to Aztlan, 49, 78. In the historical review that accompanies his archaeological study of El Zape site in northern Durango, Donald Brand—based on P.  Ramírez’ testimony (1604)—recognizes the relevance of Jesuit historians like Andrés Pérez de Ribas and Francisco Javier Alegre’s judgment in distinguishing the material culture and way of life of the peoples they missionized from the material remains of an occupation that, today, archaeologists would call Mesoamerican, which the Jesuits attributed to the ancient Mexica migrations. See Donald D. Brand, “Notes on the Geography and Archaeology of Zape, Durango,” in So Live the Works of Men: Seventieth Anniversary Volume Honoring Edgar Lee Hewitt, ed. Donald D. Brand and Fred E. Harvey (Albuquerque: UNM, 1939), 75–106. 13. For example, Christian Duverger, L’origine des aztèques (Paris: Seuil, Recherches Anthropologiques, 1983) and the studies collected in Carrasco and Sessions, ed., Cave, City and Eagle’s Nest. 14. Navarrete Linares, Los orígenes. 15. For example, Alfredo López Austin, “El texto sahaguntino sobre los mexicas,” Anales de Antropología XXII (1985): 327–333. 16. For an overview see Braniff, La Gran Chichimeca. There are a number of archaeological sites featuring monumental architecture representative of this cultural variety and of the palpable Mesoamerican presence in the North, such as Las Ranas and Toluquilla in the Sierra Gorda of Querétaro; Cerrito, near the city of Querétaro; Peralta, Plazuela, Cañada de la Virgen, and El Cóporo, in Guanajuato; Zaragoza in Michoacán; and El Ocote in Aguascalientes, among several others currently open to the public. 17. Joseph  B.  Mountjoy, “La cultura indígena en la costa de Jalisco,” in Introducción a la arqueología del Occidente de México, ed. Beatriz Braniff, 339–370 (Mexico: Universidad de Colima, CONACULTA, INAH, 2004), 361–363; Gabriela Zepeda, “Nayarit prehispánico,” in Introducción a la arqueología del Occidente de México, ed. Beatriz Braniff, 371–396 (Mexico: Universidad de Colima, CONACULTA-INAH, 2004), 380–382; Marie-Areti Hers, “La zona noroccidental en el Clásico,” in Historia Antigua de México, vol. 2, ed. Linda Manzanilla and Leonardo López Luján, 241–259 (Mexico: INAH, UNAM, Porrúa, 1994), 286–293, and “Aztatlán y los lazos con el centro de México,” in Miradas renovadas al Occidente indígena de México, ed. Marie-Areti Hers (Mexico: IIE-UNAM, INAH, CONACULTA, 2013), 273–342. 18. José Luis Punzo, “Diez siglos de habitación de grupos de tradición mesoamericana en la Sierra Madre de Durango,” in Historia de Durango, t. I: Época antigua, ed. José Luis Punzo and Marie-Areti Hers, 334–357 (Durango: IIH-UJED, 2014), 347–353. 19. The Chalchihuites valley sites were apparently already in ruins when the Tepehuanes arrived; the latter reutilized the objects and the spaces their predecessors left behind. Berrojalbiz, Paisajes y fronteras, 243–263. 20. Patricia Plunket and Gabriela Uruñuela, “Social and Cultural Consequences of a Late Holocene Eruption of Popocatepetl in Central Mexico,” Quaternary International 151, no. 1 (2006): 19–28 and “Antecedentes conceptuales de los conjuntos de tres templos,” in Ideología y política a través de materiales, imágenes y símbolos. Memoria de la Primera

102   Borderlands of the Iberian World Mesa Redonda de Teotihuacán, ed. María Elena Ruiz Gallut (Mexico: IIA-UNAM, ­IIE-UNAM, IIH-UNAM, 2002), 529–546. 21. Phil C. Weigand and Acelia García de Weigand, “Dinámica socioeconómica de la frontera prehispánica de Mesoamérica,” in Hers et al., eds., Nómadas y sedentarios en el norte de México, 113–124. 22. Linda Manzanilla, “Teopancazco: un conjunto residencial teotihuacano,” Arqueología Mexicana XI, 64 (2003): 50–53; Leonardo López Luján, Laura Filloy, Barbara Fash, William Fash, and Pilar Hernández, “The Destruction of Images in Teotihuacan: Anthropomorphic Sculpture, Elite, Cults, and the End of a Civilization,” Res 49/50 (2006): 12–39. 23. Ben A. Nelson, “Aggregation, Warfare, and the Spread of the Mesoamerican Tradition,” in The Archaeology of Regional Interaction: Religion, Warfare, and Exchange Across the American Southwest and Beyond, ed. Michelle Hegmon, 317–337 (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2000), 321; Patricia Carot and Marie-Areti Hers, “La Mesoamérica septentrional y el saber astronómico teotihuacano,” in El legado astronómico, ed. Daniel Flores Gutiérrez, Margarita Rosado Solís, and José Franco López (Mexico: IA-UNAM, 2011), 183–196; Carot and Hers “Imágenes de la serpiente a lo largo del antiguo camino de Tierra Adentro,” in Bonfiglioli et al., coords., Las vías del noroeste III, 139–179. 24. Patricia Carot, Le site de Loma Alta, Lac de Zacapu, Michoacan, Mexique (Oxford: Archaeopress, 2001) and “La larga historia purépecha,” in Miradas renovadas al Occidente indígena de México, ed. Marie-Areti Hers (Mexico: IIE-UNAM, INAH, CONACULTA, 2014), 133–214. 25. Punzo and Hers, ed., Historia de Durango t. I: Época Antigua, 168–427. 26. A route to the Northwest dating to this crucial period has been recognized, signaled by a series of unique geometrical rock carvings that have been termed “astronomical markers.” The same astronomical knowledge is reflected in this people’s evident concern to make their settlements’ architecture reflect the relationship between men and the stars. See Daniel Flores and Marie-Areti Hers, “Bajo el signo del astro solar: migración, astronomía y arte rupestre,” Revista Digital Universitaria 14, no. 6 (2013): art. 10, accessed 5 January 2016, http://www.revista.unam.mx/vol.14/num6/art10/. 27. Marie-Areti Hers, Los toltecas en tierras chichimecas (Mexico: IIE-UNAM, 1989); Beatriz Braniff and Marie-Areti Hers, “Herencias chichimecas,” Arqueología 19, 2nd series (1998): 55–80; Patricia Carot and Marie-Areti Hers, “The Toltec Chichimec and Purepecha Epic in the Ancient Southwest,” in Archaeology Without Borders: Contact, Commerce, and Change in the U.S. Southwest and Northwestern Mexico, ed. Laurie Webster D. and Maxine McBrinn (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, CONACULTA, INAH, 2008), 292–334. 28. Although Alfredo López Austin and Leonardo López Luján, “Los mexicas en Tula y Tula en México-Tenochtitlán,” Estudios de Cultura Náhuatl 38 (2007): 33–84 amply document the way in which the Mexicas copied and reutilized Toltec art, they consider that Mexica claims to a Toltec past were an act of legitimization without any historical basis and do not specify what, then, was the Mexica past. 29. Hers, “Aztatlán,” 308–310; Navarrete, Los orígenes, 93–138. 30. Carot, “La larga historia,” 182–184. 31. Among the abundant literature on the archaeology of the American Southwest, see Stephen H. Lekson, A History of the Ancient Southwest (Santa Fe: SAR, 2008), 83. 32. Ben Nelson and Destiny Crider, “Posibles pasajes migratorios en el norte de México y el Suroeste de los Estados Unidos durante el Epiclásico,” in Reacomodos demográficos del Clásico al Posclásico en el centro de México, ed. Linda Manzanilla (Mexico: IIA-UNAM,

Fluctuating Frontiers in Mesoamerica   103 2005), 75–102; Patricia Carot, “Reacomodos demográficos del Clásico al Posclásico en Michoacán: el retorno de los que se fueron,” in Manzanilla ed., Reacomodos demográficos del Clásico al Posclásico, 103–122; Marie-Areti Hers, “Imágenes norteñas de los guerreros tolteca-chichimecas,” in Manzanilla, ed. Reacomodos demográficos del Clásico al Posclásico, 11–44; Carot, Le site de Loma Alta. 33. Karl Taube, “The Iconography of Mirrors at Teotihuacan,” in Art, Ideology, and the City of Teotihuacan: A Symposium at Dumbarton Oaks, ed. Janet Catherine Berlo (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library, 1992), 169–204. 34. Marie-Areti Hers, “La Sierra Madre Occidental y el sendero del tolteca-chichimeca y del uacúsecha,” in Miradas renovadas al Occidente indígena de México, ed. Marie-Areti Hers (Mexico: IIE-UNAM, INAH, CONCULTA, 2013), 253–272. 35. Carl Lumholtz, Unknown Mexico. Explorations and Adventures among the Tarahumare, Tepehuane, Cora, Huichol, Tarasco and Aztec Indians, vol. II (Glorieta: The Rio Grande Press, 1973 [1902]), 367–370, with a photograph of a “Tarasco Peddler;” Lekson, A History, 117, figs. 3–5. 36. Marie-Areti Hers, “La música amorosa de Kokopelli y el erotismo sagrado en los confines mesoamericanos,” in Amor y desamor en las Artes. XXIII Coloquio Internacional de Historia del Arte, ed. Arnulfo Herrera (Mexico: IIE-UNAM, 2001), 293–336. 37. Hers, “La música amorosa de Kokopelli,” 293–336. 38. Patricia Carot and Marie-Areti Hers, “De Teotihuacan al cañón de Chaco: Nueva perspectiva sobre las relaciones entre Mesoamérica y el suroeste de los Estados Unidos,” Anales del Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas XXXIII, 98 (2011): 5–54. 39. Polly Schaafsma and Karl Taube, “Bringing the Rain: An Ideology of Rain Making in the Pueblo Southwest and Mesoamerica,” in A Pre-Columbian World, ed. Jeffrey Quilter and Mary Miller (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 2006), 23–285. 40. Jill E. Neitzel, “The Organization, Function and Population of Pueblo Bonito,” in Pueblo Bonito: Center of the Chacoan World, ed. Jill E. Neitzel (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books, 2003), 143–150. 41. Lekson, A History, 302, note 198. 42. Barbara Moulard, “Archaism and Emulation in Casas Grandes Painted Pottery,” in Casas Grandes and the Ceramic Art of the Ancient Southwest, ed. Richard Townsend, 67–97 (Chicago: The Art Institute of Chicago, Yale University Press, 2006), 72–95. For a recent review of the archaeology of Paquimé see Paul E. Minnis and Michael E. Wahlen, eds., Ancient Paquimé and the Casas Grandes World (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2015). 43. Lekson, A History, 173–177. 44. Charles C. Di Peso, Casas Grandes. A Fallen Trading Center of the Gran Chichimeca, vol. 2 (Flagstaff: The Amerind Foundation Inc., Dragoon, Northland Press, 1974). 45. Françoise Fauconnier and Paulina Faba Zuleta, “Las adjuntas: arte rupestre chalchihuiteño y cosmovisión huichola,” in Bonfiglioli et al., eds., Las vías del noroeste II, 475–536; Ángel Aedo, “Imágenes de la sexualidad y potencias de la naturaleza. El caso de las esculturas fálicas chalchihuiteñas de Molino, Durango,” Anales del Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas XXV, 82 (2003): 47–71. 46. Tepiman is one of the eleven subdivisions in the Uto-Aztecan language family, composed of two basic branches: Northern Uto-Aztecan and Southern Uto-Aztecan. The southern group includes the Opata, Tarahumaran, Cahitan, Tubar, Corachol, Tepiman, and Aztecan

104   Borderlands of the Iberian World subdivisions. Some linguists argue that Aztecan, either by itself or together with Corachol, forms one subgroup, and the other divisions form another, within Southern Uto-Aztecan. One of the best-documented linguistic events that can be approximately dated is the recent split of the Tepiman branch into separate languages, two or three centuries before the conquest. In contrast, the separation of the various subdivisions of Southern UtoAztecan into, especially, the Nahua languages, is thought to have occurred in the much more distant past. Leopoldo Valiñas, “Lo que la lingüística yutoazteca podría aportar en la reconstrucción histórica del norte de México,” in Hers et al., eds., Nómadas y sedentarios en el norte de México, 203. In the absence of more concrete data, it is assumed that the Mesoamerican Chalchihuites groups were formed by speakers of languages of the UtoAztecan and other language families: Nahuatl, Cora, Huichol, Purépecha, and others like Acaxee and Xixime that have since disappeared. 47. Robert  A.  Hackenberg, “Pima and Papago Social Organization,” in Handbook of North American Indians, vol. 10, ed. W.C. Sturtevant, 536–558 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1983), 163. 48. See Amy Turner Bushnell, “Patterns of Food Security in the Prehispanic Americas,” in The Oxford Handbook of Borderlands of the Iberian World, ed. Danna  A.  Levin Rojo and Cynthia Radding (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 31–55. 49. Paul H. Ezell, “History of the Pima,” in Handbook of North American Indians, vol. 10, ed. W.C. Sturtevant, 524–536 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1983), 149; A. Aguilar Zeleny, “Los símbolos del desierto. Territorialidad y sitios sagrados entre los O´odham (pimas y pápagos),” in Diálogos con el territorio. Simbolizaciones sobre el espacio en las culturas indígenas de México, vol. 3, ed. Alicia Barabás, 150–172 (Mexico: INAH, 2003) Colección Etnográfica de los Pueblos Indígenas de México, 150; Cynthia Radding, Landscapes of Power and Identity: Comparative Histories in the Sonoran Desert and the Forests of Amazonia from Colony to Republic (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 55–88; Gary P. Nabhan, The Desert Smells Like Rain: A Naturalist in Papago Indian Country (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1982); David Burckhalter, Gary P. Nabhan, and Thomas Sheridan, La Vida Norteña: Photographs of Sonora, Mexico (Albuquerque: UNM, 1998), 33–39; Bernard  L.  Fontana, A Guide to Contemporary Southwest Indians (Tucson: Southwest Parks and Monuments Association, 1999). 50. J.  Charles Kelley, “Archaeology of the Northern Frontier: Zacatecas and Durango,” in Handbook of Middle American Indians, vol. 11, part  2, ed. Robert Wauchope, 768–801 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1971), 798–801; Carrol L. Riley and Howard D. Winters, “The Prehistoric Tepehuan of Northern Mexico,” Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 19 (1963): 177–185. 51. Marie-Areti Hers, “¿Existió la cultura Loma San Gabriel? El caso de Cerro Hervideros, Durango,” Anales del Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas 60 (1989): 55–57; Berrojalbiz, Paisajes y fronteras, 180. 52. Brand, “Notes,” 92. 53. Fernando Berrojalbiz, “El origen norteño de los tepehuanes: elementos arqueológicos sobre la antigua relación tepima,” in Bonfiglioli et al., eds., Las vías del noroeste I, 110–112; Berrojalbiz, Paisajes y fronteras, 263–269. 54. Chantal Cramaussel, “De cómo los españoles clasificaban a los indios. Naciones y encomiendas en la Nueva Vizcaya Central,” in Hers et al., eds., Nómadas y sedentarios en el norte de México, 248. 55. Berrojalbiz, Paisajes y fronteras, 271–282.

Fluctuating Frontiers in Mesoamerica   105 56. Giudicelli, Pour une géopolitique de la guerre des tepehuán (1616–1619) (Paris: CRAECUniversité de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2003). Travaux et Documents no. 4, 169–173. 57. Gaspar de Alvear y Salazar, “Relación breve y sucinta de los sucesos que ha tenido la guerra de los Tepehuanes de la gobernación de la Nueva Vizcaya desde el 15 de noviembre de 1616 hasta el 16 de mayo de 1618,” in Historical Documents Relating to New Mexico, Nueva Vizcaya, and Approaches Thereto, to 1773, t. II, ed. Charles Wilson Hackett (Washington, DC: Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1926), 100–113. 58. Valiñas, “Lo que la lingüística yutoazteca podría aportar,” 203. 59. Charles Di Peso, “Prehistory: O’otam,” in Handbook of North American Indians, vol. 9: Southwest, ed. Alfonso Ortiz (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1979), 152–161; Cameron  J.  Greenleaf, Excavations at Punta de Agua in the Santa Cruz River Basin, Southeastern Arizona (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1975), Anthropological Papers of the University of Arizona 26; David L. Shaul, “Comparative Tepiman Mythology and Beyond,” in Bonfiglioli et al., coords., Las vías del noroeste III, 411; Suzanne  K.  Fish, Paul R. Fish, and M. Elisa Villalpando, Trincheras Sites in Time, Space, and Society (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2008); Deni Seymour, Where the Earth and Sky Are Sewn Together: Sobaipuri-O’odham Contexts of Contact and Colonialism (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2011). 60. David  L.  Shaul and Jane Hill, “Tepimans, Yumans, and Other Hohokam,” American Antiquity 63, no. 3 (1998): 375–396. 61. Berrojalbiz, Paisajes y fronteras, 260–263. 62. Robert  J.  Hard and John  R.  Roney, “Cerros de trincheras y el cultivo del maíz en el Noroeste de Chihuahua,” in Bonfiglioli et al., eds., Las vías del noroeste I, 113–132. 63. Aleš Hrdlička, “The Region of the Ancient ‘Chichimecs’ with a Note on the Tepecanos and the Ruin of La Quemada, México,” American Anthropologist 5, no. 3 (1903): 385–440. 64. James F. Brooks, “Women, Men, and Cycles of Evangelism in the Southwest Borderlands, A.D. 750 to 1750,” American Historical Review 118, no. 3 (2013): 738–764. 65. The chronicler of the Coronado expedition, Pedro de Castañeda Nájera, “Relación de la jornada de Cíbola,” in Las siete ciudades de Cíbola. Textos y testimonios sobre la expedición de Vázquez de Coronado, ed. Carmen de Mora, 57–164 (Seville: Ediciones Alfar, 1992), 129, reports only the name of the “Portuguese Spaniard” Andrés del Campo, leaving the men from Michoacán nameless. Nevertheless, historian Matías de la Mota y Padilla provides their names, noting that they were lay brothers: Historia del reino de Nueva Galicia en la América septentrional (Guadalajara: UdG, Instituto Jalisciense de Antropología e Historia, 1973), 168. 66. Levin Rojo, Return to Aztlan, 67.

Bibliography Berrojalbiz, Fernando. Paisajes y fronteras del Durango prehispánico. Mexico: IIA-UNAM, IIE-UNAM, 2012. Bonfiglioli, Carlo, Arturo Gutiérrez, and María Eugenia Olavarría, eds. Las vías del noroeste 1: una macrorregión indígena americana. Mexico: IIA-UNAM, 2006. Bonfiglioli, Carlo, Arturo Gutiérrez, Marie-Areti Hers, and María Eugenia Olavarría, eds. Las vías del noroeste II: propuestas para una perspectiva sistémica e interdisciplinaria. Mexico: IIA-UNAM, 2008.

106   Borderlands of the Iberian World Bonfiglioli, Carlo, Arturo Gutiérrez, Marie-Areti Hers, and Danna Levin, coords. Las vías del noroeste III: genealogías, transversalidades y convergencias. Mexico: IIA-UNAM, IIE-UNAM, 2011. Brand, Donald D. “Notes on the Geography and Archaeology of Zape, Durango.” In So Live the Works of Men; Seventieth Anniversary Volume Honoring Edgar Lee Hewitt, edited by Donald D. Brand and Fred E. Harvey, 75–106. Albuquerque: UNM, 1939. Braniff, Beatriz, coord. La Gran Chichimeca: el lugar de las rocas secas. Mexico and Milan: Jaca Books, INAH, CONACULTA, 2001. Carot, Patricia. Le site de Loma Alta, Lac de Zacapu, Michoacan, Mexique. Oxford: Archaeopress, 2001. Monograph in American Archaeology 9, BAR International Series 920. Carot, Patricia. “La larga historia purépecha.” In Miradas renovadas al Occidente indígena de México, edited by Marie-Areti Hers, 133–214. Mexico: IIE-UNAM, INAH- CONACULTA, 2014. Carrasco, David, and Scott Sessions, eds. Cave, City and Eagle’s Nest: An Interpretative Journey through the Mapa de Cuauhtinchán No.2. Albuquerque: UNM, 2007. Hers, Marie-Areti. “La música amorosa de Kokopelli y el erotismo sagrado en los confines mesoamericanos.” In Amor y desamor en las Artes. XXIII Coloquio Internacional de Historia del Arte, edited by Arnulfo Herrera, 293–336. Mexico: IIE-UNAM, 2001. Hers, Marie-Areti. “Aztatlán y los lazos con el centro de México.” In Miradas renovadas al Occidente indígena de México, edited by Marie-Areti Hers, 273–342. Mexico: IIE-UNAM, INAH-CONACULTA, 2013. Hers, Marie-Areti, José Luis Mirafuentes, María de los Dolores Soto, and Miguel Vallebueno, eds. Nómadas y sedentarios en el norte de México. Homenaje a Beatriz Braniff. Mexico: IIA-UNAM, IIE-UNAM, IIH-UNAM, 2000. Lekson, Stephen H. A History of the Ancient Southwest. Santa Fe: SAR, 2008. Levin Rojo, Danna A. Return to Aztlan: Indians, Spaniards, and the Invention of Nuevo México. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2014. Manzanilla, Linda, ed. Reacomodos demográficos del Clásico al Posclásico en el centro de México. Mexico: IIA-UNAM, 2005. Navarrete Linares, Federico. Los orígenes de los pueblos indígenas del valle de México: los altépetl y sus historias. Mexico: IIH-UNAM, 2011. Punzo, José Luis, and Marie-Areti Hers, ed. Historia de Durango, t. I: Época antigua. Durango: IIH-UJED, 2014. Valiñas Coalla, Leopoldo. “Lo que la lingüística yutoazteca podría aportar en la reconstrucción histórica del norte de México.” In Nómadas y sedentarios en el norte de México. Homenaje a Beatriz Braniff, edited by Marie-Areti Hers, María de los Dolores Soto, José Luis Mirafuentes, and Miguel Vallebueno, 175–206. Mexico: IIA-UNAM, IIE-UNAM, IIH-UNAM, 2000.

chapter 4

Popu l ation a n d Epidemics North of  Z acatecas Chantal Cramaussel Translated by Guillermina Olmedo y Vera

There is no denying the role of epidemics in the brutal decrease in numbers among indigenous populations in the central region of New Spain during the sixteenth century, nor the fundamental role played by those calamities during the conquest of the new continent. The studies by Cook and Borah exposing this catastrophe triggered the research on historical demography in the 1970s in Mexico.1 Other authors resorted not only to tax records but also to sacramental registers kept in parochial archives to observe the evolution of populations throughout the colonial period.2 The historical demography for northern New Spain was nevertheless neglected in favor of research done on settlements located more to the south and more abundantly documented. This would change in the last decade of the twentieth century, with the work done on the northern region of New Spain based upon mission records and parochial archives, which had not yet been exploited sufficiently by historians. The principal studies pertaining to the immense region north of Nueva Galicia have changed the lines of interpretation for population history. Several authors have taken the time to track records and gather all references to the occurrence of contagious diseases found in documents.3 It is, however, extremely difficult to evaluate their impact during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries due to a lack of quantitative sources. On the other hand, today it is possible to learn about the spread of disease in northern New Spain during the eighteenth century through the analysis of parochial archives. The majority of epidemic devastations covered the whole northerly region, while affecting differently the distinct areas within it. Concern regarding epidemics in modern society has grown, fed by the cholera outbreak that spread throughout Peru in 1991, the bird flu epidemic between 2004 and 2006

108   Borderlands of the Iberian World in Asia and Europe, and the H1N1 swine flu epidemic of 2009 in North America. The possible consequences of these disease outbreaks in the past cannot be compared to what happens in the present; while in the eighteenth century they would wipe out one third—or even half—of the population, today these numbers could only be brought about by a natural disaster or a lethal war. The main objective of this study is to present a chronology of those great epidemics that disrupted the structure of populations in settlements located to the north of Zacatecas, and to draw attention to their gravity without pretending to arrive at precise estimations of their demographic impact in each case. By abruptly shrinking the population in the region, the catastrophes provoked by epidemics left deep wounds in society; in many cases they accelerated the extinction of several groups of Indians, as occurred during the second half of the eighteenth century. By the time Mexico became an independent country, only a few of the Indian groups remained with a substantial population.

Historiographical Overview and Applied Methodology The first surge of demographic research for northern New Spain had its origin mostly in  the United States—when the Mexican North was included as part of the “Great Southwest” while in Mexico only a handful of scholars were specializing in the history of the “North.” The earliest studies were done in Baja California and focused on epidemics.4 Susan Deeds in 1981 was the first researcher to draw attention to the demography of the missions in the North Central region. Michael Swann, in 1982, analyzed the mobility of populations based on the marriage certificates issued in Nueva Vizcaya during the second half of the eighteenth century.5 That same year, Peter Gerhard, an Englishman by birth who first published his work in the United States, presented general descriptions of the development of populations in the north of New Spain throughout the colonial period.6 The population loss suffered in the region was studied in more detail by Daniel Reff in 1991, who based his research on the documentation found in Jesuit missions of the Northeast and Central North, from 1510 to 1764.7 In the 1980s and 1990s the articles by David Robinson on Parral, and by Robert McCaa on this same mining area in the eighteenth century, were published.8 They deal with mobility, fertility, and marriage customs within the populations studied. The latter two authors give general numbers and construct statistics without acknowledging the Indian population in the mining center under the administration of Franciscan friars, whose archives were not preserved. The missions in northwestern New Spain have garnered any special attention. Beginning in 1981, Robert Jackson has studied the decline of population among the Indians of the region comprising Pimería Alta in Sonora and Alta California; the author used Populate, a program to examine the evolution of a population based on modern

Population and Epidemics North of Zacatecas   109 statistics.9 In 1991 Daniel Reff published his book on missions located in the same area. Cynthia Radding, who centered her studies in 1997 on the province of Sonora between 1770 and 1850, qualified Jackson’s statements by arguing that the population of the missions was not sedentary and, therefore, it is impossible to pin its decline on the mission way of life or on demographic crises.10 In more recent times, based upon censuses, Refugio de la Torre, in 2012, provided complementary information on the same region.11 In their brief study of 1997, Levine and LaBauve analyze the fragmentary records of the Pecos mission in New Mexico, between 1694 and 1840, which Kessel had made known in 1979.12 Susan Deeds in 2003 took the information gathered by Daniel Reff a decade earlier and added several more sources in an attempt to systematize all available data on missions involving the Acaxee, Xixime, Tarahumara, and Tepehuan indigenous peoples.13 For the Northeast there are some separate population data found in studies published by José Cuello in 1990 on Saltillo, later buy Cecilia Sheridan on Coahuila, and recently by Gabriel Martínez Serna on Parras.14 However, these authors do not go deeply into demographic analyses. With the exceptions of Jackson and of Levine and LaBauve, the abovementioned authors do not center their work on epidemics nor do they turn to parochial archives to study them systematically. In Mexico, research on the demography of northern New Spain has been carried out by historians who specialize on a given area and try to understand the way society works based upon the evolution of its population. Most of them are part of the Red de Historia Demográfica con Sede en México, founded in 2009 at the Colegio de Michoacán, and whose members combine demography with social history.15 Among pioneer studies based upon parochial archives in the North is José Marcos Medina’s work on Hermosillo (1788–1837), published in 1997, and that of Mario Alberto Magaña, published the following year on the Santo Domingo de la Frontera mission.16 Luis Carlos Quiñones undertook the historical demography of Nombre de Dios and the south of Nueva Vizcaya during the seventeenth century.17 Miguel Vallebueno carried out the first gathering of data from sacramental records for Durango in his book on the growth of that city, which oversaw Antonio Arreola’s MA dissertation on epidemics during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Durango.18 In 2006, Chantal Cramaussel’s study on the colonial settlement of Parral in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries came out, followed by the publication of partial results of a more focused demographic perspective on the villa of San Felipe El Real in Chihuahua as well as other colonial settlements of northern New Spain.19 In 2011, Mario Alberto Magaña’s research contributed in important ways to historical demography in Baja California, as did Tomás Dimas Arenas Hernandez’s study for Sombrerete in 2013, and Raúl García Flores’ research for Linares, in the southern part of Nuevo León.20 All of these authors show that epidemics play a fundamental role in the development of a population and that it is possible to study them based upon parochial records. Patricia Osante’s recently published census records, when combined with ecclesiastical records, will allow for a better understanding of the evolution of the colonial population of Nuevo Santander.21 In face of the importance of population crises in the past, and particularly of the impact of epidemics, it is surprising that there should be so few demographic studies.

110   Borderlands of the Iberian World Both the difficulty in accessing sources and the lack of interest among historians for quantitative history may explain this tardiness. At present, the posting online of parochial records by the Church of Latter Days as well as the computerized management of databases, have made quantitative research easier for scholars to undertake. In the North, where with the exception of New Mexico tribute was paid with labor, there were no periodic tax rolls as exist for central New Spain to assist in observing the evolution of indigenous populations.22 Parochial records are the best source for studying epidemics, and other documents, as those found in mission registries, can be used as complementary sources. All in all, documentation on epidemics is not abundant. In those days people were used to witnessing recurrent bouts of elevated mortality rates, consequently epidemic outbreaks were not particularly noteworthy. Smallpox, which eradicated a good portion of the infant population every ten or fifteen years, struck the European population just as badly, as did typhus. Both were seen as part of the natural catastrophes that humans had always endured. This is why it is easier to find information on rebellions and peace campaigns undertaken by colonial subjects than on deadly diseases whose origins were unknown and, thus, were attributed to the wrath of God. Until the seventeenth century epidemics were seen as divine punishments, in which humans could not and should not intervene. This is the reason that many physicians still opposed the introduction of the smallpox vaccine at the beginning of the nineteenth century, pronouncing this measure as ungodly and contemptuous of the divine will.23 But the mentality would change little by little, and the Juntas de Sanidad (health boards) introduced by the constitution of Cadiz were institutionalized in the following decades throughout the territory of New Spain, where they tried to spread the use of this vaccine. It was from the moment civil authorities took charge of the prevention and care of the sick that the outbreaks of epidemics began to generate a significant number of information sources. But this would be a long process culminating only in the twentieth century with the advent of health-care institutions. In the seventeenth century, it was still the church and its saints who were in charge of interceding before God to stop the outbreaks of disease. It was thought to be a matter of appealing to the Divine to show compassion toward sinners and wait for His punishment to pass. The government was limited to collecting handouts for the needy, not always for the sake of charity but because their health was indispensable for maintaining the colony’s workforce. It was also thought that because of their bad conduct, the lower strata of society was more prone to falling ill. Because the poor represented a source of infection and contagion it was necessary to avoid the spread of epidemics among them to protect the rest of the population. Prayer, processions, and penitence were the only socially accepted remedies, despite the fact that they only contributed to make matters worse.24 The large gatherings of people in those public manifestations promoted the spread of epidemics. However, this phenomenon was ignored for a long time. When burials in churches were banned, it was because the miasmic theory of poisonous vapors was the best explanation for the origin of disease outbreaks, attributed at that time to foul stenches and putrefaction in general. This was the reason for opening cemeteries

Population and Epidemics North of Zacatecas   111 in the outskirts of towns during epidemics, although it was uncommon to declare quarantines or cordons sanitaires, which were seen as harmful for trade and useless inasmuch as it was believed that infections were airborne transmissions. The solution consisted in airing the place where the sick were to get rid of stagnant air; the aim was to propagate nice smells and thus “clean the air” to expel epidemic scourges. Little is known about the reactions of indigenous communities in face of the mortal arrival of epidemics. It seems that they were varied. According to missionaries, many Indians asked to be baptized in order to gain access to a better life, in view of their shamans’ impotence in treating the new ailments. But there are also documents suggesting that some Indians laid blame on the Spaniards for disseminating these diseases, as it was obvious that before the Spanish conquest native populations did not sicken for the same reasons. Fleeing colonial settlements was also an option for those who wanted to escape death. And while a lot saved their lives, their flight contributed to the spread of epidemics in areas considered as refuges by their native populations.25 Historians can detect the presence of an epidemic when the number of burials recorded in parochial archives increases abruptly, exceeding christenings, only to decrease after a few months, making it imperative to count the lists of burials month by month. The natural growth (resulting from subtracting burials from christenings) is negative during the disease episode.26 Christenings showed a tendency to escalate during the following years, due partly to the rise in second marriages among those who had lost their spouses. During epidemics there is a decline in conception, estimated by subtracting nine months to the dates of christenings. When figures are available for the total number of inhabitants, the relative incidence of epidemics may be assessed by calculating the gross mortality rate (number of deceased per thousand inhabitants). There are, in addition, two formulas for calculating the intensity of crises of heightened mortality and comparing them to each other; one is Jacques Dupâquier’s and the other Del Panta-Livi Bacci’s.27 Both are based upon burial registers; however, the methodological problem they present is that they include in their calculations numbers pertaining to records from several years before and after the epidemic crises. Both are also difficult to implement when the increased numbers of interments happen too close to one another in time. Furthermore, their calculations are based upon the civic calendar, so the importance of outbreaks starting at the end of one year and finishing at the beginning of the next is minimized. Once the super-mortality periods corresponding to massive and unexpected deaths are detected, it is possible to follow the routes of the spread of large epidemics, in view of the fact that before the nineteenth century disease outbreaks circumscribed to a few places were exceptional. This phenomenon may be explained by the lack of preventative measures against epidemics and by the higher susceptibility of indigenous populations, which were slowly building defenses against diseases coming from the Old World in their genetic material. Those incidental documentary registers of disease episodes that many authors call “qualitative” are useless to evaluate both the frequency and the geographical impact of contagious diseases, as these may spread to other places with an almost insignificant death rate. Because of a lack of homogeneity, censuses are also difficult to compare across

112   Borderlands of the Iberian World time and space even though they have proved helpful in showing the most obvious trend in populations: the decline in indigenous groups and the increase among the rest of the inhabitants of the North. In order to identify and measure the incidence of epidemics more precisely, it is essential to resort to baptismal and burial registers. But it is important to take into account that the priests who wrote down the age of the deceased were the minority, although most would distinguish children from adults, an information that should be incorporated into demographic databases because of its usefulness in identifying the nature of the outbreak, inasmuch as some would affect infants while others attacked adults. Stating the cause of death in parochial records was not systematic before independence, and it is more likely a stroke of luck to find the nature of the diseases identified in documents of another kind. Smallpox, known throughout the colonial period and during the nineteenth century, and cholera (an epidemic first occurring in Mexico in 1833), measles, and matlazahuatl have been the subject of recent essays and books penned by multiple authors.28 But little is known about yellow fever (“black vomit” or “dark vomit”), malaria, pneumonia, influenza, whooping cough, rubella, syphilis, dysentery, and many other epidemic diseases that were not diagnosed as such.29 In fact, the most common cause of death registered in parochial records is “fever,” with no detection of the disease that caused what is now considered a symptom. The words “pest” and cocolitzli (a Nahuatl term to denote an outbreak of disease that causes fever) are also found. During colonial times three different epidemic infections were identified: smallpox, measles, and matlazahuatl. They were all quite deadly in view of the physicians’ ignorance of their origin and their mode of spreading and the fact that there was no cure to stop them. Microbiology, it should be kept in mind, did not develop until the second half of the nineteenth century, and vaccines to protect humanity from viruses that jeopardized their biological reproduction did not exist before 1796; antibiotics were discovered in the twentieth century. Smallpox was undoubtedly the most deadly and recurrent of all epidemic diseases in the historical demography of the early modern period. Up until the last part of the eighteenth century it attacked adults also, especially in populations that had not been affected before. Vaccination through the introduction of an infected scab inside a small cut in healthy people—which was widespread during the War of Independence of the United States (1774–1783)—was not utilized in all of New Spain, and the administration of the vaccine from 1804 was so slow that smallpox outbreaks were registered even during the entirety of the nineteenth century, as seen in the case of Chihuahua.30 Measles was not as frequent as smallpox. But in spite of the difference between the symptoms of smallpox and measles—particularly regarding the skin eruptions of rashes or pustules (exanthema) displayed by the infected—they were confused one for the other, because at the very beginning of the infection, both present similar symptoms. Smallpox and measles became markedly childhood diseases in the nineteenth century; it is therefore difficult to tell them apart based upon burial records. However, it has been shown that measles outbreaks spread more slowly and that they lasted longer. Measles

Population and Epidemics North of Zacatecas   113 was also mistaken for scarlet fever, which started to appear among the causes of death at the beginning of the nineteenth century in New Spain.31 The Spaniards apparently used the Nahuatl term matlazahuatl or “web of spots” to designate an epidemic disease similar to what is known today as exanthematic typhus, which, in its American version, does not present intestinal lesions. The matlazahuatl should not be mistaken for the murine typhus transmitted mainly by the rat flea. This second strain of typhus became endemic in New Spain, where it was considerably less lethal. Both were frequently referred to as tabardillo during the colonial period. This disease mainly hit young adults. Its incidence was therefore more serious and lasting, insofar as by striking suddenly the working population in their reproductive years, it affected the development and productive capacity of society. The spread of typhus was way slower than that of measles or smallpox, and the duration of epidemics could extend for six months or more.

Epidemics in the North of New Spain In the North of Zacatecas, owing to the long distances, the dispersed pattern of settlements, and the low population density, demographic decline due to epidemics was slower and less drastic than that of the central zone of the viceroyalty, where it has been said that the population decreased by 95 percent in less than a century.32 Susan Deeds has pointed out that in areas where there were larger concentrations of people, as was the case among the Acaxee and the Xixime, the decline was more substantial. In the North, there were regions that became deserted.33 The indigenous population seems to have vanished during the seventeenth century on the coasts of Nayarit and the south of Sinaloa on the Pacific, and along the Atlantic coast with the exception of Nuevo Santander, colonized in the second half of the eighteenth century (Figure 4.1). Native inhabitants of northern Sinaloa and of Sonora resisted epidemic outbreaks better than the Indians of the southern provinces. In the seventeenth century it was the turn of the Indians of the central flatlands of Nueva Vizcaya, Nuevo León, and Coahuila—to disappear due to these outbreaks—to which slavery and a progressive biological and cultural mestizaje should be added, as occurred among the Opata from Sonora. Furthermore, already in the nineteenth century, there were some Indian groups, like the Guarojios, which were not acknowledged as such by the State and were therefore not mentioned in documents. Notwithstanding the lacunae in documentary records, the colonizing advance in the North was preceded and accompanied by epidemics, as was the case in all the regions of America. In southern Sinaloa, Antigua (Lower) California, the Atlantic coast, and the Northeast, destruction was total, with the last Indians disappearing in the nineteenth century. Demographic recovery among the surviving indigenous groups began between 1700 and 1730. However, in those regions where the Spanish advance was late to arrive— as in the “La Frontera” region comprising the north of the Baja California peninsula

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Figure 4.1.  Main surviving indigenous groups in northern New Spain by the end of the nineteenth century. Some of the Indian tribes originally inhabiting New Spain were extinguished after the European conquest due to epidemics. Others disappeared due to mestizaje or the lack of official recognition as indigenous groups. Produced by the author.

Population and Epidemics North of Zacatecas   115 and Alta California—the decline went on until the third decade of the nineteenth century. According to Peter Gerhard, in the north of Nueva Galicia there would have been 1,700,000 Indians in 1519 and less than 300,000 by 1821; the indigenous population was reduced to a fifth of its estimated original size. But the same author points out that the evolution of this population is actually unknown, inasmuch as the area was beyond colonial control.34 The numbers given by Gerhard originate mainly in extrapolations based on some global figures offered by Sauer, as well as on other records found by chance in sources, and they have been all taken up by the specialists.35 There are still some doubts, however, about the recovery of the indigenous population, insofar as by the middle of the seventeenth century, on top of a growing mestizaje, there were people from different origins living in the missions surpassing, at times, those of Indian descent, and making it difficult to tell them apart. According to Gerhard, the population acknowledged as non-Indian grew almost ten times between 1650 and 1821 (going from 14,800 to 450,000 inhabitants), and by 1750 had surpassed the number of Indians in the region.36 Daniel Reff confirmed Peter Gerhard’s hypothesis in general, but his estimates of the loss of population among Indians were higher, reaching 80 percent to 95 percent. Reff thinks that the demographic decline prior to the arrival of the Spaniards would have reached 33 percent by this time. The calculations of Cynthia Radding for Sonora are similar to Susan Deeds’s for the Tepehuana, Lower Tarahumara, and Topia, where populations in the missions declined until 1678.37 Deeds showed that in those places where population recovery was observed toward the beginning of the eighteenth century, it was due to the arrival of groups coming from different geographical areas. On the other hand, Reff dates the upsurge of indigenous population to 1730.38 The abovementioned authors all base their estimations on censuses, insofar as the sacramental records preserved from the missions are very fragmentary. The data from the seventeenth century presented below and belonging to the mission of Santa María de las Parras (today Parras, Coahuila) founded by the Jesuits in the last part of the sixteenth century, or San Esteban de Saltillo (a Franciscan mission originally made up of Tlaxcalans) should be taken with some skepticism, as baptized Indians were not necessarily descendants of those individuals initially congregated there.39 Ecclesiastic burial records from the seventeenth century have been preserved in Durango, San Esteban de Saltillo, and Parral, but they show inconsistencies that preclude a deeper analysis. It is possible to document measles and/or smallpox during 1692–1693, but the underreporting of burials is still important. Table 4.1 incorporates the information from scholars specializing in the North who mention epidemics. There is no available information for the far Northeast, but the present analysis considered the data published for San Luis Potosí.40 This table shows that there were repeated outbreaks of disease in each decade, with smallpox as the most recurrent. There are no comments that would identify the nature of epidemic diseases during the second half of the seventeenth century, probably due to the simultaneous presence of several outbreaks. Based upon these minimal, references it appears that epidemics did not spread throughout the whole northern territory.

116   Borderlands of the Iberian World

Table 4.1.  Epidemics Documented for Northern New Spain. Year

North Central

Northwest

San Luis Potosí

1531 1534 1545–1548 1576–1577 1590–1591 1593 1596–1597 1601–1602 1606–1607 1610 1612–1615 1616–1617 1619–1620 1623–1625 1632 1636 1638 1639–1640 1641–1643 1644 1645 1646–1647 1650–1653 1656 1658 1660 1662–1663 1666–1667 1668–1669 1673 1683 1686–1687 1692–1693 1696–1697 1698–1699 1705–1706 1710 1712 1716–1718 1721

— — — Matlazahuatl Smallpox

Pest Measles Matlazahuatl Matlazahuatl Pest Smallpox, Measles

— — — Matlazahuatl Pest —

Smallpox, Measles, tiphus Smallpox, Measles

— — — — —

Smallpox, Measles Smallpox, Measles, ¿tiphus? Viuela, Measles Smallpox Smallpox, Measles Smallpox Cocolitzli Smallpox, tabardillo

Smallpox, tiphus Smallpox, Measles Pest Smallpox, tiphus Smallpox, Pest

— — — Pest

Pest Pest Pest Malaria Pest Pest

Tabardillo Smallpox Pest

Pest Pest Pest Pest

Pest Pest

Pest Cocolitzli

Pest

Smallpox, measles Smallpox

Smallpox, measles, tiphus Smallpox

Smallpox

Smallpox Pest

Smallpox, tabardillo Pest Pest Pest Pest Pest Pest Tabardillo Pest

Sources: for central Nueva Vizcaya: Defiance and Deference, 16; Cramaussel, Poblar la frontera, 158–159; for the Northwest: Reff, Depopulation, 167, Radding, Wandering Peoples, 116–117; for San Luis Potosí: Montoya, San Luis Potosí novohispano.

Population and Epidemics North of Zacatecas   117 Even in the eighteenth century, however, when sacramental records are more reliable, the information available belongs to settlements under colonial control. It is impossible to estimate with accurate data the demographic decline suffered by those Indians who still enjoyed a certain degree of independence. It is believed, notwithstanding, that, the impact of epidemic disease was even greater among them than among the groups who had continual contact with Europeans and had consequently developed better immunological defenses. Indian groups colonized late in time, like the Comanche, suffered severe population losses due to epidemic outbreaks in the nineteenth century.41 All possible calculations for the colonial period are influenced as well by migrations and the displacement of Indian populations toward farms or haciendas and mining areas. Demographic estimates are even more complicated due to the flight of separate indigenous groups to refuge areas owing to the presence of epidemics and, above all, to their efforts to evade forced labor. In the case of colonial settlements, many Indians did not receive the sacraments, as they had not yet been evangelized; consequently burial records do not include all deaths. On the other hand, those who died and were buried as Christians during outbreaks were not necessarily from that same location; rather they had come as adults to work in the haciendas where they passed away. This phenomenon magnifies the crises of heightened mortality suffered in local populations. In view of the fact that the geographical origin of the baptized is not always mentioned, demographic studies to date show the occurrence of migrations but are unable to measure them. The conclusion based upon the numbers found is that population transfers were important. Moving Indians toward Spanish farms was a strategy used by colonizers to insure the supply of labor force. At the beginning workers from central New Spain and from encomiendas and nearby missions were enough. In time the number of Indians from other places would increase.42 It is said that for 1765 there were forty thousand Yaqui Indians spread out in the north of Mexico, and fourteen thousand more residing in missions where they were, it would seem, inscribed.43 In view of the fact that in the most populated locations in Nueva Vizcaya the records of both Franciscans and Jesuits in charge of local Indian populations incorporated to haciendas or established in nearby missions were not preserved, the figures for those who were native to the region are still unknown and could likely be under estimated. Registries were lost from Franciscan convents in Parral, Chihuahua, and Valle de San Bartolomé (there are only a few); those for the convent of San Antonio in Durango are fragmentary, as are those from Pecos or Santa Clara in New Mexico or El Paso del Norte (today Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua); almost all sacramental records registered by the Jesuits in their missions have also disappeared (Figure 4.2). The impact of epidemics in the north of New Spain was irregular, even when counting the better-known eighteenth century. It is therefore impossible to extrapolate the seriousness of the decline in population caused by a disease episode in a given place. What does seem obvious is that in mining centers, with their large concentrations of people and the overcrowded quarters typical among workers, epidemics were more frequent. The constant arrivals of Indians from faraway places, who had not necessarily been in contact with Old World diseases, made of those mining areas excellent breeding grounds,

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Figure 4.2. Main displacements of Indian tribes in northern New Spain, sixteenth to ­eighteenth centuries. Produced by the author.

given that there were a lot of individuals whose ancestors had not suffered from any of the diseases brought by the Spaniards and were therefore more likely to get sick and die.44 In missionary settlements, where most of the workforce came from, contact with pathogen agents was less frequent; and, as shown below, in order for epidemics to spread, the passage of infected persons had to be constant. Any epidemic is more virulent the first time it attacks. Little by little, through generations, Indians were able to develop defenses; but it is still impossible to define the moment in which the probability of dying from an outbreak became the same for both Spaniards and indigenous populations. Due to secondary afflictions caused by abysmal living conditions, any disease would kill more poor people, among whom the Indian workers of mining and agricultural haciendas were found. On top of poverty, they had to endure malnutrition, excessive workloads, and small, crowded living quarters, as well as cold weather and the neglect for securing clean water. Under these circumstances it is very difficult to tell whether epidemics were more deadly among Indians because of their lack of resources or because of a genetic pool incapable of dealing with Old World epidemics. The routes for epidemic contagion during the colonial period show three well differentiated regions in the New Hispanic North, associated with the traffic of men and merchandise along existing roads. They are the North Central region, the coastal corridor, and the foothills of the Northwest and Northeast. The communication axis of the inland royal road to the North Central region was an effective path for spreading epidemics from Mexico, the capital of the viceroyalty, to Santa Fe in New Mexico. All epidemics of

Population and Epidemics North of Zacatecas   119 the eighteenth century, as well as the measles outbreak of 1692–1693, and probably all diseases that came before, arrived in Nueva Vizcaya via this road. On the other hand, crosswise roads from East to West of the continent were few, so epidemics originating in the center of New Spain and reaching the North central region affected the Northwest either before, much later, or not at all. For example, the epidemic experienced in San Felipe El Real de Chihuahua, Parras, and Linares in 1757–1758 did not spread to the western slopes. Smallpox left an important death toll in 1780 in Chihuahua, in 1781 in New Mexico, and in 1782 in Sonora and the California peninsula. This would happen again with the “mysterious fevers”: the outbreak in Durango in 1813 radiated in 1814 and 1815 toward the North Central region where it reached New Mexico in 1816 and the Northeast by 1816–1817. When an outbreak of disease spread outward from Guadalajara, reaching San Blas, the road to Sinaloa was so bad that it did not extend any farther north of that Pacific Ocean port. Sometimes, however, the disease would spread through sailors navigating in the Gulf of California, as was probably the case with the smallpox outbreak of 1796, which arrived first in the province of Sonora and later in Nueva Vizcaya.45 The wars of Independence favored the spread of epidemics due to the constant movement of the army. Presidial troops, for example, were sent from the Northwest to the center of New Spain, and they were responsible of spreading the measles epidemics of 1816 in the direction of Sonora.46 Toward the Northeast, closer to the center of the viceroyalty and better connected with the mining zone of the Bajío, with a dense population, epidemics were spread in a different way than in the central North. The most frequent route for the spread from Mexico to the Northeast was shorter and crossed San Luis Potosí; thus the smallpox outbreak of 1778 arrived in Linares before it touched the central North, in contrast to the matlazahuatl of 1764, which infected the population in that same place a year after it wreaked havoc in Nueva Vizcaya. The table below illustrates those regional differences during the eighteenth century, a time when sacramental records are more reliable. In comparing this table to the one above, it is evident that during the first half of the Age of Enlightenment, epidemics were not as recurrent as in earlier periods, but in the second half of the same century, during those fifty years preceding independence, there were serious crises of heightened mortality due to the spread of outbreaks throughout northern New Spain. These established records cast doubt over the previous table, inasmuch as it is unlikely that during the seventeenth century the spread of epidemics was more limited; the Spaniards were fewer, but the people contracting these diseases for the first time were far more, so the propagation must have also been generalized. Burial records from Parral and San Bartolomé, on the other hand, reveal population declines during the 1670s, in 1680, and in 1687 not mentioned in other sources (Table 4.2). The different methods used to measure the incidence of high-mortality crises indicate that three of the epidemics were particularly devastating: matlazahuatl from 1764–1765, which in some places preceded or coincided with smallpox (in 1762 and 1763); the smallpox outbreak of 1778–1782 and the so-called “mysterious fevers” of 1813–1817, more lethal than any of the other preceding disease episodes in all settlements studied. Just as in the seventeenth century, smallpox was the most frequent outbreak; but it should be

Table 4.2.  Dates of Epidemics Causing Significantly High Mortality Found in Ecclesiastical Records. Sombrerete  

Durango (1693–1815) — —

1762 1763

San Bartolomé and San Pedro (1670–1815)

Xxxx

1671 1680 1687 1693

Xxxx

1706

Chihuahua (1715–1815)

1718

1717

1671–1676 1680 Xxxx 1693 1696 1705–1706 1711 —

Xxxx 1738

1728 1737–1738

1728 1738

1728 1739

Xxxx

Xxxx  

1748

1748–1749

Xxxx Xxxx 1763 1764 Xxxx Xxxx 1780

1757–1758 Xxxx 1763 1764 1769–1770

Xxxx Xxxx Xxxx

1762 1763 1769

1779–1780

Parral (1646–1815)

—

1780

Northwest

San Esteban (1748–1815)

Linares (1730–1815)

Parras (1694–1815)

1697–1698 1719

1780

1709–1710 1718 1721 1725 1728–1732 1737 1742 1744–1746 1748–1749

1706 1712

Xxxx 1743–1744 1748

Xxxx 1738–1739

1748

1748–1749

1752–1753 1757 1762–1763 1765–1766

1762 1764

1762–1763 1764

1762

1768–1770 1771–1773 1781–1782

1769

1769

1779–1780

1778–1780

1768 1771 1779–1780

1785

Xxxx

1785–1787

1785–1788

1784–1787

1788–1789

1787

1804–1806

Xxxx 1803

Xxxx Xxxx

1796–1797 1800–1801 1804–1806

1798

Xxxx Xxxx

1808–1810

Xxxx

1810

1813–1814

1814–1815

1814

1798–1799

1814

1786–1789 1792–1793 1798–1799

1785–1787

1802–1803

1802 1804 1809 1811 1814

1808 1814

1816–1817

1814

1811 1814–1815

1798

Note: The figures for the Northwest were taken from Jackson, Indian Population Decline, 167 and do not match precisely with the periods of high mortality revealed in parochial archives. Other figures for different regions were taken from: Magaña, Poblamiento identidades, for the Northwest; Arreola, Epidemias y muerte, 116–124, for Durango; Arenas, Migraciones a corta distancia, 2012 for Sombrerete; and García (unpublished) for Linares. All are based on parochial records. For San Bartolomé, Parral, and Chihuahua: Cramaussel, 2013, “La fragilidad demográfica,” The information for San Esteban and Parras was collected by the author for this essay. The figures in italics apply to the years of smallpox epidemics; those in bold, to matlazahuatl; the underlined figures indicate measles. “Xxxx” denotes that the epidemic broke out but although the number of burials grew, it did not surpass that of christenings. Em-dashes indicate a lack of information.

122   Borderlands of the Iberian World kept in mind that matlazahuatl struck primarily the adult population, disrupting even more severely the functioning of society. All these crises can be detected in the Center of New Spain for the same year or the year before.47 Those epidemics mentioned for Linares in 1743, 1752, and 1792 were not as critical. Generally speaking, the matlazahuatl outbreak of 1736–1739 was not as deadly in the North as it was in the territories of New Spain.48 Something noteworthy is that while in the center of the viceroyalty it was possible, as in this occasion, to multiply the casualties recorded years before by twenty or more, in the worst case-scenario in the North, epidemics only multiplied their fatalities by five, and none of them caused a major decline in population. This lesser incidence of disease outbreaks in colonial settlements could be attributed to the lower population density and the greater distances separating these northern settlements. Contrary to what seems to have happened in New Spain, the decline of populations in the North between 1785 and 1789 was due to diseases of unknown origin and not to food shortages. In the North, periods of scarcity following those of high mortality were common but did not cause deadly famines.49 However, epidemics during the 1780s were catastrophic, and it is believed that between 1776 and 1789, 41 percent of the population in New Mexico was wiped out.50 The Northwest was hit early by smallpox in 1796–1797. In the North Central region the epidemic of 1798 did not spread beyond Durango, because both the governor and the bishop were enlightened people and enforced inoculation.51 Ecclesiastical and secular authorities avoided therefore the fatal consequences of the smallpox outbreak in 1780, which would spread panic all the way to the California peninsula and New Mexico in 1781 and 1782.52 Those epidemics of the first half of the nineteenth century that hit the Northwest hard, including the measles outbreak from 1804 to 1806, are barely noticeable in other places, with the exception of the city of Durango where records are, by the way, inconsistent.53 The epidemic of 1813–1817 was identified as matlazahuatl, but in more than a few places in New Spain it was mistaken for smallpox or combined with it. Only a monthly count that distinguished adults from children would allow scholars to differentiate these two diseases. It seems that around those years only smallpox had arrived in the Northwest and in New Mexico. Some data regarding rebellions indicate the consternation that outbreaks of the Old World diseases wreaked among indigenous populations during colonial times. The important rebellion of the Tepehuanes from 1616 to 1619 came to an end when an epidemic of unknown origin wiped out the insurgents. The second conquest of New Mexico coincides with the measles epidemic of 1692–1693, the first to be documented accurately in the parochial archives of northern New Spain. But perhaps one should take into account not only the defeat of the rebels due to the epidemic but also the chronological connection between the outbreak and the beginning of the uprisings. Most likely when there was a simultaneous and massive spate of deaths among servants in a hacienda, the Spaniards sought to replace their labor force and food supplies from those Indians beyond colonial control—and to do so more violently. Those indigenous groups would

Population and Epidemics North of Zacatecas   123 try and defend themselves in armed combat against the extraction of their provisions and their men. The uprising of the Pueblo Indians broke out in 1680, during an outbreak of smallpox in the province of Santa Barbara; in that same year, the peoples from Sinaloa and Sonora rebelled. The incidence of crises due to epidemics was aggravated even further by the seizing of slaves among Indians in communities already weakened by the disease. The arrival of Indians in colonial settlements coming from the regions in crisis illustrates this phenomenon. Groups of Indians from New Mexico and Sonora grew in size in the mines of Parral starting in 1680, and the last decade of the seventeenth century; Yaquis appeared also in larger numbers in church records during the 1740s in the town of San Felipe El Real de Chihuahua, at the same time that they were rebelling against Spanish oppression. The same event occurred in the second half of the eighteenth century with the Apache.54 It is important at this point to mention the expansive periods of Spanish colonization and associate them with high mortality crises. The mining town of Cusihuriachi was founded with peoples from the provinces of Santa Barbara and Sonora, in 1687, when the same year there had been an outbreak of disease in the Río Florido watershed. The expedition to found the colony of Nuevo Santander was carried out during the smallpox epidemic of 1748–1749, and the most notable coincidence could be the last Spanish expansion toward the Sierra Madre Occidental during the 1780s, linked to one of the worst decades for epidemics during colonial times. However, during this period several mining areas of great importance were founded, populating towns such as Guarisamey, that would secure Durango’s claim to fame.55 Then again, there is no verified mechanical relation between the progress of colonization and periods of disease and high mortality. Epidemics on their own did not cause uprisings; and neither were they at the source of Spanish territorial advance. Still they are always a factor that should be taken into account. It should be kept in mind also that during the colonial period there is no such thing as a decade free from the outbreak of some epidemic; one should therefore be cautious about establishing such causal connections.

Epidemic Crises and Population Trends In view of the constant supply of Indians integrating to Spanish haciendas, who had been previously beyond colonial control, it is extremely difficult to establish the way in which epidemics interrupted population growth in the medium term, as the dead were replaced immediately by newly arrived Indians. This is particularly evident in those mining areas of central Nueva Vizcaya, where parochial records have been preserved. In mining towns such as San Felipe El Real de Chihuahua or San José del Parral, the population grew while mines were thriving, since they were supplied with an external labor force. The decline in mining implied a sudden loss of population that was not replaced. In the seventeenth century, groups of external workers were sent to Parral, until 1686,

124   Borderlands of the Iberian World when authorities decided to send them to the newly discovered mine of Cusihuiriachi. Toward 1725 Chihuahua accelerated the pace of labor recruitment until 1745; by the end of the century the mining centers of the sierra would be the ones to benefit from the arrival of Indians from other regions. In Parral, starting in the 1680s, the population declined at the same pace as mining production; it would remain stable until the measles outbreak of 1728, which coincided with Chihuahua’s boom. The population in Parral would grow again autonomously until the repeated epidemic crises of the 1780s. In the last years of the eighteenth century, the population increased through natural growth and continued this way during the nineteenth century, in spite of the fevers of 1814. In Chihuahua the growth is perceivable from the founding of the mining real in 1709 up to the smallpox outbreak of 1748–1749, which coincided with the first great collapse in mineral production. The number of inhabitants remained stagnant until the nineteenth century, when the population resumed continuous growth regardless of the 1814 fever epidemic. It is interesting to compare the evolution of those two mining centers to the demographic dynamics in nearby agricultural farming settlements, particularly during the eighteenth century for which there is more reliable information. It should be pointed out that these haciendas were also provided with a labor force recruited through the system of forced labor shifts, called repartimiento, from foreign groups of Indians originating outside the area, who lived longer than the ones destined to the mines. In San Bartolomé (today Valle de Allende, Chihuahua), the population kept growing, probably due to the expansion of agricultural farms, while that of the Franciscan mission of Pecos in New Mexico shrank. In Durango the data for the second half of the eighteenth century are too fragmentary to arrive at any solid conclusion; however, the smallpox epidemic of 1748–1749 seems to mark the origin of a subsequent stagnation. In San Esteban de Saltillo, a community of Indians close to the Spanish township, the second half of the eighteenth century saw a growth in population that was altered only fleetingly by the epidemics of 1762 and 1764, and especially the smallpox outbreaks of 1779–1782, the crisis of 1787, and the smallpox of 1798. The same scenario is repeated in Linares and Parras. However, the Northeast does not show any stagnation and the population grew continuously during the entire eighteenth century in spite of repeated disease episodes. This phenomenon can be explained in the case of Linares by the migration movements from the Bajío and the Sierra Gorda, as well as by the return of people from Nuevo Santander.56 To summarize, in farming locations epidemics did stall demographic growth but did not bring about losses in the population over a couple of years. This dynamic is explained on one hand by the military strength of the Spaniards to bring into their haciendas Indian laborers from other areas but also by the immediate rise in pregnancies that compensated for the losses due to disease. This was possible in view of the fact that most epidemics were smallpox, while the ones affecting mainly the adult population were less frequent. The general trend of the population under colonial control showed expansion in the first half of the eighteenth century, considering that the matlazahuatl outbreak of

Population and Epidemics North of Zacatecas   125 1737–1739 did not produce a demographic crisis in the north, as was the case farther south. Outside the Northeast, population growth stalled due to repeated epidemics during the second half of the century (smallpox and measles from 1748–1749, 1757, 1769–1770, 1780–1782, and disease crises from 1784–1789). The 1780s were particularly tragic. A fresh growth may be observed in the last decade of the century only to be stalled by the fevers of 1813–1817 that marked a new halt, with the exception again of the Northeast, which benefited from continuous flows of migration. These demographic trends are different in the missions and beyond colonial settlements. Indian sedentary populations seem to have increased during the first half of the eighteenth century, while during the second half the more mobile groups of the Northeast and North center disappeared. Sedentary Indians and Apaches moved into those areas but were unable to repopulate them. The impact of epidemics as well as biological and cultural mestizaje and wars of extermination led to the transformation of the northerly population, which became basically mestizo in the nineteenth century (see map 4.1).57 The Tarahumara in Chihuahua, the Tepehuana in Durango and Chihuahua as well as the Yaqui and Mayo regions in Sonora and the North of Sinaloa—all preserving to this day a highly indigenous population—are exceptions to the rule.

Notes 1. Sherburne Cook and Woodrow Borah, Ensayos sobre historia de la población: México y el Caribe (Mexico: Siglo XXI, 1978), 3 vols. Current research by Norma Angélica Castillo Palma, Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, based on parochial archives shows the same trends. 2. For a synopsis of studies based on parochial archives done in the 1970s, see Cecilia Rabell, La población novohispana a la luz de los registros parroquiales (avances y perspectivas de investigación) (Mexico: IIS-UNAM, 1990). On epidemics and measures to fight them during colonial times, see Enrique Florescano and Elsa Malvido, Ensayos sobre la historia de las epidemias en México (Mexico: IMSS, 1982), 2 vols. Malvido ignored quantitave studies when the field of history of medicine was created in 1987 (Congreso Anual Internacional sobre Salud y Enfermedad) and the workshop “Estudio sobre la Muerte” was organized at the end of the 1980s. See, for example: Elsa Malvido, Grégory Pereira and Vera Tiesler, El cuerpo humano y su tratamiento mortuorio (Mexico: INAH, CEMCA, 1997). For a summary of Mexican demographics see Elsa Malvido, La población. Siglos XVI al XX (Mexico: UNAM, Océano, 2006). 3. Peter Gerhard, The North Frontier of New Spain (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993), first edition in 1982; Robert Jackson, “Epidemic Disease and Indian Depopulation in the Baja California Missiones, 1697–1836,” Southern California Quarterly 63 (1981): 308–346, “Causes of Indian Depopulation in the Pimería Alta Missions of Northern Sonora,” Journal of Arizona History 24 (1983): 405–429, and Indian Population Decline. The Missions of Northeastern New Spain (Albuquerque: UNM, 1993); Daniel Reff, Depopulation and Culture Change in Northwestern New Spain, 1518–1764 (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1991); Cynthia Radding, Wandering Peoples: Colonialism, Ethnic Spaces and Ecological Frontiers in Northwestern Mexico, 1700–1850 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 103–141; Susan Deeds, “Rendering unto Caesar. The Secularization of Jesuit Missions in

126   Borderlands of the Iberian World Mid-Eighteenth Century Durango” (PhD diss., University of Arizona, 1981), and Defiance and Deference in Mexico’s Colonial North. Indians under Spanish Rule in Nueva Vizcaya (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003). 4. Sherburne Cook, The Extent and Significance of Disease among the Indians of Baja California, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1935). Iberoamericana 12. 5. Deeds, “Rendering unto Caesar;” Michael Swann, Tierra Adentro: Settlement and Society in Colonial Durango (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1982). 6. Gerhard, The North Frontier. 7. Reff, Depopulation. 8. David Robinson, “Patrones de población. Parral a fines del siglo XVIII,” in Demografía histórica de México. Siglos XVI–XIX, comp. Elsa Malvido and Miguel Cuenya (Mexico: Instituto Mora, UAM, 1993); Robert McCaa, “Calidad, Class and Endogamy in Colonial Mexico. The Case of Parral, 1788–1790,” Hispanic American Historical Review 64, 3 (1984): 477–502, “Migración y sociedad. El caso de Parral, Chihuahua, 1777–1930,” in Movimientos de población en el centro occidente de México, ed. Thomas Calvo and Gustavo López (Zamora: CEMCA, El Colegio de Michoacán, 1988), 265–279, and “Marriage, Migration and Willingness to Settle Down, Parrral (Nueva Viscaya), 1770–1788,” in Migration in Colonial Latin America, ed. David Robinson (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 9. Jackson, “Epidemic desease,” “Causes of Indian Depopulation,” and Indian population Decline. 10. Radding, Wandering Peoples. 11. Refugio de la Torre Curiel examines the consequences of war in the decline of populations in the Sonora missions: “Migraciones, guerras y enfermedades en el contexto de la caída de las misiones sonorenses durante la segunda mitad del siglo XVIII,” in Demografía y poblamiento, ed. Chantal Cramaussel (Zamora: El Colegio de Michoacán, 2009), 69–81, and Twilight of the Mission Frontier. Shifting Interethnic Alliances and Social Organization in Sonora, 1768–1855 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012), chap. 2, 49–76. 12. Frances Levine and Anna LaBauve, “Examining the Complexity of Historic Population Decline: A Case Study of Pecos Pueblo, New Mexico,” Ethnohistory 44, no. 1 (1997): 75–113; John Kessel, Kiva, Cross and Crown (Washington, DC: National Park Service, 1979). 13. Deeds, Defiance and Deference. 14. José Cuello, Saltillo Colonial: Orígenes y formación de una sociedad mexicana en la frontera norte (Saltillo: AMS, 2004); Cecilia Sheridan, Anónimos y deste­rrados: La contienda por el “sitio que llaman de Quauyla.” Siglos XVI–XVIII (Mexico: CIESAS, 2000); Gabriel Martínez Serna, Viñedos e indios del desierto: Fundación, auge y secularización de una misión jesuita en la frontera noreste de la Nueva España (Mexico: CONARTE, Museo de Historia Mexicana, CONACULTA, 2014). 15. Several of the seminars have produced publications: El impacto demográfico de la viruela en México, de la época colonial al siglo XX (Zamora: El Colegio de Michoacán, 2010), 3 volumes coedited by Chantal Cramaussel and Mario Alberto Magaña in vol. 2, and by Chantal Cramaussel and David Carbajal in vol. 3; Alicia Contreras and Carlos Alcalá ed., Cólera y población (Zamora: El Colegio de Michoacán, 2014); Mario Alberto Magaña Mancillas, ed., Crisis demográficas y rutas de propagación, (La Paz: UABCS, Instituto Sudcaliforniano de Cultura, 2013); Paulina Torres Franco and Chantal Cramaussel, eds., Epidemias de sarampión en la Nueva España y México (siglos XVII–XX) (Zamora: El Colegio de Michoacán, 2017); Gustavo González Flores, ed., “Epidemias de matlazahuatl y

Population and Epidemics North of Zacatecas   127 tifo en Nueva España y México. Sobremortalidades con incidencia en la población adulta del siglo XVII al XIX (Saltillo: Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila, 2017). 16. José Marcos Medina Bustos, Vida y muerte en el antiguo Hermosillo, 1773–1828. Un estudio demográfico basado en los registros parroquiales (Hermosillo: Gobierno del Estado de Sonora, 1997); see also by Medina Bustos, “La población de Sonora (1500–1900): una visión panorámica,” in 100 años de población y desarrollo (Hermosillo: Consejo Estatal de Población de Sonora, 2010); Mario Alberto Magaña Mancillas, Población y misiones de Baja California. Estudio histórico demográfico de la misión de Santo Domingo de la Frontera, 1775–1850 (Tijuana: El Colegio de la Frontera Norte, 1998). 17. Luis Carlos Quiñones, Composición demográfica de Nombre de Dios, Durango, siglo XVII (Durango: IIH-UJED, 2002). 18. Miguel Vallebueno Garcinava, Civitas y urbs: la conformación del espacio urbano de Durango (Durango: IIH-UJED, 2005); Antonio Arreola Valenzuela, Epidemias y muerte en el Durango virreinal (Durango: IIH-UJED, 2009). 19. Chantal Cramaussel, Poblar la frontera. La provincia de Santa Bárbara en Nueva Vizcaya durante los siglos XVI y XVII (Zamora: El Colegio de Michoacán, 2006); “Poblar en tierras de muchos indios. La región de Álamos en los siglos XVII y XVIII,” Región y Sociedad 53 (2012): 11–54; and “La fragilidad demográfica de los centros mineros. Incidencia diferencial de las crisis epidémicas en el norte de la Nueva Vizcaya (1715-1815),” in Crisis demográficas, 242–272. 20. Mario Alberto Magaña Mancillas, Poblamiento e identidades en el área central de las Californias (La Paz: UABCS, El Colegio de Michoacán, 2010); Tomás Dimas Arenas Hernández, Migraciones a corta distancia. La población de la parroquia de Sombrerete (1677–1825) (Zacatecas: UAZ, El Colegio de Michoacán, 2012) and “El rancho en movimiento. La construcción sociodemográfia de un ámbito regional novohispano: San Felipe de Linares, 1712–1850,” PhD dissertation at the Colegio de Michoacán, 2017. The author is deeply grateful for permission to use the information he retrieved from the parochial archives of Linares. 21. Patricia Osante, Poblar el septentrión I. Las ideas y las propuestas del marqués de Altamira, 1742–1753 (Mexico: UNAM, CONACULTA, Instituto Tamaulipeco de la Cultura y las Artes, 2012) and Poblar el septentrión II. José Tienda de Cuervo. Estado general de las fundaciones hechas por José de Escandón en la colonia del Nuevo Santander (Mexico: UNAM, CONACULTA, Instituto Tamaulipeco para la Cultura y las Artes, 2013). 22. On tributes in the North see Chantal Cramaussel, “La tributación de los indios en el septentrión novohispano,” in Indios, españoles y mestizos en zonas de frontera, siglos XVII–XX, ed. Marcos Medina and Raquel Padilla (Hermosillo: El Colegio de Sonora, El Colegio de Michoacán, 2013), 19–52. The censuses from missions are sometimes abundant: Torre Curiel, Twilight is based on ninety censuses done in the Northwest of New Spain between 1766 and 1795 and eleven secular lists. 23. Chantal Cramaussel, “La lucha contra la viruela en Chihuahua durante el siglo XIX,” Relaciones 114 (2008): 101–132. The will to cure without altering divine will is evident in the 1712 text by the Jesuit missionary Juan de Esteyneffer, Florilegio medicinal o breve epitome de las medicinas y cirugía (Mexico: Academia Nacional de Medicina, 1978), see the introduction by María del Carmen Anzures y Bolaños. 24. América Molina, Por voluntad divina. Escasez, epidemias y otras calamidades en la ciudad de México, 1700–1762 (Mexico: CIESAS, 1996).

128   Borderlands of the Iberian World 25. On the mobility of Indians as a resistance strategy, see Cynthia Radding, Wandering Peoples, 264–301. For examples on the reaction of Indians to epidemics see Deeds, Defiance and Deference, 27–29. 26. The first studies done from parochial archives were Claude Morin, Santa Inés Zacatelco, 1646–1812. Contribución a la demografía histórica del México colonial (Mexico: INAH, 1973) and Thomas Calvo, Acatzingo, demografía de una parroquia mexicana (Mexico: INAH, 1973). 27. The first study to use the Dupâquier formula was Javier Pescador, De bautizados a fieles difuntos. Familia y mentalidades en una parroquia urbana: Santa Catarina de México, 1568–1820 (Mexico: El Colegio de México, 1992), 93; calculations based on Lorenza del Panta and Massimo Livi Bacci’s proposal attempting to measure the demographic consequences of the crises are explained in their article “Chronologie, intensité et diffusion des crises de mortalité en Italie: 1600–1850,” Population (1977): 401–446. 28. Cramaussel, Carbajal and Magaña, El impacto demográfico de la viruela. On Balmis’s campaign see Susana Ramírez, La salud del Imperio (Madrid: Doce Calles, 2002); Contreras and Alcalá, Cólera y población; América Molina, La Nueva España y el matlazáhuatl, 1736–1739 (Mexico: CIESAS, 2001) although she includes only a few references to northern New Spain; González, Sobremortalidades; Torres and Cramaussel, Epidemias de sarampión. 29. Radding, Wandering Peoples, 122, found mentions to the “French disease” or syphilis, which appears rarely in parochial records. Pneumonia has been equaled to “pains on the side.” 30. Cramaussel, “La lucha.” Both smallpox and cholera became endemic in the second half of the nineteenth century. The decline in incidence of epidemics during that period allows referring to the year 1854 (last breakout of cholera in Yucatan according to Contreras and Alcalá, Cólera y población) as the landmark signaling the end of the demographic old regime, when epidemics stopped the growth of populations and could even dictate their decline. 31. Torres Franco and Cramaussel, Epidemias de sarampión, 36–37. 32. According to Gerhard, The North Frontier, 39. 33. Deeds, Defiance and Deference. 34. Gerhard, The North Frontier, 24. 35. Carl Sauer, Aztatlán. La frontera prehispánica mesoamericana en la costa del Pacífico. La población aborigen del Noroeste de México (Mexico: Siglo XXI, Fundación Ignacio Bórquez, 1998). Gerhard’s and Sauer’s works were originally published in 1935 and 1932 respectively. 36. Gerhard, The North Frontier, 24. 37. Deeds, Defiance and Deference, 76 and 126. 38. Reff, Depopulation, 235. 39. Martínez Serna, Viñedos e indios, maintains that the original population of the Laguneros vanished in the seventeenth century to be replaced by descendants of the Tlaxcalteca and mixed-blood people. 40. Alejandro Montoya, San Luis Potosí novohispano. Origen y evolución de un real de minas, San Luis Potosí (San Luis Potosí: Universidad Autónoma de San Luis Potosí, 2009). 41. See Joaquín Rivaya-Martínez, “Incidencia de la viruela y otras enfermedades epidémicas en la trayectoria histórico-demográfica de los indios comanches, 1706–1875,” in El impacto demográfico de la viruela, t. 3, 63–81. 42. Chantal Cramaussel, “The Forced Transfer of Indians in Nueva Vizcaya and Sinaloa. A Hispanic Method of Colonization,” in Contested Spaces in Early America, ed. Edward Countryman and Juliana Barr (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 184–208. 43. The numbers come from Gerhard, The North Frontier, 268. They are based on a document preserved at the University of Austin. Bishop Pedro Tamarón, on the other hand, says,

Population and Epidemics North of Zacatecas   129 referring to the Yaqui groups, that in 1765: “They are missing two of the three parts of those spread out in those provinces and in the Vizcaya.” Descripción del vastísimo obispado de la Nueva Vizcaya (1765). Viajes Pastorales y descripción de la diócesis de la Nueva Vizcaya (Madrid: Aguilar, 1958), 1000. 44. Cramaussel, “La fragilidad demográfica”. On the importance of mining centers for the spread of epidemics in central New Spain see Elinor Melville and Bradley Skopyk, “Disease, Ecology, and the Environment,” in The Oxford History of Mexico, ed. Michael Meyer and William Beezley (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). 45. Reff, Depopulation, 167. The same happened with the 1849 cholera epidemic. On roads during the colonial period see Chantal Cramaussel, ed., Rutas de la Nueva España (Zamora: El Colegio de Michoacán, 2006), and Las rutas transversales. La geografía olvidada de México (Zamora: El Colegio de Michoacán, 2016). 46. Cynthia Radding, Landscapes of Power and Identity. Comparative Histories in the Sonoran Desert and the Forest of Amazonia (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 254; José Marcos Medina Bustos and Ignacio Almada, “Inter-Ethnic War in Sonora: Indigenous Captains General and Cultural Change, 1740–1832,” in The Oxford Handbook of Borderlands of the Iberian World, ed. Danna A. Levin Rojo and Cynthia Radding (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 183–208. 47. For New Spain, see Elsa Malvido’s chart, La Población, 225–238. 48. González, Sobremortalidades. 49. Chantal Cramaussel, ed., La incidencia demográfica de crisis de subsistencia, escasez y epidemias. Comparaciones entre el Viejo y el Nuevo Mundo (Zamora: El Colegio de Michoacán, 2019). 50. Levine and LaBauve, “Examining the complexity,” 103. The smallpox outbreak of 1781–1782, anihilated between 20% and 25% of the population according to Ross Frank, From Settler to Citizen. New Mexican Economic Development and the Creation of Vecino Society, 1750–1820 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 55–60. 51. Cramaussel, El impacto, vol. 1, 16. 52. Frank, From Settler to Citizen, 55–59; Magaña Mancillas, Poblamiento e identidades, 136. 53. Mario Alberto Magaña Mancillas, “Rutas de propagación de la epidemia de sarampión en el obispado de Sonora, de 1804 a 1806,” Región y Sociedad (2015): 177–207. 54. Cramaussel, “The Forced Transfer.” 55. On this mining expansion see Chantal Cramaussel, “La vertiente occidental de la Sierra: el último frente de colonización (1760-1830),” in Historia General del Estado de Durango, t. II, ed. Miguel Vallebueno (Durango: UJED, 2013), 200–257. 56. Raúl García Flores shows this in his doctoral dissertation on Linares. 57. For Central Northern Mexico: William Griffen, Culture Change and Shifting Populations in Central Northern Mexico (Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 1969); Chantal Cramaussel, “El exterminio de los chizos, sisimbles, acoclames y cocoyomes del bolsón de Mapimí,” Revista de Historia 6 (2014): 35–56. For the Northeast see María Elena Santoscoy, Breve historia de Coahuila (Mexico: El Colegio de México), 128–139.

Bibliography Contreras, Alicia, and Carlos Alcalá ed. Cólera y población. Zamora: El Colegio de Michoacán, 2014. Cramaussel, Chantal. “La lucha contra la viruela en Chihuahua durante el siglo XIX.” Relaciones 114 (2008): 101–132.

130   Borderlands of the Iberian World Cramaussel, Chantal, David Carbajal, and Mario Alberto Magaña, ed. El impacto demográfico de la viruela en México, de la época colonial al siglo XX. Zamora: El Colegio de Michoacán, 2010, 3 vols. Cramaussel, Chantal. “The Forced Transfer of Indians in Nueva Vizcaya and Sinaloa. A Hispanic Method of Colonization.” In Contested Spaces in Early America, edited by Edward Countryman and Juliana Barr, 184–207. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Cramaussel, Chantal, “La fragilidad demográfica de los centros mineros. Incidencia diferencial de las crisis epidémicas en el norte de la Nueva Vizcaya (1715–1815).” I Crisis demográficas, y  rutas de propagación, edited by Mario Alberto Magaña Mancillas, 242–272. La Paz: UABCS, Instituto Sudcaliforniano de Cultura, 2013. Deeds, Susan. “Rendering Unto Caesar. The Secularization of Jesuit Missions in MidEighteenth Century Durango.” PhD diss., University of Arizona, 1981. Deeds, Susan. Defiance and Deference in Mexico´s Colonial North. Indians Under Spanish Rule in Nueva Vizcaya. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003. Frank, Ross. From Settler to Citizen. New Mexican Economic Development and the Creation of Vecino Society, 1750–1820. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. García Flores, Raúl. “El rancho en movimiento. La construcción sociodemográfia de un ámbito regional novohispano: San Felipe de Linares, 1712–1850.” PhD diss., El Colegio de Michoacán, 2017. Gerhard, Peter. The North Frontier of New Spain. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press: 1993. González Flores, Gustavo, ed. “Epidemias de matlazahuatl y tifo en Nueva España y México. Sobremortalidades con incidencia en la población adulta del siglo XVII al XIX. Saltillo: Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila, 2017. Jackson, Robert. Indian Population Decline. The Missions of Northwestern New Spain. Albuquerque: UNM, 1993. Jackson, Robert. “Epidemic Disease and Indian Depopulation in the Baja California Missiones, 1697–1836.” Southern California Quartely 63 (1981): 308–346. Jackson, Robert. “Causes of Indian Depopulation in the Pimería Alta Missiones of Northern Sonora.” Journal of Arizona History 24 (1983): 405–429. Levine, Frances, and Anna LaBauve. “Examining the Complexity of Historic Population Decline: A Case Study of Pecos Pueblo, New Mexico.” Ethnohistory 44, no. 1 (1997): 75–113. Magaña Mancillas, Mario Alberto. Poblamiento e identidades en el área central de las Californias. La Paz: UABCS, El Colegio de Michoacán, 2010. Malvido, Elsa. La Población. Siglos XVI al XX. Mexico: UNAM, Océano, 2006. Martínez Serna, Gabriel. Viñedos e indios del desierto: fundación, auge y secularización de una misión jesuita en la frontera noreste de la Nueva España. Mexico: CONARTE, Museo de Historia Mexicana, CONACULTA, 2014. Radding, Cynthia. Wandering Peoples: Colonialism, Ethnic Spaces and Ecological Frontiers in Northwestern Mexico, 1700–1850. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997. Reff, Daniel. Depopulation and Culture Change in Northwestern New Spain, 1518–1764. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1991. Torre Curiel, Refugio de la. Twilight of the Mission Frontier. Shifting Interethnic Alliances and Social Organization in Sonora, 1768–1855. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012. Torres, Paulina, and Chantal Cramaussel. Epidemias de sarampión en la Nueva España y México, siglos XVII–XIX. Zamora: El Colegio de Michoacán, 2017.

chapter 5

“I n di a n Fr ien ds a n d A llies” i n th e Spa n ish Imper i a l Bor der l a n ds of North A m er ica Danna A. Levin Rojo

The Spanish conquest of America would have been impossible without the willful ­collaboration of Indian allies, massively recruited from an early stage as warriors, guides, scouts, and interpreters. This, of course, is no news. Already in 1952 Philip Wayne Powell asserted: “Much, or even most, of European conquest in America was aided and abetted by the Indians fighting their own race, a fight that was supervised by handfuls of white men who astutely profited by long-standing native rivalries or the basic enmity between nomadic and sedentary Indian peoples.”1 The abundant research produced since the 1950s on Indian allies who actively shaped the successive borderlands north of Mexico-Tenochtitlan after 1521 has allowed a better understanding of the voluntary contribution of native Mesoamericans to the campaigns launched by Spanish authorities and private conquerors, or why they established new communities in remote and hostile territories. The emphasis of this research is placed on the collaboration of Tlaxcalan friends, and to a lesser degree, the Otomí allies in the sixteenth-century conquest of central Mexico and the area that came to be known as the Gran Chichimeca, a vast expanse inhabited from south to north by the Guamares, Pames, Cazcanes, Guachichiles, Zacatecos, Tepehuanes, and other smaller groups known together as Chichimecas in the colonial era (Figure 5.1). Recent contributions have shed a light on lesser-known instances such as the 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.2 Leaving aside the numerous Indians who were undeniably forced to accompany the Spanish entradas (sometimes even in chains according to several sources) does not

132   Borderlands of the Iberian World Gran Chichimeca Otomí Province of Jilotepec

Saltillo

EHU

AN

EC OS

Durango Nombre de Dios

GUA

ZA C

AT

San Martín

Zacatecas

o in m Ca

Pacific Ocean

al

ZC

CA

Guadalajara

Atlantic Ocean

sí San Luis Poto

re

Nochistlán ES

AN

HILE

S

ES

CHIC

TEP

Guanajuato San Miguel GUAMARES

L. Chapala

ES

M

PA

Querétaro OTOMÍES

L. Cuitzeo

L. Pátzcuaro TARASCOS

México

Tlaxcala

Figure 5.1.  The Gran Chichimeca and the Otomí province of Jilotepec. Like the Tlaxcalan Indians, the Otomís from the province of Jilotepec and the Purépechas played an important role as allies of the Spaniards in the conquest and pacification of the Gran Chichimeca, a region rich in silver that was primarily inhabited by resisting groups of hunter-gatherers and part-time farmers. The Spanish settlements established in the sixteenth century along the route known as the Camino Real de Tierra Adentro, with the collaboration of Indian allies cut across these vast territories and represent key foundations for the development of silver mining and the colonization of northern New Spain. Adapted by Michelle Aguilar Vera from Philip W. Powell, Mexico’s Miguel Caldera: The Taming of America’s First Frontier (1548–1597) (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1977), 18–19 and 24–25, and Frances Berdan and Patricia Rieff Anawalt, The Essential Codex Mendoza (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 60.

mean to downplay the violence and abuse that Europeans exercised, or the material and cultural destruction they executed in almost every place they went. Even as this fact is acknowledged, it is important to understand the reasons and mechanisms behind the multitudinous participation of native peoples in the Spanish conquest without necessarily attributing the phenomenon to impotence or resignation before the inevitable. Enlisting the aid of Mesoamerican warriors and porters in all sorts of expeditions was a common practice in New Spain from the sixteenth century onward. Another common practice was to mobilize large groups of Indian farmers from the colonial core in Central Mexico to colonize borderland areas far away from the circuit of regular Spanish ­activity—frequently occupied by native groups in ways that Spaniards refused to acknowledge—and serve as defensive and civilizing agents among their resisting inhabitants.3 Furthermore, as the frontier of Spanish domination moved north beyond the limit of the Aztec Empire, getting successively and temporarily established in Nueva

“Indian Friends and Allies”   133 Galicia, Nueva Vizcaya, Sonora, and Nuevo México, non-Mesoamerican Indians were recruited and conscripted (forced to participate) as allies and potential colonists.4 In many places as time passed, a hierarchy of indigenous civic and military governmental offices was created to facilitate defensive operations and tribute collection among the native population already integrated into the colonial structure.5 A good example is that of the Ópata captains in Sonora studied by José Marcos Medina Bustos and Ignacio Almada. The cases herein discussed, however, have a more collective and offensive character, as they involve groups of specific Indian communities acting on a corporate basis in collaboration with Spanish endeavors away from their own homelands. Sean F. McEnroe studies two such instances in New Spain’s northeast frontier and in Central America, showing that Nahuatl speaking allies who migrated as colonists confronted the changing imperial models of taxation and labor organization that ­periodically threatened the collective privileges they originally obtained.6 Often called “indios amigos” in chronicles, military and administrative documents, and represented in several pictorial manuscripts and lienzos drawn by indigenous scribes, these characters had a minor presence in modern historiography until fairly recent times. The conspicuous exception are Tlaxcalan allies, whose prominent role has become the subject of a specialized field of study since Marc Simmons published his seminal article “Tlaxcalans in the Spanish Borderlands.”7 This lapse in early modern historiography was partially due to the fact that, although they frequently outnumbered Europeans in conquest campaigns, Indian conquerors are poorly represented in the chronicles and reports written by Spaniards that constituted the principal sources used by scholars. For example, according to Richard Flint, co-editor with Shirley Cushing Flint of the twenty-seven known contemporaneous documents dealing with the Coronado expedition to Cíbola, an estimated 1,300 to 2,000 natives of what is now central and western Mexico joined the entrada.8 Nevertheless, they are mentioned in only 111 sentences of the more than 200 printed pages these documents add up, and twentyfive of them refer to a single man who performed as interpreter.9 Likewise, the answer to the second question of the 1584 “Relación del pueblo de Nuchiztlán,” that is devoted to the Mixtón war, mentions the Spanish captain Pedro de Alvarado and Viceroy Mendoza but says nothing about “Indian friends,” although they constituted the bulk of the manpower in the troops they commanded.10 The relative absence of Indian allies in the historiography can also be attributed to the Eurocentric and colonialist perspective that was prevalent, with some exceptions, in the study of Spanish America before the 1970s. Early twentieth-century standard historiography tended to represent the population of Spanish America in the colonial period as divided into two opposed categories: conquered Indians and European (Spanish) conquerors, often depicted as internally homogeneous groups in terms of culture, intention, and identity with clearly opposing interests.11 This simplified taxonomy neglects the fact that colonial domination entailed different degrees of negotiation, submission, and ­alliance between multiple societies. Native Americans did not constitute one single people integrated under the same political structures either before or after the conquest, and therefore they had no reason to offer a common front against Europeans; yet their uneven

134   Borderlands of the Iberian World response to the Spanish intrusion was long regarded as a somewhat incomprehensible failure. Implicit in the passage by Powell quoted at the beginning of this essay, such a perspective—which considers Indians defeated victims of their own treason and Europeans triumphant victors of a single war—lost currency as native sources, some in native languages, received more attention and historians began to search for traces of the Amerindian colonial experience in other disciplines, particularly archaeology and ethnography.12 Today most historians regard natives in that process as conscious forgers of their own destiny rather than mere objects of the brilliant manipulation by Spanish heroes and villains. One cannot always determine whether Indian participation in the conquest enterprise was a free choice or an imposition, and many times it probably was a little of both. For example, many Xochimilcas and Quauhquecholtecas who followed Captain Jorge Alvarado in his Guatemala campaign (1527–1530), as Susan Schroeder asserts, were assigned to his encomiendas and may have had little or no option.13 Coerced recruitment is certainly true for many of the Indians from Central Mexico and Michoacán that Nuño de Guzmán took as “auxiliary” troops during the conquest of Nueva Galicia (1529–1533).14 However, evidence of voluntary collaboration also exists. Because they were fundamental in furthering Spanish territorial control these allied Indians are now considered conquerors in their own right. Moreover, since their participation seems to have partially responded to the local and regional articulation of native politics that predated the arrival of Europeans it must be understood as integral to a complex realignment process rather than as a mere reaction to colonial imposition.15 Following the lead of recent studies on the subject, this overview is organized around three fundamental issues: First, the Indians’ mixed motivations to get involved in conquest and colonizing campaigns alongside Spanish individuals, including the privileges and material benefits they obtained; second, the functions they fulfilled and the way they organized themselves while in service; and third, the terms and strategies of their recruitment. Rights and privileges promised to Indian allies were not always honored, and when effectively granted they often ran the risk of extinction. Therefore, available sources include many documents—some apocryphal—elaborated by the descendants of the actors themselves long after the events recorded took place in order to further claims as heirs to those rights. To circumvent the romanticized exaggerations and inaccuracies in dates and names that some of these manuscripts exhibit as a result of this circumstance, the analysis herein developed seeks the patterns the sources reveal when considered as a whole rather than attempting a detailed sequential reconstruction of events.

Nahuas, Otomís, and Purépechas: Outstanding Allies in New Spain Native peoples of different linguistic stocks contributed valuable information, material resources, porters, and warrior squadrons to the Spanish conquest since Hernán Cortés

“Indian Friends and Allies”   135 followed the Mesoamerican shoreline in the Gulf of Mexico: this was the first European frontier in mainland America and was soon relocated to stand at the heart of the Aztec world. Despite this diversity, there are few studies on the collaboration of Otomís, Purépechas, or Tlatelolcas, to mention only three of the groups appearing in colonial sources.16 Meanwhile, at least eighteen monographic works on the Spanish-Tlaxcalan alliance exist.17 Plus there are significant passages in specialized studies on related topics.18 Perhaps this is due to the early date, endurance, and efficacy of this alliance as well as to the good care Tlaxcalans took to defend the privileges they attained, keeping for that purpose a precise documentary record.19 After their decisive collaboration with Cortés to topple Moctezuma in 1521, Tlaxcalans played an important role in Nueva Galicia alongside Nuño de Guzmán and went along to Cíbola with Vázquez de Coronado, having also served as allies in Guatemala and Oaxaca.20 Favored by several viceregal ordinances and royal laws issued at least since 1539, they were firmly established as frontier colonists in the northern edge of New Spain by the end of the sixteenth century.21 In March 14, 1591, a Real Cédula containing the capitulaciones agreed with the Tlaxcalan government granted the title of hijodalgo “to every Tlaxcalan who sets out to settle new towns.”22 Among the privileges this entailed was the exemption of tribute payments and personal service as well as the right to mount horses, carry weapons, and receive land grants and food supplies to develop their settlements.23 On the basis of this royal charter, four hundred Tlaxcalan families set out north on June 6 to colonize the borderlands and help pacify the Chichimecas (hunter-gatherers and part-time farmers living north of Mesoamerica). Already in 1560 viceroy Luis de Velasco, the elder, had requested the Republic of Tlaxcala to provide one thousand married men to populate San Miguel (present day San Miguel de Allende in the Mexican state of Guanajuato) but no agreement was reached because the Tlaxcalan cabildo feared possible “hatred resulting from a permanent move with, unlike a war expedition, no chance of return.”24 A few years later, the Tercer Concilio Mexicano (1585) endorsed the policy that the Franciscan order and the bishop of Nueva Galicia suggested for dealing with the Chichimec Wars, based on promoting the permanent settlement of Tlaxcalan or Mexican Indians in frontier towns. The 1591 capitulaciones for the migration of the Tlaxcalan families grew out of these recommendations, but the agreement involved the complex negotiation of conditions the Tlaxcalan cabildo posed through the mediation of the Franciscan friars Gerónimo de Mendieta and Gerónimo de Zárate.25 The long trek began once the conditions were clearly established. After several stops, the caravan reached the presidio of Cuicillo in the province of Nueva Galicia, where it divided into five groups (August 10) that followed different directions to reach their final destinations.26 By September eighty-seven families founded the town of San Esteban de la Nueva Tlaxcala in the heart of Nueva Vizcaya, neighboring the parallel Spanish settlement of Santiago del Saltillo; in November another group settled in the valley of San Luis Potosí near the local Guachichiles. Later on their descendants left these towns to undertake new foundations to the North and Northeast, Santa Fe de Nuevo México being the farthest place they colonized.27 The abundant literature on this diaspora underlines the roles of Tlaxcalans as farmers in charge of producing food supplies for the Spanish

136   Borderlands of the Iberian World towns and villages and as civilizing agents to teach agriculture to local Indians and entice them into settled life.28 Spanish sources are vague regarding the numbers, identity, and role of Indian “friends.” They seldom note their names and ethnicity or describe their specific action, frequently mentioning them only to demonstrate the legitimacy of conquest campaigns or to blame them for the destruction and misery left behind.29 Indigenous sources increasingly used by scholars, however, help to clarify the provenance, size, and internal organization of their companies. Other groups besides Tlaxcalans fought on the Spanish side already in the conquest of Tenochtitlan. It is clear from testimonies provided by the Nahua informants of friar Bernardino de Sahagún that Otomís from Teocalhueyacan gave their support to Hernán Cortés after the episode known as the Noche Triste (June 30, 1520), hosting and feeding his defeated forces as they fled from Tenochtitlan. The Spanish text of the Códice Florentino and Sahagún’s Historia general de las cosas de Nueva España record the incident with minor differences.30 Apart from the plentiful food they provided in their own town, the Teocalhueyacan Otomís offered to become Cortés’s ­vassals, together with the Tlaxcalan Otomís (“los otomíes de tlaxcaltecas”) who had survived the Mexica uprising in Tenochtitlan alongside Tlaxcalans and Spaniards, “because they were all kinsmen and had thus recognized each other, as it was from this town of Teucalhuiacan that they [the Tlaxcalan Otomís] had originally departed for Tlaxcala.” 31 Hernán Cortés does not even mention the place in his letters to the king, and the Indian chronicler of Tetzcoco, Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxóchitl downplays the incident to the point of presenting it as a one-day stop in a site where the Spaniards ate nothing but herbs.32 However, these and other relevant passages of the Códice Florentino, with indirect confirmation in other sources, point significantly to an early Spanish alliance with Otomí communities that had been frontier mediators and defense buffers for centuries and saw an opportunity to reinforce their autonomy. According to Sahagún, in return for their service and submission, Cortés promised the Otomís from Teocalhueyacan to make their town a cabecera once the conquest was over, so they would no longer be subjects of the Mexica or pay them tribute. This early agreement, apparently never made effective, may have been a delayed result of the battle of Tecóac (September 1519) where Cortés defeated Otomí warriors who guarded the north frontier of the Tlaxcalan territory and thus were the first to confront the invaders in the highland valleys.33 The episode is depicted in the Códice de Huamantla (c. 1592) that shows several dismembered and bleeding Otomí warriors and two Spaniards, one of whom is Pedro de Alvarado, and it is briefly mentioned by Sahagún as well: a multitude of warriors from Tlaxcala, “whom they called otomíes because they were brave at war,” says the friar, confronted the Spaniards on their way inland from the coast. The Spanish victory in this battle made the Tlaxcalans decide not to fight the intruders but to  become their friends.34 Scene three of the Lienzo de Tlaxcala, bearing the gloss Tecoaccinco, also depicts this encounter, but instead of the violent confrontation it shows four Indians offering tribute, or presents, to Cortés, just like those shown in the second scene. Jeanne Gillespie identifies them because they wear the short-feathered bands of the Otomí warriors’ headdress and not the characteristic Tlaxcalan headgear

“Indian Friends and Allies”   137 composed of a twin rope tied above the forehead and a long feather ornament (Figures 5.2 and 5.3). The obliteration of the battle in this document responds to the Tlaxcalans’ interest in portraying a welcoming reception for the Spaniards in their territory from the start, through their faithful emissaries, in order to reinforce their petitions to the emperor.35 As Contreras Martínez has noted, the Tlaxcalan decision to befriend Cortés was not as simple and homogeneous as the sources reviewed suggest in either the peaceful or violent version of the Tecóac episode.36 However, these sources show that most reasons behind the participation of Mesoamerican Indians in Spanish conquest campaigns, at least in the early sixteenth century, are to be found in the configuration of political relations among Mesoamerican societies before the Spanish arrival. To these, new pressures were certainly added by the economic demands, production activities, and requirements

Figure 5.2.  Scene three of the colonial pictographic document known as Lienzo de Tlaxcala, depicts the moment when the Otomís from Teocalhueyacan sealed an alliance with Hernán Cortés after he defeated some of their warriors in the battle of Tecóac in September 1519. The episode appears under the heading Tecoaccinco (i.e., Tecóac), as four Indians wearing the characteristic short-feathered band of the Otomí warriors present a tribute to Cortés. Drawn by Michelle Aguilar Vera from the 1773 copy by Manuel Yáñez. http://pueblosoriginarios.com/meso/valle/tlaxcalteca/lienzo.html.

138   Borderlands of the Iberian World

Figure 5.3.  A depiction from Scene 1 (Tlaxcallá) of the Lienzo de Tlaxcala shows Indians wearing the characteristic Tlaxcallan headgear, composed of a twin rope tied above the forehead and a long feather ornament. Comparing this headdress to the one worn by the Indians depicted in Scene 3, indicates that this document illustrates both the Tlaxcallan and the Otomí alliances with the Spaniards in the early conquest period. Drawn by Michelle Aguilar Vera from the 1773 copy by Manuel Yáñez. http://pueblosoriginarios.com/meso/valle/tlaxcalteca/lienzo.html.

for land and labor the Spaniards introduced. Salvador Álvarez asserts that “at least until the beginning of the decade of 1530 [ . . . ] beyond their own actions and p ­ urposes Spanish conquerors became [ . . . ] the vehicle and exhaust valve for forces accumulated within the great Mesoamerican agricultural civilizations.” In fact, the realignment of communities and polities that resulted in Indian collaboration, or opposition, during the first stage of conquest was something that Spaniards “did not control or understand, but these factors ended up acting on their behalf.”37 The Otomí instance starting in Tecóac and Teocalhueyacan, and continuing with the alliances sealed with Otomí caciques and commoners who settled Querétaro and helped subdue resisting Chichimecas in the Bajío region are clear examples.38 Otomís count among the most ancient known inhabitants of Central Mexico.39 David Wright argues that their ancestors populated the valleys of Mexico, Morelos, and Toluca, as well as El Mezquital, in present-day Hidalgo, and portions of the Puebla-Tlaxcala valleys during the Preclassic and Classic periods.40 Although not every scholar accepts

“Indian Friends and Allies”   139 this hypothesis, it is generally admitted that they arrived in the central highlands before the Nahuas and played an important role in times of Toltec hegemony. The province of Jilotepec,41 one of their territories, can be properly defined as a borderland; that is, a geographic space where diverse social groups who regard themselves as different peoples intermingle. A zone of cultural confluence between Tula and the polities of the valley of Toluca since around 600 ad, in the Postclassic period (900–1521 ad) it became a transition zone between the hunter-gatherers and part-time farmers of the Gran Chichimeca and the agricultural groups of the central plateau. Looking westward, it stood between the military powers that grew in the lake basins of Pátzcuaro and Mexico during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. After the collapse of Tula the region remained independent, but the Uacúsechas from Lake Pátzcuaro, who built the Tarascan (Purépecha) Empire, and the expanding Nahua polities of the valley of Mexico repeatedly attempted its conquest. Eventually it was engulfed in Tepaneca territory and was later integrated into the Mexica domains of Tenochtitlan.42 According to Powell, among Indian allies who fought in the Chichimeca Wars, Otomís from Jilotepec received the most important commissions and privileges.43 The province of Jilotepec was crucial for Spanish penetration in territories beyond former Aztec control due to its position bordering the southeastern edge of the Gran Chichimeca. Since pre-Hispanic times some of the groups in this region, who lived in dispersed, frequently mobile rancherías as their livelihood combined hunting and gathering with seasonal agriculture in different degrees, had intermittently attacked settlements in Jilotepec. This circumstance certainly favored early Spanish-Otomí alliances in the province starting around the mid-1530s.44 The Códice de Jilotepec, a mixed alphabetic and pictorial manuscript recently dated at c. 1919 but considered a faithful copy of late sixteenth-century documents, recounts the Otomí colonization of El Bajío, the formation of a local ruling class that emerged from the alliance between Spaniards and local caciques, and their involvement in the conquest of the Gran Chichimeca. Juan Valerio Bautista de la Cruz and his nephew Juan de la Cruz are the principal characters in the section dealing with Hispanic times, probably because the document was aimed at demonstrating their lineage and services to the Spanish Crown so their descendants could claim the right to inherit their position in accordance with the 1557 royal recognition of Indian nobility.45 Despite several mistakes and inaccuracies—like the reference to the arrival of Hernán Cortés (here named Martín) to Central Mexico in 1516—the Códice illustrates a process of dispersal and expansion of Otomí population deriving from the Spanish presence that other documents verify and is consistent with the chronology David Wright proposed for the Otomís from El Mezquital.46 In the first stage between 1521 and 1540, according to Wright, small groups of migrants established around San Miguel and Querétaro to avoid European domination; then, in a second stage that lasted until 1550 these refugees were forced to pay tribute and convert, and finally between that time and 1590 they became allies of the Spaniards against the Chichimecas.47 A similar pattern can be observed in Jilotepec, but the alliances here were also sealed by individuals who remained within the province and became local rulers. Richer and

140   Borderlands of the Iberian World closer to Mexico City than San Miguel or Querétaro, Jilotepec was soon occupied by Spaniards: in 1522 one fourth of the province was given in encomienda to Hernando de Santillana and the town itself to Juan Jaramillo, whom Cortés had married to Marina (the Malinche). The high tributes Indians paid can be inferred from well-known inheritance disputes between Luis de Quezada, married to their daughter María Jaramillo, and Francisco de Velasco, second husband of Jaramillo’s second wife and brother of the viceroy.48 Such tribute obligations and other abuses the encomenderos and allied caciques committed drove many commoners like the Indian merchant Conni to migrate. According to the 1582 Relación de Querétaro he left Jilotepec with thirty families to escape the Spanish conquerors in the early 1520s and settled among the Chichimecas he traded with in La Cañada, near the site of future Querétaro. There he eventually agreed to pay tribute to the encomendero of Acámbaro and convinced his Chichimeca neighbors to do the same. After being baptized as Fernando de Tapia, Conni founded the town of Querétaro and governed it until his death in 1571.49 Ana María Crespo notes that the fortune he gained from this collaboration included plots for corn and wheat cultivation, orchards, cattle, and mines.50 Unlike commoners who migrated, Jilotepec ruling lineages took advantage of the ruin of hegemonic polities in the valley of Mexico to strengthen their regional power, some in association with the Spaniards. Under the year 1535 the Códice de Jilotepec records a conflict of authority concerning the election of governors that “the Indians” tried to conduct following “the ancient custom.” Presumably, the elected cacique, Gabriel de los Angeles, was supported by the Spanish colonists, because when he took possession “the first mass was pronounced,” and two years later “viceroy Luis de Velasco arrived in Xilotepec,” followed shortly afterward by a “juez poblador (settler judge).”51 The confrontation was so severe that “rebel Indians intending to ruin the province came,” and some Spaniards “set out in war” against them, together with the “indios principales” (of the ruling lineages) and a friar. “This conquest was the last,” says the Códice, and two years later “no more Spaniards were needed because these indios principales had a great government.” Some stayed in Jilotepec, “others spread around” as war captains. Among the caciques who stayed, Juan Valerio Bautista de la Cruz was elected governor by all the local principales in 1545, allegedly before the presence of Viceroy Luis de Velasco who also brought a royal charter granting him the title of captain. A new election organized by friar Alonzo Rangel and Pedro de Alvarado is recorded for the year 1549, followed by a pacifying campaign to congregate the Indians around 1552 that resulted in the foundation of twelve indigenous settlements under colonial auspices in the province.52 As noted, several names and dates in this account are (or seem) mistaken. Luis de Velasco was viceroy between 1550 and 1564, and conqueror Pedro de Alvarado died in 1541 so they could have not been present at the 1545–1549 elections.53 Furthermore, it is not clear whether the information on the 1549 election, the governor’s role in the posterior construction of the church of Huichapan and a stone bridge in Jilotepec, or a new period as governor from 1582 to an unspecified date, refer to Juan Valerio Bautista de la Cruz or to his nephew, because after 1545 the document does not use the full name again,

“Indian Friends and Allies”   141 only Don Juan or Juan de la Cruz.54 Nevertheless, from this and other sources it can be surmised that Spanish-Otomí alliances in Jilotepec took place in the context of the congregation policy that viceroys Mendoza and Velasco I undertook (1535–1564).55 Even if one cannot identify the protagonist of every event in the Códice, it is clear that allied caciques consolidated their power as elected governors and received other distinctions from which they drew benefits for their communities. Two biographical accounts based on sources not always revealed make Juan Valerio Bautista de la Cruz a Texcoco-born descendent of Nezahualcóyotl who, having served in the royal militias between 1529 and 1531, conquered Jilotepec at the head of eighty Spanish soldiers and four hundred Indian bowmen in 1534. Viceroy Mendoza instructed him to recruit local warriors and conquer Tula, San Juan del Río, San Miguel el Grande, and other places, appointing him in 1550 “cacique y señor” of the towns subdued. Additional royal charters issued in 1559 and 1565, which are cited in one of these accounts granted him the right to use his pre-Hispanic coat of arms, complemented with the cross and the robe of the Order of Santiago, and the title of Captain General of the Chichimecas that brought him tribute exemptions. The king also granted him a large estate for cattle breeding (estancia de ganado mayor) in Xindejé and Coscomate, in the province of Jilotepec.56 Many doubts remain regarding the allied principales from Jilotepec but it is clear that baptism sealed the alliance in every case, after which these caciques undertook locally the task of congregation, reducing the disperse population to centralized towns in order to facilitate conversion and tribute collection. The process entailed internal divisions: the caciques who were close to the Spaniards held local Indian governments in the new order and, with the title of war captains, entered Chichimeca lands to subdue and convert its inhabitants, found new settlements, and start new and powerful lineages.57 Nicolás de San Luis Montañéz, mentioned in the Códice de Jilotepec, is perhaps the best known among the caciques who went north. Extant sources assign him a different origin in Tlaxcala, Tula, or Jilotepec; some assert he was a descendent of Moctezuma and tell his prominent role as conqueror of Santiago de Querétaro and other places in the Bajío alongside other caciques such as Fernando de Tapia/Conni.58 According to Díaz de la Vega, Viceroy Luis de Velasco named him Captain General of the Chichimecas in 1557, a position confirmed by viceroys Martín Enríquez (1574) and Lorenzo Suárez de Mendoza (1583).59 Pedro Martín de Toro, another prominent character, led mixed Otomí/Chichimeca warrior companies from Querétaro to Zacatecas during the 1550s. A late seventeenth-century manuscript probably elaborated by one of his descendants describes his exploits alongside other caciques with lesser military ranks from the Jilotepec-Tula area. Three illustrations in the document, drawn in European style and glossed in Spanish, show him as far as Sombrerete and Guadiana (present-day Durango) in the northwest edge of the Gran Chichimeca.60 Subjecting the Chichimecas was harder than it had been to incorporate Mesoamerican full-time farmers to the colonial order, due in part to their unsettled way of life. The fierce resistance these natives showed from 1540 to 1590 in the Mixtón and Chichimeca Wars also resulted from Spanish enslaving practices associated with mine

142   Borderlands of the Iberian World prospecting and development.61 Particularly counterproductive for the overall colonizing enterprise was the brutality executed by Nuño de Guzmán in the first wide-ranging campaign conducted beyond the northwestern limits of the former Aztec Empire. Although in less than two years (December 1529–September 1531) this campaign put an enormous territory nearly half the size of New Spain under the Spanish Crown, including part of the former Tarascan/Purépecha Empire in present-day Michoacán, and Nueva Galicia (currently the states of Aguascalientes, Colima, Nayarit, Jalisco, and the southern tip of Zacatecas), the bitter resentment it left behind fostered native defiance in a region where Spanish population was scarce and growing only slowly. Negotiating the collaboration of local groups to reinforce regional defense and expansion was necessary in every newly conquered region, resulting in the formation of large pluriethnic armies and the foundation of pluriethnic settlements. The phenomenon continued throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Diego Martínez de Hurdaide, for instance, enlisted Pimas and Mayos in his campaigns against the Yaquis from Sonora in 1609 and, after the 1680 Pueblo revolt was put down in Nuevo México (1692), the returning exiled Spaniards established alliances against the Comanches with some of the re-conquered Pueblos, such as Pecos, Zía, and Tesuque, and even with some Apache tribes.62 In 1792 Viceroy Revillagigedo ordered a detailed report on the Indian militias active in Nueva Galicia, Sonora, Sinaloa and the coast of the Southern Sea. Added to the results of a similar inquiry that Félix Calleja undertook in Colotlán and the Nayar Sierra the previous year, the count sums-up sixty-six Indian companies totaling approximately 4,679 active warriors in New Spain for that year.63

Figures, Functions, and Order Sources from Vázquez de Coronado’s expedition to Cíbola, Guzmán’s campaigns, the Mixtón war, and the foundation of Nombre de Dios, near present-day Durango in Nueva Vizcaya prove useful for exploring the numbers and organization of Indian allies in the sixteenth-century northern frontier of New Spain. In January 1537 Nuño de Guzmán was imprisoned in Mexico City on charges of cruelty and despotism during his performance at the head of the government of Pánuco and in the expeditions that resulted in the conquest of Nueva Galicia.64 From then on Viceroy Antonio de Mendoza took over the exploration and conquest of the north using the villages of Culiacán, Compostela (present-day Tepic), and Guadalajara that Guzmán had founded as departure stations for new expeditions. This second phase of northward expansion was triggered by the stories about seven wonderful cities that the four survivors of Pánfilo de Narváez’s failed expedition to Florida told in 1536, when they arrived in Mexico City after a nine-year odyssey wandering between the coast of present-day Texas and Culiacán.65 The brief reports on the seven cities contained in the famous Relación by Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca (known as Naufragios) and other contemporary sources, certainly accompanied by unrecorded oral accounts, seemed to confirm

“Indian Friends and Allies”   143 similar rumors regarding a promising urban world north of New Spain that Guzmán had received from an Indian captive before starting his expeditions in 1529.66 Francisco Vázquez de Coronado, appointed governor of Nueva Galicia in 1538, set out to verify Cabeza de Vaca’s reports. Between March and July 1539 a small party headed by the Franciscan friar Marcos de Niza traveled under his supervision from Culiacán to present-day New Mexico and back.67 Based on the friar’s enthusiastic news about “the land that people call Cíbola,” the Viceroy launched a colonizing expedition under the command of Vázquez de Coronado, who left Compostela in late February 1540, leading over three hundred Spaniards and more than a thousand Indian allies.68 Their departure left the recently settled northern portion of New Spain exposed to the attack of outraged natives who had experienced the brutality of Nuño de Guzmán’s campaigns and were dissatisfied with the maltreatment by succeeding government officers and the tribute levied by local encomenderos.69 The events known as the Mixtón war, or Cazcán rebellion, contemporaneous with Vázquez de Coronado’s adventure, constituted the first major uprising in the Gran Chichimeca. It is traditionally dated from 1540 to 1542 when, after a series of violent entradas organized by Cristóbal de Oñate—then lieutenant governor of Nueva Galicia— Cazcán Indians fortified in the región de los peñoles (crags region) in southern Zacatecas and northern Jalisco confronted Spanish forces. Its peak occurred after a large group of Indian warriors attacked Guadalajara in June 1541, and following the death of Pedro de Alvarado (September 1541)—who had arrived from the coast with a large contingent of Tarascan allies to reinforce the defense—Viceroy Mendoza led a huge army to suppress the uprising.70 In the journals and reports concerning all of these campaigns, the small quantity of Spanish soldiers compared to the huge size of Indian troops, and the contradictory figures contained in different testimonies describing the same events stand out. In a letter to the King dated in Omitlan, July 8, 1530, Nuño de Guzmán said he had left Mexico City accompanied by 150 “mounted [Spanish] men plus equal quantity of foot soldiers in full armor [ . . . ] and seven or eight thousand Indian friends . . .”71 One of his soldiers, Francisco de Arceo, counted 350 Spaniards and fifteen thousand Indian friends from the province of Mexico, while Captain García del Pilar, who provided no figures for the army at its outset, stated that during the initial stopover in the province of Michoacán, Guzmán requested eight thousand men from the local ruler of Uchichila to supplement his forces.72 Figure discrepancies may be explained by the divergent status probably ascribed to the functions that allies fulfilled in military campaigns, as warriors and captains, porters and servants, cooks, interpreters, guides, or ambassadors: it is not unreasonable to think that Spaniards had little interest in calculating the number of servants and porters. On the other hand, the number of Indian allies frequently changed during one single campaign, as the testimony by García del Pilar shows; naturally witnesses recorded—if they did at all—only what they saw or heard themselves. As Richard Flint has noted, some natives, particularly those serving as load carriers, accompanied the expeditions for only a few days being replaced along the way by groups of local bearers, and they

144   Borderlands of the Iberian World sometimes used different routes. This is clear from a testimony by the Pátzcuaro native Don Alonso during Tello de Sandoval’s 1544–1546 visita: “The number of tamemes (load carriers) provided depended on the [number of] expeditionaries who were passing through. [Besides] not everyone went by way of that pueblo [Pátzcuaro], since they were divided onto two routes.”73 The Spanish-Indian ratio in most northward expeditions after 1540 and many conquering parties in the earlier, central Mexico stage was between five and forty times as many Indians as Spaniards, or much more in the 1521 siege of Mexico-Tenochtitlan and the Mixtón war.74 Figures for Vázquez de Coronado’s expedition to Cíbola, like those for Guzmán’s conquests, vary in different sources. According to the muster roll drawn up in Compostela in February 1540, Coronado’s company was made up of 225 mounted Spaniards and 62 on foot.75 “Adding the friars, a small escort who went ahead before and others who joined the caravan later,” the expedition totaled 336 Spanish men besides some of their wives and children.76 The roster did not register Indian allies. But Pedro de Castañeda Nájera, Spanish chronicler and member of the expedition wrote that “about 800 Indians” native to unspecified places in Nueva España departed from Mexico City with the Spanish troops, and when the army left Culiacán heading north there were “over 1000 Indian friends and servants.”77 Richard Flint asserts that “Tello de Sandoval’s Indian witnesses provided a wide range of estimates,” usually “covering only the particular communities of individual respondents,” but in any case, considering these and Castañeda de Nájera’s figures “a total of 2,000 indios amigos for the expedition is probably not unreasonable”: that is, almost six times as many Indians as Spaniards.78 As for the number of native allies in the army that Viceroy Mendoza led to put down the Mixtón war there are no official records. But some witnesses of the Tello de Sandoval visita said it was composed of 180 mounted Spaniards and around 50,000 Indians.79 Precise figures for either Spanish soldiers or Indian warriors in this army are unavailable. Nevertheless, it was apparently the largest army recruited in the entire colonial ­period after the fall of Tenochtitlan.80 The 1541 journal on the feats performed by Francisco Sandoval Acazitli, cacique of Tlalmanalco who joined Mendoza in the Mixtón war at the head of the forces from Chalco, tells a lot about the provenance and organization of Indian companies. Besides the “principales, commoners, warriors and mandones (military chiefs)” from “Amaquemecan, Tenango, Xochimilco, and Tlalmanalco,” all towns in the Chalco province, he mentions squadrons from different polities beyond Mexico’s highland valleys such as Xilotepec, Michoacán, Tonalá in Nueva Galicia, and even Zapotecs from Oaxaca.81 His descriptions show them traveling and fighting side by side but separately, each group under the immediate command of their own cacique who had presumably taken charge of recruiting his own people, like Acazitli himself did: “I pleaded the Viceroy to allow myself and those of my province of Chalco to serve in this war; [. . .] and after I returned to Tlalmanalco, I enlisted all the people of this province for the said war [. . .] and all of them willingly admitted to go.”82 Furthermore, ethnic-specific squadrons were often assigned particular responsibilities, although they were frequently grouped with other like companies to cooperate under the command of a Spanish captain or the

“Indian Friends and Allies”   145 viceroy himself as shown in Acazitli’s account for the attack on Nochiztlán: to one side of the artillery “went the tlaxcaltecas, huexotzincas, quauhquecholtecas, followed by the mexicanos and xilotepecas, and then the aculhuas, and to the other side those from Michoacan, Mextitlan, and the chalcas,” and after this battle the Chalco contingent was put in charge of transporting the artillery and ammunition, as well as tending the sheep.83 This view is consistent with Flint’s assertion that the recruitment of Indian friends for Vázquez de Coronado’s expedition to Cíbola “was done at the level of the indigenous dynastic state, or altepetl,” and the quotas established within each of these ­polities were set and filled “by the native governor/tlatoani and the leaders of the constituent calpolli/barrios.”84 As was customary in pre-conquest Mesoamerican fighting forces, “individual Indians did not enlist separately.”85 Moreover, in the Mixtón war, as in Ross Hassig’s reconstruction of pre-Hispanic Aztec warfare, once the warring party was constituted “each town marched under its own banner with its own leaders, and if it was large enough to have more than one calpolli, it had one over-all leader [. . .], and subordinate leaders for each of the several calpolli units” that “apparently were not divided.”86 Plate 1 of the Códice de Tlatelolco (Figure  5.4), painted in the second half of the ­sixteenth century confirms the continuity of native military organization that Acazitli’s “Relación” reflects. It represents—in the left extreme—the Tlatelolca participation in the armies that Vázquez de Coronado and Viceroy Mendoza respectively took to Cíbola and the Mixtón war, personified by two large standing Indian warriors that dominate the painted scene. According to Xavier Noguez, these characters are don Alonso Cuauhnochtli, governor of Tlatelolco and his successor don Martin Cuauhtzin Tlacateccatl, both mentioned by Sahagún as having fought against the Chicimecas of Nochiztlán, Xochipillan, Tototlan, and “Sibola” (Cíbola).87 Underneath each of the Indian characters in the plate there is a toponymic glyph. The first, representing a hill crooked at the top, is the well-known glyph for Culhuacan/ Culiacán, the northernmost Spanish outpost that Vázquez de Coronado visited before entering unknown territory on his way to Cíbola. The second, representing a crag with a prickly pear tree (nochiztli in Nahuatl) at the base is Nochiztlán.88 The warrior above this location is most probably Martin Cuauhtzin Tlacateccatl, mentioned in Acazitli’s account on the Mixtón war as “D. Martin el de Tlatelulco.”89 Both glyphs show at their base a decapitated head with the eyes closed symbolizing dead Chichimecas, while the three small mounted characters between them and the Indian warriors represent the Spanish captains (including Viceroy Mendoza) and the troops they commanded.90 Together with Acazitli’s account and the testimonies by Indian allies recorded in the Tello de Sandoval visita, this interesting pictography confirms that Indian allies in the journey to Cíbola and the Mixtón war maintained traditions of organization that antedated the arrival of Spaniards at Tenochtitlan and continued to use native war gear and dress, sometimes combined with European arms and attire. This included bows and arrows, obsidian-edged swords, quilted round shields, wood and bone helmets adorned with quetzal feathers (quetzalpatzactli), and quilted cotton body armor (ichcahuipilli).91

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Figure 5.4.  The first plate of the pictorial document known as Códice de Tlatelolco depicts Tlatelolca allies on the expedition to Cibola and the Mixton war. The two large standing figures represent Tlatelolca leading warriors while the three small mounted characters at their feet ­represent the Spanish captains, including viceroy Mendoza who is holding a banner. The scene reveals the relative importance that native allies accorded to Indian and Spanish conquerors in their joint enterprise. Courtesy of the Biblioteca Nacional de Antropología e Historia, Mexico.

Most interestingly, the Tlatelolca scribe depicted the expeditions clearly as indigenous enterprises, aided by Spanish auxiliaries. After Vázquez de Coronado returned from Cíbola in 1542 a brief period of peace ensued in Nueva Galicia because the village societies of the region, shattered by the past wars and epidemics, could not challenge the reinforced presence of armed men that his troops represented. The peopling of the region by Spaniards and Indian allies that such circumstance stimulated brought along the opening of cart roads, the rapid spread of cattle, and mine prospecting, which in turn attracted more colonists and propitiated Spanish raids to capture Indian slaves. The intermittent Chichimeca Wars that afflicted northern New Spain between 1550 and 1590 resulted from this situation.92 Silver mines discovered in Zacatecas in September 1546 were so rich that three years later immigration had made the town the second largest city in the viceroyalty. Within a few years it was contributing one-fifth of the world’s silver production.93 Northward exploration in the following decades targeted above all precious metal prospecting and exploitation, primarily organized from Zacatecas.94 By the beginning of the

“Indian Friends and Allies”   147 s­eventeenth century, mine workers in the city were primarily Indians who spoke Nahuatl and Purépecha; many had fought on the Spanish side in the Chichimec frontier before settling down as day laborers.95 Nahuas and Purépechas also constituted the majority of the Amerindian population in Tlaxcalilla, near the mining town of San Luis Potosí between 1594 and 1630, according to statistics that Laurent Corbeil compiled from parish records. He explains that many could have arrived in pursuit of the economic advantages associated to the mining labor regime, but it is striking that alongside Otomís these were the main groups who served as the Spaniards’ military allies in northern New Spain.96 The ethnic-based organization just described for indigenous allies during military campaigns also ruled the colonizing strategy followed to pacify and develop newly conquered territories north of Mesoamerica, based on the establishment of multi-ethnic settlements aimed at enticing Chichimecas into farming and obedience, furnishing Spanish towns and villages with food supplies, and securing warrior forces for local defense. This is clearly illustrated by three documents on the services that two groups of Indians—one Mexica and one Purépecha—rendered to the military expedition Pedro de Ahumada commanded between June 1561 and February–March 1562 against rebel Zacatecos and Guachichiles. This rebellion threatened the mines of Avino, Sombrerete, Chalchihuites, and San Martín that had been discovered north of Zacatecas during the previous decade. Written in Nahuatl by Indians who took part in this pacifying campaign, two of these documents are memoires that deal with their participation as porters, warriors, guides, and scouts. They also describe the foundation of the village of Nombre de Dios (Figure 5.1), first permanent, non-mining colonial settlement established in the province of Nueva Vizcaya (May–June 1562), and their involvement in subsequent campaigns in the vicinity later on.97 The other document is an agreement signed in 1585 by the principales of the Mexicas and Purépechas living in the village. Its purpose was to set the periods that their respective communities would be responsible for providing the services the Spaniards demanded, which included guarding sheep, making tortillas, bringing and kindling wood, fetching water, sweeping, and caring for the horses.98 Even in shallow analysis, the memoires show the ambiguous character of these allies’ voluntary participation. Their recruitment in San Martín (Figure  5.1), where some already lived probably as mine workers, was made under penalty of a fine of forty pesos in case of refusal and no wages were paid for their services. However, amidst the campaign, in El Mezquital, Ahumada promised that they would obtain land grants in the cabecera village to be founded after the rebels’ defeat. Therefore, when the Nombre de Dios foundation site was selected, Indian allies—michoacanos/purépechas, mexicas, and naturales (natives to the region)—were given the lands “across the river,” to the exclusion of the Spaniards, and three years later this quarter was parceled, each resident group receiving separate plots within.99 The village foundation charter that Viceroy Luis de Velasco issued in October 1563 had stipulated, in fact, that Indians and Spaniards who volunteered to become residents would receive plots for houses, orchards, farmlands,

148   Borderlands of the Iberian World and cattle ranches. It stipulated as well that all of its residents—be they Natives or Spaniards—would enjoy the same privileges, tribute exemptions, and liberties as the rest of the Spanish villages in the viceroyalty.100 At least until the beginning of the seventeenth century, life in the multi-ethnic towns that Indian allies established in New Spain preserved pre-conquest traditions of cooperative though segregated settlement, as well as self-government structures for each ethnic unit within one single urban center. Their residents also preserved a number of privileges that count among the reasons for Indian participation in the Spanish conquest enterprise, even if their decision to collaborate also involved avoiding penalties of different sorts as seen above. The 1608 Descripción de la villa de Nombre de Dios, elaborated by local authorities, asserts that there were no repartimientos or encomiendas in the town, Indians paid no tribute and they all mounted horses.101 It also states that most of the town’s population at the time was of Mexican and Tarascan origin, natives from Tonalá had also immigrated and each of these groups elected annually their own alcaldes, regidores, and alguaciles. Such settlement and government order had been common among Indian allies before, as suggested by folio 32r of the Códice de Jilotepec (Figure 5.5) depicting the principales present in the election of Juan Valerio Bautista de la Cruz as Indian governor of Jilotepec in 1545. The bottom, standing character represented in the first column of this plate wears a combination of Spanish and Indigenous clothes, like the Indian captains in plate 1 of the Códice de Tlatelolco and unlike the three other characters in the column who are seated and dressed in Spanish attire. Brambila Paz thinks that he can be one of the Otomí conqueror caciques incorporated into the Spanish structures after the conquest of the Gran Chichimeca. In the third column, the first character wears a hairstyle with a bow, which according to the same author is reminiscent of the temillotl that the Nahuas used, while the band that the second wears on his head and the sleeveless shirt that covers his torso to mid-thigh represent an arrangement not uncommon in the Relación de Michoacán.102 This indicates that in mid-sixteenth-century Jilotepec, as much later in Nombre de Dios, allied groups of different ethnic origins lived together under colonial rule but preserved pre-conquest semi-autonomous government structures that channeled their participation in common overall settlement or Indian province affairs. In conclusion, neither coerced recruitment nor the urge to escape Spanish oppression, or the material benefits and privileges they obtained are sufficient to explain Indian participation in the colonial Enterprise as conquerors and settlers. Further research is needed on both the voluntary and forced collaboration of natives other than Nahuas to deepen the current understanding of how peoples of different ethnicities interacted visà-vis the Spanish overlords, as well as the continuities and adaptations of pre-Hispanic warring and alliance practices into the colonial order. Nevertheless, even when studied partially, indigenous sources show that rather than mere objects of Spanish manipulation, Indian allies had their own agendas, frequently deriving from pre-conquest political configurations, and they were able to maintain traditions of organization that antedated the arrival of Europeans.

“Indian Friends and Allies”   149

Figure 5.5.  Principales of Jilotepec present at the 1545 election of Juan Bautista Valerio de la Cruz as governor of Jilotepec, depicted in the Códice de Jilotepec. The differing attire worn by the Indian characters facing the seated Spaniards indicate that leaders of allied groups of varied ethnic origins, probably living together in this Indian province, took part in the election procedures. Courtesy of the Biblioteca Nacional de Antropología e Historia, Mexico.

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Notes Archives AGN:

Archivo General de la Nación, Mexico City (Mexico).  Biblioteca Nacional de México, Mexico City (Mexico). BNAH: Biblioteca Nacional de Antropología e Historia, Mexico City (Mexico). BNE: Biblioteca Nacional, Madrid (Spain). 1. Philip W. Powell, Soldiers, Indians, and Silver: The Northward Advance of New Spain, 1550–1600 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1952), 158. 2. See the Indian testimonies of a visita (administrative review of royal officers) conducted by Francisco Tello de Sandoval between 1544 and 1546, published in Richard Flint, “Without Them Nothing Was Possible: The Coronado Expedition’s Indian Allies,” New Mexico Historical Review 84, 1 (2009): 65–118. 3. Susan Schroeder, “Introduction. The Genre of Conquest Studies,” in Indian Conquistadors: Indigenous Allies in the Conquest of Mesoamerica, ed. Laura Matthew and Michael R. Oudijk (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2007), 5–27; David J. Weber, The Spanish Frontier in North America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), 47–49; Ida Altman, The War for Mexico’s West: Indians and Spaniards in New Galicia, 1524–1550 (Albuquerque: UNM, 2010), 22–38, 220–221; Fausto Marín Tamayo, Nuño de Guzmán (Mexico: Siglo XXI, 1992), 27, 194, 223. According to the Ynformacion juridica de los conventos, doctrinas y conversiones fundados por los padres de la provincia de Zacatecas. Conventos de Colotlan y Atotonilco . . . [1622–1623], Biblioteca Nacional de México, Nueva Vizcaya, caja 1, f. 9, Viceroy Luis de Velasco II “gave” the Franciscans some Mexicans and Tlaxcalans “who  were distributed throughout the said frontier so the barbarians of this land [. . .] would adopt their civility and education, which turned out to be a very useful remedy.” (My translation). 4. For seventeenth- and eighteenth-century local allies in the Fronteras de Colotlán, including Nahua residents see Bret Blosser, “ ‘By the Force of their Lives and The Spilling of Blood:’ Flechero Service and Political Leverage on a Nueva Galicia Frontier,” in Matthew and Oudijk, ed. Indian Conquistadors, 289–316. For Ópata companies in the Comandancia General de Provincias Internas (1780s) see José Refugio de la Torre Curiel, Twilight of the Mission Frontier: Shifting Interethnic Alliances and Social Organization in Sonora, 1768–1855 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, The Academy of American Franciscan History, 2013), 126–128. For conscriptions by Nuño de Guzmán in Michoacán see Altman, The War for Mexico’s West, 25–26. See also José Luis Mirafuentes Galván, “Las tropas de indios auxiliares: conquista, contrainsurgencia y rebelión en Sonora,” Estudios de Historia Novohispana 13, 13 (1993): 93–114. 5. Laws establishing the guidelines for indigenous governments were compiled in the Recopilación de Leyes de los Reynos de las Indias (1680), Libro VI, título III, leyes XV and XVI; Libro VI, título V, ley XX. Accessed June 10, 2016, http://www.gabrielbernat.es/ espana/leyes/rldi/rldi.html. 6. See José Marcos Medina Bustos and Ignacio Almada Bay, “Inter-Ethnic War in Sonora: Indigenous Captains General and Cultural Change, 1740–1832” and Sean F. McEnroe, “The Indian Garrison Colonies of New Spain and Central America,” both in The Oxford

“Indian Friends and Allies”   151 Handbook of Borderlands of the Iberian World, ed. Danna  A.  Levin Rojo and Cynthia Radding (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019). 7. Marc Simmons, “Tlaxcalans in the Spanish Borderlands,” New Mexico Historical Review 39 (1964): 101–110. 8. Richard Flint and Shirley Cushing Flint, ed. and trans., Documents of the Coronado Expedition, 1539–1542: They Were Not Familiar with His Majesty, nor Did They Wish to Be His Subjects (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 2005). 9. Flint, “Without Them,” 1. 10. “Relación del pueblo de Nuchiztlán” [1584], in Relaciones geográficas del siglo XVI: Nueva Galicia, vol. 10, ed. René Acuña (Mexico: IIA-UNAM, 1988), 166. 11. Danna A. Levin Rojo, Return to Aztlan: Indians, Spaniard, and the Invention of Nuevo México (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2014), 8–9, 89–90. 12. Examples of this turn are James Lockhart, Arthur J. O. Anderson, and Frances Berdan, Beyond the Codices: The Nahua View of Colonial Mexico (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976); James Lockhart, We People Here: Nahuatl Accounts of the Conquest of Mexico (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); Stephanie Wood, Transcending Conquest: Nahua Views of Spanish Colonial Mexico (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2003); Laura Matthew and Michel Oudijk, ed., Indian Conquistadors: Indigenous Allies in the Conquest of Mesoamerica (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2007); Yanna Yannakakis, “Allies or Servants? The Journey of Indian Conquistadors in the Lienzo of Analco,” Ethnohistory 58, no. 4 (2011): 653–682; Laura Matthew, Memories of conquest, Becoming Mexicano in Colonial Guatemala (Chapel Hill: UNC, 2012); Sean McEnroe, From Colony to Nationhood in Mexico. Laying the Foundations, 1560–1840 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 13. Schroeder, “Introduction,” 19. Even when their decision to fight under the Spanish banner was partially conditioned by this circumstance, Quauquecoltecas conceived of it as an alliance in a Lienzo probably painted in the 1530s or 1540s. Florine Asselbergs, “The conquest in Images. Stories of Tlaxcalteca and Quauquecholteca Conquistadors,” in Matthew and Oudijk, ed., Indian Conquistadors, 69–70, 72–74, and Conquered Conquistadors: The Lienzo de Quauquechollan. A Nahua Vision of the Conquest of Guatemala (Leiden, The Netherlands: CNWS, 2004). 14. For the forced condition of “Indian friends” in Guzmán’s campaigns see Donald Chipman, Nuño de Guzmán and the Province of Pánuco in New Spain, 1518–1533 (Glendale, CA: A.H. Clarck, 1967); Ida Altman, “Conquest, Coercion and Collaboration: Indian Allies and the Campaigns in Nueva Galicia,” in Matthew and Oudijk, ed. Indian Conquistadors, 147, 152–153, and The War for Mexico’s West, 24–34. The most important contemporaneous reports by Spanish soldiers containing evidence on how Indians were recruited are published in José Luis Razo Zaragoza y Cortés, ed., Crónicas de la conquista del reino de Nueva Galicia en territorio de la Nueva España (Guadalajara: Ayuntamiento de la Ciudad de Guadalajara, IJAH, 1963). 15. Danna A. Levin Rojo, “La búsqueda del Nuevo México: un proceso de-migratorio en la América Española del siglo XVI,” in Las vías del noroeste I: una macrorregión indígena americana, ed. Carlo Bonfiglioli et al. (Mexico: IIA-UNAM, 2006), 134–137, 157–158, and Return to Aztlan, 108–132, 191–195. 16. Some are editions of documents including extensive studies, for example: David Wright, Conquistadores otomíes en la guerra chichimeca. Dos documentos en el Archivo General de la Nación (Querétaro: SBS, Gobierno del Estado de Querétaro, 1988); Valentín Frías,

152   Borderlands of the Iberian World comp., La conquista de Querétaro (Mexico: Universidad Autónoma de Querétaro, 1990); Rosa Brambila Paz et al., Códice de Jilotepec (Estado de México). Rescate de una historia (Zinacantepec, Mexico: Fondo Editorial del Estado de México, El Colegio Mexiquense, CONACULTA, INAH, 2013). Others are monographic but brief articles: Ana María Crespo, “Don Nicolás de San Luis Montañez, cacique conquistador y pacificador en la Gran Chichimeca,” in Episodios novohispanos de la historia otomí, ed. Rosa Brambila (Toluca: UAEM, Instituto Mexiquense de Cultura, 2002), 93–138; Ana María Crespo and Beatriz Cervantes, “Jilotepec en los mitos del Bajío,” Dimensión Antropológica 9–10 (1997): 115–127; José Antonio Cruz Mina Ramírez, Jaime Font, Ma. Concepción de la Vega M., and Juan Ricardo Jiménez Gómez, Indios y franciscanos en la construcción de Santiago de Querétaro (siglos xvi y xvii) (Querétaro: Gobierno del Estado de Querétaro, 1997); Rick Hendricks, “La presencia de tlalpujenses en la reconquista de Nuevo México,” Relaciones vol. XVIII, no. 70 (1997): 195–206; and Chantal Cramaussel, “Relaciones entre la Nueva Vizcaya y la provincia de Michoacán,” Relaciones vol. XXV, no. 100 (2004): 173-203. 17. These include David B. Adams, “The Tlaxcalan Colonies of Spanish Coahuila and Nuevo León: An Aspect of the Settlement of Northern Mexico” (PhD diss., University of Texas, Austin, 1971); Celestino Eustaquio, El Señorío de San Esteban del Saltillo: Voz y escritura nahuas, siglos XVI y XVIII (Saltillo: AMS, Ayuntamiento de Saltillo, 1991); Israel Cavazos Garza, Constructores de la nación: la migración tlaxcalteca en el norte de la Nueva España (San Luis Potosí: El Colegio de San Luis, Gobierno de Tlaxcala, 1999); Patricia Martínez, “Noble” Tlaxcalans: Race and Ethnicity in Northeastern New Spain 1770–1810 (PhD diss., University of Texas, 2004); Leslie Scott Offutt, “Defending Corporate Identity on the Northern New Spanish Frontier: San Esteban de la Nueva Tlaxcala, 1770–1810,” The Americas 64, no. 3 (2007): 351–375; Jovita Baber, “Empire, Indians, and the Negotiation for the Status of City in Tlaxcala, 1521–1550,” in Negotiation within Domination: New Spain’s Indian Pueblos Confront the Spanish State, ed. Ethelia Ruiz Medrano and Susan Kellogg (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2010), 19–44; Lucina Toulet Abasolo, Tlaxcala en la conquista de México. El mito de la traición (Tlaxcala: Ediciones del Patronato Estatal de Promotores Voluntarios en Tlaxcala, 1996). 18. For example Charles Gibson, Tlaxcala in the Sixteenth Century (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1952); María del Carmen Velázquez, Colotlán: doble frontera contra los bárbaros (Mexico: UNAM, 1961); Robert Shadow, “Conquista y gobierno español en la frontera norte de la Nueva Galicia: el caso de Colotlán,” Relaciones vol. VIII, no. 32 (1987): 40–75. 19. Diego Muñoz Camargo, “Descripción de la ciudad y provincia de Tlaxcala de la Nueva España e Indias del mar océano para el buen gobierno y ennoblecimie[nt]o dellas, mandada hacer por la S.C.R.M. del rey Don Felipe, nuestro señor” (manuscript number 242 of the Hunter Collection of the University of Glasgow, U.K.), in Relaciones geográficas del siglo XVI: Tlaxcala, vol. 4, ed. René Acuña (Mexico: IIA-UNAM, 1984), 231–285, and Historia de Tlaxcala (Ms. 210 de la Biblioteca Nacional de París), paleography, intro., and notes by Luis Reyes García and Javier Lira Toledo (Mexico: Gobierno del Estado de Tlaxcala, CIESAS, UAT, 1998); Juan Buenaventura Zapata y Mendoza, Historia cronológica de la noble ciudad de Tlaxcala, ed. and trans. Luis Reyes García and Andrea Martínez Baracs (Tlaxcala: UAT, CIESAS, 1995). According to José Eduardo Contreras Martínez, “La confrontación tlaxcalteca ante la Conquista,” Dimensión Antropológica 21, 61 (2014):

“Indian Friends and Allies”   153 43–72, the deep-seated idea that this early alliance was easy and immediate is questionable, the Tlaxcalans’ attitudes toward the Spaniards were heterogeneous and the economic and political reasons that drove them to accept the alliance despite internal differences derived from conflicts related to the Mexica domination. 20. The Lienzo de Tlaxcala, a lost painted cloth elaborated around 1550 of which several copies survive, depicts Tlaxcalan participation in many of these campaigns. The final section of Muñoz Camargo’s “Descripción de la ciudad y provincia de Tlaxcala” (f. 236–317) includes copies of the same scenes, with a few additions. See also Manuel Ballesteros Gaibrois, “El Lienzo de Tlaxcalla de la Casa de Colón de Valladolid,” Cuadernos Prehispánicos 5 (1977): 5–16; Gordon Brotherston and Ana Gallegos, “El Lienzo de Tlaxcala y el Manuscrito de Glasgow (Hunter 242),” Estudios de Cultura Náhuatl 20 (1990): 117–140. Additional evidence includes the records of the cabildo of Tlaxcala, partially published by James Lockhart, Frances Berdan, and Arthur  J.  O.  Anderson, The Tlaxcalan Actas. A Compendium of the Records of the Cabildo of Tlaxcala (1545–1627) (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1986), and a 1562 letter by Tlaxcalan leaders petitioning extra rewards for their services in pacifying Chululam, Tepeyacac, Quauhquechula, Mexico City, Guatemala, Culhuacan, and other provinces: “Carta de naturales de la provincia de Tlascala al Rey Don Felipe II,” 1 March 1562, in Cartas de Indias. Tomo I (Madrid: Ministerio de Fomento, 1877), 400–405. 21. In 1539 a royal charter, confirmed in 1563, exempted Tlaxcalans from personal service in Puebla de los Ángeles. In 1581 and 1594 this exemption was expanded so they would not provide such service elsewhere. The provision was included as law 44, book VI, title I of the 1680 Recopilación de Leyes de los Reynos de las Indias. Laws XXXIX to XLI in the same book and title, confirm dispositions issued in 1545, 1563, and 1585 that allowed Tlaxcalans to preserve their ancient customs and granted the title of governor to their Alcalde Mayor. 22. “Para que a los indios de Tlaxcala que van a las nuevas poblaciones de chichimecas se les guarden las preeminencias aquí contenidas,” Mexico City, March 14, 1591, in Documentos inéditos para el estudio de los tlaxcaltecas en San Luis Potosí siglos xvi-xviii, vol. 2, introd., comp., and palaeoghraphy by José Antonio Rivera Villanueva (Mexico: Gobierno del Estado de Tlaxcala, Fideicomiso Colegio de Historia de Tlaxcala, 2010), 35–39. 23. Indians were forbidden to own or carry weapons since 1501, and to mount horses since at least 1568. Recopilación de Leyes de los Reynos de las Indias (1680), book VI, title I, laws XXI and XXXIII. 24. Lockhart et al., The Tlaxcalan Actas, 60. 25. Eugene B. Sego, Aliados y adversarios: los colonos tlaxcaltecas en la frontera septentrional de Nueva España, trans. Armando Castellanos (San Luis Potosí: El Colegio de San Luis, 1998), 37, 51–52; Tomás Martínez Saldaña, La diáspora tlaxcalteca. Colonización agrícola del norte de México (Tlaxcala: Gobierno del Estado de Tlaxcala, 1988), 45; and Andrea Martínez Baracs, “Colonizaciones tlaxcaltecas,” Historia Mexicana XLIII, 2 (1993), 206–207. 26. Sego, Aliados y adversarios, 58–59. 27. Martínez Saldaña, La diáspora, 59–69 provides details on the settlements Tlaxcalans established in the northern borderlands between 1591 and 1598. 28. For example Tomás Martínez Saldaña, Anales de los pueblos de la Nueva Tlaxcala (Tlaxcala: Gobierno del Estado de Tlaxcala, 2004), 99–103; Cecilia Sheridan, “Indios madrineros colonizadores tlaxcaltecas en el noreste novohispano,” Estudios de Historia

154   Borderlands of the Iberian World

29.

30.

31. 32. 33.

34. 35. 3 6. 37. 38. 39.

Novohispana 24 (2001): 15–51; José Cuello, Saltillo colonial. Orígenes y formación de una sociedad mexicana en la frontera norte (Saltillo: AMS, Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila, 2004). See the soldiers’ reports on the conquest of Nueva Galicia contained in Razo Zaragoza y Cortés, Crónicas. Tlaxcalans again are a notable exception: the 1591 caravan was censed at Jilotepec on July 6. The count resulted in 932 individuals, including married men and women, single adults, and children. Sego, Aliados y adversarios, 57–58. Códice Florentino [1558–77], book XII, chapters XXIV–XXVI. The Spanish portion of this bilingual manuscript taken from a sixteenth-century copy found in the convent of Tolosa, Spain, first published as Historia general de las cosas de Nueva España in the nineteenth century, is used in most modern editions. The first complete paleography of Sahagún’s Spanish text in the original manuscript was published as Bernardino de Sahagún, Historia General de las cosas de Nueva España. Versión íntegra del texto castellano del manuscrito conocido como Códice florentino, intro., palaeography, glossary, and notes by Alfredo López Austin and Josefina García Quintana (Mexico: CONACULTA, 1989). The passages here referred come from this edition (vol. 3, 1201–1204) and Historia General de las cosas de Nueva España [from the Tolosa Manuscript], ed. Angel Ma. Garibay K. (Mexico: Porrúa, 1982), 786–788. Sahagún, Historia General (López Austin and García Quntana version), 3, 1204. Hernán Cortés, Cartas de relación (Mexico: Porrúa, 1994); Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxóchitl, “Historia de la Nación Chichimeca,” in Obras Históricas, ed. Edmundo O’Gorman (Mexico: UNAM, 1985), vol. 2, 233. Sahagún, Historia General (López Austin and García Quintana version), 3, 1204. Teocalhueyacan was among the towns the Mexica conquered under Itzcóatl, according to folio 5v of Códice Mendoza, in Frances F. Berdan and Patricia Rieff Anawalt, The Essential Codex Mendoza (Berkeley: University of California Press 1997), 16. Perhaps at this time some Otomís established frontier communities in Tlaxcala, later becoming the defense forces of this polity. Due to their renown in pre-conquest times, Tlatelolca narratives on the 1521 defense of Tenochtitlan used their name to call Tlatelolca warriors. Reyes Retana, “El Códice de Jilotepec,” in Brambila Paz et al., Códice de Jilotepec, 172. Códice de Huamantla [c.1592], plate 5, upper left corner. Biblioteca Digital Mexicana, accessed August 12, 2016, http://bdmx.mx/detalle/?id_cod=20; Sahagún, Historia General, book 8, chapter 7 (López Astin and García Quntana version), 2, 736. Jeanne Gillespie, Saints and Warriors. Tlaxcallan Perspectives on the Conquest of Tenochtitlan (New Orleans: University Press of the South, 2004), 46, 48–52. Contreras Martínez, “La confrontación tlaxcalteca.” Salvador Álvarez, El indio y la sociedad colonial norteña. Siglos XVI–XVIII (Zamora: IIHUJED, El Colegio de Michoacán, 2010), 8. My translation. Located north of the Lerma River in central-western Mexico. It comprises the modern states of Guanajuato, Aguascalientes, and portions of Querétaro and Jalisco, therefore coinciding partially with the Gran Chichimeca. Rosa Brambila Paz, “Noticias del Códice de Jilotepec,” in Códice de Jilotepec, ed. Brambila Paz et al., 13–17; Reyes Retana, “El Códice de Jilotepec,” 170–174; David Wright, “La colonización de los estados de Guanajuato y Querétaro por los otomíes según las fuentes etnohistóricas,” in Contribuciones a la arqueología y etnohistoria del occidente de México, ed. Eduardo Williams (Zamora: El Colegio de Michoacán, 1994), 381–383, 386–388, and “Manuscritos otomíes del virreinato,” in Códices y documentos sobre México, segundo simposio (Mexico: INAH, 1977), accessed August 20, 2016, http.//www.villaprogresomx. com/files/manuscritosotomiesdelvirreinato.pdf;.

“Indian Friends and Allies”   155 4 0. Wright, “Manuscritos otomíes,” 3–4. 41. Also spelled Xilotepec in colonial documents. The modern spelling of Jilotepec is used except in direct quotations. 42. Brambila Paz, “Noticias del Códice,” 17 asserts this was during the reign of Ahuízotl (1486–1502). However, Reyes Retana, “El Códice de Jilotepec,” 173–174 provides other ­possible dates: during the reign of Acamapichtli in 1379, based on Chimalpahin, or during the reign of Itzcóatl around 1427–1428, based on Jilotepec tribute payments to Tenochtitlan since 1428 according to the Matrícua de Tributos (Códice Moctezuma) and the Códice Mendoza. Xilotepec appears indeed in folio 8r of Códice Mendoza among the towns ­conquered under Moctezuma Ilhuicamina (1440–1469) and again in folio 31r heading other towns of a tributary province. Reyes Retana certainly grounds his assertion that the province was conquered under Itzcóatl on the fact that Tlacopan, cabecera of the Tepaneca señorío appears as one of his conquests in folio 5v of this codex. See Berdan and Anawalt, The Essential Codex, 16, 21, 67. 43. Philip W. Powell, La guerra chichimeca, trans. Juan José Utrilla (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1977), 165–166. 44. Sego, Aliados y adversarios, 19–20. 45. Brambila Paz, “Introducción,” in Brambila Paz et al., Códice de Jilotepec, 29–30 asserts the manuscript is a 1919 copy by Vicente Dorantes, notary of the parrish of Jilotepec, compiled from older sources. Reyes Retana, “El Códice de Jilotepec,” 180, 202 says the document uses the customary Castilian discourse of 1550–1600 and the drawings preserve the pre-conquest style common in sixteenth-century documents produced by native scribes. He considers it a faithful copy of an original made shortly after Juan de la Cruz died in 1589, since a final note signed by Lopes de Sosa, mayor of Jilotepec between 1588 and 1591 according to the Códice de Huichapan, certifies it “represents all the merits of an encomienda [granted by the King . . .] for his defense and the protection of his children” (my translation). The 1557 recognition of Indian nobility by King Felipe II was supplemented by a second charter instructing the audiencias to comply, both contained in the 1680 Recopilación de Leyes de los Reynos de las Indias, book 6, title 7, laws 1–2. 46. Folio 28v, Códice de Jilotepec facsímile, in Bambila Paz et al., Códice de Jilotepec, 53. 47. Wright, “Manuscritos otomíes,” 5–6. 48. Brambila Paz, “Noticias del Códice,” 17; Reyes Retana, “El Códice de Jilotepec,” 175. 49. “Relación de Querétaro” [1582], in Relaciones geográficas del siglo XVI: Michoacán, vol. 9, ed. René Acuña, (Mexico: IIA-UNAM, 1987), 217–222. 50. Ana María Crespo, “Caciques y relatos de conquista en el Códice de Jilotepec y en los documentos otomíes de El Bajío,” in Brambila Paz et al., Códice de Jilotepec, 149, 152–153. 51. Folio 30r, Códice de Jilotepec facsímile, 56. 52. Folios 30v-32v, Códice de Jilotepec facsímile, 57–61. Crespo, “Caciques y relatos,” 150 thinks the actual number of congregation settlements then established may have not been exactly twelve, this being a metaphorical invocation of the apostles to remark the foundational character of the undertaking. 53. The document clearly refers to Luis de Velasco as Viceroy but Pedro de Alvarado is not explicitly identified as the famous conqueror. The character mentioned in the códice could be Pedro de Alvarado Cohuanacochcin, lord of Tetzcoco who, according to Francisco López de Gómara, joined Cortés’ 1523 campaign against Cristóbal de Olid in Honduras. At the time it was common to baptize Indians after renowned Spaniards, and although Gómara called this man by his native name only, the Chalca historian Domingo Chimalpahin completed the appellative with the Spanish particle in his revised version of

156   Borderlands of the Iberian World Gómara’s chronicle: Susan Schroeder, David Tavárez Bermúdez, and Cristián Roa de la Carrera, ed., La conquista de México y [La crónica de Francisco López de Gómara comentada por el historiador nahua] (México: UNAM, 2012), 391. According to his biographers (see note 56), Juan Bautista Valerio de la Cruz, an Otomí descended native of Tetzcoco, arrived in Julotepec in the 1530s; his election could have been validated by Alvarado Cohuanacochcin, who may have also had Otomí ancestors and could have arrived in Jilotepec around the same period. 54. Folios 32v–35r, Códice de Jilotepec facsímile, 61–66. 55. Crespo, “Caciques y relatos,” 145. 56. Antonio Huitrón Huitrón Un manuscrito o Códice de Xilotepec de la segunda mitad del siglo xvi [1986], cited by Reyes Retana, “El Códice de Jilotepec,” 193; Memorias piadosas de la nación indiana recogidas de varios autores por fray José Díaz de la Vega [1782], quoted in Brambila Paz, “Noticias del Códice,” 23–24. 57. Crespo, “Caciques y relatos,” 133–135, 139, 144–146, 148. 58. Sources include a relación de méritos y servicios and a narrative that chronicler Pablo Beaumont attributed to his own hand and transcribed, both published in Frías, La conquista de Querétaro. Also an anonymous Relación histórica on the conquest of Querétaro and San Juan del Río, published in 1948 by Ayala Echavarri and cited by Ana María Crespo and Beatriz Cervantes J., “Raíz colonial de la tradición otomiana en la región GuanajuatoQuerétaro,” 95 n12. Accessed July 3, 2016, http://www.estudioshistoricos.inah.gob.mx/ revistaHistorias/wp-content/uploads/historias_24_87-108.pdf 59. Memorias piadosas . . ., quoted in Brambila Paz, “Noticias del Códice,” 24. 60. It is a seven folios document in Spanish and Otomí accompanied by three plates, preserved in AGN, Tierras, vol. 1783 as Códice de Chapa de Mota. Gerardo Sámano Hernández, “Los memoriales de Pedro Martín de Toro. Un nuevo estilo documental,” Dimensión Antropológica 9–10 (1997): 99–114 thinks it was made at the end of the seventeenth century in San Francisco Chamacuero, Guanajuato. 61. Sego, Aliados y adversarios, 29–32. 62. Andrés Pérez de Ribas, History of the Triumphs of Our Holy Faith Amongst the Most Barbarous and Fierce Peoples of the New World [1645]. Trans. Daniel T. Reff, Maureen Ahern, and Richard K. Danford (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1999); Edward H. Spicer, The Yaquis. A Cultural History (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1980); Elinore M. Barrett, Conquest and Catastrophe. Changing Rio Grande Pueblo Settlement Patterns in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Albuquerque: UNM, 2002), 83; and Edward Flagler, “Defensive Policy and Indian Relations in New Mexico During the Tenure of Francisco Cuervo y Valdés, 1705–1707,” Revista Española de Antropología Americana 22 (1992): 89–104. 63. Raquel E. Güereca Durán “Indios en armas: las milicias de “flecheros” en Nueva España,” Blog Los Reinos de las Indias en el nuevo mundo. Sección Mundus Alter, entry of 27 August 2015, http://losreinosdelasindias.hypotheses.org/991 64. For Nuño de Guzmán in Pánuco (1527–1528) and Nueva Galicia see Chipman, Nuño de Guzmán, 232–245; “Memoria de los servicios que había hecho Nuño de Guzmán desde que fue nombrado gobernador de Pánuco en 1525” [c. 1538–39], and “letter to the empress, 12 June 1532,” in Adrián Blazquez and Thomas Calvo, Guadalajara y el Nuevo Mundo. Nuño Beltrán de Guzmán: Semblanza de un conquistador (Guadalajara, Spain: Institución Provincial de Cultura Marqués de Santillana, 1992), 53–73, 239–262. See also Guzmán’s letter to the king from Omitlán, 8 July 1530, and the Relaciones by Juan de Sámano (1531),

“Indian Friends and Allies”   157 Pedro de Carranza (1532), Cristóbal Flores (n/d), and García del Pilar (1531), in Razo Zaragoza y Cortés, Crónicas, 23–59, 72–129, 157–172, 185–189, 217–220. 65. Levin Rojo, Return to Aztlan, 68–70. 66. Pedro de Castañeda Nájera, a soldier in Vázquez de Coronado’s expedition to Cíbola, attributed Guzmán’s undertaking to the stories this captive told about seven sophisticated cities to the north: “Relación de la jornada de Cíbola,” in Las siete ciudades de Cíbola: Textos y testimonios sobre la expedición de Vázquez de Coronado, ed. Carmen de Mora (Seville: Alfar, 1992), 63–65. Although Chipman, Nuño de Guzmán, 231 argues he was ­trying to avoid the residencia trial concerning Pánuco, two reports by Guzmán’s captains mention they knew about, and searched for, the “Seven Cities” before leaving Mexico. Levin Rojo, Return to Aztlan, 66–67. 67. Arthur S. Aiton, “Coronado’s First Report on the Government of New Galicia,” Hispanic American Historical Review 19, 3 (1939): 308–309, 313; Herbert E. Bolton, Coronado: Knight of Pueblos and Plains (Albuquerque: UNM, 1990), 18–21, 25–36. 68. “Relación del descubrimiento de las siete ciudades, por el P.  Fr. Marcos de Niza,” September 2, 1539, in Mora, Las siete ciudades, 148, 150. 69. Álvarez, El indio y la sociedad, 42–57. In February 1540 Viceroy Mendoza compiled testimonies on the people enlisted for the expedition, to appease the fear that their departure would provoke a sensitive depopulation of New Spain: “Información del virrey de Nueva España Don Antonio de Mendoza de la gente que va a poblar la Nueva Galicia con Francisco Vázquez de Coronado, gobernador de ella,” in Colección de documentos inéditos relativos al descubrimiento, conquista y organización de las posesiones españolas en América y Oceanía (Madrid: Imprenta de José María Pérez, 1870), 14: 373–384. 70. Álvarez, El indio y la sociedad, 58–61; Ethelia Ruiz Medrano, “Versiones sobre un ­fenómeno rebelde: la guerra del Mixtón en Nueva Galicia,” in Contribuciones a la arqueo­ logía y etnohistoria del occidente de México ed. Eduardo Williams (Zamora: Colegio de Michoacán, 1994), 357–364. Mendoza’s pluriethnic army departed from Mexico City on September 29, 1541, according to Francisco Sandoval Acazitli: “Relación de la jornada que hizo D. Francisco Sandoval Acazitli, cacique y señor natural que fué del pueblo de Tlalmanalco” [1541], in Colección de documentos para la historia de México, vol. 2, ed. Joaquín García Icazbalceta (Mexico: Porrúa, 1980), 307. Preserved in AGN, Historia, vol. 4, no. 5, fols. 483–508. A 1550 map by Antón Martínez de la Marcha titled “Pintura del reino de la Nueva Galicia,” in Relaciones geográficas del siglo XVI: Nueva Galicia, 150–151 depicts Indians fighting with bows and arrows at the crags of Coyna, Nochiztlán, Juchipila, El Mixtón, and El Teúl. Apparently they represent both rebel Chichimecas and loyal allies of the Spaniards. 7 1. Razo Zaragoza y Cortés, Crónicas, 23. My translation. 72. Razo Zaragoza y Cortés, Crónicas, 241–242, and 217. 73. Quoted in Flint, “Without Them,” 10. 74. According to Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxóchitl, “Compendio histórico de los reyes de Tetzcoco,” in Códice Chimalpahin, Biblioteca Nacional de Antropología e Historia, México (hereafter BNAH), v. 2, fs. 34v, 45r, eighty thousand Indian warriors fought in this occasion, and later on Cortés sent Pedro de Alvarado to Tehuantepec at the head of 240 Spaniards and twenty thousand Indian warriors from Tetzcoco. In the seventeenth century, Lorenzo de Boturini amended such figures respectively as “eight” and “two thousand warriors,” apparently convinced that they were an exaggeration. The most widespread modern edition of Alva Ixtlilxóchitl, made by Edmundo O’Gorman based on Mariano

158   Borderlands of the Iberian World Veitia’s transcription of Boturini’s copy reproduces this amendment (Alva Ixtlilxóchitl, Obras Históricas, I, 466, 482). Infrormation based on Sergio Ángel Vásquez Galicia, “Estudio introductorio,” in Cuatro obras históricas de Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxóchitl (edición basada en los manuscritos autógrafos del Códice Chimalpahin), paleography, edition, and notes by Sergio Ángel Vásquez Galicia (forthcoming). 75. “Testimonio en relación de la gente, armas y municiones que salió de Compostela en Nueva España siendo virrey de ella don Antonio de Mendoza y que se llevó a la tierra nuevamente descubierta [ . . . ] cuyo general fue Francisco Vázquez de Coronado,” Compostela, 27 February 1540, in Mora, Las siete ciudades, 199–211. 76. Bolton, Coronado, 67–68. 77. Castañeda Nájera, “Relación de la Jornada,” in Mora, Las siete ciudades, 68, 74. 78. Flint, “Without Them,” 9–10. 79. Ruiz Medrano, “Versiones sobre un fenómeno rebelde,” 361. According to Álvarez, El indio y la sociedad, 61, the number of Spaniards was over five hundred. 80. Indian contingents had already been fighting alongside the Spaniards before Mendoza’s troops arrived. In June 1541, for example, Juan de Alvarado joined in the defense of Guadalajara with thirty Spaniards and six thousand Indians from Michoacán, and Pedro de Alvarado fought at the Peñol de Nochistlán with two hundred Spaniards and five thousand Tarascan allies. Ruiz Medrano, “Versiones sobre un fenómeno rebelde,” 360. 81. Acazitli, “Relación de la jornada,” 308, 311, 313. 82. Acazitli, “Relación de la jornada,” 307–308. My translation. 83. Acazitli, “Relación de la jornada,” 311–312. 84. This is what Flint, “Without Them,” 4, 6–7, 11–12 concluded from the testimonies by nine of the sixteen Indian witnesses to Tello de Sandoval visita who declared on the Coronado expedition, although only five of them, from Pátzcuaro, Tenochtitlan, and Tlatelolco made the journey. Although Juan Tlecanen’s testimony suggests many native allies were assigned to particular Spanish individuals rather than traveling “as a segregated, allindian unit,” Flint believes “this probably applied specifically to tamemes [porters],” not to individuals serving “a primarily warrior function.” Judging from Acazitli’s account, Indian allies in the Mixtón War did travel and served in polity-segregated units. 85. Flint, “Without Them,” 12. 86. Ross Hassig, Aztec Warfare, quoted in Flint, “Without Them,” 13. 87. Códice de Tlatelolco, BNAH, Subdirección de Documentación, Colección de Códices Originales; Xavier Noguez, “El Códice de Tlatelolco. Una nueva cronología,” in De tlacuilos y escribanos, ed. Xavier Noguez and Stephanie  G.  Wood (Mexico: El Colegio de Michoacán, 1998), 21. 88. Noguez, “El Códice de Tlatelolco,” 21. 89. Acazitli, “Relación de la jornada,” 313. 90. Noguez, “El Códice de Tlatelolco,” 21; Perla Valle “Estudio preliminar,” in Códice de Tlatelolco (Mexico: INAH, BUAP, 1994), 59–60. 91. Acazitli, “Relación de la jornada,” 307–308; Flint, “Without Them,” 3; Noguez, “El Códice de Tlatelolco,” 21. 92. Álvarez, El indio y la sociedad, 62; Sego, Aliados y adversarios, 30–32. 93. J.  Ribera Bernárdez, Compendio de las cosas más notables contenidas en los libros de cabildo de esta ciudad de Nuestra Señora de los Zacatecas desde el año de su descubrimiento 1546 hasta 1730 (Mexico: Academia Mexicana de la Historia, 1945), 2, 9, 12; Relación de Nuestra Señora de los Zacatecas, 1608, Biblioteca Nacional, Madrid, Spain (hereafter BNE), 3064, Descripción de Indias I, f. 84v; Sego, Aliados y adversarios, 29.

“Indian Friends and Allies”   159 94. Zacatecas obtained the title of ciudad in 1585. Ribera Bernárdez, Compendio, 12. 95. Relación de Nuestra Señora de los Zacatecas, f. 85r; Dana Velasco Murillo, Urban Indians in a Silver City: Zacatecas, Mexico, 1546–1810 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2016). 96. Laurent Corbeil, Identities in Motion: The Formation of a Plural Indio Society in Early San Luis Potosí, 1591–1630 (PhD diss., McGill University, 2014), 72–89. 97. “Memorial de los indios de Nombre de Dios, Durango, acerca de sus servicios al rey, c. 1563,” and “Memoria de lo que pascimos los padres y nosotros los Mexicanos,” February 1591, in Robert  H.  Barlow and George  T.  Smisor, ed., Nombre de Dios, Durango. Two Documents in Nahuatl Concerning its Foundation. Memorial of the Indians Concerning their Services, c. 1563. Agreement of the Mexicans and the Michoacanos, 1585 (Sacramento: The House of Tlaloc, 1943), 2–45, 64–66. 98. “Acuerdo de los mexicanos y michoacanenses de la villa del Nombre de Dios, 1585,” in Barlow and Smisor, Nombre de Dios, 46–49. 99. “Memorial de los indios de Nombre de Dios,” and “Memoria de lo que pascimos,” in Barlow and Smisor, Nombre de Dios, 3–5, 8–9,14–23, 65–66. 100. “Carta de fundación de Nombre de Dios,” in Barlow and Smisor, Nombre de Dios, 67–69. 101. Descripción de la villa de Nombre de Dios, 1608, BNE, 3064, Descripción de Indias I, fs. 115–124. 102. Rosa Brambila Paz, “Tras las imágenes,” in Brambila Paz et al., Códice de Jilotepec, 123–125.

Bibliography Acazitli, Francisco Sandoval. “Relación de la jornada que hizo d. Francisco Sandoval Acazitli, cacique y señor natural que fue del pueblo de Tlalmanalco” [1541]. In Colección de documentos para la historia de México, vol. 2. Edited by Joaquín García Icazbalceta, 307–332. Mexico: Porrúa, 1980. Altman, Ida. The War for Mexico’s West: Indians and Spaniards in New Galicia, 1524–1550. Albuquerque: UNM, 2010. Alva Ixtlilxóchitl, Fernando de. Obras Históricas. 2 vols., edited by Edmundo O’Gorman. Mexico: UNAM, 1985. Álvarez, Salvador. El indio y la sociedad colonial norteña. Siglos XVI–XVIII. Zamora: IIHUJED, El Colegio de Michoacán, 2010. Barlow, Robert H., and George T. Smisor, ed. Nombre de Dios, Durango. Two Documents in Nahuatl Concerning its Foundation. Memorial of the Indians Concerning their Services, c. 1563. Agreement of the Mexicans and the Michoacanos,1585. Sacramento, CA: The House of Tlaloc, 1943. Berdan, Frances  F., and Patricia Rieff Anawalt. The Essential Codex Mendoza. Berkeley: University of California Press 1997. Bolton, Herbert E. Coronado: Knight of Pueblos and Plains. Albuquerque: UNM, 1990. Brambila Paz, Rosa, Alejandra Medina Medina, María Elena Villegas M., Ana María Crespo, and Óscar Reyes Retana. Códice de Jilotepec (Estado de México). Rescate de una historia. Mexico: Fondo Editorial del Estado de México, El Colegio Mexiquense, CONACULTA, INAH, 2013. Brambila Paz, Rosa. “Noticias del Códice de Jilotepec.” In Códice de Jilotepec (Estado de México). Rescate de una historia. Edited by Brambila Paz et al., 13–25.

160   Borderlands of the Iberian World Chipman, Donald. Nuño de Guzmán and the Province of Pánuco in New Spain, 1518–1533. Glendale, CA: A.H. Clarck, 1967. Contreras Martínez, José Eduardo. “La confrontación tlaxcalteca ante la conquista.” Dimensión Antropológica 21, no. 61 (2014): 43–72. Crespo, Ana María. “Caciques y relatos de conquista en el Códice de Jilotepec y en los ­documentos otomíes de El Bajío.” In Códice de Jilotepec (Estado de México). Rescate de una historia. Edited by Brambila Paz et al., 133–162. Flint, Richard. “Without Them Nothing Was Possible: The Coronado Expedition’s Indian Allies.” New Mexico Historical Review 84, no. 1 (2009): 65–118. Frías, Valentín, comp. La conquista de Querétaro. Mexico: Universidad Autónoma de Querétaro, 1990. Levin Rojo, Danna A. Return to Aztlan: Indians, Spaniard, and the Invention of Nuevo México. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2014. Lockhart, James, Frances Berdan, and Arthur  J.  O.  Anderson. The Tlaxcalan Actas. A Compendium of the Records of the Cabildo of Tlaxcala (1545–1627). Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1986. Martínez Saldaña, Tomás. La diáspora tlaxcalteca. Colonización agrícola del norte de México. Tlaxcala: Gobierno del Estado de Tlaxcala, 1988. Matthew, Laura, and Michel  R.  Oudijk, ed. Indian Conquistadors: Indigenous Allies in the Conquest of Mesoamerica. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2007. Mora, Carmen de, ed. Las siete ciudades de Cíbola: textos y testimonios sobre la expedición de Vázquez de Coronado. Seville: Alfar, 1992. Muñoz Camargo, Diego. “Descripción de la ciudad y provincia de Tlaxcala de la Nueva España e Indias del mar océano para el buen gobierno y ennoblecimie[nt]o dellas, mandada hacer por la SCR.M. del rey Don Felipe, nuestro señor.” In Relaciones geográficas del siglo XVI: Tlaxcala, vol. 4. Edited by René Acuña, 25–285. Mexico: IIA-UNAM, 1984. Noguez, Xavier. “El Códice de Tlatelolco. Una nueva cronología.” In De tlacuilos y escribanos. Edited by Xavier Noguez and Stephanie G. Wood, 15–32. Mexico: El Colegio de Michoacán, El Colegio Mexiquense, 1998. Razo Zaragoza y Cortés, José Luis, ed. Crónicas de la conquista del reino de Nueva Galicia en territorio de la Nueva España. Guadalajara: Ayuntamiento de la Ciudad de Guadalajara, IJAH, 1963. Recopilación de Leyes de los Reynos de las Indias (1680). http://www.gabrielbernat.es/espana/ leyes/rldi/rldi.html. Accessed June 10, 2016. Reyes Retana, Óscar. “El Códice de Jilotepec.” In Códice de Jilotepec (Estado de México). Rescate de una historia. Edited by Brambila Paz et al., 165–203. Ribera Bernárdez, J. Compendio de las cosas más notables contenidas en los libros de cabildo de esta ciudad de Nuestra Señora de los Zacatecas desde el año de su descubrimiento 1546 hasta 1730. Mexico: Academia Mexicana de la Historia, 1945. Ruiz Medrano, Ethelia. “Versiones sobre un fenómeno rebelde: la guerra del Mixtón en Nueva Galicia.” In Contribuciones a la arqueología y etnohistoria del occidente de México. Edited by Eduardo Williams, 355–378. Zamora: El Colegio de Michoacán, 1994. Sahagún, Bernardino de. Historia General de las cosas de Nueva España. Versión íntegra del texto castellano del manuscrito conocido como Códice florentino, 3 vols., introduction, palaeography, glossary, and notes by Alfredo López Austin and Josefina García Quintana. Mexico: CONACULTA, 2000.

“Indian Friends and Allies”   161 Schroeder, Susan. “Introduction. The Genre of Conquest Studies.” In Indian Conquistadors. Indigenous Allies in the Conquest of Mesoamerica. Edited by Matthew and Oudijk, 5–27. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2007. Sego, Eugene. Aliados y adversarios: los colonos tlaxcaltecas en la frontera septentrional de Nueva España. Translated by Armando Castellanos. San Luis Potosí: El Colegio de San Luis, 1998. Wright, David. “Manuscritos otomíes del virreinato.” In Códices y documentos sobre México, segundo simposio. Mexico: INAH, 1977. http.//www.villaprogresomx.com/files/ manuscritosotomiesdelvirreinato.pdf. Accessed August 20, 2016.

chapter 6

The I n di a n Ga r r ison Col on ies of N ew Spa i n a n d Cen tr a l A m er ica Sean F. McEnroe Mexicapa and San Miguel de Aguayo

Every December in the Honduran town of Gracias a Dios, Santa Lucía comes out to meet her public. Every summer, in the northern Mexican town of Bustamante, the Lord of Tlaxcala emerges from his church and into the throngs of the surrounding streets. The distance between these two sites stretches more than a thousand miles, from near the US–Mexican border to central Honduras, but their histories are closely linked. Both were once frontier towns, guarding the boundaries between the colonial Ibero-Indian empire and the unincorporated peoples to its north and south. In Santa Lucía’s home (the Mexicapa barrio of Gracias a Dios) this annual celebration includes an elaborately staged guancasco—a dance that reenacts the history of Spanish conquest and Christian conversion.1 Santa Lucía goes forth into the streets, protected by the members of a local religious brotherhood. There she witnesses the confrontation between Indians and Spaniards and gives her blessing to the pact between Europeans and Mexicans to rule over Central America. The musicians sing of the arrival of the Mejicanos. The cast of performers includes actors dressed as sixteenth-century Spanish and Indian conquerors, accompanied by their modern progeny: the current alcalde and mayordomo, who flank the saint and are followed by the townspeople. The lengthy festival includes interactions between European, African, and Indian characters, as well as an encounter between Santa Lucía and San Sebastián, the patron of a neighboring community. This guancasco is a late echo of the early compact between the Spanish Crown and its Indian allies; but it is merely one of many such performances that commemorate early co-conquests in Latin America.2 Far to the north, near today’s US–Mexican border, the Lord of Tlaxcala is carried each year through the streets of Bustamante, Nuevo León, by an equally devoted crowd. In popular memory, this figure of Christ has defended the town from catastrophe for more than three centuries. The object itself is an

164   Borderlands of the Iberian World artifact from the earliest days of Hispano-Nahua settlement: a devotional image carried to the north in the seventeenth century by one of the town’s Tlaxcalan founders.3 The story of Santa Lucía and Mexicapa is harder to follow than that of the Lord of Tlaxcala. There are, in fact, two Mexicapas in the region, one a largely forgotten barrio of Comayagua, the other a still thriving barrio of the smaller city of Gracias. To further complicate matters, there are also two celebrated sculptures of Santa Lucía: the seventeenth-century image from Mexicapa de Gracias and a mid-sixteenth century one in Comayagua. The older sculpture once stood in Comayagua’s Iglesia de Santa Lucía de Jeto in a chapel beside an open-air church for Indian worshippers. When fire destroyed the church, the precious sculpture was removed to the Iglesia de la Caridad, where she remains today.4 The Jeto community (now called Suyapa) was largely inhabited by Indians subject to encomienda, but it was soon fused with Spanish and Indian communities, including Mexicapa, whose inhabitants claimed a very different set of political and economic privileges.5 The stories of the two Mexicapas and the two Santa Lucías are at times impossible to disentangle in the documentary record. It is clear from both, however, that the history of central Honduras is marked in a variety of ways by indigenous conquerors from Mexico whose political status was staked on their preservation and elaboration of a historical conquest narrative. Though festivals featuring patron saints, processions, mystery plays, and historic dances of all kinds are commonplace throughout Latin America, these two celebrations in Bustamante and Mexicapa mark a specific and distinctive shared heritage.6 A century after the first colonial settlements in Honduras, both Spanish and Indian conquerors were keen to retain the spoils of victory. The conquest of Central America won both land and local Indian labor for the Crown’s Mexica, Tlaxcalan, Otomí, Mixtec, and Zapotec allies. The labor and wealth exacted from the locals was heavy, and all the more so over time as populations declined under pressure of disease, warfare and material deprivation.7 Bustamante (then known as San Miguel de Aguayo) was founded more than a century after the first Mexicapa, but the two stories have common origins: both communities were once on the extreme periphery of a hub-and-spoke network of colonies built by central Mexican allies. Both were Indian republics that governed themselves under imperial charters, and both struggled over time to preserve their legal status as autonomous municipalities. The two stories, taken together, reveal a substructure of colonial conquest and government that accounts for much of the Spanish New World’s cultural geography and multi-ethnic political system.8 The shared genealogy of these towns begins with the Spanish conquest of Tenochtitlan. From 1519 to 1521 both the Tenochca’s long-term enemies and their erstwhile friends seized upon the Spanish invasion as an opportunity to turn against the imperial capital. First among the Spanish allies was Tlaxcala, whose soldiers (probably numbering in the tens of thousands) were a decisive factor in Spanish victory. While Hernán Cortés consolidated control over central Mexico, Pedro de Alvarado turned toward the Maya south, bringing with him an army that included a variety of Nahuatlspeaking allies: Cholulans and Tlaxcalans as well as new Mexica forces who offered their services in the aftermath of defeat. In this period of rapidly changing diplomacy

The Indian Garrison Colonies   165 and patronage, the conflicts among Maya señoríos created an opening for Spanish intervention far to the south in Chiapas and Guatemala.9 In 1524, Pedro de Alvarado’s irregular army of Spaniards and Nahuas began the conquest of Guatemala, now accompanied by Kaqchikel Mayas who leveraged a Spanish alliance against their Quiché neighbors. Santiago de Guatemala became the main hub for regional colonization in Central America—though a somewhat tenuous one.10 For the Spanish, nearby Honduras remained for some years a vexing zone of indigenous resistance. In the 1530s European and indigenous forces under the authority of Francisco de Montejo built the regional capital of Comayagua and its affiliated Indian republic of Mexicapa during their battles against the powerful indigenous leader Lempira (now mythologized as a great national hero in Honduras). In the following years, Mexicapa’s Nahua colonists, living first in a vulnerable garrison camp, then in a proper town—and ultimately in the two communities of the same name—continued to assert their distinctive conqueror privileges.11 Far to the north, and half a century later, a similar colonization took place in what are today Mexico’s northeastern states of San Luis Potosí, Coahuila, Tamaulipas, and Nuevo León. Both in the 1560s and in the 1590s, the viceroyalty of New Spain sought the services of Tlaxcalans to conquer and settle the region. On the first occasion, Tlaxcala declined the invitation; on the second occasion, it accepted. Spanish commander Francisco de Urdiñola, working with Tlaxcalan leaders and Franciscan missionaries planned Saltillo and its twin Indian Republic of San Esteban as a regional hub from which Tlaxcalans would send out generations of settlers to farther frontiers. Their efforts would, over time, transform the region’s agriculture, commerce, and military organization. In the 1680s Tlaxcalan expeditions seeking sites for mining and settlement led to the foundation of San Miguel de Aguayo. With the aid of Franciscan missionaries from the College of Santa Cruz in Querétaro, the settlers built a prosperous town among the Alasapas. On the edge of a region controlled at various times by Tobosos, Apaches, and Comanches, they established a garrison town to defend the empire. Theirs was a Tlaxcalan republic under cabildo governance that incrementally incorporated local Indians of other ethnic origins. Today the town is called Bustamente (in the Mexican state of Nuevo León), and it is still protected by the Lord of Tlaxcala.12

Patterns in Petitions: A Fight Between Conquerors The early chaotic years of Spanish imperial expansion had a way of turning indigenous communities from conquered to conquerors in short order; the wars for Central America, in particular, were fought by armies cobbled together from Europeans, early indigenous allies, and former enemies now co-opted into the imperial forces. As Laura Matthew points out, Guatemala was invaded by a mixed force of Spanish and Indian

166   Borderlands of the Iberian World soldiers, the latter drawn from the victors in the Spanish war on Tenochtitlan, as well as from the Tenochca themselves.13 Whether in Mexico or Central America their descendants have often clung to narratives of victory. As Octavio Paz so colorfully asserted, it is in the nature of most people to prefer imagining themselves victors rather than vanquished; and in colonial Spanish America, there was more than simple pride at stake when individuals retold their histories of the conquest.14 Labor was as much the coin of the colonial economy as gold or silver, and compulsory labor was widespread. The Spanish labor regime placed Indians in three broad categories: (1) the conquered, whose descendants were bound to provide tribute; (2) the elite indigenous allies and conquerors, who were rewarded with the tributary labor of other Indians; and (3) the many Indians in the middle—whether humble and unrecognized participants in the conquest, or later migrants—these Indians lacked patrimonial rights, but could often slip free from the tributary demands of Spanish and Indian elites. Colonial archives are full to bursting with the records of Spaniards, Indians, and Mestizos either defending their membership in an advantageous legal category, or seeking to escape membership in a disadvantageous one.15 For three centuries the descendants of the Spanish Empire’s Indian conquerors and co-colonizers staked their claims to property, status, and self-governance on the story of their service to the Crown.16 These political arguments appear in the archival record in the form of probanzas de méritos (records of loyal service), litigation, testaments, relaciones geográficas, primordial titles, and pictorial codices and lienzos (narrative images on cloth). Researchers who dig into this record cannot help but be struck by the concentration of documentation at certain moments, and by the paucity of documentation at others.17 Though the record clearly responded in part to changing local conditions, the overall pattern seems to have been dictated by shifts in royal policy. Any change in royal policy that affected the chartered status of these repúblicas de indios (semi-autonomous Indian municipalities), their land rights, symbolic status, political autonomy, or their exemptions from tax and labor obligations inevitably stimulated a flurry of legal and political activity. Indian co-colonist communities on the extreme north and extreme south of New Spain remained linked not just by their shared origins and traditions, but also by their parallel and often synchronized responses to threatening royal policies.18 This chapter addresses two groups of Indian ally-communities: those established during the conquest of Central America in the 1520s and 1530s, and those established on the northeastern frontier of New Spain beginning in the 1590s. Both of these developments followed a general set of Spanish practices employed throughout the New World. The original participants were principally Tlaxcalan and Mexica, though numerous Otomí, Mixtec, Zapotec, and Maya also contributed. Some of the early colonies were ephemeral, and many lost their character as independent conqueror republics, but a significant number survived through the centuries with their special status intact. The Nahua colonists modeled their subsequent alliances on those of 1520s, recalling how Spanish invaders gained the help of armies from Tlaxcala and Cholula first to topple Tenochtitlan, and later to extend the power of the emerging Hispano-indigenous empire farther to the north and south.19

The Indian Garrison Colonies   167 The early agreements between the Indian colonies and the Crown were feudal in character. The young Indian republics provided the empire with ongoing military aid in return for local autonomy. This state of affairs was compatible with sixteenth-century Hapsburg practices in Europe. However, the global Spanish Empire was not a static organization. Changes in its military, legal, and tributary systems in the coming centuries presented both threats and opportunities to these Indian republics. After the initial conquest period, renegotiations of colonial agreements were triggered by the following shifts in imperial policy: The New Laws of the 1540s; the administrative reforms of Juan de Ovando in the 1570s; the attempted fiscal and military reforms of the Duke of Olivares in the 1620s and 1630s, and finally the Bourbon reforms of the 1770s and 1780s. At all of these junctures, the Crown sought to alter its earlier compacts with local nobility (both Spanish and Indian), to reduce or eliminate heritable privileges based on service in the conquest, and to impose a more uniform system of taxation and military organization. Each transition created winners and losers; and yet, a remarkable number of Latin America’s indigenous corporate communities preserved their identities and safeguarded their privileges through much of the colonial era.20

Crown Reform and the Age of Petitions for Preferment Many of the social and political organizations of Spain’s emerging colonial state were, in the 1520s and 1530s, shaped largely by the Spanish conquerors’ military systems, and by the compacts between these conquerors and their indigenous allies. Consequently, the political geography of frontier spaces featured Spanish and indigenous-ally garrisons surrounded by subject populations; the later were heavily encumbered by tributary demands from both. Attempts to reform this state of affairs and to protect conquered Indians were codified in the New Laws of 1542, a document that at once protected subject Indians, and at the same time diminished the authority of Spanish encomenderos and allied Indian nobility. This attempt to revise the early colonial compacts would continue through the period of Juan de Ovando’s reforms in the 1560s and 1570s, provoking resistance from Spanish encomenderos, and relentless petitioning from Indian nobles and cabildos.21 Nahua soldier-colonists left for posterity both written and visual representations of their early colonial history as conquerors. The conquests of the 1520s and 1530s were chronicled by Indian leaders from Tlaxcala and Quauhquechollan. Though the two altepeme (indigenous city-states) were little more than fifty miles apart, and both located in the core area of Nahua civilization, their inhabitants participated in conquests spanning the entire length and breadth of the expanding Hispano-Indian state. The famed Lienzo de Tlaxcala and Lienzo de Quauhquechollan recounted the invasions of the Gran Chichimeca to the north and the invasion of the Maya south respectively.22 Many details

168   Borderlands of the Iberian World about the production and provenance of these lienzos remain obscure; what is certain, though, is that both capture a distinctly sixteenth-­century conception of SpanishIndigenous co-conquest. These visual narratives meld the imperial iconography of the Habsburg court with indigenous symbols of sovereignty. They tell a story of military service in the foundation of the new transatlantic empire, and they foreground the role of Nahua soldiers. These images promoted the Indian allies’ claims to land, status, autonomous governance, and authority over conquered Indians. Their implicit message is rooted in the political logic of the Iberian reconquista and the New World ­conquista—one in which feudal service to the Crown was rewarded with wealth, title, and local authority. The two visual documents find their written analog in Mexico in the form of Diego Muñoz Camargo’s Historia de Tlaxcala, and in Central America in the form of lengthy petitions begun in the 1540s and continued through the end of the century.23 In the 1540s intergenerational transmission of encomienda was under attack from the Crown. This situation presented both opportunities and risks for Indian conquerors whose privileges were linked to those of the encomenderos. On one hand, indigenous clients of the Crown who benefited from land and labor titles were at risk of losing them; on the other hand, families and communities whose early exemptions from tribute and labor had been more recently ignored could seize upon this opportunity to press for the restoration of their patrimony.24 In 1547 a large group of Indian conquistadors from Central America presented a collective petition in defense of their status. The document has received considerable attention and has been published in translation by Matthew Restall and Florine Asselbergs. The petitioners, rather than opposing the principle of encomienda, reasserted its original legal logic and presented themselves once again as the conquerors rather than the conquered. The petition recounted their meritorious service in battles against local peoples, their poor treatment by military commanders, and their own entitlement to lands and labor: “After the land was settled, we rested a little bit from the wrongdoings and mistreatments [. . .] to make us settle in the area they made us great promises of giving our leaders allotments of Indians.”25 The petitioners recounted their tragic loss of status as they fell from the ranks of conquering nobles to that of commoners and tributary Indians. In some Central American communities as late as the 1570s, the descendants of conquering Indians fought not just for freedom from tribute labor, but also for their rights to tribute labor, in the form of encomiendas over the local Indian population.26

Renewing the Compact 1550–1750 In general, the late sixteenth century was a time of declining fortunes for many of the Indian polities that had bound their fates to those of the conquerors. A second and third wave of catastrophic diseases in the 1540s and 1570s weakened the military power of repúblicas de indios and made the delivery of adequate tribute from their subject

The Indian Garrison Colonies   169 populations difficult.27 Furthermore, the age of great conquests had come to an end and with it the plundering of wealthy indigenous cities and towns. In many places, the once-indispensable Indian allies had little left to offer. It is something of a surprise, then, that the settler populations of the Tlaxcalan diaspora did not fade from history. In fact, in several locations, the seventeenth century occasioned a renewal of the old colonial compact, as indigenous leaders offered the services of allied communities for new endeavors. In the north of New Spain, the renewal of the Spanish-Tlaxcalan alliance is largely attributable to the new mining discoveries at Zacatecas in the late 1540s and at San Luis Potosí in the early 1590s. The resulting agreement between the crown and the soldiersettlers of Tlaxcala is now a familiar story, but all of its implications are becoming clearer as local studies of the Tlaxcalan diaspora continue. The expeditions of mestizo military commander Miguel Caldera and Spanish commander Francisco de Urdiñola opened the region to conquest and set in motion a procedure for conquest and settlement that would long thereafter shape northern society. They seeded binary settlements of Indian and Spanish towns at key sites for mining and military security. In the northeast, Spanish San Luis Potosí was paired with Tlaxcalan Mexquitic, and Spanish Saltillo with Tlaxcalan San Esteban. At these sites, as well as in the similar Otomí settlement of Santa María del Río, Mesoamerican settler communities were conjoined to new settlements of northern peoples such as Guachichiles, whose local institutions were modeled on those of the colonizers.28 The responsibilities of the settlers were both military and economic. They were to seize lands from local peoples, defend the settled valleys from intruders, and draw the region’s Indians into a colonial system of agriculture and commerce.29 If a swift and decisive conquest had yielded lasting peace, Tlaxcalan claims to military privilege might soon have lost credibility; but in the North, the relatively secure conditions so common in central Mexico eluded the colonial state for centuries. The proliferation of new military threats from northern tribes called for new Tlaxcalan settlements—among them San Miguel de Aguayo, a military and agricultural pueblo established in the 1680s to guard and supply recently discovered mines at nearby Villaldama. In the early eighteenth century, the whole network of Tlaxcalan settlements was expanded and formalized under the leadership of royal visitor Francisco Barbadillo.30 In the seventeenth century, the Spanish perceived European competitors to be as great a threat to the colonial order as the unassimilated populations of America’s internal frontiers. This threat was sometimes more imagined than real, but it helps to account for a resurgence of arguments for political preferment from the members of surviving Indian settler colonies. Whereas early Indian settlers in Honduras typically touted their service in the conquest of the Valleys of Ulúa and Comayagua, or their aid in conquering the armies of Coçumba and Lempira, later vecinos (local citizens) of the settler towns had less to commend them. Some reprieve was offered in 1604, when Honduran Indian republics gained a new military responsibility: manning coastal lookouts and defenses. They stood watch against European privateers and also captured contraband cargos.31 This allowed some to assert that their military fueros were not just inherited but also

170   Borderlands of the Iberian World earned by present service. In New Spain a few groups of indigenous forces were also deployed against European threats. Tlaxcalans from San Miguel aided Alonso de León in his attempts to locate and destroy French settlements in Texas and Louisiana between 1686 and 1690. Tlaxcalans also helped create the constellation of settlements that would eventually become San Antonio, Texas. The threat from the French settlers was, at the time, insignificant, but the defense of the Texas and Nuevo León colonies against highly skilled plains warriors was serious and persistent; and the Gulf Coast would always remain vulnerable to maritime attack.32 Beginning in 1749 the settler community of Altamira guarded the mouth of the Río Pánuco north of Tampico. The town’s free black and Indian settler-vecinos claimed autonomy and privilege based on military service; but as in Texas, the real threats came more often from the land than the water. Their enduring work would be to guard the pass of Metate and to secure the road between coast and interior.33 Ultimately, the ongoing contributions of the Central American settler towns was never as important to the security of the colonial state as were those of the northern settlements on the Apache frontier. Much of Central America was brought into the Spanish Empire through the chaotic expeditions launched from the Valley of Mexico in the first years after the fall of Tenochtitlan. The conquests were scattered, poorly coordinated, and plagued by intraEuropean conflicts. More of the conquerors came from the New World than the Old, and these Indian co-colonists left a distinctive pattern on the demographic and political map in the centuries that followed. From Chiapas to Nicaragua, Nahua and Maya soldiers serving with the Spanish put down roots, carrying with them practices from their motherlands and blending them with the cultural and political practices of the Spanish. In northern New Spain Indian soldiers and settlers outnumbered Spanish ones in the first days of conquest, but the balance would shift over time, gradually surrounding the nuclei of early colonial settlements with larger mixed-caste populations. In some cases, ethnically Spanish towns subsisted side-by-side with Indian ones; in other cases, the Spanish municipalities integrated the latter as semiautonomous barrios.34

Visualizing Inland Frontiers Many of these colonial Indian garrison towns were located on what one might think of as internal frontiers in the Spanish Empire. These spaces in New Spain can be described as archipelagos: that is, islands of colonial space surrounded by regions whose geography and population placed them outside the administrative authority of the colonizing empire. Sylvia Sellers-Garcia has described political authority in colonial Guatemala as defined more by routes than by spatially demarcated territories.35 These routes and archipelagos have, in some cases, a history that reaches back into the pre-Columbian past, when long commercial and tributary tentacles of Mesoamerican empires reached deep into ethnically and politically distinct regions as noted by Fernando Berrojalbiz and Marie-Areti Hers.36 John Pohl refers to some of these political-spatial webs as

The Indian Garrison Colonies   171 “alliance corridors,” and traces their history into the archeological past.37 Whatever one calls this Central American political geography, it is clearly distinct from that of modern nation-states. It must be taken on its own terms. Envisioning the position of Comayagua’s Mexicapa community within seventeenthcentury Honduras is a good way to understand this world of attenuated colonial spaces and internal frontiers. In 1629 the leading citizens and elected officials of the town of Mexicapa submitted a thick petition to the king. The petitioners were Indians, but Indians quite distinct in origin from their Kaqchikel neighbors. Like most legal correspondence of this type, the letter placed the petitioners within the vast systems of the empire, describing their location at the end of a great chain of communications and of a great social hierarchy reaching upward and outward from their remote corner of the empire toward the court and king. Just describing the king’s territorial holdings consumes pages of these documents. They wrote to the King “of Aragon of the two Sicilies of Jerusalem [. . .] of Navarre of Granada of Toledo of Valencia of the Island of Majorca of Sicily of Cordoba of the court of Murcia [. . .] of the Algarves of Algeria and Gibraltar and the Canary Islands and the western and eastern Indies and Terra Firme of the ocean sea, Archduke of Austria Duke of Aragon of [. . .] Milan [. . .] of Barcelona [. . .] and to you governor of the province of Honduras.” Farther down the great chain of being one finds “alcaldes ordinaries of the city of Comayagua and San Pedro,” and finally the writers themselves, “the Indians of the pueblo of Mexicapa in the valley next to the city of Comayagua.”38 This was a standard language for formal petitions—the sort of preamble that researchers tend to skip in their haste to reach the document’s particulars. But modern readers ought not be too hasty in passing over this material, as it contains a kind of linguistic mapping of the empire as perceived from the geographical and political periphery. Far down, at the base of this great imperial pyramid, are the king’s vassals, both Spanish and Indian, in the small towns of Central America.39 The struggles of empire were fought both at the top and at the bottom of this imperial hierarchy, and one of the most common types of conflicts was between rival conquistadors. Especially in the years following the promulgation of the New Laws of 1542, local fights throughout Spanish America over labor, land, and taxation pitted rival claimants against each other in the New World audiencias and in the Spanish court. Often, the root of the problem was an early history of ambiguous or conflicting conquest grants. In Central America, the clients of Cristóbal de Olid, the Alvarados, and Francisco de Montejo issued conflicting grants of encomienda.40 Consequently, the exemptions, titles, and privileges of their Indian allies were sometimes less than clear, as was the status of the local subject peoples. Finally, efforts by the crown to sunset intergenerational encomiendas, regularize administration, and defend Indians from abuse tended to pit all of these privileged early stakeholders against later colonial administrators.41 In 1629, the view from the top of the great imperial pyramid and the view from the bottom were not quite the same. In the court of Philip IV, all policy was driven by the financial demands of war against the English and Dutch. The kingdom had faced bankruptcy in 1627, the capture of the royal treasure fleet in 1628, and the spiraling costs of

172   Borderlands of the Iberian World near continuous campaigns by land and sea. To the king’s chief minister, the Duke of Olivares, victory could only be achieved by squeezing new fiscal and administrative ­efficiencies from a global empire whose structures had resulted more from historical accident than from rational design. His grand scheme for imperial reorganization called for the Union of Arms: a uniform regime of taxation and military systems that was to encompass all the dominions of Philip IV.42 The correspondence of the Audiencia of Guatemala shows what this meant for royal subjects heretofore untouched by the European wars.43 Documents from 1629 indicate that the jurisdiction of Guatemala was ordered to raise 250,000 ducats for the Union of Arms.44 Viewed from the center of the imperial system in Spain, this quota was part of a rational redistribution of burdens among imperial subjects. But from the perspective of Indian elites on the colonial periphery, levying this type of tax on old Indian garrison towns violated time-honored agreements that exempted Indian allies and militiamen from military taxes. It is likely that this new round of imperial pressures is what trigged a renewal of disputes over privileges, obligations, and exemptions in Comayagua. As the Council of the Indies demanded new revenues from the Audiencia of Guatemala, and the Audiencia in turn demanded revenues from the province of Honduras, the power brokers of Honduras squabbled among themselves. Honduras was a place of layered conquests. Its Lenca inhabitants were conquered—and only with great difficulty—by Spaniards and their Indian allies in the 1530s and 1540s. Spanish Comayagua (or Valladolid) grew up beside a community of Nahua co-colonists in Mexicapa. In the years that followed, the descendants of the Spanish encomenderos, the descendants of Nahua colonists in Mexicapa, and the cabildo of Valladolid-Comayagua would all jealously guard their historical claims in contradistinction to each other’s, and often to the detriment of the local Lenca. Later (if the story as told by the vecinos of Mexicapa in their petition is reliable) something went wrong. In an age of falling Indian populations and mounting demands for revenue, encomenderos and municipalities began demanding tribute labor not just from the conquered Indians, but also from the Indian conquerors. Noting their place within the history and the hierarchy of the empire, the petitioners began thus: the “Indians of the pueblo of Mexicapa in the valley and beside the city of Comayagua and by us and the rest of the principales and the rest not being sent, we Conqueror and settler Mexica Indians of that jurisdiction appear.” They spoke with authority of high birth (as principales), authority as conquering allies, and also as legally elected officials (regidores) of their town. Their argument was simple: they had conquered the valley for the Crown a century before and had been granted self-government, land titles, and freedom from ordinary labor tribute. Now they were faced with illegal demands both from encomendero Alonso Rodriguez Gallegos and from the valley’s main municipal government. They turned to the Audiencia of Guatemala for relief, insisting that “in conformity with the royal provision, one must declare that they should not owe service Indians to the city of Comayagua nor carry out orders of that government, [and be] free from Alonso Rodriguez Gallegos.”

The Indian Garrison Colonies   173

Northern and Southern Frontiers in the Age of Galvez The genealogy of Nahua-Spanish colonization splits in many directions in the years after the fall of Tenochtitlán. Even while the Tlaxcalan and Mexica allies established roots in Guatemala and Honduras, another branch of this diaspora spread northward. They fought in the Mixtón war, in the long and ill-defined Chichemic wars, and in the varied frontier conflicts that would last until the end of the colonial period.45 In the north, the Nahua invaders conquered, co-opted, and slowly integrated with the region’s indigenous population. These two regional stories have much in common, but they are also distinct. Southern co-colonization took place largely in the initial phase of conquest. Mexica, Tlaxcalan, Mixtec, and Zapotec settlers entered the Maya sphere and then reached beyond it during the first Spanish invasions of the early sixteenth century. Their influence was greatest in this early period, whether judged by wealth, population, or military power; and their status was greatest as judged by privileges, exemptions, and autonomy from Spanish oversight. In contrast, northern colonization only began in earnest with the later Mexica-Spanish colonization of sites such as Durango and Zacatecas as described by Danna Levin Rojo, and following the compact between the kingdom of Tlaxcala and the Spanish viceroyalty in 1591.46 Tlaxcalans established new colonies in the north as late as the early eighteenth century. Consequently, it was in the time of Galvez and the Bourbon Reforms (the 1770s and 1780s) rather than in the time of Olivares and the Union of Arms (the 1630s and 1640s) that the ancestral privileges of the northern settlers were put to the test. Northeastern New Spain had the same types of political players as Honduras. Both Spanish and Tlaxcalan conquerors gained early land grants and charters of self-­ government; and both groups sometimes dealt in captive labor, either in the form of early de jure Spanish encomiendas or, more commonly, in the form of judicial slavery, corvée, or congregas of semi-nomadic northern Indians. The region weathered wars and rebellions, changing administrative oversight, and a general reorganization of mission and labor rules in the 1710s. Through all these transitions, Tlaxcalans held onto their privileges tenaciously.47 Then came the Bourbon Reforms. Though Olivares’ attempts at a Union of Arms for Philip IV collapsed by the midseventeenth century, a similar aspiration gripped Charles III in the eighteenth. Confronted with yet another cataclysmic threat from England, the Spanish monarchy sought all possible means to wring from its far-flung empire the revenues and military resources to turn the tide. In New Spain this meant new taxes and new tax administration. A system of intendants now oversaw a vastly expanded system for regulating mining, collecting sales taxes, and administering royal monopolies. As in the time of Olivares, the goal was both to mobilize physical resources and to train and mobilize men. The Crown sought to replace old quasi-feudal military obligations with a regularized system of militias that would cover Spanish America from sea to sea.48

174   Borderlands of the Iberian World However, before the new militias could form, stakeholders of the old settler colonies stepped forward to defend important elements of the existing system. In the 1780s, the governor of Nuevo León, Vicente Gonzales de Santianes, was stuck with the difficult task of explaining the region’s administrative practices to his superiors while applying new Bourbon practices to a region quite distinct from Iberia. Any attempt to levy new taxes on the region’s settler communities raised a hue and cry from the old chartered Tlaxcalan towns. Their pact with the Crown had always been a simple one. They served the viceroyalty by conquering territory, suppressing local resistance, defending against outside threats, and bringing new mines and agricultural lands into the colonial economy. In return, their leaders (and no small number of followers) received titles of lesser nobility, ceremonial honors, land, charters of self-government, and relief from most forms of taxation and tributary labor. Like Europe’s early elites, their obligation to the Crown was discharged on the battlefield.49 The governor described many of the Tlaxcalan towns in ways that would have been familiar to the governors of the conquest era. Their obligations for taxation and service varied in relation to the functions they fulfilled within the empire. In some areas, Tlaxcalans functioned as part of a missionary program, living beside recently settled northern Indians. In others, they lived apart from the northern Indians, but still served as members of garrison communities. In a third category, the governor placed communities where Tlaxcalans lived beside northern Indians who now held a kind of Tlaxcalan legal status. Such was the value of these settlements that no amount of administrative reform voided their colonial pacts until the era of Mexican Independence. In speaking of these communities, the governor noted the reason for their relief from both taxes and tribute: “There still persist in the two villages and in San Miguel de Aguayo the frontier conditions of territories through which barbarous Indians still enter to carry out hostilities, to the remedy of which it [San Miguel] contributes a small company of horsemen which the aforementioned Tlaxcalans formed there and another of archers from the antiguos borrados.”50 Here one notes the key differences between the colonial experiences of the northern and southern reaches of the colonial Nahua diaspora.51 The extreme north was a place of persistent, violent frontier conditions, and a region highly valued for its mineral wealth. Whereas the Spanish colonial project in Honduras desperately needed its Nahua garrisons in the time of the Lempira Revolt, this was no longer the case a century later. Though many indigenous spaces in the interior of Honduras remained outside the effective control of the colonial government for centuries, the province experienced nothing analogous to the endless wars against Apaches and Comanches, whose mobility, military prowess, and resistance to colonial acculturation made them an insoluble problem. For this reason, the Tlaxcalans of the north were indispensable to the state. At the same time, their numbers were finite, and their survival required the serial recruitment of new Indigenous groups to aid their efforts. The north was a place of continuous conquest, alliance and cooptation. This difference in regional experience had significant consequences for the survival of Indian settlers’ corporate privileges. In the north, military and religious leaders spoke

The Indian Garrison Colonies   175 of Tlaxcalan communities as existing in a land of “guerra viva” and “viva conversión.” This permitted Tlaxcalans to make two fundamentally feudal arguments in defense of community privileges. Their petitions were based on both past and present service to church and state. They constantly re-invoked their ancestors’ faithful service in the age of Cortés and Alvarado, and their current contributions to wars against frontier enemies in the north. In contrast, the descendants of the indigenous soldier-settlers of Honduras could hope only that the Crown’s gratitude toward their conquistador ancestors would protect them from the economic and administrative overreach of their Spanish neighbors. Often, it did not.52

Notes Archives AGCA: Archivo General de Centro América, Guatemala City (Guatemala) AGS: Archivo General de Simancas (Simancas, Spain) AMM: Archivo Municipal de Monterrey, Nuevo León (Mexico) 1. The author wishes to thank Rus Sheptak for his extraordinary help with this project. He first introduced the author to the documents from the Archivo General de Centro América (hereafter AGCA) that were used to explore the history of the community of Mexicapa. Thanks also to Jim Phillips, Robert Scott and Sylvia Sellers-García for several conversations that helped to contextualize the place of Mexicapa in the history of Honduras and Guatemala, and to Brianna-Leavitt-Alcántara for commenting on a draft. 2. Manuel Chávez Borjas, “El Guancasco de Mexicapa: comunidad campesina del occidente de Honduras,” Teatro Indígena 33 (1992): 38–45; The use of public performance to symbolize the civic integration of multiple caste communities in Mexico’s post-conquest era is explored in Linda Curcio-Nagy, The Great Festivals of Colonial Mexico City: Performance, Power, and Identity (Albuquerque: UNM, 2004), chap. 3. See also Danna A. Levin Rojo, “The Matachines Dance in Alcalde, a Mestizo Community in North-Central New Mexico,” in Las vías del noroeste III: genealogías, transversalidades y convergencias, coord. Carlo Bonfiglioli, Arturo Gutiérrez, Marie-Areti Hers, and Danna Levin (Mexico: IIA, IIE-UNAM, 2011), 544–550. For dances of “Moros y Cristianos” in Sonora see Thomas Sheridan, Where the Dove Calls (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1988). 3. Héctor Jaime Treviño Villarreal, El Señor de Tlaxcala (Monterrey: Archivo General del Estado de Monterrey, 1986), 18–301; Rebeca Becerra, “Etnografía del Guancasco entre La Villa de San Antonio, departamento de Comayagua y Yarumela, departamento de La Paz, Honduras,” Bricolage 4, 12 (2006): 6–12. 4. Olga Marina Joya and Paúl Martínez, Comayagua: guía de arquitectura (Seville: Junta de Andalucía, 2011), 70–71, 163–165. 5. The institution of encomienda defined the legal relationship between conquerors and the conquered throughout much of Spanish America. Developed during the Castillian conquest of Muslim Granada, this legal instrument linked the military, religious, and economic functions of conquest. The Crown issued encomiendas to conquering vassals in return for

176   Borderlands of the Iberian World their past and current military service. Encomenderos were obligated to Christianize and protect new subjects. In return, they were entitled to collect revenues from the population in the form of commodities and or labor. In most cases, a grant of encomienda was distinct from a land grant. See Andrés Reséndez, “Borderlands of Bondage,” in The Oxford Handbook of Borderlands of the Iberian World, ed. Danna A. Levin Rojo and Cynthia Radding (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019). 6. On Nahua performace as historical re-enactment, see Louise M. Burkhart, Barry D. Sell, and Gregory Spira, ed. Nahuatl Theater: Death and Life in Colonial Nahua Mexico, 4 vols. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2004–2009). On Honduran guancascos in historical memory of war and peace, see Anne Chapman, Los hijos del copal y la candela (Mexico: UNAM, 1985), 74–75. A parallel tradition of religious procession and performance that reenacts both the global religious encounter and more localized political competition has been studied in the Andes: Tristan Platt, “The Andean Soldiers of Christ: Confraternity Organization, the Mass of the Sun, and Regenerative Warfare in Rural Potosí (18th-20th centuries),” Journal de la Société des Américanistes 73, no. 1 (1987): 139–191. 7. The experiences of Maya communities in Yucatan and Guatemala during this period were highly varied. Furthermore, as Matthew Restall, Maya Conquistador (Boston: Beacon, 1998) has shown, historical memory sometimes reframed early conquest experiences to create narratives of survival and victory. 8. On San Miguel de Aguayo (now Bustamante, Nuevo León), see Elisabeth Butzer, Historia social de una comunidad tlaxcalteca: San Miguel de Aguayo (Bustamante, N.L.) 1686–1820, trans. Jeronimo Valdés Garza (Saltillo, Austin, Tlaxcala, Bustamante: AMS, University of Texas, Instituto Tlaxcalteca de la Cultura, Presidencia Municipal de Bustamante, 2001); On the early history of Comayagua, see Robert S. Chamberlain, The Conquest and Colonization of Honduras (New York: Octagon Books, 1966), chap. 5; Pedro Escalante Arce, Los tlaxcaltecas en Centro América (San Salvador: Biblioteca de Historia Salvadoreña, 2001), chap. 4. 9. The term “señorío” is used to describe the pre-conquest political units of the Maya world. The usage followed here is that of Sergio Quezada, Maya Lords and Lordship: The Formation of Colonial Society in Yucatán, 1350–1600, trans. Terry Rugeley (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2014), in preference to contemporary European terms like “kingdom,” or modern terms like “state,” both of which connote very different structures or rules of succession. Señorío more closely approximates the meaning of the Maya cúuchcabal. 10. The first incarnation of this colonial capital, “Ciudad de Santiago de los Caballeros” founded in 1524 (at the site of Iximché) was soon abandoned during the regional rebellion. In 1527 the capital was reestablished at Almolonga only to be destroyed by a volcanic eruption and flood in 1541. The third iteration of Santiago de Guatemala (today’s Antigua) was built in 1543 where it persisted until 1773 when two massive earthquakes forced the final transfer of the colonial capital to its present location. See Christopher H. Lutz, Santiago de Guatemala, 1541–1773: City, Caste, and the Colonial Experience. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994, chaps. 1–2. 11. Lempira’s struggle has become a foundational myth for Honduras, though the historicity of much of the myth remains murky. See Rebecca Earl, The Return of the Native: Indians and Myth-Making in Spanish America, 1810–1930 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 200–204. The Lenca (as a cultural and linguistic community, though not as a unitary polity) antedated conquest and persisted long after, Atanasio Herranz, “Lenca,” in The Oxford Encyclopedia of Mesoamerican Cultures: The Civilizations of Mexico and Central America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).

The Indian Garrison Colonies   177 12. On Tlaxcalan colonization of the north, José de Jesus Dávila Aguirre, La colonización tlaxcalteca y su influencia en el noreste de la Nueva España (Coahuila: Colegio Coahuilense de Investigaciones Históricas, 1977); David  B.  Adams, Las colonias tlaxcaltecas de Coahuila y Nuevo León en la Nueva España: un aspecto de la colonización del norte de México (Saltillo: AMS, 1991), and “At the Lion’s Mouth: San Miguel de Aguayo in the Defense of Nuevo León, 1686–1820,” Colonial Latin American Historical Review 9, no. 3 (2000): 324–346; Eugene B. Sego, Aliados y adversarios: los colonos tlaxcaltecas en la frontera septentrional de Nueva España (San Luís Potosí: El Colegio de San Luis, 1998); Ildefonso Dávila del Bosque, Los cabildos tlaxcaltecas: ayuntamientos del pueblo de San Esteban de la Nueva Tlaxcala desde su establecimiento hasta su fusión con la villa del Saltillo (Saltillo: Archivo Municipal, 2000); Butzer, Historia social de una comunidad tlaxcalteca; Cecilia Sheridan Prieto, “ ‘Indios madrineros’: colonizadores tlaxcaltecas en el noreste novohispano,” Estudios de Historia Novohispana 24 (2001): 15–51; Tomás Martínez Saldaña, La diáspora tlaxcalteca: colonizacion agrícola del norte mexicano (Tlaxcala: Gobierno del Estado de Tlaxcala, 1998); and Sean F. McEnroe, From Colony to Nationhood in Mexico: Laying the Foundations, 1560–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), chaps. 1–4. 13. Laura  E.  Matthew, Memories of Conquest: Becoming Mexicano in Colonial Guatemala (Chapel Hill: UNC, 2012), chap. 3. 14. Octavio Paz, El laberinto de la soledad (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2000), 78–79. 15. This chapter treats primarily the attempts by Indian elites to retain their historic ethnic identity and legal categorization. Lutz, Santiago de Guatemala, 1541–1773, 45–78 has demonstrated that indigenous Guatemalans fleeing tribute demands frequently had as strong a motive to shed their ethnic identities as to retain them. In the case of Peru, Ann M. Wightman has shown the ways in which sustaining and escaping traditional categories could be advantageous to Indians depending on the historical moment, Indigenous Migration and Social Change: The Forasteros of Cuzco, 1570–1720 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1990). 16. The literature on interethnic negotiation, translation and alliance is now extensive. Laura E. Matthew and Michel R. Oudijk, ed., Indian Conquistadors: Indigenous Allies in the Conquest of Mesoamerica (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2007); Alida Metcalf, Go-Betweens and the Colonization of Brazil, 1500–1600 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005); Camilla Townsend, Malintzin’s Choices: An Indian Woman in the Conquest of Mexico (Albuquerque: UNM, 2006); Yanna Yannakakis, The Art of Being In-Between: Native Intermediaries, Indian Identity, and Local Rule in Colonial Oaxaca (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009); and Juliana Barr, Peace Came in the Form of a Woman: Indians and Spaniards in the Texas Borderlands (Chapel Hill: UNC, 2007). 17. Stephanie Wood, Transcending Conquest: Nahua Views of Spanish Colonial Mexico (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2003); Jovita R. Baber, “Empire, Indians and the Negotiation for Status in the City of Tlaxcala,” in Negotiation with in Domination: Colonial New Spain’s Indian Pueblos Confront the Spanish State, comp. Ethelia Ruiz Medrano and Susan Kellogg (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2009); Leslie Offutt, “Defending Corporate Identity on Spain’s Northeastern Frontier: San Esteban,” Americas 64, 3 (2007): 351–75; and Barbara  E.  Mundy, The Mapping of New Spain; Indigenous Cartography and the Maps of the Relaciones Geográficas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).

178   Borderlands of the Iberian World 18. José Marcos Medina Bustos and Ignacio Almada Bay, “Inter-Ethnic War in Sonora: Indigenous Captains General and Cultural Change, 1740–1832,” in The Oxford Handbook of Borderlands of the Iberian World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019) note a similar pattern among the Ópatas in Sonora regarding the privileges attached to the “cargos” of indigenous government they received from Spanish authorities. 19. 15 June 1560 and 16 Nov 1562 Acts of the Cabildo, in The Tlaxcalan Actas: A Compendium of the Records of the Cabildo of Tlaxcala 1545–1627, ed. James Lockhart, Frances Berdan, and Arthur J. O. Anderson (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1986), 106–108, 119–121; Charles Gibson, Tlaxcala in the Sixteenth Century (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1952), chap. 6; Andrea Martínez Baracs, Un gobierno de indios: Tlaxcala, 1519–1750 (Tlaxcala: CIESAS, 2008), chap. 6. 20. The defense of indigenous legal privileges in the Andes during this period, and into the late eighteenth century has been studied extensively: Scarlett O’Phelan Godoy, Kurakas sin sucesiones: Del cacique al alcalde de indios (Cuzco: Centro Bartolomé de las Casas, 1997); David  G.  Garrett, Shadows of Empire: The Indian Nobility of Cusco, 1750–1825 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Jeremy Ravi Mumford, Vertical Empire: The General Resettlement of Indians in the Colonial Andes (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012); Wightman, Indigenous Migration and Social Change. 21. Reforms associated with the New Laws of 1542 provoked resistance from encomenderos throughout Spanish America. See Silvio Zavala, “La encomienda como institución económica,” in Ensayos sobre la colonización Española en América (Mexico: Editorial Porrúa, 1978). The documentary record of these debates is well represented in Silvio Zavala, La encomienda indiana (Mexico: Editorial Porrúa, 1992) and Stafford Poole, Juan de Ovando: Governing the Spanish Empire in the Reign of Philip II (Norman: University of Oklahoma, Press, 2004), 109–125. 22. Florine Asselbergs, Conquered Conquistadors. The Lienzo de Quauhquechollan: A Nahua Vision of the Conquest of Guatemala (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2008); Jaime Cuadriello, Las glorias de la República de Tlaxcala: o la conciencia como imagen sublime (Mexico: IIE-UNAM, MUNAL, INBA, 2004). 23. On visual records of Indigenous co-conquest, see Stephanie Wood, Transcending Conquest; Elizabeth Hill Boone, Stories in Black and Red: Pictorial Histories of the Aztecs and Mixtecs (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000); Travis Barton Kranz, “The Tlaxcalan Conquest Pictorials: The Role of Images in Influencing Colonial Policy in Sixteenth-Century Mexico” (PhD diss, University of California at Los Angeles, 2001). On pictorial accounts by Nahua Conquistadors, see Matthew Restall and Florine Asselbergs, Invading Guatemala: Spanish, Nahua, and Maya Accounts of the Conquest Wars (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007) and Danna A. Levin Rojo, “ ‘Indian Friends and Allies’ in the Spanish Imperial Borderlands of North America,” in The Oxford Handbook of Borderlands of the Iberian World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019). 24. Early historical work on privileges among Indian conquerors varied a great deal. Charles Gibson emphasized the strengths and persistence of Tlaxcalan claims. More recently, Jovita Baber, “Law Land and Legal Rhetorical in Colonial New Spain,” in Native Claims: Indigenous Law and Empire, 1500–1920, ed. Saliha Belmessous (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 41–62 has revisited the issue. William Sherman, largely on the basis of late sixteenth century petitions, emphasized the decline in their allied status: “Tlaxcalans in Post-Conquest Guatemala,” Tlalocan 6 (1970): 124–139.

The Indian Garrison Colonies   179 25. “Letter from the King and Testimony by Tlaxcalan and Mexica Conquistadors in Guatemala,” in Restall and Asselbergs, Invading Guatemala. The original document, also treated by Matthew and Arce, is from the Archivo General de Indias (Seville), Guatemala 52: fols. 77–78r (1547). 26. Martínez Baracs, Un gobierno de indios, 270–273. 27. On demographic collapse, survival, and recovery, see W.  George Lovell, Conquest and Survival in Colonial Guatemala: A Historical Geography of the Cuchumatan Highlands, 1500–1821 (Buffalo: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1985); Nobel David Cook, Born to Die, Disease and New World Conquest, 1492–1650 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Sherburne Cook and Woodrow Borah, The Indian Population of Central Mexico, 1530–1610 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960). 28. David Frye, “The Native Peoples of Northeastern Mexico,” in The Native Peoples of the Americas, vol. 2, part 2, ed. Richard E.W. Adams and Murdo J. Macleod (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 113–125. A variation of this system under Jesuit leadership in Parras has been described in Gabriel Martínez-Serna, “Jesuit Missionaries, Indian Polities, and environmental Transformation in the Lagoon March of Northeastern New Spain,” Journal of American History 3, no. 2–3 (2013): 207–234. 29. Juan Carlos Ruiz Guadalajara, “El capitán Miguel Caldera,” Revista de Indias 70, no. 248 (2010): 23–58; Philip Wayne Powell, Mexico’s Miguel Caldera: The Taming of America’s First Frontier, 1548–1597 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1971). 30. Israel Cavazos Garza, El Lic. Francisco Barbadillo: fundador de Guadalupe, Nuevo León (Monterrey: Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León, 1980). 31. Russell Sheptak, Rosemary  A.  Joyce, and Kira Blaisdell-Sloan, “Pragmatic Choices, Colonial Lives: Resistance, Ambivalence, and Appropriation in Northern Honduras,” in Enduring Conquests: Rethinking the Archeology of Resistance to Spanish Colonialism in the Americas, ed. Matthew Liebmann and Melissa S. Murphy (Santa Fe: SAR, 2010), 149–172. 32. Alonso de León, Juan Bautista Chapa, and Fernando Sanchez de Zamora, Historia de Nuevo León, con noticias sobre Coahuila, Tamaulipas, Texas y Nuevo Mexico, siglo xvii, notes by Cavazos Garza (Monterrey: Ayuntamiento de Monterrey, 1980), chaps. 2–3; Eduardo Enrique Ríos, Fray Margil de Jesús: apóstol de América (Mexico: Editorial Jus, 1955); Vito Alessio Robles, Coahuila y Texas en la época colonial (Mexico: Editorial Porrúa, 1978), 332–347. 33. Archivo General de Simancas (hereafter AGS) Simancas, Spain. 7032, exp. 1, fols. 7, 11, 23; AGS Secretaría de Guerra 6966, exp. 69, fol. 281. 34. W. George Lovell, Christopher H. Lutz, Wendy Kramer, and William R. Swezey, “Strange Lands and Different Peoples”: Spaniards and Indians in Colonial Guatemala (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2013), chap. 1; Restall and Asselbergs, Invading Guatemala, chap 1. Alvarado’s representation of the mixture of indigenous and Spanish forces may be found in Pedro de Alvarado, An Account of the Conquest of Guatemala in 1524 by Pedro de Alvarado, ed. Sedley  J.  Mackie with facsimile of Spanish Original, 1525 (New York: Cortes Society, 1924), 53–67. Chamberlain, The Conquest and Colonization of Honduras, chap. 1 gives the troop deployments as recorded in several sources. Cortés’s fourth and fifth letters to the crown indicate similar proportions of Spaniards and Indians in the military forces in Guatemala and Honduras, Letters from Mexico, ed. and trans. Anthony Pagden (New York: Grossman, 1971), 338–447. Matthew, Memories of Conquest, 60–62

180   Borderlands of the Iberian World provides an assessment of the ethnic composition of invasion forces. In virtually all cases, allied Indian troops vastly outnumbered Europeans. 35. Sylvia Sellers-García, Distance and Documents at the Spanish Empire’s Periphery (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013); Sergio Quezada, Maya Lords, 7–22 makes a similar intervention in describing pre-Columbian political authority, which he conceives as hierarchical, but not territorial. 36. Fernando Berrojalbiz and Marie-Areti Hers, “Fluctuating Frontiers in the Borderlands of Mesoamerica,” in The Oxford Handbook of Borderlands of the Iberian World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019). 37. John M. D. Pohl, “Mexican Codices, Maps and Lienzos as Social Contracts,” in Writing without Words: Alternative Literacies in Mesoamerica and the Andes, ed. Elizabeth Hill Boone and Walter D. Mignolo (Durham, NC: Duke University Press 1994), 137–59, and The Politics of Symbolism in the Mixtec Codices (Nashville: Vanderbilt, 1994), 1–5. 38. AGCA, Guatemala City. Legajo 5357 Signatura A3 512. 39. On elite indigenous self-representation in relation to the larger empire, see Robert Haskett, “Paper Shields: The Ideology of Coats of Arms in Colonial Mexican Primordial Titles,” Ethnohistory 43, no. 1 (1996): 99–126; Garrett, Shadows of Empire; Delfina Esmeralda López Serrelangue, La nobleza indígena de Pátzcuaro en la época virreinal (Mexico: UNAM, 1965); McEnroe, From Colony to Nationhood in Mexico, chap. 1. 40. William  L.  Sherman, “A Conqueror’s Wealth: Notes on the Estate of Don Pedro de Alvarado,” The Americas 26, no. 2 (1969): 199–213. 41. “New Laws of the Indies,” in An Account Much Abbreviated of the Destruction of the Indies with Related Texts, ed. Franklin W. Knight (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2003), 93–102; Alberto Sarmiento Donate, ed., De las leyes de Indias: antología de la recopilación de 1681 (Mexico: SEP, 1985), book 6, chaps. 6–9. 42. John  H.  Elliott, Richelieu and Olivares (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 73–141. 43. “Testimonio de los autos hechas en el distrito de la Audiencia de Guatemala para el cumplimento de la cédula de Su Majesta ordenado se le sirva con 250,000 ducados para la unión de las armas, 1629,” (Guatemala 43), in Cartas de cabildos hispanoamericanos: Audiencia de Guatemala, ed. Javier Ortiz de la Tabla Ducasse, Bibiano Torres Ramírez, and Enriqueta Vila Vilar (Seville: CSIC, 1984). 44. Currency valuations for this period are notoriously difficult to assess, but this was c­ ertainly a substantial sum. Annual revenues for the Vatican were just over one million ducats for this period. Hanns Gross, Rome in the Age of Enlightenment: The Post Tridentine Syndrome and the Ancien Regime (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 129. 45. Ida Altman, The War for Mexico’s West: Indians and Spaniards in New Galicia, 1524–1550 (Albuquerque: UNM, 2010). 46. The contents of the charters may be found in Charles Gibson, Tlaxcala in the Sixteenth Century (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1952), appendix VII. See also Danna A. Levin Rojo, Return to Aztlan: Indians, Spaniards, and the Invention of Nuevo México (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2014), and “ ‘Indian Friends and Allies.’ ” 47. McEnroe, From Colony to Nationhood in Mexico, chap. 5. 48. Christon I. Archer, The Army in Bourbon Mexico, 1760–1810 (Albuquerque: UNM, 1977); John Lynch, Bourbon Spain, 1700–1808 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989). On local systems, see José Cuello, “The Economic Impact of the Bourbon Reforms and the Late Colonial Crisis of Empire at the Local Level: The Case of Saltillo, 1777–1817,” The Americas 44, no. 3

The Indian Garrison Colonies   181 (1988): 301–324; María del Carmen Velásquez, Tres estudios sobre las provincias internas de Nueva España (Mexico: El Colegio de México, 1979); Isidro Vizcaya Canales, En los albores de la independencia: las provincias internas de Oriente durante la insurgencia de Don Miguel Hidalgo (Monterrey: ITESM, 1976). 49. Archivo Municipal de Monterrey (hereafter AMM) Monterrey, Nuevo León. Correspondencia vol. 121, exp. 1, fol. 3. 50. AMM Correspondencia vol. 121, exp. 1, fol. 3. 51. Matthew, Memories of Conquest finds that in Guatemala early Indian settler communities had a strong initial colonial compact and defended their legal position avidly from the 1570s to the 1620s. But they faced a steady erosion of status thereafter, despite persistent historical memory of conquistador status. Escalante Arce, Los tlaxcaltecas, notes an erosion of Tlaxcalan privilege but still finds evidence suggesting the persistence of settler identity as a military caste late in the eighteenth century. 52. Frontier violence in this region was a constant condition from the sixteenth to nineteenth century. Phillip Wayne Powell, Mexico’s Miguel Caldera; Max L. Moorhead, The Apache Frontier in Northern New Spain, 1769–1791 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1968); William B. Griffen, Apaches at War and Peace: The Janos Presidio, 1750–1858 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1988); David J. Weber, The Spanish Frontier in North America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 204–235; Edward  H.  Spicer, Cycles of Conquest: the Impact of Spain, Mexico, and the United States on the Indians of the Southwest, 1533–1960 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1962); and Roberto Mario Salmon, Indian Revolts in Northern New Spain (1680–1786) (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1991).

Bibliography Butzer, Elizabeth. Historia social de una comunidad tlaxcalteca: San Miguel de Aguayo. (Bustamante, N.L.) 1686–1820, translated by Jeronimo Valdés Garza. Saltillo, Austin, Tlaxcala, Bustamante: AMS, University of Texas, Instituto Tlaxcalteca de la Cultura, Presidencia Municipal de Bustamante, 2001. Chamberlain, Robert  S. The Conquest and Colonization of Honduras. New York: Octagon Books, 1966. Escalante Arce, Pedro. Los tlaxcaltecas en Centro América. San Salvador: Biblioteca de Historia Salvadoreña, 2001. Garrett, David G. Shadows of Empire: The Indian Nobility of Cusco, 1750–1825. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Levin Rojo, Danna  A. “ ‘Indian Friends and Allies’ in the Spanish Imperial Borderlands of North America.” In The Oxford Handbook of Borderlands of the Iberian World, edited by Danna A. Levin Rojo and Cynthia Radding. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019. Lutz, Christopher  H. Santiago de Guatemala, 1541–1773: City, Caste, and the Colonial Experience. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994. Martínez Baracs, Andrea. Un gobierno de indios: Tlaxcala, 1519–1750. Tlaxcala: CIESAS, 2008. Matthew, Laura E. Memories of Conquest: Becoming Mexicano in Colonial Guatemala. Chapel Hill: UNC, 2012. McEnroe, Sean F. From Colony to Nationhood in Mexico: Laying the Foundations, 1560–1840. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2012.

182   Borderlands of the Iberian World Powell, Philip Wayne. Mexico’s Miguel Caldera: The Taming of America’s First Frontier, ­1548–1597. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1971. Quezada, Sergio. Maya Lords and Lordship: The Formation of Colonial Society in Yucatán, 1350–1600, translated by Terry Rugeley. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2014. Restall, Matthew, and Florine Asselbergs. Invading Guatemala: Spanish, Nahua, and Maya Accounts of the Conquest Wars. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007. Wightman, Ann  M. Indigenous Migration and Social Change: The Forasteros of Cuzco, 1570–1720. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1990. Wood, Stephanie. Transcending Conquest: Nahua Views of Spanish Colonial Mexico. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2003.

chapter 7

I n ter-Eth n ic Wa r i n Sonor a Indigenous Captains General and Cultural Change, 1740–1832 José Marcos Medina Bustos and Ignacio Almada Bay Translated by Ann Halbert-Brooks

The northern frontiers of New Spain appear historically as areas of transition and ­networks of interchange, punctuated by multi-ethnic interaction, cultural mixing, and overlapping, competing spheres of power.1 These processes become apparent through the negotiations and alliances between Spaniards and indigenous communities, particularly concerning the privileges offered to them by the Spanish government. The indigenous representatives who received them became agents of cultural mediation in a fluid landscape of contacts, where the indigenous communities’ control over territorial areas was not extinguished, and the alignments in peace and wartime carried a multi-ethnic character. In recent decades, historians working on Hispanic American frontiers have used concepts such as acculturation to understand processes of cultural contact between indigenous societies and Europeans, alluding to the ways in which societies assimilate or receive as an imposition features from other societies; and ethnogenesis, pointing to the adaptation that indigenous groups made to new situations, highlighting their role as protagonists of these changes.2 Of these the concept of ethnogenesis accurately fits the history of the northern borderlands of New Spain. More recently, the concept of transculturation refers to the process of forming a new culture from the indigenous, European, and African cultures that mutually influenced each other in America. Coined by Fernando Ortiz in 1940 to refer to the island of Cuba—as an alternative to the term “acculturation”—transculturation manifests itself in “the different phases of the process of transition from one culture to another” and

184   Borderlands of the Iberian World highlights “the subsequent creation of new cultural phenomena” that include elements of the preceding and the acquired cultures. It underscores the processes of transformation that occur between groups of different cultures that come into daily and sustained contact. Fernando Coronil emphasizes that this term makes “operative the premise that culture contact affects all the groups engaged in cross-cultural interaction, whether hegemonic, marginal, or subservient.”3 Our study will show that the strategies of expansion and defense that Spanish society practiced, particularly accepting natives as military allies, entailed processes of transculturation. The study of these cultural changes has deepened our understanding of indigenous responses to contact with the agents of the Spanish monarchy and the Mexican nation-state. Inter-ethnic violence, alluding to the conflicts between social groups that adopt an identity and the expression of that identity in cultural changes, has been studied in the recent historiography of frontier spaces.4 Nevertheless, there is limited understanding of different kinds of indigenous leadership, and in particular of those rooted in the military posts established by the Spanish colonial and Mexican national governments to secure the control of native societies. This chapter addresses these themes in order to advance our knowledge in this regard.5 Based on recent contributions to the ethnohistory of frontier regions, the role of indigenous leaders points to the degree of political centralization developed by certain native individuals whose characteristics differed according to the type of society; these positions could be situational—particularly in times of war—or stable in hierarchical societies.6 Spanish and Mexican authorities adopted a policy of co-opting these leaders by granting them offices of local indigenous government, in accordance with their regional objectives for domination. Those who occupied such positions were individuals who had the respect of their communities, but they were also accountable to their colonial rulers. This was an ambivalent role because in order to be effective, the officeholders had to attend to the needs of their indigenous communities and to the requirements of the Spanish and Mexican authorities that named them to their posts.7 In their position as intermediaries, the indigenous government officeholders alternatively promoted adaptation or open resistance, according to the treatment they received from diverse nonindigenous authorities (missionaries, civil or military authorities), who permitted them a certain degree of autonomy or imposed strict control on indigenous agents. One indigenous governmental office in the frontier region had the function of supporting the Spanish or the national state in combat against indigenous communities that resisted their control: the office of captain general. The attributes of that position and the role of its indigenous holders played an important role in forging inter-ethnic relations and in propitiating cultural change. The space occupied largely by the modern Mexican state of Sonora constitutes a region where the office of captain general was maintained over a prolonged period of time and had a visible agency.8 The period of 1740–1832 is particularly salient for exploring the corporate characteristics of this office during the period of control by the Spanish colonial regime, as well as the transformations that occurred once liberal and national institutions attempted to end these corporate institutions.

Inter-Ethnic War in Sonora   185

The Office of the Captain General in the Province of Sonora: A Necessary Evil for Spanish Dominion The sixteenth-century expansion of the Spanish colonizers north of Mesoamerica confronted a distinct situation from that which they found when conquering Tenochtitlán; in place of the hierarchical societies with centralized government institutions of Central Mexico, they encountered agrarian and hunter-gatherer societies whose political units were limited to village-dwelling groups of various sizes or to bands comprising clans. Their social organization prevented a swift conquest of the region by the Spanish who experienced, instead, a state of war that continued throughout the sixteenth century.9 This first Spanish advance employed practices of domination that had successful outcomes in the defeat of the Mexicas such as building alliances with other indigenous communities. In the war against the indigenous peoples of the west, north, and northwest, they established alliances with the Mexicas, Tarascos, Tlaxcaltecas, and Otomís, who provided contingents of men employed as porters and warriors. In this context, the Spanish authorities created indigenous military offices, one of which was the captain generalcy. According to Powell, this office was initially occupied by Otomí caciques, with the purpose of raising militias from the diverse pueblos of this ethnicity to fight the Chichimecas. On completion of their service, Otomí militiamen received prerogatives, such as land and tools to work it, permission to enslave Chichimecas, the use of weapons and horses, freedom from tribute and the repartimiento, military exemption (fuero militar) from regular civil justice, the use of uniforms, insignias, and the right to pass on their position to heirs.10 A similar situation arose in what became the extreme northwest of New Spain, where Spanish incursions beginning in the mid-sixteenth century could not establish a permanent outpost, other than the villa of Culiacán. Even at the start of the seventeenth century the Yaquis defeated a coalition of Spaniards, Mayos, and Zuaques, arresting their advance into that territory. As a result, Spanish dominion over the area, which started to be imposed since 1591, was not carried out through force of arms but through a combination of peacefully congregated indigenous peoples within mission pueblos headed by the Jesuits and by punitive actions directed against those who opposed the missionaries.11 This program was successful with the indigenous farmers (generally identified at the end of the eighteenth century as Mayos, Yaquis, Pimas Bajos, Ópatas, and Pimas Altos. See Figure  7.1 in the Appendix), but it also signified a precarious dominion compromised by the same indigenous residents of the missions, who staged limited and periodic uprisings. This method of gradually establishing Spanish dominion has been called the “colonial pact.”12 This denotes the special status of indigenous mission residents, who were

186   Borderlands of the Iberian World granted exemptions from the obligations of encomienda and tribute payments in money or in kind and enjoyed a certain degree of autonomy to manage their local governments and resources. While this protected indigenous residents from the most violent aspects of relations with the Spanish, such as slavery, it did not remove the obligation to work in the missions and mines as part of the system of repartimiento.13 Furthermore, indigenous communities were required to support the Spanish with their own militias in the repression of rebellions or in fighting indigenous nomads. The indigenous aid for Spanish rule at the end of the sixteenth century and start of the seventeenth was intended to support the enterprises of the Spanish conquest; in contrast, once the missions were established, it was aimed at defending the pueblos or the Reales de minas, although at times it was used in punitive expeditions, to conquer new territories, or to open roads for transport and communication.14 On the other hand, the Apaches and Seris, hunter-gatherer indigenous groups, remained independent despite efforts to reduce them to missions or presidios. At the end of the seventeenth century, these groups integrated into their subsistence activities the theft of cattle and attacks on mission pueblos and Spanish settlements to obtain other goods to satisfy their needs, which fueled an ongoing state of war between the Spanish (and later the Mexican), and native peoples, both the nomads and those settled in the missions.15 This situation of either latent or open violence obliged the Spanish to establish indigenous military offices in the mission pueblos, a practice that continued until well into the nineteenth century, albeit with different objectives and dynamics. The guidelines for naming indigenous government officials in New Spain were laid out in the Recopilación de Leyes de Indias (1687) and other subsequent laws that gradually imbued indigenous governments with distinctive features such as the office of governor, the síndico, and the regidores.16 The principal functions of these officers were the administration of justice, the collection of tribute, the organization of the repartimiento of workers and communal work, the administration of the caja de comunidad (community resources) and others.17 In the mission pueblos, indigenous governments also had unique adaptations that responded to the frontier situation, including the strong authority of the missionaries, exemptions from paying tribute, and the existence of a military branch of the mission’s indigenous colonial government.18 In 1764, the Jesuit missionary Juan Nentuig described indigenous government in the mission pueblos of Sonora. Referring to their military branch he observed the offices of war captain, alférez, sergeant, and cabo, and he noted their duties to conduct inspections as far as three leagues (twelve kilometers) “to the four winds” around their pueblos to scout out signs of the “enemy”—bands of nomadic raiders—and report back to the indigenous governor of the mission. Padre Nentuig explained that the captain commanded the indigenous militias on campaigns, but inside the pueblo he had authority only over his subordinate officers.19 In the same text, Nentuig criticized the office of the captain general, accusing those who occupied the office of becoming “arrogant” and “dissolute,” degrading indigenous customs, by returning to “pagan practices of drunkenness, dancing, and prognostication;” and taking advantage of the labor and even the property of indigenous peoples.20

Inter-Ethnic War in Sonora   187 Beyond Nentuig’s critique of this office, one can see that the primary function of the captain general was to recruit indigenous warriors from various pueblos to support the colonial government’s campaigns. Those occupying this position could acquire a greater degree of independence from the missionaries and sought to maintain the good will of indigenous residents of the pueblos, which turned them into potential rebel chiefs. The first references to the appointment of captains general in Sonora appeared in the late seventeenth century, at the start of a phase of open resistance against Spanish rule, which had as its background the triumphant revolt of the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico in 1680, and local conflicts related to a greater degree of exploitation of the indigenous population.21 In 1684, the Ópata gobernadorcillo of Huásabas, Francisco Javier Cuervo, was named captain general of the highland pueblos of Huásabas, Óputo, Nácori, Huachinera, Bacerac, and Bavispe to confront the uprising of the Janos, Jocomes, Sumas, Mansos, Chinarras, and Conchos.22 In 1689 Coxi, a Sobaipuri Indian, was named captain general of “all” the Pimas to combat the Apaches.23 Years later, the alcalde mayor Domingo Jironza Petriz de Cruzat named Juan Montes as captain general of the “Pima Nation,” to fight the rebellion that erupted in the Caborca mission in 1695.24 The first reference to a captain general among the Yaquis appeared in 1689, when a certain Juan Andrés occupied the position.25 In every case, those named as captains general were deemed to be trustworthy individuals by the Spanish authorities. In Sonora, only one official document naming a captain general has been found: the July 13, 1740 grant to the Yaqui Juan Ignacio Usacamea, also known as Muni, by the Viceroy and Archbishop of Mexico Julián Antonio de Vizarrón y Eguiarreta.26 The document specifies features of the office, establishing that it grants the title of captain general of the “reduced Indians of the Yaqui nation for you to use and exercise it in the causes and related issues that concern this position in accordance with and of the same manner that is done by the rest of the captains [general]”; it also established that the title was granted for having demonstrated “vigilant zeal in my royal service, fidelity and love to my ministers.” With the appointment, Usacamea received all the “honors, graces, preeminences, and privileges” associated with the office; the document also stated that he should be recognized by the captain of Sinaloa and other troops, as well as the people of his own “nation,” who should care for him, respect, and obey him, and it empowered him to punish the “disobedient[. . .]briefly and summarily, as is customary during wartime.”27 The aforementioned appointment occurred in the midst of a crisis in the relations between the Yaquis and Jesuits missionaries, exacerbated by the conflicts between the Society of Jesus and the governor of Sinaloa and Sonora, Manuel Bernal y Huidobro. Some of its elements, however, illustrate the general character of the office: it was granted by a high-level authority, had power over the whole native “nation,” was conferred upon a leader who had shown himself loyal, and conveyed privileges and honors to the recipient.28 Other details related to the designation of the captain general can be observed in the records of the Ópata captains general. For example, in 1775 Hugo O’Connor, commanding inspector of the forts of Coahuila, Nueva Vizcaya, and Sonora, proposed that three Ópata leaders choose one of themselves as captain general, since the post was vacant

188   Borderlands of the Iberian World following the death of Andrés Varela.29 O’Connor subsequently recommended the ­confirmation of Juan Manuel Varela Ávalos as the next captain general. Varela Ávalos was the war captain of the mission of Bacerac, the son of the former deceased captain general and notable for “his good conduct, valor, honorable behavior, and singular love that he has professed always for the Spanish.”30 Similarly in 1785, a document signed by José Antonio Rengel, general commander of the internal provinces, stated that Francisco Medrano, captain general of the company of Ópatas of Bavispe, would receive a ­hundred extra pesos over the four hundred that he already received in salary as “general of his nation.”31 In the same vein, Bishop Antonio María de los Reyes, in 1785, related the governance of the Yaqui pueblos to the appointment of captains general among them. He noted that the governor of the province appointed the captain general and bestowed him with authority over the full Yaqui nation, in accord with the missionaries’ nominations. The captain general, in turn, recruited and organized the battalions of native soldiers with their captains and subordinate officers, all of whom carried their emblems and banners in order to be obeyed in their frequent skirmishes with the enemies.32 Jesuit Nentuig and Bishop Reyes signaled that the appointment of captain general was meant to serve Spanish authorities, who named the individual that would hold the position; though it is hardly credible that by 1785 they did this in full accord with the missionaries: in the post-Jesuit era, the regular clergy was prevented from acquiring temporal power.33 It appears that the appointment of captain general was for life, as indicated in documents by authorities opposed to the office. These authorities proposed that once the occupant died no successor should be designated. However, the permanence of an individual in the position depended on the context.34 In times of crisis, the captains general appear to have succeeded one another rapidly. For example, among the Yaquis, after the captain general Cristóbal Gurrola was removed from office as a result of the rebellion of 1740, Luis Aquibuamea, Juan Ignacio Usacamea, and Hipólito Baheca were successively named to occupy the position.35 In contrast, in more stable times captains general could remain in office for decades. According to Hu-DeHart, the Yaqui captain general Felipe de Jesús Álvarez occupied the position for the final decade of the eighteenth century.36 Nicolás María Álvarez also held it more than twenty years (see Appendix 1 List of the Yaqui Captains General). Among the Ópatas as well, Francisco Antonio Medrano occupied the position of captain general in 1785 and he still held it by 1816 (see Appendix 2 List of the Ópata Captains General). Another element associated with the naming of captains general was kinship, particularly among the Ópatas for whom there are references to blood ties among these officers: captain general Andrés Varela was the father of Juan Manuel Varela, and Jerónimo Noperi was the grandfather of Juan Manuel Varela.37 In 1787, Ignacio Noperi, who shared a last name with Jerónimo, also appeared in documents as captain general.38 Other captains general with direct blood ties were Francisco Antonio Medrano and Blas Medrano, as it was requested by the Ópata pueblos in 1833: “That should a general of their nation be named, this should be the son of the late General Medrano, Don Blas

Inter-Ethnic War in Sonora   189 Medrano, who also lives in this town, for he has the merits of his ancestors and notorious honesty, since the other applicants for such employment have no other merit than their desire to dominate them.”39 Besides the consanguine ties of the Ópata captains general it is noticeable that until 1835—when Blas Medrano died—all of the captains general were natives of Bacerac and nearby villages such as Bavispe and Huachinera, located on the frontier with the Apaches. This suggests that the existence of the office was tied to the ongoing conflicts with the Apaches, as indicated by father Ángel Antonio Nuñez Fundidor in 1777, when he wrote that the Bacerac mission had always been honored by our Catholic sovereigns, granting its members the honorable title of Captain General of all the Ópata nation, because although in other towns of the same nation there have always been [captains general], they have not been properly so, being called only “General Lieutenants” and only Bacerac has retained the succession of supreme captains of the nation, from father to son, or otherwise to very immediate relatives.40

In the case of the Yaquis, more research is needed to establish if there were family ties among the captains general and their place of origin.41 The information gathered indicates that some of the Yaqui captains general were originally from the pueblo of Rahum. The office of captain general granted “honors, graces, preeminences, and privileges” to those who held it, as corroborated by Pima captains general in their complaints when they were dispossessed of their office by missionaries. For example, in 1722 Juan Montes denounced before the local alcalde mayor that the missionary of the pueblo of Dolores had taken the lands he had acquired for cattle raising. Luis Oacpicagigua made the same complaint in 1751: that he had been deprived of his lands as well as the symbols of his rank, Spanish weapons, and his horse.42 The land ownership noted in the preceding cases was formalized in José de Gálvez’s 1769 instructions for land distribution, which stipulated that the captains general should receive three suertes (lots) and the governors and captains two, while the Indian commoners received one.43 Another prerogative distinguishing the indigenous captains general was the high salary they received compared to other Indians with military positions.44 They also enjoyed the privilege of the fuero militar and therefore could only be held accountable to military authorities. The power that captains general could acquire depended on their good relations with Spanish authorities but also with indigenous communities. The position was an ambiguous one, and in a sense amphibious—existing between two worlds. The captains general who were least challenged by their constituencies in the colonial era were the Ópatas, whose main function was to defend their villages against Apache raids, a task that matched the interests of both Indians and Spaniards. In contrast, the Yaqui captains general did not have to defend their pueblos from the attacks of common external enemies. Instead, they supported the Spanish in combat against rebellious Yaquis, or Seris—and they helped the missionaries in the implementation of their policies. Hence the authority of the captains general began to be questioned when the authority of the missionaries declined. This was because the captains general no longer responded

190   Borderlands of the Iberian World to the needs of pueblos. Thus, in the Yaqui and Mayo rebellion of 1740, indigenous ­commoners disputed captain general Cristobal Gurrola’s support for the Jesuit policy of using “mestizos and coyotes” to manage Yaqui mission resources for the benefit of their missionary program in Baja California, rather than for the Yaquis themselves. As a result of this conflict, Juan Ignacio Usacamea rose to prominence. Also known by the nickname of Muni, Usacamea was governor of the town of Rahum and had served as a standard bearer in combat against the Seris. Manuel Bernal de Huidobro, the first governor of Sonora and Sinaloa, supported Usacamea, over the objections of the Jesuits, to travel to Mexico City and present the Yaquis’ complaints before the viceroy, who not only listened to Usacamea but even named him captain general in place of Gurrola. On his return from Mexico City, Muni devoted himself to pacifying the Yaquis and Mayos who had risen up in arms by a rumor that he had been killed. In light of what had happened before, the newly appointed acting governor Agustín de Vildósola, an ally of the Jesuits, did not cease in his efforts to punish Usacamea. In 1741, Vildósola summarily executed him on the rumor that he was preparing another uprising.45 This case illustrates the complicated conditions under which the captains general operated. The Pima captains general shared some similarities with their Ópata correlates, in the sense that they helped the Spanish in combat against the Seris and Apaches, their traditional enemies. On the other hand, one of these captains general, Juan Montes, broke with his indigenous subjects to fight the Pima rebels of Caborca in 1695. Like the Yaquis, the Pima captains general were also involved in conflicts between the Jesuits and provincial governors, as in the case of Luis Oacpicagigua, who headed a rebellion in 1751. Among the causes cited for this uprising were his documented conflicts with the missionaries because he made gifts to the Indians from his own resources and permitted them to transgress mission norms regarding conjugal relations outside marriage and festivals in the communities, stances for which he won indigenous approval. Faced with this situation, the Jesuits prepared to strip Oacpicagigua of his prerogatives as captain general. This led him to rebel; although thanks to his relationship with Governor Diego Ortíz Parrilla, he saved his life when the uprising failed.46 While the captains general were mainly intended to be military authorities, in their performance of the job they actually exercised political power, generating conflicts of jurisdiction with other authorities involved in the government of indigenous pueblos. The tone of the disputes among different jurisdictions can be appreciated in the correspondence between the Yaqui captain general Phelipe de Jesús Álvarez and the alcalde mayor of Ostimuri. In 1781 Álvarez wrote: Your grace has no authority over the Indians, only over the vecinos [non-Indians/ gente de razón]; it is I and my lieutenant general who govern the Indians: thus, my friend, leave the lieutenant [in office], because he only follows my orders. I order him [to carry out certain tasks] when I cannot go, and for that reason I send him: he goes with my order to do what I tell him to do, I do not tell him in writing because he is known as my lieutenant general [in all the pueblos] along the river. If he should affront one of the vecinos, then you should alert me so that I can discipline him, but if he is dealing with the Indians, then let him [and do not interfere].

Inter-Ethnic War in Sonora   191 This is what I say to your grace for your government, if this seems right to you, and if not, then in this instance your grace will determine how you would like to proceed.47

The Ópata captains general also faced conflicts over their jurisdiction because, when starting a military campaign their authority extended to the missionaries, who should contribute supplies and horses from the missions. Likewise, the governors of the indigenous pueblos had to provide the Ópata captains general with warriors. This is clear from the order given by the governor Juan Bautista de Anza to the captain general Juan Manuel Varela, who complained that despite this order “some justices and missionaries did not let him use his powers,” and by giving various pretexts they prevented him from “the recruitment of the warriors he needed to pursue the enemy.”48 Furthermore, Varela complained that the missionaries did not provide him with supplies “even when all the harvests in the pueblos had resulted from the work of their hijos [the Indians themselves].” The missionary Juan de Prestamero, commissary of the missions of Ostimuri and Sonora, responded to these accusations by arguing that the pueblos were impoverished, because men left their communities to fight rather than caring for their crops. Summarizing, the imposition of Spanish rule in northwest Mexico required a range of strategies, from the negotiation of implicit pacts to open confrontation. In this repertoire of coercion and negotiation what stands out is, the establishment of a military branch within the system of governmental offices. This branch included the post of captain general, a position caught between two opposing demands as “indigenous leaders with Spanish commitments.”49 These officials had to be trustworthy in the eyes of the colonial authorities who appointed them to lead indigenous mission communities in fighting rebels from the mission pueblos, or to lead troops against indigenous peoples who were impervious to sedentarization and Christianization. At the same time, they had to earn the respect of their indigenous fellows, with gifts and good conduct in times of peace, and with their military leadership in times of war and conflict. The insertion of a captain general among the Ópatas, Pimas, and Yaquis followed different patterns regarding issues such as the length of time he could hold office, how he performed in times of turbulence, and his acceptance or rejection by the indigenous people from whom he came. The majority of the captains general that have been identified remained loyal to the governors of the Province of Sonora and reaffirmed their privileges when they were challenged. They were involved in a rebellion only on two occasions: that of the Yaqui and Mayo in 1740, and the Pima rebellion in 1751. Both were framed by the conflict between the Jesuits and the ­provincial governors. The captains general functioned as agents of transculturation, as a means of communication between distinct power structures; they served as a platform for establishing an order—however precarious—that responded more to “particular interests than to the requirements of state control, which was always diffuse,” while showing “the gap that existed between normative standards and power.”50 From the year 1740 on, the captains

192   Borderlands of the Iberian World general and the system of government offices of the Indian community (república de indios), above all in Yaqui and Pima pueblos, challenged the role of missionaries as intermediaries between the secular colonial authorities and the indigenous population. This process marked a decisive political and cultural change.

Captains General and Indigenous “Nations” The office of the indigenous captain general was defined by the ability of the officeholder to recruit militias from beyond the local sphere of a pueblo, drawing upon all the settlements that comprised a given “nation,” a term the Spanish used to designate indigenous groups. Thus, the figure of the captain general concentrated the responsibility for recruitment, which otherwise would have been dispersed among the governors and captains of the towns. Despite the fact that the office of captain general was an invention of the Spanish colonizers, natives used the position as a means to re-create processes of identity that allowed them to defend their way of life. Indigenous groups at the time of Spanish contact and colonization competed for territory and resources, according to the accounts left by missionaries such as Jesuit Andrés Pérez de Ribas, who documented the conflicting relations between “nations” in the province of Sinaloa. Pérez de Ribas particularly alluded to the wars between Tehuecos and Zuaques—considered bellicose “nations,” of “capital” enmity—who he wrote were accustomed to exacting revenge. In addition, he mentioned attacks by the Tehuecos against the Ahomes, who complained about this to the Spanish because, he stated, the Tehuecos had dispossessed them of their lands, fields, women, and daughters. Another case he recorded was that of the Mayos, who could not leave their territory because of the Yaquis advancing on their lands from the north and the Tehuecos from the south; for this reason, when the Spaniards defeated the Tehuecos the Mayos became their allies in the fight against the Yaquis.51 References to conflicts between the indigenous communities living to the north of the Yaqui River came from missionaries such as Juan Nentuig, who affirmed in 1764 that there had been conflicts among “those of Bacadeguatzi with the Baceracas, because the latter group came at night to take salt in the saline of Bacadeguatzi.”52 In the same vein the Franciscan missionary Ángel Antonio Núñez, in 1777, asserted that older residents of the pueblo of Bacerac said that they had been mortal enemies of the indigenous residents of Óputo, Huásabas, and Bacadéhuachi, “and only made peace after becoming Christians.”53 Thus, the practice of warfare was common among indigenous groups before the arrival of the Spanish, although this situation is better documented for the province of Sinaloa, where there was a greater degree of competition over territories and resources due to greater population density. Despite the limitations of basing impressions on just one

Inter-Ethnic War in Sonora   193 testimony such as that of Pérez de Ribas, one can surmise that indigenous groups warlike activity imparted a certain degree of unity to small pueblos—described as rancherías by the missionaries—spread out on the margins of the rivers. According to Pérez de Ribas, while natives in the region recognized “some principal caciques, who were like heads and captains of families and rancherías,” their authority only conferred “the ability to declare war, attack enemies, or make peace with other nations.” This authority, the missionary affirmed, was obtained “not so much through ancestry as through courage in battle or the number of sons, grandsons, and other relatives they posessed, and perhaps for being good speakers or preachers.”54 Writing a century later, Juan Nentuig stated emphatically that the office of captain general had not existed in ancient times, because each ranchería obeyed only the bravest leader who emerged from their community. He observed further that conflicts and skirmishes occurred even within these segmentary groups, although they belonged to the same “nation,” such as those he had seen between Bacadéhuachi and Bacerac.55 Nentuig’s testimony supports our argument that Sonoran groups lacked political unity, because they were organized into small communities with local autonomy. If there were military leaders who united communities during wars with other groups, when those hostilities concluded the authority of those supra-local leaders also ended, and political units reverted to the rancherías internally cemented by kinship ties and directed by elders.56 This local dimension of the political and social organization of Sonora was no doubt strengthened with the concentration of rancherías into mission pueblos, as well as the practice of granting to individuals recognized as leaders of the communities, and who sympathized with the missionaries, the offices of the república de indios, which adapted a political and social organization sustained by blood ties to the new circumstance that implied the authority of the missionary. Similarly, one can argue that the office of captain general had a pre-Hispanic antecedent in the instances of leadership that bound warriors from all the rancherías. But, unlike the earlier positions, the title of the captain general was permanent and granted by Spanish authorities to acquire allies to support the colonial project. Another more important difference is that Spanish authorities established the scope of a captain general’s authority; that is, which individuals would be subjected to his command. This depended on the “nation” the Spaniards determined to place under the military leadership of the captain general. The meaning of the term “nation” among the Spanish varied over time. Jesuit Pérez de Ribas stated that the nations mentioned in his book were not analogous to those of Europe, as they were much smaller; nevertheless he described them as such because he observed that they were divided into separate small groups that spoke different languages, competed for territory, and made war against one another.57 In his view, indigenous nations had a group identity when confronting others in defense of their respective territories. This political identity could exist even when groups shared the same language, as was the case among the “nations” identified as the Yaqui, Mayo, Tehueca, Zuaque, and Ahome in the province of Sinaloa, which—despite sharing a language—waged war among each other. Anthropologists regard groups such

194   Borderlands of the Iberian World as these, which have created an identity while lacking formal mechanisms of political centralization as “tribal” communities.58 As in Sinaloa, Pérez de Ribas considered indigenous groups located to the north and west of the Yaqui territory nations, each with a local identity: Tepaguis, Conicaris, Chínipas, Guazaparis, Temoris, Ihios, Varohios, Nebomes Altos and Bajos, Aibinos, Sisibotaris, Batucos, Cumupas, Buasdabas, Bavispes, Sumas, Hures, Nacameris, Nacosaras, Himeris, and Sonoras.59 This perception of what constituted a “nation” changed by the middle of the eighteenth century, as described by the missionary Juan Nentuig in 1764, who affirmed that the Province of Sonora held two principal nations, the Ópata and the Pima, distinguished by their languages, which grouped together smaller parcialidades that in the past had spoken distinct dialects and occupied different localities.60 As one can appreciate, in contrast with Pérez de Ribas, Nentuig defined the “nations” of Sonora, to the north of the Yaqui River, by language, not by an identity associated with a territory. In this classification system there were two “nations” in Sonora: the Pima and the Ópata. One can observe a similar process for the indigenous communities of the province of Sinaloa, where the Mayo “nation” replaced the Tehuecos, Ahomes, Zuaques, etc.61 The consolidation of local identities emerged from the Spanish administrative necessity of integrating and homogenizing distinct smaller groups into larger ones, but they did not respond to real or practical identities. Spanish authorities struggled to locate what gave groups a sense of unity below the office of captain general. They particularly sought to understand indigenous social structures as a means of establishing authorities that could assist in controlling scattered groups and centralizing the control of warriors in each political entity in order to combat indigenous or independent rebels. The geographical boundaries of each captain general’s office sometimes coincided with the boundaries of “nations” that effectively had a group identity, as with the Yaquis. The captains general of the Pima and Ópata “nations,” however, did not reflect a real unity, rather Spanish authorities tried to consolidate indigenous residents’ identities by establishing a politico-military authority.62 A leader like Luis Oacpicagigua, despite his title as the head of the Pima “nation,” did not have authority that extended beyond the near environs of his home, the pueblo de visita of Sáric. A similar situation prevailed among the Ópata captains general, who found it difficult to exercise their authority effectively over all the people grouped under the name Ópata “nation,” a collection of pueblos located over a large area crisscrossed by mountains that made communication difficult. In reality, they exercised their authority in the frontier region bordering the Apaches, in pueblos like Bacerac, Bavispe, and Huachinera of which they were natives and in which they mainly resided. Nevertheless, the existence of the captain general’s office instituted an individual authority over entire “nations” that was recognized by the Spanish authorities, which favored its recreation by the Indians themselves. In this way, the authority of the captain general extended, even if only over military affairs, to all the pueblos identified as speakers of Ópata and its variants. These were the conditions under which Juan Manuel Varela

Inter-Ethnic War in Sonora   195 ordered the recruitment of seventy-five indigenous men of the pueblos, comprising all the Opatería, as presidio auxiliaries: Twenty soldiers from the pueblos of Bacerac, Guásabas, Bacadéhuachi, and their visitas [subject villages] for the presidio of San Bernardino; twenty soldiers from the pueblos of Saguaripa, Oposura, Mátape, and Batuco for the Presidio of Santa Cruz; twenty for the presidio of Tubac from the pueblos of Arizpe, Banámichi, and Aconchi; fifteen for the garrison of Pimería Alta, stationed at San Ignacio, from the pueblos of Opodepe and Cucurpe.63

In this process of transculturation, indigenous communities lost their particular names in favor of the generic label of Ópata. Key to this process was their adoption of the Spanish office of captain general and the recreation, in their lexicon and imagination, of the existence of an “Ópata Nation” to begin making claims and petitions to the authorities of the Spanish monarchy. No more captains general of the “Pima Nation” were appointed after the rebellion of Luis de Sáric in 1751, which prevented the emergence of a unified Pima political identity. In contrast, the captains general of the Ópatas and Yaquis continued succeeding one another uninterruptedly; among these groups there remained the possibility of coming together to form political units that stretched beyond individual pueblos, supra-local political units that the indigenous groups themselves called “nations.” This process reached its most critical stage with the independence of New Spain in 1821. The public debate generated by independence also influenced indigenous communities, who adapted the political language of the era in which the term “nation” was associated with liberty, self-government, and representation, to create an identity beyond the local through the office of the captain general.

The Captains General Between the “Previous Government” and the “New System” At the end of the eighteenth century, the northeastern frontier of New Spain experienced a moment of relative peace, since policies oriented to establishing compacts with the Apaches, keeping in optimal conditions the military structure of the presidios, and strengthening ties with auxiliary Indians, gave positive results.64 The weakening of indigenous rebels taking refuge in the Cerro Prieto in central Sonora also fortified the Spanish dominion over the region. Nevertheless, peace in the province began to deteriorate, along with peace in the rest of the Spanish empire, when news of the monarchical crisis of 1808 arrived. Restlessness further increased with the 1810 insurgency reaching

196   Borderlands of the Iberian World the south of the Intendancy of Arizpe that same year. Additionally, the Cortes installed in Cádiz around the same time promoted liberal ideologies of governance to the farthest corners of the “Spains.” Thus a new political terminology (constitution, national sovereignty, citizenship, equality, liberty, etc.) and new practices (election of municipal authorities and congresses, public debate, national militias, and the like) were introduced.65 These changes impacted the relations between the indigenous communities and the Spanish authorities, and the “colonial pact” began to deteriorate. The exigencies of military service ceased to make sense for indigenous communities such as the Ópatas, since their companies were no longer stationed in their towns of origin for defense against the Apaches; rather, like simple soldiers they began to be sent to faraway places to fight Spanish rebels. These conditions prompted expressions of dissatisfaction. The Ópata soldiers who arrived at the port of Guaymas in 1819, after spending nearly ten years combating insurgents in the south of Sinaloa, exhibited this malcontent when they disobeyed the order to travel on to California. Later they protested that presidio officials speculated with their rations and delayed payment of their wages, which created a crisis in their relations with the royalist authorities. The soldiers went on to ransack some communities and in order to contain them it was necessary to use the combined forces of the presidios of Sonora and Chihuahua, which defeated them in a bloody battle.66 In this rebellion the Ópata captain general, Juan Evangelista Barrios, maintained his loyalty to the authorities, and helped them suppress the insurrection. This in turn set off a dispute over his office among the Ópatas, which culminated in the 1824 uprising led by Juan Ignacio Dórame. Dórame issued a proclamation in the name of the “Ópata Nation,” claiming sovereign rights over the Ópatas and asking to be recognized as captain general in the place of the recently elevated Juan Evangelista Barrios, whom he accused of being a “traitor to God” and “to the Nation of his fatherland.”67 As occurred among the Ópatas, after 1825 some of the Yaqui pueblos mobilized against the orders of Commandant General José Figueroa, who ordered armed units for the national marines and to explore the Colorado River. The rebellion against Figueroa expanded to oppose the captain general Nicolás María Álvarez, who attempted to create the units through conscription. This attitude earned him pariah status among the nonconformist Yaquis, who elected Juan Buitimea in his place, without consulting the local military authorities appointed by the central government, as had been the practice during the colonial era.68 As a result of these rebellions and the repressive actions taken against them by the state government and the federal military commander, an uprising of Yaquis, Mayos, and Fuerteños of such magnitude was unleashed that the state capital had to be relocated to the south, and troops from other states were sent to combat the uprising. The Yaqui leader Juan Ignacio Jusacamea—also known as Banderas—came to prominence in this uprising. In the first stage of the rebellion, he circulated proclamations to indigenous communities calling them to fight the gachupines and recover the Crown of Moctezuma, all while proclaiming himself to be king.69 This radical phase of the movement ended in April of 1827, when Jusacamea was pardoned and named lieutenant general of the Yaqui Nation.70 The political effervescence continued, however.

Inter-Ethnic War in Sonora   197 These movements began a new era in the relations between indigenous groups and government authorities; their link would be with the recently formed national state of Mexico and with the states that arose out of the old provinces once the federal republic was established—in this region the ephemeral Estado Interno de Occidente (1824–1830) and, from the end of 1830, the state of Sonora. These new political entities were based on the liberalism enshrined in the Cádiz constitution of 1812, but adapted to conditions in Mexico. These liberal policies stipulated the equality of all Mexicans, which implied the end of institutions particular to Mexican indigenous groups—the pueblo de indios as a politico-territorial corporation—and the implementation of the ayuntamiento (municipal town government) as the only recognized local government. Indigenous military offices were at the heart of the debates surrounding these changes. Sectors of the political elite in the state of Occidente intended to eliminate indigenous armed bodies and achieve their submission by means of decrees, if possible, and if necessary by force. Thus, in 1828 the government approved two laws that severely affected indigenous communities: Law 88, which provided for the dissolution of the indigenous militias and the captains general; and Law 89, which established the distribution of communal lands in the pueblos as private property. This legislation provoked an indigenous mobilization among Ópatas, Yaquis, and Mayos, which a somewhat conciliatory sector of the elite sought to curb on behalf of the national government. The constituent congress of the state of Sonora articulated a pragmatic policy of conducting ad hoc negotiations with indigenous groups, as in Decree 16, of June 1, 1831, which established that on the Yaqui and Mayo Rivers there would be two companies of “civic militias,” one “captain general,” and one “lieutenant general” who would lead military companies and function as auxiliaries to the national authorities. The captain general and the lieutenant general would be elected “popularly” and the captain general would name the ensign, sergeants, corporals, and soldiers in these units. The decree above set the tone for the continuation of the office of captain general and of indigenous government among the Yaquis and Mayos. These decrees explicitly established elected offices for the first time, although in the case of the captain general—in contrast with the elected mayors—the duration of their terms of appointment was not stipulated.71 This policy did not alleviate the concerns of the Yaqui and Mayo pueblos, since the competition for offices, in particular for the office of captain general, aroused violent confrontations when the state-level authorities favored the election of individuals who were inclined to follow their instructions.72 The government offered the Ópatas room for negotiation, convening a gathering of 36 pueblos that comprised the Ópata “Nation” on June 21, 1832, bearing written instructions from their communities, to present their complaints, to say who supported the “new system” and who favored the “previous government,” and to elect a new captain general. In this gathering, the “Ópata Nation” appeared for the first time as a political entity, not merely as a linguistic identity.73 A product of this gathering was Law 36, which required that in each Ópata pueblo individuals should decide whether to ascribe to the authority of the indigenous governor (the “previous government”) or the justice of the peace (the “new system”), and also vote for their captain general from among

198   Borderlands of the Iberian World two candidates: Juan Güirizo, of the pueblo of Chinapa in the jurisdiction of the city of Arizpe—the state capital—and Blas Medrano, of the pueblo of Bacerac, son of the old captain general Francisco Medrano. After a split vote, the state government recognized Blas Medrano as the new captain general of the “Ópata Nation.”74 This policy of individual votes led to innumerable conflicts within the pueblos, impeding the consolidation of this incipient Ópata political identity.75 In later years the office of the indigenous captain general changed in function, because after independence local elites found a new purpose for the office: to provide military support in factional struggles.76 In the case of the Ópatas, after the renewal of the Apache incursions and the death of Blas Medrano in 1835, the captains general were not originally from the frontier pueblos, but from the center of the state, making evident their role as militias supporting the faction led by Manuel María Gándara.77 Through similar strategies the Yaqui and Mayo captains general were coopted by this faction.78 How this transformation of the objectives of the captains general influenced different indigenous groups is a topic that awaits further research. The office of the indigenous captain general was used by the Spanish monarchy to establish a military and political authority superior to that of the pueblos and rancherías; while this type of office could have pre-Hispanic precursors, by the end of the colonial era the captains general did not respond to the interests of indigenous groups, but rather to the interests of the colonizers. Through the captains general, Spanish colonial authorities sought to expand local indigenous identities to control the groups better and recruit militias more efficiently; nevertheless, indigenous actors understood that the office, with its scope for supra-local power, strengthened their capacity for negotiation with royal authorities, and made it theirs. Their appropriation of the office provoked a continuing tension between the interests of the officeholders, the indigenous residents of Sonora, and the Spanish authorities, as well as the creation of new identities. The most important phase of this process took place during the early years of Mexico’s national formation, since in the heat of the political debate and the defense of their communal lands, government, and traditional forms of providing military service, indigenous groups achieved greater ability to act as unified entities beyond their pueblos, as large units with extensive identities that in the era were regarded as “nations.” Indigenous communities took on the identity of nations in order to represent themselves and to make of demands upon the state and national governments. The office of captain general provided an institutional figure that was recognized in the leadership concentrated in an individual, which stood at the apex of the articulation of corporate identities as “nations” of the Ópatas, Yaquis, and Mayos, who sought to preserve the office in the face of the new liberal state’s intentions to abolish it. The figure of the indigenous captain general allows us to perceive indigenous groups as historical actors who continuously changed their identities through processes of ethnogenesis in order to adapt themselves to new circumstances, both as a result of internal developments within their communities and in response to policies put in place by the Spanish monarchy, the national government, or regional elites. From this perspective indigenous groups cease to appear as passive and excluded entities.

Inter-Ethnic War in Sonora   199

115°0'0"W

114°10'0"W

113°20'0"W

112°30'0"W

111°40'0"W

109°10'0"W

110°0'0"W

110°50'0"W

108°20'0"W

33°20'0"N

33°20'0"N

AP

32°30'0"N

32°30'0"N

AC S HE

Tubac

31°40'0"N

31°40’0"N

Santa Cruz

San Bernardino

30°50'0"N Caborca

PIMAS ALTOS

30°0'0"N

29°10'0"N

Cucurpe

Chinapa Banamichi

Opodepe Aconchi

Oputo Huasabas Bacadehuachi

OPATAS

PIMAS BAJOS

30°50'0"N

Bavispe Bacerac Huachinera

Arizpe

30°0'0"N

Nacori

Batuc

29°10'0"N Sahuaripa

Matape

28°20'0"N

28°20'0"N

YAQUIS

Guaymas 27°30'0"N

Capital

27°30'0"N

Rahum

MAYOS

Port

26°40'0"N

Presidios

26°40'0"N

0

Pueblos

115°0'0"W

114°10'0"W

113°20'0"W

112°30'0"W

111°40'0"W

37.5

110°50'0"W

75

150 km

110°0'0"W

109°10'0"W

108°20'0"W

Figure 7.1.  Selected indigenous groups and place names for Sonora, 1740–1832. Produced by Marcos Medina and David Contreras Tánori.

Appendix 7.1.  Ópata Captains General, 1684–1835 CAPTAIN GENERAL

ORIGIN

DATES

Francisco Javier Cuervo Jerónimo Noperi Andrés Varela Juan Manuel Varela Ignacio Noperi Francisco Antonio Medrano79 Juan Evangelista Barrios80 Juan Güirizo81 Blas Medrano82

Huásabas Bacerac Bacerac Bacerac Bacerac Bacerac

1684 Mid-1700s

Chinapa Bacerac

1777 1787–1790 1785, 1810–1816 1820, 1824, 1830 1832 1833–1835

200   Borderlands of the Iberian World

Appendix 7.2.  Yaqui Captains General, 1689–1842 CAPTAIN GENERAL Juan Andrés Cristóbal Gurrola Luis Xicanamea83 Juan Ignacio Usacamea, Muni Hipólito Baheca84 Phelipe de Jesús Álvarez85 Nicolás María Álvarez86 Juan Buitimea Juan Ignacio Jusacamea (Banderas)87 José María Madrid88 Juan María Jusacamea89

ORIGIN

Rahum Rahum

Rahum Huiribis Rahum Rahum

DATES 1689 1735–1740 1740 1740 1740–1743 Late 1700s 1805–1825 1825 1827 1827 1833–1842

Notes Archives AGES: AGI: AGN: AHSDN:

Archivo General del Estado de Sonora Hermosillo, Sonora (Mexico) Archivo General de Indias, Seville (Spain) Archivo General de la Nación, Mexico City (Mexico) Archivo Histórico de la Secretaría de la Defensa Nacional Ciudad de México, Mexico City (Mexico) BNM-FF: Biblioteca Nacional de México Fondo Franciscano, Mexico City (Mexico) BPEJ: Biblioteca Pública del Estado de Jalisco, Guadalajara (Mexico)  Casa de la Cultura Jurídica, Hermosillo, Sonora (Mexico) 1. Part of this chapter is the product of research financed by the Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología de México, titled “ ‘Los pueblos’ y la representación política en Sonora, 1821–1848,” reference 178308. We appreciate the critical comments and the suggestions received from the volume editors and the participants in the seminars where preliminary versions were presented. 2. See “aculturación” in Pierre Bonte and Michel Izard, Diccionario Akal de Etnología y Antropología (Madrid: Akal, 2008), 13–15. Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán, El proceso de aculturación (Mexico: CIESAS, 1982), 11–17 defines the concept of acculturation. Edward H. Spicer, “Spanish Indian Acculturation in the Southwest,” American Anthropologist 4, no. 56 (1956): 663–678, pioneered the discussion of acculturation in northwestern Mexico; Gary Clayton Anderson, The Indian Southwest 1580–1830: Ethnogenesis and Reinvention (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999), 4–6; Cynthia Radding, Wandering Peoples: Colonialism, Ethnic Spaces, and Ecological Frontiers in Northwestern Mexico, 1700–1850 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), 9, 249. 3. Danna A. Levin Rojo, Return to Aztlan: Indians, Spaniards, and the Invention of Nuevo México (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press 2014), 11, 203–204; Fernando Ortíz, Cuban Counterpoint: Tobaco and Sugar [1940], translated by H.  de Oníz, introduction by

Inter-Ethnic War in Sonora   201 B.  Malinowski with a new introduction by Fernando Coronil (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995). 4. Martha  A.  Bechis, Piezas de etnohistoria y de antropología histórica (Buenos Aires: Sociedad Argentina de Antropología, 2010), 21–22 examines this idea of ethnicity. 5. Henry  F.  Dobyns, “Military Transculturation of Northern Piman Indians, 1782–1821,” Ethnohistory 4, 19 (1972): 323–343. 6. Recent Argentine historiography about independent indigenous groups has studied this theme from the perspective of ethnohistory; for example, Ingrid de Jong, “Armado y desarmado de una confederación: el liderazgo de Calfucurá en el período de la organización nacional,” Quinto Sol 13 (2009): 11–45; Carina P. Lucaioli, Abipones en las fronteras del Chaco. Una etnografía histórica sobre el siglo XVIII (Buenos Aires: Sociedad Argentina de Antropología, 2011), 177–225; Memoria Americana: Cuadernos de Etnohistoria 13 (Buenos Aires: Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, Instituto de Ciencias Antropológicas–UBA, 2005). 7. Susan M. Deeds, Defiance and Deference in Mexico’s Colonial North: Indians under Spanish Rule in Nueva Vizcaya (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003), 19. 8. References to this office occur in other studies, generally associated with the Jesuit missions, but they are not a major focus here. For the Guaraní missions, see Alberto Armani, Ciudad de Dios y ciudad del sol: el “Estado” jesuita de los guaraníes (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1982); Guillermo Wilde, Religión y poder en las misiones guaraníes (Buenos Aires: Editorial Sb, 2009), 166–167. For the Tarahumaras in Nueva Vizcaya, Deeds, Defiance, 87, 102. 9. See Philip  W.  Powell, La guerra chichimeca (1550–1600) (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1977) on the wars of conquest conducted in the north and west of New Spain and the critique of this author in Juan Carlos Ruiz Guadalajara, “Capitán Miguel Caldera y la frontera chichimeca: entre el mestizo historiográfico y el soldado del rey,” Revista de Indias 248 (2010): 23–58; Alberto Carrillo Cázares, El debate sobre la guerra chichimeca, 1531–1585, 2 vols. (Zamora: El Colegio de Michoacán, El Colegio de San Luis, 2000); Chantal Cramaussel, Poblar la frontera. La provincia de Santa Bárbara en Nueva Vizcaya durante los siglos XVI y XVII (Zamora: El Colegio de Michoacán, 2006); Salvador Álvarez, El indio y la sociedad colonial norteña. Siglos XVI–XVIII (Zamora: IIH-UJED, El Colegio de Michoacán, 2009). 10. Powell, La guerra, 82–83, 167–170. 11. For a general picture of the Spanish advance through northwestern Mexico see Sergio Ortega Noriega and Ignacio del Río, ed., Tres siglos de historia sonorense (1530–1830) (Mexico: UNAM, 1993); Cynthia Radding, Entre el desierto y la sierra: las naciones o’odham y tegüima de Sonora, 1530–1840 (Mexico: CIESAS, 1995); Gilberto López Castillo, El poblamiento en tierra de indios cahitas (Mexico: El Colegio de Sinaloa, Siglo XXI, 2010). 12. Radding, Wandering, 12. 13. Cramaussel, Poblar, 223–224, considers the impact of the repartimiento in the depopulation of the missions greater than that of epidemics. 14. The indigenous residents of the missions provided support for defensive purposes, contrasting in its objectives and mechanisms with that offered by the Tlaxcaltecas and Otomís in northern Mesoamerica and northeastern New Spain. See Danna A. Levin Rojo, “ ‘Indian Friends and Allies’ in the Spanish Imperial Borderlands of North America,” and Sean F. McEnroe, “The Indian Garris­­­­­on Colonies of New Spain and Central America,” both in The Oxford Handbook of Borderlands of the Iberian World, ed. Danna A. Levin Rojo and Cynthia Radding (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019).

202   Borderlands of the Iberian World 15. Edward H. Spicer, Cycles of Conquest: The Impact of Spain, Mexico, and the United States on the Indians of the Southwest, 1533–1960 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1981), 106–107, 231; In Thomas Hobbes’s view, warfare signified struggle or battle and the time during which the desire to struggle is sufficiently recognized by the opposing sides. Marshall D. Sahlins, Las sociedades tribales (Barcelona: Editorial Labor, 1972), 16. 16. Recopilación de Leyes de los Reynos de las Indias, 1687 (Mexico: Miguel Angel Porrúa, 1987), Libro VI, título III, leyes XV and XVI, 200; Libro VI, título V, ley XX, 210–v. 17. Woodrow Borah, ed., El gobierno provincial en Nueva España. 1570–1787 (Mexico: UNAM, 2002), 76. 18. Indigenous government in the mission pueblos and its military branch was recently studied by Cynthia Radding in Paisajes de poder e identidad: fronteras imperiales en el desierto de Sonora y bosques de la Amazonia (Mexico: El Colegio de Sonora, CIESAS, UAM-Azcapotzalco, 2005), 259–266; José Refugio De la Torre Curiel, Twilight of the Mission Frontier: Shifting Interethnic Alliances and Social Organizations in Sonora, 1768–1855 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012), 127; José Marcos Medina Bustos, “La representación política de antiguo régimen y la transición al liberalismo en una zona de frontera. Sonora, 1650–1824” (PhD diss., El Colegio de Michoacán, 2008), 93–171. 19. Juan Nentuig, El rudo ensayo. Descripción geográfica, natural y curiosa de la provincia de Sonora, 1764 (Mexico: SEP, INAH, 1977), 103–104. 20. Nentuig, Rudo ensayo, 104–105. 21. Ignacio Almada Bay, José Marcos Medina Bustos, and María del Valle Borrero Silva, “Towards a New Interpretation of the Colonial Regime in Sonora, 1681–1821,” Journal of the Southwest 4, no. 50 (2008): 380–381; Luis Navarro García, Sonora y Sinaloa en el siglo XVII (Mexico: Siglo XXI, 1992), 233–234. 22. Navarro, Sonora y Sinaloa, 246. 23. Spicer, Cycles, 123. 24. Testimonio del general Rafael Pacheco Cevallos, alcalde mayor y teniente de capitán general de la provincia de Sonora, Hacienda de Samayoa, 13 May 1722, Archivo General de la Nación, Mexico City (hereafter AGN), Archivo Histórico de Hacienda, t. 278, exp. 9. Domingo Jironza commanded the force to combat indigenous rebels in New Mexico in two periods in which he served as governor: 1683–1686 and 1688–1692; in 1693 he was named captain for life of the flying company of Sonora and in October he occupied the position of alcalde mayor of Sonora. See Francisco  R.  Almada, Diccionario de historia, geografía y biografía sonorenses (Hermosillo: Gobierno del Estado de Sonora, 2009), 362–363 on Jironza and his connection to the Pueblo Indian rebellion of New Mexico; Martín González de la Vara, “La rebelión de los indios pueblos de Nuevo México, 1680–1693,” in Organización y liderazgo en los movimientos populares novohispanos, ed. and intro. Felipe Castro Gutiérrez et al. (Mexico: UNAM, 1992), 33. 25. Ana Luz Ramírez Zavala, “De todo se han aprovechado esos hombres políticos y revolucionarios. Los yaquis durante el proceso de formación del estado posrevolucionario: Negociación y cambio cultural, 1920–1940” (PhD diss., El Colegio de México, 2014), 25, 284. The context of the appointment is not explained. 26. Muni is a yaqui word that means bean. Edward H. Spicer, Los yaquis. Historia de una cultura (Mexico: UNAM, 1994), 41. 27. Título de capitán de la nación yaqui en Sinaloa, Juan Ignacio Escanea, 1740, AGN, México, General de parte, vol. 33, exp. 36. 28. See Luis Navarro García, La sublevación yaqui de 1740 (Seville: EEHA, 1996) on the circumstances of his appointment.

Inter-Ethnic War in Sonora   203 29. Almada, Diccionario, 465. 30. Hugo O’Connor, presidio de Carrizal, 20 December 1775, Archivo General de Indias, Seville, Spain, (hereafter AGI), Audiencia de Guadalajara, 515. 31. José Antonio Rengel a José de Gálvez, Chihuahua, 30 July 1785, AGI, Guadalajara, 515. 32. Antonio María de los Reyes, “Noticia y descripción de las misiones del obispado de Sonora formada en 1785 por su primer obispo Don Fray Antonio de los Reyes,” in Documentos para la historia de Sonora y Sinaloa, t. V (Culiacán: Biblioteca de la Academia Mexicana de la Historia, 1949), 26. 33. During the era of Spanish rule, the holders of these offices were not elected by the indigenous subjects, as suggested by Mariel Rocca-Arvoy, “Assimilation and Resistance of the Yaqui Indians During the Colonial Period” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 1981), 109. Rocca-Arvoy states that captains general were elected by the indigenous community for life but does not detail how this election took place. No further information is available prior to the two decrees issued by the Congress of the State of Sonora, number 16 of 1831 for the Yaquis and number 36 of 1832 for the Ópatas, establishing the process for electing captains general. 34. Nentuig, Rudo ensayo, 105; Consejo de Gobierno del Estado de Occidente, 1830, AGES, años 1830–1832, t. 65, exp. 2, folios 034797–034798. Appointment documents show that the duration period for the office was not established. 35. May 26, 1740, in Navarro, Sublevación, 78; This was announced June 13, 1740, and carried out June 23, 1741. Navarro, Sublevación, 152, 155. He was killed by a group of rebels in early 1743. 36. Evelyn Hu-DeHart, Adaptación y resistencia en el Yaquimi (Mexico: INI, 1995), 79. 37. Hugo O’Connor, presidio de Carrizal, December 20, 1775, AGI; Juan Bautista de Anza affirms that Juan Manuel Varela solicited the poltical government of Bacerac, Bavispe, and Huachinera, in “accordance with that which his grandfather obtained, the captain general Don Gerónimo Noperi.” Juan Bautista de Anza a Teodoro de Croix, San Miguel de Horcasitas, June 30, 1777, Biblioteca Nacional de México Fondo Franciscano, Mexico City, Mexico, (hereafter BNM-FF), exp. 34/734.1, folios 1–20; José Refugio de la Torre Curiel, “Patriotas en conflicto. Rebeliones, disputas por tierras y sospechas de infidencia entre los Ópatas de Sonora a principios del siglo XIX,” in Los grupos nativos del septentrión novohispano ante la independencia de México, 1810–1847, ed. Martha Ortega Soto, Danna Levin Rojo and María Estela Báez Villaseñor (Mexico: UAM-Iztapalpa, UABC, 2010), 208–209. 38. Radding, Wandering, 353; Radding, Desierto, 183. 39. Ignacio Samaniego, juez de paz al gobernador del Estado de Sonora, Bacerac, August 15, 1833, Archivo General del Estado de Sonora Hermosillo, Sonora, Mexico, (hereafter AGES), Fondo Ejecutivo, t. 55, exp. 2, folio 034804. 40. Julio César Montané Martí, transcrip, intro, and notes, Bacerac en 1777. Carta Edeficante de Fray Ángel Antonio Núñez Fundidor (Hermosillo: Contrapunto 14, 1999), 67. 41. Evidence of prominent family names repeated in the list of officeholders suggests kinship ties among the Yaqui captains general: Juan Ignacio Usacamea, captain general in 1740, and captains general from the period 1831–1842, Juan Ignacio Jusacamea (la Bandera) and Juan María Jusacamea. Spicer, Los yaquis, 161, asserts that the last names Usacamea and Jusacamea were the same, and that these captains general were brothers. Two captains general who served between the end of the eighteenth century (Felipe de Jesús) and 1825 (Nicolás María) shared the last name Álvarez. Evelyn Hu-DeHart, Yaqui Resistance and Survival: The Struggle for Land and Autonomy, 1821–1910 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984), 31 disagrees with Spicer’s assertion.

204   Borderlands of the Iberian World 42. Both captains accused the Jesuits of beating them and seizing their goods and other assets. Almada et al., “Towards a New Interpretation,” 382–384 discuss physical punishments carried out by Jesuit missionaries. 43. The “instructions” in Rafael A. Pérez-Taylor and Miguel Ángel Paz Frayre, Materiales para la historia de Sonora (Mexico: UNAM, Colegio de Jalisco, 2007), 415. 44. Ópata captain general Juan Manuel Varela was assigned an annual salary of four hundred pesos. An Ópata soldier earned six reales daily, which could total 135 pesos annually. See José Marcos Medina Bustos, “Ethnic Militias and Insurgency in the Arizpe Intendancy,” Journal of the Southwest 1, no. 56 (2014): 66. 45. Navarro, Sublevación, 27–28, 121, 148–149; Spicer, Los yaquis, 34–66. 46. José Luis Mirafuentes Galván, “El ‘enemigo de las casas de adobe.’ Luis de Sáric y la rebelión de los pimas altos en 1751,” in Organización y liderazgo en los movimientos populares novohispanos, ed. Felipe Castro Gutiérrez et al. (Mexico: UNAM, 1992), 147–175; Roberto Mario Salmón, “A Marginal Man: Luis of Saric and the Pima Revolt of 1751,” The Americas, 1, no. 45 (1988): 61–77. 47. Phelipe de Jesús Álvarez a Joseph María Arenas, Potam, 14 June 1784, AGES, Fondo Ejecutivo, ramo yaquis/mayos, t. 20, exp. 1, folio 011964. 48. Representación que hace el comisario de las misiones de Sonora y Ostimuri, fray Juan de Prestamero, al intendente general de las Provincias Internas para señalar las calumnias que ha hecho el teniente de justicia del pueblo de Nacameri contra el ministro misionero, Misión de Ures, 1777, BNM-FF, exp.e 34/735.1, reproduced in Radding, Desierto, 156. 49. Cynthia Radding, “The Común, Local Governance, and Defiance in Colonial Sonora,” in Choice, Persuasion, and Coercion on Spain’s North American Frontier, ed. Jesús F. de la Teja and Ross Frank (Albuquerque: UNM, 2005), 179. 50. Juan Carlos Garavaglia and Juan Marchena, América Latina de los orígenes a la ­independencia, vol. 1: América precolombina y la consolidación del espacio colonial (Barcelona: Crítica, 2005), 219–220; Sergio Serulnikov, Conflictos sociales e insurrección en el mundo colonial andino. El norte de Potosí en el siglo XVIII (Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2006), 11–18. 51. Andrés Pérez de Ribas, Historia de los triumphos de nuestra santa fee entre gentes de las más barbaras, y fieras del nuevo Orbe. Año 1645, facsimile edition (Mexico: Siglo XXI, 1992), 76, 101, 236, 237. 52. Nentuig, Rudo ensayo, 104–105. 53. Montané, Bacerac, 34. 54. Pérez de Ribas, Historia, 11–12. 55. Nentuig, Rudo ensayo, 104. 56. Spicer, Cycles, 9. 57. Pérez de Ribas, Historia, 5. 58. Sahlins, Sociedades, 24–32. 59. Pérez de Ribas, Historia, 253–255, 358–359. 60. Nentuig, Rudo ensayo, 65. 61. David  A.  Yetman, The Ópatas: In Search of a Sonoran People (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2010), 78. 62. Yetman, Ópatas, 72–75, persuasively demonstrates that the distinction of the “Ópata Nation” is an invention of the eighteenth century. 63. Representación que hace el comisario de las misiones de Sonora y Ostimuri, fray Juan de Prestamero, reproduced in Radding, Desierto, 156.

Inter-Ethnic War in Sonora   205 64. David J. Weber, Bárbaros, los españoles y sus salvajes en la era de la Ilustración (Madrid: Crítica, 2007), 286; Luis Navarro García, Don José de Gálvez y la Comandancia General de las Provincias Internas del Norte de Nueva España, prol. José Antonio Calderón Quijano. (Seville: GEHA-Alfonso XII, 1964), 457–460, 498–501. 65. François Xavier Guerra, Modernidad e independencias. Ensayos sobre las revoluciones hispánicas (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica, MAPFRE, 2000) provides an overview of the crisis of the Spanish monarchy. José Marcos Medina Bustos, “Crisis monárquica, guerra civil y revolución liberal en Sonora, 1808–1821,” in De los márgenes al centro. Sonora en la independencia y la revolución: cambios y continuidades, ed. Ignacio Almada Bay and José Marcos Medina Bustos (Hermosillo: El Colegio de Sonora, Colegio de Bachilleres del Estado de Sonora, 2011), 65–95 discusses the impact of the crisis in Sonora. 66. Almada, Diccionario, 166, 170; AGN, Provincias Internas, t. 251, foja 150. 67. José Marcos Medina Bustos, “Cambio político y las rebeliones de indígenas ópatas y yaquis (1819–1827),” in Violencia interétnica en la frontera norte novohispana y mexicana. Siglos XVII–XIX, ed., José Marcos Medina Bustos y Esther Padilla Calderón (Hermosillo: El Colegio de Sonora, el Colegio de Michoacán, UABC, 2015), 157–193; Archivo Histórico de la Secretaría de la Defensa Nacional Ciudad de México, Mexico, (hereafter AHSDN), vol. 270, foja 46. Document provided by Héctor Cuauhtémoc Hernández Silva. 68. Medina Bustos, “Cambio político;” Nicolás María Álvarez al comandante general José Figueroa, Rahum, 28 September 1825, AHSDN, Yaquis, number 1, expediente 272, image 100, accessed March 11, 2015, www.archivohistorico2010.sedena.gob.mx, with the entry “yaquis.” 69. Hu-DeHart, Yaqui Resistance, 20–37. 70. Diario de operaciones del mes de abril de 1827, José Figueroa, Álamos, 27 April 1827, in AHSDN, accessed March 11, 2015, http://www.archivohistorico2010.sedena.gob.mx, with the entry “yaquis”; Sublevación de los indios yaquis y mayos en el estado de Sonora. Años 1826–1827, image 320, folio 0021, época siglo XIX, clasificación XI/481.3/279, exp.279. 71. José Marcos Medina Bustos, “Gobierno indígena y liberalismo en Sonora: del enfrentamiento a la negociación (1814–1850),” in Los efectos del liberalismo en México. Siglo XIX, ed. Antonio Escobar Ohmstede et al. (Mexico: El Colegio de Sonora, CIESAS, 2015), 190–191. 72. Hu-DeHart, Yaqui Resistance, 39–51. Further research about Mayo captains general is necessary. The primary source research for this paper was insufficient to include them in the analytical content. 73. Francisco Moreno y Manzo, juez primero de paz de la Villa de Moctezuma, al gobernador del estado de Sonora, Moctezuma, 21 August 1832, AGES, Fondo Ejecutivo, t. 55, exp. 3, folio 034830. AGES, Fondo Ejecutivo, ramo indígenas ópatas, t. 55, exp. 2, folios 34795–34825 and exp. 3, folios 34825–34869 cover the proceedings of the meeting of the pueblos. 74. Votación para general de la nación ópata, in AGES, Fondo Ejecutivo, t. 55, exp. 2, folio 03811, 1830–1832. The appointment of Blas Medrano as captain general can be inferred from a document dated 28 May 1833, in which Medrano states that he was named general of the Ópata Nation by authority of Law 36 of 31 August 1832. AGES, legajo 17, t. 1162 (old nomenclature no longer used in the archive). 75. Medina Bustos, “Gobierno indígena,” 199–201. 76. Zulema Trejo Contreras, “Alianzas, pactos y conflictos entre notables e indígenas sonorenses,” in Conflicto y armonía. Etnias y poder civil, militar y religioso en Sonora, ed. Raquel Padilla Ramos (Hermosillo: CONACULTA, 2009) 47–59.

206   Borderlands of the Iberian World 77. In 1845 Luis Tánori appeared as captain general of the Ópatas and Pimas. AGES, Fondo Ejecutivo, t. 82, exp. 5, folios 050455 and 0504457. Justice of the peace of Tepupa to justice of the peace of Batuc. This captain general began a new series of kin-related captains general that lasted until 1866: Juan and Refugio Tánori. 78. Hu-DeHart, Yaqui Resistance, 56–74. In 1867, in a process of land-measuring, Mayo indigenous communities occupied a plot “with the full consent of our deceased Captain General, and today with the consent of his son Don Manuel Balenzuela who now occupies the Captaincy General of our pueblos by the superior order of the Government of the State.” Indígenas del Río Mayo, 1868, Casa de la Cultura Jurídica, Hermosillo, Sonora, Mexico, ramo civil, fondo Sonora, caja 4, exp. 16. Expediente sobre concesión de terrenos baldíos en número de 4 sitios de Ganado mayor en los puntos llamados Cochibampo y Techobampo, hecho por el Supremo Gobierno al C.  Carlos Cevallos y oposición a la misma por varios indígenas del Mayo. Information provided by Cynthia Radding. 79. In 1785, Medrano appears as the captain of the Ópata presidio company of Bavispe, to be paid a hundred extra pesos over the four hundred pesos that were granted to him for being “general of his nation.” However, there were no references to him as captain general. José Antonio Rengel a José de Gálvez, Chihuahua, July 30, 1785, AGI. He appears again in conflict with the insurgents, see Héctor R. Olea, “El heroico sacrificio insurgente,” in La independencia en Sinaloa, ed. Nicolás Vidales Soto (Culiacán: Centro de Estudios Históricos del Noroeste, 1992), 25–30. In 1816 he was accused of being an accomplice of the insurgents of Chapala, without much effect, documents in BPEJ, Archivo de la Real Audiencia de Guadalajara, Ramo Criminal, clasificación H2-3-12-79, Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico. 80. In 1820, Barrios did not support the Ópata rebellion. Correspondencia de Antonio Cordero, gobernador intendente de Sonora al virrey de Nueva España conde Del Venadito, Mocorito, 8 December 1820, AGN, Fondo Operaciones de Guerra, vol. 738, folios 252–254. In 1824 a rebellion called for his dismissal. Mariano Urrea al ministro del Estado y del Despacho de Guerra y Marina, Arizpe 23 August 1824, AHSDN, accessed March 1st, 2015, http://www.archivohistorico2010.sedena.gob.mx/, with the entry “ópatas.” Imágenes 322–325, fojas 00330–00332 vuelta. Época: siglo xix, clasificación xi/481.3/271, número de expediente, 271, síntesis: sublevación de las tribus apaches, ópatas, en Sonora y Sinaloa y los navajos en Nuevo Mexico, año de 1822–24. In 1830, Barrios reported movements among the pueblos. Informe de Juan Evangelista Barrios al comandante militar Manuel Ignacio Arvizu, Arizpe, 30 March 1830, AGES, Fondo Ejecutivo, t. 65, exp. 3, folio 040480. Consejo de gobierno al gobernador del Estado de Sonora, Arizpe, June 4, 1832, AGES, años 1830–1832, t. 65, exp. 2, folios 034797–034798 states that in October 1830 a decree negating the replacement of the fallen Ópata captain general was issued, probably referring to Evangelista Barrios. 81. He designated himself the captain general of the Ópata nation. Juan Güirizo al captain del pueblo de Tuape, Oputo, 7 November 1832, AGES, ramo tribu apache, t. 8 (old nomenclature, now disused). 82. He was killed by Apaches in 1835. Comunicación de José Laurilla, gobernador ópata al gobernador del Estado, Sahuaripa, April 19, 1835, AGES, t. 135/223, legajo 26 (old nomenclature no longer used in the archive). 83. Governor Manuel Huidobro appointed Xicanamea, from the faction of Juan Ignacio Usacamea, the opposing leader, instead of Gurrola. Navarro García, La sublevación, 78. 84. Named in the wake of Usacamea’s execution and assassinated by rebel partisans; Navarro García, La sublevación, 155.

Inter-Ethnic War in Sonora   207 85. Evelyn Hu-DeHart, Missionaries, Miners, and Indians: History of the Spanish Contact with the Yaqui Nation of Northwestern New Spain, 1533–1820 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1981), 101. 86. Álvarez signed some registers of the Yaqui pueblos, 1805. Padrón general de los habitantes indios de los ocho pueblos del río Yaqui, by Pedro Villaescusa and Nicolás María Álvarez, BNM-FF, exp. 37/823.1. In 1825 he was replaced in an unauthorized election, due to his advanced age. Juan Buitimea, captain of the Huiribis troop, was elected in his place. José María Melquiades Villaseñor a los curas y jueces seculares de la nación yaqui, Cócorit, 25 September 1825, AHSDN, Mexico, accessed March 11, 2015, http://www.archivohistorico2010.sedena.gob.mx, with the entry “yaquis.” Sublevación de los indios Yaquis y mayos en el estado de Sonora. Años 1825–1827, imagen 99, época siglo XIX, clasificación XI/481.3/272, número de expediente 272. 87. Leader of the Yaqui uprising of 1826, pardoned for this uprising on April 13, 1827, and appointed interim lieutenant general of the Yaquis by general José Figueroa due to “political reasons.” Figueroa feared that without granting Jusacamea an office his followers could continue the uprising. Diario de operaciones del mes de abril de 1827, José Figueroa, Álamos, 27 April 1827, AHSDN, accessed March 11, 2015, http://www.archivohistorico2010. sedena.gob.mx, with the entry “yaquis.” Sublevación de los indios yaquis y mayos en el estado de Sonora. Años 1826–1827, imagen 320, folio 0021, época siglo XIX, clasificación XI/481.3/279, exp. 279. Even without the title of captain general, Jusacamea exercised authority as such until 7 January 1833, when he was shot. Hu-DeHart, Yaqui Resistance, 36–47. 88. Madrid became captain general of the eight pueblos April 14, 1827. José Figueroa noted that he was “a subject of probity and integrity,” and that he “knew the language of the Yaquis.” He appeared frequently in Juan Ignacio Jusacamea’s correspondence from the era, but there is no further information about him. Diario de operaciones del mes de abril de 1827, José Figueroa, Álamos, 27 April 1827, AHSDN, accessed March 11, 2015, http://www. archivohistorico2010.sedena.gob.mx, with the entry “yaquis;” Sublevación de los indios yaquis y mayos en el estado de Sonora. Años 1826–1827, imagen 322, folio 00202, época siglo XIX, clasificación XI/481.3/279, exp. 279. 89. Opponent of Juan Ignacio Jusacamea, elected captain general after his execution in 1833, assassinated by rebellious Yaquis. Hu-DeHart, Yaqui Resistance, 49, 61.

Bibliography Almada Bay, Ignacio, José Marcos Medina Bustos, and María del Valle Borrero Silva. “Towards a New Interpretation of the Colonial Regime in Sonora, 1681–1821.” Journal of the Southwest 4, no. 50 (2008): 377–413. Almada, Francisco  R. Diccionario de historia, geografía y biografía sonorenses. Hermosillo: Gobierno del Estado de Sonora, 2009. Cramaussel, Chantal. Poblar la frontera. La provincia de Santa Bárbara en Nueva Vizcaya durante los siglos XVI y XVII. Zamora: El Colegio de Michoacán, 2006. Deeds, Susan  M. Defiance and Deference in Mexico City’s Colonial North: Indians under Spanish Rule in Nueva Vizcaya. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003. Hu-DeHart, Evelyn. Yaqui Resistance and Survival: The Struggle for Land and Autonomy, 1821–1910. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984.

208   Borderlands of the Iberian World Medina Bustos, José Marcos. “Cambio político y las rebeliones de indígenas ópatas y yaquis (1819–1827).” In Violencia interétnica en la frontera norte novohispana y mexicana. Siglos XVII–XIX, edited by José Marcos Medina Bustos and Esther Padilla Calderón, 157–193. Hermosillo: El Colegio de Sonora, el Colegio de Michoacán, UABC, 2015. Medina Bustos, José Marcos. “Gobierno indígena y liberalismo en Sonora: del enfrentamiento a la negociación (1814–1850).” In Los efectos del liberalismo en México. Siglo XIX, edited by Antonio Escobar Ohmstede, José Marcos Medina Bustos, and Zulema Trejo Contreras, 177–206. Mexico: El Colegio de Sonora, CIESAS, 2015. Nentuig, Juan. El rudo ensayo. Descripción geográfica, natural y curiosa de la provincia de Sonora, 1764. Mexico: SEP, INAH, 1977. Pérez de Ribas, Andrés. Historia de los triumphos de nuestra santa fee entre gentes las más bárbaras, y fieras del nuevo Orbe. Año 1645. Mexico: Siglo XXI, 1992. (Facsimile edition). Powell, Philip W. La guerra chichimeca (1550–1600). Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1977. Radding, Cynthia. Wandering Peoples: Colonialism, Ethnic Spaces, and Ecological Frontiers in Nrothwestern Mexico, 1700–1850. Durham: Duke University Press, 1997. Radding, Cynthia. Entre el desierto y la sierra: las naciones o’odham y tegüima de sonora, 1530–1840. Mexico City: CIESAS and INI, 1995. Sahlins, Marshall D. Las sociedades tribales. Barcelona: Editorial Labor, 1972. Spicer, Edward H. Cycles of Conquest: The Impact of Spain, Mexico, and the United States on the Indians of the Southwest, 1533–1960. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1981. Spicer, Edward H. Los yaquis. Historia de una cultura. Mexico: UNAM, 1994. Yetman, David A. The Ópatas: In Search of a Sonoran People. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2010.

chapter 8

Nati v e I n for m a n ts a n d the Li mits of Portugu ese Domi n ion i n L ate- Col on i a l Br a zil Hal Langfur

When the Portuguese Crown signed the Treaty of Madrid in 1750, it established South American boundaries with the Spanish Empire that largely match Brazil’s present international borders. Territorial disputes lay ahead over subsequent expansionist ambitions— for instance, in the Río de la Plata region and French Guiana—but these conflicts can divert attention from the fact that the struggle over sovereign dominion in Portuguese America had largely become an internal affair. The inter-imperial border delimited a colony with numerous areas still beyond Lisbon’s effective reach. Well-consolidated settled enclaves, where state authority and a market economy subject to effective taxation prevailed, accounted for a comparatively small portion of Brazil’s vast, unevenly colonized domain. Much of its sparsely populated space remained fragmented and incompletely incorporated, the province of not only independent Indians but also runaway slaves, criminals, ranchers, and straying subsistence farmers of mixed indigenous, African, and European descent. In a concerted policy shift, still poorly understood, the Crown redoubled its efforts in the late eighteenth century to control these many outlying areas. In addition to the southeastern region, other zones targeted for incorporation included but were not limited to inland São Paulo, eastern Minas Gerais, southern Bahia, Goiás, and portions of the Amazon Basin.1 To measure the significance of Brazil’s colonial borderlands and frontiers, in short, it is necessary to abandon the notion of a proto-national perimeter within which royal authority held sway and place greater emphasis on these interior precincts. The spaces separating settlements—the colony’s internal frontiers— did far more than is generally acknowledged to define Portuguese America.

210   Borderlands of the Iberian World Similar circumstances prevailed across the Americas. Throughout the colonial era autonomous and semiautonomous native peoples controlled enormous swathes of territory claimed by Spain’s Bourbon monarchs. Historians of Spanish America have begun to synthesize and systematize this historical reality, integrating regional studies into more comprehensive works. Noting that “in the late 1700s independent Indians still held effective dominion over at least half of the actual land mass of what is today Latin America,” David Weber, for instance, distinguished between strategic and internal frontiers. Located between imperial rivals, strategic frontiers endowed some natives with “greater leverage” because they could “play one power off against the other.” Internal frontiers, as the term implies, lay within consolidated imperial domain, either pitting unincorporated Indians against a single intruding European power or, in certain cases, fostering collaboration between them. What Weber wrote about Spanish America—that these many frontiers “had more in common with one another than with the colonial core regions with which one usually associates them”—applies equally to Portuguese America.2 Yet, in Brazil, intensive scholarly interest in native peoples as ­subjects of historical rather than anthropological research is a comparatively recent phenomenon, which helps explain why comprehensive studies have proven more ­elusive.3 Examining a thwarted effort to colonize a specific zone contributes to the historical study of native peoples in Brazil. From a geopolitical standpoint, arguably the most important of Portuguese America’s internal frontiers after 1750 lay just inland from the colonial capital Rio de Janeiro. Densely forested and mountainous, this territory divided or joined, depending on one’s perspective, Brazil’s two most dynamic southeastern captaincies. The captaincy of Rio de Janeiro, bearing the same name as Brazil’s fastest-growing city and foremost commercial entrepôt, became home to the vice-regal court after 1763. Immediately to the north, the captaincy of Minas Gerais, Brazil’s famed mining district, from which mineral wealth poured into the Atlantic world, matured into the colony’s most populous region during this period. Between these captaincies, a rugged coastal escarpment long served royal purposes by creating an environment perilous for colonists unaccustomed to its tropical flora and fauna and uneasy with its itinerant native occupants. Officials long considered this mountain wilderness an impediment to unsupervised travel into and out of the mining district. By the 1780s, however, as concerns about smuggling intensified, the Crown came to view its own lack of dominion over the zone as no longer tolerable. This chapter explores interactions between agents of Portugal’s imperial state and indigenous forest dwellers, including the Coroado, Coropó, and Puri, who continued to occupy this region despite two centuries of destabilizing contact with settlers that marked the history of this internal frontier. Gauging the importance of information— some of it reliable, some not—gathered from these Indians by officials who in 1786 staged a sizeable military operation into the area is key to understanding the nature of these colonial relations. Authorities thereby planned to stanch the flow of contraband gold and diamonds passing from the inland mining zone through the coastal mountains to seafaring smugglers. They envisioned a rapid operation designed to capture an

Native Informants in Colonial Brazil   211 infamous villain, Manoel Henriques, known as Mão de Luva (the gloved hand). In romanticized accounts, Mão de Luva assumed the attributes of a Portuguese Robin Hood. Scholars have rendered the operation to apprehend him primarily as a colorful episode in the regional history of Minas Gerais, culminating in the smuggler’s arrest by soldiers in a surprise raid coordinated from the north by the mining district’s governor.4 From the south, a much more significant yet largely overlooked deployment took place under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Manoel Soares Coimbra. No less a figure than Martinho Melo e Castro, imperial reformer, colonial secretary, and Portugal’s prime minister, planned the mission’s major elements from Lisbon, while Viceroy Luís de Vasconcelos e Sousa directed the operation from the colonial capital.5 An army officer with long experience, Coimbra led his soldiers up into the forbidding highlands that rise more than two thousand meters to the north of Rio de Janeiro. The viceroy placed more than four hundred troops at his disposal, including salaried soldiers, impressed auxiliaries, and enslaved porters. Attempting to synchronize its movements with the troops dispatched from Minas Gerais, the force was charged with shutting down the illicit mining and contraband operation, establishing the monarch’s sovereign authority. The Crown exercised virtually no control over the area, despite its proximity to the capital and its strategic location. According to the prime minister, such unincorporated territory, hemorrhaging mineral riches diverted from the royal treasury, placed the very strength of the empire at risk.6 This episode suggests that the indigenous occupants of such zones wielded what remains an underappreciated influence in shaping Portugal’s overseas capabilities and constraints. Of particular salience was their mastery of local knowledge (Figure 8.1), including intelligence concerning clandestine mining operations, forest routes, and smuggling activity. Native expertise in these matters, as well as official perceptions of indigenous proficiencies, could advance or hinder vital imperial projects. In this way, Brazil’s colonial frontiers and borderlands became a testing ground for state capacities, exposing weaknesses that in more central areas remained veiled. During the second half of the eighteenth century, the Crown strove mightily to assert dominion over the colony’s internal territorial fringes, assuming a more active presence in the interior than historians have generally recognized. But in the process royal authority was also made exceedingly malleable. It depended on the cooperation of native peoples and others precariously in possession of the lands into which state emissaries ventured. Forced to rely on elusive indigenous informants, Lieutenant Colonel Coimbra ultimately found himself commanding an isolated outpost with little to show for his efforts, suspected of misdeeds, disillusioned, and critical of his superiors. He took this fiasco personally. But as close scrutiny of his mission demonstrates, something larger was at work when officials charged with territorial expansion found themselves drawn into negotiations with backlands inhabitants. The expedition’s inglorious outcome became a measure not only of imperial overreach but of native proclivities to engage, redirect, and sometimes tame Portuguese territorial ambitions.

212   Borderlands of the Iberian World

Figure 8.1.  Renowned for their hunting skills and back-country knowledge, native peoples inhabiting the rugged region north of Rio de Janeiro faced intense pressure from the Portuguese transatlantic state during the second half of the eighteenth century. A long history of contact with coastal settlers meant these Indians did not easily fit standard categories. The original caption for this lithograph by the French artist Jean-Batiste Debret labeled them ­disparagingly as “caboclos [or] civilized Indians.” Public domain access courtesy of Biblioteca Brasiliana Guita e José Mindlin, São Paulo: http://www.brasiliana.usp.br/ bitstream/handle/1918/624510019/006245-1_IMAGEM_019.jpg.

Indians of an Uncertain Nature Coimbra did not go looking for Indians; they found him. Long-held myths about the inveterate enmity of native peoples just beyond the edge of coastal settlement were quickly dispelled, but so were any hopes for their easy subordination. The indigenous peoples living along the border between the captaincies of Minas Gerais and Rio de Janeiro did not fit easily into standard colonial categories or expectations. They were neither fully mobile nor permanently settled in one place. They were both adepts of the forest and experienced in dealings with colonists. They maintained many of their ancient practices but stocked their encampments with imported manufactured goods. Some spoke Portuguese; some did not. Some had been baptized; most had not.

Native Informants in Colonial Brazil   213 Rather than moving along the path of progressive accommodation with settler society, some seem to have been following a reverse trajectory that led back into the forest after a ­period of intensive contact with missionaries in the past. The native peoples of the highlands appeared before Coimbra and his soldiers without warning and disappeared without explanation. They did not respect the captaincy boundaries, jurisdictional lines, and Crown sovereignty that the lieutenant colonel was supposed to enforce. They could be both valuable informants about smuggling and a liability for anyone who sought to enter into their confidence. As he prepared for his expedition, Coimbra was forced to consider rumors about possible Indian attacks. By the time the operation concluded, he would be accused of conspiring with the same Indians in his own contraband scheme. The ambiguities of his experience tell us much about the distinctive challenges authorities faced when they sought to control territory occupied by native groups who asserted their independence despite longstanding interactions with colonial society. In the realm of Crown indigenous policy, the so-called Law of Liberty and Directory legislation of the 1750s, which originally targeted Amazonian Indians already settled in Jesuit missions, had a distinct meaning along the internal frontier between southeastern Minas Gerais and Rio de Janeiro. The paternalist aspirations of Crown policy impelled Coimbra to be cautious and conciliatory. His direct interactions revealed the region’s Indians to be amenable to certain exchanges. They were competent subsistence farmers and eager recipients of gifts. They uncomfortably fit the description of Indians “living in the darkness of ignorance,” far removed from colonial influence, which served as a justification written into royal legislation for ongoing aggression elsewhere.7 Such circumstances help clarify why scholars have only begun to make sense of these sorts of encounters. Until quite recently, historians and anthropologists devalued the study of native groups whose experience of colonialism left them neither fully autonomous nor fully integrated into settler enclaves. In Brazil, as elsewhere, scholars have slowly acknowledged that an earlier search for a pristine native viewpoint, unadulterated by contact with intruders, had little to do with the indeterminacy of many frontier encounters. The term “colonial Indians,” rather than an oxymoron, perhaps best describes the condition of peoples of indigenous descent who traversed histories of the sort that characterized this borderland.8 Their presence and resilience is increasingly recognized as a constant over the course of the colonial period. They resided in or interacted with missionary villages established along the coast and deep in the interior. They joined militias formed to combat French, Dutch, and indigenous adversaries. They became refugees gathered within, as well as soldiers deployed against, runaway slave communities. They entered the towns and villages of the inland mining zones, forming minority populations.9 Their knowledge of the forests, mountains, savannahs, and waterways has long been understood to have aided early exploration efforts and inland slaving missions known as bandeiras.10 Only recently, however, have historians begun to appreciate the ongoing importance of such expertise during the final century of Portuguese rule.11 The mountainous captaincy border region into which Coimbra’s expedition marched provided inconstant refuge for two native groups that exemplified backlands proficiencies.

214   Borderlands of the Iberian World The Coropó and Coroado demonstrated they could sometimes subvert, sometimes ­buttress, and sometimes even inspire imperial designs. We can assume they did so not as gullible dupes, shortsighted collaborators, or duplicitous conspirators but primarily as pragmatists, seeking to ensure their individual and communal well-being according to their own logic and contingencies. In many cases, their objectives remain ambiguous because their actions and purported intentions reach us through the filter of official sources. What is certain is that the area they occupied, although at the outer edge of the jurisdictional capacities of the two captaincy administrations, had not escaped the effects of colonial expansion. Given the zone’s proximity to the coast, one can surmise that waves of smallpox, measles, and other contagions spread their ravages as early as the sixteenth century, when epidemic disease first struck the littoral.12 From the seventeenth century and likely earlier, pressures from settlers gradually ascending the region’s river valleys reverberated inland. According to some accounts, displaced Goitacá Indians had conquered the upland Coropó and Coroado. According to others, these groups themselves were fragments or “mixtures” of Goitacá bands. Farther inland, during the late 1750s, as the search for gold-bearing and agricultural lands in southeastern Minas intensified, these Indians fought annihilation in what one of the era’s most respected observers described as a “barbarous and bloody war.”13 Through subsequent decades, they responded to settler incursions with a combination of resistance, strategic engagement, and flight. To the north, the Coropó and Coroado also faced competition from the semi-nomadic Puri and Botocudo Indians, reputed cannibals. Puri domain stretched northward from the Paraíba do Sul River. By the turn of the nineteenth century, if not sooner, many Puri also inhabited lands south of the river. Botocudo territory overlapped some Puri lands and extended much farther north to the captaincy of Bahia. All of these peoples were speakers of associated languages of the Macro-Gê linguistic stock. According to a naturalist who spent time among them in the 1810s, the Coropó, Coroado, and Puri communicated readily. They shared cultural traits but contended with the pressures of dwindling territory and resources that exacerbated interethnic conflict.14 Some Coropó and Coroado responded by seeking protection from authorities in both captaincies. In the late 1760s, not long after the first reports of Mão de Luva’s contraband operation began to provoke official anxieties, the governor of Minas Gerais intensified efforts to incorporate the region’s native bands. He placed a militia captain and a mulatto priest in charge of the effort. They managed to establish several aldeias (villages) where Indians settled, supplied with goods purchased by the royal treasury. The priest remained active in Christianizing the dispersed Coroado and Coropó for more than forty years. He appealed to authorities repeatedly over this period to impede settlers encroaching on lands he considered part of the native villages, even as his activities helped open the territory to such settlement.15 Coroado hostilities in the captaincy of Rio de Janeiro appear to have increased toward the end of the eighteenth century, suggesting that some bands were pushed out of Minas Gerais entirely, prompting clashes with settlers pushing up into the mountains from the coast.16 Coimbra’s 1786 expedition began amid reports that the Indians he was likely to encounter could be hostile even as they possessed special knowledge of the area’s

Native Informants in Colonial Brazil   215 mineral wealth. The belief that Amerindians controlled and concealed undiscovered treasures emerged with the discovery of the New World as a defining European conceit. The history of Brazil’s mining boom nurtured this instinct when, after more than a century of raiding the interior for indigenous laborers, Paulista bandeirantes struck gold and later diamonds in native domain. As the boom subsided, the impulse to locate new mineral deposits reinvigorated the association between terra incognita and what colonists mysteriously referred to as haveres incognitos, buried wealth presumed to be concealed by Indians.17 For men like Coimbra, the prime minister, and the viceroy, it thus came as no surprise that Mão de Luva located his smuggling operation in an indigenous refuge zone. Any accurate information about the place would require gathering intelligence from these natives. Tales passed down by prospectors and some gold specimens presented by an Indian familiar with the region animated the first intensive exploration of the area, according to the prime minister. Explorers gained access to the zone by following native trails. The source of the gold was thought to lie just south of the Paraíba do Sul River at a spot where “barbarous” Indians of the “Ozoró nation” resided. Unknown to modern scholarship, this ethnonym may indicate that these peoples disappeared or melded with others. Twenty years earlier the governor of Minas Gerais had estimated that some 150 separate “nations” inhabited the southeastern reaches of his captaincy.18 The figure was probably exaggerated but it pointed to the multiple small bands characterizing the social organization of these peoples. It also hints at the limits of official knowledge, as well as our own, about native ethnic commonalities and divisions. It seems likely that the name was a bastardization of Coroado, Coropó, or Croato, the latter a common eighteenth-century designation for the Coroado. Based on these clues, a prospector from Cachoeiras de Macacu, a hamlet at the foot of the mountains, below the falls on the Macacu River, requested official permission to reconnoiter the area in 1763. He had spoken with various “indomitable Indians” belonging to the “barbarous nations” that inhabited the highlands, individuals who periodically made visits to the coastal plain. Particularly helpful had been an Indian “captain” who used the Christian name Joaquim. The informant “knew of places where there was much gold” and twice turned over samples.19 Before the year was out, his petition granted, the prospector had explored the area and returned well compensated. After paying the Crown’s quinto, a 20 percent tax, he walked away with almost twelve ounces of gold.20 This sum was more than enough to buy a healthy male slave.21 The gold came from somewhere near the border between the two captaincies, an area “still possessed by heathens,” which the Indians called Castelo (the castle), presumably in reference to the towering rock formations in the area.22 Authorities tried but failed to stop what they first allowed. The decision to permit the initial reconnaissance and prospecting came from a lesser official. Two years later the Crown reversed course, belatedly apprehending how easily gold could be moved out of the mountains without detection or taxation. It ordered vacated all lands already claimed by miners and the razing of their properties. Not even representatives of the state were to enter the region. Not even the memory of the discovery was to be preserved

216   Borderlands of the Iberian World in official documents. But colonists did not easily forget. The decision to turn the area into a no man’s land quickly backfired. Prospectors, now in far greater numbers, many of them armed and crossing the border from Minas Gerais, took advantage of the absence of state authority to return. They chose an Indian village as the place most suitable for their mining camp, where they “extracted extremely copious riches.”23 The Indians withdrew “out of fear.”24 They continued, however, to shape the state’s response over the next two decades as rumors of contraband activity circulated unabated. Officials depended on Indians for intelligence gathering but also suspected them of participating in the illegal extraction, transit, and exchange of gold. Authorities conjectured that “barbarous Indians” were trading gold with settlers in Cachoeiras de Macacu. Adding to these concerns were repeated cases of soldiers deserting their posts, presumably to try their luck as prospectors. Troubled by these reports, the viceroy dispatched the field officer Miguel Antunes Ferreira to lead a small party into the mountains to inspect the area. Climbing above the falls, Ferreira met two Indian men and two women nursing their infants. He convinced the men to guide him into the mountains. Following a “heathen trail,” the only route through an area surrounded by “impenetrable ranges” and “dangerous waterfalls,” the party advanced for two weeks until they approached the Rio Grande, a southern tributary of the Paraíba do Sul. Beyond the river, Ferreira related, repeating what the Indians told him, lay mountains laden with “the greatest of riches,” never explored or exploited because of the presence of “the most numerous and most barbarous and warlike nations that abound in that sertão [backlands or wilderness].”25 During the final days of his expedition, Ferreira collected still more tantalizing intelligence. Vulnerable to attack by the Puri, finding no sign of smugglers, contending with sick soldiers in his party, and lacking specific orders to proceed, he never crossed the Rio Grande. But he did explore downriver some distance, encountering a “copious number of barbarous heathens of the Orosó nation,” including five headmen. They appeared “proud and formidable,” but Ferreira judged them “flexible and tamable.” He convinced the headmen and many of their followers to return with him to Rio de Janeiro to meet with the viceroy. Their description of the region fed Portuguese fantasies, as Ferreira would be called on to repeat what he had learned to three successive viceroys.26 From the beginning of his term in office in 1778, Viceroy Vasconcelos made a determined effort to collect such intelligence, ordering his mining superintendent to conduct a wide-ranging investigation by questioning officials and informants in outlying districts. The results only deepened concerns about the extent of the ongoing illegal gold smuggling, as well as suspicions that Indians were participating as intermediaries. The viceroy received Ferreira’s narrative in writing in 1779. In the same year, local officials informed him that prospectors were still heading into the mountains, first to make contact with the Indians, and then to reach the illegal mining area. An attempt to impede smuggling by placing a guard post well above the last colonial settlement on the lower Paraíba do Sul River was foiled when what one sergeant-major described as a war party of “wild heathen,” sounding a horn and armed with bows and arrows, descended the river in seven canoes, chasing away the soldiers. The officer despaired of the possibility of combating such foes, given their habit of withdrawing into the forest when attacked.27

Native Informants in Colonial Brazil   217 The officer also extracted a confession from an Indian caught leading prospectors into the highlands. The man said his village was the gateway for a route that connected it, by trail and canoe, to a series of more distant native aldeias. Other trails tied it to the captaincy’s coastal Indian settlements, former Jesuit missions. He admitted to guiding four prospectors—three woodcutters and a sailor—to the illegal mining area. Serving as a paid translator, he helped the prospectors pass unharmed through the native villages upriver. The Indian recalled approaching the clandestine mines along the captaincy border as night fell. The party was met by “a tall man [. . .] with a gloved hand,” Mão de Luva himself, wielding a pistol and machete. The Indian guide estimated that about twenty men, whites and blacks, many of them armed, were working at the mining camp.28 A final critical source rounded out the decades-long accumulation of backlands knowledge that prompted and oriented Lieutenant Colonel Coimbra’s military mobilization. Secret testimony, this information was coerced from a sertanista (backwoodsman) named José Gomes, held prisoner in Rio de Janeiro’s Carmelite convent before he was transferred to Lisbon for further interrogation. Denounced to clergymen employed in the service of the Holy Office of the Inquisition, Gomes was accused of an unspecified crime. While the sources do not identify him as an Indian, much circumstantial evidence suggests he was. His activities were consistent with an individual later identified by Coimbra as a native woodcutter from a coastal aldeia who traveled to the border region with other prospectors. Gomes’s knowledge of trails, his ability to pass through Indian villages, and his familiarity with the illegal mining camp, among other corroborating details, support the conclusion that he was a backcountry guide, the same José Gomes who would be implicated later in depositions gathered by Coimbra. Whether or not an Indian himself, Gomes drew much of his own knowledge of the region from interactions with native inhabitants. His testimony was considered so sensitive that the mining superintendent copied it himself, rather than use a scribe, when reporting to Lisbon.29 Gomes provided by far the most detailed descriptions of trails leading to the illegal mining operation from the coast. He displayed an unparalleled knowledge of wilderness topography. An environment culturally constructed and historically produced as sinister and inhospitable by the Portuguese could be mastered, his accounts made clear, by those with native proficiencies. He seemed to know every bend in the trail, every rise and descent, every native encampment, protected sleeping place, false summit, pass, bog, and river crossing. He knew names for the most obscure geographic features, drawn from both colonial and indigenous sources: “burned hill,” “Santa Teresa Creek,” “Jequitibá Ranch.” He could identify rocks, skulls, trunks carved with crosses, and other signs placed by Indians and smugglers to orient themselves as they traveled.30 Gomes’s familiarity with the region’s mineral wealth and unsupervised mining activity was no less impressive. He reported the amounts of gold dust and grains, the size of “small shotgun lead,” drawn from an average day’s work panning in various streams. He described the quantity, color, and shape of gemstones found in the area. “In one afternoon,” Gomes recounted, according to the priest who questioned him, miners “removed a libra [pound] of precious stones.” A “pardo” (colored) prospector who had “spent twenty years roaming this sertão” once “took out a diamond weighing thirty three

218   Borderlands of the Iberian World oitavas” (117 g or 585 carats uncut).31 The accused identified the precise locations of ­various mineral washings, among them those of Mão de Luva. Although only eleven prospectors were working at the site the last time Gomes visited, many more had abandoned it when rumors spread about an approaching official crackdown. He admitted to having worked directly with Mão de Luva for a full year, coming and going from the mineral washings numerous times.32 Acquired from and intensifying suspicions about the area’s Indians, interwoven with and inseparable from stories about untapped gold, silver, diamonds, and other gems, these accounts were among the key documents that crossed the Atlantic as the Crown decided to deploy Coimbra’s expedition. Bolstered with details gathered by military patrols and from other sources, the intelligence convinced officials in Rio de Janeiro that their attempt to establish a lowland “blockade” around the vast mountainous region accessed by trails from various directions had come to naught.33 In Lisbon, Prime Minister Melo e Castro agreed. In his orders to the viceroy to ready Coimbra’s expedition, he made repeated reference to the information acquired from Indians. He quoted extensively from Gomes’s testimony, acknowledging that the region had been thoroughly “penetrated and invaded from various directions.” Gomes’s assertion that the contrabandists maintained their home base in Minas Gerais bore “every appearance of truth,” the prime minister concluded. It was this information that convinced him, against the viceroy’s advice, to allow soldiers from Minas Gerais to take the lead in the phase of the operation that called for a surprise attack on Mão de Luva’s band of criminals, consigning the Rio de Janeiro forces to a supporting role until they were called on to secure the site.34 The significance of native backcountry knowledge becomes even more evident when we remember that the whole operation was premised not merely on capturing Mão de Luva but on establishing effective state hegemony throughout the region. The reports from and about Indians detailed the area’s wealth and how to locate it in the inhospitable terrain of the coastal mountains. The assessment of the potential windfall was also inflated by those who confided in Indians or coerced their testimony, and by officials who took this intelligence to heart. Had the ranking authorities in both the colony and the metropolis been less credulous, less subject to the colonial conviction that Indians and undiscovered riches went hand in hand, Coimbra’s orders would likely have been much more limited and practicable. The costly expedition he led might never have been deployed. Its origins and outcome rested on dreams founded on rumors. Both could be traced to Indians whose purposes officials took for granted but could rarely comprehend.

Disenchantment Coimbra’s encounters with the natives failed to deliver on expectations roused by the extravagant claims attributed to them. Whatever it was that Indians had actually said or seen, he became the reluctant recipient of orders from officials in Lisbon and Rio de

Native Informants in Colonial Brazil   219 Janeiro who were convinced that the Osoró (if such a group existed) or the Coroado or Coropó (if not) would lead him to rich new mineral deposits in the vicinity of Mão de Luva’s gold washings. He also became the target of others who preferred to emphasize the unreliable and even subversive nature of the colony’s indigenous inhabitants. He remained for some time too circumspect to put into writing his opinion of the intelligence gathered from Indians by others over the years. Well before he reached his objective, however, he became convinced that the region mined by the accused smugglers would not live up such promises. To the degree that superiors who held power over his future preferred to embrace inflated dreams, this put him in an exceedingly difficult position. Like others before him, Coimbra sought any information he could from native informants. About two months into his mission, the commander conducted a detailed inquiry of a number of individuals known to have collaborated with Indians. He interrogated a colonist from Cachoeira de Macacu, Joaquim da Silva, who claimed that the Indian guide José Gomes “had induced him” and six of his companions a year earlier to travel together to the border region. This was the individual whose activities seem to match those of the José Gomes arrested by the Inquisition. Gomes revealed to them a network of trails linking the clandestine mineral washings to the coast, skirting patrols and checkpoints along the Caminho Novo, one of only two officially sanctioned routes through the coastal mountains (the second, the Caminho Velho, lay far to the west). The party never located the riches promised to them. Eventually, Silva related, they became convinced of the Indian’s “deceit.” The others abandoned the quest and returned to Cachoeiras de Macacu. Silva continued alone.35 He came upon no fewer than six separate mining sites, five of them operational. Mão de Luva and his kin ran the two largest alluvial mines and were developing a third. The sites employed some thirty laborers, most of them armed, including whites, free men of color, and some dozen slaves.36 Silva said he worked in the gold fields for only a month while recovering from a gunshot wound suffered in a dispute. At the time, Mão de Luva was away in Minas Gerais, said to have been summoned to Vila Rica by the governor. Raising the possibility of official collusion, he said soldiers from Minas Gerais periodically visited the illegal operation to transport gold to ranking military officers in Vila Rica. The contrabandists negotiated with soldiers posted along the Caminho Novo for provisions and transport. The prospector also reported communications between members of Mão de Luva’s clan and the Indian villages along the trail descending to the coast. Other men questioned by Coimbra produced similar stories.37 At the end of his inquest, Coimbra summarized the proceedings for the viceroy and counseled restraint. Apart from the rumors spread by Indians, or by those who claimed to have communicated with them, there was little evidence to sustain the conviction that great mineral wealth remained to be, or perhaps ever had been, extracted from the region. None of the visitors to the area reported anything approaching the two hundred prospectors, each with three or more slaves, believed by key officials in Lisbon and Rio de Janeiro to be working there. Most traveled to the site because they were poor and easily lured into any scheme that might relieve their misery. Some were coerced.

220   Borderlands of the Iberian World They returned exhausted, abused, sometimes wounded and without their promised pay. If the viceroy wished to proceed against everyone who had visited the illegal operation, Coimbra concluded, it would be necessary to “punish almost the entire district.”38

At the Mines It was not until the lieutenant colonel finally arrived at the diggings in early August 1786 that he had the chance to weigh all of the talk by and about Indians against their actual behavior. Like many colonists, his superiors considered Indians to possess a preternatural access to hidden gold and diamond deposits. The prime minister had accentuated this presumption by quoting declarations about easily obtainable precious minerals while ignoring evidence to the contrary. Considering doubts that had arisen during his plodding approach, Coimbra probably did not expect a great deal when he reached the site. An anticlimactic conclusion to the mission, many months behind schedule, must have seemed inevitable. The troops from Minas Gerais had long-since come and gone, burning many structures to cinders. Following their raid, the place became known by its current name, Cantagalo, meaning the crowing rooster (Figure 8.2). Local lore had it that a rooster’s cry betrayed the location of Mão de Luva’s and his co-conspirators.39 In other words, before the expedition from the coast reached its destination, the smugglers had departed, some of them arrested, others apparently informed about the military operation in plenty of time to escape. It was in this context that Coimbra first made contact with Indians in the area. These interactions set the tone for his final, dismal assessment of the outcome of his efforts. The Indians made their presence evident immediately. Coimbra received them in friendship. At least one spoke Portuguese, allowing the lieutenant colonel to request a meeting with their “captain,” who soon appeared with a larger group. Coimbra counted thirty men, women, and children of various ages. He gave them clothing, food, and beads, and engaged in “other similar gallantries with which they were very pleased.” They spent the night at an encampment the troops had begun to construct, departed the following morning, and promised to return, initiating a period of regular visits. Additional members of this band spoke Portuguese and had been baptized, including their leader, who used the name Joaquim.40 Coimbra’s thoughts turned to the potential for more permanent contact and exchange. If the viceroy desired that the region’s forest dwellers “be reduced to the faith,” he wrote, a modest material investment would be required, consisting of knives, other gifts, and more clothing, “because all of them go around nude.”41 Before two weeks had elapsed, Coimbra registered increasing competition for material goods, as well as other grounds for concern. The Indians visited almost every day and eagerly sought more handouts, including machetes, knives, hoes, and aguardente, the Brazilian liquor distilled from sugarcane juice.42 The resulting shortage of tools hampered efforts by the troops to cultivate foodstuffs. Meanwhile, having learned of

Native Informants in Colonial Brazil   221

Figure 8.2.  Jean-Baptiste Debret, “Aldea de Cabocles a Canta-Gallo” (hamlet of Cabocles in Canta-Gallo). This scene was painted by Jean Baptiste Debret more than three decades after soldiers arrived to secure Cantagalo, until then a smugglers’ refuge. The image testifies to the persistence of native peoples in the area, still hunting and gathering despite official efforts to transform them into a sedentary workforce supporting commercial mining and agriculture. The approaching visitors, led by a native guide, offer the Indians alcohol. Public domain access courtesy of Biblioteca Brasiliana Guita e José Mindlin, São Paulo, http://www.brasiliana.usp.br/bitstream/handle/1918/624510020/006245-1_IMAGEM_020.jpg.

Coimbra’s actions, including his liberal distribution of warm clothes during the coolest season, members of another band of Indians began to visit the military encampment. They followed a Christian Indian named Martinho, whose godfather was one of the soldiers participating in the expedition. Martinho explained that his people had once lived below the falls in the vicinity of Cachoeiras de Macacu. They later resettled in the more remote border area but had been forced to abandon their new aldeia as a consequence of the “poor treatment and abuses” suffered when the prospectors from Minas Gerais arrived. The Indians had resorted to “wandering in this sertão without having a fixed home,” surviving by hunting and gathering. The departure of the contrabandists presented the possibility of returning to their former dwelling place, a day’s journey from Cantagalo. Short on supplies for his own troops, Coimbra could not grant their request for clothing and farm implements. He believed these Indians deserved the state’s “compassion” and its recognition of the “great necessity that they have for some way to cultivate the land” in order to guarantee their own subsistence. He appealed to the viceroy for aid.43

222   Borderlands of the Iberian World The commander qualified his request with a final observation: in their clothing ­ references, he noted, the Indians were “very inclined to the colors blood-red and light p blue.”44 It was an offhand remark that captured the delicacy of the situation. From the moment Coimbra left the realm of rumors and coerced intelligence and began to deal with the needs of Indians who sought his aid, a new dynamic took hold. As natives assessed the prospects of adopting sedentary ways, some were attracted by the trappings of settler society, some became dependent on manufactured goods and provisions, and some used them as a basis for new realms of negotiation. If officials wished to incorporate these wandering peoples, they would have to make commitments that were bound to strain their resources, norms, and patience. For every success in transforming natives into Christian agriculturalists, the state would create its own expectations, obligations, and even dependencies, which made it susceptible to—and quickly resentful of—Indian demands. As if to underline the developing tensions, when the viceroy agreed to the latest request for supplies and sent a shipment of colorful cloth to the encampment, the commander considered the response insufficient. Barely suppressing his exasperation, he pressed for still other items he thought the state should logically provide: thread, buttons, and needles, as well as a tailor to fashion the cloth into garments.45 Nearly three months after the expedition arrived in Cantagalo, long enough to dash any hopes harbored by its commanding officer for a prompt reassignment, interactions with the natives inexplicably ceased. The bands that had regularly visited no longer appeared, placing Coimbra on the defensive. He was already fending off sharp questions from the viceroy about his treatment of soldiers, auxiliaries, and slaves, queries prompted by the desertion of some of his troops, the deaths of a number of slave porters, and the disappearance of others who ran away after stealing food from the supply train. These concerns were fueled by grumbling soldiers and officers, as well as by slave-owners compelled to rent or lend their captive laborers to the military to ferry military supplies into the mountains. Coimbra knew that the viceroy would assume the Indians had withdrawn because they were somehow dissatisfied with their treatment. With little to show for all the state funds and effort expended on his mission, he could ill afford another incident that might be interpreted as evidence of his incompetence or his abusive command.46 Even before he reported the disappearance of the Indians, he sought an explanation. In an ironic reversal of the once routine visits of Indians to his wilderness military base, he twice dispatched troops to seek out natives in the forest. They were nowhere to be found. The only remnants of their presence were a field planted in corn, beans, potatoes, and bananas, and an array of possessions left behind in one of their encampments— machetes, hoes, knives, plates, barrels, hammocks, woolen shawls, sieves made of vegetable fibers, wooden bowls, jars, a rooster, and some chickens—which Coimbra inventoried and safeguarded for their return. His soldiers spotted signs along a trail that the Indians had headed in the direction of the coast.47 Coimbra struggled to explain what had happened. Reporting the event to Viceroy Vasconcelos, he insisted that the Indians “had no motive that might compel them to flee from our friendship.” He had shared his table with some, generously distributed gifts

Native Informants in Colonial Brazil   223 and provisions to others. According to those with long experience of their “character and customs,” there was no reason to be alarmed by their departure. Among the items they had left behind were tools they valued so highly that they were sure to return. They were known to “regulate themselves” according to the phases of the moon. They had a tendency to plant foodstuffs in several areas at once, wandering from place to place as crops matured. This was the time of year when they left their cabanas to hunt for insects they prized. The more explanations he listed, the less convincing he appeared. He tried to convey a sense of calm and confidence but ended sounding fretful. “I certify to Your Excellency that I always treated them with the greatest kindness possible.” If the Viceroy wished him to pursue them, he would do so.48 Coimbra’s chagrin at the Indians’ disappearance can be understood in the light of the prevailing paternalist indigenous policies, which would have made him sensitive to any suggestion that he had harmed them. His concern also reflected their value as informants and potential laborers. The contrabandists who had been whisked away from the site for interrogation in Vila Rica were unlikely to volunteer more details than absolutely necessary about their own illegal actions. Backwoodsmen on the Rio de Janeiro side of the captaincy border had similar reasons to be reticent, even though Coimbra had managed to pry some information from them. The Indians had unmatched access to intelligence about clandestine activity in the area, even if they were sometimes less than forthright. To the extent that more was to be learned about smuggling operations it was not unreasonable to expect that they would serve as primary informants. Assuming relations remained amicable, the possibility that they might labor as boatmen, porters, woodcutters, and agricultural workers to advance the cause of colonizing the region further enhanced their value in the minds of many officials. In this respect, the viceroy was less optimistic. “This cast of people,” he warned, was “barely subjugated.” They tended to “desert and abandon the work in which they are employed” unless subjected to rigorous discipline. Even so, faced with the increasing need for workers to effect his plans, the viceroy approved Coimbra’s proposal to employ some Indians as day laborers. But they would have to be brought up to the highlands from the coastal aldeais, at least until the Indians at Cantagalo showed an inclination to return.49 Coimbra and the viceroy could theorize about using native labor in their colonizing project, but the Indians had moved on. The lieutenant colonel’s attempts to understand why they had vanished after such promising initial exchanges proved futile. The decisive role they had played in his expedition from the moment it was conceived had ended. Although he would remain deployed at Cantagalo until April 1787, almost a year after he first ordered his troops to begin their march, he would report no further contact of any consequence. It must have come as the cruelest of ironies, therefore, to be accused of conspiring with the Indians to smuggle gold out of the area. Suspicions of Indian misconduct had a long history. For many years, officials had “conjectured,” in the words of one officer, that the Indians were participants in the illicit trade. Information that surfaced in inquiries before and during Coimbra’s expedition reinforced this distrust.50 The distance between Rio de Janeiro and the commander’s military base in the mountains, his long absence

224   Borderlands of the Iberian World from the capital city, and the suspicion and envy present whenever treasure and secrecy combined spawned rumors and misrepresentation, especially among those resentful of Coimbra’s position or eager to gain access to the region’s resources. There is no indication that this gossip damaged Coimbra’s record in any permanent way. He would continue his successful military career, eventually earning promotion to the governorship of the captaincy of Rio Grande do Sul. However, by the end of 1786, having spent three months leading the expedition to the highlands and another five months perched at his remote encampment, he admitted to a “profound state of melancholy” in a rare personal letter to a trusted friend.51 Once again, the Indians had a role. From the outset, Coimbra had conducted himself as a model officer. He proved himself loyal, circumspect, and proficient, if not as prompt in achieving his objective as the viceroy desired. Undoubtedly, he anticipated the usual rewards for a military commission successfully executed: official commendation, perhaps a promotion, and personal and professional honor. Yet, as his expedition progressed, he had become increasingly dispirited, convinced that his superiors in the colonial capital and in Lisbon were finding his performance lackluster, despite its rigors. Writing to his friend, he rejected allegations of his incompetence, which had spread through the city and wider region. As for the accusations that he was conspiring with Indians, he scarcely knew how to respond. The expedition chaplain returned from a visit to Rio de Janeiro to recount that more than once he had been asked “if it was true that Captain Joaquim [the Indian headman] had given [Coimbra] a container filled with gold and various precious stones.” Losing his accustomed composure, Coimbra despaired, “They want to annihilate me.” Acknowledging feelings of isolation and gloom, he wrote, “I have never been in a more desperate post than this, and I would gladly trade this place for one with the greatest risk of facing the enemy.”52 Nearly four months later, when the viceroy unceremoniously granted Coimbra “permission to withdraw,” he left his garrison so quickly there was no time to write a final communique.53 Coimbra summed up his mission with a personal lament, but his experience reflected much larger issues. Despite all the official efforts and state resources brought to bear on the area, it would still take decades to bring the kind of commercial development and administrative consolidation to the highlands that the prime minister, viceroy, and lieutenant colonel aimed to achieve with their ambitious military mobilization. When the British traveler John Mawe visited Cantagalo in 1809, he described a feeble settlement, where “so little gold is at present found” that the tax revenue collected on its production “scarcely pays the officers and soldiers appointed to receive it.” The hamlet was “very poorly stocked with cattle”; it primarily sent foodstuffs rather than more profitable export commodities to the capital city; and its environs, “destitute of inhabitants,” remained the province of “half-civilized aborigines [. . .] but one remove from the anthropophagi.” Their refusal to labor for colonists accounted, as Mawe saw it, for “the low state of agriculture in the district.”54 A more thoroughgoing transformation would await the growth of the slave-based coffee export economy that ascended the Paraíba do Sul River Valley to enrich landholders during the following decades.

Native Informants in Colonial Brazil   225 Late in the eighteenth century, more than two hundred years after European s­ ettlement first took hold along the not-so-distant coast, the native inhabitants of the internal frontier separating the colony’s burgeoning capital from its primary inland mining district retained considerable sway over the Crown’s ability to impose its sovereign dominion. They largely determined what could be known, what remained a mystery, what could be accomplished, and what was beyond reach in this strategic mountainous expanse. Cautious purveyors of backlands knowledge, they could influence the success or failure of state exploration, law enforcement, taxation, and colonization efforts. The fate of Coimbra’s expedition, an undertaking orchestrated at the highest levels of the imperial administration, suggests the need to redouble scholarly efforts to investigate similar ventures, both military and civilian, pursued during this period to consolidate control over the colony’s many internal frontiers. Interactions with autonomous and semiautonomous Indians in these zones exposed both the aspirations and limitations of Portuguese territorial control during the critical final decades of colonial rule. Although it is beyond the scope of this essay, the frustrations Coimbra and his superiors encountered attempting to incorporate Coroado and Coropó domain point to the state’s inability to project power not only over this zone relatively close to the administrative center of Portuguese America but also over many frontier regions throughout a vast colony. Further research will flesh out the implications of such constraints, likely elevating the problem of the crown’s piecemeal internal dominion to a more central place in our understanding of the final decades of Portuguese rule. The enduring resilience of the Coroado, the Coropó, and dozens of other groups in zones undergoing parallel processes of incorporation turned Brazil’s internal frontiers into largely unacknowledged testing grounds and, in some cases, quagmires for the projects of a centralizing, territorializing transatlantic state.

Notes Archives AHU: ANTT: ANRJ: APM: BPE: BNRJ:

Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino, Lisbon (Portugal) Arquivo Nacional do Torre do Tombo, Lisbon (Portugal) Arquivo Nacional, Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) Arquivo Público Mineiro, Belo Horizonte (Brazil) Biblioteca Pública de Évora, Évora (Portugal) Biblioteca Nacional Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro (Brazil)

1. Alida C. Metcalf, Family and Frontier in Colonial Brazil: Santana de Parnaíba, 1520–1822 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992); Hal Langfur, The Forbidden Lands: Colonial Identity, Frontier Violence, and the Persistence of Brazil’s Eastern Indians, 1750–1830 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006); Mary Karasch, “Rethinking the Conquest of Goiás, 1775–1819,” The Americas 61, no. 3 (2005): 463–492; B. J. Barickman, “ ‘Tame Indians,’ ‘Wild

226   Borderlands of the Iberian World Heathens,’ and Settlers in Southern Bahia in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries,” The Americas 51, no. 3 (1995): 325–368; Heather F. Roller, Amazonian Routes: Indigenous Mobility and Colonial Communities in Northern Brazil (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014), chap. 2. 2. David  J.  Weber, Bárbaros: Spaniards and Their Savages in the Age of Enlightenment (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 12, 85. “By 1800,” according to Curtin, “not a quarter of the territory of the Americas was actually governed by Europeans.” Philip D. Curtin, The World and the West: The European Challenge and the Overseas Response in the Age of Empire (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 12. Also see, Amy Turner Bushnell, “Gates, Patterns, and Peripheries: The Field of Frontier Latin America,” in Negotiated Empires: Centers and Peripheries in the Americas, 1500–1820, ed. Christine Daniels and Michael  V.  Kennedy (New York: Routledge, 2002), 19–21. Tamar Herzog, Frontiers of Possession: Spain and Portugal in Europe and the Americas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 7 notes that, as Iberian territorial expansion advanced, the “meaning and extension” of internal and external frontiers “were constantly reelaborated,” making the distinctions between them unstable. 3. Contributions pointing toward such a synthesis include John Hemming, Red Gold: The Conquest of the Brazilian Indians, 1500–1760 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977) and Amazon Frontier: The Defeat of the Brazilian Indians (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987); Herzog, Frontiers of Possession; Hal Langfur, ed., Native Brazil: Beyond the Convert and the Cannibal, 1500–1889 (Albuquerque: UNM, 2014); Manuela Carneiro da Cunha, ed., História dos Índios no Brasil (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, FAPESP, SMC,1992); Frank Salomon and Stuart B. Schwartz, eds., The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas, vol. 3: South America, part  2 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press,1999). On the belated scholarly interest in Brazilian indigenous history, see Hal Langfur, “Introduction: Recovering Brazil’s Indigenous Pasts,” in Native Brazil: Beyond the Cannibal and the Convert, 1500–1889, ed. Hal Langfur (Albuquerque: UNM, 2014). 4. On Mão de Luva and the raid staged from Minas Gerais, see Sebastião A. B. de Carvalho, O Tesouro de Cantagalo (Niterói: Gráfica do Colégio Salesiano, 1951); Acácio Ferreira Dias, O Mão de Luva (Fundador de Cantagalo) (Np: Imprensa Oficial, 1953); Diogo [Luís de Almeida Pereira] de Vasconcelos, História Média de Minas Gerais, 4th ed. (Belo Horizonte: Ed. Itatiaia, 1974), 277–281; Celso Falabella de Figueiredo Castro, Os Sertões de Leste: Achegas para a História da Zona da Mata (Belo Horizonte: Imprensa Oficial, 1987), 18–38; José Antônio Soares Sousa, “As Minas do Sertão de Macacu,” Revista do Instituto Histórico e Geográfico Brasileiro 326 (1980): 21–86; Carla Maria Junho Anastasia, A Geografia do Crime: Violência nas Minas Setecentistas (Belo Horizonte: Ed. UFMG, 2005), 96–104; Rodrigo Leonardo de Sousa Oliveira, “ ‘Mão de Luva’ e ‘Montanha’: Bandoleiros e Salteadores nos Caminhos de Minas Gerais no Século XVIII (Matas Gerais da Mantiqueira: 1755–1786)” (MA diss., Universidade Federal de Juiz de Fora, 2008), especially chapters 3–4; Mauro Leão Gomes, “Ouro, Posseiros e Fazendas de Café: A Ocupação e a Degradação Ambiental da Região das Minas do Canta Gallo na Província do Rio de Janeiro” (PhD diss., Universidade Federal Rural do Rio de Janeiro, 2004), chap. 1; Fernando G. Lamas, “Conflitos Agrários em Minas Gerais: O Processo de Conquista da Terra na Área Central da Zona da Mata (1767–1820)” (PhD diss., Universidade Federal Fluminense, 2013), 66–85. For an overview of much of this historiography, see Oliveira, “Mão de Luva”, 36–43.

Native Informants in Colonial Brazil   227 5. Martinho Melo e Castro served as colonial secretary from 1770 to 95 and as Portugal’s prime minister from 1785 to 1786. Luís de Vasconcelos e Sousa served as viceroy from 1778 to 1790. 6. For the expedition’s departure from Rio de Janeiro, May 8, 1786, see Coimbra to viceroy, Vila de Santo Antonio de Sá [present day Cachoeiras de Macacu], 10 May 1786, Correspondências e documentos relativos às Novas Minas de Macacu, do Rio de Janeiro, de que era superintendente geral Manuel Pinto da Cunha e Sousa, 1786–[17]90, Biblioteca Nacional, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Seção de Manuscritos [hereafter CDRNMM, BNRJ, SM], cód. 9, 3, 17, doc. 5. Most of the sources documenting the expedition are found in this codex, the first of five, catalogued as códs. 9, 3, 17–21. Each volume covers a single year’s activity in the highlands. The first also contains much preliminary correspondence and relevant royal legislation from earlier years, beginning in 1730 but concentrating on the period after 1760 when the first reports of the contraband ring drew the attention of royal authorities. Copies of this correspondence are also found in Correspondência do vicereinado para a corte, Arquivo Nacional, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil [ANRJ], Fundo Negócios de Portugal, Códice 68, vol. 4, fols. 187–225v. For tallies of expedition members placed at Coimbra’s disposal and those present on the eve of the mission’s arrival at its destination, see Relasão da tropa que se deve aprontar a ordem do Ilustrisimo e Excelentisimo Senhor Vice Rei, ca. Mar. 1786, CDRNMM, BNRJ, SM, cód. 9, 3, 17, doc. 151; Mapa das prasas de tropa paga e auxiliary e mais pesoas q. se achão debaixo do comando do Tenente Coronel Manoel Soares Coimbra, 22 July 1786, CDRNMM, BNRJ, SM, cód. 9, 3, 17, doc. 52. For the prime minister’s concern about the mounting threat to royal sovereignty in this zone, see Colonial Secretary to Viceroy, Palácio de Nossa Senhora da Ajuda, 8 Jan. 1785, CDRNMM, BNRJ, SM, cód. 9, 3, 17, doc. 127, par. 15–16. 7. See “Ley porque V. Magestade ha por bem restituir aos Indios do Grão Pará, e Maranhão a liberdade das suas pessoas, bens, e commercio na forma que nella se declara” (Lisbon, 1755) and “Directorio que se deve observar nas Povoaçoens dos Indios do Pará, e Maranhão em quanto Sua Magestade não mandar o contrario” (Pará, 1757), in Carlos de Araújo Moreira Neto, Índios da Amazônia: De Maioria a Minoria (1750–1850) (Petrópolis: Editora Vozes, 1988), 161–62, 165–203. On the import of these laws in Amazonia, see Rita Heloísa de Almeida, O Diretório dos Índios: Um Projeto de “Civilização” no Brasil do Século XVIII (Brasília: UnB, 1997); Ângela Domingues, Quando os Índios Eram Vassalos: Colonização e Relações de Poder no Norte do Brasil na Segunda Metade do Século XVIII (Lisbon: CNCDP, 2000). On how these measures were circumvented by the Minas governor in other areas occupied by native peoples, see Langfur, Forbidden Lands, 61–7. 8. A more detailed discussion in John M. Monteiro, “Tupis, Tapuias e Historiadores: Estudos de História Indígena e do Indigenismo” (Livre Docência Thesis, IFCH-UNICAMP, 2001), chap. 3; Monteiro, “Indigenous Histories in Colonial Brazil: Between Ethnocide and Ethnogenesis,” in The Oxford Handbook of Borderlands of the Iberian World, ed. Danna  A.  Levin Rojo and Cynthia Radding (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019); Langfur, “Introduction.” 9. Within a growing body of scholarship concerned with these colonial Indians, see Stuart B. Schwartz and Frank Salomon, “New Peoples and New Kinds of People: Adaptation, Readjustment, and Ethnogenesis in South American Indigenous Societies (Colonial Era),” in The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas, vol. 3: South America, part 2, ed. Frank Salomon and Stuart B. Schwartz (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Alida  C.  Metcalf, Go-Betweens and the Colonization of Brazil, 1500–1600 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006); Maria Regina Celestino de Almeida, Metamorfoses

228   Borderlands of the Iberian World Indígenas: Cultura e Identidade nos Aldeamentos Indígenas do Rio de Janeiro (Rio de Janeiro: Arquivo Nacional, 2002); Barbara A. Sommer, “Negotiated Settlements: Native Amazonians and Portuguese Policy in Pará, Brazil, 1758–1798” (PhD diss., University of New Mexico, 2000); Roller, Amazonian Routes; Muriel Nazzari, “Vanishing Indians: The Social Construction of Race in Colonial São Paulo,” The Americas 57, no. 4 (2001): 497–524; Ronaldo Vainfas, Traição: Um Jesuíta a Serviço do Brasil Holandês Processado pela Inquisição (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2008); Stuart  B.  Schwartz and Hal Langfur, “Tapanhuns, Negros da Terra, and Curibocas: Common Cause and Confrontation Between Blacks and Indians in Colonial Brazil,” in Black and Red: African-Indigenous Relations in Colonial Latin America, ed. Matthew Restall (Albuquerque: UNM, 2005), 81–114; Maria Leônia Chaves de Resende and Hal Langfur, “Minas Expansionista, Minas Mestiça: A Resistência dos Índios em Minas Gerais do Século do Ouro,” Anais de História de Além-Mar (Lisbon) 9 (2008): 79–103. 10. Sérgio Buarque de Holanda, Caminhos e Fronteiras (Rio de Janeiro: J.  Olympio, 1957); John M. Monteiro, Negros da Terra: Índios e Bandeirantes nas Origens de São Paulo (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1994). 11. Domingues, Quando os Índios Eram Vassalos; Neil Safier, Measuring the New World: Enlightenment Science and South America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008); Heather F. Roller, “River Guides, Geographical Informants, and Colonial Field Agents in the Portuguese Amazon,” Colonial Latin American Review 21, no. 1 (2012): 101–126. 12. Deadly epidemics were recorded around Guanabara Bay in the 1550s, although it is likely they began to depopulate the area during the first half of the century. Metcalf, Go-Betweens, chapter 5, especially 131–133. For contacts between highlands Indians and coastal Indians and settlers, see Márcia Malheiros, “ ‘Homens de Fronteira’: Índios e Capuchinhos na Ocupação dos Sertões do Leste do Paraíba ou Goytacazes (Séculos XVIII e XIX)” (PhD diss., Universidade Federal Fluminense, 2008), especially chapter 3. 13. José Joaquim da Cunha de Azeredo Coutinho, Ensaio Economico sobre o Comerico de Portugal e suas Colonias (Lisbon: Academia Real das Ciências, 1794), 65; “Requerimento de D.  José Joaquim da Cunha de Azeredo Coutinho a rainha D.  Maria I,” ca. 1794, in Alberto Lamego, A Terra Goitacá á Luz de Documentos Inéditos, vol. 2 (Rio de Janeiro: Garnier, 1913–41), 505–6; Lamas, “Conflitos agrários;” Paulo Mercadante, Os Sertões do Leste. Estudo de uma Região: A Mata Mineira (Rio de Janeiro: Zahar, 1973). 14. Alfred Métraux, “The Purí-Coroado Linguistic Family,” in Handbook of South American Indians, vol. 1, ed. Julian  H.  Steward (New York: Cooper Square, 1963), 523–30; José Ribamar Bessa Freire and Márcia Fernanda Malheiros, Aldeamentos Indígenas do Rio de Janeiro (Rio de Janeiro: Programa de Estudos dos Povos Indígenas, UERJ, 1997), 21–25; José de Souza Azevedo Pizarro e Araújo, Memórias Históricas do Rio de Janeiro e das Provincias Annexas a Jurisdicção do Vice-rei do Estado do Brasil, 9 vols. (Rio de Janeiro: Imp. Regia, 1820–22), vol. 5, 288–95; Prinz von Wied Maximilian, Travels in Brazil in the Years 1815, 1816, 1817 (London: Henry Colburn, 1820). On scholarly disagreement over linguistic commonalities among groups classified as Gê speakers, see Norman A. McQuown, “The Indigenous Languages of Latin America,” American Anthropologist, 57, no. 3, pt. 1 (1955): 560; Langfur, Forbidden Lands, 23–24; Paiva, Os Indígenas. On Coropó, Coroado, and Puri linguistic commonalities and distinctions, see Malheiros, “Homens de Fronteira,” 102. Like Malheiros, I consider the names ascribed to these indigenous “nations” in the historical sources to be products of such contact and territorial compression. Imposed by outsiders, whether colonists or indigenous enemies, such ethnonyms should not be

Native Informants in Colonial Brazil   229 assumed to reflect primeval, fixed ethnic identities. For example, Coroado, which means “crowned” in Portuguese, referred to the distinctive way these Indians cut their hair. Both the Coroado and Puri, moreover, were said to call each other Puri, a pejorative term meaning thief or cannibal. Colonists’ appropriation of the term reflected a conviction that Coroado bands were more tractable than groups designated as Puri (Malheiros, “Homens de Fronteira,” 108). 15. Petition of Padre Manoel de Jesus Maria to King, [Mariana?, ca. Nov. 1768], Arquivo Nacional do Torre do Tombo, Lisbon, Portugal [ANTT], Ordem de Cristo, Padroado do Brasil, Bispado de Mariana, maço 5; Ordens sôbre arrecadação e despesas, 1768[–1771], 23 July and 8 Aug. 1770, 18 Feb. 1771, BNRJ, SM, Arquivo Casa dos Contos, gaveta I-10–7, docs. 56, 71; Auguste de Saint-Hilaire, Viagem Pelas Províncias do Rio de Janeiro e Minas Gerais, trans. Vivaldi Moreira (Belo Horizonte: Ed. Itatiaia, 1975), 276–277; Castro, Os sertões de leste, 11–15, esp. transcription, 14 n. 4, of royal order dated 20 Out. 1779, describing the priest’s activities. For the original MS, see Arquivo Público Mineiro (APM), SC, cód. 220, fols. 44v–45. See also Vasconcelos, História Média de Minas Gerais, 205–210; Mercadante, Os Sertões do Leste, 40–42; Paiva, Os Indígenas, chap. 1. 16. Araújo, Memórias Históricas, vol. 5, 288–95; Hermann Burmeister, Viagem ao Brasil Através das Províncias do Rio de Janeiro e Minas Gerais, trans. Manoel Salvaterra and Hubert Schoenfeldt (São Paulo: Livraria Martins, 1952); Langfur, Forbidden Lands, 23–24, 205–12. 17. For references to the Indians’ haveres or haveres incognitos see, for example, Ordens sôbre arrecadação e despesas, 1768[–1771], August 6, 1768, BNRJ, SM, Arquivo Casa dos Contos, gaveta I–10–7, doc. 1; Miguel Antunes Ferreira to Viceroy, Rio de Janeiro, August 10, 1779, CDRNMM, BNRJ, SM, cód. 9, 3, 17, doc. 135. Also see Hal Langfur, “Uncertain Refuge: Frontier Formation and the Origins of the Botocudo War in Late-Colonial Brazil,” Hispanic American Historical Review 82, no. 2 (2002): 239–240. 18. Colonial Secretary to Viceroy, Palácio de Nossa Senhora da Ajuda, 8 Jan. 1785, CDRNMM, BNRJ, SM, cód. 9, 3, 17, doc. 127; Miguel Antunes Ferreira to Viceroy, Rio de Janeiro, August 10, 1779; Governor to Francisco Xavier de Mendonça Furtado, Vila Rica, March 1, 1764, Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino, Lisbon, Portugal [AHU], Minas Gerais, cx. 83, doc. 16. 19. Petition of Mauricio José Portugal to interim governors, with appended documents, Rio de Janeiro, May 21, 1763, CDRNMM, BNRJ, SM, cód. 9, 3, 17, doc. 129. The petition was remitted to and approved by the Desembargador Intendente Geral de Ouro (Superintendent of Mines). 20. Petition of Mauricio José Portugal to interim governors, with appended documents, Rio de Janeiro, May 21, 1763, CDRNMM, BNRJ, SM, cód. 9, 3, 17, doc. 129. The prospector’s accumulated gain after paying the quinto tax but before deducting expenses was one marco (mark), three onças (ounces), six oitavas (eighths of an ounce), 28 and 4/5 grãos (grains), or just under twelve ounces. One mark equaled eight ounces; one ounce equaled eight oitavas; and one oitava equaled seventy-two grains. The sum of five separate amounts of gold turned over to authorities reveals an accounting error in the source. The document states that the Indians and Portugal originally turned over four ounces, but the scribe must have meant four oitavas, which would bring to total to the correct amount. For weights of gold, see Rafael Bluteau, Vocabulario Portuguez & Latino (Lisbon: Pascoal da Sylva, 1720), 75. 21. Between 1751 and 1803 the Crown set the value of one ounce of gold at 9$600 (monetary notation in mil reis) in Minas Gerais. Thus twelve ounces equaled 114$400. See “Mappa do

230   Borderlands of the Iberian World Rendimento que produzio o Real Quinto do Oiro na Cappitania de Minas Geraes desde o anno de 1700 a 1781 a saber,” Revista do Arquivo Público Mineiro 8 (1903): 578; Kenneth  R.  Maxwell, Conflicts and Conspiracies: Brazil and Portugal, 1750–1808 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 245. By 1770, amid a contracting mining economy, the value of a slave between fifteen and forty years old in Minas Gerais averaged approximately 100$000, with males costing about 15 percent more than females. In coastal Bahia, for which reliable figures also exist, a healthy male slave purchased for fieldwork in the 1780s also cost about 100$000. Prices in rural Rio de Janeiro were apparently lower. There an adult male slave born in Africa cost, on average, 73$000 in 1790, 87$000 in 1800, and 95$000 in 1810, while those born in Brazil cost less in 1790 (60$000) but more in 1800 and 1810 (101$000 and 105$000). Laird  W.  Bergad, Slavery and the Demographic and Economic History of Minas Gerais, Brazil, 1720–1888 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 163–176; Laird W. Bergad, “After the Mining Boom: Demographic and Economic Aspects of Slavery in Mariana, Minas Gerais, 1750-1808,” Latin American Research Review 31, no. 1 (1996): 67–97; B.  J.  Barickman, A Bahian Counterpoint: Sugar, Tobacco, Cassava, and Slavery in the Recôncavo, 1780–1860 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 139, Figure 10; Manolo Garcia Florentino, Em Costas Negras: Uma História do Tráfico de Escravos entre a África e o Rio de Janeiro (Séculos XVIII e XIX) (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1997), 300. 22. A colorful map of the discovery drawn around this time reveals how uncertain officials were about the geography of the region. They had little sense even of the size of the area they were trying to control. Mapa das Minas Novas do Castelo dos Campos dos Goutacazes, [second half of 18th century], Biblioteca Pública de Évora, Portugal [BPE], gaveta 4, pasta A, no. 16. For a geographic description linking the Cantagalo mines, where Mão de Luva was active, and the Castelo mines as two poles of a vast region subject to illegal prospecting, see Miguel Antunes Ferreira to Viceroy, Rio de Janeiro, August 10, 1779. For the location of the Castelo mines in Espírito Santo, see Superintendent of Mines to Colonial Secretary, Rio de Janeiro, July 16, 1781, CDRNMM, BNRJ, SM, cód. 9, 3, 17, doc. 128. 23. Colonial Secretary to Viceroy, Palácio de Nossa Senhora da Ajuda, 8 Jan. 1785; Miguel Antunes Ferreira to Viceroy, Rio de Janeiro, August 10, 1779. 24. Miguel Antunes Ferreira to Viceroy, Rio de Janeiro, August 10, 1779. 25. Miguel Antunes Ferreira to Viceroy, Rio de Janeiro, August 10, 1779. 26. Miguel Antunes Ferreira to Viceroy, Rio de Janeiro, August 10, 1779. As can be gleaned from this report, Ferreira related his findings not only to Viceroy Cunha, who ordered the mission, but also to the marquis of Lavradio, sometime between 1769 and 1778, and then to Viceroy Vasconcelos, in 1779. It is not clear whether he also shared the information with Viceroy Antônio Rolim de Moura Tavares, the count of Azambuja (1767–1769). 27. Town Council to Viceroy, Santo Antônio de Sá, 26 Apr. 1779, CDRNMM, BNRJ, SM, cód. 9, 3, 17, doc. 132; Manoel Pereira da Silva to Viceroy, São Salvador [dos Campos dos Goytacazes] with appended confession, 28 Nov. 1779, CDRNMM, BNRJ, SM, cód. 9, 3, 17, doc. 137. Rio’s superintendent of mines, Manoel Pinto da Cunha e Souza, summarized this and other information gathered from outlying districts in a report to the viceroy. See Superintendent of Mines to Viceroy, Rio de Janeiro, 24 Dec. 1779, CDRNMM, BNRJ, SM, cód. 9, 3, 17, doc. 137. Also see Oliveira, “Mão de Luva”, 117–123. 28. Superintendent of Mines to Viceroy, Rio de Janeiro, December 24, 1779. 29. The prisoner José Gomes was questioned by two representatives of the Holy Office: Vicente Ferreira de Noronha, vicar of the coastal parish of Maricá, the site of a former

Native Informants in Colonial Brazil   231 Jesuit mission where many Indians continued to live; and the Carmelite friar Bernardo de Vasconcelos. As comissários (commissioners) of the Holy Office, both were among a small number of clergymen serving as the highest resident authorities of the Inquisition in Brazil. See Vicente Ferreira de Noronha to Viceroy, before July 1781, CDRNMM, BNRJ, SM, cód. 9, 3, 17, doc. 141; Bernardo de Vasconcelos to Viceroy, n.p., before July 1781, CDRNMM, BNRJ, SM, cód. 9, 3, 17, doc. 142. Although a date was not noted in these sources, the mining superintendent and prime minister specified that Gomes’s testimony was collected sometime after 1779 but before July 1781, consistent with the evidence that he was the Indian guide by the same name. See Superintendent of Mines to Colonial Secretary, Rio de Janeiro, July 16, 1781; Colonial Secretary to Viceroy, Palácio de Nossa Senhora da Ajuda, January 8, 1785, CDRNMM, BNRJ, SM, cód. 9, 3, 17, doc. 127, parag. 14. For the colonists’ testimony, see Coimbra to [Viceroy], Registo da Fazenda do Cônego, July 14, 1786, CDRNMM, BNRJ, SM, cód. 9, 3, 17, doc. 47. On colonial Inquisition officials, see James E. Wadsworth, “In the Name of the Inquisition: The Portuguese Inquisition and Delegated Authority in Colonial Pernambuco, Brazil,” The Americas 61, no. 1 (2004): esp. 23, 32–34. 30. Vicente Ferreira de Noronha to Viceroy, n.p., before July 1781. 31. Vicente Ferreira de Noronha to Viceroy, n.p., before July 1781. The size of an uncut diamond is never a guarantee of the size or quality of the resulting cut gem. For purposes of comparison, the famed De Beers Centenary Diamond, discovered in South Africa, weighed 599 carats (120 g) uncut, 274 carats (55 g) when cut, making it the world’s largest colorless, flawless diamond. 32. Vicente Ferreira de Noronha to Viceroy, n.p., before July 1781; Bernardo de Vasconcelos to Viceroy, n.p., before July 1781. 33. Superintendent of Mines to Viceroy, Rio de Janeiro, 24 Dec. 1779. For military patrols, see Alexandre Alves Duarte e Azevedo to Viceroy, Santo Antônio de Sá, June 7, 1780, CDRNMM, BNRJ, SM, cód. 9, 3, 17, doc. 140. For information about the comings and goings of Mão de Luva in Minas Gerais, Lisbon also relied on a preliminary report by the military officer who later led the raid that captured the smuggler. See Colonial Secretary to Viceroy, Palácio de Nossa Senhora da Ajuda, January 8, 1785. 34. Colonial Secretary to Viceroy, Palácio de Nossa Senhora da Ajuda, January 8, 1785, CDRNMM, BNRJ, SM, cód. 9, 3, 17, doc. 127, quoting parag. 6 and 17. For material quoted by the prime minister from Gomes’s testimony, see para. 10–13. On the viceroy’s dissenting view about who should lead the attack, see Anastasia, A Geografia do Crime, 102. 35. For the viceroy’s urgings, see Coimbra to Viceroy, Registo da Fazenda do Cônego, July 19, 1768 [sic, 1786], CDRNMM, BNRJ, SM, cód. 9, 3, 17, doc. 46. For the inquiry, including the quoted phrases, see Coimbra to [Viceroy], Registo da Fazenda do Cônego, July 14, 1786, CDRNMM, BNRJ, SM, cód. 9, 3, 17, doc. 47. Coimbra questioned eight individuals in total. 36. Coimbra to [Viceroy], Registo da Fazenda do Cônego, July 14, 1786. 37. Coimbra to [Viceroy], Registo da Fazenda do Cônego, July 14, 1786. 38. Coimbra to [Viceroy], Registo da Fazenda do Cônego, July 19, 1768 [sic, 1786]. For an ­estimation of the prospectors working at the site, see Colonial Secretary to Viceroy, Palácio de Nossa Senhora da Ajuda, January 8, 1785. The estimate relied on a report from a local field officer who concluded that some two hundred prospectors were mining at the site, each with three to five slaves. See Bartolomeu José Vahia to Viceroy, n.p., August 6, 1779, CDRNMM, BNRJ, SM, cód. 9, 3, 17, doc. 135.

232   Borderlands of the Iberian World 39. John Mawe, Travels in the Interior of Brazil, Particularly in the Gold and Diamond Districts of that Country (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1812), 120–121. 40. The sources leave unclear whether this was the same Joaquim who more than twenty years earlier lured prospectors into the area from the coast when he showed them a ­sample of gold. 41. Coimbra to Viceroy, Cantagalo, August 10, 1786, CDRNMM, BNRJ, SM, cód. 9, 3, 17, doc. 60. 42. Coimbra to Viceroy, Cantagalo, August 19, 1786, CDRNMM, BNRJ, SM, cód. 9, 3, 17, doc. 61. 43. Coimbra to Viceroy, Cantagalo, August 25, 1786, CDRNMM, BNRJ, SM, cód. 9, 3, 17, doc. 62. 44. Coimbra to Viceroy, Cantagalo, August 25, 1786, CDRNMM, BNRJ, SM, cód. 9, 3, 17, doc. 62. 45. Coimbra to Viceroy, Cantagalo, September 22, 1786, CDRNMM, BNRJ, SM, cód. 9, 3, 17, doc. 67; Viceroy to Coimbra, Rio de Janeiro, September 16, 1786, CDRNMM, BNRJ, SM, doc. 175. The Indians continued their regular visits to Cantagalo through the first days of November. For Coimbra’s subsequent comments on the challenges of providing for their needs, see Coimbra to Viceroy, Cantagalo, October 7, 1786, CDRNMM, BNRJ, SM, cód. 9, 3, 17, doc. 73; Coimbra to Viceroy, Cantagalo, November 4, 1786, CDRNMM, BNRJ, SM, cód. 9, 3, 17, doc. 83. On responses by Brazil’s eastern Indians to trade goods during this period, see Langfur, Forbidden Lands, 230–239, and Richard White, The Roots of Dependency: Subsistence, Environment, and Social Change among the Choctaws, Pawnees, and Navajos (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983). 46. Coimbra to Viceroy, Cantagalo, November 4, 1786; Viceroy to Coimbra, Rio de Janeiro, November 11, 1786, CDRNMM, BNRJ, SM, cód. 9, 3, 17, doc. 190; Coimbra to Camilo Maria Tonnelot, Cantagalo, December 28, 1786, CDRNMM, BNRJ, SM, cód. 9, 3, 17, doc. 122. For more on desertions, see Coimbra to Viceroy, Cantagalo, September 7, 1786, CDRNMM, BNRJ, SM, cód. 9, 3, 17, doc. 64; Viceroy to Coimbra, Rio de Janeiro, September 16, 1786, CDRNMM, BNRJ, SM, cód. 9, 3, 17, doc. 178; Coimbra to Viceroy, Cantagalo, September 22, 1786, CDRNMM, BNRJ, SM, cód. 9, 3, 17, doc. 67; Viceroy to Coimbra, Rio de Janeiro, October 9, 1786, CDRNMM, BNRJ, SM, cód. 9, 3, 17, doc. 182; Alexandre Alves Duarte e Azevedo to Coimbra, Itaboraí, November 4, 1786, CDRNMM, BNRJ, SM, cód. 9, 3, 17, doc. 87. For more on slave flights and deaths, see Coimbra to Antonio Luiz Pereira, Cantagalo, September 8, 1786, CDRNMM, BNRJ, SM, cód. 9, 3, 17, doc. 99; Coimbra to Viceroy, Cantagalo, November 18, 1786, CDRNMM, BNRJ, SM, cód. 9, 3, 17, doc. 86; Coimbra to Viceroy, Cantagalo, December 16, 1786, CDRNMM, BNRJ, SM, cód. 9, 3, 17, doc. 121. On slave requisitions, see Viceroy to José Joaquim da Fonseca, Rio de Janeiro, September 4, 1786, CDRNMM, BNRJ, SM, cód. 9, 3, 17, doc. 174; Coimbra to Viceroy, Cantagalo, September 29, 1786, CDRNMM, BNRJ, SM, cód. 9, 3, 17, doc. 70. 47. Coimbra to Viceroy, Cantagalo, November 4, 1786; Coimbra, Relasão dos trastes pertencentes aos Indios, Cantagalo, November 4, 1786, CDRNMM, BNRJ, SM, cód. 9, 3, 17, doc. 84. 48. Coimbra to Viceroy, Cantagalo, November 4, 1786. According to the priest who informed Coimbra about this matter, the Indians found the insects they desired in taquara groves. The plant, bearing a Tupi name, is a genus of bamboo (Gramineae: Bambusoideae). John Luccock, Notes on Rio de Janeiro and the Southern Parts of Brazil; Taken During a Residence of Ten Years in that Country, from 1808 to 1818 (London: Samuel Leigh, 1820), 688; Oikos Laboratório, “Taquara e Bambu,” Universidade Federal de Paraná, accessed October 24, 2015, http://www.oikos.ufpr.br/produtos/taquaras%20e%20bambus.pdf. 49. Coimbra to Viceroy, Cantagalo, December 11, 1786, CDRNMM, BNRJ, SM, cód. 9, 3, 17, doc. 106; Viceroy to Coimbra, Rio de Janeiro, December 31, 1786, CDRNMM, BNRJ, SM,

Native Informants in Colonial Brazil   233 cód. 9, 3, 17, doc. 211 (quoted). Native boatmen came to the highlands from the São Barnabé aldeia, founded by Jesuits in the sixteenth century. The village’s proximity to the city of Rio de Janeiro meant that these Indians had long experience serving as day laborers. See Almeida, Metamorfoses Indígenas. 50. Miguel Antunes Ferreira to Viceroy, Rio de Janeiro, August 10, 1779. 51. Coimbra to Camilo Maria Tonnelot, Cantagalo, December 28, 1786. 52. Coimbra to Camilo Maria Tonnelot, Cantagalo, December 28, 1786. 53. Viceroy to Coimbra, Rio de Janeiro, April 20, 1787, CDRNMM, BNRJ, SM, cód. 9, 3, 18, doc. 198. 54. Mawe, Travels in the Interior of Brazil, 122–125.

Bibliography Almeida, Maria Regina Celestino de. Metamorfoses Indígenas: Cultura e Identidade nos Aldeamentos Indígenas do Rio de Janeiro. Rio de Janeiro: Arquivo Nacional, 2002. Anastasia, Carla Maria Junho. A Geografia do Crime: Violência nas Minas Setecentistas. Belo Horizonte: Ed. UFMG, 2005. Araújo, José de Souza Azevedo Pizarro e. Memórias Históricas do Rio de Janeiro e das Provincias Annexas a Jurisdicção do Vice-rei do Estado do Brasil. 9 vols. Rio de Janeiro: Imp. Regia, 1820–22. Castro, Celso Falabella de Figueiredo. Os Sertões de Leste: Achegas para a História da Zona da Mata. Belo Horizonte: Imprensa Oficial, 1987. Coutinho, José Joaquim da Cunha de Azeredo. Ensaio Economico sobre o Comerico de Portugal e suas Colonias. Lisbon: Academia Real das Ciências, 1794. Domingues, Ângela. Quando os Índios Eram Vassalos: Colonização e Relações de Poder no Norte do Brasil na Segunda Metade do Século XVIII. Lisbon: CNCDP, 2000. Gomes, Mauro Leão. “Ouro, Posseiros e Fazendas de Café: A Ocupação e a Degradação Ambiental da Região das Minas do Canta Gallo na Província do Rio de Janeiro.” PhD diss., Universidade Federal Rural do Rio de Janeiro, 2004. Herzog, Tamar. Frontiers of Possession: Spain and Portugal in Europe and the Americas. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015. Lamas, Fernando  G. “Conflitos Agrários em Minas Gerais: O Processo de Conquista da Terra na Área Central da Zona da Mata (1767–1820).” PhD. diss., Universidade Federal Fluminense, 2013. Langfur, Hal. The Forbidden Lands: Colonial Identity, Frontier Violence, and the Persistence of Brazil’s Eastern Indians, 1750–1830. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006. Langfur, Hal. “Introduction: Recovering Brazil’s Indigenous Pasts.” In Native Brazil: Beyond the Cannibal and the Convert, 1500–1889, edited by Hal Langfur, 1–28. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2014. Malheiros, Márcia. “ ‘Homens de Fronteira’: Índios e Capuchinhos na Ocupação dos Sertões do Leste do Paraíba ou Goytacazes (Séculos XVIII e XIX).” PhD diss., Universidade Federal Fluminense, 2008. Mawe, John. Travels in the Interior of Brazil, Particularly in the Gold and Diamond Districts of that Country. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1812. Mercadante, Paulo. Os Sertões do Leste. Estudo de uma Região: A Mata Mineira. Rio de Janeiro: Zahar, 1973.

234   Borderlands of the Iberian World Metcalf, Alida C. Go-Betweens and the Colonization of Brazil, 1500–1600. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006. Oliveira, Rodrigo Leonardo de Sousa. “ ‘Mão de Luva’ e ‘Montanha’: Bandoleiros e Salteadores nos Caminhos de Minas Gerais no Século XVIII (Matas Gerais da Mantiqueira: 1755–1786).” MA diss., Universidade Federal de Juiz de Fora, 2008. Paiva, Adriano Toledo. Os Indígenas e os Processos de Conquista dos Sertões de Minas Gerais (1767–1813). Belo Horizonte: Argumentum, 2010. Roller, Heather F. Amazonian Routes: Indigenous Mobility and Colonial Communities in Northern Brazil. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014. Roller, Heather F. “Autonomous Indian Nations and Peacemaking in Colonial Brazil.” In The Oxford Handbook of Borderlands of the Iberian World, edited by Danna A. Levin Rojo and Cynthia Radding. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019. Sommer, Barbara A. “Negotiated Settlements: Native Amazonians and Portuguese Policy in Pará, Brazil, 1758–1798.” PhD diss., University of New Mexico, 2000. Vasconcelos, Diogo [Luís de Almeida Pereira] de. História Média de Minas Gerais. 4th ed. Belo Horizonte: Ed. Itatiaia, 1974.

pa rt I I

T R A NS C ON T I N E N TA L BOR DE R L A N DS I N I BE RO -A M E R IC A

Internal Trade Networks: Commercial and Migr atory L a bor Circuits

chapter 9

I n digenous Tr a de i n Ca r ibbea n Cen tr a l A m er ica, 1700s–1800s Alejandra Boza and Juan Carlos Solórzano Fonseca

In 1759 Spanish captain Juan Lara y Ortega led a reconnaissance expedition to the Caribbean shore of Honduras and Nicaragua, an area known at the time as Mosquitia or Mosquito Shore. He explained that there, the Miskitu Indians “defend the entire coast, and consider themselves absolute Masters of it, giving the reason that they have not been conquered by any potent force, and for this reason the Coast is theirs.”1 These Indians were not misrepresenting their situation, as they had become the most powerful among several indigenous groups that retained their independence in Caribbean Central America. Sustained resistance to Spanish colonizing schemes and alliance with Spain’s rivals were two crucial elements accounting for Miskitu success. Lesser-known but equally important was their ability to engage in a complex web of trade and exchange that connected them to other independent Indians, to Indians settled under Spanish control, and to a variety of European colonials. Independent Indians across Caribbean Central America engaged in similar exchange activities throughout the colonial period. These indigenous worlds were surprisingly active and internally well connected. The three regions herein examined from northwest to southeast, Mosquitia, Talamanca, and Darién, encompass most of Central America’s Caribbean lands from eastern Honduras to westernmost Colombia. These are lowland areas where the high humidity and frequent rains typical of tropical climates, along with fierce indigenous opposition, posed great challenges to European control. Between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries these regions belonged in theory to the Spanish Empire. In practice, however, the colonial government only gained a weak foothold over a few indigenous villages for brief periods, while most of the territory remained under the control of independent Indians. Threats to Spanish sovereign claims over these areas increased in the seventeenth

240   Borderlands of the Iberian World century, as they became one of the main theaters of protracted conflict that set the Iberian Empire against its European rivals for dominion of the Caribbean and the New World’s riches. In this sense, they typify borderlands where environmental conditions limited the impact of the technological and social toolbox that colonial powers normally used to cement their control, where multiple cultural traditions came into contact, and where different polities challenged each other’s hegemony. In Mosquitia and Darién, Spain’s European rivals created strong connections with local indigenous groups and established a few settlements. Several generations of scholars have examined these interactions and the regions’ role in the larger geopolitical conflicts among European powers over the Caribbean.2 Spanish attempts at military and religious conquest are also long-standing topics for all three areas, as are the several rebellions the Indians carried out in Darién and Talamanca.3 Indigenous trade networks, however, have remained a marginal topic. During the last two centuries of colonial rule, Central America’s economies grew dependent on contraband trade with Spain’s European rivals, especially England and the Netherlands. Most of these commercial networks connected the area’s core regions with island and mainland hubs in the Caribbean, such as Jamaica, Curaçao, and Black River in Mosquitia. In spite of the salience of these commercial links, only a few works have examined them in depth. Generally, the independent Indians that controlled large swaths of the lands the contraband goods had to cross have received marginal attention.4 Moreover, the studies that concentrate on the local Indians’ trading have favored two main subjects: the trafficking of enslaved Amerindians that the Miskitu Indians put in place with English support.5 And the exchange of manufactures for natural products that developed between European, non-Spanish traders and local populations, especially the Miskitu and the Tule in Darién.6 While these contributions are fundamental to understand native and European interactions in the colonial period, they do not capture the extent and complexity of the Indians’ trading activities, for the independent Indians maintained a more active trade among themselves than has been recognized. Trafficking in Amerindian captives, an extremely violent form of exchange, was not an exclusive Miskitu prerogative as it remained common among several other groups. Moreover, an active trading of goods among independent Indians emerged concurrently and sometimes coincidental with these coerced relations, not after the export of enslaved Amerindians declined, as others have suggested.7 Few studies examine the commercial role of the Spanish-organized indigenous settlements (reducciones) that the Crown struggled to create and maintain across these borderlands. These villages constituted important trading nodes. Tracing the connections between indios reducidos (Indians living in reducciones) and their independent neighbors, as well as among different groups of independent Indians, provides a new perspective on the indigenous exchanges with Europeans. From an indigenous-centered point of view, trade with Europeans appears as just one element, albeit an important one, within larger commercial webs. Moreover, all these connections had effects beyond the circulation of goods or the bondage of people, affecting the plans and actions of European powers in these lands.

Indigenous Trade in Caribbean Central America   241 The Spanish colonial government lacked effective control over these territories, but this did not stop it from carving Caribbean Central America into several administrative units whose names and sizes changed over time. These partitions responded to imperial expectations, rivalries among religious orders, and secular conflicts of jurisdiction, among other factors. Other scholars have already examined this administrative history.8 But it is important to emphasize that these colonial units did not reflect the realities of the indigenous groups that controlled the territories on the ground. Hence, to trace the full territorial extent of the networks that functioned throughout the region under analysis, it is necessary to abandon Spanish definitions and examine the large continuous territories that, in each one of these areas, remained beyond imperial reach and under the Indians’ control. They do not conform to the Spanish units but extended from the coast deeply inland to the indigenous reducciones that marked the unstable terminus of Spanish sovereignty. This border was never fixed, waxing and waning as the colonial government struggled to create new settlements while other towns disappeared, usually due to indigenous opposition. Turning from colonial administrative history to determine the polities and ethnicities of the groups that controlled these areas is a daunting task. Over time these groups became different from their pre-Columbian predecessors as a result of repeated European interference, the impact of Eurasian diseases, voluntary or coerced migration, and contact with other Indians. Some scholars have suggested that the Miskitu from Mosquitia and the Tule from Darién became distinct groups during the colonial period through a process of ethnogenesis that provided common ground to populations with disparate origins and traditions. However, no consensus exists on this topic, and the paucity of information has so far prevented similar analyses for the great majority of the communities that made these borderlands their home. Moreover, it is likely, that, as it happened in Tucumán, an ongoing “indianization” of individuals with European and African ancestry further complicated ethnic identifications.9 The imprecisions and contradictions that characterize European reports on the names and features of the Indians they encountered make the task of determining political and cultural units even harder.10 In spite of these challenges, scholars have already established approximate spatial distributions for indigenous languages in these regions during the colonial period.11 While the details for these distributions remain open for debate, their findings help to identify and organize the myriad names that appear in the sources. It is important to bear in mind, however, that languages are not equivalent to ethnic or political entities, and hence the names used here are not proper ethnonyms. The single exception are the Miskitu, whose lasting alliance with the English and systematic harassment of the Spanish not only spurred contemporaries to write page after page on them but also attracted systematic scholarly attention. Recent studies, therefore, have been able to examine in considerable depth both their ethnic identity and their political organization.12 By looking first at the commercial relations, both coerced and voluntary, that connected the numerous groups of independent Indians inhabiting Caribbean Central America, the examination of how these independent groups interacted with the Indians that

242   Borderlands of the Iberian World agreed to settle in Spanish-controlled reducciones becomes clearer. Considering then the active trade that certain groups, but not all of them, sustained with the many Europeans interested in their territories and their goods will lead the reader to the conclusions, which highlight some of the ways in which these networks shaped colonial and indigenous power in these areas.

Among Independent Indians In 1502 Columbus and his crew were the first Europeans to set foot on Central America’s Caribbean coast, during their fourth voyage. After this brief contact, however, Spanish attention moved away from the lands that would become Mosquitia and Talamanca. Conquistadores focused instead on the Pacific slopes and central highlands of current Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica, areas with larger autochthonous populations and more temperate climates.13 By the mid-seventeenth century colonial power in Mosquitia and Talamanca barely held to a few haciendas and the poorly-kept ports of Trujillo in Honduras and Matina in Costa Rica.14 In contrast, Darién did become a crucial area for Spanish expansion schemes during the early sixteenth century. It was here that the conquistadores founded their first mainland city in the Americas, Santa María de la Antigua del Darién, and where they organized many of the conquest expeditions heading to North, Central, and South America. But Darién’s salience was short lived. By the mid-1520s the Spanish started to move out of the region as a result of the local Indians’ demographic collapse, the destruction of its main city in 1524, and the opening of new settlement areas with larger indigenous populations in New Spain and Peru. Instead of Darién the Spanish favored the western and central sections of the Panamanian isthmus, where they founded two of the empire’s main commercial hubs, Panamá and Portobelo. By the mid-sixteenth century Darién had become little more than a colonial backwater with Spanish control shrinking to a few mining towns and haciendas.15 Largely sheltered from Spanish control, indigenous groups in Mosquitia, Talamanca, and Darién reorganized and reconstituted themselves. Most of the details about these changes are still unknown, as studies on how settlement patterns, livelihoods, and cultural practices were transformed remain scarce. In some cases, however, migrations of new indigenous groups or admixture with Afro-descendant populations had a significant impact on the configuration of native societies. The Miskitu Indians illustrate clearly these processes of ethnogenesis.16 The Miskitu as they are known today originated in the mid-seventeenth century from the merging of local Indians with enslaved Africans that had shipwrecked near the Cape Gracias a Dios and successfully escaped their captors. Scholars disagree, however, on whether the Indians at the Cape constituted a separate group from their neighbors before mixing with the Africans or became one as a result of this admixture.17 Recent scholarship has shown that the Africans’ arrival provoked significant tension within

Indigenous Trade in Caribbean Central America   243 the group and eventually led to a split into two subgroups. Contemporaries referred to the first one, dominated by mixed African Amerindian individuals, as Sambo (or Zambo) Miskitu. Individuals that considered themselves purely Amerindian dominated the other group, which contemporaries labeled “indios” (Indians) or Tawira (straight-haired) Miskitu.18 Differences between these two branches went beyond ancestry to include geographical segregation as well as diverging economic and political strategies. Nonetheless, Miskitu and non-Miskitu alike recognized the Sambo and the Tawira as part of a single group, which shared several cultural traits and belonged to a polity that the British baptized Mosquito Kingdom.19 In the late seventeenth century the Miskitu occupied a small area around Honduras’s Cape Gracias a Dios. During the eighteenth century, however, their territory expanded rapidly. By the 1760s they had spread out from their original area—around Cape Gracias a Dios—toward the northwest to the Black River (Honduras), and southward as far as the Escondido River (Nicaragua). Although the Sambo and Tawira relative locations changed over time, the former consistently occupied the north and northeastern sections of their territory, while the later congregated in its southern areas. The region under direct Miskitu control was known as Mosquitia or the Mosquito Shore.20 Altogether the Miskitu Indians came to dominate a significant portion of Central America’s Caribbean coast.21 Allied with the English during most of the colonial period, the Miskitu became one of the most powerful indigenous groups in the Americas. We know considerably less about the different groups that inhabited Mosquitia’s inland areas, located between the coastal Miskitu and the areas of Spanish settlement in southwestern Honduras and western Nicaragua. From north to south, these groups included the Pech (or Paya), Twahka (or Sumu), Panamahka (or Matagalpa), Tungla, Ulwa, Kukra, and Rama.22 The Miskitu gained significant influence over all of them and over some of the neighboring Spanish villages and reducciones. Small settlements where mixed, Afro-descendant and European populations coexisted also emerged, especially in the areas where British settlers concentrated. In the case of Talamanca, it is not known how the local indigenous communities reconfigured throughout the colonial period. It is clear, however, that no single group there gained a level of dominance similar to that of the Miskitu. By the early seventeenth century the region’s main groups from northeast to southwest included the Cabécar, Bribri (or Blanco), Teribe (or Terbi), Dorasque, Chánguina, and Ngöbe (or Guaymí).23 Several of these groups also interacted frequently with Indians from the Pacific slope, especially the Boruca from southwestern Costa Rica. In Darién, the formerly dominant Cueva Indians had practically disappeared by the time Spanish presence abated in the 1520s. Soon other Indians began to repopulate the area. Starting in the seventeenth century, the Tule Indians (also known as Kuna) became the most important of them. Scholars do not agree on their origin. Some argue that they descended directly from one of the groups the Spaniards had first encountered there in the sixteenth century. Others consider that they arrived to Darién in the seventeenth century, migrating from the area around the Atrato River (in the isthmus’ southeastern extreme). And yet others contend that the Tule emerged out of the blend of disparate

244   Borderlands of the Iberian World indigenous communities that already inhabited Darién in the sixteenth century but became a unified group in the seventeenth century. In any case, Spanish documents mention the Tule for the first time in 1611.24 These Indians were not alone in Darién. Their neighbors included a few Spanish settlers, freed and enslaved Afro-descendants, small groups of Cueva and Páparo Indians, and, later in the seventeenth century, another indigenous group migrating northward from the Atrato region, the Emberá (or Chocó).25 All of these Indians organized in dispersed communities, inhabiting small, sometimes temporary settlements located along the numerous rivers that crisscrossed the region. They relied on a combination of farming, hunting, fishing, and gathering. Trade was also important. They made their living in regions covered by dense tropical forests, where heavy rains and extreme humidity were common for several months of the year. These environmental and demographic conditions had been instrumental in discouraging Spanish colonization and continued to hinder colonial control in the following centuries. Life in these places, as in several areas of central Brazil, was violent and brutal, with European raids wreaking havoc often, independent Indians attacking each other or burning reducciones to the ground, and settled Indians aggressively rebelling.26 Spanish sources are filled with accounts of this violence.27 And yet, raids and revolts could foster exchanges, some of them coerced and others peaceful. The taking of captives is the form of coercive exchange best documented in Caribbean Central America. The Miskitu gained a particularly bad reputation in this regard, due to the expansive system of slaving raids they put in place with English encouragement. Multiple scholars have examined the expeditions they organized to capture Amerindians and non-indigenous people to sell as slaves in Jamaica, Curaçao, and Belize, and the terror that the sight of Miskitu canoes or on-foot expeditions put in their intended victims’ hearts.28 Between 1693 and 1841 the Miskitu seized tens of thousands of people from their Pech, Ulwa, Kukra, and Rama neighbors, as well as from groups farther away in Yucatán to the north and Talamanca and Bocas del Toro (Panamá) to the south.29 They also captured European, Afro-descendant, and indigenous individuals from villages and haciendas under Spanish control.30 This violent trafficking was crucial for strengthening the compact between Miskitu raiders and English privateers and traders. It also fostered alliances with other Indians, as the Miskitu recruited the Twahka from Mosquitia and the Teribe from Talamanca to join them in these incursions.31 In other New World borderlands, colonials established similar networks for trafficking enslaved Amerindians across large areas and in great numbers. As Reséndez explains, the involvement of local groups as collaborators or even independent slavers was essential to secure success.32 In most of these regions, however, the new long-distance networks did not supersede older forms of Indian-on-Indian aggression. In Caribbean Central America, the taking of war captives occurred during pre-Columbian times, and different groups in Talamanca, Darién, and Mosquitia continued to engage in it after the Spanish invasion.33 There are no detailed studies on what happened to these captives once taken.34 According to Spanish sources, their captors enslaved them, sacrificed them during chiefs’

Indigenous Trade in Caribbean Central America   245 funerals and other ceremonies, or exchanged them with neighboring groups for similar purposes.35 In Darién, the Tule Indians often took captives when attacking neighboring Indians and Spanish villages. Some reports claimed that they would sell their prisoners, but it remains unclear to whom, and what the Indians did with the captives they failed to trade.36 In Talamanca, Indians could use captives to reward their warriors, as did the Boruca in 1619 with the Aoyaque Indians they took after a successful attack.37 Some Indians used slaves to foster alliances. For example, in 1620 Talamancan Indians took several captives after their attack against the reducción of Hamea and handed them over to other neighboring Indians hoping that the gift would convince them to join in a coalition.38 As the previous example indicates, slaving raids brought independent and reduced Indians into frequent interaction. Sometimes the former were attacked, taken, and enslaved.39 Other times reduced Indians themselves demanded slaves. For instance, in 1610 a missionary working in Talamanca reported that Indians settled in their missions obtained from independent ones, among other items, “slaves, Indian [men?] or women, that they have captured in war.” According to the missionary, some of these captives were sacrificed. The priest explained, however, that the slaves were no longer traded, since colonial authorities would not allow it.40 In sum, evidence from across Caribbean Central America demonstrates that taking captives was not a Miskitu prerogative. It also shows that alongside Miskitu export-oriented slaving, local indigenous groups used and traded captives locally. The hostility and extreme violence involved in these mutual attacks did not preclude other, more pacific interactions from arising among the same groups. For example, in 1699 a European pirate that had lived among the Miskitu explained that the Chato Indians (probably Twahka), met to trade with the Miskitu several times a year in a small island in the Coco River. Once the fair was over, however, they turned to robbing, killing, and attacking each other until the time for a new fair arrived.41 Scholars have identified a similar combination of coerced and voluntary exchanges among indigenous groups in the borderlands of North and South America, where neighboring groups both raided and traded with each other on a regular basis.42 Mutual hostilities aside, the Miskitu did gain the upper hand in the region, subordinating several of the European and indigenous communities that dwelled in Mosquitia and beyond. These unequal relations were expressed in a particular form of exchange: tribute exaction. The Miskitu started to demand this payment systematically in 1713, as the English withdrew their support for slaving raids that targeted Spanish towns and haciendas. In response, the Miskitu intensified their attacks against certain groups of independent Indians and at the same time expanded and intensified the exaction of tribute in natural and locally manufactured goods from other groups. Hence, the Pech and Twahka became tributary to the Sambo Miskitu, while Tawira Miskitu demanded payment from the Ulwa and other southern communities.43 In the early nineteenth century the Ngöbe from southeastern Talamanca (Bocas del Toro) and a few Spanish towns like Matina and San Juan del Norte (or Greytown) were also tributary to the Miskitu.44 It is not clear when and how this system disappeared, but in the 1860s the Rama, Kukra, Ulwa, Tungla, and Pech still paid the Miskitu.45

246   Borderlands of the Iberian World Along with tribute, several of these same Indians exchanged goods with the Miskitu, including the Pech, Twahka, Tungla, Panamahka, Kukra, and Ulwa.46 While the information is less conclusive, it seems that in the early nineteenth century the Miskitu also traded on occasion with Indians from Talamanca, most likely Cabécar, when the former visited the port of Matina to obtain cacao from Spanish colonials.47 Besides these contacts with the Cabécar, there exists no additional evidence that the Miskitu exacted tribute or sustained trade with indigenous groups from Talamanca or Darién. Talamancan Indians, however, did develop active exchanges among themselves. For example, in 1697 a missionary reported to the Spanish King that the Indians of the Island of Tójar (current Island of Colón in Panamá), the Teribe, the Chánguina, the Dorasque, and the Urinama (Cabécar) traded frequently with each other.48 Commerce in Mosquitia and Talamanca included a wide variety of items produced or gathered from both the indigenous and colonial economies: natural goods like sarsaparilla, carey, and cacao; animals such as dogs, swine, and cattle; local manufactures like necklaces, hammocks, boats, waistbands, fabric, cotton lines, and beads; and, finally, European goods obtained from the English, the Dutch or the Spanish, such as firearms, axes, machetes, knives, and other iron tools. These goods the Indians could consume locally or use to trade further with other indigenous groups or with colonial vassals.49 It is important to note that the links between different groups of independent Indians went beyond trade, voluntary or coerced. Even though the sources are sketchy on the topic, there is evidence that a variety of political and social ties also bonded some of these groups together in Mosquitia, Talamanca, and Darién.50 Relationships included temporary alliances, political subordination to the Miskitu, as well as, in a few cases, sharing ritual celebrations. Exchanges also linked independent Indians with the Indians that lived in villages under Spanish control.

Trade in the Reducciones By the end of the sixteenth century the Spanish controlled effectively most of Central America’s Pacific slope and highlands. In contrast, the Caribbean side, which amounted to almost two-thirds of the territory, remained beyond the Crown’s effective reach. Interest in these lands resurfaced often, and the Spanish drew up repeated plans for exploration and conquest in response to the core regions’ need for additional laborers, the spread of tales about rich mines, and their European enemies’ repeated attempts to gain a foothold there. Most of these plans never materialized or ended in failure due to indigenous resistance, lack of resources, and challenging geographic and weather conditions. Facing similar obstacles for its territorial expansion across the Americas, in 1573 the Crown passed the “Ordenanzas de descubrimientos, nueva población y pacificación de las Indias.” This decree altered Spain’s main conquest strategy from armed military

Indigenous Trade in Caribbean Central America   247 campaigns to negotiated settlement and religious conversion under the care of Catholic missionaries.51 For the next 250 years, priests from a variety of religious orders spread across the Spanish American borderlands, including Caribbean Central America, attempting to create settled towns under colonial auspices in territories that independent Indians controlled de facto. While Spanish officials termed this policy “pacification” in opposition to the supposedly more violent “conquest,” the use of force did not disappear. Not only did the missionaries resort to armed escorts frequently, the local colonial elites or the provincial or central authorities also organized military expeditions.52 Several Catholic orders attempted to penetrate Mosquitia, Talamanca, and Darién, including Augustinians, Capuchins, Dominicans, Mercedarians, Jesuits, Observant and Recollect Franciscans, and secular priests. In Mosquitia, friars had brief contact with the coastal Miskitu in the 1620s, but afterward they focused on the region’s inland populations, including the Twahka and Pech in the Olancho and Agalta valleys (Honduran Mosquitia), and the Twahka, Panamahka, and Ulwa of Nicaragua’s central highlands.53 In the late eighteenth century the missionaries made another short-lived and unsuccessful attempt at converting the Miskitu. In Talamanca, Catholic priests worked among the northwestern Cabécar Indians and among the Teribe, Chánguina and Ngöbe located in the region’s southeastern section. Missionaries also targeted Indians living on the Pacific slope of southwestern Costa Rica and northeastern Panamá, areas that bordered Talamanca. In Darién, missions reached the Tule Indians located both in the central area and around the Gulf of Urabá to the northeast.54 Only in northwestern Mosquitia rival colonial powers fostered similar, if considerably more limited evangelizing efforts. Starting in the second half of the eighteenth century, English Protestant missionaries targeted the Sambo Miskitu’s higher political ranks along with the local free Afrodescendant population. In this sense, the missionaries’ efforts had a limited impact.55 The Catholic missionaries’ most common strategy consisted in concentrating the Indians into reducciones, towns under their supervision where the reduced Indians devoted themselves to agriculture and other economic activities, while learning the basics of Spanish culture and Catholicism. Priests founded several of these villages across Caribbean Central America, but the results of their efforts did not meet missionary and imperial ambitions. Most reducciones lasted only a few years or decades, as their Indians slowly fled or violently rebelled. Missions in different areas of Brazil were similarly unstable.56 By the end of the colonial period, Spanish control in Central America had barely expanded from its late sixteenth-century limits. While these villages did not serve as the expansion tool the Spanish expected, they did become a familiar element in these areas and fostered new political and economic strategies among the locals. In fact, on occasion the Indians could take the lead in settling into existing reducciones or promoting the creation of new ones, as a way to deal with intra- or inter-group conflicts.57 Studies on the Mosquitia, Talamanca and Darién have rarely considered the relations between reduced and independent Indians; however, our initial assessment shows that these settlements were an important node in the local exchange networks.

248   Borderlands of the Iberian World As happened among independent Indians, hostility and violence were widespread in relations between independent and reduced Indians, and reducciones in Mosquitia, Talamanca, and Darién were attacked repeatedly, their inhabitants captured or killed, and their houses burned to the ground. Ironically, in some cases it was precisely the threat of violence that fostered other, more peaceful interactions.58 In 1765 a Spanish official reported that independent Indians from Talamanca communicated frequently with those of the reducciones of Boruca, Térraba, and Atirro. While some of these interactions derived from family connections, other reduced Indians received the outsiders peacefully in an effort to prevent them from entering “in a war-like attitude and burning the churches and houses they keep, or taking with them several families as they had tried to do in previous years.”59 Other peaceful interactions were also common. There is abundant evidence that reduced and independent Indians cooperated among one another, to facilitate the former’s escape from the missions, to advance the latter’s settlement in the villages or to  create formal alliances.60 In some cases, relations were intense and frequent. For instance, in 1739 a missionary reported that the reduced Pech “are close to the mountains, close to their relatives, they leave and stay there and return whenever they want.”61 Almost a century before, in 1649, another missionary expressed the same complaint about the Quepo, Dorasque, and Ngöbe Indians from Talamanca.62 The same happened in Mosquitia in 1814, when a Spanish official complained that the independent Ulwa lived “intermingled with the Christian [reduced] ones.” In the reducción of Olama, the Indians were not only intermixed but also “in an intimate alliance, inviting each other to their celebrations and weddings.”63 Trade was an important component in the reduced-independent Indians’ relations. In early seventeenth-century Talamanca, Indians from recently created mission settlements provided independent ones with tamed tapirs and wild pigs, resins, and beads. In exchange they received slaves, cotton clothing, and gold.64 More than a century later, in the late eighteenth century, missionaries had again founded reducciones in Talamanca, whose Indians exchanged their manufactures both with independent Indians and other Spanish subjects.65 Also, different independent groups traded with the Indians of Boruca, a reducción located on the Pacific side.66 The exchange of goods was also important in Mosquitia, with the Ulwa and Kukra visiting on a regular basis the reducciones located in Matagalpa, Boaco, and Chontales, where they traded English manufactures for a variety of natural products.67 In 1740s Darién, independent Tule approached reduced ones to obtain Spanish-provided manufactures, especially iron tools like machetes and axes. These Indians also visited other Spanish non-indigenous settlements to obtain the same articles.68 In all three regions European manufactures became important commodities in the networks that linked the Indians, independent and reduced, among themselves. While missionaries supplied some of these items as gifts to attract neophytes, starting in the  seventeenth century British, French, and Dutch traders became their main providers.

Indigenous Trade in Caribbean Central America   249

Atlantic Connections: Trading with the European Foreigners Spanish subjects were hardly the only foreigners interested in these lands. Since the mid-sixteenth century, European wars and the New World’s treasures had encouraged French, English, and Dutch privateers and interlopers to attack Spanish ships, ports, and towns in the Americas. In the mid-seventeenth century, Spain’s enemies finally succeeded in controlling a few Caribbean islands. These included the Dutch colony of Curaçao which became a major commercial hub, as did British-controlled Jamaica.69 The British also founded settlements on the Central American mainland like Belize and Black River (Nicaragua).70 Unlike the Spanish, the main goal of the other European powers (if not always of the settlers that established themselves in those lands) was not territorial control. Instead, they focused on extracting the areas’ natural products and on fostering contraband trade with Spanish core areas.71 They also sought to secure assistance from local populations. The Spanish, who had intended to monopolize all of its colonies’ commerce, considered these exchanges illegal. Other Europeans and the local Indians did not share these qualms, and in fact many independent Indians took the opportunity to ally themselves with these foreigners. The Miskitu and the Tule proved the most successful at these dealings. The Miskitu dominance over the Central American Caribbean coast responded in no small measure to their long-lasting alliance with the English, who first contacted them in the 1620s during the latter’s failed attempt to settle in a group of islands off Cape Gracias a Dios. Although these Indians also interacted with French and Dutch privateers, in time they established a preferential collaboration with English settlers and traders. The British formalized their interests in Mosquitia in 1749, when they created a superintendency in the area. The Miskitu, however, retained their political autonomy. Except for a short span between 1787 and 1800, British influence in the region remained unabated up to the mid1890s when the independent Nicaraguan state forcibly asserted control over the area.72 External pressure and Miskitu initiative also brought about changes in the Indians’ political organization. One of them was the gradual emergence of four distinct leadership positions under the titles of king, governor, general, and admiral. In 1687 English administrators gave an official commission to a Miskitu leader, whom the Europeans recognized as the group’s king. In spite of the supreme authority that the word “king” conveys, the Miskitu had a decentralized system that the English recognized gradually by granting additional commissions for the general, the governor, and the admiral.73 These officials had jurisdiction over separate geographical areas and remained largely independent from each other. In 1757 the British Superintendent of the Mosquito Shore, Robert Hodgson, explained the relations between the first three leaders (the fourth position had only recently emerged): “The power of these three important men (which

250   Borderlands of the Iberian World is hereditary) is about the same, and there is only a slight difference in favor of the King, whom the whites support a little bit because of his title.”74 The four-leader structure recognized the internal differences between Sambo and Tawira Miskitu, for the king and the general were always Sambo, while the Tawira held the governorship and the admiralship.75 Alongside these top officials, the British also granted commissions—as captains, generals, major generals, and colonels—to several lesser chiefs. By the late eighteenth century, the Miskitu leaders’ legitimacy depended, at least in part, on their possession of a British commission.76 This, however, did not mean that the indigenous leaders were mere British puppets or that their powers derived solely from their external connection, as some scholars have argued.77 There is abundant evidence that local ideas of authority also shaped political structures.78 The British could not appoint leaders at will. Instead, the four regional leaders followed a hereditary succession system that had been in place since before contact with the foreigners. It was the regional leaders who directed British officials as to which men should receive new commissions. Moreover, the minor leaders’ authority was based on local factors such as the size of their communities, their talents as war leaders, or their role as powerful ritual specialists.79 The British had even less influence over other Miskitu political institutions, such as the elders’ customary assemblies or juntas and the ritual specialists known as sukyas.80 Commercial exchanges constituted an essential component of the Miskitu-English relationship. In 1711 Nicaragua’s Bishop explained that the English provided the Indians: “with guns, bullets and gunpowder, receiving in payment the tortoiseshell they fish and the Indians they capture.”81 As the previous quote indicates, the two most important commodities the English sought from their allies were Amerindian slaves and hawksbill turtle shells (carey). The raiding system described above fed European demand for slaves in Jamaica, Belize, and other areas. In the case of carey, there is a disagreement as to whether or not the Miskitu used the shell before the English arrived.82 But it is clear that European demand prompted the Indians to intensify their fishing expeditions, which could take them as far south as Costa Rica and Panamá. These travels fostered the Miskitu territorial expansion.83 Along with carey and captives, the Miskitu also exchanged their own manufactures (cotton and silk grass hammocks and blankets, and canoes), as well as natural products like cacao, sarsaparilla, honey, fresh meat, parrots, vanilla, and animal skins. In return they obtained firearms, gunpowder, ammunition, and iron tools (axes, machetes, spears, knives, needles, hooks, pots), along with great variety of other goods including rum, coarse and fine linens, hats, handkerchiefs, and flour.84 In Mosquitia, other Indians also traded directly with the English: the Twahka, Pamamahka, Ulwa, and Rama. They obtained in exchange for natural products and crafts, goods like ammunition, war supplies, axes, machetes, spears, and arrows. Some of these Indians also traded directly with Spanish villages or hired themselves as laborers for the British in their extractive activities.85 A variety of indigenous groups from Mosquitia to Darién were willing to facilitate English contraband with inland Spanish settlements.86 The Miskitu did not engage in these activities, limiting themselves to taxing or controlling this trade, or to hinder it

Indigenous Trade in Caribbean Central America   251 when it failed to serve their interests.87 Other groups did not share Miskitu reservations. Hence, the Ulwa served as guides, carriers, river sailors, and middlemen between the British traders and the Spanish settlements from Chontales and Matagalpa to Bluefields.88 In the late 1770s an Indian named Huil, lieutenant to an important Ulwa leader, traveled frequently to Bluefields to meet with an English captain and help him transport his merchandise inland by canoe.89 Also, villages of reduced Ulwa Indians, such as Olama Real, Santa Cruz, and Acoyapa, served as meeting points where the independent Ulwa or the English sold manufactures to Spanish settlers.90 North of the Ulwa area, between Chontales and Black River, other indigenous groups served as middlemen as well: “the Twahka between the Olancho Valley and the north coast, the Panamahka between the Segovia highlands and Cape Gracias, and the Pech [. . .] between Olancho and Black River.” In some of these areas, Spanish settlers also played the role of commercial intermediaries.91 Studies of Talamanca’s interactions with external actors during this period have focused almost exclusively on the disrupting impacts of Miskitu slaving raids. There exists evidence that connections with Europeans went beyond these coerced relations, however, as the Indians also engaged in trade. For example, in 1797 a friar complained that the Cabécar no longer visited their relatives’ reducciones to obtain gifts from the friars, preferring to visit Matina. There they procured salt, dogs, and arrows, among other items, in exchange for their mastate (fabric made out of tree bark), bags, and grains. Even though the friar did not indicate the origin of this merchandise, it is likely that the Indians were trading directly with the English, since Matina was a major hub for their contraband. The same friar reported that the Teribe had been slowly moving to the coastal areas, in an effort to gain easier access to the English that frequently visited Bocas del Toro (southeastern Talamanca) to fish carey. From them, the Teribe obtained “print fabric, powder compacts, vests, leather jackets, mirrors, jars, china cups, swords, hats, and other trinkets.” Their relations were so good that the friar despaired because the Teribe were “very in love with the English.”92 In spite of these connections, there exists no evidence that the Cabécar, the Teribe or other Indians from Talamanca maintained political or social relations with the foreigners. The other region where the Indians built strong connections with European powers was Darién. In contrast with the Miskitu, the Tule from Darién maintained longstanding relations not just with the English, but also with the Scots, the French, the Dutch and, importantly, even the Spanish. In fact, the latter relied on a family of mixed Spanish and Tule ancestry, the Carrisoli, to create a successful compact with a fraction of the Tule that lasted from the 1630s to the 1720s. However, other Tule leaders sought alliances with the privateers, settlers, and traders whose activities had re-ignited Spain’s interest in the area in the first place.93 Interactions between the Tule and Spain’s European rivals started since the late sixteenth century, as Darién became an area of widespread piracy. By 1700 the golden age of piracy was over, but Spain’s enemies remained interested in the region. Between 1698 and 1700 a Scottish company attempted to create a colony in the area, and some Tule communities were willing to trade with the foreigners. After the Spanish definitely expelled the Scots in 1700, French ex-buccaneers began gradually settling in

252   Borderlands of the Iberian World the area. Tule relations with the French were initially very friendly, but they began to turn sour in the 1740s, when the French began planting cacao, sought an alliance with Spain, and started to introduce enslaved Africans against the Tule Indians’ will. In 1757–1758 the Tule finally rebelled and expelled the settlers. After this episode, British traders—present in the area since the early eighteenth century—gained a new salience as Tule’s most important business partners, a role they retained at least until the early nineteenth century.94 Dutch traders, although less influential than the English, often visited Darién.95 It is important to note that none of the Tule’s European allies and trade partners established long-lasting settlements in the area. That is, the Tule retained greater territorial control than the Miskitu. As happened with the Miskitu, sustained contact with outsiders led to political changes among the Tule. In a recent study historian Ignacio Gallup-Diaz argues that the main transformation they underwent was the emergence of caciques or chiefs, who did not hold coercive powers but served as mediators between their communities and the multi-layered foreign interests that affected Darién at the time. Before the seventeenth century no such leaders had existed, and Tule communities organized exclusively around ritual specialists known as neles. The colonial-period caciques did not replace the neles but instead added another level of leadership. Neither did the caciques advance political centralization, as the Tule remained fragmented into a myriad of small polities. Nonetheless, according to Gallup-Diaz these chiefs’ ability to negotiate with outsiders was key for securing Tule autonomy.96 Many authors have noted the ongoing commercial relations between the Tule and the varied foreigners interested in crossing or settling on their territories. Since the late seventeenth century the constant flow of privateers of several nationalities, who were very willing to trade with the Indians, convinced some Tule groups to populate the coastal lands on Darién’s north coast and around the Gulf of Urabá.97 These relations proved so profitable, that even the Indians allied with the Spanish continued trading with the French, Dutch, and English.98 In 1743, Panamá’s governor explained that several Tule groups around the Gulf of Urabá were “at peace with the Spanish, but still traded with the English,” who provided them with arms and trained them in their use.99 These Indians’ main trading goods were carey, gold and, after the 1750s, cacao from the plantations they had taken over from the French. They also traded foodstuffs such as plantains, swine, and fowl. In return they received the same goods as did other Indians along the coasts: tools, fabric, firearms, as well as beads, mirrors, liquor, combs, needles, hooks, among others.100 There exists no indication that the Emberá Indians dealt directly with these foreigners. However, both the Tule and the Emberá exchanged foodstuff with the Spanish in Panamá City. The Tule also traded cacao in the major colonial port of Cartagena (current Colombia) for knives, machetes, and other goods.101 Besides the exchange of goods, Tule Indians also provided services to the foreigners, serving as carriers, guides, and mercenaries, as well as in repairing ships.102 According to a missionary writing in the 1740s, “in all of this the Indians help them [the English], that is in extracting wood, and in carrying the goods, and also in killing Spanish.”103

Indigenous Trade in Caribbean Central America   253 Unlike the case of Mosquitia, scholarship on Darién has paid no attention to the Tule Indians’ role as middlemen in the British contraband trade with Spanish inland settlements. Nonetheless, there exists evidence that they could take on that task.104 For example, in a report from 1774 a Spanish official explained that these Indians often visited the security post (vigía) the Spanish kept in Río Sucio in Citará (Chocó, current Colombia). The Indians brought cacao, gunpowder, and “goods from the foreigners,” which they exchanged with the local Spanish colonials. Apparently, a considerable number of people attended that fair.105 The active and widespread trade did not stop after the Spanish colonies gained independence from Spain around the 1820s. A few scholars have tried to trace these networks into the first nineteenth-century decades.106 Some of them remained in place into the late nineteenth and even the early twentieth century. Moreover, the Indians also integrated new commercial partners along the way.107 During the 1840s the Tule took advantage of the great numbers of passengers crossing the isthmus en route to the California mines. One of these travelers wrote that the Tule offered provisions like cacao and bananas, as well as parrots, in exchange for cotton fabric, wool, and American coins.108 That is, in the mid-nineteenth century the Tule remained able and willing to involve themselves in new trading ventures. To summarize, exchanges between the different groups that came together in these borderlands were both pacific and extremely violent. The taking of captives was an example of the latter, and the Miskitu owed a significant part of their power to the expansive system of capture and sale of enslaved individuals that they developed with enthusiastic English support. While never reaching the scale of the Miskitu nor their access to international markets, many other indigenous groups resorted to seizing other Indians to use or trade locally as slaves. This included some reduced Indians, whom were often taken captive but on occasion also sought to obtain slaves for their own use. As the previous point indicates, accepting Spanish hegemony did not prevent Indians settled in reducciones from engaging with their independent neighbors. Similarly, violence did not prevent, and on occasion even fostered, more peaceful trading. Trade in a variety of goods connected independent and reduced Indians, as well as independent Indians among themselves and with European traders, privateers, and settlers. In most cases these exchanges connected groups that were not subordinate to each other. However, in Mosquitia the majority of the groups did find themselves under some degree of Miskitu control, and hence engaged not only in barter trade but also in tribute payment. The items that changed hands within these networks had different origins: foodstuffs and manufactures the Indians produced directly as well as products they had obtained from other Indians or from Europeans like Spanish missionaries and non-Spanish settlers and traders. The image that emerges from this analysis is not that of isolated groups terrorized by Miskitu incursions (although terrorize the Miskitu did) or devoted single-mindedly to oppose the Spanish. Rather, we witness communities that engaged in constant interactions with other groups, indigenous and otherwise, and managed to gain some control over their material lives.

254   Borderlands of the Iberian World Some of the exchanges reviewed were part of the larger webs of contraband that linked non-Spanish European traders with mainland Spanish settlers in Central America. In fact, local independent Indians served as crucial facilitators for a good portion of this trading. Thus, contrary to common interpretations, the Indians’ sustained dealings with Spain’s European enemies did not lead them to sever all ties with the Iberian colonial world. However, most of the Indians’ interactions with the Spanish colonial regime were short and did not lead to subordination, a situation hardly satisfactory for Iberian officials who viewed settled life in reducciones and acknowledgment of royal authority as the only acceptable way forward for indigenous populations. The trading networks examined affected reducciones in other ways. For one thing, they diminished the reducciones’ appeal for local Indians by transforming them into one of several sources, and usually not the most important one, for valued European goods. For another thing, these dynamics could influence when missions succeeded or failed. At times, increased Miskitu slaving raids pushed numerous Indians to search for security in new reducciones or return to old ones. At other times, new possibilities for trade with Europeans could take reduced Indians away from their settlements temporarily or even permanently. Finally, the alliances that this commerce helped cement, be they between Europeans and Indians or among different indigenous groups, increased the local communities’ ability to play different powers off each other in their efforts to remain beyond Spanish control.

Notes Archives AGI: Archivo General de Indias, Seville (Spain). ANCR: Archivo Nacional de Costa Rica, San José (Costa Rica) 1. Karl H. Offen, “The Miskitu Kingdom: Landscape and the Emergence of a Miskitu Ethnic Identity, Northeastern Nicaragua and Honduras, 1600–1800” (PhD diss., University of Texas, 1999), 196. 2. Troy  S.  Floyd, The Anglo-Spanish Struggle for Mosquitia (Albuquerque: UNM, 1967); Robert A. Naylor, Penny Ante Imperialism: The Mosquito Shore and the Bay of Honduras, 1600–1914. A Case Study in British Informal Empire (Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1989); Alejandro Salomón Sagastume  F., “Historia de una frontera olvidada. Establecimientos ingleses en Honduras,” in Estudios (nuevos y viejos) sobre la frontera, ed. Salvador Bernabéu Albert and Francisco de Solano (Madrid: ­Centro de Estudios Históricos del-CSIC, 1991); Christopher Storrs, “Disaster at Darien (1698–1700)? The Persistence of Spanish Imperial Power on the Eve of the Demise of the Spanish Habsburgs,” European History Quarterly 29, no. 1 (1999): 5–38. Reina Torres de Araúz, “Nuevo Edimburgo del Darién. Los cunas: anfitriones de los escoceses,” Lotería 314–316 (1982): 134–156. 3. William Sorsby, “Spanish Colonization of the Mosquito Coast, 1787–1800,” Revista de Historia de América 73–74 (1972): 145–153; Ethel García Buchard, “Evangelizar a los indios

Indigenous Trade in Caribbean Central America   255 gentiles de la frontera de Honduras: una ardua tarea (Siglos XVII–XIX)”Intercambio 1, no. 1 (2002): n.p.; Alfredo Castillero, Conquista, evangelización y resistencia, ¿triunfo o fracaso de la política indigenista? (Panamá: Colección Ricardo Miró, 1995); María del Carmen Mena García, El oro del Darién. Entradas y cabalgatas en la conquista de Tierra Firme (1509–1526) (Seville: CSIC; Centro de Estudios Andaluces, 2011); Joaquín García Casares, Historia del Darién: cuevas, cunas, españoles, afros, presencia y actualidad de los chocoes (Panamá: Editorial Universitaria Carlos Manuel Gasteazoro, 2008); Juan Carlos Solórzano Fonseca, “Indígenas insumisos, frailes y soldados: Talamanca y Guatuso, 1660–1821,” Anuario de Estudios Centroamericanos 23, no. 2 (1997): 143–197; Juan Carlos Solórzano Fonseca, “Rebeliones y sublevaciones de los indígenas contra la dominación española en las áreas periféricas de Costa Rica (de 1502 a 1710),” Anuario de Estudios Centroamericanos 22, no. 1 (1996): 125–147; Mario Humberto Ruz, “Melodías para el tigre. Pablo de Rebullida y los indios de Talamanca, 1694–1709,” Revista de Historia 23 (1991): 59–105; Ignacio Gallup–Diaz, “ ‘Haven’t We Come to Kill the Spaniards?’ The Tule Upheaval in Eastern Panama, 1727–1728,” Colonial Latin American Review 10, no. 2 (2001): 251–171. 4. Barbara Potthast-Jutkeit, “Centroamérica y el contrabando por la Costa de Mosquitos en el siglo XVIII,” Mesoamérica 19, no. 36 (1998): 449–516; Juan Carlos Solórzano Fonseca, “El comercio de Costa Rica durante el declive del comercio español y el desarrollo del contrabando inglés: Periodo 1690–1750,” Anuario de Estudios Centroamericanos 20, no. 2 (1994): 71–119; María Eugenia Brenes Castillo, “Matina, bastión del contrabando en Costa Rica,” Anuario de Estudios Centroamericanos 4 (1978): 393–450; Miles Wortman, Gobierno y sociedad en Centroamérica, 1680–1840 (San José: EDUCA-BCIE, 1991), 146–148, 209–212; Murdo  J. MacLeod, Historia socioeconómica de la América Central española, 1520–1720 (Guatemala: Editorial Piedra Santa, 1990), 294–314. Several studies focusing on borderlands history make passing references to indigenous trade without analyzing it. 5. Mary W. Helms, “Miskito Slaving and Culture Contact: Ethnicity and Opportunity in an Expanding Population,” Journal of Anthropological Research 39, no. 2 (1983): 179–197. Offen, “The Miskitu Kingdom,” 318–335 offers the most detailed analysis. 6. Michael  D.  Olien, “After the Indian Slave Trade: Cross-Cultural Trade in the Western Caribbean Rimland, 1816–1820,” Journal of Anthropological Research 44, no. 1 (1988): 41–66; Offen, “The Miskitu Kingdom,” 310–317, 336–342; Germán Romero Vargas, Las sociedades del Atlántico de Nicaragua en los siglos XVII y XVIII (Managua: Fondo de Promoción Cultural-Banic, 1995), 146–155; Carl Henrik Langebaek, “Cuna Long Distance Journeys: The Result of Colonial Interaction,” Ethnology 30, no. 4 (1991): 371–380. 7. See: Olien, “After the Indian Slave Trade,” 43. 8. García Casares, Historia del Darién; Offen, “The Miskitu Kingdom,” 100–103; Ricardo Fernández Guardia, “Reseña Histórica de Talamanca,” in El descubrimiento y la conquista (San José: Imprenta Nacional, 1976), 147–183. 9. See Christophe Giudicelli, “Indigenous autonomy and the blurring of Spanish sovereignty in the Calchaquí Valley, Sixteenth to Seventeenth Century,” in The Oxford Handbook of Borderlands of the Iberian World, ed. Danna A. Levin Rojo and Cynthia Radding (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019). 10. Christophe Giudicelli analyzes this problem for Nueva Vizcaya and Tucumán in “Hétéronomie et classifications coloniales. La construction des «nations» indiennes aux confins de l’Amérique espagnole (XVI–XVIIe siècle),” Nuevo Mundo. Mundos Nuevos (2010), accessed 13 July 2016, https://nuevomundo.revues.org/59411#article-59411. 11. García Casares, Historia del Darién; Offen, “The Miskitu Kingdom”; Adolfo Constenla Umaña and Eugenia Ibarra Rojas, “Mapa de la distribución territorial aproximada de las

256   Borderlands of the Iberian World lenguas indígenas habladas en Costa Rica y en sectores colindantes de Nicaragua y de Panamá en el siglo XVI,” Estudios de Lingüística Chibcha 28 (2009): 109–112. 12. Offen, “The Miskitu Kingdom,” and “The Sambo and Tawira Miskitu: The Colonial Origins and Geography of Intra-Miskitu Differentiation in Eastern Nicaragua and Honduras,” Ethnohistory 49, no. 2 (2002): 319–372. 13. Offen, “The Miskitu Kingdom,” 98–103; Romero Vargas, Las sociedades del Atlántico, 19–22; Sagastume, “Historia de una frontera olvidada,” 122; Juan Carlos Solórzano Fonseca and Claudia Quirós Vargas, Costa Rica en el siglo XVI: descubrimiento, exploración y conquista (San José: Editorial UCR, 2014), 178–233; Giselle Marín Araya, “La población de Bocas del Toro y la comarca Ngöbe-Buglé hasta inicios del siglo XIX,” Anuario de Estudios Centroamericanos 30 (2004): 127–129. 14. Offen “The Miskitu Kingdom,” 14. 15. García Casares, Historia del Darién, 19–69. Mena García, El oro del Darién. 16. Offen, “The Miskitu Kingdom.” 17. Offen, “The Sambo and Tawira Miskitu,” 328–332, 340–341; Romero Vargas, Las sociedades del Atlántico, 122–124; Mary  W.  Helms, “The Cultural Ecology of a Colonial Tribe,” Ethnology 8, no. 1 (1969): 78; Floyd, The Anglo-Spanish Struggle, 143. 18. Claudia García, “Género, etnia y poder en la Costa de Mosquitos (siglos XVII y XVIII),” Mesoamérica 21, no. 40 (2000): 98; Romero Vargas, Las sociedades del Atlántico, 159–160. 19. Karl  H.  Offen, “Creating Mosquitia: Mapping Amerindian Spatial Practices in Eastern Central America, 1629–1779,” Journal of Historical Geography 33 (2007): 263; Caroline A. Williams, “Living Between Empires: Diplomacy and Politics in the Late EighteenthCentury Mosquitia,” The Americas 70, no. 2 (2013): 248–250. 20. Offen, “The Sambo and Tawira Miskitu,” 338–339; Offen, “ ‘Race and Place’ in Colonial Mosquitia, 1600–1787,” in Blacks & Blackness in Central America: Between Race and Place, ed. Lowell Gudmundson and Justin Wolfe (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 97–98. 21. Offen, “The Sambo and Tawira Miskitu,” 338–339. Claudia García, Etnogénesis, hibridación y consolidación de la identidad del pueblo Miskitu (Madrid: CSIC, 2007), 27–36. 22. Offen, “The Miskitu Kingdom,” 29–34, 110; Romero Vargas, Las sociedades del Atlántico, 42–46. 23. Marín Araya, “La población de Bocas del Toro,” 124–125; Alejandra Boza Villarreal, La frontera indígena de la Gran Talamanca, 1840–1930 (Cartago: EUCR, EUNA, EUNED, 2014), 50–56. 24. Mónica Martínez Mauri, La autonomía indígena en Panamá. La experiencia del pueblo kuna (siglos XVI–XX) (Quito: Ediciones Abya Yala, 2011), 30–36. Today, only a small portion of the Tule Indians lives in the Darién; most having migrated to Panamá’s eastern Atlantic coast and the San Blas islands during the second half of the nineteenth century. Ignacio Gallup-Diaz, The Door of the Seas and Key to the Universe: Indian Politics and Imperial Rivalry in the Darién, 1640–1750 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), xi, note 3. 25. Langebaek, “Cuna Long Distance Journeys,” 373; García Casares, Historia del Darién, 160–183, 206–238. 26. Mary Karasch, “Riverine Borderlands and Multicultural Contacts in Central Brazil, 1775–1835,” in The Oxford Handbook of Borderlands of the Iberian World, ed. Danna A. Levin Rojo and Cynthia Radding (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019). 27. For Talamanca: “Carta de fray Sebastián de las Alas á fray Diego Macotela. Año de 1689,” in Colección de Documentos para la Historia de Costa Rica VIII, ed. León Fernández,

Indigenous Trade in Caribbean Central America   257 502–504 (Barcelona: Imprenta viuda de Luis Tasso, 1907), 503; “Carta del capitán Alonso de Bonilla al gobernador don Juan de Ocón y Trillo. Año de 1608,” in Colección de Documentos para la Historia de Costa Rica V, ed. León Fernández (Paris: Imprenta Pablo Dupont, 1886), 147; “Proposición á S. M. del capitán Diego del Cubillo para conquistar los indios de Talamanca y otros. Año de 1617,” in Colección de Documentos para la Historia de Costa Rica V, ed. León Fernández, 218–222 (Paris: Imprenta Pablo Dupont, 1886), 222; “Carta de fray Pablo de Rebullida. Año de 1702,” in Colección de Documentos para la Historia de Costa Rica V, ed. León Fernández, 405–408 (Paris: Imprenta Pablo Dupont, 1886), 408; “Carta de fray Bernabé de San Francisco y Ríos. Año de 1703,” in Colección de Documentos para la Historia de Costa Rica V, ed. León Fernández, 409–411 (Paris: Imprenta Pablo Dupont, 1886), 410; “Fray Ramón Roxas, Comisario Prefecto de la orden de San Francisco, al Obispo de Nicaragua, sobre las misiones de Talamanca, etc.” [1815], in Límites de Costa-Rica y Colombia; nuevos documentos para la historia de su jurisdicción territorial, con notas, comentarios y un examen de la cartografía de Costa-Rica y Veragua, ed. Manuel María Peralta, 226–231 (Madrid: M.  G.  Hernández, 1890), 227–228; Marín Araya, “La población de Bocas del Toro,” 130. For Darien: Marín Araya, “La población de Bocas del Toro,” 130; Jacobo Walburger, “Relación de la provincia del Darién, escrita en el año de 1748, por el padre fray Jacobo Walburger de la Compañía de Jesús, y trasladada de la letra original por el mismo padre,” in El diablo vestido de negro y los cunas del Darién en el siglo XVIII: Jacobo Walburger y su Breve noticia de la provincia del Darién, de la ley y costumbres de los yndios, de la poca esperanza de plantar nuestra fé, y del número de sus naturales, 1748, ed. Carl Henrik Langebaek (Bogotá: Universidad de los Andes, CESO, 2006), 67, 76; Andrés de Ariza, “Comentos de la rica y fertilísima provincia del Darién, año de 1774,” in La gobernación del Darién a finales del siglo XVIII: el informe de un funcionario ilustrado, ed. Álvaro Baquero Montoya and Antonino Vidal Ortega (Barranquilla: Ediciones Uninorte, 2004), 37, 53, 86; H.  Wassén, “Anonymous Spanish Manuscript from 1739 on the Province of Darién: A  Contribution to the Colonial History and Ethnography of Panamá and Colombia,” Etnologiska Studier 10 (1940): 91; García Casares, Historia del Darién, 176, 182, 217, 226, 230, 303, 352–353. 28. Karl Offen, “Mapping Amerindian Captivity in Colonial Mosquitia,” Journal of Latin American Geography 14, no. 3 (2015): 35–65; Offen, “The Miskitu Kingdom,” 318–320. 29. “Informe de fray Antonio de Andrade y fray Pablo de Rebullida. Año de 1709,” in Colección de Documentos para la Historia de Costa Rica V, ed. León Fernández, 450–461 (Paris: Imprenta Pablo Dupont, 1886), 453; “Relación hecha por Fray Rodrigo Betancur de las costumbres de los yndios ynfieles payas de la Provincia de Honduras Año de 1698,” in Documentos coloniales de Honduras, ed. Héctor M.  Leyva (Tegucigalpa: Centro de Publicaciones Obispado de Choluteca, Centro de Estudios Históricos y Sociales para el Desarrollo de Honduras, 1991), 208; Offen, “The Sambo and Tawira Miskitu,” 343–345; Edward Long, “La costa mosquito” [1774], Wani 5 (1987): 52; Offen, “The Miskitu Kingdom,” 328–331, 333, 343; “Relación del viaje de fr. Pedro de la Concepción por la Taguzgalpa y de las costumbres y creencias de los indios infieles que allí habitan. Año de 1699,” in Leyva, ed., Documentos coloniales de Honduras, 213–215; “Don Diego de la Haya, Gobernador de Costa-Rica, reclama en virtud de Real Cédula de 23 de Agosto de 1721 del Gobernador de Jamaica la restitucion de los lndios Tójares y otros cautivados por los Ingleses y Mosquitos” [1722], in Peralta, ed., Límites de Costa-Rica y Colombia, 20–31; “Declaración de Carlos Casarola, negro esclavo bozal, 1737,” Wani 10 (1991): 86–87; Romero Vargas, Las sociedades del Atlántico, 76, 111, 277–279, 280–281, 284; Matthew Restall, “Crossing to Safety? Frontier

258   Borderlands of the Iberian World Flight in Eighteenth-Century Belize and Yucatan,” Hispanic American Historical Review 94, no. 3 (2014): 381–419. 30. Romero Vargas, Las sociedades del Atlántico, 278, 284. 31. “Carta de los misioneros. Año de 1706,” in Colección de Documentos para la Historia de Costa Rica V, ed. León Fernández, 438–441 (Paris: Imprenta Pablo Dupont, 1886), 439. 32. Andrés Reséndez, “Borderlands of Bondage,” in The Oxford Handbook of Borderlands of the Iberian World, ed. Danna  A.  Levin Rojo and Cynthia Radding (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019). 33. Eugenia Ibarra Rojas, Intercambio, política y sociedad en el siglo XVI. Historia indígena de Panamá, Costa Rica y Nicaragua (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 2000); “Fundación de la ciudad de Santiago de Talamanca. Año de 1605,” in Colección de Documentos para la Historia de Costa Rica V, ed. León Fernández, 116–130 (Paris: Imprenta Pablo Dupont, 1886), 116; “Carta del presidente de la Audiencia de Guatemala a S.  M.  Año de 1608,” in Colección de Documentos para la Historia de Costa Rica V, ed. León Fernández, 152–153 (Paris: Imprenta Pablo Dupont, 1886), 152; “Información de méritos y servicios del capitán Pedro Flórez. Año de 1611,” in Colección de Documentos para la Historia de Costa Rica V, ed. León Fernández, 165–215 (Paris: Imprenta Pablo Dupont, 1886), 170, 178, 185, 192; “Memorial del capitán Diego del Cubillo. Año de 1617,” in Colección de Documentos para la Historia de Costa Rica V, ed. León Fernández, 216–217 (Paris: Imprenta Pablo Dupont, 1886), 216; Juan Fernández de Salinas, “Proposición del mismo para conquistar Talamanca. Año de 1651,” in Colección de Documentos para la Historia de Costa Rica V, ed. León Fernández, 336–343 (Paris: Imprenta Pablo Dupont, 1886), 339; “Informe de misioneros. Año de 1705,” in Colección de Documentos para la Historia de Costa Rica V, ed. León Fernández, 430–437 (Paris: Imprenta Pablo Dupont, 1886), 432; “Informe de fray Antonio de Andrade y fray Pablo de Rebullida,” 459; “Relación del castigo que el gobernador D. Alonso de Castilla y Guzmán hizo á los indios Aoyaques, Cureros y Hebenas en 1619. Año de 1620,” in Colección de Documentos para la Historia de Costa Rica VIII, ed. León Fernández, 151–194 (Barcelona: Imprenta viuda de Luis Tasso, 1907), 151, 153, 165, 182; García Casares, Historia del Darién, 230, 322, 337; Ariza, “Comentos de la rica y fertilísima,” 75, 86; Eugenia Ibarra Rojas, Pueblos que capturan. Esclavitud indígena al sur de América Central del siglo XVI al XIX (San José: Editorial UCR, 2012), 93. Authors disagree on whether the Miskitu kept slaves themselves. See: Romero Vargas, Las sociedades del Atlántico, 273–290; Helms, “Miskito Slaving”, and Offen, “The Miskitu Kingdom,” 320–321. 34. Ibarra, Pueblos que capturan, provides interesting suggestions. 35. On Talamanca: “Fundación de la ciudad de Santiago,” 116; “Carta del presidente de la Audiencia,” 152; “Memorial para el Rey Nuestro Señor de la descripción y calidades de la Provincia de Costa Rica. Año de 1610,” in Colección de Documentos para la Historia de Costa Rica V, ed. León Fernández, 156–161 (Paris: Imprenta Pablo Dupont, 1886), 158–159; Flórez, “Información de méritos,” 168; “Relación del castigo,” 182. On Darién: Walburger, “Relación de la provincia,” 76, and García Casares, Historia del Darién, 322, 337. 36. García Casares, Historia del Darién, 180, 270, 274, 322, 337; Jaime Navarro, “Sur la Pacification des Indienes Cuna,” Jahrbuch fur Geschichte von Staat, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft Lateinamerikas 12 (1975): 179; Walburger, “Relación de la provincia,” 67, 76, 109; Wassén, “Anonymous Spanish Manuscript,” 89. 37. “Relación del castigo,” 191. 38. The Aoyaque, Curero, and Hebena took the captives, and tried to give them to the Boruca, Oruscara, Xicagua, and Moyagua. “Relación del castigo,” 165–166.

Indigenous Trade in Caribbean Central America   259 3 9. “Relación del castigo,” 182. 40. “Memorial para el Rey,” 158. 41. Ibarra, Pueblos que capturan, 110. 42. James F. Brooks, Captives and Cousins. Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest Borderlands (Chapel Hill: UNC, 2002); Kristine L. Jones, “Comparative Raiding Economies: North and South,” in Contested Ground. Comparative Frontiers on the Northern and Southern Edges of the Spanish Empire, ed. Donna J. Guy and Thomas E. Sheridan (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1998). 43. Offen, “Creating Mosquitia,” 265–266; Romero Vargas, Las sociedades del Atlántico, 248, 250. 44. Olien, “After the Indian Slave Trade,” 45–47. 45. Offen, “The Miskitu Kingdom,” 335. 46. Karl H. Offen, “British Logwood Extraction from the Mosquitia: The Origin of a Myth,” Hispanic American Historical Review 80, no. 1 (2000): 132; Offen, “The Miskitu Kingdom,” 223, 245, 335, 449, and “The Sambo and Tawira Miskitu,” 346; Romero Vargas, Las sociedades del Atlántico, 227. 47. “El Gobernador de Costa-Rica al Capitán General de Guatemala” [1808], in Peralta, ed., Límites de Costa-Rica y Colombia, 201. 48. “Declaración de las casas y parcialidades de los térrabas por fray Francisco de San José. Año de 1697,” in Colección de Documentos para la Historia de Costa Rica V, ed. León Fernández, 369–374 (Paris: Imprenta Pablo Dupont, 1886), 370, 372. 49. “Declaración de las casas y parcialidades,” 370, 372; Francisco de Mora Pacheco, “Relación geográfica del Partido de Chontales, 1743,” Wani 7 (1990): 45–47; Olien, “After the Indian Slave Trade,” 45, 48–49; Romero Vargas, Las sociedades del Atlántico, 51, 139–140, 209, 227, 250, 251; Offen, “The Miskitu Kingdom,” 223, 245, 335, and “British Logwood Extraction,” 132. 50. John Roach, “Las sorprendentes aventuras de John Roach (2da parte y última parte)” [1798], Wani 12 (1992): 64; Romero Vargas, Las sociedades del Atlántico, 71, 81, 188, 244, 248, 250; Olien, “After the Indian Slave Trade,” 45; “Relación del castigo,” 180; “Carta de fray Antonio de Andrade. Año de 1709,” in Colección de Documentos para la Historia de Costa Rica V, ed. León Fernández, 471 (Paris: Imprenta Pablo Dupont, 1886); Navarro, “Sur la Pacification,” 182–183. 51. Carolyn Hall, Héctor Pérez Brignoli, and John V. Cotter, Historical Atlas of Central America (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2003), 69. 52. Hall et al., Historical Atlas, 74–75; García Buchard, “Evangelizar a los indios gentiles;” Castillero, Conquista, evangelización y resistencia; García Casares, Historia del Darién. 53. Offen, “The Miskitu Kingdom,” 103–111; García Buchard, “Evangelizar a los indios gentiles.” 54. Gallup-Diaz, Door of the Seas; Hall et al., Historical Atlas, 75; Marín Araya, “La población de Bocas del Toro,” 137–141; García Casares, Historia del Darién, 187–199, 371–379. 55. Offen, “The Sambo and Tawira Miskitu,” 346–347; Karl Offen and Terry Rugeley, ed., The Awakening Coast: An Anthology of Moravian Writings from Mosquitia and Eastern Nicaragua, 1849–1899 (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2014), 11–18. 56. Karasch, “Riverine Borderlands;” Barbara A. Sommer, “Conflict, Alliance, Mobility, and Place in the Evolution of Identity in Portuguese Amazonia” and Heather  F.  Roller, “Autonomous Indian Nations and Peacemaking in Colonial Brazil,” both in The Oxford Handbook of Borderlands of the Iberian World, ed. Danna  A.  Levin Rojo and Cynthia Radding (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019). 57. Long, “La costa mosquito,” 52; Romero Vargas, Las sociedades del Atlántico, 222, 256–257, 259, 306–307; García Casares, Historia del Darién, 324, 347; “Proposición de don Francisco

260   Borderlands of the Iberian World Núñez de Temiño para conquistar Talamanca. Años de 1648 a 1649,” in Colección de Documentos para la Historia de Costa Rica V, ed. León Fernández, 320–333 (Paris: Imprenta Pablo Dupont, 1886), 329; “Informe de misioneros,” 432–433; “Estado y progresos de las misiones de Talamanca. Real Cédula de 22 de mayo de 1705,” in Peralta, ed., Límites de Costa-Rica y Colombia, 40; Boza, La frontera indígena, 47–48. 58. Mora Pacheco, “Relación geográfica,” 47; Romero Vargas, Las sociedades del Atlántico, 51–52, 83, 171, 176, 222, 238; “El Obispo de Nicaragua haze relazión a Vuestra Magestad del origen de los zambos llamados mosquitos y de las bárbaras crueldades que han executado hasta oy en las provincias de Honduras, Nicaragua y Costarrica. 30 de noviembre de 1711,” in Leyva, ed., Documentos coloniales de Honduras, 221; “Relación de los Religiosos Franciscanos que ay en la seráphica provincia del Santísimo Nombre de Jesús de Guathemala, de los que tiene en las reducciones de su cargo, el número de ellas y su situación, según y en la conformidad que se ordena por Real Cédula de 21 de mayo de 1747. Año de 1748,” in Leyva, ed., Documentos coloniales de Honduras, 232; “Memorial para el Rey,” 158; “Informe del cabildo de Cartago. Año de 1648,” in Colección de Documentos para la Historia de Costa Rica V, ed. León Fernández, 314–319 (Paris: Imprenta Pablo Dupont, 1886), 314; Fernández de Salinas, “Proposición del mismo,” 339; “Carta de don José de Guzmán. Año de 1702,” in Colección de Documentos para la Historia de Costa Rica V, ed. León Fernández, 403–404 (Paris: Imprenta Pablo Dupont, 1886), 403; Navarro, “Sur la Pacification,” 46; García Casares, Historia del Darién, 165–166, 270, 274, 347, 377, 383, 388–389, 395, 422; Ariza, “Comentos de la rica y fertilísima,” 76; Wassén, “Anonymous Spanish Manuscript,” 90. 59. Archivo General de Indias (AGI), Seville, Spain; Fondo Guatemala 964. 60. “Testimonio de Autos sobre las Misiones y Entradas en la Provincia de Comayagua presentado por el Presidente de la Audiencia de Guatemala, Año de 1739,” in Leyva, ed., Documentos coloniales de Honduras, 224–225; Romero Vargas, Las sociedades del Atlántico, 227, 254, 306–307; “Autorización al gobernador don Rodrigo Arias Maldonado para la conquista de Talamanca. Año de 1662,” in Colección de Documentos para la Historia de Costa Rica V, ed. León Fernández (Paris: Imprenta Pablo Dupont, 1886), 345; Navarro, “Sur la Pacification,” 178–179; “Carta de fray Pablo de Rebullida,” 407; “El obispo de Panamá informa,” 117–118; García Casares, Historia del Darién, 176; and “Relación del castigo,” 157–159. 61. Romero Vargas, Las sociedades del Atlántico, 80, 224, 227; “El guardián del colegio apostólico de misioneros franciscanos de Nueva Guatemala informa á S. M. sobre el estado de las reducciones y conversiones que están á cargo del referido colegio. Año de 1797,” in Colección de Documentos para la Historia de Costa Rica X, ed. León Fernández, 258–264 (Barcelona: Imprenta viuda de Luis Tasso, 1907), 262–263; “Testimonio de Autos sobre las Misiones,” 224–225. 62. “Proposición de don Francisco Núñez,” 329. 63. Romero Vargas, Las sociedades del Atlántico, 229. 64. “Memorial para el Rey,” 157–158. 65. “El guardián del colegio apostólico,” 260. 66. “Declaración de las casas y parcialidades,” 373; “Carta del capitán don Juan de Bonilla. Año de 1702,” in Colección de Documentos para la Historia de Costa Rica V, ed. León Fernández, 399–402 (Paris: Imprenta Pablo Dupont, 1886), 401; “Estado y progresos de las misiones,” 41, 46. 67. Offen, “The Miskitu Kingdom,” 284; Romero Vargas, Las sociedades del Atlántico, 81, 86. 68. Walburger, “Relación de la provincia,” 104. 69. Linda M. Rupert, “Shaping an Inter-imperial Exchange Zone: Smugglers, Runaway Slaves, and Itinerant Priests in the Southern Caribbean,” in The Oxford Handbook of Borderlands

Indigenous Trade in Caribbean Central America   261 of the Iberian World, ed. Danna A. Levin Rojo and Cynthia Radding (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019). 70. Potthast-Jutkeit, “Centroamérica y el contrabando.” 7 1. Potthast-Jutkeit, “Centroamérica y el contrabando;” Walburger, “Relación de la provincia,” 99; García Casares, Historia del Darién, 285; Offen, “The Miskitu Kingdom,” 283–288; Romero Vargas, Las sociedades del Atlántico, 68–91. 72. Romero Vargas, Las sociedades del Atlántico, 23–30; Offen, “Creating Mosquitia,” 260–270, and “Race and Place,” 93. 73. Michael D. Olien, “General, Governor, and Admiral: Three Miskito Lines of Succession,” Ethnohistory 45, no. 2 (1998); Offen, “Race and Place”; García, Etnogénesis, hibridación, 53–55. 74. Roberto Hodgson, “Primera versión sobre la situación de esta parte de América llamada la Costa de Mosquitos,” Wani 7 (1990): 77. 75. García, Etnogénesis, hibridación, 53–55; Offen, “Race and Place,” 99. 76. Williams, “Living Between Empires,” 247, 251. 77. Romero Vargas, Las sociedades del Atlántico, 163–208. 78. Olien, “General, Governor, and Admiral;” Offen, “Race and Place”; Pekka Hämäläinen, The Comanche Empire (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008) offers a comparative study for the Great Plains of North America in the late eighteenth century. 79. Williams, “Living Between Empires,” 251–252; García, Etnogénesis, hibridación, 56; Michael D. Olien, “The Miskito Kings and the Line of Succession,” Journal of Anthropological Research 39, no. 2 (1983). 80. Williams, “Living Between Empires,” 250; García, Etnogénesis, hibridación, 54–55; Romero Vargas, Las sociedades del Atlántico, 213–217. 81. “El Obispo de Nicaragua,” 220. 82. Romero Vargas, Las sociedades del Atlántico, 150–151; Offen, “The Miskitu Kingdom,” 313. 83. Offen, “The Miskitu Kingdom,” 313–317; Hodgson, “Primera versión,” 79. 84. “El Obispo de Nicaragua,” 220; “Don Diego de la Haya,” 27; Diego de la Haya, “La isla del Escudo de Veragua, límite de Costa Rica por el mar de las Antillas” [1803], in Peralta, ed., Límites de Costa-Rica y Colombia, 186; “Declaración de Carlos Casarola,” 86–87; Hodgson, “Primera versión,” 79; Long, “La costa mosquito,” 50; Antonio Porta Costas, “Relación del reconocimiento geométrico y político de la Costa de Mosquitos, desde el establecimiento de Cabo Gracias a Dios hasta Blewfields,” Wani 7 (1990): 59–61; Romero Vargas, Las sociedades del Atlántico, 78, 137–138, 148, 277–279; Offen, “The Miskitu Kingdom,” 289, 310. 85. Romero Vargas, Las sociedades del Atlántico, 83–85, 223, 235–236, 260–261, 265, 267–268, 307. 86. “Relación del viaje de fr. Pedro de la Concepción,” 212; “Breve manifiesto y relación suçinta del origen, progresos y estado de las conversiones de los yndios ynfieles xicaques, paias y haras, en que han entendido y actualmente están entendiendo, religiosos de la Seráphica Orden de Nuestro Padre San Francisco, hijos de la Provincia del Santísimo Nombre de Jesús de Guatemala, en las Govemaciones de Honduras y Nicaragua. Año de 1681,” in Leyva, ed., Documentos coloniales de Honduras, 151; Romero Vargas, Las sociedades del Atlántico, 68, 82, 263, 265; Archivo Nacional de Costa Rica (ANCR), San José, Costa Rica, Serie Guatemala 110; “Carta del gobernador don Juan Francisco Sáenz á S. M. Año de 1615,” in Colección de Documentos para la Historia de Costa Rica V, ed. León Fernández, 349–352 (Paris: Imprenta Pablo Dupont, 1886), 351; “Carta del gobernador don Juan Francisco Sáenz á S. M. Año de 1676,” in Colección de Documentos para la Historia de Costa Rica V, ed. León Fernández, 360–364 (Paris: Imprenta Pablo Dupont, 1886), 361–362; “Carta de los misioneros. Año de 1706,” 439; “Carta del mismo gobernador. Año de 1709,” in Colección de Documentos para la Historia de Costa Rica V, ed. León Fernández, 468–470 (Paris: Imprenta Pablo Dupont, 1886), 469.

262   Borderlands of the Iberian World 87. Offen, “The Miskitu Kingdom,” 289–291; Long, “La costa mosquito,” 53; Helms, “The Cultural Ecology” considered the Miskitu as middlemen in the contraband trade. 88. Romero Vargas, Las sociedades del Atlántico, 81–82, 85–87, 309; Offen, “The Miskitu Kingdom,” 289. 89. Romero Vargas, Las sociedades del Atlántico, 240; Porta Costas, “Relación del reconocimiento,” 57, 59 on Ulwa trade; Long, “La costa mosquito,” 44 on Rama Indians. 90. Romero Vargas, Las sociedades del Atlántico, 87. 91. Offen, “The Miskitu Kingdom,” 289–290; Long, “La costa mosquito,” 51–54; Romero Vargas, Las sociedades del Atlántico, 68–69, 73–75. 92. “El guardián del colegio apostólico,” 262–263. 93. Gallup-Diaz, Door of the Seas, 53–74; James Howe, A People Who Would Not Kneel: Panama, the United States, and the San Blas Kuna (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1998), 12–13. 94. Langebaek, “Cuna Long Distance Journeys,” 375–378; Gallup-Diaz, Door of the Seas, 75–111; García Casares, Historia del Darién, 250–261; Olien, “After the Indian Slave Trade,” 53; Martínez Mauri, La autonomía indígena en Panamá, 50 on nineteenth-century English relations with the Tule. 95. García Casares, Historia del Darién, 273. 96. Gallup-Diaz, Door of the Seas, 53–142. 97. García Casares, Historia del Darién, 204; “Panamá, 29 de noviembre de 1651. El cabildo, justicia y regimiento de la ciudad de Panamá da cuenta a vuestra majestad del levantamiento de los indios de la provincia del Darién,” document signed by Gaspar De Aybar, in Indios y negros en Panamá en los siglos XVI y XVII: selecciones de los documentos del Archivo General de Indias, ed. Carol F. Jopling (Antigua: CIRMA, Plumsock Mesoamerican Studies, 1994), 536–537; Navarro, “Sur la Pacification,” 190; García Casares, Historia del Darién, 182, 265. 98. Walburger, “Relación de la provincia,” 97–98; García Casares, Historia del Darién, 174, 283, 286, 299, 361–362. 99. García Casares, Historia del Darién, 283. 100. García Casares, Historia del Darién, 180, 204, 283, 360, 362–366; “Panamá, 5 de enero de 1679. El Presidente de Panamá da por noticia favorable habíanse formado una reducción de indios infieles Darienses en gran convenía de lo espiritual y temporal de aquel reino,” in Jopling, ed., Indios y negros en Panamá en los siglos XVI y XVII, 568–569; Navarro, “Sur la Pacification,” 178, 190; Langebaek, “Cuna Long Distance Journeys,” 377. 101. Ariza, “Comentos de la rica y fertilísima,” 40, 59, 98; García Casares, Historia del Darién, 359, 361, 365–366, 382. 102. Navarro, “Sur la Pacification,” 178; García Casares, Historia del Darién, 180, 204, 275, 360; “El obispo de Panamá informa,” 118, 120. 103. Walburger, “Relación de la provincia,” 99. 104. García Casares, Historia del Darién, 265, 362. 105. Navarro, “Sur la Pacification,” 179; Caroline  A.  Williams, Between Resistance and Adaptation: Indigenous Peoples and the Colonisation of the Chocó, 1510–1753 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2005). 106. Olien, “After the Indian Slave Trade.” 107. Boza Villarreal, La frontera indígena, 105–191. For Darién, see Edward Cullen, “The Darien Indians,” Transactions of the Ethnological Society of London 4 (1866): 265–266; Armando Reclus, Exploraciones a los istmos de Panamá y de Darién (San José: EDUCA,

Indigenous Trade in Caribbean Central America   263 1972), 345–346. For Mosquitia, see V.  Wolfgang von Hagen, “The Mosquito Coast of Honduras and Its Inhabitants,” Geographical Review 30, no. 2 (1940): 255–257. 1 08. García Casares, Historia del Darién, 428.

Bibliography Ariza, Andrés de. “Comentos de la rica y fertilísima provincia del Darién, año de 1774.” In La gobernación del Darién a finales del siglo XVIII: el informe de un funcionario ilustrado, edited by Álvaro Baquero Montoya and Antonino Vidal Ortega, 32–97. Barranquilla: Ediciones Uninorte, 2004. Boza Villarreal, Alejandra. La frontera indígena de la Gran Talamanca, 1840–1930. Cartago: EUCR, EUNA, EUNED, 2014. Castillero, Alfredo. Conquista, evangelización y resistencia, ¿triunfo o fracaso de la política indigenista? Panamá: Colección Ricardo Miró, 1995. Colección de Documentos para la Historia de Costa Rica, vol. V, edited by León Fernández. Paris: Imprenta Pablo Dupont, 1886. Colección de Documentos para la Historia de Costa Rica, vol. VIII, edited by León Fernández. Barcelona: Imprenta viuda de Luis Tasso, 1907. Colección de Documentos para la Historia de Costa Rica, vol. X, edited by León Fernández. Barcelona: Imprenta viuda de Luis Tasso, 1907. “Declaración de Carlos Casarola, negro esclavo bozal, 1737.” Wani 10 (1991): 84–90. Floyd, Troy S. The Anglo-Spanish Struggle for Mosquitia. Albuquerque: UNM, 1967. Gallup-Diaz, Ignacio. The Door of the Seas and Key to the Universe: Indian Politics and Imperial Rivalry in the Darién, 1640–1750. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008. García, Claudia. Etnogénesis, hibridación y consolidación de la identidad del pueblo Miskitu. Madrid: CSIC, 2007. García Buchard, Ethel. “Evangelizar a los indios gentiles de la frontera de Honduras: una ardua tarea (Siglos XVII–XIX).” Intercambio 1, no. 1 (2002): n.p. Accessed 10 July 2016. http://www. ciicla.ucr.ac.cr/recursos/docs/biblioteca/revista-intercambio/ano1/evangelizaralos.pdf García Casares, Joaquín. Historia del Darién: cuevas, cunas, españoles, afros, presencia y actualidad de los chocoes. Panamá: Editorial Universitaria Carlos Manuel Gasteazoro, 2008. Hall, Carolyn, Héctor Pérez Brignoli, and John V. Cotter. Historical Atlas of Central America. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2003. Helms, Mary  W. “Miskito Slaving and Culture Contact: Ethnicity and Opportunity in an Expanding Population.” Journal of Anthropological Research 39, no. 2 (1983): 179–197. Helms, Mary W. “The Cultural Ecology of a Colonial Tribe.” Ethnology 8, no. 1 (1969): 76–84. Hodgson, Roberto. “Primera versión sobre la situación de esta parte de América llamada la Costa de Mosquitos.” Wani 7 (1990): 65–80. Ibarra Rojas, Eugenia. Pueblos que capturan. Esclavitud indígena al sur de América central del siglo XVI al XIX. San José: Editorial UCR, 2012. Jopling, Carol F. Indios y negros en Panamá en los siglos XVI y XVII: selecciones de los documentos del Archivo General de Indias. Antigua: CIRMA, Plumsock Mesoamerican Studies, 1994. Karasch, Mary. “Riverine Borderlands and Multicultural Contacts in Central Brazil, 1775–1835.” In The Oxford Handbook of Borderlands of the Iberian World, edited by Danna A. Levin Rojo and Cynthia Radding. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019.

264   Borderlands of the Iberian World Langebaek, Carl Henrik. “Cuna Long Distance Journeys: The Result of Colonial Interaction.” Ethnology 30, no. 4 (1991): 371–380. Leyva, Héctor M., ed. Documentos coloniales de Honduras. Tegucigalpa: Centro de Publicaciones Obispado de Choluteca, Centro de Estudios Históricos y Sociales para el Desarrollo de Honduras, 1991. Long, Edward. “La costa mosquito.” Wani 5 (1987 [1774]): 42–54. Marín Araya, Giselle. “La población de Bocas del Toro y la comarca Ngöbe-Buglé hasta inicios del siglo XIX.” Anuario de Estudios Centroamericanos 30 (2004): 119–162. Martínez Mauri, Mónica. La autonomía indígena en Panamá. La experiencia del pueblo kuna (siglos XVI–XX). Quito: Ediciones Abya Yala, 2011. Mena García, María del Carmen. El oro del Darién. Entradas y cabalgatas en la conquista de Tierra Firme (1509–1526). Seville: CSIC; Centro de Estudios Andaluces, 2011. Mora Pacheco, Francisco de. “Relación geográfica del Partido de Chontales, 1743.” Wani 7 (1990): 42–50. Navarro, Jaime. “Sur la Pacification des Indienes Cuna.” Jahrbuch fur Geschichte von Staat, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft Lateinamerikas 12 (1975): 176–210. Offen, Karl  H. “British Logwood Extraction from the Mosquitia: The Origin of a Myth.” Hispanic American Historical Review 80, no. 1 (2000): 113–135. Offen, Karl H. “Creating Mosquitia: Mapping Amerindian Spatial Practices in Eastern Central America, 1629–1779.” Journal of Historical Geography 33 (2007): 254–282. Offen, Karl  H. “The Miskitu Kingdom: Landscape and the Emergence of a Miskitu Ethnic Identity, Northeastern Nicaragua and Honduras, 1600–1800.” PhD diss., University of Texas, 1999. Offen, Karl  H. “The Sambo and Tawira Miskitu: The Colonial Origins and Geography of Intra-Miskitu Differentiation in Eastern Nicaragua and Honduras.” Ethnohistory 49, no. 2 (2002): 319–372. Olien, Michael  D. “After the Indian Slave Trade: Cross-Cultural Trade in the Western Caribbean Rimland, 1816–1820.” Journal of Anthropological Research 44, no. 1 (1988): 41–66. Olien, Michael  D. “General, Governor, and Admiral: Three Miskito Lines of Succession.” Ethnohistory 45, no. 2 (1998): 277–318. Peralta, Manuel María, ed. Límites de Costa-Rica y Colombia; nuevos documentos para la historia de su jurisdicción territorial, con notas, comentarios y un examen de la cartografía de Costa-Rica y Veragua. Madrid: M. G. Hernández, 1890. Porta Costas, Antonio. “Relación del reconocimiento geométrico y político de la Costa de Mosquitos, desde el establecimiento de Cabo Gracias a Dios hasta Blewfields.” Wani 7 (1990): 51–64. Potthast-Jutkeit, Barbara. “Centroamérica y el contrabando por la Costa de Mosquitos en el siglo XVIII.” Mesoamérica 19, no. 36 (1998): 499–516. Romero Vargas, Germán. Las sociedades del Atlántico de Nicaragua en los siglos XVII y XVIII. Managua: Fondo de Promoción Cultural-Banic, 1995. Sagastume F., Alejandro Salomón. “Historia de una frontera olvidada. Establecimientos ingleses en Honduras.” In Estudios (nuevos y viejos) sobre la frontera, edited by Salvador Bernabéu Albert and Francisco de Solano, 119–162. Madrid: Centro de Estudios Históricos–CSIC, 1991. Walburger, Jacobo. “Relación de la provincia del Darién, escrita en el año de 1748, por el padre fray Jacobo Walburger de la Compañía de Jesús, y trasladada de la letra original por el mismo padre.” In El diablo vestido de negro y los cunas del Darién en el siglo XVIII: Jacobo Walburger y su Breve noticia de la provincia del Darién, de la ley y costumbres de los yndios,

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chapter 10

Con n ections a n d Circu l ation i n th e Sou ther n A n de s from Col on y to R epu blic Viviana E. Conti Translated by Anne Corrigan

The borderlands between present-day Argentina, Bolivia, and Chile served as a space of exchange since the end of the colonial period through the political partitions of the nineteenth century. Analyzed from a long-term historical perspective, the networks and connections that developed within this zone from the eighteenth century up to the formation of nation-states show that even before colonial times the South Andes were characterized by mobility and the continual displacement of people and goods. Since pre-Incan times, trade between indigenous peoples from distinct ecological environments established extensive networks of paths and roads, in use for centuries. These links supported a complementarity of products and goods that passed between different ecological environments such as the highlands, the hills, the yungas, the forest, the d ­ esert, and the coast that were connected by trade and communication routes.1 The distinct dynamics of this environmental complementarity can be observed graphically in the diagrams drafted by Troll and Brush2 and constitute the foundation for the millenarian practices of population and resource mobility studied here. Despite the large and significant changes that took place in South Andean society over time, one notable element endured: that of connections facilitating exchange. These connections, characteristic of South Andean mobility, will be studied through time and according to the specific conditions of each particular area and historical context in order to show how the regional spaces of circulation that were created by practices of mobility endured and acquired distinct characteristics through the nineteenth century, including the post-independence period and the establishment of borders that came with the formation of republics.

268   Borderlands of the Iberian World

South Andean Connections and Circulations Through Time In the expanse of the South Andean highlands, particular networks evolved for the transportation of people and goods between distinct ecological environments, notably different from those that developed in the Central Andean territory. The need to link diverse environmental areas and reach economic complementarity resulted in a web of roads that made use of natural pathways such as gorges, clearings, or crossings.3 The pioneer work of Núñez and Dillehay discusses the importance of mobility in the Southern Andes during the pre-Incaic period.4 The authors understand mobility as a coordinated movement that involves the circulation of goods, which took place on trade routes. Llama herds driven by expert caravan drivers would transport resources between distinct ecological environments and stop along the way for rest and provisions in the posts that existed on the roads for that purpose. Following this line of inquiry, works published in recent years compile case studies on specific regions of the South Andean territory. Among these, the works by Albeck, Ortiz and Ventura, Nielsen and others as well as that by Núñez and Nielsen, represent recent, if not singular, bibliographical references on mobility and transportation in the area investigated here.5 Núñez and Nielsen maintain that the caravan model of transport, in use since before the Spanish conquest, was characterized by the presence of groups of llama drivers (llameros) who moved resources between distinct ecological areas, and involved specific forms of circulation, organization, exchange, and social relations. The caravan model also involves a particular kind of person and is associated with certain places of convergence where, in addition to the exchange of goods, interpersonal and by extension political relations were established. Studies on the traffic of these caravans have been carried out in a variety of disciplines (e.g., archaeology, history, anthropology) and illuminate the wide-ranging importance of circulation and connections established in the South Andean space.6 The works by Nielsen, in the field of archaeology, focus on the caravans driven between high altitude valleys and the yungas, as well as between the highlands and the oases in the Atacama Desert.7 Walter Sánchez, using linguistic and ethnographic sources, points to the existence of routes of exchange for prestige goods and ritual links in pre-Incaic times. Caravans used these same routes to transport coca to the highlands and other goods to the yungas and forests. In addition to products, trade routes enabled the exchange of ideas, knowledge, and technology.8 Experts such as Hislop, Rafino, and Vitry concur that under the Inca Empire the existing road network was amplified, extended, and converted into a symbol of power that made more visible the Inca authority and their control over the region and its resources.9 As these authors agree, the capacñam (in Quechua) or Camino Real (in Spanish) was a complex system of roads whose longitudinal axes ran north to south from present-­day Ecuador to the Chilean and Argentinian center in two principal roads,

Connections and Circulation in the Southern Andes   269 one along the Cordillera/highlands and one along the coast. The transverse roads crossed the Cordillera, connecting the Pacific coast with the border of the Amazon and the Yungas. There were also alternative and secondary routes, occasionally paved, elevated, or enclosed between walls. Some routes were seasonal (summer and winter roads). The system depended upon a network of tambos (inns) that connected the four sections of the Tawantinsuyu from Cuzco.10 Roads and inns were constructed or recovered thanks to the labor of local populations. According to Rafino, during the Inca Empire trails in this region were converted into a network of roads that extended for almost nine thousand kilometers and included more than 250 inns.11 Bouysse-Cassagne and other authors describe how trails bifurcated into distinct branches and directions.12 Spanish domination greatly impacted connections and exchanges among indigenous and rural populations. Taxation forced indigenous people to acquire non-local goods; therefore they had to barter and visit the markets in order to obtain the required products.13 This reinforced existing trade routes, which were also used for the transport of Spanish cargo sent to or from central mining zones. As Luis Miguel Glace and Cecilia Sanhueza point out, the Spanish conquest inspired a re-signification of roads and trajinantes (traveling merchants) due to the introduction of a commercial market and the exploitation of the mines.14 From the beginning of Spanish rule in the Andes, transport played a significant role in economic integration. Mobility and displacement across preexisting trade routes contributed to the development of circuits that served particular purposes. Meanwhile, exchanges between indigenous and rural societies continued but were subsumed under the commercial market. Many of the roadway systems (Inca and pre-Incaic) were reused and reoriented according to the demands of the market economy that supplied provisions to urban and mining centers. Older, secondary roads were in use until the end of the nineteenth century and served, along with the Camino Real, as a site for the celebration of market fairs that were scattered across the South Andean territory.15 Caravan traffic articulated around the demands of colonial mining centers and the urban expansion they provoked. This was especially true of Potosí, a new center of attraction demanding people, goods, and supplies, as the works of Bakewell and Romano describe.16 The movement of goods—both European and indigenous products— intensified and covered longer distances, but continued to follow South Andean routes.17 In this way, Assadourian observes, the South Andes formed part of what was considered “Peruvian space,” a politically and economically integrated macro-region.18 Here, silver mining supported a colonial market that revolved around mining zones, especially Alto Peru, where the transport of goods from different areas and environments was fundamental. Regional integration brought together specialized products from each region. Generally, this system developed through traditional routes of exchange, though with certain adaptations introduced by the market. In the seventeenth century, a shift in driving technology occurred as indigenous societies began to use European livestock to complete their journeys. The mule, a hybrid animal, was bred in Santa Fe and Córdoba, two regions situated to the south of the Southern Andes in the Pampas. Indigenous and mestizo populations could afford the

270   Borderlands of the Iberian World mule’s initially high cost, which was offset by the amount of weight the animal could carry. As compared to the llama, the mule could carry much more weight and access a wider variety of ecological environments.19 The movement of goods by mules and donkeys was termed arriería, distinct from caravaneo, which refers to transport by Camelid species. Both types of animal driving coexisted until the twentieth century. According to the sources studied by Sica cargo was moved on an individual, not communal, basis. For this reason, temporary associations formed between mule drivers when necessary and shipments included products and goods belonging to the drivers, intended for personal exchange. Arriería was a source of additional income for indigenous people, who were familiar with pre-Hispanic routes, possessed the necessary driving skills and animals to carry the load.20 The profession of mule driving was organized hierarchically and according to specializations: the mule driver owned cargo animals (mules and donkeys) that carried the goods, and was therefore in possession of a considerable capital, which was in turn the warranty for the articles he transported and was responsible of during the journey and until delivery to the location agreed upon by the merchant or proprietor. During the journey, the mule driver was aided by other individuals responsible for various tasks: the ayudante looked after the goods, the tenedor was responsible for the upkeep of the animals and the madrinero drove the lead mule, who guided the pack, and took care of the other animals.21 Sica explains these droves varied in number of animals, usually between fifty and four hundred mules according to testaments and contracts of shipments and maintains that medium to smaller herds of animals belonged to Indians of various ethnic profiles.22 In response to growing demands for animals for transport and consumption, arreo de ganado (cattle driving) emerged alongside arriería, accounted for by the seller (producer or intermediary) or buyer.23 Driving animal herds to centers of commercial demand required specialized knowledge and was organized hierarchically. A foreman would handle the livestock, usually someone trusted by the animal owner. He was an expert in managing the men who worked under him: laborers, apprentices and baqueanos (local guides).24 Cattle driving was usually learned from childhood and demanded an in-depth understanding of various tasks.25 The meeting of cattle buyers and sellers brought about seasonal markets, after the summer rains and before the cold of winter set in.26 They employed local workers: mestizo laborers and indigenous people specialized in distinct trades. The market was also a meeting place for trajinantes from different areas and environments who took advantage of the opportunity to trade.27 From the end of the seventeenth century, the mule market in Salta brought together products and producers from Córdoba and Santa Fe. Mules stayed in stables over the winter for one year or more under the protection of local workers who eventually sold the animals to mule dealers from Alto and Bajo Peru. Estela Toledo dates the beginning of the business of winter care, taming, castration of males, and eventual chartering of mules back to 1679. For 1694 she calculated that 22,297 mules were chartered and 15,689 were sheltered for winter care.28 In Jujuy a smaller market was held, located in the northern part of the city in the tablada and attended by cattle buyers and sellers.29 The valleys where the cities of

Connections and Circulation in the Southern Andes   271 Salta and Jujuy are located represent a midway point between arid and subtropical environments.30 The Camino Real passed through these valleys, connecting the cities of Buenos Aires and Lima, as well as the secondary paths running between the subtropical valleys of the east and the Pacific coast, through the trans-Cordillera passageway to the west. Both cities were essential transit points between the highland plateau and the lowlands of the Pampas, and this prime location lent them a great amount of dynamism. Merchants, traders, dealers, functionaries, and general travelers would pass through and remain in the cities for the time necessary to equip themselves with supplies. This flow of visitors created activity and jobs in many different areas. The city of Jujuy was the last stop on the paved road of the Camino Real between River Plate and Potosí.31 Further along, the road climbed to the highlands and became a narrow trail, for this reason the journey could be continued on mule or donkey only and merchandise had to be wrapped and secured to the haunches of the animals.32 Caravans, mule driving, cattle driving, and seasonal markets not only contributed to colonial commercial expansion but also enabled social relations and maintained traditional trading practices typical of the South Andean space such as barter, since farmers, mule and cattle drivers from nearby areas took advantage of the markets for their own business. In this way, ancestral means of interconnection and customary exchanges were perpetuated and incorporated into the commercial circulation of the colonial market.

Connections and Circulation in the Late Colonial Period The movement of goods delineated social and commercial networks and relations across social and ethnic borders that involved not only large-scale merchants and cattle dealers but also people who transported goods (mule drivers) and small-scale traders (shopowners, retail grocers, small producers, and craftsmen). The drop in mining production in Potosí beginning in the mid-seventeenth century and lasting until the eighteenth impacted the supply regions; however, as Tándeter explains, the commodification of diverse regions, companies and indigenous communities did not retract uniformly.33 In the northern River Plate, the Salta-Jujuy area took part in the colonial market as a supplier of mules and various local surpluses to the mining zones, besides serving as an intermediate stopover for products that originated in the different ecological environments of the River Plate and Andean regions, which were known as efectos americanos (American goods) or efectos de la tierra (goods from the land).34 The geographic characteristics of the territory in the Salta-Jujuy jurisdiction constituted a transition zone between the Altiplano and the valleys that led to the Pampas. From early on, these ecological conditions and location transformed the area into a juncture point integrated in cultural, ethnic, economic, and social terms to Chichas and Atacama, also constituting a link between the Andes and the coasts of the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans. In this

272   Borderlands of the Iberian World mercantile region, local activities supporting livestock and agricultural production (as well as the provision of related services) involved all social and ethnic sectors; namely, large scale import/export retailers, pulperos, ranchers, small producers, foreman, laborers, mule drivers, animal tamers, tanners, potters, and craftsmen.35 By the second half of the eighteenth century thanks to long and medium distance trade, tocuyos arrived in the stores of Salta and Jujuy; these were coarse cotton blankets made in obrajes (textile factories), in high demand in the markets of the River Plate and sent by merchants from Cochabamba.36 Also with these arrived bayetas (woolen textiles) and locally produced cloth (ropa de la tierra) from Cuzco, Arequipa, Huamanga and La Paz. These products increased re-exportation from Salta and Jujuy to Buenos Aires, where they were distributed to the countryside surrounding the River Plate. Diverse goods and products arrived in turn from Buenos Aires for both consumption within the territory and re-exportation to other regional markets. The most re-sold articles were Paraguayan yerba mate, European products and slaves, re-sold in the urban and mining centers of Alto Peru, the Pacific coast and Bajo Peru.37 All were acquired at the port with silver earned through the sale of cattle in Andean marketplaces, as well as tocuyos, bayetas, hides, wool, and other products. Prominent local dealers, who possessed substantial capital, carried out intermediary business between the port of Buenos Aires, Potosí and Lima. A large portion of the surrounding area was accessible for trade through freight contracts (wagons to Buenos Aires and mule drivers to Alto and Bajo Peru). Throughout the eighteenth century, mule driving became the most lucrative business in the region. The Salta market attracted criollo and mestizo mule sellers, winter caretakers, and buyers, in addition to indigenous people and farmers from different ecological environments who took advantage of this opportunity to carry out their own business and exchanges. In his contemporaneous chronicle, Filiberto de Mena asserted that in the Salta market an average of thirty to fifty mules were sold per year.38 This was a figure that Concoloncorvo deemed larger in his own account, which also presented a detailed description of the market and its characteristics in the late eighteenth century.39 Owing to the modern research by Nicolás Sánchez Albornoz, one can access the true figures of mule sales at both the Salta and Jujuy markets. For example, in 1771 3,400 mules were sold in Jujuy and 39,000 in Salta; in 1774 and 1784—considered exceptional years—around 7,500 mules destined for Alto and Bajo Peru were transported out of Jujuy. Meanwhile, 26,000 and 28,000 mules were sold from Salta in the same years. The sale of cattle destined for Alto Peru was concentrated in the Jujuy market, where the cattle sold was twice as much as mules.40 The volume and direction of this traffic continued until the first decade of the nineteenth century.41 Merchants wove successful commercial networks across the entire South Andean region; they sent products from different areas to their local middlemen and proxy agents who in turn supplied them with goods locally produced. Expert and reliable mule drivers, generally indigenous or mestizo people, traveled between highlands and lowlands, serving as important links in the commercial network of this region. The trade of

Connections and Circulation in the Southern Andes   273 mule driving involved different social sectors, from elite merchants to lower class farmers and Indians who, through freight contracts, transported goods from producers to consumers, and from ports to the interior. Traders such as Indalecio González de Socasa, Ignacio de la Torre, Manuel de Tezanos Pinto (with a commercial base in Potosí), Sebastián Antonio de Arana from La Plata, Juan Esteban de Anchorena from Buenos Aires, Domingo Manuel Sánchez de Bustamante from Potosí and Jujuy, José de Alvarado (resident of Salta, Cuzco and Jujuy), to name a few of the cases studied, had proxy agents in the most important commercial centers from Buenos Aires to Lima.42 For this reason, they were able to trade with European merchants and local producers from distant regions across the continent, simultaneously serving as proxy agents for established traders who had businesses in other commercial areas. These sophisticated networks of relations often transcended the strictly mercantile and extended to familiar relations and friendships, nurturing connections that lasted until the wars of independence of 1810 and, in some cases, through and beyond the military phase of these conflicts.43

Connections and Exchanges During Wartime Between 1809 and 1810, when revolutionary agitation broke out in the South Andean territory, and 1825, when the liberation forces entered Alto Peru, the region served as a setting for the War of Independence. Over these fifteen years, the circulation of goods and people was repeatedly interrupted, while the effects of war impacted different networks of relations. Between 1810 and 1816, as the revolutionary army marched from Rio de la Plata to Alto Peru communications were reinstated after every military advance and business negotiations and exchanges recommenced. From 1817, however, all connection was cut off until 1825, except for short periods when royalist forces occupied the entire territory.44 Nonetheless, until 1811 a strong link between Alto Peru and River Plate guaranteed the circulation of people and continuous exchange between the regions. These commercial relations can be analyzed at the micro level of the Jujuy jurisdiction, an unavoidable transit zone along the Camino Real. Here, during 1811, the arrival of different merchandise from Potosí, coca from La Paz, tocuyos from Cochabamba, wine and sugar from Chuquisaca, Castilian goods from the port of Buenos Aires, and fruit, wine and liquor from La Rioja is notable.45 Herds of livestock (cattle, horses, and mules) continued to be sold in the local market in the customary gathering of merchants from the provinces of Alto Peru. That year, customs reports the export of 6,544 head of cattle (destined for Chichas and Cinti) and 1,829 mules (destined for Chichas, Tarija, Potosí, and “provinces of Peru”).46

274   Borderlands of the Iberian World The commercial landscape from this period reveals a steady flow of products with no marked difference from the years before the war, except in the volume of animals exported. This is because herds were subject to confiscation by the army. Things changed after the defeat of the Auxiliary Army in October 1811, the subsequent advance of Peruvian Royalist troops into Alto Peru, and the invasion of Jujuy and Salta in 1812. When news of a massacre in Cochabamba perpetrated by Royalist troops under the command of Goyeneche reached Jujuy, the population of the city prepared to flee. Retailers sent their goods away by wagon, donkey and mule; landowners began organizing the driving of any livestock that remained in their care and the storage of surplus grains; members of more affluent sectors moved with their possessions, families, servants and slaves while indigenous people retreated to inaccessible distant hills. Those who lagged behind departed on August 23, protected by the rearguard of the revolutionary army in the journey to Tucumán. The next day, Peruvian troops occupied the city of Jujuy and advanced on Salta. This chain of events would repeat itself in 1814 and 1817, when Royalist troops occupied the jurisdictions of Salta and Jujuy.47 As is clear in the tables and graphs included on mule and cow exports (Tables 10.1 and 10.2, Figure 10.1), during the second revolutionary advance on Alto Peru in 1813, 2,130 cows and 245 mules were sold in the Jujuy market to merchants from Porco.48 The alcabala registry books signal active commercial movement during the months of July to October 1813. In just four months, European articles valuing 91,150 pesos entered Jujuy.49 The most prominent local traders had imported these goods from Buenos Aires and sold them, as well as different regional products, to partners in the provinces of Alto Peru. The most significant transactions of “goods from the land” involved tocuyos and coca from Cochabamba and La Paz, as well as liquor and spirits from Chuquisaca.50 The sources do not describe indigenous-farmer transactions, which were exempt from taxation (except coca and soap). Nonetheless, it is worth noting that mule drivers transporting the merchandise of traders also carried their own goods for personal business transactions. Traders came from Potosí, Chuquisaca, and Cochabamba with the intention of closing deals on European merchandise at the stores in Jujuy or on their way to conduct business in Buenos Aires. This is the case of a trader from Chuquisaca, Sebastián Antonio de Arana, who took advantage of open trade routes to make commercial transactions in Buenos Aires and Jujuy. In Jujuy, he met with his proxy agent Félix de Echazo, to whom he was indebted for European articles. Arana died in Jujuy during this journey, according to the declaration of his widow Margarita Dávila de Arana and other witnesses.51 Regional exchanges and negotiations were interrupted by the tumult of war again at the end of 1813. Some traders, convinced that conflict was temporary and peace was on its way, continued to carry out their habitual transactions. The case of Ignacio de la Torre, a trader from Potosí studied by William Lofstrom, is especially interesting. He stubbornly maintained his connection with markets in Buenos Aires and Cuzco and remained in contact with Antonio Freire in Jujuy. He conducted business with Francisco de Aráoz in Salta, José de Gramajo and Francisco Colombres in Tucumán, Martin José

Connections and Circulation in the Southern Andes   275 Table 10.1.  Mule Exports from Salta and Jujuy Customs (quantity of heads exported) Year

Salta

Jujuy

Annual Total

1813 1814 1815 1816 1817 1818 1819 1820 1821 1822 1823 1824 1825 1826 1827 1828 1829 1830 1831 1832 1833 1834 1835 1836 1837 1838 1839 1840 1841 1842 1843 1844 1845 1846 1847 1848 1849 1850 1851 1852 1853 Totals

340 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1,787 3,960 1,364 0 1,055 6,851 4,349 2,046 5,545 2,546 616 402 1,478 1,047 1,009 966 32 0 2,180 1,163 2,546 1,510 2,390 3,936 3,878 3,580 3,903 6,061 no data 8,316 8,204 6,973 9,538 99,571

245 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 no data no data no data 0 692 764 4,396 1,340 6,432 2,830 1,053 931 1,103 no data no data no data no data no data no data no data 2,087 472 no data no data no data no data no data no data 3,495 3,140 4,101 2,843 no data 35,924

585 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1,787 3,960 1,364 0 1,747 7,615 8,745 3,386 11,977 5,376 1,669 1,333 2,581 1,047 1,009 966 32 0 2,180 1,163 4,633 1,982 2,390 3,936 3,878 3,580 3,903 6,061 3,495 11,456 12,305 9,816 9,538 1,35,495

Source: AHS and AHPJ, Exportation Guides 1813 to 1853

276   Borderlands of the Iberian World Table 10.2.  Cow Exports from Salta and Jujuy Customs (quantity of heads exported) Year

Salta

Jujuy

Annual total

1813 1814 1815 1816 1817 1818 1819 1820 1821 1822 1823 1824 1825 1826 1827 1828 1829 1830 1831 1832 1833 1834 1835 1836 1837 1838 1839 1840 1841 1842 1843 1844 1845 1846 1847 1848 1849 1850 1851 1852 1853

0 0 20 0 50 0 0 0 0 16 0 0 50 512 0 350 1,222 969 3,968 3,941 4,564 3,245 1,797 1,585 845 295 2,279 3,273 3,748 3,253 2,106 2,356 3,540 2,213 1,760 2,518 no data 2,792 2,059 1,552 2,208

2,130 0 1,438 0 0 10 10 10 no data no data no data 0 80 7 0 5 678 1,667 2,759 2,933 3,164 no data no data no data no data no data no data no data 4,815 2,406 no data no data no data no data no data no data 3,158 4,096 3,132 1,125 no data

2,469 0 1,458 0 50 0 0 0 0 16 0 0 130 519 0 355 1,900 2,636 6,727 6,874 7,728 3,245 1,797 1,585 845 295 2,279 3,273 8,563 5,659 2,106 2,356 3,540 2,213 1,760 2,518 3,158 6,888 5,191 2,677 90,810

Source: AHS and AHPJ, Exportation Guides 1813 to 1815.

Connections and Circulation in the Southern Andes   277 14000 12000

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Figure 10.1.  Mule exports to Alto and Bajo Peru from Salta and Jujuy customs 1813–1853 (based on Table 10.1) 9000

6000 5000 4000

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heads of cattle

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Jujuy

Figure 10.2.  Cattle exports to Alto and Bajo Peru from Salta and Jujuy customs 1813–1853 (based on Table 10.2)

de Torres in Buenos Aires and Antonio de Ochoa and Carlos Carasas in Cuzco. In 1810 he signed a contract with the latter regarding the sale of bayetas “from the land”, sugar and other products purchased in Cuzco, and European goods in Buenos Aires. Three years passed and “the goods were not delivered”, “the crates were lost” and the debts kept rising. Finally, he became convinced that trading between Lima and Buenos

278   Borderlands of the Iberian World Aires, a ­territory occupied by troops, deserters and spies was impossible. He opted to recover his losses in a shorter and safer run from the Villa Imperial de Potosí.52 In 1815, communication and the circulation of goods and people recommenced. In the city of Jujuy, the market enjoyed a renewal, as is evidenced by an increase in the sale of local products and goods originating from regions near and far. The table and graph on cow exports above (Table 10.2 and Figure 10.2) signal the sale of 1,438 cows to merchants from Chichas in the local market of Jujuy. The sale of yerba mate (1,337 arrobas) and soap (264 arrobas) was also revitalized due to increased ­business activity with traders from Cochabama, Tarija, Potosí, Chichas, La Paz, and Chuquisca. The increased volume of business transactions with goods produced in Europe brought about a movement of merchandise that was valued in 94,318 pesos sold by stores in Jujuy to buyers from Alto Peru. These transactions also involved traders from Buenos Aires and Alto Peru who came to Jujuy for business or on their way to and from Buenos Aires.53 Mercantile activity ended with the defeat of the revolutionary forces in 1816. Until 1825 there is no evidence of any movement of goods or people through Jujuy. Brief periods of renewed exchange, business and social relations motivated and reinforced social and familial links and friendships. However, not everything was business in the early years of the war. Jujuy’s arriería was practically destroyed: in fact the council of Jujuy reported the loss of two hundred experienced mule drivers in 1815.54 Entire families migrated south (to the River Plate provinces) or north (to Alto and Bajo Peru). Indigenous people sought refuge in remote areas, fleeing persecution and retaliation from both armies. Meanwhile, constant military presence in the countryside drove rural families to seek refuge in the hills and distant areas for the duration of the war.55 A military draft (involving both compulsive and voluntary enlistment), casualties on the battlefield, displacement of residents, emigration and exile all contributed to a dramatic drop in the local population. Between 1812 and 1823 the population of Jujuy declined by 25 percent in the city and much more in the countryside. Despite the lack of documented figures for this last sector we know that gaucho contingents were formed in rural areas during this time. These contingents were made up of unskilled laborers, workers, and farmhands who had abandoned their occupation to join the armed forces or militia. Young men—between 20 and 35 years old—were rural workers and had an intimate knowledge of the local geography. They represented the most competent sector of the rural population.56 The seizure and robbery of mules and carriage animals by soldiers further intensified this demographic loss. Grain and cattle production was continuously devastated by mobile and stationary troops, and these rampages allowed no time for the crops and cattle to regenerate. Rising prices resulting from these shortages impacted consumption for the local population, who suffered from famine and lack of foodstuffs. In the South Andean territory, peace and the circulation of goods and people that came with it—that is the reinstatement of familial, mercantile and social relationships—did not begin again until 1825.

Connections and Circulation in the Southern Andes   279

The Republican Emergence: Political Disintegration of an Integrated Space Once the wars of independence finished, around 1825, the region was divided into new discreet political-administrative entities. In the north, Bajo Peru became a ­consolidated nation between 1821 and 1824. Alto Peru was incorporated in 1825, forming the Republic of Bolivia. To the south, the United Provinces of the River Plate, which had declared independence in 1816, organized themselves into separate provinces after 1820 each possessing their own political and fiscal administration. To the south of the Tropic of Capricorn, Chile began to organize as an independent state in 1818. In the South Andean territory, between 1825 and 1850 a slow but sustained recuperation of Peruvian, Bolivian, and Chilean mines took place, creating new mining centers located in areas different from those that were established during the colonial period. The growth of mining centers resulted in an increasing demand for different goods and merchandise. Some were produced in nearby areas and thus involved lower transport costs. Other goods, such as tools, machinery, industrial supplies, had to be imported from the global market. The commercial circuits of the Republican period redefined zones of exchange in which mule drivers, merchants, cattle drivers and an endless flow of small producers and intermediaries circulated, moving across the new political boundaries and constructing a “trans-frontier” space of social and economic relations that disintegrated in the twentieth century.57 Only the formative stage of this transnational space is considered here. At the start of the Republican period, the mining industry of Alto Peru was completely abandoned, with just a few functioning mines in Potosí and the province of Chichas.58 Small companies formed by local associates contributed to the renewal of mines.59 These efforts were rewarded only in the following decade.60 In Peru, as in Bolivia, there was a diversification of mining centers. To Pasco hill, traditionally mined for silver, new centers were added and between the years of 1828 and 1832 the extraction of minerals in Pasco, Arequipa, and Puno expanded.61 José Deustua observes an increase of mineral extraction in the Republic of Peru that initiated in 1823 and, with fluctuations, grew to peak production between 1840 and 1850.62 To the north of the United Provinces of the River Plate in Salta and its southern territories, the damages suffered during wartime are clear.63 The production of grains and cattle diminished at an alarming rate due to seizure and pillaging. Simultaneously, the supply of mules from the provinces of the Pampas was interrupted by conflicts and skirmishes between provinces to such an extent that the mule market was no longer held in Salta, as it had been for more than a century. The “instructions” that the council of Jujuy

280   Borderlands of the Iberian World gave to a representative in the General Congress held in the province of Córdoba in 1821 illustrate the local economic situation: In light of the fact that Farming, Husbandry and Mule Driving are the only three branches through which the capital lost can be restored, and given that only this country [region] has experienced this collapse, the just thing to do is to establish an exclusive franchise for at least twelve years during which time calving will go uninterrupted by requisitions from State troops, and it will not be subject to any type of additional charges on provisions that the Arriería must pay to Interior Commerce on transports to Jujuy and its jurisdiction; Farming will benefit as well from the same exemption as livestock breeding, being additionally enabled for the export of grains to the Province of Chichas.64

In the rehabilitation of mines, the elites of the region saw the possibility to develop local production.65 There was also the possibility of participating as intermediaries in the sale of products from other provinces. This enabled the revitalization of mule and cattle driving circuits between Andean regions and the Pacific coast. Economic interests centered on the regeneration of a circuit that once linked Buenos Aires with Potosí and Lima, which had proved lucrative in the past. The demand for cattle and mounts from Andean regions lent incentive to economic interests and ultimately initiated a new phase of animal transport, which began with small shipments of mules in 1820. The exportation of cattle, despite this demand, would take almost a decade to recommence, given the time required for breeding.66 The reactivation of mines in Bolivia required diverse goods imported from other River Plate provinces.67 This involved landowners and ranchers, as well as small producers who brought surpluses to urban and mining markets. During the Republican period, shipments of mules and cattle from the northern River Plate provinces were sent to Cuzco, Puno, La Paz, La Plata, Potosí, Chichas, and Tarija.68 These shipments carried out by merchants who had long been involved in the markets of Alto Peru such as Marcos Zorilla, Facundo de Zuviría and José Manuel de Alvarado.69 In addition to livestock, the opening of these routes benefitted small producers and traders from Salta and Jujuy. Traders negotiated for themselves or as commissioners and proxy agents for partners in Buenos Aires, Córdoba and Tucumán. Many had acquired merchandise in the Atlantic port, which they stockpiled during the last years of the war, waiting for the opportunity to carry out business again.70 A large amount of concentrated commercial activity and the burgeoning development of mines made Potosí a prime location for business that extended to Chuquisaca, La Paz, Chochabamba, and Cinti and included the markets of Chichas and Tarija. In southern Bolivia, commercial activity centered on the cities of Potosí and Chuquisaca (La Plata/Sucre), the new capital, where large amounts of European goods were stored having entered the market from the River Plate and Arica during 1825.71 These transactions renewed old links between dealers from different areas. Because the market saturated rapidly, business in Potosí did not turn out as was hoped.72 Nevertheless,

Connections and Circulation in the Southern Andes   281 networks between traders were organized and strengthened anew, prompting a great amount of mule driving and activity. The case of the trader Manuel de Tezanos Pinto exemplifies the reinforcement of these commercial links. Operating in Potosí during the last decades of the eighteenth century, he resided in Jujuy from his marriage in 1795.73 By 1825 he belonged to one of the leading families in Jujuy, recognized for its economic activity and political participation. The first of his notable positions was at an import-export business in the Buenos Aires-Jujuy-Potosí circuit, where he acted as a trader for the “goods” branch. This position involved the sale of “Castilian goods” purchased in Buenos Aires then sold in the shops of Jujuy and distributed in Potosí. There, in turn, he acquired a variety of “goods of the land,” most particularly tocuyos from Cochabamba, which were sent to Buenos Aires. During the difficult postwar years, his business activities focused on the local shop. In 1825, when communications with Alto Peru were reopened, Manuel de Tezanos Pinto returned to Potosí, this time with his son Martín, whom he set up in a trading house. Simultaneously, he sent his nephew Pedro José del Portal to work in Chuquisaca.74 This was the origin of the trading house “Tezanos Pinto y Cía.” of Potosí and Chuquisaca, which later expanded with subsidiaries in La Paz, Cobija, Tacna, and Valparaíso, as well as branches in Salta and Jujuy.75 This case is just one example of the sweeping commercial networks that involved merchants in disparate locations across the Southern Andes. The mining activity that took place in Alto Peru (now Bolivia) in the early years of post-independence was advanced through mining of tailings, but it only yielded lowgrade minerals.76 A decade later, minerals were extracted through deep tunnel mining and by the beginning of the 1840s, the renewal of the silver mining industry was perceptible.77 Intense mercantile activity emerged around mining, made possible by a network of animal driving that employed llamas, donkeys and mules.78 Given the dispersion of mining centers and the inexistence of paved roads, mule-transport was necessary to move minerals to the callanas (foundries). Between 1826 and 1830, on average between 7,420 mules and 1,080 cattle were sent from the Pampas to Peru and Bolivia annually.79 The commercial demand created by the emergence of Bolivian mining can also be observed in the amount and direction of traffic between 1829 and 1834.80 This was when 45 percent of the animals exported were sent to the highlands of Bolivia and 44 percent were sent to Peru.81 The circulation of mules and cattle during the Republican period was far less than that recorded during the colonial period; this is not due to a lack of demand but to a scarcity in the animals available for transport.82 The nineteenth-century desire for mules signaled a resurgence of seasonal market fairs on the Camino Real (running north to south). The most prominent of these, with a superior amount of goods bought and sold, were La Tablada (Jujuy), Huari (Oruro), and Vilque (Puno). On the path that connected these major markets, small local fairs sprang up that served the double function of cattle selling and traditional exchange between farmers and indigenous peoples.83 The Tablada fair of Jujuy superseded that of Salta and became the meeting place for mule traders. It was also a favorable location for the exchange of products from distinct

282   Borderlands of the Iberian World ecological environments. In the Bolivian territory, the Huari fair gathered at the same time every year from March to April. This market was generally dedicated to livestock trading and the exchange of diverse goods. Isaiah Bowman, who visited the market in the early twentieth century, was of the opinion that it was “one of the premiere locations for trade in Spanish America.”84 Both markets survived changes in transportation technology and endured until the first decades of the twentieth century, bringing together cattle drivers and buyers from very different areas and contributing to the continual ­relevance of circulation and traditional exchange in the South Andean space. The Camino Real and its extensions connected the most important urban centers of the area. Innumerable mule drivers traversed these urban centers, transporting both upper and middle-class merchants with herds of mules and donkeys. The absence of mule driving contracts, characteristic of colonial times, makes these drivers virtually invisible. For this reason, they only appear in the historical record when mentioned or self-identified in solicitations for transport and guidance services. At the center of the mule driving circuit was a group of women who traversed major routes during peacetime, generally accompanied. Such is the case of the mule-driving Ruilaba family (Dolores Chavarría de Ruilaba, Guadalupe, Martina, and Josefa Ruilaba). Between the years of 1829 and 1831, they moved between Tarija, Jujuy and Salta transporting goods at the request of the Tarijan merchants Domingo Arge and Isidro Granados. They moved shipments of donkeys with yerba mate and foreign goods (English textiles and ironmongery articles).85 These were not the only women who participated in transportation. In 1830 Victorina Tejerina was contracted by the Salta-based merchant Ildefonso Álvarez Navarro to bring parcels of grapes, soap, English textiles and reams of paper to Tarija.86 Josefa Saracho, resident of Tarija, appears repeatedly in the customs registers for Salta, Jujuy and Tarija between 1830 and 1850, always accompanied by two workmen carrying “various articles” for the merchant Isidro Granados, including his cash payment.87 In 1850 and 1851, during a period of peace in the region, evidence suggests that a variety of women carried freight between Salta, Tarija and Potosí: Manuela Vázquez, Juliana Chaca, María Mogro, Dolores Moreno, and María Alegre. María Mogro and Dolores Moreno traveled together, as evidenced by their guide licenses. In 1851 for example, María drove a pack of forty-one donkeys with textiles, pottery and hardware while Dolores drove thirty-five donkeys with baskets of pottery, hardware articles and various other objects. Both requested guides in Salta on June 2.88 These cases reveal that mule driving, in addition to being an area of multi-ethnic diversity, was also a gender diverse activity practiced by both men and women. Along transversal roads (east to west), a large variety of merchandise was transported, in addition to cattle, including European goods that entered the continent from the Bolivian port of Cobija.89 These goods were dispatched at Calama, where experienced mule drivers packaged them for the ascent of the Cordillera and delivery at their final destination of Potosí, Oruro, or Salta.90 From these commercial markets, they were absorbed into the largest merchant houses of the region and then distributed throughout the interior continent that covered the southern part of the South Andean space.91

Connections and Circulation in the Southern Andes   283 Merchants from northern Argentina gathered in the Bolivian port and merchant houses of Salta and Jujuy. There, they established connections with branches and/or commissioners.92 Mule drivers from Atacama on both sides of the Andes mountain range drove donkeys carrying these overseas goods, returning with minerals for export and provisions for survival in the desert. The business of intermediation involved intercepting regional products that circulated from San Juan, La Rioja, and Tucumán to Tacna, for absorption by the merchant houses of Salta and Potosí.93 This first Republican period of commercial circulation across frontiers was interrupted in the years 1836 to 1838 by the war between the Peru-Bolivian Confederation and the Argentine Confederation. In 1839, cattle shipments recommenced and strengthened the connection between mercantile networks and the Bolivian port. This was due in part to a customs legislation that benefited the commercial exchange with Argentine provinces.94 In 1840, twelve hundred shipments entered Salta from Cobija, representing 19 percent of overseas merchandise, a portion of which was resold in other urban centers.95 In the following years, this commercial flow increased and came to represent 70 percent of the imported material that passed through the customs office in Salta.96 Businesses from Cobija were sustained by exporting cattle to Bolivia and Peru. From Calama, thousands of donkeys and mules crossed the Cordillera annually carrying goods to be sold and returning with provisions, food and a variety of supplies for daily consumption. The prosperity of the Bolivian port greatly contributed to the commercial success of Potosí. The rise in goods arriving from overseas influenced its population growth and elevated its status to match the main commercial cities in Southern Bolivia, where merchant houses were installed with a large amount of (mostly foreign) capital. These merchant houses maintained links or subsidiaries in the port of Cobija.97 In 1842, 95 percent of imports arriving to the merchant houses of Potosí came from Cobija through mule drivers, who returned with minerals for export.98 The development of the Bolivian port during the 1840s required many different resources to support residents and inhabitants of nearby oases. Transport through the desert over the Cordillera always involved the carriage of provisions, water, and firewood. If oases produced food, it was usually an insufficient amount to feed the port and, frequently, the oasis itself. As a result, mule driving became the most important activity in these areas, and horticultural production gave way to the growth of alfalfa for animal feed. As one witness declared, during the mid-nineteenth century the majority of oasis dwellers dedicated their lives to the business of mule driving and transport.99 Resources arrived from the ocean through commerce and coastal shipping by way of the trans-Cordillera routes. Cattle driving provided meat (in the form of steers) and transport (mules and asses), while mule driving provided supplies for daily life, abundant in the eastern valleys of the Andes.100 This traffic followed pre-Columbian routes originally intended for ecological complementarity to which mule drivers now applied their knowledge and skill. The boom of the new mercantile hub of the Bolivian port supported existing networks in the east-west corridor and strengthened connections on both sides of the Cordillera.

284   Borderlands of the Iberian World Mercantile exchange in the South Andean territory witnessed a progression of e­ conomic phases (silver, copper, salt). Despite the exhaustion of each mineral phase, connections of exchange between farmers lasted through the twentieth century. Over time, trans-Cordillera transit between the Pacific coast and the yungas, understood through the logic of indigenous ecological complementarity between the coast and the jungle (like north–south traffic between the highlands and the valleys) was overwhelmed by mercantile circuits with an abundant flow of goods, evidenced by the specific contexts addressed here. Both circuits of transport contributed to the renewal of links and social bonds that strengthened a space of exchange and lasted beyond the formation of independent South American countries. National frontier lines and borders drawn after independence in South America did not interrupt dynamic regional circulation nor the links and connections that had shaped an autonomous economic space in the Southern region of the Andes. The movement of goods and people characterized the South Andean population over the long duration of historical periods from pre-Hispanic to modern times. Today, this exchange is reflected in the peasant exchanges across borders that are now considered “illegal” and the seasonal market fairs, such as the Manca Fiesta that is celebrated annually on the border between Argentina and Bolivia.101

Notes Archives ABNB: AGNA:  AHP: AHS: AHPJ:

Archivo y Biblioteca Nacionales de Bolivia, Sucre (Bolivia) Archivo General de la Nación, Buenos Aires (Argentina) Archivo Histórico de Potosí, Potosí (Bolivia) Archivo Histórico de Salta, Salta (Argentina) Archivo Histórico Provincial de Jujuy, San Salvador de Jujuy (Argentina)

1. The yungas are the warm, high altitude valleys of the East Andean mountain range. 2. Carl Troll and Stephen Brush, El eco-sistema andino (La Paz: HISBOL, 1987), 35. 3. María Ester Albeck, Viviana Conti and Marta Ruíz, “Entre les Oasis d’Atacama et la Puna de Jujuy: Voies de Communication et Mobilité dans la Longue Durée,” Histoire des Alpes 8 (2003): 80. 4. Lautaro Núñez A. and Tom Dillehay, Movilidad giratoria, armonía social y desarrollo en los Andes meridionales: Patrones de tráfico e interacción económica (Antofagasta: Universidad Católica del Norte, 1995). 5. Axel Nielsen, Axel, Clara A. Rivolta, Verónica Seldes, María Magdalena Vázquez, and Pablo H. Mercoli, comp., Producción y circulación prehispánica de bienes en el sur andino (Córdoba: Editorial Brujas, 2007); Lautaro Núñez A. and Axel E. Nielsen, ed., En ruta. Arqueología, historia y etnografía del tráfico surandino (Córdoba: Encuentro Grupo Editor, 2011). 6. Lautaro Núñez A.  and Axel  E.  Nielsen, “Caminante, sí hay camino: reflexiones sobre el tráfico sur andino,” in En ruta. Arqueología, historia y etnografía del tráfico surandino, ed. Lautaro Núñez A. and Axel E. Nielsen, 21, 25. “Rescatiris” (from the Aymara language) is the name given to indigenous traffickers who cultivated and traded guano and charquesillo.

Connections and Circulation in the Southern Andes   285 7. Axel E. Nielsen, “Por las rutas del Zenta: evidencias directas de tráfico prehispánico entre Humahuaca y las Yungas,” in La mitad verde del mundo Andino. Investigaciones arqueo­ lógicas en la vertiente oriental de los Andes y las tierras bajas de Bolivia y Argentina, ed. Gabriela Ortiz and Beatriz Ventura (San Salvador de Jujuy: Universidad Nacional de Jujuy, 2003), 261–284; “Aproximación a la arqueología de la frontera tripartita BoliviaChile-Argentina,” Chungará 36 (2004): 861–878; and “El tráfico de caravanas entre Lípez y Atacama visto desde la cordillera occidental,” in En ruta. Arqueología, historia y etnografía del tráfico surandino, ed. Lautaro Núñez A., and Axel E. Nielsen, 83–109. 8. Walter Sánchez C., “Redes viales y entramados relacionales entre los valles, la puna y los yungas de Cochabamba,” in En ruta. Arqueología, historia y etnografía del tráfico suran­ dino, ed. Lautaro Núñez A. and Axel E. Nielsen, 177–197. 9. John Hislop, The Inka Road System (Orlando and London: Academic Press, 1984); Rodolfo Rafino, “Capacñam: la red caminera inka,” in Las rutas del capricornio andino. Huellas milenarias de Antofagasta, San Pedro de Atacama, Jujuy y Salta, coord. María Soledad Silva 39–45 (Santiago: CMN Chile, 2000), 45; C. Vitry, Aportes para el estudio de los caminos incaicos. Tramo Morohuasi-Incahuasi. Salta-Argentina (Salta: Universidad Nacional de Salta, 2004). 10. Tambo (tampus) refers to a place of refuge for travelers, caravans, messengers (chasquis), human carriers, and armies who travelled on the Incan trails. 11. Rodolfo Raffino, Rubén Iturriza, Aylen Capparelli, Diego Gobbo, Victoria  G.  Montes, Cristina Diez Marín, and Anahí Lancona, “El capacñam inka en el riñón valliserrano del noroeste argentino,” in Historia argentina prehispánica, t. II, dir. Eduardo Berberián and Axel E. Nielsen 493–521 (Córdoba: Editorial Brujas, 2001), 493–497. 12. Thèrése Bouysse-Cassagne, La identidad aymara: aproximación histórica (siglos XV–XVI) (La Paz: HISBOL, IFEA, 1987). 13. Tristan Platt, Thèrése Bouysse-Cassagne, and Olivia Harris, Qaraqara-Charka. Mallku, inka y rey en las provincias de Charcas (siglos XVI–XVII). Historia antropológica de una confederación aymara (Lima: IFEA, 2011), 331 ff. 14. Luis Miguel Glave, Trajinantes. Caminos indígenas en la sociedad colonial siglos XVI/XVII (Lima: Instituto de Apoyo Agrario, 1989), 25–176; Cecilia Sanhueza, “Tráfico caravanero y arriería colonial en el siglo XVI,” Estudios Atacameños 10 (1992): 169–182; ‘Trajinante’ (trader) indicates someone who transported and carried his own goods and products. 15. Albeck, Conti, and Ruíz, “Entre les Oasis,” 79–98. The colonial “Camino Real” was the route that connected Lima and Buenos Aires, following the description of Concoloncorvo, who coined the name. Alonso Carrió de la Vandera (Concoloncorvo), El lazarillo de ciegos caminantes [1775–1776] (Barcelona: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1985), 19. This route is also known as the “road of the Sierra to the South.” Laura Escobari de Querejazu, Producción y comercio en la historia de Bolivia colonial. Siglos XVI–XVIII (La Paz: Plural, 2014), 82. 16. Peter Bakewell, Mineros de la montaña roja (Madrid: Alianza, 1989), 39; Ruggiero Romano, Coyunturas opuestas. La crisis del siglo XVII en Europa e Hispanoamérica (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1993), 91. 17. Sanhueza, “Tráfico caravanero y arriería colonial,” 169–182; Cecilia Sanhueza, “Atacama y Lípez. Breve historia de una ruta: escenarios históricos, estrategias indígenas y ritualidad andina,” in En ruta: Arqueología, historia y etnografía del tráfico surandino, ed. Lautaro Núñez A. and Axel E. Nielsen, 313–339; Gabriela Sica, “Del tráfico caravanero a la arriería indígena en Jujuy. Siglos XVII–XVIII,” Revista Transporte y Territorio 3 (2010): 23–39, accessed August 15, 2015, http://www.redalyc.org/articulo.oa?id=333027081003; Viviana Conti and Gabriela Sica, “Arrieros andinos de la colonia a la independencia. El negocio de la arriería en Jujuy,” Revista Nuevo Mundo, Mundos Nuevos, accessed August 15, 2015, http://nuevomundo.revues.org/60560.

286   Borderlands of the Iberian World 18. Carlos Sempat Assadourian, El sistema de la economía colonial. El mercado interior, regiones y espacio económico (Mexico: Nueva Imagen, 1983), 127–154. 19. Sica, “Del tráfico caravanero,” 30; Sanhueza, “Atacama y Lípez,” 322. 20. Sica, “Del tráfico caravanero,” 30–32. 21. Conti and Sica, “Arrieros andinos.” 22. Sica, “Del tráfico caravanero,” 30. 23. “Arreo de ganado” (cattle driving) refers to the relocation of herds from their place of production to the place of demand. The most in-demand and expensive animals were mules that, being barren, had to be reproduced continuously. In addition to mules, the arreos included cowherds, required for food in mining and urban zones. Mules, horses and cows constituted what was called a “major herd”, which were moved in arreos and taxed differently. The “minor herd” of asses, sheep and goats, comprised the rural herds, moved in seasonal migrations or through exchange and therefore exempt from taxes. The characteristics of each type of herd determined the routes and times of the year when they would move across the highlands. 24. Experts on the trails, water sources, pastures, rest areas and alterations to the route were called “baqueanos.” 25. Viviana Conti, “La frontera argentino-boliviana durante la temprana república. Complementariedad económica e integración social,” Si somos americanos. Revista de estudios transfronterizos XI–I (2011): 35–36; Ricardo Valderrama Fernández and Carmen Escalante Gutiérrez, “Arrieros, troperos y llameros en Huancavelica,” Allpanchis 21 (1983): 65–88. 26. In the Southern Hemisphere, this corresponds to the months of March and April, generally coinciding with the Easter religious holidays. 27. Main market fairs and small secondary market fairs were held in the surrounding areas. They concentrated local production and facilitated exchange. Jaime Urrutia, “De rutas, ferias y circuitos en Huamanga,” Allpanchis 21 (1983): 61–64; Viviana E. Conti, “Articulación económica en los Andes Centromeridionales (siglo XIX),” Anuario de Estudios Americanos XLVI (1989): 423–453. 28. Estela Toledo, “El comercio de mulas en Salta: 1657–1698,” Anuario del Instituto de Investigaciones Históricas de Rosario VI (1962–1963): 169 and 172. 29. The term “tablada” applied to an open space, generally near a slaughterhouse and commercial center, dedicated to buying and selling (as well as the fattening) of cattle. The Jujuy market functioned secondarily to the Salta market until the nineteenth century, when it overtook and replaced it as the premier regional market. See Conti, “Articulación.” 30. Located between a thousand and thirteen hundred meters above sea level, with a mild climate, ample rainfall and good daily thermic amplitude due to the elevation and closeness to the Tropic of Capricorn. 31. Marcelo Lagos and Viviana Conti, Jujuy, de la Revolución de Mayo a nuestros días. 1810-1910-2010 (Jujuy: Universidad Nacional de Jujuy, 2010), 26–29. Roads from Buenos Aires, Córdoba or Tucumán brought to Jujuy loads of merchandise destined for the markets in Alto and Bajo Peru. The same occurred in Salta, where goods and travelers had to deviate from the Camino Real to cross the Andes on the Desploblado Camino. 32. Accounts by travelers from that time provide interesting descriptions: Carrió de la Vandera, El lazarillo, 88; Joseph Andrews, Las provincias del norte en 1825 (Tucumán: Universidad Nacional de Tucumán, 1957), 104; Edmundo Temple, Córdoba, Tucumán,

Connections and Circulation in the Southern Andes   287 Salta y Jujuy en 1826 [extracted chapters “Travels in various parts of Perú.” London, 1830.] (Jujuy: Universidad Nacional de Jujuy, 1989), 167–168. 33. Enrique Tándeter, Vilma Milletich, and Roberto Schmit, “Flujos mercantiles en el Potosí colonial tardío,” in Circuitos mercantiles y mercados en Latinoamérica. Siglos XVIII–XI, comp. Jorge Silva Riquer, Juan Carlos Grosso, and Carmen Yuste (Mexico: Instituto de Investigaciones Dr. José María Luis Mora, IIH-UNAM, 1995), 15. 34. “Goods from the land” were produced in other areas and transported through the SaltaJujuy territory. These included wine, liquor, vinager, pepper, coca, yerba mate, sugar and its by-products, rice, fruit (fresh and dried), cotton, and wool; manufactured products like ‘textiles from the land’ (tocuyos, bayetas, ponchos), ceramics (faience and other types), tools and implements for riding (saddles, reins, blankets, boots, whips, bridles). 35. Pulperos refers to people who managed a “pulpería” (shop that sold diverse goods and products, as well as drinks for consumption on the premises therefore functioning as a site for social interaction). There were pulperías in cities as well as in small towns. Emma Raspi, “Sobre tenderos y pulperos: minoristas urbanos de Salta y Jujuy (siglo XIX),” Cuadernos 21 (2003): 23–39; The 1778–1779 Census, referred to as the “Census of Carlos III”, reveals that there were 11,565 inhabitants from Salta, and 13,619 from Jujuy in that year. In the territory of Salta, 27 percent of the population was of Spanish origin and 25 percent was indigenous; In Jujuy only 4 percent of the population was Spanish and 81 percent was indigenous. The rest of the population comprised black people, castas (mixed- black race people), and mestizos (people of Indigenous and Spanish ancestry). Elberto Oscar Acevedo, La Intendencia de Salta del Tucumán en el virreinato del Río de La Plata (Mendoza: UNCUYO, 1965), 322–325. 36. Brooke Larson, “The Cotton Textiles Industry of Cochabamba, 1770–1810. The Opportunities and Limits of Growth,” in The Economies of Mexico and Peru During the Late Colonial Period 1760, 1810, ed. Nils Jacobsen and Hans Jurgen (Berlin: Colloquium Verlag, Bibliotheca Ibero-Americana, 1986), 150–168, and Cochabamba 1550–1900 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1988), 243, 259–266. 37. Sara Mata, “El crédito mercantil. Salta a fines del siglo XVIII,” Anuario de Estudios Americanos LIII, no. 2 (1996): 147–171. 38. Filiberto de Mena, “Fundación de Salta. Descripción y narración historial de la antigua provincia del Tucumán” [1772], in La patria vieja: cuadros históricos. Guerra, política y diplomacia, ed. Gregorio F. Rodríguez 291–473 (Buenos Aires: Compañía Sudamericana de Billetes de Banco, 1946). 39. Carrió de la Vandera, El lazarillo, 75–85. 40. Nicolás Sánchez Albonoz, “La saca de mulas de Salta al Perú. 1778–1808,” Anuario VIII (1965): 261–310, and “La extracción de mulas de Jujuy al Perú. Fuentes, volumen y negociantes,” Estudios de Historia Social 1 (1965): 108-109-112. The connection route between Jujuy and Alto Peru ran along the ravine of La Cueva-Yavi-Suipacha and offered rest stops and pastures all along, which made it ideal for the transport of cattle. The road from Salta ran along the ravine of Toro (the Desploblado route), with few rest stops and pastures was better for mule transport than for cows. This reveals the important role played by the Jujuy market in the commercialization of cattle. 41. Assadourian, El sistema de la economía colonial, 155–254; Sara Mata, “Población y producción a fines de la colonia. El caso de Salta en el noroeste argentino en la segunda mitad del siglo XVIII,” Andes 9 (1998): 143–169; Silvia Palomeque, “La circulación mercantil en las provincias del Interior, 1800–1810,” Anuario del IEHS IV (1989): 164.

288   Borderlands of the Iberian World 42. Ester Aillón Soria, Vida, pasión y negocios. El propietario de la viña “San Pedro Mártir” Indalecio González de Socasa (1755–1820) (Sucre: ABNB, 2009); William Lofstrom, Redes y estrategias mercantiles; el giro de un comerciante potosino en tiempos de guerra (Sucre: Tupak Katari, 2012); Viviana E. Conti, “Una empresa mercantil familiar en el espacio económico surandino. ‘Tezanos Pinto y Cía.’ 1794–1854,” in Las escalas de la historia comparada, vol. 2, coord. Susana Bandieri, Graciela Blanco, and Mónica Blanco (Buenos Aires: Miño y Dávila, 2008), 29–55; Testamento e Inventario de bienes de Sebastián Antonio de Arana, 1814: Escrituras Públicas de la ciudad de La Plata; Archivo y Biblioteca Nacionales de Bolivia (hereafter ABNB), escribano Calixto Valda, folios 321–338v; Vilma Milletich, “La formación del capital de un comerciante porteño: Juan Esteban de Anchorena, 1750–1775,” Anuario del IEHS 21 (2006): 311–330. Also correspondence between Juan Esteban de Anchorena and his clients and sons (Juan José, Nicolás, and Tomás de Anchorena), who acted in his name in Tucumán, Salta, Jujuy, Potosí, Tarija, Cochabamba, Mojo, and provinces of Alto Perú between 1778–1801: Fondo Juan  E.  Anchorena y sucesores, documentación oficial y particular 1739–1831, Archivo General de la Nación, Buenos Aires, Argentina (hereafter AGNA), Sala 7, Legajo 317, 7-4-2 and 4-4-24. Correspondence of Joaquín Obregón Zevallos, Potosí, 1806; AGNA, Sala 7, Legajo 315, 7-4-16. Testamentaria del finado Juan Esteban Anchorena, Buenos Aires, 10 de junio de 1809, AGNA, Sala 7, Legajo 317, 4-4-17. Potosí 1785, Archivo Histórico de Potosí (hereafter AHP), Escrituras Notariales (EN) 176, Escribano Plácido Molina; from 1756 his business revolved around the sale of mules in Potosí. Earlier, based in Jujuy in the 1770s, he worked as a commissioner for Joseph de Endeyza, his neighbor and merchant in Potosí. Potosí 1778, AHP, EN 169, Escribano Plácido de Molina: 596-597v; and Viviana Conti and Mirta Gutiérrez, “Empresarios de los Andes de la Colonia a la Independencia. Dos estudios de casos de Jujuy,” América Latina en la Historia Económica 32 (2009): 137–163. 43. Domingo Manuel Sánchez de Bustamante married his daughters to merchants and friends from the network he formed in Potosí: Manuel de Tezanos Pinto, José de Alvarado, and Félix de Echavarría. The second generation of Tezanos Pinto, Sánchez de Bustamante, Alvarado, and Echavarría contracted endogamic marriages between cousins. Conti and Gutiérrez, “Empresarios de los Andes,” 149: Diagrama de descendientes; Viviana Conti, “Familia, redes y negocios en Sudamérica,” Revista Nuevo Mundo Mundos Nuevos (2008), accessed August 15, 2015, https://nuevomundo.revues.org/17323?lang=es. 44. Eighteen twenty-five was a “hinge” year when two highly important political events converged: the arrival of Bolívar’s troops in La Plata and the death of royalist José Manuel de Olañeta (leader and executer of repeated invasions of Jujuy) in Tumusla. The effects of said events were felt immediately in the surrounding regions. 45. Libro auxiliar del ramo de alcabalas de Jujuy de 1811; Archivo Histórico de Salta (hereafter AHS), Libro de Hacienda (LH) 344. 46. Libro auxiliar del ramo de Sisa de 1811 de la Sub–Tesorería de Jujuy; AHS; LH 451. Exported from February to July and in December, from August to November there were no exports (except for 103 cows in September). 47. Viviana Conti, El éxodo de 1812 (Jujuy: Ediciones Bicentenario, Gobierno de Jujuy, 2012); Lagos and Conti, Jujuy, de la Revolución de Mayo, 133–210; Viviana Conti and Emma Raspi, “De las guerras de la independencia a la organización del Estado. 1810–1852,” in Jujuy en la historia. De la colonia al siglo XX, dir. Ana Teruel and Marcelo Lagos (Jujuy: Universidad Nacional de Jujuy, 2006), 85–137.

Connections and Circulation in the Southern Andes   289 48. Libro manual de Hacienda de la Tesorería Menor de Jujuy de 1813; AHS, LH 480. Libro auxiliar del ramo de Sisa para el año de 1813; AHS, LH 411. The cattle originated from the River Plate interior. 49. “Peso” refers to the silver currency used at the time. Eight reales equaled one peso, with the legal rate at ten coins to twenty grains (902,77 thousandth), valuing 272 maravedís. Luis Peñaloza Cordero, Nueva historia económica de Bolivia. Comercio, moneda y bancos (La Paz: Los amigos del libro, 1984), 18; Julio Benavides  M., Historia de la moneda en Bolivia (La Paz: Puerta del Sol, 1972), 24. 50. AHS, LH. 480, LH 411 and Libro auxiliar de alcabalas de Jujuy para 1813; LH 412. 51. Testamento e inventario; ABNB, EP 379: 321–388v. 52. Lofstrom, Redes y estrategias mercantiles. 53. Libro manual de Jujuy de 1815; AHS, LH. 306 y 183. Libro auxiliar del ramo de Sisa de Jujuy de 1815; AHS, LH 149. Libro auxiliar del ramo de alcabalas de Jujuy de 1815; AHS, LH 148 y 182. 54. Informe elevado al cabildo de Jujuy por Mariano de Gordaliza; 1815; Archivo Histórico Provincial de Jujuy (hereafter AHPJ), Sección Ricardo Rojas (SRR), Caja XLIV. 55. Informe sobre la situación de la población, presentado al cabildo de Jujuy; AHPJ, SRR, Caja II, Libro Capitular, acta 25 de agosto de 1818. 56. Raquel Gil Montero, “La ciudad de Jujuy y su campaña circundante: algunos aspectos de su población entre fines del siglo XVIII y mediados del XIX,” in Jujuy en la historia, avances de investigación II, coord. Marcelo Lagos 57–80 (Jujuy: Universidad Nacional de Jujuy, 1995); Gustavo Paz, “ ‘El orden es el desorden.’ Guerra y movilización campesina en la campaña de Jujuy 1815–1821,” in Desafíos al orden. Política y sociedades rurales durante la revolución de la Independencia, comp. Raúl Fradkin and Jorge Gelman (Rosario: Prohistoria, 2008), 83–101. 57. Viviana Conti, “Salta entre el Atlántico y el Pacífico. Vinculaciones mercantiles y producciones en el siglo XIX,” in Cruzando la Cordillera . . . La frontera argentino-chilena como espacio social, coord. Susana Bandieri (Neuquen: Universidad Nacional del Comahue, 2001), 233–261, and “Entre la plata y el salitre. Los mercados del Pacífico para las producciones del Norte argentino (1830–1930),” in Una tierra y tres naciones. El litoral salitrero entre 1830 y 1930, comp. Viviana Conti and Marcelo Lagos (Jujuy: Universidad Nacional de Jujuy, 2002), 119–149; Erick  D.  Langer and Viviana  E.  Conti, “Circuitos comerciales tradicionales y cambio económico en los Andes Centromeridionales (1830–1930),” Desarrollo Económico 31, no. 121 (1991): 91–111; Sanhueza, “Atacama y Lípez.” 58. Joseph Barcalay Pentland, Informe sobre Bolivia, 1826 (Potosí: Impresión de la Casa de la Moneda, 1975), 65–97. 59. For mining companies during the early Republican period, see William Lofstrom, Dámaso de Uriburu, un empresario minero de principios del siglo XIX en Bolivia (La Paz: Biblioteca Minera Boliviana, 1982); Tristan Platt, “Historias unidas, memorias escindidas: las empresas mineras de los hermanos Ortiz y la formación de las elites nacionales, en Salta y Potosí, 1800–1880,” Andes 7 (1997): 137–220. 60. Tristan Platt, “Producción, tecnología y trabajo en la Rivera de Potosí durante la República temprana,” in El siglo XIX en Bolivia y América Latina, ed. Rossana Barragán et al. (La Paz: Muela del Diablo, 1997), 395–435. 61. Carlos Sempat Assadourian, Heraclio Bonilla, Antonio Mitre, and Tristan Platt, Minería y espacio económico en los Andes. Siglos XVI–XX (Lima: IEP, 1980), 49.

290   Borderlands of the Iberian World 62. José Deustua, La minería peruana en la iniciación de la República, 1820–1840 (Lima: IEP, 1986), 34. The figure shows the total production of silver in Peru from 1800 to 1850. 63. The province of Salta contained the jurisdictions of Jujuy, Tarija, and the territories of Tucumán and Catamarca. Between 1820 and 1834 boundaries were established dividing independent provinces. 64. Instrucciones que el Cabildo de Jujuy entregó al diputado Iriarte; artículo 13. AHPJ, SRR, Caja III, Libro Capitular de 1820–1825, acta del 18 de enero de 1821. 65. The rural production of Salta and Jujuy competed with that of the Pampas, which was better quality and had lower transport costs. Therefore, the only possibility for the distribution of surplus was to send them to the Andean region, where no competition existed and profits were received in metallic currency. 66. See Table 10.1 for annual sums. In 1824 exports of cattle were not registered due to the war in the transit zone between Jujuy and Chichas. 67. Goods in highest demand were liquor, suet, sugar and its byproducts, starch, soap, tobacco, rice, cheese, fruit, honey, vinegar, wax, textiles from the land, reins, tools, and footwear. 68. These sums include the animals legally exported by the customs office of Salta: Cuaderno de toma de razón de guías 1823–1833 (CTRG); AHPJ. Caja principal de Hacienda de 1824 y 1825; AHS. 69. Both moved to Chuquisaca some years later, diversifying their businesses; José Manuel de Alvarado was the son and heir of trader Manuel de Alvarado, from the pre-revolutionary period. 70. In 1823 business was resumed with Tarija and Chichas (Mojo and Mineral del Rosario), where European merchandise, local and American products were sold, like yerba mate, saddle blankets and liquor. AHPJ, CTRG, years 1823 and 1824. 7 1. Libro principal de guías de la Real Aduana de Potosí, 1825, ABNB, Tribunal Nacional de Cuentas (TNC) 3363; Pentland, Informe, 99–127. 72. Merchants from Salta and Jujuy, as in Arica, carried out long journeys aiming to have a sales tax repaid as they returned to their places of origin with merchandise that was supposedly “unsellable.” Libro principal de guías de la Real Aduana de Potosí, 1825, ABNB, TNC 3363. Libro auxiliar de guías de la Aduana Nacional de Potosí, 1827, ABNB, TNC 2298. 73. Viviana E. Conti, “Comercio y comerciantes en el espacio surandino de la colonia a la república. Tezanos Pinto y Cía.,” Anuario de estudios bolivianos, archivísticos y bibliográficos 19 (2013): 189–217. 74. Tezanos Pinto resumed his networks from Potosí, where he set up a shop (wholesale, at retail price) with overseas goods and yerba mate, which he supplied personally. In October, his son Serapio was sent to Jujuy with twenty-nine cargos of mules, driven by local arrieros, carrying European merchandise purchased in Buenos Aires in July to stock the stores in Potosí and Sucre. AHPJ, CTRG, 1825. 75. Viviana  E.  Conti, “Circulación de mercancías y mercaderes por el espacio surandino (1820–1850),” in La circulación de personas en los países andinos entre 1760 y 1860. Su importancia cultural, social y económica, ed. Teresa Pereira and Adolfo Ibáñez (Santiago de Chile: Fundación Mario Góngora, 2008), 219–252. 76. Antonio Mitre, El monedero de los Andes. Región económica y moneda boliviana en el siglo XIX (La Paz: HISBOL, 1986), 21–26. 77. Platt, “Producción y tecnología.”

Connections and Circulation in the Southern Andes   291 78. Nelson Manrique, Mercado interno y región. La sierra central 1820–1930 (Lima: DESCO, 1987), 60. 79. These represent the first mercantile exchanges of the Republican period. Eighty percent of animals were sent to the Peruvian plains and coastal areas, 10 percent to the highlands of Bolivia, 2 percent to Atacama, and the rest to the lowlands of Bolivia. 80. Between 1835 and 1838 the war of the Peruvian-Bolivian Confederation cut off commercial circulation. 81. Guías de exportación: AHPJ, CTRG, AHS in annual Government Packages (CG). Eight percent were sent to the lowlands of Bolivia and 2 percent to Atacama. 82. There was a scarcity of mules and cows because areas traditionally providing this livestock were hit by civil wars and lacked surplus supplies, or because the journey to Salta or Jujuy was too dangerous. The mules of the Republican period came from closer areas (Santiago del Estero, Tucumán, and San Juan). Since they were less the demand increased their value as a scarce commodity. 83. Conti, “Articulación.” 84. Isaiah Bowman, Los senderos del desierto de Atacama (Santiago: Sociedad Chilena de Historia y Geografía, Imprenta Universitaria, 1942), 260. [First edition in English, Desert trails of Atacama (New York: American Geographical Society, 1924)]. 85. AHS, CG 1830, guías 9, 99 y 173. AHPJ, CG 1830, guía 100. ABNB, TNC 5228, partidas 3, 9 and 23, and TNC 3657, partida 63. 86. AHS, CG 1830, guía 120. 87. Libro manual de Hacienda de 1830; AHPJ, guía 3. AHS, CG 1851, guía 122. ABNB, TNC 5228, partida 9 y TNC 3657, partida 105. 88. AHS, LH 1851, guías 124 y 125. 89. The port of Bolivia, named Lamar by Bolívar in 1825, was located in the bay of Cobija that constituted Bolivia’s exit to the Ocean, at a southern latitude of 22°degrees 30’ minutes. This was the “national port” of Bolivia until destroyed by an earthquake in 1877 and the subsequent occupation by Chile during the War of the Pacific. It was used for the exportation of minerals extracted in Bolivia, the importation of goods from the global market, and as a point of communication in the traffic of people on the Pacific Ocean. 90. Calama is an oasis in the Atacama Desert. It functioned as a stopover between the port of Cobija and the cities in the interior of Bolivia (especially Potosí, Sucre and Oruro). 91. Libro manual principal de la Aduana de Potosí, 1829; ABNB, TNC 5119. Libro auxiliar y comprobantes de la Aduana de Potosí, 1829; ABNB, TNC 3119. Libro manual principal de la Aduana de Potosí, 1830; ABNB. TNC 4779. Libro auxiliar principal de la Aduana de Potosí, 1830: ABNB, TNC 7408. Libro copiador de guías de Potosí, 1833; ABNB, TNC 2260. 92. A representative or commissioner acted as an intermediary for the import and export Commercial Houses in the port. Cartas de varios comerciantes; AHS; Archivo Metálico, Estante 3, Sobre Oficio. See Viviana Conti, “Circuitos mercantiles, medios de pago y estrategias en Salta y Jujuy (1820–1852),” in La desintegración de la economía colonial. Comercio y moneda en el interior del espacio colonial (1800–1860), ed. Alejandra Irigorin y Roberto Schmit (Buenos Aires: Biblos, 2003), 113–133, and “El puerto de La Mar en el Pacífico Sur. Vinculaciones con el interior del espacio surandino. Flujos y redes mercantiles 1827–1850,” Anuario de estudios bolivianos, archivísticos y bibliográficos 20 (2014): 395–426. 93. Libro copiador de guías de Potosí, 1833; ABNB, TNC 2260. Libro copiador de guías expedidas, Potosí, 1834; ABNB, TNC 5533. Libro auxiliar de guías de Potosí, 1835; ABNB, TNC 2296. What circulated most was yerba mate, coca, pepper, honey, chocolate, liquor and

292   Borderlands of the Iberian World wine, soap, sugar and molasses, cotton, bayetas from the land, native tocuyos, native barragán, and leathers. 94. Fernando Cajías de la Vega, La provincia de Atacama, 1825–1842 (La Paz: Instituto Boliviano de Cultura, 1975); Conti, “El puerto.” 95. Merchandise introduced in Salta from Cobija was resold to Tucumán, Catamarca, and Jujuy. AHS, LH 13. 96. Twenty percent came from the Chilean port of Valparaiso via San Juan on the road that ran through the valleys of Calchaquíes to Salta and 10 percent came from the port in Buenos Aires in carts. AHS, Libros de Hacienda 13 y 95. 97. Erick Langer, “Bajo la sombra del cerro rico. Redes comerciales y fracaso del naciona­ lismo económico en el Potosí del siglo XIX,” Revista Andina 37 (2003): 77–94; Conti, “El puerto.” 98. Libro manual principal de la Aduana Nacional de Potosí, 1842; ABNB, TNC 6730. 99. Rodulfo Philippi, Viaje al desierto de Atacama, hecho de orden del Gobierno de Chile en el verano 1853–54 (Halle en Sajonia: Librería de Eduardo Anton, 1860). 100. Trans-Cordillera mule driving supplemented the daily consumption products of the Atacama Desert inhabitants with grease, tobacco, cheeses, yerba mate, meat, flours, sugar, cane liquor, soap, and soles of leather among other goods. 101. Google Search, accessed September 15, 2015, https://www.google.com.ar/search?q=man ca+fiesta+2015&safe=active&rlz=1C1WZPI_esAR626AR626&es_sm=122&tbm=isch&t bo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ved=0CCIQsAR&gws_rd=ssl.

Bibliography Albeck, María Ester, Viviana Conti, and Marta Ruíz. “Entre les Oasis d’Atacama et la Puna de Jujuy: Voies de Communication et Mobilité dans la Longue Durée.” Histoire des Alpes, 8 (2003): 79–98. Albeck, María Ester, ed., De la costa a la selva: producción e intercambio entre los pueblos agroalfareros de los Andes Centro Sur. Tilcara: Instituto Interdisciplinario Tilcara, 1994. Assadourian, Carlos Sempat. El sistema de la economía colonial. El mercado interior, regiones y espacio económico. Mexico: Nueva Imagen, 1983. Bouysse-Cassagne, Thèrése, La Identidad Aymara: aproximación histórica (siglos XV–XVI). La Paz: HISBOL-IFEA, 1987. Carrió de la Vandera, Alonso (Concoloncorvo). El lazarillo de ciegos caminantes. Barcelona: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1985. Conti, Viviana, and Mirta Gutiérrez. “Empresarios de los Andes de la Colonia a la Independencia. Dos estudios de casos de Jujuy.” América Latina en la Historia Económica 32 (2009): 137–163. Conti, Viviana, and Gabriela Sica. “Arrieros andinos de la colonia a la independencia. El negocio de la arriería en Jujuy.” Revista Nuevo Mundo Mundos Nuevos. Accessed August 15, 2015, http://nuevomundo.revues.org/60560. Conti, Viviana. “Articulación económica en los Andes centromeridionales (siglo XIX).” Anuario de Estudios Americanos XLVI (1989): 423–453. Conti, Viviana. “El puerto de La Mar en el Pacífico Sur. Vinculaciones con el interior del espacio surandino. Flujos y redes mercantiles 1827–1850.” Anuario de estudios bolivianos, archivísticos y bibliográficos 20 (2014): 395–426.

Connections and Circulation in the Southern Andes   293 Lagos, Marcelo, and Viviana Conti. Jujuy, de la Revolución de Mayo a nuestros días. 18101910–2010. Jujuy: Universidad Nacional de Jujuy, 2010. Lofstrom, William. Redes y estrategias mercantiles; el giro de un comerciante potosino en tiempos de guerra. Sucre: Tupak Katari, 2012. Núñez A., Lautaro, and Axel Nielsen, ed. En ruta. Arqueología, historia y etnografía del tráfico surandino. Córdoba: Encuentro Grupo Editor, 2011. Ortiz, Gabriela, and Beatriz Ventura, ed. La mitad verde del mundo andino. Investigaciones arqueológicas en la vertiente oriental de los Andes y las tierras bajas de Bolivia y Argentina. San Salvador de Jujuy: Universidad Nacional de Jujuy, 2003. Pentland, Joseph Barcalay. Informe sobre Bolivia, 1826. Potosí: Impresión de la Casa de la Moneda, 1975. Platt, Tristan. “Producción, tecnología y trabajo en la Rivera de Potosí durante la República temprana.” In El siglo XIX. Bolivia y América Latina, edited by Rossana Barragán, Dora Cajías, and Seemin Quayun, 395–435. La Paz: Muela del Diablo, 1997. Platt, Tristan, Bouysse-Cassagne, Thèrése, and Olivia Harris. Qaraqara-Charka. Mallku, inka y rey en las provincias de Charcas (siglos XVI–XVII). Historia antropológica de una confede­ ración aymara. Lima: IFEA, 2011 Sanhueza, Cecilia. “Atacama y Lípez. Breve historia de una ruta: escenarios históricos, estrategias indígenas y ritualidad andina.” In En ruta. Arqueología, historia y etnografía del tráfico surandino, edited by Lautaro Núñez A., and Axel E. Nielsen, 313–339. Córdoba: Encuentro Grupo Editor, 2011. Sanhueza, Cecilia. “Tráfico caravanero y arriería colonial en el siglo XVI.” Estudios Atacameños 10 (1992): 169–182. Sica, Gabriela. “Del tráfico caravanero a la arriería indígena en Jujuy. Siglos XVII–XVIII”. Revista Transporte y Territorio 3 (2010): 23–39. Accessed August 15, 2015, http://www. redalyc.org/articulo.oa?id=333027081003> ISSN.

chapter 11

The Roya l Roa d of th e I n ter ior i n N ew Spa i n Indigenous Commerce and Political Action Tatiana Seijas

A web of terrestrial roads and trails crisscrossed the vast territory between Central Mexico and the Rio Grande Valley—a distance of over 1,840 kilometers.1 Indigenous peoples traded across this space for centuries, maintaining short- and long-distance commerce in the context of varied political regimes. For some three hundred years, Spaniards made use of parts of this elaborate transport network and called it the camino real de tierra adentro or “royal road of the interior”.2 Most roads in so-called Spanish America followed ancient indigenous pathways.3 Colonists conceived of this northward royal road as a singular structure of empire that connected Mexico City to the furthest reaches of Spanish sovereignty in North America.4 For indigenous communities, in contrast, the royal road of the interior was merely one trunk line in a larger network of pathways that linked sites of commerce. After European contact, Indian traders, artisans, guides, messengers, farmers, and others continued to live and travel along these routes. Some indigenous communities demanded access to the royal road as their prerogative, insisting that their legal status as Indians and vassals of the crown granted them this favor. Micro-histories gleaned from the archives offer a unique lens for examining the ways Indians claimed the royal road as a borderland space, where they bought and sold goods and services. They did so to maintain some degree of financial independence, while also inserting themselves into wider circuits of economic exchange. This terrestrial web highlights the indigenous origins of colonial routes, and it showcases the economic and political agency exerted by native peoples. Indians were the demographic majority throughout the northern frontier from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries.5 Until recently, however, the dominant historiography has focused on the minority experience of colonists and examined the routes through the lens of colonialism and imperial expansion. Economic analysis has ignored indigenous activity beyond

296   Borderlands of the Iberian World identifying Indians as laborers in the colonial productive sector, particularly in mining. Historians’ conceptualization of roads as imperial structures is partly to blame for the omission of indigenous people as economic actors. The aim here is to rethink roads as indigenous pathways and to underscore the resilient and adaptive qualities of native commerce. Borderland studies must include the sociopolitical and economic perspectives of indigenous people. This analytical perspective aims, in part, to identify the significance of transcultural frontiers for Indians and to carve out borderland spaces that do not necessarily correlate with European boundary lines. Mary Karash, for example, shows that the Amazon basin and its tributaries served as a fluvial borderland space where different indigenous groups gathered to trade, crossing ethnic and linguistic divides to acquire different goods.6 Indigenous groups living in the diverse provinces between the Rio Grande Valley in New Mexico and the Central Valley of Mexico used terrestrial pathways in a similar way. The routes were like rivers on the land, and they constituted a borderland zone of intercultural exchange. Fabrício Prado makes a related point about urban sectors by arguing that human interaction in certain areas altered that space and transformed it into a borderland—an idea that is similarly articulated by Linda M. Rupert.7 Following the same lines, this chapter conceptualizes the royal road of the interior as a contact zone to shed light on the everyday experiences of indigenous people who made this a borderland corridor (with cases from the 1690s to 1720s).8 The act of interpreting routes as borderlands diverges from more traditional depictions of transport networks. For many historians, roads served to connect centers of power with peripheral regions. Some historical actors would likely have agreed with this political rendering. For Spanish officials, the royal road of the interior was meant to supply the militarized northern zone and to secure the region from competing European empires and “unconquered” indigenous groups. From this perspective, the camino real began in Mexico City and headed northward to the frontier. In a related manner, treasury officers understood this royal road as critical transport infrastructure for silver, which had to be moved southward from the northern mines to Mexico City, and hence to the coastal ports to be exported abroad. Some historians have followed this take, emphasizing the royal road’s significance as a silver highway. The historiography centered on the Spanish crown overlooks the preponderance of human activity that took place along this space. Colonists and royal officials certainly used these pathways for their own economic and political purposes, but so did Indians and people of mixed descent. For most indigenous people, the royal road was not a route to a far-away borderland region, or a “return” path to the capital of the viceroyalty of New Spain. From their perspective, the pathways existed as a borderland in itself—a zone where indigenous commercial enterprise coincided with, but was not always dependent on, the ventures of outside settlers. Indigenous actors from these lands interacted with different ethnic groups and in this way transformed the physical space into a contact zone. Indians living near and far traveled to the road, as if to a river, to exchange goods and services and thus to secure some profit for their productive labor. To date, scholars have neglected this

The Royal Road of the Interior in New Spain   297 vantage point to the detriment of our understanding of the economic practices and everyday experiences of the majority of the population who lived across the territory. Shifting the historiography away from colonial paradigms and toward enduring indigenous structures poses new questions about the indigenous experience, de-centering previous interpretations of imperial borderlands by assessing the workings of indigenous commercial circuits.9 Indian trajinantes—a Spanish word, with no direct English translation, referring to individuals who travel with merchandise for sale—played a key role in maintaining these networks, as did innkeepers, guides, and others. By focusing on these historical actors, this chapter deviates from previous historical studies that have mainly articulated around European commercial networks. Throughout the Spanish empire, Indians walked along royal roads to reach their draft labor assignments, as well as to sell their merchandise at major markets and to find paid employment. The historiographical emphasis on the imperial administration’s organization of tributary labor (repartimiento) should not obscure the fact that indigenous vassals made complex financial decisions about trade and other remunerative activities. A review of the scholarship on the royal roads of New Spain shows the need for the proposed analytical shift towards studying routes in the context of indigenous commerce and political action. It also provides a framework for examining the methodological implications of focusing on indigenous people as economic agents.

State of the Field The paucity of published studies on the history of routes as spaces for indigenous commercial enterprise indicates the need for additional research. Historians have conceived of roads in a restrictive sense, favoring European conceptions of economic infrastructure and spatial organization. This Euro-centered perspective has distracted scholars from studying the economic contributions of indigenous peoples after Spanish arrival, other than as coerced laborers. More specifically, historians have overlooked the ways in which Indians—singly and as communities—continued to operate as independent economic actors. Before turning to the historiography, a few comments are necessary regarding studies in the fields of archaeology, anthropology, and art history that have examined the connections between Central Mexico and the United States Southwest prior to European contact.10 Several scholars engaged in this debate have been concerned with the physical routes that allowed for such interactions.11 The analytical framework for their work, with some exceptions, centers on cultural developments, rather than economic processes. Historians interested in indigenous trade and commerce must engage this scholarly corpus to understand the cultural roots that sustained such trade in the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries. They should also harken archaeologists’ call to think beyond binaries that identify roads as rationally built edifices of “civilizations” and pathways and trails as unintentional structures of less-complex societies.12 The routes connecting

298   Borderlands of the Iberian World Mesoamerica and the US Southwest served as vehicles for cultural exchange before and after European contact. Commercial exchange must be studied along similar lines. In the early nineteenth century, the renowned geographer and naturalist Alexander von Humboldt mapped the roads of New Spain in an influential and widely published report and atlas.13 Humboldt conceived of royal roads in terms of the viceroyalty’s political economy—roads were imperial structures that served the economic and military interests of the Spanish crown. His rendering of Mexico’s transport infrastructure shaped historical thinking throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.14 Following Humboldt’s lead, historians followed the outlines of the official caminos reales to examine them through the lens of imperial administration. The underlying assumption of much of the historiography on New Spain’s political economy is that transport infrastructure and specialized vehicles foster economic growth, while their absence explains underdevelopment. The understanding is that viable states must encourage road construction and maintenance. Following this reasoning, historians have examined royal roads in conjunction with the royal government’s effort to expand the mining industry.15 They have also written about roads in terms of the development of trade fairs and large-scale agricultural production.16 In these studies, historical roads are defined as constructed environments that linked the capital with colonial settlements in the tradition of the Roman empire.17 Based on this formulation, historians in the 1970s sought to explain, for example, why mule-trains served as the dominant mode of transportation in the sixteenth century, rather than carting (animaldrawn wagons), which predominated in Europe.18 Since the 1980s, studies on mule carriage have shown that this form of transportation was better suited to move goods across Mexico’s mountainous topography.19 Future studies will show that Indians adopted mule transport for their own commerce, along the same lines as the well-known integration of horse culture by mobile (semi-sedentary) indigenous peoples in other parts of North America.20 Humboldt’s influence is manifest in the dominant conceptualization of the physical layout of the main royal roads. He identified and mapped four major caminos reales that radiated outwards from Mexico City in cardinal directions to the main coastal ports and the northern and southern frontiers of New Spain. In reality, each royal road consisted of a number of routes that converged and separated, and they experienced shifts in location due to environmental changes. For Humboldt, however, the roads were like fixed spokes on a wheel—bound to the capital at the center to sustain the colony as a whole. Subsequent scholars built on this vision by studying each of the four roads (usually separately), articulating their individual development in terms of their relation to Mexico City and, most importantly, based on each road’s individual connection to commodities and markets. From the perspective of the Spanish crown, and hence Humboldt and his followers, the export-based economy determined the direction of the roads out of Mexico City. Following Humboldt’s visual map as if it were a clock, one can visualize that the first and earliest-built camino real, stretching eastward from Mexico City to Veracruz, was at 3 o’clock. Generations of scholars have been inspired by the road’s legendary connection

The Royal Road of the Interior in New Spain   299 to the pathway trekked by Europeans and enslaved Africans during their first march into Mexico in 1519.21 In articulating its significance for Spain, historians have argued that the road supported local and foreign economic integration and that it contributed to the expansion of productive sectors.22 The road at 6 o’clock—the camino real of Soconusco—lay southward from Mexico City to Chiapas and onward to Guatemala. The road has so far drawn scant historical interest, likely because it was unconnected to mining.23 Turning clockwise, the royal road that traveled westward from the capital to the port of Acapulco lay at 9 o’clock. Its common name—the China road (camino de China)—expressed its economic purpose: it was the way to Asia and the riches of China.24 Outward from Mexico City, merchants, soldiers, and all others who followed this 415-kilometer road wound around mountains and across rivers to reach the port, where they boarded the Manila Galleon (annual fleet) to their final destination in the Spanish Philippines.25 Mexican silver flowed across the Pacific, and Chinese goods, especially silk and porcelain, and slaves returned to Mexico.26 A renewed interest since the mid-2000s on the Pacific promises further investigation.27 Finally, at 12 o’clock lay the royal road of the interior that joined Mexico City to the northern silver mines and hence to New Mexico. From Humboldt’s mapping and the analysis of subsequent historians, the four main roads provided access to territorial and oceanic frontiers. In the case of the camino real de tierra adentro, this visual representation has encouraged historians to imagine it as an imperial corridor to the north. The traditional historiographical characterization of the royal road of the interior, as a conduit for European goods, ideas, and beliefs that enabled the government to maintain sovereignty, order, and justice, is a center-north and top-down interpretation of Spanish dominion.28 It reflects Humboldt’s imperial viewpoint, as well as that of several pioneering historians.29 Herbert E. Bolton and Primo Feliciano Velázquez Rodríguez, among others, inspired generations of scholars to study the route through the lens of Europeans’ penetration northwards.30 Carl O. Sauer, for instance, reconstructed the terrestrial and coastal paths taken by some of the first Spanish explorers to New Mexico, naming this route the Road to Cíbola.31 Following in their steps, historians have argued that the road was a colonial project oriented toward three goals: pacifying Indians, finding new mines, and provisioning new settlements.32 Anthropologists have offered correctives to this perspective, calling into question the extent of the political power wielded by the Spanish crown over the region.33 The scholarship on the territory, however, remains divided by disciplinary biases and contrasting periodizations (“Pre-Hispanic” versus “Hispanic”), and most historians continue to argue that this royal road was a colonial space.34 The interpretation of the route as a borderland space and conduit for indigenous goods offers a more inclusive view of the territory. The approach builds on the work of scholars who have similarly departed from traditional narratives of Spanish domination.35 Ethnohistorians have been particularly interested in centering the analysis on indigenous people.36 The historical reconstruction of the northward royal road will require scholars to redraw Humboldt’s map of the route from Mexico City to New Mexico in order to represent its true complexity, in terms of the diversity of the pathways that

300   Borderlands of the Iberian World constituted the route, in its directionality, and in its varied purposes. Historians must also analyze this camino real as a borderland in itself. Modern-day interest in the joined history of Mexico and the United States has led to fruitful governmental and scholarly collaborations, especially in public outreach. The launch of the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994 was especially galvanizing. States on both sides of the Mexico-US border have supported institutional efforts for historical heritage preservation and to foster public interest on the camino real.37 The state of the field is now ripe for historical studies that articulate the economic links maintained by indigenous peoples in the pre- and post-contact periods.

Micro-Histories The stories that follow represent a first effort to give a human face to indigenous economic activity and political agency along the royal road of the interior. The surviving historical documentation mainly consists of paperwork produced by the Spanish administrative apparatus. A careful ethno-historical reading of the colonial archive is thus required to recover the native past. Following this methodology, the micro-histories narrated below are based on court records produced in Mexico City at the General Indian Court.38 The individuals and communities depicted here turned to the court to seek justice regarding territorial and commercial claims related to the road (among varied other affairs associated with communal resources, labor drafts, tribute, and the election of indigenous officers, among other concerns). Some appeals were made in person, while others relied on legal representatives and written missives. Cases in which indigenous leaders made the journey to the capital might seem to contradict larger claims made about the camino real being a contact zone, rather than a connecting pathway between the frontier and center. Spaniards, however, did have this center-focus, and indigenous people who sought access to colonial courts had to attend to this territorial reality. Furthermore, Indians used the camino real to make their way to Mexico City as royal subjects (indigenous vassals), even as they carried out their own vision of the road. By turning to the General Indian Court and navigating the imperial bureaucracy, indigenous people ensured their claims to this borderland space vis-à-vis colonists. Such legal action did not necessarily mean that Indians shared Spain’s geographic orientation. For most native people, the location of power remained within their communities. The following episodes, which took place in the late 1600s and early 1700s, involved five indigenous communities that were situated in the near vicinity of, or along, the camino real. To visualize the locations, readers should imagine a line out of Central Mexico that reached northwards to Nueva Vizcaya; the communities are dots on this line. All five of the communities were situated in the mining region of northern Mexico, which encompassed the present-day states of Zacatecas, Durango, and Guanajuato. The communities appealed to the General Indian Court based on different economic

The Royal Road of the Interior in New Spain   301 contexts, but they all had one thing in common. In all cases, indigenous actors sought to make a living and perhaps some profit based on having access to the royal road of the interior. In 1723, Indian elders of San Miguel (in Guanajuato) traveled to Mexico City, some 260 kilometers away, to seek justice from the viceroy.39 Several self-identified Spaniards from the nearby town of Celaya who had haciendas that bordered on their town were the cause of the complaint. The Indians received “continuous vexations and annoyances” from them, which included having their oxen seized under the pretext that the animals ran wild. In order to have their property returned, the Spaniards demanded that the Indians hand over “some money or chickens” in exchange. Worse, these same Spaniards had also “clubbed” some community members when they tried to approach the haciendas looking for their lost animals. This kind of thievery and mistreatment was the least of the elders’ concerns. In their briefing, the elders declared that having access to the camino real was the greatest issue at hand. One of the Spaniards, Don Diego de Morales, had dug a deep ditch across his property and into communal lands, which effectively cut off the community’s direct access to the road. Indian traders from San Miguel who used the camino real to reach the markets of the nearby cities of Celaya or Querétaro now had to walk around the ditch to get on their way, which added time and strain to their journey. The community worked hard to grow foodstuffs and make leather goods with the intent of selling them in towns up and down the road. From the elders’ perspective, Morales and his allies were obstructing the pathway because they either had no sense of the importance of their trade, or were purposely trying to ruin them. In order to solve this critical matter, the elders asked the viceroy to grant their community royal favor and protection of their livelihood. They had to be able to access the road “freely” and directly, which meant forcing Morales to repair his wrong. Specifically, the community needed royal authorities to force him “to cover the ditch he had opened” through their land, and “to free up the path” they used “to cart their goods and carry out commerce.” After some consideration with legal advisors, the viceroy sided with their cause and took action. He gave the assignment to the municipal magistrate of Celaya, ordering him “to bring justice” to the natives of San Miguel. The historical record does not explain if the viceroy’s mandate had the outcome desired by the Indians of San Miguel, but the case does illustrate their political activism while also underscoring the economic significance of the camino real. The town elders took their cause to the highest power in the viceroyalty, and they made grave accusations against their wealthy neighbors. The community’s right to trade was far more important than any fear of reprisals they may have had. Apart from attesting to the elders’ resourcefulness and legal knowhow, their petition shows that the community’s prosperity, like others on the royal road, depended on accessing an economic network that reached far beyond their native lands. The following story, which took place a few decades earlier and in a town some hundred kilometers to the northwest further illustrates the ways Indian farmers, craftsmen, and traders defended their right to profit from the regional economy.

302   Borderlands of the Iberian World Domingo Hernández, a weaver by profession, was a relatively prosperous resident of the Indian congregation of Santiago in the town of Silao, and the proud owner of a small textile shop that made rough woolen blankets.40 With help from female family members, Domingo cleaned, washed, and carded shorn wool and then spun it into thread to weave in his loom. Part of Domingo’s business success had to do with the way he procured the raw material. Domingo purchased wool directly from nearby haciendas, where it sold for far less than in the local town market. The money saved on the raw product and his family’s labor resulted in some earnings. Domingo periodically traveled along the royal road in search of local buyers and followed it to the regional markets in León and Guanajuato where he sold the blankets at a small profit. After years of work and trade, a recently appointed justice official (justicia) in 1704 started to interfere in Domingo’s business affairs by issuing an order that prohibited the direct purchase of wool from sheep proprietors. Why the change? One might assume at first glance that the official targeted indigenous manufacturing, perhaps because Indian craftsmen posed competition to their Spanish counterparts. Yet, another explanation is that the official’s ban was intended to harm Spanish hacienda owners, rather than their Indian customers. Spanish hacienda owners were supposed to sell their wool at the town market or in bulk orders to textile mills (obrajes) to ensure they paid the sales tax (alcabala).41 By selling wool directly to Indian weavers away from government oversight, Spaniards were effectively evading taxation. They were selling their wool, in other words, before officials valued and charged them the said tax. Indians, in contrast, were exempt from paying sales tax on fruits of the earth (frutos de la tierra) and products made from them.42 The official would thus have known that he had to ban direct sales to improve compliance and garner royal revenue. In all likelihood, the official actually had both aims in mind (to suppress indigenous craftsmanship and to prevent Spanish tax evasion) as part of a larger plan to regulate the Silao market and bring fiscal order to his appointed region. For our purposes, Domingo’s response to this policy change showcases indigenous workmanship, beneficial sourcing (acquisition of raw wool), and the use of the camino real by Indians to seek markets for their products near and far. Like the elders of San Miguel, Domingo had to petition the viceroy if he hoped to return to business as ­normal. So, he made use of his right to legal representation and had a lawyer ask for an exemption from the ban on buying wool at the haciendas. At the hearing, the case raised questions for the viceroy regarding the desirability of this policy change, so he asked the justice official in Silao to provide the court with further information about his plans and justifications for instituting the ban in the first place. In the meantime, the viceroy exempted Domingo Hernández from the prohibition, stating that he had every right “to buy wool wherever he thought best to profit from his looms.”43 The decision was a personal validation of Domingo’s occupation (oficio) and business dealings, as well as a confirmation of Indians’ use of the royal road to access larger regional markets. The next episode, which took place some four hundred kilometers to the north, illustrates how communities used colonial tropes of loyalty and vassalage to secure land rights along the camino real.

The Royal Road of the Interior in New Spain   303 As the elders of La Frontera de San Sebastián, a village in Zacatecas, explained to the General Indian Court in 1701, the natives (naturales) of their community faced a threepart crisis.44 One, a certain Doña Felipa, a Spanish widow, had expropriated some of their land. Second, the Diocese of Durango had removed their local priest who had defended them in the territorial dispute. Doña Felipa had four sons, including a priest, who had lobbied for San Sebastián’s spiritual guide to be replaced. Third, the community had no official governing body to represent their interests, so the elders had had to take matters into their own hands. They traveled to the nearby royal mining town of Sombrerete, about a day’s walk away to the northwest, to appeal for formal government intervention. Soon after, a letter reached the viceroy explaining the community’s predicament. Since Sombrerete was a main stop on the royal road, this missive was quickly carried to the capital for attention at the General Indian Court. The language employed in the letter points to the complexity of indigenous government and corporate identity during this period. In their words, the “natives” of San Sebastián “had been in this frontier” for many decades and “remained there to defend the land from enemy Chichimec Indians.”45 They based their appeal for government protection on the services their ancestors and they themselves had rendered to the crown’s colonizing efforts. They had migrated to this frontier from Central Mexico as indigenous colonists and settled there to defend the frontier and to serve as an example for non-sedentary Indians, who had remained independent, in order to persuade them to become indigenous vassals and subjects of the Spanish crown.46 Based on this service, they deserved “to have and possess the land necessary for their sustenance and conservation.” It was a common refrain for a group or an individual to petition for royal favor based on service to the king. This example, however, shows that some communities articulated their legal rights to land and commerce in terms of their service in opposing other native people, who, unlike them, rejected Spanish claims to territorial sovereignty. This community, in fact, sought to have a more formalized relationship to the colonial government. “Due to their greatly expanded numbers, now upwards of three thousand,” the community requested to have “a governor and alcaldes . . . who would defend and govern them with public order (policía) as laid out in the Laws of the Indies.” The natives of San Sebastián, in other words, embraced the legal category of Indian as laid out by the Spanish colonial government to defend their rights and acquire additional benefits through legal avenues. The crisis in San Sebastián was based on the economy of land ownership. The community needed to grow food for its subsistence and also to sell the surplus at their discretion. To do so, they needed legal title to the land their recent forefathers had gained through colonial service. The letter to the viceroy asked that “the governor of the mines [Sombrerete] make Doña Phelipa and her sons abandon their claim [to the land] and not cause them further damages.” The viceroy’s response shows that the community’s linkage of land rights and royal service was a shrewd move. He ordered the justices of Sombrerete “not to allow any damages to the natives’ lands” and to remove “any impediments to the enjoyment of the fruits of their labor.” The highest official in the region (alcalde mayor) had instructions to inform the viceroy and court about the community’s appeal for a cabildo (formal governing council), to which they were entitled.

304   Borderlands of the Iberian World A few months later, the viceroy received a report from a curate that disavowed the community’s right to ask for any protections, claiming that they “had not fought against Chichimecas, having no real arms and only bows and arrows.”47 This derogatory characterization of deadly military technology only served to expose the churchman’s ignorance of the crown’s reliance on Indian bowmen. His report was discernibly partial to Doña Phelipa, who apparently wanted to expand her family’s hacienda to include silver mining. Knowingly, the viceroy sustained his support for the indigenous community, issuing the following order: “The natives who have ranches in the outskirts of San Sebastián are not to be disturbed.” Instead, the community was to be given immediate license to name their cabildo officials, who would, in turn, be eligible to seek justice at the High Court (Audiencia) of Guadalajara (closer by) in case of further troubles. From the viceroy’s perspective, the mining region needed Indian settlements with faithful indigenous vassals to stand in opposition to Chichimeca “rebels.” It was a security concern. San Sebastián was located on the main route between Zacatecas and Durango. Travelers needed to be able to stop there safely and acquire food and lodging from loyal natives in the vicinity. This necessity overturned considerations that might otherwise have favored local Spanish families. The indigenous community of San Sebastián overcame a crisis involving land, religion, and government by shrewdly positioning themselves as loyal vassals. The next case, which took place a decade earlier and some 115 kilometers northward, is similarly about a native community’s effort to receive some profit from their location on the camino real. Spaniards together with Nahua and Purépecha colonists established Nombre de Dios in Durango in the mid sixteenth century, as both a Spanish town (villa) and an Indian pueblo to serve the purposes of miners and Franciscan missionaries.48 More than a century and a half later, colonists seeking their fortune in this rich mining territory continued to rely on local Indian guides.49 The camino real passed through the town’s vicinity, but its meandering path across the rocky terrain, as well as the smaller lanes that stemmed from the road, made it difficult for outsiders to follow. As a result, from time to time Spanish travelers would demand free guides from the indigenous community. Colonial officials, however, well understood the perils of permitting this kind of insolence. Indian guides had to be paid to perform this service. In 1691, the indigenous governor Nicolas Rodríguez sought to protect his community’s trade, which was not in a physical commodity but in more abstract goods—information about the lay of the land. They sold their own knowledge of the terrain. The community had a profitable claim to this borderland space, which had to be secured from abusive outsiders. To do so, Rodríguez and Mateo de la Torre, another indigenous representative (regidor), traveled over 850 kilometers to Mexico City to acquire a legal writ of protection from the General Indian Court. The aim was to avoid future conflicts with travelers who underestimated the value of their community’s service. Upon arrival in Mexico City, Rodríguez and Torre gravely explained their community’s situation at court. As of late, certain Spanish colonists had been “bothering natives to guide them along the Camino [sic] without paying them for this inconvenience (molestia).”50 Any Spaniard who needed an Indian “to accompany him and guide him

The Royal Road of the Interior in New Spain   305 had to pay,” because the community understood this service to be “voluntary.” Their forthright assessment of the value of the labor performed by Indian guides is testimony to their economic understanding of the market. Local Indians had a service to offer that colonists needed as newcomers, and all services came with a cost. The number of available men willing to provide such services (supply of labor) and the necessity of the individual colonists who required them (demand) dictated the price to be paid. In addition to protecting their trade in geographic knowledge, Rodríguez and Torre had a related request. The church in Nombre de Dios belonged to the community. As of late, a number of resident Spaniards (vecinos) had pressured the friars to prevent Indian elders from sitting during services, but the community knew that this kind of prohibition was unheard of “in all the cities, towns, and villages of New Spain.” These Spanish vecinos were acting against all customary practice. The church was Indian space in the same way as the camino real and surrounding pathways. The presiding prosecutor agreed. According to the court’s decision, Indians from Nombre de Dios “who conducted travelers (pasajeros) from one place to another” had to be paid for their work “in cash” (en tabla y mano). Beyond the justice of paying for services rendered, the legal opinion was that Spanish colonists had to be realistic: “if it was left to the discretion of Indians, [some] might decide to go or not to go,” in which case “there would be no one else who knew the passageways of the camino.” The court understood what some travelers had not: colonists would be lost without Indian guides. As for the incidents at the church, what the Spaniards “had intended to do” went against all custom. Indian elders had every right to sit in their own Christian space. To ensure full compliance, Viceroy Conde de Galve ordered the alcalde mayor of Nombre de Dios to carry out the court’s decision in full compliance (referring to the town’s municipal government, as opposed to the Indian government represented by the claimants). As in other cases, there is no certainty about what happened once Rodríguez and Torre returned to Nombre de Dios. It is probable, however, that the alcalde mayor acted according to orders. The indigenous cabildo would have kept a copy of the viceroy’s command to ensure compliance. Regarding the economic issue at hand, the community also knew that they had market demand on their side. Indian guides performed a critical service in this segment of the camino real. In this borderland space, Spanish colonists depended on Indians. The following episode took place some 160 kilometers to the northwest along the camino real—in a frontier region where travelers similarly relied on the presence of loyal indigenous vassals to continue their journeys. Blas de la Cruz, “native and captain of the pueblo of Santiago de Cuencamé,” and several other native representatives of the community petitioned for assistance sometime in 1690.51 Their frontier community in Durango was disappearing and their land was in peril. Cattle from a nearby ranch were allowed to roam freely and regularly destroyed the community’s plantings. Though aware of the damages, Spanish ranchers refused “to gather their animals or keep them away from damaging” the Indians’ maize fields. The men had to plant “small plots and keep them under guard day and night.” As a result, indigenous farmers had hungry children and no surplus corn to sell to pay their tribute. Many families had already been forced to abandon their homes and move to local

306   Borderlands of the Iberian World haciendas to find work. Worst of all, due to their much-reduced numbers, the lieutenant in charge at the local presidio was pressuring the remaining families to leave their land altogether and move to the town of Peñón Blanco, some forty-five kilometers to the west. Santiago de Cuencamé was on the camino real, which every year brought a stream of travelers. Prior to the calamitous decline of the community’s fortunes, the natives had provided them with food and shelter. The move westward to Peñón Blanco would distance them from the thoroughfare and thus imperil the community’s link to the market economy. The document (memorial) addressed to the viceroy articulated the community’s demands as a plan to return Santiago to its former strength. First, they needed protection from the local cattle ranchers, who had to be made to control their livestock and keep them enclosed. If ranchers were unable or unwilling to do so, community members had to be allowed to shoot down the animals with arrows. Second, the community members who had been forced to leave were to be encouraged to return and repopulate the town. Many of these families had acquired loans from hacienda owners to make tribute payments. Knowing that such loans would have to be paid back, Cruz and the others insisted that the maximum amount of repayment be limited to six pesos as set by “royal ordinances.” The specificity of this request suggests that community members well knew that haciendas had a way of extending credit at compounded interest rates to secure a labor force. Back in Mexico City, the viceroy approved the community’s plan and set forth the necessary orders to bring about Santiago’s restoration. Perhaps he took note of a clause in the natives’ written appeal: Santiago was “a frontier town,” where members had served the crown by “resisting the invasions of barbarous Indians.” The town was also perfectly located along the camino real and thus able to provide food and other services to travelers. As in the case of San Sebastián further to the south, the indigenous community at Santiago de Cuencamé likely received government favor because of its strategic location. Cruz and the others used the language of fealty and indigenous vassalage to empower the community and ensure their town’s survival. Native communities located on the royal road of the interior and its vicinity had unique access to commercial opportunities. Indigenous artisans, like Domingo Hernández of Silao, traveled to and along the road to find a market for their products. Farmers similarly relied on a steady stream of travelers seeking food and shelter to buy their surplus corn and other products to make some gains. Indian guides found paying customers who required their services to find their way from one stop along the road, like Nombre de Dios, to the next settlement. That said, for most community members, time on the camino real involved a day’s journey at most, and few of them ever covered the road’s entire geographic reach. The rhythms of long-distance trade nonetheless shaped their lives. The road was where Indians from different ethnicities interacted with one another, as well as with Spaniards and people of mixed descent—sometimes in conflict, sometimes for some mutual benefit. The colonial archive is filled with stories of Indian communities that sought to secure their legal right to the pathways of the royal road of the interior. They did so based on the

The Royal Road of the Interior in New Spain   307 understanding that the camino real provided opportunities for economic exchange and that travelers would always come their way. The communities represented in the microhistories above were deeply immersed in the colonial economy, and their leaders and representatives acknowledged the geopolitical reality of Spanish governance (with its associated structural inequalities). These understandings did not diminish their economic and political agency. The historiography has primarily focused on royal roads in Mexico as infrastructure for Spanish gains. A micro-historical approach can shift the narrative to how indigenous peoples used these pathways for their own purposes.

Notes Archives AGN:  Archivo General de la Nación, Mexico City (Mexico) 1. For a discussion of this route of migration, ritual, and commercial exchange in the precontact period, see Fernando Berrojalbiz and Marie-Areti Hers, “Fluctuating Frontiers in the Borderlands of Mesoamerica,” in The Oxford Handbook of Borderlands in the Iberian World, ed. Danna A. Levin Rojo and Cynthia Radding, 83–106 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019). 2. A road was a camino real if it was funded, at least in part, by the royal treasury and was under the protection of Spanish soldiers. Public roads (caminos, veredas, and carriles) were the responsibility of towns or landowners. Carriage roads (caminos para carruaje) were for two-wheel carts pulled by oxen; bridleways (caminos de herradura) were for horses and pack animals. Wolfgang Trautmann, “El establecimiento de la red de comunicaciones,” in Las transformaciones en el paisaje cultural de Tlaxcala durante la época colonial, ed. Wolfgang Trautmann (Wiesbaden, Germany: Steiner, 1981), 220. The ordinances for road construction and maintenance were codified in the Laws of the Indies: Recopilación de leyes de los reynos de las Indias, mandadas imprimir y publicar por la Majestad Católica del Rey don Cárlos II, 3 vols. (Madrid, Spain: Joaquín Ibarra, 1791), book 4, title 16, law 1; book 4, title 17 laws 1–2; book 3, title 5, law 54. The collection is available online through Internet Archive. 3. Some scholars debate the extent to which Spaniards followed pre-contact paths. Rees, for instance, argues against continuity and posits that the road from Mexico City to Veracruz was an entirely “Hispanic” creation, see Peter W. Rees, “Origins of Colonial Transportation in Mexico,” Geographical Review 65, 3 (1975): 323–434. Most studies, however, take it as a given that Europeans followed well-trodden native routes. Danna A. Levin Rojo, Return to Aztlan: Indians, Spaniards, and the Invention of Nuevo México (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2014) for example, demonstrates that Spaniards and their Indian allies followed pre-contact routes in their northern advance. 4. Two major trunk lines led from Central Mexico northward, one along the eastern flank of the Sierra Madre Occidental and the other along its western flank. The focus here is on the camino real de tierra adentro, which constituted the eastern network of routes and trails. The western trunk line was a coastal route leading north from Compostela in present-day Nayarit. There were also east-west routes that connected the main trunk lines, like the camino real from Sonora to New Mexico.

308   Borderlands of the Iberian World 5. The indigenous population declined after contact in all the provinces of the northern frontier, but it was nonetheless greater than the non-Indian population until circa 1750. For the demographic breakdown, see Peter Gerhard, The North Frontier of New Spain, revised ed. (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993), 24–25. 6. Mary Karasch, “Riverine Borderlands and Multicultural Contacts in Central Brazil, 1775–1835,” in Levin Rojo and Radding, Oxford Handbook of Borderlands, 591–612. 7. Fabrício Prado, “Trans-Imperial Interaction and the Rio de la Plata as an Atlantic Borderland,” and Linda Rupert, “Shaping an Inter-imperial Exchange Zone: Smugglers, Runaway Slaves, and Itinerant Priests in the Southern Caribbean,” both in Levin Rojo and Radding, Oxford Handbook of Borderlands, 669–690 and 741–764 respectively. 8. Literary critic Pratt coined the term contact zone to describe places where people from diverse cultures interact with one another, especially in the context of unequal power relations, see Mary Louise Pratt, “Arts of the Contact Zone,” Profession 91 (1991): 33–40. 9. For an analysis of indigenous commerce in South America and the borderland of southern Central America, see respectively Viviana Conti, “Connections and Circulation in the Southern Andes from Colony to Republic,” and Alejandra Boza and Juan Carlos Solórzano, “Indigenous Trade in Caribbean Central America, 1700s-1800s,” both in Levin Rojo and Radding, Oxford Handbook of Borderlands, 267–293 and 239–265. 10. There is a long-standing debate over whether or not Mesoamerican peoples influenced cultures in the American Southwest prior to European contact, be it by long-distance trade or migrations. For recent articulations, see Linda S. Cordell and Maxine McBrinn, Archaeology of the Southwest (Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2012); Randall H. McGuire, “Mesoamerica and the Southwest/Northwest,” in The Oxford Handbook of Mesoamerican Archaeology, ed. Deborah L. Nichols and Christopher A. Pool (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 513–524; M. Elisa Villalpando and Beatriz Braniff C. ed., Boundaries and Territories: Prehistory of the U.S. Southwest and Northern Mexico (Tempe, AZ: Arizona State University, 2002), and Michael S. Foster and Shirley Gorenstein, ed., Greater Mesoamerica: The Archaeology of West and Northwest Mexico (Salt Lake City, UT: University of Utah Press, 2000). 11. See, for example, Carroll L. Riley, Becoming Aztlan: Mesoamerican Influence in the Greater Southwest, AD 1200–1500 (Salt Lake City, UT: University of Utah Press, 2005). 12. James E. Snead, “Obliterated Itineraries: Pueblo Trails, Chaco Roads, and Archaeological Knowledge,” in Highways, Byways, and Road Systems in the Pre-Modern World, ed. Susan E. Alcock, John P. Bodel, and Richard J. A. Talbert (New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 106–127. 13. Alexander von Humboldt, Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain: With Physical Sections and Maps Founded on Astronomical Observations and Trigonometrical and Barometrical Measurements, 2 vols. (London, UK: Printed for Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1811). The unabridged version is available as an electronic book through the HathiTrust Digital Library. 14. Serrera, for example, describes the roads of “Hispanic America” as an axis of the Spanish empire; see Ramón María Serrera, Tráfico terrestre y red vial en las Indias Españolas (Madrid, Spain: Lunwerg Editores S.A., 1992), 33. 15. Enrique Florescano Mayet, “Colonización, ocupación del suelo y “frontera” en el norte de Nueva España, 1521–1750,” in Tierras nuevas: expansión territorial y ocupación del suelo en América, siglos XVI–XIX, ed. Alvaro Jara (Mexico City, MEX: El Colegio de México, 1969), 43–76.

The Royal Road of the Interior in New Spain   309 16. Manuel Carrera Stampa was a leading historian in this vein; he argued that the colonial government played a key role in maintaining roads in the interest of commerce: Manuel Carrera Stampa and José Joaquín Real Díaz, Las ferias comerciales de Nueva España (Mexico City, MEX: Instituto Mexicano de Comercio Exterior, 1965). A similar emphasis on regional markets is found in María Ángeles Gálvez Ruiz, “Fuentes para el estudio de una feria en el interior de México colonial: San Juan de los Lagos, centro regulador de circulación comercial (1777–1810),” Chronica Nova: Revista de Historia Moderna de la Universidad de Granada 26 (1999): 145–160. For the study of roads in conjunction with haciendas, see the influential work on the rise of latifundia agriculture vis-à-vis mining by François Chevalier, Land and Society in Colonial Mexico: The Great Hacienda, trans. Lesley Byrd Simpson, 2nd ed. (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1963). 17. For an overview of the vast historiography on Roman roads, see Richard  J.  A.  Talbert, Rome’s World: The Peutinger Map Reconsidered (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 18. David  R.  Ringrose, “Carting in the Hispanic World: An Example of Divergent Development,” The Hispanic American Historical Review 50, no. 1 (1970): 30–51. The author accepts as a central tenet the now disputed idea that Spain’s economic decline in the seventeenth century impacted the colonies, as argued in the 1950s by E.P. Hobsbawm and Woodrow W. Borah. For a recent assessment of the overall debate, see Herbert S. Klein and Sergio T. Serrano, “Was there a 17th century crisis in Spanish America?". Revista de historia económica 37, no. 1 (2019): 43–80. 19. Social historians have examined the role of muleteers in the organization of short- and long-distance trade, their involvement in local and export markets, and their social makeup. Bernd Hausberger, “En el camino, en busca de los arrieros novohispanos,” Historia Mexicana 64 (2014): 65–104; José Adrián Barragán-Álvarez, “The Feet of Commerce: Mule-Trains and Transportation in Eighteenth Century New Spain” (PhD diss., University of Texas, 2013); and Clara Elena Suárez Argüello, Camino real y carrera larga: la arriería en la Nueva España durante el siglo XVIII (Mexico City, MEX: CIESAS, 1997); Richard Boyer, “Juan Vázquez: Muleteer of Seventeenth Century Mexico,” The Americas 37 (1981): 421–443. 20. Peter Mitchell, Horse Nations: The Worldwide Impact of the Horse on Indigenous Societies Post-1492 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). For an analysis of mule transportation in the road linking Río de la Plata and the Andes, including the role of indigenous people in breeding and trading the animals, see Conti, “Connections and Circulation.” 21. Peter W. Rees, Transportes y comercio entre México y Veracruz, 1519–1910 (Mexico City, MEX: SEP, 1976), and “Origins of Colonial Transportation.” 22. Guillermina del Valle Pavón, “Desarrollo de la economía mercantil y construcción de los caminos México-Veracruz en el siglo XVI,” América Latina en la historia económica 27 (2007): 5–49; Steven Driever and Peter Rees, “The Veracruz-Mexico City Routes in the Sixteenth Century and the Study of Pre-Industrial Transport in Historical Geography,” Geografía y Desarrollo: Revista del Colegio Mexicano de Geografía 12 (1995): 5–17; Sergio Florescano Mayet, El camino México-Veracruz en la época colonial: su importancia económica, social y estratégica (Xalapa, VER: Universidad Veracruzana, 1987); Trautmann, “Establecimiento de la red.” Historians have also examined the social and economic effects of the Bourbon Reforms: Bruce A. Castleman, Building the King’s Highway: Labor, Society, and Family on Mexico’s Caminos Reales, 1757–1804 (Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona

310   Borderlands of the Iberian World Press, 2005); Matilde Souto Mantecón, “Préstamos e inversiones para el camino entre Veracruz y Perote,” in Los negocios y las ganancias de la colonia al México moderno, ed. Leonor Ludlow and Jorge Silva Riquer (Mexico City: UNAM, 1993), 192–210. 23. Edith Ortiz Díaz, “El camino real del Soconusco: eje de articulación comercial entre la Provincia de Oaxaca y la Audiencia de Guatemala en el siglo XVI,” in Caminos y mercados de México, ed. Janet Long and Amalia Attolini Lecón (Mexico City: UNAM, INAH, 2009), 241–260; Juan Pedro Viqueira, “Ires y venires de los caminos de Chiapas (épocas prehispánica y colonial),” in Rutas de la Nueva España, ed. Chantal Cramaussel (Zamora: El Colegio de Michoacán, 2006), 137–171. 2 4. Ramón María Serrera’s chapter “El camino de Asia: la ruta de México a Acapulco,” exemplifies historians’ economic approach, arguing that the road facilitated the transcontinental movement of bullion; see in Cramaussel, Rutas, 211–230 25. Tatiana Seijas, “Inns, Mules, and Hardtack for the Voyage: The Local Economy of the Manila Galleon in Mexico,” Colonial Latin America Review 25, no. 1 (2016): 56–76. 26. For the history of the transpacific slave trade, see Tatiana Seijas, Asian Slaves in Colonial Mexico: From Chinos to Indians (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014). 27. For a historiographical review of the Spanish Pacific borderland, see Catherine Tracy Goode, “The Pacific Borderlands of the Spanish Empire,” in Levin Rojo and Radding, Oxford Handbook of Borderlands, 765–788. 28. Cramaussel, whose work is representative of the dominant historiography, argues that the road was a colonial infrastructure built over time in adjoining segments, starting from the center of New Spain and moving northwards. Chantal Cramaussel, “El Camino Real de Tierra Adentro,” in Cramaussel, Rutas, 299–327, and “De la Nueva Galicia al Nuevo México por el Camino Real de Tierra Adentro,” in El Septentrión novohispano: ecohistoria, sociedades e imágenes de frontera, ed. Salvador Bernabéu Albert (Madrid, Spain: CSIC, 2000). See also, Thomas Calvo, Por los caminos de Nueva Galicia: transportes y transportistas en el siglo XVII (Guadalajara, JAL: Universidad de Guadalajara, 1997). 29. Alfredo Jiménez Núñez, for example, underscores the perspective of Spanish colonists in El gran norte de México: Una frontera imperial en la Nueva España, 1540–1820 (Madrid, Spain: Editorial Tébar, 2006). 30. Herbert E. Bolton, The Spanish Borderlands: A Chronicle of Old Florida and the Southwest (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1921), and Spanish Exploration in the Southwest, 1542–1706 (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1916); Primo Feliciano Velázquez, ed. Colección de documentos para la historia de San Luis Potosí, 2nd ed., 4 vols. (San Luis Potosí, SLP: Archivo Histórico del Estado de San Luis Potosí, 1987). 31. Though the study conveys a bias toward famed conquistadors, Carl O. Sauer, The Road to Cíbola (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1932) rightly emphasized that Spaniards followed and depended on Indian guides to make their way across the terrain. Cíbola was a version of the El Dorado legend, which inspired colonists to seek fabled gold cities across the Americas. Fernando Ainsa, “The Myth, Marvel, and Adventure of El Dorado Semantic Mutations of a Legend,” Diogenes 41, no. 164 (1993): 13–26. For a more recent analysis with the same perspective, see Maria Luisa Perez-Gonzalez, “Royal Roads in the Old World and the New World: The Camino de Oñate and Its Importance in the Spanish Settlement of New Mexico,” Colonial Latin American Historical Review 7 (1998): 191–218. A critical revision of the “Cíbola myth” is offered in Levin Rojo, Return to Aztlan. 32. The identification of the northern frontier as an “uncivilized” region with “barbarian Indians” was the predominant historical narrative from the 1950s through the 1970s, with

The Royal Road of the Interior in New Spain   311 a few recent apparitions. In Max L. Moorhead, New Mexico’s Royal Road: Trade and Travel on the Chihuahua Trail (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1958), a work of its time, the sole mention of mobile (semi-sedentary) indigenous peoples was as “nomads” who threatened missionaries and merchants traveling the road to and from Santa Fe—an “outpost of civilization.” Philip W. Powell, “The Forty-Niners of Sixteenth-Century Mexico,” Pacific Historical Review 19, no. 3 (1950): 242, shared a similar interpretation of “nomadic barbarism.” Cultural sensitivity aside, Powell’s book on Spain’s northern advance was groundbreaking for its narrative rendering of the Chichimec wars (1550–1600), reconstructed from Spanish-language archival and printed sources, as well as the archaeological findings of his time. The original title was “Soldiers, Indians and Silver: The Northward Advance of New Spain, 1550–1600.” Philip W. Powell, Soldiers, Indians, and Silver: North America’s First Frontier War (Tempe, AZ: Arizona State University, 1975). 33. According to Sheridan, Spaniards faced four main limiting challenges: geographical distance; ecology (aridity); topography (mountain ranges); and Amerindian opposition. He conceptualized the region as a frontier, which he defined as a place where no one group had full authority; see Thomas  E.  Sheridan, “The Limits of Power: The Political Ecology of the Spanish Empire in the Greater Southwest,” Antiquity 66 (1992): 154. 34. For the colonial emphasis, see for example Juan Ricardo Jiménez Gómez, “El Camino Real de Tierra Adentro a su paso por el pueblo de Querétaro y el mercado a finales del siglo XVI y principios del XVII,” in Long and Lecón, Caminos y mercados, 261–290; María Rosa Avilés and Rosa Brambila Paz, “La puerta del Camino a Tierra Adentro,” in Cramaussel, Rutas, 329–345. 35. David  J.  Weber, “Spanish Fur Trade from New Mexico, 1540–1821,” The Americas 24, 2 (1967): 122–136, changed the debates on Plains Indians and similar groups by writing about them as economic agents who delivered a valuable commodity—hides—that traveled down the camino real to Mexican markets. Weber’s later work, Bárbaros: Spaniards and Their Savages in the Age of Enlightenment (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005) continued to challenge the historical trope of the barbarian Indian. 36. For example Ross Hassig, Trade, Tribute, and Transportation: The Sixteenth-Century Political Economy of the Valley of Mexico (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1985). 37. In the United States, a survey under the auspices of the New Mexico Historic Preservation Division was at the vanguard of this public history project: Larry Walsh, “Archaeological Survey Project on El Camino Real de Tierra Adentro: A Public Report,” (Santa Fe, NM: New Mexico State Historical Preservation Division, 1991); Michael  P.  Marshall, “El Camino Real de Tierra Adentro, An Archeological Investigation: The 1990 New Mexico Historic Preservation Survey,” (Ms. on file at New Mexico State Historic Preservation Division, Santa Fe, NM, 1990); Gabrielle G. Palmer, June-el Piper, and LouAnn Jacobson, ed, El Camino Real de Tierra Adentro (Santa Fe, NM: New Mexico State Office, 1993). The United States section of the camino real (from El Paso, TX to San Juan Pueblo, NM) is a designated National Historic Trail under the administration of the Department of the Interior. In Mexico, the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) has headed a similar and related effort to investigate and publicize the historical connections between the two countries. See José de la Cruz Pacheco and Joseph  P.  Sánchez, ed., Memorias del coloquio internacional “El Camino Real de Tierra Adentro” (Mexico City, MEX: INAH, 2000). The route was inscribed as a UNESCO site in 2010 for tourism purposes. For cultural patrimony/UNESCO debates about routes, see Celia Martínez Yáñez,

312   Borderlands of the Iberian World “Los itinerarios culturales: caracterización y desafíos de una nueva categoría del patrimonio cultural mundial.” In, Apuntes: Revista de estudios sobre patrimonio cultural 23, no. 2 (2010): 194–209. 38. Indigenous communities were served by the General Indian Court (Juzgado de General de Naturales) in Mexico City, established in 1571 and headed by the viceroy of New Spain. It was responsible for the “good government” and “prompt administration” of matters relating to the indigenous population. Its role and administration were codified in book 6, title 1, law 47 of the Laws of the Indies. The classic work on the topic is Woodrow W. Borah, Justice by Insurance: The General Indian Court of Colonial Mexico and the Legal Aides of the Half-Real (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1983). Recent scholarship has emphasized indigenous agency and the changing ways in which native peoples used the court to assert their rights: Brian P. Owensby, Empire of Law and Indian Justice in Colonial Mexico (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008). 39. Archivo General de la Nacion, Mexico City (hereafter AGN), Indios 48, exp. 93, f. 127–128 (1723). The Pueblo of San Miguel [Octopán] was under the jurisdiction of the Villa of Celaya in Guanajuato. Ethnically, the community was likely a mix of Purépecha (Tarascan), Otomí, and Pame peoples. Peter Gerhard, A Guide to the Historical Geography of New Spain (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993), 64–67. 40. AGN, Indios 36, exp. 143, f. 131v–132 (1704). Silao [de la Victoria] was under the jurisdiction of the city of Guanajuato. Ethnically, the community was likely a mix of Purépecha (Tarascan), Otomí, and Nahua peoples. See the same document, f. 121–123. 41. The alcabala rate on raw products like wool was based on the approximate cost of the goods that would be made from it. See “Instrucción de alcabalas de la Nueva España, para que los administradores hagan la debida exacción en las aduanas,” (Toluca de Lerdo, MEX: Tip. del Instituto Literario, 1857), accesed May 10, 2016, http://catalog.hathitrust. org/api/volumes/oclc/21651843.html. 42. Europeans brought sheep, pigs, chickens, and many other animals to the Americas, so they were not “native” to the land, but the law nonetheless counted them as such. The 1567 decree regarding the rights and privileges of Indian producers and traders was codified as book 6, title 1, law 25 of the Laws of the Indies. 43. AGN, Indios 36, exp. 143, f. 131v–132 (1704). 44. The community lived in the outskirts (frontera) of the town of San Sebastián [Saín], which was under the jurisdiction of the mining town (real y minas) of Sombrerete, some forty-five kilometers to the northwest, in Zacatecas. Ethnically, the Indian population was likely Nahua, descendants of indigenous colonists who displaced the Zacatecan population a century prior. For an analysis of the Zacatecas mining region in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, see Dana Velasco Murillo, “Borderlands in the Silver Mines of New Spain, 1540–1660,” in Levin Rojo and Radding, Oxford Handbook of Borderlands, 371–395. 45. AGN, Indios 35, exp. 57, f. 89v–90v (1701). 46. For an analysis of the colonist project carried out by Tlaxcalans, see Sean  F.  McEnroe, From Colony to Nationhood in Mexico: Laying the Foundations, 1560–1840 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 47. AGN, Indios 35, exp. 79, f. 143–145 (1701). Native soldiers (known as bowmen, or flecheros) who fought alongside European colonists often used bows and arrows as part of their military repertoire. 48. Gerhard, The North, 165–167. For the foundation of the Villa de Nombre de Dios in the context of allied Indian settlers, see Danna A. Levin Rojo, “Indian Friends and Allies in

The Royal Road of the Interior in New Spain   313 the Spanish Imperial Borderlands of North America,” in Levin Rojo and Radding, Oxford Handbook of Borderlands, 131–161, and Return to Aztlan, 77–78, 237–238. 49. Ethnically, the Indians living in this region in the 1690s were likely a mix of Nahua and Purépecha (Tarascan) peoples, who displaced the Zacatecan population a century before. Gerhard, A Guide, 203–205. 50. AGN, Indios 30, exp. 418, f. 391–392 (1691). 51. AGN, Indios 30. exp. 405, f. 3719v–381v (1691). The Pueblo de Indios of Santiago de Cuencamé [Cuencamé de Ceniceros] in Durango, founded in the late sixteenth century as a congregation (congregación) associated with a Franciscan mission, was under the jurisdiction of the real y minas of San Antonio de Cuancamé and the local presidio during this period. Ethnically, the Indian population was likely a mix of Zacatecan, Tepehuan, Nahua, and other indigenous groups. Gerhard, The North, 192–195.

Bibliography Cramaussel, Chantal, ed. Rutas de la Nueva España. Zamora: El Colegio de Michoacán, 2006. Gerhard, Peter. A Guide to the Historical Geography of New Spain. Rev. ed. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993. Gerhard, Peter. The North Frontier of New Spain. Rev. ed. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993. Levin Rojo, Danna A. Return to Aztlan: Indians, Spaniards, and the invention of Nuevo México. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2014. Recopilación de leyes de los reynos de las Indias, mandadas imprimir y publicar por la Majestad Católica del Rey don Cárlos II. 3 vols. Madrid, Spain: Joaquín Ibarra, 1791.

Shifting Identities in R el ation to Gender, D e m o g r a p h y, E t h n i c i t y, a n d Mestizaje

chapter 12

I n digenous Au tonom y a n d the Blu r r i ng of Spa n ish Sov er eign t y i n the Ca l ch aqu í Va l l ey, Si xteen th to Sev en teen th Cen tu ry Christophe Giudicelli Translated by Dawn Curtis

The history of the imperial borders of the Iberian powers shows remarkable consistency following the teleological schema of the inevitable incorporation of each and every one of the indigenous populations into the sphere of colonial obedience. In other words, this narrative suggests a global process, guided by the outcome supposedly achieved by colonial agents and completed by national states in the republican period: the absorption of the indigenous populations into a unified society, governed by a unitary body of laws, rules and customs. Ethnohistorical research over the last quarter century has shattered this monolithic viewpoint by proving that the interactive processes occurring in the contrasting frontier regions of the Spanish colonies were not linear and stable, nor did they always draw the contours of an undisputed hegemony.1 Studies centered on the long or medium duration have demonstrated that even though the colonial power did not exercise direct control over the vast hinterlands beyond the formal Spanish jurisdictions, other forms of control evolved. Encounters, skirmishes, and confrontation of political hegemonies could lead to several types of accommodation: that is, to regimes or orders of coexistence that worked for the imperial agents, the independent indigenous groups, and the supposed enemies.2

318   Borderlands of the Iberian World These interactions are increasingly accepted as fundamental types of border relations for the contact zones in America.3 It has long been observed how, as the scope of concrete actions in the exercise of power weakened, the imperial agents had no choice but to negotiate, collaborate, and inscribe their action in a logic that sometimes escaped them. This is obvious in the acts of war where the “Indian friends” were the majority, which meant that in practice Iberian leaders acted as auxiliaries in conflicts that went well beyond their own interests and, at times, their understanding of the context in which they developed. In fact a pacification campaign could also cover operations related to other conflicts internal to the indigenous geopolitical fabric, whether older or born from the new colonial conditions.4 Thus, it would be more accurate, at times, to speak of “Spanish or Portuguese friends” rather than “Indian friends,” or at least to attempt a polyphonic narrative that takes into account all the strategic perspectives of a single conflict.5 For example, the Paulista “bandeiras” were slave hunts not always exclusively following the official mission, but rather they obeyed the internal logic of the group which carried them out.6 By focusing on these border interactions and leaving aside the narrative thread of conquest and Iberian expansions, research has moved toward the study of new objects and forms of contact that blur and complicate the old perspective of acculturation based on the unilateral model of the erosion of identity. Among these new subjects, the “mediating agents” stand out in works by Ares, Gruzinski and Benat-Tachot, among others.7 The most important recent theoretical turn has rescued the indigenous subject of the colonial borderlands and, by means of a methodological hybridization of history and anthropology, returned the indigenous peoples to the living historical narrative. This means no longer viewing them as part of the decoration, as archaic obstacles standing in the way of progress, the spiritual or missionary conquest, mining development, urban foundations, or the structuring of an internal colonial market—to cite just a few historiographical fields that traditionally considered the indigenous presence only at its outer edges, or rather as the mute raw material for its development. It was not that long ago that serious work was begun on the missions as arenas for power and social transformation, based on the reduced indigenous populations in the Jesuit or Franciscan networks.8 Taking the indigenous subject seriously, as recognized by Boccara, is probably a debt owed to the same intellectual and political context that in other places has allowed for the development of post-colonial and subaltern studies.9 For borderland studies, this change in direction had profound consequences, advancing the critical analysis of the symbolic devices that had kept the indigenous populations in an ahistorical state. It also brought about a deconstruction of the ideological scaffolding that underpinned the process of ethnification begun in the colonial period and reproduced acritically in classical studies. Specifically, it was necessary to show the framework of colonial classifications in order to understand the ideologically structured image of those regions where the indigenous population was reduced, conceptually, according to the demands of colonial circumstances.10 This historiographical revolution had its most visible results in studies of those porous territories separating the spaces of effective imperial sovereignty from the immense

Indigenous autonomy in the Calchaquí Valley   319 confines where indigenous societies maintained a high level of independence: to the south of the Bio-Bio River, in the eastern Andes, in northern New Spain, on the Miskitu coast, and the Amazon.11 Centered on the long or medium duration, these studies deal with diverse forms of identity creation leading to what is now called ethnogenesis.12 This means the appearance of “new peoples and new kinds of peoples,” of “new worlds at the borders of the new world.”13 This change in focus also had profound consequences for research on the internal borders, those enclaves that were formally incorporated into the jurisdictional space of the colony but that for decades—at times centuries— were the theater of permanent clashes between a variety of social agents, both natives and outsiders.14 All those provinces, founded in the “interior,” were a laboratory in which institutional bodies and individuals interacted every day according to a series of reasonings that were not necessarily subject to the rules governing the implementation of the imperial authority, the expansion of the Catholic faith, or indigenous resistance. In this sense, changing the scale to observe the historical phenomena at ground level reveals the constant movement between the two extremes—“European,” and “indigenous”—with all their possible variations.15 Their cross-overs and interactions cannot be summarized under the concept of mestizaje.16 That is, in as much as it does not address the fundamental questions of power and autonomy.17 A series of different cases rooted in colonial Tucumán (sixteenth and seventeenth centuries), a province exhibiting all the characteristics of a borderland without borders (that is a borderland and a borderless land), lost in the far south of the viceroyalty of Peru are illustrative. More precisely, these cases come from a region of this peripheral province, the Calchaquí Valley, where indigenous societies maintained political autonomy for over a century, despite its early incorporation into the colonial sphere through the means of control implemented by Spanish-Creole agents. To show how this enclave became a kind of black hole in which colonial hegemony dissolved and the power apparatus was ineffective, it is necessary to start by discussing what made Tucumán a precarious and unstable border, and then shift the focus to the Calchaquí Valley as an internal border where two hegemonies confronted each other. Understanding how the particular conditions of this autonomous space allowed for the development of singular trajectories is only possible once these issues have been explained.

Tucumán, an Imperial Limbo From its official foundation in the 1540s, the Province of Tucumán, Juríes and Diaguitas presented the hallmarks of a distant frontier with no defined southern limit, a borderless border, since its jurisdiction could potentially be cast as far as the Strait of Magellan.18 From the beginning, its foundation occurred under negative auspices, because the priority of the viceroyalty was less to increase the possessions of his majesty than to “empty the land” and “disperse the people” in order to restore peace in Peru following the bloody

320   Borderlands of the Iberian World episodes of civil war between the supporters of Pizarro and Almagro. By encouraging forays into the distant lands of Chile, Pacamoros, Moyobamba, Chachapoyas, Çumaco, Tucumán (and even some of the islands of the South Sea), the authorities in Lima sought, above all, to distance poor soldiers and other failed adventurers from the conquest who were dragging their shields on the streets of the viceregal cities. Predictably, just as the first foray (in 1543) followed immediately after the defeat of Diego de Almagro “el mozo” (the lad), the second expedition, culminating in the official founding of the province, came in the wake of the crushing of Gonzalo Pizarro in 1548. Juan Núñez de Prado, one of Pizarro’s ex-captains who had changed sides at just the right time, received governorship of the future province. The founders—fewer than one hundred Spaniards—had a remarkably unruly profile that would instigate internal wars, rebellions, and clashes between factions, which multiplied in a land soon reputed as a refuge for delinquents and fugitives from the law in Lima or in Potosí.19 Moreover, from the outset this province suffered due to disputed jurisdictional claims with Chile, which were not resolved until 1563 when Tucumán was definitively included in the jurisdiction of the Audiencia de Charcas. This instability was worsened by a series of conflicts between governors appointed simultaneously by Lima and Spain. Along with jurisdictional disputes, local enmities, and conflicts over succession to the head of the province, a curious practice developed: in the best cases, the governors ended their rule in prison and left the province in chains; in the worst cases, they were executed by their successors, a ritual only interrupted halfway through the 1580s by the arrival of the first governor with real political clout: Juan Ramírez de Velasco.20 The extreme violence observed among the leaders of the province reflected that which prevailed in all sectors of the incipient Tucumán society. Tucumán suffered as well from an endemic demographic weakness, largely due to competition from Chile, which offered better prospects, and from Charcas, encouraged by the growth of Potosí. By 1587, almost forty years after it was founded, the province had just seven hundred vecinos, that is approximately thirty-five hundred permanent Spanish inhabitants, as well as a floating population of Peruvian Indian dwellers, temporary residents, cattle farmers and yanaconas stationed with their owners.21 Even taking into account the fragmentary nature of these estimates, there were few inhabitants in a vast territory covering all of what is now northwestern Argentina.22 Beyond the quantitative aspect, Governor Ramírez de Velasco complained of the shortage of nobility. A situation of chronic poverty and the lack of an elite class worried him enough to take measures aimed at enlarging and “improving” Tucumán society. As well as literally importing sons of families who had a measure of fame and wealth, Ramírez de Velasco took it upon himself to marry the daughters of poor conquistadors with the “soldiers” that arrived with him. He also went to great pains to correct attitudes not coinciding with Christian morality or with the interests of the Crown: he made the inhabitants lead an honorable life with their legitimate wives and stop appearing scandalously in public with their indigenous mistresses, which was a fairly widespread practice even among the principal members of society in the province.23 This insistence on moralizing

Indigenous autonomy in the Calchaquí Valley   321 public life would unleash a chain of violent consequences and, at the same time, reveal that beneath the colonial order lay other kinds of social and political reasonings. Relations between the colonists and the indigenous people varied across the region, even if they were marked by predatory violence. From the beginning Indians were granted in encomienda to the espadachines (troopers) who made up the majority of the founders, following a common practice in this type of borderland. It was standardized by the Ordenanzas de Poblamiento (Ordinances of Settlement) of 1573.24 This explicitly established the granting of encomiendas for two lifetimes to each settler.25 These encomiendas were distributed without the prior knowledge of the indigenous groups that were shared out and without their being previously settled. Therefore, systematic compulsion prevailed for a long time without any real control on the part of the authorities. The abovementioned Ramírez de Velasco could only deplore, in the mid-1580s, the bloodshed suffered by the indigenous people of Tucumán, who were “rented out to Potosí and Chile as though they were mules for hire.”26 A practice still followed twenty years later for the Indians of Córdoba, where the encomenderos went to “muster them and make raids on the scrubland as though they were deer.”27

A Colonial Black Hole: The Calchaquí Valley The situation of generalized violence led to armed conflicts in the inter-Andean corridor known today as the Calchaquí Valleys, formed by the Calchaquí and Santa María Rivers. This internal border was an enclave of indigenous autonomy that defied colonial hegemony for over a century—from 1536 to 1664—despite having been the theater of the first encounters between Spanish conquistadors and the indigenous people of the future Tucumán. From the founding of the province, the Spanish referred to these “Indians of war” from the Andean area generically as Diaguitas, as opposed to the Juríes of the lower region corresponding to the Tucumán-Santiago plain. They described the Diaguitas, who spoke the kakán language, as “of more reason than the others” and linked them with the agricultural societies of the Altiplano.28 Since the Diaguitas managed all the ecological levels of the valley ecosystem, the first colonists settled among them to take advantage of their land and manpower: four of the five cities of the province in the 1550s stood in this region.29 All the “feudal settlers” (vecinos feudatarios) of these cities received Diaguita Indians in encomienda; thus from the beginning of colonial settlement many of the indigenous inhabitants of the high Andean valleys were linked to the Spanish-Creole colonists and they were baptized, as indicated by the Christian first names that preceded their indigenous names.30 This framework of coexistence, governed by the classic institutions of conquest and colonization, was shattered in 1562, when a loose confederation expelled the

322   Borderlands of the Iberian World Spanish-Creole vecinos. The testimonies preserved regarding the causes of the uprising point to terrible management on the part of governor Gregorio de Castañeda who, after imprisoning and humiliating his predecessor, broke the diplomatic balance with the Indians, mistreated the influential cacique of the Indian village of Tolombón, Juan Calchaquí, and reassigned the encomiendas that had already been distributed as he pleased in order to favor his clients and servants.31 These led to a general mobilization of the Indians. The precarious moral economy on which the peace rested collapsed in just a few months, and the colonists sought refuge in Chile, Charcas, or Santiago del Estero, the only Tucumán city that was not razed to the ground, located on the plain far from the epicenter of the uprising.32 The colonists from Córdoba de Calchaquí, close to the site of the modern-day Saltan city of San Carlos in the heart of the valleys, were executed within days, after a long siege.33 Only a few were able to escape and take the news to La Plata, the seat of the Audiencia.34 Many women and children were captured and “adopted” by the victors. The trauma that ensued the fate of the inhabitants of Córdoba as well as the fact that responsibility for the massacre was attributed to the cacique Juan Calchaquí, explains why this part of the inter-Andean valleys was called the Calchaquí Valley, and his name was adopted for the whole group of “Diaguitas of war,” then collectively labeled “Calchaquís.” The great offensive of 1562 therefore meant a radical contraction of the borderland, delimiting an area where the Spanish were not able to establish settlements for decades. In fact, up until the end of the 1580s, new cities were only founded outside this area: Talavera de Esteco (1567) and Córdoba (1573), respectively to the east and south, beyond the Andean region. Spaniards were able to maintain San Miguel de Tucumán, rebuilt in 1565 on the ruins of Cañete, but it was almost destroyed again on a number of occasions. On the other hand, attempts to regain a foothold in the Calchaquí and the Salta Valleys met with resounding defeats in 1577.35 Salta itself, founded in 1582, vegetated as an isolated stronghold in a land of conflict until the latter part of the decade.36 The indigenous offensive of 1562 created an impenetrable space with long-term consequences. It prevented the Spaniards from accessing a fertile, densely populated area that was strategic for communications with the seat of the Audiencia and the Potosí mines, since the Valley of the Calchaquí River provided a route with natural access to the Altiplano.37 Furthermore, the Indians’ resistance, maintaining their political autonomy for decades, obstructed the colonists’ access to this source of manpower, which became ever more necessary following the demographic collapse in the controlled areas.38 The advancement of the Spanish-Creoles from the cities of Salta and La Rioja at the end of the sixteenth century and the beginning of the seventeenth subdivided the naming of the peoples until then generically designated as Diaguita. The groups from the north of the valley, from the time they became trapped in Salta’s orbit following a hard military campaign in 1588, entered a deep process of colonial transformation and came to be called Pulares.39 To the south the populations divided between the encomenderos from La Rioja and, from 1607, San Juan de la Ribera (the official name of Londres following its resettlement) kept the name of Diaguitas. In the middle of those two relatively controlled spaces, the Diaguitas of war kept the name of the enemy, Calchaquí, and were

Indigenous autonomy in the Calchaquí Valley   323 defined by their “rebellious” nature. In this territory of about thirty square leagues (480 kilometers), according to the majority of sources, the indigenous people did not serve their encomenderos, nor did they comply with the labor drafts that Spaniards attempted to impose upon them.40 Many had been given as encomiendas since the beginning of the conquest; others were shared out later on, during periods of relative détente.41 However, as soon as the demands became pressing, the Indians would cut off all relations, destroy the infrastructure, kill the encomendero or his representative, and close the access points to the valleys. According to the governor of Tucumán, the Indians “serve badly and only when they want to.”42 In the first decades of the seventeenth century, the colonial project was constantly at risk. The Calchaquís took up arms every time the colonists tried to impose burdens they found unacceptable, and they supported their neighbors in areas where colonial control was more efficient, such as in the north of the Valley of Calchaquí or in Londres, to the south. Both Spaniards and “domestic Indians” often perished in armed uprisings. In 1604 Governor Barraza y Cárdenas described his powerlessness in the face of the indigenous groups’ virtual autonomy and his failure to incorporate them into the colonial economy: “They have not been conquered or made Christians [. . .] which is seen every day in Salta, the Calchaquí Valley and the others and Jujuy, every day the Indians flee and depart.”43 To the south the situation was no different: despite many punitive expeditions, the colonists in La Rioja could not keep the Indians from fleeing or prevent their attacks on haciendas and livestock ranches.44 In 1609, three or four rebel caciques were hung, to no effect: the Indians killed a mestizo and refused to work.45 Reports from Governor Alonso de Rivera deplored the fact that by the 1610s in San Miguel de Tucumán “their Indians do not provide them services, or if any no more than ten [serve each master] because they are at war.”46 The strengthening of unsubmissive areas worked against colonial interests because they constituted a refuge for rebellious Indians from regions already pacified: “Many Indians of peace and even whole villages have fled at one time or another to the Calchaquí Valley where they find protection.”47 All the governors and the town councils of the main cities—Tucumán, Salta, La Rioja—demanded for decades that the authorities take measures to re-establish a permanent city in the intermontane region in order to stop what the Tucumán officials called “the bogeyman of this land” [el coco de esta tierra].48 Finally, in 1607, the city of Londres was refounded in precarious conditions.49 Nevertheless, the project to build another town on the ruins of Córdoba de Calchaquí always came up against a lack of enthusiasm on the part of the inhabitants of Tucumán and Salta, who feared testing the firepower of Indians who had already destroyed three attempts in the past.50 New encomiendas had to be promised to the poor Spaniards so that they would risk their necks as soldiers in this project. This measure had been used, with variable success, for refounding Londres.51 In the case of the Calchaquí Valley, the authorities sought sufficient incentives. To begin with they had to free some encomiendas: even if they existed in name only, the encomenderos held the title deeds and were unwilling to relinquish them. At the start those that owned two encomiendas were forced to choose one.52

324   Borderlands of the Iberian World But this was not enough, and thus more drastic measures had to be taken. In order to finance the settlement project, in 1630, Governor Felipe de Albornoz promoted a series of “compositions,” encouraging the encomenderos to cede a third of their holdings to create new encomiendas. Although the legality of this measure was dubious, and it caused more than a few complaints, it succeeded. The encomenderos who had not been able to benefit from “their” Indians hoped that pressure from the new city would at last make their titles effective, so they gave part of them up with no particular opposition.53 An isolated outbreak by some Calchaquís against their encomendero from Salta in dramatic circumstances provided Albornoz the pretext he needed to cement his project and re-establish a city in the valley.54 This new city constituted one more on the long list of failures: the fort of Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe was maintained for barely a year and a half before being abandoned and burned down in 1632. Rebuilt the next year, it could never become any more than a precarious entrenched encampment that was abandoned once and for all just a few years later.55 Worse still, the Calchaquí uprising spread like wild fire, plunging all the Andean part of the province into a war that lasted for over ten years.56 The destruction was huge, the reestablished city of Londres was once again displaced.57 Many of the Diaguita Indians from La Rioja and Londres died, while others were deported.58 The Pulares from the north of the valley who had participated in the repression on the side of the colonists had to abandon their reducciones (missions) and were relocated around Salta, where they would be safe from the reprisals of their neighbors.59

Colonial Power and Indigenous Autonomy The history outlined thus far shows not only the relative impotence of colonial policies but also the ability of the Diaguitas, grouped together by the Spanish-Creoles under the label “Calchaquí,” to preserve a good degree of political autonomy and territorial control. The fact that they maintained this control for over a century shows that this was not simply the resistance of a closed traditional society but rather an effective way of adapting to the new situation. Despite gaps in the sources, which seldom leave room for the indigenous people to have their say—much less rebellious ones—the shreds of available information illuminate the depth of this resistant adaptation in all spheres of confrontation with colonial society, especially in negotiation, war, and intelligence. From the uprising of 1562 until the “denaturalization” (deportation) campaigns of 1659–1665, the Diaguitas and the Calchaquí groups demonstrated their aptitude for negotiating and measuring the correlation of forces, combining armed resistance with a timely and always revocable acceptance of a certain degree of obedience when the circumstances made this the wise course. The Bishop of Tucumán for example, clearly attributed the end of the hostilities, in 1635, to an agreement which was not very

Indigenous autonomy in the Calchaquí Valley   325 demanding: they are willing to send, he wrote, “voluntary mita (labor service) to the surrounding cities and [depart] when and how they want to drive mules and cattle to Peru, Salta, Potosí.”60 In warfare they were able to adapt their tactics from the beginning to fight the Tucumán troops, inventing defensive constructions and traps to break the superiority of the Spanish cavalry. They would retreat toward the Sierra while sustaining guerrilla warfare to wear the enemy down, rather than accepting clashes in the open in which the Spanish-Creoles enjoyed obvious superiority. They even developed camouflage techniques to mislead the lookouts, adopting Spanish visual codes and appearances.61 In order to compensate for the effects of the scorched-earth policy systematically used by the colonists, they diversified their crops and planted them in more inaccessible places.62 And they maintained necessary reserves in order to endure the “forays.” Finally, permanent contact with the colonial world and the fluid communication constantly maintained with their “allies and relatives” from areas that had been reclassified by the controlling geography as Diaguita and Pular, gave the Calchaquí a good knowledge of the enemy on which they built intelligence networks for gathering information even inside the cities of the province.63 Not only that, but they adapted their movements according to what they knew was being plotted in La Rioja, Londres, San Miguel de Tucumán or Salta. From these brief comments it can be seen that the Calchaquí enclave should not be viewed as a closed hermetic space, nor the Diaguita-Calchaquí society as cornered and isolated. The same resistance that enabled them to maintain a good level of political autonomy for a long time was in turn fed by the wide range of contacts with neighboring territories and groups, themselves trapped in the colonial sphere and held under direct military pressure. Therefore, to understand the capacity for constant renewal of the autonomous Calchaquí space, one must consider the strength of the attraction of an enclave that, in different moments of the sixteenth century, offered an alternative to a series of individuals wanting to leave the model of society that had been imposed in the province of Tucumán, or retained by force other subjects, literally abducted into Calchaquí society. As an autonomous space, the Calchaquí Valley welcomed throughout the period under consideration different types of individuals or groups who, willingly or unwillingly, found themselves outside the space of colonial obedience. Two groups are distinguishable among these. The first was made up of captives who were true castaways from inland. Especially in the beginning numerous Spaniards, mestizos, or service Indians, often from Peru, were unwillingly integrated into the Calchaquí space. The second category covers those who willingly took the decision to move there and break with colonial obedience. The main deserters were, of course, Diaguitas or Pulares who tried to flee from severe exploitation in their lands through the continuance of personal service.64 These interesting cases provide a view of constant movement between the sphere of Spanish sovereignty and the autonomous Calchaquí space. They also provide valuable information regarding the survival of an indigenous geopolitical structure, even under colonial control. They reveal a web of alliances that do not conform to the geography of Spanish

326   Borderlands of the Iberian World control and that could be reactivated at any time, as evidenced by the successive ­episodes of war in which the arrows of alliance—which implicated the groups accepting them in plans for widespread rebellion—circulated across the whole territory, whether pacified or not.65 In fact, this web of alliances between groups who (for the most part) spoke the Kakán language, reemerged with certain regularity in all of the major episodes of conflict with the Spanish-Creoles during the period, demonstrating that the colonial demarcation of the territory never completely replaced a different political logic, underlying but always operative, with its epicenter in the Calchaquí enclave.66 These fugitives-neighbors-kinfolk were not the only ones to seek refuge in the gray area of the Calchaquí Valley. Various individuals, Spaniards, mestizos, and even indigenous auxiliaries who had participated in “pacification” campaigns, voluntarily went to live among the rebellious groups. In many cases, this choice was made by default, to flee or reach safety from a risky situation in the Tucumán area under Spanish sovereignty; but in others, this rupture was more of an affirmative decision. This attractive quality of the autonomous Calchaquí enclave challenged the hegemonic model privileged in Spanish sources, as it created a space for resistance that directly questioned the foundations of the colonial order. Among many known examples, four cases from the beginning and end of the period considered in this work are outstanding. The first two instances concern two young sons of first-generation conquistadors, at the end of the 1580s, who suffered diametrically opposed fates: one is a captive of the Calchaquís “turned Indian”; the other is the son of one of the most important men in Tucumán society, who literally took to the hills, to the lands of the enemy Indians, for both political and sexual reasons, and chose to rearticulate his existence according to alliances that led him to confront violently the very society from which he came. The second two cases, inscribed in the decline of the autonomous Calchaquí Valley occurred at times of intense unrest, which culminated in the final defeat of the Calchaquís during the denaturalization campaigns.67 One is that of the famous Andalusian imposter Pedro Bohórquez—known as the Inca of Tucumán—who passed through the intermontane region; the other concerns his right-hand man, the mestizo Luís Henríquez, an ambiguous figure who participated in suppressing the Diaguita uprising in the 1640s but later switched sides, taking with him a strong contingent of “yanaconas” from Malfin in order to strengthen the phony Inca in the heart of the Calchaquí Valley.68

Indianization and Subversion of Colonial Order The principal policies carried out by Governor Ramírez de Velasco—pacification of the war zones and repression of the colonists’ scandalous behavior—frame the two different cases herein examined. Alonso Ximénez and Juan Bautista Muñoz, the characters under

Indigenous autonomy in the Calchaquí Valley   327 consideration, were young men in the second half of the 1580s who were sons of first-generation conquistadors. The father of Alonso Ximénez, Juan Ximénez, was one of the few survivors of Córdoba de Calchaquí, and Juan Bautista Muñoz’s father, Juan Bautista Bernio, one of the founders of the city of Londres in 1558 and of San Miguel de Tucumán in 1565. Both grew up around the Calchaquí Valley in permanent contact with the Indians. Despite having a common background, their personal stories and destinies set them apart from each other.69 Alonso Ximénez was one of the Spanish children captured and adopted by indigenous people after the fall of Córdoba de Calchaquí in 1562. Almost nothing is known about him besides the fact that his father had survived the capture and destruction of the city.70 No news about this group of captive women and children came to light for over twenty years, but the few pieces of information that sporadically filtered through over the years did not leave room for doubt that they had been adopted into the DiaguitaCalchaquí society of their captors.71 This was a practice similar to what Gilles Havard described for other lands as a “war of captivity.”72 The sources only allow following the trail of these captives intermittently, and their destiny does not appear to have worried the authorities overmuch, since this kind of captivity was common. All trace of them soon disappears, and they are not mentioned again until twelve years later, following the peculiar liberation of Alonso Ximénez, who was unexpectedly recognized in Salta among the Indian prisoners by the troops of Ramírez de Velasco during his 1588 military campaign in the northern Calchaquí Valley. The governor himself ordered that they verify this strange “specimen” from among the ranks of indigenous prisoners, and he did everything possible to capitalize his rescue. The descriptions of this Spanish Indian are interesting, if rather brief. Of particular note is the perception of a “Spaniard dressed as a gentil (non-christian),” or in “the clothing of an Indian,” according to other witnesses. Juan Hermoso Granero, for example, declared that “he was in such condition that it was necessary to teach him to speak the Spanish tongue because he had no knowledge of it, neither any civility (pulicía) at all.”73 Beyond the particulars of this case, attention should be called to the dramatization of the rescue, because it contains a lot of information on how the Tucumanos represented the world of the Calchaquí and on the potential danger of transformation they would be exposed to if swallowed up by a territory beyond Spanish sovereignty. The governor’s service report (información de servicio) projected an edifying picture: that of the “­de-barbarization” of the Spaniard swallowed up by tierra adentro, of the Christian who disappeared among the apostate Indians and returned to the lights of life among Christians. Of his role among the rebel Calchaquís, sadly nothing is mentioned, nor do we know what might have become of him afterward. Therefore hypothesis and conjectures must be formulated from other related information, based on the impression that this Calchaquí Campaign left on historical memory. In the general context of his “liberation” it is by no means a coincidence that the governor’s service report systematically associated Ximénez’s re-apparition with the transfer to Santiago del Estero of the heir of Juan Calchaquí, called Siltipocle and considered the supreme leader of the indigenous rebel forces. Along with the restitution

328   Borderlands of the Iberian World of the son to his father, the documents attest the no less exemplary scene of the ­magnanimous welcome of the defeated and tamed barbarian leader, following the ancient tradition of Roman triumphs (triumphus): the barbarian is baptized with the Christian name of his godfather Juan Ramírez de Velasco, according to a well-established ritual, and this godfather showers him with gifts and invites him to reside in peace in his own home. Five years later, Ramírez de Velasco expounded a little more, showing the ­symbolic—but also material—value of what he considered a real trophy, highlighting how much this exemplary ceremony of civilizing the barbarian cost him.74 A plausible hypothesis regarding the role of this and other early captives, brought up among the Calchaquí Indians, can be drawn from the comparison that was systematically established between the Indianized Alonso Ximénez and the pacified cacique Siltipocle. Fray Reginaldo de Lizárraga, who passed through Salta in the same year of 1589, witnessed the capture of a mestizo who led a faction of Indians from the valley. Like Alonso Ximénez, “he did not know our tongue, because he had not heard it.”75 Nothing indicates that this mestizo was Ximénez, and there were probably other similar cases. What is noteworthy in this testimony is the complexity of the political games between the different powers in question, which entailed more than a simple clash between Spanish conquistadors and rebel Indians. In fact, the chronicler mentions “taking the mestizo,” and not “freeing” the “son of the Spaniard,” as in the case of Alonso Ximénez.76 The unease that can be perceived in the sources when dealing with these cases springs from the realization that “the Spaniard” is not at all impervious to the influence of the neighboring indigenous world. Both in the parable of the rough, armed Indianized character who has become “acclimatized” to the roughness of his land, but allows himself to be softened by the love of his—Spanish—father, and in the show-trophy of Alonso Ximénez, a return to order is highlighted. The lost son, upon returning to his original society, removes all stains of Indianization. Integrated once again into the Spanish fold, he leaves his exterior marks of barbarism—the “clothing of a gentil” or the “outfit of an Indian”—and recovers his lost Christian tongue. In other words, he is reassigned the microphysical marks of power, all proof, according to the colonial discourse, of its undisputed domination. There are more than enough elements to question the cleanness of the socio-ethnic borders that supposedly separated and defined the protagonists, according to the sources themselves. Today nobody doubts that a great number of “Spaniards” had an indigenous mother and, were it not for their social status, they would have been labeled as “mestizos.”77 Almost at the same time that Alonso Ximénez was brought down from the Andean Valleys as a Calchaquí “specimen,” another young Tucumano, Juan Bautista Muñoz, was undertaking the opposite journey and traveling into the interior of the sierra to the land of the “Indians of war,” breaking dramatically with his society of origin. His story is better documented due to his position in the high society of San Miguel de Tucumán. In many aspects, the two cases are in opposition. Alonso Ximénez was brought up in a tense environment, given his position as a captive, between the difficulty of negotiating a place in the society that had taken him in and the threat of the Spanish-Creoles, who

Indigenous autonomy in the Calchaquí Valley   329 regularly raided in the valley. Juan Bautista Muñoz enjoyed the sweet privileges of his  social status as a member of one of the most powerful families of San Miguel de Tucumán.78 Nobody would have imagined that from one day to the next this son of a good family could become public enemy number one, suspected of collusion with the feared Calchaquís, as it indeed happened. In mid-November 1586, Muñoz fled to the mountains and dug himself in to the impregnable summit of the Sierra del Aconquija, with some fifty or sixty armed Indians. His flight caused great alarm, due to the serious danger that the Indians of the region would take advantage of the situation to launch a new general offensive: it was known that they were linked to the encomienda Indians that had fled with the rebel oligarch.79 What was feared was no less than a new destruction of San Miguel, following that of Cañete, in 1562, and the nearly successful attempt of 1578. This time, however, the potential assailants could count on an unprecedented network of alliances ranging from the rebellious groups from the Calchaquí Valley, to the encomienda towns close to the city, with probable accomplices within the city itself and with the support of a scion of high Tucumán society. Muñoz’s attitude was not reassuring: he had shot with his arquebus a delegation sent from San Miguel to make him see reason and was even on the verge of killing the friar who led them.80 The governor’s report specified the reasons that drove Muñoz to seek refuge among the enemy Indians: The circumstance which led him to commit this folly was that for six years he had been cohabiting with three or four Indian women from his father's villages and was not living with his wife. Since he understood that a report had been sent about this, and that he would not be pardoned and his mistresses would be taken from him, he resolved to go off to the mountains with them.81

Beyond the attack on public morals, what seriously concerned the colonists—in particular those from San Miguel—was that the secession of one of their most outstanding members implied a destabilization of the local balance, founded in something much more complex than a one-sided game of domination of the Europeans over the Indians. The testimony seems to betray the fact that the authority of Juan Bautista Muñoz and his father over the Indians of his encomienda rested in part on quasi-matrimonial alliances that formed a mutually beneficial asymmetric relationship between the encomendero “relative” and the people under his administration. This complex game of interchanges and considerations was unacceptable in the eyes of someone recently arrived from the Iberian peninsula like Governor Ramírez de Velasco.82 While the colonial diagram evidently pointed to the subjection of the indigenous population by means of political domination, economic exploitation, and cultural repression, on a micro level the unspoken strategies of this colonial power also followed tortuous paths.83 In this case it was the articulation of a network of solidarities which covered the encomendero and the groups integrated into the colonial system by means of personal connections with

330   Borderlands of the Iberian World intricate extensions in a land of war.84 Without going into detail, Muñoz gave up in the end, no doubt convinced by the Damocles sword hanging over his head.85 He was arrested and seemingly judged in the Audiencia de Charcas, with unusual clemency in those times of extreme violence.86 The date of his death is not known (the last mention of him is in 1609).87 But the ex-insurgent and accomplice of the “enemy Indians” died as a respectable resident of San Miguel. The remarkable clemency with which he was treated remains to be explained. The ­reasons are several and varied: first his social standing and the political weight of his family.88 However, other deeper reasons contribute to explaining the understanding that benefited Muñoz in spite of his betrayal. What concerned his peers, the aspiring nobility of San Miguel and the encomenderos from the province was not that he had a carnal or marital relationship with one of his Indians: many had not only lovers, mistresses, or concubines but rather indigenous families, and many had chosen their wives—officially or otherwise—from among the higher-class Indians in their encomiendas, in particular the daughters or wives of caciques, to strengthen their authority among the indigenous population. Hernán Mexía Miraval himself, the veteran conquistador who went to bring Muñoz out of his hideout, had recognized mestizo offspring outside of his legitimate marriage to a Spanish woman: two sons and a daughter with María Mexía, an indigenous woman that many writers believe was a descendant of the caciques of Guatiliguala, a village of his encomienda.89 And it seems they all shared the same homestead without apparent conflict.90 Above all, Muñoz was criticized for having reversed the political significance of these alliances, opening up a gulf by subverting the misnamed colonial pact. The explosive reaction from the authorities—three expeditionary corps to deal with a matter of public morals—is in itself totally disproportionate. But it was too dangerous to allow such a secession in the heart of Tucumán society, because it would undermine the very foundations of the colonial system of relations with the Indians. The Indianization of Juan Bautista Muñoz should not therefore be sought in its transcultural aspects. He was accused of being “ladino in the natural tongues of this government” and it is clear that he knew the sierra well enough to hide out in an almost impregnably rocky part of the mountains, following the Diaguita military tactic.91 But the same could be said of many encomenderos and of the majority of those who pursued him. It was precisely because they had the same access to the indigenous world that they so accurately perceived the danger. What worried them was not his scandalous attitude but rather the political meaning of his suddenly breaking with colonial order. If Ramírez de Velasco, recently arrived on a vessel from Spain, was horrified at such attacks on public morals and determined to punish him exemplarily, he was unable to achieve his aims due to the pressure from a society which was much more understanding of the errors of the young encomendero. What lessons can one take from these two very different cases, grouped together under the heading of “Indianization”? Firstly, that at the end of the sixteenth century, Spanish-Creole society was much closer to the indigenous societies—whether subjugated or not—than a perspective limited to studying the expansion of the border would suggest,

Indigenous autonomy in the Calchaquí Valley   331 and even than what Spanish sources imply about the early phases of colonization. A “Spaniard” could spend over twenty years among the “Indians of war” and become an Indian himself. The Tucumán elite was involved in a network of very intricate alliances that placed the principal Spanish potentates in a contiguous relationship with the rebellious groups of the Calchaquí enclave, following a logic that often eluded them. Secondly, these two stories advise using the concept of “Indianization” with caution. If it is only a question of measuring the degree of acculturation of the conquistadors in positions of contact with the border, of evaluating the influence of the indigenous world on their customs and being-in-the-world, then one would only be dealing with a dressed-up version of the old mestizaje. Nevertheless, the concept of Indianization can have a heuristic value in as much as it propitiates a shift in focus and helps to identify in  particular cases—few, no doubt—the “indigenous” political logic that guided the actions of one or another of the “Spanish” protagonists. It also allows one to see how intersubjective spaces operated in colonial society itself, instances of which these are only the visible and documented part. In both examples, the cultural dimension is patently inadequate for defining the phenomenon. Alonso Ximénez is living proof that another order can effectively be imposed on a few colonists from the province, even on their body itself. As for Juan Bautista Muñoz, his secession opens the dizzying perspective of an alternative order founded on a logic of alliances that subverted the colonial project and outlined a ­different hegemony. The resolution achieved in both cases indicates how impossible it was for the agents of the Crown to tolerate such figures. The rescue of Alonso Ximénez was paraded as a trophy and an exemplary stamp in the fight against indigenous barbarism, which maintained spheres of political autonomy with the capacity of social reproduction—and of adopting Spaniards. In turn, the crushing repression of Juan Bautista Muñoz’s attempted rebellion should be understood as a defense mechanism against potential subversion of the system that underpinned the asymmetric relations between the colonists and the indigenous groups. Moreover, the reinstatement of the offender to enjoy all his prerogatives is a good indicator of the real scope of this repression: it was above all about preserving Spanish hegemony, protecting it from all internal threats, much more than straightening out some immoral habits that high society could easily tolerate.

The Decline of Calchaquí Autonomy The native groups of the Calchaquí Valley maintained their autonomy during the first half of the seventeenth century, putting at risk all the attempts to populate the valley and successfully opposing their incorporation into the colonial directives for exploiting their labor, despite their status as encomienda Indians. Their enclave, however, came under ever-increasing pressures. After the Great Uprising of 1630–1640, Indians had to accept certain economic concessions; in 1643 they also tolerated the re-establishment of

332   Borderlands of the Iberian World the Society of Jesus. Both were limited concessions that satisfied neither the Jesuits nor the encomenderos, who derived no benefit from them. Pedro Bohórquez, the “Inca from Tucumán” also known as Pedro Chamijo or Pedro Huallpa, appeared on the scene at this conjuncture. This Andalusian who tried to discover the Gran Paititi in the jungles of Peru was deported to Valdivia prison in the south of Chile, tricked his jailers, and later reappeared on the other side of the Andes, in the valleys of Tucumán where he was accepted as “Inca” by the Diaguitas, the Jesuits, and the governor himself, even though he could not speak quechua or kakán.92 The consequences of his actions are also known: the last general uprising of the remaining autonomous groups, their final defeat, and the systematic denaturalization they suffered. The analysis of the network of alliances articulated around his person within the Calchaquí Valley shows their importance extended beyond him and even transcended the details of his fabrications. The project that took shape around his character was not limited to his own agenda or extravagant plots. In fact, the alliances he personally established with various Diaguita and Calchaquí groups, by means of different types of connections, bear witness to a mechanism already visible in the case of Juan Bautista Muñoz. It is known that he had indeed contracted marital relations with many women of different groups from the valley, and that around his person a chain of alliances broken since 1630 had been reestablished.93 First, that of the Pulares with the Calchaquís, which had been affected by the participation of the former group in campaigns against the latter causing their relocation outside the valley for many years and their resettlement near the city of Salta. Secondly, the installation of Bohórquez in the heart of the Calchaquí Valley had attracted many Diaguitas who had deserted the lands to which they had been reduced following the pacification of the 1630–1640s. By the end of the 1650s a chain of alliances was reconstituted, almost identical to that formed a century earlier during the general uprising of 1562. It linked groups from the Altiplano to the south of Potosí—Cochinoca and Casavindo in particular—up to the limits of San Juan.94 But this time the majority of those involved were supposedly “Indians of peace.” One of the greatest architects of this mass flight of “domestic” Diaguitas to the heart of the valley, who figured in Bohórquez’s first circle, was one Luis Henríquez, a mestizo cacique who had served with the Spanish ranks in the thick of the pacification of the Diaguitas, in the 1640s.95 He deserted in 1658, throwing his lot in with the new pseudoInca order formed around Bohórquez and settled with his followers in the village of Tolombón, transformed into the headquarters of Pedro Huallpa. What matters here is the political scope of this secession rather than its personal or psychological aspects, that is Bohórquez’s bet for strengthening an independent territory endowed with full autonomy and governed by an alternative order to Spanish domination, which he attacked with its own weapons.96 In fact, when Bohórquez left Tucumán, Henríquez and the overwhelming majority of the indigenous people continued the fight, demonstrating that something much bigger than Bohórquez’s fantasy had been set in motion: the project of consolidating a space that could escape the Tucumán hegemonic framework. The defeat of the 1658 indigenous offensive, which had threatened even Salta and San Miguel de Tucumán, and the subsequent pacification campaigns, put an end to Calchaquí

Indigenous autonomy in the Calchaquí Valley   333 autonomy. Following a new economic model of massive indigenous deportation and redistribution in order to fund his military operations, Governor Mercado y Villacorta literally emptied the valley of its inhabitants in two “denaturalization” campaigns in 1659 and 1664. Over twelve thousand Indians were sent to the four corners of the province, Santa Fe, and even the far away shores of the Río de la Plata. Various groups managed to return to their place of origin more or less in secret; others were even resettled there by their encomenderos. But in every case, their return occurred under conditions of domination. The mid-seventeenth-century campaigns finished off Calchaquí autonomy, the intermontane territory was integrated once and for all into the province of Tucumán and the southern-Andean economy, coming to play an important role in breeding mules for the Potosí mines. Beyond these particular cases, it is important to remember that the Calchaquí Valley appeared in different moments of borderlands confrontations as an alternative territory in which individuals could reinvent their existence, willingly or otherwise, and project themselves onto a scenario which they did not fully control. Since the Calchaquí Valley maintained its political autonomy for a long time, it continued to exercise a certain power of attraction conducive to the integration of new elements breaking with colonial hegemony. The ability for incorporation and adoption that Diaguita societies showed throughout the period considered, fed in turn the permanent renewal of the methods of resistance. Besides blurring colonial authority, the cases studied drew a politically autonomous order that discontinuously reintroduced elements from both sides of an extremely porous border.

Notes Archives AGI: Archivo General de Indias, Seville (Spain) AGNA: Archivo General de la Nación, Buenos Aires (Argentina) AHT: Archivo Histórico de Tucumán, San Miguel de Tucumán (Argentina) Achivum Romanum Societatis Iesu, Rome (Italy) BNBA: Fondo García Viñas de la Biblioteca Nacional, Buenos Aires (Argentina) 1. For the Brazilian and Novo Hispanic confines respectively, see Hal Langfur, “Native Informants and the Limits of Portuguese Dominion in Late-Colonial Brazil,” and Sean F. McEnroe, “The Indian Garrison Colonies of New Spain and Central America,” both in The Oxford Handbook of Borderlands of the Iberian World, ed. Danna A. Levin Rojo and Cynthia Radding (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019). 2. Guillaume Boccara and Silvia Galindo G., Lógica mestiza en América (Temuco: Universidad de La Frontera, Instituto de Estudios Indígenas, 2000); Raúl Mandrini and Carlos Paz, Las fronteras hispanocriollas del mundo indígena latinoamericano en los siglos XVIII–XIX. Un estudio comparativo (Tandil: IEHS, Centro de Estudios de Historia Regional–Universidad Nacional del Comahue, UNS, 2003); Ingrid de Jong and Lorena Rodríguez, comps., Dossier

334   Borderlands of the Iberian World “Mestizaje, etnogénesis y frontera,” Memoria Americana 13 (2005); Raúl Mandrini, Antonio Escobar Ohmstede, and Sara Ortelli, ed., “Más Allá de las Fronteras,” Sociedades en movimiento. Los pueblos indígenas de América Latina en el siglo XIX, Suplemento del Anuario del IEHS (Tandil: IEHS, –UNCPBA, 2007); Sara Ortelli and Maria Regina Celestino de Almeida, “Atravesando fronteras. Circulación de población en los márgenes iberoamericanos. Siglos XVI–XIX,” Nuevo Mundo Mundos Nuevos (2011 and 2012), accessed June 22, 2016, http://nuevomundo.revues.org/60702. 3. Jeremy Adelman and Stephen Aron, “From Borderlands to Borders: Empires, Nation-States, and the Peoples in between in North American History,” The American Historical Review 104, no. 3 (1999): 814–841. 4. Christophe Giudicelli, Pour une géopolitique de la guerre des Tepehuán (1616–1619) (Paris: Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2003). 5. Danna A. Levin Rojo, Return to Aztlan: Indians, Spaniards, and the Invention of Nuevo México (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2014), and “ ‘Indian Friends and Allies’ in the Spanish Imperial Borderlands of North America,” in The Oxford Handbook of Borderlands of the Iberian World, ed. Danna A. Levin Rojo and Cynthia Radding (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019) demonstrate that the colonial expansion towards the north of Mexico must also be considered in terms of the specific interests of different Nahua groups, for whom the Spanish were merely another element in an older and more complex panorama. 6. Guida Marques, “Martim Soares Moreno, capitaine luso-brésilien au service du roi et chef indien: Colonisation et indianisation dans l’Amérique portugaise du XVIIe siècle,” in La Indianización. Cautivos, renegados, “hommes libres” y misioneros en los confines americanos, ed. Christophe Giudicelli, Gilles Havard, and Salvador Bernabéu Albert (Madrid: Doce Calles, 2013), 161–182; John Monteiro, Negros da Terra—Índios e Bandeirantes nas Origens de São Paulo (São Paulo: Cia das letras, 1994). 7. Berta Ares Queija and Serge Gruzinski, ed., Entre dos mundos. Fronteras culturales y agentes mediadores (Seville: EEHA, 1997); Louise Bénat-Tachot and Serge Gruzinski, ed., Passeurs culturels. Mécanismes de métissage (Paris: PUMS-MSH, 2001). 8. Guillermo Wilde, Religión y poder en las misiones Guaraníes (Buenos Aires: SB, 2009); Guillermo Wilde, ed., Saberes de la conversión. Jesuitas, indígenas e imperios coloniales en las fronteras de la cristiandad (Buenos Aires: Grupo Editorial SB, 2012); Elisa Fruhaü Garcia, ed., Dossier “Missões na América Ibérica: Dimensões Políticas e Religiosas,” Tempo 19, no. 35 (2013); Susan Deeds, Defiance and Deference in Colonial Mexico: Indians under Spanish Rule in Nueva Vizcaya (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003); Cynthia Radding, Wandering Peoples: Colonialism, Ethnic Spaces, and Ecological Frontiers in Northwestern Mexico, 1700–1850 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997); Cecilia Sheridan Prieto, Anónimos y desterrados: la contienda por el “sitio que llaman de Quauyla:” siglos XVI–XVIII (Mexico: CIESAS, Miguel Angel Porrúa, 2000). 9. Guillaume Boccara, “¿Qué es lo “etno” en etnohistoria? la vocación crítica de los estudios etnohistóricos y los nuevos objetos de lucha,” Memoria Americana 20 (2012): 37–52; Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies. Research and Indigenous Peoples (London and New York: Zed Books, 1999). 10. José Luis Martínez Cereceda, Gente de la tierra de guerra. Los Lipes en las tradiciones andinas y el imaginario colonial (Lima and Santiago: PUCP, DIBAM, 2011); Marie-Areti Hers, José Luis Mirafuentes, María de los Dolores Soto, and Miguel Vallebueno, comps., Nómadas y sedentarios en el Norte de México (Mexico: UNAM, 2000); Christophe Giudicelli, ed., Fronteras movedizas. Clasificaciones coloniales y dinámicas socioculturales en las fronteras

Indigenous autonomy in the Calchaquí Valley   335 americanas (Mexico: CEMCA, El Colegio de Michoacán, 2011); Francisco Gil García, “Los intereses creados. Los Lipes en las clasificaciones coloniales del siglo XVI,” Chungara 45, no. 4 (2015): 533–542. 11. Guillaume Boccara, Los vencedores. Historia del pueblo mapuche en la época colonial (Santiago and San Pedro de Atacama: Universidad de Chile, UCN, 2007); Leonardo León, Los señores de la cordillera y las pampas: los pehuenches de Malargüe, 1770–1800 (Santiago: DIBAM, Centro de Investigaciones Diego Barros Arana, 2004); Thierry Saignes, Ava y Karai: Ensayos sobre la frontera Chiriguano (siglo XVI–XX) (La Paz: HISBOL, 1990); Thierry Saignes and Isabelle Combès, Alter Ego. Naissance de l’identité chiriguano (Paris: EHESS, Cahiers de l’Homme, 1991); France Marie Renard Casevitz, Thierry Saignes, and Anne-Christine Taylor, Al este de los Andes. Relaciones entre las sociedades amazónicas y andinas entre los siglos XV y XVII (Quito: Abya-Yala, 1988); Sara Ortelli, Trama de una guerra conveniente: Nueva Vizcaya y la sombra de los apaches (1748–1790) (Mexico: El Colegio de México, 2007); Salvador Bernabéu Albert, ed., El gran norte de México. Indios, misioneros y pobladores entre el mito y la historia (Seville: CSIC, 2009); and, although more debatably and for a later time, Pekka Hämäläinen, The Comanche Empire (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008); Claudia García, The Making of the Miskitu People of Nicaragua: The Social Construction of Ethnic Identity (Philadelphia: Coronet Books, 1996); and Jonathan Hill, ed., History, Power, and Identity. Ethnogenesis in the Americas, 1492–1992 (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1996). 12. Miguel Ángel Bartolomé, “As Etnogêneses: Velhos Atores et Novos Papeis no Cenário Cultural e Político,” Mana 12, no. 1 (2006): 39–68; João Pacheco de Oliveira, ed., A Viagem da Volta: Etnicidade, Política e Reelaboração Cultural no Nordeste Indígena, 2nd ed. (Rio de Janeiro: Contra Capa Livraria, LACED, 2004). 13. Stuart Schwartz and Frank Salomon, “New Peoples and New Kinds of People: Adaptation, Readjustment, and Ethnogenesis in South American Indigenous Areas (Colonial Era),” in The Cambridge History of Native Peoples of The Americas, South America, ed. Stuart Schwartz and Frank Salomon (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 443–501; Guillaume Boccara, “Mundos nuevos en las fronteras del nuevo mundo,” Nuevo Mundo Mundos Nuevos (2001), accessed May 31, 2016, http://nuevomundo.revues.org/426. See also Hill, History, Power and Identity. 14. See Hal Langfur, The Forbidden Lands: Colonial Identity, Frontier Violence, and the Persistence of Brazil’s Eastern Indians, 1750–1830 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006), and “Native Informants.” 15. For a comparable perspective for the conquest of New Mexico, see Levin Rojo, Return to Aztlan, 39, 197–198. 16. Serge Gruzinski, La pensée métisse (Paris: Fayard, 1999); François Laplantine, and Alexis Nouss, Le métissage (Paris: Flammarion, 1998); Jacques Poloni-Simard, La Mosaïque Indienne. Mobilité, stratification sociale et métissage dans le corregimiento de Cuenca (Équateur) du XVIe au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: EHESS, 2000). 17. This of course does not take anything away from its heuristic contributions. 18. On two occasions: 1543 for the first expedition under the command of Diego de Rojas, and 1549 for the official foundation by Juan Nuñez de Prado. 19. Viceroy Francisco de Toledo himself warned the new governor Hernando de Lerma that the “said province is full of delinquents and outlaws.” “Instrucciones dadas por el virrey don Fco de Toledo al gob. Lic. Hdo de Lerma, 21-11-1579,” in Roberto Levillier, Nueva crónica de la conquista del Tucumán, III (Varsovia and Buenos Aires: Colección de Publicaciones Históricas de la Biblioteca del Congreso Argentino, 1930), 262.

336   Borderlands of the Iberian World 2 0. He was nephew of Luis de Velasco the elder and cousin of Luis de Velasco the second. 21. “Carta del gobernador Juan Ramírez de Velasco al rey, 10-12-1586,” in El Tucumán colonial, ed. Ricardo Jaimes Freyre (Buenos Aires: Coni Hermanos, 1915), 102–123; Indian servants, the equivalent of the naborías in New Spain. 22. Tucumán, Salta, Jujuy, Catamarca, La Rioja, Santiago del Estero, and Córdoba. 23. See below the case of Hernando Mexía Miraval. 24. “Ordenanzas de descubrimiento, nueva población y pacificación de las Indias,” in Teoría y leyes de la conquista, ed. Francisco Morales Padrón (Madrid: Ediciones Cultura Hispánica del Centro Iberoamericano de Cooperación, 1979), 489–518. 25. Title 58 even provided for three lifetimes for new settlements. 26. “Carta del gobernador Juan Ramírez de Velasco al rey, 10-12-1586,” in Freyre, El Tucumán colonial, 119. 27. Carta del gobernador Barraza y Cárdenas, 29-05-1605. Biblioteca Nacional, Buenos Aires (henceforth BNBA), Fondo García Viñas, 186: 3920. 28. On the indigenous languages of Tucumán and the Río de la Plata: “Carta del p. Alonso de Barzana (SJ), 20-12-1593,” in Monumenta Peruana, vol. 5 (Rome: IHSI, 1974), 383; “Pedro Sotelo Narváez, Para el licenciado Cepeda, presidente de la Audiencia de los Charcas 1582,” in Levillier, Nueva crónica, III, 324–332. 29. Córdoba de Calchaquí, Londres, Cañete, the first San Miguel de Tucumán, and Nieva, the first Jujuy. 30. In Tucumán “feudal neighbors” (vecino feudatario) were encomendero neighbors. 31. “Información hecha a pedido del capitán Hernán Mexia Miraval de los servicios hechos por él en el descubrimiento y población de las provincias del Tucumán desde su entrada con Juan Nuñez de Prado, por el año 1550” (Information granted upon the request of Captain Hernán . . . of the services rendered by him in the discovery and settlement of the provinces of Tucumán from his arrival with Juan Nuñez de Prado, around 1550), declaration by Pedro Nuñez Roldán, in Roberto Levillier, Probanzas de méritos y servicios de los conquistadores, II (Madrid: Sucesores de Rivadeneyra, 1919–1920), 92; Pedro Lozano, Historia de la conquista de las provincias del Paraguay, Río de la Plata y Tucumán, IV (Buenos Aires: ANH, 2010), 906–908. 32. For this concept, taken from the British historian Edward E. Thompson, see Didier Fassin, “Les économies morales revisitées,” Annales Histoire, Sciences Sociales 6 (2009): 1237–1266. 33. For details of the siege and the destruction of Córdoba de Calchaquí, see Christophe Giudicelli, “La prise de Córdoba de Calchaquí,” in La bataille, du fait d’armes au combat idéologique, XIe–XIXe s., ed. Ariane Boltanski, Yann Lagadec, and Franck Mercier (Rennes: PUR, 2015), 93–108. 34. Also called Chuquisaca. Now Sucre, Bolivia. 35. “Carta de Hernando de Retamoso a S.M., 25-01-1582,” in Levillier, Nueva crónica, III, 293–298. 36. Ramírez de Velasco himself reports that this city only had 16 men and was on the brink of depopulation due to attacks from indigenous groups at the end of 1585. “Información hecha a petición de don Juan Ramírez de Velasco, 23-09-1594,” in Levillier, Probanzas, II, 443. 37. “Carta a SM del licenciado Matienzo, 02-01-1566,” in Freyre, El Tucumán colonial, 53–71. 38. Estela Noli, “La declinación de la población indígena de la jurisdicción de San Miguel de Tucumán (1600–1680),” in América bajo los Austria: economía, cultura y sociedad, coord. Héctor Omar Noejovich (Lima: PUCP, 2001), 165–192; Roberto Pucci, “El tamaño de la población aborigen del Tucumán en la época de la conquista: Balance de un problema y propuesta de nueva estimación,” Población y sociedad 5 (1998): 239–270.

Indigenous autonomy in the Calchaquí Valley   337 39. Christophe Giudicelli, “La raya de los pulares. Pouvoir colonial et quadrillage de l’espace social dans le Valle de Calchaquí,” in Les indiens des frontières coloniales. Amérique australe, XVIe au XXe siècle, ed. Luc Capdevila et al. (Rennes: PUR, 2011): 27–58. 40. A linear Spanish league was approximately four kilometers. In colonial times, however, measurements for the league varied from place to place. See Freyre, El Tucumán colonial, 64 (note 1). 41. Merced de encomienda del pueblo de Amimaná a Juan de Abreu, Amimaná, 30-07-1592, and Posesión de los indios encomienda del pueblo de Amimaná a Juan de Abreu, 09-14-1596. Archivo General de la Nación, Buenos Aires, Escribanías Antiguas. 42. Carta al rey del gob. del Tucumán, don Alonso de Rivera, 26-02-1611. BNBA, Fondo García Viñas, n° 4131. 43. Carta del gobernador Barraza y Cárdenas, 29-05-1604. BNBA, Fondo García Viñas, 186: 3920. 44. Carta del gobernador Barraza y Cárdenas. BNBA, 29-05-1604. 45. Anua de 1609. Achivum Romanum Societatis Iesu, Rome, Paraquaria, 8, 30–32. 46. “Carta al rey del gob. del Tucumán, don Alonso de Rivera, 19-03-1611,” in Freyre, El Tucumán colonial, 131–137. 47. Carta al rey del gob. del Tucumán, don Alonso de Rivera, 10-03-1610. BNBA, Fondo García Viñas, n° 4134. 48. “Carta al rey del cabildo de San Miguel del Tucumán, postreros de noviembre 1613,” in Papeles eclesiásticos del Tucumán, vol.1, ed. Roberto Levillier (Madrid: ed. De Juan Pueyo, 1926), 100–103. 49. Carta del gob. Don Luis de Quiñones Osorio sobre las medidas de gobierno que comenzó a practicar desde que llegó a ejercer su cargo, 22-02-1612. BNBA, Fondo García Viñas, 196: 4152. 50. Córdoba de Calchaquí in 1562, San Clemente de la Nueva Sevilla twice in 1577. 51. Carta al rey del gob. del Tucumán, don Alonso de Rivera, 11-04-1610. BNBA, Fondo García Viñas, n° 4083. 52. Carta del gobernador Barraza y Cárdenas, 29-05-1604. BNBA, Fondo García Viñas, 186: 3920. 53. Carta del gob. Felipe de Albornoz, 16-04-1630. Archivo General de Indias, Seville (henceforth AGI), Charcas 26, R. 10, N.88, f 57; Antonio Larrouy, Documentos del Archivo de Indias para la historia del Tucumán, vol.1: Santuario de Señora del Valle (Buenos Aires: n/p, 1923), 56–59; Renuncias a indios de encomiendas en la corona. Archivo Histórico de Tucumán (henceforth AHT), Protocolos. Vol. 2, Fs 281–291. According to his opponents, the measure had a different objective: the governor could thereby satisfy the thirst for social advancement of those who aspired to be encomenderos, which often turned out to be his own relatives and debtors. Carta del licenciado Andrés Guzmán al rey, 15-11-1629, AGI, Charcas 55–2. 54. The encomendero Juan Ortiz de Urbina, his brother-in-law, their respective wives, his son, a miller, and various “service Indians” were executed. The assailants took his four daughters as captives. “Carta del gob. Felipe de Albornoz al rey, 29-04-1631,” in Levillier, Nueva crónica, III, 411–417. 55. Roxana Boixados, “Rebeldes, soldados y cautivos. Etnografía de un episodio en la frontera de guerra del valle Calchaquí (1634),” in Resistencias, conflictos y negociaciones. El valle Calchaquí desde el período prehispánico hasta la actualidad, ed. Lorena Rodríguez (Rosario: Prohistoria, 2011), 93–122. 56. The most detailed study is still Aníbal Montes, “El gran alzamiento diaguita,” Revista del Instituto de Antropología 1 (1961): 81–159.

338   Borderlands of the Iberian World 57. It was relocated five times. The minutes of its re-foundation (1648) in the Valley of Pomán can be found in Larrouy, Documentos, 125–131. 58. Ana María Lorandi and Sara Sosa Miatello, “El precio de la libertad. Desnaturalización y traslado de indios rebeldes en el siglo XVII,” Memoria Americana 1 (1991): 7–28; Constanza González Navarro, “La incorporación de los indios desnaturalizados del valle Calchaquí y de la región del Chaco a la jurisdicción de Córdoba del Tucumán. Una mirada desde la visita del oidor Antonio Martines Luxan de Vargas, 1692–1693,” Jahrbuch für Lateinamerikas 46 (2009): 231–259; Christophe Giudicelli, “De la déportation à l’invisibilisation: la “dénaturalisation” des Indiens Calchaquís (Nord-ouest argentin), XVIIe–XXIe siècle,” Recherches amérindiennes au Québec XLI, 2–3 (2011 [2013]): 61–82. 59. Giudicelli, “Raya de los pulares.” 60. “Carta del obispo de Tucumán, Alonso de Maldonado a S.M., 13-09-1658,” in Larrouy, Documentos, 202. Regarding the circumstances of this understanding, see Boixados, “Rebeldes,” and Lorandi and Sosa, “El precio de la libertad.” 61. In 1634 a prisoner describes to his Spanish-Creole captors the arrival of a rebel cacique, literally disguised, to a military junta in the town of Anguigasta: “said cacique Utimpa came on a race horse in a Spanish outfit with many Indians on horseback and among them ten with jacket and jerkins and arquebuses and some in Spanish costumes.” Boixados, “Rebeldes, soldados y cautivos,” 106–107. 62. In Tucumán, as in every war zone in colonial America, the peacekeeping troops “cut down their crops”; Laura Quiroga, “En sus huaycos y quebradas: formas materiales de la resistencia en las tierras de Malfín,” Memoria Americana 18, no. 2 (2010): 185–209. 63. Ana E. Schaposhnik, “Aliados y parientes. Los diaguitas rebeldes de Catamarca durante el gran alzamiento,” in El Tucumán colonial y Charcas, vol. 1, comp. Ana María Lorandi (Buenos Aires: UBA, FdFyL, 1997), 309–340; Giudicelli, “Raya de los pulares”; Many groups came and went from the war zone. Rodolfo Cruz, “La “construcción” de identidades étnicas en el Tucumán colonial: los amaichas y los tafies en el debate sobre su “verdadera” estructura étnica,” in El Tucumán colonial y Charcas, vol. 1, ed. Ana María Lorandi (Buenos Aires: UBA, FdFyL, 1997), 253–282. According to Governor Albornoz, the ruin of the city of Londres and the siege of La Rioja were due to “an agreement between the rebel Indians with the domestic and service Indians.” “Carta a S.M.  del gob. Francisco de Albornoz, 1° de marzo de 1633,” in Larrouy, Documentos, 88–89. 64. Judith Farberman, and Raquel Gil Montero, comp. Los pueblos de indios del Tucumán colonial: pervivencia y desestructuración (Quilmes: UNQ, 2002); Gastón Doucet, “La encomienda de servicio personal en el Tucumán bajo régimen legal: comentarios a las ordenanzas de Gonzalo de Abreu,” in El aborigen y el derecho en el pasado y el presente, ed. Abelardo Levaggi (Buenos Aires: UMSA 1990), 141–244; Roxana Boixado and Carlos Zanolli, ed. La visita de Luján de Vargas a las encomienda de la Rioja y Jujuy (1693–1694) (Quilmes: UNQ, 2003); Laura Quiroga, “Las granjerías de la tierra: actores y escenarios del conflicto colonial en el valle de Londres (gobernación del Tucumán, 1607–1611),” Surandino Monográfico, segunda sección del Prohal Monográfico II (2012): 1–37; Isabel Castro Olañeta, “La numeración de los indios del partido del Río Salado. Santiago del Estero, 1607. Encomiendas y servicio personal,” Corpus 3, 2 (2013), accessed June 21, 2016, https://corpusarchivos.revues.org/535. 65. This form of alliance, typical of the region, occurred during the whole period. In the 1580s “certain Indians offered peace and obedience and as a symbol of this gave arrows of a particular kind as a gift to his Lordship,” “Testimonio de la paz que ha dado Calchaqui, 19-04-1588,” in Roberto Levillier, Papeles de los gobernadores en el siglo XVI, vol. I (Madrid:

Indigenous autonomy in the Calchaquí Valley   339 Juan Pueyo, 1920), 243–246. For the “Great Uprising” of 1630–1640 see Montes, El gran alzamiento; for the preparation of the offensive of 1658–1659 see Hernando de Torreblanca, Relación histórica de Calchaquí (Buenos Aires: AGNA, 1999), 45. 66. Giudicelli, “Encasillar la frontera. Clasificaciones coloniales y disciplinamiento del espacio en el área diaguito-calchaquí (S. XVI–XVII),” Anuario IEHS 22, (2007): 161–201. For comparable examples from the Caribbean continental coast, see Alejandra Boza and Juan Carlos Solórzano, “Indigenous Trade in Caribbean Central America, 1700s–1800s,” in The Oxford Handbook of Borderlands of the Iberian World, ed. Danna A. Levin Rojo and Cynthia Radding (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019). 67. Miguel Angel Palermo and Roxana Boixados, “Transformaciones en una comunidad desnaturalizada; los quilmes, del Valle Calchaqui a Buenos Aires,” Anuario del IEHS VI (1991): 13–42; Giudicelli, “De la déportation à l’invisibilisation;” Lorena Rodríguez, Después de las desnaturalizaciones (Buenos Aires: Antropofagia, 2008). 68. Ana María Lorandi, Spanish King of the Incas: The Epic Life of Pedro Bohorques (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005). For a novelized reconstruction of his actions in Tucumán, Teresa Piossek Prebisch, Pedro Bohórquez. El Inca del Tucumán. 1656–1659 (Tucumán: Juárez editor, 1976). 69. Both cases are studied in detail in Giudicelli, “El conquistador y su sombra. Silencios en la conquista del Tucumán,” In La Indianización, ed. Giudicelli, et al., 137–160. 70. “Carta de la Audiencia de los Charcas al Rey, 30-10-1564,” in Freyre, El Tucumán colonial, 46. 7 1. According to some yanaconas who escaped, “they brought as servants the Castilian women barefoot and dressed as Indian women, and subjecting them to most injurious insults and affronts.” “Carta de la Audiencia de los Charcas al Rey, 30-10-1564,” in Freyre, El Tucumán colonial, 46. 72. Gilles Havard, Empire et métissages. Indiens et Français dans le Pays d’en Haut 1660–1715 (Paris: PUPS, 2003), 145–166. 73. No doubt blinded by his enthusiasm, Ramírez de Velasco attributed ten years more captivity to the poor fellow: twenty-two and not thirty-two years lapsed between the fall of Córdoba and his capture-liberation. “Información hecha a petición de don Juan Ramírez de Velasco 23-09-1594,” in Levillier, Probanzas, II, 446; “Declaración de Félix López” and “declaración del lic. Juan Hermoso Granero,” in Levillier, Probanzas, II, 481 and 493 respectively; and “Declaración del lic. Juan Hermoso Granero,” in Levillier, Probanzas, II, 493. 74. “Información hecha a petición de don Juan Ramírez de Velasco 23-09-1594,” in Levillier, Probanzas, II, 445–446: “I brought the principal cacique of said Valley with me to the city of Santiago del Estero where I spent more than five hundred in dressing him with silk and cloth.” 75. Reginaldo de Lizárraga, Descripción breve de toda la tierra del Perú, Río de la Plata y Chile (Buenos Aires: Librería La Facultad, 1916 [1605]), Libro II, cap. LXIII, 232. 76. For another example, see Pedro Lozano, Historia, 1009. 77. To consider only Tucumán and the neighboring regions, one can take the well-known cases of the founder of Corrientes, Alonso de Vera y Aragón, nicknamed “the Tupi,” and the author of La Argentina, Ruy Díaz de Guzmán, grandson of Domingo Martínez de Irala and one of his Guaraní wives. Both participated very actively in the “Spanish” expansion in the region. Like Vera y Aragón, Díaz de Guzmán participated in the founding of Salta (“Testimonio y reseña de la jornada de Salta, 20-01-1582,” in Levillier, Papeles de los gobernadores, vol. 1, 111), and was for a time a resident of San Miguel and then of Santiago del Estero (“Carta a S.M. de Rui Díaz de Guzmán, contador de la ciudad de Santiago del

340   Borderlands of the Iberian World Estero, dando cuenta de las encomiendas de indios de aquellas provincias, y otros asuntos de Real Hacienda, 12-05-1607,” BNBA, Fondo García Viñas, n° 3541). No one would have officially disputed his status as a Spaniard on the basis of his indigenous ancestry. 78. For details on his insertion into high Tucumán society, see Giudicelli, “El conquistador y sus sombra.” 79. “Carta del gobernador Juan Ramírez de Velasco al rey 10-12-1586,” in Freyre, El Tucumán colonial, 121–122; “Comisión dada por el gobernador D. Juan Ramírez de Velasco al capitán Hernán Mexia Miraval para que fuese a prender a Juan Bautista Muñoz,” in Levillier, Probanzas, II, 602; “Información de servicios del governador don Juan Ramírez de Velasco, 23-09-1594” and “Testimonio de Hernán Mexía Miraval,” in Levillier, Probanzas, II, 443 and 424, respectively. 80. “Comisión dada por el gobernador D. Juan Ramírez de Velasco al capitán Hernán Mexia Miraval para que fuese a prender a Juan Bautista Muñoz,” in Levillier, Probanzas, II, 602. 81. “Carta del gobernador Juan Ramírez de Velasco al rey, 10-12-1586,” in Freyre, El Tucumán colonial, 122. 82. This interpretation generally fits with the hypothesis Stuart Schwartz and Frank Salomon formulated for this case: “In kin-structured societies marriage to daughters of leaders often signifies a political bond, where the wife taker becomes an indebted subordinate— in the case of the European, one obliged to reciprocate by procuring European technology. Success in this role might lead to power that no mere soldier could attain among Spaniards, and this seems to have been an appealing option. Juan Bautista Bernio in Tucumán won such power.” Schwartz and Salomon, “New peoples,” 473. These authors here are confused though, taking the father for the son: the Juan Bautista they refer to is Muñoz, and not his father, Bernio. 83. “Power has no essence, is operative. It is not an attribute, but rather a relationship: the relationship of power is the set of power relationships, which doesn’t occur less for the dominated forces than for the dominating forces.” Gilles Deleuze, Foucault (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 2004 [1986]), 35. 84. A more prosaic reading is possible: the young Muñoz felt better with his three or four indigenous lovers than with his Spanish wife. However, sexual appetite alone is not enough to explain his choice. 85. Had he refused to return, the leader of the operation had instructions to “fight him and engage with him and destroy him and kill him and bring his fried head” before the Governor. “Comisión dada por el gobernador D.  Juan Ramírez de Velasco al capitán Hernán Mexia Miraval para que fuese a prender a Juan Bautista Muñoz,” in Levillier, Probanzas, vol. II, 602. 86. His own father held the post of bailiff (alguacil) of the Holy Office of the Inquisition, and was among the most generous patrons of the Society of Jesus: “Don Juan Bautista Bernio bailiff of the Holy Office of the Inquisition, makes a donation to the Society of Jesus of a piece of land which falls beside the city’s river.” San Miguel de Tucumán, 12-9-1588, AHT, protocolos, vol 1, FS 1–2v. His wife later donated another piece of land: AHT, protocolos, vol 1, Fs 3–4v. 87. “Testamento de Catalina de Morales,” in Margarita Gentile Lafaille, Testamentos de indios, Tucumán (Buenos Aires: IUNA, 2008), 197. 88. His father became the Governor’s Lieutenant in 1592: they had lost none of their influence. 89. Ana de Córdoba, sister-in-law of Juan Pérez Moreno, another influential conquistador in Tucumán at that time; “Testimonio de María Mexía,” in Gentile Lafaille, Testamentos, 92–98 and 186–190.

Indigenous autonomy in the Calchaquí Valley   341 90. Regarding this proximity, see for San Miguel de Tucumán Estela Noli, Indios ladinos, criollos aindiados (Rosario: Prohistoria, 2012). 91. The highest hill that dominates the Tafi Valley is still called Muñoz Hill, and a local tradition establishes a direct link—though difficult to prove—between this toponym and the story of Juan Bautista Muñoz. Pedro León Cornet, “El cerro Muñoz: una curiosidad toponímica,” El viejo Tucumán en la memoria X (2003): 29–36. 92. Documents relating to his process are kept in various files of the Archivo General de Indias (Seville). In particular AGI, Charcas 58, 121 y 122; see also Hernando de Torreblanca, Relación histórica, 83. 93. Fourteen, according to Father Lozano, without counting the daughter of Luís Henríquez Historia, 1094 and 1097. 94. Torreblanca, Relación, 45. 95. Torreblanca, Relación, 44. 96. Luís Henríquez, as a good “Spanish” leader, had arquebuses and knew perfectly well the tactics of the opposing side.

Bibliography Boixados, Roxana. “Rebeldes, soldados y cautivos. Etnografía de un episodio en la frontera de guerra del valle Calchaquí (1634).” In Resistencias, conflictos y negociaciones. El valle Calchaquí desde el período prehispánico hasta la actualidad, edited by Lorena Rodríguez, 93–122. Rosario: Prohistoria, 2011. Gentile Lafaille, Margarita. Testamentos de indios, Tucumán. Buenos Aires: IUNA, 2008. Giudicelli, Christophe. “De la déportation à l’invisibilisation: la “dénaturalisation” des Indiens Calchaquís (Nord-ouest argentin), XVIIe–XXIe siècle.” Recherches amérindiennes au Québec XLI, 2–3 (2011 [2013]): 61–82. Giudicelli, Christophe. “El conquistador y su sombra. Silencios en la conquista del Tucumán.” In La Indianización. Cautivos, renegados, “hommes libres” y misioneros en los confines americanos, edited by Christophe Giudicelli, Gilles Havard, and Salvador Bernabéu Albert, 137–160. Madrid: Doce Calles, 2013. Giudicelli, Christophe. “La raya de los pulares. Pouvoir colonial et quadrillage de l’espace social dans le Valle de Calchaquí.” In Les indiens des frontières coloniales. Amérique australe, XVIe au XXe siècle, edited by Luc Capdevila, Jimena Paz Obregón Iturra, and Nicolas Richard, 27–58. Rennes: PUR, 2011. Hill, Jonathan, ed. History, Power, and Identity. Ethnogenesis in the Americas, 1492–1992. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1996. Jaimes Freyre, Ricardo, ed. El Tucumán colonial. Buenos Aires: Coni Hermanos, 1915. Langfur, Hal. “Native Informants and the Limits of Portuguese Dominion in Late-Colonial Brazil.” In The Oxford Handbook of Borderlands of the Iberian World, edited by Danna A. Levin Rojo and Cynthia Radding. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019. Larrouy, Antonio. Documentos del Archivo de Indias para la historia del Tucumán, vol.1: Santuario de Señora del Valle. Buenos Aires: L. J. Rosso y Cía., Impresores, 1923. León Cornet, Pedro. “El cerro Muñoz: Una curiosidad toponímica.” El viejo Tucumán en la memoria X (2003): 29–36. Levillier, Roberto. Probanzas de méritos y servicios de los conquistadores, vol. II. Madrid: Sucesores de Rivadeneyra, 1919–1920.

342   Borderlands of the Iberian World Levillier, Roberto. Nueva crónica de la conquista del Tucumán, III. 3 vols. Varsovia and Buenos Aires: Colección de Publicaciones Históricas de la Biblioteca del Congreso Argentino, 1926–1930. Levillier, Roberto. Papeles de los gobernadores en el siglo XVI, vol. 1. Madrid: Juan Pueyo, 1920. Levin Rojo, Danna A. Return to Aztlan: Indians, Spaniards, and the Invention of Nuevo México. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2014. Lorandi, Ana María, and Sara Sosa Miatello. “El precio de la libertad. Desnaturalización y traslado de indios rebeldes en el siglo XVII.” Memoria Americana 1 (1991): 7–28. Lozano, Pedro. Historia de la conquista de las provincias del Paraguay, Río de la Plata y Tucumán, IV. Buenos Aires: ANH, 2010. Montes, Aníbal. “El gran alzamiento diaguita.” Revista del Instituto de Antropología 1 (1961): 81–159. Schwartz, Stuart, and Frank Salomon. “New Peoples and New Kinds of People: Adaptation, Readjustment, and Ethnogenesis in South American Indigenous Areas (Colonial Era).” In The Cambridge History of Native Peoples of The Americas, South America, edited by Stuart Schwartz and Frank Salomon, 443–501. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Torreblanca, Hernando de. Relación histórica de Calchaquí. Buenos Aires: AGNA, 1999.

chapter 13

L a by r i n ths of M estiz aje Understanding Cultural Persistence and Transformation in Nueva Vizcaya Susan M. Deeds

The inhabitants of Santiago Papasquiaro are gradually turning into vecinos, something I would encourage as the only way to stop the machinations of such a small group to keep gente de razón out of the village. Such poor workers, they retard the cultivation of exceptionally fertile lands that can only be dreamed of in most parts of the bishopric. It would be very beneficial if the few Indians who remain in Papasquiaro would disappear so that it could become a fine Spanish village.1

This startling appraisal of a former Jesuit mission, recently secularized, was penned in 1765 by the bishop of Nueva Vizcaya, Pedro Tamarón y Romeral. It recognized a process that had been occurring for over a century and a half, one that gradually “whitened” the village through contact with non-Indians despite the derogatory remarks by priests and officials about the pernicious influence of outsiders in the missions and attempts to curb it.2 Interethnic contact among indigenous peoples, blacks, mulattoes, lobos, coyotes, mestizos and Spaniards dated from the earliest silver discoveries in the region. An early seventeenth-century Jesuit missionary in Nueva Vizcaya was not so benign in his opinion, attributing such mixing to the creation of a “cesspool” of vice and corruption.3 Outsiders attempted through various means to incorporate native peoples into the colonial society of the region. This process has been studied through different approaches and methodologies that draw on theories about culture, ecology, epidemiology, ethnogenesis, gender, and resistance. Two key themes emerge: (1) the varied indigenous responses to colonialism and (2) the evolution of a multiracial society. Recent research has removed the institution of the mission from center stage as the primary agent of change on this frontier, locating it in a larger dynamic of cultural and biological mixing that took place in missions, Spanish towns, presidios, and haciendas.4 All these spaces

344   Borderlands of the Iberian World served as transactional, sometimes transitory, crossroads in a region where ethnic identities, subsistence patterns, cultural beliefs, and gender relations evolved and changed over time. Social and spatial mingling across ethnic groups, in which violence and migration played key roles, was rife with possibilities for subverting the social separation and subjugation that rulers tried to impose, and frequently did in harsh circumstances.5 In New Spain’s constellation of far northern frontiers, Nueva Vizcaya served as the heart whose arteries pumped the precious silver exploited by conquering Spaniards from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries. In order to maintain this productive enterprise in unstable conditions, Europeans undertook to harness the labor of the relatively sparse native populations living in this vast, semi-arid area for mining and agriculture. They also imported workers, indigenous and non-native from other areas, creating a labyrinth of mestizaje where women and men—Indians, Europeans, Africans, and their progeny—argued, battled, had sex, cast spells, and interacted in work, trade, leisure, sickness, and spiritual activity. Labyrinth, as it is used here, describes a complicated network of passages. Neither a puzzle to be solved, nor a maze where people are lost, a labyrinth is a path to be experienced, an intricate process that takes twists and turns, branching off in different directions and combinations. Mestizaje also signifies movement: a complex process that unfolded at various paces, in labyrinths of relationships, never unilinear or primarily biological. Encounters between culturally different peoples bring wars, exploitations, linguistic and demographic collapses and obliterations but also beneficial mutual exchanges of technologies, crops, practices, and cultural traits. Such exchanges can lead to the creation of new complex cultures. What our use of the word “mestizaje” perhaps simplifies, or even obscures, are the immense variety and number of variables that help to define the regional and temporal nature of these new cultural creations and identities.6

Cultural Confrontations in Nueva Vizcaya: Historiography and Methodology After Herbert Eugene Bolton, in the early twentieth century, opened vistas to the Spanish presence in areas that would become part of the United States, the history of Spanish entradas into areas directly north of Zacatecas in the sixteenth century began to be charted.7 Inspired by Bolton’s essay, “The Mission as a Frontier Institution,” others took up the history of the Jesuit missionary endeavor in northwest Mexico.8 Early works set the tone for the “triumphal” imprint that for the next half century emphasized the exploits of Spanish conquerors and missionaries in confronting natives and founding towns, presidios, and missions.9 François Chevalier’s pioneering work argued that New Spain’s vast northern expanses especially favored the development of the seigniorial hacienda.10

Labyrinths of Mestizaje in Nueva Vizcaya   345 As Latin Americanists turned their attention to socioeconomic history in the 1960s, emphasizing the study of land tenure and labor, some Mexicanists, notably Miguel León Portilla, Charles Gibson, and Nancy Farriss, examined the persistence of Mesoamerican peoples under colonial rule, while primarily geographers and anthropologists focused on northwest Mexico.11 Encouraged by the run-up to the 1992 Columbian quincentennial, historians began to explore how native populations responded to Spanish movement into Nueva Vizcaya. Some of this generation turned first to the records on Jesuit and Franciscan missions with an eye to resistance, cultural persistence, and ethnic identity, while others examined settler societies through administrative, notarial, and parish documents.12 Virtually all moved away from an exclusive focus on institutional history; even those who drew heavily on mission documentation endeavored to contextualize their findings in the larger context of social relations and economic development in the north. They studied multiple variables to understand the dynamics involved when people from diverse cultural backgrounds came into continuous contact with one another in Nueva Vizcaya.13 Looking closely at these studies calls for an explanation of how the terms frontier and borderland are used: Frontier is defined as a geographical area that has not been fully incorporated into a state polity, while borderland signifies a liminal space and a transformative process, not fully one thing or another, where control is contested between social groups. Both are fluid concepts that consider changes over time. In geographical terms, Nueva Vizcaya, founded by Francisco de Ibarra in the 1560s, came to include the present-day states of Durango and Chihuahua as well as Sinaloa and Sonora until 1733, when the latter two became a separate jurisdiction. At different stages, parts of Coahuila were also subject administratively to Nueva Vizcaya.14 As time went on, areas of Nueva Vizcaya became less volatile as Spanish laws and customs were implemented, but throughout the colonial period Spaniards saw themselves as engaged in a battle between the forces of “civilization” and “barbarity.”15 This struggle inscribed northern Nueva Vizcaya as a frontier and a borderland even after Spanish rule ended and the Mexican nation-state began to assert itself, if haltingly, over the northern provinces.

The Nueva Vizcayan Frontier: Spanish Invasions and Native Responses When Spaniards arrived in the north/northwest, they found largely semi-sedentary native groups.16 Most practiced some agriculture along with hunting and gathering, in a semi-arid environment. Some, like coastal and mountain Sinaloan groups, exhibited Mesoamerican cultural traits, and others, like Conchos, Tobosos, or Seris were more nomadic. Before Nueva Vizcaya was created, natives had already felt the Spanish presence in the form of slaving expeditions and the spread of disease. Nuño de Guzmán and others led slave raids into Sinaloa (Culiacán and Chiametla) beginning in the 1530s,

346   Borderlands of the Iberian World compelling Indians to work for them in the coastal areas and up the western escarpment of the Sierra Madre Occidental. Forced labor along with epidemics resulted in precipitous Indian population decline.17 This lethal combination was reproduced as Spaniards pushed northward into the province of Santa Bárbara in the 1560s. The history of this region, which included the agricultural core in the Valle de San Bartolomé (1569) and the silver mines of Parral (1631), has been extensively documented.18 Franciscan friars arrived early to minister to the native groups in this area. In time, encouraged by early silver discoveries in northern Durango, prospective miners and agricultural colonists moved north into Chihuahua and northwest into Sonora, followed by Jesuit missionaries.19 Key studies of the region have produced variations on this history. Among the most prolific scholars of the region, Chantal Cramaussel and Salvador Álvarez have assembled a collage that accentuates the coercive, authoritarian, and class-stratified aspects of Nueva Vizcayan frontier processes. After early entradas of Spaniards into Culiacán and Chiametla (1520s–1600), brought warfare, disease, and enslavement, they moved north up the coast and east into areas of the Sierra Madre Occidental.20 Jesuits followed by establishing missions among mostly sedentary groups (e.g. Guasaves, Ocoronis, Mayos, Acaxees, and Xiximes) that practiced agriculture. They continued to produce corn and beans, adding livestock for mission consumption as well as for arriving Spanish colonists and soldiers. Gradually the missions in coastal riverine areas of Sinaloa as well as the canyons of the Sierra Madre that straddle Sinaloa and Durango became racially mixed. Meanwhile, Spaniards pushed north of Durango in the last half of the sixteenth century, attracted by the lure of silver. In some cases, agricultural colonization preceded intensive mining operations, but the key to both was control of labor by Spanish colonists. Early conquerors needed contingents of allies, soldiers, and servants to succeed. At first Indian labor was acquired through slave raiding. Many of these captives became known as naboríos; removed from their kin groups, they virtually belonged to their masters in perpetuity. To control unfettered access to scarce labor, local officials followed by allocating labor service through encomienda. Since most native peoples lived in rancherías or hamlets with dispersed dwellings of kin groups, rather than villages, an encomienda grant assigned natives of a ranchería to work for an encomendero who was obligated in turn to provide protection and religious instruction. Encomenderos needed military force to appropriate the labor assigned to them; native caciques frequently cooperated with them in return for gifts and privileges. In practice, encomienda Indians often became part of permanent labor forces in mines or haciendas although they could not legally be sold.21 When encomienda was abolished in the north in 1672, natives continued to be drafted by local and provincial officials to provide labor in repartimiento (system of forced rotational labor). In the first century of colonization, the three systems existed simultaneously in the scramble to recruit labor and, in Coahuila, natives were virtually enslaved through an institution called congrega.22 Both encomienda and repartimiento were legally limited in terms of duration of service and distances natives could travel, but

Labyrinths of Mestizaje in Nueva Vizcaya   347 these laws were abused or ignored for the most part. Indigenous men and women alike were drafted. The wealthiest colonists brought black slaves (in modest but as yet unknown numbers).23 Indians from central Mexico were recruited to help set up missions or establish colonies nearby. As mixing proceeded, mestizos and mulattoes became another source of labor. These processes have been well-documented for core areas of Nueva Vizcaya.24 Although repartimientos could be drawn from ranchería units, they came to be heavily based on drafts from mission pueblos established by Franciscans and Jesuits, supplying labor for charcoal making, mining, and agriculture. Mission Indians were also required to produce for their own subsistence and to supply Spanish settlements. Where repartimiento drafts exceeded legal limits, missions were depopulated of laborers during key periods of planting and harvest. These pressures as well as frequent droughts and ­periodic epidemics meant that mission populations were highly unstable. Natives migrated in and out, seeking protection and sustenance. Some continued to alternate hunting and gathering in rancherías with agriculture in missions. Others were drawn to work on haciendas by force or because hacendados could offer protection, food, clothing, and exemption from labor tribute. Debt peonage frequently ensued, either in the form of advancing credit to attract laborers or binding them to the hacienda as peons. This panorama is one in which coercion, violence, and disease led inexorably to death or a life of semi-servitude. Cramaussel also describes massive movements of repartimiento labor (consisting of whole families) from Sinaloa, Sonora, and New Mexico to mining reales throughout Nueva Vizcaya in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Using parish registers, she argues that a quarter of mining labor in Chihuahua came from outside the region.25 Evidence suggests that Yaquis who labored in Parral and Chihuahua mines sought this work of their own accord as part of their strategy to conserve forms of autonomy.26 To explain native responses to Spanish incursions and demands requires examining their natural setting, pre-conquest sociopolitical organization, subsistence patterns, and mobility. To date such analyses reveal local responses that were more complex and the outcome for ethnic persistence more heterogeneous than a panorama of unmitigated repression would suggest. Undoubtedly, Spaniards used all manner of force to gain access to Indian labor. Yet from the beginning of contact, natives responded aggressively through flight, raiding, and rebellion. Some groups became more mobile, adopting the horse to flee from slave hunters or to raid Spanish settlements for grain and livestock.27 Indians forced into missions staged revolts to eject the invaders. “First-generation” revolts took place among Acaxees, Xiximes, Tepehuanes, and Tarahumaras in the seventeenth century. These rebellions were early responses, often millenarian, to cataclysmic changes wrought by labor demands, disease, and threats to autochthonous cosmologies that assured balance with the universe.28 They differed from the uprisings of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that responded to changes in the status quo or “moral economy” which had evolved between Spaniards and Indians, notably the Yaqui and Pima rebellions of Sonora and the Pueblo revolt of 1680 in New Mexico that reverberated throughout northern Nueva Vizcaya.29

348   Borderlands of the Iberian World Flight and raiding were the most successful aggressive responses in resisting Spanish hegemony. Tepehuanes and Tarahumaras, who fled to remote canyons, and raiders including Apaches, preserved autonomy into the national period. After armed resistance failed, most groups tried to navigate colonial conditions and negotiate degrees of autonomy with mixed results. Indigenous population decline continued throughout the seventeenth century, with numbers beginning to rebound somewhat in the eighteenth.30 Long after the initial disease episodes, severe epidemics such as those of the 1690s (smallpox and measles) and the 1730s (matlazahuatl) continued to reduce mission populations. Demographic data are very uneven before the late eighteenth century; however, missionary and military reports provide a basis for estimating the effects of disease and subsistence crises on population movements.31 The region saw population drops of between 75 and 90 percent in the first hundred years of contact.32

Windows onto a Multiethnic Frontier: Spaces of Economic and Social Interaction The most fully documented studies of native responses are those classified as “new mission history,” based on the rich documentation that ecclesiastical and administrative sources provide.33 José Refugio de la Torre Curiel offers an astute overview of “the writing of mission history,” noting the shift from the view that missions were enclaves of Spanish dominion to an emphasis on process: “social change constructed, rejected, or suffered by the indigenous peoples in the context of colonial domination.”34 As he argues, however, there is no conceptual unity to these studies, or even agreement on the definition of mission. While attempting to reveal native perspectives, their goals vary widely, comprising attempts to understand missions as a form of settlement, places of religious indoctrination, centers of oppression and resistance, mediators or cultural brokers between natives and Spaniards, self-sufficient agricultural producers, suppliers of foodstuffs and labor to the non-Indian economy, places of gendered divisions of labor, sites of cultural changes and exchanges, laboratories for the construction of power relations, and contact zones of mutual interdependence. These themes emerge clearly in several studies that have taken a comparative tack. For the southern Nueva Vizcayan core areas, Susan M. Deeds has shown why some peoples persisted as distinct ethnic groups while others did not. Focusing on an area of missions that Jesuits voluntarily turned over to the diocese of Durango by the mideighteenth century, the study develops the history of Acaxees, Xiximes, Tepehuanes, Tarahumaras, and Conchos in missions through a conceptual construct that she called “mediated opportunism.” Accepting that ethnogenesis is the larger process through which ethnic cultures recreate themselves over time, this comparative study suggests how different groups selected material and cultural innovations in the face of barriers

Labyrinths of Mestizaje in Nueva Vizcaya   349 imposed not only by brute force and biological vulnerabilities but also by their own ­cosmologies for assuring life’s balance. The extent to which they could formulate mixed strategies and exercise choices in adapting to changing cultural and ecological circumstances was tempered by circumstances that varied across groups.35 The Acaxees and Xiximes who occupied the gorges and canyon bottoms of the Sierra Madre in today’s western Durango and eastern Sinaloa, were the first of the five groups to be invaded by Europeans, and they exhibited the most Mesoamerican cultural traits. But their more complex social organization and trading networks did not give them the advantage in dealing with Spanish slavers. Relatively concentrated population clusters made them targets for labor appropriation and vulnerable to the spread of epidemic diseases. High early mortality and continued exploitation prompted both groups to rebel in the first decade of the seventeenth century but not in concert. They allied with the conquerors against each other, as Spaniards easily recruited allies from groups hostile to them since pre-contact times. Forced to submit, continued disease cycles reduced their numbers to levels that deterred recuperation in the long run. When the native birth rate rose slightly in the mid-eighteenth century, interracial mixing was well underway. The daily lives of this mixed population differed little from those of their poor Spanish neighbors in a fragile ecosystem disrupted by mining, its decline, and subsequent grazing. In eastern Chihuahua the more dispersed, less sedentary Conchos were also contacted early, but the responses of their discrete groups or bands were mixed. Some fled north and east and others raided and pilfered Spanish livestock in southeastern Chihuahua. Yet as a result of slave-raiding expeditions from the early settlements around Santa Bárbara, many Concho bands joined the labor force in haciendas and mines, with local caciques often serving as labor brokers. Other Concho groups settled in missions and Spanish centers and furnished auxiliary troops to Spaniards, while many formed shifting relationships with eastern nomads to oppose Europeans, aided by their adoption of the horse. In the end, neither accommodation nor armed resistance (both lacking cohesion and coordination) proved effective against the slow but constant decimating force of Spanish institutions and military power. The frailty of communal bonds and links to broader networks allowed Spanish tactics of divide-and-rule to mediate against their inventive adaptations to colonial intrusion. Tepehuanes, between the previously mentioned groups on the continuum of population concentration, proved more effective in resisting early Spanish intrusion. Nevertheless, their serious rebellion of 1616 could not eject the invaders. This juncture was decisive for Tepehuan ethnicity, which persisted as Odame, largely through the peoples who removed themselves from the Spanish orbit by taking their livestock to remote locations of extreme marginality to Spanish interests in the Sierra Madre of southwest Chihuahua and northwest Durango. There Odames worked to rebuild their society by incorporating some elements of Spanish material and religious culture, at the same time evolving barriers to counter penetration by non-Indians. The few Tepehuanes who remained in missions after the rebellion continued to succumb to disease and other Spanish pressures over time. But they became adept at using evasive tactics and legal channels to resist encroachments on their land and labor, even

350   Borderlands of the Iberian World after their missions were secularized in the 1750s. Over time they integrated other ethnic groups, Xiximes and mixed-race partners, creating a corporate community that identified itself as Indian and Christian. This identity facilitated their ability to take advantage of laws to impede further intrusion from elite vecinos and growing numbers of marginal non-Indians. The early rebellions of the Tarahumaras also proved to be a watershed. Already migrating west and north before the arrival of the Spaniards, after their first-generation rebellions failed in the 1690s, many retreated into the Sierra Madre where they mixed with and incorporated Sonoran sierra groups. Later they participated in multi-ethnic bands that raided Spanish properties. Increasingly drawing moral boundaries between themselves and non-Indian outsiders, Rarámuris developed new patterns of transhumance, and the shared cultural memories that evolved in their greater isolation from Spanish society provided moral and social cohesion. Those Tarahumaras who stayed in missions close to Spanish settlements faced different options. Most were drawn or forced into the Spanish-driven economy, especially in areas nearest the Chihuahua mines. Not a few observers noted that Tarahumaras in the eastern localities were eager to barter their produce or service for Spanish trade goods, and they mixed with other ethnic groups. At least some gravitated voluntarily to Spanish haciendas, prompting Jesuit missionaries to offer them credit to stay in the missions. By the last half of the eighteenth century, the few thousand Acaxees, Xiximes, Conchos, Tepehuanes, and Tarahumaras living in missions were at different stages of material, cultural, and ethnic change. How they identified themselves varied considerably since the changing demographics of racial mixing produced biological difference but did not determine ethnic identification. Nonetheless, only a few of them maintained corporate bonds as indigenous communities. Studies of Sonoran mission areas disclose similarly complex patterns in native responses to Spanish penetration and offer the chance to compare the center-north and the northwest where mines were fewer and encomienda absent.36 In Wandering Peoples, Cynthia Radding examines the history of the Opata, Pima, and Eudeve peoples (serranos) of the Sonoran highlands, using the concept of social ecology (a changing complex of relations that developed among different groups and with the lands they inhabited). She traces these relationships to show how ethnic identities evolved in specific Jesuit missions at the same time that shifts in subsistence activities, land tenure patterns, crop production, and the expansion of commerce were instrumental to class formation and the creation of a rural peasantry. Mobility and migration were keys to the reproduction of families and reconstitution of communities, but coercion and repression played their parts in creating the new order that gradually shifted control of productive resources to private ownership. Radding’s environmental focus was groundbreaking in adding a crucial dimension to our understanding of native responses on this frontier. In a subsequent work, she compared this borderland with the Chiquitos region in Bolivia to further explain how natural worlds differentially shaped indigenous identities and adaptations to colonial regimes.37

Labyrinths of Mestizaje in Nueva Vizcaya   351 José Refugio de la Torre Curiel studied the late Sonoran frontier to understand how the consolidation of other forms of Spanish settlement modified mission dynamics.38 He compared two mission districts under different Franciscan groups in the late colonial/early national periods: the Pimería Baja/Opatería and the Pimería Alta. Even within the same order the Franciscans employed dissimilar management schemes, also different from Jesuit practice. With mission capacity to structure day-to-day activities diminishing over time, indigenous religious practice and material culture changed through selective integration of new elements. Sonoran merchants and hacendados ­created a “captive” commercial system (not a true market economy) that allowed them to defraud consumers and tie workers to estates. A horizontal pluriethnic mobility came to characterize the flow of diverse ethnic groups back and forth between missions, villages, towns, and countryside.39 In different contexts, Radding and de la Torre Curiel describe colonial pacts between Spaniards and Indians that provided security and reciprocal, but unequal, benefits, and they offer an explanation for why few indigenous groups outside of the Pimería Alta persisted ethnically into the modern period. Demographic rearrangements in Sonora were influenced by many factors, including inter-ethnic warfare, but de la Torre Curiel, like Sara Ortelli, downplays the overwhelming weight accorded by historians to the Apache threat.40 For southern Sonora, a similar aggregate story begins with the work of Edward H. Spicer, who examined Yaqui history as the story of an “enduring people.” He and Evelyn Hu-Dehart portrayed the Yaquis as partially successful in negotiating a colonial pact that facilitated their persistence as an ethnic group to this day.41 Their thesis has held up to scrutiny in subsequent works.42 Most recently, Raphael Folsom added a new wrinkle by arguing that even when divided among themselves, Yaquis succeeded in minimizing the impositions of empire by continuously alternating negotiation with intimidating tactics, a balancing act they dominated over time, sometimes using women as go-betweens.43 Native responses to Spanish impositions in Nueva Vizcaya are most easily studied through mission records; however, missions were not the only, or even the main, sites of Spanish-Indian exchanges. Presidios, mining centers, towns, haciendas and ranchos constituted major settings for these interactions and the molding of social hierarchies in the region. Studies of northern presidios reveal how Spanish soldiers not only waged war to the death with hostile indigenous groups, but also developed land around their forts with native labor.44 In the early stages, missions supplied foodstuffs to presidios, but in time presidial commanders and other officers accumulated sizeable landholdings, while soldiers, mostly poorer Spaniards or mestizos, received land grants in the form of small ranchos or town lots, and some presidios evolved to become towns, for example, Janos in Chihuahua and Monclova in Coahuila.45 Deeply enmeshed in regional commercial circuits, presidial commanders and provincial governors controlled the supply of provisions to the garrisons. Emblematic of the military character of frontiers, presidios were not the only units of force designed to deter hostile natives; instead multiethnic militias assembled by local elites performed the bulk of this task.

352   Borderlands of the Iberian World In her comprehensive study of the Santa Bárbara province, Cramaussel offered settler prosopographies to show how the ruling elite evolved, emphasizing that in the early years only those Spaniards with significant contingents of indigenous allies and servants rose to prominence. Control of Indian labor was the chief requisite for the accumulation of political and economic power.46 In the Parral area, an overlapping landowner/miner/ merchant oligarchy evolved from early criollo settlers (from Mexico City, Puebla, and Michoacán) and peninsular immigrants, primarily Andalucians and Portuguese. Later arriving Basques, some of whom accompanied newly appointed provincial governors, came to control much of the region’s commerce. New governors frequently clashed with local elites but, for the most part, stable government prevailed, owing to the need to control multiethnic laborers and population movements. Newcomers with titles or ties to officials frequently married daughters of the local elites, strengthening bonds among the economically and politically powerful. These were furthered by extra-kinship (compadrazgo) ties among hacendados, miners, and merchants.47 By mid-seventeenth century in the most heavily settled areas, the casta group— mestizos, mulattoes, and coyotes—was rapidly expanding, as the Indian population declined due to disease, poor diet, excessive work, and lack of sanitary conditions.48 Although the numbers of Spanish and criolla partners increased over time, Spanish men added to the mixed-race population by fathering illegitimate children. Thus, one might expect an increase of mestizos in population estimates; however, the majority of castas were classified as mulattoes and coyotes. One explanation holds that in the eighteenth century a large number of Indians self-identified or were designated by clergy as mixedrace in order to exempt them from tribute and/or labor obligations.49 Perhaps true in the later colonial period, it cannot account for the entire population of those classified as mulattoes since their biological presence in areas of the north, including mission communities, has been documented from the late sixteenth century on, a situation that missionaries decried.50 In addition, their sizeable presence in Saltillo, Parral, Chihuahua, and other cities has been demonstrated.51 Other factors are also ignored in this argument. By designating Indians as mulattoes, missionaries would have undermined their raison d’etre since the Spanish Crown paid stipends to missions for the sole purpose of Christianizing natives. Officials repeatedly issued edicts that forbade non-Indians from living in missions, indicating that the practice persisted.52 And the fertility rates for black slaves and mulattoes exceeded that of Indians. Another explanation for fewer numbers of mestizos than mulattoes relates to the sistema de castas. In this fluid classification scheme based on race and other factors, it was possible for lighter-skinned mestizos to ascend to the Spanish criollo rank. But officials were reluctant to ascribe Spanish or mestizo status to those with darker skin. Scholars should not dismiss the multiple observations found in reports, letters, judicial and other documents that attest to the interrelationships—including antagonisms and camaraderie—between indigenous peoples and mulattoes. At the bottom of the social scale, they existed as two separate (if racially constructed) groups. In eighteenth-century core areas of Nueva Vizcaya, landowners expanded their holdings and access to water. Below powerful Spaniards who monopolized labor and

Labyrinths of Mestizaje in Nueva Vizcaya   353 military force, some skilled workers occupied a middle position but the majority of the population, Indians and mixed-race laborers, lived in poor barrios of mining towns or predominantly on haciendas and attached rancherías. A similar development occurred further north in the mining areas of Santa Eulalia, San Francisco de Cuéllar, and San Felipe el Real de Chihuahua.53 Long before silver began to be exploited, its existence had been known, but hostile natives and intermittent warfare inhibited Spanish settlement. Only after Franciscan and Jesuit missions had been founded, and Spaniards had begun to establish estancias in central Chihuahua were there sufficient resources of grain, livestock, and labor to service silver mining. The Tarahumaras and Conchos who remained in missions, along with castas, constituted a workable labor pool.54 Mining operations began in Chihuahua during the first decade of eighteenth century, undertaken by powerful elites from the south and ranchers in adjacent areas, as well as some miners who had benefitted from a brief, but profitable silver boom in Cusihuiriachic to the west. Long-distance commercial networks expanded, controlled largely by Basques like Manuel San Juan de Santa Cruz, governor of Nueva Vizcaya from 1714 to 1720. Subsequently Chihuahua’s most powerful entrepreneur, his activities spanned the Pacific and the Atlantic.55 Cheryl Martin scrutinized power relationships on the Chihuahua mining frontier—labor relations, the ethos and rituals of elite control, the social negotiations that characterized class and ethnic relations among different Indian groups and castas, and the patriarchal order. Within the hierarchical society, dominated by a ruling class whose talents had shifted from the earlier stamp of military service to commercial acumen, the short supply of indigenous and casta laborers allowed workers flexibility to negotiate conditions.56 Saltillo, Parras, and Monclova at times fell under Nueva Vizcayan jurisdiction.57 There and in areas to the east, non-sedentary natives predominated, prompting the viceroy in the late sixteenth century to send Mesoamerican communities to establish colonies designed to pacify hostile northeastern Indians and acculturate them.58 Granted privileged status, Mesoamericans, especially Tlaxcalans, sometimes chose partners across ethnic lines.59 Early Spanish expeditions into the northeast met with serious native resistance. Saltillo was founded in 1577, with the first Tlaxcalan colony established there in 1591. In 1598, Tlaxcalans settled alongside the Jesuit mission at Parras among rapidly disappearing Lagunero Indians.60 This area was also the site of lands claimed by Francisco de Urdiñola, a former governor of Nueva Vizcaya. By forceful appropriations of labor and especially water, his descendants expanded his haciendas and wine-­ producing vineyards, eventually receiving the title of Marqués de Aguayo.61 The marquisate became the largest latifundia in New Spain, partially explaining why Chevalier attributed the formation of the seigniorial estates to the “ricos y poderosos” of the north, but this pattern was not the norm for Nueva Vizcaya until the late eighteenth century.62 Saltillo actually went through a period in which original single-owner agricultural estates were divided among multiple owners who shared water in turn (by time allotments). Eventually Saltillo became an important commercial center connecting central New Spain to Texas and Nuevo Santander. A late colonial portrait describes merchant elites, peninsular Spaniards and creoles, bound by ties of marriage and compadrazgo,

354   Borderlands of the Iberian World who increasingly invested in land.63 At Saltillo’s annual fair, goods from all over the region were traded for products from the south: for example, wool, deer skins, salt, and mules, for clothes, tanned hides, soap, saddles, and a variety of foodstuffs that came from Michoacán and Nueva Galicia, such as rice, sugar, and chickpeas.64 The fairs comprised fertile ground for ethnic mixing. Taken as a whole, these studies reveal that by the end of the colonial period, Nueva Vizcaya was a borderland in flux. Economic and political elites administered a classstratified society in which mixed-race peoples predominated numerically and it was difficult to find “biologically pure” Indians in multiethnic settlements. Few indigenous groups had persisted as discrete ethnic entities.

Gender and Ethnicity in the Labyrinths of Mestizaje It remains to consider how the history described above was experienced in human ­relationships. The examples offered here of the cultural and biological mixing that took place highlight the importance of gender and migration in understanding borderlands history. Missions, reales de minas, towns, presidios, haciendas, and ranchos provided multiple venues for the cultural, socioeconomic, ethnic, and gendered exchanges that evolved.65 Missions congregated previously scattered peoples and then dispersed them into exchanges with others, furnishing labor to haciendas and mines where whole families mixed with outsiders. Indians left missions to collect for their cofradías (confraternities dedicated to local saints and used to support community activities). Not a few migrated voluntarily to work and acquire material goods, marriage partners, or freedom from oppressive missionaries. The sizeable flight of Indians from the Sierra Madre to Nueva Vizcayan mines resulted in frequent sexual encounters across Indian and casta groups. Of Tarahumara men and women, the Jesuit Ignacio Javier de Estrada observed: “Pues ya se van blanqueando mucho . . . perdiendo su color natural.”66 Non-natives and other Indian groups entered missions to barter, to celebrate Catholic rituals, or to seek refuge from enemies. Missionaries not infrequently appointed mixed-race governors to do their bidding, and they recruited natives as ethnic soldiers. Multiethnic travelers and drifters along the camino real used missions as way-stations for lodging and respite, and in some cases for swindling the locals.67 Still other spaces furthered mestizaje. Indians tending livestock came into contact with mixed-race cowboys and herders on Spanish ranches, sometimes sharing camaraderie, food, and drink around the campfire. Occasional visits to rancherías exposed them not only to unconverted kin but also to renegade non-Indians fleeing Spanish justice. On haciendas, Indians mixed with others both socially (sometimes in relations of compadrazgo) and biologically; rape was not uncommon. In mining reales, mission Indians also mingled with other ethnicities, enjoying the pleasures of drinking,

Labyrinths of Mestizaje in Nueva Vizcaya   355 c­ ockfighting, gambling, and other pastimes. Folk practices of diverse racial groups ­commonly intersected in the areas of healing and love magic. Secularization of missions only stepped up the process of the fluid migrations between former missions, unacculturated settlements, and Spanish towns, and between regions. Indian communities increasingly rented out lands and eventually lost or forfeited their claims to them. Connections with outsiders brought growing social differentiation within Indian communities, including changes in status and wealth. At the same time, the gap between poor Spaniards, mixed races, and Indians on the one hand, and regional, predominantly Spanish, merchant-miner-landholder elites on the other, widened as the latter consolidated wealth and power and incorporated Indian lands in the later eighteenth century. The myriad interactions that created the labyrinth of mestizaje can only be understood by placing not only ethnicity, but also gender, at the center of analysis. Some scholars working on the north have begun to examine the history of women and gender, not only the efforts of church and state to impose patriarchal norms but also the roles of women in the formation and reproduction of families, in work, and in the creation and recreation of communities in the colonial period. Another thread weaving its way through the labyrinth illuminates how conditions of frontier violence fostered masculinity. The forced participation of women in captive exchanges and labor of course began before Europeans arrived but endured in different forms. James F. Brooks described a captive exchange economy for “greater New Mexico” that “knit diverse communities into vital, and violent, webs of interdependence.”68 Thousands of Indian and hundreds of Spanish women and children crossed cultures through this militarized socioeconomic system, often as ransomed captives. When female captives established families they might negotiate some agency within an indigenous host society. Indigenous women captured by Spaniards, on the contrary, likely became permanent servants on haciendas. In her book on Texas cross-cultural negotiations, Juliana Barr argued that although men prevailed in public decisions involving warfare and diplomacy, women possessed agency through patterns of matrilineal descent and kin reckoning, frequently serving as mediators to negotiate alliances in diplomatic exchanges.69 In another study, Lance Blyth posited that violence was the principal medium through which Chiricahua Apaches and non-Indian soldier/settlers at the presidio of Janos related to each other. Violence served both communities in providing the means for males to gain access to the resources they needed to establish families.70 Congregation in missions changed patterns of gendered division of labor, kinship relationships, and ritual roles for many indigenous groups. In the early period, missionaries forcefully promoted endogamous marriages, and rates of illegitimacy were low. Reorganization of production, especially the intensification of agriculture, involved women in agricultural labor in addition to gathering and sometimes herding. Since women also processed food and engaged in weaving, their workload actually increased. In terms of ritual performance, women (and men) were prevented from participating in those rites that were aimed at ensuring cosmological balance.71 Although precontact females were subordinated in terms of their public roles to males who acquired status

356   Borderlands of the Iberian World through warfare, some women became shamans. Females shied away from the new ­religion at first (especially confession which required reporting “sexual sins”); they could not hold local political or ecclesiastical office. Radding examined women’s labor in ways that underscored their centrality in household and family formation among highland Sonoran Indian groups. Her analysis of late eighteenth-century censuses ­suggested that the effects of disease and demographic decline promoted exogamous marriages and new formulations of ethnic identity in reconstituted communities. She noted, furthermore, gendered difference in spiritual activities related to language and how the natural world shaped ideas.72 Mission studies emphasize women’s contributions to economic subsistence and cultural production. Over time, native women acquired status in the Christian world of their missions, notably as participants in church choirs, an occupation they were not allowed in most of New Spain. Music not only was an instrument of evangelization but also an avenue that created spaces for indigenous forms to persist. Kristin Mann showed how women’s liturgical roles expanded and how they negotiated gendered space in song and dance.73 As time went on, they often became the strongest Catholic protagonists and organizers of religious ceremonies. Increasingly women became the main healers (curanderas), largely replacing male shamans.74 Cultural and biological mixing occurred widely on haciendas and in towns. What this meant for ethnic identity varied. Studies of mining reales and towns in the north generally confirm endogamous patterns within the Indian and Spanish groups, revealing also more exogamy among castas as well as more illegitimacy and female headed households.75 Women were more likely to seek legal recourse to resolve problems in these urban ­centers. Several studies have shown that Spanish officials in the north were largely tolerant of illicit sexual relations and illegitimacy among the mixed-race groups and unmarried Spaniards.76 According to one comparative study, most illegitimate children were the offspring of liaisons among casta groups working on haciendas, where they were raised by their mothers. A much smaller number were expósitos (abandoned)—in this case, a higher percentage of children had one Spanish parent.77 Abandoned ­children were usually adopted by other families in towns and on haciendas. Illegitimate births were low in missions where people could marry without paying fees, a problem for non-Indians living in towns and haciendas who had to pay for this sacrament. Illegitimate children were widely accepted by hacendados who kept their work forces confined. Laura Shelton examined the circulation of children in Sonora during the late colonial and early republican periods, demonstrating how the informal practice of child raising by others—extended kin and unrelated guardians—began in the colonial period and continued in modified, and more coercive, forms of labor acquisition after 1821 when Sonora became more interlinked commercially with the outside world. These practices had a precedent in the earlier taking of Apache children as captives who were raised as servants in Spanish households.78 Cheryl Martin’s research on eighteenth-century Chihuahua concluded that although ethnic and class hierarchies were somewhat fluid, gender boundaries hardened. “Patriarchy furnished a relatively stable, non-negotiable set of governing principles even

Labyrinths of Mestizaje in Nueva Vizcaya   357 when all other rules came into question.”79 A Christian family’s claim to limpieza de ­sangre and honor depended upon restraining the naturally depraved sexual appetites of females. Domestic abuse of women by their husbands was expected and condoned, and women who displayed improper sexual conduct could be jailed. Certainly, the patriarchal ethos varied across class, especially in female-headed households which comprised about 30 percent of the total. In presidios, authorities seem to have been lax in punishing sexual transgressions by Spanish women.80 Little is known about individual elite Spanish women and family networks, even though there are studies of the formation of an oligarchy in a number of cities and regions, including Parral, Saltillo, and Nuevo Santander.81 In these cases, ruling elites became entrenched in the eighteenth century through marriages between daughters of local elites and newly arriving peninsular Spaniards. Two exceptions stand out. Gabriel Martínez Serna has looked at the role of the seemingly ruthless Isabel de Urdiñola, daughter of the conqueror Francisco de Urdiñola and wife to two Nueva Vizcayan governors, who vastly expanded the family holdings that eventually became part of the enormous Marquisate of Aguayo.82 In another case, Catherine Tracy Goode examined the activities of women in the formation of the family and the preservation of the assets of Nueva Vizcayan governor, Manuel San Juan de Santa Cruz.83 Indigenous women used a variety of methods to avoid the wholesale application of Spanish Christian norms and were crucial to the preservation of indigenous ways among the northern groups that persisted as discrete ethnicities.84 Early on, some practiced abortion and infanticide as a means of survival and even played active roles in rebellions. Their reactions to new gender roles and gendered spaces were mixed, but some were violent. In Baja California, an indigenous woman named Bárbara Gandiaga murdered an overbearing Dominican missionary.85 In the eastern Tarahumara where community cohesiveness waned, María Gertrudis Ysidora de Medina, daughter of a pueblo governor, bashed in the head of her husband when he fell into a drunken slumber after brutally beating her.86 In both cases, the patriarchal judicial system that demanded women’s submission characterized them as immoral, unruly, vengeful, and diabolical. Not even their allegedly limited powers of reason as females or minors saved them. Many women of all ethnicities turned to another power: witchcraft. Most of these instances involved relatively innocuous forms of love magic, but some were more transgressive. Rarely cases of overt resistance, hechicería and brujería offered women ways to ameliorate their circumstances or even temporarily escape from onerous burdens. They used potions and sometimes made pacts with the devil to protect their families, cure illness, deter errant husbands or render them impotent, attract men (especially important for protection in the violent milieu of the frontier), cross-dress and engage in male activities, seduce priests, or murder abusive husbands or owners in the case of slaves. In spite of official attempts to restrict movement by Indians and castas, migrations and interethnic exchange of witchcraft practices were widespread. Although some reported cases were surely anomalies in their excesses, they offer important insights about how people related across gender and ethnicity, as well as their beliefs, aspirations, and desires. Judicial

358   Borderlands of the Iberian World archives (ecclesiastical and notarial) contain hundreds of cases of minor infractions involving curanderismo and love magic, revealing that the number of mixed race and indigenous women participating in these activities increased over the colonial ­period. Typically, these cases went unpunished, but there were exceptions.87 In 1691, a mulatta slave from Durango, Antonia de Soto, made a startling confession to ecclesiastical authorities. For more than six years, she had traversed much of Nueva Vizcaya while masquerading as a man. Her fantastic tale had all the elements of a swashbuckling adventure: travel, riches, derring-do, masculine prowess, murder, and mayhem. The story chronicles a thorough subversion of the social order that fleetingly freed Antonia not only from the legal bonds of slavery but also the gendered bonds of patriarchy. Her testimony reveals a great deal about gender roles and ideals, as well as interethnic activities that took place within a shared popular culture on the frontier. In this case, the open spaces of the north clearly offered more latitude to deviate at least until her conscience or the law caught up with her.88 Spanish women also participated in witchcraft, often using non-Spaniards as their intercessors, and in some cases were prosecuted, especially if their offenses included pacts with the devil. In one case, reported by a Jesuit who claimed to be a victim, the Spanish Cristina de Villanueva, aided by her “mixed-race female cabal,” allegedly seduced him and then rendered him impotent and ailing from several maladies. When his recourse to shamans and other healers failed, he resorted to the Inquisition, even though it meant admitting his sexual sin. Cristina used her relationship with him to extract favors for her husband and father who were traders in the mining real of Cusihuiriachic. In this case, as in a number of others, women employed witchcraft to enhance family or individual income.89 An exceptionally rich case from Monclova demonstrates how it is possible to reconstruct community dynamics, as well as gender and inter-ethnic relations, from Inquisition records. By far the most sensational instance of witchcraft deemed threatening to the social order on the Apache frontier came to be called “la complicidad de Coahuila” or the Coahuila Conspiracy.90 In the mid-eighteenth century, the Inquisition investigated a network of over a hundred women accused of making pacts with the devil. They allegedly used them to cast spells, murder, sabotage crops, and even to fly about the north on wild turkeys. Many startling revelations were provoked by a misogynist Inquisition official who behaved throughout the proceedings with a complete lack of discretion and exhibited signs of mental instability. In the end charges were brought against three Spanish women, a mulata and one apparently Spanish male, but the testimonies name scores of other women (Spanish, mestiza, coyota, mulata, and Indian) and a few men as practitioners of love magic and witchcraft. They also reveal information about the places (kitchens, sleeping areas, tiendas, corrals, abandoned buildings, and wilderness spaces) in which inter-ethnic activities took place. The case suggests that some women living precariously on the margins in unfulfilling relationships rather easily strayed beyond love magic to seek the assistance of the devil to ameliorate their conditions or to find new partners, even

Labyrinths of Mestizaje in Nueva Vizcaya   359 through murder. Or was it the community members living on the edge, many of them believers in popular diabolism, who over-reacted to the discovery of a simple magical bundle and allowed themselves to be swept away in the currents of hysteria encouraged by some of the local officials?91 Ephemeral antidotes to unequal power relations did little to change a social order embedded in patriarchy, well-entrenched in some areas as the colony came to an end. This was nowhere truer than on the Sonoran frontier where tenacious Apache resistance to conquest fed an ascendant paradigm. Laura Shelton’s analysis of judicial records uncovers a dominant discourse that contrasted “civilization” based on a strictly observed class hierarchy and patriarchal authority (buenas costumbres) to “barbarism” consisting of immorality, sloth, and lax parenting. This ethos buttressed a gender order founded on patriarchal power over wives, children, servants, and laborers.92 Nonetheless, the overall picture of power relations in terms of ethnicity and class, as well as gender, shows that Indian, Spanish, mestiza, and Afromestiza women were crucial to the creation of a largely mixed-race and pluriethnic society through their formal unions and informal liaisons. A full panorama of how identities were forged in the labyrinth with extraordinary cultural creativity in conditions of violence, migration, and displacement must be predicated on a thorough understanding of the social and cultural intersections of ethnicity, gender, and class. The peoples of the northern Mexican border area who are today imagined as predominantly white and of European descent, in contrast to the center and south, were forged from a labyrinth of cultural and biological mestizaje that still has many stories to tell.

Notes Archives AGN:  Archivo General de la Nación, Mexico City (Mexico) Archivo Histórico de Parral, Chihuahua (Mexico) 1. Pedro Tamarón y Romeral, Demostración del vastísimo obispado de la Nueva Vizcaya, 1765 (Mexico: Antigua Librería Robredo, 1937), 93; Miguel Vallebueno Garcinava, “El poblamiento del valle de Santiago Papasquiaro, Durango, hasta 1743.” Transición 8 (1991): 19–29. 2. Orden del gobernador Ignacio Francisco de Barrutia, June 18, 1729, Parroquia de Santiago Papasquiaro, microfilm reels of the Genealogical Records of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, no. 658011; Padre Ignacio Javier de Estrada, Themeichi, November 23, 1730, to Padre Provincial Juan Antonio de Oviedo, Archivo General de la Nación, Mexico (hereafter AGN), Archivo Histórico de Hacienda, Temporalidades, leg. 278, exp. 7. 3. Padre Alberto Clereci, Zape, June 3, 1627, AGN, Inquisición, vol. 360, fol. 30. Lobos and coyotes designated persons of mixed race, the first usually of Indian and African origin, and the second of Indian and mestizo. 4. Cynthia Radding, Wandering Peoples: Colonialism, Ethnic Spaces, and Ecological Frontiers in Northwestern Mexico, 1700–1850 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997);

360   Borderlands of the Iberian World Susan M. Deeds, Defiance and Deference in Colonial Mexico: Indians under Spanish Rule in Nueva Vizcaya (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003). 5. Susan  M.  Deeds, “Subverting the Social Order: Gender, Power, and Magic in Nueva Vizcaya,” in Choice, Persuasion, and Coercion: Social Control in New Spain’s Northern Frontiers, ed. Ross Frank and Jesús Frank de la Teja (Albuquerque: UNM, 2005), 95–119. 6. See John Monteiro, “Indigenous Histories in Colonial Brazil: Between Ethnocide and Ethnogenesis,” in The Oxford Handbook of Borderlands of the Iberian World, ed. Danna A. Levin Rojo and Cynthia Radding (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019). 7. Charles W. Hackett, Historical Documents Relating to New Mexico, Nueva Vizcaya, and Approaches Thereto, to 1773, vol. 2 (Washington: Carnegie Institution, 1926), published documents on the movement north to New Mexico. See also J. Lloyd Mecham, Francisco de Ibarra and Nueva Vizcaya (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1927). 8. Herbert  E.  Bolton, “The Mission as a Frontier Institution in the Spanish American Colonies,” American Historical Review 23, 1 (1917): 42–61. Notable among them was Bolton’s student, Peter Masten Dunne, S.J.: Pioneer Jesuits in Northern Mexico and Early Jesuit Missions in Tarahumara (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1944 and 1948). Dunne made extensive use of Andrés Pérez de Ribas, Historia de los triunfos de Nuestra Santa Fe entre gentes las más bárbaras y fieras del Nuevo Mundo, reprint ed. Ignacio Guzmán Betancourt (Mexico: Siglo XXI Editores, 1992). 9. See, for example, Francisco Almada, Resumen de historia del estado de Chihuahua (Mexico: Libros Mexicanos, 1955); Atanasio G. Saravia, Apuntes para la historia de la Nueva Vizcaya (Mexico: UNAM, 1993); José Ignacio Gallegos, Durango colonial, 1563–1821 (Mexico: Editorial Jus, 1960); Luis Navarro García, Sonora y Sinaloa en el siglo XVII (Seville: Universidad de Sevilla, EEHA, 1967); John Francis Bannon, S.J., The Spanish Borderlands Frontier, 1513–1821 (Albuquerque: UNM, 1974); María del Carmen Velázquez, Establecimiento y pérdida del septentrión de México (Mexico: El Colegio de México, 1974); Max L. Moorhead, The Presidio: Bastion of the Spanish Borderlands (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1975); Phillip Hadley, Minería y sociedad en el centro minero de Santa Eulalia, Chihuahua, 1709–1750 (Mexico: SEP, 1979); Guillermo Porras Muñoz, La frontera con los indios de Nueva Vizcaya en el siglo XVII (Mexico: Fomento Cultural Banamex, 1980); and Thomas H. Naylor and Charles W. Polzer, ed., Pedro de Rivera and the Military Regulations for Northern New Spain, 1724–1729 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1988); Oakah Jones, Los Paisanos: Spanish Settlers on the Northern Frontier of New Spain (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1979). 10. François Chevalier, La formation des grands domaines au Mexique (terre et société aux XVIe et XVIIe siècles) (Paris: Instituto de Etnología, 1952). For a more diverse pattern of landholding, see Susan M. Deeds, “Land Tenure Patterns in Northern New Spain,” The Americas 41, 4 (1985): 446–461, and “Mission Villages and Agrarian Patterns in a Nueva Vizcayan Heartland, 1600–1750.” Journal of the Southwest 33, no. 3 (1991): 345–365. 11. Carl Sauer, The Distribution of Aboriginal Tribes and Languages in Northwestern Mexico (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1934) Ibero-Americana Series 5; Robert C. West, The Mining Community in Northern New Spain: The Parral Mining District (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1949); Edward H. Spicer, Cycles of Conquest: The Impact of Spain, Mexico, and the United States on the Indians of the Southwest, 1533–1960 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1963); William  B.  Griffen, Indian Assimilation in the Franciscan Areas of Nueva Vizcaya (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1979); Luis González Rodríguez, Crónicas de la Sierra Tarahumara (Mexico: SEP, 1984) and El

Labyrinths of Mestizaje in Nueva Vizcaya   361 noroeste novohispano en la época colonial (Mexico: UNAM, Miguel Angel Porrúa, 1993); Peter Gerhard, The North Frontier of New Spain (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993); and Michael M. Swann, “Tierra Adentro”: Settlement and Society in Colonial Durango (Boulder: Westview Press, 1982). A few historians took up the challenge: Luis Navarro García, La sublevación yaqui de 1740 (Seville: EEHA, 1966); María Teresa Huerta Preciado, Rebeliones indígenas en el noreste de México en la época colonial (Mexico: INAH, 1966); Silvio Zavala, Los esclavos indios en Nueva España (Mexico: El Colegio Nacional, 1968); Evelyn Hu-Dehart, Missionaries, Miners, and Indians: Spanish Contact and the Yaqui Nation, 1533–1820 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1981); José Luis Mirafuentes Galván, Movimientos de resistencia y rebeliones indígenas en el norte de México, 1680–1821: Guía documental. (Mexico: IIH-UNAM, 1989). 12. Radding, Wandering Peoples; Robert H. Jackson, Indian Population Decline: The Missions of Northwestern New Spain, 1687–1840 (Albuquerque: UNM, 1994) and From Savages to Subjects: Missions in the History of the American Southwest (Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 2000); Charlotte M. Gradie, The Tepehuan Revolt of 1616: Militarism, Evangelism and Colonialism in the Seventeenth Century (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2000); Deeds, Defiance and Deference; Ignacio del Río, Conquista y aculturación en la California jesuítica (Mexico: UNAM, 1984); José Cuello, El norte, el noreste y Saltillo en la historia colonial de México (Saltillo: AMS, R. Ayuntamiento de Saltillo, 1990); Chantal Cramaussel, La provincia de Santa Bárbara en la Nueva Vizcaya, 1563–1631 (Juárez: UACJ, 1990); Poblar la frontera: la provincia de Santa Bárbara en Nueva Vizcaya durante los siglos XVI y XVII (Zamora: Colegio de Michoacán, 2006); Salvador Álvarez, “Agricultural Colonization and Mining Colonization: The Area of Chihuahua during the First Half of the Eighteenth Century,” in In Quest of Mineral Wealth: Aboriginal and Colonial Mining and Metallurgy in Spanish America, ed. Alan K. Craig and Robert C. West (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1994), 171–204; Cecilia Sheridan, Anónimos y desterrados: la contienda por el sitio que llaman de Quauyla, siglos XVI-XVIII (Mexico: CIESAS, 2000); Leslie Offutt, Saltillo, 1570–1810: Town and Region in the Mexican North (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2001); Miguel Vallebueno Garcinava, Civitas y urbs: la conformación del espacio urbano de Durango (Durango: UJED, Instituto Cultural del Estado de Durango, 2005); and Ignacio Almada Bay, “La descomposición de las misiones en las provincias de Sonora y Sinaloa, 1690–1767,” in Misiones del Noroeste de México: origen y destino, ed. José Rómulo Félix Gastelum and Raquel Padilla Ramos (Hermosillo: Fondo Regional para la Cultura y las Artes, CONACULTA, 2007), 169–188. Note also that several anthropologists turned to the past: Daniel T. Reff, Disease, Depopulation and Culture Change in Northwestern New Spain, 1518–1764 (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1991); William L. Merrill, “Cultural Creativity and Raiding Bands in Eighteenth-Century Northern New Spain,” in Violence, Resistance and Survival in the Americas, ed. William  B.  Taylor and Franklin Pease  G.Y.  (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994), 124–142; and Thomas E. Sheridan, Empire of Sand: The Seri Indians and the Struggle for Spanish Sonora, 1645–1803 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1999). 13. Their multidisciplinary approaches draw on theories of acculturation, transculturation, gender, human ecology, hybridity, agency, and ethnogenesis, elaborated by Antonio Gramsci, Edward  P.  Thompson, Stuart Hall, Michel Foucault, James  C.  Scott, Donald Worster, Richard White, and Mary Louise Pratt, among others. 14. Except for some Tlaxcalan colonies in the area of present-day Coahuila, the natives of northeastern New Spain who tended to be more nomadic (in Nuevo Leon and Nuevo

362   Borderlands of the Iberian World Santander) are not considered here. See Cynthia Radding, “Crafting Landscapes in the Iberian Borderlands of the Americas,” in The Oxford Handbook of Borderlands of the Iberian World, ed. Danna  A.  Levin Rojo and Cynthia Radding (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019) for a geographical and ecological definition of Nueva Vizcaya. 15. Christophe Giudicelli, ed., Fronteras movedizas: clasificaciones coloniales y dinámicas socioculturales en las fronteras americanas (Mexico: CEMCA, Colegio de Michoacán, 2011); Giudicelli,“Indigenous Autonomy and the Blurring of Spanish Sovereignty in the Calchaquí Valley, Sixteenth to Seventeenth Century,” in The Oxford Handbook of Borderlands of the Iberian World, ed. Danna A. Levin Rojo and Cynthia Radding (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019); and Cecilia Sheridan, Fronterización del espacio hacia el norte de la Nueva España (Mexico: CIESAS, Instituto Mora, 2015). 16. Fernando Berrojalbiz and Marie-Areti Hers, “Fluctuating Frontiers in the Borderlands of Mesoamerica,” in The Oxford Handbook of Borderlands of the Iberian World, ed. Danna  A.  Levin Rojo and Cynthia Radding (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019); Susan M. Deeds, “Legacies of Resistance, Adaptation, and Tenacity: History of the Native Peoples of Northwest Mexico,” in The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas, vol. II: Mesoamerica, part 2, ed. Richard E. W. Adams and Murdo J. MacLeod (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 44–88; and Radding, Wandering Peoples. 17. Ida Altman, The War for Mexico’s West: Indians and Spaniards in Nueva Galicia, 1524–1550 (Albuquerque: UNM, 2010); Mecham, Francisco de Ibarra; Salvador Álvarez, El indio y la sociedad colonial norteña: siglos XVI–XVIII (Durango: UJED, Colegio de Michoacán, 2009), and “La conquista de la Nueva Vizcaya” and “La Nueva Vizcaya en el siglo XVI,” both in Miguel Vallebueno Garcinava, ed., Historia de Durango, vol. 2 (Durango: UJED, 2013), 22–125; Reff, Depopulation and Culture Change; Deeds, Defiance and Deference. 18. Cramaussel, Poblar la frontera. Related works by this author are: “El poder de los caudillos en el Norte de la Nueva España: Parral, siglo XVII,” in Círculos de poder en la Nueva España, coord. Carmen Castañeda (Mexico: CIESAS, Miguel Ángel Porrúa, 1998), 39–59; “Una oligarquía de la frontera norte novohispana: Parral en el siglo XVII,” in Beneméritos, aristócratas y empresarios. Identidades y estructuras sociales de las capas altas urbanas en Iberoamérica, ed. Bernd Schroeter and Christian Brüschges (Frankfurt and Madrid: Vervuert, Iberoamericana, 1999), 85–103; and “De la Nueva Galicia al Nuevo México por el camino real de Tierra adentro,” in El septentrión novohispano: ecohistoria, sociedades e imágenes de frontera, ed. Salvador Bernabéu Albert (Madrid: CSIC, 2000), 48–71. 19. Deeds, Defiance and Deference; Hu-Dehart, Missionaries, Miners, and Indians; Raphael  B.  Folsom, The Yaquis and the Empire: Violence, Spanish Imperial Power, and Native Resilience in Colonial Mexico (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014); Cynthia Radding, Landscapes of Power and Identity: Comparative Histories in the Sonoran Desert and the Forests of Amazonia from Colony to Republic (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), and Wandering Peoples; José Refugio de la Torre Curiel, Twilight of the Mission Frontier: Shifting Interethnic Alliances and Social Organization in Sonora, 1768–1755 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013). 20. Sergio Ortega Noriega, Reflexiones sobre la historia colonial de Sinaloa (Culiacán: Colegio de Sinaloa, 2002); Gilberto López Castillo, “Composiciones de tierras en un ‘país lejano’: Culiacán y Chiametla, 1691–1790,” Región y Sociedad 22, no. 48 (2010): 243–282. 21. Chantal Cramaussel, “Encomienda, repartimiento y conquista en Nueva Vizcaya,” Historias 25 (1990–1991): 73–91 explains how these forms of labor worked in northern New

Labyrinths of Mestizaje in Nueva Vizcaya   363 Spain. With few exceptions, Spaniards exacted tribute from Indians through personal service rather than specie or commodities. 22. José Cuello, “The Persistence of Indian Slavery and Encomienda in the Northeast of Colonial Mexico, 1577–1723,” Journal of Social History 21 (1988): 683–700, and El norte, el noreste y Saltillo; Sheridan, Anónimos y desterrados. 23. Cramaussel, Poblar la frontera; Carlos Manuel Valdés and Ildefonso Dávila, Esclavos negros en Saltillo: Siglos XVII a XIX (Saltillo: Ayuntamiento de Saltillo, Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila, 1989); Peter  J.  Bakewell, Silver Mining and Society in Colonial Zacatecas, 1546–1700 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1971), 122–124. 24. Cramaussel, Poblar la frontera; Susan M. Deeds, “Rural Work in Nueva Vizcaya: Forms of Labor Coercion on the Periphery,” Hispanic American Historical Review 69, no. 3 (1989): 425–450, and Defiance and Deference; Radding, Wandering Peoples. 25. Chantal Cramaussel, “La tributación de los indios en el septentrión novohispano,” in Indios, españoles y mestizos en zonas de frontera, siglos XVII–XX, ed. José Marcos Medina Bustos and Esther Padilla Calderón (Hermosillo: Colegio de Sonora, Colegio de Michoacán, 2013), 19–52. Nevertheless, the scarcity of documentation for repartimiento orders (mandamientos) begs the question of whether all of these were forced migrations. 26. On occasion Yaquis confronted authorities: Defiance and Deference, 135, 168, 185; Cheryl E. Martin, Governance and Society in Colonial Mexico: Chihuahua in the Eighteenth Century (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), 42, 55, 113. 27. Griffen, Indian Assimilation; Merrill, “Cultural Creativity;” Sara Ortelli, Trama de una guerra conveniente: Nueva Vizcaya y la sombra de los apaches, 1748–1790 (Mexico: El Colegio de México, 2007). 28. Navarro García, La sublevación yaqui; Hu-Dehart, Missionaries, Miners, and Indians; Gradie, The Tepehuan Revolt of 1616; Christophe Giudicelli, Pour une géopolitique de la guerre des Tepehuán, 1616–1619 (Paris: Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2003) and “El miedo de los monstruos: indios ladinos y mestizos en la guerra de los Tepehuanes de 1616,” Nuevo Mundo. Mundos nuevos (2005): 176-190; Radding, Wandering Peoples; Raphael Folsom, “Voces yaquis en la rebelión de 1740: ironías imperiales en la Sonora borbónica,” in De los márgenes al centro: Sonora en la independencia y la revolución. Cambios y continuidades, ed. Ignacio Almada Bay and José Marcos Medina Bustos (Hermosillo: El Colegio de Sonora, 2010), 19–43. 29. Susan M. Deeds, “Las rebeliones de los tepehuanes y tarahumaras durante el siglo XVII en la Nueva Vizcaya,” in Colección conmemorativa del quinto centenario del encuentro de dos mundos, vol. 4: El contacto entre los españoles y los indígenas en el norte de la Nueva España, ed. Ysla Campbell (Juárez: UACJ, 1992), 9–40; “First-Generation Rebellions in Nueva Vizcaya,” in Native Resistance and the Pax Colonial in New Spain, ed. Susan Schroeder (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998), 1–29; “Indigenous Rebellions on the Northern Mexican Mission Frontier: From First-Generation to Later Colonial Responses,” in Contested Ground: Comparative Frontiers on the Northern and Southern Edges of the Spanish Empire, ed. Donna J. Guy and Thomas E. Sheridan (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1998), 32–51; “Las guerras indígenas: colisiones catastróficas, conflagraciones milenarias y culturas en flujo,” in Historia General de Durango, vol. 2: Época colonial (Durango: UJED, 2013), 126–161. 30. Gerhard, The North Frontier, 23–26; Reff, Depopulation and Culture Change; Jackson, Indian Population Decline; Deeds, Defiance and Deference.

364   Borderlands of the Iberian World 31. Chantal Cramaussel, “Population and Epidemics North of Zacatecas,” in The Oxford Handbook of Borderlands of the Iberian World, ed. Danna  A.  Levin Rojo and Cynthia Radding (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019). 32. Deeds, Defiance and Deference. These statistics mirror epidemiological/demographic studies of other regions of Mexico; for example, Sherburne F. Cook and Woodrow Borah, Essays in Population History: Mexico and the Caribbean (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971–1979); Elsa Malvido Miranda, “La población: siglos XVI–XX,” in Historia económica de México 7, coord. Enrique Semo (Mexico: Océano, 2006). 33. Erick Langer and Robert  H.  Jackson, ed., The New Latin American Mission History (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995). 34. De la Torre Curiel, Twilight of the Mission Frontier, xviii–xxii. 35. The secularization process generated an extraordinary cache of documents; the following paragraphs summarize Deeds’s arguments in Defiance and Deference and "Indigenous Responses to Mission Settlement in Nueva Vizcaya,” in The New Latin American Mission History, ed. Erick Langer and Robert H. Jackson (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 77–108. 36. Ignacio del Río, “Comercio, real hacienda y flujos monetarios en el norte de México a fines de la época colonial,” Históricas. Boletín del Instituto de Investigaciones Históricas 67 (2003): 29–59; Ignacio Almada Bay, José Marcos Medina Bustos, and María del Valle Borrero Silva, “Hacia una nueva interpretación del régimen colonial en Sonora: descubriendo a los indios y redimensionando a los misioneros, 16810–1821,” Región y Sociedad 19 (2007): 237–266; David Yetman, Conflict in Sonora: Indians, Priests, and Settlers (Albuquerque: UNM, 2012). 37. Radding, Landscapes of Power. 38. De la Torre, Twilight of the Mission Frontier; Maria Wade, Missions, Missionaries, and Native Americans: Long-Term Processes and Daily Practices (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2009) on Franciscan missions in northeastern New Spain. 39. This scenario differs somewhat from the forced migrations of workers from Sonora to Nueva Vizcaya depicted in Cramaussel, “La tributación de los indios.” See also José Luis Mirafuentes Galván, “Tradición y cambio sociocultural: los indios del noroeste de México ante el dominio español, siglo XVIII,” Estudios de Historia Novohispana 35 (2006): 71–115. 40. Ortelli, Trama de una guerra conveniente. 41. Edward H. Spicer, The Yaquis: A Cultural History (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1980); Hu-Dehart, Missionaries, Miners, and Indians. 42. Alejandro Figueroa Valenzuela, Los que hablan fuerte: el desarrollo de la sociedad yaqui (Hermosillo: INAH, 1986); Thomas R. McGuire, Politics and Ethnicity on the Rio Yaqui: Potam Revisited (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1986); María Eugenia Olavarría, Cruces, flores y serpientes: Simbolismo y vida ritual yaquis (Mexico: UAM-Iztapalapa, Plaza y Valdés, 2003). 43. Folsom, The Yaquis and the Empire. 44. Moorhead, The Presidio: Bastion of the Spanish Borderlands; Naylor and Polzer, ed., The Presidio and Militia on the Northern Frontier of New Spain: A Documentary History, vol. 1: 1570–1700 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1986) and Pedro de Rivera and the Military Regulations for Northern New Spain; Harry W. Crosby, Antigua California: Mission and Colony on the Peninsular Frontier, 1697–1768 (Albuquerque: UNM, 1994); and Lance Blyth, Chiricahua and Janos: Communities of Violence in the Southwestern Borderlands, 1680–1880 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2012).

Labyrinths of Mestizaje in Nueva Vizcaya   365 45. On missions as suppliers, see Del Río, Conquista y aculturación; Naylor and Polzer, ed., The Presidio and Militia; Crosby, Antigua California; Steven W. Hackel, Children of Coyote, Missionaries of St. Francis: Indian-Spanish Relations in Colonial California, 1768–1850 (Chapel Hill: UNC, 2005). 46. Cramaussel, Poblar la frontera. 47. Cramaussel, “El poder de los caudillos en el Norte” and “Una oligarquía de la frontera norte.” 48. Jackson, Indian Population Decline. 49. Chantal Cramaussel, “Mestizaje y familias pluriétnicas en la villa de San Felipe El Real de Chihuahua y multiplicación de los mulatos en el septentrión novohispano durante el siglo XVIII,” in Familias pluriétnicas y mestizaje en la Nueva España y el Río de la Plata, ed. David Carbajal López (Guadalajara: UdG, 2014), 17–45, and “The Forced Transfer of Indians in Nueva Vizcaya and Sinaloa: A Hispanic Method of Colonization,” in Contested Spaces of Early America, ed. Juliana Barr and Edward Countryman (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), 184–207. 50. Peter Stern, “Marginals and Acculturation in Frontier Society,” in New Views of Borderlands History, ed. Robert H. Jackson (Albuquerque: UNM, 1998), 170–173, reports a runaway community (palenque); Deeds, Defiance and Deference, cites scores of references to their presence in ecclesiastical, civil, military, and judicial documents: 30, 58, 60, 80, 83–85, 96, 99, 111, 113, 117–118, 111, 113, 121, 130, 136–137, 144, 148, 149, 159, 161, 163–164, 179, 199–200. 51. Valdés and Dávila, Esclavos negros; Martin, Governance and Society. These populations included both slave and free blacks and mulattoes. The end of the slave trade with the Portuguese did not signal the end of slavery in Mexico, augmented by two factors: slaves trans-shipped legally and illegally from the Caribbean and the relatively high birth rates of slaves and their progeny in Mexico; see Frank W. Proctor III, “Damned Notions of Liberty”: Slavery, Culture, and Power in Colonial Mexico, 1640–1769 (Albuquerque: UNM, 2010). 52. “Que los españoles. . . no se introduzcan a los pueblos de indios, Parral, Jan. 18, 1718, and visita que hizo el gobernador…, Apr. 1724, both in Archivo Histórico de Parral, reel 1718a, fr. 12–17, reel 1722b, fr. 659–687. 53. Álvarez, “Agricultural Colonization;” Martin, Governance and Society; Deeds, “Land Tenure Patterns in Northern New Spain.” 54. Deeds, Defiance and Deference. 55. Catherine Tracy Goode, “Corrupting the Governor: Manuel de San Juan y Santa Cruz and Power in Early Eighteenth-Century Chihuahua” (MA diss., Northern Arizona University, 2000), “Power in the Peripheries: Family Business and the Global Reach of the 18th Century Spanish Empire” (PhD diss., University of Arizona, 2012), and “The Pacific Borderlands of the Spanish Empire,” in The Oxford Handbook of Borderlands of the Iberian World, ed. Danna A. Levin Rojo and Cynthia Radding (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019). Goode emphasizes the centrality of New Spain in the Spanish overseas empire. 56. Martin, Governance and Society. 57. Cuello, El norte, el noreste y Saltillo; Sheridan, Anónimos y desterrados. 58. David B. Adams, Las colonias tlaxcaltecas de Coahuila y Nuevo León en la Nueva España (Saltillo: AMS, 1991); Sean McEnroe, From Colony to Nationhood: Laying the Foundations, 1560–1840 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012). See also McEnroe, “The Indian Garrison Colonies of New Spain and Central America” and Danna Levin Rojo, “ ‘Indian Friends and Allies’ in the Spanish Imperial Borderlands of North America,” both in The Oxford Handbook of Borderlands of the Iberian World, ed. Danna  A.  Levin Rojo and Cynthia Radding (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019).

366   Borderlands of the Iberian World 59. Susan  M.  Deeds, “Escasez y conflicto: la historia del agua en el noreste de la Nueva España,” in Usos y desusos del agua en cuencas del norte de México, ed. Cecilia Sheridan Prieto and Mario Cerruti (Mexico: CIESAS, 2011), 43–65; Dana Velasco Murillo, Urban Indians in a Silver City: Zacatecas, Mexico, 1546–1810 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2017) and “Borderlands in the Silver Mines of New Spain, 1540–1660,” in The Oxford Handbook of Borderlands of the Iberian World, ed. Danna  A.  Levin Rojo and Cynthia Radding (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019). Laurent Corbeil, The Motions Beneath: Indigenous Migrants on the Urban Frontier of New Spain (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2018, 178–188 develops the idea of complex families and cohesive social networks among Tlaxcalans, Otomies, and Tarascans. 60. José Gabriel Martínez-Serna, Viñedos e indios del desierto: fundación, auge y secularización de una misión jesuita en la frontera noreste de la Nueva España (Monterrey: CONARTE, Museo de Historia Mexicana, CONACULTA, 2014). 61. María Vargas-Lobsinger, Formación y decadencia de una fortuna: los mayorazgos de San Miguel de Aguayo y de San Pedro del Álamo, 1583–1823 (Mexico: UNAM, 1992). 62. See note 10. 63. Offutt, Saltillo, 1570–1810. 64. Jesús Frank de la Teja, “St. James at the Fair: Religious Ceremony, Civic Boosterism, and Commercial Development on the Colonial Mexican Frontier,” The Americas 57, no. 3 (2001): 395–416. 65. Stern, “Marginals and Acculturation,” and Deeds, “Colonial Chihuahua: Peoples and Frontiers in Flux,” in New Views of Borderlands History, ed. Robert  H.  Jackson (Albuquerque: UNM, 1998), 157–188 and 21–40, respectively; Hadley, Minería y sociedad. 66. The quote, also cited by Mirafuentes Galván, “Tradición y cambio sociocultural,” 94–95, is from the 1730 report by Estrada (note 2). Mirafuentes’s analysis provides numerous examples of the voluntary flow of Sonoran natives, unstoppable by missionaries, to mining reales and isolated places of refuge where they developed solidarity with other groups and frequently returned to their missions and disrupted missionary control, pilfering supplies, evading communal labor, and ignoring spiritual obligations. 67. Tatiana Seijas, “The Royal Road of the Interior in New Spain: Indigenous Commerce and Political Action,” in The Oxford Handbook of Borderlands of the Iberian World, ed. Danna A. Levin Rojo and Cynthia Radding (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019); Deeds, Defiance and Deference, 121–122; 149–150. 68. James F. Brooks, “This Evil Extends Especially to the Feminine Sex,” Feminist Studies 22, no. 2 (1996): 280, and Captives and Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest Borderlands (Chapel Hill: UNC, 2002); Pekka Hämäläinen, The Comanche Empire (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009); Radding, Landscapes of Power, 160–161. 69. Juliana Barr, Peace Came in the Form of a Woman: Indians and Spaniards in the Texas Borderlands (Chapel Hill: UNC, 2007). On women as negotiators, see Folsom, The Yaquis and the Empire. 70. Blyth, Chiricahua and Janos. On gender and violence, see Elisa Idalia Coronel Higuera, “Experiencias femeninas en la frontera: la incidencia de la violencia en la conformación de una cultura de género fronteriza en el septentrión novohispano, Sonora, siglos XVII– XVIII” (MA diss., Escuela Nacional de Antropología e Historia, México, 2012). 7 1. Deeds, Defiance and Deference, especially chaps. 1 and 2, and “Double Jeopardy: Indian Women in Jesuit Missions of Nueva Vizcaya,” in Indian Women of Early Mexico, ed. Susan Schroeder et al. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997), 255–272.

Labyrinths of Mestizaje in Nueva Vizcaya   367 72. Radding, Landscapes of Power, and “Crosses, Caves, and Matachinis: Divergent Appropriations of Catholic Discourse in Northwestern New Spain,” The Americas 55, no. 2 (1998): 177–201. 73. Kristin Mann, The Power of Song: Music and Dance in the Mission Communities of Northern New Spain, 1590–1810 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010). See also Kristin Dutcher Mann and Drew Edward Davies, “Musical Cultures of the Ibero-American Borderlands,” in The Oxford Handbook of Borderlands of the Iberian World, ed. Danna A. Levin Rojo and Cynthia Radding (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019). 74. De la Torre Curiel, Twilight of the Mission Frontier, 86, 103–107; Susan  M.  Deeds, “Hechicería en el norte colonial de México: reflexiones sobre género y metodología,” in El historiador frente a la historia. Mujeres e historia: homenaje a Josefina Muriel, ed. Alicia Mayer (Mexico: UNAM, 2008), 81–102. 75. Robert McCaa, “Calidad, Clase, and Marriage in Colonial Mexico: The Case of Parral, 1788–1790,” Hispanic American Historical Review 64, 3 (1984): 477–501; Swann, “Tierra Adentro;” Cramaussel, Poblar la frontera. 76. Carla Gerona, “Women and Kinship in Spanish East Texas at the End of the 18th Century,” in Women of the Iberian Atlantic, ed. Sarah E. Owens and Jane E. Mangan (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2012), 101–126; Cramaussel, Poblar la frontera, 173–176. 77. Cramaussel, “Ilegítimos y abandonados en la frontera norte: Parral y San Bartolomé en el siglo XVII,” Colonial Latin American Historical Review (1995): 405–439. Unmarried Hispanic women were likely to give up a child, hoping to contract a respectable marriage. 7 8. Laura Shelton, “Like a Servant or Like a Son? Circulating Children in Northwestern Mexico, 1790–1850,” in Raising an Empire in Early Modern Iberia and Colonial Latin America, ed. Ondina  E.  González and Bianca Premo (Albuquerque: UNM, 2007), 219–237. 79. Martin, Governance and Society, 182. On honor and patriarchy, see Ana María Alonso, Thread of Blood: Colonialism, Revolution, and Gender on Mexico’s Northern Frontier (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1995). 80. Deeds, “Subverting the Social Order;” Gerona, “Women and Kinship in Spanish East Texas.” 81. Cramaussel, Poblar la frontera; Offutt, Saltillo, 1170–1810; Patricia Osante, Poblar el septentrión (Mexico: IIH-UNAM, CONACULTA, Instituto Tamaulipeco para la Cultura y las Artes, 2012 and 2013). 82. Gabriel Martínez Serna, Viñedos e indios del desierto, ch. 4; Vargas-Lobsinger, Formación y decadencia de una fortuna. 83. Goode, “Power in the Peripheries,” and “The Pacific Borderlands of the Spanish Empire.” 84. Radding, Wandering Peoples; Deeds, Defiance and Deference; De la Torre Curiel, Twilight of the Mission Frontier; Leslie Offutt, “Women’s Voices from the Frontier: San Esteban de Nueva Tlaxcala in the Late Eighteenth Century,” in Indian Women of Early Mexico, ed. Susan Schroeder, Stephanie Wood, and Robert Haskett (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999), 273–289. 85. Barbara Reyes, Private Women, Public Lives: Gender and the Missions of the Californias (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009), ch. 4. 86. Deeds, “Double Jeopardy.” 87. For an overview of about 350 cases, see Deeds, “Hechicería en el norte colonial,” and “Subverting the Social Order.” See also Ruth Behar, “Sex and Sin, Witchcraft, and the Devil in Late Colonial Mexico,” American Ethnologist 14, no. 1 (1987): 34–54. 88. Denunciación que contra si hizo Antonia de Soto, mulata esclava [. . .] de diferentes hechos con pacto con el demonio, 1691, AGN, Inquisición, vol. 525, exp. 48, fols. 500–520; Deeds,

368   Borderlands of the Iberian World “Brujería, género e inquisición en Nueva Vizcaya,” Desacatos: Revista de Antropología Social 10 (2003): 30–47. 89. Denuncia against Cristina de Villanueva by Father Felipe Calderón, S.J., Parral, July 16, 1721, AGN, Inquisición, vol. 791, exp. 31. Inquisitorial officials worked to keep such scandalous cases quiet. 90. The documentation for this case amounts to thousands of pages in Mexican Inquisition records, e.g. Autos sobre la complicidad de brujería en Monclova, 1748–1750s, AGN, Inquisición, vol. 827, exps. 1–5; vol. 886, exp. 9; vol. 918, exp. 1; vol. 935, exp. 1; vol. 939, exps. 8 y 9; vol. 947, exp. 12; vol. 966, exp. 17; vol. 977, exp. 11; vol. 980, exp. 21; vol. 983, exp. 2; vol. 992, exp. 11; vol. 1010, exp. 2; vol. 1116, exp. 2. 91. The case has parallels with the Salem witch scare: Mary Beth Norton, In the Devil’s Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692 (New York: Vintage, 2002). 92. Laura Shelton, For Tranquility and Order: Family and Community on Mexico’s Northern Frontier, 1800–1850 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2010) offers one of the few portraits of children and family.

Bibliography Álvarez, Salvador. “Agricultural Colonization and Mining Colonization: The Area of Chihuahua during the First Half of the Eighteenth Century.” In In Quest of Mineral Wealth: Aboriginal and Colonial Mining and Metallurgy in Spanish America, edited by Alan K. Craig and Robert C. West, 171–204. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1994. Blyth, Lance. Chiricahua and Janos: Communities of Violence in the Southwestern Borderlands, 1680–1880. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2012. Cramaussel, Chantal. “Una oligarquía de la frontera norte novohispana: Parral en el siglo XVII.” In Beneméritos, aristócratas y empresarios. Identidades y estructuras sociales de las capas altas urbanas en Iberoamérica colonial, edited by Bernd Schroeter and Christian Brüschges, 85–103. Frankfurt and Madrid: Vervuert, Iberoamericana, 1999. Cramaussel, Chantal. Poblar la frontera: la provincia de Santa Bárbara en Nueva Vizcaya durante los siglos XVI y XVII. Zamora: El Colegio de Michoacán, 2006. Cramaussel, Chantal. “El poder de los caudillos en el Norte de la Nueva España: Parral, siglo XVII.” In Círculos de poder en la Nueva España, coordinated by Carmen Castañeda, 39–59. Mexico: CIESAS, Porrúa, 1998. Cramaussel, Chantal. “La tributación de los indios en el septentrión novohispano.” In Indios, españoles y mestizos en zonas de frontera, siglos XVII–XX, edited by José Marcos Medina Bustos and Esther Padilla Calderón, 19–52. Hermosillo: Colegio de Sonora, Colegio de Michoacán, 2013. Crosby, Harry W. Antigua California: Mission and Colony on the Peninsular Frontier, 1697–1768. Albuquerque: UNM, 1994. Cuello, José. El norte, el noreste y Saltillo en la historia colonial de México. Saltillo: AMS, R. Ayuntamiento de Saltillo, 1990. Deeds, Susan M. Defiance and Deference in Colonial Mexico: Indians under Spanish Rule in Nueva Vizcaya. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003. Deeds, Susan M. “Double Jeopardy: Indian Women in Jesuit Missions of Nueva Vizcaya.” In Indian Women of Early Mexico, edited by Susan Schroeder, Stephanie Wood, and Robert Haskett, 255–272. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997.

Labyrinths of Mestizaje in Nueva Vizcaya   369 Deeds, Susan  M. “Hechicería en el norte colonial de México: reflexiones sobre género y metodología.” In El historiador frente a la historia. Mujeres e historia: homenaje a Josefina Muriel, edited by Alicia Mayer, 81–102. Mexico: UNAM, 2008. Deeds, Susan M. “Land Tenure Patterns in Northern New Spain,” The Americas 41, 4 (1985): 446–461. Deeds, Susan M. “Subverting the Social Order: Gender, Power, and Magic in Nueva Vizcaya.” In Choice, Persuasion, and Coercion: Social Control on New Spain’s Northern Frontiers, edited by Ross Frank and Jesús Frank de la Teja, 95–119. Albuquerque: UNM, 2005. De la Torre Curiel, José Refugio. Twilight of the Mission Frontier: Shifting Interethnic Alliances and Social Organization in Sonora, 1768–1855. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013. Del Río, Ignacio. Conquista y aculturación en la California jesuítica. Mexico: UNAM, 1984. Folsom, Raphael. The Yaquis and the Empire: Violence, Spanish Imperial Power, and Native Resilience in Colonial Mexico. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014. Gerhard, Peter. The North Frontier of New Spain. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993. Gerona, Carla. “Women and Kinship in Spanish East Texas at the End of the 18th Century.” In Women of the Iberian Atlantic, edited by Sarah  E.  Owens and Jane  E.  Mangan, 101–126. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2012. Goode, Catherine Tracy. “Power in the Peripheries: Family Business and the Global Reach of the 18th Century Spanish Empire.” PhD diss., University of Arizona, 2012. Goode, Catherine Tracy. “The Pacific Borderlands of the Spanish Empire.” In The Oxford Handbook of Borderlands of the Iberian World, edited by Danna A. Levin Rojo and Cynthia Radding, 765–788. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019. Gradie, Charlotte M. The Tepehuan Revolt of 1616: Militarism, Evangelism and Colonialism in the Seventeenth Century. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2000. Griffen, William  B. Indian Assimilation in the Franciscan Areas of Nueva Vizcaya. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1979. Hadley, Phillip. Minería y sociedad en el centro minero de Santa Eulalia, Chihuahua, 1709–1750. Mexico: SEP, 1979. Hu-Dehart, Evelyn. Missionaries, Miners, and Indians: Spanish Contact and the Yaqui Nation, 1533–1820. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1981. Jackson, Robert  H. Indian Population Decline: The Missions of Northwestern New Spain, 1687–1840. Albuquerque: UNM, 1994. Langer, Erick, and Robert H. Jackson, ed. The New Latin American Mission History. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995. Martin, Cheryl. Governance and Society in Colonial Mexico: Chihuahua in the Eighteenth Century. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996. Martínez-Serna, José Gabriel. Viñedos e indios del desierto: fundación, auge y secularización de una misión jesuita en la frontera noreste de la Nueva España. Monterrey: CONARTE, Museo de Historia Mexicana, CONACULTA, 2014. Mecham, J.  Lloyd. Francisco de Ibarra and Nueva Vizcaya. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1927. Merrill, William L. “Cultural Creativity and Raiding Bands in Eighteenth-Century Northern New Spain.” In Violence, Resistance and Survival in the Americas, edited by William B. Taylor and Franklin Pease G.Y., 124–142. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994. Mirafuentes Galván, José Luis. “Tradición y cambio sociocultural: los indios del noroeste de México ante el dominio español, siglo XVIII.” Estudios de Historia Novohispana 35 (2006): 71–115.

370   Borderlands of the Iberian World Moorhead, Max L. The Presidio: Bastion of the Spanish Borderlands. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1975. Navarro García, Luis. La sublevación yaqui de 1740. Seville: EEHA, 1966. Naylor, Thomas H., and Charles W. Polzer, ed. Pedro de Rivera and the Military Regulations for Northern New Spain, 1724–1729. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1988. Naylor, Thomas  H., and Charles  W.  Polzer, ed. The Presidio and Militia on the Northern Frontier of New Spain: A Documentary History, vol. 1: 1570–1700. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1986. Offutt, Leslie. Saltillo, 1570–1810: Town and Region in the Mexican North. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2001. Ortelli, Sara. Trama de una guerra conveniente: Nueva Vizcaya y la sombra de los apaches, 1748–1790. Mexico: El Colegio de Mexico, 2007. Radding, Cynthia. Landscapes of Power and Identity: Comparative Histories in the Sonoran Desert and the Forests of Amazonia from Colony to Republic. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005. Radding, Cynthia. Wandering Peoples: Colonialism, Ethnic Spaces, and Ecological Frontiers in Northwestern Mexico, 1700–1850. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997. Sheridan, Cecilia. Anónimos y desterrados: la contienda por el sitio que llaman de Quauyla, siglos XVI–XVIII. Mexico: CIESAS, 2000. Stern, Peter. “Marginals and Acculturation in Frontier Society.” In NewViews of Borderlands History, edited by Robert H. Jackson, 157–188. Albuquerque: UNM, 1998. Swann, Michael  M. “Tierra Adentro”: Settlement and Society in Colonial Durango. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1982. Valdés, Carlos Manuel, and Ildefonso Dávila. Esclavos negros en Saltillo: siglos XVII a XIX. Saltillo: Ayuntamiento de Saltillo, Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila, 1989. Vargas-Lobsinger, María. Formación y decadencia de una fortuna: los mayorazgos de San Miguel de Aguayo y de San Pedro del Álamo, 1583–1823. Mexico: UNAM, 1992.

chapter 14

Bor der l a n ds i n th e Silv er Mi n e s of N ew Spa i n, 1540 –1660 Dana Velasco Murillo

On 24 July 1621, Pedro de Arizmendi Gogorrón, resident of the silver mining town of San Luis Potosí, finished a lengthy letter detailing his many services to the Spanish Crown during his long tenure in New Spain. Arizmendi, who was seeking material compensation or social advancement, had labored in different capacities on behalf of the Spanish Empire for decades. In the late sixteenth century, he had received the appointment of captain and justicia mayor, or head magistrate, in what then had been New Spain’s northern frontier, or the “Gran Chichimeca” (Figure 14.1). The frontier captain had played a substantial role in bringing and maintaining peace to an area beleaguered for decades (c. 1540 to 1590) by indigenous and Spanish military conflicts.1 But he barely dwelt on the war or fighting matters. Rather than justifying his request for rewards on his status as a captain, he focused on his contributions as a minero (the owner of a mine or a refining hacienda). The content of his letter illuminates several ­critical connections between the development of silver mines and the creation of borderlands. Arizmendi had been resident in the city of Zacatecas—the most productive mining center in New Spain at the time—when he heard news of the discovery of silver veins to the southeast in San Luis Potosí.2 He left Zacatecas (c. 1596–1598) for the new find and built a highly profitable hacienda de minas (silver refining plant). He went on to establish several other profitable mines and haciendas, which over the course of twenty-three years yielded more than 250,000 marcos of silver. However, the intrepid miner did more than simply fill the Crown’s coffers with bullion. Other activities associated with his mining ventures laid down “veins” of a more durable nature. Arriving in San Luis Potosí, Arizmendi claimed that he encountered a town with few signs of urban development. As he focused his energies on extracting silver, he also made plans to “poblar” or make the area habitable for Spanish settlement. He constructed a house—“because there were none”—and brought his wife and children.3 The former frontier captain also called on

372   Borderlands of the Iberian World

Mining towns

Parral(1631)

N

U

Salt mines

N EV

Guanaceví (c. 1575)

A V IZCA

YA

Indé (1567)

Saltillo Cedros (c. 1590)

Avino (ca. 1558)

Nieves (1574)

San Martín (ca. 1555) Chalchihuites (ca. 1556)

Mazapil (1568)

Sombrerete (ca. 1558)

Santa María

Fresnillo (1556)

Charcas (ca. 1574) Pánuco San Demetrio (ca. 1566) (1548) Zacatecas (1546) E MONTE GRANDPeñol Blanco Peñol Blanco Ojo Caliente (ca. 1597) Pinos (1593) U EEVVAA U

N

Ramos (1608)

GA

LI

CI

A

GULF OF MEXICO

San Luis Potosí (c.1592)

Guanajuato (1557)

Guadalajara

B A J Í O a

erm R io L

0 PAC I F I C OCEAN

0

50 50

100 mi

Mexico City

100 150 km

Figure 14.1.  New Spain’s borderlands mining district, ca. 1631. Drawn by the author.

his old job skills to arrive at an understanding with the local indigenous population— possibly groups of Guachichiles and Guamares—by giving them clothes, bringing them to his home, and offering them shares (probably silver tailings) of his hacienda. He pointed out that because of his friendly and generous overtures, these “indios chichimecos”—as he generically referred to the area’s diverse native population—ceased their fighting and became “friends of the Spaniards.” His mining, settlement, and diplomatic activities, he claimed, converted San Luis Potosí into a populated town and one of the “best” silver producers in New Spain. Inspired by his success he pursued further mining enterprises in the area.

Borderlands in the Silver Mines   373 Ultimately, Arizmendi’s letter sought to refresh the Crown’s memory of how his mining ventures had simultaneously enriched the metropole and developed the colony. His undertakings also remind that mining enterprises in colonial Mexico produced more than silver; they led to the creation of new colonial settlements. In the sixteenth century, the founding of mining camps and towns outside of central Mexico often served as catalysts for further exploration, becoming and creating new borderlands in their wake. Scholarship on New Spain’s borderlands encompasses a large geographic area, ­spanning the contemporary US southwest to the far northern Mexican states. Spanishlanguage historiography has a long tradition of considering the “Septentrión de la Nueva España,” the northern viceregal provinces including those of the US southwest, as a borderlands region.4 In contrast, early US borderland studies tended to focus on regions north of the border and on Spaniards and colonial institutions. Over time these separate lines of research have come to consider the roles and experiences of native peoples, women, and castas—individuals of diverse ethnic descent—in New Spain’s northern frontier.5 In order to contribute to this literature it is important to situate the concept of borderlands within the historiography on colonial mining. The connection between these two themes is relatively underdeveloped since mining towns rarely figure as the central focus of borderlands scholarship, while works on silver mining primarily ­consider issues of labor, production, and commercial exchange.6 Understanding how “borderlands” developed must include a discussion of the role of mining towns in their evolution. The formation of the Spanish borderlands dates to the mid-sixteenth-century expeditions in search of precious metals in northern Mexico that expanded the territorial limits of the colony. By bringing new areas permanently within the Spanish Empire and forming the basis for future colonial settlements, mining towns became early critical borderland institutions. Mining towns constituted both geographic and social borderlands. They commonly developed in areas that served as seasonal settlement sites for semisedentary and nonsedentary native peoples, but they only became borderlands when they came under the colonial orbit, developed Spanish institutions and infrastructures, and were inhabited by local and migratory Indians, Spaniards, African and Afro-descended individuals, and castas. While many mining towns converted over time from fringe to central areas, their distance from the metropole did not encourage the development of strong colonial institutions, creating sites of fluid cultural exchanges and social boundaries where nonSpaniards often made critical interventions to their sociopolitical and economic vitality.7 Small, individual searches for silver in areas that Spaniards had yet to colonize within the region north of Mexico City that encompassed the great production centers of Zacatecas, Guanajuato, San Luis Potosí, and Parral in the period of their establishment and consolidation (about 1540 to 1660) led to the creation of new settlements and urban infrastructure, stimulated the formation of agricultural hinterlands, and brought dramatic changes to the environmental landscape. The evolution of colonial society in this borderlands mining district depended on the development of mining towns, as they had significant impacts on labor and migration patterns, demographics, indigenous lifeways, gender roles, inter-ethnic exchanges and identity formation. Throughout the

374   Borderlands of the Iberian World colonial period mining towns remained borderlands, fluid and dynamic zones of ­cultural influences, shaped by both Spaniards and non-Spaniards.

Forging the Frontier: Geographic, Urban, and Environmental Transformations Silver mining was the engine of the Spanish Empire. On a global scale, the precious metal stimulated transpacific and transatlantic economies (Figure 14.2). On the Continent, it provided Spain with the wealth to fuel its religious and dynastic wars. Within New Spain, it created traffic in goods and peoples along the trunk line from Vera Cruz to Mexico City to Zacatecas to tierra adentro (the northern interior). Mining served as a source of intermittent, if not lasting, wealth to a select group of Spanish entrepreneurs, including the mine owners and the merchants or aviadores who financed their ventures. Even a substantial number of non-Spaniards eked out profit or some type of living from laboring in the mines or providing the resources and foodstuffs necessary to mining societies. The production of silver spurred a series of capitalist activities and markets that reached beyond the trunk line to the immediate and distant hinterlands.8 Gold was the initial focus of many Spaniards.9 But the majority of gold collected in New Spain came during the early conquest from the plunder of Aztec altepetl (Nahua

Figure 14.2.  The image and the insignia on the reverse side of this eight-real silver coin minted in Zacatecas in 1821 symbolize the prerogative of the Crown to tax their production of silver and gold and testifies to the centuries-long wealth that mining centers generated for the Spanish Empire. Courtesy of William Taylor.

Borderlands in the Silver Mines   375 ethnic states) in central Mexico and to the west from Tarascan communities (Purépecha polities) in areas encompassing the contemporary state of Michoacán.10 Yet the search for gold did little to expand the empire economically or geographically.11 Rather the physical growth of Spain’s empire resulted from the exploratory campaigns for silver in its northern frontier. By the early 1530s, Spaniards earnestly took up silver production, developing ­several reales de minas (mining camps) within central Mexico. But the conversion of “fringe” territories—regions according to James Lockhart “in which Iberians at any given time were not very interested”—into “central areas” owed a great deal to silver production and the subsequent economic and agricultural industries it engendered.12 Lockhart argues “that the whole of north Mexico might have become an ultrafringe [. . . ] had it not been for the great silver strikes.”13 He credits the “mining district” with converting the Chichimec frontier into a central area by 1650. The exchanges between Spaniards and the autochthonous native population, both cooperative and contentious, amidst the quest for s­ ilver, transfigured this region in the sixteenth century into New Spain’s borderlands. Robert West argues that documentary sources “rarely give the names of the actual Spanish discoverers of the ore deposits,” most likely because they were first uncovered by native prospectors.14 Juan de Tolosa, for example, is credited with finding ­silver at Zacatecas in 1546 and Francisco de Ibarra is acknowledged as the discoverer of several sites in the 1550s and 1560s, including San Martín, Sombrerete, Avino, Guanaceví, and Indé. In Zacatecas evidence indicates that native peoples from Tlaltenango told Tolosa where to search.15 Tolosa’s reliance on indigenous peoples was typical of the period. Few Spaniards arrived in the Americas with any skills in mining or refining, making it likely that they initially counted on natives to make the majority of finds.16 In Pachuca, in the 1550s, Spanish miners had cuadrillas (labor gangs) of Indians and African slaves specifically assigned to search for silver. Native prospector Pablo Cosametli, testifying in a dispute over a mine, stated that his job was to “go about searching for mines” and to inform his amos (employers) when he found one.17 There were at least eleven native prospectors in Pablo’s unit, including Francisco, Diego, Anton Uiatl, and Martin Yautl, as well as several African slaves. They each received a salary and lived in the houses of their Spanish amos, near the area under exploitation. Unacknowledged and unnamed, these non-Spanish ore seekers were the true pathfinders of the borderlands. Armed with information and indigenous or African laborers, Spaniards engaged in intense searches for precious metals. Constant references from late-sixteenth-century Crown questionnaires speak of Spaniards “going about searching and discovering [ore],” and establishing communities in areas previously devoid of colonial settlements.18 For example, eight leagues to the north of Zacatecas, four Spaniards established mining operations at San Demetrio in October of 1566. They had previously been in Zacatecas where they received information of potential ores in the area. Around four months later, some individuals from San Demetrio went on a scouting expedition about a league away and founded another mining settlement at Fresnillo. Many individuals

376   Borderlands of the Iberian World from these sites went on to develop a real de minas to the northwest at Charcas in 1574.19 This pattern of settlement in which the success of one mining enterprise led to the development of others functioned as the catalyst for creating and expanding the mining borderlands. It mirrored the relay cycle of the initial Spanish conquest, in which capitulated native communities served as the base for future conquests. Miners were primarily interested in extracting and refining silver, not necessarily with the development of population centers, but even they recognized that the two processes were intimately intertwined. When speaking of forming mining centers, Spaniards often used the word “poblar” (settle), referred to themselves as “descubridores” (discoverers) and “pobladores,” and called their new settlements “poblazón y minas.” The founding pobladores often took credit for the population and growth of the new colonial communities, claiming that they developed through their labor and skill. The success of a community soon drew others. The founders of San Demetrio, for example, claimed that “the news which circulated through the district of the new mining discovery,” brought many individuals to the area to claim mining sites and to settle nearby.20 Before the silver strikes of the 1560s this area had witnessed little Spanish activity let alone any sustained settlement; it primarily functioned as a way station for individuals and muleteers headed towards Zacatecas. An ash tree (fresnillo) and a water source offered travelers some shade to rest and a place to quench their thirst. Francisco de Ibarra’s decision to name the town El Fresnillo surely was a nod to the period when the tree stood as the area’s only significant landmark.21 The sparse landscape of these arid lands witnessed a substantial transformation with the advent of mining activity. Slowly the traditional infrastructure of a Spanish urban center began to appear, albeit on a much more rudimentary and simple level than that found outside the borderlands. Near Fresnillo, at the mines of Peñol, the lack of stone initially forced residents to build single story adobe houses. One respondent admitted that they were not very sturdy.22 A humble church and a small space cleared for a market usually followed soon after. Not too far from these civic structures were the large haciendas and refining mills that gave the towns their raison d’être. In 1585, nearly twenty years after its foundation, Fresnillo had six silver refining plants enclosed by mud walls (tapias) and about thirty Spanish vecinos (or householders) along with an untold number of non-Spanish inhabitants.23 The establishment of the mining community was the first stage in a larger process of colonization.24 Silver production, Jose Moya points out, “foster[ed] levels of industrialization and urbanization within the region itself that have gone unnoticed” in many scholarly studies.25 The town stood at the center of a nucleated area that included administrative buildings, haciendas for refining, and indigenous pueblos. Concentric circles of settlements developed around urban settlements to meet their resource and supply needs. Grain and livestock ranches (ganado mayor or menor) evolved in the southern plains of the Bajío and across the northern provinces. Salt, necessary for the reduction process, led to the creation of communities such as Santa María and Peñol Blanco, about fifty miles to the east of Zacatecas. Other settlements on the surrounding montes or woods, such as the ranchos de carbón exclusively focused on the production of charcoal. While many of these smaller settlements remained intimately linked with

Borderlands in the Silver Mines   377 mining production, others became population centers in their own right. In either case, mining towns could not have survived without the resources provided by these hinterland communities. The development of the mining borderlands dramatically altered the socioeconomic landscape of the region. Yet silver mining also took its toll on the environment, both in the immediate production zones and hundreds of miles into the interior.26 Extraction and refining involved multiple processes that required significant natural resources. Some scholars have argued that Mexican mining was “among the most important agents of biomass consumption in the early modern Atlantic world.”27 Water was needed to mix and clear ore, while dams powered machinery. Built from scratch, haciendas needed wood for water wheels and mills. Within the mines, laborers used timber for ladders and for scaffolding. Damp conditions frequently required the replacement of rotten wood.28 Heat in the form or charcoal or wood was necessary for every stage of production. As more and more reales developed, the collection of these resources spread well beyond the perimeter of production sites. The changes brought about by mining and the agricultural settlements it engendered created an ecological crisis. Environmental decay from mining had preconquest precedents. In the mines at Chalchihuites, Phil Weigand notes that the use of a pine known as ocote for lighting in the mines had led to deforestation.29 But the repercussions of these practices were minor compared to those generated by colonial extraction. Within the towns proper, mercury residues from the refining process contaminated rivers, airways, and land, eventually making its way into food, animals, and humans. John F. Rivers argues that the mercury used in silver production in Mexico and Peru “constituted the single largest source of industrial pollution in the entire early modern world.”30 The constant need for wood led to severe deforestation of dense woodlands of pine, oak, willow, poplar, cedar, walnut, and mesquite. Scholars argue that from 1558 to 1804 more than 315,642 km2 of Mexican forests were cleared, most significantly around Zacatecas, San Luis Potosí, and Guanajuato. The area around San Luis Potosí was deforested at a rate of 126 km2 per year.31 Depleted forests had little chance to revive as land was targeted for agricultural production and transhumance developed in mining’s wake. The environmental transformation of the landscape had a devastating impact on the autochthonous native population, particularly the so-called chichimecs who continued to resist Spanish incursions into their territory well into the late sixteenth century. The strain placed upon local food supplies compelled many communities to submit to Spanish authority.32

The Foundations of Mining Society: Labor, Immigration, and Population Besides natural resources, silver production and urban construction also depended on the significant expenditure of human labor. Mining required a sizeable and skilled work pool, which was not readily available in the northern regions The northern mining

378   Borderlands of the Iberian World districts were thinly populated and their autochthonous native populations were not organized in the tribute and labor draft systems of the hierarchical preconquest states of central Mexico. The dramatic need for workers in the face of scarcity led to the creation of new labor patterns in the mining borderlands, which ultimately shaped their demographic and social dynamics.33 In zones of dense indigenous settlements, Spaniards effectively implemented forced labor—including slavery, encomienda, and eventually repartimiento—among the native population. In the 1570s, for example, in Peru, colonial officials annually assigned over thirteen thousand mita workers to the Andean mining town of Potosí.34 In central Mexico and near Guadalajara, many mines functioned primarily on local conscripted Indians.35 But these coercive practices met with little success in northern New Spain. Initially the labor pool included local native peoples taken in enslavement or those in encomienda from other regions.36 But forced or enslaved labor did not become widespread in the region because it was not practical or economical. Conveying native peoples from central Mexico would have been expensive and logistically difficult, while the purchase and transportation of African slaves from either Veracruz or Mexico City represented an equally costly venture. Under these circumstances, Spaniards had to create socioeconomic conditions that would draw workers to their reales. Local conditions in the mining borderlands forced Spaniards to restructure traditional labor patterns. Miners had to offer incentives that compensated individuals for leaving their communities for distant frontier towns and the dangerous and demanding work associated with mining. Silver production carried along the risk of accidents, pulmonary illness, mercury poisoning, and other occupational hazards, along with a gruelling day-long Monday through Saturday work schedule. The average age of death for a miner at the Andean site of Potosí, for example, was 31.6 years.37 In a measure aimed at the indigenous population, Spaniards initially exempted workers living in mining towns from paying tribute or participating in forced labor drafts. This arrangement, eventually codified in a decree by Phillip II, clarified that they did not have to meet these obligations in “the pueblos where they lived and resided when they left for [the mining towns].”38 Wages constituted another significant inducement. These conditions were generally followed in larger towns such as Zacatecas, Guanajuato, and San Luis Potosí, but some local officials and miners in smaller sites that had trouble drawing laborers and were far from the oversight of colonial authorities often took liberties with the letter of the law. In 1610, the visitador, or inspector of the Audiencia of New Galicia in Guadalajara, Gaspar de la Fuente, discovered native peoples detained against their will in prisons at Mazapil because of debts they owed in advanced wages and goods.39 However, high labor demands along with few if any legal or contractual ties to their overseers, allowed many workers to flee to other mining centers. While labor conditions varied at different sites, free-wage labor predominated in the borderlands mining district through the colonial period. In spring 1550, during his review of the mines of Zacatecas, the visitador Hernando Martínez de la Marcha set the tone for the labor practices that would predominate in the region.40 In a series of measures, he stipulated that indigenous mine workers were “free Indians,” forbade draft labor, and established a

Borderlands in the Silver Mines   379 standard wage scale. By the early nineteenth century, David Brading claims that New Spain’s mines had over forty-five thousand wageworkers.41 The amount of wages paid in coin or in kind varied by site. In the early 1600s, in Zacatecas, according to Bishop Alonso Mota y Escobar, native mine workers made from sixty to seventy-two pesos a year.42 Around the same period by comparison, the position of town crier (often held by a native person) made twenty-four pesos a year, and a Spanish interpreter made eighty pesos!43 Some laborers in San Luis Potosí had annual incomes of nearly 150 pesos.44 Allotments of water, meat, chili, maize, and wood usually accompanied salaries. The main draw for most mine laborers, however, was payment in silver tailings, known as the partido or the pepena. In this practice mineworkers kept a certain percentage of the ore they had collected. These tailings did a brisk trade on the informal markets that existed in most reales, with laborers often making a handsome profit selling them to merchants and miners.45 Proceeds from sales of ores often surpassed wages. Together, the two earning streams offered a solid income. In San Luis Potosí, one official claimed that Indians did not receive salary, “nor did they want it,” so great was the profit from ore sharing.46 Mine workers also had the possibility to search out better wages, ore sharing arrangements, and living conditions, a practice often encouraged by miners who offered greater compensation in hopes of luring laborers to their sites. Colonial officials criticized miners who, in violation of viceregal decrees, gave “a great deal of pesos, exceeding that which they can receive.” The Crown worried that excessive payments would lead to the depopulation of certain mining sites or create situations of indentured servitude for workers. In Mazapil, native peoples owed over three thousand pesos in advance wages.47 There is little evidence of pervasive indentured ­servitude in this period; rather complaints of workers absconding with wages before completing their contracts were common. Numerous documents illustrate laborers, merchants, and migrants entering and exiting an area based on production levels. From the 1550s through the end of Spanish rule, economic opportunities drew a steady stream of laborers, particularly native peoples, to the mining borderlands. One should not confuse these migrants with the state sponsored relocation of Tlaxcalan colonies to some parts of the area in the 1590s.48 Rather, mine workers traveled alone or with their spouses or families, nor were they all men. Large numbers of women looked to mining towns as sources of income. Some immigrants came from long distances, such as central Mexico, others from the local hinterlands. As one anonymous Crown official reported, “All the Indians have come from abroad, from different lands.”49 The mining reales of Parral, for example, drew native migrants from Sinaloa, Sonora, and Durango, including groups of Acaxee, Xixime, Opata, Huichol, and Tepehuan.50 Miners also sent out agents or enganchadores to recruit workers, paying for their journey and advancing their salary.51 Some migrants returned to their home communities or divided their time between neighboring reales, but a large number made permanent roots in their new towns, forming the demographic basis of mining society. The influx of miners and migrant laborers changed the demographic dynamics of this borderlands region. Yet, despite the draw of silver, the near northern mining district never achieved the population levels of central or southern Mexico or the spectacular

380   Borderlands of the Iberian World demographic boom of its South American counterpart, Potosí, which by the 1600s had over 160,000 inhabitants.52 Still, the larger mining centers had fairly sizeable populations as the incentives of the mining money economy drew men and women from every element of colonial society. Early-seventeenth-century counts offer approximate numbers for the three major mining centers. In 1597, San Luis Potosí had about three thousand inhabitants, while Guanajuato had four thousand residents in 1600.53 By 1608, Zacatecas had achieved about forty-five hundred inhabitants.54 Actual numbers were greater as counts often failed to include or undercounted women and children. These figures point to relatively large, stable populations: although they could not compare to those of Mexico City, which by 1574 already had twenty-five thousand people. Yet in most of the district the population remained thin and dispersed. Visitador de la Fuente’s observation that only three Spaniards, forty Indians, and twenty slaves lived in the fledgling mining real of Ojo Caliente was representative of the often small numbers that characterized these sites in this period.55 Demographic instability beleaguered the mining borderlands as populations often ebbed and flowed with the rise and fall of mining production. In 1633, for example, Guanajuato had about five thousand people. With the resurgence of mining in the 1690s, its population tripled to sixteen thousand by the century mark.56 In San Luis Potosí, in 1594, about two years after its founding, the combined Spanish/indigenous population totalled 245 (70 and 175 respectively). Continued mining production saw that figure increase to three thousand within three years. Later estimates place the male indigenous population alone at seven thousand by the 1620s.57 Production boosts also had a dramatic impact on smaller reales. At Charcas, Marcelo Carmagnani connected a rise in population with a production spurt that began in the 1650s. Employing parish records, he illustrated that the number of children baptized in the town rose from 14 percent in the pre-boom period (1640 to 1649) to 24 percent in the 1650s. He identified a similar trend for the number of adult Indian baptisms.58 Demographic increases usually signalled a healthy economy for the mining center and for its hinterlands. Unlike the late colonial period, it does not appear that the population spikes of the seventeenth century placed an inordinate strain on resources. Boom/bust cycles created demographic crises. The same economic incentives that drew people to mining towns often pushed individuals to relocate to other areas. In 1636, Zacatecas’s cabildo complained that for over six years the city’s finances had suffered from “la falta de vecindad” or a lack of residents who had left the city with the discovery of the mines at Parral.59 Slowdowns in production also led to dramatic declines, although the larger centers usually sustained stable numbers even during these periods.60 Yet even these sites did not escape the population decreases produced by the midseventeenth century mining depression. Some reales even bordered on the cliché “ghost town” after a series of particularly bad busts or labor exoduses. Production was so diminished at the formerly prosperous real of Nieves that by 1610 only two haciendas remained.61 In a reversal of fate, the once booming town of Parral was almost completely depopulated in the late seventeenth century after a series of strikes in neighboring locations followed a drop in production.62 Population fluctuations occurred even during

Borderlands in the Silver Mines   381 periods of stable mining activity as laborers moved from one site to another in search of better working conditions or more favorable pay—or as diseases and epidemics took their toll.63 Yet for all its irregularities the demographic composition of the mining borderlands exhibited several long-term ethnic and social trends. The semi-desert regions north of Mexico City appeared uninhabited to Spaniards, because they lay outside of densely populated indigenous zones. Yet most silver veins were found directly on or near the traditional lands of semisedentary native peoples. When Spaniards aggressively moved into these territories to start silver mining and city building, their actions had a dramatic impact on the configuration of the area’s native population. Silver production in the mining borderlands reduced and displaced autochthonous groups as it drew foreign Indians from all areas of New Spain. Native immigration made mining towns as ethnically diverse as major urban centers and engendered new cultural patterns among the indigenous population. The pre-conquest mining district was home to several prominent ethnic groups, including significant numbers of Zacatecos, Tepehuanes, Guamares, Guachichiles, Tecuexes, Tepeques, Caxcanes, and Pames.64 These native populations usually organized in small non-or semisedentary bands that Spaniards referred to as rancherías. They often were collectively and pejoratively referred to as “Chichimecs.” The search for silver brought colonial peoples into their territories, significantly impacting their lifeways. Zacatecas, for example, evolved on seasonal Zacateco land, and Guanajuato developed in an area occupied by small groups of Guamares. The construction of San Luis Potosí displaced resident Guachichiles. Aside from dislocation, these native communities also suffered from Spanish raids in which kidnapping, physical harassment, and the stealing of foodstuffs and livestock was common. Under these circumstances, many native groups retreated to other sites. But others remained in the vicinity, attacking Spanish convoys and personnel as they traveled along the various arteries of the silver-mining highway, or camino real de tierra adentro.65 While most large mining towns evaded direct assaults, hostilities led to the temporary closure or abandonment of smaller reales. Over time even autonomous groups that had opposed Spanish incursions were integrated into the mining district. For example, Mazapil, to the northeast of Zacatecas, came into the Spanish orbit with the discovery of silver in 1568. But groups of Guachichiles and Zacatecos controlled the roads around the area and almost destroyed the mining camp in 1573. Many of these native peoples, however, worn down by war and its deprivations, submitted to Spanish rule, laying down their arms in exchange for subsidies and favorable resettlement terms. In 1587, a Spanish frontier captain reported a “large number of Indians that came peacefully from the sierras of Rocamonte, Pedregoso, and Potosí.”66 Some of these individuals settled not far from Mazapil in Cedros, which served as the hub of four communities of resettled native groups, primarily Guachichiles.67 Ultimately, whether they retreated from the area, willingly remained, or made war on Spaniards, the intrusion of colonial migrants and institutions into the region permanently changed the lifeways of the autochthonous native population and destroyed their habitat. The region’s shrinking native population could not meet the demands of the labor-intensive mining industry, drawing thousands of “foreign” Indians to the mining

382   Borderlands of the Iberian World borderlands, characterized by an extremely diverse Indian population.68 Individuals or families migrated from various parts of New Spain seeking labor opportunities. From 1550 onward, large numbers of Tonaltecos, Mexicas, Cazcanes, Otomis, Tlaxcalans, Texcocans, Cholulans, and Tarascans flocked to Zacatecas and its satellite mining towns.69 Labor-hungry San Luis Potosí also drew a diverse native population. From 1591 to 1630, Laurent Corbeil identified over 130 communities of origin there, representing more than a dozen ethnic groups—including Cazcanes, Coca, Tecuexe, Sayultecan, Tarascan, Nahua, and Otomi.70 A variety of indigenous languages could be heard at mines, haciendas, and urban plazas, most commonly Nahuatl, the native language of central Mexico, and Purépecha, the language of the Tarascan state. In San Luis Potosi, over ten indigenous languages were spoken.71 Some native peoples may have even been trilingual, speaking Spanish, Guachichil, and Purépecha. Yet the overall predominance of Nahuatl elevated it to the lingua franca of the mining district and most towns usually had an official nahuatlato, or interpreter.72 The immigrant native population was critical to the development of silver production and the urban economy. Indians held jobs in all stages of the production process, serving as extractors (barreteros), carriers (tenateros), or refiners (azogueros). They also held a variety of occupations in the city, such as tailors, coopers, and shoemakers. The focus on native labor in mining towns often occludes their vibrant civic lives and reinforces stereotypes of itinerant, wage-seeking native men. In fact, a substantial majority of native men and women established urban roots, organizing themselves into communities of long-term residents, new migrants, and multigenerational families. Seven indigenous barrios evolved alongside the Spanish traza or central residential area of San Luis Potosí. In Zacatecas, four Indian towns or pueblos with multiple communities formed along the Spanish center. These pueblos had municipal councils and confraternities that operated with relatively little Spanish interference.73 Flourishing Indian towns and parishes, the significant presence of multigenerational families, and the vitality of native institutions, organizations, and networks, illustrate that it was not just Spanish societies that evolved and persisted in these borderland mining towns.

Ethnic, Gender, and Social Fluidity on the Frontier Scholarly representations of mining towns vary by place and period. Still, some general trends emerge from the literature, including, most prominently, depicting them as “motors of [Spanish] acculturation” and gendering them as male.74 These generalizations, however, fail to capture the ethnic and social nuances that developed in the mining borderlands. Mining towns, for instance, were administrative strongholds for Spaniards but not demographic ones. Cultural interchanges, as the few previous examples illustrate, were not solely limited to Spanish practices or ways of life. Nor were men

Borderlands in the Silver Mines   383 necessarily the predominant residents. Mining towns depended on women (and children) to meet myriad needs. Within these contexts, weak colonial institutions along with distance from metropolitan cities often led to relaxation of societal norms and greater potential for latitude in social practices and behaviors. Local factors and conditions (location, population size and composition, rate of compulsory labor, political and economic systems) often shaped the level of inter-ethnic exchange and social fluidity, for both men and women, at each site. The confluence of individuals from so many ethnic groups and social statuses facilitated inter-ethnic exchanges at levels usually seen in large colonial cities. Some smaller, more isolated haciendas were often multicultural islands. Near Mazapil, for example, the hacendado Juan Guerra de Resado lived with two other Spaniards, three mestizos, and ten African or African descent slaves.75 Ties between these ethnically diverse communities developed around daily contact at labor and residential settings. At the mines, native peoples labored side by side with individuals of African descent under the supervision of a Spanish mayordomo; the latter might have spoken Nahuatl.76 Occasionally, Spaniards and native peoples formed mining partnerships. Urban occupations brought ethnic groups together at plazas, schools, convents, taverns, bakeries, and homes. The shop of the Spaniard Agustín de Barriento in Zacatecas frequently catered to indigenous customers.77 Mestizas raised Spanish children, and Francisca Delgado, a mulata who lived in one of Zacatecas’ ethnically mixed neighborhoods, served as a partera, or midwife.78 On a more intimate level, countless inter-ethnic unions formed, many of them culminating in marriage. At both the occupational and personal level, the social diversity of mining towns sparked contact and encouraged relations and exchanges between ethnically distinct groups. High rates of inter-ethnic interactions alone do not necessarily signal elevated levels of acculturation or cultural loss. In the main urban mining centers, for example, large native populations facilitated the persistence of indigenous identities. In Zacatecas the native population took the lead in establishing their own towns and urban institutions and in San Luis Potosí intricate social networks and personal and occupational solidarity developed across diverse indigenous groups. In eighteenth-century Zacatecas, high endogamy rates were common.79 At smaller, more removed sites that lacked large demographic pools of core ethnic groups, there was probably more biological and cultural miscegenation. In seventeenth-century Charcas, for example, native peoples and Spaniards tended to marry within their larger ethnic group, but mestizos and mulattos displayed more exogamous patterns.80 High levels of contact between groups are observed in such places; nevertheless, generic depictions of pervasive acculturation and miscegenation do not capture the complex social dynamics existing in the towns and reales. Local factors played a key role in the formation of ethnic identities and relations in the mining borderlands. The population fluctuations that characterized borderland areas often resulted in skewed demographic imbalances with men frequently outnumbering women. The mining region was no exception to this rule, but the tendency of the historiography to omit women has made their actual numbers seem even smaller. The scant presence of women

384   Borderlands of the Iberian World in sources involving mining production, economic exchange, and labor led James Lockhart to conclude that “several men and one woman is what we usually see when the intention is mining.”81 This paradigm, however, underestimates the size and important roles of women in the development and persistence of mining towns. The presence of innumerable women from all walks of life in the documentation complicates the standard gendered narrative of borderland mining societies.82 There are no reliable figures on how many women lived in the mining district as civil census takers rarely accounted for them. Ecclesiastical padrones occasionally offer better insight. A 1622 padrón of fourteen haciendas in Zacatecas indicated that 42 percent of the population was female.83 Thus while men predominated, women were present in fair numbers. Various other counts illustrated similar trends. It was not uncommon for households or smaller ranches and cuadrillas to exhibit greater gender parity. When considering the female population of mining towns it is more instructive to focus on their pervasiveness than their total numbers. Women were part of almost every social and labor unit, at times outnumbering men, particularly at agricultural haciendas. The female population of the mining borderlands was ethnically and socially diverse. Spanish, indigenous, African, and casta women resided in mining centers in varying numbers. As with men, non-Spaniards always outnumbered their Spanish counterparts. Lifestyles varied according to ethnicity, occupation, and civil status, from relatively well-off Spanish women to indigenous women with small houses and fields to slaves living in grueling conditions. Anecdotal sources from various reales suggest that migration created a large core group of women between fifteen and thirty years of age. But a viable number of women from every age range lived and labored in mining towns. The configuration of the hacienda of Luis Zubriel, near Parral, in 1649 offers a microcosm of female mining society. In his services he had a bonded Indian woman of the “Tarahumara nation,” and four female African slaves: Ana, Catalina, Felipa, and Juana. Ana was thirty years old, young in comparison to Catalina who at over eighty years of age was listed as “not available for labor.” The other two girls were probably Ana’s children. Juana was a three years toddler and Felipa was only six months.84 Here in this one site lived women of all ethnicities, statuses, and ages. Their multigenerational presence reminds us that there was rarely a mining complex that did not require female labor for cleaning and other tasks. In this case, one can see the reproduction of the workforce over three generations. Documents record large numbers of widows and female household heads, due to the high rates of mortality in the mining industry. Laurent Corbeil relates, for example, the history of María Isabel, a native woman from Guadalajara in the early seventeenth century.85 She moved with her husband to San Luis Potosí and then returned to Guadalajara. On his death she returned to San Luis Potosí and her former employer. María Isabel was one of many women who assumed positions as heads of households either on the death of their spouses or during periods when they migrated to other mining sites for shorter labor stints.86 Significant numbers of widows and female household heads became a gendered characteristic of mining borderlands.

Borderlands in the Silver Mines   385 The support work of women in the private and public sphere played a key role in the success of mining production and the towns themselves. Women sometimes counted among the town’s founding members. In 1593, out of sixty-five settlers, Teresa de Rodes, Marina de Mendoza, Ana de Toledo, Beatriz de Salinas, and Isabel López received founding plots of land (solares) in San Luis Potosí.87 While these women did not start mining ventures, female mine owners were not unknown. In 1562, Zacatecas’s city council minutes listed Doña Ana del Corral and Teresa de Morales as owners of mining haciendas.88 Many other women participated in more mundane tasks related to mining, though there is no evidence that women worked in the actual extraction of silver or in the refining process. Whether they lived at the hacienda (some were even born there) or came as day workers, their labor proved critical to the running of these sites. Women, most often indigenous, cleaned, laundered, cooked, hauled water, and cared for the hacienda’s many laborers, wives, children, and large numbers of animals. Outside of mining complexes, women tended to lodgers, ran markets, and managed properties. On the domestic front they cared for children and other family members and ran their homes so that their male kin could work at mines and other sites. These activities contributed to the success of family and city life, as well as mining production. The mining world then could not have functioned on a model of “several men and one woman.” As with other borderlands areas, women were integral elements to the success of mining societies and economies. It appears that both men and women experienced certain freedoms from societal norms within these mining towns. The greater silver mining district is often depicted as a frontier “wild west society” where the social order was commonly inverted.89 It is not known, however, to what extent mining towns allowed individuals to lessen or escape the strictures of colonial society. Sources indicate that certain features of frontier mining towns (underdeveloped colonial institutions, imbalanced sex ratios, isolated settings) provided individuals with some latitude in their personal lives.90 Lack of colonial oversight was a chronic problem. The remote location of certain mining towns and their significant distance from the metropole often placed them far from the reach of viceregal authority. Local mechanisms of supervision exhibited high rates of absenteeism, corruption, or negligence. Civil authorities had multiple interests and maintaining civic life did not always rank among their highest priorities. Some representatives committed relatively minor omissions such as missing cabildo meetings, others incurred in more serious forms of negligence. In the jurisdiction of Charcas, visitador de la Fuente complained that “not once did the alcalde mayor, his lieutenant, or any other officer” appear during his visita in 1610. Nearby, in Monte Grande, he discovered that the corregidor of Zacatecas, in charge of administering justice for the region, failed to visit the site in the entire year. But local entities were not alone to blame, the town of Mazapil had not once in its fifty years of existence received a visit from the Bishop.91 On the other hand, having an official on site did not necessarily guarantee administrative order: near the villa of Llerena the alcalde mayor was charged with abuse of office, while in Fresnillo the local magistrate, found guilty of misusing his post,

386   Borderlands of the Iberian World received a two-year suspension and a substantial fine.92 De la Fuente’s observations ­confirm that smaller, satellite towns were particularly vulnerable to lack of colonial oversight. Their remote locations lent themselves to abuse and negligence on the part of their local officials. Larger towns had more mechanisms for supervision, but even there authorities often had a greater interest in maintaining silver production than social order. As occurred in other borderlands, violence was endemic in mining towns, where weapons were omnipresent. Miners brought guns to mining sites; workers carried knives and machetes despite ordinances to the contrary.93 The tally of crimes of murder, cattle theft, and store burglary in the Villa de Llerena was common to most mining reales.94 In Fresnillo, de la Fuente deemed two individuals so criminal that he banned them from ever returning to the town.95 On a larger scale, indigenous labor gangs in Zacatecas and San Luis Potosí often fought each other in pitched battles.96 The money economy created a profitable black market, particularly in silver tailings, but also in other items. Miners and laborers often failed to mint their silver.97 On the open market, sellers frequently capitalized on scarcity to sell foodstuffs and commodities at inflated prices despite the value, or postura, set by authorities. The consumption of alcohol was common to all social groups and ethnicities. Viceregal mandates forbidding the sale of wine to “Indians, Blacks, and castas” were routinely ignored. While systematic evidence that mining towns were more violent than any other large urban center is lacking, there is little doubt that a strong money economy within a frontier borderland created multiple opportunities for criminality and social disorder. Individuals took advantage of weak colonial institutions to engage in personal arrangements that fell outside of social norms. Borrowing Thomas Calvo’s expression, a great deal of “wanton living,” occurred in mining towns.98 Informal unions were ­commonplace and often illicit as well. In Mazapil, de la Fuente found large numbers of married indigenous women openly cohabiting with men they claimed to be their spouses.99 The visitador ordered the women to return to their lawful husbands. But local authorities, recognizing that the town needed the women for labor and sexual companionship, did not comply. These conditions laid fertile ground for episodes of bigamy, concubinage, and prostitution. While many of these informal relations evolved into long-term family units, orphans repeatedly appear in the documents. In Charcas, illegitimacy rates among the mestizo population from 1620 to 1624, and again from 1650 to 1654, were as high as 50 percent. During these same periods, about one third of the mulatto population had a classification of illegitimate in parish records. This trend was mirrored in San Luis Potosí, where from 1635 to 1639 illegitimacy rates among the nonSpanish and non-Indian populations averaged 65 percent, and in Parral where from 1638 to 1647 illegitimate and abandoned children represented a third of all baptized.100 Other unorthodox behaviors appear in Inquisition sources, particularly episodes that involved accusations of love magic and witchcraft. In fall 1665, the Holy Office questioned several women in Zacatecas about superstitious behavior.101 The brunt of the blame fell on Francisca Delgado, a mulatta, who stood accused of selling enchantment bundles. Francisca’s file is more noteworthy for its timing, during a mining depression,

Borderlands in the Silver Mines   387 rather than its content. In her review, periods of increases or decreases in mining ­production led to a rise in accusations.102 The high number of cases during economic transitions suggests that societal tensions made certain individuals more vulnerable targets for accusations of moral transgressions and reprisals.103 Most of the silver extracted from New Spain traveled beyond the mainland, influencing the formation of empires, nation-states, and religious conflicts in Europe and Asia. Yet silver production had a dramatic impact on shaping Mexico’s northern mining district. The search for ores in the period between 1540 and 1660 brought areas previously devoid of a significant colonial presence into the empire, creating geographic and social borderlands. Geographically, they represented Spain’s first stake in transforming the northern provinces from a region of sporadic indigenous settlements to one of mining and agricultural population clusters. New towns and communities emerged in silver’s wake, with established reales serving as the catalysts for future explorations and settlements. Some of these mining towns ranked among the largest cities in Mexico or served as the main population magnets of their region. Their founding significantly transformed the physical and environmental landscape. The infrastructure of production and urban life—homes, churches, dams, and mills—enveloped the natural landscape. The need for foodstuffs, goods, and resources led to the creation of population centers, grain and livestock ranches, salt works, and carbon ranches, in the surrounding environs. The environmental degradation caused by these human activities— deforestation and contaminated rivers and airways—spread in concentric rings from the mines towards the hinterlands, bringing illness and disease to local residents and dramatically altering the traditional settlement sites and lifeways of autochthonous native populations. The societies that evolved in these reales developed in large part in response to the circumstances of mining. Population scarcity along with the inability to implement large-scale labor drafts in the mining district, engendered new labor arrangements and demographic and migration patterns. The need for immigrants, especially non-Spanish laborers, made mining towns among the most geographically mobile and ethnically distinct populations in New Spain. The confluence of Spaniards, native peoples, Africans, and castas, created social conditions that shaped ethnic identities, inter-ethnic interactions, and gender roles. Lack of colonial oversight in the mining borderlands provided some groups and individuals with more autonomy in their daily life, such as native peoples who recreated multi-ethnic indigenous pueblos and communities in the towns where they labored. Over time, the socioeconomic conditions of mining towns lost some of their frontier character. Closer ties with central institutions and officials reinforced the social hierarchy. In the eighteenth century, in particular, the decline in ore sharing, more coercive labor practices, and the implementation of central over local policies widened the disparity between social and ethnic groups.104 Even with these changes, New Spain’s northern mining borderlands remained dynamic and fluid social spaces, shaped by individuals from all ethnicities and social statuses, from the native prospectors who found the initial silver veins to the African women who sold chocolates on city streets.

388   Borderlands of the Iberian World

Notes Archives AGI: AHEZ: AGN: BN:

Archivo General de Indias, Seville (Spain) Archivo Histórico del Estado de Zacatecas, Zacatecas (Mexico) Archivo General de la Nación, Mexico City (Mexico) Biblioteca Nacional de México (Mexico)

1. The indigenous groups of the “Gran Chichimeca” continuously resisted colonial rule. Rebellions and sporadic fighting were endemic to the area from 1540 to 1590 until Spanish officials pursued more conciliatory strategies such as diplomacy and subsidies. The Crown charged frontier captains like Arizmendi with maintaining the fragile peace. For the peacemaking process, see Phillip Wayne Powell, “Peacemaking on North America’s First Frontier,” The Americas 16, no. 3 (1960): 221–250. On the different meanings of chichimeca see Fernando Berrojalbiz and Marie-Areti Hers, “Fluctuating Frontiers in the Borderlands of Mesoamerica,” in The Oxford Handbook of Borderlands of the Iberian World, ed. Danna A. Levin Rojo and Cynthia Radding (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019). 2. Spaniards founded San Luis Potosí in 1592–1593. For its development see Primo Feliciano Velázquez, Historia de San Luis Potosí, vols. 1 and 2 (Mexico: SMGE, 1946–1947); Guadalupe Salazar González, Las haciendas en el siglo XVII en la región minera de San Luis Potosí (San Luis Potosí: Universidad Autónoma de San Luis Potosí, 2000); Alejandro Montoya, ‘Población y sociedad en un real de minas de la frontera norte novohispana: San Luis Potosí, de finales del siglo XVI a 1810’ (PhD diss., Université de Montréal, 2004). 3. Archivo General de Indias, Seville (hereafter AGI), Guadalajara 4, no pagination, 1621. 4. See Alfredo Jiménez Núñez, Los hispanos de Nuevo México: contribución a una antropología de la cultura hispana en USA (Seville: Publicaciones de la Universidad de Sevilla, 1974); María del Carmen Velázquez, Tres estudios sobre las provincias internas de Nueva España (Mexico: El Colegio de México, 1979); Guillermo Porras Muñoz, La frontera con los indios de Nueva Vizcaya en el siglo XVII (Mexico: Fomento Cultural Banamex, A. C., 1980); Sergio Ortega Noriega, Breve historia de Sinaloa (Mexico: El Colegio de México, Fideicomiso Historia de las Américas-Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1999), 15–157. 5. For examples of Spanish-centered borderlands histories, see J. Lloyd Mecham, “The Real de Minas as a Political Institution: A Study of a Frontier Institution in Colonial Spanish America,” The Hispanic American Historical Review 7, no. 1 (1927): 45–83; Charles E. Chapman, A History of California: The Spanish Period (New York: Macmillan, 1949); John Francis Bannon, The Spanish Borderlands Frontier, 1513–1821 (Albuquerque: UNM, 1974). For more inclusive studies, see Steven W. Hackel, Children of Coyote, Missionaries of Saint Francis: Indian-Spanish Relations in Colonial California 1769–1850 (Chapel Hill: UNC, 2005); Juliana Barr, Peace Came in the Form of a Woman: Indians and Spaniards in the Texas Borderlands (Chapel Hill: UNC, 2007); David  J.  Weber, The Spanish Frontier in North America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009). 6. For mining towns in New Spain, see Robert C. West, The Mining Community in Northern New Spain: The Parral Mining District (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1949); Peter Bakewell, Silver Mining and Society in Colonial Mexico: Zacatecas, 1546–1700 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1971); David  A.  Brading, Miners and

Borderlands in the Silver Mines   389 Merchants in Bourbon Mexico, 1763–1810 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1971); Oscar Alatriste, Desarrollo de la industria y la comunidad minera de Hidalgo del Parral durante la segunda mitad del siglo XVIII (1765–1810) (Mexico: UNAM, 1983); Cheryl English L. Martin, Governance and Society in Colonial Mexico: Chihuahua in the Eighteenth Century (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996); Laura Pérez Rosales, Minería y sociedad en Taxco durante el siglo XVIII (Mexico: Universidad Iberoamericana, 1996); Frederique Langue, Los Señores de Zacatecas: una aristocracia minera del siglo XVII novohispano (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1999); and Salazar González, Las haciendas. 7. Dana Velasco Murillo, Urban Indians in a Silver City: Zacatecas, Mexico, 1546-1810 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2016). 8. Peter Bakewell, “Zacatecas: An Economic and Social Outline of a Silver Mining District, 1547–1700,” in Provinces of Early Mexico, ed., Ida Altman and James Lockhart (Los Angeles: Latin American Center-UCLA, 1976), 227–228; John Tutino, Making a New World: Founding Capitalism in the Bajío and Spanish North America (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). 9. Jorge Gurría Lacroix, “La minería, señuelo de conquistas y fundaciones en el siglo XVI novohispano,” in La minería en México: estudios sobre su desarollo histórico, ed. Miguel León-Portilla et al. (Mexico: UNAM, 1978), 42; Modesto Ardévo Bargalló, La minería y la metalurgia en la América Española durante la época colonial (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1955), 48. 10. Robert  C.  West, “Early Silver Mining in New Spain, 1531–1555,” in In Quest of Mineral Wealth: Aboriginal and Colonial Mining and Metallurgy in Spanish America, ed. Alan  K.  Craig and Robert  C.  West (Baton Rouge: Geoscience Publications, Dept. of Geography and Anthropology-LSU, 1994), 120–122. 11. For the connection between gold and colonization in the early conquest, see Gurría Lacroix, “La minería, señuelo de conquistas,” 43–60. 12. James Lockhart and Stuart B. Schwartz, Early Latin America: A History of Colonial Spanish America and Brazil (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 255–256. 13. Lockhart and Schwartz, Early Latin America, 290. 14. See West, “Early Silver Mining,” 124. Dana Velasco Murillo is currently researching native prospectors and their participation in initial discoveries. 15. Bakewell, Silver Mining and Society, 7–8. 16. West, “Early Silver Mining,” 122. 17. AGI, Justicia, 13–16v, 1564. 18. ‘[Minas del Fresnillo II],’ as transcribed in René Acuña, Relaciones geográficas del siglo XVI: Nueva Galicia (Mexico: IIA-UNAM, 1982), 119. 19. ‘[Minas de San Demetrio],’ as transcribed in Acuña, Relaciones geográficas, 103–105. 20. ‘[Minas de San Demetrio],’ as transcribed in Acuña, Relaciones geográficas, 104. 21. Bakewell, Silver Mining and Society, 29. 22. “[Minas del Peñol],” as transcribed in René Acuña, Relaciones geográficas, 114. 23. “[Minas del Peñol].” The term vecino had a variety of meanings depending on the period, region, and context. In relation to censuses, such as this count from Fresnillo, it referred to heads of household. See Velasco Murillo, Urban Indians, 7–8. 24. Chantal Cramaussel, Poblar la frontera: La provincia de Santa Bárbara en Nueva Vizcaya durante los siglos XVI y XVII (Zamora: El Colegio de Michoacán, 2006), 85–134. 25. Jose Moya, “Introduction,” in The Oxford Handbook of Latin American History, ed. Jose Moya (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 8.

390   Borderlands of the Iberian World 26. For the Andes, see Nicholas A. Robins, Mercury, Mining, and Empire: The Human and Ecological Cost of Colonial Silver Mining in the Andes (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011). 27. Daviken Studnicki-Gizbert and David Schecter, “The Environmental Dynamics of a Colonial Fuel-Rush: Silver Mining and Deforestation in New Spain, 1522 to 1810,” Environmental History 15, no.1 (2010): 95. 28. West, “The Mining Community,” 41–42; 22. 29. Phil C. Weigand, “Mining and Mineral Trade in Prehispanic Zacatecas,” in Mining and Mineral Techniques in Ancient Mesoamerica, ed. Phil C. Weigand and Gretchen Gwynne (Stony Brook, NY: Department of Anthropology, SUNY, 1983), 110–111. 30. John F. Richards, The Unending Frontier: An Environmental History of the Early Modern World (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003), 366–372. 31. Studnicki-Gizbert and Schecter, “The Environmental Dynamics,” 99–106. For the longterm effects of charcoal production, see Matthew J. Taylor, “Biomass in the Borderlands: Charcoal and Firewood Production in Sonoran Ejidos,” Journal of the Southwest 4, no. 1 (2006), 63–90. 32. Studnicki-Gizbert and Schecter, “The Environmental Dynamics,” 107–108; For the impact of environmental changes on northern indigenous groups see Cynthia Radding, Wandering Peoples: Colonialism, Ethnic Spaces, and Ecological Frontiers (Northwestern Mexico, 1700–1850) (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997). 33. For labor and mining in New Spain during this period, see Bakewell, Silver Mining and Society, 121–130; Silvio Zavala, El servicio personal de los indios en la Nueva España, 1576–1599, vol. 3 (Mexico: CEH-El Colegio de México, 1987), 299–396; 338; Robert Haskett, “ ‘Our Suffering with the Taxco Tribute’: Involuntary Mine Labor and Indigenous Society in Central New Spain,” Hispanic American Historical Review 71, no. 3 (1991): 447–475; Peter Bakewell, “Notes on the Mexican Silver Mining Industry in the 1590s,” in Mines of Silver and Gold in the Americas, ed. Peter Bakewell (Brookfield: Variorum, 1997), 170, 184; Ignacio del Río, “Sobre la aparición del trabajo libre asalariado en el norte de Nueva España, siglos XVI y XVII,” in Estudios históricos sobre la formación del norte de México, ed. Ignacio del Río (Mexico: UNAM, 2009) 27–46. 34. Kendall W. Brown, A History of Mining in Latin America: From the Colonial Era to the Present (Albuquerque: UNM, 2012), 20. 35. Ida Altman, The War for Mexico’s West: Spaniards and Indians in New Galicia, 1524–1550 (Albuquerque: UNM, 2010), 84–87. 36. Del Río, ‘Sobre la aparición,’ 28–29; Velasco Murillo, Urban Indians, 34–36. 37. Kendall  W.  Brown, “The Impact of Colonial Latin American Mining: For the Global Economy and the Environment.” Paper presented at the American Historical Association 129th Annual Meeting, New York City, January 4, 2015. 38. As cited in Del Río, ‘Sobre la aparición,’ 39. 39. ‘Relación de lo hecho por el señor licenciado Gaspar de la Fuente, oidor de esta Real Audiencia, Visitador General de este reino del tiempo que anduvo en la visita de él,’ as transcribed by Jean-Pierre Berthe in Sociedades en construcción: la Nueva Galicia según las visitas de oidores, 1606–1616, ed. Jean-Pierre Berthe et al. (Guadalajara: UdG, CEMCA, 2000), 107. 40. AGI, Guadalajara 5, 12–23, 1550. 41. Brading, Miners and Merchants, 146. For free-wage labor in the Mexican mining district, see Robert C. West, Sonora: Its Geographic Personality (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993), 62–63, and The Mining Community, 48–51; Velasco Murillo, Urban Indians, 37–42.

Borderlands in the Silver Mines   391 42. See Alonso de la Mota y Escobar, Descripción geográfica de los reinos de Nueva Galicia, Nueva Vizcaya y Nuevo León (Mexico: Editorial Pedro Robredo, 1940), 151–152. 43. Archivo Histórico del Estado de Zacatecas (hereafter AHEZ), Libro de Cabildo, 2, f. 252v, 1609; 3, 2, 1614. 44. Del Río, “Sobre la aparición,” 42. 45. West, The Mining Community, 84. 46. Primo Feliciano Velázquez, “Fundación del pueblo de San Luis,” in La ciudad indígena de los siete barrios: San Luis Potosí, ed. José Félix Zavala (San Luis Potosí, 1996), 31. 47. “Relación de lo hecho,” 123. 48. For the Tlaxcalan colonies see Rafael Montejano y Aguiñaga, “La evolución de los tlaxcaltecas en San Luis Potosí,” in Constructores de la nación: La migración tlaxcalteca en el norte de la Nueva España, ed. María Isabel Monroy Castillo (San Luis Potosí: El Colegio de San Luis, Gobierno del Estado de Tlaxcala, 1999); Eugene Sego, Aliados y adversarios: los colonos tlaxcaltecas en la frontera septentrional de Nueva España (San Luis Potosí: El Colegio de San Luis, 1998). 49. “Relación de nuestra Señora de los Zacatecas, sacada de la información que, por mandado del Consejo, en ella se hizo el año de 1608,” in Pedro de Valencia, obras completas, ed. Jesús Paniagua Pérez and Rafael González Cañal, 291–301, Humanistas Españoles 5 (Salamanca: Secretariado de Publicaciones de la Universidedad de León, 1995), 185. 50. West, The Mining Community, 5. For these northern indigenous peoples, see Susan Deeds, “Labyrinths of Mestizaje: Understanding Cultural Persistence and Transformation in Nueva Vizcaya,” in The Oxford Handbook of Borderlands of the Iberian World, ed. Danna A. Levin Rojo and Cynthia Radding (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019). 51. Felipe Castro Gutiérrez, Los tarascos y el imperio español, 1600–1740 (Mexico: UNAM, UMSNH, 2004), 46–49. Kendall Brown, A History of Mining, 66. Brown argues that lazadores, or labor recruiters, unlawfully “impress[ed]” individuals into mine labor. 52. Jane Mangan, Trading Roles: Gender, Ethnicity, and the Urban Economy in Colonial Potosí (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 160. 53. For San Luis Potosí, see Laurent Corbeil, ‘Identities in Motion: The Formation of a Plural Indio Society in Early San Luis Potosí, New Spain, 1591–1630’ (PhD diss., McGill University, 2015), 42; for Guanajuato, Brading, Miners and Merchants, 224. 54. For Zacatecas, see ‘Relación de nuestra Señora,’ 182, 185. 55. “Relación de lo hecho,” 134. 56. Mónica Blanco, Alma Parra, and Ethelia Ruiz Medrano, Breve historia de Guanajuato (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2000), 66. 57. Corbeil, “Identities in Motion,” 42–43. 58. Marcelo Carmagnani, “Demografía y sociedad: la estructura de los centros mineros del norte de México, 1600–1720,” Historia Mexicana 21, no. 3 (1972): 422. 59. AHEZ, Libro de Cabildo, 4, 4–4v, 1636. 60. Richard L. Garner, Zacatecas, 1750-1821: The Study of a Late Colonial Mexican City (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 1970), 7. Garner estimates that the average population of Zacatecas during the colonial period was about twenty-four thousand people. 61. “Relación de lo hecho,” 124. 62. Peter Gerhard, A Guide to the Historical Geography of New Spain, rev. ed. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993), 218. 63. For the impact of epidemics in northern Mexico, albeit in the eighteenth century, see Chantal Cramaussel, “Population and Epidemics North of Zacatecas,” in The Oxford

392   Borderlands of the Iberian World Handbook of Borderlands of the Iberian World, ed. Danna  A.  Levin Rojo and Cynthia Radding (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019). 64. For the autochthonous mining population, see François Rodriguez-Loubet, Les Chichimèques: archéologie et ethnohistorie des chasseurs-collecteurs du San Luis Potosí, Mexique (Mexico: Colección de Estudios Mesoamericanos, 1985); Susan Deeds, Defiance and Deference in Mexico’s Colonial North: Indians Under Spanish Rule in Nueva Vizcaya (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003); and Verónica Zamora Ayala, “Asentamientos prehispánicos en el estado de Guanajuato,” Acta Universitaria 14, no. 2 (2004): 25–44. 65. See Tatiana Seijas, “The Royal Road of the Interior in New Spain: Indigenous Commerce and Political Action,” in The Oxford of Borderlands of the Iberian World, ed. Danna A. Levin Rojo and Cynthia Radding (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019). 66. AGI, Contaduría 851, Morlete, 23v, 1590. 67. AGI, Contaduría 851, 1591. 68. For studies of native peoples and mining towns in New Spain, see Haskett, “Our Suffering with the Taxco Tribute”; Velasco Murillo, Urban Indians; Corbeil, “Identities in Motion.” 69. Velasco Murillo, Urban Indians, 38. 70. Corbeil, “Identities in Motion,” 49–51. 7 1. Languages present included Nahuatl, Tarascan, Otomi, Tepehuan, Tepecan, Guachichil, Concha, and Coca. Corbeil, “Identities in Motion,” 66–67. 72. AHEZ, Libro de Cabildo, 1, 70, 1577. 73. See Velasco Murillo, Urban Indians, 70–81, 94–100. 74. See Peter Bakewell, Miners of the Red Mountain (Albuquerque: UNM, 1984), 49; West, The Mining Community, 5, 55–56. 75. “Relación de lo hecho,” 120. 76. Dana Velasco Murillo and Pablo Sierra Silva, “Mine Workers and Weavers: Afro Indigenous Labor Arrangements and Interactions in Puebla and Zacatecas, 1600–1700,” in City Indians in Spain’s American Empire: Urban Indigenous Society in Colonial Mesoamerica and Andean South America, 1521–1810, ed. Dana Velasco Murillo, Mark Lentz, and Margarita R. Ochoa (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2012), 104–127. 77. AHEZ, Criminales, box 1, exp. 59, 1–4v, 1633. 78. Archivo General de la Nación, Mexico (hereafter AGN), “Proceso y causa contra Francisca Delgado,” Inquisition, vol. 480, exp. 7, 1665. 79. Velasco Murillo, Urban Indians, 136–138; 183. 80. Carmagnani, “Demografía y sociedad,” 427–437. 81. James Lockhart, “Between the Lines,” in Of Things of the Indies: Essays Old and New in Early Latin American History (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 236. 82. For northern New Spain, see Susan Deeds, “Double Jeopardy: Indian Women in Jesuit Missions of Nueva Vizcaya,” in Indian Women of Early Mexico, ed., Susan Schroeder, Stephanie Wood, and Robert Haskett (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999), 255–272; Leslie Offutt, ‘Women’s Voices from the Frontier: San Esteban de Nueva Tlaxcala in the Late Eighteenth Century,’ in Indian Women of Early Mexico, ed. Susan Schroeder, Stephanie Wood, and Robert Haskett (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997), 273–289; Dana Velasco Murillo, “Laboring Above Ground: Indigenous Women in New Spain’s Silver-Mining District, Zacatecas, Mexico, 1620–1770,” The Hispanic American Historical Review 93, no. 1 (2013): 3–32. The South American historiography on this topic is more robust, see Kathleen  J.  Higgins, ‘Licentious Liberty’ in a Brazilian Gold-Mining Region: Slavery, Gender, and Social Control in Eighteenth-Century Sabará, Minas Gerais (University Park: Penn State University Press, 1999); and Mangan, Trading Roles.

Borderlands in the Silver Mines   393 83. Biblioteca Nacional de México, Archivo del Fondo Franciscano, box 58, folder 1160, no. 2, 1–2, 1623. 84. As transcribed by West, The Mining Community, 93–97, from Archivo Municipal de Hidalgo de Parral, Protocolos, 1649. 85. Corbeil, “Identities in Motion,” 1–2. 86. See Velasco Murillo, “Laboring Above Ground,” 22–31. 87. Velázquez, “Fundación del pueblo,” 26–27. 88. AHEZ, Libro de Cabildo, 1, 16, 1562. 89. See Solange Alberro, “Zacatecas, zona frontera, según los documentos inquisitoriales, siglos XVI y XVII,” Estudios de Historia Novohispana 8, no. 8 (1985): 139–174. 90. For further evidence that the northern provinces provided some ease from the strictures of colonial norms, see Deeds “Labyrinths of Mestizaje,” and Martin, Governance, 159–183. 91. “Relación de lo hecho,” 136–137; 122. 92. “Relación de lo hecho,” 122; 128. 93. “Este es un traslado,” transcribed by José Enciso Contreras, in Ordenanzas de Zacatecas del siglo XVI y otros documentos normativos neogallegos (Zacatecas: Ayuntamiento de Zacatecas, 1998), 49, 48. 94. “Relación de lo hecho,” 127. 95. “Relación de lo hecho,” 127, 129. 96. In Zacatecas, these fights were called saçemis. Velasco Murillo, ‘ “For the Last Time, Once and for All”: Indians, Violence, and Local Authority in the Colonial City, Zacatecas, Mexico, 1587–1628,’ Ethnohistory 63. no. 1 (2016): 47–70; Corbeil, “Identities in Motion,” 266–280. 97. “Este es un traslado,” 49. 98. Thomas Calvo, “The Warmth of the Hearth: Seventeenth-Century Guadalajara Families,” in Sexuality and Marriage in Colonial Latin America, ed. Asunción Lavrin (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), 304. 99. See “Relación de lo hecho,” 105–107. 100. Carmagnani, “Demografía y sociedad,” 442, 444; Cramaussel, Poblar la frontera, 163–164. 101. AGN, “Proceso y causa contra Francisca Delgado,” Inquisition, vol. 480, exp. 7, 1685. 102. Solange Alberro, Inquisición y Sociedad en México, 1571–1700 (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1988), 162. 103. For another discussion of inquisitorial activity against women in Mexico’s far north, see Deeds “Labyrinths of Mestizaje.” In her coverage of an eighteenth-century case from Monclova, several Spanish and mulatta women were accused of witchcraft and remanded to the Inquisition. 104. For the reproduction of the social hierarchy, see Martin, Governance, 97–148. For the changing conditions of eighteenth-century mining towns, see Velasco Murillo, Urban Indians, 176–180.

Bibliography Acuña, René. Relaciones geográficas del siglo XVI: Nueva Galicia. Mexico: IIA-UNAM, 1982. Bakewell, Peter. Silver Mining and Society in Colonial Mexico: Zacatecas, 1546–1700. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1971.

394   Borderlands of the Iberian World Brading, David A. Miners and Merchants in Bourbon Mexico, 1763–1810. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1971. Brown, Kendall W. A History of Mining in Latin America: From the Colonial Era to the Present. Albuquerque: UNM, 2012. Carmagnani, Marcelo. “Demografía y sociedad: la estructura de los centros mineros del norte de México, 1600–1720.” Historia Mexicana 21, no. 3 (1972): 419–459. Corbeil, Laurent. “Identities in Motion: The Formation of a Plural Indio Society in Early San Luis Potosi, New Spain, 1591–1630.” PhD diss., McGill University, 2015. Published as The Motions Beneath. Indigenous Migrants on the Urban Frontier of New Spain. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2018. Cramaussel, Chantal. Poblar la frontera: la provincia de Santa Bárbara en Nueva Vizcaya durante los siglos XVI y XVII. Zamora: El Colegio de Michoacán, 2006. Deeds, Susan. “Labyrinths of Mestizaje: Understanding Cultural Persistence and Transformation in Nueva Vizcaya.” In The Oxford Handbook of Borderlands of the Iberian World, edited by Danna A. Levin Rojo and Cynthia Radding, 343–370. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019. “Este es un traslado,” transcription by José Enciso Contreras. In Ordenanzas de Zacatecas del siglo XVI y otros documentos normativos Neogallegos. Zacatecas: Ayuntamiento de Zacatecas, 1998. Gurría Lacroix, Jorge. ‘La minería, señuelo de conquistas y fundaciones en el siglo XVI novohispano.’ In La minería en México: estudios sobre su desarollo histórico, edited by Miguel León-Portilla, Jorge Gurría Lacroix, Roberto Moreno, and Enrique Madero Bracho, 39–65. Mexico: UNAM, 1978. Haskett, Robert. “ ‘Our Suffering with the Taxco Tribute’: Involuntary Mine Labor and Indigenous Society in Central New Spain.” Hispanic American Historical Review 71, no. 3 (1991): 447–475. Lockhart, James, and Stuart B. Schwartz. Early Latin America: A History of Colonial Spanish America and Brazil. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Mangan, Jane. Trading Roles: Gender, Ethnicity, and the Urban Economy in Colonial Potosí. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005. Martin, Cheryl English  L. Governance and Society in Colonial Mexico: Chihuahua in the Eighteenth Century. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996. “Relación de lo hecho por el señor licenciado Gaspar de la Fuente, oidor de esta Real Audiencia, Visitador General de este reino del tiempo que anduvo en la visita de él,” transcribed by Jean-Pierre Berthe. In Sociedades en construcción: La Nueva Galicia según las visitas de oidores, 1606–1616, edited by Jean-Pierre Berthe, Thomas Calvo, and Águeda Jiménez Pelayo, 95–154. Guadalajara: UdG, CEMCA, 2000. “Relación de nuestra Señora de los Zacatecas, sacada de la información que, por mandado del Consejo, en ella se hizo el año de 1608.” In Pedro de Valencia, obras completas, edited by Jesús Paniagua Pérez and Rafael González Cañal, 291–301, Humanistas Españoles 5. Salamanca: Secretariado de Publicaciones de la Universidad de León, 1995. Río, Ignacio del. “Sobre la aparición del trabajo libre asalariado en el norte de Nueva España, siglos XVI y XVII.” In Estudios históricos sobre la formación del norte de México, edited by Ignacio del Río, 27–46. Mexico: UNAM, 2009. Salazar González, Guadalupe. Las haciendas en el siglo XVII en la región minera de San Luis Potosí. San Luis Potosí: Universidad Autónoma de San Luis Potosí, 2000.

Borderlands in the Silver Mines   395 Studnicki-Gizbert, Daviken, and David Schecter. “The Environmental Dynamics of a Colonial Fuel-Rush: Silver Mining and Deforestation in New Spain, 1522 to 1810.” Environmental History 15, no. 1 (2010): 94–119. Velasco Murillo, Dana. “Laboring Above Ground: Indigenous Women in New Spain’s ­Silver- Mining District, Zacatecas, Mexico, 1620–1770.” The Hispanic American Historical Review 93, no. 1 (2013): 3–32. Velasco Murillo, Dana. Urban Indians in a Silver City: Zacatecas, Mexico, 1546–1810. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2016. Velázquez, Primo Feliciano. “Fundación del pueblo de San Luis.” In La ciudad indígena de los siete barrios: San Luis Potosí, edited by José Félix Zavala, 31. San Luis Potosí: Private edition, 1996. West, Robert C. “Early Silver Mining in New Spain, 1531–1555.” In In Quest of Mineral Wealth: Aboriginal and Colonial Mining and Metallurgy in Spanish America, edited by Alan K. Craig and Robert  C.  West, 119–135. Baton Rouge: Geoscience Publications, Department of Geography and Anthropology-LSU, 1994. West, Robert C. The Mining Community in Northern New Spain: The Parral Mining District. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1949.

chapter 15

I n digenous Histor ies i n Col on i a l Br a zil Between Ethnocide and Ethnogenesis John M. Monteiro

In a curious passage in his History of Brazil, written in 1627, Frei Vicente do Salvador mentions the obscure work of a certain Dom Diego Dávalos, “resident of Chuquiabue, in Peru,” which traces the origins of the Indians of South America to the Iberian Peninsula.1 According to D.  Diego, there once lived a barbarous people, eaters of human flesh, somewhere in the hills of Andalusia. Slaughtered by Spaniards in cruel wars, a few survivors left that land and, “guided by the winds of fortune,” first settled in the Canary Islands, then went on to the Cape Verde islands and finally landed in Brazil. “There were two brothers who set out as captains, one named Tupi and the other Guarani; the latter, leaving Tupi to populate Brazil, took his followers to Paraguay and then populated Peru.”2 Frei Vicente did not take this fantastic account seriously, but he did agree with the idea that the indigenous peoples originated from somewhere outside of the Americas, “although we do not know where, because they have no written records and there is no mention of them by any ancient author.” In identifying the Indians’ remote Peninsular origins, perhaps D. Diego was trying to say something about the unity of mankind, with this rather creative reflection upon the ancient proximity between Amerindians and European colonizers. At the same time, however, he provided a capsule narrative of the conquest, with special reference to the Tupi and the Guarani, among whom cannibalism, population decline, and migration had played a significant role in their recent history. In any case, this Spanish writer’s account is interesting not only in terms of its specific contents but also because of its explanation of the origins of ethnic names in colonial South America within the historical framework of contact and conquest. Not long after D. Diego had written his account, the Capuchin missionary Claude d’Abbeville recorded a remarkable speech by Momboré-uaçu, an elderly Tupinambá

398   Borderlands of the Iberian World chief who lived alongside the fledgling French colony at Saint Louis (later São Luís), Maranhão, in the early seventeenth century: I witnessed the arrival of the Pero [Portuguese] in Pernambuco and Potiú [. . .] In the beginning, the Pero did little other than trading, without intending to establish residence. In those days, they slept freely with [the Indians’] daughters, which our fellow men in Pernambuco & Potiú held to be a great honor. Later, they told them that they should become accustomed to them and that they needed to build fortresses to defend themselves and to build towns so they could all live together, making it seem that they desired to live as one single nation. Later, they began saying that they could no longer take their daughters in that way, and that God only allowed them to take them through marriage and that they could not marry unless the girls were baptized. And for that they needed to bring paí [priests]. So they ordered the priests to come; and these raised crosses and began to teach [the Indians] and baptize them. Later they declared that neither they nor the paí could live without slaves to serve them and to work for them. Then, our people were compelled to supply them with slaves. But they were not satisfied with the slaves captured in war, they also wanted the village children and ended up enslaving the entire nation; and they treated them with such tyranny and cruelty that those who were still free, as we were, were forced to leave the region.3

Perhaps the most important aspect of this account is that it affords a view of the conquest from a Tupinambá perspective, even though filtered through the missionary lens. “They desired to live as one single nation”: this was the Tupinambá reading of the early years of contact, when the relations between Indians and Europeans appeared to follow an indigenous logic. However, these new allies began to subvert the Indians’ expectations, interfering directly in the domains of kinship, warfare, and religion, with the increasingly invasive presence of missionaries. The insatiable thirst for slaves—here, significantly, the Jesuit mission is represented as a form of slavery—at first involved the Tupinambá as suppliers of war captives but later enslaved the Tupinambá directly. In order to guarantee their freedom, their only option was to “leave the region.” This was the conclusion Florestan Fernandes also reached nearly half a century ago, in his important study of the “Tupi reaction to conquest.”4 However, Fernandes’s Tupinambá seem to be prisoners of the structures that the ethnologist constructed in his meticulous functionalist model, and therefore they could survive the impact of conquest only through migration, as in the example of the groups that fled from Portuguese control in Pernambuco and reconstituted their “tribal cohesion” well away from the European presence. In this perspective, the Indians turned their backs on history to avoid becoming one of its victims. Other interpretations are possible. In the ensuing half century since Fernandes’s initial publication of his work on the Tupi, ethnohistorical research has re-oriented our thinking about European contact and conquest in the Americas to emphasize the production of “new peoples and new kinds of peoples,” in the words of Stuart Schwartz and Frank Salomon.5 Guillaume Boccara’s study of Mapuche ethnogenesis on the southern

Indigenous Histories in Colonial Brazil   399 frontier of Spanish America has endeavored to break down the radical opposition between precontact “purity” and post-contact “contamination,” underscoring the continuous process of cultural innovation.6 Neil Whitehead for his part, insisted that postcontact transformations include a broad spectrum of possibilities, “ranging from the total extinction of some ethnic formations to the endurance and invention of others.”7 These authors, joined by Jonathan Hill and Gary Clayton Anderson, have reconfigured the term “ethnogenesis” in ways that weave together endogenous patterns of change and the exogenous forces introduced by European expansion. Hill reminded us that “specific forms of ethnogenesis” emerge not only from the relations between subaltern peoples and the structures of domination and power, but also from the conflicts within and among indigenous and Afro-American peoples.”8 Anderson, focused on the northern frontier of Spanish America, identified processes by which “bands altered themselves culturally to forge unity with other groups, abandoning languages, social practices, and even economic processes to meet the needs of the new order.” Anderson’s study provided an important example of how to employ “external” documentary sources to shed light on native attitudes and actions as their societies underwent significant changes in response to European commerce and territorial advances.9 These innovations become important insofar as they underscore the internal dynamics of indigenous “reactions to conquest” in a different manner than that proposed by Florestan Fernandes, who assumed that the key to ethnic survival lay in the restoration of equilibrium in the “tribal organizational system.”10 The literature has increasingly emphasized the agency of native actors, grounded in their deeply ingrained cosmologies and their responses to the colonial situation, but it has left ambiguous the question of what social or ethnic units should become the subject of analysis before and after the arrival of the Europeans. Eduardo Viveiros de Castro asserted that “the freezing and isolation of ethnic groups is a post-Columbian sociological and cognitive phenomenon that strayed far from the “relative and relational nature of indigenous ethnic, political, and social categories.”11 Furthermore, as Nicholas Dirks has argued, this classification of subordinate (or potentially subordinate) peoples into naturalized and fixed categories was a necessary step in the articulation of colonial ­domination.12 The entwined processes of ethnic and social classifications imposed by the colonial order and the formation of ethnic identities by the peoples Europeans attempted to colonize cannot be separated from the demographic consequences of the conquest itself, which imposed a fundamental discontinuity in the history of indigenous societies.

Ethnocide By the time Diego Dávalos, Momboré-uaçu, and Frei Vicente do Salvador narrated their accounts in the early seventeenth century, the Brazilian coast already had experienced a terrible catastrophe. European exploration, commerce, and colonization unleashed

400   Borderlands of the Iberian World deep transformations among indigenous societies in the Americas, some intentional, while others were introduced unconsciously. In Brazil, the triple assault by the king’s vassals, by the Jesuit Soldiers of Christ, and by the microscopic battalions of deadly pathogens affected a great number of Amerindian societies, especially the coastal Tupi. Disease certainly proved to be the most lethal of these factors, showing its most brutal face in the repeated epidemics that claimed countless thousands of victims. The destructive waves of Old World diseases must be treated, following Neil Whitehead’s suggestion, with greater attention to spatial and temporal variations. According to Whitehead, authors who focus exclusively on the tragic dimension of depopulation tend to “impute far too uniform a characteristic to the spread of epidemics,” leaving aside important factors that either intensified or diminished the impact of lethal pathogens.13 Among these factors, ecological differences, nutrition, and native response played significant roles in determining different outcomes. At the same time, different labor systems or mission arrangements conditioned the impact of disease, producing widely variable mortality scales.14 Another crucial point that Whitehead makes has to do with the temporal lag between first contacts and the major episodes of epidemic disease that struck the coastal populations. At the same time, however, there is evidence that some indigenous societies came into contact with the diseases before having direct contact with European, African, Asian, or mestizo carriers. In any case, direct contact on the Brazilian coast had already spanned five decades before the first great epidemics spread. Although disease constituted the principal vector in causing death, it was far from an independent variable, since peaks of mortality coincided with other significant changes in the relations between colonizers and Indians. After all, the first major outbreaks occurred precisely in the wake of Governor Mem de Sá’s all-out offensive against recalcitrant Tupi populations in the 1550s, when significant portions of the Indian population within colonial reach were being resettled in mission villages. While this new strategy by the colony’s third governor sought to protect the Indians from indiscriminate enslavement by the colonists, it paradoxically exposed them to a far greater threat to their welfare. Indeed, the smallpox pandemic that swept the coast from Pernambuco to São Vicente in 1562–1563 hit the fledgling mission villages the hardest.15 In their most lethal form, epidemics caused disorder among indigenous populations, especially those subordinated to missionaries and colonists. Writing in 1584, the Jesuit José de Anchieta remembered the great event of twenty years earlier: In that same year of 1562, by God’s judgement, a great sickness overcame the Indians and slaves of the Portuguese, along with a great famine, killing many people, and of those who survived, many sold themselves and sought out the Portuguese to become slaves, selling themselves for a plate of manioc meal, while others asked to be placed in chains because they wanted to be slaves; death was so great among the heathen that some say that 30,000 Indian slaves and freedmen would have died in the space of two or three months.16

In that same account, Anchieta sought to quantify the dramatic decline in Bahia’s Indian population: “The people that have been wasted in Bahia over the last twenty years

Indigenous Histories in Colonial Brazil   401 is something incredible; because no one considered that so many people could ever be expended, especially in so short a time; because in the 14 missions that the Fathers maintained, 40,000 souls were gathered [. . .] and if now the three remaining missions have 3,500 souls it would be many.”17 Unfortunately, we know relatively little about Tupi responses to epidemic crises. Early Jesuit letters tell us something about the Indians’ perceptions on the origin of the new diseases, clearly associated to the presence of missionaries. Shortly after arriving in Brazil in 1549, Father Manuel da Nóbrega became alarmed not only by the frequency of disease among the baptized population but also by the rumors that were spread by “witches,” or shamans, who accused the missionaries of inflicting illness with holy water and of causing death by conversion. Father Francisco Pires wrote that many of the Indians began to avoid the missionaries altogether: “the heathen began to flee [from the missionaries] as if from death and they abandoned their houses and fled to the forests; others burned peppers to keep death from entering their homes. They carried a cross held up high, which they always feared, and some came out to the path and begged the priests not to harm them but be on their way, and showing them the path, while shaking like switches, they refused to hear any preaching.”18 At least some idea of the terror that the epidemics brought was inscribed in the dramatic term used in Brazil to this day for chicken pox: catapora, the “leaping flames.”19 While the missionaries, in their efforts to protect the Indians, created conditions for their destruction, other colonial activities also contributed to the spread of disease throughout the vast lands of Portuguese America. In their search for Indian slaves and mineral wealth, backwoodsmen from Salvador, São Paulo, São Luís, and Belém were among the principal agents of contact during the first centuries of colonization. Although contemporaneous as well as modern accounts have highlighted the violence of overland slaving expeditions and river-bound canoe expeditions as a factor in the depopulation of parts of the interior, disease played a crucial role during these excursions. Following epidemics, colonists outfitted major expeditions seeking to replenish the Indian labor force; however, the constant introduction of a high-risk population of new captives and mission neophytes in elevated quantities also contributed to fresh outbreaks, in a seemingly endless spiral of mortality.20 In sum, following Gerald Sider’s suggestive essay on “identity as history,” in order to understand ethnogenesis in colonial America, one must first grasp the radical discontinuity that the conquest represented, creating a significant rupture “between the historical dynamics of pre- and post-contact native social systems.”21 Devastating epidemics, spatial dislocations, changes in the form and meaning of warfare all contributed to fundamental transformations in indigenous societies. However, rather than focusing only on the dilapidation of native structures as a result of conquest—a term increasingly used to describe the early Brazilian “encounter”—it seems rather more interesting to analyze the emergence of different and divergent forms of indigenous society following the definitive arrival of Europeans on American soil. More research is needed to elucidate further both the dislocation of indigenous societies and the new social formations that emerged from the colonial encounter.

402   Borderlands of the Iberian World

Ethnogenesis New ethnic configurations developed through the different ways in which indigenous polities engaged with the colonial project, whether as allies, enemies, or refugees. Involvement in colonial wars or “ethnic soldiering”—in Neil Whitehead’s words— describes the ways in which specific ethnic groups carried out colonial military actions against indigenous enemies, European invaders, and runaway slave communities.22 Their participation in colonial violence signified not only the Europeans’ manipulation of pre-colonial rivalries between ethnic groups, but also the generation of new sociopolitical units.23 From early European expansion onward, ethnic names acquired a historically ­specific character. The trajectory of Potiguar leaders in the northern Brazilian provinces of Paraíba and Rio Grande do Norte illustrates the process of ethnic consolidation within the context of colonial wars. Their name presents different origins and meanings: alternatively identified as Petiguar (tobacco chewers) or Potiguar (shrimp eaters).24 Over time, Potiguar and its Portuguese translation, camarão (shrimp), identified this indigenous dynasty in formation. Once they secured firearms from French traders, the Potiguar became feared enemies of the Portuguese during the latter sixteenth century. They engaged in punishing wars against the Portuguese and their Tobajara allies, but an important faction of Potiguar assented to a peace agreement in 1599. After accepting baptism and a new alliance with the Portuguese, they turned their military prowess against the Aimoré rebellions in the captaincies of Ilhéus and Porto Seguro, to the south. Commanded by Chief Zorobabé, six caravels carried thirteen hundred Potiguar and Tobajara warriors to these Atlantic coastal provinces, where they defeated and enslaved several Aimoré groups. The Camarão family suggests another path followed by the post-conquest Potiguar. While Antônio Felipe Camarão’s role as a faithful ally to the Portuguese in the war against the Dutch is well known, this figure must be placed in a larger context, in a colonial world where alliance, vassalage, and privilege constituted important elements in the projection of native leaders. His father was a powerful Potiguar chief, who in the late sixteenth century had helped the French stall the expansion of Portuguese interests to the north of the São Francisco River. Potiguaçu—the Great Shrimp—was chief of the Potiguar on the left bank of the Potengi River in Rio Grande do Norte, and after a protracted negotiation, he agreed to the peace accord signed at the Reis Magos fort in 1599. He also consented to the presence of Franciscan missionaries among his people, and he himself was baptized Antônio Camarão in 1612. But this did not mean that these warriors set aside their arms. Much to the contrary, now allied to the Portuguese in their continued march to the north with the intention of taking Maranhão from the French, the Potengi Potiguar became indispensable allies in the many bloody conflicts that marked the seventeenth century. Potiguaçu led his warriors to participate in the early Maranhão campaigns around 1614, but he appears to have died on the way there.

Indigenous Histories in Colonial Brazil   403 Born around 1601, Antônio Felipe Camarão was still a child when dispatched to a r­ elative’s village in Pernambuco, probably along with other Potiguar children who were sent to missions following the peace accord of 1599. In the words of a Jesuit writer, he was “raised and indoctrinated” by the Franciscans in their São Miguel mission, where he also learned to read and write. Following in his father’s footsteps, this Camarão became an important leader, commanding mission troops that were mobilized by Crown authorities to combat threats to Portuguese control: French, Dutch, maroons, and especially indigenous enemies. Among the latter, several Potiguar groups played a major role, especially those of the Baía da Traição (Treason Bay) in Paraíba, who stormed the city of Salvador with the Dutch in 1625. For services rendered, King Philip III (IV of Spain) awarded this leader with membership in the Order of Christ with an annual income of forty thousand réis, along with another forty thousand as salary for his post as Captain-Major of the Potiguar Indians. Loyal vassal to the Crown, Antônio Felipe Camarão thus received posts, honors and income, which presumably were hereditary rewards. The Camarão name became attached to a succession of native ­leaders who held the post of Governor of the Indians of Pernambuco and Attached Captaincies, thus constituting a veritable indigenous dynasty that was to last well into the eighteenth century.25

In Search of the Colonial Indian The presence of titled Indian dynasties in Portuguese America proved relatively rare and usually derived from rewards for military services, but it does afford a glimpse at the important role played by native actors in the unfolding of the colonial drama. To be sure, the inclusion of different indigenous populations within the colonial sphere—or at its margins—remains a key issue to be explored in greater detail, especially since most of the pertinent unpublished sources in Brazilian and overseas archives deal with missions, land, and labor.26 A new image begins to emerge of political and spiritual leaders who operated within and often against the colonial order, securing a place for them as relevant historical agents. This picture stands in stark contrast to the more usual approach to resistance, often portrayed as amorphous, collective actions in stubborn defense of ancestral traditions. By shifting their focus to native strategies and actions, recent studies have underscored the need to revise a broad spectrum of questions, ranging from the so-called spiritual conquest, to Indian slavery, mission labor, and the impact of late colonial reforms, among others.27 Regina Celestino de Almeida has shown in her important study of Rio de Janeiro that indigenous peoples reconfigured their identities in mission villages throughout the colonial period.28 Notwithstanding the missionaries’ claims that the Indians once converted to Christianity had left their pagan pasts behind, their accounts unwittingly reveal rich details about the persistence of native religious manifestations in the ways they reconstituted their social and symbolic universe to cope with devastating

404   Borderlands of the Iberian World e­ pidemics, forced migrations, and the imposition of a Christian cosmology.29 For example, Jesuit Visitor Cristóvão de Gouveia’s inspection of the Brazilian missions and colleges between 1583 and 1590, as related in Fernão Cardim’s “Epistolar Narrative,” includes numerous descriptions of how the mission Tupinambá adjusted to the colonial order.30 Two principal themes emerge from the foregoing discussion: the reconfiguration of warfare and the centrality of rituals. Jesuit Fernão Cardim related an episode that illustrated the Indians’ quandary when they observed the missionaries’ apparent calm in the face of danger: “A boy, passing by the Visitor in a canoe, asked in his language: Pay, marapé guaranîme nande popeçoari? [that is], Father, how can you be unarmed in these times of war and siege?” In the Jesuits’ view, they shielded themselves with the word of God. They were, after all, the Soldiers of Christ and this military equivalency did not go unnoticed by the Indians. A few years earlier, a letter sent by Diego Topinambá Peribira Mongetá Quatiá (probably a composite name disguising the true author of the letter, Jesuit Francisco Pires) to the Jesuit college of Coimbra narrated an account of “a pilgrimage to the interior, to where we set out armed with Christ’s cross and his words.”31 The Jesuits made a point of reporting the Indians’ enthusiastic response to the elaborate rituals they prepared for the Catholic liturgical calendar. Holy Thursday (endoenças) was observed in both Portuguese and Tupi, as were many religious ceremonies: “the mandato [ablution ceremony] was given in Portuguese, and the passion in the native tongue, which caused great devotion and brought tears to the Indians.” Tupi constituted the main language in devotional performances, but the Jesuits also taught Portuguese, Latin, and Spanish to the curumins, or Indian boys. In another ceremony in the same mission of Espírito Santo, “The Indians performed a dialogue in the Brazilian [Tupi] language, Portuguese, and Castilian, and they are very graceful in speaking peregrine languages, especially Castilian.”32 These accounts undoubtedly tell us more about Jesuit strategies and intentions than about indigenous responses. But they reveal the ways in which mission Indians forged a unique space of their own within the colonial project.33 Celebrations that were intended to receive the Jesuit authorities with the requisite solemnity included the performance of native traditions, such as the ritual sweeping of the visitor’s path and the renowned greeting ceremony known as the “welcome of tears.” As Cardim’s description suggests, mission Indians performed these reception rituals in ways that demonstrated their Christian devotion while conserving some of their own traditions, which gained new meanings on each new occasion. The “Epistolar Narrative” includes passages that reveal the hybrid character of these celebrations, as there was a clear effort to integrate the new religious activities into pre-Christian patterns. “The curumins, or boys, their bows and arrows raised, shouted out their war cry, and painted in various tones, naked, they advanced with their hands raised to receive the father’s blessing, saying in Portuguese ‘Jesus Christ be blessed.’ ” The devil, no less, appeared regularly in the celebrations and theater performances of these missions. Cardim remarked that “an anhangá, or devil, did not fail to appear, as he emerged from behind the trees; this was the Indian Ambrósio Pires, who had gone to Lisbon with Father Rodrigo de Freitas. The Indians celebrate this figure with great enthusiasm because of his attractiveness, expressions, and caginess; they always put some devil in all their festivities, if these are to be well celebrated.”34

Indigenous Histories in Colonial Brazil   405 Mission Indians gave great importance to sacred music, instructional dialogues, and carefully staged rituals without abandoning native chants and rites. Despite the missionaries’ efforts to suppress indigenous ceremonies, Cardim reported that following one of the devotional ceremonies described in the Epistolar Narrative, the Indians carried on the festivities on their own, to the rhythm of “gourds filled with stones (not unlike Portuguese boys with their tambourines)” and choreographed so “that they never miss a step, and stamp on the ground together in such a way that they make the earth shake.” Not sure of what he had seen, Cardim in effect had witnessed a ritual to the sound of the maracá, recalling the glories of past warfare and vengeance. “I could not understand what they were chanting,” confessed Cardim, “but some of the priests told me that they were singing in verse about the deeds and deaths their ancestors perpetrated.”35 On a different occasion, “the procession was filled with devotion, with many torches and bonfires, and many of the Indians had to be disciplined, since they go at one another in a cruel manner, and this they hold not only to be a virtue, but they also ­consider it to be an act of bravery to take blood and become abaetê, that is, valiant.”36 Two centuries later, Alexandre Rodrigues Ferreira observed this mixture of precolo­ nial and post-contact features in the villages he visited during his “philosophical journey” through the Amazon. His account of the ceramic bowls (cuias) made by the Indian women of Monte Alegre and Santarém provides an invaluably detailed description of production techniques and volume. These villages produced five to six thousand cuias annually, earning 100 to 120 réis apiece, “depending on the size, the color, the quality, or if it is smooth or in sections.” Europeans purchased most of the production: “The Indian women who know that the whites will buy them, make sure to perfect them.” But Alexandre Rodrigues noticed with particular interest that the Indian women reserved part of their production for their own use, with not only material but also symbolic implications: The cuias are the Indians’ plates, cups, and all of their tableware. Each of them reserves one for the Principal [headman] from which to drink water or wine [probably the fermented drink cauím] when he visits [. . .] The bowl is distinguished by a shell ornament, attached by a ball of wax covered with beads, and a muiraquitã [a sacred green stone in the form of an animal] on top, which serves as a handle for the Principal. They offer it to him on a tray made from [P]atauá palm shafts. No matter how hard I tried to buy one of these, it was not possible, so great is the esteem that they hold for the bowl from which their chief drinks.37

Agents of their Own History Just as Momboré-uaçu’s reflection served to inform the relations between the Tupinambá and the new wave of Europeans that had come to Maranhão, other leaders summoned their traditional knowledge to say something about their position vis-à-vis the history of contact. As recorded in Claude d’Abbeville’s History of the Capuchin

406   Borderlands of the Iberian World Missions in Maranhão, Tupinambá leader Japiaçu narrated the origins of the radical ­separation between Indians and whites: We lived as one, you and us; but God, sometime after the deluge, dispatched his bearded prophets to teach us his laws. These prophets gave our father, from whom we descend, two swords, one made of wood and the other iron, allowing him to choose between them. He thought the iron sword was too heavy and chose the wooden one. Seeing this, the ancestor from whom you descend, who was more clever, took the iron sword. Ever since then, we have been miserable, because when the prophets saw that we did not want to believe in them, they returned to the heavens, leaving their footprints inscribed with crosses in the rocks near Potiú.38

This provocative speech can be interpreted in different ways. Japiaçu’s account appears to transform the tragic history of contact into myth, offering a native explanation— within an indigenous narrative genre—for the subordinate condition experienced by the Tupinambá of Maranhão in the early seventeenth century. When read more closely, the most revealing aspect of d’Abbeville’s rendering of the indigenous leader’s words lies in the displacement of the subject, since it was the actions of the Indian’s ancestor that determined the march of history. Manuela Carneiro da Cunha’s commentary on this and other mythical passages that explain the origins of whites, emphasizes the fact that “in the myth, a choice is offered to the Indians, who rather than victims of some predestined force become agents determining their own fate. Perhaps they made the wrong choice. But at least they saved their dignity in having shaped their own history.”39 Recognizing in native leaders knowledgeable subjects capable of constructing their own history marks an important advance in Brazilian history and anthropology. It should be noted, however, that post-contact choices were conditioned invariably by a series of factors set in motion with the arrival and expansion of Europeans in the Americas. In the wake of the demographic catastrophe that deeply affected native ­societies, so closely associated with the Europeans’ military, religious, and economic designs, fragmented societies faced a desperate situation in which they were increasingly drawn into an emerging colonial scenario. Native leaders developed various responses to increasingly unfavorable conditions, often adopting objects, strategies, and discourses introduced by the colonizers. Hence native resistance did not cling stubbornly to precolonial traditions, despite the traditional way in which it has been portrayed, but rather gained force and meaning as indigenous leaders and societies opened themselves to innovation. European observers were slow to recognize this characteristic of indigenous politics in their portrayal of the Indians who resisted as veritable savages that by nature were openly hostile to the whites. Sebastião da Rocha Pita, author of a History of Portuguese America, published in 1730, expressed this view in a chapter on the Portuguese occupation of the sertão in Pernambuco, where he pointed out that the landowners who had received grants measured in leagues, had to conquer that territory step by step, so great was the Indians’ resistance to their advance.40 The opposite view of this image of

Indigenous Histories in Colonial Brazil   407 “barbarous heathen” involved Indians who collaborated with colonial projects. An anonymous, mid-eighteenth-century document provides an interesting portrayal of this second stereotype by listing twenty-five examples of “Famous Indians in Arms who contributed to the temporal and spiritual conquest of this State of Brazil.” Headed by Dom Felipe Camarão, the list included several leaders whose conduct should have dispelled certain notions about the Indians’ supposed incapacity to act politically. “From these and other similar cases,” argued the anonymous writer, “clearly we can infer that the Indians of our Lusitanian America are not as limited, crude, and undisciplined as ordinarily portrayed, where they are treated more like irrational wild beasts and brutes than as men capable of reason.”41 Among others, the author singled out “Pindobuçu, magnanimous, intrepid and brave who, wielding a wooden sword, threatened his own in order to maintain peace with the Portuguese and the favor of the Jesuit priests.” He also mentioned “Garcia de Sá, another famous preacher of the Faith, whose spirit resembled that of the Apostle of the Gentiles.” Or yet another Indian preacher: “The celebrated Jacaranha, great friend of the missionaries who dressed in a long blue habit with a red cross embroidered on his breast.” In addition to their assistance in the conversion field, the author also described the participation of Indians in other colonial activities, as in the dislocation of indigenous populations from the remote hinterland to the colonial settlements. For example, “the famous Indian Arco Verde (Green Bow), who proved so zealous in his faith that he traveled 400 leagues into the wilderness in search of his kinsmen in order to bring them under the control of the Church and the priests, with little fear of his enemies, whom he defeated, placing them in retreat and killing many.” In effect, the author emphasized the collaborative role of these Indians. However, it seems clear that such activities involved much more than the mere manipulation of native leaders by colonial interests. Perhaps more to the point, these examples show how different indigenous subjects adopted some of the symbols and discourses of the Europeans, in order to forge their own space within the New World that was beginning to become delineated. The Indians’ adoption and adaptation of colonial instruments was revealed as well in the rebellious movements that opposed colonial rule. The Tupinambá of Maranhão, for example, in addition to the wooden swords, also used the written word in a ­conspiracy plotted by a leader named Amaro, who supposedly had been “raised” by the Jesuits in a Pernambuco mission. Brandishing a few Portuguese letters, Amaro pretended to read them to a large meeting of rebellious headmen, asserting that “the subject of these letters is that all the Tupinambá are to be enslaved.” According to colonial writer Bernardo Pereira de Berredo, “this suggestion was so diabolical that it soon took hold of the brutality of so many barbarians, who agreed unanimously that they should kill all the whites.”42 Father Antônio Vieira’s, account of the Ibiapaba mission, took special note of the ways that rebellious Indians used writing in order to negotiate peace with the Jesuits who had begun to encroach on this “Geneva of the backlands.” One of the local leaders, Francisco,

408   Borderlands of the Iberian World “presented letters to the missionaries, which they brought from all the headmen, encased in calabashes sealed with wax, so that they would not be damaged when the bearers cross the rivers.” Moreover, “the priests were impressed when they saw that the letters were written on Venice paper, and closed with sealing wax from India.”43 This same fascination for writing appeared in Jesuit João Felipe Bettendorf ’s late ­seventeenth-century account. The Jesuits did not give up trying to teach the Indians how to read and write, although they lacked paper and ink. Remembering his first years as a priest in the Mortugura mission in Maranhão in the early 1660s, Bettendorf wrote: And so they would not have to stop learning for want of books, ink, and paper, I ordered them to make ink from carbon mixed with the juice from some plants and to write with that on the broad leaves of [P]acobeira palms; and to make it all easier, I put a little stick in their hands to serve as a pen and I taught them to form and become familiar with the letters, both large and small, in the dust [of the village] and sand of the beaches, which they enjoyed so much, that they filled the village and the beaches with letters.44

The Indians covered the beach with letters, finding in the written word an alternative weapon from which indigenous leaders could choose, not unlike the wooden sword. While the myth presented at the beginning of this section would appear to dislocate the turning point in the course of the group’s fate to a remote past, the narrative pointed directly to the contemporary situation experienced by the Tupinambá. Japiaçu knew very well who his interlocutors were. After all, the bearded prophets had returned, presenting new choices that were as challenging as the one presented to their ancestral father. It was at this crossroads, where tradition and innovation met face to face, that the history of the Indians was forged against the strong current of colonial expansion—and it continues to be forged today. The challenge of interpreting history from a perspective in which native peoples play a critical and crucial role remains a daunting task. Different from many other countries in the Americas, where the presence of indigenous peoples has had an important place in the articulation of national identities, Indians in Brazil continue, for the most part, to be conjugated in the past tense. A small minority, today’s Indian peoples barely account for 0.4 percent of Brazil’s total population according to official statistics. Seen in a different way, however, behind that apparently negligible sum flourishes a rich source of diversity—more than 220 distinct ethnic groups speaking over 170 different languages—which constitutes a historical legacy that the country has yet to acknowledge fully. Although founded on some truth, the simplistic chronicle of destruction is no longer acceptable to explain the historical trajectory of the indigenous populations within Brazilian territory. What that approach leaves out are the multiple experiences of peoples who elaborated and recreated identities as creative responses to the grim prospects that contact, contagion, and subordination offered. There is yet much to be done, but fortunately several anthropologists and a few historians have begun to take steps in the right direction.

Indigenous Histories in Colonial Brazil   409

Notes 1. Portions of this chapter had been published in John Monteiro’s essay, “Rethinking Amerindian Resistance and Persistence in Colonial Portuguese America,” in New Approaches to Resistance in Brazil and Mexico, edited by John Gledhill and Patience A. Schell (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012, 25–43). Their inclusion here to complete the text not yet finished when the author died was authorized by Duke University Press. 2. Frei Vicente do Salvador, História do Brasil, 1500–1627, 7th ed. (São Paulo and Belo Horizonte: EDUSP, Itatiaia, 1982), 77. D. Diego Dávalos y Figueroa, himself Andalusian, came to the New World in the mid-1570s and eventually settled in Alto Peru (Bolivia), in La Paz (also known as Chuquiabo), where he held an encomienda grant, which entitled him to Indian labor and tribute. A Petrarchan poet, he published a volume of prose and poetry in Lima in 1602, titled Miscelánea Austral, which does not include this story. On Dávalos, see Alicia de Colombí-Monguió, Petrarquismo Peruano: Diego Dávalos y Figueroa y la Poesía de la Miscelánea Austral (London: Tamesis Books, 1985). Frei Gaspar may have mistaken this writer for D. Martín del Barco Centenera, whose epic poem Argentina y conquista del Río de la Plata, published in Lisbon in 1602, presents a variant of the brothers Tupi and Guarani in his first canto. My thanks go to Paul Firbas of Princeton University for introducing me to Barco Centenera. In any case, Frei Vicente’s mention of the story most certainly derives from the exchange of information that flowed along with the commodities bought and sold by peruleiros, Portuguese merchants who plied markets in Peru and Alto Peru during this period. Cf. Luiz Felipe de Alencastro, O Trato dos Viventes (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2000), 110–112. 3. Claude d’Abbeville, O.F.M.  Cap., Histoire de la mission des pères capucins en l’Isle du Maragnan et terres circonvoizines (Paris: François Duby, 1614), 149r–150r, my translation. In many French accounts, the Indians refer to the Portuguese generically as Peró, a ­corruption of Pedro, the most common name among them. 4. Florestan Fernandes, “Os Tupi e a Reação Tribal à Conquista,” in Investigação Etnológica no Brasil e Outros Ensaios (Petrópolis: Vozes, 1975), 11–32. This essay was published originally in 1960, under a slightly different title. 5. Stuart Schwartz and Frank Salomon, “New Peoples and New Kinds of People: Adaptation, Readjustment, and Ethnogenesis in South American Indigenous Societies (Colonial Era),” in Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas, vol. 3: South America, ed. Frank Salomon and Stuart Schwartz (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999), part 2, 443–501. This perspective stirred a considerable debate, especially following Claude LéviStrauss’s biting critique in “Review of Frank Salomon and Stuart  B.  Schwartz, eds. The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas, vol. 3: South America . . . ,” L’Homme 158–59 (2001): 439–442. 6. Guillaume Boccara, “Mundos Nuevos en las Fronteras del Nuevo Mundo: Relectura de los Procesos Coloniales de Etnogénesis, Etnificación y Mestizaje en Tiempos de Globalización,” Mundo Nuevo. Nuevos Mundos 1 (2001), accessed August 2006, http://nuevomundo.revues. org/document426.html. 7. Neil Whitehead, “Ethnic Transformation and Historical Discontinuity in Native Amazonia and Guayana, 1500–1900,” L’Homme 126–128 (1993): 285. 8. Jonathan Hill, “Introduction,” in History, Power, and Identity: Ethnogenesis in the Americas, 1492–1992, ed. J. Hill (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1996), 1–2.

410   Borderlands of the Iberian World 9. Gary Clayton Anderson, The Indian Southwest, 1580–1830: Ethnogenesis and Reinvention (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999). 10. Fernandes, “Os Tupi e a Reação Tribal à Conquista,” 21–22. 11. Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, “Histórias Ameríndias (resenha de História dos Índios no Brasil, Manuela Carneiro da Cunha, org.),” Novos Estudos Cebrap 36 (1993): 32. 12. Nicholas Dirks, “Preface: Forward,” in Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India, ed. Bernard Cohn (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), xi. 13. Whitehead, “Ethnic Transformation and Historical Discontinuity,” 288–291. 14. Linda Newson, “Indian Population Patterns in Colonial Spanish America,” Latin American Research Review 20, no. 3 (1985): 41–74. 15. On these epidemics, see Warren Dean, “Indigenous Populations of the São Paulo-Rio de Janeiro Coast: Trade, Aldeamento, Slavery, and Extinction,” Revista de História 117 (1984), 1–26; Alencastro, O Trato dos Viventes, 127–133; and John Monteiro, “The Crises and Transformations of Invaded Societies: Coastal Brazil in the Sixteenth Century,” in Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas, vol. 3, South America, ed. Frank Salomon and Stuart Schwartz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), part 1, 996–1009. 16. José de Anchieta, S.J., Cartas, Informações, Fragmentos Históricos e Sermões (1554–1594) (Belo Horizonte and São Paulo: Itatiaia, EDUSP, 1988), 364, my translation. 17. Anchieta, Cartas, 385. 18. Letters from Manuel da Nóbrega to Dr. Azpicuelta Navarro, 10 August 1549, and Francisco Pires to College of Coimbra, 7 August 1552, in Monumenta Brasiliae, ed. Serafim Leite, S.J. (Rome: IHSI, 1956–60), vol. 1, 143 and 397. 19. Alencastro, Trato dos Viventes, 129. 20. John Monteiro, “Escravidão Indígena e Despovoamento na América Portuguesa: São Paulo e Maranhão,” in Brasil nas Vésperas do Mundo Moderno, ed. J. Dias (Lisbon: CNCDP, 1991), 137–168. 21. Gerald Sider, “Identity as History: Ethnohistory, Ethnogenesis, and Ethnocide in the Southeastern United States,” Identities 1, 1 (1994): 110. 22. On ethnic soldiering, see Neil Whitehead, “Carib Ethnic Soldiering in Venezuela, the Guianas, and the Antilles, 1492–1820,” Ethnohistory 37, no. 4 (1990): 357–385. 23. On the movement of slaves within the indigenous sphere, see Nádia Farage, As Muralhas dos Sertões: os Povos Indígenas no Rio Branco e a Colonização (Rio de Janeiro: Paz e Terra, ANPOCS, 1991), 85–119; Mary Karasch, “Riverine Borderlands and Multicultural Contacts in Central Brazil, 1775–1835,” in The Oxford Handbook of Borderlands of the Iberian World, ed. Danna A. Levin Rojo and Cynthia Radding (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019); and John Monteiro, Negros da Terra (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1994), 57–76. While Farage treats the broader exchange circuit involving the Portuguese Amazon and the Guianas (especially Dutch Surinam), little research has been done on commerce in iron, firearms, and alcohol. On the latter, João Azevedo Fernandes, “Selvagens Bebedeiras: Álcool, Embriaguez e Contatos Culturais no Brasil Colonial” (PhD diss., Universidade Federal Fluminense, 2004), raises important suggestions. 24. According to Theodoro Sampaio, O Tupi na Geografia Nacional. Memoria Lida no Instituto Historico e Geographico de S. Paulo (São Paulo: Typ. da Casa Eclectica, 1901), 306–307, the term Potiguara had the much more indecorous meaning of “eaters of excrement,” in other words, an offensive term used by enemies. Slightly corrupted, the term came to mean “shrimp eaters.”

Indigenous Histories in Colonial Brazil   411 25. Fátima Martins Lopes, Índios, Colonos e Missionários na Colonização da Capitania do Rio Grande do Norte (Natal: Instituto Histórico e Geográfico do Rio Grande do Norte, 2003). 26. There is a preliminary guide to the Brazilian archives: John Monteiro, Guia de Fontes para a História Indígena e do Indigenismo em Arquivos Brasileiros (São Paulo: NHII-USP, 1994). Recently, a massive digitalization project copied a large part of Lisbon’s Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino and made this material available on CD-Rom. For a descriptive list of the published catalogues, see John Monteiro, Os Índios na História do Brasil. Bibliografia Comentada, accessed July 20, 2016, https://docplayer.com.br/15745305-Os-indios-na-historia-do-brasil-home-bibliografia-comentada-versao-julho-2012.html 27. On these themes, see the studies in Manuela Carneiro da Cunha, ed., História dos Índios no Brasil (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1992); Farage, As Muralhas dos Sertões; Monteiro, Negros da Terra; Ronaldo Vainfas, A Heresia dos Índios: Catolicismo e Rebeldia no Brasil Colonial (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1995); João Azevedo Fernandes, De Cunhã a Mameluca: a Mulher Tupinambá e o Nascimento do Brasil (João Pessoa: Universidade Federal da Paraíba, 2003); Ângela Domingues, Quando os Índios eram Vassalos: Colonização e Relações de Poder no Norte do Brasil na Segunda Metade do Século XVIII (Lisbon: CNCDP, 2000); Barbara Sommer, “Negotiated Settlements: Native Amazonians and Portuguese Policy in Pará, Brazil, 1758–1798” (PhD diss., University of New Mexico, 2000), and “Conflict, Alliance, Mobility, and Place in the Evolution of Identity in Portuguese Amazonia,” in The Oxford Handbook of Borderlands of the Iberian World, ed. Danna A. Levin Rojo and Cynthia Radding (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019); Maria Regina Celestino de Almeida, Metamorfoses Indígenas: Identidade e Cultura nas Aldeias Colonias do Rio de Janeiro (Rio de Janeiro: Presidencia da República, Arquivo Nacional, 2003); Cristina Pompa, Religião como Tradução: Missionários, Tupi e Tapuia no Brasil Colonial (Bauru: Edusc, ANPOCS, 2003); and Patrícia de Melo Sampaio, “Espelhos Partidos: Etnia, Legislação e Desigualdade na Colônia” (PhD diss., Universidade Federal Fluminense, 2001). 28. Almeida, Metamorfoses Indígenas, esp. 129–185 and 257–280. 29. For an outstanding study from this perspective, see Pompa, Religião como Tradução, 339–419. 30. This period is well studied by Charlotte Castelnau-L’Estoile, Les Ouvriers d’une Vigne Stérile: les jésuites et la conversion des Indiens au Brésil, 1580–1620 (Paris and Lisbon: Centre Culturel Calouste Gulbenkian, CNCDP, 2000). 31. Meninos Órfãos to the Coimbra College, 1552, in Leite, Monumenta Brasiliae, 1: 378. 32. Fernão Cardim, S.J., Tratados da Terra e da Gente do Brasil [1583–90], ed., Ana Maria de Azevedo (Lisbon: CNCDP, 1997), 232. 33. Guillermo Wilde, “Frontier Missions in South America: Impositions, Adaptations, and Appropriations,” in The Oxford Handbook of Borderlands of the Iberian World, ed. Danna A. Levin Rojo and Cynthia Radding (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019). 34. All quotations in this paragraph are from Cardim, Tratados da Terra, 222. 35. Cardim, Tratados da Terra, 234–235. 36. Cardim, Tratados da Terra, 247. 37. Alexandre Rodrigues Ferreira, Viagem Filosófica pelas Capitanias do Grão Pará, Rio Negro, Mato Grosso e Cuiabá. Memórias, Antropologia [1783–92] (Brasília: Conselho Federal da Cultura, 1974), 36–39, original author’s emphasis. 38. Claude d’Abbeville, Histoire de la mission, 69v–70. 39. Manuela Carneiro da Cunha, “Introdução a uma História Indígena,” in História dos Índios no Brasil, 19. For an excellent set of articles on this theme, see Alcida Ramos and Bruce

412   Borderlands of the Iberian World Albert, eds., Pacificando o Branco: Cosmologias do Contato no Norte-Amazônico (São Paulo: UNESP, 2002). 40. Sebastião da Rocha Pita, História da América Portuguesa [1730] (São Paulo and Belo Horizonte: EDUSP, Itatitaia, 1980). 41. Anonymous, “Índios Famosos em Armas que neste Estado do Brasil concorreram para sua conquista temporal e espiritual, 10 March 1758,” Instituto de Estudos Brasileiros, Universidade de São Paulo, Coleção Lamego, Cod. 5.6, A8. On the specific intellectual and political context that generated this account, see the excellent study of Iris Kantor, Esquecidos e Renascidos: Historiografia Acadêmica Luso-Americana, 1724–1759 (São Paulo and Salvador: Hucitec, Centro de Estudos Baianos-UFBA, 2004), 108–115 and 219–235. 42. Bernardo Pereira de Berredo, Anais Históricos do Estado do Maranhão [1749] (Rio de Janeiro: Tipo, 1989). 43. Antônio Vieira, “Relação da Missão da Serra de Ibiapaba,” in A Missão de Ibiapaba, coord. António de Araújo (Coimbra: Almedina, 2006), 139–40. 44. João Felipe Bettendorf, Crônica dos Padres da Companhia de Jesus no Estado do Maranhão [1699], facsimile of 1901 edition (Belém: Secult, 1990), 156.

Bibliography Alencastro, Luiz Felipe de. O Trato dos Viventes. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2000. Almeida, Maria Regina Celestino de. Metamorfoses Indígenas: Identidade e Cultura nas Aldeias Colonias do Rio de Janeiro. Rio de Janeiro: Presidencia da República, Arquivo Nacional, 2003. Cardim, Fernão S.J. Tratados da Terra e da Gente do Brasil [1583–90], edited by Ana Maria de Azevedo. Lisbon: CNCDP, 1997. D’Abbeville, Claude. O.F.M. Cap., Histoire de la mission des pères capucins en l’Isle du Maragnan et terres circonvoizines. Paris: François Duby, 1614. Da Cunha, Manuela Carneiro ed. História dos Índios no Brasil. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1992. Fernandes, Florestan. “Os Tupi e a Reação Tribal à Conquista.” In Investigação Etnológica no Brasil e Outros Ensaios, 11–32. Petrópolis: Vozes, 1975. Leite, Serafim S.J., ed., Monumenta Brasiliae, vol. 1. Rome: Institutum Historicum Societatis Iesu, 1956–1960. Monteiro, John. Negros da Terra. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1994. Pompa, Cristina. Religião como Tradução: Missionários, Tupi e Tapuia no Brasil Colonial. Bauru: Edusc, ANPOCS, 2003. Salvador, Frei Vicente do. História do Brasil, 1500–1627, 7th ed. São Paulo and Belo Horizonte: EDUSP, Itatiaia, 1982. Schwartz, Stuart B., and Frank Salomon. “New Peoples and New Kinds of People: Adaptation, Readjustment, and Ethnogenesis in South American Indigenous Societies (Colonial Era).” In The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas, vol.3: South America. Edited by Frank Salomon and Stuart B. Schwartz, 443–501. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Whitehead, Neil. “Ethnic Transformation and Historical Discontinuity in Native Amazonia and Guayana, 1500–1900.” L’Homme 126–128 (1993): 285.

chapter 16

Col on iz ation, M edi ation, a n d M estiz aje i n th e Bor der l a n ds of N i n eteen th- Cen tu ry Mi nas Ger a is, Br a zil Izabel Missagia de Mattos Translated by Lucy Greaves

The nineteenth century marks a period during which a large indigenous population “disappeared” from the Province of Minas Gerais, as well as other areas of the Brazilian interior, through the processes of border expansion and the apparatus of state policy in relation to the existing population. This same period witnessed the process of construction and consolidation of a national narrative from which the existence of “savages” was also erased.1 The category sertão (backlands) was widely adopted in the Portuguese colonial administration to represent spaces deemed empty of civilization and therefore “deserted.” Present in social thinking about colonialism and the nation over the centuries, the term appears in the nineteenth-century chronicles of naturalist travelers to mean “unpopulated areas in the Brazilian interior.” However, as the French traveler August Saint-Hilaire declared, the term “unpopulated” referred only to “civilized inhabitants,” since “with heathens and wild animals” the backlands were “populated even to excess.”2 Nineteenth-century Brazil can be characterized by extreme political heterogeneity, serving as a stage for three different regimes beginning with the Colony (until 1822), passing through the empire, and ending with the republic (1889). In this process the

414   Borderlands of the Iberian World contrast between older areas of colonization and new frontiers became increasingly ­evident, such as in the southeast of the country where the Sertões do Leste are situated. All these disparities are reflected in the indigenist legislation that regulated the relationship between indigenous peoples and the state. Unlike other Latin American nations that were consolidated on the basis of republican ideas, the sense of belonging to Brazilian nationality was constructed from historiographic and literary reflections that helped create the most important foundational myths during the imperial period.3 The interest in the country’s interior and its unknown populations can be chiefly observed from the 1870s onward, when a series of writings fundamental for the country’s history inscribed themselves within an imaginary that sought in the backlands the bases for an authentic sense of the Brazilian that would forge a national identity.4 With the end of the transatlantic slave trade (1850) and the abolition of slavery (1888) scarcity of labor in Brazil became acute. At the same time the regulatory instruments of state policies on indigenous peoples, such as the Law of Landholding (1850) and the Law of Catechesis (1845), led to the valorization of indigenous lands and contributed to the problem of “civilization” being conceived and implemented through the same move that made indigenous peoples lose their collective rights to land ownership, thereby becoming an amorphous body of national workers. “Strangers in their own lands,” observed the anthropologist Edgar Roquette-Pinto (1884–1954) in his exploration of northern Brazil, “the rural workers of Brazil’s interior continue to live in the disgraceful conditions of disguised servitude.”5 As a matter of fact, because they favored only a small section of the landowning population, exclusive political practices contributed to creating a situation of instability that became fertile ground for the outbreak of revolts in which excluded social groups, including indigenous people, participated during this period.6 The border zone under discussion had remained “off limits” and untouched during the colonial period due to the prohibition against opening roads and river navigation decreed by seven royal acts between 1725 and 1758, which aimed to prevent the smuggling of the gold discovered in the Espinhaço hills, where Vila Rica had been established as the provincial capital.7 Such measures preserved the environmental conditions that could shelter indigenous peoples who, in continuing to fight for survival and local autonomy, served as living walls of defense against incursions into the region.8 Peoples inhabiting the area had diverse geographical and linguistic origins, although they were socially and territorially interlinked through dynamic relationships of conflict and alliance. The complexity of the sociopolitical forms in this border region leads to agree with the proposal of certain geographers for “a kind of Geo-History” through interdisciplinary research.9 This was to comprehend nomadic and mobile spaces. To better characterize these spaces, one should also incorporate recent contributions from ethnology in order to recover, to a certain extent, the point of view of indigenous peoples. The Sertões do Leste make up an ethnographical area comprising portions of the current states of Minas Gerais, Espírito Santo, and Bahia and can be categorized by the phenomenon of interdigitation or a multi-ethnic web—that is, when the idea of “territory”

Colonization, Mediation, and Mestizaje   415 does not coincide with that of an “ethnic group.”10 Amazonian ethnology has shown the importance of the role of relations of affinity on “processes of symbolic exchange (war, cannibalism, hunting, shamanism, funeral rites)” that influence identity formation.11 In the light of these discoveries one can comprehend the transformative processes of peoples living in that densely forested region, speakers of Maxakali, Puri, and Botocudo, all branches of the Macro-Jê linguistic-cultural stock. Despite the apparent similarity of their livelihood, based on hunting and gathering, these peoples were observed and described in their conflicting interrelationships through inimical witchcraft and wars of revenge, which did not impede the preservation of some of their diverse socio-linguistic heritage even to the present day. On the contrary, the plentiful descriptions of these peoples in the extant sources reveal a cosmopolitics.12 Cosmopolitics produces cultural differences underlying the characteristic identity dynamics of their historical experience. Recent ethnological proposals lead us to interpret such dynamics according to the logic that drives both the reconfiguration of identity through alliance/revenge relationships and the articulation of spatial network-territories, to show that Amerindian cosmopolitics generates a model of nomadic territoriality. Food security constitutes a pillar of the political autonomy of peoples in border regions.13 Amerindians were the eminent masters of those dense forests, attributing to their constitutive elements meanings that could also nourish their social and symbolic lives, thereby creating an autonomous system. They developed combat strategies using their knowledge of the environment which proved effective in their heroic attempts at resistance, called “guerrilha” tactics by the Portuguese, who were terrified by the supremacy of the Botocudos.14 Different denominations such as Kamakã, Pataxó, Malali, Macuni, Monoxó, Cumanoxó, Maxacali, Puri, Pojichá, Aranã, Naknenuk and others appear in sources from throughout the 1800s.15 Some of these peoples were named according to the words for “enemies” in native languages, others received the nicknames of some of their recognized leaders or came to be known by pejorative Portuguese epithets, as was the case of the Botocudos—a generic designation used by Luso-Brazilians to identify several of the aforementioned groups. The flow of indigenous people from the coastal region as they fled frequent conflicts with colonists provoked intense disputes between “enemy” peoples linked to this wider network of sociability.16 Notwithstanding the importance given to the constitutive role of revenge in the study of Amerindian socialities, the growing scarcity of areas for hunting and roaming surely stimulated “domestic wars” and the establishment of alliances with the first colonists. In addition to physical violence, the bellicose language that marked the relationships between indigenous people and Europeans also characterized relations among the indigenous groups themselves. Several contemporary observers describe the Botocudos’ predilection for vengeance, with Auguste de Saint-Hilaire writing that he heard from a landowner in the region that “the botocudos [. . .] resemble the French, all they like is war.”17 The imperative of constructing the cosmos itself through affinity relationships, which led to war (both cosmological and political) and produced diversification, once

416   Borderlands of the Iberian World placed in the context of the expansion of national borders into indigenous territory, motivated cruel and widely-documented extermination expeditions and fed “fratricidal” war.18 With the advancing border, Botocudo subgroups gradually changed in diverse ways, according to how they articulated with groups of escaped slaves or mestizo pioneers who progressively became part of the region’s landscape and disputed indigenous lands with increasing violence.19 The history of these peoples, particularly those who spoke Botocudo and Maxacali and were articulated in network-territories, in turn, was interlinked with non-indigenous populations such as colonists, escaped slaves and freedmen, administrators and missionaries.20 To reconstruct their history, one must bear in mind the difficulties that indigenous groups represented for colonizing fronts, which were recorded in different sources, although the suppression of their memory was integral to long-term political and ideological projects at the service of political and state interests. This ethnographical reconstitution focuses on social relationships and processes of mediation between the different worlds inscribed in the colonial situation—a concept adopted here to consider the processes of constituting “ethnic objects” through mechanisms exterior to these peoples themselves.21

Arms and Arguments of Civilization With the decline of mining in Vila Rica, the region came to be conceived in the colonial imaginary as a kind of Eldorado. It became the bloody stage for military policies of pacification of the indomitable Botocudos through an Offensive War (1808–1831) decreed after the Portuguese Court was transferred to Rio de Janeiro (1808–1815) due to the threat posed by the Napoleonic invasion. In practice, the colonization of those Sertões had thus far been spontaneous, as shown by Hal Langfur and Haruf Espíndola.22 The significance of this decree emerges in the recent military historiography of the “ancien régime of the tropics.”23 The extemporaneous declaration of “Just War” against the “cannibal Botocudos” who “infested” the forests of Rio Doce can be interpreted through the judicial explanation proposed by António M. Hespanha based on the writings of the Jesuit jurist and theologian Luís de Molina (1535–1600), who highlighted, among the foundations of the Just War in the colonial period, the injustices derived from the wars among the “savages” themselves.24 Although anthropophagy cannot be indicated as a characteristic of their cosmopolitics according to several of those observing and studying the Botocudos, cannibalism was repeatedly used in the body of that decree as one of its principal judicial arguments.25 Scholar of Brazilian colonial literature, João Adolfo Hansen analyzed the authority of royal power as it was reaffirmed through the institution of Just War, because the king constituted the only figure able to declare such a war out of consideration for his own “just causes” that demanded “righteous methods.”26 A. M. Hespanha seems to coincide

Colonization, Mediation, and Mestizaje   417 regarding this sense of the concept, which points to reverence to the king, to the extent that a decree of this nature heralds, on both sides of the Atlantic, the potency of royal power, reminding everyone that “there on high, half-asleep but always latent, is the suprema puniva potestas of the king.”27 In the context of transferring the Portuguese Court to Brazil, another Just War was decreed in the captaincy of São Paulo through the “Royal Letter on Botocudo Indians, culture and population of the general areas of Coritiba and Guarapuava.”28 This second decree took as its reference the severe measures adopted against the Botocudos of Minas and targeted the Kaingang, peoples of a different linguistic family but who were also related to the Macro-Jê cultural-linguistic stock. Because they decorated their lips with wooden discs, they received the same derogatory nickname of Botocudos, which suggests their alleged “rudeness” so heavily mentioned in the decree. The opening up of the backlands of Guarapuava—located in an area bordering the viceroyalty of Peru, in what is now Argentina—would, as in Rio Doce, employ the double strategy of wiping out indigenous “enemies” and enticement of “friendly” indigenous peoples, in order to encourage national and foreign colonization.29 It is important to note that the occupation of those borderlands through declarations of war allowed the conquered areas to be taken as uninhabited and strategically distributed for the settlement and defense of the country.30 Andrés Reséndez also demonstrates how the allegation of cannibalism was used to justify capturing indigenous people to be exploited as slave labor in Spanish colonization. The widespread capture of Indians for slavery in Spanish America would decline drastically throughout the second half of the sixteenth century.31 The trading of Botocudo (kruk) children, repeatedly documented in nineteenth-century sources, became naturalized in the regional imaginary as a salvation measure. Most travelers who passed through the region took one of these children along, and they even left a record of their sad fates.32 Much to the contrary of the Turnerian notion of the border as a space of renovation, hope and life, the Sertão referred to an environment full of dangers, with poisonous animals, savage indigenous people and shadowy forests, in which mystery and death would constantly threaten the adventurer. The nineteenth-century concept of Sertão signified not only the antithesis of “Christian” space but also the absence of authority, a place where only “barbarism” could reign.33 Sociologist Ivan Vellasco observed that, for the Province of Minas during that period, “the place of violence and savagery is the backlands; in opposition to that, justice.” In a document he analyzed, a witness cautioned defendants accused of assault that they “were not in the backlands to practice such barbaric and inhumane violence in the face of justice.”34 In force since the Directorate of Indians of 175735 and inspired by the 1755 legislation that established indigenous people’s freedom, indigenist laws were not adopted in the administration of natives in the backlands. As a matter of fact, the evident anti-indigenous tendency in the imperial politics of Minas has its roots in colonial times, when “the fear of indigenous actions subverted the judicial body, because laws such as the Directorate of Indians seemed, in daily life, like empty words.”36

418   Borderlands of the Iberian World Within the belligerent and violent frame that marked the beginning of the nineteenth century for the people of the Sertões do Leste, it is still possible to relate the experiences of the “pacification” of that period in Minas Gerais to the comparable process led by the military in the pampas of Argentina and Uruguay in the mid-nineteenth century. Through the formation of narratives relating to the nationalities under construction, reports of the defeat of barbarism remained in their national imaginaries over a long period.37 Unlike in Argentina, where the process of economic and territorial frontier expansion consecrated the extermination of indigenous people as the basis for the foundation of a civilized European nationality, the role of “mestizaje” for the civilization of the Brazilian interior configured the historical experiences of indigenous peoples, as was expressed in the guidelines for a civilizational policy in the backlands. In both experiences the process of expanding borders provided elements for the elaboration of foundational myths of nationality; in the case of Brazil, however, this involved recognizing the existence of the backlands and developing policies that could transform their excluded peoples into the national working class,38 although their citizenship has been shaped in uneven and precarious conditions. While Argentina focused on the conquest of new territories belonging to indigenous people in order to repopulate them through European colonization. The category “mestizaje” investigated here is not restricted to the coeval conception held by the Provincial Catechesis Service, insofar as for this office the problem of civilizing indigenous peoples and building the nation was intrinsically associated with a “solution” through the “racial correction” and “mixing of races.”39 Such preoccupations were also related to another fundamental problem that did not exist on the same scale in Spanish America: the pressing need to replace black slave labor, above all in agricultural work. Such emic conceptions of “race” and “mestizaje” appear in the extensive documents sent by the general directorate of Indians of the province to the provincial presidency and are different from another important conception of “mestizaje” used here, which has interested scholars of border processes insofar as it helps to understand the emergence of new social configurations, also called ethnogenesis.40 An anthropological approach through the etic category of mestizaje as a symbolic and social phenomenon in fact makes it possible to overcome dualities such as civilized/savage, allowing us to focus on border processes in which the Other comes to be taken as a relational part of the self.41 Such a focus allows the interpretation of border situations involving “colonial processes in all their complexity” through a “microphysical reconstruction of civilization” which, according to Guillaume Boccara, should not exclude, but be accompanied by a “macrophysical [reconstruction] of ethnification.”42 Accounts by soldiers, travelers, naturalists, and civil administrators, among other sources for the history of native peoples allow us to track the implementation of a “civilizing” model for the administration of indigenous peoples in the region and this, in turn, renders more visible the mechanisms behind the Indian population’s gradual ­“disappearance.”43 The ethnographic tracking of miscegenation empirically described in the Sertões do Leste, together with other similar experiences in the empire, reveal

Colonization, Mediation, and Mestizaje   419 their fundamental role for the elaboration of public policies based on ideas of the “mestizo nation,” later developed by intellectuals working on Brazilian social thought.44 The exploratory and exclusive nature of “pacification through mestizaje,” conceived and implemented by national authorities in the territories under discussion, promoted terrible living conditions in the settlements, where frequent episodes of flight and “rebellion” occurred. The contexts for interaction between indigenous groups and other segments of the backlands society, reveal their experiences within the different border posts established there, such as the military garrisons and barracks built to fight the Botocudos (1808–1831), the Mucuri Commerce and Navigation Company (1847–1861), and the Itambacuri Central Indian Settlement, overseen by Italian Capuchin friars (1873–1911). The behavior of the political, agrarian and slave-owning elite constitutes an important social segment in that setting—that was always interested in the indigenous workforce—given their political and ideological role in the nineteenth-century context of disputed national projects. Equally important were the indigenous and national intermediary figures, such as mestizos and escaped or freed slaves, who were part of the constantly changing inter-ethnic web.

Garrisons, Barracks, and Indigenist Legislation (1804–1845) Through the Just War Decree of May 13, 1808, presídios (military barracks) were created along rivers for the colonists’ military protection during clashes with indigenous bands. The preferential use of the term “presídio” (barrack) over “garrison” to designate military division border posts was noted by naturalist George Wilhem Freireyss’s account on the Coroado Indians, that related it “to the establishment of criminals who, fleeing the law, settled among the Indians and, later, solicited and received soldiers from the government.”45 Following the appointment of Guido Thomaz Marlière (1767–1836) to oversee the settlements that formed part of the Rio Doce Military Divisions in 1813, the “civilization of indigenous people” figured more explicitly in the political plan for Minas Gerais.46 The policy of civilization was limited, however, to forcing indigenous people to live alongside “Brazilians,” conceived as the sole means of “grounding” indigenous people. Marlière turned to mestizaje, territorialization, and military occupation for the “pacification” of the Botocudos. He became famous for insisting—to the scandal of his contemporaries—on turning those border posts into centers of food provision for the indigenous groups, where crops, principally corn and manioc, were grown. Marlière’s vast official correspondence as well as his frequent articles in the Ouro Preto newspaper O Abelha constitute precious sources on the history of indigenous

420   Borderlands of the Iberian World people under the impact of the Rio Doce Military Divisions (DMRD). During the time he was in command, Marlière defended the idea that indigenous people should not be fought with bullets but with “grains of corn.”47 Between 1824 and 1829 he became director general of Indians in Minas Gerais, denouncing practices that were common in the process of sedentarization of indigenous people, such as the indiscriminate use of aguardente (rum). Faced with the difficulties posed by work in the military divisions, as Marlière’s correspondence suggests, he resorted to the compulsory recruitment of ­soldiers among the “vagrants” and deported criminals in the towns and outlying areas of Minas Gerais. In these hybrid places, daily search for the improvement of living conditions brought about certain interpenetrations of interests, knowledge, and practices among the diverse social actors; some who found themselves in inhospitable conditions, if the forest environment itself is considered, others forcibly removed from their sociocultural milieu and placed in a relationship of dependency. Laws and rules needed to be negotiated on a daily basis, which entailed a practice of mestizaje of sociocultural, political, and economic dimensions. Leadership among the Amerindians, for example, is related to other symbolic and social elements. While settled in the garrisons of the Rio Doce Military Divisions, indigenous leaders learned to negotiate with the law, receiving the title of “captain” and becoming “authorities.” Physical punishments such as the trunk—long used in the punishment of African slaves—were adopted to discipline soldiers and indigenous captains. According to Marlière’s correspondence, these “captains”—even though they did not wear clothes or know what money was—received wages, land titles, and other documents in their names. They proved useful in conquering groups still “isolated” in the forest and some of them became famous, like Guido Pokrane, the protégé of Guido Marlière, whose name was given to a town that exists today in the Rio Doce Valley. He was even received by the emperor himself in 1841 to negotiate peace between the enemy Botocudo subgroups on the north and south banks of the river. The military divisions functioned as a police force and guardians of indigenous people; they built chapels, cemeteries and villages, and parceled off allotments. Each garrison cleared areas of forest and planted crops to attract natives, who suffered from hunger. The settlements were not, however, conceived as reservations for indigenous people, because the organizing precept was to “absolutely renounce the project of establishing populations entirely composed of Indians.”48 Such settlements formed part of a process in which spaces, paths, and rivers were appropriated and controlled under a legal logic and the definition of boundaries.49 In this sense, they functioned above all as apparatuses of normalization, focused on disciplining nomadic movement through the institutionalization of a legal-political norm founded on the classification and administration of indigenous people by state powers. In the settlements, Indians suffered constant abuses in their relationships with Brazilians, who also used intoxication with aguardente to dominate them. “The examples of the sinister effects of this pernicious drug are so great,” Marlière asserted, that “the Indians give women and children to the ignoble contractors in exchange for it.”50

Colonization, Mediation, and Mestizaje   421 The trafficking of women and children this passage reveals promoted, indirectly, the population of those backlands with local mestizo workers. Marlière’s countryman A. Saint-Hilaire, in evaluating the conditions in the Seventh Military Division of Jequitinhonha administrated by Second Lieutenant Julião Fernandes Leão, also denounced the perverse effect of the civilizing model the Crown put into practice for the Botocudos, which had them living alongside “venturous soldiers and public women” in conditions of utter poverty.51 According to Monsenhor José de Sousa Pizarro (1753–1830), that region bathed by the river Jequitinhonha— then within the jurisdiction of Porto Seguro, Bahia—had been colonized by virtue of “dispositions carried out by Royal Order,” which made Botocudos lose “their fear of white men,” and with the work of “Menhã Indians settled” in the garrisons, who ­forsake “their natural ferocity, [giving] themselves today to cultivating the land and [carrying out] all kinds of work,” along with “various other individuals and married couples from their district.”52 One of the indigenous settlements founded by Guido Marlière in 1823 in Barra do Cuieté, on the right bank of Rio Doce, was made up entirely of young people and ­children, mainly girls. According to lieutenant Felipe Cunha do Castro, who inspected several of these villages in 1832 it was more profitable than the others he visited in Jequitinhonha.53 Sergeant José Rodrigues de Medeiros, one of its directors, “preferred to settle children because he judged them more permeable to civilization.” As for the adults, they remained “rough and brave,” hunting, fishing, trading with wax “from the land,” wood honey (mel de pau) and poaia syrup “and not working at all” but fighting among themselves, “it being impossible to put an end to that custom.”54 Meanwhile, those in the settlement were basically occupied with “navigating rivers, weaving, growing cotton and foodstuffs,” the adults appeared only “to eat the crops obtained through the work of the children,” which Cunha do Castro considered an “eloquent testimony of their resisting against organized labor.”55 The Minas Gerais politician Nelson de Senna (1876–1952) described Rio Doce as “our Canaan, where the good Lord planted an abundance of incomparable treasures,” naming the precious stones that could be mined, the vegetable resources, such as sandalwood, poaia, velame, capaíba, and quinine that could be extracted and commercialized; he pointed to its fertile lands and high content minerals.56 The exploitation of such riches mainly required an available workforce. When administrated in government settlements, Indians could be employed exclusively in the colonists’ enterprises. Throughout the nineteenth century this became the principal concern for governmental legislation on the issue of “catechesis and civilization.”57 The revocation of laws that authorized Just War on the Indians in 1831 was led by senators of the empire for the Province of São Paulo, where it had already been noted that simply arming troops with gunpowder and shot was not an adequate method for dealing with indigenous people. In 1829 the Provincial General Council had insisted on the need for the government to “settle and catechize those Indians, who when pursued by the bravest and most ferocious ones might seek our protection [. . .] Even if we do not

422   Borderlands of the Iberian World have a Law on this important subject, it is for the Government to give the necessary instructions for achieving this end”.58 As historian Fernanda Sposito indicated, during the many debates and public discussions on the issue, the Provincial Legislative Assemblies, established in 1834, were made responsible with a budget for overseeing the catechesis and civilization of indigenous people.59 The president of Minas Gerais Antônio da Costa Pinto, proposed in 1837 that the system of Catholic missions be reinstated to administer the Indians, “following the example of the Jesuits, who, on the occasion of the discovery of America, made regular associations of the Savage hordes.”60 Decree no. 426 of 24 July 1845, known as the Law of Missions, determined on the administrative system of indigenist policy, which came to focus on the figure of Director General of Indians. This important decree for the history of indigenist legislation in Brazil consolidated village directors—already foreseen in the Directorate of Indians of 1757—as tutelary figures mediating between indigenous people and national society. Its application, however, supposed an organizational infrastructure on the provincial level that demanded the direct designation by the emperor of the director general of Indians. As the process of land valorization continued, official efforts to census the indigenous population would occupy the administrators’ agenda: discovering and classifying native peoples and their “types,” precisely mapping their villages and administrating territorial conflicts became major governmental concerns. The Law of Missions of 184561 underwent notable political resistance on the part of those interested in the wealth and in the Indians the forest concealed. The contradiction between the cabinet—constituted by European-educated lawyers—and the backlands (where the laws they made seemed valueless) was well observed by John Monteiro as a tendency across the Brazilian Empire.62 In October 1850, the minister and secretary of state responsible for the “Catechesis and Civilization” program sent all the directors general of Indians an official letter that included copies of the Law of Landholding, and clarified the course of action recommended for the future of indigenous lands. This year marked both the end of black slavery and the Law of Landholding, which deemed “uninhabited” all lands not owned by individuals or in recognized public use. The presupposition of indigenous and mestizo racial inferiority is patently clear in the unequal distribution of land, considering the solid immigration policy set up under the Law of Landholding. From then on, according to anthropologist Giralda Seyferth, immigrants, who were considered ­better suited for colonizing the country, would occupy the lands expropriated from their traditional occupants, with “civilized Indians” remaining on the margins of the colonization process.63 In the political and academic spheres, the principal discussions about the nation’s history, or its future, revolved around mestizaje and its effects. The systematic implementation of the Law of Missions was enforced in Minas Gerais through a decree issued on January 25, 1872, which projected “five large central settlements to concentrate the Indians wandering in the valleys of Rio Doce, Mucuri, Jequitinhonha, Rio Pardo, and Rio Grande.” Only three were established in the basins of the rivers Manhuaçu, Doce, and Mucuri, and only the last, situated in Itambacuri, remained in function until the beginning of the twentieth century.

Colonization, Mediation, and Mestizaje   423

The Colonization of the Mucuri Various historical records refer to a network of peoples of the Maxakalli linguistic ­family, established under the leadership of the legendary “captain” Tomé in the region of the upper Mucuri from the mid-eighteenth century onward. The populous settlement there had been established through a “peace” agreement: the indigenous leader possessed a permit signed by the captaincy governor to occupy the upper Mucuri, albeit within strictly defined limits.64 Principally due to their absorption into the garrisons as a workforce for the fight against enemy Botocudos, who moved into those areas in large numbers over the course of the nineteenth century, the entire Maxakali-speaking population was drastically reduced, with the loss of most of its subgroups. In 1808 chief judge Luiz Thomaz de Navarro made a journey overland on the orders of the prince regent and described the “pagan nations” in the Jurisdiction of Porto Seguro, encompassing the basins of the Jequitinhonha and São Mateus rivers. He mentioned the “Pataxó, most numerous and very aggressive nation,” the Manaxá, Maconi, Macaxó, Mangalo (Maxakali linguistic family), and Botocudo, “which is the most ferocious and daring, with the Pataxó and Botocudo certainly being cannibals.” The certainty of cannibalism justified to the Crown the need to continue the war against them, a civilizing method assessed as effective in the chief judge’s account. Among these known peoples— the author goes on—all the “aforementioned nations make their pacts of alliance” with the exception of the “pagan Pataxó and Botocudo, [who] do not [. . .] want to be associated with any nation.” What is most surprising in this account, however, is the information about the “Governor of the Macaxans”—the famous Tomé mentioned above—who in 1807 was in Vila do Prado with his by then greatly reduced people. “He came out of the forest [. . .] and sought peace, and thanks to the priest’s persuasion some seventy pagans came, and on 15 February 1807 twenty-six were baptized by the reverend vicar, some already adults, who asked that they and their children be baptized.”65 Part of the wider region known as Sertões do Leste, the Jequitinhonha and Doce valleys were ravaged throughout the 1800s by military occupation. Since the Mucuri Valley had not undergone the “settlement” of indigenous people by military detachments, it remained the last frontier for them and other nationals. Like the Maxakali and Botocudo speakers, the Mucuri received a constant flow of poor laborers and former slaves displaced from other areas of the province and even from the northeast, attracted by the valorization of the land and its reimagining as a place promising riches.66 There are numerous accounts of Indians who joined the pioneers on different undertakings, such as the clearing of forests and the establishment of villages. The resistance to official, military or religious settlement by the association of a Botocudo group known as the Aranã with a family of pioneers called Pêgo was well documented.67 The same occurred in other locations, like the region where the Itambacuri mission was established in 1873, where three brothers from Bahia surnamed Ramos da Cruz lived alongside different Botocudo groups under the leadership of “captain” Pohóc. These brothers and their mestizo children became important interpreters for the later work of missionaries.68

424   Borderlands of the Iberian World The creation, in 1847, of the Mucuri Navigation and Trading Company—a mixed c­ apital enterprise directed by the Minas Gerais politician Teófilo Benedito Otoni—had a significant impact on that regional landscape and its ethnic and cultural meanings.69 Aiming to exert coercive power on that border area, the imperial government ceded various privileges to business ventures, even if their investment came from the private sector. Imbued with the liberal projects of its director, the company was founded with the help of the imperial government under the justification of stimulating regional and national trade by reducing the transport time for agricultural products from that border zone to the Court in Rio de Janeiro. As part of the Company’s project, from 1855 African slaves as well as criollo, Portuguese, Chinese, German, Dutch, Swiss, and French workers were brought to the Mucuri area to work in agriculture and open roads. The colonizing Company celebrated “peace accords” with indigenous groups who “accepted commerce,” as documented by the founder, who—to emphasize his commitment to republicanism—called the headquarters, in the center of the forest, “Philadelphia” (today the city of Teófilo Otoni, Minas Gerais) in a clear allusion to the rights consecrated in the US Declaration of Independence.70 After describing the barbarities committed against indigenous people of the Mucuri region under the command of military divisions, Otoni described his first attempt to establish peace following his arrival in the area, since natives could not be convinced “that there was [. . .] a new process of catechesis which did not make use of gunpowder and shot, or aim to steal their children.”71 Despite the politician’s “friendly” attitude, it took five years after the Mucuri Company began its activities to organize a kind of “­parliament” with the Indians, during which they were given gifts of flour and tools.72 When they finally resolved to “capitulate,” however, Otoni thought it was because they were afraid of the soldiers he brought in his entourage. As a demonstration of their willingness to talk, they handed over their children to members of the bandeira.73 Otoni reported that the establishment of friendly relations with the Giporokas made it possible to survey the land between Santa Clara and Filadélfia for the construction of the highway. He heralded the expedition in Mucuri as an opportunity to reestablish human relations far from the Imperial Court, such that people, products and ideas would circulate in an atmosphere of greater freedom. The conquest of those backlands echoed the frontier concept that Frederick J. Turner developed as the opening of free territories for the construction of the American national character.74 Thus, historian José Murilo de Carvalho associated the utopia of Minas Gerais to that of North America— self-government, confederation, and republic—since the important pro-independence revolt known as the Inconfidência Mineira or Minas Gerais Conspiracy (1789).75 By way of comparison, one can see how in other pro-independence movements in Spanish America, the naming of indigenous leaders for the negotiation of peace accords with “confederated” peoples resulted in multiple processes of ethnogenesis, ethnification, territorialization, and pacification. According to Otoni’s liberal ideas, indigenous people and their “countries” would be recognized under the aegis of the new national project. Thus, the provincial directorate general of Indians, whose director came to be

Colonization, Mediation, and Mestizaje   425 amalgamated with that of the Mucuri Company, strived to map and name the sub-groups whose areas of habitation were known in the mid-nineteenth century, besides denouncing the genocidal practices widely adopted thereto in the backlands.

On the Different Botocudo Groups The ethnonymy of the Botocudo peoples corresponds to a wide range of diverse subgroups whose distribution was documented by several officers throughout the 1800s. The meaning of the native term Borum used for self-denomination is “people,” and it can be extended to all the indigenous people in the Botocudo network of sociability, independently of their linguistic filiation. Naknenuk was used from the beginning of the military administration of indigenous people in Rio Doce, probably following a criterion of geographic origin widely employed in Botocudo ethnonymy.76 The movement of Naknenuk peoples in the capital of the Province of Minas is recorded, including denunciation of the violence committed against them, in the books of the general directorate of Indians.77 In 1850, the Mucuri Company engineer Roberto Scholbach developed a plan for a main road from Filadélfia to Urucu, following various studies that took into consideration preexisting indigenous trails.78 His map situated the quijemes (villages) of various Botocudo groups living in the area who did not agree to negotiate with the company. One after the other, these villages were slaughtered following the company’s bankruptcy, and the denunciation of these crimes was among the motives for the creation of Central Settlements, decreed by Minas Law no. 1921 of 19 July 1872.79 The commissary of the imperial government responsible for declaring the company’s bankruptcy (1861), José Cândido Gomes, conservative politician and enemy of Otoni, made detailed notes on the known Botocudo subgroups in the Mucuri, analyzing their internal political relationships, and their hostilities or alliances with public powers. In his mission to inspect Teófilo Benedito Otoni’s Mucuri Company (1851–1861), he observed the particularities of Naknenuk’s coexistence with the established colonial population, assuming the “peaceful nature [of their] villages” prior to the installation of the company. According to his analysis, the Naknenuks had appeared in the region among the Christian inhabitants as early as 1836, “fleeing the hostility of the Giporokas and seeking work.”80 Because the Giporokas refused to negotiate with the company, the Naknenuk’s strategy to “trade” with the colonists was interpreted as representative of a cultural “essence” different to that of the “true” Botocudos, who could never be “meek.”81 The interpretation adopted here proposes that relationships of enmity and opposition among the Botocudo subgroups themselves were part of the cosmopolitics observed throughout their long histories of inter-societal rearrangements and articulations. Before the arrival of the missionaries in Itambacuri, the Brazilian interpreter Félix Ramos da Cruz who lived with his extended family among the Indians captained by  Pohóc—his father in law—had presented himself to the director of the Third

426   Borderlands of the Iberian World Circumscription of Indians, Augusto Benedito Otoni, together with Pohóc and his ­people, showing their willingness to negotiate. Therefore, in the following decades, they would live the mission experience planned under the aegis of imperial indigenism. Fruit of his union with Umbelina (daughter of chief Pohóc), the future teacher at the Itambacuri mission Domingos Ramos Pacó wrote an enlightening description of the distribution of Naknenuk groups in the region, reflecting an organization based on their different alliance strategies (Figure 16.1): In the center of Itambacuri lived only Captain Pohóc’s co-villagers, numbering eight hundred men. Other tribes that could be related to him lived outside, on the edges of the Itambacuri waters, serving as sentinels to repel attacks from other enemy tribes. The Kracatã, Cujãn, Jeruñhim, and Nerinhim tribes, which came from Poté, Trindade, and Pontarat were relocated in the center. The other tribes were the Hén, Jukjût, Remré, Krermum, Nhãn-Nhãn, Cânmri, Pmácjirum, which came from Cressiúma, Potão, São Mateus, and Pézinho.82 Pacó further related that the missionaries entrusted his father to help attract the diverse Naknenuk subgroups to the central settlement because he was a skillful interpreter, which entailed the power to convince and mobilize those peoples through an understanding of their cosmopolitics based on warrior shamanism.83

Figure 16.1.  These families of Botocudos from the north of Rio Doce were photographed in 1912 when they were contacted by the Service of Protection to the Indians and Location of National Workers (SPILTN). The surviving remnants of this population are known today as Krenak indigenous people. Photograph taken on 5/24/1912. NCS. 7(8) 1363. Arquivo Público Da Cidade Da Belo Horizonte.

Colonization, Mediation, and Mestizaje   427 It is important to note that landholders never stopped investing in the “enticement” and “seduction” of those “meek” Indians, even with the systematic implementation of indigenist politics in Mucuri; as a result, the Italian Capuchin missionaries who got established there in 1873 took the landholders to be enemies of catechesis and attributed the failure of their projects to the political maneuverings of the elites interested in administrating indigenous people and their lands.

Shamanism and “Revolt”: The Capuchin Mission and Indigenous People The major problem of catechesis was to administer adequate doses of “civilizing discipline” capable of converting “rough, idle and dangerous” Indians into future “moralized and domestic workers.” For this reason, the directorship of Indians of Minas Gerais understood that “the general powers [should] make efforts to acquire authentic [indigenous] colonists” because they were “acclimatized” and satisfied “with frugal nourishment” and “simple clothing.”84 In 1848, the president of the province of Espírito Santo reported the number of Botocudos populating the northern portion of the lower Rio Doce as “considerable.” Even so, he noted their decrease compared to colonial times as they had “retreated to the banks of Mucuri,” either because in the settlement of Beririca they did not find “the supplies they hoped to obtain,” or because they were still terrified by the practices of colonists in the early nineteenth century. The Botocudos who remained in the region, he observed, “were spread amongst individual houses and farms, where they worked,” and sometimes they traded with the village inhabitants, exchanging plants and other products they extracted from the forest for provisions, tools and other items. Also, they sometimes let themselves be hired as workers.85 These accounts show the value of indigenous labor in that border zone, as they were frequently employed in extractive activities that generated large profits for their contractors. The poaia plant, an important drug from the backlands that according to Nelson de Senna had “good commercial value” up until the twentieth century, was plentiful in the region.86 In addition to the situation described for the Botocudos in the north of Espírito Santo fleeing to the Mucuri, during the 1840s there was a “strong resistance by the slaves to the conditions imposed by captivity” in that same region. The missionary directors of the Nossa Senhora dos Anjos do Itambacuri Central Settlement later reported to the authorities the presence of escaped slaves among the Pojichá.87 Recent research points to frequent slave-flight from farms, even if the fugitive groups were small, and there is evidence of indigenous and black people sharing experiences in that border zone.88 This was a field of study only recently approached by anthropology and history.89 Their cohabitation can be seen in the photographs of bugrinhas taken in the Itambacuri

428   Borderlands of the Iberian World orphanage in 1910; that is, pictures of the daughters of Pojichá Indians from the forests of São Mateus, Province of Espírito Santo, who were enemies of the Naknenuk “confederation,” the last Botocudo group the missionaries settled in Itambacuri (Figure 16.2). Contradictions soon appeared in the structural core of the catechesis service in the Sertões, where violence and crime persisted in fact and memory. The discourse of catechesis reveals the impracticability of the conversion of Botocudos, “incorrigible” in their “superstitious” thinking. The alleged indigenous “love of errant life” and “aversion to fixed work” led the Itambacuri directors to conclude that civilizing the Botocudos depended on the complete “discovery” of the forest. The entry of “Brazilians” therefore became strategic, making the “caboclos” and their “mestizo work” responsible for opening new agricultural areas in the mission’s territory.90 Documents from the provincial directorate general of Indians in this period reveal, however, a constant flow of indigenous leaders to Ouro Preto—capital of the province following Brazil’s independence—seeking official solutions to the problems they faced. There they often found the support of leading functionaries such as the brigadier Antônio Luís de Magalhães Musqueira, head of the provincial directorate general of Indians between 1867 and 1879. Even as they sought official response to their demands, the different indigenous subgroups inhabiting the backlands would reconstitute themselves through associations with pioneering colonists. The brutal process of land expropriation meant they had to fight for survival and food security in mixed settlements. “Racial” mixing, which was even proposed as a public policy of the directorate general of Indians, proved strategic for strengthening new symbolic frameworks and means of survival. The 1893 revolt of two thousand “civilized Indians” in the mission at Itambacuri points to some of the contradictions involved in the conversion of Botocudos through catechesis. In letters sent to the director general of Indians, the director of the Third Circumscription of Indians of the province and acting justice of the peace, colonel Antônio Onofre, showed himself visibly affected by the “truly horrific scenes” witnessed in the Itambacuri settlement, “until very recent times the most prosperous spot in the north of Minas”: rising up against the missionaries, Indians had committed murders, using the firearms provided by the priests and firing arrows at people who went to work in the fields. They burned “all the farm houses and the stores of supplies belonging to the  nationals established there;” they killed every domestic animal they found and destroyed the bridges. The missionaries took refuge in the convent, not without fighting back. Trying to close the door, the missionary director was seriously wounded and maintained a long hand-to-hand combat with the rebellion leaders. The recognition that the friars were saved “through clear benevolence of Divine Providence,” together with other “miracles attested to by people altogether conscious of having received them,” increased the fame and charisma of Itambacuri. Even the “learned superior” of the Capuchin Order, minister general Andermatt, acknowledged the miracle.91 In retaliation against the revolt, expeditions were organized to “hunt” the Indians who had escaped into the forest, sometimes “the state police [took part in them] to protect the life and property

Colonization, Mediation, and Mestizaje   429

Santa Clara School – Asylum for Indians and Orphans in Itacamburi – 1910s

“As Bugrinhas” (detail)

Figure 16.2.  The Colégio Santa Clara in the Itambacuri Central Indian Settlement provided a home for indigenous people and orphans. Taken during the decade of 1910, the photograph features two of the founders of Itambacuri, Fr. Seraphim of Gorizia (center, with a long white beard) and Frei Angelo of Sassoferrato (second from left to right), shown in the second row. The detail labeled “As bugrinhas,” or indigenous girls, suggests features of racial mestizaje. Arquivo do Colégio Santa Clara, Itambacuri, MG, Brazil.

430   Borderlands of the Iberian World of threatened individuals,” as later reported by engineer Pedro Versiani who was responsible for processing denunciations directed to the state secretary for agriculture, commerce and public works regarding the administration of catechesis. The ideal of indigenous conversion for the missionary catechesis project emerges in a wider sense after the indigenous mobilization was dismantled. The few Indians who returned to the mission, “persuaded by hunger” were granted “pardon,” but only to the extent of their “repentance”—individual recognition of “guilt” of aspiring to persist in a “savage” and “sinful” life—because they bore an indelible mark of their “pernicious” nature that went against national “order” and “progress.” The alleged impossibility of civilizing the Botocudos remained a strong racial marker in the local imaginary, in which remembrance of indigenous people is deliberately suppressed from public rites and from the origin narratives of localities and individuals in the region. It is estimated that the trade in kruks was a major cause of rapid indigenous population decline, an ethnocide committed by state policies.92 Countless stories circulate about the descendants of captive Indians who were absorbed by new families of rural workers in the area, having lost every trace of the links with their ancestors. Together with the contingents of freed slaves, they came to constitute a large part of the population of landless mestizo workers. The last director of Indians in Minas Gerais, during the republican period, recommended that the “extremely fertile lands” of Itambacuri should accommodate “no less than one thousand immigrant families, being, however, of justice [to grant] not only the Indians but also the nationals the land lots they rightfully deserve.” In this same report he praised the “mixing of races” adopted by the missionaries for its “scientific” as well as economic consequences, since “the Indian married to a national is hard-working, economic, well-mannered and docile, becoming more easily adapted to our customs.”93 The naturalization of indigenous “poverty,” derived from the conception of indigenous inaptitude for civility, emerged in the course of this process of colonization. It is expressed, for example, in the hierarchy of employees in official settlements: indigenous teachers working in the Nossa Senhora dos Anjos do Itambacuri Central Settlement received half the salary of a non-indigenous teacher from another parish, and even from another settlement.94 There is an enormous challenge represented by approaching history from a perspective that accords native populations “a critical and crucial role.”95 This is illustrated by the establishment of the city of Joaíma, in the Jequitinhonha Valley in present-day Minas Gerais in order to signpost the enduring idea of mestizaje as a foundation of nationality. The cacique Joaíma is considered the hero of this city, founded when the Seventh Military Division of Rio Doce was created in 1812. For having “sealed the peace” with the second lieutenant of this division, Julião Fernandes Leão, against whom the cacique himself fought, Joaíma is regarded as “the Big Chief ” that “must be followed and imitated.” To seal that peace, he had offered “one of his daughters to the second lieutenant as his wife.” From then on, “the process of miscegenation continued and the customs of civilized people were assimilated by those conquered.”96 The argument developed at this microscopic level of a city’s disciplinary foundational narrative can be extended to

Colonization, Mediation, and Mestizaje   431 the whole process of civilization across the region in the 1800s, fitting perfectly with the idea of a peaceful mestizo nationality, yet built on violence against Indians who refused to be subjugated.

Notes Archives Arquivo do Colégio Santa Santa Clara, Itambacuri, Minas Gerais (Brazil) Arquivo dos Capuchinhos do Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) AN: Arquivo Nacional, Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) APCBH: Arquivo Público da Cidade da Belo Horizonte, Belo Horizonte (Brazil) APM: Arquivo Público Mineiro, Belo Horizonte (Brazil) 1. The author is grateful for the guidance of Prof. John Manuel Monteiro (1956–2013), to whom this research is dedicated in memoriam. 2. Auguste de Saint-Hilaire, Viagem às Nascentes do Rio São Francisco e pela Província de Goiás, t. 2 (São Paulo: Cia Ed. Nacional, 1937), 378. 3. The creation of the Brazilian Geographical and Historical Institute (IHGB) in 1838 is related to the need of “outlining a profile for the ‘Brazilian nation’, that would guarantee its distinct identity in the wider group of ‘Nations,’ ” according to the new organizing principles of social life in the nineteenth century. Meanwhile, the creation of a new national project for a society marked by slave labor and the existence of indigenous populations involved specific difficulties, to which Emperor José Bonifácio referred in 1813: “it will be very difficult to produce an amalgamation of so many heterogeneous metals such as white, mulattoes, free blacks and slaves, Indians, etc, etc, etc, in a solid and political body.” Manoel Luís Salgado Guimarães, “Nação e Civilização nos Trópicos: O Instituto Histórico e Geográfico Brasileiro e o Projeto de uma História Nacional,” Estudos Históricos 1, no. 1 (1988): 5–27. 4. Rebeca Gontijo, “Na Trilha de Capistrano de Abreu (1853–1927): Índios, História e Formação do Brasil,” in A Presença Indígena no Nordeste, ed. João Pacheco de Oliveira (Rio de Janeiro: Ed. Contra-capa, 2011), 608. 5. Edgar Roquette-Pinto Rondônia, Archivos do Museu Nacional do Rio de Janeiro, vol. XX (Rio de Janeiro: Imprensa Nacional, 1917), 31. Accessed 3 October 2015. http://www.etnolinguistica.org/biblio:roquette-pinto-1917-rondonia 6. Various articles in João Pacheco de Oliveira, ed., A Presença Indígena no Nordeste, explore themes relating to the empirical operations of ideologies involved in the “disappearance” of indigenous populations from the northeast during this period. 7. Copy of the Order of the Royal Exchequer, of 18 November 1773. Efemérides Mineiras, IX, pp. 227–228. Arquivo Nacional, Rio de Janeiro (hereafter AN), Fundo Família Lobo Leite Pereira, AP-5, Cx. 1, Pacote 2. 8. Tragic news of the destruction of the Rio Doce following the bursting of dams containing mining waste in Mariana, came on November 5, 2015, resulting in a huge spill of toxic mud that buried towns and their inhabitants, moving down the course of the river toward the ocean, rendering agricultural areas sterile and killing all forms of life in the river.

432   Borderlands of the Iberian World 9. Rogério Haesbaert and G. Bruce, “A Desterritorialização na Obra de Deleuze e Guattari,” Unbral Fronteiras. Accessed April 9, 2015, http://unbral.nuvem.ufrgs.br/base/items/ show/1545. 10. The concept of ethnographical area was proposed by ethnologist Júlio César Melatti, following Eduardo Galvão, “Áreas Culturais Indígenas do Brasil: 1900–1959,” in Encontro de Sociedades: Ìndios e Brancos no Brasil (Rio de Janeiro: Paz e Terra, 1979), 193–228. For the map featuring the ethnographical area “Leste” see Júlio César Melatti, Áreas Etnográficas da América indígena. Accessed April 9, 2015, http://www.juliomelatti.pro.br/areas/b2leste. pdf. The concepts of interdigitated identities and geoethnic space go back to John Murra, “El control vertical de un máximo de pisos ecológicos en la economía de las sociedades andinas,” in Formaciones económicas y políticas del mundo andino (Lima: IEP, 1975). Chilean anthropologist José Luis Martínez, “Acerca de las etnicidades en la puna árida en el siglo XVI,” in Etnicidad, economía y simbolismo en los Andes, comp. Silvia Arze, Rossana Barragán, Laura Escobari, and Ximena Medinaceli (La Paz: HISBOL, IFEA, SBH, ASUR, 1992), 35–65, used the concept of “interdigitated identities” to show how the determination of separate political and ethnic units is not applicable to certain ecological spaces. 11. Taking into account the Lévi-Straussian doctrine on alliance, anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, “ ‘Transformação’ na Antropologia, Transformação da ‘Antropologia,’ ” Mana 18, no. 1 (2012): 156, suggests that bonds of affinity operate as “the generic schema of indigenous social relationships.” According to him, the so-called theory of potential affinity characterizes “an indigenous sociology in which difference rather than similarity is the fundamental relational schema”; Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, A Inconstância da Alma Selvagem e Outros Ensaios de Antropologia (São Paulo: Cosac & Naify, 2002), 336. 12. The term “cosmopolitics” used in contemporary ethnology emphasizes the existence of different notions of cosmos and different politics. According to anthropologist Bruno Latour, “From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik or How to Make Things Public,” in Making Things Public. Atmospheres of Democracy, ed. Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), 347, it goes back to the ancient Stoics to express “the relationship to humanity in general and not to a city in particular.” Isabelle Stengers expanded upon the idea proposing “a new politics, no longer conforming to the modernist accord between nature and society.” In the Amerindian case, cosmopolitics is related to animism, in the sense that all beings, both animals and humans, are considered to have subjectivity and intentionality. Their different perspectives are based on predation, extending to relationships between all beings in the universe, human and non-human, natural or supernatural. Revenge characterizes relationships with the Other and serves to explain processes such as sickening, where the subject’s “soul” can be “cannibalized” by the “soul” of the animal ingested, for example, which takes revenge for having been eaten. On this cosmopolitical level one can also include wars, which aim to bring the “outside” to the inner world, (related) powers that contribute to the construction of a sense of “consanguine” identity, through incorporation of the Other. 13. Amy Turner Bushnell, “Patterns of Food Security in the Prehispanic Americas,” in The Oxford Handbook of Borderlands of the Iberian World, ed. Danna  A.  Levin Rojo and Cynthia Radding, 31–55 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019). 14. Thus named by the Portuguese due to their characteristic labial decoration, the imató, a light wooden disc compared to the cork or bung used in bottles of cachaça: “botoque.” This group’s self-designation, but extensible to all Amerindians, in the native language, is Borum, meaning “people.” Although these peoples have become famous in history and

Colonization, Mediation, and Mestizaje   433 ethnology under the ethnonym Botocudo, they were only referred to by this term in ­literature, because in practice the epithet “bugres” was usually adopted by the backlands population. In the account of his journey along the Rio Doce, Paul Ehrencheich, Índios Botocudos do Espírito Santo no século XIX (Vitoria: Ed. IHGES, 2004 [1887]), 47–48, clarifies that while the name Botocudo “seems to come from the reference to the wooden discs the indigenous people use as decoration, similar to the bungs used in Portuguese barrels (botoques), the name bugre must refer to the word bougre, which means heretic.” 15. Czech linguist Chestmir Loukotka, “Línguas Indígenas do Brasil,” Revista do Arquivo Municipal de São Paulo 54, V (1939): 147–174, proposed a synthesis of the occurrence of ethnonyms and their linguistic meanings. 16. Maximiliano de Wied-Neuwied, Viagem ao Brasil (São Paulo: Companhia Ed. Nacional, 1958 [1823]); Johan Jakob von Tschudi, Reisen durch Sudämerika, vol. 2 (Stuttgart: Brockhaus, 1971 [1866]). 17. Auguste de Saint-Hilaire, Segunda Viagem ao Interior do Brasil: Espírito Santo (São Paulo: Cia Ed. Nacional, 1936 [1818]), 86. 18. One of many documentary examples refers to the alliance of various peoples with members of the Pêgo family. Antonio Negreiros Pêgo—a son of Manoel Luiz, founder of the city of Capelinha, Minas Gerais—served as a soldier in the Rio Doce Seventh Military Division and, for his ability to forge and maintain alliances with indigenous people, he was promoted several times. His brother Feliciano Pêgo, a landowner, along with other relatives, came to “domesticate” indigenous people in the private sphere for decades, and also fought rebels in combat. In 1832, he was paid to fight Botocudo hostilities and attacked a village with fifty men (including allied Indians) killing at least forty warriors. João Pêgo Moço, a third-generation member of this pioneers family, was accused by the Municipal Council of Minas Novas of kidnapping indigenous children. Felipe Joaquim da Cunha e Castro, “Expedição ao Rio Doce: Relatório de Viagem de Inspeção à 1ª, 5ª, 6ª e 7ª Divisão do Rio Doce, Realizada pelo Comandante Interino do Quartel Geral das Divisões, Dirigido ao Presidente da Província das Minas Gerais, em 09/11/1832,” Revista do Arquivo Público Mineiro 17 (1913), 86–87. 19. These were quilombos, communities present in the history of Minas Gerais and other areas of Brazil since colonial times. As anthropologist Eliane Cantarino O’Dwyer points out, “the term quilombo was used almost exclusively by historians,” but its meaning was updated, being inscribed in article 68 of the Act of Transitory Constitutional Dispositions, in the Brazilian Constitution of 1988, “to give territorial rights to the remnants of quilombos still occupying their lands.” Published in her book Quilombos: Identidade Étnica e Territorialidade (Rio de Janeiro: Editora FGV, 2002). 20. Charlotte Emmerich and Ruth Montserrat, “Sobre os Aymorés, Kréns e Botocudos. Notas Linguísticas,” Boletim do Museu do Índio 3 (1975): 5–42. Some dictionaries of the Botocudo language, including the Naknenuk, were made by Pedro Victor Renault, “Vocabulários da Língua dos Botocudos, Nac-Nanucs e Giporocas, Habitantes das Margens do Rio Mucury e Todos os Santos, Tambem Identico ao dos Kraik-mús Habitantes das Margens do Gequitinhonha [1836],” Revista do Arquivo Público Mineiro 8 (1903): 1095–1117. 21. Georges Balandier, “La situation coloniale: approche théorique,” Cahiers Internationaux de Sociologie XI (1951): 44–79. From this perspective, Brazilian anthropologist Roberto Cardoso de Oliveira, “A Noção de Colonialismo Interno na Etnologia,” in Sociologia do Brasil Indígena (Rio, Brasilia: Civilização Brasileira, Tempo Brasileiro, 1978) introduced into Brazilian ethnography the study of the problematic history of contact, which has

434   Borderlands of the Iberian World produced reflections pertinent to the “anthropology of colonialism,” above all in issues of internal colonization. See also João Pacheco de Oliveira, “Uma Etnologia dos Índios Misturados?,” Mana 4, no. 1 (1998): 47–77. 22. Hal Lawrence Langfur, “Uncertain Refuge: Frontier Formation and the Origins of the Botocudo War in the Late Colonial Brasil,” Hispanic American Historical Review 82, no. 2 (2002): 215–256; Haruf Salem Espíndola, Sertão do Rio Doce (Bauru: EDUSC, UNIVALE, Instituto Terra, 2005). 23. The political cohesion necessary for the government of the Portuguese Empire and the formal rules for the conduct of colonial institutions under royal power were analyzed by António Manuel Hespanha, “Por que é que foi ‘portuguesa’ a expansão portuguesa? Ou O revisionismo nos trópicos,” in O Governo dos Povos, ed. Laura de Mello e Souza, Júnia Ferreira Furtado, and Maria Fernanda Bicalho (São Paulo: Alameda, 2009). For Hespanha “[there was] nothing of an absolutist conception of power, but rather the habitual and pervasive figure of the pact between the king and the communities, a pact whose principal consequence was a mutual limitation of the power of the king and his subjects.” In his view, such pacts—which resulted in the Decrees of Offensive War against the Botocudos in Minas Gerais and São Paulo—served to reinforce the prolongation of royal power, through the feeling of belonging to the kingdom (p. 50). 24. António Manuel Hespanha, Imbecillitas. As Bem-aventuranças da Inferioridade nas Sociedades de Antigo Regime (São Paulo: Annablume, 2010), 229. 25. Leis Históricas: Carta Régia—de 13 de maio de 1808. Accessed April 9, 2015, http://www. planalto.gov.br/ccivil_03/revista/Rev_18/CartaRegia_1305.htm. 26. João Adolfo Hansen, “A Servidão Natural do Selvagem e a Guerra Justa Contra o Bárbaro,” in A Descoberta do Homem e do Mundo, ed. Adauto Novaes (São Paulo: Companhia da Letras, 1998), 355. 27. António Manuel Hespanha, As Vésperas do Leviatã. A Sociedade do Antigo Regime (Séc. XVIII) (Coimbra: Almedina, 2002), 222. 28. Accessed September 14, 2015, http://www.planalto.gov.br/ccivil_03/revista/Rev_19/ CartaRegia_0511.htm. 29. Rosângela Ferreira Leite, “A Política Joanina para a Ocupação dos Sertões (Guarapuava, 1808–1821),” Revista de História 159 (2008): 167–187. 30. Manuela Carneiro da Cunha, “Política Indigenista no Século XIX,” in História dos Índios no Brasil, ed. Manuela Carneiro da Cunha (São Paulo: Cia das Letras, 2006), 142. 31. Andrés Reséndez, “Borderlands of Bondage,” in The Oxford Handbook of Borderlands of the Iberian World, ed. Danna A. Levin Rojo and Cynthia Radding, 571–189 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019). 32. Indigenous children who were victims of the war were highly sought-after by traffickers, farmers and foreign traveling naturalists. Everyone coming in the area in the first half of the 1800s negotiated to take along a kruk, mainly with second lieutenant Julião Fernandes Leão in the Seventh Military Division of São Miguel, in Jequitinhonha. One boy, Quäck, was acquired by Prince Maximilian of Wied-Neuwied and sent to Germany where he died aged twenty-seven, having been an important aide to Wied in linguistic research and the identification of species taken from the region. Saint-Hilaire also negotiated a boy to take to Europe, after various journeys described in his Viagens Pelas Províncias do Rio de Janeiro e Minas Gerais (Belo Horizonte: Itatiaia, 1975 [1830]), 276. The kruk obtained by the Austrian Johann Emanuel Pohl managed to escape. See Pohl’s Viagem no Interior do Brasil (São Paulo: EDUSP, 1976 [1817–1821]), 141–142.

Colonization, Mediation, and Mestizaje   435 33. Sérgio da Mata, “Chão de Deus: Catolicismo Popular, Espaço e Proto-urbanização em Minas Gerais. Séculos XVIII–XIX” (PhD diss., University of Köln, 2002); Hilda Pívaro Stadnik, “Fronteira e Mito: Turner e o Agrarismo Norte-americano,” CyTA - Geografía Económica 7- Gecon Suplemento (2007). Accessed April 4, 2014, http://www.cyta.com.ar/ suplementos/gecon/articulos/articulos_archivos/geo_v6_n2_a4.pdf. 34. Ivan de Andrade Velasco, As Seduções da Ordem:Violência,Criminalidade e Administração da Justiça, Minas Gerais, Século XIX (Bauru: EDUSC, 2004), 184. 35. The full text of the Directive of Indians can be viewed at http://www.nacaomestica.org/ diretorio_dos_indios.htm. Accessed April 9, 2015. 36. Laura de Mello e Souza, Norma e Conflito: A Aspectos da História de Minas no Século XVIII (Belo Horizonte: UFMG, 1999), 92. 37. For the Uruguayan case, see María Inés de Torres Carballal, “Construir la nación desde la(s) periferia(s): sujetos letrados y sujetos criollos en el Uruguay del siglo XIX” (PhD diss., Michigan State University, 1986). For the Argentinian case, see Andrea Roca, Os Sertões e o Deserto. Imagens da Nacionalização dos Índios no Brasil e na Argentina, na Obra de J. M. Rugendas (1802–1858), vol. 1 (Rio de Janeiro: Garamond, 2014). 38. Márcia Regina  C.  Naxara, “Estrangeiros em sua Própria Terra: Representações do Trabalhador Nacional (1870–1920)” (PhD diss., Universidade Estadual de Campinas, 1991). 39. The term “catechesis,” known for its association with the conversion of indigenous people carried out by Catholic missionaries, was widely used in the Imperial period (1822–1889) to refer to a branch of public service dedicated to the indigenous “problem.” The “catechesis and civilization” of indigenous people—common subject in political deliberation on the provincial and national levels—was conceived, throughout the nineteenth century, as a governmental action to promote colonization, the use of Indian labor and, principally, the occupation of land. Patrícia Melo Sampaio, “Política Indigenista no Brasil Imperial,” in O Brasil Imperial (1808–1889), vol. 1, ed. Keila Grinberg and Ricardo Salles (Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira, 2009), 175–206. 40. The distinction between the categories emic and etic is often used in anthropology to differentiate concepts inherent to the groups or societies studied from those used by anthropologists in their analyses; The directorate general of Indians in Minas Gerais, established by the Royal Letters of 1808 as part of a policy of continuity with the Pombaline Era measures relating to the civilization of Indians, was aimed at protecting indigenous people, as well as the state’s interests in occupying and populating more land. This structure of the Service of Catechesis and Civilization remained in Minas Gerais throughout the nineteenth century and was implanted in other provinces after the Law of Catechesis of 1845. See Izabel Missagia de Mattos, Civilização e Revolta: os Botocudos e a Catequese na Província de Minas (Bauru: EDUSC, ANPOCS, 2004); For more on the concept of ethnogenesis, see John Monteiro, “Indigenous Histories in Colonial Brazil: Between Ethnocide and Ethnogenesis,” in The Oxford Handbook of Borderlands of the Iberian World, ed. Danna A. Levin Rojo and Cynthia Radding, 397–412 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019). 41. Serge Gruzinski, O Pensamento Mestiço (São Paulo: Cia. das Letras, 2001). 42. Guillaume Boccara, “Antropología política en los márgenes del Nuevo Mundo: categorías coloniales, tipologías antropológicas y producción de la diferencia,” in Fronteras movedizas. Clasificaciones coloniales y dinámicas socioculturales en las fronteras americanas, ed. Christophe Giudicelli (Mexico: El Colegio de Michoacán, CEMCA, Embajada de Francia en México, 2010), 120.

436   Borderlands of the Iberian World 43. In 1992 John Monteiro and Manuela Carneiro da Cunha organized an exhaustive survey of sources for the history of indigenous peoples in the Public Archives of Brazil, for which Izabel Missagia contributed the entries for Minas Gerais. John  M.  Monteiro, Guia de Fontes sobre História Indígena em Arquivos Públicos Brasileiros, Acervos das Capitais (São Paulo: NHII-USP, FAPESP, 1994). 44. By the 1870s a generation of intellectuals such as Sílvio Romero, Euclides da Cunha, Alberto Torres, Nina Rodrigues, Manoel Bomfim, Machado de Assis, Tobias Barreto, Aluízio Azevedo, and Graça Aranha, among others, stood out for scrutinizing national culture with an “eminently critical perspective” on the Romanticism that had thus far prevailed, according to literary critic Antônio Cândido, Introducão ao Método Crítico em Sílvio Romero (São Paulo: Ed. USP, 1988), 39–40. On eugenics, Thomas Skidmore, Preto no Branco: Raça e Nacionalidade no Pensamento Brasileiro (Rio de Janeiro: Paz e Terra, 1976), 70, believes that the ideal of whitening came into existence around 1870, through the influence of European racial theories. According to Celia Maria Marinho de Azevedo, Onda Negra, Medo Branco: o Negro no Imaginário das Elites—Século XIX (Rio de Janeiro: Paz e Terra, 1987), 61–62, the idea of racial inferiority “seen thus far in terms of ‘paganism’ and cultural ‘barbarism,’ began to be overlaid with sophisticated racial theories, branded with the prestigious seal of the sciences.” See also Nancy Stepan, “Identidades Nacionais e Transformações Raciais,” in A Hora da Eugenia: Raça, Gênero e Nação na América Latina (Rio de Janeiro: Fiocruz, 2005). 45. George Wilhem Freireyss, “Viagem a Varias Tribus de Selvagens na Capitania de Minas Gerais; Permanência entre ellas, Descripção de seus Usos e Costumes,” Revista do Instituto Histórico e Geográfico de São Paulo VI (1901): 237. 46. Guido Thomaz Marlière was a French soldier who deserted the army of Napoleon Bonaparte and enlisted in Portugal. In 1808 he traveled with the royal family to Brazil, being sent to Minas Gerais in 1810, as a lieutenant attached to the Linha Cavalry Regiment. In 1818 he took command of the Rio Doce military divisions. 47. Darcy Ribeiro, Os Índios e a Civilização: a Integração das Populações Indígenas no Brasil Moderno (Petropolis: Editora Vozes, 1977), 95. 48. “Carta de Marlière ao Coronel João José Lopes, deputado à Assembleia, de 11 de julho de 1825,” Revista do Arquivo Público Mineiro 11 (1906): 609. 49. Espíndola, Sertão do Rio Doce. 50. “Continuação dos Documentos e Correspondência Oficial de Guido Thomaz Marliere,” Revista do Arquivo Público Mineiro 11 (1906): 81. 51. Saint-Hilaire, Viagens pelas Províncias, 276–277. 52. José de Sousa Azevedo Pizarro Araujo, Memórias Históricas do Rio de Janeiro e das Províncias Anexas à Jurisdição do Vice-Rei do Estado do Brasil, Dedicadas a El-Rei Nosso Senhor D. João VI (Rio de Janeiro: Impressão Regia, 1820), 47. 53. Filipe Joaquim da Cunha e Castro, “Expedição ao Rio Doce: relatório,” Revista do Arquivo Público Mineiro 17 (1913): 86–87. 54. Made from the roots of Cephäelis ipecacuanha. “At certain times of year,” writes botanist George Wilhelm Freireyss, “[the Portuguese who do profitable business trading this drug] gather the largest possible number of Indians and cross the forest with them. On these excursions they always take provisions and especially aguardente, which they sell at a profit—although trading it to Indians is prohibited—exchanging one small cup for every one-fourth of a pound of valuable ipecacuanha root collected by the Indians.” Freireyss, “Viagem a Varias Tribus de Selvagens,” 245.

Colonization, Mediation, and Mestizaje   437 55. Freireyss, “Viagem a Varias Tribus de Selvagens,” 245. 56. Nelson Coelho de Senna, Discurso Pronunciado como Orador Official, na Sessão Inaugural, da Academia Mineira de Letras, no Theatro de Juiz de Fora, a 13 de maio de 1910 (Belo Horizonte: IOMP, 1910). Accessed April 9, 2015, http://hdl.handle.net/2027/uiuo.ark:/ 13960/t3711bf4d. 57. In an 1823 official letter to the emperor, Marlière described the situation in the presidio of Manoel Burgo, where besides the house where the director of Indians lived with his family, there was a church with its ensign and a tiled mill: “The Portuguese poaia traders use labor from most huts by force, they eat corn from the cleared land that produced well, and run with the Puris, who flee into the woods whenever their Director clears another tract of land and comes back to them with abundant provisions that the presidio supplies for the poaia business, the trading of which everyone knows I do not practice.” “Oficio Enviado ao Imperador por Guido Thomaz Marlière,” Revista do Arquivo Público Mineiro 10 (1823): 443. 58. “Atas do Conselho da Presidência da Província de São Paulo, anos 1829–1832,” Boletim 15, Nova Fase (São Paulo: Departamento do Arquivo do Estado de São Paulo, Secretaria da Educação, 1961), 19–20. 59. Fernanda Sposito. “Liberdade para os índios no Império do Brasil. A revogação das guerras justas em 1831,” Almanak 1, no. 1 (2011): 63. 60. Relatório do Presidente da Província, Antônio da Costa Pinto, à Assembléia Provincial, relativo ao ano de 1837, XXII–XXIII. AN. Fundo: Exposições, Falas, Mensagens e Relatórios Provinciais-Estaduais. Minas Gerais. 61. Full text of Decree 426 of 1845 (Law of Missions). Accessed April 9, 2015, http:// www2.camara.leg.br/legin/fed/decret/1824–1899/decreto-426-24-julho-1845-560529publicacaooriginal-83578-pe.html. 62. John M. Monteiro, “Tupis, Tapuias e Historiadores” (Tese de Livre-Docência, Instituto de Filosofia e Ciências Humanas da Universidade Estadual de Campinas, 2001), 129–168. 63. Giralda Seyferth, “La inmigración alemana y la política brasileña de colonización,” Estudios Migratorios Latinoamericanos 10, no. 29 (1995): 60. 64. Relação fornecida pelo capitão-mor João da Silva Santos a respeito da aldeia do Capitão Tomé. Inventário dos Documentos Relativos ao Brasil. Arquivo de Marinha e Ultramar de Lisboa. Bahia, t. V, pp. 230–272, nn. 27108–27111 and 27113–27114, vol. XXXVII dos Anais da Biblioteca Nacional. 65. Luiz Thomaz de Navarro, “Apontamentos, da Bahia ao Rio de Janeiro, por ordem do príncipe regente, em 1808, o desembargador Luiz Thomaz de Navarro” (Manuscrito inédito, oferecido ao Instituto pelo sócio correspondente o Ser. F.  A.  de Varnhagen), Revista Trimensal de História e Geografia. Jornal Instituto Histórico e Geográfico Brasilerio VII (186): 443. 66. Hal Lawrence Langfur. “The Forbidden Lands: Frontier Settlers, Slaves, and Indians in Minas Gerais, Brazil, 1760–1830” (PhD diss., University of Texas-Austin, 1999). 67. See note 15, and Izabel Missagia de Mattos, “A presença dos Aranã nos Registros Históricos. Goiânia,” Habitus 3, 1 (2005): 41–79. 68. Domingos Ramos Pacó, son of the Brazilian interpreter Félix Ramos da Cruz and Umbelina Pohóc, daughter of the famous indigenous “captain” Pohóc, is the author of an incomparable document in indigenous history. It is a memoir of the Missionary Settlement written against the grain of history as told by the missionaries with sections in the ­language spoken in Itambacuri (Botocudo or Borún). A testimony of a grandson of Domingos Pacó

438   Borderlands of the Iberian World I colleted in 2014 in the city of Itambacuri, told in vivid detail how the family of pioneers came to be accepted by the indigenous population, after being kept prisoners for several days. See the transcription of Ramos Pacó’s manuscript “Hámbric Anhamprán ti Mattâ Nhiñchopón? 1918,” in Lembranças da Terra: Histórias do Mucuri e Jequitinhonha, ed. Eduardo Ribeiro, 198–211 (Contagem: CEDEFES, 1996), 201. 69. Born in Serro, Minas Gerais (1807), deceased in Rio de Janeiro (1869). Son of a trader, Otoni attended the Naval Academy in Rio de Janeiro, having been elected representative for the Province of Minas in 1835 and general representative in the fourth, fifth and seventh legislature. In 1842 he was arrested and accused as one of the leaders of the Liberal Revolt. 70. The existence of such “peace accords” was rarely reported in Imperial Brazil, having been a common practice in the colonization of Spanish America. The study of the expansion of the Iberian empires on the internal frontiers of America in the second half of the eighteenth century reveals certain aspects of the relationships between colonial administra­ tions and indigenist politics. Guillaume Boccara, “Poder Colonial e Etnicidade no Chile: Territorialização e Reestruturação entre os Mapuche da Época Colonial,” Tempo 12, no. 23 (2007), 56–72, demonstrated the importance of such negotiations and trade with colonial agents, as a disciplinary instrument that contributed to this people being constituted as a recognized ethnic group. Among the impacts of the expansion of states on indigenous populations the concentration of political power—specifically coercive power—on native chieftaincies has been emphasized. The ritualism of peace accords involving military uniforms, names of governors and other attendants afforded instruments for coopting indigenous authorities. Ingrid de Jong, “Políticas indígenas y estatales en Pampa y Patagonia (1850–1880),” Habitus 5, no. 2 (2007): 301–331 made an in-depth analysis of this phenomenon of reconfiguration of frontiers and ethnic identities for eighteenth-century Argentina. 7 1. Teófilo Benedito Otoni, “Notícia sobre os Selvagens do Mucury em uma Carta Dirigida pelo Sr. Teófilo Benedito Otoni ao Senhor Dr. Joaquim Manuel de Macedo,” Revista do Instituto Histórico e Geográfico Brasileiro XXI (1858): 200. 72. Otoni, “Notícia sobre os selvagens,” 14. 73. According to the Michaelis Portuguese-English dictionary, the term “bandeira” refers to an “expedition (to the hinterland in conquest of new land, gold and precious stones).” Accessed January 4, 2015, http://michaelis.uol.com.br/moderno/ingles/index.php?lingua= portugues-ingles&palavra=bandeira. 74. Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American History (New York: Dover Publications, 1996 [1920]). 75. José Murilo de Carvalho, Cidadania no Brasil: o Longo Caminho (Rio de Janeiro: Ed. Civilização Brasileira, 2002); “Two [of the political revolts that occurred in the 18th century] came to be symptomatic in the region of Minas, where conditions were favorable for rebellion. The most politicized was the Inconfidência Mineira (1789), which was inspired by the enlightenment thinking of the eighteenth century and the example of the independence of North American colonies.” Carvalho, Cidadania no Brasil: o Longo Caminho, 24. 76. Luiz Pedreira do Couto Ferraz. “Apontamentos sobre a Vida do Índio Guido Pokrane e sobre o Francez Guido Marlière, Offerecido ao Instituto Historico e Geographico do Brasil, pelo Socio Exmo. Snr. Conselheiro Luiz Pedreira do Couto Ferraz,” Revista do Instituto Histórico e Geográfico Brasileiro XVIII (1855): 413. 77. Izabel Missagia de Mattos, “Catequese, Miscigenação e Nacionalidade: o Indigenismo em Minas na Transição para a República,” Tellus 3, no. 5 (2003), 55–72.

Colonization, Mediation, and Mestizaje   439 78. Roberto Scholbach, Relatório e Esboço da Picada para o Urucu. Arquivo Público Mineiro (hereafter APM). Fundo: Presidência da Província, Série: correspondência recebida, Subsérie: obras públicas. Cx. 76. Doc. 6. 79. Law no. 1921 of July 19, 1872. Assembleia Legislativa de Minas Gerais. Accessed October 13, 2015, http://www.almg.gov.br/consulte/legislacao/completa/completa.html?tipo=LEI&nu m=1921&comp=&ano=1872. 80. Frei Olavo Timmers, OFM, O Mucuri e o Nordeste Mineiro no Passado e seu Desenvolvimento Segundo Documentos e Notícias Recolhidas por Frei Olavo Timmers OFM em Lembrança do 100o Aniversário de Teófilo Benedito Ottoni. 1869–17 de Outubro de 1969. Teófilo Otoni. Datilografado com emendas manuscritas. APM, 535 fls., 36v. 81. The interpretation that the “true identity” of the Naknenuk would be Maxakali was proposed by anthropologist Maria Hilda Paraíso in “O tempo da dor e do trabalho: a conquista dos territórios indígenas nos sertões do leste” (PhD diss., USP, 1998). In the documentation analyzed, however, many Botocudo language terms appear in the Naknenuk onomasticon, such as the names attributed to some of their captains, according to the correspondence of G.  Marlière. Using this wide documentation, the Botocudo language was also studied by Emmerich and Montserrat, “Sobre os Aymorés, Kréns e Botocudos,” 5–42. 82. Pacó, “Hámbric Anhamprán ti Mattâ Nhiñchopón? 1918.” 83. Izabel Missagia de Mattos, “Considerações sobre Política e Parentesco entre os Botocudos (Borún) do Século XIX: Uma Interpretação da Articulação de uma Rede Social e Simbólica,” R@U Revista de Antropologia da UFSCar 5, no. 1 (2013): 82–96. 84. Report from director general of Indians José Januário de Cerqueira. 17 February 1886. Annexed to the report of the president of the Province to the Provincial Assembly. APM. 85. Hermillo Candido da Costa Alves, Estrada de Ferro da Victoria para Minas. Relatorio Apresentado ao Ministro da Agricultura, etc., Conselheiro Thomaz José Coelho de Almeida (Rio de Janeiro: Typ. Nacional, 1876). 86. Coelho de Senna, Discurso Pronunciado como Orador Official, na Sessão Inaugural, da Academia Mineira de Letras. 87. Ana Lúcia Côgo, “História Agrária do Espírito Santo no Século XIX. A Região de São Mateus” (PhD diss., USP, 2012), 111; Official letter from the directors of the Itambacuri settlement to the minister and secretary of state for business, agriculture and public works in Rio de Janeiro, March 1885. Arquivo Geral da Ordem, Colegio San Lorenzo da Brindisi, Roma, Italia. 88. Márcio Santos Achtschin, “Mucuri: Sociabilidades e Cotidiano Escravo no Século XIX” (Dissertação de Mestrado, Universidade Severino Sombra, 2006). 89. Maria Rosário de Carvalho, Edwin Reesink, and Julie A. Cavignac, Negros no Mundo dos Índios: Imagens, Reflexos, Alteridades (Natal: EDUFRN, 2011). 90. For a detailed analysis of this revolt, see Izabel Missagia de Mattos, “Botocudos entre a Catequese e a Revolta,” Revista do Arquivo Público Mineiro 51, no. 2 (2015): 24–47. 91. Frei Ângelo de Sassoferrato, ofm Cap., Synopse da Missão cathechética dos selvicolas do Mucury, norte do Estado de Minas Geraes (1915), 11. Arquivo dos Capuchinhos do Rio de Janeiro, Gav. c, pasta IV, 1915. This mission was founded in 1873, by the Capuchin friars Seraphim de Gorizia and Ângelo de Sassoferrato amid the forest, 36 kilometers to the south of the city of Theophilo Ottoni (previously named Philadelphia). 92. For an analysis of the concept of ethnocide, see Monteiro, “Indigenous Histories in Colonial Brazil.”

440   Borderlands of the Iberian World 93. Brigadeiro Antônio Alves Pereira da Silva, Report to the Secretary of Agriculture, Commerce and Public Works, David Campista. 4 November 1893. APM. SG 25, rolo 04, 86 94. Table of Distribuição do Crédito de 15:000$000 destinados à Catequese que vigora desde 1889. SG 25, p. 71v. APM. In the 1892 annual report presented to the Provincial Presidency, the director general of Indians, Antônio Alves Pereira da Silva, finally recognized after the indigenous school had been functioning for almost 20 years, “that it is absolutely fair to make their salaries equal to those earned by parish teachers.” APM. SG 25, 71v. 95. Monteiro, “Tupis, Tapuias e Historiadores,” 78. 96. See Homepage of the city of Joaíma, Minas Geraisa. Accessed April 9, 2015, http://imagensjoaima.blogspot.com.br.

Bibliography Carvalho, José Murilo de. Cidadania no Brasil: o Longo Caminho. Rio de Janeiro: Ed. Civilização Brasileira, 2002. Castro, Filipe Joaquim Da Cunha. “Expedição ao Rio Doce: Relatório de Viagem de Inspeção à 1ª, 5ª, 6ª e 7ª Divisão do Rio Doce, Realizada pelo Comandante Interino do Quartel Geral das Divisões, Dirigido ao Presidente da Província das Minas Gerais, em 09/11/1832.” Revista do Arquivo Público Mineiro 17, 1913 [1832]. Coelho de Senna, Nelson. Discurso Pronunciado como Orador Official, na Sessão Inaugural, da Academia Mineira de Letras, no Theatro de Juiz de Fora, a 13 de maio de 1910. Bello Horizonte, 1910. Accessed April 9, 2015. Http://hdl.handle.net/2027/uiuo.ark:/13960/t3711bf4d. Emmerich, Charlotte, and Ruth Montserrat. “Sobre os Aymorés, Kréns e Botocudos. Notas Linguísticas.” Boletim do Museu do Índio 3 (1975): 5–42. Espíndola, Haruf S. Sertão do Rio Doce. Bauru: EDUSC, UNIVALE, Instituto Terra, 2005. Freireyss, George Wilhem. “Viagem a Varias Tribus de Selvagens na Capitania de Minas Gerais; Permanência entre ellas, Descripção de seus Usos e Costumes.” Revista do Instituto Histórico e Geográfico de São Paulo VI (1901): 236–252. Monteiro, John  M. “Tupis, Tapuias e Historiadores.” Tese de Livre-Docência, Instituto de Filosofia e Ciências Humanas da Universidade Estadual de Campinas, 2001. Monteiro, John. “Indigenous Histories in Colonial Brazil: Between Ethnocide and Ethnogenesis.” In The Oxford Handbook of Borderlands of the Iberian World, edited by Danna A. Levin Rojo and Cynthia Radding, 397–412. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019. Oliveira, João Pacheco. “Uma Etnologia dos Índios Misturados?” Mana 4, no. 1 (1998): 47–77. Oliveira, João Pacheco de, ed. A Presença Indígena no Nordeste. Rio de Janeiro: Ed. Contracapa, 2011. Ottoni, Teóphilo Benedicto. “Notícia sobre os Selvagens do Mucury em uma Carta Dirigida pelo Sr. Teófilo Benedito Otoni ao Senhor Dr. Joaquim Manuel de Macedo.” Revista do Instituto Histórico e Geográfico Brasileiro XXI (1858): 191–238. Rio de Janeiro: Typ. Brasiliense de Maximiano Gomes Ribeiro, 1858. Pacó, Domingos Ramos. “Hámbric Anhamprán ti Mattâ Nhiñchopón? 1918.” In Lembranças da Terra: Histórias do Mucuri e Jequitinhonha, coordinated by Eduardo Ribeiro, 198–211. Contagem: CEDEFES, 1996 [1918]. Saint-Hilaire, Auguste de. Viagens pelas Províncias do Rio de Janeiro e Minas Gerais. Belo Horizonte: Itatiaia, 1975 [1830].

the production of knowledge: science and c a r t o g r a p h y, a r t, r e l i g i o n , and music

chapter 17

Bor der l a n ds of K now ledge i n th e Esta do da Í n di a (Si xteen th– Eighteen th Cen tu r ie s) Ines G. Županov

In 1632, a Mughal army literally smoked out the Franks from their unfortified settlement in Bengal on the river Hugli (or Hoogly). On the colorful miniature in the Padshahnama (Figure 17.1), the Portuguese are portrayed loading chests and boxes onto the carracks in the harbor and getting ready to leave their beautiful city with huge, shapely buildings and a rose-colored impressive church in the center.1 While this imaginary urban setting was obviously inspired by European pictorial tradition, the anonymous painter clearly presented a Mughal point of view of the events. The scene perfectly sums up the shifting nature of South Asian borderlands in the early modern period in which the Portuguese in their official and informal roles had always been at the mercy of local geopolitical configurations. At the time of their expulsion from Hugli, the Portuguese had been present in the Bengal region for more than a century and even received a farman (decree) from the Emperor Akbar (r.1566–1605) in the 1580s, and made it into “one of the richest towns in the East.”2 On the next miniature in the same Mughal album, a wooden box beautifully worked with gold or silver linings from the previous picture appears in the hands of the prisoners from Hugli who were waiting to offer it to Shahjahan (1592–1666), Akbar’s grandson and emperor in his magnificent jharokha darshan in Agra. Introduced by Akbar as a courtly ritual, jharokha darshan had been a daily public audience (darshan) at the balcony (jharokha) in the palaces of medieval kings in India. Shahjahan probably appreciated the presents since the

Figure 17.1.  An anonymous artist in Padshahnama, an imperial Mughal manuscript, depicts “The Capture of Port Hoogly” (June –October 1632), a Portuguese trading center in the Bengal region near the estuary of the Brahmaputra River, by the Mughal army. The port’s proximity to Satgaon impacted the commerce and agitated the Mughals. It is possible that Portuguese conversion efforts in the region also provoked hostilities. More probably it was the imposition of political sovereignty that was at stake in capturing the port. Padshahnama, f. 117a. Anonymous artist, in Padshahnama, f. 117a, The Royal Library, Windsor Castle. Royal Collection Trust/© Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, 2015.

Borderlands of Knowledge in the Estado da Índia   445 Portuguese returned to Hugli a year later, but in the long run this formerly bustling ­settlement never fully recovered. The fragility of Hugli’s defense can partly be attributed to the fact that it was part of the Portuguese “shadow” or “informal” empire in the Bay of Bengal.3 Populated and organized by renegades, pirates, and freebooters—depending on the perspective of the observer—these Portuguese settlements, some not much more than a merchant factory (feitoria), dotting the coast from the Bay of Bengal to Southeast Asia, were mostly on their own and governed by “adventurers.” They were also often torn between making profits and alliances freely in the region, and gaining some official recognition and honors from the Estado da Índia or a Portuguese King.4 The problem with the Portuguese Empire in Asia was that it was created in the first decade of the sixteenth century as a string of presídios and commercial settlements, conquered, or ceded by the local rulers—from Kilwa on the East African coast and Hormuz in the Persian Gulf to West and East Coast of India and Sri Lanka, to Southeast Asia, Japan, and Macau in China—but started losing its grip on most of these exclusively coastal places already in the mid-seventeenth century. Historiography defined this ­period of decline, starting for some in the second part of the sixteenth century, as the age of the decadência, a concept already used by the historian and the first archivist in Goa, Diogo do Couto (1542–1616) and that followed a golden age of imperial expansion.5 Sanjay Subrahmanyam has argued that decline literature was a kind of a “genre” also present in Ottoman and Mughal cases, and that it, in fact, expressed “social realignments” taking place: the influence of Spanish model with emphasis on territorial possession; new social elites replacing old ones; the rise of the Dutch commercial challenge; the expansion of the Mughal state on Indian subcontinent; the reorientation toward Atlantic empire. At the same time the scramble for Brazil was gaining momentum as the Portuguese wholeheartedly engaged in explorations and attempts to find exploitable resources.6 In spite of the literature mulling the tragic histories of gain and loss in Asia that also became popular in the late seventeenth-century Portuguese historiography, often combined with millenarian visions of punishment for sins and future recovery under the aureole of the fifth and the last empire of the world, the Ásia Portuguesa was never much more, geographically and demographically speaking, than a permanent, discontinuous borderland of settlements squeezed between the sea and the huge landmass or terra firma behind them. There is no doubt that the Portuguese used well their long experience as sailors, and their mastery of the sea gave them a competitive edge in sixteenth-century Asia. However, on land the demography of a place had been of utmost importance when it came to settling down. Unlike in Brazil where they encountered a sparsely populated territory of some 2.4 million people in all, in South Asia the local population has been estimated to 110 million in 1500.7 Except for three spectacular conquests of Goa (1510), Melaka (1511), and Hormuz (1507) by Afonso de Albuquerque (1453–1515), with an excess of violence of which the winners bragged in their reports, the Portuguese had to negotiate their way to settle and trade, with no guarantee to permanence.

446   Borderlands of the Iberian World It was from around the mid-sixteenth century that another strategy was added to the Portuguese survival toolbox in the tropics—the spread of religious conversion to Catholicism. The spiritual conquest by any means provided the ideological glue to the enterprise that, according to the titles of the Portuguese kings, had been: lordship of navigation, conquest and commerce of Ethiopia, Arabia Persia, and India.8 The arrival of the missionaries, of whom the Jesuits were the most efficient, mobile, and impressively diligent writers, significantly expanded the frontiers of Portuguese presence inland. Jesuit missions were the true borderland zone in which Portuguese had no political sovereignty and yet counted it as part of their Indias and their Asia. This political fiction was based on Catholic universalism, shored up officially and in theory by the royal patronage (padroado) of the missions, and, most importantly, on knowledge fostered by the missionary venture.9 It is precisely the marginality and insecurity of the Portuguese Empire in Asia, its permanent borderland position vis-à-vis the landed neighbours and maritime competitors that stimulated the creation of imperial knowledge: maps, travel narratives, descriptions of plants, people and territories, of anything that can be exploited and traded, of curiosities and heroic battles, conquests, and missionary successes. In a literal sense, a great deal of this knowledge was collected in and about borderlands of the empire, the areas that were not (yet) in Portuguese possession and were still to be brought under control and administration. The Portuguese Empire of knowledge was much larger than its territorial empire. Locating and compiling facts about particular objects of desire, such as plants and medicines and precious stones and metals, went hand in hand with building social relationships in loco. In fact, acquiring useful imperial knowledge was only possible through exchange and dialogue with indigenous scientific (in the largest possible sense of the word) communities. Looking into three particular domains of knowledge production will show that imperial knowledge in Portuguese India nearly always came from the borderlands, beyond Portuguese “secular” arm’s grasp and that it sparked at times something that was close to border thinking.10 It did not foster, however, as Walter Mignolo argued from a Latin American case, a “critical” reflection “delinked” from the matrix of colonial power, but rather both “wishful” and “wistful” border thinking. In this way, a fragmentary Estado da Índia could be imagined as a full-fledged empire. Borderland was thus both imaginary and foundational of an empire that was unable to expand, not even to maintain its borders, except in Goa, a territory that was never more than a spec on the map of India (Figure 17.2). It was this permanent borderland and nomadic experience in the multiple contact zones created by the Estado da Índia that provided a fertile ground for various types of cosmopolitan encounters that always stimulated knowledge acquisition. Portuguese colonial archives remain fragmentary, for various reasons stemming from official censure to the catastrophic earthquake of 1755, in which some of the most important collections such as those of the Casa da Índia perished in fire. Nevertheless, the archives reveal to us a multitude of encounters with

Borderlands of Knowledge in the Estado da Índia   447 Delhi Agra

M

R JA

UG

HAL EMPI

RE Hugli Calcutta (Kolkata)

AT

GU

Diu

Daman

ST COA

Chudmani (Chorão) Divar Panaji Old Goa TISWADI

São Tomé de Méliapor (Chennai) Pondichéry Tanur (French)

GOA

Masulipatnam

Bay of Bengal

Pegu

Ayutthaya

E L COAST

S AR LAB

MA

BARDEZ

N

GOA

DE CC A

T OAS

Mapusa

Reis Magos

Hyderabad

COROMAN D

NC

Sea

SA

IS

OR

Baçaim Salsete Bombaim (Mumbai) Chaul

ST AT E

KA KON

Arabian

Chatigão AR AK AN

Madurai Cochim (Kochi) Tuticorim (Tuttukuti)

SRI LANKA

ANDAMAN ISLANDS

NICOBAR ISLANDS

Colombo

Sancoale Arabian Sea

Cortalim

Galle Aceh

SALSETE Verna

Colva

Madgaon (Margão)

St ra its

of M ela ka

INDIAN OCEAN

Melaka

Figure 17.2.  Map of South Asia and the Bay of Bengal where European merchant companies traded and intermittently made war on local merchants in order to wrest monopoly over the most profitable merchandise. On the smaller map is Goa, a tiny but significant region on the east coast of India. It was the only permanent colonial settlement of the Portuguese that endured until the mid-twentieth century. In the sixteenth century, Goa was called “the key to all Asia” and was the seat of the viceroy and the archbishop. Map by Nadia Guerguadj (Centre d’études de l’Inde et de l’Asie du Sud), CNRS-EHESS, Paris.

cultural, social, and ecological diversity that stimulated narratives and reports from a wide variety of agents, even those who were not too literate to start with and those who were not necessarily Portuguese at all.

Materia Medica or a No Man’s Land The most difficult to fix, package, translate, transport, and fully control are objects that by their nature travel easily, sometimes among or within other objects, sometimes stolen, adulterated, or falsified, which for these reasons required supervision by professional experts. The book Garcia de Orta (1501–1568) published on the “simples, drugs and medical things” in Goa in 1563 was his solution to bringing together in one place at

448   Borderlands of the Iberian World the heart of the empire all the borderland knowledge of plants and materia medica that Portuguese collected, exchanged, traded, and tested from the beginning of the century. As a physician and empiricist, Orta was well placed to write this book, although a huge amount of information must have been well known to the Portuguese in India, and especially to other travelers and merchants, some of whom were also apothecaries and physicians. Already in the first decades of the sixteenth century, Tomé Pires (1465?–1524 or 1540) and Duarte Barbosa (c. 1480–1521) wrote their famous travelogues/geographies full of important information concerning the Portuguese Empire. Pires even went as far as to flatter the king of Portugal on his “great dominions”: “Who does not know that they stretch from the beginning of Africa to China, including the whole of Africa and Asia and part of Europe along the sea coast, with an infinity of islands, [and that they are] very great, rich and very populous within their boundaries.”11 This was, in fact, wishful boundary thinking at its earliest. He also underscored a cosmopolitan quality (long before Kant’s pronouncement on the universal peace) of the Portuguese Empire in which vassals live “peacefully” while those who are rebels “live in fire and torment.” The boundaries that Pires thus designated in Asia are signposted by “banners . . . in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ,” combining religious and political dimensions. This reads as an echo of another Portuguese custom of marking imaginary boundaries of possession: such as the memorial stones or padrões, planted along the coasts. However, according to Patricia Seed, it was through the artifice of maps that the Portuguese audiences were offered the illusion of ownership of desired territories. They were the true “signs of possession.”12 Maps were also useful for con­quests and for political communication, just as detailed geographies and chorographies (in addition to travelogues) were essential instru­ments for inscribing Portuguese power into the new territories. The blood that animated all these maps and desires were, according to Pires, the merchandises and trade. The most important commercial commodities were, in his treatise, what some historians call the “green gold”—medicinal plants and plant-derived medicine—in addition to other bio-resources such as a wide variety of fruits, vegetables, and minerals. Many of these substances found their way into remedies made in India and in Portugal, and later on in Brazil and wherever the ships and the Jesuits took them. The Jesuit order held a royal monopoly and even commercialized certain medicines.13 Thus a “fever bark” or a “Jesuit bark” (Cinchona spec.) successfully cured Kangxi (1654–1722), the emperor in China, who issued a famous “Edict of Tolerance” (1692), permitting the Jesuits to “burn incense and give offerings” in their churches.14 In the early sixteenth century, botanical and commercial knowledge of plants (their identification; place of growth; the best quality; the lowest prices to buy and the highest to sell, etc.) were Portuguese strategic secrets. This may explain why Tomé Pires’s manuscript and that of Duarte Barbosa remained unpublished in Portugal. On the other hand, Giovanni Battista Ramusio, the Venetian editor of the famous travel collection Delle Navigationi et Viaggi, managed to acquire and publish in 1550 the text of Barbosa’s O Livro and parts of Pires’ Suma Oriental without mentioning the name of the authors.15 Just like plants that could travel as stowaways on ships, or in people and in animals,

Borderlands of Knowledge in the Estado da Índia   449 manuscripts traveled easily embedded in other manuscripts. Establishing dominion over the “green gold” was as difficult as was preventing the circulation of information about them. If in the early sixteenth century Dom Manuel (1469–1521) tried to keep the monopoly over pepper (piper nigrum L.) by not allowing it to be transplanted to Brazil, in the late seventeenth century the Portuguese Crown reversed the decision as all its colonial hopes were turned toward its Atlantic empire.16 In addition, the pepper itself was grown in Portuguese Indian “borderlands” and under the Kerala “pepper kings” in the sixteenth century. After 1650s, all these arrangements were undone since the Malabar pepper forests and the city of Cochim [Kochi] fell into Dutch hands. One of the reasons Orta famously erred in his pepper identification—the much ­discussed confusion of white and black pepper—is that he did not see it grow in Goa, although pepper cultivation had been slowly spreading northward under Portuguese impetus.17 The final effort at wrestling away this precious commodity from India—before an infinitely more versatile capsicum conquered the world from the West—occurred in the 1680s when the Portuguese Crown reversed more than a century and a half long ban on transplantation of the East Indian spices to Brazil.18 In 1690, the plants were sent to Bahia with written instructions from Goa and accompanied by two Goan cultivators.19 Controlling the land was important to the Estado da Índia, even if both historiography and some contemporary observers had doubts about it.20 For example, the Portuguese were compared to fish by the Chinese who thought, tongue-in-cheek, that they were unable to survive when taken out of the water. Portuguese concern with territory is amply clear in the formidable corpus of documents collected and written down for the purpose of taxation and administration of landed properties in Goa and in the Províncias do Norte (Daman, Salsete, Bombaim, Baçaim, Diu, Chaul). Called tombos (property registers) or forais (charters), these documents witness the extent to which the Crown was willing to assert control over the core colonial area of its Indian Empire. The problem was that there were few such territories, and in the seventeenth century the map shrank further. While tombos and forais recorded, like few other colonial documents, the detailed situation on the ground, with borderlines and delimitations as clear as possible—who possessed what palm grove; who farmed revenue from the temple lands and how much; who were the inhabitants, and similar factual knowledge—the famous medico-botanical treatise written by Garcia de Orta was also factual but the objects to be recorded were too volatile and coming from “no man’s lands,” at least from the Portuguese point of view. Moreover, they carried the signs that clearly showed them to be also possessed by other people. These signs were names under which they were known and Orta, as all natural historians of his time, gave special attention to their variety. Strung mostly in alphabetic order in the Colóquios, the things and their multiple names are manipulated from one use to another, from one state to another. They are turned into juices, boiled, distilled, changed to powder and stone. Aloes, the first plant in Orta’s herbarium, is defined by its Latin and Greek name “aloes, or aloe” and then by as many names as his research

450   Borderlands of the Iberian World permitted him to collect. “The Arabs call it cebar, and the Gujeratis and Deccanis areá, the Canarins (who inhabit this strip of sea shore) call it catecomer, and the Castillians acibar, and the Portuguese azevre.”21 Cutting through linguistic misappropriations, Orta was both dismayed and excited about his discovery that one and the same word might mean different things to different peoples and at different times. Asserting his intellectual authority, Orta turned this botanical linguistic relativism and historicism to launch an attack on his intellectual predecessors. These included Greek and Roman naturalists and physicians; among the most famous of these were Dioscorides, Galen, and Hippocrates. Orta rebelled against textual authorities in general, from medieval Arabic and Jewish scholars such as Avicenna, Razi, Averroës, to his contemporaries Pietro Andrea Mattioli, Andrés de Laguna, Leonhart Fuchs, and others. At first sight the Colóquios appears as a narrative map delineating the frontiers of Portuguese possessions of Asian plants, substances and remedies; it was in that way that the Spanish Crown perceived it at the time. A closer reading of Orta’s tome reveals that this work represented an important effort at contributing to a map of a newly established discipline: natural history.22 Incidentally, though rather crucially from Orta’s indirectly expressed point of view, the book was also his life saver as the shadow of the Inquisition narrowed in on New Christian families such as his.23 José Pardo Tomás has recently argued that the printing in Burgos in 1578 of another important medico-botanical work by Christóvão da Costa, had been facilitated by the  Spanish Crown’s interest in Portuguese East Indies.24 The Tractado, was based on the Colóquios with important additions, such as drawings, and materials that this Portuguese physician collected in person during his stay in Asia. Spain’s imperial interests focused especially on the spice and medicinal plant trade that continued to be more profitable than in American succedanea (substitutes). With the Union of the Two Crowns (1580–1640), however, the Iberian empire became the largest global empire in the early modern period. The Spanish Crown could afford to lose interest in  this kind of printed works as soon as Portuguese Indies became part of the Spanish Empire.25 Both Portuguese Asian and Spanish American materia medica, however, remained subjects of intense study and desire by northern Europeans, first the Dutch, who stepped up their own commercial enterprises in the beginning of the seventeenth ­century. They not only appropriated the books and medico-botanical knowledge but also the trade routes and territories that formerly belonged to the Portuguese, such as Sri Lanka and coastal settlements in Kerala and on the Coromandel Coast. By the end of the seventeenth century, instead of reclaiming the territory, the Portuguese focused on trying to “steel,” from the Dutch point of view, the superior quality cinnamon trees from Sri Lanka in order to transplant them to Brazil.26 The lowlands of Sri Lanka had been at one point close to the definition of Portuguese colonial “core” land, but in the seventeenth century it was not even a political frontier. It continued to be, however, a Catholic missionary and Portuguese padroado borderland.

Borderlands of Knowledge in the Estado da Índia   451

Catholic Missionary Frontiers Catholic missions were by definition outside of the core lands of the Portuguese colonial empire in Asia, since within the core, the process of conversion to Catholicism was mostly mandatory and enforced from the start, turning “missions” into parishes. In 1570 among the population of Goa, 90 percent were Christian, although their religious orthodoxy continued to be questioned by Catholic religious specialists. The Inquisition arrived to Goa in 1560, initially mostly to persecute the New Christians (of Jewish origin), such as the family of Garcia de Orta, but in the seventeenth century, it turned against the locally converted Goans (former “gentiles” and Muslims). All in all, the Inquisition processed 16,172 cases between 1661 and 1774 and earned infamy throughout Europe when Charles Dellon’s Relation de l’Inquisition de Goa became something of a bestseller in 1680s.27 The distinction between territories under Portuguese secular-cum-ecclesiastical administration and the missions under the authority of the local non-Christian kings fits perfectly into the general distinction between the core and the borderland. Technically, both were imagined as existing under the umbrella of the Portuguese royal patronage of the mission (padroado) that came into being at the same time as the Spanish patronato, instituted by the Popes in the early sixteenth century. Nevertheless, the missions beyond direct Portuguese political authority were marked by events and people who disagreed and even opposed the Portuguese vision and methods of Christian religious expansion. The men of the cloth arrived in the East on the Portuguese carracks since Christianization was part of the expansion project from the start. That is, if one trusts the much cited response of Vasco da Gama’s “convict-exile (degredado),” João Nunes, who established the first contact with the Indians by stating that the Portuguese came in search of “Christians and spices”28 They did find both since the Nasrani or as they became known under Portuguese—St. Thomas Christians—had been important pepper and spice merchants in Kerala. It was among these that the Franciscan friars tried to establish the missions and discovered that their customs and Christian liturgy were “Nestorian” and needed to be corrected. In their role as rich pepper merchants and politically well connected with the local Malabar kings, St. Thomas Christians were considered by the Portuguese as possible strategic allies in the region. However, the alliance did not go as well as planned. Not only were St. Thomas Christians ignorant of Catholic doctrine, they also lacked sacraments, just as Protestants. They also practiced rituals and customs that Catholics considered “superstitious” resembling those of the “pagans” among whom they had lived in India for centuries. In the first part of the sixteenth century, both Franciscans and Dominicans were mandated by the padroado authorities to reform this ancient Christian community, and to replace the “foreign” Syrian prelates sent for centuries, if somewhat intermittently, from west Asian patriarchates. Four west Asian (Syrian) bishops arrived to Kerala roughly around the same time as the Portuguese

452   Borderlands of the Iberian World and were rather quickly identified as Nestorian heresiarchs by the Catholic religious specialists.29 The only thing these early missionaries accomplished was to antagonize the St. Thomas Christians. It was only around 1575, with the arrival of Alessandro Valignano (1539–1606) in a post-Tridentine spirit, that the Jesuits were invited to devise a method for “reducing (reducir)” St. Thomas Christians to the true faith and to obedience to the Holy Mother Church and to the Portuguese king.30 The mission among the St. Thomas Christians is important because it was the first in India where the Jesuits experimented with their new method of conversion that is known under the name of “accommodation.” This method was used mostly in the religious borderlands of the Portuguese Empire and on the frontiers of the Catholic Church. It was associated with the “Italian” Jesuits and in particular with Alessandro Valignano, who arrived to Goa in 1574 and then traveled extensively through Asia before dying in Macau in 1606. Under his helmet the missions, in particular those outside of the Portuguese territorial authority, came to be reorganized in order to allow a deeper engagement with local cultures. His actions were inspired primarily by the decisions of the Council of Trent (1563) that emphasized pedagogy, teaching catechism and vernacular languages to be used and adapted depending on the specific situation and on differences in culture that the missionaries faced in Asia. For this reason, this approach was based on an initial ethnographic, linguistic and political assessment of the missionary terrain, before devising an appropriate “entrance” into the local culture and society. Matteo Ricci’s (1552–1610) missions in Beijing as well as Valignano’s favorite Japan mission were the most famous examples of this approach to evangelization. In South Asia, as well, similar experiments were going on and in 1606, just as Valignano died in Macau, another Italian missionary, Roberto Nobili (1577–1656) started his New Madurai mission.31 These Jesuit missions were seen as the legitimate extension of the Portuguese padroado. Nevertheless, a controversy regarding the methods of conversion they employed and the correct interpretation of Christianity divided the Jesuits along “national” lines, although political and social differences played a role as well. The major “national” rift occurred between Portuguese and Italian (and Spanish) missionaries. For many important Portuguese Jesuits and ecclesiastics, especially those who remained in Goa, to be Christian meant to become (a kind of) Portuguese. From liturgy, domestic customs, and even food and clothing, the newly converted Christians (cristãos novamente convertidos) were supposed to resemble the colonial casado (or settler) ­community. The casados or “married men” were, moreover, mostly married to Asian women who brought with them a whole lot of different habits in behavior and of mind. Even before the arrival of Valignano the necessity of accommodation was evoked by the first Bishop of Goa, Juan de Albuquerque (d. 1553)—a Franciscan—who furnished biblical examples on behalf of such practices when the king of Tanur demanded in 1545 to be allowed to preserve after conversion certain “external” signs of his caste, such as the (Brahmanical) thread.32 According to Albuquerque, “Nicodemos and Guamaliel [Gamaliel] kept it inside their hearts, that is, the belief in Our Lord, and concealed it outside for fear of Jews.”33 The insistence on the split between inside (soul) and outside

Borderlands of Knowledge in the Estado da Índia   453 (society), private and public, combined with the conscious strategic maintenance of a certain illusion for the sake of later triumph, marked a new kind of thinking, if not yet a policy, in the conversion of the “gentiles.” With this proposition, Juan de Albuquerque projected the early apostolic era and thus the early apostolic methods onto the contemporary Christianization of India. This method of conversion, which required reading the “external” and guessing the “internal” signs, meant that the profound study of the cultures through their texts and languages was necessary. The external signs, seen with the naked eye, were temples, the visible manifestations of idolatry, called pagode in sixteenth-century Portuguese documents.34 The same name was used for the “idol.” The temples in India ranged from a palm tree hut to massive rock-cut buildings or elaborate stone constructions. They were topics of description and objects of destruction. In Goa the temples were also immediately marked out as a special place for a church, while the tax-free land and revenue allocated for the temples was, with some hesitation and after negotiations, attributed to the churches built in their place. The destiny of all temples in the core areas of Portuguese Asia is told and attested to in the Registers and Charters.35 They were doomed to be destroyed not only because of the menace of the presumed demonic powers that inhabited them, but more importantly because they were the center of local sociability, a memory archive of social distinctions, a collective treasury, and the seat of the village authority. In spite of the fact that in the long run even in this context some accommodation did occur, hundreds of temples were ordered to be destroyed. The church replaced the temple in Goa, usually at an exact place, and more often than not on top of and with the materials from the ruined structure. In the missionary ­frontiers a church resembled a temple even more, as a social, economic and aesthetic monument. In Goa, moreover, as anthropologists recently argued, the deities that fled the territory when the Portuguese took over remained present in the Christian and non-Christian consciousness in different guises.36 The local supernatural presences that the Portuguese in Goa were required to ignore, had to be faced head on by the missionaries in other parts of India—along the east and the west coasts in Sri Lanka and in the interior of the sub-continent, in particular. Their names, qualities, and powers had to be studied and analyzed. From the second half of the sixteenth century the exoteric descriptions of the Indian “machine of gentility,” were already relatively well known among the curious Catholic religious specialists in India and were pouring into printed books in Europe, but it was not until the accommodationist missions were put in practice that the “Indological moment,” led by the Jesuits, took place in the beginning of the seventeenth century. This was, according to historian Joan Pau Rubiés, a moment of the European discovery of “Hinduism.” The missionaries in the frontier missions, such as Roberto Nobili in Madurai, sought local informants in order to discover “the esoteric aspects of the religion of the Brahmans.”37 In this way, the knowledge of what would be called Hinduism only in the nineteenth century, came to be already discussed as a specific “religion” (avant la lettre) and not simply under the generic notion of gentility. Moreover, a Jesuit missionary in Madurai, Gonçalo Fernandes Trancoso gave the first name to the unified Brahmanical

454   Borderlands of the Iberian World religion as “bramanismo (Brahmanism).” Without the backing of Portuguese secular and ecclesiastical institutions in the territory under the Nayak of Madurai, where the missionaries were perceived as Portuguese envoys and nothing more, Nobili’s approach, rooted on the conviction that learned and highly literate Brahmans possess the light of reason, was based exclusively on intercultural dialogue and persuasion. The same was the case in another mission, among the “infidels,” at the Mughal court. There was no accommodation to Islam, not in the way that was possible with religions that barely had a name. However, the Jesuits applied the same method of targeting Mughal aristocracy and using literature in the language of the literati, that is, Persian. Especially Jerome Xavier, the great-nephew of Francis Xavier wrote a few long treatises such as Mir’āt al-quds (Mirror of Holiness), with the help of his informant Abd’ al-Sattar b. Qasim Lahawri in which he both refuted Islam and promoted Christianity.38 One of the differences between Nobili and Xavier, both of whom were missionaries around the same time and were prolific writers in Tamil and Persian respectively, was the status of their mission in the Portuguese political scheme. While for the Iberians Islam was considered as irreconcilable religious other, the Mughal Empire was the most important political power in India. South Indian lesser kings and the gentile “religion” were perhaps more alien, but far less threatening. Catholic missions, established and maintained beyond the Estado da Índia, can be defined, therefore, as Portuguese and Catholic imperial borderlands. All through the seventeenth and the first part of the eighteenth century, other Catholic rivals, such as Rome and France, challenged the Portuguese padroado, all the while extending the frontier of Catholicism through foundation of new residences and churches. All these activities were meticulously recorded in Jesuit correspondence as well as in specific treatises and histories that they started producing in the second part of the sixteenth century. On the other hand, the Discalced Carmelites sent by the Propaganda Fide in order to substitute Jesuit missionaries among the St. Thomas Christians in Kerala, and reclaim the missions for the Papacy and against the Portuguese padroado, chose the genre of travel literature to impart their experience from the late seventeenth to the late eighteenth centuries.39 This may have been a diplomatic gesture, at least in the beginning, since a viaggio connoted travel and return, not taking over a mission from another religious order. From Philippe de Très Sainte Trinité’s Itinerarium (1649), translated as Voyage, to Paulinus a Sancto Bartholomaeo Viaggio alle Indie Orientali (1796), these books were, in fact, much more than travelogues.40 They were compendia of all old and new missionary knowledge, mostly borrowed from the manuscripts of the Portuguese padroado missionaries, from botany, geography, and architecture to ethnography, linguistics and history. One of the goals of these books, some of which were printed in the stamperia poliglotta of the Propaganda Fide, one of the most important “Orientalist” printing presses of the eighteenth century, was to showcase the work of the Propaganda Fide missionaries, to inspire new missionary vocations, and to supplant and efface the Portuguese missionary presence in Asia.

Borderlands of Knowledge in the Estado da Índia   455 During the late eighteenth century, Rome became the center of missionary information while the Propaganda Fide tried to organize the accumulated knowledge into printed books among which was a series of grammars of South Asian languages. The first printed Sanskrit grammar by Paulinus a S. Bartholomaeo appeared in 1791, based on indigenous grammatical tradition and on the Sanskrit grammar manuscript by a German (padroado) Jesuit, Johann Ernst Hanxelden.41 In fact in the seventeenth century another German Jesuit, Heinrich Roth had been already a Sanskrit expert and a missionary at the Mughal court.42 Although these books were brushed aside in the next century by the British Orientalists as lacking and useless, they were considerable achievements based on two hundred years of Catholic missionary linguistic border crossing and borderland learning in situ.

Linguistic Borders and Translation Zones The linguistic policy of the Estado da Índia did not go hand in hand with the missionary practice. Although the Estado da Índia was itself a borderland against the demographically and geographically enormous continent, it maintained its imperial façade at least until the end of the eighteenth century. One of the fictions or topoi, with its roots in sixteenth-century Portuguese humanism, was the belief that Portuguese ­language, in its imperial mission, resembled in all, and was even superior to Latin. The phantasy of the famous polymath, João de Barros, who thought that Portuguese idiom would remain in Asia even if/when the empire crumbled, evaporated as soon as the missionary program came into existence. The local vernacular languages were a boundary and a barrier to the spread of Christianity. Teaching Portuguese to the local people, in particular to young boys, and making them into translators or “línguas” had been an initial plan of the missionary minded clerics in Goa and the Estado da Índia, in fact, continued to employ the official translators in all administrative and diplomatic dealings.43 However, in the Goan parishes, as well as in the missions, already in the sixteenth century, local idioms, such as Konkani were used in confession and in teaching catechism. Goan Catholic elites who converted in that century, divided into Brahmans and Charodos, chose to learn and study Portuguese in order to confirm and enhance their status in the imperial order.44 By the end of the seventeenth century, some of them wrote in perfect Portuguese.45 However, Konkani remained the lingua franca of the ordinary people in Goa. In the missions, under the Portuguese padroado, but far from the Portuguese Estado, accommodation was the preferred method to deal with linguistic diversity. The history of Tamil and Konkani learning by the missionaries, in the early modern period, has received some attention by the scholars. Other pioneer research is on the way for other languages such as Syriac, Malayalam, Kannada, Telugu, Persian, Sanskrit, Hindi, and Bengali.

456   Borderlands of the Iberian World Unlike travelers, merchants and Portuguese officials in Goa, the missionaries studied these languages in a different way and for a different purpose. Rather than simply imposing the “language of command,” their goal was to acquire the “command of language.”46 Perfecting a local idiom into the principal medium of Christianization was an integral part of the method of accommodation, which was structured as a three-stage process: first the missionaries had to learn the language to a point of passing for the natives; then they had to describe the language in the artes (grammars and vocabularies) in order to teach the next generation of missionaries, in addition to preparing basic doctrinal and pedagogical literature such as catechisms, lives of saints, and confession manuals; the final stage, often already out of missionaries’ hands, occurred when the converts themselves took over and continued to produce their own pious literature. In this way, the Christian message broke through the linguistic frontiers, but in the process changed and acquired new linguistic and cultural clothing. The Christianization of a language was not accomplished without problems and doubts as to the suitability of a “pagan” idiom to receive a sacred message into its own lexical and semantic field. Certain key words—sacrament, confession, mass, communion, etc.—remained, as was the case in almost all missions in other parts of the world, untranslated but only transliterated. However in the seventeenth century, in the Madurai Mission, Portuguese (and Latin) was completely discarded in the translations into Tamil while Sanskrit was substituted for all the Christian “sacred” words. This was a famous experiment by Roberto Nobili whose project was to delink Christianity from the Portuguese Empire and Portuguese language. By Sanskritizing Christianity, he was trying to create for it an indigenous genealogy with what he considered was a prestigious tradition of Brahmanical learning and theology. It was this particular socio-linguistic decision that infuriated his Portuguese Jesuit coworker in the same mission, Gonçalo Fernandes Trancoso, and prompted him to denounce the Italian of “going native.” His letter of complaint from 1610 became the beginning of the first act in the two-century-long Malabar rites controversy.47 What was at stake, besides the appropriate method of conversion, was knowledge or command of language(s) and their textual traditions. One of the problems was that both Nobili and Fernandes Trancoso, just as other missionaries in this period, depended on the local informants for both texts and translations. At times, the same informant could sell his services and provide diametrically opposing interpretation to the rival missionary factions. This extreme fluidity of information and the weakness in missionary comprehension, even after long and profound linguistic immersion, was an effect of frontier knowledge practices from “grammaticalization” of the languages to choosing the appropriate translation registers. In addition, there was an important economic question (correct information was expensive) since the Portuguese padroado was notoriously short on money. Even if the Malabar rites quarrels were started in the deep borderlands of the Estado da India, they were discussed and decided on in Goa, Lisbon, and, finally in Rome. What looked possible or indispensable in the far outposts of the empire, in the missions, and in the small and fragile Portuguese settlements, such as Hugli, Tuticorim

Borderlands of Knowledge in the Estado da Índia   457 [Tuttukut ̣i], or São Tomé de Meliapor (today a suburb of Chennai), had been differently configured in Goa. Knowledge of Konkani was important, especially in the villages away from urban centers. Franciscans and Jesuits wrote grammars and dictionaries of the language for the purpose of the pastoral care of the rural majority. Without specifically mentioning accommodation, the Jesuits specialized in creating a Konkani/Marathi Christian literature. An English Jesuit, Thomas Stephens wrote the Discurso sobre a vinda de Jesu Christo [Discourse on the coming of Jesus Christ], popularly known as the Krisṭapurāṇ a, which is even today considered as one of the successful literary works inspired by the Marāt ̣hī bhakti tradition.48 This was written and published in Goa, in the very center of the Estado da Índia in 1617, albeit in Roman script. This and similar successful publications and the close presence of the Portuguese political authority may have been partly responsible for the fact that Konkani remains the only Indian language written in the Latin script. Portuguese empire became even more fragile in the eighteenth century in spite of the fact that Goa acquired new territories. The so-called New Conquests, encircling the old core, received a different treatment in terms of religious and linguistic policies. No significant pressure was exerted to convert the majority Hindu population, nor to teach Portuguese language. By that time João de Barros’s ambition to see all Indians speak Portuguese in their temples and Francis Xavier’s mission to convert the whole world were long things of the past. Even with this substantial territorial gain, the fact of the matter remained that Portuguese empire in South Asia in the early modern period was not much more than a permanent borderland between the sea and the continent. In the missionary outposts inland, the symbolic conquest of the densely populated hinterland still went on, but the tension between serving the empire and the church only increased with the influx of non-Portuguese missionaries and of the rival missions set up by the Propaganda Fide and the French king. The borderland quality of the empire combined with a permanent insecurity from within and without stimulated indeed a quest for knowledge. This knowledge remained fragmentary, biased and fluid, however, due to the salient novelty encountered, the inbuilt Christian wiring with which it was inevitably approached, and the fragile ­central authority. As much as it was pioneer and experimental, this imperial knowledge served as a base on which various other colonial disciplines, such as anthropology and philology, grew in prominence, while in the process it slipped from the Iberian portfolio into British colonial archives. There it was repackaged as a “source” at the best or as untrustworthy “native” account at the worst. Devalued under the weight of British imperial machine, this Catholic knowledge, collected and practiced on the borderlands of the Portuguese Empire, dissolved by the end of the eighteenth century, and yet inspired analytical ­categories such as “caste,” “Brahmanism,” “Oriental despotism” and many other that became the signposts and foundations in the construction of disciplinary fields such as Orientalism, as well as anthropology, linguistics, and history.49

458   Borderlands of the Iberian World

Notes 1. Milo Cleveland Beach and Ebba Koch, eds., King of the World. The Padshahnama: An Imperial Mughal Manuscript from the Royal Library, Windsor Castle, trans. Wheeler Thackston (London: Thames & Hudson, 1997), 56–59 and 179–180; picture no.19–20. 2. Frey Sebastian Manrique, Travels of Fray Sebastien Manrique 1629–1643, vol. 1 (Oxford: Hakluyt Society, 1927), 31. Farman is an imperial order bestowing the right to settle and trade against certain obligations such as a tribute or taxes paid to the emperor’s treasury. Biplab Dasgupta, European Trade and Colonial Conquest, vol. 1 (London: Anthem Press, 2005), 259–261. 3. George Davison Winius, “The ‘Shadow Empire’ of Goa in the Bay of Bengal,” Itinerario 7, no. 2 (1983): 83–101. 4. Jorge Flores, “Um ‘Homem que Tem Muito Crédito Naquelas Partes’: Miguel Ferreira, os ‘Alevantados’ do Coromandel e o Estado da Índia,” Mare Liberum 5 (July 1993): 21–37. Rila Mukherjee, “The Struggle for the Bay: The Life and Times of Sandwip, an Almost Unknown Portuguese Port in the Bay of Bengal in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” Revista da Faculdade de Letras, História 9 (2008): 67–88. 5. Stefan Halikowski Smith, Creolization and Diaspora in the Portuguese Indies: The Social World of Ayutthaya, 1640–1720 (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 1. 6. Sanjay Subrahmanyam, The Portuguese Empire in Asia; A Political and Economic History (London and New York: Longman, 1993), 107–144. 7. Angus Maddison, “Appendix B; Growth of World Population, GDP and GDP Per Capita before 1820,” in The World Economy; A Millennial Perspective (Paris: OECD, 2011), 229–265. 8. The title of Dom João III (1502–1557) was: “by the grace of God, King of Portugal, of the Algarves, of either side of the sea in Africa, Lord of Guinea, & of the Conquest, Navigation, & Commerce of Ethiopia, Arabia, Persia, & India.” 9. See also Brandon Bayne, “Converting the Pacific: Jesuit Networks between New Spain and Asia,” in Oxford Handbook on Borderlands of the Iberian World, ed. Danna A. Levin Rojo and Cynthia Radding, 789–816 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019) on the Jesuit effort to extend Christendom across the Pacific under the patronato real. 10. Walter D. Mignolo, “Delinking; the Rhetoric of Modernity, the Logic of Coloniality and the Grammar of De-coloniality,” Cultural Studies 21, no. 2 (2007): 455. 11. Armando Cortesão, ed., A Suma Oriental de Tomé Pires e o Livro de Francisco Rodrigues, (Coimbra: Biblioteca Geral da Universidade de Coimbra, 1978). The English version was published as The Suma Oriental of Tome Pires: An Account of the East, From the Red Sea to China. Written in Malacca and India 1512–1515 (New Delhi: Asian Educational Service, 1990). See also Luís Filipe Barreto, “Duarte Barbosa e Tomé Pires: os Autores das Primeiras Geografias Globais do Oriente,” in Entre dos mundos: fronteras culturales y agentes mediadores, ed., Berta Ares Queija and Serge Gruzinski (Madrid and Seville: EEHA-CSIC, 1997), 177–190. 12. Patricia Seed, Ceremonies of Possession in Europe’s Conquest of the New World, 1492–1640 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 13. Timothy Walker, “Acquisition and Circulation of Medical Knowledge within the Portuguese Colonial Empire During the Early Modern Period,” in Science in the Spanish and Portuguese Empires, ed. Daniela Bleichmar, Paula De Vos, Kristine Huffine, and Kevin Sheehan (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2008), 247–270.

Borderlands of Knowledge in the Estado da Índia   459 14. M. E. Hanson, “Jesuits and Medicine in the Kangxi Court (1662–1722),” Pacific Rim Report 43 (2007): 4; Nicolas Standaert, “The ‘Edict of Tolerance’: A Textual History and Reading,” in In the Light and Shadow of an Emperor: Tomás Pereira, SJ (1645–1708), the Kangxi Emperor and the Jesuit Mission in China, ed. António Vasconcelos de Saldanha (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012), 308–358. 15. Maria Augusta da Veiga e Sousa, ed., O livro de Duarte Barbosa do que Vio e Ouvio (Lisbon: Instituto de Investigação Científica Tropical, 1996–2000). 16. Stefan Halikowski Smith, “In the Shadow of a Pepper-centric Historiography: Understanding the Global Diffusion of Capsicums in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” Journal of Ethnopharmacology. Accessed November 16, 2015, http://dx.doi. org/10.1016/j.jep.2014.10.048. 17. Ângela Barreto Xavier and Ines  G.  Županov, Catholic Orientalism; Portuguese Empire, Indian Knowledge (16th–18th centuries) (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2015), 102. 18. A. J. R. Russell-Wood, The Portuguese Empire, 1415–1808: The World on the Move (Baltimore and London: JHU, 1992), 153. 19. Russell-Wood, The Portuguese Empire, 155–156. 20. Luís Filipe F. R. Thomaz, De Ceuta a Timor (Lisbon: Difel, 1994). 21. Garcia de Orta, Colóquios dos Simples e Drogas he Cousas Medicinais da India, vol. 1 (Reprint Lisbon: Imprensa Nacional-Casa da Moeda, 1987 [Goa, 1563]), 25. 22. Brian  W.  Ogilvie, The Science of Describing: Natural History in Renaissance Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 1. 23. By this book he tried to promote his exceptional expertise in curing Portuguese “colonial” bodies in the tropics, and this knowledge saved his life. See Ines G. Županov, “Botanizing in Portuguese India: Between Errors and Certainties (16th–17th centuries),” in Garcia de Orta and Alexander von Humboldt; Across the East and the West, ed. Anabela Mendes (Lisbon: UCE, 2009), 21–31. 24. Christoval Acosta (or Cristóvão da Costa), Tractado de las drogas, y medicinas de las Indias Orientales: con sus plantas debuxadas al bivo por Christoval Acosta medico y cirujano que las vio ocularmente (Burgos: Por Martin de Victoria impressor de su Magestad, 1578). 25. José Pardo-Tomás, “East Indies, West Indies: Garcia de Orta and the Spanish Treatises on Exotic Materia Medica,” in Medicine, Trade and Empire: Garcia de Orta’s Colloquies on the Simples and Drugs of India (1563) in Context, ed. Palmira Fotes da Costa (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), 154–212. 26. Philomena Sequeira Antony, The Goa-Bahia Intra-Colonial Relations 1675–1825 (Tellicherry: IRISH, 2004). See also, Ines  G.  Županov, “Goan Brahmans in the Land of Promise: Missionaries, Spies and Gentiles in the 17th-18th century Sri Lanka,” in Re-exploring the Links: History and Constructed Histories Between Portugal and Sri Lanka, ed. Jorge Flores (Wiesbaden, Germany: Harrassowitz Verlag, Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, 2006), 171–210. 27. Caio Boschi, “Estruturas Eclesiáticas e Inquisição,” in História da Expansão Portuguesa, eds. F. Bethencourt and K. Chaudhuri, vol. 2 (Lisbon: Círculo de Leitores, 1998), 447. 28. Ines G. Županov, Missionary Tropics: The Catholic Frontier in India (16th–17th centuries) (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), 48. 29. On general history of St. Thomas Christians, see Mathias  A.  Mundadan, History of Christianity in India: From the Beginning up to the Middle of the Sixteenth Century (up to 1542), vol. 1 (Bangalore: Church History Association of India, 1989), and Leslie Brown,

460   Borderlands of the Iberian World The Indian Christians of St. Thomas; An Account of the Ancient Syrian Church of Malabar (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1982). 30. Ines G. Županov, “ ‘One Civility, but Multiple Religion’: Jesuit Mission among St. Thomas Christians in India (16th–17th centuries),” Journal of Early Modern History 9, no. 3–4 (2005): 284–325. 31. Ines  G.  Županov, Disputed Mission: Jesuit Experiments and Brahmanical Knowledge in Seventeenth-Century India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999). 32. The question of Brahmanical thread, worn by high-caste Hindu had been one of the major topics in the Malabar rites controversy. The Jesuits claimed that it was a “social” sign of caste and nobility, and not a “religious” sign of priesthood. With this definition, they claimed that the Brahmanical thread could be blessed by a Catholic priest and worn by Catholics. All Malabar rites and customs, accommodated into Christianity by the Jesuits in the seventeenth century were formally banned by the Papacy in 1744. 33. Županov, Missionary Tropics, 134. 34. Early in the sixteenth century, pagode was identified as a “house of prayer,” a “house dedicated to the devil,” a “house of idols,” a pagan “church,” and a “mosque.” The word itself comes from Bhagavati (Indian Goddess) whose form was printed on the Indian coin. Hence, pagoda is also used in the period for a gold coin. On the etymology of the word denoting both an idol and the temple, see Hans J. Vermeer, ed., Introduction to The First European Tamil Grammar: A Critical Edition, trans. Angelika Morath (Heidelberg, Germany: Groos, 1982). 35. Xavier and Županov, Catholic Orientalism, 46–76. 36. Paul Axelrod and Michelle  A.  Fuerch, “Flight of the Deities: Hindu Resistance in Portuguese Goa,” Modern Asian Studies 30, 2 (1996): 387–421. See also Alexander Henn, Hindu-Catholic Encounters in Goa: Religion, Colonialism, and Modernity (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2014). 37. Joan Pau Rubiés, “From Christian Apologetics to Deism: Libertine Readings of Hinduism (1600–1730),” in Antiquarianism and Intellectual Life in Europe and China, 1500–1800, ed. Peter  N.  Miller and François Louis (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012), 313–364. 38. Pedro Moura Carvalho, ed., Mir’āt al-quds (Mirror of Holiness): A Life of Christ for Emperor Akbar, trans. Wheeler M. Thackston (Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2012). In the later period, the conversion of the non-Muslims within the Mughal Empire became more attractive to the Jesuits, but the results were always meager. 39. Efforts by the Roman Church to repeal and replace the padroado real in Asia can be detected from the Council of Trent (1563) onward, and they become clearly visible with the establishment of the Congregation for the Propagation of Faith (Propaganda Fide) in 1622. The Portuguese padroado was unable to finance, expand, and control its ecclesiastical network in the territories under the Asian kings and emperors. The Propaganda Fide argued that these areas could legitimately fall under the direct administration of the Roman Church, which tried to reassert forcefully its universality and centrality in the post-Tridentine period. The missions taken over by the Propaganda Fide missionaries were typically those from which the Portuguese were expelled by the Dutch or simply had no means to support missionary residences and churches. One such mission was among the St. Thomas Christians in Kerala, to which the Propaganda Fide sent the Discalced Carmelites. The Portuguese, however, held on to their padroado right until the twentieth century, in spite of their obvious material disengagement from mission support.

Borderlands of Knowledge in the Estado da Índia   461 40. Philippe de Très Sainte-Trinité (1603–71) published his Itinerarium Orientale in Lyon in  1649 and the French translation, Voyage d’Orient was published in 1652. Another important viaggio is that by Vincenzo Maria di Santa Caterina da Siena (alias Vincenzo Maria Murchio), Il viaggio all’Indie Orientali (Venice: Giacomo Zattoni, 1678). See also, Paulinus  A.  Sancto Bartholomaeo or Paolino da S.  Bartolomaeo, Viaggio alle Indie Orientali, umiliato alla Santita di N.S Papa Pio Sesto Pontefice Massimo (Rome: Presso Antonio Fulgoni, 1796). For the more detailed discussion on these works see, Xavier and Županov, Catholic Orientalism, 298–299. 41. See Paulinus  A.  S.  Bartholomaeo, Sidharubam seu Grammatica Samscrdamica (Rome: Typis  S.  C.  de Prop. Fide, [1790] 1791); Christophe Vieille and Toon van Hal, eds. Grammatica Grandonica: The Sanskrit Grammar of Johann Ernst Hanxleden s.j. (1681–1732) (Potsdam: Universitätsverlag Potsdam, 2013). 42. Pierre-Sylvain Filliozat, “L’approche scientifique du sanscrit et de la pensée indienne par Heinrich Roth, S.  J.  au XVIIe siècle,” in L’oeuvre scientifique des missionnaires en Asie (Journée d’études organisés par l’Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres et la Société Asiatique), eds. Pierre-Sylvain Filliozat, Jean-Pierre Mahé, and Jean Leclant (Paris: Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, Société Asiatique, 2011), 17–30. 43. Jorge Flores, “Le “língua” cosmopolite; le monde social des interprètes hindous de Goa au XVIIe siècle,” in Cosmpolitisme en Asie du Sud à l’époque moderne: sources, itinéraires, langues (XVIe et XVIIIe siècles), ed. Corinne Lefèvre, Ines G. Županov, and Jorge Flores, Puruṣārtha 33 (Paris: EHESS, 2015), 225–250. 44. Xavier and Županov, Catholic Orientalism, 298–299. 45. Ângela Barreto Xavier, “Purity of Blood and Caste: Identity Narratives in Goan Elites,” in Race and Blood in Spain and Colonial Hispano-America, ed. María Elena Martínez, Max S. Herring Torres, and David Nirenberg (Berlin: LIT Verlag, 2012), 125–149. 46. Bernard  S.  Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 16–56. 47. Županov, Disputed Mission, 5 48. Ananya Chakrabarti, “Three Anthonies: Saints, Locality and Empire in the Seventeenth Century Portuguese World” (paper presented at Warburg Institute of the University of London. London, England, May 2012). 49. Xavier and Županov, Catholic Orientalism, 287–329.

Bibliography Russel-Wood, A. J. R. The Portuguese Empire, 1415–1808: The World on the Move. Baltimore and London: JHU, 1992. Xavier, Ângela Barreto and Ines G. Županov. Catholic Orientalism; Portuguese Empire, Indian Knowledge (16th–18th centuries). New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2015. Županov, Ines G. Missionary Tropics: The Catholic Frontier in India (16th–17th centuries). Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005. Županov, Ines  G. Disputed Mission: Jesuit Experiments and Brahmanical Knowledge in Seventeenth-Century India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999.

chapter 18

Tier r a I ncogn ita Cartography and Projects of Territorial Expansion in Sonora and Arizona, Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries José Refugio de la Torre Curiel

Throughout the eighteenth century, different kinds of images regarding the ­northernmost territories of New Spain—in written and cartographic formats—found their way to Mexico City. In most cases, they contained information prepared in response to needs identified by authorities in New Spain related to reinforcing or modifying their policies for the control, settlement, and defense of those borderlands.1 At other times these images carried news on projects that different religious institutions presented to their superiors (or to instances of colonial government in New Spain and on the peninsula) to reform the mission regime in which they participated, or to propose expansion into new mission turf. For some years now, instead of simple, transparent texts containing the knowledge, misguided impressions, or ignorance of the realities supposedly described for their readers, these writings, maps, and images have been studied as cultural objects; that is, as writings and graphic representations of those spaces composed by authors with diverse intentions, perhaps to re-interpret earlier experiences or to disseminate a specific agenda.2 The analysis of cartographic representations made by Jesuits and Franciscans in northwestern New Spain in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries builds upon that conceptual discussion by situating the production of these visual representations of frontier areas in a wider narrative of imperial borderlands construction. While mapping northwestern New Spain missionaries privileged an imperial vision in which certain preexisting forms of territorial occupation were left out, and new spaces appeared before the beholder to promote Spanish expansion along those successive frontiers.3 Studying such cartographic documents is most useful when pondering the importance of space—as a social product—and proposals for defining territories as expression of the limits of the relations established among individuals, social practices, and

464   Borderlands of the Iberian World g­ eographic settings in the evolution of the notions of frontier in New Spain.4 Although Jesuits and Franciscans differed in their ways of characterizing the existence, customs, languages, and other cultural elements of indigenous groups in northwestern New Spain (mainly Yumas, Pimas, and Apaches), their approaches shared a common denominator: both highlighted certain features of those groups that aligned with efforts to subject frontier areas to colonial domination.5 As authors who put on paper their reflections on that landscape, Jesuits and Franciscans alike participated in a special invention of territories, “in the sense that each observed [landscape] from his own perspective and recorded nature and culture in a narration of his own.”6 Several studies of the chronicles and geographic descriptions produced by Jesuits and Franciscans for these zones have elucidated these processes and revealed the importance that classic works of medieval Spanish thought (especially biblical and patristic sources, along with authors of Classical Antiquity) had for their representations of northern indigenous people, where terms like “barbarian,” “savage,” “gentile,” “infidel,” “enemy of the faith,” or the “Devil’s allies” stand out.7 These very processes are present in graphic representations of northwestern New Spain: images that suggest Spanish appropriation of native forms of occupying geographic spaces, the displacement of local Indian groups as agents in the definition of ethnic territory, the Christianizing of space, and the configuration of jurisdictional limits.

The neutralization of space: the northern frontier as “theater” For authors of Classical Antiquity, beholding landscapes and writing about places that appeared before them were intertwined processes, rooted in the comprehension of surrounding spaces as scenarios where distinct elements coincided to offer spectators the opportunity to re-create the senses. Space, as theater, was thus a canvas for condensing the news discovered by—or represented for—a new observer, one entrusted with “reelaborating, ordering, selecting, clarifying, developing, organizing and compiling” recognizable attributes.8 Such understanding of spaces, or more precisely, the idea of the natural world as a “theater” related to the Greek philosophical discussion on human fate as part of a theatrical representation in which society at large was part of either a comedy or a tragedy. As a literary topic, this idea has a long evolution, leading to the baroque conception of the world as a stage. From the time of Strabo (first century ad in Greece), every geographic scenario, from the earthly sphere in general to specific territories in particular, took on meaning when described in itself, especially if said description addressed the dialectic relation between the elements that pertained to the delimited space and the larger spaces in which said partition was embedded.9 Other Latin authors, Pliny the Elder, for example, strove to fill these spaces with as much information as they could gather for their readers.10 This offered inventories of the known world by selecting data for each space in an effort to

Tierra Incognita: Cartography   465 reach “an admiring spectator whom the author invites to [get] a sample of what is knowable and [to get a glimpse] of nature.”11 Ideas such as these were part of the schooling of clergymen like the Jesuit Eusebio Francisco Kino.12 Kino was the author of a series of maps of northwestern New Spain whose thematic, technical, and chronological evolution was analyzed several decades ago by Jesuit scholar Ernest Burrus. In his works on Kino’s life, writings, and maps, Burrus privileged the analysis of issues related to authorship, craftsmanship (especially in connection with technical skills, decorative elements), publication, and circulation of maps. In his opinion, Kino’s cartography expanded over time, in the sense that his maps progressively incorporated new geographic references, they were more accurate, and gradually eliminated previous mistakes that Kino and other mapmakers had included in previous documents.13 For many years, this line of interpretation of Kino’s maps—and the cartographic works of other missionaries before and after Kino—has dominated much of the scholarship on the exploration of New Spain’s borderlands; however, this approach to cartography as speculum orbis terrarum, or “as a reflection of the degree of scientific knowledge” and artistic sensibilities of a given society,14 has received some criticism since the 1990s not only because it implicitly posits a linear progression of mapmaking but also circumscribes the understanding of maps to their formal elements. Beyond those fields of inquiry, there is much to be said about the forms of representing space that emerge from these maps of the northernmost reaches of New Spain.15 In this regard, attention is drawn strongly to the resources Kino used to highlight the spaces that delimited the Society of Jesus’ mission activities in this area in the late seventeenth century; especially because significant stretches of land were depicted as empty spaces when, in reality, they were home to various Indian peoples that shared commercial, linguistic, or kinship relations. Even without the intention to deceive the viewer, this “neutralization” of space dissociated the nexus between people and territory in the sense that elements such as the extension of local dwellings, the usage of local place names, and the existence of indigenous symbolic places were left out of the space thus represented. It must be recalled that by mid seventeenth century, Jesuit missions had been established along the Yaqui and Sonora Rivers, in the southern and central regions of Sonora. During the following decades, “the Jesuits consolidated their gains bringing outlying rancherías into established pueblos of Pima, Opata, Eudeve and Jova speakers. Then, beginning in 1687, the Crown financed new entradas into the Pimería Alta, where further reducciones brought the northern O’odham into the riverine villages of the Magdalena, Altar, and Asunción valleys.”16 Up to that point, the missionaries had managed to handle the “guarded opposition and reluctant acquiescence” they met when trying to bring indigenous groups into the mission system in Sonora’s highlands. In general terms, it seems that before moving to the Pimería Alta, the Jesuits had enjoyed relative acceptance among the serrano peoples in Sonora; there, “the missionary project appeared benevolent to highland nations, embroiled in chronic warfare, who recalled earlier, violent encounters with slaving expeditions. Moreover, the missions offered material benefits and new deities in this time of crisis.”17 In this context of Jesuit expansion, Kino’s 1696 map was conceived to disseminate information on the environment of the area of New Spain where the Jesuits had ­consolidated their evangelizing efforts and had recently opened a new mission field

466   Borderlands of the Iberian World (Figure 18.1).18 Accordingly, Kino presented the area as a stage for missionary activity—a theater—emphasizing the proximity of the provinces where missionaries were at work and suggesting a continuity running from Sinaloa through the Mayo and Yaqui Rivers, Chínipas, the sierra Tarahumara, Pimería and Moqui, and ending in New Mexico. But this map omitted all mention of the fact that this last area was a province where evangelization had been entrusted to the Franciscans, or that Moqui was in no way comparable to the other zones because it was barely a group of dwellings that marked the approximate location of a mission that the Jesuits aspired to establish. References to Seris, Sobaipuras, Sumas, Janos, Sobas, and Guaymas signaled indigenous groups in those northern provinces in whose midst missions had been set up; however, once again there was no distinction between those already founded and projects for future mission expansion. Peoples like the Opa and Cocomaricopa, for example, who inhabited the

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Figure 18.1.  Theater of the Apostolic Works of the Society of Jesus in North America. As a token of Jesuit cartography of aspirations, the Teatro de los trabajos apostólicos de la Compañía de Jesús en la América Septentrional (1695–1696) shows how the Jesuits attempted to organize peoples and spaces in northern New Spain. Drawn by José Refugio de la Torre Curiel from Ernest J. Burrus, La obra cartográfica de la Provincia Mexicana de la Compañía de Jesús (1567–1967), vol. 2 (Madrid: José Porrúa Turanzas, 1967), plate 8.

Tierra Incognita: Cartography   467 banks of the Gila River and its feeders, are represented in exactly the same way as groups with fixed residences, despite the fact that no permanent missions existed there. According to Burrus, in Kino’s cartography, especially this particular map, “the human element holds the first place.” In his view, Kino’s identification of the indigenous groups attests to this primacy, since all the other elements are ordered as a function of this basic element. In Kino’s cartography, adds Burrus, “It is not the mountains, rivers, bays, nor the vast expanse of the plains, not so much the native settlements nor even the missions themselves which are of primary interest to Kino; it is the people. The names of their groups or tribes are written in the largest letters across his charts and in color. Even geographic features are thought of and represented in relation to the inhabitants, ­villages and groups of people.”19 This reading of the 1696 map, however, no longer seems sustainable. The selection and overlapping of the elements that Kino knew and displayed on his map suggests uniformity, though some of those zones had only a precarious Spanish presence. Visual uniformity, for instance, was particularly striking in the cases of New Mexico and Moqui. It is important to remember that after the 1680 revolt in New Mexico, most Franciscan-staffed missions were still striving to get back on their feet; Moqui province, on the other hand, was a compound of Indian settlements that remained beyond the reach of the Spanish dominions and by no means constituted a missionary district. Visual representations of these areas dismissed such elements, suggesting that the Spanish presence—and dominion—there was as firmly established as in Nueva Vizcaya or Sonora. When taken together with his references to recently-gathered information on the northernmost territories—the Gila River banks, for instance—what emerges is an insistence on a project that this Jesuit missionary adamantly defended; namely, that it was viable to reach and colonize California by expanding the Jesuit missions on the continent. Inscribed in the aforementioned Western tradition of articulating specific scenarios into a larger whole, the 1696 map proposes a solution for continuing the colonization of northwestern New Spain, from New Mexico to the California peninsula. The mission areas shown there constituted a graphic complement to Kino’s active and persistent pursuit of authorization to push the enterprise of Christianization into those territories; in this sense, standardizing the representation of ill-defined areas—as New Mexico and Moqui—and Jesuit mission districts was a visual resource designed to strengthen the argument that Kino would present to the authorities of the Society of Jesus in Mexico City in defense of his proposal to expand the mission frontier.20 It is important to recall that Kino prepared this map just after the Pima rebellion of 1695, in which Jesuit missionary Francisco Xavier Saeta was killed; an event that led to profound soul-searching among Kino’s superiors in the Jesuit Mexican province regarding missionary work on those far-off frontiers. Facing adverse opinions by the Jesuit General, Tirso de González, and provincial, Diego de Almonacir, that he was motivated more by the ambition to cover an enormous mission territory than any conviction to consolidate his work among new converts, in 1695–1696 Kino responded with a long memorial on the life and death of Saeta. But that text also had a secondary aim: to demonstrate the solidity of his proposal to push into the peninsula of California from a supply base in Sonora.21

468   Borderlands of the Iberian World Kino’s articulation of spaces was based on two processes that he combined in the respective images and texts: on the one hand, knowledge previously acquired from informants and Indian guides on the relations among deserts, watering holes, river systems, and the distribution of the local Indian groups that inhabited those territories; on the other, a sort of neutralization of these elements achieved by privileging aspects of territorial ordering and homogeneity. Although Kino’s documents recognize the existence of Indian groups and the presence of non-Spanish inhabitants in northwestern New Spain, in reality those references serve as only a diffuse backdrop to his efforts to document advances in the founding of mission towns administered by Jesuits. Seen in this light, his work reveals a decentering process; one in which the map maker and the observer consciously omit indigenous ways of territorial articulation in order to propose an alternative way of perceiving the space there depicted. In his 1696 map, Kino standardized the visual display of the names of Indian groups, provinces and rivers. He chose to represent mission Indians (e.g., Chínipas and Tarahumaras) and groups living outside the colonial system like the Opas and Cocomaricopas, for whom only the scantiest information existed, in exactly the same way. This process of homogenizing—or neutralizing—space made no mention of the intensity of forms of indigenous occupation in the province, because his main goal in mapping the region was to configure a grand theater for evangelization.22 Analyzing another map of northwestern New Spain drawn by Kino in 1701 in connection with two reports on the same area, dated 1698 and 1703, allows us to better appreciate the emergence of these images of New Spain’s borderlands. On September 15, 1698, the alcalde mayor of Sonora, Domingo Jironza, commissioned his lieutenant, Diego Carrasco, to accompany Kino to the entrada that, at that time, they had organized to reach the confluence of the Gila and Colorado Rivers. As part of his commission, Carrasco was instructed to take careful note of all features along the way, estimate the number of Indians living in the area, and record landmarks of the terrain.23 In his report to Jironza, Carrasco explained that on the northwest coast of Sonora, from the Gila River to La Concepción de Caborca, the province had “over forty rancherías [encampments], small and large [that together] have more than four thousand souls.”24 At an intermediate point on their journey, near the Santa Brígida mountain (marked on contemporary maps as Santa Clara, but now known to be El Pinacate) Carrasco noted that he was told that people from the ranchería of Santa Brígida often go to see their Pima relatives, who live on the other side of the Río Grande [Gila River], [and] on the other fast-flowing, densely-populated Colorado River; and that they used to bring back squash and maize seeds that were cultivated there, with which they fed us. There’s a multitude of Indians working there and they have abundant maize, beans, squash and cotton, and lots of fish, and the river is very populated with prosperous rancherías.25

Returning to Kino, we find that his cartographic record of 1701 conveys a much simpler image of this space. A series of settlements was shown there to mark the “Passage by

Tierra Incognita: Cartography   469 land to California”26 following a chain of reference points meant to signal the feasibility of connecting Caborca and the Gila River. But there was no mention whatsoever of the other forms of territorial articulation that Carrasco saw in the same period. In Kino’s view, the purpose of representing space in this way was to produce a broad image of a whole that accorded with his plans for northwestern New Spain. As he made explicit in a report to the viceroy of New Spain in 1703, there were favorable signs that the northern reaches of the province of Sonora could be considered one grand territorial unit: “It would be easy to effect in this northern region both the conversion of the countless inhabitants to our Catholic faith and the winning over of very numerous and unheard of tribes to the obedience and advantageous fealty of our Sovereign. Likewise, it would be no difficult task to acquire very rich valleys watered by bounteous and fertile rivers, and densely populated by well-disposed and docile natives, long inured to work.”27 Here, Kino assured the viceroy that if he authorized dispatching more missionaries to accelerate the conversion of the Indians of those zones, the consolidation of the conquest of the enormous territory he had delineated earlier based on his previous explorations would be guaranteed to the west, as far as the lands of the Soba and the Sea of California, to the Sobaipuris and the Río Grande de Gila, which has its headwaters in New Mexico; to the northeast, as far as the bounds of the land of the Apaches, which borders on New Mexico and the home of the Zuñis and the Moquis; to the northwest, as far as the most bounteous and fertile Río Colorado with its densely settled valley, and to the land passage to Upper California.28

This extensive territory that, in synthesis, spanned the province of Sonora, Pimería Alta, and the nations bordering the Gila and Colorado Rivers, was for Kino not only a key piece of the spiritual geography of the Jesuit Mexican province but also an area that could serve as the nerve center for expanding Spain’s dominions beyond that northern frontier. He argued that consolidating the Jesuits’ missionary labors would make it possible to open communications from California to New Mexico, and from there to New France, thus completing a new transcontinental route that would connect much more expeditiously to Europe than the one through Veracruz.29 Though Kino’s plans never came to fruition, the idea of northern New Spain as a grand mission theater did not vanish entirely. In fact, a similar way of representing the northern frontier can be found in José Antonio de Villaseñor y Sánchez’s Theatro Americano (1746–1748), a work that aspired to integrate a “true state or balance of the economic, demographic and political reality of the Vice-Royalty,” and that became extremely important in ensuing decades as “the first regional geography of Mexico elaborated in New Spain” by a creole, and because “it helped create awareness of the real dimensions of that territory.”30 It must be noted that Villaseñor y Sánchez’s work combined demographic information, detailed descriptions of New Spain’s regions, and visual images, emphasizing the reliability and thoroughness of his data. In this respect, his work was illustrative of the pursuit of administrative efficiency and tight control that

470   Borderlands of the Iberian World Bourbon authorities promoted across the Spanish Empire. Thus, reliance on statistical information and field-collected observations were at the core of government action by this time.31 Accordingly, Villaseñor y Sánchez relied on Jesuit missionaries for information on northwestern New Spain. For example, in response to a request from this cosmographer, Jesuit Jacobo Sedelmayr journeyed from Tubutama to the Gila River hoping to reach the province of Moqui and evaluate the possibility of extending the mission enterprise into that remote zone32—which, as the reader will recall, Kino included in his 1696 map as part of the Teatro de los trabajos apostólicos of the Society of Jesus in northern New Spain. Villaseñor y Sánchez’s Theatro Americano reproduces the image that Sedelmayr projected of the potential for establishing a continuum of Christian towns that would stretch well beyond the remotest mission in northern Sonora.33 In the Pimería Alta region, to begin with, between Tubutama and the Gila River, lay a vast expanse comprising some eighty leagues through a space populated by “a multitude of people”—un gran gentío—with “some Christians.” In general, those groups were considered “docile and tame thanks to the ongoing work of Jesuits zealous [in teaching] the Catechism, who have performed their ministry in this area for fifty years.”34 As in Kino’s time, evangelizing in this zone could lead to the formation of an extensive mission circuit that would complement colonization between Pimería Alta and the Gila and Colorado River basins: The nations that have so far been verified as living on the riverbanks of the Gila are, upstream, the Apaches, our enemies, and after an unpopulated area of some twenty-four leagues follows the Pima nation in the villages mentioned above, and then another unpopulated area of twenty-four leagues, after which we find the nation of the Cocomaricopas, before entering another unpopulated area of thirty [leagues], and then coming upon the Yuma Indians; and from there downstream the river joins the Colorado and continues out to the ocean. The entire river could be administered with just seven or eight evangelical operators; with two more [missionaries] for the Cocomaricopas of the Colorado River, one [additional] operative to administer the Sobaipuris [and] Pimas, and another in Busani, which together with the seven Jesuit missions already founded in Pimería, and those that could be established in said places, leaves no doubt that the reduction of all those gentiles would be achieved.35

In this way, New Spain’s remote northwestern area was integrated into a unitary vision of the viceregal territory as an arena for evangelical action in which the Society of Jesus was forging ahead among indigenous peoples willing to accept the Spanish presence. In this vision, the northern frontier acquired meaning as a geographic unit with the characteristic features of a zone of territorial expansion, while simultaneously being presented as a region that contrasted sharply with the rest of New Spain. What emerged was a conundrum: could that immensity be brought under Spanish dominion, or would it be allowed to fall into the hands of foreigners and indigenous enemies? The answer these visual and textual images proposed resolutely emphasized the imperial support for projects of mission expansion.

Tierra Incognita: Cartography   471

Incorporation into Christianity From an institutional perspective, it is clear that Jesuit cartography on northwestern New Spain presented an image of territorial continuity. Part of this vision required homogenizing references to local populations, but equally important were efforts to demonstrate that the northern frontier had been effectively incorporated into the domain of Christianity because, when all was said and done, that was the element that would confer a sense of unity to this region of North America. Through operations such as these, the territories of northern New Spain acquired a new characteristic: instead of the components neutralized by the authors of earlier documents, Jesuit and Franciscan maps began to show a frontier explicitly assimilated to Christianity. In some cases, this transformation was enabled by the preparation of statistical reports on the population of the northern missions, like the accounts presented in 1754 by the Mexican Province of the Society of Jesus, which included a petition to Jesuit authorities in Rome to create a new province in New Spain centered on mission establishments in the north. According to this document—which, interestingly, was accompanied by a map by Villaseñor y Sánchez highlighting the opposition between the center of the vice-royalty and the immense northern reaches—the inhabitants of those places were Christo aggregati: a total of three hundred localities with over twenty-four thousand families and almost eighteen thousand children who constituted the “harvest of souls” that the Jesuits could celebrate in northern New Spain.36 More frequently, however, mission cartography used a different resource to represent New Spain’s northern frontier; that of sacralizing geographic space by applying place names from the Christian calendar (patronymics) to population centers and local landmarks. One of the best-documented examples for the northwest is the transition carried out in the way localities along the margins of the Gila and Colorado Rivers were represented in regional maps. Into the late seventeenth century, references to villages there conserved the indigenous names that Kino had noted in his early maps. However, as he gathered more detailed information on these territories, his representation of the geographic features of the confluence of the Gila and Colorado Rivers became more precise, as did the vision of the insularity of California that still held sway at that time. In addition to these geographic rectifications reflected on the famous map of 1701 that documented the “Passage by land to California”—but without abandoning the cartographic tradition discussed above—Kino decided to include Christian place names to designate populations in Pimería Alta and around the Gila and Colorado Rivers, combining some Indian names with new denominations or, in some cases, simply replacing ancient names (Figure 18.2).37 As mentioned above, the representations of the territories of northwestern New Spain that Kino created for this map—the proximity of nations of friendly Indians, local toponyms, the continuity of Indian populations from New Mexico to California—would be reproduced in later maps made in New Spain and Europe in the eighteenth century as

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Figure 18.2.  Fragment of a map drawn by Francisco Eusebio Kino in 1701, titled Passage per terre a la Californie (“Overland Passage to California”). Eighteenth-century Jesuit cartography was at the core of the fixation of a renewed focus on the geography and landscapes of northwestern New Spain. Renaming places and sketching rivalries and cooperation among native groups created a biased idea of proximity and integration; it also obscured indigenous understandings of space, trade, and communication. Courtesy of Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Département Cartes et Plans, GE DD-2987 (8880).

part of the official demarcation of the frontiers of the viceroyalty; some examples of this tendency can be found in the works of cartographers such as Francisco Álvarez Barreiro, Antonio de Villaseñor y Sánchez, and José Antonio de Alzate.38 Around 1710, the elaboration of the map of Nueva Navarra (available for publication towards 1724) accentuated the tendency that Kino began with his “Passage by land to California.” The very idea of renaming New Spain’s northwestern portions, under the pompous title of New Navarre, echoed Kino´s project of uniting diverse regions where Jesuit missionaries were already actively involved. Thus, as he suggested to the first Bourbon monarch of Spain, King Philip V, New Navarre could be regarded as a new kingdom that “might unite still other neighboring kingdoms which are being conquered with those already conquered, just as the kingdom of Navarre in Europe lies between and unites the crowns and realms of France and Spain.” In Kino’s vision, seven “kingdoms” could be established along and beyond New Spain’s northern frontier: New Biscay, New Mexico, and Lower California, were provinces already established; Upper California and “Gran Quivira” were already at hand; New Navarre would comprise northern Sinaloa, Sonora and Pimería Alta, while New France consisted of the French dominions in Canada. The project of creating a kingdom of New Navarre was soon rejected due to the political implications of uniting French and Spanish dominions, however, the term along with Kino’s map of “New Navarre” were reproduced by several English treatises on geography.39 On this new chart, settlements in the province of Sonora are represented as communities where the religious labors of the Jesuits were consolidated. They were referred to as Indian Christian towns—Pueblos Xptianos de Indios—though the map also recognizes the existence of rancherías of gentile Indians in the province. The resource was also

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Tierra Incognita: Cartography   473

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40

Figure 18.3.  In 1710 when Francisco Eusebio Kino drew this map, the proposal of connecting New Spain’s northwestern frontier and the French dominions in Canada was rapidly dismissed by Spanish bureaucrats, but the idea of the New Kingdom of New Navarre (part of this projected alliance) would remain in European cartographic imagination. Drawn by José Refugio de la Torre Curiel from Ernest J. Burrus, La obra cartográfica de la Provincia Mexicana de la Compañía de Jesús (1567–1967), vol. 2 (Madrid: José Porrúa Turanzas, 1967), plate 13.

applied to New Mexico, as villages and missions there were marked as centers of Christianity, omitting, in most cases, indigenous names (Figure 18.3). One feature of this map that stands out is that its author—also Kino—once again omitted Indian place names from the rancherías on the banks of the Gila and Colorado Rivers, leaving only Christian patronymics. In actual fact, missionaries had barely begun to enter this zone to establish new missions, and in the early eighteenth century this project had not materialized. Indian settlements in this region are represented on the map under the label of gentile locations, but are assigned a place in Spain’s dominions through the act of giving them new denominations. This practice was proposed for the broad waterways of the northwest as well, which are identified as the Río de los apóstoles, or River of the Apostles (the Gila River), and the Río Colorado de los mártires—the Colorado River “of the martyrs.”

474   Borderlands of the Iberian World As on earlier maps, the idea of the Nueva Navarra as a group of Christian ­ opulations—or settlements en route to incorporation into Christianity—would be p echoed in the works of new European printers who adopted this image of New Spain’s northwestern frontier and reproduced it in their publications.40 As a potent visual discourse, the map of Nueva Navarra portrayed this frontier as a group of rancherías that lent themselves to the expansion of the Jesuit missions; such an argument was also strengthened by testimonies that lauded the alleged merits of the Society of Jesus in converting local Indian peoples. Thus, when the Jesuit Ignaz Pfefferkorn published his Description of Sonora in Germany in 1794, he included a map that delineated the state of that frontier at the moment of the expulsion of the Jesuits in 1767 (Figure 18.4). The layout designed by the author of this map—a soldier named C. Du Puis—showed that

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Figure 18.4.  In 1767 the Jesuits were expelled from the Spanish dominions, including northern New Spain; in response to their critics, members of the Society of Jesus produced a plethora of written and visual records during the ensuing decades, documenting what they saw as a history of continuous expansion of Christianity. A typical example is the Map of Sonora and Ostimuri drawn by C. Du Puis and published by Ignaz Pfefferkorn in his Description of Sonora (Germany 1794). Drawn by Mariana de la Torre from Ignaz Pfefferkorn, Beschreibung der Landschaft (Cologne: Lang, 1794).

Tierra Incognita: Cartography   475 the Spaniards had retreated from the northernmost part of Pimería Alta, and that the Jesuits had been forced to abandon several mission zones. But it also revealed that the remaining mission establishments, together with reminders of the deaths of the final four Jesuits who perished in those provinces, were the keys for reading this map as the society’s legacy in northwestern New Spain. Pfefferkorn’s 1794 map holds a prominent place among references to the martyrdom of padres Heinrich Ruhen and Tomás Tello, in Sonoita and Caborca, respectively, during the Pima rebellion of 1751, and Nicolás Tamaral and Lorenzo Carranco, killed at the missions of San José del Cabo and Santiago in Lower California in October 1734, during the rebellion of the Pericúes.41 What this type of cartography intended to recreate on New Spain’s northern frontier was a series of images that would attest to the achievements in expanding the mission enterprise up to the eighteenth century.42 As in the case of works by the grand chroniclers of Antiquity, the aim was to create monuments that would disseminate the accomplishment of their labors through time and space.43

The Threat of Hostile Indians and the Discursive Return to a Militarized Frontier Parallel to these visual and written representations—which might be dubbed as “cartography of aspirations,” since they promoted the idea of consolidating the Jesuits’ religious mission—by the late seventeenth century the complex social tissue of the province of Sonora clearly manifested the accumulated tensions of the mission regime. The year 1681 marked the beginning of a long period—that would extend to the late eighteenth century—during which the province was ravaged by repeated inter-ethnic revolts. Several indigenous groups openly opposed the mission regime, key sectors of the population rejected the colonial order, Indians resented the burden of forced work imposed on them, local authorities turned to violent means to put down local uprisings, and the threat of attacks by Apaches and multiethnic bands on mission towns and Spanish settlements was ever-present. These factors and others potentiated the growing social instability that characterized this period. The Ópata rebellion of 1681, uprisings by different Indian groups between 1690 and 1697, the Yaqui revolt of 1740–1741, the rebellion of the Seris in 1751, and the war waged from Cerro Prieto by the Seris and Lower Pimas from 1726 to 1771 are among the most notable episodes of indigenous reactions to the pressures of Spanish colonialism.44 By the mid-eighteenth century, especially after the Yaqui and Seri rebellions of the 1740s and 1750s, forms of representing northwestern New Spain changed as the urgency to resolve internal conflicts in the province was aggravated by the pressing need to deploy resources to counteract a growing external threat.45 Mission cartography had frequently registered the presence of hostile Indians around the confines of Spanish

476   Borderlands of the Iberian World settlements, but in the second half of the eighteenth century various opinions warned that the province of Sonora was actually at the mercy of raids by “bellicose Indians” (indios bravos), especially the dreaded Apaches.46 Clearly, this attitude reflected the growing hostility between Spaniards and Apaches in the frontier provinces of Sonora and Nueva Vizcaya, which “reached their maximum intensity between 1748 and 1788.”47 But this attitude also reflected the multiplication of multiethnic bands, which concentrated large contingents of Indians, mestizos and members of other castes who chose to live on the margins of colonial society.48 As a result, in the eighteenth century the Apaches “were considered as the official enemy [ . . . ] on the basis of elements both real and constructed.” In this context, mapping the northern frontier became a support for official discourses by soldiers, residents, and authorities, all of whom clamored for assistance, exemptions, and privileges as the war demanded that they demonstrate “the presence of an enemy, the outline of conflict, [and] the threat of danger.”49 Under these conditions, old allusions to the territories of non-subjected Indians took on new meaning, for they were now associated with the effects of depopulation that the internal uprisings and incursions by hostile Indians were causing in spaces where traditional thought held that the Spanish had a firm presence. Thus, in his Description of Sonora (1762), the Jesuit Juan Nentuig no longer alluded to a continuous domain of Christianity achieved among the populations of northern Pimería Alta, the frontier that missionaries from other epochs held up as a shining example of the success of the Jesuits’ mission enterprise. Nentuig argued in the early 1760s that the populations along the Gila and Colorado Rivers and the broad “unpopulated” expanses of Pimería Alta actually offered a valuable means of contributing to the defense of the province of Sonora as they could press forward and establish new missions “to the enemy’s very back.”50 Against the backdrop of the growing threat of non-subjected Indians, a space heretofore presented to the viceregal authorities as a domain of Christianity was now seen as a possible defensive solution for reorganizing the northwestern frontier. After the expulsion of the Jesuits in 1767, the Franciscans of the Colegio de Querétaro and the province of Santiago de Xalisco were sent to northwestern New Spain to carry on the mission work performed up to then by the Society of Jesus. This change did not presuppose continuity in the methods employed or the influence that the Jesuits had exerted on the social organization of Indian communities.51 But it did permit some continuity in the concept of northern New Spain as a “frontier to the gentiles”—frontera con la gentilidad—thereby reinforcing the idea that Spanish occupation of the area was indispensable. In fact, this was one of the main objectives that the Franciscans of the Colegio de Querétaro had in mind when they arrived at the missions in Pimería Alta, in 1768, pondering the possibility of establishing new reducciones around the Gila and Colorado Rivers.52 Father Francisco Garcés traveled frequently to different groups of Gileño Pimas, and by the following decade his experiences made him a key figure in attempts to reconfigure New Spain’s northern frontier by means of land expeditions organized to open a road between New Mexico and California (1774–1776).53 According to Garcés, the Indians of those regions—especially the Yumas—looked favorably on being congregated in missions, so the only support he required was Viceroy

Tierra Incognita: Cartography   477 Bucareli’s authorization to found two presidios nearby. His view was seconded by the captain of the presidio at Tubac, Juan Bautista de Anza, leader of the aforementioned expeditions from New Mexico to Alta California.54 Anza manifested his support for this project in a letter to the viceroy in which he recounted that a Yuma chief had promised to keep the peace, promote friendship with the Spaniards, and allow the conversion of his people to Christianity.55 In the context of these expeditions, Father Pedro de Font—a Franciscan from the Colegio de Querétaro who accompanied De Anza as he reconnoitered land routes through northwestern New Spain—gathered observations on the indigenous groups in Pimería Alta and along the Gila and Colorado Rivers.56 It was an effort to make this idea a reality and push Spanish colonization forward into a geographic space once again imagined as a “frontier to the gentiles.” From notes in his field diaries, Font later produced several writings that described the settings he encountered during the expedition, and outlined a personal project not explicitly requested by his superiors but born of his desire to suggest how they “could sustain the new missions of the Colorado River, once established.”57 At this point, Font proposed to the Colegio a clearly defined and delimited geographic unit: the series of sierras running from the town of Dolores on the margins of the San Miguel River, through Tucson, and as far as the Gila River, would mark the frontier with the “Apachería,” leaving the Papaguería to the west of that zone in the area around Tucson (Figure 18.5).58 Upon reaching the Gila River, the northern limit of the proposed conquest, missionaries could work with the Gileño Pimas, whom he described as “quite dark-skinned and robust of body, valiant and sworn enemies of the Apaches.” There, they could also exploit water and timber as the Indians did to benefit their harvests and build their dwellings. Font went on to say that the series of Pima rancherías lining the banks of the Gila River had an incipient labor organization that the mission enterprise could use to its advantage. Those Indians had cornfields “fenced with poles [and] tilled in plots” and irrigated by canals (acequias) that held out the promise of increased production because they had already begun to build small dams. But what was most encouraging in this scenario, Font argued, was that the Gileño Pimas “show a willingness to have missions among them, not only as they are peaceful, but also as they live in sedentary villages (pueblos formados), for in this district of some six leagues there are five hamlets [ . . . ] and they keep busy with their crops (sementeras).” Further downstream, the Cocomaricopas and Yumas were similarly well disposed to receiving missionaries, with the added advantage, Font insisted, that the current there was stronger because it joined with the Asunción River, thus ensuring more plentiful crops.59 The map that Font annexed to his descriptions showed an image of spaces organized in line with Spanish customs, where the successive delimitations of different towns created a continuum of forms of territorial occupation. Thus, it was possible to visualize, between the confines of the zones of alleged Spanish dominion—Papaguería and Pimería Alta in northern Sonora—and those inhabited by hostile Indians (Apachería, which blocked the route to Moqui and New Mexico), a group of seven districts that

478   Borderlands of the Iberian World

Figure 18.5.  Plano que contiene las provincias de Sonora, Pimerías, Papaguería [ . . . ] (“Chart Containing the Provinces of Sonora, Pimerías, Papaguería”) drawn by fray Pedro de Font in 1776. Late in the eighteenth century, Spanish observers kept thinking of New Spain’s northwestern frontier as a single unit. Although they registered the presence of many interconnected but autonomous ethnic spaces, the standard practice was to recommend their incorporation into new administrative units. Archivo General de Indias, Mapas y Planos, México 349. Reproduced by permission of the Spanish Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y Deporte.

could constitute a new, well-structured frontier capable of fencing the Apache threat out. The visual contrast between the imposing area of Apachería that limited communications with New Mexico and was a constant threat to Nueva Vizcaya and Sonora, and a potential territorial organization that the Spaniards had not been able to achieve, was part of a proposal to pursue the goal of returning to the Gila and Colorado Rivers to complete a long-delayed project. After all, in a period marked by efforts to establish ­terrestrial communications among the provinces of northwestern New Spain—also reflected in the routes described in Font’s diary and on his map—it seemed logical to utilize the communication routes that those riverine nations had used since ancient times to contact the Moquino and Pueblo Indians. This argument proved so convincing that by 1780 the founding of new missions among the Yuma and Cocomaricopa at the confluence of the Gila and Colorado Rivers was a reality. After drawn-out negotiations in Mexico City, the Franciscans established the missions of La Purísima Concepción del Río Colorado and San Pedro and San Pablo de Vicuñer in that same year. The missionaries were escorted to the area by two contingents

Tierra Incognita: Cartography   479 of soldiers and their families to support the project of Spanish colonization.60 But things did not go well for these new missions, and after just a few months local Indians violently rejected the newcomers. Local discontent led to the death of some settlers and the missionaries Juan Díaz and Matías Moreno (in San Pedro and San Pablo de Vicuñer on July 17, 1781), and Francisco Garcés and Juan Antonio de Barreneche (in la Purísima Concepción on July 19, 1781).61 The Franciscans blamed the fiasco at the Colorado River on the viceregal authorities’ decision to entrust the administration of the new population centers to soldiers.62 They argued vehemently that the best arrangement for organizing missions was the so-called Texas method, in which administration of community life was under their direct control. In contrast, they contended, wherever the excesses of Spaniards, or interference in that system of government occurred, results for the advancement of the missions were disastrous.63 Obviously, the Franciscans’ diagnosis of the roots of discontent among the Indians along the Colorado River was debatable, since it glossed over the disruptions that the Spanish presence inevitably caused in local systems of social organization, regardless of who directed the project. But their evocation of frustrated aspirations captured clearly the geopolitical dimension of this failure. As Franciscan author Diego de Bringas recalled years later, in 1781 they lost the opportunity to consolidate the Spanish presence “among the gentiles” in a territory that covered “from 32 to nearly 37 degrees boreal latitude.” But this episode was not only a failed attempt to broaden New Spain’s dominions but also meant losing access to large contingents of potential converts that since ancient times had maintained contact with the most remote towns in Papaguería and who were, moreover, bitter enemies of the Apaches.64 In these final comments, expressed in the context of efforts to obtain support for a return to the Gila and Colorado Rivers in the late eighteenth century, Bringas synthesized the central aspects of the “cartography of aspirations” that the Jesuits and Franciscans had elaborated in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries for this part of New Spain’s northern frontier. On the one hand, those texts documented the viability of the projects of mission expansion proposed at different moments. In this regard, maps demonstrated that it was possible to “be there,” to penetrate new geographic spaces, and suggested, through several visual resources, the territorial benefits that the projected expansion might bring: creating new districts, linking various populated areas, Christianizing and controlling inhabited spaces, and establishing alliances with the enemies of non-subjected Indians. On the other, these aspirational maps reflected various initiatives to exploit local knowledge of the geographic space and forms of communication from, and towards, “empty spaces”; that is, those not yet under Spanish control. While a whole series of visual and rhetorical images of New Spain´s northern frontier was constructed on the basis of detailed records of inter-ethnic contacts and indigenous forms of territorial occupation, in the end, the religious and geopolitical agenda of representatives of the church and Crown appeared as the explicit or dominant referents in the cartography of those borderlands. They certainly reflected observations from the field but were overloaded with preoccupations from the desk, which included neutralizing

480   Borderlands of the Iberian World indigenous landscapes, creating visual arguments and proofs about the likelihood of  evangelization, and delineating an integral theater comprising a succession of Christian kingdoms and provinces. In this way linking the Californias to Sonora and New Mexico, and even to regions further north, or documenting the existence of a frontier to the gentiles were all intellectual and visual resources intended to provide the basis for new occupation of those regions. Agents of the Spanish Empire created these images about the borderlands they later suggested how to “fill” with their presence, although in many cases those alleged vacuums reacted against those forms of occupation in ways that made this story much more complex.

Notes 1. Some descriptions of northern New Spain were associated with military inspections like those led by Brigadier Pedro de Rivera (1728), the Marqués de Rubí (1766–1768) and Hugo O’Connor (1771–1776). Military incursions to pursue rebel groups were another source of information on the northern territories; one particularly important case was the Expedición de Sonora, launched against the Seris and commanded by Domingo de Elizondo. Other detailed descriptions of northern New Spain that circulated in this epoch were the records of visitas by civil and ecclesiastical authorities, like José Rodríguez Gallardo (Sinaloa and Sonora 1748–1749) and the Bishop of Nueva Vizcaya, Pedro Tamarón y Romeral (1765). 2. On maps as cultural objects, see John B. Harley, The New Nature of Maps: Essays in the History of Cartography (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001); Raymond Craib, “Cartographic Mexico. A History of State Fixations, National Maps, and the Geo-historical Imagination in nineteenth-century Mexico,” Hispanic American Historical Review 82, no.1 (2002): 33–68; Raquel Urroz Kanán, Mapas de México. Contextos e historiografía moderna y contemporánea (Mexico: CONACULTA, Gobierno del Estado de Veracruz, Instituto Veracruzano de la Cultura, 2012). On the analysis of written descriptions, see Guy Rozat, América. Imperio del demonio: cuentos y recuentos (Mexico: Universidad Iberoamericana, 1995), 72; Walter Mignolo, “Colonial Situations, Geographical Discourses and Territorial Representations: Toward a Diatopical Understanding of Colonial Semiosis,” Dispositio XIV, 36–38 (1989): 93–140. 3. Cecilia Sheridan Prieto, “Diversidad nativa, territorios y fronteras en el noreste novohispano,” Desacatos 10 (2002): 16, 20–21, identifies this as “territorial transformation of space,” which is also linked to the construction of “new territorialities.” 4. As a social product, the notion of space remits to individuals’ representation of their experiences in a given physical environment and to projects destined to influence that whole. José Ortega Valcárcel, “La geografía para el siglo XXI,” in Geografía Humana, ed. Juan Romero González (Barcelona: Ariel, 2004), 25–53; John B. Jackson, A Sense of Place, a Sense of Time (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994). 5. Ivonne del Valle, Escribiendo desde los márgenes: colonialismo y jesuitas en el siglo XVIII (Mexico: Siglo XXI Editores, 2009), 10, 42–46; Sara Ortelli, Trama de una guerra conveniente: Nueva Vizcaya y la sombra de los apaches (1748–1790) (Mexico: El Colegio de México, 2007). 6. Héctor Mendoza Vargas and Karina Busto Ibarra, “La Baja California inventada: visiones sobre un territorio mexicano a mediados del siglo XX,” Investigaciones Geográficas. Boletín del Instituto de Geografía, UNAM 86 (2015): 98–115. Quote from page 99.

Tierra Incognita: Cartography   481 7. Guy Rozat, Indios imaginarios e indios reales en los relatos de la conquista de México (Mexico: Universidad Veracruzana, INAH, BUAP, 2002), 334; Del Valle, Escribiendo desde los márgenes, 14–17; José Refugio de la Torre Curiel, “Talking to the Desert: Franciscan Explorations and Narratives of eighteenth-century Arizona,” in From La Florida to La California: Franciscan Evangelization in the Spanish Borderlands, ed. Timothy J. Johnson and Gert Melville (Berkeley: The Academy of American Franciscan History, 2013), 305–321. 8. Sandra I. Ramos Maldonado, “La Naturalis Historia de Plinio el Viejo: lectura en clave humanística de un clásico,” Ágora. Estudos Clássicos em Debate 15 (2013): 57. 9. Strabo’s Geography follows this order of “general-to-specific” in a dialectical relation. His plan was to begin by “describing in general the land we inhabit,” and then focus on “each one of its parts,” highlighting the location of specific points; i.e., “the situation and climate or quality of each place.” Libro tercero de la Geografía de Estrabón que comprehende un tratado sobre España antigua. Traducido del latín por Don Juan López . . . (Madrid: Viuda de Ibarra, Hijos y Compañía, 1787), 1–2. 10. Pliny the Elder, Natural History, vol. 2 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), books 5–7. 11. Ramos Maldonado, “La Naturalis Historia,” 71. 12. At Ingolstadt and Freiburg, Kino received religious training and studied mathematics, cosmography, and geography before becoming teacher of mathematics. It is very likely that as a student he became acquainted with Pliny’s works, available in local German editions since at least 1522. Plinius Major, Liber octavus naturalis historiae . . . (Vienna: Johan I Singriener, 1522); Plinius Major, Praefatio in naturalem historiam eruditissima atque incomparabilis. Ad titum vespasianum (Ingolstadt: Andreas Lutz, 1522). 13. Ernest J. Burrus, Kino and the Cartography of Northwestern New Spain (Tucson: Arizona Pioneers’ Historical Society, 1965), 14. 14. Albrecht Classen, Early History of the Southwest Through the Eyes of German-Speaking Jesuit Missionaries. A Transcultural Experience in the Eighteenth Century (Lanham and Plymouth: Lexington Books, 2013), 56. 15. Urroz Kanán, Mapas de México, 24–27; John  B.  Harley, “Deconstructing the Map,” Cartographica 26, no. 2 (1989): 1–20. 16. Cynthia Radding, Wandering Peoples. Colonialism, Ethnic Spaces, and Ecological Frontiers in Northwestern Mexico, 1700–1850 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 34. 17. Radding, Wandering Peoples, 35. 18. The caption in this map reads “Teatro de los Trabajos Apostólicos de la Compañía de Jesús en la América Septentrional” (Theater of the Apostolic Efforts of the Society of Jesus in North America). According to Burrus, this map “was almost completed by November 1695,” when Kino traveled to Mexico City and “put the finishing touches to it” before sending it to Rome in 1696. Burrus, Kino and the Cartography, 17. The exact completion date is a matter of debate; Kino´s biography of Francisco Xavier Saeta includes reference to this map in its title, adding the date 1695. Burrus consistently addressed this map as a “1695–1696 production.” References to this map here are given as a 1696 document. 19. Burrus, Kino and the Cartography, 13. 20. Among the Jesuits, this idea of expanding the missionary areas further north did not end with Kino’s death in 1711. The cartographic argument of a spatial continuum in New Spain’s northern frontier found new proponents when, for instance, during the late 1730s and 1740s reports reached the Jesuit authorities in Mexico City concerning the possibility of connecting and defending additional locations between Sonora and the California peninsula. Sigismundo Taraval’s “Historia de las misiones jesuitas en la California Baja, desde

482   Borderlands of the Iberian World su establecimiento hasta 1737,” as well as his map of California understand such spaces in the same way. Also Fernando Consag sojourned the eastern board of the California peninsula in 1746 with this conviction, and reported to Jesuit provincial Cristóbal de Escobar— including a new map of California—about the land route to Sonora; these materials were published by Miguel Venegas and Andres Burriel in Noticia de la California (Madrid: Imprenta de la viuda de Manel Fernández y del Supremo Consejo de la Inquisición, 1757). References to the geography and open spaces in northern New Spain in both Taraval and Consag “arrange the space in ways that promote the Jesuit enterprise in Baja California by showing its proximity to Nueva Vizcaya and the Pimería.” The author thanks Cynthia Radding for sharing her thoughts on these Jesuit works and pointing him towards these references. 21. Eusebio Kino, Vida del P.  Francisco  J.  Saeta, S.J.  Sangre misionera en Sonora (Mexico: Editorial Jus, 1961), 85–98; Gabriel Gómez Padilla, Tubutama en llamas. Testimonios de Marco Antonio Kappus y Juan Muñoz de Burgos sobre la Rebelión Pima de 1695 (Guadalajara: UdG, 2009), 46. 22. The metaphor of the world as a theater had long been commonplace among writers. However, in ancient Greek thought, the metaphor suggested human history resembled either a comedy or a tragedy, and humans could not help following a pre-established script. In the Spanish baroque tradition, “ theater” was rhetorically used to convey an idea of the physical world as the scenery in which God’s glory was revealed. Close examples of the use of this metaphor in this sense during Kino’s times and shortly after are Augustín Vetancurt’s Teatro Mexicano: Crónica de la Provincia del Santo Evangelio de México, Menologio Franciscano (Mexico: Doña María de Benavides Viuda de Ivan de Ribera, 1697–1698), and Joseph Villaseñor y Sánchez’ Theatro Americano, descripción general de los reynos y provincias de la Nueva España y sus jurisdicciones (1746–1748). In Spain, the most ambitious project conceived within this same framework was Henrique Florez’s twenty-nine volume España Sagrada, Theatro geographico-historico de la iglesia de España (Madrid: Miguel Francisco Rodríguez, 1747–1751). See, José Refugio de la Torre Curiel, “Comarcas ribereñas. Las naciones de los ríos Gila y Colorado desde la perspectiva franciscana del siglo XVIII,” in Expansión territorial y formación de espacios de poder en la Nueva España, ed. José Refugio de la Torre Curiel (Zapopan: El Colegio de Jalisco, 2015), 245–285. 23. Ernest  J.  Burrus, Kino and Manje: Explorers of Sonora and Arizona. Their vision of the future (Rome and St. Louis: Jesuit Historical Institute, St. Louis University, 1971), 555–556. 24. Diego Carrasco to Domingo Jironza, Dolores, October 18, 1698. In Burrus, Kino and Manje, 557–558. 25. “Diario hecho por el capitán Diego Carrasco . . . ,” in Burrus, Kino and Manje, 571. 26. This map, originally delineated in Spanish by Kino in 1701, was copied, translated into French, and published in the journal Lettres Edifiantes in 1705. Later, a German printer published a Latin version—based on the French edition. Burrus, Kino and the Cartography, 46–50. 27. Eusebio Francisco Kino to the Viceroy of New Spain, Dolores, February 5, 1703. In Ernest  J.  Burrus, Kino’s Plan for the Development of Pimería Alta, Arizona and Upper California (Tucson: Arizona Pioneers’ Historical Society, 1961), 24. 28. Burrus, Kino’s Plan, 28. 29. Burrus, Kino’s Plan, 33.

Tierra Incognita: Cartography   483 30. Ramón María Serrera, “Estudio preliminar,” in José Antonio de Villaseñor y Sánchez, Suplemento al Theatro Americano. La ciudad de México en 1755 (Mexico: UNAM, EEHA, 1980), 17. 31. José Marcos Medina Bustos, “Entre el informe moderno y el discurso tradicional. Representaciones sobre la población en la intendencia de Arizpe. 1792,” in Expansión territorial y formación de espacios de poder en la Nueva España, ed. José Refugio de la Torre Curiel (Zapopan: El Colegio de Jalisco, 2015), 213–243; Thomas Calvo, “Ciencia, cultura y política ilustradas (Nueva España y otras partes),” in Las reformas borbónicas. 1750–1808, ed. Clara García Ayluardo (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2010), 95–96. 32. On Sedelmayr, see E.  J.  Burrus, “Sedelmayer, Jacobo,” in Diccionario Histórico de la Compañía de Jesús, vol. IV, ed. Charles E. O’Neill and Joaquín Ma. Domínguez (Rome and Madrid: Institutum Historicum S. I., Universidad Pontificia Comillas, 2001), 3544. 33. José de Ortega and Juan Antonio Baltasar. Apostólicos Afanes de la Compañía de Jesús: Escritos por un Padre de la misma Sagrada Religión de su Provincia de México (Barcelona: Nadal, 1754). 34. José Antonio de Villaseñor y Sánchez, Theatro Americano. Descripción general de los reynos y provincias de la Nueva España y sus jurisdicciones (Mexico: UNAM, 2005), 682. 35. Villaseñor y Sánchez, Theatro Americano, 685–686. 36. Ernest J. Burrus, La obra cartográfica de la Provincia Mexicana de la Compañía de Jesús (1567–1967) (Madrid: José Porrúa Turanzas, 1967), vol. II, plate 16. 37. Burrus, Kino and the Cartography, 46. 38. An army engineer who in the 1720s accompanied Brigadier Pedro de Rivera on his inspection of all the presidios in northern New Spain. He authored abundant cartographic works on the northern provinces and different fortifications in New Spain. Some of Álvarez Barreiro’s maps were later redrawn and published by Luis de Surville. An example is Álvarez’s chorographic map of Sonora (1727), reproduced by Surville in 1770. Archivo General de Indias, Seville, Spain (henceforth AGI), Mapas y Planos, Mexico 123; Real Biblioteca de Palacio, Madrid, Miscelánea de Ayala, Ms. 2826; José Antonio de Alzate y Ramírez (1737, Ozumba-1799, Mexico City) was a noted eighteenth-century scientist and humanist of New Spain. Ordained a priest at the age of twenty, he was a geographer, astronomer, mathematician, historian, physicist and botanist. His writings were published in periodicals that he founded—Diario Literario de México (1768), Asuntos varios sobre Ciencias y Artes (1772–1773), and Gaceta de Literatura de México (1788–1797)—and in numerous pamphlets, charts, maps, and memoirs on specific topics. Biblioteca Digital Mexicana, “Plano de las Provincias de Ostimuri, Sinaloa, Sonora,” accessed April 1, 2015, http://bdmx.mx/detalle/?id_cod=46. 39. Herbert Eugene Bolton, Rim of Christendom. A Biography of Eusebio Francisco Kino, Pacific Coast Pioneer (Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 1936), 573. Examples of British sources with references to New Navarre include F.  Francis’s An Introduction to Geography (London: Weed & Rider, 1818), 68; also, Thomas Keith, A System of Geography for the Use of Schools (London: A. & R. Spottiswoode, 1826), 321. 40. A couple of examples are Robert de Vaugondy’s “Partie du Mexique ou de la Nouvelle Espagne: ou se trouve l’Audience de Guadalajara, Nouveau Mexique, Nouvelle Navarre, Californie & . . . ” (1749), in Atlas Portatif, Universel Et Militaire (Paris: Durand and Pissot Fils, 1749); and Rigobert Bonne’s “Le Nouveau Méxique,” in Atlas de toutes les parties connues du globe terrestre, dressé pour l’Histoire philosophique et politique des établissemens et

484   Borderlands of the Iberian World du commerce des Européens dans les deux Indes. Place of publication not identified ([Geneva]: J.L. Pellet, ca. 1780). 41. Ruhen was born in 1718 in Lower Saxony (Germany). See Felix Zubillaga, “Heinrich Ruhen,” in Diccionario Histórico de la Compañía de Jesús, ed. Charles  E.  O’Neill and Joaquín Ma. Domínguez, vol. IV, 3434. Tomás Antonio Tello, born in Almagro (Ciudad Real), Spain, in 1720 arrived in New Spain in 1736; Felix Zubillaga, “Tomas Antonio Tello,” in Diccionario Histórico de la Compañía de Jesús, ed. Charles E. O’Neill and Joaquín Ma. Domínguez, vol. 4, 3718. Born in Seville in 1687 and arrived in New Spain in 1714, Tamaral also founded the missions at Purísima Concepción de Cadegomó and Santa María; Felix Zubillaga, “Nicolás Tamaral,” in Diccionario Histórico de la Compañía de Jesús, ed. Charles E. O’Neill and Joaquín Ma. Domínguez, vol. 4, 3697. Born in Cholula (Puebla) in 1695, Carranco was assigned to mission Santiago at the time of his death; Ernest Burrus, “Lorenzo Carranco,” in Diccionario Histórico de la Compañía de Jesús, ed. Charles E. O’Neill and Joaquín Ma. Domínguez, vol. I, 665. Brandon Bayne, “Converting the Pacific: Jesuit Networks between New Spain and Asia,” in The Oxford Handbook of Borderlands of the Iberian World, ed. Danna A. Levin Rojo and Cynthia Radding, 789–816 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019) discusses the concept of martyrdom in the context of Jesuit mission fields. 42. See also the map entitled “Chorographia de las missiones apostolicas, que administró antes en Topia, y la Tepeguana, y actualmente administra en Nayarit, Tarahumara, Chinipas, Cinaloa, Sonora, Pimeria y California la Compañia de Jesus en la America Septentrional.” Although the map does not bear a date of elaboration, it has been dated around 1767, before the expulsion of the Society of Jesus. Biblioteca Digital Mexicana. Accessed April 10, 2015, http://bdmx.mx/detalle/?id_cod=53. 43. Susana González Marín, “El libro 1 de la Historia natural de Plinio el Viejo, ¿texto o paratexto?,” Veleia 23, (2006): 247–265, points out that works like Historia Natural were conceived as monumentum; that is, testimonies—in this case written—“that due to their dimensions and spectacular character are destined to endure, commemorating and cementing in memory all the achievements of the Roman Empire, while also assuring the memory of its author.” 44. Radding, Wandering Peoples, 266–268; Ignacio Almada Bay et al., “Hacia una nueva interpretación del régimen colonial en Sonora. Descubriendo a los indios y redimensionando a los misioneros, 1681–1821,” Región y Sociedad XIX (2007): 240–242. On indigenous uprisings during this period, see Luis González Rodríguez, “Las guerrillas de resistencia étnica en el noroeste (1690). Un análisis de la documentación oficial,” in Organización y liderazgo en los movimientos populares novohispanos, ed. Felipe Castro, Virginia Guedea, and José Luis Mirafuentes (Mexico: UNAM, 1992), 37–114; Evelyn Hu-DeHart, “Rebelión campesina en el noroeste: los indios yaquis de Sonora, 1740–1976,” in Revuelta, rebelión y revolución. La lucha rural en México del siglo XVI al siglo XX, vol. 1, ed. Friedrich Katz (Mexico: Ediciones Era, 1990), 135–163; José Luis Mirafuentes and Pilar Máynez, ed., Domingo Elizondo. Noticia de la expedición militar contra los rebeldes seris y pimas del Cerro Prieto, Sonora, 1767–1771 (Mexico: UNAM, 1999). 45. José Refugio de la Torre Curiel, “Geografías en construcción: los proyectos de poblamiento en Sonora delineados en tres mapas del siglo XVIII,” in Poblar la inmensidad: sociedades, conflictividad y representación en los márgenes del Imperio Hispánico (siglos XV–XIX), ed. Salvador Bernabéu Albert (Madrid: Gobierno de España, Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación, CSIC, Ediciones Rubeo, 2010), 184–187.

Tierra Incognita: Cartography   485 46. “Contemporary reports denounced the physical destruction wrought by the “enemies” (nearly always understood to be Apaches or Seris) and the abandonment of traditional villages, now reduced to a small fraction of their former populations. Mission districts comprising three or four visitas at midcentury counted only one or two pueblos fifty years later, with less than half of their original population.” Radding, Wandering Peoples, 269. 47. Almada et al, “Hacia una nueva interpretación,” 240. 48. José Refugio de la Torre Curiel, “ ‘Enemigos encubiertos’: bandas pluriétnicas y estado de alerta en la frontera sonorense a finales del siglo XVIII,” Takwá. Revista de Historia 14 (2008): 11–31; William Merrill, “Cultural Creativity and Raiding Bands in eighteenthcentury northern New Spain,” in Violence, Resistance and Survival in the Americas, ed. William Taylor and Franklin Pease (Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994), 124–152; Sara Ortelli, “Crisis de subsistencia y robo de ganado en el septentrión novohispano: San José del Parral (1770–1790),” Relaciones. Estudios de Historia y Sociedad 121 (2010): 21–56; and Ortelli, Trama, 85–170. 49. Ortelli, Trama, 85. As part of Pedro de Rivera’s entourage during his 1724–1728 visita to New Spain’s northern provinces, Francisco Álvarez Barreiro recorded the location of villages of “friendly,” “indifferent” and “hostile” Indians, and the sierras they inhabited; his observations were incorporated into different regional maps between 1728 and 1729. The fact that Luis de Surville used Álvarez Barreiro’s observations in 1770 when he redrew and printed the “Plano corográfico e hidrográphico de las provincias del Nuevo México, Sonora, Ostimuri, Sinaloa, Culiacán, Nueva Vizcaya, Nayarit, Nuevo Reino de Leon, Nueva Extremadura o Coaguila, y la del Nuevo Reyno de Philipinas, provincia de los Tejas” reflected both the need to have such information at hand, and the contemporary reality of the Apache threat. Francisco Ferten showed a similar concern in the 1760s in his “Mapa de una porción de la provincia de Sonora que manifiesta la posición de los enemigos indios bravos” (ca. 1762), which states that in northwestern New Spain the Sierra Madre offered a continuous series of ports of entry that allowed the Apaches access to carry out raids in the province of Sonora. 50. Juan Nentuig, El rudo ensayo. Descripción geográfica, natural y curiosa de la provincia de Sonora, 1764 (Mexico: INAH, 1977), 100, paragraph 288. De la Torre, “Geografías en construcción,” 196–203. 51. “The expulsion of the Jesuits in 1767 accelerated long-initiated processes of change, such as the strengthening of Indigenous local authorities [ . . . ] spatial mobility and interethnic contacts, Indian population growth [ . . . ] and individual appropriation of communal lands by Europeans, creoles, mestizos and Indigenous peoples [ . . . ]” Almada et al, “Hacia una nueva interpretación,” 250. Concerning this process of change, it must be considered that the decline varied by region and did not depend only on economic factors, De la Torre, Twilight of the Mission Frontier: Shifting Interethnic Alliances and Social Organization in Sonora, 1768–1855 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, The Academy of American Franciscan History, 2012), 274. 52. Instructions for the missionaries of the Colegio de Querétaro assigned to Sonora, Querétaro, August 4, 1767. Archivo Franciscano de la Provincia de Michoacán, Archivo de Querétaro (henceforth AFPM, AQ). Letter K, leg. 14, no. 3. 53. On fray Francisco Garcés travels, see Francisco Garcés, A Record of Travels in Arizona and California, 1775–1776, ed. John Galvin (San Francisco: J. Howell-Books, 1965); on Anza’s expeditions, see Herbert Eugene Bolton, Anza’s California Expeditions, 5 vols. (New York:

486   Borderlands of the Iberian World Russell and Russel, 1966); Julio César Montané Martí, Juan Bautista de Anza. Diario del Primer Viaje a la California (Hermosillo: Sociedad Sonorense de Historia, 1989). 54. From 1774 to 1776, at least four Franciscans from the Colegio de Querétaro accompanied the groups commanded by De Anza: the Friars Juan Díaz, Francisco Garcés, Pedro de Font, and Tomás Eixarch. Each wrote his observations on the stages of exploration in which they participated, during either the trek that reached the mission in San Gabriel, California, in 1774, or the 1775–1776 expedition to San Francisco Bay. Díaz’s diary from the 1774 trip (in two parts) was published in English in Herbert Eugene Bolton, Anza’s California Expeditions, vol. 2 (New York: Russell & Russell, 1966), 247–290, 293–306; Eixarch’s text was also translated and published in Bolton, Anza’s California Expeditions, vol. 3, 311–381; an abridged version of Font’s diary, called the “short diary,” can be found in Bolton, Anza’s California Expeditions, vol. 3, 203–307; Font’s complete manuscript, including Eixarch’s diary, is in Julio César Montané Martí, Fray Pedro Font. Diario Íntimo, y diario de fray Tomás Eixarch (Mexico: Universidad de Sonora, Plaza y Valdés, 2000). 55. See, for instance, the letter allegedly written by Yuma captain Salvador Palma addressed “to the Viceroy of Mejico,” in which he requests the viceroy’s sending missionaries to the Yuman people in order to promote their Christianization and subordination to the Spanish Crown. AGI, Guadalajara 516. 56. A Catalonian born in Gerona around 1738, he was sent to Sonora by the Colegio de Querétaro in 1773 to administer the recently created mission of San José de Pimas. He was still living there when commissioned by Viceroy Bucareli to accompany Juan Bautista de Anza on his second expedition to find the land route to California. Font and the Franciscans Garcés and Eixarch joined that trip—which took the members from the presidio of San Miguel de Horcasitas to San Francisco and back to Horcasitas, between September 29, 1775, and June 2, 1776—at different stages. Font made the journey from Horcasitas, while Garcés and Eixarch caught up to the expedition in Tubac on October 21, 1775. Montané, Fray Pedro Font, 23. 57. At least three copies of Font’s writings have been identified. The so-called, “long” or “intimate” diary is an extended version prepared for the Franciscans at Colegio de Queretaro. It was completed and signed at Ures, on May 11, 1777. 58. Fray Pedro Font, Diario que formó el P. Pdor. Apco . . . , en el viaje que hizo a Monterey . . . , in Montané, Fray Pedro Font, 66. 59. Montané, Fray Pedro Font, 69, 81–83. 60. Juan Domingo Arricivita, Crónica seráfica y apostólica del Colegio de Propaganda Fide de la Santa Cruz de Querétaro en la Nueva España (Mexico: Felipe de Zúñiga y Ontiveros, 1792), book 4, chapters viii–ix. 61. Arricivita, Crónica seráfica, book 4, chapters xiv–xvii, 529–554. 62. According to Arricivita, “the missionaries were well aware that those unexpected foundations of villages of Spaniards were far off the main goal [of that project], which was congregating—la reducción—of those gentiles.” The missions of the Colorado River, pointed out the Franciscan chronicler, had been established according to a “new method of government,” leaving the missionaries’ opinions aside. Arricivita, Crónica seráfica, book 4, chapter 9, 504–505. 63. The method that the Franciscans of the Colegio de Guadalupe accorded with the authorities of New Spain to organize the missions in Texas gave the clerics control over matters of government in mission towns. Soldiers were stationed nearby to protect the missionaries

Tierra Incognita: Cartography   487 and help them control the local population. In Texas, the Franciscans essentially strove to implement a method of government that emphasized sustaining a chain of missions with communal properties worked by the Indians, who would live “in good order” (en policía), supervised by the missionaries and isolated from the negative influence of Indians not yet subjected to the Crown, and some Spaniards. Under this arrangement, “the missionary was the religious leader as well as the purchase agent and financial manager of the community.” Mariah Wade, “The Missionary Predicament: Conversion Practices in Texas, New Mexico, and the Californias,” in From La Florida to La California. Franciscan Evangelization in the Spanish Borderlands, ed. Timothy  J.  Johnson and Gert Melville (Berkeley: The Academy of American Franciscan History, 2013), 293. 64. Fr. Diego de Bringas to the Commander General of the Internal Provinces. Chihuahua, March 7, 1796. AFPM, AQ. Letter K, leg. 18, no. 27.

Bibliography Almada Bay, Ignacio, José Marcos Medina Bustos, and María del Valle Borrero Silva. “Hacia una nueva interpretación del régimen colonial en Sonora. Descubriendo a los indios y redimensionando a los misioneros, 1681–1821.” Región y Sociedad XIX (2007): 237–266. Arricivita, Juan Domingo. Crónica seráfica y apostólica del Colegio de Propaganda Fide de la Santa Cruz de Querétaro en la Nueva España. Mexico: Felipe de Zúñiga y Ontiveros, 1792. Bolton, Herbert Eugene. Anza’s California Expeditions, vols. 1–5. New York: Russell and Russell, 1966. Burrus, Ernest J. Kino and Manje: Explorers of Sonora and Arizona. Their vision of the future. Rome and St. Louis: Jesuit Historical Institute, St. Louis University, 1971. Burrus, Ernest  J. Kino and the Cartography of Northwestern New Spain. Tucson: Arizona Pioneers’ Historical Society, 1965. Burrus, Ernest J. Kino’s Plan for the Development of Pimería Alta, Arizona and Upper California. Tucson: Arizona Pioneers’ Historical Society, 1961. De la Torre Curiel, José Refugio. “Geografías en construcción: los proyectos de poblamiento en Sonora delineados en tres mapas del siglo XVIII.” In Poblar la inmensidad: sociedades, conflictividad y representación en los márgenes del Imperio Hispánico (siglos XV–XIX), edited by Salvador Bernabéu Albert, 179–207. Madrid: Gobierno de España, Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación, CSIC, Ediciones Rubeo, 2010. Del Valle, Ivonne. Escribiendo desde los márgenes: colonialismo y jesuitas en el siglo XVIII. Mexico: Siglo XXI Editores, 2009. Garcés, Francisco. A Record of Travels in Arizona and California, 1775–1776, edited by John Galvin. San Francisco: J. Howell-Books, 1965. Montané Martí, Julio César. Fray Pedro Font. Diario Íntimo, y diario de fray Tomás Eixarch. Mexico: Universidad de Sonora, Plaza y Valdés, 2000. Ortelli, Sara. Trama de una guerra conveniente: Nueva Vizcaya y la sombra de los apaches (1748–1790). Mexico: El Colegio de México, 2007. Ramos Maldonado, Sandra. “La Naturalis Historia de Plinio el Viejo: lectura en clave humanística de un clásico.” Ágora. Estudos Clássicos em Debate 15 (2013): 51–94. Radding, Cynthia. Wandering Peoples. Colonialism, Ethnic Spaces, and Ecological Frontiers in Northwestern Mexico, 1700–1850. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997.

488   Borderlands of the Iberian World Urroz Kanán, Raquel. Mapas de México. Contextos e historiografía moderna y contemporánea. Mexico: CONACULTA, Gobierno del Estado de Veracruz, Instituto Veracruzano de la Cultura, 2012. Villaseñor y Sánchez, José Antonio. Theatro Americano. Descripción general de los reynos y provincias de la Nueva España y sus jurisdicciones. Mexico: UNAM, 2005. Wade, Mariah. “The Missionary Predicament: Conversion Practices in Texas, New Mexico, and the Californias.” In From La Florida to La California. Franciscan Evangelization in the Spanish Borderlands, edited by Timothy J. Johnson and Gert Melville, 285–296. Berkeley: The Academy of American Franciscan History, 2013. Zubillaga, Felix. Diccionario Histórico de la Compañía de Jesús: Biográfico-temático, vol. IV, edited by Charles  E.  O’Neill and Joaquín Ma. Domínguez. Rome and Madrid: IHSI, Universidad Pontificia Comillas, 2001.

chapter 19

The V irgi n of El Z a pe a n d J esu it Missions i n N u eva V izcaya Clara Bargellini

The sculpture of the Virgin Mary at El Zape (Figure 19.1), a Jesuit mission site between 1602 and 1753, now in the state of Durango, Mexico is emblematic. Although today it is known and venerated only locally, the Virgin of the Immaculate Conception of El Zape received considerable attention in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, documented in written sources. Most importantly, the image has survived to this day, and it has been possible to examine it at closer range than is normally permitted for this sort of object. These circumstances offer unusual opportunities for considerations of the problems of image making and reception at mission sites in northern New Spain, and more generally in the Iberian borderlands. It is possible to sketch a critical history of this image, as well as to propose a biography for the sculpture. The critical history of an object refers to the opinions and observations that have been expressed about it. The biography of an object is what has occurred to it over time; it is applicable to any artifact and includes any kind of event. It is broader and more inclusive than the provenance studies of objects in museum and private collections.1 The Virgin venerated at El Zape enables us to examine more fully the processes by which this type of religious object, now called “art,” came to be, and how the interaction of artistic qualities, physical materials, and historical circumstances can illuminate our understanding of sensibilities in areas of conflict. It is not surprising that images of the Virgin Mary were everywhere in northern New Spain in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Each church had at least one, and usually, more than one. These had different titles, but often also repetitions of the same title for different uses: images to be venerated on altars or carried in processions, for example. Judging from eighteenth-century inventories, we can conclude that, by then, sculptures of the Immaculate Conception and the Virgin of Sorrows predominated in northern New Spain; in painting, it was the Virgin of Guadalupe.2 There were many

490   Borderlands of the Iberian World

Figure 19.1.  The sculpture of the Virgin of the Immaculate Conception of El Zape, Durango, is dressed in contemporary gown and mantle. It is located in the principal niche over the main altar of the parish church at El Zape, Durango, in northern New Spain (Mexico). Photograph by Begoña Aránzazu Muerza.

­ thers, of course, some of which, like the one at Zape, were related to the presence of the o Jesuits, such as the Virgin of Loreto and “del Pópulo,” which arrived from Europe in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.3 The paintings of the Virgins of Light (“de la Luz”) and Refuge (“del Refugio”) were also introduced by the Jesuits, but in the eighteenth century.4 The Franciscans, who replaced the Jesuits in the northern missions after the 1767 expulsion of the Society of Jesus, adopted these images, both of which are popular to this day. Other Marian devotions, which also had a strong presence in parish churches and are still venerated, recall particular pious practices, especially the Virgin of the Rosary. Colonial inventories of Nueva Vizcaya also list Marian images of Spanish devotions: Aránzazu, Balvanera, Caldas, and others. These, of course, were in towns that were generally not former mission sites, but rather, Spanish settlements. The presence of images at the missions, as well as the buildings they occupy, are usually remembered today (especially in popular literature) to honor the valor and piety of the missionaries who faced danger and hardship in order to establish the Catholic religion in northern Mexico. The Zape sculpture of the Immaculate Conception—the Virgin in a prayerful attitude, standing alone on a crescent moon—has been celebrated in such a  context. However, it also has a particular, local story, which fortunately has been

The Virgin of El Zape and Jesuit Missions in Nueva Vizcaya   491 ­ reserved in various texts. The story of this image in written accounts and its physical p appearance offer a complex view of the relationships among missionaries, natives, settlers, and image making and reception. The identity and history of the Virgin of El Zape of Durango is closely tied to the role and fate of the missionaries themselves, as well as to the history of native conversion and Spanish settlement at its location: and thus, its interest for the study of borderlands. The town of El Zape, to the northwest of Durango, is situated at the base of a hill where there is a pre-Hispanic site. It is next to a river and also near a source of thermal waters that formed a small lake. Its history as a Jesuit mission began around 1602, when it is first mentioned in Jesuit records in conjunction with an epidemic that decimated the native population there that year. Among the sick were the daughter and the wife of two caciques. In defiance of the missionary, who had admonished them in the local church, which at that time must have been a very simple structure, the two men held a ceremony (mitote) in an effort to save the women. The women (as well as others) died, and the stage was set for conflict. Many of the natives left, the town was burned, though the small church remained. And according to the oldest Jesuit source, some of the natives expressed a desire to build a new one.5 Scattered news of religious imagery in the area is found in records of the following years. In 1604, Juan Font was ministering at El Zape, named then in honor of St. Ignatius. In 1607, he reported on the destruction of an “idol” in the area.6 In the annual report of 1608, Font gives an optimistic account of El Zape, then a town of sixty families. Of particular interest is his assertion that the Virgin Mary was celebrated in song and dance by the Tepehuanes.7 The same year, Font wrote to the Jesuit provincial with information about the need for images, altarpieces and vestments at the missions.8 In another letter, he expounds on the power of symbolic objects to pacify the natives, especially dwelling on the authority inherent in episcopal insignae.9 Writing a few years later, in 1612, Juan del Valle, another Jesuit, recounts how at Santiago Papasquiaro, not far from El Zape, the “Mexican Indians,” that is, the natives of central Mexico who accompanied settlers and missionaries in their northward expansion, were so devoted to Mary that they managed to acquire “a statue of Our Lady for their processions, remembering the many that are in their native towns.” He adds that they convinced the native Tepehuanes to contribute to the expense of having the sculpture sent from Mexico City. After the statue arrived, they founded a confraternity of the Immaculate Conception that met every Sunday when they would sing the “Salve Regina” in their native Nahuatl. The Tepehuanes participated in the devotion by helping to carry the Virgin in processions. Meanwhile, at El Zape, they were helping to erect a church and house for the missionaries. Del Valle reports that the workers were amazed to find ancient artifacts at the site, which he believed had been made by the ancient Mexicas moving south toward the Valley of Mexico.10 These snippets of written evidence indicate a deep awareness and interest in visual communication mediated by objects, both on the part of the missionaries and of converted and neophyte natives. By 1616, despite difficult beginnings, the Jesuits and colonists apparently were hopeful that the missions in the region were well on their way to being stable. However, the

492   Borderlands of the Iberian World Tepehuanes had planned an uprising, and one of its main targets was precisely El Zape, where the arrival of a new sculpture of the Virgin was to be celebrated on the feast of the Presentation of Mary, November 21. The Jesuits certainly were aware of the parallel between the entry of the child Mary into the temple and the arrival of her sculpture at the mission church. For the Tepehuanes, on the other hand, the gathering provided a tactical opportunity. In their attack at El Zape and its aftermath, eight missionaries were killed at various locations in the area, including Juan Font and Juan del Valle, as well as numerous Spanish settlers, natives from central Mexico, and Africans who labored in the mines of the region. According to an account of May 18, 1617, that was sent to Rome by the Mexican provincial, which is the earliest document that survives of what happened at El Zape in 1616, the bodies of the missionaries were found dead, their heads disfigured, and the Indians had thrown “the head of the Virgin into a small lake.”11 The destruction of religious images in the missions of northern New Spain is ­documented in other places, but several circumstances make the case of the Zape Virgin particularly interesting for art history. First of all, a colonial sculpture of the Immaculate Conception still exists at El Zape. Its relationship to the one at the church in 1616 is an important question, because the image became famous after she was attacked, and there are written records about it throughout the entire Jesuit period, and afterward as well. Important as the written accounts are, they are sometimes in conflict with one another, which makes them even more interesting. The examination of these documents helps to understand the Zape sculpture itself and its place among other religious imagery.

Documenting Miracles and the Virgin of Zape The 1645 account by the Jesuit chronicler, Andrés Perez de Ribas, in his Historia de los triunphos de nuestra Santa Fee, is the earliest published report of the 1616 uprising. It situates the Zape story as foundational for later Jesuit success. Though Pérez de Ribas may never have visited El Zape, he had been a missionary in Sinaloa, to the west of Durango, between 1604 and 1612. In 1616, he returned to Mexico City, reportedly through Durango.12 It is not clear exactly when he received information about the Tepehuan uprising, but no doubt it was soon after it occurred. The following year he was again in the north, where he founded the mission among the Yaqui of Sonora.13 His published description of the events at El Zape is much more extensive and dramatic than the 1617 letter of the Jesuit provincial cited above, which was meant only for communication among members of the order. Pérez de Ribas made the Zape story a central part of book X of his Historia, published in Spain and directed to European and Mexico City audiences. According to this text, the sculpture of the Zape Virgin was smashed to pieces (despedazada) by the Tepehuanes.14 Evidently, for Pérez de Ribas it was important to dramatize the destructive violence of the attack in order to better exalt the later

The Virgin of El Zape and Jesuit Missions in Nueva Vizcaya   493 “triumphs” of the Jesuit efforts in northern New Spain. Pérez de Ribas seems to have been the first to give the sculpture the title of “de los Mártires.” His text does not contradict the letter sent to Rome, but it does make the destruction of the sculpture sound more final. After all, a head made of wood could have been rescued from the pond but not a sculpture reduced to pieces. Pérez de Ribas goes on to relate how an image of the Virgin returned to the church at El Zape. After 1620, when the rebellion had been put down, a Spaniard from nearby Guanaceví decided to have a new image of the Virgin made in gratitude for having survived the violence. Though the Jesuit does not say where the new sculpture was carved, he describes it as “one of the most beautiful and perfect images in the kingdom.”15 It was kept for a while at Guanaceví, but then installed in the church at El Zape with much celebration, on the feast of Mary’s triumphant Assumption into heaven after her death, August 15. Pérez de Ribas emphasizes the exceptional quality of the sculpture as part of her miraculous status. He declares that the new Virgin was so beautiful that “it seemed as if God had given the sculptor a special grace.”16 Indeed, he insists that divine providence had had a hand not only in the making of the new sculpture but also in its acquiring miraculous powers after the return of the missionaries, so much so that people began leaving offerings of clothes and jewels for the statue. Furthermore, he tells of how the powdered remains of another image of Mary, which also had been destroyed by the natives, mixed with water, were used to effect miraculous cures.17 It is important to notice that in these passages, Pérez de Ribas not only attributes miracles to the image at Zape; he also suggests–carefully to be sure—that the sculpture itself is a miracle. It shares traits with representations of a particular kind, known throughout church history as “acheiropoieta;” that is, images not made by human hands—or, as in this case, not entirely made by human hands. The next document to mention the sculpture is a rambling 1662 letter to his superior in Mexico City, written by Francisco de Mendoza, then the missionary at El Zape.18 Mendoza makes several references to mysterious supernatural presences in and near the town. He claims, however, that a confraternity of the Immaculate Conception has been established, and that the natives no longer worship the devil in a nearby cave. Further, he defends his parishioners, saying that they have not killed any priests, which is probably a reference to what had happened in 1616. Besides, he mentions images of Our Lady that had belonged to natives. At their deaths, the images were placed “with all reverence” in the trunks of trees, and the ground around them was swept. In other words, there was respect for sacred images in what may have been considered peculiarly native terms. Mendoza also tells the story of how he had sent a rosary to an Indian who was dying. As soon as the sick man had placed it around his neck, he fell asleep and dreamed he was kneeling before the Virgin in the church, who told him to go pray before a crucifix at another altar. Christ told the man that because the Virgin had interceded for him, he would be forgiven. He should go to the priest, be baptized, and confess his sins. He obeyed, was healed, and still lived at the mission in 1662. Mendoza relates another story, more directly related to the image of the Virgin in the mission church. In what seems to be a response to a request from his superior for

494   Borderlands of the Iberian World information about the Zape sculpture, he reports that his predecessor, Antonio Flores de Cierra, had seen something extraordinary while praying in the church: “From the breast of Our Lady—which is a miraculous sculpture—a bright and beautiful star came forth, and it lasted during all of vespers when it disappeared. It was seen by all the Indians and by some Spaniards who were there.” Mendoza, who says he had been at Zape for seven years, claims that the miracle of the brilliant star was in order “to banish the darkness of idolatry,” which was practiced at a nearby shrine. He had seen the place and had witnessed how the idolatry practiced there was fast disappearing, thanks to the light of the Virgin. In other words, the breast of the sculpture was a source of efficacious supernatural light. Mendoza also left an inventory of the contents of the church in 1665.19 The church and town no longer bore the name of St. Ignatius but rather that of Nuestra Señora de El Zape. This is evidence that the image was by then widely venerated. The first object in the inventory is “the miraculous statue” (la imagen milagrosa de bulto) of the Virgin. Though the sculpture is not described in detail, it is clear from the listing of her six velvet and silk dresses and six mantles, that it was usually dressed in actual clothing, which may have covered either a full sculpture or one consisting of a head mounted on an armature. Mendoza would have used the “de bulto” expression to identify a three-­ dimensional figure as a sculpture in a general way, without taking into account particular details of carving or construction. The next account of the Zape image appears in the prologue of the 1671 translation, published in Madrid, of Orazio Tursellino’s book about the Virgin of Loreto by the Jesuit Juan de Burgos, who worked in Puebla. In it, he includes some of the most important images of Mary in New Spain, including the one at El Zape, famous for her “very frequent miracles” and her “beautiful image.”20 Then he adds something new: the Zape image is one of three figures of Mary that the Jesuits had brought to Tepehuan territories. They are called “the three sisters”: the one at Zape, another at Santiago Papasquiaro, that he was familiar with (because he himself had been a missionary there) and a third one that was in a chapel on a hill, near the capital of Nueva Vizcaya. He says that the first two had suffered at the hands of the rebellious Tepehuanes. The Zape image “had her throat cut and was thrown into a lake.”21 This coincides with the story of the head thrown in the lagoon of the first Jesuit account of 1617. The one at Papasquiaro, which could well have been the Immaculate Conception mentioned above, that belonged to the natives from central New Spain, was shot through by arrows and strangled. The third image of the Virgin was so grieved by what had happened to the other two at the missions that she was found outside of her niche, prostrate on the ground, as in sorrow for the injuries done to her “two sisters.” Though the chapel on a hill near Durango, cited by Burgos as the location of this third image, brings to mind the Remedios church there, the small sculpture now at the site is relatively modern. On the other hand, there is a sculpture of the Virgin of Loreto, a Jesuit devotion, in the nearby Analco church, also in Durango, which is said to have had a chapel dedicated to the Immaculate Conception. The date of the Analco image is not certain, but the Jesuits had been in Durango since 1596, and so there is the possibility of an image of the Virgin related to an early Jesuit presence at

The Virgin of El Zape and Jesuit Missions in Nueva Vizcaya   495 Analco, or even at Remedios, although the history of both places is related to the Franciscans. In any case, Burgos is referring only to an image of the Virgin in Durango, which need not have been a Jesuit image, nor even an image of the Virgin of the Immaculate Conception.22 In 1678, when the Jesuit Juan Ortíz Zapata went to El Zape, he found a well-kept and adorned Marian sanctuary.23 Like everyone before him, except Pérez de Ribas, Ortíz Zapata says that the image had been damaged and thrown into a lagoon. The water had become miraculous, because the image had been there. Since the phrase is in the past tense, one can suppose that the sculpture had been rescued. Ortíz Zapata had earlier served at the mission at El Zape and would have had firsthand knowledge of the situation.24 Peter Thomas van Hamme, a young Jesuit from Ghent, after having spent almost three years in Rome visiting miraculous images and sites of early Christian history, sailed to New Spain in July of 1687.25 In November, soon after his arrival in Mexico City, he began his travels northward to the Tarahumara missions. From his diary, we know that he passed through El Zape in late January of 1688. His version of the events of 1616 emphasizes the miraculous. He tells how the natives “had wounded the statue of the Virgin on the cheek with an ax and committed atrocities impossible to describe. Then they had thrown the sculpture into a pond next to the church; the water became so hot that it is almost unbearable to hold one’s hand in it.”26 This is the first record of a wound on the cheek of the image and the only mention of how the presence of the image had miraculously heated the water. A few years later, in 1694, the Jesuit Francisco de Florencia also emphasized the wonder-working nature of the sculpture in a brief mention of the “very miraculous” (milagrosísima) Zape Virgin in his 1694 text about the figures of Mary at Zapopan and San Juan de los Lagos.27 Another Jesuit account, dated in 1725, is by Juan de Guendulaín. He also attests to the fact that the sculpture of the Virgin is the original and, like others, he insists on its quality: “The image of the Immaculate Conception of our Lady is very beautiful.” He adds that on one of her cheeks can be seen the mark left by the ax that struck her.28 This text calls particular attention to the success of the mission by emphasizing the religiosity of the natives, who recite the Rosary at the church every afternoon. Furthermore, he refers not only to the cult of the Virgin, but also to the memory of the Jesuit martyrs of 1616, whose portraits are in the sacristy. Yet another Jesuit wrote of the Virgin at El Zape: Benito Rinaldini, in the dedication of his Arte de la Lengua Tepeguana, published in Mexico City in 1743.29 Rinaldini was himself a missionary in the Tepehuan region and died in 1764 at the Tarahumara mission of Coyachi. He addresses the Virgin directly, “whose miraculous image is venerated in El Zape, center of the Tepehuan province, with the title ‘of the Martyrs’. ” He goes on to recall the Virgin’s special protection of the Jesuits: “accompanying the first fathers in martyrdom [. . .] you wished to receive the wound on your divine cheek [. . .] which no instrument has been able to remove, nor brush restore.” He goes on for more than two pages to declare the love that the Jesuits bear the image and the Virgin’s return of that love, citing scripture and theologians. Rinaldini also recalls that the Tepehuanes tried to totally destroy the image of the Virgin by “burying” her “in a deep well which is now a

496   Borderlands of the Iberian World perennial fountain and pool of salvation and health.” Thus, Rinaldini insists on the Virgin’s survival, though wounded, and on the miracles and favors that her continued presence is able to grant, especially through the waters sanctified by her presence. Juan Antonio de Oviedo in the Zodiaco Mariano, a book begun by Francisco de Florencia in the late seventeenth century and finished and published by Oviedo in 1755, also includes an account of the Zape image.30 Oviedo informs that he is using two Jesuit sources: Florencia’s notes and the 1645 Pérez de Ribas book. He says that the Zape image was shot full of arrows by the Tepehuanes, then it was dragged around the church with a rope around its neck and beaten. This sounds as if he may be confusing the story of the Papasquiaro image, as referred by Burgos, with that of El Zape. Finally, Mary’s head and hands were cut off, and the sculpture was thrown into the nearby pond. This is the only mention found of the hands, which are, in fact, lovely, and may be contemporary with the head. Oviedo repeats the title of “Our Lady of the Martyrs.” He also mentions a second image of the Virgin at El Zape. It, too, is miraculous, he says, and was ordered made by a Spaniard after the rebellion, which recalls the story told by Pérez de Ribas of the substitute made for the original. There is, indeed, today at El Zape a second sculpture of the Virgin, smaller in size and possibly the one mentioned in the 1753 inventory, which is used for processions to this day. El Zape was one of the Jesuit missions that was secularized at mid-century; that is, it was entrusted to the diocesan clergy. The inventory for the 1753 transferal of the mission with all its property, including religious images, to the bishop of Durango is extensive. The sculpture of the Virgin was at the center of an “old” altarpiece, between paintings of her parents, St. Joachim and St. Ann, and below a painting of Sts. Ignatius and Francis Xavier. To the sides were two large paintings (lienzos grandes): one of the image of the Virgin and the other of St. Ignatius.31 There were two other representations of the Virgin at an altar in the nave of the church: an old painting and a medium sized sculpture, which could be the one mentioned by Oviedo, cited above.32 Whatever the case, two points must be underlined. One is that the Jesuit presence and identification with the Virgin was emphasized. The other is that outside of the main altar with the original image, at least two other representations of the Virgin seem to have been copies of the “original.” Certainly, this was the case of the large painting in front of St. Ignatius, which is explicitly identified as “of the image of the Virgin” and probably the medium-sized sculpture in the nave. The same 1753 inventory also mentions other objects, kept in the sacristy, which pertain to the cult of the Virgin at Zape: four paintings of the Jesuit martyrs, documents of the confraternity, and clothing and jewelry of the Virgin. The clothing included eight dresses and mantles of various colors as well as an ample collection of jewelry, including a gold snake with a figure of Christ within it.33 Ten years later, in 1763, bishop Pedro Tamarón y Romeral visited El Zape. In contrast to what is described in the 1753 inventory, he recorded a church in poor condition, the image neglected and its confraternity, first mentioned by Mendoza in 1662, forgotten.34 On seeing the Virgin, however, Tamarón writes that he was captivated by such rare beauty, because, although her adornments were poor, her allure was powerful, the wound and mark of the hatchet on the left side of the head

The Virgin of El Zape and Jesuit Missions in Nueva Vizcaya   497 serve to emphasize the attraction of her most beautiful face, so much so that it moves to tender compassion and enflames with efficacious warmth a holy love and, since I found what my soul had been seeking, I made my residence there for several days.35

His attitude and actions bespeak his wish to appropriate the image for the bishopric. Tamarón clearly thought that the sculpture of the church at Zape was the original that had been attacked and damaged by the Tepehuanes. He explicitly refutes the story of a replacement for it and states that he looked for documents and asked qualified informants. He also relates the story of the hatchet wound on the Virgin’s face, which he says is in accord with “commonly held tradition,” confirmed to him by some Jesuits, one of whom could well have been Rinaldini. In other words, he pays little or no attention to Pérez de Ribas, says nothing of a new image made after the rebellion, and reinforces the identification of the Virgin with the martyrdom of the Jesuits and other victims of the Tepehuan uprising. Finally, he recounts how the restoration of the original image was accompanied by miraculous circumstances. Taken to Mexico City to be repaired, the face of the sculpture could not be altered, just as Rinaldini maintained (though only Tamarón mentions the Mexico City episode). No matter how many attempts were made, it was impossible to remove the signs of the hatchet wound. The restoration thus had to include the conservation of the memory of her injury. The bishop, who was responsible at the time for the Virgin of El Zape, took on the task of repairing and redecorating the church and encouraging devotion to the Virgin. He had the building restored, and a new choir loft with rococo decoration was installed. Also, a new altarpiece was made for the sculpture. Only a relief of the Trinity, now garishly repainted, survives. The paintings and images of Jesuit saints in the church, listed in the 1753 inventory, were eliminated, probably as part of an effort to appropriate the image for the diocesan clergy. Two years later, in 1765, Tamarón began the second general visit of his bishopric in front of the new altarpiece for the “Virgen del Hachazo de El Zape,” whom he declared to be the patroness of his journey.36 As is clear by this point, the text of Pérez de Ribas differs from all the others, since he states that the original sculpture was completely destroyed and replaced by a new one made with the help of God. All of the other sources indicate (or permit one to believe) that the original sculpture at El Zape, although damaged, survived the Tepehuan attacks. There is repeated mention of the Virgin’s head being separated from her body. Indeed, it is probable that the image may always have been a sculpted head on a mannequin body, made to be dressed in real clothing, as implied in Mendoza’s 1665 inventory. It is probable that Pérez de Ribas insisted on the total destruction of the figure so that he could attribute to divine intervention the creation of a miraculous new image and magnify the providential nature of the Jesuit return and eventual success in Nueva Vizcaya. The others, writing later when the missions were well established, all concentrated on the sculpture’s survival and efficacy in performing miracles. Jesuit success and Mary’s protection were posited then in the visible wound on the left side of the Virgin’s face, which could not be repaired. It objectifies the memory of martyrdom and also acknowledges the designs of divine providence but without the extreme intervention that would be implied in a

498   Borderlands of the Iberian World sculpture created, albeit only in part, by God, as Pérez de Ribas wrote. The discrepancy in the accounts can be attributed to Pérez de Ribas’s proximity to his martyred Jesuit brothers, and the initial shock of the 1616 events at Zape. The later authors knew firsthand only the successes of many years later. Besides, being individuals of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, they may have been less prone to resort to the same level of miraculous intervention as would have been more acceptable in the first decades of the seventeenth century. Especially in the eighteenth century, the memory of a wound, perceptible on the face of an old sculpture, was miracle enough, and Tamarón insists on it. That memory would not have existed on a new sculpture finished by God in the early seventeenth century. In other words, the two accounts are incompatible in material terms: Pérez de Ribas needed a new image to conquer the tragedy of 1616, with God’s direct help. Later Jesuits and particularly Rinaldini in the eighteenth century, were sensitive to the heroic memory of destruction and suffering and fascinated by the beauty of the face, noticed in practically all the sources, where they saw traces of that memory. For them, and no doubt for others, the sculpture was not miraculously made but miraculously conserved: it was a relic. Tamarón was of the same mind and appropriated the Virgin and her shrine for the bishopric. Eventually, the paintings of Jesuit saints disappeared from the church at El Zape.

The Sculpture of the Virgin of Zape The historical observations found in the Jesuit and episcopal correspondence and the photographs provided by Begoña Aránzazu Muerza Avendaño, conservator of the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia in Durango, inform the meanings of the Zape sculpture.37 As it exists today, it is, in fact, an example of the type known as “de candelero” (Figure 19.2), a figure consisting of a head and bust on an armature designed to display real clothing. These became popular in the eighteenth century. However, heads and hands were often produced separately from the bodies of sculptures since the late sixteenth century.38 The Zape head with its symmetrical composition, large eyes and fine features is striking (Figure 19.3). It has the elegant, hieratic appearance of a fine early seventeenth-century sculpture. It is also essential to observe that the large eyes are carved in wood. They are not of glass, which would indicate a later date. In brief, the head is probably that of the figure sent from Mexico City in time for the 1616 celebration. Furthermore, close examination reveals clear signs of damage to the head, in accordance with its history as a wounded image.39 There are evident marks of blows and cuts, especially at the top of the head. Moreover, the left side of the face shows more injury: a large dent on the forehead, which seems to be the result of a blow with a heavy object, and a damaged surface on the cheek. Although modern restorers, unlike seventeenthcentury craftsmen, have been able to overpaint the signs of a scar on the left cheek, there is no doubt that the head was damaged, particularly on its left side. In addition, the head and upper body seem to be a unit, or at least to have become one early in the history of

The Virgin of El Zape and Jesuit Missions in Nueva Vizcaya   499

Figure 19.2.  The sculpture of the Virgen of El Zape, outside of its niche and without the gown and mantle, reveals the square cavity in the chest of the figure. The sculpture combines elements of different dates and materials. The wooden head is from the early seventeenth century, the lower torso, arms and rest of the body, which is a simple armature, also of wood, are probably of the eighteenth century. The figure’s body was designed to be covered by a tunic and mantle. Photograph by Begoña Aránzazu Muerza.

the image, possibly after her rescue from the lagoon. The head, upper chest, and hands are well finished, while the arms and the straight supports for skirts could well have been the result of alterations in the seventeenth or eighteenth century to better accommodate ex-voto gowns. In any case, the basic structure of the sculpture, with its long neck and moveable arms, appropriate to display gifts in jewelry and clothing, belong to its early history. The ears are formed to show off earrings, and the head sports a wig of donated hair. It is also important to note that there are two old layers of painted surface on the upper torso: the inferior, which can be seen at the shoulders, is grayish and damaged, while the upper layer is shiny and whiter. The latter could be part of the earliest restoration, shortly after 1616. The layers corresponding to more recent restorations are not as white. The close examination of the sculpture brings us to yet another feature of the Zape figure that deserves careful attention. Seeing the sculpture at close range solved one problem by disclosing the unquestionably fine quality of the head and its probable early seventeenth-century origin. However, it has presented a new, unexpected problem and revelation: the Zape sculpture has a rectangular (almost square) cavity in the middle of

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Figure 19.3.  The face of the sculpture of the Virgin of El Zape clearly shows discernible ­evidence of damage and of different attempts at restoration, probably undertaken at various times. Photograph by Begoña Aránzazu Muerza.

its torso (Figure 19.2), and within, smeared around the edges with red pigment of an ­unidentified nature, is an engraving of the bust of Mary herself (Figure 19.4). The print is similar to one by Jan Sadeler (1550–1600), or a copy of one of his works, though an exact same impression has not been localized.40 The discovery of the chest cavity gives the Zape Virgin the identity of an image containing and sheltering another image. How to understand this? Since the Zape figure portrays the Virgin, one thinks of Shrine Madonnas: sculptures of Mary that open to disclose other images, related conceptually to her role and identity. Because she is the Mother of God, God dwells within her. Thus, in these types of images, Mary’s figure often opens to disclose the Trinity or Jesus; or her sculpture may be a tabernacle made to contain the host (the body of Christ), or relics. The Zape Virgin does not fit neatly into these medieval categories, however. For one thing, her image, having been in contact with the martyrs of 1616, and having survived the Tepehuan attack, is itself a relic, as already noted. The print inside her body is a representation of herself, but not of herself as the Immaculate Conception, which is the identity evident from her attributes. The hidden image could be a Virgin of the Annunciation, because of her crossed arms, which is a gesture of acceptance and is the identity of the Sadeler engraving closest to the Zape one. It could also be a Dolorosa or a Soledad, the Virgin of Sorrows or alone after the death of Christ, especially since the

The Virgin of El Zape and Jesuit Missions in Nueva Vizcaya   501

Figure 19.4.  The square cavity in the chest of the sculpture of the Virgin of El Zape contains an engraving by Johannes Sadeler (1550–1600), which was probably meant to represent the Virgin of Sorrows; that is, Mary after the death of Jesus. The print was covered with red pigment around the edges at an unknown date. The crossed arms of Mary in the print may also be a reference to the Annunciation, another event that implies Mary’s acceptance of the will of God. Photograph by Begoña Aránzazu Muerza.

multiple veils in the print are more typical of representations of Mary as an older woman.41 In any case, the two themes—Annunciation and Sorrows—are intimately related, since the outcome of Mary’s acceptance of the role of mother of God was the birth of Christ and his eventual death. Indeed, the Virgin and her sorrows are a frequent occurrence in this type of image concealing other images, especially in the Hispanic world.42 In the Zape Virgin, the sorrows suggested by the print may be related to her own story as a wounded image. They also refer, of course, to the death of her son, Jesus, which, in turn, calls to mind her more recent sons: the Jesuits killed in 1616. No doubt, the engraving was added after the reconquest of the Tepehuan territories, since it is unlikely that a small piece of paper would have survived the 1616 attack. The discrepancies in materials and the concealment of the engraving would seem to signal a wish to recall something beyond the visible sculpture, or to honor an intimate memory. The print itself may be an integral part of this hidden history: it may have belonged to a particular missionary, for example. Thus, the sculpture is both a relic and a reliquary.

502   Borderlands of the Iberian World It is curious in this regard that some of the objects listed in the 1665 inventory of the belongings of the Zape image consisted of figures within figures. The Virgin had, among other things: “a gold serpent with a small image inside, and another gold jewel in the shape of a castle also with an image inside.”43 These would have been given as gifts to the image, and would have been worn or used by someone before being offered to Mary, possibly as ex-votos; the 1753 inventory, cited above, probably refers to at least one of these objects. The different materials of the gifts along with the combinations of imagery may mean that they were reliquaries. They suggest the rich semantic fields that might be created within and around a sculpture such as the one at Zape. The inclusion of the engraving in her body probably should be thought of as a way of amplifying the identity and associations of the image, particularly for those who handled, dressed it, and knew it intimately, since the chest cavity is hidden from the view of the general public.44 Finally, the concealed print also recalls the miracle reported by Mendoza in 1662 of the “bright and beautiful star” shining forth from the Virgin’s breast, as if it were a kind of revelation or a metaphor. As a hidden attribute, the print conceals and reveals the Virgin’s story, which is both tragic and triumphant. All these accounts illumine the importance of this remarkable sculpture. The Jesuit and episcopal records make clear that the destruction or damage of the Zape sculpture is an integral part of her story. In this, the Zape Virgin is akin to the wounded Virgin, “La Vulnerata,” venerated since 1600 in the English College of Valladolid, which received and still displays on itself the violence of the conflict, both religious and political, between Spain and England in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.45 It is probably no accident that the stories of the two images, that of Valladolid and El Zape, are close to one another in time. Furthermore, the attack on the image at El Zape by the Tepehuanes can be attributed in part to what they had learned from the Europeans about how one should behave toward symbolic objects different from one’s own. There is ample evidence that the missionaries, as they moved into Tepehuan territories, violently destroyed the “idols” they came across, as recounted by Font himself, and also by Pérez de Ribas. It is not surprising that the Tepehuanes would do the same to Christian objects and images, and it can only amaze us, who live in another time, that the Jesuits generally did not seem to realize what their own role probably had been in provoking the waves of destruction of Christian images. Susan Deeds has studied the cycles of reciprocal violence toward the enemy’s symbols and objects of belief in the Jesuit territories of northern New Spain, but there is probably a little more information to be gleaned.46 We must consider not only what was destroyed but also what was preserved or recycled, by whom, when, and how. Mendoza himself was interested in these questions, as seen in the letter to his superior. For example, the Tepehuanes and others, at a later phase of their contact with Christian images, appropriated them for their own, as protection against the Spaniards.47 Only Pérez de Ribas insists that the original image was destroyed and replaced by a new one. Direct observation of the sculpture, however, suggests strongly that he was wrong, although “wrong” is the right qualifier only if Pérez de Ribas was writing a factual document of the kind exemplified by the 1617 letter to Rome from the father provincial or by the inventories of El Zape. Nevertheless, he was doing no such thing. He was rather

The Virgin of El Zape and Jesuit Missions in Nueva Vizcaya   503 writing an apology for Jesuit missionary activity in northern New Spain. The Zape Virgin, in her identity as a missionary image, made a perfect parallel with the missionary martyrs. Like them, she was mistreated and killed. Like the Jesuit order, however, she returned to her station, and her work continued. It fit Pérez de Ribas’s immediate experience and intentions much better for her to die, for her relics to produce miracles, as in the water from the pond where she had been drowned, and to return in a triumphant new guise, formed in a miraculous manner, to reestablish the mission. However, since the head and upper part of the image likely date to c. 1616, as all the later texts maintain, and as the examination of the physical characteristics of the sculpture itself make manifest, our conclusion has to be different from that of Pérez de Ribas. The Zape figure is an exceptionally significant sculpture for the early history of Jesuit mission art in New Spain, both as an object and in the complexity of its history. The Zape Virgin in the texts that describe it and tell its stories, and as an object-sculpture, presents varied perspectives on the character and use of the image. The responses to it over time include the substitution of an old image with a new one made with divine assistance. The more likely account, however, is that the original image was preserved but also altered in accordance with its new role as a wounded image, charged with the memory of a tragedy. Besides, it took on miraculous powers that asserted its active participation in the mission enterprise. For Rinaldini and Tamarón, who were men with eighteenth century sensibilities, the emotional attraction of the image and its story was overwhelming. Rinaldini’s text is more abstract and theological, while Bishop Tamarón, in the 1760’s, speaks of his passionate, intimate experience of the beauty and pain of the image, which was the key to his enthusiastic appreciation of it. Indeed, the Zape image may be related to a very unusual 1766 representation of St. Ignatius himself in a painting on copper by Nicolás Enríquez, preserved in the city of Durango and very possibly from the former Jesuit church or college there (Figure 19.5).48 In the painting, the founder of the Jesuits displays on his breast a large scapular with a representation of the Pietà, the Virgin with the dead Christ in her arms. Ignatius’s own arms are crossed feelingly over the image, though they do not conceal it; rather, his left hand draws attention to it, while his right hand holds the emblem of the order (IHS). An angel over his right shoulder displays a book with the Jesuit motto (Ad maiorem Dei gloriam), while Ignatius’s gaze leads the viewer to an apparition of the Trinity above his left shoulder. The painter, no doubt instructed by a patron close to the Jesuits or by the Jesuits themselves, is showing Ignatius identified with the sorrowful Virgin in the very guise of the Sadeler print within the Zape figure. Like Mary in the print, Ignatius crosses his hands on his breast. It is difficult not to perceive a kinship between the suffering of the Zape Virgin and that of Ignatius. Both contain and partly conceal an image of the pain of the loss of precious “sons,” while expressing sorrowful acceptance.49 In recent decades, historians and cultural historians have become interested in the stories of miraculous images like the one at Zape. Historians of art, especially medieval art, have long looked at the stories and functions of sacred images, and their work is now receiving renewed attention. There are abundant written sources for the Zape image, but their interpretation requires the art-historical stance of examining the

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Figure 19.5.  In this 1766 portrait of St. Ignatius by Nicolás Enríquez, the saint has on his chest an image of the Pietà (Mary holding the body of the dead Christ), and he contemplates an apparition of the Trinity. Oil on copper, Sacristy of the church of Santa Ana, Durango, Dgo., Mexico. Photograph by Balaam deLot Gálvez Luque. Adolfo Martínez Romero/ Fototeca de la Galería Episcopal de la Catedral de Durango, Durango (Mexico).

object closely. This is not easy to accomplish for sculptures and paintings that are still in devotional contexts. However, when the opportunity does arise, as in this case, the possibilities for understanding multiply. Future research on the Zape sculpture and other mission images will lead to even richer and multidimensional stories. Whatever the case, it is now possible to assert that the Zape image is an outstanding example of early seventeenth-century sculpture that displays important memories of its colonial history, some of which had not been noticed before. Others are still to be explored. In any case, there can be little doubt that both the stories and the physical characteristics of devotional objects, like the Zape Virgin, are windows into the situations, ideas, and sentiments that accompanied their creation and use over time. It will be essential in the future to conserve and better understand its history as both a relic and a reliquary but also to continue to accommodate its past and current functions and uses as a miracle working image and object. Crucial to its understanding is the recognition of its role as an expression of the work of the imagination over several centuries, as well as its identity as witness to the miracle of its own survival.

The Virgin of El Zape and Jesuit Missions in Nueva Vizcaya   505

Notes Archives AGN:  Archivo General de la Nación, Mexico City (Mexico) British Museum 1. Some preliminary comments on the Zape Virgin, as well as on the Refugio, appeared in a paper presented by Bargellini in 2006: see Clara Bargellini, “Las obras ‘inservibles’ en la Nueva España y después: entre la desaparición y la recreación,” in Estéticas del des(h)echo, XXX Coloquio Internacional de Historia del Arte (Mexico: UNAM, 2014), 245–261. Especially important for its discussion of the same sorts of questions that have arisen around the Zape sculpture is a recent study on comparable European images of Mary: Ralph Dekoninck, “Between Denial and Exaltation. The Materials of the Miraculous Images of the Virgin in the Southern Netherlands During the Seventeenth Century,” in  Meaning in Materials, 1400–1800 (Leiden, The Netherlands, and Boston: Brill, 2013), 148–175. 2. The identities and approximate quantities of the devotions mentioned here are based on the published and unpublished inventories of the two pastoral visits by bishop Pedro Tamarón y Romeral, in 1759–1761 and 1765–1768. I am preparing for publication, with Adolfo Martínez Romero, the inventories of the first visit. For the second visit: Pedro Tamarón y Romeral, Libro Registro de la segunda visita, introduction and notes by Clara Bargellini and Chantal Cramaussel (Mexico: UNAM, Siglo XXI, 1997). 3. Luisa Elena Alcalá, “Blanqueando la Loreto mexicana. Prejuicios sociales y condicionantes materiales en la representación de virgenes negras,” in La imagen religiosa en la monarquía hispánica. Usos y espacios, ed. Maria Cruz de Carlos et al. (Madrid: Casa de Velázquez, 2008), 171–193; Clara Bargellini, “The Holy House of Loreto in Latin America: Presence and Absence,” 2019, deal with the appearances of the Loreto Virgin as well as its house. This is the usual title given in Mexico, since viceregal times, to the icon in the Borghese Chapel of Santa Maria Maggiore, Rome, known traditionally as “della Neve” (of the Snows) because of a fourth- century miracle of snow in August, and also as the “Salus Populi Romani” (Salvation/Health of the Roman People). The Italian “Santa Maria del Popolo” is a different icon, also known in copies in New Spain, venerated in the Roman church of the same name. 4. For a general account of religious imagery at the missions of northern New Spain: Clara Bargellini and Michael Komanecky, The Art of the Missions of Northern New Spain (Mexico: Antiguo Colegio de San Ildefonso, 2009), 54–79. 5. Internet Archive. “Monumenta mexicana,” vol. 7 (1599–1602): 665–666, par. 335–339. Accessed March 10, 2015, https://archive.org/stream/mhsi122/mhsi_122web#page/n637/ mode/2up. 6. Luis González Rodríguez, Crónicas de la Sierra Tarahumara (Mexico: SEP, 1987), 148. 7. González Rodríguez, Crónicas de la Sierra, 161–163. 8. González Rodríguez, Crónicas de la Sierra, 179. 9. González Rodríguez, Crónicas de la Sierra, 183. 10. González Rodríguez, Crónicas de la Sierra, 171–173.

506   Borderlands of the Iberian World 11. González Rodríguez, Crónicas de la Sierra, 151: “a la cabeza de la Virgen del Zape la habían metido dentro de un ojo de agua.” He is citing the account of the Jesuit Provincial Nicolás de Arnaya, in the Jesuit Archives in Rome (Mexicana, vol. 17, 86–125). My thanks to Katherine Moore for help with the early Jesuit sources about the martyrs. 12. González Rodríguez, Crónicas de la Sierra, 65. 13. Daniel  T.  Reff, “Critical Introduction,” in History of the Triumphs of our Holy Faith by Andrés Pérez de Ribas (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1999), 14. 14. Andrés Pérez de Ribas, Historia de los triumphos de nuestra Santa Fee entre gentes las más bárbaras, y fieras del nuevo Orbe (Madrid: Alonso de Paredes, 1645), consulted in the facsimile edition (Mexico: Siglo XXI, 1992), book X, chap. 36, 641. 15. “una de las más bellas y acabadas imágenes que hay en el reyno,” Pérez de Ribas, Historia de los triumphos, book 10, chap. 36, 641. 16. “parecía que para labrarla le había dado Dios gracia particular.” Pérez de Ribas, Historia de los triumphos, book 10, chap. 37, 642. 17. Pérez de Ribas, Historia de los triumphos, book X, chap. 37, 643. Pérez de Ribas seems at times to confuse the stories of the Zape Virgin and Papasquiaro Virgin, which was also attacked, as he himself relates. 18. Misión del Zape, Carta annua referente a esta misión del padre Francisco de Mendoza, 1662. Archivo General de la Nación, México (henceforth AGN), Misiones, vol. 26, exp. 29, f. 166. I owe this reference to Alejandro Vacio Longoria. 19. AGN, Jesuitas II-18, exp. 5. My thanks to Linda Fajardo for having located this document. 20. Juan de Burgos, Discursos historiales panegyricos de las glorias de la serenissima reyna de los ángeles en su sagrada casa de Loreto . . . que escribió Oracio Turselino . . . con los sucessos y aumentos hasta el año de 1659 (Madrid: Joseph Fernández de Buendia, 1671), no page number. The complete phrase of Burgos cited reads: “es muy venerado el Santuario del Zape, por los continuos milagros que ha obrado una hermosa imagen de la Santísima Virgen, que allí colocaron los Padres de la Compañía.” 21. “A la del Zape degollaron los indios y arrojaron en un lago cercano al templo.” 22. Miguel Vallebueno Garcinava, Civitas y urbs: la conformación del espacio urbano de Durango (Durango: Instituto de Cultura del Estado de Durango, 2005), 191. My thanks to the author for discussing this problem with me. More research is needed on this image. 23. AGN, Historia, vol. 20, exp. 3, cited in Miguel Vallebueno Garcinava, “Las misiones del sur de la Nueva Vizcaya, 1556–1753,” in Patrimonio misional en el sur de Nueva Vizcaya, coords. MIguel Vallebueno and Antonio Reyes Valdez (Mexico City: INAH, 2009) 42–43, 138. I am grateful to the author sending me this reference. 24. This story of the Virgin rescued from the water and replaced in the church after the Tepehuanes had been defeated, remains in the oral tradition, and it was told to the author at El Zape in the 1980’s. 25. Luis González Rodríguez, “Un cronista flamenco de la Tarahumara en 1688: Petrus Thomas van Hamme,” Estudios de Historia Novohispana 3, no. 3 (1970): 1–18. 26. González Rodríguez, “Un cronista flamenco,” 10: “a la que hirieron en la mejilla de un hachazo, con atrocidades que no es posible describir. Después arrojaron la estatua a un lado de la iglesia en un estanque de agua que se calentó tanto que si uno mete ahí las manos, apenas la puede soportar.” 27. Francisco de Florencia, Origen de los dos célebres santuarios de la nueva Galicia . . . (Mexico: Imprenta de la Bibliotheca Mexicana, 1757), 4.

The Virgin of El Zape and Jesuit Missions in Nueva Vizcaya   507 28. AGN, Jesuitas, II-4, exp. 32: “La imagen de la Concepcion de Nuestra Señora es bellísima y ricamente vestida con su peana de plata y algunas joyas de precio, en una mejilla tiene señalado el golpe (aun después de haberla retocado) que le dieron los indios con una hacha.” 29. Benito Rinaldini, Arte de la lengua Tepeguana (Mexico: Viuda de Joseph Bernardo de Hogal, 1743), consulted in the facsimile edition published by the Gobierno del Estado de Durango, 1994. 30. Francisco de Florencia and Juan Antonio de Oviedo, Zodiaco mariano [1755] (Mexico: CONACULTA, 1995), 371–374. 31. Cesión de las misiones de la provincia jesuita de Tepehuana–Tarahumara Baja al obispo del Durango, 1753. AGN, Californias, vol. 64, exp. 14, 317–325; 317v: “un Retablo viejo y en él la imagen de bulto de la Santísima Virgen de la Concepción a cuyo lado están dos lienzos el uno de San Joaquín y el otro de Santa Anna, y arriba de la Santa imagen por remate del retablo otro lienzo de los Santos Ignacio y San Francisco Xavier [. . .] fuera del retablo, a los dos lados, dos lienzos grandes, el uno de la imagen de la Santísima Virgen y el otro con la de San Ignacio.” 32. Cesión de las misiones de la provincia jesuita, f. 318: “otro altar con lienzo viejo de la Concepción de Nuestra Señora y en la mesa de dicho altar otra imagen mediana en su tabernáculo de la misma santísima Señora.” 33. Cesión de las misiones de la provincia jesuita, 320–322. The last item is one that the image of the Virgin was wearing at the time of the inventory: “tiene ahora puesta la Santísima Señora una sierpe de oro con un Santo Christo dentro de madera.” The four portraits of the martyrs are still at El Zape. 34. Pedro Tamarón y Romeral, Demostración del vastísimo obispado de la Nueva Vizcaya [1765] (Mexico: Porrúa, 1937), viii, 87–92. 35. Tamarón y Romeral, Demostración del vastísimo obispado, 86: “cautivo de tan rara belleza, pues aunque pobres los adornos, riquísimos sus poderosos atractivos, realzando tanto la belleza de su hermosísimo rostro, la cisura y señal del hachazo, que le partió por el lado siniestro, que mueve a tierna compasión y enciende con eficaz brío a su santo amor, y como encontré lo que mi alma buscaba, allí hice mansión algunos días.” 36. Tamarón y Romeral, Libro Registro, 5–6. 37. Begoña Muerza was asked by the congregation at El Zape to conserve their sculpture. She was able to examine and clean it superficially, as well as do some minor repairs. There was no time nor funds for serious technical examinations. Hopefully, these can be carried out in the future. I am very grateful for her help. 38. My thanks to Pablo Amador for confirming this information. 39. The close observations that follow were discussed with Begoña Muerza. 40. British Museum 1868.0612.482. My thanks to Lia Markey, Peter Parshall, Aaron Hyman and Charles Talbot for their assistence in trying to locate the exact engraving. 41. The engraving could have been inspired by a Titian prototype. Both Maerten de Vos, who may have made the drawing, and the engraver Jan Sadeler spent time in Venice. 42. Irene González Hernando, “Las vírgenes abrideras,” Revista Digital de Iconografía Medieval I, no. 2 (2009): 58–59, 61–62. 43. “Una sierpe de oro con una imagen pequeña dentro. Otra joya a modo de castillete con otra imagen dentro, es de oro.” 44. I owe to Guillermo Arce the knowledge of another Mexican sculpture of Mary that shelters an image of herself in a print. It is a figure in the round of a Virgin of the Rosary in the

508   Borderlands of the Iberian World church of the town of Santiago Mamalhuazuca, close to Ozumba, Mexico. This sculpture, probably from the seventeenth century, displays an eighteenth-century Mexican print of the Immaculate Conception within her breast. Though it has not been possible to access this sculpture directly, the similarity at Zape and at Mamalhuazuca of the combination of prints and sculptures is striking, although at Mamalhuazuca the print is visible, not hidden. Still, in both instances, the print serves as an attribute that amplifies the concepts present in the image, in the way that a badge, medal, or reliquary might. It gives these sculptures more complex identities. The one at Zape is not only an Immaculate Conception, and the one at Mamalhuazuca is more than a Virgin of the Rosary. 45. Javier Burrieza Sánchez, Virgen de los ingleses entre Cádiz y Valladolid (Valladolid: Colegio de San Albano, 2008). 46. Susan M. Deeds, Defiance and Deference in Mexico’s Colonial North (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003), chap. 1. 47. Bargellini and Komanecky, The Art of the Missions, 75. 48. Clara Bargellini, “Painting on Copper in Spanish America,” in Copper as Canvas, coord. Clara Bargellini and Michael K. Komanecky (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 41. 49. I suggest that the Zape image may have inspired the stories of the Franciscan Virgin of La Macana, which is known today only in a few mid and later eighteenth-century paintings and texts, and what seems to be a relatively modern sculpture: Ilona Katzew, “La Virgen de la Macana. Emblema de una coyuntura franciscana,” Anales del Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas 72 (1998): 39–72. There is a small sculpture identified as “de la Macana” in the church of San Francisco in Mexico City, but it is impossible to see it at close range.

Bibliography Bargellini, Clara, and Michael Komanecky. The Art of the Missions of Northern New Spain. Mexico: Antiguo Colegio de San Ildefonso, 2009. González Rodríguez, Luis. “Un cronista flamenco de la Tarahumara en 1688: Petrus Thomas van Hamme.” Estudios de Historia Novohispana 3 (1970): 1–18. González Rodríguez, Luis. Crónicas de la Sierra Tarahumara. Mexico: SEP, 1987. Internet Archive. “Monumenta mexicana,” vol. 7 (1599–1602): 665–666, par. 335–339. Accessed March 10, 2015, https://archive.org/stream/mhsi122/mhsi_122web#page/n637/mode/2up. Pérez de Ribas, Andrés. Historia de los triumphos de nuestra Santa Fee entre gentes las más bárbaras, y fieras del nuevo Orbe. Madrid: Alonso de Paredes, 1645. (Consulted in the facsimile edition, Mexico: Siglo XXI, 1992). Tamarón y Romeral, Pedro. Demostración del vastísimo obispado de la Nueva Vizcaya. Mexico: Porrúa, 1937. Tamarón y Romeral, Pedro. Libro Registro de la segunda visita. Introduction and notes by Clara Bargellini and Chantal Cramaussel. Mexico: UNAM, Siglo XXI, 1997.

chapter 20

Fr a ncisca n M ysticism on the North er n Fron tier of N ew Spa i n Cecilia Sheridan Prieto Translated by Charlotte Whittle

With such variety, as the Lord showed, among those who did not profess the Faith, Gentiles, Idolaters, perfidious Jews, Mohammedans, and Heretics, I declare your Majesty, that those creatures least indisposed to convert, were the gentiles of New Mexico, and other remote Kingdoms in that region.  —Fray Joseph Jiménez Samaniego (1759)

An extensive historiography examines the range of processes that developed around the evangelization of the native people who were subject to the spiritual conquest of the northern frontier of New Spain. This vast space was the scene of many events that demonstrated the hardships, fears, and possibilities brought by the conquest: its greatest challenge, according to historians, was the transformation of the frontier region into a space of faith and obedience to the king of Spain. Due to the theological assemblies held in Mexico City between 1569 and 1575, and the decision by the Third Provincial Council of Mexico (1585) to deny support to the war of blood and fire against the Chichimec Indians, the Viceroy Villamanrique (1585–1589) was obliged to find a different means of pacifying the Chichimec territories. In this context, the influence of the Augustinian friar Guillermo de Santa María laid the foundations for the design of a process of pacification through colonization, the creation of Indian towns, and the establishment of missions.1 Viceroy Villamanrique’s predecessor Pedro Moya de Contreras,2 concerned like Santa María by the situation of the Indians, undertook the creation of a network of missions and defensive settlements in response to a petition by Domingo de Alzola, Bishop of Guadalajara, who advocated for the teaching of the faith and for the conversion of the Indians by example.3

510   Borderlands of the Iberian World These events ushered in a long period of religious conquest in the Americas, in which more than fifteen thousand missionaries participated between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries.4 With the objective of converting the pagans, the mendicant orders set a range of jurisdictional processes in motion under the principles contained in the 1573 ordinances banning war: “War cannot and shall not be made against the Indians of any province to make them receive the holy Catholic faith or to make them obedient to us, or for any other reason.”5 In the region that was considered the frontier of the conquered territories of northern New Spain, and under the banner of conversion by peaceful conquest, the difficult and complex process of territorial occupation and conversion through the founding of missions began. The missions, different from convents, were established in the Americas beginning in the second half of the sixteenth century.6 The earliest Franciscan missions on the northern frontier were founded around 1560, when Brother Pedro de Espinareda and lay Brother Jacinto de San Francisco made incursions into the Guadiana Valley on their missionary journeys through Nueva Vizcaya.7 Later, evangelizing activities expanded into different regions, where each order would have priority or exclusivity; the space was thus divided geographically into mission territories. This territorialization would cause disagreements between different Franciscan provinces and colleges, who claimed the Indians of a given area as belonging to their missions, and defended their right to reduce them, among themselves and before other orders.8 The religious orders participating in this process of peaceful conversion took inspiration from the observations that other missionaries and friars made during the conquest of Mexico, which in fact form the basis of missionary thought in the Americas. For example, the Dominican Bartolomé de las Casas (1474–1566) had a decisive influence on imperial policy regarding the treatment of the indigenous people of New Spain and the Americas in general.9 While Fray Bernardino de Sahagún was a spokesman of “Franciscan eschatological hope”10 and a proponent of the utopia that sought to create a new Kingdom of Christ in the Indies. However, the actual conditions in the frontier region, derived from the presence of natives who were culturally different from the Indians in the central areas and the altiplano of New Spain, caused the ideals of primitive Franciscanism to be abandoned and opened up the space to a different approach, as the Jesuit José de Acosta recognized in his 1576 treatise De procuranda indorum: “the old, apostolic evangelizing method cannot be applied exactly to the savages.” According to this method, preachers went in search of gentiles, without any form of protection, in order to preach the Gospel.11 Escandell refers to the “universalist character of evangelization” and the agreement between objectives and actions among the missionary orders, acknowledging that they acted in accordance with autonomous and traditional methods of organization: the Franciscan approach was conditioned by nominalist and scotist doctrine that viewed evangelization as a long-term project, while the Dominican approach adhered to Secunda secunda Tomist theology that viewed missionary action as constrained by free assent.12 The Jesuits, driven by their philosophy of seeking “universal” good and the salvation of souls, employed the same system of reductions as the Franciscans, seeking

Franciscan Mysticism in Northern New Spain   511 to distance the Indians from the abuses of the encomenderos and prevent all contact with nearby Spaniards and mestizos. The origins of the Franciscan eschatological utopia date to the middle ages, when religious groups and sects sought a return to primitive Christianity founded on the renunciation of worldly goods and a strict adherence to a life of poverty, while also undertaking to evangelize in all parts of the known world where there were infidels. This utopian ideal opened the doors to the first Franciscan attempts at evangelization in the Americas. From the moment of their arrival, evangelization and colonization went hand in hand in the conquest of new regions. In this process, however, dissident positions arose that condemned any form of association with colonial power.13 Several significant instances of mysticism were influenced by the Franciscan evangelizing project in the northern borderlands of New Spain from the perspective of primitive Franciscanism. Of particular interest are the cases of mysticism that resulted from the influence of the nun Sor María de Jesús (1602–1665) on the work to promote evangelization done by the Franciscan missionaries Alonso de Benavides (1578–1635) and Antonio Margil de Jesús (1657–1726). The New Spanish beata Francisca de los Angeles (1674–1744), would emulate the spiritual journeys of Sor María de Jesús de Ágreda to the regions of the infidels on the northern frontier to convert them to Christianity.14

Conversion Miracles The possibility of creating a new world based on the conversion of the Indian infidels is a fundamental aspect of the motivations of most Spanish inhabitants of the borderlands. The idea of the creation of a space based on the new utopia finds expression in a land that for the Europeans was devoid of history, a new world full of possibilities. In this context, the Franciscan utopia in the marginal regions of the New World is often seen as a consequence of exigencies that were overcome in the process of creating new, Western spaces over old, native ones. The utopian content of the spiritual conquest is only occasionally covered in the historiography of those remote spaces that were barely reached by the influence of the Crown, but where God was present in the miracles and wonders he bestowed on a world of infidelity waiting to be transformed. In this sense, the task of conversion was a product of divine will; if it was not realized, everything would be over, as the friar Jerónimo de Mendieta expressed: “Since beyond this transaction of souls (for which God wished to reveal this land to us), all else is pestilent greed and misery of the evil world.”15 Franciscan mission work on the frontier nurtured the utopia by combating infidelity in those rugged, distant regions plagued with spiritual challenges. It was inspired by their belief in a new creation after the end of history. A large portion of the slow and difficult missionary activity in northern New Spain imprinted the space with its imagination of the miraculous and sustained its creation through the power of faith. The mission

512   Borderlands of the Iberian World space gradually promoted and strengthened the Franciscans’ enormous effort to control mass infidelity, placing a bet on utopia in the New World, where spaces were divided between the holy and the infidel on the basis of the establishment of missions. These were normalizing heterotopias, or localized utopias.16 They were characterized by their distinctness and the difficulty of their permanence but that established spaces safe from idolatry and the devil. In his struggle against idolatry and the devil, and in his pursuit of the salvation of infidels, Fray Martín de Valencia (1474–1534), the superior of the 1524 expedition that brought the first twelve Franciscans to Mexico, experienced raptures even before his voyage to New Spain. In them, he observed “many souls of infidels who were converted in great numbers, and came as if rushing to receive holy baptism.”17 Martín de Valencia’s mysticism had an important impact on the odyssey of the twelve missionaries, as much on those that were close to him as on those who came after. One of these Franciscans, Fray Jerónimo de Mendieta (1525–1604), took mystical thought to another level of connection with evangelical work, by defining the miracles and marvels of evangelization as an expression of “martyrdom without death.”18 He viewed the work of evangelizing the “savage” Indians as the most valuable spiritual labor because it demanded martyrdom in life, and he thought it was a means of attaining holiness through contact with the Chichimec Indians, whose very name meant “fierceness, ferocity and bestiality of the said [Indians].”19 These Chichimec Indians were difficult to convert even after they had been exposed to Christianity, to the extent that they committed deliberate acts of apostasy. For Mendieta, the persistence of patience represented the possibility of conversion among the savages: The occasions of deaths of friars is what has been related, according to the Spaniards. But I say that the main thing was their desire to turn to idolatry, tempted by the devil, and regress, and become apostates [. . .] of all these friars here named, and others I am unaware of, dead at the hands of the Chichimecas, it can be left only to God to judge which ones achieved the palm and crown of martyrdom.20

Mendieta’s history is one of eminent men, devout Catholics, told for a western, Christian audience. After a few years, given the Indians’ willingness to accept Christianity, Friar Martín and his companion, Friar Toribio de Benavente, Motolinía, were believed to have baptized more than a hundred thousand people. Mass conversion resulted from an urgent need to save the infidels before the end of time, and also from another kind of miracle: the disposition of the infidels and their implicit conscience of self-redemption, even when they were unfamiliar with the content of the Gospel or what it meant in their own languages. From Friar Martín de Valencia onwards, this miracle would be repeated on many occasions throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in a variety of settings; there are abundant testimonies of this in documents relating to evangelization on the northern frontier, such as the one referred to by Balcárcel y Rivadeneira about conversions by Friar Juan Larios in 1673, who claimed that over three

Franciscan Mysticism in Northern New Spain   513 thousand Indians with weapons followed him, begging to be converted and baptized.21 Despite the long century between them, both Friar Alonso de Benavides and Friar Margil de Jesús seem attached to this idea of primitive Franciscanism. The stories of Sor María de Jesús and Francisca de los Angeles, both of whom wished to spread the Gospel among the infidels but who were legally prevented from working as missionaries, appear as part of a secret history of Franciscan evangelizing in new lands where all kinds of miracles, signs, and wonders were possible. Those possibilities could include martyrdom in life when the women concerned were classified as mad, false mystics, or any other insult commonly applied to women who believed themselves intermediaries of God or the Virgin. Both women suffered persecution and a harsh trial by the Inquisition. Later, as hagiographers and faithful followers of the “venerable” Sor María, both friars Antonio de Benavides and Antonio Margil de Jesús promoted and constantly revived Sor María de Jesús’s miracle of bilocation, in lands that were removed from the center of political clashes over the path of conquest through war, or the alternative of a conquest via spiritual means. Despite policies established by the Crown that privileged conquest by spiritual means, in the regions furthest from viceregal authority, the situation of belligerence was not fundamentally altered. For decades, conquistadors and adventurers who entered the northern territories marked their trails with the two apparently unopposed symbols of the sword and the cross, just as they had in the war against the Moors in the Iberian Peninsula. War, then, could be seen as a crusade, a constant and “harsh war against Hell” personified by “ministers of war” (the friars) engaged in announcing the law of the Gospel to the “savage and untamed nations,” “converting numerous souls to a life of grace, and removing them from the ugly lethargy of guilt,” as Fray Joseph de Arlegui stated in 1737.22 The scale of evangelizing activity in the Americas and Asia, inspired by the potential to end infidelity in the world by preaching the Gospel and offering baptism by missionaries who risked their lives “armed with the shield of faith,” represented for Sor María de Jesús the possibility of attaining one of her greatest desires: to evangelize in a land of infidels.23 María de Jesús’s parents, Catalina de Arana and Francisco Coronel, were devout Catholics and were close to the Franciscans of the San Julián Convent in the town of Ágreda, where María de Jesús was born in 1602. She was baptized with the name María Coronel y Arana. This connection to the Franciscans, in addition to other more earthly circumstances related to the family’s economic situation, undoubtedly explains why in 1619 her mother established a convent of Franciscan nuns of the order of the Immaculate Conception in the family home where María and her sister took their vows. Her father and two brothers entered the Franciscan convent in Nalda, also in the province of Soria. The Conceptionist convent would be Sister María de Jesús’s sole residence until her death at the age of 63.24 At the age of eighteen, having had a brief but intense spiritual life, and attempted to enter the barefoot Carmelite convent in Tarazona, María de Jesús took her vows as a Conceptionist nun at the Ágreda convent. From then on, she experienced a series of

514   Borderlands of the Iberian World mystical phenomena such as raptures, ecstasies and levitations, and trances, which lasted approximately a decade, until 1630. The hagiography of Sor María de Jesús, authored by Fray Joseph Ximénez Samaniego, provides an account of this period of her life. According to the friar, María demonstrated an infinite love of God and had mystical contact with him from a young age. Her most important memory refers to a vision in which God showed her the difference between good and evil. After this encounter, she had no more visions until a few days after having taken her vows as a nun, when God “illuminated her within [. . .] with a light, or illumination, which [. . .] the Mystics normally call internal speech.”25 From that moment, the nun experienced mystical states up to three or four times a day. She said she received from God the deepest secrets of the faith and of Christ’s sufferings for the redemption of souls. In these trances, she gained access to knowledge of unredeemed souls who had died in sin without the possibility of redemption. God had transported her spiritually so that she could gain knowledge of the range and quantity of souls at risk of dying in sin, a fact that caused her a suffering that was only alleviated by offering her own sickness, pain, and torments for the conversion of those infidels. In one of her raptures, which generally occurred after communion, God told her his predilection for the conversion of the gentiles of New Mexico and “other remote kingdoms” of the region and that those gentiles had demonstrated their openness to conversion. From that time on, always when she was in a state of ecstasy, God showed her the situation of those provinces in great detail, the Indians’ way of life, their great desire for conversion, and the immense need for missionaries willing to risk their lives for these gentiles in the Americas. After months of communication with God, on one occasion for the first time she experienced the miracle she had been hoping for: “[God] worked in her and through her, one of the greatest wonders witnessed by the centuries.” From one moment to the next, in a fit of ecstasy, she found herself in a place with a climate very different from that of her surroundings, and in a town of people like those God had described to her: “It seemed I could see them with my eyes, that I could strongly perceive the warmer climate of the land, and that the rest of my senses experienced that difference. [. . .] The Lord ordered her to relieve her longings for his charity by preaching his Faith, and his Holy Law to those peoples.”26 Sor María perceived that she was preaching to them in Spanish and that the Indians could understand her perfectly, as if she were speaking to them in their own language. From her point of view, this fact proved, as God had assured her, that the Indians were willing to be converted, and she saw them kneel before her, clamoring to be redeemed. But the greatest miracle, described by Ximénez Samaniego, was that of the preaching itself: the nun’s desire to preach, to act as a missionary among the infidels, and in this way achieve their salvation. As a result of her efforts she was able to verify that the Indians were converted to the faith, and she continued with her catechism. This was repeated more than five hundred times in ten years, achieving the conversion of “an extensive kingdom” near the region where the Franciscan missionaries she claimed to have seen in action were already preaching. Knowing that she was unable to baptize the

Franciscan Mysticism in Northern New Spain   515 Indians, Sor María guided them to beg the ministers to baptize them and to send them “workers” or missionaries, who would teach them the catechism.27 Fearful that such miracles were the result of an evil influence, she found it difficult to believe that her visions occurred beyond her spirit. Her confessor assured her that she had been sent bodily to the Indies, by the grace of God, which would later be corroborated by the testimony of Indians who referred to a beautiful woman in a blue tunic, who appeared among them to catechize them. The miracle was confirmed when Fray Alonso de Benavides, guardian of New Mexico, heard of these wonders from the mouths of the Indians and corroborated that they had known of the Gospel even before missionaries arrived there.28 Eight years later, in 1630, when Fray Alonso was in Madrid, he began to investigate the events that had occurred in New Mexico. He met with the general minister of the Franciscan order, Fray Bernardino de Sena, who assured him that the missionary nun was Sor María de Jesús de Ágreda, whom he knew by her reputation for saintliness. The minister immediately appointed this friar as commissioner in charge of writing an account of the events, based on the statements of the nun, whom he instructed him to visit in Ágreda. “Sacrificing her secret, for the sake of obedience,” Sor María told Friar Alonso the story of her experiences of being bodily transported to those regions of America, in the presence of her confessor. Fray Alonso asked her to describe the places, the Indians, their customs, and anything that might help him corroborate the events she narrated to him. Sor María told many things that could only be defined with such clarity by someone who had lived in those remote regions, in addition to describing the missionaries who worked there, the places, the days, the hours, and so on. Along with the provincial father and Sor María’s confessor, Fray Alonso de Benavides wrote an account of the events that would later become two memorials that sought to provide a true record of the mystical phenomenon that led the nun to preach in body and spirit among the Indians in the north of New Spain.29 Benavides wrote the memorials while he was in Europe acting as confessor to Francisco Melo, Spanish Ambassador before the Holy See in Rome and sent them to the two highest authorities on the subject of missions and evangelization: Pope Urban VIII, and the recently created Propaganda Fide.30 In the first memorial, Benavides recounts the earliest news of the presence of a woman, to whom he refers as the “Servant of God,” who converted and catechized the Indians. He tells how the fathers Juan de Salas and Diego López, assigned as guardians to New Mexico, were received by over ten thousand Indians requesting baptism. After a brief examination of what they had learned from the mouth of the woman who came to visit them and teach them the faith, the fathers decided to baptize them all. In that moment the miracle of the Indians’ faith became apparent, as they begged through the mouths of their leaders: “Father, until now we have been like deer and wild animals, but you have much power before God.” They asked that their sick (the blind, the crippled, the paralyzed) be healed and that the fathers not abandon them. The fathers, reading the Gospel Loquente Jesu (Mark 16) and replying with the Concede Nos prayer, saw that the Indians were instantly healed.31

516   Borderlands of the Iberian World In the second memorial (1631), Benavides describes what Sor María claimed to have seen on her mystical travels to New Mexico and Gran Quivira: “All of the things I write here were told to me by our Mother María de Jesús [ . . . ] nobody has heard these things in Spain, and they are from New Mexico.”32 The nun assured him that through the ministry of angels she had been there many times and that the last time had been a month and a half before meeting with Fray Alonso. To support her claims, she signed a letter dated May 15, 1631, in which she assured the reader that everything Fray Alonso had written was true: “Thus I tell of what happened in the provinces and kingdoms of New Mexico, of Quivira, Yumanas, and other nations [. . .] I believe the first kingdoms I visited are in the east [. . .] I call those kingdoms, with respect to our terms of speaking, Tidar, and another Chillescas and Caburcos, which have not been discovered.”33 Fray Alonso wrote to his missionary brothers in New Mexico, emphasizing the nun’s mediation between God and the Franciscans, in which he took pleasure for being [the missionaries] beneficiaries of the blessed soul of María de Jesús [. . .] since her style and thought is Evangelical [. . .] she has seen them, and she commends them to God, and thus I thank them [. . .] And I also give many thanks to the Indians, as they are deserving of her love [. . .] as spiritual children, to whom she has preached the Holy Catholic Faith, and lit up the darkness of Idolatry.34 Sor María’s fame seemed to have expanded beyond the town of Ágreda after the attention garnered from the General of the order. Clergy, laypeople, and devotees of the nun attended the convent to witness the raptures she suffered daily, with the knowledge of her sisters, causing “reckless and dangerous disturbances,” of which she was thoroughly unaware.35 When the nun discovered these abuses, the provincial ordered her to ask God to spare her from externally visible manifestations and visions. Four years after Fray Alonso de Benavides’s visit to Ágreda, the Audience of the Holy Office of the Inquisition in Logroño advanced a case against Sor María de Jesús, dated the May 19, 1635. According to one of the witnesses, Fray Andrés de la Torre, the case recorded the accusation “that the aforementioned María de Jesús, being sometimes and sometimes not in a state of rapture, was transported by the hands of angels to some kingdoms of idolaters in the Indies, and that there she instructed the Indians in the faith of the true God.”36 The Inquisition desisted from its case in 1645 following the intervention of Philip IV, with whom María de Jesús maintained a long epistolary relationship as his advisor and confidante up until his death in 1665. From the moment the case was opened, Sor María ceased to travel to America in body and spirit as a missionary and devoted her life to writing various works dictated to her by the Virgin Mary, among which is the notable history of the life of the Virgin: Mystica Ciudad de Dios (1725), a baroque story in which she narrates the life of the mother of Christ.37 The verification of the nun’s apparitions occurred at a time when the mission to convert the savage Indians in the north of New Spain was undergoing a period of profound questioning with regard to mass conversion methods. If Fray Alonso de Benavides could claim that in her mystical travels, Sor María had achieved half a million conversions in distant northern New Spain, this “extraordinary harvest”38 opened up new possibilities for the redemption of infidelity governed by the devil.

Franciscan Mysticism in Northern New Spain   517

Fray Antonio Margil de Jesús and the Santa Rosa Beatas Among the Ágreda nun’s writings, the first of her spiritual exercises—among others Escala para subir a la perfección (Ladder for rising to perfection); Ejercicio cotidiano (Daily exercise); Ejercicios espirituales y leyes de la esposa (Spiritual exercises and laws for wives), along with the Mystica Ciudad de Dios, would have a decisive influence on two of the most remarkable Franciscans in the history of evangelization in the Americas: Antonio Margil de Jesús (1657–1726), founder of the convent of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Zacatecas for propaganda fide in 1706, and Junípero Serra (1713–1784), founder of a dozen missions in the region of Alta California.39 For over four decades, Margil de Jesús did missionary work in the Americas: in Nicaragua, his first venture, in Costa Rica, among the Talamanca Indians, in Boruca, on the Isthmus of Panama, and in Guatemala and Yucatán. He also headed the Franciscan mission in the northernmost part of Texas, Nachitoches. The missionary work of Fray Margil, as he is known among Franciscans, was associated with a number of wonders and miracles that brought him close to saintliness, thus the order of the friars’ minor and their followers advocated for his canonization along with the venerable Sor María de Jesús of Ágreda. The sobriquets applied to Margil, “Northern Atlas Pilgrim,” and “Friar of the Winged Feet,” respond to the miracles attributed to him in his extraordinary mobility, for the speed with which he could travel from one place to another, very distant (e.g., from Guatemala to Querétaro), in an amount of time impossible for a human being.40 Juan Domingo Arricivita described Fray Margil’s missionary work in detail, describing him as a “kind of wonder in which were renewed the footprints of the primitive apostolic men, who miraculously traveled the rough paths of these Realms,” and commenting that “such rare speed was doubtless to be admired.”41 It seems that the friar only slept a few hours at night, and on waking he read the writings of Sor María de Jesús with Fray Antonio de los Angeles before moving on to confession and penitence: “He told me, like someone very enlightened, what God had ordered, then I would lie on my back on the floor and he would put his foot on my mouth, while reciting three credos: then I would sit and he would do the same, until we reached the matins.”42 His dedication to meditating upon the life, passion, and death of Christ was equal to his dedication to the Virgin through reading the history of her life that was transcribed by Mother Ágreda. Fray Isidro Felix de Espinosa adds an interesting memory: acting as president of the Missionary College of Zacatecas, Fray Margil exhorted the Franciscans to fulfill their duty to recognize the Mother Guadalupana, since she ennobled the college, and “elect her as their special prelate, in imitation of the venerable Mother María de Jesús of Ágreda, with those most devout circumstances that can be read at the end of the third volume of the Mystica Ciudad de Dios.”43 From then on, the Colegio de Zacatecas would recognize the Virgin of Guadalupe as its prelate.

518   Borderlands of the Iberian World Additionally, Arricivita explicitly mentions Father Margil’s influence on the “beatas of Santa Rosa” and describes his effort to encourage them “so that they would be perfect”44 and emulate the Virgin Mary in their qualities and actions. For a while, the friar acted as confessor to the mestiza Francisca de los Angeles, one of the founders of the Real Colegio Beaterio de Santa Rosa de Viterbo, in the city of Querétaro. The founding of this Real Colegio Beaterio precisely in Querétaro was no coincidence, since the Franciscan Order had established the Colegio de Propaganda Fide de la Santa Cruz in that same city in 1683, the purpose of which was to promote missionary work in northern New Spain. Fray Antonio Margil de Jesús was among the founders of the Colegio de Santa Cruz in this city that marked the beginning of the Camino Real de Tierra Adentro (the Royal Inland Road).45 Francisca de los Angeles stands out in the history of mysticism in New Spain for having been subject to a trial by the Inquisition, and later named a Venerable, along with her mother and her two sisters, Gertrudis de Jesús and María Clara de la Asunción.46 In 1689 she entered cloistered life, taking the veil of the third Franciscan Order of Penance. Years later, when the aforementioned Real Colegio was established by Royal Decree, on July 28, 1727, in a plot the sisters inherited from their father, she became the first rector of the institution, dying at the age of seventy-eight “with a reputation for great saintliness.”47 Being followers of the Franciscans who were established in the recently founded Propaganda Fide college (1683), and under the protection of Friar Francisco de Frutes to whom their father had entrusted them, the sisters received protection and guidance for the creation of the beaterio. Both the founding of this college and the circumstances in which Francisca took the veil at an early age, coincide with the story of the life of Sor María de Jesús, who had died two decades earlier. Once in the cloister, Francisca began having mystical experiences that, just as with Sor María, would spiritually transport her to the northern frontier of New Spain, where she would act as a missionary, teaching the Gospel and catechizing the natives. Similarly, according to the account provided by María de Ágreda when she came into contact with the Indians, Francisca vowed that after traveling great distances, accompanied by her guardian angel, she had verified the Indians’ willingness to be converted. However, unlike Sor María, Francisca gave herself over to the task of carrying out baptisms. The Franciscan missionaries acknowledged her journeys and thus sought her counsel before leaving for the northern frontier. As Rubial García points out, the missionary effort was to have her recognized as a local saint.48 This would undoubtedly help them obtain economic and political support for the work to be done in those regions. Among the confessors of Francisca de los Angeles, Fray Margil de Jesús played an important role in the establishment of the beaterio, and, as a result, in the increase and acknowledgment of her virtues. Francisca’s writings, unlike Sor María’s extensive works, are limited to a series of letters written between 1689 and 1736 to her confessors and friends, who considered her to be a visionary. The letters narrate her intimate conversations with God, and her ability to be transported spiritually to the region of Texas, to convert and baptize the Indians.49 Like Sor María de Jesús, Francisca de los Angeles affirmed that in her journeys to the northern regions, a guardian angel took her place in the beaterio so that her absence would

Franciscan Mysticism in Northern New Spain   519 go unnoticed. She also alleged that she had established “utopian” societies in Texas, built churches, and performed mass for her disciples. Also, like Sor María, Francisca described the places she visited in great detail. She was undoubtedly a fervent follower of the Ágreda nun, whose spiritual writings she read enthusiastically and returned to daily, as did her guide Fray Antonio Margil de Jesús, who spent whole days with the nuns of Santa Clara and the beatas of Santa Rosa, to whom he provided confession and counsel.50 Francisca’s spirituality was founded on her devotion to the passion of Christ, and she had no doubt of her privileged relationship to the divine, especially the Holy Trinity, the Virgin Mary, and the Catholic saints. At the age of twenty she suffered a trial by the Inquisition, which accused her of being an alumbrada.51 But she was exonerated a few years after the case began. Beyond the similarities or differences between the two mystics, Sor María de Jesús de Ágreda was undeniably a definitive influence on the apostolic life of Fray Margil de Jesús, who, in his eagerness to attain the purest expression of primitive Franciscanism, placed his hopes for a repetition of the miracle in the beata Francisca de los Angeles. For Francisca, the emulation of Sor María, who was already venerable at the time, allowed her to carve a space for herself in the society of Querétaro, even while she was aware of the risk of a trial by the Inquisition and recognized its imminence in the religious climate of the city. Saints and missionaries form part of an imagination that goes beyond the simple reasoning of benefits or privileges that were obtained or desired for missionary work on the northern frontier. The major difference between the mysticism of Sor María and that of the beata mestiza of Querétaro resides in the fact that in each case their importance took a course linked to the eschatological hopes of their times. On one hand, sor María de Jesús lives on in her religious intention to one day become a saint; her works transcended their time. In contrast Francisca de los Angeles, known in her time as a beata mestiza and an alumbrada, was forgotten by the history of Franciscanism in New Spain, and perhaps remains as just one among the women subjected to trial by the Inquisition: an episode that demonstrates the power held by the Inquisition in New Spain. The northern frontier of New Spain, as occurred in other borderlands of the Americas, transcended in time and space the binary oppositions between good and evil, life and death, the wars waged by Spaniards against the Indians and those of the Indians against the Iberian invaders, the war against the devil, and the transformation of redeemed souls that would follow. In all its different expressions, mysticism undoubtedly nurtured the imaginary that was so needed for the survival of a monumental project for the spiritual transformation of the heathen in these distant spaces of the vast territorial dominion of colonial New Spain.

Notes Archives Archivo Franciscano, Fondo Reservado, Biblioteca Nacional de la Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Mexico City (Mexico) AGN:  Archivo General de la Nación, Mexico City (Mexico)

520   Borderlands of the Iberian World 1. Guillermo de Santa María, a Spanish Augustinian friar, witness of the Mixtón War (1541) and missionary among the Indians known as Chichimecas for over two decades, who is the author of the tract The War of the Chichimecas, participated in the theological conference of 1569. Alberto Carrillo Cázares, El debate sobre la Guerra Chichimeca, 1531–1585. Derecho y política en la Nueva España, vol. I (Mexico: El Colegio de Michoacán, El Colegio de San Luis, 2000). 2. Archbishop-viceroy and first inquisitor of New Spain. In 1585 he summoned the third Mexican council. 3. Andrea Martínez Baracs, Un gobierno de indios: Tlaxcala, 1519–1570 (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica, CIESAS, Colegio de Historia de Tlaxcala, 2008), 278. 4. The missionary orders authorized by the Spanish Crown to evangelize the Indians in the Americas were the Franciscans, Dominicans, Augustinians, Mercedarians, Jesuits, and Capuchins. The majority were Franciscans (57 percent of the missionaries between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries), with the Jesuits in second place (16 percent), and the Dominicans third (15 percent). Antonio Gil Albarracín, “Estrategias espaciales de las órdenes mendicantes,” Scripta Nova. Revista electrónica de geografía y ciencias sociales 10, 218. Accessed August 16, 2016, http://www.ub.es/geocrit/sn/sn-218–45.htm. 5. Gil Albarracín, “Estrategias espaciales de las órdenes mendicantes.” 6. There is an extensive bibliography on the processes of colonization, mission activity, and control of indigenous spaces in the northeast and northwest of New Spain. These processes differ in many aspects in relation to the actions of Jesuits and Franciscans, and Indians, as well as to the cultural diversity and ways of confronting Indians considered “enemies” of the Crown. See Salvador Bernabéu Albert, coord., El gran norte mexicano. Indios, misioneros y pobladores entre el mito y la historia (Seville: CSIC, 2009); Chantal Cramaussel, La provincia de Santa Bárbara en Nueva Vizacaya (Mexico: SEP, Gobierno del Estado de Chihuahua, 2004); Susan Deeds, Defiance and Deference in Mexico’s Colonial North (Texas: University of Texas Press, 2003); Cynthia Radding, Wandering Peoples. Colonialism, Ethnic Spaces and Ecological Frontiers in Northwestern Mexico, 1700–1850 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997); Cecilia Sheridan, Anónimos y desterrados (Mexico: CIESAS, Instituto Mora, 2000); Thomas E. Sheridan and Thomas H. Naylor, ed., Rarámuri. A Tarahumara Colonial Chronicle, 1607–1791 (Flagstaff: Northland Press, 1979); Thomas  E.  Sheridan and Nancy J. Parezo, eds., Paths of Life: American Indians of the Southwest and northern Mexico (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1996); David J. Weber, The Spanish Frontier on North America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), among others. 7. Esteban  J.  Palomera, Fray Diego Valadés, O.F.M.: evangelizador humanista de la Nueva España. El hombre, su época y su obra (Mexico: Universidad Iberoamericana, 1988), 99. 8. Representación del guardián y discretorio del Colegio de la Santa Cruz de Querétaro al Comisario General de la orden de San Francisco sobre restitución a la misión de San Juan Capistrano de los indios que huyeron a la de San Francisco de Vizarrón, 1754, fs. 1–9, Archivo Franciscano, Fondo Reservado, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Ms. 5/104. See the problem of frontier missions in Sheridan, Anónimos y desterrados, 171. 9. See Beatríz Fernández Herrero, La utopía de América: teoría, leyes, experimentos (Barcelona: Editorial Anthropos, 1992). 10.  Javier Ordiz Velázquez, “La utopía del Nuevo Mundo en el pensamiento de Bartolomé de las Casas y Fray Bernardino de Sahagún,” Tierras de León: Revista de la Diputación Provincial 28, no. 71 (1988): 1–14. 11. The tract was written in the first and second sessions of the First Provincial Congregation of the Society of Jesus in Peru in 1576 and was not published until 1588 since it was censored

Franciscan Mysticism in Northern New Spain   521 by the Jesuits themselves, and by the Council of the Indies. Paulo Suess, La conquista espiritual de la América española. Doscientos documentos del siglo XVI (Quito: AbyaYala, 2002), 274–284. A complete version was published in 1984 by the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas en España: José de Acosta, De Procuranda Indorum Salute (Madrid: CSIC, 1984). 12. Bartolomé Escandell Bonet, Teoría del Discurso Historiográfico (Oviedo: Universidad de Oviedo, 1992). 13. Beatriz Pastor Bodmer, El jardín y el peregrino: ensayos sobre el pensamiento tópico latinoamericano, 1492–1695 (Mexico: UNAM, 1999), 219. 14. The beata was a common figure in New Spain, the term referring to those women devoted to a mystical service but who had not officially taken the veil or lived in a convent. They could live alone and isolated in their homes or belong to a beaterio or religious ­community. For more information on the meaning and role of these female figures in New Spain’s society see Antonio Rubial García, Profetizas y solitarios (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2006), 30. 15. Quoted in Luis González, Jerónimo de Mendieta: Vida, pasión y mensaje de un indigenista apocalíptico (Mexico: El Colegio de Michoacán, 1996), 61. 16. Michael Foucault, El cuerpo utópico. Las heterotopías (Buenos Aires: Ediciones Nueva Visión, 2010), 21. 17. Jerónimo de Mendieta, Vidas franciscanas (Mexico: UNAM, 1994), 10. 18. Since there are numerous versions of this work by Mendieta, the order of the original, and the page numbers of the edition cited in this article will be systematically referred. Gerónimo de Mendieta, Historia eclesiástica indiana, t. II, Libro V, segunda parte (Mexico: CONACULTA, Cien de México, 2002), 459. Brandon Bayne, “Converting the Pacific: Jesuit Networks between New Spain and Asia,” in The Oxford Handbook of Borderlands of the Iberian World, ed. Danna A. Levin Rojo and Cynthia Radding, 789–816 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019) provides extensive treatment of the concept of martyrdom without death, and the general motivations for missionary work in the context of the Jesuit missions. 19. Mendieta, Historia eclesiástica indiana, 460. For the different cultural and spatial meanings of chichimeca see Fernando Berrojalbiz and Marie-Areti Hers, “Fluctuating Frontiers in the Borderlands of Mesoamerica,” in The Oxford Handbook of Borderlands of the Iberian World, ed. Danna  A.  Levin Rojo and Cynthia Radding, 83–106 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), and Cecilia Sheridan Prieto, Fronterización del espacio hacia el norte de la Nueva España (Mexico: CIESAS, Instituto Mora, 2015), 91. 20. Mendieta, Historia eclesiástica indiana, 500, 502. The desire for martyrdom is also seen among Jesuit missionaries. Carta del padre Fernando Consag de la Compañía de Jesús Visitador de las Misiones de California a los Padres Superiores de esta Provincia de  Nueva España, prol. María Eugenia Patricia Ponce Alcocer (Mexico: Universidad Iberoamericana, 2005). 21. Registro de los Autos formados el año de 1673 en la ciudad de Guadalajara a petición del Procurador General de la Provincia de Santiago de Xalisco de la orden de San Francisco, 1673–1674, 30, Archivo Franciscano, Fondo Reservado, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Ms.5/86. Mendieta, Vidas franciscanas, insists on this point. Pastor Bodmer, El jardín y el peregrino, 237, mentions that for the Franciscans this accelerated conversion and baptism was a convenient way to expedite the fulfillment of prophecies—the end times, for example—a system in conflict with the Dominicans, who insisted on a more rigorous catechism that cast doubt on the idea of the Indians’ natural readiness for baptism.

522   Borderlands of the Iberian World 22. Joseph Arlegui, Crónica de la Provincia de N.S.P.S. Francisco de Zacatecas: compuesta por el M.R.P FR. Joseph Arlegui [1737] (Mexico: Cumplido Impresor, 1851), 55. 23. Francisco de los Ángeles, “Patente y obediencia” taken from Mendieta, Historia Eclesiástica Indiana, L.III, Cap. X, cited by Elsa Cecilia Frost, La historia de Dios en las Indias. Visión franciscana del Nuevo Mundo (Mexico: Tusquets Editores, 2002), 166. 24. Joseph Ximénez Samaniego, Prologo Galeato. Relación de la vida de la V. Madre Sor María de Jesús, Abadesa que fue, del Convento de la inmaculada Concepción, de la Villa de Ágreda, de la Provincia de Burgos, y Notas a las tres partes de la Mystica Ciudad de Dios con Privilegio (Madrid: Imprenta de la Causa de la V. Madre, 1759). 25. Ximénez Samaniego, Prologo Galeato, 100. 26. Ximénez Samaniego, Prologo Galeato, 132. 27. Ximénez Samaniego, Prologo Galeato, 139. 28. A Spanish missionary, member of the regular observance and guardianship of conversion in New Mexico, to whom Ximénez Samaniego refers as “a man of great spirit, and zeal for the conversion of souls,” Prólogo Galeato, 95. 29. Alonso de Benavides, Memorial que Fray Iván de Santander de la Orden de San Francisco, Comissario General de Indias, presenta a la Magestad Catolica del Rey don Felipe Qvarto nuestro Señor. Hecho por el Padre Fray Alonso de Benavides Comissario del Santo Oficio, y Custodio que ha sido de las Provincias, y conversiones del Nuevo–Mexico. Tratese en el de los Tesoros Espirituales, y temporales, que la divina Magestad ha manifestado en aquellas conversiones, y nuevos descubrimientos, por medio de los Padres de esta seráfica Religion (Madrid: Imprenta Real, 1630). 30. Mar Rey Bueno, Magos y reyes. El ocultismo y lo sobrenatural en las monarquías (Madrid: EDAF, 2004), 209. 31. Benavides, Memorial. 32. Benavides, Memorial. 33. Diego Miguel Bringas, Índice Apologético de las razones que recomiendan la obra intitulada Mistica Ciudad de Dios escrita por la Ven. Madre Sor María de Jesus Coronel y Arama, fundadora y abadesa del religiosisimo convento de religiosas descalzas de la Purisima Concepción de la villa de Ágreda (Valencia: Oficina de Brusola, 1834), 280. 34. Junípero Serra, “Traslados de las razones, que la Bendita Madre María de Jesús escribe a los dichos PP. del Nuevo México,” in Francisco Palou, Relación histórica de la vida y apostólicas tareas del Venerable Padre Fray Junípero Serra, y de las misiones que fundó en la California Septentrional, y nuevos establecimientos de Monterrey (Mexico: Imprenta de Don Felipe de Zúñiga y Ontiveros, 1787), 340–341. 35. Ximénez Samaniego, Prologo Galeato, 138. 36. Benavides, Memorial. 37. First published in 1684 in Lisbon by Miguel Manescal, printer of the Holy Inquisition. 38. Serge Gruzinski, La colonización de lo imaginario. Sociedades indígenas y occidentalización en el México español. Siglos XVI–XVIII (Mexico: Fondo de cultura Económica, 1991), 196. 39. The “exercises” authored by Sister María de Jesús can be consulted in the last three volumes of the Obras no Impresas de la V.M. Sor Maria de Jesús, comp. Juan Izidro Yáñez Faxardo, available in the Biblioteca Digital del Patrimonio Iberamericano. Accessed August 8, 2016, www.iberoamericadigital.net; For friar Antonio Margil, see the hagiography by friar Isidro Felis de Espinosa, El peregrino septentrional atlante: delineado en la exemplarissima vida del Venerable Padre Fray Antonio Margil de Jesús (Mexico: Joseph Bernardo de Hogal, 1737). Concerning the propaganda fide colleges, see Isidro Felis de Espinosa, Crónica Apostolica y

Franciscan Mysticism in Northern New Spain   523 Seraphica de todos los Colegios de Propaganda Fide de esta Nueva España de Misioneros Franciscanos Observantes (Mexico: Viuda de don Jospeh Bernardo de Hogal, 1746). 40. Concerning the ‘wonders’ attributed to friar Antonio Margil de Jesús, see Espinosa, El peregrino septentrional atlante. 41. Juan Domingo Arricivita, Crónica Seráfica y Apostólica del Colegio de propaganda Fide de la Santa Cruz de Querétaro en la Nueva España (Mexico: Don Felipe de Zúñiga y Ontiveros, 1792), 36. 42. Arricivita, Crónica Seráfica y Apostólica, 278. 43. Espinosa, El peregrino septentrional atlante, 408. In 1643 Sister María de Jesús de Ágreda and the nuns of her convent took a vow for persuading the king’s council to name the Virgin Mary as the patron saint of Spain, which occurred over a century later when Charles III declared the Immaculate Conception principal patron of Spain. Monique Gustin, “Iglesias de cal y canto,” in La Sierra Gorda: documentos para su historia, vol. I, coord. Margarita Velasco Mireles (Mexico: INAH, 1997), 293. 44. Arricivita, Crónica Seráfica y Apostólica, 110. 45. On the camino real de tierra adentro, see Tatiana Seijas “The Royal Road of the Interior in New Spain: Indigenous Commerce and Political Action,” in The Oxford Handbook of Borderlands of the Iberian World, ed. Danna A. Levin Rojo and Cynthia Radding, 295–313 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019). On the Colegio de Propaganda Fide de la Santa Cruz de Querétaro, see Espinosa, Crónica apostólica y seráfica, 1746. 46. Varias declaraciones en el caso de Francisca de los Ángeles, 1694, México, Archivo General de la Nación (hereafter AGN), Ramo Inquisición, vol. 693, exp. 5 and 6. 47. Gazeta de México VIII, 17, 133 (3 September 1796), due to the celebration of the Rectory Chapter of the Colegio de Santa Rosa de Viterbo in the city of Querétaro. 48. Rubial García, Profetizas y solitarios, 40. 49. Ellen Gunnarsdóttir, Mexican Karismata. The Baroque Vocation of Francisca de los Ángeles, 1674–1744 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004). 50. Ellen Gunnarsdóttir, ‘Una visionaria barroca de la provincia mexicana: Francisca de los Ángeles (1674–1744),’ in Monjas y beatas. La escritura femenina en la espiritualidad barroca novohispana siglos XVII y XVIII, ed. Asunción Lavrin and Rosalba Loreto (Alicante: Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes, 2006), 205–261. 51. El fiscal del Santo Oficio contra una mujer llamada Francisca de los Ángeles, vecina de Querétaro por alumbrada, 1694, México, AGN, Ramo Inquisición, vol. 693, exp. 5.

Bibliography Acosta, José de. De Procuranda Indorum Salute. Madrid: CSIC, 1984. Ágreda, Sor María de Jesús. Mystica Ciudad de Dios, milagro de su omnipotencia, y abismo de la gracia: Historia divina y vida de la Virgen Madre de Dios, Reyna y Señora Nuestra, María Santissima, restauradora de la culpa de Eva, y medianera de la gracia: manifestada en estos últimos siglos por la misma Señora a su Esclava Sor Maria de Jesus, Abadesa del Convento de la Inmaculada Concepción de la Villa de Ágreda, de la provincia de Burgos, de la Regular Observancia de nuestro Serafico Padre San Francisco, para nueva luz del Mundo, alegría de la Iglesia Catholica, y confianza de los mortales. Madrid: Imprenta de la Casa de la V. Madre, 1725. Arricivita, Juan Domingo. Crónica Seráfica y Apostólica del Colegio de propaganda Fide de la Santa Cruz de Querétaro en la Nueva España. Mexico: Don Felipe de Zúñiga y Ontiveros, 1792.

524   Borderlands of the Iberian World Benavides, Fray Alonso de. Memorial que Fray Iván de Santander de la Orden de San Francisco, Comissario General de Indias, presenta a la Magestad Catolica del Rey don Felipe Qvarto nuestro Señor. Hecho por el Padre Fray Alonso de Benavides Comissario del Santo Oficio, y Custodio que ha sido de las Provincias, y conversiones del Nuevo–Mexico. Tratese en el el de los Tesoros Espirituales, y temporales, que la divina Magestad ha manifestado en aquellas conversiones, y nuevos descubrimientos, por medio de los Padres de esta seráfica Religion. Con Licencia. Madrid: Imprenta Real, 1630. Espinosa, Isidro Felis de. Crónica Apostolica y Seraphica de todos los Colegios de Propaganda Fide de esta Nueva España de Misioneros Franciscanos Observantes. Mexico: Viuda de don Jospeh Bernardo de Hogal, 1746. Espinosa, Isidro Felis de. El peregrino septentrional atlante: delineado en la exemplarissima vida del Venerable Padre Fray Antonio Margil de Jesús. Mexico: Joseph Bernardo de Hogal, 1737. Gil Albarracín, Antonio. ‘Estrategias espaciales de las órdenes mendicantes.’ Scripta Nova. Revista electrónica de geografía y ciencias sociales X, 218. Accessed August 16 2016. http:// www.ub.es/geocrit/sn/sn-218–45.htm. Mendieta, Jerónimo de. Vidas franciscanas. Mexico: UNAM, 1994. Mendieta, Fray Gerónimo de. Historia eclesiástica indiana, t. II. Mexico: CONACULTA, Cien de México, 2002. Pastor Bodmer, Beatriz. El jardín y el peregrino: ensayos sobre el pensamiento utópico latinoamericano, 1492–1695. Mexico: UNAM, 1999. Rubial García, Antonio. Profetizas y solitarios. Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2006. Sheridan, Cecilia. Anónimos y desterrados. La contienda por el ‘sitio que llaman de Quauyla,’ siglos XVI–XVIII. Mexico: CIESAS, Miguel Ángel Porrúa, 2000. Ximénez Samaniego, Joseph. Prologo Galeato. Relación de la vida de la V. Madre Sor María de Jesús, Abadesa que fue, del Convento de la inmaculada Concepción, de la Villa de Ágreda, de la Provincia de Burgos, y Notas a las tres partes de la Mystica Ciudad de Dios con Privilegio. Madrid: Imprenta de la Causa de la V. Madre, 1759.

chapter 21

M usica l Cu lt u r e s of the Ibero -A m er ica n Bor der l a n ds Kristin Dutcher Mann and Drew Edward Davies

When Franciscan friar Alonso de Benavides addressed his 1630 Memorial to King Philip IV, he offered singing, cleanliness, and confession as evidence that natives of the pueblos of Nuevo México had accepted Catholicism and Spanish rule like “cristianos antiguos.”1 The phrase’s dual meaning implied not only that friars had converted Puebloans into veteran Christians but also that their methods continued a tradition dating to the origins of the spread of Christianity itself. Like fray Alonso, missionaries who worked among native peoples in the borderlands of the early modern Spanish Empire must have been tempted to imagine those they evangelized as new Christians, joined together to form a righteous community of shared religion, resources, and rituals within a dynamic of territorial expansion and exploitation. A key cultural activity shared by early Christian cultures and those of the early modern Ibero-American borderlands was the significant presence of song, both liturgical and communal. From the colonizers’ perspectives, proficiency in Western musical practices equaled acculturation to Catholic norms and civilized, sedentary society. Musical acculturation indicated success in evangelistic endeavors and might be rewarded with additional funding, resources, or promotion. As such, the reports of missionaries and ecclesiastic visitors from throughout the Ibero-American borderlands often present a narrative of miraculous musical performance on the part of native peoples. Typical is the praise of Lodovico Antonio Muratori, who toured the Guaraní mission communities with the bishop of Asunción in 1759: “I have heard the music of the Indians more than once, and always with the same surprise that I experienced at first. I shall not be easily brought to believe that the music of the most celebrated cathedrals in Spain can be heard with greater pleasure.”2 Jesuit Ignaz Pfefferkorn reported that the Marqués de Rubí was

526   Borderlands of the Iberian World so astonished by two women performing a setting of Salve Regina that he “leaped up in church and told me that he had never heard such glorious voices, even in Madrid.”3 But what reality lay behind this rhetoric? How and why did the diverse groups who populated the Ibero-American borderlands sing and dance? How did they understand the role of music in constructing their worlds? Examining the music and dance of the Ibero-American borderlands makes it clear that there was no uniform music or musical practice in the borderland during the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries. The spectrum of borderlands musical cultures, particularly those of northern New Spain, provides a meaningful comparison with those of the urban centers of the Spanish Empire in the Americas. The homogenizing forces of colonial power, set against the backdrop of local musical practices and musicians, combined to create unique practices of music and dance in the borderlands. Music historian Christopher Page writes: “The principal purpose of Christian singing was to laud a divine power and to intensify the bonds of community,” and indeed many types of Western and non-Western ritual serve a similar function, both past and ­present.4 Whether or not native singers and instrumentalists rivaled the musicians of the Spanish Royal Chapel or the choirs of urban cathedrals, harnessing the power of music to build and perpetuate community was a goal of missionaries, priests, and civil officials throughout the Ibero-American world. And though it is more difficult to tease from the colonial documentation, native leaders, castas, and performers from a wide variety of ethnic and social backgrounds also employed song and dance to build and recreate community, as well as to challenge colonial power structures. Studies of music in colonial Latin America highlight the ways in which imported European forms of song and dance interacted with native practices and ceremonies, and with the forces of colonial rule, both in the viceregal centers and the missions of distant frontier regions.5 Across distinct colonial settings, music of different types formed an integral part of quotidian life as well as performances and celebrations, which punctuated liturgical and agricultural cycles. Part of the Spanish viceroyalties, yet distinct administratively and culturally, the Ibero-American borderlands encompassed transitional, multiethnic communities with diverse musical practices that varied by institutional context, location, period, access to resources, and particularly the agency of individual performers and musicians. Nonetheless, musical practices served similar goals in distinct local contexts. For example, the cathedral of a frontier mining city such as Durango, in northern New Spain, embellished religious services with European choral music in contemporary baroque and Italianate styles, accompanied by small chamber orchestras, professional singers, and organs. In the eighteenth century, this resembled the music produced in a small regional center in Europe, demonstrating urban “civilization” in a frontier context.6 In contrast, Jesuit missions in Chiquitos, Moxos, and among the Guaraní in South America, and Franciscan missions in Alta California, trained native choirs, instrumentalists, and instrument makers in more interactive and hybrid environments. In all these settings, music constituted a part of daily and weekly religious services, including the Mass and other daily services, doctrinal instruction, as well as celebrations on special religious and civic occasions. It provided opportunities for native peoples to gain social status and

Musical Cultures   527 earn livelihoods, but also, in some cases, preserve and refashion native language, culture, and identity in new contexts. Within these varied regions and practices, song and dance mediated cultural encounters. Song and dance shaped group identities in the shifting populations of towns, ranchos, mining centers, and mission communities. Music connected the Ibero-American borderlands to wider networks of exchange through the importation of instruments and music manuscripts, and the diffusion of musical practices, compositions, and locally made instruments to local and regional networks. Built on the foundational works of musicologists from both sides of the Atlantic, studies of the music and dance of the early modern Iberian world have exploded in recent years.7 These works consider not only the music manuscripts of cathedral and mission archives, but also scour passenger lists, inventories, supply requisitions, travel and conquest narratives, missionary reports, edicts, and inquisition records, which contain rich data about the diverse musical practices, musicians, and instruments.8 Earlier studies considered the music of core regions, and focused largely on the written music of the cathedrals and policies governing liturgical music. Of late, some scholars have focused on the ways in which music shaped cultural accommodation and exchange, including from native perspectives.9 In addition, recent work highlights the interconnections between practices of frontier territories, such as Alta California and Manila, to those of urban centers of the Iberian Peninsula and in the Americas.10 Music and dance of the Jesuit reductions in Chiquitos and Charcas in South America and the Franciscan missions in California have also generated both recent scholarly attention and modern recreations and performance venues, despite an uneven documentary record.11 Borderlands music encompassed a wide range of presentational and participatory practices, often learned by ear. Presentational practices, most common in cathedrals and urban parishes, included Catholic services of the Mass and canonical hours, and formal services at mission churches, in which clergy, choirboys, and trained musicians delivered the liturgy to worshipers through music, especially plainchant and chant-based vocal music. Public theatrical performances, dance-dramas, and dances performed for spectators, might also be considered presentational in nature. Participatory practices, with few distinctions between musicians and audience members, comprised the large body of song in borderlands communities. This type of music included versions of the Catholic prayers set to music, dances involving the entire community, processions, and alabados and alabanzas, religious praise songs, still sung today in parts of the US Southwest.12 The two categories intersect, with distinctions among music based upon whether it was performed from written scores, oral tradition, or extemporized. In both urban centers and frontier contexts of the Spanish and Portuguese empires, indigenous and African musical traditions formed part of the non-written musical practice. Remaining descriptions of these performances hail exclusively from the colonial perspective, and thus inhibit our ability to understand fully the colonial soundscape. We may know the ritual context and significance of musical activity and dance, and might even have access to instruments, descriptions, or lyrics that have been preserved, but it is difficult to reconstruct the sound. Studies of the extant written sources

528   Borderlands of the Iberian World have underrepresented the extemporized elements of church music; much of the organ music in New Spanish churches was improvised, as were certain types of simple polyphony and the music played on shawms and instrumental ensembles. While manuscripts and musical instruments for some repertoires exist, the music itself does not, and thus we are left with a truncated vestige of the soundscape of the past. Musical genres idealized, articulated, legitimized, created, even questioned relationships of power between the wide variety of socioeconomic and ethnic groups on the edges of empire. As church and state spread from the centers of initial Spanish settlement in the Caribbean, the valley of Mexico, and Peru, the performative and participatory musical practices that structured daily life—ringing of bells, communal chanting or singing of prayers and hymns, and recitation of the canonical hours—accompanied missionaries, soldiers, and settlers. Missionaries used music to teach doctrine and language to native populations and to forge Christian identity. Music was not so much an end product or goal, but rather a vehicle through which other religious and civic objectives could be achieved. Song, dance, and ritual celebrations made mission life more appealing, in addition to the attraction of food, clothing, and tools. Even in the borderlands, missions boasted the potential to produce an amazing array of monophonic and polyphonic choral music, with instrumental accompaniment on organs, violins, shawms, trumpets, and/or horns, and lyrics in Latin, Spanish, and in some places, even native languages. Music was part of daily doctrinal instruction and worship, and children in mission schools learned to read, write, and sing. Conveying Christian concepts, such as the resurrection and the Holy Trinity, was difficult, at best, even when prayers, songs, and the catechism were translated into local languages. Melody, gesture, and artwork helped to shape native understandings of Christianity and facilitated memory skills and learning, just as they had for centuries in other contexts. Missionary orders sent clergy and lay brothers to build and staff missions throughout the Ibero-American borderlands. Jesuit missionaries evangelized in northern New Spain, Charcas, Chiquitos, Moxos, Brazil, and Chile, until their expulsion by the Portuguese and Spanish crowns in 1759 and 1767, respectively. Franciscans established missions in northern New Spain, including California and Texas, and among the Maya in the Yucatán peninsula. Dominicans established missions in Chiapas and Oaxaca. Both groups took over administration of some Jesuit missions after their expulsion. Missionaries emphasized cultural uniformity and adaptation to European-style dress, diet, Spanish language, economic activity, religion, and political organization based on a hierarchical chain of command that reported to the resident missionary. Individual mission communities differed widely in their populations, and thus in their cultural aspects. For example, ten mission towns, whose populations ranged from a thousand to three thousand residents, and associated ranchos attempted to push a variety of ethnic and linguistic groups into Hispanicized, Christian, pastoral communities, in the Chiquitos region of Upper Peru in the period from 1691 to 1767. A rich musical culture, complete with training for instrumentalists, singers, and instrument makers, developed in these large, urban mission towns, like those of the nearby Guaraní missions.13 However, in other borderland regions, such as New Spain’s far north, mission churches languished, largely abandoned

Musical Cultures   529 by native groups. Bishop José Joaquin Granados made a plea for musical instruments in Sonora, believing that perhaps they could placate the Seri and Apache, and encourage them to develop a more sedentary, Hispanicized lifestyle.14 Most of the missionaries who staffed the Ibero-American missions came from Spain and Central Europe. They learned and performed liturgical music, especially plainchant, as part of their training and could sing hundreds of liturgical melodies from memory or with help from liturgical books. The rich musical cultures of the mission communities they worked in, especially those in South America in the early eighteenth century, included imported Italian baroque music and orchestras of strings, winds, and brass in addition to liturgical drama. Missionaries traveled to urban convents and provincial houses in the Americas before heading to frontier territories. While living in community with one another in Europe and America, they structured their days according to the obligations of the liturgy. When they established missions, they replicated these patterns of daily life. Repetition of quotidian tasks, including worship, doctrinal instruction, and work in mission kitchens, workshops, or fields, was a key component of missionary attempts to create not only religious converts, but also Hispanicized, productive workers. Bells, in particular, signaled a new structure for daily life in mission communities, and they sounded throughout the Ibero-American world. After entering a new territory, entrada parties of soldiers, Hispanicized converts, and missionaries built temporary spaces for worship, a workshop, and living quarters. Wooden beams or rocks supported a bell, which ordered the days of the community. More elaborate and permanent mission churches, built by native labor from local materials, were erected within the first few decades of congregation, and bell towers were prominent features in the architecture and soundscape of mission communities. Missionaries strove to establish order in their communities through the discipline of time. Daily schedules appearing in missionary reports from the Jesuit missions of Baja California and the Franciscan missions in New Mexico and Texas, although not reliable pictures of the realities of mission life, provide a sense of the ways in which missionaries strove to structure daily life to appeal to religious and civil officials’ desire for order and the outward trappings of Christianity, particularly through participatory song.15 The day was to begin at dawn, when a bell called the faithful to worship. A morning meal was followed by doctrinal instruction for children and neophytes, in which missionaries or native catechists often set the prayers or doctrine to music. Meanwhile, those who had been baptized engaged in daily work tasks. In larger mission communities, musicians, instrument-makers, singers, and scribes traded labor in mission fields, ranches, or local mines for activities related to music making or teaching. An afternoon meal, signaled by bells and concluded with the singing of an alabado, was followed by an additional period of work and instruction. The day concluded with worship, sometimes with a procession from the mission church to individual homes. Musical cultures interacted with structures of power, time, and space. Sacred songs such as alabados and alabanzas, and the music of the liturgy domesticated and regulated life. Alabanzas, also called “gozos,” as well as the related subgenre of the alabado or penitential song, are strophic poems in Spanish set or improvised to relatively simple, easily

530   Borderlands of the Iberian World memorable music.16 Common in early modern Spain, alabados and alabanzas (still sung today in New Mexico and northern Mexico) likely originated out of the eighteenthcentury context of orality, in which literate colonists produced poetry resembling the earlier Spanish tradition.17 Both within and outside missions and parish churches, alabanzas were performed publicly on feast days, in processions, and privately as personal devotional songs, sometimes accompanied by melodic instruments or percussion. Alabados and alabanzas represented a middle ground between the presentational cathedral repertoires and the participatory practices of missions and other religious communities. In 1803, José Inasio Yarto, a lay religious administrator and military lieutenant, dedicated an alabanza to the Virgin of Guadalupe that survived in musical notation at Durango’s cathedral archive.18 Consisting of a short introductory march for trumpets and strings and two strophes of the tune, the simple piece could have been performed by professionals or everyday people alike (see Figure 21.1). The text itself, sung from a collective perspective, is about participatory ritual: the people sing to and praise the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe as a plea for intercession:

V Her - mo - sa Gua - da - lu Se Her - mo - sí - si - ma

-

pa - na ño - ra

al que hoy te pre - sen - tas ma - dre del di - vi - no

pue - blo Ver - bo

v|1 v|2 bc

5

V y a

to - dos gri - tos

en al - ta voz to - dos pe - di - mos

te la - ve - mos y can - te - mos. el ra - me - dio y el con - sue - lo.

v|1 v|2 bc

Figure 21.1.  José Ignacio Yarto, Hermosa Guadalupana, 1803 is a rare notated example of a devotional song or alabanza from northern New Spain in the late colonial period. Written down in a version for two voices accompanied by strings, the piece straddles the boundary between what professional musicians would perform in official ritual and what common people would sing in popular devotion without the aid of music notation. Ms. Mús. 825. Archivo Histórico de la Arquidiócesis de Durango, transcribed by Drew Edward Davies.

Musical Cultures   531 Hermosa Guadalupana, que hoy te presentas al pueblo y todos en alta voz te lavemos y cantemos. Hermosísima Señora, Madre del Divino Verbo, a gritos todos pedimos el remedio y el consuelo.

Beautiful image of Guadalupe presented to the people today, with all our voices raised we honor you and sing to you. Most beautiful lady, Mother of the Divine Word, at the top of our voices we ask for relief and comfort.

This poem and its musical setting conform to tastes around 1800, but songs akin to this in spirit and context would have been a mainstay in mission and popular religious communities for much of the colonial period. As this song has no identified composer, it is impossible to know whether it passed from oral to written culture by means of Yarto’s arrangement, or whether it was written anew. Nonetheless, it would be easy to teach this melody without relying on musical notation. Hundreds of alabanzas survive today in folk culture and in printed form from various periods, and a small number of them also appear in cathedral and mission archives, for example in California, as edited by Craig Russell.19 Alabanzas were malleable songs that could be programmed by a priest as part of a celebration or sung spontaneously by faithful individuals in urban and rural contexts. While many had composed melodies, others probably adapted music of eclectic origins. Neither daily life, nor the music, in frontier missions were solely based on European models. While ranching and European crops were introduced, trade based on the production of local goods, such as wax, textiles, and carpentry dominated the economic activity. Similarly, the political decisions of local cabildos and the designation of physical spaces for cultural activities, such as music and dance, allowed native peoples to have some control over the shape of their identity, beliefs, and cultural practices. Native musicians enjoyed prestige and elevated social standing in their communities, and they often functioned as cultural mediators who translated Christian concepts and behaviors to their communities, especially children.20 Multiple studies of music in the Ibero-American world have concluded that native musicians were key participants in the creation of Catholic culture and identity.21 In northern New Spain, unlike in Europe and core areas of empire, men, women, and children participated in the choir and learned hymns, religious songs, and chants.22 Jesuit superiors encouraged missionaries to teach children to “read, write and sing so they can serve in the church and give a wholly virtuous example to the rest of the pueblos. This [. . .] has been found to be highly successful in establishing Christianity and preserving peace in these missions.”23 Skilled natives served as chapel masters, cantors, singers, instrumentalists, and catechists. Performing music—whether as a singer, instrumentalist, or dancer—was a transferrable skill, which could be used for temporary employment in local or larger urban markets, and it sometimes enabled musicians to avoid other physical labor. Musical skill allowed individuals to transcend the norms of race, class and gender. Some native and mixed-race

532   Borderlands of the Iberian World musicians adopted European practices of music making. Simultaneously, especially in the smaller frontier missions, they continued or refashioned native forms and practices. Native music and dance flourished alongside imported forms of European religious music in the Ibero-American borderlands. Missionaries and travelers routinely wrote of nocturnal dances, songs for hunting, war, and rites of passage, which lasted for days. To the ears of many of these observers, the music was horrible, pagan, led by the devil, or full of screaming and shouting.24 It represented all that the missionary regime was designed to correct. Missionaries responded to native dancing in a variety of ways— from accommodation and incorporation into Christian rituals, to outright prohibition. Franciscans in New Mexico disagreed with Governor Bernardo López de Mendizábal about whether the Puebloans should be allowed to continue catsina dances, ultimately resulting, in part, in Inquisition charges against Mendizábal.25 Subsequent Franciscan suppression of catsina dances was one of the factors in the massive Pueblo Revolt of 1680. Friars in San Antonio, Texas, struggled against the popularity of nocturnal mitotes. Some chose to employ corporal punishment, while others attempted to channel musical talent into playing stringed instruments, drums, and learning Spanish dances.26 Jesuit Phillipp Segesser admitted to his uncle and brother that although he perceived the harm done by the Pima’s nocturnal dances, “they told me that if I forbade dancing, they would return to their wilds where they could dance undisturbed.”27 Segesser, like others, calculated that inaction was a tradeoff for tenuous cooperative relationships in the region. Performative ritual conquest dances, like the matachines and moros y cristianos dance-dramas likely traveled to the borderlands, including northern New Spain, Oaxaca, Colombia, Brazil, Puerto Rico, and Brazil through a combination of missionaries, auxiliary troops, and settlers—native, Spanish, and mestizo.28 They were connected with the evangelization programs of missionaries and their native allies, and Spanish accounts indicate that missionaries pushed their association with Christmas and patronal feasts, but their origin is not clear, because both central Mexican dances and those of Europe bear some similarities to the forms recorded in the late nineteenth century through the present day. Regardless of their origin, these hybrid rituals employed native and European-style instruments, costumes, and motifs. They opened spaces for performers to refashion and reinterpret both the musical performances and the symbolism of conversion and resistance. As recent studies of matachines show, their meanings and practices became localized over time.29 By the nineteenth century, Hispanic and native communities on both sides of the US–Mexico border boasted dancers with costumes, including animal masks, performing conquest dances to the music of the violin, but also ankle rattles and cascabels, although these traditions vary considerably by geographic region.30 Music and dance in borderlands missions and towns forged individual and ­community identity among the disparate groups of natives, mixed-race settlers, and soldiers. Religious feast days, as well as civic festivals provided opportunities for Indians, soldiers, settlers, and missionaries from throughout the region to congregate for impressive fiestas, including not only worship but also dances, feasting, fireworks, and bullfights. These participatory, exterior musical expressions were further outside the

Musical Cultures   533 control of colonial power structures, which dominated interior, performative spaces of churches and cathedrals. Although they replicated colonial power structures, for example, in the order of Corpus Christi processions, they also provided space for challenging these structures and offering native interpretations to Catholic stories and rituals.31 Extant scores from South America, as well as numerous letters and reports from missionaries and government officials demonstrate that indigenous practitioners appropriated and contributed to music, processions, and other elements of Catholic ritual for their own uses, ranging from public expressions of devotion to mockery and rebellion.32 For example, Jesuit Andrés Pérez de Ribas described a native woman who taught the Guasave to chant the catechism twice daily, even at night, to replace customary dancing.33 On the other hand, native leaders used flutes, bells and drums within rebellions in both Sonoran and Chiquitano communities.34 The presence of musical instruments, in isolated cases, large numbers of them, musical scores, and talented performers demonstrates that borderlands cathedrals, missions, and parishes were not necessarily backwater, frontier outposts without access to human and capital resources. Instead, these religious institutions functioned as aspirational microcosms of wider early modern practices, which developed distinct local identities. Rich and complex musical cultures, requiring substantial investments of money and resources, were present in locations throughout the Ibero-American borderlands. Strong similarities among the types of borderlands music indicate the homogenizing power of empire, particularly during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, even though regional differences surfaced over time. The primary musical repertoire of the Catholic Church, whether cathedrals, parishes, or missions—in the center or the periphery—was plainchant, the melodies used to intone the liturgy. Chant disseminated in Europe through monastic channels in the early ninth century, and underwent systematic revision after the Council of Trent in the sixteenth century. Chant had the advantage of being both aesthetically appealing and a memory device, and although it was traditionally learned by rote, it was later transmitted through a system of written neumes that helped achieve uniformity among Western Christianity.35 When Alonso de Benavides brought liturgical books containing chant to New Mexico in 1626, he was reenacting the medieval diffusion of liturgy, music, and ritual in a new territory among new communities. While clergy in the borderlands occasionally possessed printed books of chant, many only reproduced from memory the melodies upon which they had been trained, inevitably resulting in extemporized variants. The spread of European instruments into borderlands regions is another area in which the homogenizing influence of colonialism can be seen. Missionary accounts from the seventeenth century often note singing in polyphony, stringed instruments such as violins, as well as music on wind instruments such as shawms.36 Shawms and curtals (small bassoons) were present in New Mexico pueblo missions in the seventeenth century, as well as up to seventeen organs in the twenty-seven missions of the region, despite the difficulty of transporting large cargo overland from Mexico City.37 These instruments would have primarily improvised, or followed along with the parts of

534   Borderlands of the Iberian World choral music, doubling their lines or embellishing them, as was the practice in some Spanish churches.38 Similarly, late sixteenth and early seventeenth-century Jesuit missions of New Spain’s far north boasted a wide variety of wind and stringed instruments, bells, and instrumental and choral groups composed of Hispanicized Indians from Central New Spain, as well as new converts.39 At larger mission centers, including those among the Tarahumara, Guaraní, Chiquitanos, and Moxos, Indians learned to manufacture European-style musical instruments, such as violins, and trumpets, shawms (chirimías), and even organs, in workshops designed for that purpose.40 Mission libraries including musical manuscripts and part-books, and mission scriptoria employed young men to copy music. Jesuit Anton Sepp boasted, “We have two organs, of which one was brought from Europe, while the other has been made by the Indians [. . .] There is a missal here, a print by Antwerp of the best quality; and there is another missal, copied by an Indian; one cannot recognize which one of the two is a print and which one is a copy. The trumpets are identical with those from Nuremberg.”41 Instruments made in the mission workshops were sold to Spaniards in nearby cities, such as Santa Fe de Bogota. Many Jesuit and Franciscan missionaries who served in the Ibero-American borderlands were well-trained musicians who embraced modern Italian baroque music and brought it to their mission posts. Jesuits Martin Schmidt, Johann Mesner, and the Italian composer Domenico Zipoli evangelized in the missions of Paraguay and Bolivia.42 Their compositions had wider audiences than the mixed-race populations of the borderlands regions they worked in, traveling back across the Atlantic through ecclesiastic networks of exchange.43 Similarly, the late eighteenth-century Alta California missions were staffed by friar-composers Juan Bautista Sancho, Narciso Durán, Florencio Ibáñez, Estevan Tápis, and Pedro Cabot.44 The piecemeal influx of missionary musicians from Europe to the borderlands missions brought European musical compositions, updated teaching methods, and performance techniques to frontier communities. Anton Sepp, a Jesuit from Tyrol who sang in the Viennese imperial court, brought German and Italian compositions to the Guaraní missions in the late seventeenth century.45 Despite the transference of chant repertoires from Europe, via central Mexico, there is little evidence that the sixteenth and seventeenth century choral music of central New Spain was ever transmitted northward to the missions; on the contrary, the mission repertoire does not seem to comprehensively align with that of the cathedrals until the end of the eighteenth century. In northern New Spain, mission liturgical and musical practices followed traditions characteristic of the specific order, rather than any central Mexican secular practice, and thus in some ways might be considered more aligned with European practices in the same orders.46 However, in South America, cathedral music making more closely resembled the music of Chiquitos in the first half of the eighteenth century. Overall, it is likely that individual agency on the part of specific mission musicians strongly influenced musical practices beyond chant in each community. Music of cathedrals on the edges of the Spanish Empire, as in borderlands missions, reflected European style but adapted to available resources and personnel within the

Musical Cultures   535 region. The closest settlement to a metropolis along the northern borderlands of New Spain was Durango, a mining and agricultural city founded by Francisco de Ibarra in 1562 and elevated in 1620 to become the center of a new diocese. On one hand, Durango counts as the northernmost colonial city of central New Spain, as its civic and ecclesiastical institutions reflected the organization of the larger cities to the south; yet it was also a city on the frontier, the administrative center of the borderless expanse of Nueva Vizcaya. Unlike the principal central New Spanish cities, which grew on or near the sites of indigenous communities, Durango was founded in an area of semi-sedentary or nomadic peoples, who were relatively few in number, diverse in language and not organized into polities at a large scale.47 Some of the indigenous groups lived in small farming settlements in the micro-valleys of the region, whereas others were nomadic, a situation that sporadically affected Durango itself in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In the city itself, much of the native population were migrants, either from the region of Tlaxcala as part of Franciscan mission and economic endeavors, especially in the outlying neighborhood of San Juan Bautista de Analco, or resettled from the surrounding mountain areas. The institution of the cathedral was primarily criollo, administered by a peninsular Spanish religious administration and superimposed onto this sparse but diverse stage. Although each cathedral in the Spanish world has its own distinct history, that of Durango is likely similar to those of other rural regions with contested sovereignty. Urban Franciscan and Jesuit institutions, as well as several parish churches, stood within blocks of the cathedral and fostered celebrations that articulated their specific identities. The chapel of priests, singers, and instrumental musicians that provided music for important services at Durango cathedral represents the frontier musical institution most aligned with the major churches of central New Spain. It was primarily a locus for presentational music making according to the Roman liturgy of the secular clergy and rarely had a participatory element characteristic of the more negotiated spaces of the mission context discussed earlier. A few key points underscore the dual center-periphery character of the institution in Nueva Vizcaya.48 First, at the height of its “baroque moment” of the mid-eighteenth century, when mining revenues surged, Durango Cathedral boasted a musical culture comparable to a small city anywhere in the Spanish world.49 Its ensemble of thirteen musicians in addition to choirboys and a choir of priests resembled those of Ávila and Coria cathedrals in Spain around the same time.50 It had the resources to attract one of the most accomplished violinists and composers in New Spain, a Roman expatriate musician named Santiago Billoni, who served as chapel master between 1749 and 1756.51 Billoni, the first Italian to accede to such a post in New Spain, left a legacy of thirty-one outstanding compositions, which feature unusual virtuoso violin parts for the composer himself to play. Recognizably modern Italian music of its day, the violin technique required to perform it surpasses repertoires from Mexico City or the South American missions that supported string ensembles. Conversely, Billoni’s vocal parts, sung mostly by local criollo singers and choirboys who had been educated in local schools, remain relatively sparse and easy to sing. The result was a unique performance of the frontier reality: contemporary

536   Borderlands of the Iberian World Italianate music that accommodated the ability of local performers and the devotional needs of the local congregation. Aesthetically the music was globalized; but its craft depended fully upon local necessities. Secondly, the cathedral preserves an archive of 936 works of music, dating primarily from the second half of the eighteenth century. It includes a mixture of motets from Spain, pieces written by the cathedral’s chapel masters for specific services, copies of European opera arias that served as the basis for sacred pieces; and a few instances of songs of praise and penitence from the later colonial period that signal participatory performance among the public during popular religious rituals.52 Aside from a handful of composers, the repertoire was primarily imported from Europe or central New Spain and adapted to the availability and ability of local musicians. The specifics of local training, instruments, vocal pronunciation, and timbral preferences shaped the sound of the music in ways that can not necessarily be inferred today but nonetheless would have differed from how music sounded in Italy or Spain. The degree to which musicians of the cathedral—including those who played violins, cellos, horns, organs, bassoons and from time to time trumpets, oboes and flutes—participated in music making in other contexts is unclear. Aside from cathedral musicians accepting jobs in churches of the religious orders or performing in civic festivities, it is not clear what other scenarios existed in the European model for Italianate music, especially secular music, in the borderlands. What is clear, however, is that the musicians who worked in the cathedral were more likely to encompass diverse ethnic backgrounds earlier in the colonial period rather than later. A case in point is Alonso Ascencio, the first chapel master of the cathedral, who took holy orders at Durango on March 14, 1658. A mulatto, as was a large percentage of the population in northern New Spain at the time, Ascensio identified as de color pardo, a reality that would generally prohibit him from attaining a post of ecclesiastical authority due to regulations on limpieza de sangre. Nonetheless, a dossier of documents survives that attests to the community’s desire for Ascencio to be ordained on account of his skill as a musician, making exception for his race. As with the aforementioned women, who sang in frontier mission choirs, Ascencio transcended the usual boundaries of race and gender because of skill and demand.53 Upon accepting the post, Ascencio responded that your letter was served me in which you nobly exempt me from legitimacy for being color pardo [ . . . ] I have been and am a virtuous person of good inclination and manners and I am the same as master of music and performer of music, and distinguished in its composition [. . .] I have fulfilled [this job] since I came to this city and am teaching some singers and musicians for the holy cathedral church of this city, which was in a condition of being bereft of music for its celebrations.54

The lack of trained musicians for covering the religious services in an urban cathedral was a frontier reality and is articulated frequently over the course of the colonial period. In Durango, the chapter never seemed to contract musicians who originated in mission

Musical Cultures   537 or popular environments, with the exception of occasional instrumentalists identified as indios by first name only, such as a bassoonist in the early eighteenth century. A cathedral such as Durango, with an organizational design for producing presentational music making modeled on those of Mexico City and European urban centers, in reality created a heterogeneous mixture of practices based upon local resources and realities. Some mission communities, especially those with higher populations and priests or friars who supported programs of music education—including Chiquitos and Santa Clara in Alta California—developed musical profiles similar to that of Durango. On the other hand, other missions, including many on the northern frontier of New Spain, remained quite distinct as their soundscapes centered more on bells, participatory song, liturgical chant, and external dances. Whether in the cathedrals of mining centers such as Durango, or the missions of northern New Spain, or the highlands of South America, music was a homogenizing force of colonialism. The splendor of baroque aesthetics asserted power dynamics, whether for distinctly hegemonic purposes or for legitimization and preservation of institutional authority. The liturgy itself, the redacted word of God delivered through song, articulated the power dynamic between the worldwide church and its publics by adding an intangible quality of solemnity. Festivals and external activities encouraged the public to feel a part of civic and religious institutions of empire through participation.55 The Ibero-American borderlands were active zones of cultural, economic, and political contact and exchange between different groups of native peoples, missionaries, merchants and traders, free people of color, and mestizos. They were deeply shaped by colonial, Catholic culture, propelled by European musical forms, instruments, and practices. Although there were many different styles of borderlands music, in multiple borderlands contexts, performance “como cristianos antiguos” signified piety and civilization. The varieties of music and dance of the Ibero-American borderlands—from mission, to cathedral, to village—both reflected and shaped cultural and political realities. The interior spaces of the cathedral and mission church were dominated by performative (cathedrals, large missions) and participatory (parish churches, small missions) elements of the liturgy. Music making in exterior spaces, both urban and rural, such as street dances, processions, fiestas, and indigenous-controlled spaces outside mission communities produced diverse ambient soundscapes. These external displays shaped and reflected communal identity, as they perpetuated, but often challenged, ideals of Christian civilization. By the late colonial period, the distinctions between the musical practices of borderlands missions, rural churches, and cathedrals remained, but the decreasing role of the church and the secularization of mission communities lessened the impact of individual missionaries and chapel masters. Community identity became closely linked with not only the music of the liturgy but also sacred songs such as alabanzas, conquest dances, such as the matachines performed on feast days, and public demonstrations for civic and religious occasions. As evidenced by Guadalupan processions and alabanzas in the developing Mexican national culture of the early nineteenth century, outward

538   Borderlands of the Iberian World signs of Catholic identity became localized, instead of tied to the outward signs of “cristianos antiguos.”

Notes Archives AGI: AGN: AHAD: BINAH: OSMHRC: 

Archivo General de Indias, Seville (Spain) Archivo General de la Nación, Mexico City (Mexico) Archivo Histórico de la Arquidiócesis de Durango, Durango (Mexico) Biblioteca Nacional de Antropología e Historia, Mexico City (Mexico) Old Spanish Missions Historical Research Collection, Texas (United States)

1. Alonso de Benavides, Memorial que fray Ivan de Santander de la orden de San Francisco, comissario general de Indias, presenta a la Magestad católica del rey (Madrid: Imprenta Real, 1630), cap. 20. 2. Lodovico Antonio Muratori, A Relation of the Missions of Paraguay (London: Printed for J.  Marmaduke, 1759), cited in Piotr Nawrot, “Teaching of Music and the Celebration of Liturgical Events in the Jesuit Reductions,” Anthropos 99, no. 1 (2004): 78. 3. Ignaz Pfefferkorn, Sonora: A Description of the Province, trans. Theodore Treutlein (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1989), 247. 4. Christopher Page, The Christian West and its Singers: The First Thousand Years (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), 524. 5. For an introduction to music in colonial Latin America, see Susan Thomas, “Music, Conquest, and Colonialism,” in Musics of Latin America, ed. Robin D. Moore and Walter Aaron Clark (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2012), 24–74; Gerard Béhague, Music in Latin America: An Introduction (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1979); Robert Stevenson, Music in Aztec and Inca Territory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), Music in Mexico: An Historical Survey (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1952), and The Music of Peru: Aboriginal and Viceregal Epochs (Washington, DC: Pan American Union, 1960). 6. Drew Edward Davies, “The Italianized Frontier: Music at Durango Cathedral, Español Culture, and the Aesthetics of Devotion in Eighteenth-Century New Spain” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2006). 7. Recent works include Geoffrey Baker, Imposing Harmony: Music and Society in Colonial Cuzco (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008); Tess Knighton and Álvaro Torrente, eds., Devotional Music in the Iberian World, 1450–1800 (London: Ashgate, 2007); Geoffrey Baker and Tess Knighton, eds., Music and Urban Society in Colonial Latin America (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Javier Marín López, Música y músicos entre dos mundos: la Catedral de México y sus libros de polifonía (siglos XVI–XVIII) (PhD diss., University of Granada, 2007); Davies, “The Italianized Frontier;” Emilio Casares, ed., Diccionario de la música española e hispanoamericana (Madrid: SGAE, 1999–2002). Other works include Jesús Estrada, Música y músicos de la época virreinal (Mexico: SEP, 1973) and Gabriel Saldívar, Historia de la música en México (épocas precortesiana y colonial) (Mexico: SEP, 1934). 8. For example, María Gembero Ustárroz, “Documentación de interés musical en el Archivo General de Indias de Sevilla,” Revista de Musicología 24, no. 1–2 (2001): 11–38.

Musical Cultures   539 9. Carol E. Robertson, ed., Musical Repercussions of 1492: Encounters in Text and Performance (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992); Lourdes Turrent, La conquista musical de México (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1996); Víctor Rondón, ed., Mujeres, negros y niños en la música y sociedad colonial iberoamericana: IV Reunión Científica (Santa Cruz de la Sierra: Asociación Pro Arte y Cultura, 2002), and Gary Tomlinson, The Singing of the New World: Indigenous Voice in the Era of European Contact (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 10. Craig Russell, From Serra to Sancho: Music and Pageantry in the California Missions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009) and D.  R.  M.  Irving, Colonial Counterpoint: Music in Early Modern Manila (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). 11. Excellent studies of the role of music and culture in the Jesuit missions of South America include Leonardo J. Waisman, “Urban Music in the Wilderness: Ideology and Power in the Jesuit Reducciones, 1609–1767,” in Baker and Kington, Music and Urban Society in Colonial Latin America, 208–229; Pedro Querejazu and Plácido Molina Barbery, eds., Las misiones jesuíticas de Chiquitos (La Paz: Fundación BHN, Línea Editorial, 1995); T. Frank Kennedy, “An Integrated Perspective: Music and Art in the Jesuit Reductions of Paraguay,” in The Jesuit Tradition in Education and Missions: A 450-year Perspective, ed. Christopher Chapple (Scranton, PA: University of Scranton Press, 1993), 215–229; Samuel Claro Valdés, “La música en las misiones jesuitas de Moxos,” Revista Musical Chilena 23, 108 (1969): 7–31. For the missions of northern New Spain, see Kristin Dutcher Mann, The Power of Song: Music and Dance in the Mission Communities of Northern New Spain, 1590–1810 (Stanford, CA, and Berkeley: Stanford University Press, The Academy of American Franciscan History, 2010). 12. Thomas Turino, Music as Social Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 26. 13. For the urban dimensions of the Jesuit reductions, see Waisman, “Urban Music in the Wilderness,” 208–229. 14. Granados to Jacobo Ugarte y Loyola, March 31, 1791, Archivo General de la Nación (hereafater AGN), Provincias Internas 235. A discussion of the exchange between the viceroy and the bishop is found in Mann, The Power of Song, 155–156. 15. For a discussion of daily schedules in borderlands missions, see Mann, Power of Song, 182–207. Specific descriptions of daily routines include Nicolas Tamaral’s 1730 report, reproduced in Manuel de la Vega, Relación, Biblioteca Nacional de Antropología e Historia (BINAH), Fondo Franciscano, vol. 68, f. 99v–110, and Noticia y estado actual de los misiones que en la provincia de Sonora administran los P.P. del Colegio de Propaganda Fide de Querétaro, 1784, Archivo General de Indias (hereafter AGI), Guadalajara, 586, f. 39v–40. 16. Russell, From Serra to Sancho, 161. 17. Thomas Steele, ed., The Alabados of New Mexico (Albuquerque: UNM, 2005), 5. 18. Archivo Histórico de la Arquidiócesis de Durango (hereafter AHAD), MS. Mús. 825. Yarto, who was serving as mayordomo of Durango’s Sanctuary of Guadalupe in 1803, had been named a military lieutenant (teniente) in 1789. See Luis Carlos Quiñones Hernández, Compilación de referencias documentales para la historia de la Nueva Vizcaya 1563–1821 (Durango: IIH-UJED, 2010), 334. 19. Russell, From Serra to Sancho, 155–168. 20. On the social standing of musicians, see María Gembero Ustárroz, “Enlightened Reformism Versus Jesuit Utopia,” in Baker and Knighton, ed., Music and Urban Society in Colonial Latin America, 237–238; Mann, Power of Song, chapter 7.

540   Borderlands of the Iberian World 21. Baker, Imposing Harmony; Waisman, “Urban Music in the Wilderness;” Irving, Colonial Counterpoint; Mann, The Power of Song. 22. Jesuit Ignaz Pfefferkorn’s choir at Mission Cucurpe included at least four women, Sonora: A Description of the Province, 246–247. Women were listed as musicians in the records of the Franciscan missions in Alta California as well: James Sandos, “Professionalization of Music: Choristers at Missions Santa Clara, 1800–1845, and the Mystery of Mission San Antonio” (paper presented at Encuentros/Encounters 2009: Music and Musicians of the California Missions, Riverside, CA. January 30, 2009). 23. Charles W. Polzer, trans., “Rules and Precepts for the Mission Rectorate of San Francisco Borja, Sonora, Mexico, 1610–1767” (Tucson: University of Arizona Special Collections, 1972), 5. 24. See Diario del R.P.G. Gaspar José de Solís, 1768, on the mitotes of the Guapites and Qujanes surround Mission Rosario in Texas. Microfilm copy in Old Spanish Missions Historical Research Collection (OSMHRC), Our Lady of the Lake University, San Antonio, TX, Archivo del Colegio de Zacatecas, reel 1, fr. 164–168. 25. Proceso contra Mendizábal, AGN, Inquisición 487, 593, 594. See Carroll  L.  Riley, The Kachina and the Cross: Indians and Spaniards in the Early Southwest (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1999), 269–270. 26. Solís, Diario del R.P.G. Gaspar José de Solís . . . , reel 1, fr. 179–181. Mitote, a Nahuatl term, was often used in a derogatory sense to describe nighttime, circular dances, by both religious and civil officials. In Ostimuri, 1784, see Joseph Álbarez, Juez privativo de tierras, AGN. Tierras, vol. 1109, exp. 4; for Texas, Juan Agustín Morfi, Diario y derrotero, ed. Eugenio del Hoyo and Malcolm D. McLean (Monterrey: ITESM, 1967), 99. For a less negative use of the term, see Howard Benoist and María Eva Flores, ed., Guidelines for a Texas Mission: Instructions for the Missionary of Mission Concepción in San Antonio, trans., Benedict Leutenegger (San Antonio: Old Spanish Missions Historical Research Library, 1994), 12. 27. “Tecoripa, 7/31/1737,” in Raymond H. Thompson, ed., A Jesuit Missionary in EighteenthCentury Sonora: The Family Correspondence of Philipp Segesser, trans., Werner S. Zimmt and Robert E. Dahlquist (Albuquerque: UNM, 2014), 207. 28. Max Harris, “One Name, Many Dances: Differentiating the Danzas de los Matachines,” in Matachines! Essays for the 2008 Gathering, ed. Claude Stephenson (Santa Fe: New Mexico Department of Cultural Affairs), 15–18. 29. Jesús Jaureguí, Carlo Bonfiglioli and Demetrio Brisset, Las danzas de conquista (Mexico: CONACULTA, 1996); Danna A. Levin Rojo, “The Matachines Dance in Alcalde, A Mestizo Community in North-Central New Mexico,” in Las vías del noroeste III: genealogías, transversalidades y convergencias, ed. Carlo Bonfiglioli et al (Mexico: UNAM, 2011), 554–557; Brenda M. Romero, “The Matachines Danza as Intercultural Discourse,” in Dancing Across Borders: Danzas y Bailes Mexicanos, ed. Olga Nájera-Ramírez, Norma  E.  Cantú, and Brenda M. Romero (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009), 185–205. 30. Sylvia Rodríguez, The Matachines Dance: Ritual, Symbolism, and Interethnic Relations in the Upper Río Grande Valley (Albuquerque: UNM, 1983), considered the New Mexican versions of these dances, while Bonfiglioli placed the dances in a wider context. 31. William Beezley, Cheryl English Martin, and William French, eds., Rituals of Rule, Rituals of Resistance: Public Celebrations and Popular Culture in Mexico (Wilmington: SR Books, 1994).

Musical Cultures   541 32. Cynthia Radding, “Crosses, Caves, and Matachinis: Divergent Appropriations of Catholic Discourse in Northwestern New Spain,” The Americas 55 (1998): 177–201, and Landscapes of Power and Identity: Comparative Histories in the Sonoran Desert and the Forests of Amazonia from Colony to Republic (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 226–227 and 235–238. 33. Andrés Pérez de Ribas, History of the Triumphs of Our Holy Faith amongst the Most Barbarous and Fierce Peoples of the New World, trans. Daniel T. Reff, Maureen Ahern, and Richard K. Danforth (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1999), book 2, chapter 11, p. 134. 34. Radding, Landscapes of Power and Identity, 236–237; Edward  H.  Spicer, The Yaquis (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1980), 44; Mann, Power of Song, 201. 35. Helmut Hucke, “Toward a New Historical View of Gregorian Chant,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 33, no. 3 (1980): 437–467. 36. Lincoln Bunce Spiess, “Benavides and Church Music in 17th-Century New Mexico,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 17, no. 2 (1964): 144–156. 37. Lincoln Bunce Spiess, “Instruments in the Missions of New Mexico, 1598–1680,” in Essays in Musicology: A Birthday Offering for Willi Apel, ed. Hans Tischler (Bloomington: Indiana University School of Music, 1968), 131–136. 38. Kenneth Kreitner, “The Cathedral Band of León in 1548, and when It Played,” Early Music 31, no. 1 (2003): 41–63. 39. See the Jesuit “Cartas anuas” of 1598 and 1600 in Monumenta Mexicana, vol. 6, ed. Felix Zubillaga (Rome: Societatis Iesu, 1956), 2201–221. 40. For the manufacture of instruments in the Tarahumara missions, see the visita report of Pedro Tápis (1715), AGI, Guadalajara 206, f. 152, and William Merrill, “Conversion and Colonialism in Northern Mexico: The Tarahumara Response to the Jesuit Mission Program, 1601–1767,” in Conversion to Christianity: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives on a Great Transformation, ed. Robert  W.  Hefner (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 129–163. On instrument making in the Chiquitos and Guaraní missions, see Piotr Nawrot, “Teaching of Music,” 73–84. 41. Anton Sepp, Erster Theil del Reißbeschreibug, RR.PP. Antonii Sepp und Antonii Böhm, der Societät JSU Prisetern Teutscher Nation (Ingolstadt: J.A. de la Haye, 1712) f. 232, cited in Nawrot, “Teaching of Music,” 76. 42. Bernardo Illari, Domenico Zipoli: para una genealogía de la música “clásica” latinoamericana (Havana: Fondo Editorial Casa de las Américas, 2011); Barbara Ganson, The Guaraní Under Spanish Rule in the Río de la Plata (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003); Querejazu and Molina, Las misiones jesuíticas de Chiquitos. 43. Irving, Colonial Counterpoint. 44. Russell, From Serra to Sancho, and William John Summers, J.B. Sancho: Pioneer Composer of California (Javier Mir. Palma de Mallorca: Universitat de les Illes Balears, Servei de Publicaciones I Intercanvi Cientific, 2007). 45. Nawrot, “Teaching of Music,” 75. 46. Grayson Wagstaff, “Franciscan Mission Music in California, 1770–1830: Chant, Liturgical and Polyphonic Traditions,” Journal of the Royal Musical Association 126 (2001): 54–82; William J. Summers, “The Spanish Origins of California Mission Music,” Miscellanea musicological 12 (1987): 109–126. 47. Michael M. Swann, Tierra Adentro: Settlement and Society in Colonial Durango (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1982), 4–7.

542   Borderlands of the Iberian World 48. On the history of music in Durango Cathedral, see Davies, “The Italianized Frontier;” Massimo Gatta, “La actividad musical de la Catedral de Durango (16341749)” (MA diss., Universidad Juárez del Estado de Durango, 2012); and Francisco Antunez, La capilla de música de la Catedral de Durango (Aguascalientes: Self-published, 1970). 49. María Angélica Martínez Rodríguez, El momento del Durango barroco: Arquitectura y sociedad en el siglo XVIII, 2nd ed. (Chapala: Amarona, 2013). 50. Davies, “The Italianized Frontier,” 117. 51. Drew Edward Davies, ed., Santiago Billoni: Complete Works. Recent Researches in Music of the Baroque, vol. 170 (Middleton: A-R Editions, 2011). 52. Drew Edward Davies, Catálogo de la Colección de Música del Archivo Histórico de la Arquidiócesis de Durango (Mexico: IIH-UNAM, Apoyo al Desarrollo de Archivos y Bibliotecas de México, 2013). 53. For multiple ways in which mixed-race women and men negotiated these boundaries, see  Susan Deeds, “Labyrinths of Mestizaje: Understanding Cultural Persistence and Transformation in Nueva Vizcaya,” in The Oxford Handbook of Borderlands of the Iberian World, ed. Danna  A.  Levin Rojo and Cynthia Radding, 343–370 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019). 54. AHAD-8, exp. 339, March 14, 1658. Cited in Davies, “The Italianized Frontier,” 124. 55. Israel Álvarez Moctezuma, “Notas incipientes alrededor de la consagración de una episcópolis,” Cuadernos del Seminario Nacional de Música en la Nueva España y el México Independiente 2 (2007): 4–13, cit. 9. Original in Spanish: “Detrás de la solemnidad [. . .] se encuentra siempre la autoridad, el poder eficaz, la capacidad de emitir un discurso hegemónico.” See also, Antonio Rubial, coord., Historia de la vida cotidiana en México, vol. 2: La ciudad barroca (Mexico: El Colegio de México, Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2005); José Antonio Maravall, La cultura del barroco (Espluges de Llobregat: Ariel, 1975).

Bibliography Baker, Geoffrey. Imposing Harmony: Music and Society in Colonial Cuzco. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008. Baker, Geoffrey, and Tess Knighton, ed. Music and Urban Society in Colonial Latin America. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Davies, Drew Edward. “The Italianized Frontier: Music at Durango Cathedral, Español Culture, and the Aesthetics of Devotion in Eighteenth-Century New Spain.” PhD dissertation, University of Chicago, 2006. Irving, D. R. M. Colonial Counterpoint: Music in Early Modern Manila. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. Mann, Kristin Dutcher. The Power of Song: Music and Dance in the Mission Communities of Northern New Spain, 1590–1810. Stanford, CA, and Berkeley: Stanford University Press, The Academy of American Franciscan History, 2010. Nawrot, Piotr. “Teaching of Music and the Celebration of Liturgical Events in the Jesuit Reductions.” Anthropos 99, no. 1 (2004): 73–84. Pfefferkorn, Ignaz. Sonora: A Description of the Province, translated by Theodore Treutlein. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1989.

Musical Cultures   543 Querejazu, Pedro, and Plácido Molina Barbery, ed. Las misiones jesuíticas de Chiquitos. La Paz: Fundación BHN, Línea Editorial, 1995. Radding, Cynthia. Landscapes of Power and Identity: Comparative Histories in the Sonoran Desert and the Forests of Amazonia from Colony to Republic. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005. Waisman, Leonardo  J. “Urban Music in the Wilderness: Ideology and Power in the Jesuit Reducciones, 1609–1767.” In Music and Urban Society in Colonial Latin America, edited by Geoffrey Baker and Tess Knighton, 208–229. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011.

chapter 22

Fron tier Missions i n Sou th A m er ica Impositions, Adaptations, and Appropriations Guillermo Wilde Translated by Charlotte Whittle

In a classic text from 1917, Herbert Bolton defined the missions as frontier colonial institutions that were a key factor for Spanish control in the Americas. Their fundamental goal was “to convert, to civilize, and to exploit,” and along with the cities, they soon became organizing centers for the territoriality and politics of conquest in the remotest regions of the Spanish Empire. While Spanish settlements were founded to control the territory, Indian establishments were meant to “police” and evangelize the natives, and to ensure that they paid their tribute to the Crown.1 In South America from the end of the sixteenth century, a policy of missions, “reductions,” or Indian towns was adopted to relocate and consolidate the indigenous population, which until then lived “scattered” throughout the regions furthest from central administration. Although its effects were uneven in the regions where it was applied, this policy, entrusted to the missionaries of the Society of Jesus, was the most effective method of incorporating still unconquered indigenous groups. From the Amazon to the Andes, and from New Granada to Patagonia, the Jesuits carried out numerous expeditions, and founded a large number of mission towns, many of which lasted only briefly. In the Jesuit provinces of Peru and Paraguay, beginning in the early seventeenth century, the most important groups of missions were established among the Guaraní, Chiquito, and Moxos “nations,” where the Jesuits were active for more than a century, until their expulsion in 1767–1768. One immediate consequence of this process was the territorial and demographic fragmentation of the “reduced” indigenous groups, many of which did not survive the reduction policy that forced them to leave their original settlements, move long distances,

546   Borderlands of the Iberian World and accept living standards very different from those they were accustomed to. However, many others gradually adjusted to the new social and political order, constructing new identities in connection with the missions. Scholarly research has described this process as ethnogenesis. Three analytical approaches to the experience of these incorporated indigenous groups and their participation in the missions prevailed in historiography until the 1990s. The first, represented by the history of the church, emphasized the role of ecclesiastical institutions and the missionaries in the evangelizing project. Pedro Borges’s book, Métodos misionales en la cristianización de América, summarizes the main principles of this approach. The second, linked to social and economic history, was initially concerned with reconstructing the regional networks created by missionary establishments, and radically questioned the supposed isolation of the missions. Magnus Mörner initiated this line of investigation in his Actividades Políticas y Económicas de los jesuitas en el Río de la Plata, still valid in many aspects. Later, Juan Carlos Garavaglia extended the analysis of European expansionist methods of domination and the effects of economic exploitation upon the invaded societies in the context of the world economy. The third approach, based on demographics, focused on population evolution over time in the reductions, for which Ernesto Maeder’s work was essential for the Paraguay and Río de la Plata regions.2 Although these three approaches shed light on relevant aspects of the missions, in general they neglected to examine cultural and religious practices and the strategies of indigenous actors. Except for studies by anthropologists like Branislava Susnik or Bartomeu Melià, no significant ethnohistory of the region was undertaken until the 1990s.3 This tendency has been reversed during the last twenty years, following a new approach that sought to reconceptualize religious missions as spaces of cultural and political transaction in which indigenous actors played a determining role. This new emphasis on subaltern experience, “indigenous agency,” and daily life and “praxis” is inspired by a reassessment of colonial interactions and the need to overcome the classic opposition between domination and resistance, in order to explore more complex and ambiguous realities. This approach explores indigenous regimes of production of historicity and native conceptions of the “person” and “alterity.” A number of works have focused on specific, enclosed cases of contact, attempting to understand “how natives think,” and the way they assimilate or “introject” the figure of the colonizer.”4 Authors like the Brazilian ethnographers Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and Carlos Fausto have emphasized indigenous capacity to absorb the discourse, gestures, and objects brought by Christians on their own symbolic terms. Their work opens new ways of thinking about the nature of indigenous cosmologies at the moment of contact, from missionary sources and their basic misapprehensions.5 In contrast with the perennial nature of belief in God and the scriptures, the native attitude, which the missionaries considered “inconstant,” was based on a fluid, provisional, and open-ended conception of identity that was in a constant process of negotiation and dispute with exogenous entities (whose balance was negotiated by the shamans). An alternative perspective

Frontier Missions in South America   547 closer to history than to ethnography, also developed in Brazil, is represented by the articles in Deus na Aldeia, edited by Paula Montero, which consider both sides of the interaction between indigenous people and Jesuits, and the production of shared codes (language games).6 Although useful for analyzing situations of contact, these studies leave out the long-term processes in which the extreme cultural contrasts that were evident at first tended to disappear. Since the 1990s, another approach, the “new history” of the missions, has emphasized the internal dynamic of identity production in the missions, frontier transactions, and inter-ethnic relations. Influenced in part by David Weber’s renovation of border studies in Spanish America, it is represented by a number of authors who examine border missions in both North and South America.7 A common theme of this research was the relations among populations that were incorporated into the colonial regime, and groups that remained unconquered (“infidels”), who circulated between Portuguese and Spanish territories. Some studies of the mission space emphasized the complex recreation of ecology and landscape, changing notions of power and leadership, and the development of new daily routines in the long term, aspects of life in which missionaries as much as indigenous people took part.8 While these approaches were wide reaching, except in a few cases, a comparative discussion was not systematically developed. However, in recent years, growing interest in the global mission has been directed toward the isolation of mission space.9 In this context, the concept of ethnogenesis acquired special resonance as a methodological tool. In accordance with the definition proposed by Jonathan Hill, ethnogenesis can be understood as a “creative adaptation to a general history of violent changes— including demographic collapse, forced relocations, enslavement, ethnic soldiering, ethnocide, and genocide—imposed during the historical expansion of colonial and national states in the Americas.”10 In other words, interest is focused on the reconstruction of dismantled societies over a period of time, taking into account their capacity for agency. In any case, the productiveness of a concept like ethnogenesis (or ethnification) for explaining the appearance of new groups under colonial rule is debatable, especially given the development of alternative concepts in recent years. One such concept is that of “territorialization” proposed by Pacheco de Oliveira, which explains the emergence of collective groups as a “political act” contributing to the creation of “territorially based political-administrative entities,” which became “organized and autonomous communities.” Other concepts recently developed, including the “tribal area,” “mestizaje,” and “middle ground,” have also been considered by various studies on frontier missions.11 The paradigm shift these approaches represent attempts to overcome the model of domination and resistance that characterized colonial history for so long and moves toward a more complex examination that acknowledges intermediary spaces and actors, in addition to concrete practices of interaction. In fact, despite being part of the colonial regime, the missions were not, as is often believed, socially closed and culturally homogeneous totalitarian spaces. Missionaries had to adjust to concrete practices, incorporating local elements while indigenous people were not passive subjects; rather they participated in the creation of new identities, giving new meanings to certain features of their

548   Borderlands of the Iberian World traditions and appropriating externally imposed elements to use them for their own benefit. The history of the missions cannot be understood without considering the constant tension between imposition, adaptation, and appropriation, which made up missionary praxis. As James Scott suggests in his examination of statecraft, “Formal schemes of order are untenable without some elements of the practical knowledge that they tend to dismiss.”12 It is instructive to examine each of these elements in tension, based on evidence from the Guaraní, Moxos, and Chiquitos mission regions. In the long term these elements solidified specific regimes of “mission memory.” “Memory” here is understood as the collection of material and symbolic devices (visual, auditory, and perceptual in general) that gave a unique form to the spatial and temporal organization of the missions. The various foundations of this “memory” (images, music, ritual, writing, cartography) were at once a means and an end of the interaction between missionaries and indigenous people, especially members of the elite, who obtained a significant level of autonomy through this process. The nature of the mission space as frontier territory (in geographic, symbolic, and social terms) in turn reinforced the tendency toward autonomy.

Impositions In strict terms, Indian settlements formed in central areas of the Spanish Empire were known as “reductions,” while those in peripheral or frontier areas were called “missions.” In practice, however, the two terms were often confused. In general, “mission,” “conversion,” and “reduction” were used as synonyms “to temporally and spatially designate the initial period of indoctrination,” in contrast with “doctrine,” a term that referred to “a territorial entity institutionalized by royal command.” The latter was a legal, administrative, and civic term. “Missions (or conversions or reductions) could become d ­ octrines by decree or royal charter.”13 Missions were for non-Christian Indians, known as “infidels” or “gentiles,” who became catecúmenos once they entered the mission town and learned the catechism. After baptism they became “neophytes.” These mission towns, unlike Indian parishes, were overseen by the regular clergy; that is, members of religious orders, who controlled spiritual activities as much as temporal ones.14 It is important to emphasize the polysemy of the terms used here. A word such as “mission” could simultaneously allude to different situations, among them, (1) the group of missionaries, or the act of preaching, temporarily or permanently, to either converted or gentile Indians (the Indian “ministry” or the “live mission”), (2) the settlement of Indians and missionaries (the residential entity), (3) intensive preaching in Spanish or Indian parishes that were already Christian, as was common in the Peruvian viceroyalty.15 In contexts like Paraguay, unlike in Alto Peru, the term “reduction” was used to refer to settlements that were “live missions,” that became “doctrines” or Indian parishes once they were more established. The latter implied at least in theory that these establishments would pass into management by the secular clergy and would be subject to a

Frontier Missions in South America   549 diocese. In general this change of category took place over a period of ten years, but in the region in question this did not occur until after the expulsion of the Jesuits, owing to the scarcity of priests who were willing to move there. The establishment of reductions was motivated by the idea of bringing Christian social organization to the Indians in a way that was planned according to homogeneous and rational spatial and temporal patterns. The first step involved removing the Indians from their villages in the jungle, preferably by peaceful means, seeking an agreement with indigenous chiefs to consolidate them in new locations where they could be instructed in the principles of Christianity, organized according to a new system of economic production, and taxed for their tribute to the Crown.16 With the objective of avoiding contact between the Spanish and indigenous populations, the Jesuits staunchly defended a residential segregation policy: keeping the Indians in the reductions away from work in encomiendas. As part of this policy the continued use of indigenous languages was allowed, making them “general languages.” Contact with different groups was accompanied by their identification through ethnonyms that generally referred to the language most spoken in each region.17 The diversity observed in the earliest contact documents declined considerably over time, and the association of “nation” and “language” later became fixed in Jesuit discourse. This correlation was reinforced through the creation of grammars, vocabularies, and catechisms for use in the pastoral effort. Thus, the word “reduce” had two meanings in the linguistic sphere: to unify diversity, and to standardize the use of some variants through the written alphabet. In the Moxos region, Akira Saito observes a gradual process of disappearance of local languages along with the development of new mission identities, as part of a deliberate Jesuit policy of social organization. The Jesuits saw the profusion of Indian languages as a sign of social fragmentation, a “Tower of Babel” that impeded their effort to spread the faith. Judging by some of their reports, in addition to presenting a technical problem that complicated evangelization, linguistic diversity was “a sign of the moral degradation of the local population.”18 While Jesuit language policy assured the survival of those chosen as lingua franca to the detriment of the others, different registers of language use that escaped the Jesuits’ control and were reproduced in various ways at the level of daily practice should also be taken into account. In other words, the Jesuits employed a highly standardized language for preaching, but this was not necessarily the one spoken informally by the indigenous people. In the areas considered here, it is evident that over time each reduction consolidated its own idiomatic variants, which tended to constitute a mark of identity.19 In the Chiquitos region, Tomichá claims that despite seeking linguistic homogenization, the Jesuits never completely obtained it, since as late as 1745, 34.55 percent of the total population in the area belonged to non-chiquitano groups.20 This question should be studied further, considering the dilemma it must have created for the effective management of the towns. The coexistence of diverse groups speaking different languages in a shared space was frequently an obstacle to the establishment and stability of the settlements. Differences of any kind could even undermine the continued existence of certain groups. Those that maintained old quarrels resisted integration, due to the loss of

550   Borderlands of the Iberian World autonomy that this implied, or simply because war was also a form of social reproduction. Some reduced groups, whose subsistence was not totally agricultural or sedentary, also opposed remaining in the reductions. For the daily management of the towns, the Jesuits were at first obliged to establish ways of organizing the space that would prevent any conflict between enemy groups. At least initially, in every settlement they required each “faction” to occupy a different section or neighborhood. Jesuit chronicles of the Guaraní region detail the incorporation of “chieftainships” or “factions” that were integrated into the reductions in autonomous neighborhoods, participating in the economic life of the towns, and later in local government, according to their leader’s level of prestige.21 In regions such as Moxos, where ethnic diversity was greater, there is evidence of divisions between factions, which participated separately in celebrations or used different paths to get to the same destination.22 The Jesuits sought to control mission internal diversity by encouraging incorporated groups to participate in liturgical life, including them in new social categories and integrating them into the towns’ secular administration. Town council (cabildo) and church positions, militias, religious confraternities or brotherhoods, and craft trades drove this long process of social change and integration.23 The institutional political organization of the reductions depended in great measure on the town council, which was required as an instrument of local government in all Spanish territories. In accordance with Indian laws, this institution was composed of various posts that were renewed annually (corregidor, teniente de corregidor, alcaldes ordinarios de primer y segundo voto, alcaldes de hermandad, alférez real, regidores, alguaciles mayores, mayordomo, and secretario). As decades passed and a formal education for the elites became established, a new specialized indigenous “bureaucracy” developed.24 It was necessary to demonstrate respect for traditional chiefs or “caciques,” especially those known as “principals,” by “honoring them with a trade,” and offering them attire that differentiated them from the rest of the group. Their children attended school, where they learned to read and write. Town planning, along with the imposition of a daily routine, facilitated the social control of the indigenous population, reinforcing preestablished hierarchies. The houses of chiefs and their followers, mboyas in Guarani, were closer or further away from the plaza according to their importance or age.25 The presence of deliberately registered cacicazgos (groups organized under certain leaders) assured the surveillance of economic and religious activities. According to documents from the period, work on individual and communal chacras (small farms) was organized by cacicazgos. As for liturgical activities, provincial Jesuit leaders ordered confessions to occur in order, “by chiefs, or houses.” In this manner, those who lived further away could be better controlled. The Indians had to demonstrate knowledge of Christian doctrine, and only those who had confessed were allowed to take communion; to prove it they wore a “tablilla” that could immediately be handed over as proof to ad hoc indigenous officials.26 Ritual and daily life in the towns was based on a strict routine that alternated participation in mass, the rosary, and indoctrination with work in the chacras and communal

Frontier Missions in South America   551 fields. This alternation adhered to a schedule set by the bell, and was supervised by the reduction leaders. Every morning the bells rang for mass, which the whole settlement attended before heading to work in the chacras. In the afternoon the bell rang for the rosary, attended by members of the town’s “devotees of the virgin.” Each morning and night, children were taught Christian doctrine, and on Thursdays there was a general lesson for the whole town in the church. On Sundays and holidays there was a sung mass and a sermon after the lesson had been taught. In the afternoon, officials (fiscales) informed the missionaries of mass absentees recorded during the week, and penances were assigned.27 One Jesuit chronicler observed that in the Guaraní region young men and women were supervised while saying the catechism aloud by officials called herequaras, “from when they crossed themselves until they had said all the prayers, questions, and answers of the catechism.”28 Men and women were separated for the mass and entered the church through different doors. In addition, widowed, orphaned, or punished women were confined in a special enclosure called the cotyguazú, where all their movements were supervised. Jesuit laws clearly established how this enclosure should be run, with the help of the Indians themselves. An old man “of reason” was to look after “that house” and keep it closed most of the time, taking the key to the priest’s home when he took the women out to recite the Ave María. Women confined there could only attend mass or any other collective activity in a group.29 A lot of attention was paid to women’s dress in general. An order clarified that “clothing for the Indian women should not be absent: and it should be sufficiently long, and worn in such a way that it does not offend the sight of anyone.”30 This kind of alteration of indigenous customs was introduced slowly and gradually, but signs of it are already present in the earliest period of the missions. For example, in a 1634 letter, Jesuit authorities ordered that converted Indians would not be allowed to wear their hair long, since this was a gentile custom, and it should be cut upon baptism.31 Jesuits entrusted the surveillance of the indigenous people to a series of ad hoc officials who were to inform the authorities of their behavior. Just as sacristans, musicians, and singers were in charge of the care and maintenance of the mission churches and the celebration of mass, in some regions the fiscales, along with the town corregidor, were entrusted to repeat the catechism and sometimes the sermon in the plaza and the streets, exhorting people to virtue, and scolding idleness. The Jesuit chronicler Escandón describes the role of these figures as follows: The substance of sermons and practices is repeated to both men and women, before and after they have seen who is missing, in the patio and in the cemetery. This repetition is generally done by the alcaldes or the corregidor, in the tone of the person who preaches it, just as the priest has said it to everyone in church, and they exhort them to comply with what has been preached. And these repeaters have usually taken full responsibility for the substance of the sermon or talk, if not all, which almost never happens, at least much of it. And the others listen to them there with much attention, as with the priest in church. After this, they go home, and before they leave, the yerba for that day is distributed to men, and tobacco and salt, if there is any.32

552   Borderlands of the Iberian World In the earliest decades of mission activity, “congregations,” “confraternities,” or “brotherhoods” were established in the reductions, intended to reinforce the civic virtues of a given sector of the indigenous population, which would in turn serve as a model of good conduct for other Indians in the town. Confraternity members not only knew doctrine well, but in the absence of priests they were sometimes authorized to administer certain sacraments such as baptism.33 Regulations were often upheld by a visual and ritual framework that provided pedagogical emphasis on the oppositions between the Christian world and that of the infidel. Official Jesuit chronicles describe these impositions in detail, seeking to give the reader the impression of a significant degree of justice and fairness on the part of the Jesuits. However, this picture tends to be excessively consistent and favorable to the missionary regime. Additional sources, many of them internal to the Jesuit order, offer a more nuanced view, signaling both a diverse range of conflicts, and practical adaptations implemented by the missionaries. They reveal not only a certain degree of tolerance toward the incorporation of local elements to the religious and civil liturgy in the missions, but also the existence of spaces not completely controlled, in which indigenous people experienced a certain degree of autonomy.

Adaptations In 1609 Diego de Torres, first Jesuit provincial of Paraguay, sent missionaries to establish the first reductions with precise instructions concerning the form they should take. At the same time, although it seemed contradictory, he advised missionaries to take into account the “preferences of the Indians,” thus inviting them to adapt the rules to practical necessities, according to their judgment. Indeed, the priests were pragmatic, and in the long run the mission town model was set on the basis of a series of tests clearly oriented to achieve effective evangelization. In designing the towns, the Jesuits sought to reconcile received instructions with the necessities they encountered in practice.34 The initial period was characterized by experimentation in urban layout, which became standardized over time to the extent that it proved effective. Both mission architecture and town planning allowed for the incorporation of different kinds of local elements within a predominantly European framework. Some of these made a strong visual impact. In the church at the town of Santísima Trinidad, one of the thirty Guaraní reductions of the Jesuit province of Paraguay, there is an interesting frieze carved in stone on the side-walls of the presbytery, with a number of angels playing musical instruments. Some face forward, and others are in profile; but all have distinctly indigenous features. In the transept, the angels play stringed instruments, and on the opposite wall, they play wind instruments. The more visually prominent lateral walls of the presbytery show two rows of figures. In the upper row, which is fully preserved, two angels play a bellows organ, one plays the harpsichord, one the trumpet, and another the shawm. In the midst of these figures, the

Frontier Missions in South America   553 virgin and child appear with an angel bearing incense, in profile on either side; beneath them, an angel plays the harp. On the opposite side almost the same figures can be seen, but the Immaculate Virgin appears instead of Mary and the child. This series of images is remarkable for its four angels, two on each side, that seem to be playing maracas as they dance: they face forward, with one foot forward, and the other to the side at a right angle; they wear short tunics with folds that seem to move as the angels dance. The repetition of these figures, their central location, and the simultaneity of their different elements seem to underline their relevance. But it remains a mystery why these angels with maracas were placed in this setting during a peak moment in Jesuit mission architecture. Although no documents mention it specifically, the frieze was apparently made at around the end of the 1760s. The work was interrupted by the expulsion of the Jesuits. It is thought that at least three indigenous sculptors worked on it under the direction of an Italian priest, Pedro Danesi, widely recognized as a sculptor.35 Did the frieze represent musical practices in the towns at that time? Were the maracas played in liturgical contexts in the missions? Why did the missionaries immortalize them in a frieze? According to accounts of early evangelization, maracas were instruments associated with indigenous shamans, who had strongly opposed the founding of the missions, and destroyed all signs of Christianity. Both their appearance and the sound they made, as well as the way they were played, had a particular meaning for the ancient Guaraní people; it was associated with the construction of subjectivity, gender division, the gods, and temporality. It is clear that in a period when evangelization was so advanced, the maracas had lost their previous meaning; they were no longer played by shamans but rather by harmless angels. Although a definitive conclusion is impossible, it is reasonable to think that over the course of several decades of missionary activity, these instruments acquired a completely new meaning and were adapted to the necessities of Christian ritual. In fact, additional sources indicate that the liturgy effectively incorporated local acoustic and visual elements, which strengthened its effects and its successfulness among indigenous people.36 A similar transformation occurred with an interesting Guaraní chant known as the guahú. At the end of the seventeenth century Jesuit leaders prohibited it, since it had caused a number of disturbances among the Indians. But almost a century later, descriptions of the same chant can be found, associated with formal contexts. The Jesuit Escandón writes that this chant was sung during funeral ceremonies. After the burial began, “the cries of the mother, wife, or relatives” were heard, “with a kind of chant that was somber and so out of tune that it is impossible to describe.” This chant or lament was called guahú by the Indians, and was sung only by women, who “cry or wail praises of the deceased, saying not only what he was, but also what he would have become, had he not died.”37 This case and that of the maracas seem to indicate a gradual solemnization of native ritual auditory practices in the Christian liturgical context. Thus, indigenous sounds appeared in Christian rituals as signs of a prior period that had been assigned new meanings. Such practices did not threaten as much as strengthen the mission regime, since they provided a vehicle for indigenous involvement in the new order.38

554   Borderlands of the Iberian World Tolerance of native practices like chants and dances was based on the Jesuits’ categorization of them as Indian “community customs,” which did not represent a threat to Christianity. Some missionaries even described them as simple and pleasant Indian pastimes that should be maintained for the common good.39 Some of the main events in the liturgical calendar became an ideal setting for the introduction of local elements. Jesuit Cardiel wrote that the festival of Corpus Christi was performed “with remarkable solemnity and devotion.” He continued: Days before, Indians go to the fields and the mountains to collect animals, birds, and flowers. They make a large street around the plaza, where the procession will pass. The whole plaza that is taken up by this street is full of arches made of colorful branches and flowers, with the same decorations on each side. These arches are adorned with parrots, and colored birds, and other kinds of birds, to which they add monkeys and deer, and other animals tethered here and there. In each corner the sacristans decorate a chapel with an embellished spire, with many frontals and other church treasures. The musicians and dancers are well prepared, and well rehearsed in their arts. After mass, the priest emerges with his monstrance (which is colorful and sumptuous), to the resounding and devout clamor of all the town’s instruments: violins, harps, dulcians, bugles, drums, tabors, and flutes. There are always two altar boys with sumptuous surplices and cassocks, censing with two silver censers, and others with a colorful basket full of flowers, throwing them at the priest’s feet throughout the procession.40

The acceptance of certain local elements in these celebrations was surely deliberate on the part of the Jesuits, who sought to affect the indigenous population in concrete ways.41 The Jesuit conversion method tried to appeal to the Indians through the senses, using images, decorations, and the performance of formal ceremonies as the fundamental means. Despite their belief in a strong distinction between outward appearance and inner faith, the missionaries considered it possible and necessary to travel the path between mere sensory appreciation, and the spiritual message of God. This was especially valid for indigenous people, since missionaries believed that they were afflicted by a lack of capacity for abstraction. An aesthetic of wonder and the miraculous was central to Jesuit rhetoric and methods of communication; it could provoke pleasure and fascination, and captivate the sight and the ear, appealing effectively to the population.42 Anton Sepp is explicit on this point: “In truth, our Indians have little skill in understanding that which is invisible or does not stand out, which is to say, the spiritual and the abstract, but they are very well trained in the mechanical arts: they imitate everything they see, like monkeys, even when it requires patience, forbearance, and a tireless spirit.”43 Jesuits encouraged prayer in the missions, using images as the first means to exalt indigenous senses. Already in the earliest encounters with the Guayrá Indians, Jesuit letters refer to the display of an image of the seven archangels painted by the lay brother Luis Berger. The Jesuit Ruiz de Montoya, who often invoked the help of the angels in fighting rebellious Indians, tells that while he was in the region, he had the image unfolded, put on his surplice and stole, and ordered a long procession to meet

Frontier Missions in South America   555 Don Nicolás Tayaoba, an important indigenous leader in the area. Also a representation of the theme of the Four Final Things painted as well by Berger, which made a strong impression on the Indians, is mentioned early on. The Jesuit Diego Boroa tells that on seeing those images, the Indians “were very amazed and engrossed [. . .], they especially admired the image of the Four Last Things that Your Reverence left us here, in the hand of Brother Luis.” The chief who had been shown the image “went away happily with his people, saying he was glad that the Priests had come to those lands, and afterwards, at home, he said the same thing.”44 Although the worship of images was a purely external imposition among the indigenous societies of these regions, where there had been no similar precedent, the missionary production of images was sui generis. In other words, the images showed material adaptations that resulted from the contexts of their use, which distanced them notably from the contemporary European images (the “originals”) on which they were based. Within a visual framework that clearly privileged the transmission of Christian doctrine and sought to exalt feelings of compassion and fear among the Indians, methods of visual presentation were developed that did not correspond to the stylistic canon. For instance, certain dominant characteristics of missionary sculpture and painting of the seventeenth century, such as symmetry, frontality, and the direct gaze at the viewer, are not comparable to the religious art produced in Europe during the same period.45 These examples from the visual and ritual world of the missions are only a small fraction of the corpus of possible analysis. They generally indicate the presence of local elements and adaptations, promoted by the missionaries who negotiated with their indigenous audience. But Indians were not passive in this process. They were active participants in the observance of rituals in the missions, and they evidently had a certain degree of control over the production of these materials and performances, which occasionally represented a risk to the monopoly that the Jesuits intended to exert over all spheres of mission life.

Appropriations In 1736, the Jesuit Bernardo Nusdorffer reported the establishment of a town of Indian fugitives from the Guaraní missions, who had no priest and therefore managed themselves. They had built their houses in rows, just as they had in their native towns, and they had a town council whose leader was an Indian called Diego Chaupai, who dressed in the Spanish style, “with a hat and stockings, but without shoes.” The inhabitants of this town observed a liturgical routine that began in the morning with the saying of the “Litany of Our Lady,” for which an Indian from one of the towns, named Miguel, was responsible. In the afternoon the women and the “rabble” gathered to say the Rosary. On Sundays, the town captain preached to the Indians, exhorting them to live together in peace. The town was at the height of its prosperity when it was destroyed by Hispanic colonists in retaliation for livestock thefts committed by the Indians.46

556   Borderlands of the Iberian World This case appears to be exceptional in the history of the missions of the River Plate region, but it reveals the degree of autonomy acquired by indigenous people in the development of the basic forms of ritual life in the missions. Not only were the Indians qualified to establish a new town independently, following the model of their native towns, but they could also carry out liturgical activities without the help of a priest. These capabilities come as no surprise at a time of such advanced evangelizing activity, when missionary forms of devotion had been consolidated in all regions, and the basic tenets of Christian life had been fully adopted by the Indians. Such appropriations were inscribed in ritual and daily practices, which is to say that they involved localized personal interactions mediated by objects and physical gestures. This fact is clear from the development of mission devotion, which provides an index of what recent research calls “practicing,” or “material religion.”47 Confraternities or brotherhoods played a crucial role in the missions. These were religious associations intended for worship, but they also reformed indigenous customs and promoted Christian morals. Despite being under missionary supervision, it is possible that within these associations, indigenous people developed a certain degree of autonomy in their own spiritual management. In fact, letters show that under certain critical circumstances such as epidemics, confraternity members were authorized to perform baptisms, since they had been taught to do so. This happened in the Guaraní missions, where the Virgin and Saint Michael brotherhoods were active and grew quickly in the seventeenth century.48 In Chiquitos, the Anuas letters report that the Indians’ lives are “in keeping with Christian commandments,” and that among them the “soldiers of the Holy Virgin” are especially distinguished. A confraternity of these was established in each town, “there being in addition a great number of aspirants, only the five most outstanding being chosen from among them.” Members of this confraternity frequently attended the sacraments and religious functions (mass, sermon, Rosary, litanies, burials, etc.), and funerals. The letters insist on the importance of their attendance at burials, which were performed adhering to a rigid set of rules.49 The most distinguished members would carry the corpse, demonstrating their charity toward the deceased through this “final service.” According to another letter, along with the inducement to virtue provided by the confraternity of the Virgin, in towns such as Concepción, worship of the Holy Passion of Christ also developed: Indians “wish to copy the sufferings of Christ through cruel whippings they give themselves, and through other spontaneous mortifications.”50 Many of them also pray at home with their families, before going to sleep, “a third of the rosary after having already prayed two parts of it in church.” Members of the confraternity rarely missed mass or the Rosary, “many being alerted by the toll of the bell, they are an example to the rest of the people in the town for their frequent attendance.”51 In Easter Week they whipped themselves and carried out public penitence to show their gratitude “for the most holy death of Our Lord Jesus Christ.”52 The displays of devotion described above suggest a strong appropriation of the ideal of virtue represented by the central figures of Christianity (the Virgin, Christ, the saints and angels) that sometimes went beyond what was acceptable to the church leaders, who occasionally prohibited them. Such devotional practices cannot be separated from

Frontier Missions in South America   557 the ritual communities that sustained them by promoting the production of a body of doctrinal and musical texts specifically for these associations. In fact, the musical repertory celebrating the Virgin was extensive in Chiquitos, especially after the arrival of central European Jesuits like Martin Schmid and the coadjutor Johannes Messner, who broadened and diversified liturgical music in the region. The repertoire composed for confraternity members included antiphons such as the Salve Regina, litanies praising the Virgin of Loreto, hymns, masses, and “Marian prayers” that were sung in Spanish, Latin, and Chiquitano during the feast of the Holy Virgin.53 Another important example of appropriation is the sermons, delivered by Jesuit priests and certain indigenous leaders in daily and festive activities to provide examples of virtue, or emphasize certain moral commandments. The sermons usually expressed intermediary forms between oral and physical modes of communication, and the written word, which not only expressed religious ideas but also constructed social and political prestige. In Chiquitos the recitation of sermons was generally a man’s privilege. Transmitted in oral and written form, sermons were performed in a special intonation during the most important celebrations of the mission towns.54 Indigenous autonomy was expressed through doctrinal and liturgical knowledge but also through the acquisition of certain practical crafts (learned in artisans’ workshops), and skills such as writing and cartography. These skills and knowledge accompanied the process of political and administrative centralization driven by the reductions. As mission bureaucracy developed, so too did writing skills among the Indians. According to studies by Eduardo Neumann there was a multiplication of written genres, especially during the eighteenth century. Writing became a political tool of the indigenous elite, especially in the town councils and religious confraternities, which quickly came to master it. Writing was used for a range of purposes, in a range of mediums, for varied recipients, and in intermediary forms that fell between writing and orality. Due to the necessity to translate and spread doctrinal texts, writing formats (notes, letters, memorials, diaries, personal narratives, town council minutes, crosses, gravestones, historical narratives) multiplied and were consolidated over time, together with archival practices and even printing presses in remote parts of the South American rainforests.55 Many handwritten texts were produced, including catechisms, sermons, sacrament manuals, and confessionals in the various indigenous languages, Spanish, and Latin. But there was also a range of genres beyond those strictly doctrinal. Some were political or administrative in character, while others were communications of a more personal or narrative nature. In such settings, the texts functioned as knowledge repositories and also acquired value as objects of daily use.56 Among the most notable examples of texts printed in the missions is the Guaraní translation of De la diferencia entre lo temporal y lo eterno by the Spanish Jesuit Eusebio Nieremberg, which contains a series of engravings by indigenous craftsmen, one bearing the signature of Juan Yaparí. Although the text was translated by the Jesuit José Serrano, the indigenous craftsmen apparently had a certain amount of interpretive freedom in producing the images. The book has not yet been analyzed from a linguistic perspective, but the images show adjustments that betray the printers’ need to enhance

558   Borderlands of the Iberian World certain effects for a native audience, thus distancing themselves from their European models.57 Other examples of mission printing press are two books (Sermones y ejemplos and Explicación del catecismo) written under the guidance of the Jesuit Paulo Restivo by the Indian Nicolás Yapuguay, a chief and musician in the Santa María la Mayor mission. According to the linguist Bartomeu Melià, although written under supervision, these are more than mere translations of Spanish originals, since they display recreations connected to indigenous interpretations.58 Cartography was another practical skill that indigenous people appropriated in the context of the reductions. The most representative Indian maps were made to resolve disputes over lands between towns. These documents are valuable not only for understanding the ways in which native people represented space but also for establishing aspects of the collective memory of the missions, linked to land use. In general these maps do not display the realism that is conspicuous in other non-indigenous representations from the same period. One example is a map made by town councilors in Santo Tomé around 1784, after the expulsion of the Jesuits.59 The visual representation is highly original: roads are depicted with dotted lines and also show what appear to be chapels or outposts. Place names are written in Guaraní. This map displays a remarkably distorted representation of rivers, depicted as horizontally oriented, with the Paraná River appearing at the bottom and the Uruguay River in the center along with its tributaries, without any indication of latitude or longitude.60 According to the Jesuit Peramás, the absence of such references from indigenous cartography was common. He describes the case of a history of the Corpus Christi reduction by an Indian author, accompanied by a map in which the degrees of longitude and latitude were absent but the locations of the hills, streams, and rivers pertaining to the town were recorded with great accuracy.61 Peramás suggests that Indians who could write were also capable of map-making, and the ways in which these were used contributed to the construction of a historical narrative. The skills described above allowed for the expression of an “indigenous way of seeing” space, in which the connections between spaces of social and economic circulation acquired greater relevance. The map’s visual discourse clearly reveals that the skills Indians acquired from the dominant culture were adjusted to fit native parameters and practices. An awareness of the boundaries of their towns probably developed gradually among the Indians in the reductions, in connection with the use and historical recognition they exercised over them. This possession became especially visible in times of crisis, when the territorial integrity of each reduction was at risk from the arrival on the scene of new actors or the reigniting of old disputes. Territorial conflicts originating during the Jesuit period intensified once the priests had been expelled. They occurred among the reductions themselves, and also between the reductions and the landowners and occupiers who disputed the possession and use of the land. In this period one can observe the activation of a “territorial memory” among the indigenous elites that used the colonial legal structures to defend their rights. Another document from after the expulsion of the Jesuits is also highly representative. It is a 1773 accusation by the administrator and protector de indios (protector of the Indians) of the reductions against an individual who had trespassed upon the yerba

Frontier Missions in South America   559 mate plantations under the jurisdiction of the town of Loreto. In one of the letters included in the file, the indigenous leaders who presented the complaint claimed to have sent boats up the Paraná River with the order to bring a cargo of yerba mate from their town’s plantation, but on arrival they had found some Spaniards who had taken a large quantity of the yerba, leaving them almost without provisions. They concluded the letter saying that those very intruders had previously taken away bundles of yerba mate without the town’s permission, it being those plantations the only means the town Indians had to pay their tribute to the king.62 Along with the letters, some written in Guaraní, the town leaders sent a beautiful colored map showing the use previously made of the yerba mate plantations in question by thirteen chiefs in the reductions, whose names were listed: Melchor Yaguarendí, Pedro Guaca, Francisco Papa, Nicolás Patagui, Lorenzo Nandabú, Claudio Pirapepó, Martín Sayobí, Esteban Guase, Miguel Ayucu, Antonio Guarapy, Cristóbal Bie, Ignacio Mboacati, and Pedro Sumey. The map shows the places where these chiefs and their subjects lived, from which the people of Loreto harvested their yerba. A legend in the map adds an interesting clarification: “It should be known that these chiefs were not from Loreto, rather they are in Corpus, and are from the town of Acaray that was founded with Corpus, and also with Itapúa.”63 This apparently muddled paragraph in fact summarizes the story of the relocations of the indigenous population that began in the previous century, and highlights the connection between indigenous chiefs and the formation of local territories. The Loreto reduction had been founded in 1632 with a population that had moved from the Guayrá region, and was later relocated in 1647, 1649, and 1686. According to the 1773 dispute, the indigenous leaders were not from Loreto but rather from the neighboring reduction of Corpus, which was in turn the result of a migration from another town, Nuestra Señora de la Natividad del Acaray that was destroyed and abandoned in 1633. The population of Acaray had been redistributed between Corpus and Itapúa, in the Paraná region. Describing a process that took place over a long period, this valuable source points to the influence of indigenous leadership on the territorial organization of the reductions. Despite the breakdown that took place during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the reductions preserved a detailed record of their previous migrations. The file containing the map offers no explanation of how this information was retained, but it can be assumed that, as with the case of the town of fugitive Indians referenced above, the strength of daily routines and the intensity of the social and economic practices of the missions, in combination with certain local elements, contributed to the creation of a spatially inscribed indigenous social memory that was reinforced through the exercise of skills such as writing and cartography. The indigenous population was directly involved in the creation, reproduction, distribution, collection, consultation, preservation, and transmission of texts and maps. All of these activities and practices contributed to solidifying a “mission memory” that persisted in the long term, even after the expulsion of the Jesuits in 1768. Three aspects stand out in the history of the process of conversion and missionary practice in frontier regions of South America: imposition, adaptation, and appropriation.

560   Borderlands of the Iberian World The impositions refer to actions undertaken by missionaries in the context of colonial regulations to create a new social, political, and cultural organization with the collaboration of members of the indigenous elite. They involved principally the standardization of language, the mapping of space, and the organization of the population into a hierarchy. As time passed, the establishment of institutions such as town councils, militias, and religious confraternities, activated the creation of new identities associated with the missionary context. Adaptation was also part of this process. Relying on “good judgment,” the Jesuits had to adjust their methods to local realities, incorporating aspects of native culture that did not threaten order in the reductions. They therefore tolerated certain indigenous acoustic and visual practices that were incorporated into the daily liturgy and the celebrations of the Christian calendar. Finally, indigenous people appropriated different aspects of the missionary regime, and developed them with a significant degree of autonomy. The Indians made use of practices such as writing and cartography for their own benefit, sometimes evading direct supervision by the priests. Imposition, adaptation, and appropriation together contributed to the creation of a “mission memory”; that is, specific regimes of spatial and temporal perception and subjectivity, resulting from the interactions between indigenous people and priests. In this theoretical framework, the consideration of space has multiple implications, from the practical organization of the territory, to the creation of a hierarchy of symbols and their distribution in concrete locations. The temporal considerations correspond to subjective experience of the daily routine and its rhythms. Finally, subjectivity relates specifically to the experience and representation of the body. The articulation of these three aspects of life make up a sui generis sensory “landscape” that underwent transformations over time.

Notes Archives AGNA:  Archivo General de la Nación, Buenos Aires (Argentina) Biblioteca Nacional do Brasil, Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) 1. Tamar Herzog, “Terres et déserts, société et sauvagerie. De la communauté en Amérique et en Castille à l´époque moderne.”Annales Histoire, Sciences Sociales 3 (2007): 509; Herbert Bolton, “The Mission as a Frontier Institution in the Spanish American Colonies,” American Historical Review 23, no. 1 (1917): 42–61. 2. Pedro Borges, Métodos misionales en la cristianización de América, siglo XVI (Madrid: CSIC, Departamento de Misionología Española, 1960); Magnus Mörner, Actividades políticas y económicas de los jesuitas en el Río de la Plata (Buenos Aires: Hyspamérica, 1985). The English version of Mörner’s dissertation is from 1953. Juan Carlos Garavaglia, Mercado interno y economía colonial. Tres siglos de la yerba mate (Mexico: Grijalbo, 1983); Ernesto Maeder, “La población de las Misiones de guaraníes (1641–1682). Reubicación de los pueblos y

Frontier Missions in South America   561 consecuencias demográficas,” Estudios Iberoamericanos 15, no. 1 (1989): 49–68; and Misiones del Paraguay, conflicto y disolución de la sociedad guaraní (Madrid: Ed. MAPFRE, 1992). 3. Bartomeu Melià, El guaraní conquistado y reducido. Ensayos de etnohistoria (Asunción: CEADUC, 1986); Branislava Susnik, Los aborígenes del Paraguay, vol. 2: Etnohistoria de los Guaraníes. Época colonial (Asunción: MEAB, 1979–1980). 4. Among the most representative works from recent years are Jonathan Hill, Rethinking History and Myth. Indigenous South American Perspectives on the Past (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988); Aurore Becquelin and Antoinette Molinié, Memoire de la tradition (Paris: Societé d´ethnologie, 1992); Bruce Albert and Alcida R. Ramos, Pacificando o Branco: Cosmologias do Contato no Norte-amazônico (Sao Paulo: UNESP, 2002); and Carlos Fausto and Michael Heckenberger, Time and Memory in Indigenous Amazonia. Anthropological Perspectives (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2007); Carlo Severi, El sendero y la voz: una antropología de la memoria (Buenos Aires: Editorial SB, 2010). 5. Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, A Inconstancia da Alma Selvagem (Sao Paulo: Cosac & Naify, 2002); Carlos Fausto, “Se Deus Fosse Jaguar: Canibalismo e Cristianismo entre os Guarani (Séculos XVI–XX),” Mana 11, no. 2 (2005): 385–418; Aparecida Vilaça and Robin Wright, ed., Native Christians: Modes and Effects of Christianity Among Indigenous Peoples of the Americas (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009). 6. Paula Montero, Deus na Aldeia. Missionários, Índios e Mediação (Sao Paulo: Globo, 2006); Cristina Pompa, Religião como Tradução: Missionários, Tupi e Tapuia no Brasil Colonial (Sao Paulo: EDUSC, ANPOCS, 2003). 7. David Weber, Bárbaros. Spaniards and Their Savages in the Age of Enlightenment (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005); David Weber and Jane Rausch, ed., Where Cultures Meet: Frontiers in Latin American History (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1994); Donna  J.  Guy and Thomas  E.  Sheridan, ed., Contested Ground: Comparative Frontiers on the Northern and Southern Edges of the Spanish Empire (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1998). Among the most recent work on frontier missions, see Salvador Bernabéu Albert, ed., El gran norte mexicano. Indios, misioneros y pobladores entre el mito y la historia (Seville: CSIC, 2009); Bernd Hausberger, “La conquista jesuita del noroeste novohispano,” Memoria Americana 12 (2004): 131–168; Arno Alvarez Kern and Robert H. Jackson, ed., Missoes Ibéricas Coloniais: da Califórnia ao Prata (Porto Alegre: Palier, 2006); Daniel Santamaria, Del tabaco al incienso. Reducción y conversión en las misiones jesuitas de las selvas sudamericanas. Siglos XVII y XVIII (Jujuy: CEIC, 1994). For a discussion of the idea of the frontier in English language historiography, see Jeremy Adelman and Stephen Aron, “From Borderlands to Borders: Empires, NationStates, and the Peoples in Between in North American History,” The American Historical Review 104, no. 3 (2011): 1–26. 8. Erick Langer and Robert Jackson, ed., The New Latin American Mission History (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995); David Block, Mission Culture on the Upper Amazon. Native Tradition, Jesuit Enterprise, & Secular Policy in Moxos, 1660–1880 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994); Cynthia Radding, Wandering Peoples: Colonialism, Ethnic Spaces, and Ecological Frontiers in Northwestern Mexico, 1700–1850 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), and Landscapes of Power and Identity: Comparative Histories in the Sonoran Desert and the Forests of Amazonia from Colony to Republic (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005); Roberto Tomichá Charupá, La primera evangelización en las reducciones de Chiquitos, Bolivia (1691–1767) (Cochabamba: Editorial Verbo Divino, 2002); Barbara Ganson, The Guarani Under Spanish Rule in the Rio de la Plata (Stanford: Stanford

562   Borderlands of the Iberian World University Press, 2003); Guillermo Wilde, Religión y poder en las misiones de Guaraníes (Buenos Aires: Editorial SB, 2009). Research on Portuguese South America has expanded considerably in the last decade, since the work of John Monteiro and his many followers. See especially John Monteiro, Negros da Terra: Índios e Bandeirantes nas Origens de São Paulo (Sao Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1994). On the relations between Indians in the reductions and their infidel counterparts see Diego Bracco, Charrúas, guenoas y guaraníes. Interacción y destrucción: indígenas en el Río de la Plata (Montevideo: Linardi y Risso, 2005); and Elisa F. Garcia, As Diversas Formas de Ser Índio. Políticas Indígenas e Políticas Indigenistas no Extremo Sul da América Portuguesa (Rio de Janeiro: Arquivo Nacional, 2009). 9. Pierre-Antoine Fabre and Bernard Vincent, ed., Missions religieuses modernes. “Notre Lieu est le monde” (Rome: École Française de Rome, 2007); Luke Clossey, Salvation and Globalization in the Early Jesuit Missions (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Elisabeta Corsi, ed., Órdenes religiosas entre América y Asia. Ideas para una historia misionera de los espacios coloniales (Mexico: El Colegio de México, 2008); Guillermo Wilde, ed., Saberes de la conversión. Jesuitas, indígenas e imperios coloniales en las fronteras de la cristiandad (Buenos Aires: Editorial SB, 2011); and Charlotte de Castelnau, Marie L. Copete, Aliocha Maldavsky, and Ines Zupanov, ed., Missions d´évangelisation et circulation des savoirs. XVIe–XVIIIe siècle (Madrid and Paris: Casa de Velasquez, EHESS, 2011). 10. Jonathan D. Hill, History, Power, and Identity: Ethnogenesis in the Americas, 1492–1992 (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1996), 1. For a conceptual synthesis see Stuart Schwartz and Frank Salomon, “New Peoples and New Kinds of People: Adaptations, Readjustment, and Ethnogenesis in South Amercian Indigenous Societies (Colonial Era),” in The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas, vol. 3: South America, ed. Frank Salomon and Stuart  B.  Schwartz (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 443–501; Guillaume Boccara, “Fronteras, mestizaje y etnogénesis en las Américas,” in Las fronteras hispano-criollas del mundo indígena latinoamericano en los siglos XVIII y XIX, ed. Raúl Mandrini and Carlos Paz (Neuquén: IEHS, Centro de Estudios Históricos Regionales-UNS, 2003), 63–108. 11. João Pacheco de Oliveira, “Uma Etnologia dos ‘Indios Misturados’? Situação Colonial, Territorialização e Fluxos Culturais,” Mana 4, no. 1 (1998): 47–77; Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991); R. Brian Ferguson and Neil L. Whitehead, ed., War in the Tribal Zone. Expanding States and Indigenous Warfare (Sante Fe: SAR Press, 1992); and Serge Gruzinski, The Mestizo Mind: The Intellectual Dynamics of Colonization and Globalization (New York: Routledge, 2002). 12. James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 7. In recent decades discussion of the domination-resistance dichotomy has been plentiful. See especially the work of Scott, and the critical propositions of Sherry  B.  Ortner, Anthropology and Social Theory: Culture, Power, and the Acting Subject (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006). For a discussion of this issue in relation to the politics of the Andean reductions, see Steven A. Wernke, Negotiated Settlements: Andean Communities and Landscapes under Inka and Spanish Colonialism (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2013). 13. Fernando Mires, La colonización de las almas: misión y conquista en Hispanoamérica (Buenos Aires: Libros de la Araucaria, 2007), 193. 14. Magnus Mörner, La corona española y los foráneos en los pueblos de indios de América (Madrid: Ediciones de Cultura Hispánica, AECI, 1999); Akira Saito, “Creation of Indian

Frontier Missions in South America   563 Republics in Spanish South America,” Bulletin of the National Museum of Ethnology 31, no. 4 (2007): 443–477. 15. Mires, La colonización, 193. On the Jesuits’ missionary activity in Peru see Aliocha Maldavsky, Vocaciones inciertas. Misión y misioneros en la provincia jesuita del Perú en los siglos XVI y XVII (Seville: CSIC, 2012). 16. Mörner, La corona española. 17. Most groups in the reductions in the Moxos region spoke languages of the Arawak linguistic group. But regardless of different ethnic affiliations, the missionaries called all of them “Mojos” and grouped them together in four towns: Loreto, Trinidad, San Ignacio and San Javier. In the Guaraní region there was also significant ethnic diversity, which tends to be simplified in Jesuit chronicles, especially the later ones that were more widely circulated. See, for example, the 1747 report by Manuel Querini and the Relación de Muriel from 1766, which identified different reductions with homogeneous ethnic groups. Guillermo Furlong, Manuel Querini S.J. y sus “Informes al Rey” 1747–1750 (Buenos Aires: Ediciones Theoria, 1967), and Domingo Muriel, S.J. y su Relación de las Misiones (1766) (Buenos Aires: Librería del Plata S.R.L., 1955). 18. Of the more than thirty languages recorded in the early period, only seven were spoken at the time the Jesuits were expelled. Akira Saito, “ ‘Fighting Against a Hydra’: Jesuit Language Policy in Moxos,” in Beyond Borders: A Global Perspective of Jesuit Mission History, ed. Shinzo Kawamura and Cyril Veliath (Tokyo: Sophia University Press, 2009), 352. 19. For the Guaraní instance see Bartomeu Melià, La lengua guaraní en el Paraguay colonial. La creación de un lenguaje cristiano en las reducciones de los guaraníes en el Paraguay (Asunción: CEPAG, 2003); Franz Obermeier and Leonardo Cerno, “Nuevos aportes de la lingüística para la investigación de documentos jesuíticos del siglo XVIII,” Folia Histórica del Nordeste 26 (2003): 33–56. 20. Tomichá Charupá, La primera evangelización, 186. 21. The Jesuit José Cardiel wrote in 1747 that in each town various “tribes” distinguished themselves by using names of the virgin and saints. These “tribes” were integrated by up to six leaders who each had “forty or more subjects” that accompanied them in work and specific tasks. José Cardiel, “Costumbres de los Guaraníes,” in Francisco Muriel, Historia del Paraguay desde 1747 a 1767 (Madrid: J. Suárez, 1919), 462–544, especially p. 474. 22. Saito, “Creation of Indian Republics,” 460. 23. For a detailed study of how power was wielded in the missions, and how different indigenous leaders interacted among themselves and with the Jesuits, see Wilde, Religión y poder. For a recent study based on a rigorous analysis of municipal registers, see Kazuhiza Takeda, “Cambio y continuidad del liderazgo indígena en el Cacicazgo y en la milicia de las misiones jesuíticas: Análisis cualitativos de las listas de indios guaraníes,” Tellus 12, no. 23 (2012): 59–79. See also Julia Sarreal, “Caciques as Placeholders in the Guaraní Missions of Eighteenth Century Paraguay,” Colonial Latin American Review 23, no. 2 (2014): 224–251. 24. Corregidor can be rendered as a governor and his lieutenant; alcalde is a magistrate of the first and second vote; alcaldes de hermandad would be brotherhood magistrates; alférez real is a standard bearer; regidores (“those who rule”) are simply council members; mayordomo is an overseer or warden who oversaw labor and the warehousing of mission produce; alguaciles had a policing function; secretario was a literate officer who kept records. 25. A post-Jesuit source shows the rationality of this organization’s management of the indigenous population: “Each chiefdom lives in the towns in Compounds or rows of houses of equal size and proportion, covered with tile, with corridors on all sides that serve as

564   Borderlands of the Iberian World walkways: These separate compounds with equal distances between them make up the streets, and form a Plaza; each Compound is divided into several small rooms, and each is occupied by a family belonging to that chiefdom, and depending on its size it may have more or less space in the Compounds. When the Chief is asked what Mboyas he has, he replies, “I have so many rows of houses, or Compounds, so that the number can be judged.” Julio Cesar González, “Un Informe del gobernador de Misiones, don Francisco Bruno de Zavala, sobre el estado de los treinta pueblos,” Boletín del Instituto de Investigaciones Históricas 25, nos. 85–88 (1941): 162. 26. Libro de Preceptos (Book of precepts), Jesuit rule in the mission towns. Precepts of our Fathers General and Provincial immediately relevant to the Fathers Provincial who live in the Doctrines, on various subjects, with statements. Archivo General de la Nación, Buenos Aires, Argentina (hereafter AGNA), sala VII, Colección Biblioteca Nacional, Leg. 140, 31. 27. Cartas Anuas de la Provincia Jesuítica del Paraguay, 1641 a 1643, intr. Ernesto J. A. Maeder (Resistencia: IIGHI-CONICET, 1996), Documentos de Geohistoria Regional, vol. 11. 28. Guillermo Furlong, Juan Escandón y su carta a Burriel (1760) (Buenos Aires: Ediciones Theoria, 1965), 88–89. 29. Libro de Preceptos, 44. 30. Libro de Preceptos, 31v. 31. Martín María Morales, A mis manos han llegado. Cartas de los PP. Generales a la Antigua Provincia del Paraguay (1608–1639) (Madrid-Roma: IHSI, Universidad Pontificia de Comillas, 2005), 508. 32. Furlong, Juan Escandón, 96. 33. Mónica Martini, El indio y los sacramentos en Hispanoamérica colonial. Circunstancias adversas y malas interpretaciones (Buenos Aires: PRHISCO-CONICET, 1993). 34. Ramón Gutiérrez, Evolución urbanística y arquitectónica del Paraguay, 1537–1911 (Corrientes: Departamento de Historia de la Arquitectura-UNNE, 1974), 125. 35. Darko Sustersic, Templos jesuítico-guaraníes (Buenos Aires: Instituto de Teoría e Historia del Arte “Julio E. Payró,” FFyL-UBA, 1999). 36. For further analysis of the angels with maracas in this frieze, see Guillermo Wilde, “El enigma sonoro de Trinidad: ensayo de etnomusicología histórica,” Revista Resonancias 23 (2008): 41–66. For a detailed description of music and dance activity in the missions, see Kristin Dutcher Mann and Drew Edward Davies, “Musical Cultures of the Ibero-American Borderlands,” in The Oxford Handbook of Borderlands of the Iberian World, ed. Danna A. Levin Rojo and Cynthia Radding, 525–543 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019). 37. Furlong, Juan Escandón, 102. 38. See Mann and Davies, “Musical Cultures” for a more comprehensive view of these ­practices. For a discussion of the solemnization of ritual, see Guillermo Wilde, “The Sounds of Indigenous Ancestors. Music, Corporality and Memory in the Jesuit Missions of Colonial South America,” in The Oxford Handbook of Music Censorship, ed. Patricia Hall (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017 [digital ed. 2015]). On the relationship of music and power, Guillermo Wilde, “Toward a Political Anthropology of Mission Sound: Paraguay in the 17th and 18th Centuries.” Music & Politics 1, no. 2 (2007). Accessed August 16, 2016, http://dx.doi.org/10.3998/mp.9460447.0001.204. 39. The Jesuit Julián Knogler, “Relato sobre el país y la nación de los chiquitos en las Indias Occidentales o América del Sud, y las misiones en su territorio, redactado para un amigo [1772],” in Las misiones jesuíticas entre los chiquitanos, ed. Werner Hoffmann (Buenos Aires: FECIC, 1979), 119–185, 160, refers to the persistence of certain dances that

Frontier Missions in South America   565 entertained the Indians, which continued because they represented no threat to Christianity: “If there were anything of that kind in that custom, it could not be a true and lasting source of pleasure, according to the principles of good judgment.” 40. José Cardiel, “Breve relación de las misiones del Paraguay,” in Pablo Hernández, Misiones del Paraguay—Organización social de las doctrinas guaraníes de la Compañía de Jesús, vol. 2, (Barcelona: Gustavo Gili, 1913), 514–614, 566–567. 41. On musical practice in the missions, see Bernardo Illari, “El sonido de la misión: práctica de ejecución e identidad en las reducciones de la Provincia del Paraguay,” in Música colonial iberoamericana: interpretaciones en torno a la práctica de ejecución y ejecución de la práctica. Actas del V Encuentro Científico Simposio Internacional de Musicología, comp. Victor Rondón (Santa Cruz de la Sierra: APAC, 2004); Leonardo Waisman, “La contribución indígena a la música misional en Mojos (Bolivia).” Memoria Americana. Cuadernos de Etnohistoria 12 (2004): 11–38. 42. Akira Saito, “Art and Christian Conversion in the Jesuit Missions on the Spanish South American Frontier,” in Anthropological Studies of Christianity and Civilization, ed. Sugimoto Yoshio (Osaka: National Museum of Ethnology, 2006), 177, 179. (Senri Ethnological Studies 62). 43. Anton Sepp, Continuación de las labores apostólicas (Buenos Aires: EUDEBA, 1973), 270. 44. Leonhardt, quoted in Darko Sustersic, “Las Imágenes conquistadoras. Un nuevo lenguaje figurativo en las misiones del Paraguay,” Suplemento Antropológico 60, no. 2 (2005): 151–194, 168. 45. For an integrated approach to the different aspects of Jesuit mission style in Paraguay, see Josefina Plá, El barroco hispano-guaraní (Asunción: Editorial del Centenario S.R.L., 1975). As with the visual arts, musical performance adaptations, which some sources describe in detail, were common and reveal the necessity to adjust to contextual preferences and limitations. 46. Bernardo Nusdoffer, Población nueba de los fugitibos en el Ybera, en 1736. Biblioteca Nacional do Brasil, Coleção de Angelis I-29-4-59. 47. For a discussion of the concepts of “material religion” and “practicing religion” see articles included in Robert A. Orsi, The Cambridge Companion to Religious Studies (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Caroline W. Bynum, Christian Materiality: An Essay on Religion in Late Medieval Europe (New York: Zone Books, 2011), and David Morgan, The Embodied Eye: Religious Visual Culture and the Social Life of Feeling (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012). 48. On the Guaraní reduction of Asunción del Mbororé, a letter reports: “the good Priest was very pleased with this, seeing that his efforts were not in vain since so many souls could be saved [ . . . ] the members of the congregation helped him physically, since he had shown them how to perform a baptism.” Carta Ânua da Província Jesuítica do Paraguai. 1659–1662 (Sao Leopoldo: Editora UNISINOS, 2008), 84–85. 49. Javier Matienzo et al., Chiquitos en las Cartas Anuas de la Compañía de Jesús (1691–1767) (Cochabamba: Itinerarios Editorial, 2011), 224, 260–261. 50. Matienzo et al, Chiquitos, 224. 51. Matienzo et al, Chiquitos, 267. 52. Matienzo et al, Chiquitos, 265–266. 53. Among the antiphons of the Virgin, the most prevalent in Chiquitos was the Salve Regina, used in processions. In the Chiquitos Archive there are also nine Loreto litanies. Among the hymns to the virgin, Leonardo Waisman, “¡Viva María!” La música para la Virgen en

566   Borderlands of the Iberian World las misiones de Chiquitos,” Latin American Music Review 13, no. 2 (1992): 213–225 includes small motets (or arias) and songs in which the rhythm and phrasing are dominated by text, as well as sequences such as the Stabat Mater, masses and magnificat, and prayers to the Virgin (included among the “offertories”). On the diffusion of the devotion to the Virgin of Loreto in Europe and New Spain from a visual perspective, see Luisa Elena Alcalá, “Blanqueando la Loreto mexicana. Prejuicios sociales y condicionantes materiales en la representación de virgenes negras,” in La imagen religiosa en la monarquía hispánica. Usos y espacios, ed. María Cruz de Carlos, Felipe Pereda, Cecile Vincent-Cassy, and Pierre Civil (Madrid: Casa de Velázquez, 2008), 171–193. For a thorough discussion of the virgin’s presence in the colonial frontier, see Clara Bargellini, “The Virgin of El Zape and Jesuit Missions in Nueva Vizcaya,” in The Oxford Handbook of Borderlands of the Iberian World, ed. Danna A. Levin Rojo and Cynthia Radding, 489–508 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019). 54. Sieglinde Falkinger, Anauxti Jesucristo Mariaboka. Manual de Sermones (Santa Cruz de la Sierra: Fondo Editorial APAC, 2010); Perla Chinchilla, El sermón de misión y su tipología: antología de sermones en español, náhuatl e italiano (Mexico: Universidad Iberoamericana, 2013). 55. Eduardo Neumann, Letra de índio. Cultura Escrita, Comunicação e Memoria Indígena nas Reduções di Paraguai (Sao Paulo: Nhanduti, 2015), and “Razón gráfica y escritura indígena en las reducciones guaraníticas,” in Guillermo Wilde, ed., Saberes de la conversión. Jesuitas, indígenas e imperios coloniales en las fronteras de la cristiandad. 56. Akira Saito, “Las misiones y la administración del documento: el caso de Mojos, siglos XVIII–XX,” in Usos del documento y cambios sociales en la historia de Bolivia, ed. Clara López Beltrán and Akira Saito (Osaka: National Museum of Ethnology, 2005): 27–72. 5 7. Ricardo González, “Textos e imágenes para la salvación: la edición misionera de la diferencia entre lo temporal y eterno.” ArtCultura, Uberlândia 11, 18 (2009): 137–158. Guillermo Wilde, “The Political Dimension of Space-Time Categories in the Jesuit Missions of Paraguay (17th and 18th Centuries),” in Space and Conversion in Global Perspective, ed. Giuseppe Marcocci, Wietse De Boer, Aliocha Maldavsky, and Ilaria Pavan (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 175–213. 58. Melià, La lengua guaraní. 59. For a reproduction of this map see Guillermo Furlong, Cartografía jesuítica del Río de la Plata (Buenos Aires: FFyL-IIH-UBA, 1936), plate XLVII, 122, n. 1º 2. 60. Artur Barcelos, “El saber cartográfico indígena entre los guaraníes de las misiones jesuíticas,” in Guillermo Wilde ed., Saberes de la conversión. Jesuitas, indígenas e imperios coloniales en las fronteras de la cristiandad. 61. Artur Barcelos, “O Mergulho no Seculum: Exploração, Conquista e Organização Espacial Jesuítica na América Espanhola Colonial” (PhD diss., Pontificia Universidade Católica de Rio Grande do Sul, 2006), 369. 62. The Mission Town Administrator General Don Juan Angel Lazcano versus Don Josef de Velasco, for having taken a part of the yerba from the yerba plantations in the town of Loreto, 1773. AGNA, Sala IX, legajo 40.2.5, 43. 63. AGNA, Sala IX, file 40.2.5. Although these practices might be compared with the creation of land titles and the codexes of New Spain at least with respect to their uses, it should be emphasized that in the region examined there was no tradition of writing or pictography before the conquest. Map making was developed entirely in the setting of the missions. Even so, the visual elements described suggest the sui generis nature of indigenous cartography in this region.

Frontier Missions in South America   567

Bibliography Block, David. Mission Culture on the Upper Amazon. Native Tradition, Jesuit Enterprise, & Secular Policy in Moxos, 1660–1880. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994. Bolton, Herbert. “The Mission as a Frontier Institution in the Spanish American Colonies.” American Historical Review 23, no. 1 (1917): 42–61. Furlong, Guillermo. Juan Escandón y su carta a Burriel (1760). Buenos Aires: Ediciones Theoria, 1965. Mann, Kristin Dutcher, and Drew Edward Davies, “Musical Cultures of the Ibero-American Borderlands,” in The Oxford Handbook of Borderlands of the Iberian World, ed. Danna A. Levin Rojo and Cynthia Radding, 525–543 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019). Matienzo, Javier, Roberto Tomichá Charupá, Isabelle Combès, and Carlos Page. Chiquitos en las Cartas Anuas de la Compañía de Jesús (1691–1767). Cochabamba: Itinerarios Editorial, 2011. Melià, Bartomeu. El guaraní conquistado y reducido. Ensayos de etnohistoria. Asunción: CEADUC, 1986. Melià, Bartomeu. La lengua guaraní en el Paraguay colonial. La creación de un lenguaje cristiano en las reducciones de los guaraníes en el Paraguay. Asunción: CEPAG, 2003. Mires, Fernando. La colonización de las almas: misión y conquista en Hispanoamérica. Buenos Aires: Libros de la Araucaria, 2007. Mörner, Magnus. La corona española y los foráneos en los pueblos de indios de América. Madrid: Ediciones de Cultura Hispánica, AECI, 1999. Saito, Akira. “Creation of Indian Republics in Spanish South America.” Bulletin of the National Museum of Ethnology 31, no. 4 (2007): 443–477. Tomichá Charupá, Roberto. La primera evangelización en las reducciones de Chiquitos, Bolivia (1691–1767). Cochabamba: Editorial Verbo Divino, 2002. Wilde, Guillermo. Religión y poder en las misiones de guaraníes. Buenos Aires: Editorial SB, 2009. Wilde, Guillermo, ed. Saberes de la conversión. Jesuitas, indígenas e imperios coloniales en las fronteras de la cristiandad. Buenos Aires: Editorial SB, 2011.

Shifting Territories and Enduring Peoples in the Iberian American Borderlands

chapter 23

Bor der l a n ds of Bon dage Andrés Reséndez

Historians working in various borderlands of the Americas have recognized the importance of Indian slavery to the story of Europe’s overseas expansion. They have shown the ubiquity of the institution, described how Europeans procured and exploited Native Americans, studied the role of Indian groups as intermediaries and slavers, and examined the webs of alliances and exchanges linking European and native communities in kaleidoscopic patterns of violence and cooperation.1 These scholars have made clear that Indian slavery matters not only because of its prevalence (more common than generally believed) and centrality to the colonial enterprise (arguably as crucial as African slavery) but also because it offers a privileged vantage point from which one can gain insight into the dynamics of borderlands. For instance, through the lens of indigenous enslavement glimpses of various imperial and national projects become visible. At the same time the real limits of state power are shown in distant colonial settings and contested areas, where Indians emerge in multiple guises as captives, middlemen, and traffickers. Although all European powers participated in the Indian slave trade and took native slaves, not all relied on them to the same degree. The French enslaved thousands of Indians over a vast area stretching through eastern Canada, the Western Great Lakes and Upper Mississippi as Brett Rushforth has shown.2 Something similar can be said about the British Empire in the Americas. Alan Gallay has estimated that between twenty-­ four thousand and fifty-one thousand natives were sold into slavery in the Carolinas during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.3 Brazil was a far more significant slaving area, perhaps accounting for one-fifth of all Indian slaves taken in the New World.4 Still, it can well be argued that Spain became the leading slaving power due to the sheer enormity and human density of its colonies. Spain was to Indian slavery what Portugal and England were to African slavery.

572   Borderlands of the Iberian World

A Dynamic Institution Thanks to the work of many scholars, there is now a wealth of information about Indian enslavement in Spanish America. Although not all the details are clear, the main lines of this story are straightforward enough. During the first half of the sixteenth century Indian slavery was common in all areas of Spanish colonization. This occurred in spite of a series of regulations—starting at least since 1496 and culminating with the famous New Laws of 1542—that increasingly curtailed Indian slavery as Antonio Rumeu de Armas, Esteban Mira Caballos, and others have shown.5 Queen Isabella of Castile, for instance, opposed Columbus’s plan of sending shipments of Indians to Spain to be sold as slaves in order to defray the growing costs of the expeditions of colonization. However, the Crown’s early opposition to Indian slavery was not absolute. Instead, the Catholic monarchs made exceptions to the general policy against Indian slavery in response to pressures from colonists and officials posted in the New World and to keep viable the enterprise of colonization. European colonists were permitted to keep Indians who were deemed cannibalistic as legal slaves (1503). Similarly, Spaniards were allowed to enslave Indians acquired through “Just Wars” (1504) as well as those who had been “ransomed” (i.e., purchased) from other Indians (1506). These well-known exceptions rendered the royal antislavery policy largely ineffective. A growing consensus among scholars is that during the first half of the sixteenth century more Indian slaves were taken in the Spanish Empire than in any other fifty-year period.6 The Caribbean offers the most dramatic example of this phenomenon. Even though smallpox and other illnesses took a terrible tall on the Taíno population, man-made factors such as enslavement and the forcible relocation of Indian peoples from one place to another played a major role in the rapid demographic collapse of the early Caribbean, as demographer Massimo Livi Bacci has ably shown.7 To supply the labor demands of Spanish enterprises in the Caribbean in the face of this population loss, indigenous workers and entire families were forcibly relocated from mainland New Spain to the Spanish Antilles, as Jason Yaremko has shown in detail for Cuba.8 The Spanish Crown responded to this cataclysmic fifty-year cycle of Indian enslavement by promulgating the New Laws of 1542. The New Laws categorically forbade Indian slavery and closed off all previous loopholes: “We order and command that from this time forward, for no cause rather war or any other, even though it were a rebellion, nor for ransom or in any other way no indian can be made a slaver, and we want them to be treated as our vassals of the Crown of Castille, as they actually are.”9 Although one may be tempted to dismiss the New Laws of 1542 as another example of Spain’s legal culture— long on idealistic declarations and short on enforcement—a fair assessment of the situation on the ground reveals that the Spanish Crown was very serious about enforcement, at least during the mid-sixteenth century. In the Iberian Peninsula, where upwards of 2,500 Indians were held as slaves by 1550, the New Laws paved the way for Native Americans to sue their masters and gain their freedom in dramatic courtroom proceedings as detailed in recent works by Mira Caballos and Nancy E. van Deusen.10

Borderlands of Bondage   573 In Spanish America the enforcement of the New Laws proved extremely controversial. Still, the Spanish Crown persevered with variable results. In Central America, for instance, the antislavery crusade succeeded for some time. The president of the newly created Audiencia de los Confines, Alonso López de Cerrato, took the law seriously. He embarked on blanket liberations as described by the members of the cabildo of Guatemala: The first thing he did was to have it announced that all those who had slaves should bring them before the Audiencia [. . .] and notwithstanding that the vecinos claimed to have had the slaves for a long time in this area possessing them as slaves who were branded with the iron of Your Majesty; and having bought them at public auctions (and other places as well), and having engaged in exchanging them, one for another, as is done with slaves; and that many of them are from the slaves that the officials of Your Majesty sold from the [royal] quintos—without any one of those Indians ­asking for liberty, the licenciado Cerrato order them set free.

Writing some sixty years after the fact, the Dominican chronicler Antonio de Remesal remarked that Spanish colonists, who had previously had forty or fifty servants, were left without any Indians as servants or porters, nor did they have any means to obtain chopped wood or water. Yet, even this emancipationist victory was short lived, as the excellent work by William L. Sherman makes abundantly clear. In the waning decades of the sixteenth century the abolitionist ardor ran its course, and the Spanish colonists were able to reassert their claims to Indian labor.11 The Spanish Crown also waged its antislavery crusade in New Spain. But here the main official charged with liberating the Indians, Bartolomé Melgarejo, turned out to be a professor at the Pontifical University of Mexico given to complex reasoning, fine distinctions, and considering each case on its own merits. The result was endless litigation, gridlock, and invidious distinctions between Indian slaves held legally and illegally. Rather than a categorical liberation as stipulated in the New Laws of 1542 and carried out in Central America, in New Spain the procurador de indios Melgarejo took into consideration the massive indigenous insurrection generally known as the Mixtón war (1540–1542) in western Mexico and the silver strikes of the 1540s and 1550s such that he liberated some Indians but left most of them in bondage, as the classic work of Silvio Zavala has shown.12 In other areas Spanish colonists requested extraordinary exceptions to the ban against Indian slavery. The mechanics of this process are quite evident in the case of Chile. Relations between Spanish colonists and Indians were never peaceful. When the Spanish first entered this part of South America in the middle of the sixteenth century, the Mapuche were a semi-nomadic people with stone tools and lacking beasts of burden. But in half a century of hard-won experience, they acquired steel lances, horses, and the knowledge to fight Europeans with their own weapons. Thus reinforced, the Mapuches fought back. This conflict reached a high point on Christmas day of 1598 when a group of Mapuches spied the Spanish governor who was touring an unsettled area with a small entourage. They descended on the governor’s camp, killed most of the Europeans, beheaded the governor, and in the next weeks carried his head on a pike through one

574   Borderlands of the Iberian World Mapuche community after another. As it turned out, the head belonged to one of the most illustrious Spaniards of that era. Governor Martín García de Loyola had been the nephew of Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Jesuit Order, and a hero of the wars of Peru best remembered for leading the advance column that captured the last Inca emperor, Tupac Amaru.13 Within days of the governor’s slaying, the principal civil and religious authorities of Chile gathered at the cathedral of the city of Santiago. With “tears in his eyes and great emotion” one of the leading colonists recounted “the sad event of the death of His Excellency the governor and of the more than thirty persons who were with him.” Then a Jesuit priest read aloud a tract that had been hastily composed in the days leading up to the gathering. The Treatise on the Importance and Utility of Giving the Rebellious Indians as Slaves constitutes a model of how to demonize an indigenous people. It was well received in a crowd that already harbored a mixture of alarm, outrage, and desire for vengeance. The document’s principal aim was to prove the barbarity and treachery of the Mapuche Indians: “If these our enemies, have condemned the entire Spanish nation to a cruel death, for they do not spare the lives of anyone whom they apprehend, why would it not be legal for us to condemn all of them to slavery which is a lesser evil than death?”14 The clamor for the legalization of Indian slavery soon reached the ears of the Spanish king. Philip III considered the grave situation of Chile and, after consulting theologians in Lima and Madrid, decided to strip the Mapuches of the customary royal protection against enslavement. “[The Indians of Chile] have devastated towns and cities, they have torn down and desecrated churches, and they have killed many friars as well as Governor Martín García de Loyola”—read his fateful decree of 1608—“and I declare that all Indian men older than ten and women older than nine [. . .] can be made into slaves and as such can be sold and disposed as you wish.” Without delving further into the details of this story, suffice it to say that even though Jesuit Luis de Valdivia conducted the public reading of Melchor Calderón’s Tratado de la importancia y utilidad que hay en dar por esclavos a los indios rebelados en Chile and seemed to have been in agreement with the plan at the time, he subsequently changed his mind. Emboldened by the royal sanction, slavers launched raids and brought so many slaves that colonists who had earlier favored enslavement subsequently opposed it. At their urging, Philip III decreed that the war in Chile should be “defensive” only while maintaining the 1608 order in force. In contrast, Philip IV and his ministers expanded the conflict in Chile by ordering “an offensive war in the same way that it used to be waged before the King our lord and my father (may his soul rest in peace) stopped it and made it defensive only. And in particular you will make sure that all Indians captured in the war will be distributed as slaves.”15 In short, the New Laws of 1542 posed a major problem to Spanish colonists throughout the Americas who had long relied on enslaved Indian labor. Different regions coped with this formidable challenge in somewhat different ways. But a common and significant result was the increasing reliance on alternative labor institutions, conditions, and terms that allowed owners to formally comply with the royal ban against Indian slavery while retaining control over Indian laborers.

Borderlands of Bondage   575 The case that has been studied the most is that of the encomienda system. Encomiendas were grants of Indians awarded by viceroys, governors, and sometimes Audiencias (High Courts) to meritorious colonists. Encomienda Indians were required to give tribute in specie or sometimes in labor and, in return, the encomendero oversaw the religious conversion and well-being of the Indians under his care. First introduced in the early Caribbean, the encomienda system subsequently expanded to the mainland acquiring different modalities and characteristics in the process. In central Mexico, for instance, encomienda Indians remained in their communities, under their own indigenous authorities, and were paid mostly in tribute rather than labor. It was not tantamount to slavery as the pioneering work by Charles Gibson has shown. But in northern New Spain, where Spaniards received nomadic or semi-nomadic Indians with little or no agricultural surpluses in encomienda, the only way to profit was by extracting labor from them in circumstances that were not too different from slavery (i.e., colonists made entradas to subdue Indians whom they subsequently requested as encomiendas and then exploited in their ranches and mines as documented by Eugenio del Hoyo, Cecilia Sheridan, Chantal Cramaussel, Susan Deeds, Carlos Manuel Valdés, and others).16 The New Laws of 1542 banned the granting of new encomiendas. But unlike the prohibition against Indian slavery that remained in force, in the case of the encomienda the Spanish Crown ultimately backed down and allowed the system to continue. Grants of Indians continued to be made in New Spain until the 1670s and even later in other parts of the New World. Another labor institution employed by colonists to retain Indian labor without resorting to outright enslavement was the repartimiento. Like the encomienda, the repartimiento originated in the early Caribbean where two terms were sometimes used interchangeably to refer to Indians “distributed” or “entrusted” to colonists. But by the second half of the sixteenth century, and for the next two hundred years, the repartimiento referred to a system of draft labor used in many parts of the New World. Like the encomienda, the repartimiento acquired specific characteristics in different contexts. The system was generally set into motion by mine or hacienda owners or other private individuals requesting Indians to perform specified tasks from colonial authorities. The jueces repartidores or some other officials then approved or denied the requests and proceeded to draft the workers (both men and women) from Indian settlements, missions, and other communities. In theory, the system was regulated to prevent abuse: the draft could not last more than six weeks, for instance, and the draftees needed to be paid set salaries. But in reality abuse and exploitation were frequent, whether in the drafting of the Indians or in the length of the service, the compensation, and the overall working conditions.17 Quite significantly, in New Spain the repartimiento gained in importance in the aftermath of the promulgation and early enforcement of the New Laws and became a major form of coerced Indian labor in the seventeenth and, to a lesser extent, in the eighteenth centuries. A somewhat analogous institution that arose also in the aftermath of the New Laws but in South America was the mita. The mita was a system of compulsory draft labor used in pre-contact times and systematized by Viceroy Francisco de Toledo in 1572–1573

576   Borderlands of the Iberian World to extract silver and mercury from the mines of Potosí, Huancavelica, and Cailloma. More than two hundred Indian communities in what are now Peru and Bolivia were required to send one seventh of their adult population to work in the mines. Although the mita evolved with the passage of time, this massive compulsory draft system at the heart of South America lasted until the very end of the colonial period.18 Three additional labor institutions functioned like slavery even if by another name: convict leasing, naborías/laboríos, and debt peonage. Convict leasing was a general practice rather than an institution specifically mentioned in the archival record. During the colonial period frontier captains and colonists at large made entradas into remote areas, took Indian captives, tried them for real or imagined crimes, sentenced them to five, ten, fifteen, or even twenty years of service; and finally awarded “the service” rather than the person (to preserve the legal fiction) to anyone willing to pay for it. The Chichimec Wars raged through northern New Spain during much of the sixteenth century, giving ample opportunity to frontier captains like Luis de Carbajal, Gaspar Castaño de Sosa, Diego Pérez de Luxán, and many others to capture Indians and profit from convict leasing. In the seventeenth century New Mexico’s Governor Juan Manso (1656–1659) even systematized the process by issuing a “definitive death sentence against the entire Apache nation and others of the same ilk” and giving out certificates allowing the bearers to keep captured Apaches “in deposit” for a specified number of years.19 The term naborías/laboríos was used to describe widely different labor arrangements. In the early Caribbean naborías were servants attached to specific Spanish overlords for life. Naborías were almost identical to slaves except that they could not be sold or traded away. One can find documentation on naborías in the Caribbean, Venezuela, and Peru at least into the 1550s.20 In the seventeenth century the term indios naboríos (or laboríos) was extended to all servants residing permanently in the haciendas of Nueva Vizcaya and elsewhere in northern New Spain. These naboríos/laboríos were attached to the haciendas, so when the haciendas were sold these Indians stayed with the property and worked for the new owner.21 Debt peonage existed since the early colonial period. As early as 1587 an Indian from Turicato, Michoacán named Juan Vázques testified to show how some Spaniards had given him money “at a far higher price than it was worth and then seized my possessions and took me and my wife and children, and they have kept us locked up for twelve years, moving us from one obraje to another.”22 Nearly a century later, the Recopilación de las leyes de indias of 1680 still warned against “locking up Indian women and forcing them to spin yarn and do knitting on account of the tribute owed by their husbands.”23 The evidence suggests that debt peonage spread particularly during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as owners advanced credit to unsuspecting laborers to bind them to their haciendas, mines, and other businesses at a time when encomiendas, repartimientos, naborías, and other arrangements to obtain coerced labor were no longer available.24 Scholars of the colonial period have long recognized that Spanish America was characterized by a spectrum of labor practices running from freedom to unfreedom with many degrees in between. What is less obvious is that these parallel labor arrangements were not permanent or inevitable but rather deliberate inventions, adaptations, and

Borderlands of Bondage   577 manipulations by owners and Crown officials bent on exploiting Indians without breaking the law. Contemporaries were well aware that these alternative labor arrangements frequently amounted to enslavement by another name. Writing in 1613 and taking stock of the entire sixteenth century, the famous Franciscan friar Juan de Torquemada remarked how the Spanish king had issued multiple royal orders in the 1530s, 1540s, and 1550s prohibiting the use of encomienda Indians as laborers in the mines or burdening them with personal services, and yet such practices had remained so widespread that “a multitude of Indians have been consumed as we can see all too clearly.” Similarly, various Jesuit priests expressed their opinion with regard to the merits of the repartimiento system in 1584. Gaspar de Recarte flatly stated that the repartimiento was “an illicit and evil practice that rendered Indians into slaves of the Spaniards” while Antonio Rubio and Pedro de Hortigosa expressed the more cautious opinion that, even though the repartimiento appeared to be illicit “considering that Indians were as free as the Spaniards,” nonetheless it was necessary “because the number of Spaniards in New Spain were not enough to do all the work and the Indians would not do the work willingly and therefore needed to be compelled.”25 Crown officials were no less critical. In 1597 Viceroy of New Spain don Gaspar de Zúñiga y Azevedo became persuaded that the repartimiento system was so abusive that it was necessary to revamp it completely. Favorably impressed by the mita system of Peru, Viceroy Zúñiga proposed to lengthen the repartimiento duty from six weeks to one year in the belief that it would result in fewer draftees and less overall travel and would therefore be less disruptive. However, other officials were skeptical about lengthening the repartimiento service on the grounds that it would make the drafting process a lot more difficult, force the draftee to take his wife and children along who would also be subjected to the whims of the mine owner in exchange for food, and that the long absence from their home communities would encourage local leaders to appropriate the draftees’ houses, land, and other property left behind. The high-level discussion about how to adjust the repartimiento system conducted in New Spain at the turn of the seventeenth century reveals two things: first, that Crown officials and ecclesiastics were well aware that the repartimiento was downright abusive and highly coercive; and second, that these officials sought to adjust and adapt the system to comply with the laws but without disrupting the viceroyalty’s economy.26 An even clearer illustration is that of the mita system in Peru. The royal instructions given to Viceroy Francisco de Toledo were clear and worth quoting at length: Given that the mines of Peru cannot be exploited using Spanish laborers, since those who are there will not work in them, and as it is said that [black] slaves cannot withstand the work, owing to the nature and coldness of the land, it appears necessary to employ the Indians. Though these are not to be forced or compelled, as has already been ordered, they must be attracted with all just and reasonable means, so that there will be the required number of laborers for the mines. To this end, it seems that great care must be given to the settlement of large numbers of Indians in nearby towns and estates, so that they might more easily apply themselves to the work involved.27

578   Borderlands of the Iberian World Thus instructed, Viceroy Toledo proceeded to institute a massive labor draft beginning in 1573. But even after having mobilized tens of thousands of Indians in the 1570s and 1580s, Viceroy Toledo was unsure about the legality of the compulsory draft system. He repeatedly asked for confirmation from King Philip II. And yet the Spanish king and his councilors refused to confirm Toledo’s labor draft system for more than fifteen years. As Jeffrey Cole notes, Philip II finally confirmed the mita system in 1589, prompted by the high cost of annexing Portugal, his desire to quell an insurrection in the Netherlands, and various other international and domestic entanglements that made the silver of Potosí indispensable.28 These and many other examples indicate that the ban on Indian slavery in Spanish America after 1542 resulted in the proliferation of alternative labor arrangements such as the encomienda in frontier areas, repartimiento, mita, convict leasing, naborías/laboríos, debt peonage, and others meant to procure forced Indian labor while outwardly complying with the law. Not all of these labor arrangements were equally coercive. But virtually all of them shared four key elements that made them akin to enslavement: (1) forcible removal of Native Americans from one place to another, (2) inability to leave the workplace, in some instances, (3) threat of violence to get compliance, and (4) little or no pay. These constantly changing labor arrangements arose out of similar pressures, resulted from conscious invention and manipulation by Crown officials, shared a number of traits that made all of them akin to slavery, and therefore can be viewed as  a  unified system of labor coercion that Andrés Reséndez refers to broadly as “the other slavery.”29

How Many Indian Slaves? Is it possible to count the Indian slaves in the Americas since the time of Columbus? And, if so, who should be counted as a slave? One possibility is to include only Native Americans clearly labeled as such in the documentation. This number would be significant, probably in excess of one million. Yet, it can be argued that hewing so closely to the slavery label would undercount significantly the number of Indians who were actually in bondage. The colonial labor terminology ended up obfuscating the full scope of indigenous exploitation. Therefore, a far more challenging but more realistic way to conduct this census is to make fundamental distinctions about slavery and freedom within the many labor categories ascribed to Indians and across time and space. This may seem like a quixotic enterprise. But contemporaries, not only officials and ecclesiastics but above all the victims of the colonial labor regime themselves, made such fundamental distinctions constantly. Encomienda Indians, indebted servants, leased convicts, and many others frequently described their condition as “slave-like” or “worse than slavery” and yearned to be “free.” When thinking about the colonial regime, historians in the twenty-first century may conceive of a broad spectrum of labor conditions more or less coercive, but those who lived at the time were more definite about their circumstances.30

Borderlands of Bondage   579 Precisely because it is so difficult to disentangle Indian slavery from various related forms of native forced labor, scholars have opted to deal with this problem in a piecemeal fashion, studying individual labor categories—often in a specific region and a limited time frame—but without offering a sense of the larger whole. The result has been a dizzying portrait with extremely rich detail and variation at the local, regional, and viceregal levels. Although this portrait reveals a great layering of different eras, the general contours and overall trajectories of Indian enslavement remain difficult to discern. This state of affairs stands in stark contrast to the historiography on African slavery. In the 1970s and 1980s various scholars began assembling data on slaves and slave voyages independently from one another, often pursuing the subject along imperial or national lines, but by the end of that period they had gathered a dataset of some eleven thousand individual transatlantic voyages. In the 1990s David Eltis and Stephen Behrendt began the process of assembling a single multisource dataset of transatlantic slave voyages that has blossomed into the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, an online resource freely available that contains information about more than thirty-five thousand slave voyages and the forcible transportation of some 12.5 million Africans to the New World between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. Anyone working on the history of transatlantic slavery today is able to download information about gender and age breakdowns, ports of origin and debarkation, numbers of slaves over time, and a great deal of additional contextual information.31 We are far from anything like this for estimating and quantifying the magnitude of Indian enslavement. It was only in 2012 that Brett Rushforth provided the first comprehensive estimate of Indian slaves in the Americas by all European colonial powers from the late fifteenth to the mid-nineteenth century, based on the published scholarly work, which he set at between two and four million.32 More recently, Nancy E. van Deusen arrived at a figure of at least 650,000 enslaved Indians in the sixteenth century.33 Reséndez has attempted a more detailed census based on a variety of primary and secondary sources, organizing the data in fifty-year intervals and by region to get a sense of geographic variation as well as change over time (see Table 23.1).34 Needless to say, these figures are highly speculative and preliminary, but they will generate discussion, competing estimates, and significant revisions. The current breakdown is as follows: Before looking at the general trends, it is necessary to say a few words about the scope of these estimates. First, these figures represent Native Americans held in bondage by EuroAmericans, but they exclude Indian captives held by other Indians. Second, they comprise “Indian slaves” identified as such in the archival record as well as individuals held in bondage through coercive labor arrangements like encomiendas in peripheral regions—but not in the viceregal centers—congregas, repartimientos, mitas, convict leasing, naborías, debt peons in certain circumstances, as well as more regional manifestations of forced labor such as nixoras and genízaros in northern New Spain. Third, in cases when contemporaries offered different numbers of enslaved Indians, Table 23.1 shows the lower figures (i.e., discarding Bartolomé de las Casas’s estimate of “more than three million slaves” in Mexico, Central America, and Venezuela in favor of Motolonía’s range of one hundred thousand and two hundred thousand slaves for all the provinces of Mexico up to 1555.35

580   Borderlands of the Iberian World Table 23.1.  Indian Slaves in the Americas (in Thousands) North America Mexico Circum-Caribbean South America (excluding and Central (excluding Mexico) America Brazil) 1492–1550 1551–1600 1601–1650 1651–1700 1701–1750 1751–1800 1801–1850 1851–1900 Totals

2–10 5–15 15–45 40–90 20–40 15–30 10–30 40–90 147–340

250–700 110–190 35–90 45–90 20–50 30–60 30–80 70–150 590–1,410

130–200 30–75 30–55 20–35 15–25 10–20 15–45 20–70 270–525

40–80 165–270 190–350 185–335 145–260 100–145 40–90 100–180 965–1,730

Brazil

Totals

40–60 462–1,050 120–200 430–750 80–150 350–690 60–100 350–670 50–130 250–505 40–100 195–355 30–90 125–335 70–150 300–640 490–980 2,462–4,985

Some of the findings derived from Table  23.1 and the following Figure  23.1 are unsurprising. For instance, in absolute numbers, more Indian slaves were made in the most heavily populated regions of the hemisphere: Mexico and Central America, the viceroyalty of Peru, and to a lesser extent Brazil and the Caribbean. Also expected to some degree is the observation that relative to their initial population, peripheral areas suffered disproportionately from the scourge of Indian slavery and related forms of bondage. This was especially true in regions exempted from the prohibition against Indian slavery such as the Caribbean (where the enslavement of cannibalistic Indians was reaffirmed shortly after the New Laws of 1542 as stipulated by the real cédula of 1569 permitting the enslavement of Carib Indians) and Chile (where the Mapuche were stripped of the customary protection against enslavement between 1608 and 1674).36 Less intuitive is the multi-secular decline of Indian slavery followed by a rebound in absolute numbers during the nineteenth century (see chart). Roughly speaking, this is the exact opposite trajectory of the transatlantic slave trade, which grew during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and reached its apogee in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. One crucial factor that explains the decline of Indian slavery in the course of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries is the decline of the Indian population of the New World as a whole. Another factor that played a role was the legal environment that increasingly outlawed Indian slavery and related labor arrangements. The Spanish Crown outlawed Indian slavery in 1542, banned the granting of new encomiendas in northern New Spain after 1673, and phased out repartimientos after 1777. A more stringent legal environment did not do away with enslavement, but it surely made things more difficult for slavers who had to worry about prosecution and owners who risked losing their Indians; while the Indians themselves could now use the legal system to seek redress.37 The one practice that was tolerated was debt peonage. For instance, in the aftermath of Mexico’s independence from Spain in 1821, several states and territories including Yucatán, Chiapas, Tabasco, Chihuahua, Coahuila, Sonora, New Mexico, and others

Borderlands of Bondage   581 1,600 1,400 1,200 1,000 800 600 400 200

90 0 –1 51

85 0 18

–1 01

80 0 18

–1 51

75 0

High Estimate

17

–1 01

70 0 17

–1 51

65 0 16

–1 01

60 0 16

–1 51 15

14

92

–1

55 0

0

Low Estimate

Figure 23.1.  Number of Indian slaves in the Americas in fifty-year intervals from 1492 to 1900 (in thousands). Based on Table 23.1.

introduced servitude and vagrancy laws. Similar conditions existed in Central America and elsewhere.38 Debt peonage appears to have spread slowly in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and more rapidly after midcentury as Latin America experienced export-led booms of henequen, sugar, coffee, mining, and other commodities in what Steven Topik and Allen Wells have called “the Second Conquest of Latin America.”39 Muckraker journalist John Kenneth Turner estimated that in Mexico alone there were 750,000 slaves by 1908—an estimate deemed too high by scholars.40 Still, the rising tide of peonage in Mexico, Central America, and other parts of the hemisphere go a long way toward explaining the rebound in the overall number of slaves in the second half of the nineteenth century. There are remarkable parallelisms between the experience of Native Americans from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries and what Kevin Bales has called “the new slaves” of today.41 In the same way that the Spanish Crown banned Indian slavery after 1542, virtually all states worldwide have prohibited human trafficking and slavery. Yet, then and now, covert forms of enslavement, often posing as a form of legitimate labor, proliferated to replace state-sanctioned slavery. In both cases this happened because owners and government officials were able to exploit loopholes, deceive regulators, and achieve their economic objectives through abusive and extralegal means. “The other slavery” and “the new slavery” are also similar in that both are characterized by a proliferation of related but distinct forms of labor coercion and bondage. Indians in Spanish American colonies endured a number of labor arrangements from encomiendas to debt peonage which existed parallel to one another and indeed could be found in the very same worksite (the mining town of Parral, for instance, boasted

582   Borderlands of the Iberian World salaried workers, Indian slaves, black slaves, Asian slaves, encomienda Indians, repartimiento Indians, as well as indebted laborers rubbing elbows with one another).42 Scholars of the “new slavery” have similarly identified a variety of coercive labor arrangements occurring simultaneously. As trafficking expert Louise Shelly has pointed out, today there is no set pattern but rather a variety of business models used in ­different parts of the world and for different kinds of activities from sex trafficking to sweatshop labor.43 Ultimately, what the “the other slavery” and the “new slavery” show is that the enslavement of humans should not be viewed as a stable institution that can be neatly codified. Instead, it is better to think about it as a dynamic process capable of changing shape and adapting to new legal and economic conditions. Historian of African slavery Joseph C. Miller has made the case that the tendency of scholars to pigeonhole African slavery as an institution—or “a peculiar institution”—has been detrimental to a full understanding of the phenomenon.44 The same can be said of indigenous enslavement and different historical forms of forced labor.”

Notes Archives AGI: Archivo General de Indias, Seville (Spain) Archivo General de la Nación, Mexico City (Mexico) AP: Archivo Histórico de Parral, Parral, Chihuahua (Mexico) 1. In North America the antecedents hark back more than one hundred years to Almon Wheeler Lauber’s Indian Slavery in Colonial Times Within the Present Limits of the United States (New York: Columbia University, 1913). The two best known recent books on native enslavement in North America are Alan Gallay, The Indian Slave Trade: The Rise of the English Empire in the American South 1670–1717 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), and James F. Brooks, Captives and Cousins (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2002). For a recent appraisal and sampling of this literature see Allan Gallay, ed., Indian Slavery in Colonial America (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2010), and Christina Snyder, Slavery in Indian Country: The Changing Face of Captivity in Early America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010). Telling passages on Indian slavery also appear on virtually every recent book on the Southwest and northern Mexico such as Juliana Barr, Peace Came in the Form of a Woman: Indians and Spaniards in the Texas Borderlands (Chapel Hill: UNC, 2007); Ned Blackhawk, Violence Over the Land: Indians and Empires in the Early American West (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006); Sondra Jones, The Trial of Don Pedro León Luján: The Attack Against Indian Slavery and Mexican Traders in Utah (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press); Chantal Cramaussel, Poblar la frontera: la provincia de Santa Bárbara en Nueva Vizcaya durante los siglos XVI y XVII (Zamora: El Colegio de Michoacán, 2006); Susan Deeds, Defiance and Deference in Mexico’s Colonial North: Indians under Spanish Rule in

Borderlands of Bondage   583 Nueva Vizcaya (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003); Pekka Hämäläinen, The Comanche Empire (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008); Brian DeLay, War of a Thousand Deserts: Indian Raids and the U.S.-Mexican War (New Haven, CT: Yale University, 2008); and H. Henrietta Stockel, Salvation through Slavery: Chiricahua Apaches and Priests on the Spanish Colonial Frontier (Albuquerque: UNM, 2008). 2. Brett Rushforth, Bonds of Alliance: Indigenous and Atlantic Slaveries in New France (Chapel Hill: UNC, 2012). 3. Gallay, The Indian Slave Trade, 294–299; Alejandra Boza and Juan Carlos Solórzano, “Indigenous Trade in Caribbean Central America, 1700s–1800s,” in The Oxford Handbook of Borderlands of the Iberian World, ed. Danna A. Levin Rojo and Cynthia Radding, 239–265 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019). 4. On Brazil see Stuart B. Schwartz, Sugar Plantations in the Formation of Brazilian Society: Bahia, 1550–1835 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 37–38; John Hemming, Red Gold: The Conquest of the Brazilian Indians, 1500–1760 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), chapter 2; John M. Monteiro, Negros da Terra: Índios e Bandeirantes nas Origens de Sâo Paulo (Sâo Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1994), and “The Crises and Transformations of Invaded Societies: Coastal Brazil in the Sixteenth Century,” in The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas, vol. 3: South America, part 1, ed. Frank Salomon, and Stuart  B.  Schwartz (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 973–1023; Stuart  B.  Schwartz, “Indian Labor and New World Plantations: European Demands and Indian Responses in Northeastern Brazil,” The American Historical Review 83, no. 1 (1978): 44–79; Alida C. Metcalf, “The Entradas of Bahia of the Sixteenth Century,” The Americas 61 (2005): 401–428; Barbara A. Sommer, “Colony of the Sertão: Amazonian Expeditions and the Indian Slave Trade,” The Americas 61, no. 3 (2005): 401–428. For overall calculations of Indian slaves in the Americas see Rushforth, Bonds of Alliance, 9; Andrés Reséndez, The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016), appendix 1. 5. Antonio Rumeu de Armas, La política indigenista de Isabel la Católica (Valladolid: Instituto “Isabel la Católica” de Historia Eclesiástica, 1969), 134–141; Esteban Mira Caballos, El indio antillano: repartimiento, encomienda, y esclavitud (1492–1542) (Seville: Muñoz Moya editor, 1997), 266–267; John  M.  Monteiro, “Labor Systems, 1492–1850,” in The Cambridge Economic History of Latin America, vol. 2, ed. Victor Bulmer-Thomas, John Coatsworth, and Roberto Cortés-Conde (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 1–80, among others. 6. For a brief recapitulation of this phenomenon see Nancy E. van Deusen, Global Indios: The Indigenous Struggle for Justice in Sixteenth-Century Spain (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 1–2. 7. Massimo Livi Bacci, “Return to Hispaniola: Reassessing a Demographic Catastrophe,” Hispanic American Historical Review 83, no. 3 (2003): 3–52, and Conquest: The Destruction of the American Indios (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2008), chapter  5. See also Mira Caballos, El indio antillano, 34, and Erin Woodruff Stone, “Indian Harvest: The Rise of the Indigenous Slave Trade and Diaspora from Española to the Circum-Caribbean, 1492–1542” (PhD diss., Vanderbilt University, 2014). 8. Jason M. Yaremko, “Indigenous Diaspora, Bondage, and Freedom in Colonial Cuba,” in The Oxford Handbook of Borderlands of the Iberian World, ed. Danna A. Levin Rojo and Cynthia Radding, 817–840 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019).

584   Borderlands of the Iberian World 9. “Ordenamos y mandamos que de aquí adelante, por ninguna causa de guerra ni otra alguna, aunque sea so título de rebelión, ni por rescate ni otra manera, no se pueda hacer esclavo indio alguno, y queremos que sean tratados como vasallos nuestros de la corona de Castilla, pues lo son.” (Barcelona, November 20, 1542) “Leyes y ordenanzas, nuevamente hechas por S. M. para la gobernación de las indias, y buen tratamiento y conservación de los indios,” in Colección de documentos para la historia de México: versión actualizada, ed. Joaquín García Icazbalceta (Mexico City: Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes). Accessed June 9, 2016, http://www.cervantesvirtual.com/servlet/SirveObras/069227521 00647273089079/p0000026.htm. 10. Nancy  E.  van Deusen, “Seeing Indios in Sixteenth-Century Castile,” William and Mary Quarterly 69, no. 2 (2012): 205–234, “The Intimacies of Bondage: Female Indigenous Servants and Slaves and their Spanish Masters, 1492–1555,” Journal of Women’s History 24, no. 1 (2012): 13–43, and Global Indios. For the eventual disappearance of slavery see Esteban Mira Caballos, “De esclavos a siervos: amerindios en España tras las Leyes Nuevas de 1542,” Revista de Historia de América 140 (2009): 95–110. 11. William L. Sherman, Forced Native Labor in Sixteenth-Century Central America (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1979), especially chapters 8 to 11. The quotes come from pages 148 and 150. See also Linda A. Newson, Indian Survival in Colonial Nicaragua (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987), chapter  2; Carmen Mena García and Carmen María Panera Rico, “Los inicios de la esclavitud indígena en el Darién y la desaparición de los ‘Cuevas’ ” (paper presented at the Congreso de la Asociación Española de Americanistas, Barcelona, September, 2011); and more generally Carmen Mena García, El oro del Darién: entradas y cabalgadas en la conquista de Tierra Firme (1509–1526) (Seville: Centro de Estudios Andaluces, 2011). 12. Silvio Zavala, Los esclavos indios en Nueva España (Mexico: El Colegio Nacional, 1967), chapter 2, and “Los esclavos indios en el norte de México, siglo XVI,” in El norte de México y el sur de Estados Unidos: Tercera Reunión de Mesa Redonda sobre Problemas antropológicos de México y Centro América (Mexico: Sociedad Mexicana de Antropología, 1943), 83–118; and Andrés Reséndez, The Other Slavery, chapter 3. 13. For a recent appraisal of this conflict see José Bengoa, Historia de los antiguos mapuches del sur: desde antes de la llegada de los españoles hasta las paces de Quilín (Santiago: Catalonia, 2007), especially 317–348, and Conquista y barbarie: ensayo crítico acerca de la conquista de Chile (Santiago: Ediciones Sur, 1992). Álvaro Jara argues that slavery played a significant role in the war in his Guerra y sociedad en Chile (Santiago: Editorial Universitaria S.A., 1971). 14. See Jara, Guerra y sociedad, 193–199. 15. Royal decree, May 26, 1608, Archivo General de Indias [hereafter AGI], Chile, 57. Real cédula al virrey del Perú, Aranjuez, April 13, 1625, in Fuentes para la historia del trabajo en el reino de Chile: legislación, 1546–1810, ed. Álvaro Jara and Sonia Pinto (Santiago: Editorial Andrés Bello, 1982), 276. See also the letter to the regent queen sent by the governor, bishop, and other authorities of Chile, Santiago de Chile, October 19, 1671, in AGI Chile, 57. The bibliography on Indian slavery in Chile is vast. Excellent introductions are: Jaime Valenzuela Márquez, “Esclavos mapuches. Para una historia del secuestro y deportación de indígenas en la colonia,” in Historias de racismo y discriminación en Chile, ed. Rafael Gaune, and Martín Lara (Santiago: Uqbar Editores, 2009), 38–59; and Walter Hanisch Espíndola, S.J., “Esclavitud y libertad de los indios de Chile, 1608–1696,” Historia 16 (1981): 5–65. For additional context see Christophe Giudicelli, “Indigenous Autonomy and the

Borderlands of Bondage   585 Blurring of Spanish Sovereignty in the Calchaquí Valley, Sixteenth to Seventeenth Century,” in The Oxford Handbook of Borderlands of the Iberian World, ed. Danna A. Levin Rojo and Cynthia Radding, 317–342 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019). 16. Charles Gibson, The Aztecs under Spanish Rule: A History of the Indians of the Valley of Mexico (1519–1810) (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1976); Lesley Simpson, The Encomienda in New Spain: The Beginning of Spanish Mexico (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966); Eugenio del Hoyo, Esclavitud y encomiendas de indios en el Nuevo Reino de León, siglos XVI y XVII (Monterrey: Archivo Municipal de Monterrey, 1985); Susan Deeds, “Rural Work in Nueva Vizcaya: Forms of Labor Coercion on the Periphery,” Hispanic American Historical Review 69, 3 (1989): 425–449; Carlos Manuel Valdés, La gente del mezquite: los nómadas del noreste en la Colonia (Mexico: CIESAS, 1995), 189; Cecilia Sheridan, “Social Control and Native Territoriality in Northeastern New Spain,” in Choice, Persuasion, and Coercion, ed. Jesús de la Teja and Ross Frank (Albuquerque: UNM, 2005), 137–141; among others. 17. Chantal Cramaussel, “Encomiendas, repartimientos y conquista en Nueva Vizcaya,” in Actas del primer congreso de historia regional comparada (Ciudad Juárez: UACJ, 1989), 105–137; Susan M. Deeds, “Trabajo rural en Nueva Vizcaya: formas de coerción laboral en la periferia,” in Actas del primer congreso de historia regional comparada (Ciudad Juárez: UACJ, 1989), 161–170, Defiance and Deference, chapter  3, and “Rural Work in Nueva Vizcaya,” 425–449; Cramaussel, Poblar la frontera, 145, 219–234. 18. The mita system has been extensively studied. See Enrique Tandeter, Coercion and Market: Silver Mining in Colonial Potosí 1692–1826 (Albuquerque: UNM, 1993); Jeffrey A. Cole, The Potosí Mita 1573–1700: Compulsory Indian Labor in the Andes (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1985); Melissa Dell, “The Persistent Effects of Peru's Mining Mita,” Econometrica 78, no. 6 (2010): 1863–1903. 19. Philip Wayne Powell, Soldiers, Indians and Silver: North America’s First Frontier War (Tempe: Arizona State University, 1975); Chantal Cramaussel, “Diego Pérez de Luján: las desventuras de un cazador de esclavos arrepentido,” Meridiano 107 (1991): 3–57; Albert  H.  Schroeder and Daniel  S.  Matson, A Colony on the Move: Gaspar Castaño de Sosa’s Journal, 1590–1591 (Santa Fe: SAR, 1965), and “Accounts of Captain Juan Morlete,” in The Presidio and Militia on the Northern Frontier of New Spain 1570–1700, 3 vols., ed. Thomas H. Naylor and Charles W. Polzer (Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 1986), I, 66–110; Reséndez, The Other Slavery, chapter 3. For the case of New Mexico see Rick Hendricks and Gerald  J.  Mandell, “Juan Manso, Frontier Entrepreneur,” New Mexico Historical Review 75, no. 3 (2000): 339–365; and certificate issued by Captain Juan Manso, Santa Fe, October 12, 1658, in the microfilmed edition of the Archivo Histórico de Parral [hereafter AP], reel, 1660C, frames 1375–1387. In the eighteenth century, as the Spanish Crown bolstered the frontier defenses of northern New Spain and other parts of the New World, presidial commanders and soldiers supplemented their incomes by either capturing “criminal” Indians and leasing their labor or turning the presidios themselves into labor centers manned by the inmates serving out their sentences. See Reséndez, The Other Slavery, chapter 8. 20. See Real cédula permitiendo llevar a los indios por naborías, Burgos, Feb 22, 1512, AGI, Patronato, 231, R.1; Real cédula al gobernador de la provincial de Venezuela y Cabo de la Vela, Madrid, April 5, 1552, AGI, Caracas, 1, L.1, F.171V–172R; Real cédula prohibiendo al licenciado Pedro de la Gasca servirse de los indios por vía de naboría, Valladolid, March 11, 1550, AGI, Lima, 566, L.6, F. 222r–222v.

586   Borderlands of the Iberian World 21. Cramaussel, Poblar la frontera, 234–240; and Deeds, Defiance and Deference, 61. 22. Juan Vázquez, Turicato, Michoacán, August 31, 1587, Archivo General de la Nación (Mexico), Instituciones Coloniales, Indiferente Virreinal, Caja 2094, Expediente 13. 23. Recopilación de las leyes de indias, libro 6, título II. 2 4. For the latter period see especially Moisés González Navarro, “El trabajo forzoso en México, 1821–1917,” Historia Mexicana 27 (1977–1978): 588–615; Alan Knight, “Mexican Peonage: What Was It and Why Was It?” Journal of Latin American Studies 18, 1 (1986): 41–74; James David Nichols, “The Line of Liberty: Runaway Slaves and Fugitive Peons in the Texas-Mexico Borderlands,” Western Historical Quarterly 44 (2013): 413–433; John Kenneth Turner, Barbarous Mexico (Chicago: C.  H.  Kerr & Company, 1911); Claudio Lomnitz, The Return of Comrade Ricardo Flores Magón (New York: Zone Books, 2014), 146–171; and Reséndez, The Other Slavery, chapters 10–12. Some historians like Arnold J. Bauer counter-argue that debt peonage in the nineteenth century could, in some instances, constitute a credit and that indebted laborers did move from one estate to another on their own volition. See Bauer, “Rural Workers in Spanish America: Problems of Peonage and Oppression,” The Hispanic American Historical Review 59, no. 1 (1979) 34–63. 25. Fray Juan de Torquemada, Monarquía Indiana, 3 vols. (Mexico: Porrúa, 1969), vol. 3, 255–256; exposición del padre fray Gaspar de Recarte sobre el servicio personal de los indios, and Antonio Rubio y Pedro de Hortigosa, S.J., acerca del repartimiento de los indios, Mexico City, 1584, in Documentos inéditos del siglo XVI para la historia de México, ed. Mariano Cuevas (Mexico: Porrúa, 1975), 354–385 and 478–479 respectively. 26. Viceroy Gaspar de Zúñiga y Azevedo, Count of Monterey, to the king of Spain, Mexico, January 15, 1597, AGI, Mexico, 24, N.6; and viceroy and other witnesses, March 1603, in Cartas del virrey conde de Monterrey, AGI, Mexico, 25, N. 26. 27. Viceroy Toledo’s instructions quoted in Cole, The Potosí Mita, 5. 28. Cole, The Potosí Mita, 4–20. Of course, this does not mean that Indians were unable to manipulate the mita as Steve Stern, Enrique Tandeter, and others have shown. 29. Reséndez, The Other Slavery. 30. However mediated, judicial proceedings provide some access to the voice of Indians held in bondage. See Brian P. Owensby, Empire of Law and Indian Justice in Colonial Mexico (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008); Van Deusen, Global Indios; Cynthia Radding, Landscapes of Power and Identity: Comparative Histories in the Sonoran Desert and the Forests of Amazonia from Colony to Republic (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), chapter 5; and Reséndez, The Other Slavery, chapter 2. 31. Voyages. The Trans Atlantic Slave Trade Databases. Accessed June 9, 2016, http://www. slavevoyages.org/tast/index.faces. See also the recent slave estimates in Alex Borucki, David Eltis, and David Wheat, “Atlantic History and the Slave Trade to Spanish America,” American Historical Review 120, no. 2 (2015): 407–432. 32. Rushforth, Bonds of Alliance, 9–10. 33. Van Deusen, Global Indios, 1–2. 34. Mira Caballos, El indio antillano; Sherman, Forced Native Labor, chapter 6; David R. Radell, “The Indian Slave Trade and Population of Nicaragua during the Sixteenth Century,” in  The Native Population of the Americas in 1492, ed. William  M.  Denevan (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1976), 67–76; Linda Newson, The Cost of Conquest: Indian Decline in Honduras Under Spanish Rule (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1986), 110–111 and 127, and “The Depopulation of Nicaragua in the Sixteenth Century,” Journal of Latin American Studies 14, no. 2 (November 1982): 271–275; Livi Bacci, Conquest: The Destruction

Borderlands of Bondage   587 of the American Indios, 67–88, and “Return to Hispaniola,” 3–51; Morella A. Jiménez, La Esclavitud indígena en Venezuela (siglo XVI) (Caracas: Academia Nacional de la Historia, 1986), chapter 6; Mena García, El oro del Darién; van Deusen, Global Indios, 2; Schwartz, Sugar Plantations, 37–38, and “Indian Labor,” 44–79; Hemming, Red Gold, chapter  2; Monteiro, Negros da Terra, and “The Crises and Transformations of Invaded Societies,” 973–1023; Metcalf, “The Entradas of Bahia,” 401–428; Del Hoyo, Esclavitud y Encomiendas; Juan  A.  and Judith  E.  Villamarin, Indian Labor in Mainland Colonial Spanish America (Newark: Juan  A.  and Judith  E.  Villamarin, 1975), 114; Cole, The Potosí Mita; Tandeter, Coercion and Market; Jara, Guerra y sociedad, 31; Neil L. Whitehead, Lords of the Tiger Spirit: A History of the Caribs in Colonial Venezuela and Guyana 1498–1820 (Dordrecht: Foris Publications, 1988), 186–187; Gallay, The Indian Slave Trade, 298–299; Sommer, “Colony of the Sertão,” 413; Hal Langfur, “The Return of the Bandeira: Economic Calamity, Historical Memory, and Armed Expeditions to the Sertão in Minas Gerais, Brazil, 1750–1808,” The Americas 61, no. 3 (2005): 429–461; González Navarro, “El trabajo forzoso,” 588–615; Severo Martínez Peláez, La patria del criollo: ensayo de interpretación de la realidad colonial guatemalteca (Guatemala: EDUCA, 1979); Steven C. Topik and Allen Wells eds., The Second Conquest of Latin America: Coffee, Henequen, and Oil during the Export Boom, 1850–1930 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998); Turner, Barbarous Mexico; David McCreery, “Debt Servitude in Rural Guatemala, 1876–1936,” Hispanic American Historical Review 63 (1983): 735–759; and Nara Milanich, “Women, Children, and Domestic Labor in Nineteenth-Century Chile,” Hispanic American Historical Review 91, 1 (February 2011): 29–62. A detailed explanation of how I arrived at these ranges can be found in Appendix 1 of Reséndez, The Other Slavery. 35. Reséndez, The Other Slavery, appendix 1. 36. See “Real provisión por la cual, sin embargo de las Nuevas Leyes, se da licencia a los vecinos de la isla Española,” Valladolid, June 22, 1558, AGI, Santo Domingo, 899, L.1, F.111; and for Chile see Real cédula para que los indios de guerra de las provincias de Chile sean dados por esclavos,” in Fuentes para la historia del trabajo en el reino de Chile: legislación, 1546–1810, ed. Álvaro Jara and Sonia Pinto (Santiago: Editorial Andrés Bello, 1982), 254–256. 37. Yaremko, “Indigenous Diaspora,” has shown this persuasively for Cuba. 38. See especially Navarro, “El trabajo forzoso en México, 1821–1917,” 588–615; and Martínez Peláez, La patria del criollo. 39. Topik and Wells eds., The Second Conquest of Latin America. For Guatemala see McCreery, “Debt Servitude,” 735–759, and “ ‘An Odious Feudalism.’ Mandamiento Labor and Commer­cial Agriculture in Guatemala, 1858–1920,” Latin American Perspectives 13 (1986): 99–117. 40. Turner, Barbarous Mexico, 57; Reséndez, The Other Slavery, chapter 9. 41. Kevin Bales, Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), and The Slave Next Door: Human Trafficking and Slavery in America Today (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 42. Robert C. West, The Mining Community in Northern New Spain: The Parral Mining District (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1949). 43. Louise Shelley, Human Trafficking: A Global Perspective (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 44. Joseph C. Miller, The Problem of Slavery as History: A Global Approach (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012).

588   Borderlands of the Iberian World

Bibliography Cole, Jeffrey A. The Potosí Mita 1573–1700: Compulsory Indian Labor in the Andes. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1985. Cramaussel, Chantal. Poblar la frontera: la provincia de Santa Bárbara en Nueva Vizcaya durante los siglos XVI y XVII. Zamora: El Colegio de Michoacán, 2006. Deeds, Susan M. Defiance and Deference in Mexico’s Colonial North: Indians Under Spanish Rule in Nueva Vizcaya. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003. Deeds, Susan M. “Rural Work in Nueva Vizcaya: Forms of Labor Coercion on the Periphery” Hispanic American Historical Review 69, no. 3 (1989): 425–449. Del Hoyo, Eugenio. Esclavitud y encomiendas de indios en el Nuevo Reino de León, siglos XVI y XVII. Monterrey: Archivo Municipal de Monterrey, 1985. Gallay, Alan. The Indian Slave Trade: The Rise of the English Empire in the American South 1670–1717. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002. Hemming, John. Red Gold: The Conquest of the Brazilian Indians, 1500–1760. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978. Jara, Álvaro. Guerra y sociedad en Chile. Santiago: Editorial Universitaria S.A., 1971. Jara, Álvaro, and Sonia Pinto, ed. Fuentes para la historia del trabajo en el reino de Chile: legislación, 1546–1810. Santiago: Editorial Andrés Bello, 1982. Livi Bacci, Massimo. “Return to Hispaniola: Reassessing a Demographic Catastrophe.” Hispanic American Historical Review 83, no. 3 (2003): 3–52. Livi Bacci, Massimo. Conquest: The Destruction of the American Indios. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2008. Martínez Peláez, Severo. La patria del criollo: Ensayo de interpretación de la realidad colonial guatemalteca. Guatemala: EDUCA, 1979. McCreery, David. “Debt Servitude in Rural Guatemala, 1876–1936.” Hispanic American Historical Review 63 (1983): 735–759. Mena García, Carmen. El oro del Darién: entradas y cabalgadas en la conquista de Tierra Firme (1509-1526). Seville: Centro de Estudios Andaluces, 2011. Metcalf, Alida C. “The Entradas of Bahia of the Sixteenth Century.” The Americas 61 (2005): 401–428. Mira Caballos, Esteban. El indio antillano: repartimiento, encomienda, y esclavitud (1492–1542). Seville: Muñoz Moya editor, 1997. Monteiro, John M. “The Crises and Transformations of Invaded Societies: Coastal Brazil in the Sixteenth Century.” In The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas, vol III: South America, part 1, edited by Frank Salomon and Stuart B. Schwartz, 973–1023. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Monteiro, John M. Negros da Terra: Índios e Bandeirantes nas Origens de Sâo Paulo. Sâo Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1994. Navarro González, Moisés. “El trabajo forzoso en México, 1821–1917.” Historia Mexicana 27 (1977–1978): 588–615. Reséndez, Andrés. The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016. Rushforth, Brett. Bonds of Alliance: Indigenous and Atlantic Slaveries in New France. Chapel Hill: UNC, 2012. Schwartz, Stuart B. “Indian Labor and New World Plantations: European Demands and Indian Responses in Northeastern Brazil.” The American Historical Review 83, no. 1 (1978): 44–79.

Borderlands of Bondage   589 Schwartz, Stuart B. Sugar Plantations in the Formation of Brazilian Society: Bahia, 1550–1835. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Sherman, William  L. Forced Native Labor in Sixteenth-Century Central America. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1979. Sommer, Barbara  A. “Colony of the Sertão: Amazonian Expeditions and the Indian Slave Trade.” The Americas 61, no. 3 (2005): 401–428. Tandeter, Enrique. Coercion and Market: Silver Mining in Colonial Potosí 1692–1826. Albuquerque: UNM, 1993. Topik, Steven C., and Allen Wells, ed. The Second Conquest of Latin America: Coffee, Henequen, and Oil during the Export Boom, 1850–1930. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998. Turner, John Kenneth. Barbarous Mexico. Chicago: C. H. Kerr, 1911. Van Deusen, Nancy E. Global Indios: The Indigenous Struggle for Justice in Sixteenth-Century Spain. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015. Yaremko, Jason M. “Indigenous Diaspora, Bondage, and Freedom in Colonial Cuba.” In The Oxford Handbook of Borderlands of the Iberian World, edited by Danna A. Levin Rojo and Cynthia Radding, 817–840. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019.

chapter 24

R i v er i n e Bor der l a n ds a n d M u lticu ltu r a l Con tacts i n Cen tr a l Br a zil , 17 75–1835 Mary Karasch

Central Brazil was a greatly contested region in the eighteenth century. Although Portuguese governors proclaimed their conquest of the region they called Goiás, indigenous nations and communities of fugitive slaves (quilombos) maintained control over their own lands. For more than a century after the discovery of gold in the 1720s, lands remained in dispute; and the governors of the captaincy of Goiás failed to impose effective control over the region, in part, because climate and the physical environment posed significant obstacles to the colonial authorities. Great rivers and mountainous terrain in Central Brazil created boundaries between peoples that enabled indigenous peoples to survive in spite of armed expeditions that enslaved them and seized their gold-rich lands. The history of Goias comprehends three major themes: the complex physical and cultural geography of Central Brazil; the outsiders, including enslaved Africans, who invaded Goiás via the rivers and were followed by those who established Portuguese imperial rule between the 1720s and 1740s; the contacts between Luso-Brazilians (those of Portuguese and Brazilian descent) and all others, involving warfare, peacemaking, alliance formation, and trade relations. Goiás constitutes a compelling case study of borderlands as transitional zones with networks of exchange but marked by “appalling violence” that included forcible kidnappings and enslavement.1 At the same time it illustrates the resilience of those who adapted and shaped new lives, thus guaranteeing the survival of their people. “Riverine Borderlands” builds on recent ethno-historical scholarship on Central Brazil. Although traditional scholarship in Brazil relegates the study of the Brazilian

592   Borderlands of the Iberian World Indian to anthropologists, both historians and anthropologists are revising that tradition. Two significant influences on the historiography of Central Brazil are Manuela Carneiro da Cunha’s História dos Índios no Brasil, and John Monteiro’s, Negros da Terra: Índios e Bandeirantes nas Origens de São Paulo, published in 1992 and 1994, respectively.2 Since their release, there have been more excellent ethno-historical studies, such as, Juciene Ricarte Apolinário, Os Akroá e outros povos indígenas nas Fronteiras do Sertão; Jézus Marco de Ataídes, Sob o Signo da Violência: Colonizadores e Kayapó do Sul no Brasil Central; and the essays edited by Marlene Castro Ossami de Moura, Índios de Goiás: Uma Perspectiva Histórico-Cultural.3 Also significant are a number of master’s theses in anthropology from Brazil, such as Dulce Madalena Rios Pedroso, “Avá-Canoeiro: A História do Povo Invisível—Séculos XVIII e XIX;” André Amaral de Toral, “Cosmologia e Sociedade Karajá;” and the now published dissertation by Odair Giraldin, Cayapó e Panará: Luta e sobrevivência de um povo Jê no Brasil Central. One of the best dissertations in English is David L. Mead’s “Caiapó do Sul: An Ethno-history (1610–1920).”4 Other significant authors who have contributed to the study of indigenous populations in Brazil from an ethno-historical perspective include John Hemming, Heather F. Roller, and Barbara Sommer, working on the Amazon region, while David McCreery and Mary Karasch have developed the frontier/borderlands themes for Central Brazil.5

The Geographical and Cultural Background of Goiás Before exploring Brazil’s rivers as fluid borderlands some clarification about the contested territory of the captaincy of Goiás is needed. In the eighteenth century, the capital of Goiás was Vila Boa de Goiás, which was founded in the 1720s as a mining town, before serving as the capital of the captaincy, and then the province and state of Goiás. The Portuguese governor based in Vila Boa attempted to rule an enormous region of one million square kilometers, including the modern states of Goiás and Tocantins and parts of Maranhão, Minas Gerais, Mato Grosso, and Mato Grosso do Sul.6 The reason was gold, which Portugal tried to secure in spite of the captaincy’s extensive borders.7 Climate, disease, and the physical landscape conditioned the formation of borders between these captaincies and their populations in Central Brazil. What happened to the rivers during the dry season or rainy season affected everyone’s lives. The dry season lasted from April or May until September or October and turned small creeks and streams into dry and dusty roads that could be utilized for trade and warfare. But if the dry season lingered too long, drought forced migrations of people and animals, not only within Goiás but also in nearby drought-afflicted captaincies.8 On the other hand, the rainy season could bring respite from warfare as horsemen could not easily move through flooded landscapes, but heavy rains could also cause misery. Daily downpours

Riverine Borderlands and Multicultural Contacts   593 for six months or more created flooded rivers and swampy lands, where mosquitoes spread malarial parasites to new hosts.9 People escaped malaria by moving to elevated regions. To the east were the mountain ranges that divided the captaincies of Maranhão, Piauí, and Bahia from the captaincy of Goiás. These were notable redoubts of fugitive slaves, indigenous peoples, bandits, and smugglers. One obstacle to travel was the Serra Geral de Goiás, which divided the Tocantins River basin from the São Francisco River basin to the east. This range was like an “inaccessible wall” with some mountain passes that served as “doors” to the mines of Goiás. The Portuguese placed checkpoints at these “doors” to stop the illegal flow of gold from the captaincy.10 Many other low mountains existed throughout the captaincy, although one of the most important as a source for gold was the Serra Dourada. Located between the Santa Teresa and Tocantins Rivers, the Serra Dourada sheltered the Canoeiro nation and African fugitives. The highest mountains were in the Pireneus range, at the foot of which Meia Ponte (now Pirenópolis) was built on the Almas River in the 1720s. Yet another mountain range was the Cordillera Grande (now Serra do Estrondo) between the Araguaia and Tocantins Rivers. Especially difficult to access were the mountains near Cavalcante that protected the famous quilombo of Kalunga. When enslaved Africans were numerous, they commonly escaped to the mountains or followed nearby rivers to find freedom, often among indigenous nations.11 Due to the mountainous terrain, rivers were of primary importance as arteries of travel and trade. In the far south, the Paranaíba was connected to the Paraná and the Tietê rivers of São Paulo. Thus, expeditions of armed men (bandeiras) could travel from São Paulo almost all the way to Goiás by river to the Araguaia and Tocantins Rivers and later by road.12 Via the Paraná River they were even linked with the trade networks of the Río de la Plata. The Araguaia River had numerous indigenous nations living along its banks and on Bananal Island. From Central Brazil the Araguaia flows north, joining the Tocantins before the latter empties into a channel of the Amazon River at its mouth. From this region, merchants and missionaries resident in Belém do Pará organized canoe expeditions up the Tocantins River into Central Brazil; but they had to confront indigenous warriors, who controlled the banks of the river. Unlike the great rivers, the savanna (cerrado) and central plateau did not attract many invaders, except for cattlemen, most likely due to the lack of significant gold deposits, except at Santa Luzia. There were two settlements, however, with large numbers of black people: Couros (now Formosa in the Federal District), which was founded by people of color, who built their houses out of animal skins and traded in animals and hides; and the gold mining town of Santa Luzia (now Luziânia) with a large proportion of enslaved Africans.13 The indigenous populations of the captaincy generally occupied the banks of the Tocantins and Araguaia Rivers and their tributaries (Figure 24.1). At their juncture lived the Apinaje. In the eighteenth century, they had inhabited the east bank of the Tocantins River; but by the early nineteenth century, they were living in five villages near the Santo

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Figure 24.1.  Indigenous nations in the Captaincy of Goiás. Diverse nations that inhabited the region of central Brazil were the Akroá, Xacriabá, Apinaje, Krahô, Karajá, Javaé, Tapirapé, Araés, Xavante, Xerente, Avá-Canoeiro, and Kayapó do Sul, who were only a few of those who resisted invasion, Portuguese colonial rule, and enslavement. From Mary C. Karasch, Before Brasilia: Frontier Life in Central Brazil (Albuquerque: UNM Press, 2016). Courtesy of the author, University of New Mexico Press, and Paul Mirocha, who designed and executed the map.

Riverine Borderlands and Multicultural Contacts   595 Antônio falls on the Araguaia River. Speakers of a Gê language, they were unlike other Gê (also Jê) populations in making ubás (hollowed out canoes), which they used for traveling to Belém to raid or trade for tools. Not only did they cultivate crops, such as manioc, but they also raised cattle. Their warriors were notably skilled in river combat.14 To the south of the Apinaje the group who occupied the east bank of the Tocantins River was the Krahô, who spoke an eastern Timbira dialect of the Gê language family. According to tradition, they had migrated to the Tocantins River after living in Maranhão, where they had raided for cattle; but by the 1840s they were raising their own cattle and prospered until 1848.15 Two other nations who had once lived to the east of the Tocantins River were the Akroá, a Gê-speaking Timbira people, and the Xacriabá, who spoke a Central Gê language. Before 1750, they were such adept warriors that the Portuguese believed that the only way to stop their attacks on settlers and miners was to persuade them to make peace and live in a Christian mission village (aldeia). In the 1750s, they accepted Jesuit missionaries until the Jesuit expulsion of 1759, when they took up arms once again. Afterward, the Akroá were settled at the missions of São José de Mossâmedes and Duro; and the Xacriabá were moved south to the mission of Santa Ana, in what is now Minas Gerais.16 Both missions were served by secular parish priests. Also south of the Apinaje but a month’s journey by canoe on the Araguaia River were the Karajá and related peoples, the Javaé and Xambioá. For at least a thousand years, the Karajá had inhabited villages along the Araguaia River, while others were clustered on Bananal Island, the world’s largest fluvial island. They spoke one of the Macro-Gê languages with a sharp distinction between the speech of men and women. The Karajá had been in contact with slaving bandeiras from São Paulo since at least the early seventeenth century, and they resisted both secular and Jesuit attempts to penetrate their lands until they made peace with the Portuguese in 1775. They also traded directly with merchants of Pará for tools and weapons.17 Among the indigenous enemies of the Karajá were the Xavante, speakers of a Central Gê language who had once lived to the east of the Tocantins River. According to tradition, their first contact with non-Indians was “at the sea.” By 1751 some had crossed the Tocantins River and were living to the east and northeast of Bananal Island. The Xavante who settled along the Tocantins River or one of its tributaries, established villages where they cultivated fields of corn, manioc, tobacco, and sugar cane, and went hunting and fishing.18 In the early nineteenth century, Luso-Brazilian cattlemen invaded the Tocantins River region, putting pressure on indigenous peoples. At some point between the 1810s and 1840s, the Xavante separated into two distinct nations now known as the Akwe Xavante and the Xerente. The Xerente had had their own identity as early as the 1780s, but they had been conquered by the Xavante. Allegedly, the cause of their separation was over resistance to, or living with, Luso-Brazilians. The Xerente chose to remain near settlers on the Tocantins River, while the Xavante moved west of the Araguaia River, eventually settling in Mato Grosso.19

596   Borderlands of the Iberian World Among the indigenous enemies of the Xavante were the Canoeiro (now Avá-Canoeiro from the Portuguese for canoer, since they plied the rivers in canoes). They spoke a Tupi language, and some knew Portuguese and Latin prayers. In the 1830s, the territory they claimed was the sertão (backlands) of the west bank of the Maranhão River (southern Tocantins River), but before that they had lived in the mountains near the Jesuit mission of Duro. Their reputation as a “very cruel and bellicose nation” was due to their frequent attacks on settlers and mining towns.20 Another people notable for their resistance to Luso-Brazilians were the Kayapó do Sul. A Gê- speaking population, the southern Kayapó (Panará) lived in large villages with cultivated fields of corn, manioc, and other crops in southern Goiás and neighboring captaincies. Besides threatening Vila Boa, their skilled warriors attacked Luso-Brazilians on the mines and ranches and raided for plunder. Although some made peace and settled in the missions of São José de Mossâmedes and Maria I, they were forced west in the 1830s by settlers anxious to seize their lands.21 These, then, were the great nations of the captaincy of Goiás who would challenge the invaders: the southern Kayapó, the Tupi-speaking Canoeiro, the divided Xavante and Xerente, the river-dwelling Karajá, the cattle-keeping Krahô, and the canoe warriors and traders, the Apinaje (Figure 24.1). Although there were many other indige­ nous nations that once occupied the territory of this captaincy, such as the Goiá (also Goyá), they did not survive the onslaught of bandeiras, epidemic diseases, and enslavement.22

The Invaders The first contact occurred in the late sixteenth century, when the invaders of Central Brazil came from the south. They were the forerunners of two-centuries of bandeiras organized by the men of São Paulo, who sought the wealth of the backlands in indigenous slaves, gold, and emeralds. They discovered the mineral wealth of Goiás in the 1720s; but for more than a century before then, they had returned to São Paulo with indigenous captives. In the 1590s, the bandeira of Antônio de Macedo and Luís Grau reached the sertão of the Araguaia/Tocantins Rivers. Subsequent bandeiras followed their route, and by 1611, enslaved Karajá were documented in São Paulo. Other targets of these bandeiras were the Araés, whose golden jewelry fueled the formation of bandeiras to locate their sources of gold.23 In the 1680s, Bartolomeu Bueno da Silva, from São Paulo, went in search of their gold but instead assaulted one of their villages and returned to Cuiabá with indigenous captives. His son, with the same name, discovered a small amount of gold on the Vermelho River in 1722, which prompted a second expedition to the same river in 1726, where miners discovered even more gold. What had been a small camp grew into the town of Vila Boa de Goiás by 1739.24

Riverine Borderlands and Multicultural Contacts   597 The location of gold in Vila Boa stimulated more gold-seekers to invade Central Brazil and seize indigenous lands. Unlike previous bandeiras, the new expeditions included many enslaved Africans, who were quickly set to work at “gold washing” along the rivers. As of 1732 an estimated twelve thousand miners had reached the Maranhão River, where they secured abundant alluvial gold until an unknown epidemic broke out, killing the miners and forcing the abandonment of the river. Further north in the captaincy, even more gold was discovered in the 1730s in Natividade and Traíras. By the mid-eighteenth century, African miners and their slaveholders were scattered throughout the center and northeast of the captaincy. Consequently, there would be a concentration of enslaved black men in the mining cores, while the rest of the captaincy was still held by autonomous indigenous nations.25

Missionaries and Missions In addition to the bandeiras, another type of expedition entered the captaincy from Belém in order to convert the peoples of the Tocantins region. These were the Catholic missionaries, first the Franciscans and then the Society of Jesus (the Jesuits). After the Jesuit expulsion of 1759, the captaincy was notable for the absence of foreign missionaries for almost eighty years until Italian Capuchins re-introduced a missionary endeavor among the indigenous in the 1840s. Friar Cristovão Severin de Lisboa, a Franciscan missionary, traveled from Belém with an expedition on the Tocantins in 1625. He and other friars were successful in contacting indigenous populations along the river, and they won the loyalty of a powerful cacique Tomagica. Notably, Friar Cristovão was one of the few priests who wrote a letter protesting against indigenous enslavement. When the Jesuit priest Antônio Vieira traveled south on the Tocantins River in the 1650s, he encountered Christianized Indians, apparently the result of the eleven years of the friars’ work along the river.26 Not only did the Jesuits explore the Tocantins River, but they also set up missions for the indigenous population of the captaincy. In the north, they built missions for the Xacriabá and Akroá at São Francisco Xavier and São José do Duro. They also established missions for the Bororo and other nations at Santa Ana do Rio das Velhas, Lanhozo, Rio das Pedras, and Pissarrão in the south of the captaincy.27 But the Jesuit missions did not last long and were replaced by the Directorate missions (1757–1798), which were designed to Christianize and civilize “pacified Indians” who agreed to settle in an aldeia under a secular priest and administrator. While directorate missions existed elsewhere in Brazil, such as Amazonia as Barbara Sommer has shown, the most famous aldeias of Central Brazil were São José de Mossâmedes (1755; renovated 1775), Maria I (1780), and São José do Carretão (1788).28 The first two housed the Kayapó and the third the Xavante. In spite of imperial efforts and in part due to indigenous resistance, these establishments declined and then closed in the nineteenth century.29

598   Borderlands of the Iberian World

Structures of Empire Bandeiras and missions enabled the Portuguese to claim hegemony in Central Brazil, but this was still a violent frontier in which indigenous peoples and Africans contested conquest and colonial governance. The Portuguese were able to cling to power until the 1820s, due to their imperial system, the wealth generated by the gold mining economy, and their armed forces, including bandeiras and militias that defended local communities.30 The first resident governor of Goiás was Dom Marcos de Noronha in 1749. Henceforth, as captain-general, each governor was responsible for the delivery of the Crown’s share of gold (the quinto), as well as the defense of the captaincy. The governor’s authority came directly from the Crown in Portugal, and he corresponded with the Overseas Council and other state councils in Lisbon. One of the governor’s most important obligations was to see to the spread of Christianity to pagan “gentiles” and support the missions. In order to accomplish these goals, each governor mounted armed expeditions of conquest and “pacification” that included experienced bandeira leaders and indigenous warriors, who returned with indigenous captives to share with the governor. Official support for conquest and enslavement of war captives was re-affirmed in a royal letter of September 5, 1811 that authorized offensive war against all those who refused “pacification” and settlement in missions on the Tocantins-Araguaia frontier.31 In the late colonial period, the economy of Goiás was still centered on gold mining and the control of gold circulation and trade. There was no one source of gold in Goiás but rather many locations of gold and some diamond mines; and gold mining took place in many towns, such as Traíras, São José, São Félix, Natividade, Santa Luzia, Meia Ponte, and Vila Boa. Each of these locations served as a pole of development for a surrounding agro-pastoral economy that provided food and cattle to the miners, as well as to indigenous raiders. As the output of the mines declined in the eighteenth century, then Goianos focused more on agriculture and ranching. In the future, the true wealth of Central Brazil would be based on the land, where people raised cattle, sugar cane, corn, beans, manioc, tobacco, cotton, and coffee.32 Other sectors of the economy remained underdeveloped. There were a limited number of retail stores, but there were many taverns in the mining towns. And craft activities included metal working and carpentry; distilling sugar cane (aguardente); processing foods, hides, and shoes; and spinning, weaving, and sewing cotton cloth. At that time, the captaincy largely depended on imported manufactured goods, especially luxury items and iron wares, and was thus most reliant for its tools and weapons on long-distance merchants.33 Because of gold, long-distance trade was linked to the Atlantic world. In the first half of the eighteenth century, Salvador, Bahia, was essential to trade between Goiás, Europe, Africa, and Asia. Even as late as 1804, Salvador was the north’s principal trading partner. Portuguese merchants organized legal commerce and contraband trade in gold from Goiás to Salvador. After the decline of the mines, cattle, tobacco, and cotton were transported along the old gold routes to Bahia.34

Riverine Borderlands and Multicultural Contacts   599 The Tocantins River formed another important trade route dominated by the merchants of Belém, who outfitted river boat expeditions that traveled south on the river to connect with the mining towns. They sent enslaved Africans, European manufactures, foodstuffs, and salt to exchange for gold. To the west, the Araguaia river trade also flowed north to the port of Belém, as well as west to Cuiabá, Mato Grosso. In the 1820s, merchants, traveling on the rivers to Belém, traded directly with the Indians in iron wares, clothing, and beads for the women. They also gifted salt, tobacco, and manioc meal to facilitate trade.35 Vila Boa not only looked to Salvador but also to the southeast since the great majority of its imports came from Rio de Janeiro or São Paulo. After 1783, the legal quinto route ran from Vila Boa to Vila Rica (Ouro Preto) in Minas Gerais, and then overland to Rio de Janeiro. European goods loaded on mules and enslaved Africans followed the same route back. By 1804 an official study of the captaincy’s population and economy revealed that Rio provided the greatest volume of imported goods to the south of the captaincy.36 Other southern routes were by river, and the men of São Paulo traded with Goiás via the Tietê and Paranaíba rivers. Others journeyed overland to Goiás with pack animals laden with salt, tools, and foodstuffs. Upon arrival in Vila Boa, they sold everything, including the animals, and returned to São Paulo with gold. Notably, in 1804, São Paulo was second to Rio in the value of imports into the south.37 Thus, the rivers of the interior of South America made possible the trade of late colonial Goiás. Only one small leg of a vast interior trade network based on gold was under the authority of the Portuguese governor resident in Vila Boa, and segments of it were even controlled by indigenous nations, such as the Karajá. Long distance traders had not only linked Central Brazil with the Atlantic economy of the late eighteenth century but also with the interior of South America, including Spain’s viceroyalties. To defend its trade and wealth in gold, the Portuguese had only a small number of men in the regular army and depended on the recently conquered and enslaved peoples to fight for them. In 1736 the Portuguese company of mounted dragoons had only fifty men, while in 1808 there were only sixty.38 Those who actually fought the indigenous nations of Goiás and took war captives were the pedestres (indigenous foot soldiers, such as the Akroá), the pardo regiments, composed of brown men of African descent, and the Henriques (black troops). They also protected towns from enemy attacks, kept peace within the missions, and hunted down African fugitives and re-enslaved them.39 Therefore, nonwhite troops and their families often bore the brunt of indigenous vengeance attacks.

War and Intertribal Relations Brutal treatment by the bandeiras and militias, enslavement, and forced labor in the missions exacerbated frontier violence. As John Monteiro argued for the sixteenth century, we stress here “the fundamental importance of war in intertribal relations,” as well as

600   Borderlands of the Iberian World “a culture of terror” with “senseless brutality” on all sides during the late eighteenth century. There were, however, interludes of peace making, the formation of alliances, and coalition building, including with Luso-Brazilians, that were designed to maintain indigenous “autonomy and territorial control.” The nations that pursued a variety of strategies are among those who have endured to the present.40 One of the more significant characteristics of warfare in Central Brazil was the use of the rivers in fighting one’s enemies or raiding for goods. Since the Tocantins River is narrow and rocky in parts of its long trajectory from the central plateau to the delta of the Amazon River, invaders found it treacherous to navigate unless they traveled in large well-armed expeditions because warriors hid in bushes on the river banks “in order to ambush them.” The Apinaje most likely struck Luso-Brazilian expeditions, and they also raided for tools and beads along the river and attacked the quilombo of Pederneiras near Alcobaça.41 The best colonial description of Apinaje canoe warfare comes from 1774, when warriors encircled the canoes of Antônio Luiz Tavares Lisboa on the Tocantins River. At the rapids of Três Barras, he saw “formed regiments” on the beach, while three canoes of warriors reinforced the circle around him. Each regiment was led by an Apinaje captain, except for the one headed by Joaquim Angola. They fought with bows and arrows until Lisboa’s men, using firearms, forced them to retreat; but the next day they attacked again from the shore or from two ubás.42 According to Curt Nimuendajú, their principal motive for warfare was “blood revenge.” When soldiers from a garrison (presídio) raided their fields, the Apinaje ambushed and killed them. In retaliation, Luso-Brazilians used artillery against one or more of their villages. In turn, the Apinaje joined in coalition with the Karajá, Xavante, and Xerente to destroy the presídio of Santa Maria do Araguaia in 1813.43 In spite of such violence, the Apinaje later forged alliances with Luso-Brazilian officers and even allied with proindependence forces against Portuguese royalists in the 1820s. Subsequently, they served as hired warriors for the governors of Goiás.44 Other reasons for warfare and alliances were pursued along the Tocantins River. In 1808, for example, the merchant Francisco José Pinto de Magalhães convinced the Porekamekrã Timbira to ally with him in return for his protection. But he left for Pará, and the Macamecrã (the Krahô), who lived on the east bank of the Tocantins River, took advantage of his absence to gather palm fruit claimed by the Porekamekrã across the river. The ensuing war was “bloody,” but after Pinto de Magalhães returned in 1810, he succeeded in making peace between them with the assistance of a Macamecrã woman.45 Almost a decade later some of the Porekamekrã were living in Cocal on the Tocantins River, when they were visited in 1819 by the Austrian traveler Johann E. Pohl, a noted scientist who came as part of a scientific expedition to Central Brazil with the backing of the Portuguese imperial family.46 According to him, they had a military chief or “captain,” who was assisted by a council of elders in making decisions for war or peace. At that time, Captain Romão, who was “praised for his love of peace,” occupied this position. In order to demonstrate how his people made war, Captain Romão and his

Riverine Borderlands and Multicultural Contacts   601 warriors reenacted the whole process of diplomacy and conflict for the European visitor. According to tradition, diplomacy was the initial step to try to prevent war. Therefore, in this reenactment an enemy’s ambassador entered the village to argue with an envoy about the cause of the war. Additional ambassadors followed, which suggests that they made more than one attempt to resolve conflicts. Showing what happened when these efforts were unsuccessful in achieving peace, the envoy returned running. After sounding their horns, troops of Indians appeared, each one carrying a bow in one hand and a horn in the other with a sheaf of arrows on each shoulder. Some carried clubs. From the opposite side of the forest, a second “division,” representing the enemy, went out in files. Catching sight of their adversaries, they shot arrows so that they flew over their heads without wounding them. Next combat shifted to war clubs until the game became too violent, and Captain Romão stopped the fight. Traditionally, the vanquished side asked the victor for peace. In 1815 the Porekamekrã had made peace, presumably in this way, with the mulatto bandeira leader, Antônio Moreira da Silva, who offered peace to the larger of their two villages, to which they agreed and performed a ceremony of alliance on the banks of the Tocantins River.47 Some of the Porekamekrã from the other village, however, did not trust Moreira da Silva and hid their families in the forest. With the bandeira were some Krahô warriors, who convinced them to come out of their hiding places; they were quickly taken prisoner and their girls and women raped. Many were killed, but the survivors were taken to São Pedro de Alcântara (now Carolina), and there 130 were sent as captives to Pará. The violence the bandeira exerted against the second village convinced the Indians of the first one to travel to the town bearing “green twigs in token of peace.” After being settled nearby, they too were abused and enslaved until their protector Pinto de Magalhães sent some of them back to Cocal.48 In order to stop such practices, five nations, including the Krahô, protested against the powerful who executed “horrible atrocities [. . .] depriving them of their liberty, treating them as slaves of Ethiopia; [and] robbing them of their lands.” In 1821, the “princes” of the “United Indian Nations” asked the King to restore “the liberty of their persons, and property, and of their commerce;” and to demarcate lands, on which to build a “majestic temple” for St. John the Baptist. After a long process, the petition of the five nations finally resulted in a royal decision to demarcate their lands in 1822.49 The Krahô arrived at the end of the colonial period as strong allies of Luso-Brazilians, who helped them fight and enslave their neighbors and seize their territories. Thus, both Krahô warriors and cattlemen pushed other nations west into the captaincy of Goiás; but after the cattlemen had consolidated their control over Krahô lands, they no longer needed them as allies and turned against them, forcing them to settle in the mission of Pedro Affonso in 1848.50 In contrast to the Tocantins River region, there are few descriptions of inter-ethnic warfare and peacemaking from the Araguaia River for the eighteenth century. Although Jesuits reported on fierce resistance from the Karajá, they reveal little about their warfare or contacts with other nations. The Xavante were among their enemies because

602   Borderlands of the Iberian World they commonly raided Karajá fields for food in the dry season; and if they could, they kidnapped Karajá women. When the Karajá raided or went to war, they also took captives and enslaved them.51 Besides the Xavante, there was also hostility between the Karajá and the Apinaje. When Tomás de Sousa Vila Real visited the Karajá and allied with one of their leading men, he personally observed a raid on the Apinajé in 1793, when they captured a woman with two small girls and carried off their canoes. The previous year, the principal (head chief) of the Karajá had traveled to Pará in order to ask the governor for help in defending his people against the Apinaje. The Karajá maintained peaceful contacts, by way of contrast, with the Javaé. Lieutenant José Pinto da Fonseca reported on their ritual meeting in 1775. When the Javaé arrived at Bananal Island, the two nations met each other; they did not fight but formed a large circle. Next, a warrior from each nation went into the circle and then out of it, forming a line and running paired; they greeted everyone with loud cries and sounds of their horns. The Karajá symbol of peace was a pipe that they smoked in the direction of the place “where the sun is born.”52 After they allied with the Portuguese and accepted the status of vassals, the Karajá agreed to the establishment of a mission and garrison on Bananal Island. By 1813, however, they had become so fearful of losing their lands that they apparently initiated the coalition with the Xerente and Xavante designed to eliminate the presídio of Santa Maria do Araguaia. Their justification for the destruction of the garrison was that “the whites had taken their lands and wanted to enslave them.” The surprise attack on Santa Maria revealed that former enemies could ally together against Luso-Brazilians, but coalitions and alliances did not always last.53 The same changeable behavior was true for the Xavante, and sources reveal that raiding and warfare were combined with diplomacy on other occasions. Before 1750, the Xavante had largely raided for food on small farms and cattle ranches, taking captives back to their villages. At this time, they were willing to make peace with Luso-Brazilians, but after being treated like slaves at the mission of Carretão, they had become “violent and vengeful” enemies of the Luso-Brazilians.54 The Xavante, however, had many other enemies. Historically, the Xavante who lived west of the Tocantins River raided the Karajá. Other Xavante crossed over the Tocantins River into Maranhão and Piauí to raid ranches for cattle. They lived in one captaincy but took advantage of administrative boundaries to secure food. Since the Xavante were often the aggressor nation, they incorporated others, such as the Akroá and Xerente, and even encouraged black slaves to run away and join them. Perhaps for this reason, the Xerente were often at war with them in the 1820s.55 Like the Xavante, the Xerente had many enemies in the north. In the face of threats from the Xavante in the 1820s, they sought Luso-Brazilian help at Porto Real (today Porto Nacional). Other enemies of the Xerente were the Canoeiro, the Macamecrã (Krahô), the Apinaje, and the Kayapó. Their motivations for war against Luso-Brazilians often involved vengeance. As Pohl clarifies, “All the murders” of boatmen on the Maranhão River had only one motive—“retaliation for ignominy endured and revenge for deceived confidence and the kidnapping of their offspring.”56

Riverine Borderlands and Multicultural Contacts   603 In preparation for warfare, young men were expected to participate in war games. In the case of a real war, however, a messenger summoned the council of chiefs to make the decision for war or peace. Three chiefs led the Xerente into war, while warriors were divided into four companies, which were each under two leaders. An attack usually began with the sound of whistles, followed by arrows shot from ambush and an assault with clubs and lances. Either the enemy surrendered, or both sides moved to handto-hand combat. To frighten their enemies, they roared like “tigers,” displaying their teeth, and shooting flaming arrows. After they won a battle, they killed all adults with blows to the head from their war clubs.57 Unlike the Xavante, the Xerente did not enter a mission in large numbers until the 1820s, when Cunha Matos founded the aldeia of Graciosa on the Tocantins River in 1824. The Xerente agreed to move to Graciosa to secure his protection against their enemies, including the Xavante of the Sono River. But when Cunha Matos left the north in 1825, the Xerente quickly abandoned Graciosa because they had not received weapons and soldiers to protect themselves; they returned to raiding and warfare with LusoBrazilians through the nineteenth century.58 In contrast to those groups who made peace, the only contact the Canoeiro seem to have had with other nations was in combat; even their women participated in the fighting. According to Friar Berthet, the Canoeiro were an “object of terror” to other Indians as late as the 1880s. As canoe Indians, they attacked Luso-Brazilian expeditions traveling on the Tocantins River. When ranchers tried to build ranches along the banks of that river, the Canoeiro drove them out. Elsewhere, they raided ranches for horse meat and cattle, often reducing a ranch to ashes. In the nineteenth century, they were daring enough to assault mining towns: in fact, destroying Tesouras. In particular, they struck towns on Sundays and set fire to churches.59 They refused to enter into peace negotiations with Luso-Brazilians; only a few of them ever spent time in a mission, resisting all efforts to settle them there because they did not want to be “our slaves.” If their enemies did not surrender or make peace when overwhelmed, they did not permit them to surrender later since they took no captives and killed everyone, including children.60 Obviously, the Canoeiro were an impressive example of courageous resistance against over-whelming odds and Luso-Brazilian weaponry. Although they succeeded in keeping some of their lands through much of the nineteenth century, their descendants struggled to survive and live autonomous lives, as Goianos relentlessly massacred them, driving them almost to extinction.61 The Kayapó were notable for their resistance to Luso-Brazilians, but unlike the Canoeiro they were also famous for settling in missions in the 1780s after decades of warfare. Thus, there are two contradictory images in elite discourse: one of the “savage” club-wielding warrior and the other of the peaceful mission Indian, symbolized by Dona Damiana da Cunha, a famous Kayapó woman from the mission of São José de Mossâmedes.62 The Kayapó had many reasons for warfare, primarily to defend themselves against the bandeiras that enslaved them. In the eighteenth century, they confronted bandeiras from three captaincies: Goiás, Minas Gerais, and Mato Grosso. According to Odair Giraldin, the Kayapó motive for war was “vengeance.” Each time they were

604   Borderlands of the Iberian World attacked, they retaliated. After local whites assaulted a Kayapó village in the 1760s, the Kayapó struck the mining town of Santa Luzia.63 As the bandeiras pressured them and as cattlemen invaded their lands, the Kayapó often faced subsistence crises, especially those who lived in the more arid and less fertile lands of eastern Mato Grosso or in the region south of the Paraná River. They retaliated against ranchers by raiding for food, mainly cattle and horses. Or, they attacked the well-supplied convoys of food-laden mules that plied the roads from Vila Boa to Cuiabá or to São Paulo. According to David Mead, one of their powerful motivations for raiding was the search for plunder.64 Another reason for war was injustice. In one occasion, for instance, a group of Kayapó from one of the aldeias went to petition the governor, but they were badly treated and put in irons. When other Kayapó learned of this, they deserted their aldeia and took up arms. Their forcible removal from the aldeia of São José de Mossâmedes in the 1830s constituted an especially bitter injustice. Those who had lived with Dona Damiana at the mission resented the decision to transfer them against their will to Mato Grosso. After an interlude, many Kayapó waged war again in the 1850s due to settler invasion of their lands, especially in the Claro and Bonito River regions.65 In addition to Luso-Brazilians, traditional enemies of the Kayapó were the Bororo and fugitive Africans who lived in quilombos. In 1742, a bandeira destroyed an entire Kayapó village with the help of 120 Bororo from Mato Grosso. As allies of the bandeira leader Antônio Pires de Campos, the Bororo had also participated in other bandeiras against the Kayapó, taking their heads as war trophies or enslaving them. Fugitive Africans were particular targets of the Kayapó, but they also killed enslaved Africans while at work on mines and ranches. The Kayapó also raided quilombos, taking captives to sell to the Portuguese.66 The southern Kayapó resisted Luso-Brazilian invasion of their lands in three captaincies as long as the 1880s. Although some had tried peace in the eighteenth century, they abandoned mission life after being expelled from São José in the 1830s. Ultimately, they disappeared into the forests of Mato Grosso to live autonomous lives and be re-contacted in the late twentieth century as the Kreen-Akarore (Panará).67 In brief, inter-ethnic warfare in Central Brazil was episodic, interrupted by periods of peace that usually did not last long. When Portuguese governors presumed that permanent conquests had taken place, they were misguided. Traditionally, negotiated peace agreements were only interludes in what seemed to be continuous warfare among enemies. Sometimes people fought over resources, such as palm fruit; at other times thefts of women and food led to violent confrontation. Luso-Brazilian intrusions, beginning in the 1590s, clearly provoked vengeance warfare, shifting patterns of alliances, and migration to escape enslavement. Although some nations profited by allying with Luso-Brazilians and agreeing to settle in missions, others did not, such as the Canoeiro. Still others like the Araés never had a chance to choose and disappeared as an identifiable group in Goiás due to diseases and enslavement. Clearly, abilities in warfare enabled some indigenous peoples to survive and contest the Portuguese for hegemony. In the first half of the nineteenth century, they almost

Riverine Borderlands and Multicultural Contacts   605 succeeded in driving settlers from vast portions of the north of the captaincy, that is, the modern state of Tocantins. They were even strong enough to burn down entire towns. Their skills in warfare and hit-and-run raids were remarkably enduring over two ­centuries. But what is also notable from the documentary record, as opposed to Portuguese discourse, is that diplomacy and peacemaking were also pursued by the very warriors and their leaders who fought each other. Not only did they have “ambassadors” that included women, but also diplomatic procedures for making peace with their enemies. With such traditions, they also mastered the protocols of peace with their colonial enemy by accepting the protection of local military officers and the vassalage relationship to a distant Crown in Portugal. Because of skills in warfare and diplomacy, they skillfully prevented the closure of the frontier to the benefit of the Portuguese in the late colonial period and ensured the survival of their nations.

Notes Archives and Manuscript Collections AHG: AHU: ANTT: BNL: BNRJ: IHGB:

Arquivo Histórico do Estado de Goiás, Goiânia (Brazil) Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino, Lisbon (Portugal) Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo, Lisbon (Portugal) Biblioteca Nacional, Lisbon (Portugal) Biblioteca Nacional, Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) Arquivo do Instituto Histórico e Geográfico Brasileiro, Rio de Janeiro (Brazil)

1. Hal Langfur, The Forbidden Lands: Colonial Identity, Frontier Violence, and the Persistence of Brazil’s Eastern Indians, 1750–1830 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006), 260 note 82, 363–364. For more evidence of such violence see Mary Karasch, Before Brasília: Frontier Life in Central Brazil (Albuquerque: UNM, 2016), which draws on a variety of archival sources in Brazil and Portugal. 2. Manuela Carneiro da Cunha, ed., Historia dos Índios no Brasil (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1992); John Monteiro, Negros da Terra: Índios e Bandeirantes nas Origens de São Paulo (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1994). 3. Juciene Ricarte Apolinário, Os Akroá e Outros Povos Indigenas nas Fronteiras do Sertão (Goiânia: Kelps, 2006); Jézus Marco de Ataídes, Sob o Signo da Violência: Colonizadores e Kayapó do Sul no Brasil Central (Goiânia: UCG, 1998); Marlene Castro Ossami de Moura, ed., Índios de Goiás: Uma Perspectiva Histórico-Cultural (Goiânia: UCG, Ed. Kelps, 2006). 4. Dulce Madalena Rios Pedroso, “Avá-Canoeiro: A História do Povo Invisível—Séculos XVIII e XIX” (MA diss., Universidade Federal de Goiás, 1992); André Amaral de Toral, “Cosmologia e Sociedade Karajá” (MA diss, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, 1992); Odair Giraldin, Cayapó e Panará: Luta e Sobrevivência de um Povo Jê no Brasil Central (Campinas: UNICAMP, 1997); David L. Mead, “Caiapó do Sul: An Ethno-history (1610–1920)” (PhD diss., University of Florida, 2010).

606   Borderlands of the Iberian World 5. John Hemming, Amazon Frontier: The Defeat of the Brazilian Indians (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987); Heather F. Roller, Amazonian Routes: Indigenous Mobility and Colonial Communities in Northern Brazil (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014); Barbara Sommer, “The Amazonian Native Nobility in Late Colonial Pará,” in Native Brazil: Beyond the Convert and the Cannibal, 1500–1900, ed. Hal Langfur (Albuquerque: UNM, 2014), 108–132; David McCreery, Frontier Goiás, 1822–1889 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006); Karasch, Before Brasília. 6. Horieste Gomes, Antônio Teixeira Neto, and Altair Sales Barbosa, Geografia: Goiás-Tocantins (Goiânia: UFG, 2005), 51 and maps, 42, 55. 7. Mary Karasch, “The Periphery of the Periphery? Vila Boa de Goiás, 1780–1835,” in Negotiated Empires: Centers and Peripheries in the Americas, 1500–1820, ed. Christine Daniels and Michael V. Kennedy (New York and London: Routledge, 2002), 143–169. 8. Luiz Cruls, Planalto Central do Brasil (Rio de Janeiro: José Olympio, 1957), 215–220. 9. Mary C. Karasch, “História das Doenças e dos Cuidados Médicos na Capitania de Goiás,” in Saúde e Doenças em Goiás, ed. Lena Castello Branco F. de Freitas (Goiânia: UFG, 1999), 20–25. 10. Voto do Comiçario Francisco Jozé Pinto de Magalhaens Cap.am d’Ordenanças . . . , São Pedro de Alcântara, 11 August 1815, Biblioteca Nacional, Rio de Janeiro (henceforth BNRJ), II-31, 19,13; and Ofício de José de Almeida de Vasconcellos to Martinho de Mello e Castro, Vila Boa, January 1774, Instituto Histórico e Geográphico Brasileiro, Rio de Janeiro (henceforth IHGB), Arquivo 1.2.7., vol. 36, 169–170. 11. Dulce Madalena Rios Pedroso, “Avá-Canoeiro,” in Índios de Goiás: Uma Perspectiva Histórico-Cultural, ed. Marlene C. O. de Moura (Goiânia: UCG, Ed. Kelps, 2006), 101; Cruls, Planalto Central, 85 (map) and 77–82; Carta da Provincia de Goyaz, 1874, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., Map Library; map in Johann Baptiste von Spix and Carl Friedrich Philipp von Martius, Viagem pelo Brasil, 1817–1820: Excertos e Ilustrações, trans. Lúcia Furquim Lahmeyer (São Paulo: Edições Melhoramentos, 1968), 100; and Martiniano J. Silva, Quilombos do Brasil Central: Violência e Resistência Escrava, 1719–1888 (Goiânia: Ed. Kelps, 2003), 373–394. 12. Monteiro, Negros da Terra, 13 (map), 79–80; Manoel Rodrigues Ferreira, As Bandeiras do Paraupava (São Paulo: Prefeitura Municipal de São Paulo, 1977), map 76. 13. Gilka V. F. de Salles, Economia e Escravidão na Capitania de Goiás (Goiânia: CEGRAF-UFG, 1992), 61; Padre Luiz Antônio da Silva e Souza, Memoria sobre o Descobrimento, Governo, População e Cousas mais Notaveis Da Capitania de Goyaz [1812], BNRJ, 9, 2, 10, 38. 14. Odair Giraldin, “AXPÊN PYRÁK: História, Cosmologia, Onomástica e Amizade Formal Apinaje” (PhD diss., Universidade Estadual de Campinas, 2000); Da Viagem que se faz da Cidade de Bellem [sic] do Grão Pará, athe ás ultimas Colonias dos Dominios Portuguezes nos Rios Amazonas, e Negro Pelo Tenente Colonel de Engenharia João Vasco Manoel de Braun, 1782, Biblioteca Nacional, Lisbon (henceforth BNL), Rare Books, Cod. 568, f. 41; Silva e Souza, Memoria sobre o Descobrimento, BNRJ, 9, 2, 10, 43–44; and Curt Nimuendajú, The Apinayé, trans. Robert H. Lowie, ed. Robert H. Lowie and John M. Cooper (New York: Humanities Press, 1967), 1–10. 15. For the Krahô see Greg Urban, “A História da Cultura Brasileira Segundo as Línguas Nativas,” trans. Beatriz Perrone-Moisés, in História dos Índios no Brasil, ed. Manuela Carneiro da Cunha (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1992), 88, 90; Mary Karasch, “Catequese e Cativeiro,” in História dos Índios no Brasil, ed. Manuela Carneiro da Cunha, 402, 408–409; Hemming, Amazon Frontier, 190; Curt Nimuendajú, The Eastern Timbira, trans. and ed. Robert  H.  Lowie (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1946), 22–27;

Riverine Borderlands and Multicultural Contacts   607 Izabel Missagia de Matos, “Colonization, Mediation, and Mestizaje in the Borderlands of Nineteenth-Century Minas Gerais, Brazil,” in The Oxford Handbook of Borderlands of the Iberian World, ed. Danna A. Levin Rojo and Cynthia Radding, 413–440 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019). 16. Urban, “A História da Cultura Brasileira,” 88, 90–91; Apolinário, Os Akroá e Outros Povos Indigenas, 45–49, 77–79. 17. Gomes, Teixeira Neto, and Sales Barbosa, Geografia, 49; Toral, “Cosmologia e Sociedade Karajá,” 14–16; map in Marivone Matos Chaim, Os Aldeamentos Indígenas na Capitania de Goiás (Goiânia: Oriente, 1974), 43; Mônica Veloso Borges, “Diferenças entre as Falas Feminina e Masculina no Karajá e em Outras Línguas Brasileiras: Aspectos Tipológicos,” Liames: Línguas Indígenas Americanas 4 (2004): 103–113. Karajá contacts with the bandeiras of 1755 and 1775 are narrated in Mary Karasch, “Rethinking the Conquest of Goiás, 1775–1819,” The Americas 61, no. 3 (January 2005), 463–492. On trade, see letter of Souza Von Araujo J. to Santos e Sousa, Niquelandia 1776, Arquivo Histórico do Estado de Goiás, Goiânia (henceforth AHG). 18. Laura  R.  Graham, Performing Dreams: Discourses of Immortality among the Xavante of Central Brazil (Tucson: Fenestra Books, 2003), 25–27; Aracy Lopes da Silva, “Dois Séculos e Meio de História Xavante,” in História dos Índios, ed. Manuela Carneiro da Cunha, 362–365; map 1751 in Chaim, Aldeamentos, 43; Johann E. Pohl, Viagem no Interior do Brasil, trans. Milton Amado e Eugênio Amado (Belo Horizonte: Ed. Itatiaia, 1976), 236–242. 19. Lopes da Silva, “Dois Séculos,” 364–365; Graham, Performing Dreams, 25–26 and map of the Xavante reserves, 30; Curt Nimuandajú, The Serente, trans. from the manuscript by Robert H. Lowie [1942] (New York: AMS Press 1979), 1–2, 4; Urban, “A História da Cultura Brasileira,” 88. 20. Dulce Madalena Rios Pedroso, Eliana Granado, Ester Silveira, Hélio Madalena, and Monica Pechincha, Avá-Canoeiro: a Terra, o Homem, a Luta (Goiânia: UCG, 1990), 91–128; André A. Toral, “Os Índios Negros ou os Carijó de Goiás: A História dos Avá-Canoeiro,” Revista de Antropologia 27–28 (1984–1985): 287–326; Silva e Souza, Memoria sobre o Descobrimento, BNRJ, 9,2,10, 28, 43. 21. Giraldin, Cayapó e Panará; Mead, “Caiapó do Sul.” 22. On the Goiá, see Gomes, Teixeira Neto, and Sales Barbosa, Geografia, 49; and Monteiro, Negros da Terra, 137. 23. On early bandeiras, see Affonso de E. Taunay, História das Bandeiras Paulistas, vol. 2 (São Paulo: Edições Melhoramentos, 1975), 183–184; Monteiro, Negros da Terra, 79; Ferreira, Bandeiras do Paraupava, 117–127; Salles, Economia e Escravidão, 314, notes 4 and 7; and José Martins Pereira de Alencastre, Anais da Província de Goiás [1863] (Brasília: Ed. Gráfica Ipiranga, 1979), 77–78. 24. John Hemming, Red Gold: The Conquest of the Brazilian Indians, 1500–1760 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), 377–378, 381–384; Padre Luiz Antônio da Silva e Souza, “Memoria sobre o Descobrimento, Governo, População, e Cousas mais Notaveis Da Capitania de Goyaz [1812],” Revista Trimensal de História e Geographia 16 (4th term 1849): 76–77; Taunay, História das Bandeiras Paulistas, vol. 2, 189–199; and Alencastre, Anais, 28, 30, 32–47. 25. Salles, Economia e Escravidão, 75–76; Luiz Palacin, Goiás: 1722–1822 (Goiânia: Oriente, 1976), 33–42; and Silva e Souza, “Memoria sobre o Descobrimento,” 96. 26. J. Trindade da Fonseca e Silva, Lugares e Pessoas: Subsídios Eclesiásticos para a História de Goiás (Goiânia: UCG, 2006), 39–43; José Luiz de Castro, A Organização da Igreja Católica na Capitania de Goiás, 1726–1824 (Goiânia: UCG, 2006), 103–110. 27. Fonseca e Silva, Lugares, 44–51; Castro, A organização da Igreja Católica, 105–110.

608   Borderlands of the Iberian World 28. Barbara Sommer, “Conflict, Alliance, Mobility, and Place in the Evolution of Identity in Portuguese Amazonia,” in The Oxford Handbook of Borderlands of the Iberian World, ed. Danna A. Levin Rojo and Cynthia Radding, 613–634 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019). 29. For the directorate missions, see Rita Heloísa de Almeida, O Diretório dos Índios: Um Projeto de “Civilização” no Brasil do Século XVIII (Brasília: UnB, 1997). For Goiás, see Pohl, Viagem, 152–157; Auguste de Saint-Hilaire, Viagem à Província de Goiás, trans. Regina Regis Junqueira (Belo Horizonte: Ed. Itatiaia, 1975), 63–66, 70–71; Giraldin, Cayapó e Panará, 100; and Mead, “Caiapó do Sul,” 226–284. An illustration of São José in ruins is in Native Brazil, ed. Hal Langfur, 212. 30. These themes are elaborated in Karasch, “The Periphery of the Periphery?,” 143–169. 31. On the Carta regia of 1811, see Mary Karasch, “Catechese e Cativeiro,” in História dos Índios, ed. Manuela Carneiro da Cunha, 402. 32. Palacin, Goiás, 81–93; McCreery, Frontier Goiás, 105–108. The decline of income from the quinto is in Table 3 in Karasch, “The Periphery of the Periphery?,” 153. 33. Noticia Geral da Capitania de Goiás, 1783, BNRJ, Manuscript Section, Cod. 16.3.2. For craftsmen in five mining towns, see AHG, Documentação Diversa (henceforth AHGDD), no. 68, Correspondência Dirigida do Comandante das Armas—Raimundo José da Cunha Matos, 1823–1824, Água Quente, ff. 112–121; Cocal, 99–106; Pontal, ff. 175–185; São José do Tocantins, 123–142; and Traíras, 86–98. They included metal workers, carpenters, tailors and seamstresses, shoemakers, spinners, and weavers. 34. For more on the captaincy’s trade, see Karasch, “The Periphery of the Periphery?,” 158–162. 35. Karasch, “The Periphery of the Periphery?,” 158–159; and AHGDD, no. 69, Origenais dos Comandantes dos Registros e Presídios da Província, to Cunha Matos, from Pacifico Antônio Xavier de Barros, Porto Real, February 20, 1824, 151. 36. AHGDD, no. 69, Origenais dos Comandantes dos Registros e Presídios da Província, to Cunha Matos, from Pacifico Antônio Xavier de Barros, Porto Real, 20 February 1824, 161–162; and Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino, Lisbon (henceforth AHU), Cod. 2109, Reflexoens economicas sobre as tabellas statisticas da Capitania de Goyaz pertencentes ao anno de 1804 e feitas no de 1806. 37. Karasch, “The Periphery of the Periphery?,” 160–162; and AHU, Cod. 2109, Reflexoens, 1806. 38. Palacin, Goiás, 156–158; and Dom Francisco de Assis Mascarenhas, Mappa das Companhias de Dragoens, e Pedestres da Capitania de Goiaz, Vila Boa de Goias, April 15, 1806, AHU, Goiás, caixa 43. 39. Karasch, “The Periphery of the Periphery?,” 154–155. 40. Monteiro, Negros da Terra, 29; Heather  F.  Roller, “Autonomous Indian Nations and Peacemaking in Colonial Brazil,” in The Oxford Handbook of Borderlands of the Iberian World, ed. Danna A. Levin Rojo and Cynthia Radding, 641–666 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019). 41. Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo, Lisbon (henceforth ANTT), Ministério do Reino, maço 598, to Conde de Oeiras from Frei João, Bishop of Pará, Pará, 8 November 1760 (copy); BNL, Rare Books, Cod. 568, Da Viagem que se faz da Cidade de Bellem, . . . de Braun, 1782, 4; Nimuendajú, Apinayé, 3, 120–122; and AHU, no. 995, caixa 17, Goiás, 1756–1799 [1779?]. 42. Nimuendajú, Apinayé, 2–3; Hemming, Amazon Frontier, 187. 43. Nimuendajú, Apinayé, 120; Mary Karasch and David McCreery, “Indigenous Resistance in Central Brazil, 1770–1890,” in Native Brazil, ed. Hal Langfur, 228.

Riverine Borderlands and Multicultural Contacts   609 44. Hemming: Amazon Frontier, 188–189; AHGDD, no. 18, no. 48, Silveira Mendonça, from Cunha Matos, Ofício, 62; Karasch and McCreery, “Indigenous Resistance,” 228–229. 45. Nimuendajú, Eastern Timbira, 27–28; Hemming, Amazon Frontier, 190–192; and IHGB, Arq. 1.5.16, Major Francisco de Paulo Ribeiro, Viagem ao Rio do Tucantins [sic] em 1815, pelos sertoens do Maranham [sic] 1818, 268. 46. Pohl, Viagem, 255–256. 47. “Roteiro da Viagem que Fez o Capitão Francisco de Paula Ribeiro a’s [sic] Fronteiras da Capitania do Maranhão e da de Goyaz no Anno de 1815 [1848],” Revista Trimensal de Historia e Geographia 10 (1870): 45–46; Hemming, Amazon Frontier, 184–185; Goiás (Capitania), Copia da Memoria oferecida pelo Capitam d’ordenanças Francisco Jozé Pinto de Mangalhens [Magalhães] em 3 de Janeiro de 1813, BNRJ, I-31,21,9. 48. Ribeiro, Viagem, ff. 276, 278–279; Hemming, Amazon Frontier, 184–185; AHGDD, no. 18, Correspondência, Cunha Matos, 1823–1825, f. 50; Nimuendajú, Eastern Timbira, 27–28. 49. ANTT, maço 500, Ministério do Reino, Negocios do Brasil e Ultramar, 1730–1823. 50. Hemming, Amazon Frontier, 190–191; Ribeiro, Viagem, ff. 271–272; Nimuendajú, Eastern Timbira, 4; and Mary C. Karasch, “Catechism and Captivity: Indian Policy in Goiás, 1780–1889,” in Native Brazil, ed. Hal Langfur, 216. 51. On Karajá enemies, see Karasch, “Rethinking the Conquest,” 474. On Apinajé see D.  Francisco de Souza Coutinho to Martinho de Mello e Castro, Pará, 8 March 1793, IHGB, Lata 281, pasta 4, doc. 1; IHGB, lata 281, pasta 4, doc. 3, 8 February 1793; and IHGB, Lata 281, pasta 4, doc. 3, 17–28 January 1793. 52. Karasch, “Rethinking the Conquest,” 477–478. 53. Karasch, “Rethinking the Conquest,” 480; Alencastre, Anais, 331–336. 54. Ofício of Tristão da Cunha Menezes to Martinho de Mello e Castro, Vila Boa, 17 July 1784, f. 283, IHGB, Arq. 1.2.7, v. 36; Rita Eloisa Almeida Lazarin, “O Aldeamento do Carretão: Duas Histórias” (MA diss., University of Brasília), 133; and Pohl, Viagem, 237–239. 55. On Xavante enemies see Spix and von Martius, Viagem pelo Brasil, 229; Oswaldo Martins Ravagnani, “A Experiência Xavante com o Mundo dos Brancos” (PhD diss., Escola de Sociologia e Politica de São Paulo, 1978), 91–92; Memoria, Pinto de Magalhães, 1813, BNRJ, I-31,21,9; Correspondência, Cunha Matos, 1823–1825, f. 48, AHGDD, no. 18; Karasch, “Rethinking the Conquest,” 481–485. 56. Pohl, Viagem, 238. 57. On Xerente enemies and warfare, see Nimuendajú, Serente, 9, 75–77; Hemming, Amazon Frontier, 194; Memoria, Magalhães, 1813, RJBN I-31, 21, 9; Spix and von Martius, Viagem, vol. 2, 229. 58. On Graciosa, see Registro de Correspondências Militares ao Governo Civil da Província, 1823–1826, ff. 167–169, AHGDD, no. 70; and Ofício ao conselho da Província, from Cunha Matos, Traíras, 26 February, 1825, AHGDD. 59. Friar Michel Berthet, “Uma Viagem de Missão pelo Interior do Brasil [1890],” trans. Laura Chaer, in Memorias Goianas I (Goiânia: Centauro, 1982), 145; Hemming, Amazon Frontier, 193; Ofício to Silveira Mendonça from Cunha Matos, f. 62, AHGDD, no. 18, no. 48; and Pedroso, “Avá-Canoeiro,” 100–103, and maps, 130–131. 60. Ofício de Miguel Lino de Moraes . . . , expondo o estado econômico [e politico] da provincia de Goiaz” (cópia), Goiás, 1 December 1830, BNRJ, I-28,31,26, Goiás (Província); and Virgilio Martins de Mello Franco, Viagens pelo interior de Minas Geraes e Goyaz (Rio de Janeiro: Imprensa Nacional, 1888), 120–121.

610   Borderlands of the Iberian World 61. Toral, “Os Índios Negros,” 287–326. On twentieth-century contacts, see Pedroso, “Avá Canoeiro,” 104–177. 62. Karasch, “Damiana da Cunha: Catechist and Sertanista,” in Struggle and Survival in Colonial America, ed. David G. Sweet and Gary B. Nash (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 102–120. 63. Giraldin, Cayapó e Panará, 49, 55–56, 80–81, 94; and Mead, “Caiapó do Sul,” 99–108. Mead, 436–437, argues that plunder was also a motivation for raids among the Kayapó do Sul. 64. Mead, “Caiapó do Sul,” 81–85; Jézus Marco de Ataídes, “A Chegada do Colonizador e os Kayapó,” in Índios de Goiás: Uma Perspectiva Histórico-Cultural, ed. Marlene  C.  O.  de Moura (Goiânia: UCG, Ed. Kelps, 2006), 67; and Ofício de Lino de Moraes, 1 December 1830, BNRJ, I-28, 31, 26. 65. Goiás, Redução dos índios da Capitania de Goiás, do Arquivo do Dr. Ernesto Ferreira França Filho, s. d. Removal to Arinos, IHGB, lata 397, doc. 2; Mary Karasch, “Interethnic Conflict and Resistance on the Brazilian Frontier of Goiás, 1750–1890,” in Contested Ground: Comparative Frontiers on the Northern and Southern Edge of the Spanish Empire, ed. Donna J. Guy and Thomas E. Sheridan (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1998), 131; and Karasch and McCreery, “Indigenous Resistance,” 230–233. 66. For the Bororo see Alencastre, Anais, 74–75; Mead, “Caiapó,” 146–150. For quilombo attacks see Redução dos índios, IHGB, lata 397, doc. 2. 67. Giraldin, Cayapó e Panará, 121–128, 133–136. On contact, see Mead, “Caiapó do Sul,” 16–25.

Bibliography Alencastre, José Martins Pereira de. Anais da Província de Goiás. Brasília: Ed. Gráfica Ipiranga, 1979. Apolinário, Juciene Ricarte. Os Akroá e Outros Povos Indigenas nas Fronteiras do Sertão. Goiânia: Ed. Kelps, 2006. Castro, José Luiz de. A Organização da Igreja Católica na Capitania de Goiás (1726–1824). Goiânia: UCG, 2006. Chaim, Marivone Matos. Os Aldeamentos Indígenas na Capitania de Goiás. Goiânia: Oriente, 1974. Cruls, Luiz. Planalto Central do Brasil. Rio de Janeiro: José Olympio, 1957. Cunha, Manuela Carneiro da, ed. História dos Índios no Brasil. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1992. Ferreira, Manoel Rodrigues. As Bandeiras do Paraupava. São Paulo: Prefeitura Municipal de São Paulo, 1977. Fonseca e Silva, J. Trindade da. Lugares e Pessoas: Subsídios Eclesiásticos para a História de Goiás. Goiânia: UCG, 2006. Giraldin, Odair. Cayapó e Panará: Luta e Sobrevivência de um Povo Jê no Brasil Central. Campinas: UNICAMP, 1997. Gomes, Horieste, Antônio Teixeira Neto, and Altair Sales Barbosa. Geografia: Goiás-Tocantins. Goiânia: UFG, 2005. Graham, Laura R. Performing Dreams: Discourses of Immortality among the Xavante of Central Brazil. Tucson: Fenestra Books, 2003. Hemming, John. Amazon Frontier: The Defeat of the Brazilian Indians. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987.

Riverine Borderlands and Multicultural Contacts   611 Karasch, Mary C. Before Brasília: Frontier Life in Central Brazil. Albuquerque: UNM, 2016. Karasch, Mary. “The Periphery of the Periphery? Vila Boa de Goiás, 1780–1835.” In Negotiated Empires: Centers and Peripheries in the Americas, 1500–1820, edited by Christine Daniels and Michael V. Kennedy, 143–169. New York: Routledge, 2002. Karasch, Mary. “Rethinking the Conquest of Goiás, 1775–1819.” The Americas 61, no. 3 (2005): 463–492. Karasch, Mary, and David McCreery, “Indigenous Resistance in Central Brazil, 1770–1890,” in Native Brazil: Beyond the Convert and the Cannibal, 1500–1900, edited by Hal Langfur, 225–249. Albuquerque: UNM, 2014. Langfur, Hal, ed. Native Brazil: Beyond the Convert and the Cannibal, 1500–1900. Albuquerque: UNM, 2014. Lopes da Silva, Aracy. “Dois Séculos e Meio de História Xavante.” In História dos Índios no Brasil, edited by Manuela Carneiro da Cunha, 362–365. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1992. McCreery, David. Frontier Goiás, 1822–1889. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006. Mead, David L. “Caiapó do Sul, an Ethnohistory (1610–1920).” PhD diss., University of Florida, 2010. Monteiro, John Manuel. Negros da Terra: Índios e Bandeirantes nas Origens de São Paulo. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1994. Moura, Marlene Castro Ossami de, ed. Índios de Goiás: Uma Perspectiva Histórico-Cultural. Goiânia: UCG, Ed. Kelps, 2006. Nimuendajú, Curt. The Apinayé. Translated by Robert H. Lowie, edited by Robert H. Lowie and John M. Cooper. New York: Humanities Press, 1967. Nimuendajú, Curt. The Eastern Timbira. Translated and edited by Robert H. Lowie. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1946. Nimuendajú, Curt. The Serente. Translated by Robert H. Lowie. New York: AMS Press, 1979. Palacin, Luiz. Goiás: 1722–1822. Goiânia: Oriente, 1976. Pedroso, Dulce Madalena Rios. “Avá-Canoeiro: A História do Povo Invisível—Séculos XVIII e XIX.” MA diss., Federal University of Goiás, 1992. Pedroso, Dulce Madalena Rios. “Avá-Canoeiro.” In Índios de Goiás: Uma Perspectiva HistóricoCultural, edited by Marlene C. O. de Moura. Goiânia: UCG, Ed. Kelps, Ed. Vieira, 2006. Pohl, Johann  E. Viagem no Interior do Brasil. Translation by Milton Amado and Eugênio Amado. Belo Horizonte: Ed. Itatiaia, 1976. Roller, Heather  F. Amazonian Routes: Indigenous Mobility and Colonial Communities in Northern Brazil. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014. Salles, Gilka V.F. de. Economia e Escravidão na Capitania de Goiás. Goiânia: CEGRAF-UFG, 1992. Silva e Souza, Padre Luiz Antonio da. “Memoria sobre o Descobrimento, Governo, População, e Cousas mais Notaveis Da Capitania de Goyaz.” Revista Trimensal de Historia e Geographia 16 (4th quarter 1849): 71–139. Spix, Johann Baptist von, and Carl Friedrich Philipp von Martius. Viagem pelo Brasil, 1817–1820: Excertos e Ilustraçoes. Translated by Lúcia Furquim Lahmeyer. São Paulo: Edições Melhoramentos, 1968. Taunay, Affonso de. História das Bandeiras Paulistas, vol. 2. 3 vols. São Paulo: Edições Melhoramentos, 1975. Toral, Andre Amaral de. “Cosmologia e Sociedade Karajá.” MA diss., Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, 1992.

612   Borderlands of the Iberian World Toral, Andre Amaral de. “Os Índios Negros ou os Carijó de Goiás: A História dos Avá-Canoeiro.” Revista de Antropologia 27–28 (1984–1985): 287–326. Urban, Greg. “A História da Cultura Brasileira Segundo as Línguas Nativas.” Translated by Beatriz Perrone-Moisés. In História dos Índios no Brasil, edited by Manuela Carneiro da Cunha, 87–102. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1992.

chapter 25

Con flict, A l li a nce , Mobilit y, a n d Pl ace i n the Evolu tion of Iden tit y i n Portugu ese A m a zon i a Barbara A. Sommer

The 1750 Treaty of Madrid awarded much of the Amazon region of South America to the Portuguese Crown, with boundaries to be determined by a joint Spanish–Portuguese commission. Consequently, the powerful minister Sebastião José de Carvalho e Melo, later the Marquês de Pombal, prioritized sweeping administrative, defensive, and economic reforms to confirm the Crown’s exclusive control of the vast river basin. His brother, Francisco Xavier de Mendonça Furtado, as governor and captain general, would implement these changes and lead the demarcation commission. Effective occupation required taking control of the missions, formalizing the military and building forts at strategic locations. Pombal’s plan would link three distant hubs: the capital city of Belém do Pará, near the mouth of the Amazon on the Atlantic coast; a new town, Barcelos, halfway up the Rio Negro to the north; and Vila Bela to the southwest, up the Rio Madeira in the distant captaincy of Mato Grosso. Although the 1777 Treaty of San Ildefonso would supersede the Treaty of Madrid, it confirmed that the Spanish– Portuguese borders would be determined by effective occupation (uti possidetis).1 A handful of colonial agents had formally claimed some lands for the Portuguese Crown over the centuries, but generations of Indian slavers, military squadrons, and missionaries had pushed up the main Amazon River and its tributaries, allying with natives and, in the process, expanding Crown rights. When the Spanish and Portuguese finally met to demarcate the inland imperial boundaries in the late eighteenth century, they ventured far up the old slave-trading routes.2

614   Borderlands of the Iberian World By the mid-eighteenth century, settlement patterns had emerged from early colonial turmoil determined by the extensive river system. When Mendonça Furtado arrived from Lisbon in 1751, he found Belém not unlike the native villages of the forest.3 Yet the town of roughly six thousand, and the rural estates that surrounded it, defined the heart of Portuguese influence.4 Other significant settlements were situated at the juncture of major tributaries along the main river, such as Cametá, at the mouth of the Rio Tocantins, as were forts and adjacent missions. In downriver areas, Portuguese immigrants, descendants of native and African slaves and freemen, and mixed-race mamelucos and mulattos planted cacao, sugar, cotton, and food crops, raised cattle, and traded in natural forest products. Free natives populated over sixty missions stretching from Belém, along the Amazon, the Rio Solimões (as the Amazon above the Rio Negro is called in Brazil), and the Rio Negro, the river route north to Guiana. Near Belém, the missions dotted Marajó, the world’s largest fluvial island, and the area southeast toward the Atlantic. Those indigenous people who had avoided most European contact lived in the sertão, backland forests, along less-traveled rivers, or above the falls of tributaries.5 These included the Munduruku, Mawé, Mura, and Juruna. With relatively few Portuguese colonists or African slaves, the population of the north was predominantly indigenous. For some eleven thousand years, the vast network of navigable rivers in equatorial South America had been home to Paleoindian hunter-gatherers and later agriculturalists who had transformed Amazon forests and savannahs. They foraged along the main river leaving shell middens over six meters deep in some places, and their agricultural activities created black anthropogenic soil deposits, or terra preta. After painting caves and rock outcroppings, they went on to build plazas, roads, canals, raised fields, and earthworks and produce stone figurines as well as some of the earliest pottery in the Americas. At the time of European contact in the sixteenth century, the region supported densely settled, ethnically heterogeneous agricultural groups, speaking an estimated seven hundred different languages. They manufactured sophisticated ceramics, canoes, and an array of weapons, tools, and ceremonial objects.6 The várzea, or floodplain, provided aquatic resources as well as fertile soils for planting manioc, maize, and fruit trees. In contrast, the people of the forested upland interior (terra firme) planted in poorer soils and had more limited access to rivers and lakes. The Omagua on the Rio Solimões spoke disparagingly of the round heads of these forest “barbarians” who did not flatten their foreheads at birth, as did the Omagua. Indeed, the Omagua captured them and put them to work in their fields.7 Natives along the main river vied for resources, moving swiftly over vast distances in their large canoes. After 1600, the vast fluvial system provided European explorers, missionaries, traders, and slavers access to the dense indigenous populations and natural resources.8 Surging up the Amazon, they waged war in canoes and introduced diseases such as smallpox and measles that ravaged the dense populations recorded at initial contact.9 Imperial conflicts played out through the shifting alliances with indigenous groups that eventually determined borders. From Belém, the Portuguese and their native allies routed early Irish, English, Dutch, and French traders and then set up forts, missions,

Conflict, Alliance, Mobility, and Place   615 and slave-trading posts. By the end of the seventeenth century, they confronted a Jesuit in the service of the Spanish Crown above the mouth of the Rio Negro. Waterways allowed some native peoples and runaway slaves, both indigenous and African, to flee colonial exploitation and find refuge above the waterfalls of tributary rivers and along igarapé, backwater channels, beyond imperial control. Swamps, dense forests of the sertão, and cataracts obstructed free movement and provided havens. Many of the supposedly uncontacted “tribes” of the nineteenth and twentieth century had thus evaded enslavement or missions in previous centuries. Today, the descendants of African slaves who fled up the Trombetas establishing maroon communities above the falls, recount stories in which their protector, Mother Waterfall, plays a prominent role.10 On the great inland sea inter-ethnic contact and conflict, ethnogenesis,11 disease, and voluntary isolation would define the future boundaries and nature of the Amazon region. Historians deem northern Brazil a “fringe” area of the Portuguese colony, demographically and economically insignificant in comparison to the sugar plantations of the northeast or the mining centers of Minas Gerais.12 But the indigenous “core” of South America lay in the interior near the confluence of the Negro, Madeira, and Amazon rivers. From that area, migration and commerce connected the Atlantic Ocean, the Caribbean, the Andes, and the southern highlands along fluvial routes. In the early eighteenth century, the powerful Manao confederacy would attempt to control the corridor north and the trade with the Dutch in Guiana and the Portuguese to the south, but military forces from Belém broke their defense in the mid-1720s. By the mid-eighteenth century, Portuguese slave traders and missionaries had explored the far reaches of Rio Negro and Rio Branco tributaries. Native allies were essential to Portuguese claims to lowland South America. Indian leaders settled in the missions, called principais, gained privileges from the Crown in return for leading their followers against common enemies.13 Expert native or mestizo river pilots, called prácticos or jacumaúbas, and highly skilled canoe men were central to exploration and exploitation. Their large harvesting canoes coursing with the annual highwaters brought to Belém the drogas do sertão, the forest products that sustained the colony. Native informants helped the Portuguese map and substantiate their territorial claims, as they had probably previously contributed to Jesuit maps of the region.14 By the late eighteenth century, Pombal’s plan for what was by then the Portuguese State of Grão Pará and the creation of a state monopoly trading company had enhanced ethnic and social identities, as groups and individuals competed for resources. Through strategic uses of place and both native and African slave labor, wealthy landowners near Belém had established sugar plantations in the rich várzea, and cattle ranchers flourished on Marajó. They aspired to a seigneurial lifestyle, maintaining plantation homes and townhouses in the capital.15 Other Portuguese immigrants practiced trades or had small shops in the city, or they settled in the new colony at Mazagão or at Bragança, growing commercial crops for export. Free people of indigenous, African, and mixed descent as well as Portuguese immigrants worked small farms and ranches along the lower Amazon. Other immigrants and mixed-race soldiers at lower social levels settled

616   Borderlands of the Iberian World in the former missions and married native women, relying on their relatives to gain access to the resources of the sertão. Indigenous peoples exploited the colony and the forest, as places of opportunity or refuge according to changing circumstances, taking advantage of what the Europeans offered while retaining some autonomy. They acquired tools and protection from hostile neighbors in the former missions, where they adopted European dress and discourse but rejoined independent native groups in the sertão to escape disease, colonial restrictions, and a harsh regime of forced labor. By the 1780s, this process extended all the way to the distant Rio Branco where Portuguese and Dutch interests collided.16 Seasonal changes also affected movement between European-controlled settlements and the forest. Just as the Indian canoes to the sertão travelled annually with the rains, during the dry summers, mixed-race people, and runaway soldiers and slaves congregated on isolated rivers to take advantage of seasonal fishing. Geographical mobility determined these inhabitants’ use of both town and forest and the ever-mutable northern borderlands. Cultural and social values evolved and coalesced through disparate groups of the northern colony. While Catholicism and European technology and agricultural methods were adopted, indigenous, as well as African, language, lifestyle, technology, foods, and beliefs persisted, making the North a unique region of Portuguese America.17 Language, an important indicator of identity, provides a case in point. The Tupí-based Língua Geral Amazônica, also called Nheengatu, with its origins in the língua geral of São Paulo, became the regional lingua franca and only in the eighteenth century did Pombaline authorities try (with limited success) to impose Portuguese. During the eighteenth century, bilingualism was common, with Europeans speaking Portuguese and Nheengatu, and Indians using Nheengatu and an indigenous language.18 The populace abandoned most Nheengatu only in the nineteenth century, although some groups of the Rio Negro region continue to speak it today. Throughout Grão-Pará, people practiced a repertoire of colonial cultural habits drawing on European, African, and Amerindian traditions in the areas of religion, healing, magic, and social mores.19 By the late nineteenth century, this mosaic of shifting colonial ethnic and legal identities had largely coalesced but was deemphasized in the national context. Historians of the new Brazilian republic effectively obscured the historical component of its development. Early national scholars mapped out the broad outlines of events and actors in foundational studies that depicted the North as an afterthought to coastal Brazil.20 Amazonian history became shrouded in romantic mists, as a “paradise lost,” or a place essentially “without history.”21 Yet the development of identities during the colonial era is key to understanding later periods. A partial source of obfuscation followed post-Independence violence as Amazonians fought against national intrusion during the late-1830s revolt known as the Cabanagem.22 In the following century, when ethnographers and missionaries encountered native groups in remote forests they identified them as “uncontacted”: however, many of these groups descended from peoples whose mobility after contact and exploitation of natural boundaries allowed them to survive in “voluntary isolation.”

Conflict, Alliance, Mobility, and Place   617

Territorial Occupation The 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas had given the Portuguese only the Atlantic “bulge” of South America, but they gradually expanded their claims to much of the northern half of the continent. Spanish explorer Vicente Yáñez Pinzón made the first recorded contact in the Amazon coastal region in 1500, but subsequent Spanish and Portuguese attempts to establish colonies in the 1530s failed, and the Iberians lost interest in the region.23 In their absence, English, Irish, Dutch, and French traders coursed along the coast and upriver to establish working relations with the inhabitants, exchanging European tools and manufactured goods for dyewood, tobacco, and other natural products.24 Portuguese from the sugar-producing captaincy of Pernambuco finally moved north against the French in 1615, founding a colony in Maranhão, as well as fort Persépio de Belém, where the Rio Guamá enters Marajó Bay in the Amazon region called Grão-Pará. The mainland Tupinambá of Maranhão and Pará initially realigned themselves with the newcomers, but some soon tired of the demands of the Indian slave trade. Twenty-four headmen organized a “confederation” and mounted a failed attack on the fort at Belém in 1619. The Portuguese and their loyal Tobajara and Tremembé allies spent the rest of the year in reprisals, enslaving rebels between São Luís and Belém.25 The Crown established the State of Maranhão in 1621 to administer the North, which was more easily accessible from Lisbon than the state of Brazil.26 The Portuguese next launched aggressive attacks on the Irish, English, and Dutch trading forts and non-allied natives.27 In 1623, they expelled the Dutch from their upriver fort at Gurupá and ousted English interlopers in 1631.28 While Brazilian nationalist scholars heralded the expulsion of foreigners by Luso-Brazilians, it should be remembered that the Spanish Crown ruled Portugal from 1580 to 1640 and incentivized the Iberian territorial expansion.29 Over the next two decades, the Portuguese and their remaining Tupinambá allies ravaged the area north and west of Belém, including the lower Rio Pacajá and Rio Tocantins and the south side of Marajó Island, sending native captives to missions or the auction block.30 Indigenous people, as allies, slaves, or free workers, were the key to wealth in the north, and Portuguese authorities developed policies to ensure they profited from their native subjects.31 All productive endeavors relied on their labor and during the 1630s the Portuguese even exported them as slaves north to the Spanish Indies and south to Pernambuco.32 The enslavement of indigenous people in Brazil was by no means new—the Portuguese had shipped Tupi from southern ports to Lisbon as early as 1511.33 But by 1641, Frei Cristóvão de Lisboa noted “not a single Indian village in the one hundred leagues between São Luís and Belém, and only domesticated Indians within one ­hundred leagues from Belém westward.”34 The Portuguese moved progressively up the main river and its tributaries, pursuing and enslaving indigenous people who revolted or refused to settle in villages within the expanding colony. In 1637, the arrival in Belém of two Spanish Franciscans and six soldiers from Peru posed a potential challenge.35 Although the Spanish and Portuguese Crowns were still united, signs indicated that a separation was imminent. To reassert Portuguese control,

618   Borderlands of the Iberian World Pedro Teixeira, along with seventy Portuguese and twelve hundred native allies, escorted four of the Spaniards back upstream to Peru, and along the way laid claim to the greater part of the basin. Jesuit Cristóbal de Acuña, who accompanied Teixeira when he returned to Belém from Quito the following year, highlighted, nonetheless, the limits of Portuguese control in the region.36 He described Cametá, the former center of operations for forays into the interior, as abandoned, while only Fort Desterro (Almeirim) was in active use below the Rio Ginipape (Rio Parú) on the north side of the Amazon. The native settlement furthest upriver mentioned as allied to the Portuguese was Gurupatuba (Monte Alegre), midway between the Rio Negro and Belém on the north side of the Amazon across from the Rio Tapajós. In Belém, Acuña found that only the captain major and three captains of infantry represented Portuguese authority for the entire region. He described groups that remained independent on many islands on the south side of the river, including the valiant Pacajás on the banks of the river of the same name.37 A century later, many of these groups inhabited Portuguese missions established in their territories. As in many borderland regions, missions and forts were key to Portuguese geographical control in Amazonia. As they ventured upriver, stalwart individuals built forts at the juncture of important tributaries—Parú (Almeirim), Rio Negro, Pauxis (Óbidos), and Tapajós (Santarém)—and on an island near Belém both as slaving stations and to preclude invasions by the French from Cayenne.38 Although the religious orders had originally relocated Indians to missions near Belém, they soon created missions in tribal areas.39 They expanded the king’s military both geographically and numerically because the mission men comprised fighting forces replete with native officers. The king formalized this territorial occupation in 1693, dividing Grão-Pará among the Jesuits, Franciscan Capuchins of Santo António, Franciscans of Piedade and Conceição, and Mercedarians.40 The Carmelites became active on the Rio Negro and Solimões, establishing missions during the first quarter of the eighteenth century.41 Significantly, after the 1750 Treaty of Madrid, these missions became secular Portuguese villages and further secured territorial claims.42 The economic imperatives of slavery and the extractive economy pushed Portuguese canoe expeditions progressively further up the Amazon.43 While commercial agricultural products included tobacco and sugar, the early colony relied on the harvest and exportation of natural forest and aquatic products, the so-called drogas do sertão.44 Cacao was the primary commercial export among the collected products, followed by a relative of Mexico’s true vanilla, sarsaparilla, annatto dye, a bark substitute for clove (cravo), tree oils (especially copaíba), and a cinnamon substitute. As the Jesuit António Vieira commented, “A person’s assets are not his lands, but the products he extracts from them, and the only instruments for their extraction are the Indians.”45 Portuguese law allowed natives to be enslaved through legal purchase or ransom (resgate) from their enemies who held them as prisoners (presos à corda), or they could be captured as enemies in a Just War ( guerra justa).46 Combined military-missionary expeditions also resettled indigenous allies downriver, in villages near Belém, where although legally free, all but the leaders had to work for wages through a system of forced labor (repartição).47 The colonists relied on indigenous labor for transportation, food production (agriculture,

Conflict, Alliance, Mobility, and Place   619 fishing, and hunting), construction, and to man the six-month-long canoe expeditions to the interior to extract and process forest products. Although the economy of Pará expanded at the turn of the eighteenth century, it continued to rely on the exportation of extractive products, in addition to a growing agricultural sector that included domesticated cacao.48 The Crown claimed exclusive rights to workers in two of the most populated villages of Pará—the people of Maracaná (Sintra) on the Atlantic coast produced salt, and at Joanes (Monforte) on Marajó Island, a royal fishery established in the 1680s supplied the infantry as well as the general population throughout the colonial period.49 Natives also manned the canoes of the tithe contractor and worked at the Gurupá fort.50 The Crown and the Jesuits, despite condemning abuses, took advantage of their positions to exploit the slave trade and Indian labor. Imported diseases took a heavy toll on allies, enemies, and uncontacted people alike, and helped to drive the slave trade. As early as 1621, smallpox ravaged the region near Belém and west to the Rio Tocantins. A pan epidemic hit Maranhão in 1662 and spread to Belém by February of the following year, leaving the colonists without workers. The governor ordered missionaries with armed escorts to trade for slaves. These expeditions traveled far up the Amazon. They preyed on Peruvian Jesuit missions and then brought a measles epidemic downriver.51 During the mid-1690s, a smallpox epidemic again increased slave expeditions.52 After 1700, Portuguese canoes became common on the Solimões, where they beleaguered the Spanish Jesuit missionary, Samuel Fritz, who could not convince the Spanish Crown to provide soldiers or supply iron tools and other trade goods with any regularity. 53 To save his converts from enslavement by the Portuguese, he retreated with them far upriver, and the Spanish Crown thereby lost claim to hundreds of miles of the upper Amazon. Slaving and wars carried the Portuguese upriver and settlements of native allies would determine the boundaries of territorial claims. In the east, the governor sought to preserve territory by moving the Aruã from the north side of Marajó Island to the south to keep them from allying with the French and encroaching on Portuguese claims.54 The constant demand for slaves brought calls for the increased importation of enslaved Africans who had greater resistance to Old World diseases. Yet official Indian slaving expeditions were revived again in the 1720s and, in 1728, an act permitted colonists with adequate resources to capture the heathen and the Junta das Missões allowed private traders to accompany the official expeditions into the interior.55 Illegal trade flourished, too, as expeditions captured, purchased, and received as gifts slaves from friendly indigenous people from all parts of the basin, but especially the Solimões and Rio Negro. Former intermediaries, the Manao on the Rio Negro rebelled under leader Ajuricaba in the 1720s, incurring a Just War and enslavement.56 The end of the Manao confederacy opened the river and ushered in a high point in the trade. Between 1738 and 1745, licenses were issued to over three hundred people to capture over ten thousand natives.57 The mixed-race traders called cunhamenas (meaning the husband of a female relative), who secured alliances with ethnic groups by accepting their women as wives now flourished.58 They led the illegal trade because their Arawak- and Tukanoan-speaking relatives

620   Borderlands of the Iberian World would supply enemy captives. These allies used ancestral ritual and geographic knowledge to ply the complex waterways of the various tributaries of the Rio Japurá, Rio Branco, Rio Negro, and into the Orinoco River, passing from one drainage to the next where headwaters met, which allowed them to control a vast territory extending into regions that today span parts of Brazil, Venezuela, and Colombia.59 This apex in the slave trade, which had penetrated distant tributaries and met the Spanish and Dutch in the north, declined only in the late 1740s.60 In the 1750s, Mendonça Furtado, with his entourage of engineers, cartographers, and the famed Italian architect António José Landi, undertook extreme measures to consolidate Portuguese control of the region.61 In 1751, the new State of Grão-Pará and Maranhão incorporated the remaining donatory captaincies in the region and increased Crown influence in the basin. Mendonça Furtado even reined in the cunhamenas, using their allies to populate the colony and solidify control in the interior.62 In 1755, the new captaincy of São José do Rio Negro confirmed Portuguese occupation of the indigenous heartland. In addition to a number of other administrative and economic reforms, the Crown built formidable new towns and forts at strategic points. They secured the entrance to the Amazon River on the north side of Marajó Island from the French with the new town of Mazagão and the fort at nearby Macapá, a massive construction that consumed generations of Directorate workers as well as enslaved Africans. Far north on the Rio Negro at Barcelos, above the old falls of the sertão, Landi designed and built a monumental civic complex. The rational lines of the Enlightenment found in Landi’s imposing stone structures would impress the demarcation commission, while the ­former missions on the Solimões and other tributaries secured the western region from the Spanish.

Floating Frontiers: Identity and Place at Mid-Century Pombaline authorities attempted to invigorate the economy by establishing a monopoly state trading company and satisfying the chronic need for labor by importing “copious” numbers of African slaves to develop an agricultural-based export economy.63 They promoted links to Mato Grosso and the rest of Brazil via the major southern tributaries of the Amazon, especially the Tocantins and Madeira, and outlawed indigenous slavery, closing the old slave-raiding frontier. In 1757, a new policy, the Diretório que se deve observar nas povoações dos índios do Pará e Maranhão, sought to integrate the native populace by converting the missions to towns (vilas) and their inhabitants from religious neophytes to tax-paying citizens.64 With the introduction of this new system, called the Directorate, the governor retained the right to assign all able-bodied adult men—with the exception of the native officers— to work for the state or for Portuguese settlers at menial wages, although the stipulation

Conflict, Alliance, Mobility, and Place   621 that recognized their primary legal right to the land suggests the relatively weak position of the state.65 The Crown took control of the missions and replaced the missionaries with appointed civic directors, who were expected to oversee the transformation of the natives to producers and commercial agents, and educated townspeople. The men in these towns would still constitute a sector of the military forces and the new policy emphasized the role of indigenous officers.66 The governor hoped that encouraging poorer Portuguese settlers to marry into the native villages would speed the process of cultural conversion. The Diretório’s potential for success lay in the premise that everyone born in a particular town would remain under the administration of their native leaders but within reach of colonial authority. In practice, however, many frequently deserted, just as they had abandoned the missions.67 As in other areas of the Americas, “where imperial [ . . . ] power was too weak to maintain stable patterns of coerced labor [. . .] either violent resistance or flight was a more viable strategy there than it was nearer the core.”68 As late eighteenth-century colonial authorities in Pará strove to settle, count, and control native Amazonians, they faced formidable challenges, not the least of which was indigenous mobility.69 Political and ethnic boundaries were in constant flux. A number of the larger old missions, such as Oeiras, Portel, Melgaço, Monte Alegre, and Vila Franca, maintained a relatively stable population, with some groups considering themselves to be nacionais, or ethnic natives of those towns. New towns established by officials as frontier outposts were, in contrast, notably unstable. Some natives shuttled from the former mission towns located along major rivers to Belém, to outlying estates, or to the surrounding forests and less accessible waterways above the cataracts. The mobility of those who joined colonial settlements only to return to the interior shortly thereafter blurred the distinction between baptized Christians and gentio, the so-called heathen, of the forest. Mobility and canoe transportation was part of everyday life in Pará and Directorate Indians had legitimate reasons to travel. The great majority of these settlements, with their church, houses, a canoe house, and sometimes workshops for weaving and other manufacturing activities, were former missions situated on the main waterways. Many men maintained ties to the city and the sertão through their annual seasonal canoe trips upriver to harvest and process cacao, sarsaparilla, turtle oil, and other natural products, which they delivered to Belém.70 Participation in royal service might require helping to build the new colony of Mazagão or one of the fortifications along the main river. Some towns mined the ancient shell middens, hauling the shells to Belém to be made into lime for the construction of royal projects, including Landi’s governor’s palace and the church of Santa Anna. Indians were assigned also to man the canoes on the long voyage to Mato Grosso, while unmarried women provided domestic and agricultural labor for settlers at country estates or in Belém. Both men and women worked at the royal fishing and salt works. Even those who stayed relatively close to their towns went on fishing trips, visited relatives in neighboring towns, and resided at family subsistence plots, which were sometimes located quite a distance from their actual villages. Families and individuals moved frequently and sometimes great distances. When they left without permission, they were said to be ausente, or absent.

622   Borderlands of the Iberian World Temporary absentees among native men listed on the labor rolls of Directorate villages used the sertão and their physical mobility to leverage negotiations and to protest harsh treatment or punishment.71 They also fled to the forest to avoid epidemics, especially smallpox often returning after the danger of infection had passed.72 Other runaways made definitive breaks with diverse destinations: to work for themselves in the capital of Belém or in neighboring towns, setting up independent maroon communities, or joining independent indigenous groups in the forest. Since many Directorate villages consisted of descendants of the original mission-era inhabitants together with contingents from more recently arrived ethnic groups, the interaction between these distinct factions had important consequences for the towns. Good relations could dramatically increase the size of a town, while conflict could lead to a precipitous decline.73 Some factional or ethnic disputes prompted runaways to form mini-maroon settlements not too distant from the Directorate settlements.74 For information about such deserters, directors relied on long-term resident leaders who had often played a role in the process of communal disintegration by antagonizing newer arrivals.75 At the large town Portel, located at the mouth of the Rio Pacajá, the Tapijara considered themselves the natives, preceding the Perû and the Ariquena who arrived around 1748. The Perû headman fled Portel with his followers on various occasions, and while more than two hundred men and their families had settled at Portel, only about thirty remained in 1759.76 Although it is unclear where the Perû homeland was, runaways did not necessarily try to return to their old homes. In the case of the Ariquena, they deserted Portel in 1765, led by their headman Basílio de Carvalho, to escape to Guiana. Witnesses attributed the cause to “the little concordance they had with the natives of the settlement,” and accused Tapijara leaders of having effectively pushed the Ariquena off their land. In addition, Carvalho had hidden a runaway African slave, who incited him to flee by reminding him of the Tapijara insults and the continual burden of their labor assignments.77 Guiana had provided a haven to dislocated peoples, both Indian and African, for decades.78 In the mid-seventeenth century, the Arawak-speaking Tarumã had fled north from their Carmelite mission and Portuguese slavers near the mouth of the Rio Negro until they reached the Essequibo River in British Guyana. There the German explorer Robert Schomburgk found them in 1837, integrated into Carib-speaking communities.79 Similarly, although the Portuguese had relocated some Aruã from the north side of Marajó in the early eighteenth century, another faction had fled north toward Cayenne, where a French traveler encountered them in the nineteenth century. By moving physically beyond the reach of local authorities, natives limited the coercive power of the Crown, thereby obviating the primary objectives of the Diretório. When deserters fled to the forest, often no one was in pursuit, as local authorities generally had no one to chase after them very far or bring them back by force. Although they faced three months hard labor for abandoning their towns, authorities were incapable of controlling the problem, as frequent offers of amnesty during the forty years of the Directorate affirm.80 The indigenous people of eighteenth-century Pará, like people anywhere, generally, acted in their own best interests, as they understood them, ignoring the colonialists’ vital distinction between Directorate Christians and “heathen” of the forest.

Conflict, Alliance, Mobility, and Place   623 The Portuguese had to modify policy in response to changes in Paraense society prompted by this mobility. At the end of the eighteenth century, Governor and Captain General Francisco de Souza Coutinho suggested ending the Directorate, largely due to the lack of native laborers available for state projects.81 While the population of the Directorate communities for the Captaincy of Pará remained at roughly 20,000 throughout the third quarter of the century, the labor rolls dropped by almost 20 percent between 1783–1784 and 1797. Even though the governor in the early 1780s had increased the rolls, desertion and the acquisition of exempt status by the children of native leaders and those born to Indian women and Portuguese fathers depleted them.82 Meanwhile, the general population, including non-Directorate Indians, mixed-race peoples, free blacks and slaves, had grown proportionally faster than that of the former missions. The total population of Pará grew from fifty-five thousand to seventy-seven thousand between 1772 and 1797, but the proportion of Indians in the Directorate towns decreased from about 35 percent to 28 percent, while the slave population increased from 20 percent to 28 percent.83 When the governor suspended the Diretório, by order of the queen, he instituted a state labor corps that included all men without substantial estates, regardless of their ethnicity or place of residence. Indigenous mobility, ethnogenesis, and racial mixture had substantially modified the demographic profile of the colony and the new legislation sought to remedy conditions.

False Frontiers: The Civilized and The Heathen Some native groups used their mobility to exploit the Portuguese colony and yet retain their independence on the frontier.84 Jesuit missionaries had contacted numerous indigenous peoples on the southern tributaries of the Amazon during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, including the Mura on the Madeira River, the Mawé (or Maué) on the Rio Mahué and the left bank of the Tapajós, and the Juruna on the Xingú.85 Each of these three groups developed a different kind of relationship with the colony during the mid-eighteenth century. Another group, the Munduruku (or Mundurucú) responded with raids on the Tapajós, stealing crops, goods, and captives.86 The Mura also attacked colonial settlements, but attracted some adherents and kept familial ties to colonial Indians in a few places on the far frontier.87 The Mawé used yet another strategy, alternately joining and abandoning the vilas, while the Juruna divided into two groups, one within the colony, the other in the sertão, trading between the two. All four groups gained access to European manufactured goods, and other benefits that the colony could offer in times of need, while retaining their independence. Natural boundaries and obstacles propitiated their autonomy. The independent Juruna and the Munduruku lived above the falls on the Xingú and Tapajós rivers; the Mawé occupied a low-lying maze of lakes and rivers between the Tapajós and Madeira; while the Mura relocated from the upper Rio Madeira to the swampy Autazes region

624   Borderlands of the Iberian World west of that river near its mouth. In addition, until the late eighteenth century, the Crown forbade navigation among captaincies via these southern tributaries and was not averse to having hostile natives hindering contraband trade between the mines of central Brazil and the Amazon River.88 So, rather than trying to reduce the Juruna, Munduruku, and Mawé to colonial control, the Crown may have used them as gatekeepers, as was the case along the Atlantic seaboard between the mines of Minas Gerais and the populated coast.89 Linguistic differences also contributed to their isolation. All four groups spoke languages related to the Tupi-based língua geral of the Directorate towns, but they were unintelligible to colonials.90 No one could understand three Munduruku captured in 1773 near Altar do Chão, for example; and the Mura used língua geral speakers kidnapped from the Directorate towns as their translators.91 Language difference per se does not explain their isolation, however, since the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century missions were veritable Babels, but missionary work among these groups came later and the Munduruku had not been missionized at all. Each group, united internally by language and other shared cultural practices, consisted of smaller units related by blood and marriage and led by a headman. Outwardly, they differed from the native peoples in the former missions, who had adopted Western dress, spoke the língua geral, had been baptized, and had abandoned those cultural practices that most obviously clashed with Christian mores, such as openly having multiple wives. Observers could quickly identify the independent ethnic groups by their clothing (or lack thereof), their body paint, the stones, sticks, or feathers they wore in their pierced ears and lips, and the design of their weapons.92 Native residents of the villages on the Tapajós distinguished between themselves, the “canicaruz,” and the “iapiruara,” or “people of the sertão or upper part of the river.”93 The fierce Munduruku emerged from the interior along the Rio Tapajós in the early 1770s and by the 1790s everyone along all the major lower southern tributaries feared them.94 They reportedly attacked any member of the colony, native or white, male or female. As one witness stated, these are people whose depravity “pardons neither sex nor age.”95 Their only interactions with the colony seemed to be violent ones, and they did not attract adherents. The populous Munduruku had successfully eluded the colonial system, which they could now exploit. Early attacks targeted the annual collecting canoes from the Directorate towns that crossed into their territory above the falls of the Tapajós.96 They raided crops after severe drought in the lower Amazon region in the early 1770s and residents only got a respite from attacks during the three rainy winter months, when the river was full.97 Attacks were not limited to the settlements; in 1777, their indigenous neighbors on the Tapajós, the Guarupás, fled to Directorate towns for protection.98 In spite of frequent complaints from Directorate towns on the south side of the Amazon throughout the 1770s and 1780s, it was only in 1794 that Governor and Captain General Francisco de Souza Coutinho sent an effective force against the Munduruku.99 Resources had been stretched to the limits in the 1780s and the Crown had derived some benefit from “the barbarity of the heathen Munduruku” as they pushed other natives into the Directorate towns, as was the case of the Aretú, who joined Monte Alegre in the

Conflict, Alliance, Mobility, and Place   625 early 1790s.100 The governor mounted a major offensive. He ordered soldiers to patrol the southern tributaries and sent an expeditionary force of some one thousand men up the Tapajós to scout for Munduruku longhouses.101 After traveling upriver for two weeks they entered the Rio Tropas were they battled the Munduruku for three days until they ran out of ammunition. Many of the Munduruku died and the group apparently divided: some remained on the Tropas; others sued for peace, traveling down the Tapajós to Santarém and sending a contingent of headmen to parley with the governor in Belém. Two decades of these forest dwellers’ attacks against residents ended, with some Munduruku maintaining their independence and others taking up their roles, however reluctantly, as subjects of the faraway King of Portugal. The Murá, Juruna, and Mawé, however, continued to circumvent the legal distinction between Christian allies and heathen enemy—demonstrating in practice that the boundary between forest and town was more permeable than crown policy recognized. Bishop João do São José Queiroz pointed out the “fickleness or transcendent inconstancy” of the Mawé in joining Directorate villages only to desert shortly thereafter.102 The Mawé themselves probably did not recognize the inconstancy in using loopholes to their own advantage. Written sources show the concerns of the bureaucrats who wrote them, but also define indigenous motives. The Mawé strategy was to settle at Pinhel, Boim, or Santarém on the Tapajós to obtain tools, trade goods, and food in times of drought, and then leave.103 About forty Mawé deserted Pinhel, the last outpost on the west side of the Tapajós, in 1762. Their headman, Marcello de Alfaia, was said to have orchestrated their departure carefully by sending the women, the elderly, and children far ahead into the forest, and then following with the men. When the director who had been in Belém at the time returned to Pinhel, he did not discover the exodus for two days because the villagers had kept it a secret.104 Their cooperation might be explained by a sense of shared ethnicity, since Mawé had populated the original missions at Pinhel (São José) and at neighboring Boim (Santo Inácio).105 They may have wished also to curry favor with the Mawé because they traded the famous stimulant guaraná, obtained from a vine (Paullinia cupania) that grew in their lands.106 The group’s departure was in any event a calculated political maneuver with a clear message of violence for anyone who interfered. The deserters left a menacing wooden effigy for the Portuguese authorities: a soldier, complete with gun at his side, matchlock on his shoulder and cartridges, riddled with arrows.107 The vicar of Pinhel claimed that because the inhabitants were for the most part newly arrived from the forests, they were inclined to return to it whenever they pleased. But there was a more immediate factor: The authorities had arrested Alfaia’s brother-in-law, who had been roaming about with a concubine, and were sending him to Belém “to instruct him in the faith” and serve the crown (presumably in forced labor). This event, perceived as an insult, might have provided adequate justification for abandoning the colony.108 Although Governor and Captain General Fernando da Costa de Ataíde Teive prohibited trade with the Mawé in 1769 to gain their submission, Mawé machinations continued to the end of the century.109 Natives disgruntled by the labor regime in Directorate towns or by personal insults might settle with independent tribes, such as the Mura, which appeared to offer a viable

626   Borderlands of the Iberian World alternative to colonial society and even challenged the Portuguese militarily.110 The Mura gained renown by attacking cacao-collecting canoes on the Rio Madeira in the first half of the eighteenth century and harassing the Jesuit mission founded on the lower reaches of that river in 1724.111 Requests for an offensive war in 1738–1739 went unheeded and the river was closed to travelers by royal order in 1747.112 The Mura re-emerged as hostile actors after 1755, when Pombal’s reforms reopened the Madeira-Guaporé-Mamoré corridor. They responded by expanding their raids to the entire central Amazon, stealing crops at Directorate villages on the Solimões, Negro, and Amazon, and impeding the establishment of agriculture and forest product collection in the region by occupying key rural spaces. They even attacked the royal fishery near Óbidos in 1774 and were reported “doing evil” there the following June.113 Three years later, the Mura reportedly killed two natives and shot another.114 And, by the early 1780s, the entire middle basin from the Tocantins to the Solimões and up the Madeira, Negro, and Japurá rivers was threatened. The Mura “expansion” reached mythic proportions inducing great paranoia as they incorporated other ethnicities and renegade adherents. “Murification,” both voluntary and forced, swelled their ranks with converts and captives.115 Five such converted Mura, seeking refuge from the Munduruku, shocked colonial authorities when they appeared at the Directorate village of S. António de Maripi on the Rio Japurá in 1784, asking for knives and other tools and offering peace.116 The colony served forest peoples as a refuge from Munduruku attacks while the Mura offered an alternative for disgruntled colonial natives. While the Mura drew adherents from the Directorate towns, runaways often served to radicalize native groups living outside the colony such as the Juruna. Deserters from the town of Pombal led a band that in 1772 attacked a Pombal headman at the falls of the Xingú. The director reported that a Pombal native named Simão, who had fled to these “heathen” years previously, led some 250 Juruna in twelve canoes in the attack. Simão later sent a message “that he would soon have the heads of the director and priest” of Pombal.117 Simão vowed that he would resist incursions into the territory above the falls. Yet the Juruna, like the Mawé, maintained communications and trade relations with relatives in the colony, perhaps for several generations.118 In the early 1760s, Bishop Queiroz recounted the curious story of a Juruna who secretly visited his relatives at Souzel to identify the remains of unknown creatures encountered on the savannah above the falls. He brought their heads—one belonged to a black man, the other a cow.119 As late as 1823, Juruna came down the Xingú to trade cotton and hammocks, as well as bows and arrows, for tools at Souzel.120 Descriptions of these native–European interactions were usually generated by missionaries or government officials, yet native oral histories collected in the twentieth century suggest the transformative power of the colony and the process of ethnogenesis. Modern Juruna informants state clearly that when part of their group settled downriver, the headman cut the men’s hair “and with that, they all became another people, speaking another language.” They multiplied and transformed. When other Juruna went downriver to trade with them, “nobody could understand their language any more [. . .] the Juruna landed in their canoes and asked for the tools they needed: knives, machetes, axes, and

Conflict, Alliance, Mobility, and Place   627 other things, but they were not understood.”121 Some might interpret this information as a myth to explain the creation of non-native peoples, but given the long trading relation between the Juruna and their colonial relatives, it has validity as historical narrative. Cutting their hair, an act attributed to their headman, and adopting a new language demonstrated their transformed identities. The divided Juruna, those who joined the colony and those above the falls, used their contacts to their mutual benefit until those in the sertão reduced their ties to Souzel, only to be “discovered” decades later in 1884 by the German ethnographer Karl von den Steinen.122 The confrontational Munduruku and Mura, raiding crops and taking tools, manufactured goods, and captives, took advantage of natural boundaries and their mobility. The exclusionary Munduruku descended from their traditional villages deep in the forest, while the Mura’s conglomeration, including people who had fled the colony by choice or were kidnapped, circulated in their canoes like “corsairs.” The Mawé exploited the Portuguese policy of resettling natives to gain tools and temporary protection, arriving and departing when they chose. The Juruna, from their relative isolation above the falls on the Xingú, visited relatives at Souzel to trade on a regular basis, maintaining connections to both colony and forest. For all four groups, as for the maroons, the sertão provided a refuge from the foreign culture and labor demands, yet the colony offered crops, manufactured goods, and potential allies. Interactions and conflict between natives and outsiders eventually led to a transmutation of ethnic identity. The Mura and Juruna in particular created “zones of transculturation” wherein the advantages of the colony could be had without certain costs.123 In contrast, ethnic divisions within the colonial settlements were exacerbated when groups competed with one another for access to benefits and to evade colonial demands, primarily labor obligations. Competition, rupture, and disassociation led to the demise of numerous ethnicities, but ultimately survivors formed connections and new identities that transformed the nature of colonial society in Pará. While the Mawé continued to join and depart the colony until at least the end of the eighteenth century, in 1784 some Mura “spontaneously” abandoned their pillaging and joined Directorate villages when the Munduruku became active on the Xingú and Tapajós rivers. The natives who remained in their Directorate towns, relocated to Belém, or joined settler communities to become the civil society of the next century, while maroons became more isolated in the little-traveled areas of the state. In their upstream enclave, the Juruna lost contact with the colony until their supposed discovery. Anthropologists have dubiously classified the historic period of the upper Xingú as beginning in 1884.124 Conventional histories of the Amazon date the greatest changes in the region to the first years of the rubber boom after 1850. But local-level documents reveal that modern societal identities emerged from the colonial-era cultural interactions and territorial boundaries that formed when earlier generations made decisions about where to live. Early alliances with native peoples and the strategic use of waterways and environment facilitated Portuguese expansion far beyond the original Tordesillas demarcation between Spanish and Portuguese in the New World. As they battled and enslaved native enemies, imported diseases decimated allies and enemies alike, forcing expeditions ever further

628   Borderlands of the Iberian World up the main river and its tributaries until they reached the Solimões at the end of the seventeenth century and the headwaters of the Rio Negro and Rio Branco in the mideighteenth century. Missions and forts had furnished provisions and native men for these expeditions, as well as for the boundary demarcation commissions, while Indian collecting canoes gathered forest products for export. Downriver, near Belém, burgeoning plantations, farms, ranches, fisheries, and salt works supplied the growing colony. In the process native Amazonian peoples made conscious choices about where and how to live. Yet by the late-nineteenth century observers negated this historical evolution perceiving only “caboclos,” people with national rather than ethnic identity, along the main rivers and, in the forests, “undiscovered” tribal Indians.125 In reality over the course of the tumultuous colonial period, native peoples, Europeans, and Africans all forged new identities and created a dynamic new society on the rivers, lakes, and backwaters of Amazonia.

Notes Archives AHU: Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino, Lisbon (Portugal) APEP: Arquivo Público do Estado do Pará, Belém (Brazil) IHGB: Instituto Histórico e Geográfico Brasileiro, Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) 1. Manuel Lucena Giraldo, “Reformar as florestas O Tratado de 1777 e as demarcações entre a América espanhola e a América portuguesa,” Oceanos 40 (1999): 66–76; David M. Davidson, “How the Brazilian West Was Won: Freelance and State on the Mato Grosso Frontier, 1737– 1752,” in Colonial Roots of Modern Brazil: Papers of the Newberry Library Conference, ed. Dauril Alden, 61–106 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973). 2. For the transformation of borderlands into borders, see Jeremy Adelman and Stephen Aron, “From Borderlands to Borders: Empires, Nation-States, and the Peoples in between in North American History,” The American Historical Review 104, no. 3 (1999): 814–841. For the relationship between identities and borders, see Peter Sahlins, Boundaries: The Making of France and Spain in the Pyrenees (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989). 3. “Governor Francisco Xavier de Mendonça Furtado to the king,” Pará, February 21 1759, Annaes da Bibliotheca e Archivo Publico do Pará 8 (1913): 52. 4. Francisco Adolfo de Varnhagen, História geral do Brasil: Antes de sua separação e independência de Portugal, vol. 2, pt. 4, ed. J. Capistrano de Abreu and Rodolfo Garcia (Belo Horizonte and São Paulo: Ed. Itatiaia, EDUSP, 1981), 289; Antônio Ladislau Monteiro Baena, Compêndio das eras da Província do Pará. (Belém: EDUFPA, 1969), 231. 5. The sertão generally refers to the territory beyond effective colonial occupation populated by indigenous people. See A.  J.  R.  Russell-Wood, “Frontiers in Colonial Brazil: Reality, Myth, and Metaphor,” in Society and Government in Colonial Brazil, 1500–1822 (Aldershot: Variorum, 1992), 37. For the terms “sertão” and “sertanejo” in seventeenth-century Amazonia, see Rafael Chambouleyron, “A prática dos sertões na Amazônia colonial (século XVII),”

Conflict, Alliance, Mobility, and Place   629 Outros Tempos 10, no. 15 (2013): 79–99. For independent ethnic groups, see Manuela Carneiro da Cunha, ed. História dos índios no Brasil (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1992). Overviews of Brazilian native history include John Hemming, Red Gold: The Conquest of the Brazilian Indians (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), and Amazon Frontier: The Defeat of the Brazilian Indians (London: Macmillan, 1987). 6. Anna C. Roosevelt et al., “Paleoindian Cave Dwellers in the Amazon: The Peopling of the Americas,” Science 272, no. 5260 (1996): 373–384; Michael J. Heckenberger, “Lost Cities of the Amazon,” Scientific American 301, 4 (2009): 64–71; and Denise P. Schaan, Sacred Geographies of Ancient Amazonia: Historical Ecology of Social Complexity (Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2012). 7. Samuel Fritz, Journal of the Travels and Labours of Father Samuel Fritz in the River of the Amazons between 1686 and 1723, trans. George Edmundson (London: Hakluyt Society, 1922), 47, 49. See Antônio Porro, O Povo das Águas: Ensaios de etno-história amazônica (Petrópolis and São Paulo: Editora Vozes, EDUSP, 1996). 8. David Cleary, “Towards an Environmental History of the Amazon: From Prehistory to the Nineteenth Century,” Latin American Research Review 36, no. 2 (2001): 65–96. 9. Neil L. Whitehead, “Colonial Intrusions and the Transformation of Native Society in the Amazon Valley, 1500–1800,” in Native Brazil: Beyond the Convert and the Cannibal, 1500–1900, ed. Hal Langfur, 86–107 (Albuquerque: UNM, 2014), 104. 10. Candace Slater, Entangled Edens: Visions of the Amazon (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002), chap. 7. 11. For ethnogenesis, see Stuart B. Schwartz and Frank Salomon, “New Peoples and New Kinds of People: Adaptation, Readjustment, and Ethnogenesis in South American Indigenous Societies,” in The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of The Americas, vol. 3: South America, ed. Frank Salomon and Stuart  B.  Schwartz (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 443–501; John M. Monteiro, “500 Years of Native Brazilian History,” Diálogos Latinoamericanos 2 (2000): 2–15, and “Indigenous Histories in Colonial Brazil: Between Ethnocide and Ethnogenesis,” in The Oxford Handbook of Borderlands of the Iberian World, ed. Danna A. Levin Rojo and Cynthia Radding, 397–412 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019). 12. James Lockhart and Stuart B. Schwartz, Early Latin America: A History of Colonial Spanish America and Brazil (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983); John Hemming, “Indians and the Frontier,” in Colonial Brazil, ed. Leslie Bethell, 145–189 (Cambridge, UK: University of Cambridge Press, 1991), 160. 13. Nádia Farage, As muralhas dos sertões: Os povos indígenas no Rio Branco e a colonização (Rio de Janeiro: Paz e Terra, ANPOCS, 1991); Barbara A. Sommer, “The Amazonian Native Nobility in Late-Colonial Pará,” in Native Brazil: Beyond the Cannibal and the Convert, 1500–1899, ed. Hal Langfur, 108–131 (Albuquerque: UNM, 2014); Mauro Cezar Coelho, “O Diretório dos Índios e as chefias indígenas: Uma inflexão,” Campos 7, no. 1 (2006): 117–34. 14. Decio de Alencar Guzmán “Constructores de ciudades: mamelucos, indios y europeos en las ciudades pombalinas de la Amazonia (siglo XVIII),” Ciudades mestizas: Intercambios y continuidades en la expansión occidental Siglos XVI a XIX, Actas del 3er. Congreso International Mediadores Culturales (Mexico: Servicos Condumex, 2001), 89–99; Neil Safier, “The Confines of the Colony: Boundaries, Ethnographic Landscapes, and Imperial Cartography in Iberoamerica,” in The Imperial Map: Cartography and the Mastery of

630   Borderlands of the Iberian World Empire, ed. James  R.  Akerman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 169–177; Heather F. Roller, “River Guides, Geographical Informants, and Colonial Field Agents in the Portuguese Amazon,” Colonial Latin American Review 21, no. 1 (2012): 101–126. 15. Bishop João de São José Queiroz, “Viagem e visita do sertão em o Bispado do Gram-Pará em 1762 e 1763,” Revista do Instituto Histórico e Geográfico Brasileiro 9 (1847): 508–509. 16. Farage, As muralhas dos sertões. 17. Stuart B. Schwartz, “Plantations and Peripheries, c. 1580 - c. 1750,” in Colonial Brazil, ed. Leslie Bethell (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 118–127. 18. José Ribamar Bessa Freire, Rio babel: A história das línguas na Amazônia (Rio de Janeiro: Atlântica Editora, 2004). Exceptions included women—monolingual in their native tongue—and men who spoke, read, and wrote Portuguese well. Barbara  A.  Sommer, “Negotiated Settlements: Native Amazonians and Portuguese Policy in Pará, Brazil, 1758–1798” (PhD diss., University of New Mexico, 2000), 149. 19. See J. R. Amaral Lapa, ed., Livro da visitaçao do Santa Oficio da Inquisiçao ao Estado do Grão-Pará, 1763–1769 (Petrópolis: Vozes, 1978); and the digitized Inquisition files from the Tribunal do Santo Ofício de Lisboa, Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo, Portugal, accessible online at “A presença da Inquisição na Amazônia colonial,” Centro de Memória da Amazônia, Universidade Federal do Pará (UFPA), funded by CNPq-Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico (2009). Accessed July 13, 2016, http://www.ufpa.br/cma/ inquisicao/projeto.html; Barbara A. Sommer, “Cupid on the Amazon: Sexual Witchcraft and Society in Late-Colonial Pará, Brazil,” Colonial Latin American Historical Review 12, no. 4 (2003): 415–446. 20. Varnhagen, História geral do Brasil; João Capistrano de Abreu, Chapters of Brazil’s Colonial History 1500–1800 [1907], trans. Arthur Brakel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). 21. Euclides da Cunha, The Amazon: Land without History, trans. Ronald Sousa, ed. Lúcia Sá (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006). 22. Mark Harris, Rebellion on the Amazon: The Cabanagem, Race, and Popular Culture in the North of Brazil, 1798–1840 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 23. H. B. Johnson, “Portuguese Settlement 1500–1580,” in Colonial Brazil, ed. Leslie Bethell (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 12–19; Sérgio Buarque de Holanda, História geral da civilização brasileira I: A época colonial (São Paulo: Difusão Européia do Livro, 1960), vol. 1, 105–106. 24. Joyce Lorimer, ed., English and Irish Settlement on the River Amazon, 1550–1646 (London: The Hakluyt Society, 1989). 25. John M. Monteiro, “Escravidão indígena e despovoamento na América portuguesa: S. Paulo e Maranhão,” in Brasil nas vésperas do mundo moderno (Lisbon: CNCDP, 1992), 140. 26. Although unified in 1774, these two states retained their distinctiveness. 27. Monteiro, “Escravidão indígena,” 150–51; Hemming, Red Gold, 223–28; Johnson, “Portuguese Settlement,” 44. 28. Lorimer, English and Irish, 115–122. 29. Rafael Chambouleyron has surveyed recent scholarship in “O Estado do Maranhão e Pará: Territorialidade e ocupação (séculos XVII e XVIII),” in A terra num império ultramarino, ed. José Vicente Serrão (Lisbon: ICS, forthcoming). 30. João Felipe Bettendorff [Betendorf], Crônica da missão dos Padres da Companhia de Jesus no Estado do Maranhão, 2d ed. (Belém: Fundação Cultural do Pará Tancredo Neves; Secretaria de Estado da Cultura, 1990), 97; Curt Nimuendajú, “Little Known Tribes of the Lower Tocantins River Region,” in Handbook of South American Indians, vol. 3 The Tropical

Conflict, Alliance, Mobility, and Place   631 Forest Tribes, ed. Julian H. Steward (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1948. Smithsonian Institution, Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 143), 203; Monteiro, “Escravidão indígena,” 156. 31. Mathias C. Kiemen, “The Indian Policy of Portugal on the Amazon Region, 1614–1693” (PhD diss., Catholic University of America, 1954). 32. Capistrano de Abreu, Chapters of Brazil’s Colonial History, 105; Johnson, “Portuguese Settlement,” 47–48. The governor and donatory captain of Cametá exported nine hundred natives in 1636. David Graham Sweet, “A Rich Realm of Nature Destroyed: The Middle Amazon Valley, 1640–1750” (PhD diss., University of Wisconsin, 1974), 171 n. 19. 33. Johnson, “Portuguese Settlement,” 9; Holanda, História geral, vol. 1, 90–91. 34. Quoted in Kiemen, “Indian Policy,” 62; Vieira to Padre Provincial do Brasil, 1654, in Cartas do Padre António Vieira, vol. 1, ed. J. Lúcio d’Azevedo (Coimbra: Imprensa da Universidade, 1925), 356. 35. Acuña, “Nuevo descubrimiento del gran Rio del Amazonas, en el año 1539.” In Informes de Jesuitas en el Amazonas, 1550–1684. Iquitos: IIAP, Centro de Estudios Teológicos de la Amazonía, 1986), 40–41. 36. Kiemen, “Indian Policy,” 54. The tenuous Portuguese hold on the North allowed the Dutch to occupy São Luís in 1641–1644. 37. Acuña, “Nuevo descubrimiento,” 97–100. 38. David Sweet, “The Ibero-American Frontier Mission in Native American History,” in The New Latin American Mission History, ed. Erick Langer and Robert H. Jackson (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 1–48; Sweet, “A Rich Realm,” 771; Varnhagen, História geral do Brasil, vol. 2, part 3, 245, 247; Bishop Queiroz, “Viagem e visita,” 81. 39. Almir Diniz de Carvalho Júnior, “Índios cristãos: A conversão dos gentios na Amazônia portuguesa (1653–1769)” (PhD diss., Universidade Estadual de Campinas, 2005); Roberto Zahluth de Carvalho Junior, “Espíritos inquietos e orgulhosos: Os Frades Capuchos na Amazônia Joanina (1706–1751)” (PhD diss., Universidade Federal do Pará, 2009). 40. Carta Régia, “Sobre mandar separar distritos e encarregar aos Padres de Santo Antonio as missões do Cabo Norte,” Lisbon, 19 March 1693, Anais da Biblioteca Nacional 66 (1948): 142–144. 41. Kiemen, “Indian Policy,” 170–177; Sweet, “A Rich Realm,” 626–671. 42. Hemming, “Indians and the frontier,” 179–180. 43. Sweet, “A Rich Realm”; Dauril Alden, “Indian Versus Black Slavery in the State of Maranhão During the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” Bibliotheca Americana 1, no. 3 (1983): 91–142; Monteiro, “Escravidão indígena,” 137–167; Barbara A. Sommer, “Colony of the Sertão: Amazonian Expeditions and the Indian Slave Trade,” in Rethinking Bandeirismo. Studies in Colonial Brazil, ed. John Russell-Wood, special issue of The Americas 61, no. 3 (2005): 401–428, and “Cracking Down on the Cunhamenas: Renegade Amazonian Traders under Pombaline Reform,” Journal of Latin American Studies 38, no. 4 (2006): 767–791; Ângela Domingues, “ ‘Régulos e absolutos’: Episódios de multiculturalismo e intermediação no Norte do Brasil (meados do século XVIII),” in Império de várias faces: Relações de poder no mundo ibérico da Época Moderna, ed. Rodrigo Bentes Monteiro and Ronaldo Vainfas (São Paulo: Alameda, 2009), 119–138. 44. Jesuit António Vieira to Padre Provincial do Brasil, 1654, in Azevedo, ed., Cartas, vol. 1, 366. See Rafael Chambouleyron, Povoamento, ocupação e agricultura na Amazônia colonial (1640–1706) (Belém: Ed. Açai, Programa de Pós-graduação em História Social da AmazôniaUFPA, Centro de Memória da Amazônia-UFPA, 2010).

632   Borderlands of the Iberian World 45. Quoted in Capistrano de Abreu, Chapters of Brazil’s Colonial History, 109. 46. Malheiro, A escravidão no Brasil: Ensaio histórico, jurídico, social (Petrópolis: Editora Vozes, 1976), 160. 47. Expedito Arnaud, “A legislação sobre os índios do Grão-Pará e Maranhão nos séculos XVII e XVIII,” Boletim de Pesquisa da CEDEAM 4, no. 6 (1985): 35–36; Heloisa Liberalli Belotto, “Trabalho indígena, regalismo e colonização no Estado do Maranhão nos séculos XVII e XVIII,” Revista Brasileira de História 2, no. 4 (1982): 180; Alvará, “Ley por que S. Magte. mandou que os Indios do Maranhão sejão libres, e que não haja administradores nem admenistração nelles, antes possão livremente servir etrabalhar com quem lhe bem estiver emilhor lhes pagar seu trabalho, Lisbon, 10 Nov. 1647,” Anais da Biblioteca Nacional 66 (1948): 17. Also see Malheiro, A escravidão, vol. 1, 185–186; and Kiemen, “Indian Policy,” 67. 48. Rafael Chambouleyron, “Cacao, Bark-Clove and Agriculture in the Portuguese Amazon Region in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century,” Luso-Brazilian Review 51, no. 1 (2014): 1–35; Alam da Silva Lima, Rafael Chambouleyron, and Danilo Camargo Igloiori, “Plata, paño, cacao y clavo: ‘dinero de la tierra’ en la Amazonía portuguesa (c. 1640–1750),” Fronteras de la Historia 14, no. 2 (2009): 205–227. 49. Varnhagen, História geral do Brasil, vol. 2 (part 3), 255 n. 43. The royal fishery on Marajó dated to 1692, Capistrano de Abreu, Chapters of Brazil’s Colonial History, 111. 50. João de Sousa Ferreira, “Noticiario Maranhense,” Revista do Instituto Histórico e Geográfico Brasileiro 81 (1917): 329. 51. Sweet, “A Rich Realm,” 80–81. 52. Carta Régia, “Sobre se agradecer a Hilario de Souza de Azevedo Capitão-Mór do Pará a viagem que fez ao Rio das Amazonas e o muito que nella obrou,” Lisbon, 28 November 1695, Anais da Biblioteca Nacional 66 (1948): 154. 53. Fritz, Journal of the Travels; Camila Loureiro Dias, “Jesuit Maps and Political Discourse: The Amazon River of Father Samuel Fritz,” The Americas 69, no. 1 (2012): 95–116; Décio de Alencar Guzmán, “Encontros circulares: Guerra e comércio no Rio Negro (Grão-Pará), séculos XVII e XVIII,” Anais do Arquivo Público do Pará 5 (part 1) (2006): 139–165. 54. Carta Régia, “Sobre mudar os Indios Aruans p.a se poderem atalhar as entradas dos Francezes no Rio das Amazonas, Lisbon, 9 December 1698,” Anais da Biblioteca Nacional 66 (1948): 180. 55. Sweet, “A Rich Realm,” 469; Alexandre Rodrigues Ferreira, “Diario da Viagem Philosophica pela Capitania de São-José do Rio-Negro,” Revista do Instituto Histórico e Geográfico Brasileiro 48, part 1 (1885): 29; João Lúcio de Azevedo, Os Jesuitas no Grão-Pará. Suas missões e colonização, 3 vols. (Coimbra: Imprensa da Universidade, 1925), 209. 56. Sweet, “A Rich Realm,” 475–478, 513–559. 57. Dauril Alden, “El indio desechable en el Estado de Maranhão durante los siglos XVII y XVIII,” América Indígena 45 (1985): 436–437. 58. Sommer, “Colony of the Sertão,” 418–425; Domingues, “ ‘Régulos e absolutos.’ ” 59. Silvia M. Vidal, “Kuwé Duwákalumi: The Arawak Sacred Routes of Migration, Trade, and Resistance,” Ethnohistory 47, nos. 3–4 (2000): 635–667, and “The Arawak-Speaking Groups of Northwestern Amazonia: Amerindian Cartography as a Way of Preserving and Interpreting the Past,” in Histories and Historicities in Amazonia, ed. Neil L. Whitehead (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2003), 33–57. 60. Sweet, “A Rich Realm,” 578–625. 61. Comissão Nacional para as Comemorações dos Descobrimentos Portugueses, Amazónia Felsínea: António José Landi, itinerário artístico e científico de um arquitecto bolonhês na

Conflict, Alliance, Mobility, and Place   633 Amazónia do século XVIII (Lisbon: CNCDP, 1999); Beatriz Piccolotto Siqueira Bueno, Desenho e desígnio: O Brasil dos engenheiro militares (1500–1822) (São Paulo: EDUSP; FAPESP, 2011). 62. Sommer, “Cracking Down on the Cunhamenas.” 63. Andrée Mansuy-Denis Silva, “Imperial re-organization, 1750–1808,” in Colonial Brazil, ed. Leslie Bethell (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Kenneth Maxwell, Pombal, Paradox of the Enlightenment (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Isabel Vieira Rodrigues, “A política de Francisco Xavier de Mendonça Furtado no norte do Brasil (1751–1759),” Oceanos 40 (1999): 94–110. 64. See Colin MacLachlan, “The Indian Directorate: Forced Acculturation in Portuguese America,” The Americas 28, 4 (1972): 357–387; Sommer, “Negotiated Settlements;” Ângela Domingues, Quando os índios eram vassalos: Colonização e relações de poder no norte do Brasil na segunda metade do século XVIII (Lisbon: CNCDP, 2000); Patrícia Maria Melo Sampaio, “Espelhos partidos: Etnia, legislação e desigualdade na colônia sertões do Grão-Pará” (PhD diss., Universidade Federal Fluminense, 2001); Mauro Cezar Coelho, “Do sertão para o mar: Um estudo sobre a experiência portugesa na América, a partir da colônial: o caso do Diretório dos Índios (1751–1798)” (PhD diss., University of São Paulo, 2005); Heather F. Roller, Amazonian Routes: Indigenous Mobility and Colonial Communities in Northern Brazil (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014). 65. Donna J. Guy and Thomas E. Sheridan, ed., Contested Ground: Comparative Frontiers on the Northern and Southern Edges of the Spanish Empire (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1998), 11. 66. Máppa Gerál de toda a Força Millitar do Estádo do Gram Pará, al 1.o de Julho de 1775, in Governor João Pereira Caldas to Martinho de Melo e Castro, Pará, February 1, 1776, Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino (AHU), Lisbon, Portugal, 013, Cx. 75, Doc. 6273; Farage, As muralhas dos sertões; Sommer, “The Amazonian Native Nobility;” Domingues, Quando os índios eram vassalos; Coelho, “O Diretório dos Índios.” 67. One woman ran away from Portel in the 1740s when it was a Jesuit mission only to return in 1771. Aniçeto Fran.co de Carvalho to governor, Portel, December 9, 1771, Arquivo Público do Estado do Pará (hereafter APEP), cod. 236, doc. 67. 68. Guy and Sheridan, Contested Ground, 11. 69. On the mobility of native peoples during the Directorate, see Sommer, “Negotiated Settlements,” chap. 4; Heather F. Roller, Amazonian Routes: Indigenous Mobility and Colonial Communities in Northern Brazil (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014). 70. Heather Flynn Roller, “Colonial Collecting Expeditions and the Pursuit of Opportunities in the Amazonian Sertão, c. 1750–1800,” The Americas 66, no. 4 (2010): 435–467. 7 1. Escrivão Hilario Franco degoiz, Informação que dão o Principal Sargto mor emais officiaes epessoas outras desta villa de Alomquer[. . .], Alemquer, February 9, 1792, APEP, cod. 470, doc. 28; João Fernandes to governor, Bragança, August 21, 1764, APEP, cod. 141, doc. 45; and [General intendant and magistrate], Souzel, January 26, 1766, APEP, cod. 160. 72. Sommer, “Negotiated Settlements,” 185–186. 73. Jozé Fellis Galvão de Araujo e Oliveira to governor, Monsarás, September 27, 1761, APEP, cod. 107, doc. 93; [General intendant and magistrate] Azevedo, December 24, 1764, APEP, cod. 160; Director Ant.oJozé Alves to governor, Colares, October 8, 1774, APEP, cod. 268, doc. 54; Director Antonio de Almeida Salazar to Governor Martinho de Souza e Alburquerque, Lugar de S. Bento, June 15, 1789, APEP, cod. 325, doc. 18; Fran.co Roiz to governor, Chaves, July 28, 1761, APEP cod. 107, doc. 40.

634   Borderlands of the Iberian World 74. In one case, a priest found a man from Rebordelo and his seven sons in the forest near Chaves on Marajó, living as fugitives. Fran.co Roiz’ to governor, Chaves, July 28, 1761, APEP, cod. 107, doc. 40. 75. Director Joze Fellis Galvão de Araujo eOlivra to Governor Fernando daCosta de Atahide Teive, Portel, April 17, 1765, APEP, cod. 151, doc. 131. See also Director Aniceto Franco de Carvalho to governor, Portel, June 18, 1768, APEP, cod. 189, doc. 73. 76. Director Jozé da Silva Senna to governor, Portel, May 10, 1759, APEP, cod. 95, doc. 39. 77. Director to Governor Portel, April 17, 1765, APEP, cod. 151, doc. 131. 78. Flávio dos Santos Gomes, “A ‘Safe Haven’: Runaway Slaves, Mocambos, and Borders in Colonial Amazonia, Brazil,” Hispanic American Historical Review 82, 3 (2002): 467–498. 79. Freire, Rio Babel, 77–78. 80. MacLachlan, “The Indian Directorate,” 380, 382. 81. MacLachlan, “Indian Labor Structure in the Portuguese Amazon, 1700–1800,” in Colonial Roots of Modern Brazil, ed. Dauril Alden (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), 229. 82. See Barbara A. Sommer, “Why Joanna Baptista Sold Herself into Slavery: Indian Women in Portuguese Amazonia, 1755–1798,” Slavery & Abolition: A Journal of Slave and Post-Slave Studies 34, no. 1 (2013): 77–97; Roller, Amazonian Routes, chap. 5. 83. Barbara A. Sommer, “ ‘A Unified Civil Society’: Pombal’s Vision for a Portuguese Amazonia, A Preliminary Demographic Analysis” (paper presented at the XXIII Latin American Studies Association Conference, Washington, September 6–8, 2001). 84. Francisco Jorge dos Santos, Além da conquista: Guerras e rebeliões indígenas na Amazônia Pombalina (Manaus: EDUA, 2002). 85. P.o da Costa Sotto Mayor to governor, Santarém, August 24, 1773, APEP, cod. 73, doc. 63. 86. The Munduruku appear in mid-eighteenth century sources, but may have had earlier dealings with the colony. Miguel A. Menéndez, “A área Madeira-Tapajós: Situação de contato e relações entre colonizador e indígena,” in História dos índios no Brasil, ed. Manuela Carneiro da Cunha, 281–296 (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras: Secretaria Municipal de Cultural, FAPESP, 1992). 87. In addition to raids by the Munduruku and Mura, in 1784, unspecified groups raided on the Tocantins across from Cametá. Alberto de Souza Coelho to governor, Cametá, June 19, 1784, APEP, cod. 408, doc. 68. In September, people living along the Tocantins below Baião had abandoned their homes and taken refuge on the islands. Juis Ordenario Luis Viheyra da Costa to governor, Cametá, September 13, 1784, APEP, cod. 408, doc. 104. The Jê-speaking “Apinajás” were active on the Tocantins at this time: Alexandre Rodrigues Ferreira, “Diario da Viagem Philosophica,” Revista do Instituto Histórico e Geográfico Brasileiro 50, pt. 2 (1887): 72. For language affiliation, see Greg Urban, “A história da cultura brasileira segundo as línguas nativas,” in História dos índios no Brasil, ed. Manuela Carneiro da Cunha (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, Secretaria Municipal de Cultural, FAPESP, 1992), 88. 88. Rodrigues Ferreira, “Diario da Viagem Philosophica,” 50, part  2 (1887): 57; Amoroso, “Corsarios no caminho fluvial,” 300. 89. Hal Langfur, “Uncertain Refuge: Frontier Formation and the Origins of the Botocudo War in Late Colonial Brazil,” Hispanic American Historical Review 82, no. 2 (2002): 216–217. 90. While Mura is classified as a separate language family, Munduruku, Mawe, and Juruna are all Macro-Tupi languages according to Greg Urban, “A história da cultura brasileira,” 89, 97–98. 91. P.o da Costa Sotto Mayor to governor, Santarem, August 24, 1773, APEP, cod. 73, doc. 63.

Conflict, Alliance, Mobility, and Place   635 92. See for example [José Monteiro de Noronha], “Roteiro da viagem da Cidade do Pará até as últimas colónias dos domínios portugueses em os rios Amazonas e Negro ou Roteiro da viagem da Cidade do Pará até as últimas colônias do sertão da província,” ed. José Pereira da Silva, Revista do Instituto Histórico e Geográfico Brasileiro 150, no. 364 (1989): 478–479, 486, 498, 502, 504, 512. 93. [Noronha], “Roteiro da viagem,” 486–487. 94. An attack on Santarém in 1780 is cited as the beginning of their depredations by Menéndez, “A Área Madeira-Tapajós,” 290, yet directors’ reports in the Pará state archive push this date back a decade. As early as 1769, the residents of Pinhel fled after unnamed groups of natives killed “three whites, two mamelucos, and one native boy” on the Tapajós. Director Belchior Henrique to governor, Pinhel, October 18, 1769, APEP, cod. 202, doc 96. A month earlier, the same director reported that the headman had planned to make an alliance with the “heathens.” Director Belchior Henrique to governor, Pinhel, September 18, 1769, APEP, cod. 202, doc. 77. For more reports, see APEP, cods. 73, 268, 271, 272, 276, 283, and 285. 95. During the summer of 1772, the Munduruku attacked near Altar do Chão. P.o da Costa Sotto Mayor to governor, Santarem, August 24, 1773, APEP, cod. 73, doc. 63. 96. In 1773 they besieged the collecting canoe from Villa Franca at the headwaters of the Tapajós. Joze P.o da Costa Sotto mayor to governor, Santarem, June 20, 1773, APEP, cod. 73, doc 60. 97. The judge of Pinhel summed up the events in 1783: Residents had been fighting off the Munduruku for ten or eleven years, during which time they had invaded the town three times and killed five of the seventeen white men who had married indigenous women. Juis Ordinario dorfeos Joze da S.a Godinho to governor, Pinhel, December 29, 1783, APEP, cod. 408, doc. 123. 98. Director Domingos Glz’ Alexa to governor, Pinhel, August 29, 1777, APEP, cod. 312, doc. 29. 99. Governor  D.  Francisco de Souza Coutinho to Governor of Rio Negro, Pará, April 10, 1794, APEP, cod. 494, doc. 83. 100. Comandante Pedro Miguel Ayres Pereira to Governor D. Francisco de Souza Coutinho, Santarém, March 25, 1791, APEP, cod. 470, doc. 12. The Aretú joined Monte Alegre in the 1790s because others of their group had settled there long before. Domingos Caetano Lima to Governor D. Francisco de Souza Coutinha, Monte Alegre, November 23, 1792, APEP, cod. 470, doc. 56. Headmen from the Erury and Jaraurary “nations” appeared at the Directorate town of Borba on the Madeira River in May 1786, reporting that the Munduruku had killed many of their people. Antonio Carlos da Fonseca Coutinho to Governor João Pereira Caldas, Borba, June 13, 1786, in “Notícias da voluntária reducção de paz e amizade do feroz nação do gentio Mura nos annos de 1784, 1785, e 1786,” Revista do Instituto Histórico e Geográfico Brasileiro 36, no. 46 (1873): 376. 101. Governor D. Francisco de Souza Coutinho to governor of the Rio Negro, Pará, Apriñ 10, 1794, APEP, cod. 494, doc. 83; Anonymous, “Memoria da nova navegação do Rio Arinos até á Villa de Santarém, estado do Grão-Pará,” Revista do Instituto Histórico e Geográfico Brasileiro 19, no. 59 (1898): 107–08, 110. 102. Queiroz, “Viagem e visita,” 101; Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, “O mármore e a murta: sobre a inconstância da alma selvagem,” Revista de Antropologia [São Paulo] 35 (1992): 21–74. 103. Queiroz, “Viagem e visita,” 101; Director Jeronimo Mel de Carvo to governor, Pinhel, May 27, 1763, APEP, cod. 130, doc. 82. In addition to the Mawé, others joined and abandoned the

636   Borderlands of the Iberian World former missions, including natives of the Rio Jari who arrived in Fragoso in 1774, having abandoned the neighboring directorate village of Esposende only two years earlier. Director Boaventr.a do Cun.a [?] Caldr.a to governor, Fragozo, November 21, 1774, APEP, cod. 268, doc. 89. 104. Director Jeromino M.el de Carv.o to Ill.m e Ex.m Sñr General, Pinhel, November 29, 1762, APEP cod. 115, doc. 52. 105. Curt Nimuendajú, “The Maue and Arapium,” in Handbook of South American Indians, vol. 3 The Tropical Forest Tribes, ed. Julian H. Steward (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1948. Smithsonian Institution, Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 143), 245; Anonymous, “Memoria da nova navegação,” 110–111. 106. Mixed with water, guaraná made an energizing beverage used to treat a variety of ailments including fevers and diarrhea. Its popularity among Amazonians, particularly the Mawé inhabitants of the Directorate villages, made it a valuable trade item. Queiroz, “Viagem e visita,” 88–89; [Noronha], “Roteiro da viagem,” 488. Many Directorate villages maintained trading relations with forest peoples, such as the men of Alter do Chão who traded with the Arús nation. [Director] Fran. Coelho de Mesq.ta to governor, Altar do Chão, November 25, 1774, APEP, cod. 268, doc. 93. Also see Director Francisco Ruberto Pimentel to governor, Portel, September 26, 1778, APEP, cod. 330, doc. 53. 107. Fr. João B.o do Pará to Governor Mel Bernardo de Mello e Castro, Santarém, December 13, 1762, APEP, cod. 17, doc. 55; Queiroz, “Viagem e visita,” 85–86. 108. Queiroz, “Viagem e visita,” 101. 109. Governor Fernando da Costa de A.te Teive to S.r Pedro Maciel Parente, Director da Villa de Santarem, Pará, October 3, 1769, Instituto Histórico e Geográfico Brasileiro (IHGB), Lata 283, Pasta 10; Miguel Menéndez, “Uma contribuição para a etno-história da área Tapajós-Madeira,” Revista Museu Paulista 28, 81–82 (n.d.): 369; Nimuendajú, “The Maue and Arapium,” 245; Director Franco de Abreu, Va de Araolas, September 30, 1774, APEP, cod. 268, doc. 44. 110. Raimundo Sançhes de Britto to Governor Francisco de Souza Coutinha, Alter do Chão, January 1, 1793, APEP, cod. 500, doc. 1. 111. Menéndez, A área Madeira-Tapajós, 289. 112. See Adélia Engrácia de Oliveira introduction, Autos da devassa contra os índios Mura do Rio Madeira e nações do Rio Tocantins (1728–39) (Manaus and Brasilia: FUA, INL, 1986). 113. Joze da Costa Sotto Mayor to governor, Santarem, September 20, 1774, APEP, cod. 73, doc. 82; Carlos Daniel de Seiras to governor, Santarém, June 29, 1775, APEP, cod. 73, doc. 96. 114. [Director] Francisco Ruberto Pimentel to governor, Portel, September 26, 1778, APEP, cod. 330, doc. 53. 115. Heather F. Roller, “Autonomous Indian Nations and Peacemaking in Colonial Brazil,” in The Oxford Handbook of Borderlands of the Iberian World, ed. Danna A. Levin Rojo and Cynthia Radding, 641–666 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019) discusses this alliance further. See also Marta Rosa Amoroso, “Corsários no caminho fluvial: Os Mura do Rio Madeira,” in História dos índios no Brasil, ed. Manuela Carneiro da Cunha (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras: Secretaria Municipal de Cultural, FAPESP, 1992), 297–310; David Sweet, “Native Resistance in Eighteenth-Century Amazonia: The ‘Abominable Muras’ in War and Peace,” Radical History Review 53 (1992): 49–80; Safier, “The Confines of the Colony.” 116. João Baptista Mardel to João Pereira Caldas, Nogueira, July 26, 1785, in “Notícias da voluntária reducção de paz,” 350–51. João Pereira Caldas apparently gave Alexandre

Conflict, Alliance, Mobility, and Place   637 Rodrigues Ferreira the collection of copied correspondence. See Rodrigues Ferreira, “Diario da Viagem Philosophica,” 50, part 2 (1887): 75. Regarding the negotiation, the vicar and director complied, giving the Mura 25 knives, an axe, a harpoon, and manioc. Manoel Joze Valada to João Bapte Mard[e]l, n.l., July [6?], 1784, APEP, cod. 774, doc. 13; Mathias Fernandes to Sñr. Tenente Cornel, S. Antonio de Maripi, July 6, 1784, APEP, cod. 774, doc. 14. Língua geral speakers were clearly important intermediaries, although their numbers should not be exaggerated. See Director, Serpa, September 24, 1786, in “Notícias da voluntária reducção de paz,” 389. 117. Director Lucas Joze Espz.a de Brito Coelho Folgman to governor, Pombal, February 21, 1772, APEP, cod. 241, doc. 33. This message was probably meant quite literally. Nimuendajú, “Tribes of the Lower and Middle Xingú River,” in Handbook of South American Indians, vol. 3, The Tropical Forest Tribes, ed. Julian H. Steward (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1948. Smithsonian Institution, Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 143), 236, 238. The Juruna are again mentioned on the Xingú in Director Domingos Cardozo to governor, Souzel, December 24, 1775, APEP, cod. 283, doc. 89. These eighteenth-century sources are valuable for reconstructing the history and migrations of those Jurura who inhabit the Xingu today. Nimuendajú, “Tribes of the Lower and Middle Xingú,” 218, erroneously reported there were no records mentioning the Juruna between the Jesuit expulsion and the nineteenth century. 118. Nimuendajú, “Tribes of the Lower and Middle Xingú,” 230–231. 119. Queiroz, “Viagem e visita,” 372–373. 120. Lista do Informaçõens para aparte Historica da Villa de Souzel, eseu destricto dada em o mes de Agosto do anno de 1823, APEP, cod. 768, art. 9. 121. Orlando Villas Boas and Claudio Villas Boas, Xingu: The Indians, Their Myths, ed. Kenneth S. Brecher, trans. Susanna Hertelendy Rudge (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973), 248. See also Mariana Kawall Leal Ferreira, ed., Histórias do Xingu: Coletânea de depoimentos dos índios Suyá, Kayabi, Juruna, Trumai, Txucarramãe e Txicão (São Paulo: NHII-USP, FAPESP, 1994), 171–177. 122. Pedro Agostinho da Silva, “Testemunhos da ocupação pré-xinjuana na bacia dos formadores do Xingu,” in Karl von den Steinen: Um século de antropologia no Xingu, ed. Vera Penteado Coelho (São Paulo: EDUSP, 1991), 239–240. 123. See David  J.  Weber and Jane  M.  Rausch, ed., Where Cultures Meet: Frontiers in Latin American History (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1994), xiii–xli; and Guy and Sheridan, Contested Ground, 3–15. 124. Silva, “Testemunhos da ocupação pré-xinjuana,” 239–240. 125. Stephen Nugent, Amazonian Caboclo Society: An Essay on Invisibility and Peasant Economy (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 1993).

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638   Borderlands of the Iberian World Alden, Dauril. “El indio desechable en el Estado de Maranhão durante los siglos XVII y XVIII.” América Indígena 45 (1985): 427–446. Amoroso, Marta Rosa. “Corsários no caminho fluvial: Os Mura do Rio Madeira.” In História dos índios no Brasil, edited by Manuela Carneiro da Cunha, 297–310. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras; Secretaria Municipal de Cultural, FAPESP, 1992. Anonymous. “Memoria da nova navegação do Rio Arinos até á Villa de Santarem, estado do Grão-Pará” [1856]. Revista do Instituto Histórico e Geográfico Brasileiro 19, no. 59 (1898): 99–118. Anonymous. “Notícias da voluntária reducção de paz e amizade do feroz nação do gentio Mura nos annos de 1784, 1785, e 1786.” Revista do Instituto Histórico e Geográfico Brasileiro 36, no. 46 (1873): 323–92. Azevedo, João Lúcio de, ed. Cartas do Padre António Vieira, vol. 1. Coimbra: Imprensa da Universidade, 1925. Boas, Orlando Villas, and Claudio Villas Boas. Xingu: The Indians, Their Myths. Edited by Kenneth S. Brecher. Translated by Susanna Hertelendy Rudge. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973. Cunha, Manuela Carneiro da, ed. História dos índios no Brasil. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, Secretaria Municipal de Cultural, FAPESP, 1992. Dias, Camila Loureiro. “Jesuit Maps and Political Discourse: The Amazon River of Father Samuel Fritz.” The Americas 69, no. 1 (2012): 95–116. Domingues, Ângela. “ ‘Régulos e absolutos’: Episódios de multiculturalismo e intermediação no norte do Brasil (Meados do Século XVIII).” In Império de várias faces: Relações de poder no mundo ibérico da Época Moderna, edited by Rodrigo Bentes Monteiro and Ronaldo Vainfas, 119–138. São Paulo: Alameda, 2009. Domingues, Ângela. Quando os índios eram vassalos: Colonização e relações de poder no norte do Brasil na segunda metade do século XVIII. Lisbon: CNCDP, 2000. Farage, Nádia. As muralhas dos sertões: Os povos indígenas no Rio Branco e a colonização. Rio de Janeiro: Paz e Terra, ANPOCS, 1991. Ferreira, Alexandre Rodrigues. “Diario da Viagem Philosophica pela Capitania de São José do Rio Negro (1786).” Revista do Instituto Histórico e Geográfico Brasileiro 48, pt.1 (1885): 1–234; 50, pt. 2 (1887): 11–142. Freire, José Ribamar Bessa. Rio babel: A história das línguas na Amazônia. Rio de Janeiro: Atlântica Editora, 2004. Fritz, Samuel. Journal of the Travels and Labours of Father Samuel Fritz in the River of the Amazons between 1686 and 1723. Translated by George Edmundson. London: Hakluyt Society, 1922. Guy, Donna J., and Thomas E. Sheridan, ed., Contested Ground: Comparative Frontiers on the Northern and Southern Edges of the Spanish Empire. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1998. Hemming, John. Amazon Frontier: The Defeat of the Brazilian Indians. London: Macmillan, 1987. Hemming, John. Red Gold: The Conquest of the Brazilian Indians. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978. Holanda, Sérgio Buarque de. História geral da civilização brasileira I: A época colonial. 2 vols. São Paulo: Difusão Européia do Livro, 1960. Johnson, H. B. “Portuguese Settlement 1500–1580.” In Colonial Brazil, edited by Leslie Bethell, 1–38. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Kiemen, Mathias C. “The Indian Policy of Portugal on the Amazon Region, 1614–1693.” PhD diss., Catholic University of America, 1954.

Conflict, Alliance, Mobility, and Place   639 Lima, Alam da Silva, Rafael Chambouleyron, and Danilo Camargo Igloiori. “Plata, paño, cacao y clavo: ‘dinero de la tierra’ en la Amazonía portuguesa (c. 1640–1750).” Fronteras de la Historia 14, no. 2 (2009): 205–227. Lorimer, Joyce, ed. English and Irish Settlement on the River Amazon, 1550–1646. London: The Hakluyt Society, 1989. Malheiro, Perdigão. A escravidão no Brasil: Ensaio histórico, jurídico, social. 3rd ed. 2 vols. Petrópolis: Editora Vozes, 1976. Menéndez, Miguel A. “A área Madeira-Tapajós: Situação de contato e relações entre colonizador e indígena.” In História dos índios no Brasil, edited by Manuela Carneiro da Cunha, 281–296. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, Secretaria Municipal de Cultural, FAPESP, 1992. Monteiro, John Manuel. “Escravidão indígena e despovoamento na América portuguesa: S. Paulo e Maranhão.” In Brasil nas vésperas do mundo moderno, 137–167. Lisbon: CNCDP, 1992. Nimuendajú, Curt. “The Maue and Arapium.” In Handbook of South American Indians: The Tropical Forest Tribes, edited by Julian H. Steward, 245–254. Vol. 3. Washington: Smithsonian Institution, 1948 (Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 143). Nimuendajú, Curt. “Tribes of the Lower and Middle Xingú River.” In Handbook of South American Indians: The Tropical Forest Tribes, edited by Julian H. Steward, 213–243. Vol. 3. Washington: Smithsonian Institution, 1948 (Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 143). Queiroz, Bishop João de São José. “Viagem e visita do sertão em o Bispado do Gram-Pará em 1762 e 1763.” Revista do Instituto Histórico e Geográfico Brasileiro 9 (1847): 43–107, 179–227, 328–375, 476–527. Roller, Heather F. Amazonian Routes: Indigenous Mobility and Colonial Communities in Northern Brazil. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014. Roller, Heather F. “Autonomous Indian Nations and Peacemaking in Colonial Brazil.” in The Oxford Handbook of Borderlands of the Iberian World,” edited by Danna A. Levin Rojo and Cynthia Radding, 641–666. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019. Roosevelt, A. C., M. Lima da Costa, C. Lopes Machado, et al. “Paleoindian Cave Dwellers in the Amazon: The Peopling of the Americas.” Science 272, no. 5260 (1996): 373–384. Russell-Wood, A. J. R. Society and Government in Colonial Brazil, 1500–1822. Aldershot, UK: Variorum, 1992. Safier, Neil. “The Confines of the Colony: Boundaries, Ethnographic Landscapes, and Imperial Cartography in Iberoamerica.” In The Imperial Map: Cartography and the Mastery of Empire, edited by James R. Akerman, 133–184. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. Schwartz, Stuart B. “Plantations and Peripheries, c. 1580–c. 1750.” In Colonial Brazil, edited by Leslie Bethell, 118–127. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Schwartz, Stuart B., and Frank Salomon. “New Peoples and New Kinds of People: Adaptation, Readjustment, and Ethnogenesis in South American Indigenous Societies.” In The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of The Americas: South America, part. 2, edited by Frank Salomon and Stuart B. Schwartz, 443–501. Vol. 3. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Silva, Pedro Agostinho da. “Testemunhos da ocupação pré-xinjuana na bacia dos formadores do Xingu.” In Karl von den Steinen: Um século de antropologia no Xingu, edited by Vera Penteado Coelho, 233–287. São Paulo: EDUSP, 1991. Sommer, Barbara  A. “Colony of the Sertão: Amazonian Expeditions and the Indian Slave Trade.” In Rethinking Bandeirismo Studies in Colonial Brazil, edited by John Russell-Wood, Special issue, The Americas 61, no. 3 (2005): 401–428.

640   Borderlands of the Iberian World Sommer, Barbara  A. “Cracking Down on the Cunhamenas: Renegade Amazonian Traders under Pombaline Reform.” Journal of Latin American Studies 38, no. 4 (2006): 767–791. Sommer, Barbara A. “Negotiated Settlements: Native Amazonians and Portuguese Policy in Pará, Brazil, 1758–1798.” PhD diss., University of New Mexico, 2000. Sommer, Barbara A. “The Amazonian Native Nobility in Late-Colonial Pará.” In Native Brazil: Beyond the Cannibal and the Convert, 1500–1899, edited by Hal Langfur, 108–131. Albuquerque: UNM, 2014. Sweet, David Graham. “A Rich Realm of Nature Destroyed: The Middle Amazon Valley, 1640–1750.” PhD diss., University of Wisconsin, 1974. Sweet, David. “The Ibero-American Frontier Mission in Native American History.” In The New Latin American Mission History, edited by Erick Langer and Robert H. Jackson, 1–48. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995. Urban, Greg. “A história da cultura brasileira segundo as línguas nativas.” In História dos índios no Brasil, edited by Manuela Carneiro da Cunha, 87–102. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, Secretaria Municipal de Cultural, FAPESP, 1992. Varnhagen, Francisco Adolfo de. História geral do Brasil: Antes de sua separação e independência de Portugal. Edited by J. Capistrano de Abreu and Rodolfo Garcia. 3 vols., 5 pts., 10th ed. Belo Horizonte and São Paulo: Ed. Itatiaia, EDUSP, 1981.

chapter 26

Au tonomous I n di a n Nations a n d Peacem a k i ng i n Col on i a l Br a zil Heather F. Roller

Meeting face-to-face at frontier outposts, garrisons, and camps across Brazil during the last quarter of the eighteenth century, Indians and Portuguese laid down their weapons and embraced. Warily, they stepped into unfamiliar watercraft and entered one another’s houses, barracks, or tents. Indigenous captives, oftentimes women, reached for the right words to communicate the peaceful intentions of their masters. Portuguese men took off jackets and shirts, standing bare-chested to watch as Indian men tried on their clothes. Leaders on both sides were formally recognized in speeches and with gifts; knives, fishhooks, and strands of beads passed quickly from hand to hand for inspection before being stashed away for safekeeping. Finally, the parties played music, sang, and danced for each other, and it was so good—after long days of trekking and ­reconnaissance—that some even forgot to eat or sleep.1 Revelries soon ended, and weapons were often taken up anew, but peacemaking remained a viable form of political and social interaction in the borderlands of late eighteenth-century Brazil. Peace agreements were forged between the Portuguese and significant factions of Karajá (1775), Kayapó do Sul (1780), Mura (1784–1787), Xavante (1788), Mbayá-Guaikurú (1791), and Mundurukú (1795). Changing colonial policies and imperial competition for indigenous allies are only (the better-known) factors that explain why and how these peace processes unfolded; just as important are flexible native strategies for maintaining autonomy or control over territories formally claimed by European Crowns. Peacemaking must be analyzed not only as “pacification”—a state-led program, for state aims—but as a process that also hinged on the motivations, interests, and customs of non-state peoples. Independent Indian nations had their own ideas of why and how peace should be made and what it should entail. These ideas,

642   Borderlands of the Iberian World furthermore, compelled even the most cynical colonial officials on the ground to make concessions and compromises. Shaped by Portuguese as well as native “practices of peace” in the borderlands, the peacemaking process might suffer setbacks from a colonial perspective, while opening up new possibilities from an indigenous point of view.2 The extent to which Indians directed or influenced this process has been obscured from scholars’ view, perhaps because the overall trend from the eighteenth to the nineteenth centuries was toward increasing state power over indigenous peoples and their territories. This topic invites comparative study, because similar processes played out in neighboring Spanish American colonies during the same period. The demarcation of a new border between Spanish and Portuguese territories after 1750 intensified the rivalry for native allies, as both Crowns sought to justify their claims to territory. With a new sense of urgency, Spanish and Portuguese policymakers turned toward making treaties and trade agreements with powerful Indian nations, without (yet) attempting to govern them. Often tacking back and forth between Portuguese- and Spanish-claimed territories, autonomous Indian nations carried their own expectations of gifts, titles, and accommodations that in turn determined what the two imperial rivals were willing to concede to them. What emerged from these trans-border negotiations were common conventions of treatment and patterns of interaction between Iberian officials and the Indians they could not conquer but hoped to win to their side. For these reasons, the more extensive scholarly literature on Spanish American peacemaking is relevant to the Brazilian cases examined here, and even to those that involved indigenous groups not in direct or regular contact with Spaniards.3

Dispatches from the Garrison Peace agreements between Iberians and Indians took many forms, and just one of these was the formal, written treaty. Accordingly, the documentary remains of the peacemaking process are diverse and scattered, more likely to be found in regional archives than in national or overseas archives. In Brazil, some of the most interesting sources consist of the correspondence of administrators and military men who found themselves exiled at remote forts or garrisons or at the head of backlands expeditions. Both types of Portuguese officials described how they hosted contingents of visiting Indians; supervised the distribution of gifts; negotiated conditions of friendship; broached the possibilities of resettlement, evangelization, and military cooperation; and arranged for Indians to visit the outpost in the future, or even to visit the governor in the capital.4 The records of colonial field agents reveal a great deal about the participation of Indians in peacemaking, and they can be read, cautiously, for native perspectives on the process. In general, the on-the-ground sources describe what Indians did: how they approached or received colonial officials, what gifts were exchanged, and how they comported themselves in the context of the garrison, camp, or frontier settlement.

Autonomous Indian Nations and Peacemaking   643 Occasionally, colonial authors reported what Indians said, either purporting to quote them directly, or providing a summary. They named and described the indigenous men whom officials perceived (or wished to perceive) as leaders of bands (malocas, tolderias) or representatives of indigenous nations (nações), and occasionally they paid attention to the women who accompanied these leaders as family members or translators. Much ink was also spilled on personal interactions that were seen as important milestones in the peace process. The sources might tell us that high-ranking Indians sat down to share a meal with the Portuguese commander; that the two groups staged “friendly” demonstrations of their respective weapons (firearms and bows and arrows); or that a kind of impromptu trade fair took place between the two parties. In some cases, the documents describe how Indian leaders responded to proposals that they settle in aldeamentos, nuclear settlements overseen by missionaries or secular administrators, or that they serve as military auxiliaries against other indigenous groups or against Spaniards. Occasionally, Indians’ conditions or demands are listed: protection against enemies, a steady supply of metal tools and other colonial goods, freedom of movement, or control of territory. These negotiations might end in a pact (written or unwritten) or, more ambiguously, a promise to meet again in several “moons” or at some unspecified time in the future. In a perceptive methodological essay on the study of Spanish-indigenous peacemaking, Florencia Roulet argued that the written records distort the process in several ways. They tended not to admit how difficult it was to dominate Indians, portraying the peace agreements as unilaterally imposed rather than the result of compromise between the two parties. This had to do with the recognition and rewards sought by colonial officials, who generally glorified their own roles in the negotiations and claimed greater authority over Indians than they really had. The colonial records also downplayed the extent to which Indians imposed conditions for peace and extracted concessions from Spaniards—concessions that provided many of the same benefits that had previously been obtained by Indians through raids.5 These same distortions surface in the sources from eighteenth-century Brazil, and several more can be added to the list. For one, the process was almost always described through the lens of colonial suspicion. Indians were seen as inherently untrustworthy and mercurial in their loyalties, as captured in the label inconstante, or inconstant, applied to Indians in the writings of military men, administrators, and ecclesiastics throughout the Iberian colonial world.6 Strongly associated with nomadism (which contemporaries disdained as “living like beasts . . . wandering about without ever truly settling”), the notion of Indian inconstancy profoundly shaped colonial understandings of native actions and words.7 Luso-Brazilian authors occasionally did recount the explanations given by Indians for switching sides or turning against their former allies, but they framed these as deceptive. Historians would do well to give such explanations more credit than contemporaries did and to read them for evidence of native political strategies. One should also keep in mind that the Portuguese perception of Indians as fickle and mercurial was likely reciprocal; Indians, too, made accusations of broken promises and complained of insults received from their Portuguese allies.8

644   Borderlands of the Iberian World Another problem with the colonial Brazilian sources—as well as their Spanish American counterparts—is their tendency to identify Indians as representatives of generic “nations” rather than as members of factions or internally divided groups.9 Applied to delegations of peaceful Indians, such an identification might represent a kind of wishful thinking on the part of colonial authors: not just a small faction, but rather a whole nation, could be considered “pacified” or on the way to pacification. For ­borderlands administrators and military men, there were material incentives for making such claims, as the Royal Treasury typically sent supplies and funds in accordance with the presumed importance and size of the target group.10 The colonial categorization of Indian “nations” thus presents a picture of unity that is unhelpful for reconstructing the ebb and flow of indigenous alliances. A number of documents, however, show that the colonial record does contain evidence of native factionalism; it simply can be hard to find amidst the triumphalist accounts. A final, related problem has to do with coverage. The peacemaking activities of some Indian groups in colonial Brazil were much better documented than others, corresponding to their relative strength (whether in actual or perceived power) and the frequency and intensity of their contacts with colonial officials. Two of the bestdocumented cases—the Mura in the central Amazon and the Mbayá-Guaikurú in the northern Chaco and western Brazil—can be fruitfully complemented by making ­reference to other Indian nations in the Iberian borderlands that have been the ­subject of recent investigation.11 Mostly left out of the present analysis are the many smaller indigenous groups that left only fleeting traces in the documentary record of peacemaking.

Indigenous Motivations and Aims in Peacemaking The advantages that accrued to peacemaking Portuguese or Spaniards are relatively well known to scholars. Competing with one another in the mid- to late eighteenth century, each Iberian Crown sought to claim territory on the basis of occupation by native “vassals,” who might someday be made into obedient subjects, even if they as yet lived autonomously. Peace with independent Indian nations also brought a measure of frontier security, permitting the expansion of colonial populations—miners, merchants, ranchers, soldiers, and missionaries—as well as extractive or agricultural industries along the strategic river and overland routes of the interior.12 Though it did not carry the same risks and costs of a military offensive, peace with Indian nations was not free; colonial fort commanders and governors were expected to host and entertain visiting Indians, giving rise (in Spanish America) to the budget category of gastos de indios, or “Indian expenses.”13 But officials could recoup some of their expenditures through trading for livestock, hides, or raw forest products with those same visitors. Indians

Autonomous Indian Nations and Peacemaking   645 often obtained some of those trade goods through raiding in other colonial areas—and this did not seem problematic to colonial officials, as long as it affected their rivals.14 Finally, Indian nations were seen as strategic allies in the borderlands: they could serve as military auxiliaries against other indigenous groups or other Europeans, and they could convince other independent Indian nations to come to the negotiating table.15 Alliance with one native group sometimes directly facilitated relations with another group, as was the case with the Portuguese alliance with the Guaikurú and then the Guaná.16 Indigenous objectives for establishing peaceful relations, in contrast, have not been as well studied. To explain why some Indian nations chose to align themselves with Iberian powers, scholars have reasonably emphasized the many hardships facing indigenous populations during the late colonial period: reduced territorial control, epidemics, ecological crises like droughts or floods, and threats from both European and indigenous enemies.17 These pressures and challenges were very real, and the sources suggest that they intensified during the latter half of the eighteenth century as Iberians sought to expand mining and ranching enterprises into new regions and to secure the routes and frontier outposts of their colonies. But is this a complete picture of indigenous motivations to make peace? Recent studies of indigenous peacemaking in Brazil and Spanish America have tried to expand the frame of analysis beyond external pressures or “push factors.” In examining how Minuano negotiators represented themselves to their Portuguese interlocutors in southern Brazil, Elisa Garcia notes that the Indians did not paint themselves as being between a rock and a hard place—in other words, as forced by dire circumstances to find new allies. Instead, they framed their history as one in which they were proactively choosing to ally with the Portuguese against a common enemy (the Spanish).18 Similarly, Lidia Nacuzzi, Carina Lucaioli, José Manuel Zavala, and Guillaume Boccara have emphasized that autonomous indigenous groups in the Chaco, the Pampas, and northern Patagonia sought peace agreements with Spaniards not because they faced new resource shortages but because such realignments opened up a new range of social, political, and economic possibilities. These included access to livestock, participation in larger trade networks, recovery of captives, domination of indigenous rivals, and social interaction with indigenous groups already living in colonial reducciones and cities. These advantages could be gained without relinquishing traditional patterns of seasonal mobility. Allied Indians came and went from the colonial settlements as they pleased— after reprovisioning themselves with metal tools and food supplies, of course.19 Mary Karasch likewise suggests that for the Kayapó do Sul, Xavante, and Xerente—factions of which made peace with the Portuguese in central Brazil during the late eighteenth century—temporary settlement in the colonial sphere offered opportunities to learn the enemy’s language, technologies, and tactical weaknesses. These lessons were later applied in warfare against the Portuguese.20 Situated between two imperial powers on the fertile floodplains of the Paraguay River, the Mbayá-Guaikurú were especially alert to the new commercial and political possibilities of peace. As an equestrian society of seasonally mobile bands, the Guaikurú ranged

646   Borderlands of the Iberian World widely in search of pasturage as well as raiding targets. Their approach by horseback—or, later in the eighteenth century, by canoe—struck dread into the hearts of Jesuit mission Indians as well as Portuguese travelers and soldiers. (As Amy Turner Bushnell notes in her hemispheric overview of indigenous peoples, “It is no accident that the Indian groups labeled indomitable and barbarous were people of either horses or canoes, similarly mobile.”21) The Guaikurú had made intermittent peace agreements with Spaniards in the Chaco since the seventeenth century, and some groups had experimented briefly with Jesuit mission life. But by the 1780s, they had begun raiding the newly established Spanish ranches north of Asunción for livestock, which they then traded for metal tools and other colonial goods with the Portuguese. The Guaikurú had, in effect, “followed the market” at a time when Spain’s ability to import trade items was hampered by the British blockade of the 1790s (Figure 26.1).22 The lucrative new trading arrangements with the Portuguese were cemented by an alliance between two large bands of Guaikurú and the Portuguese in 1791, at the Fort of Coimbra on the Upper Paraguay River. (It was formalized later that year in the capital of Mato Grosso, Vila Bela.)23 As their relationships with Spaniards further deteriorated in the context of intensified raiding and reprisals, the majority of Guaikurú groups chose to ally with the Portuguese and move farther north with their vast herds of horses. By the end of the century, many were living seasonally in the vicinity of the Portuguese military outposts of Coimbra, Albuquerque, and Miranda, which Francismar Carvalho describes as “entrepôts of attraction for native populations [and] outposts for establishing political relations with caciques.”24 With this new base of operations in what is now the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso do Sul, the Guaikurú continued to cross the border to raid Spanish ranches and yerba mate plantations. They also went on taking captives among less powerful indigenous groups like the Chamacoco and Guató, while maintaining their long-standing symbiotic relationship with the agricultural Guaná.25 Portuguese efforts to meddle in these border-crossings—whether though licensing requirements or bribery–usually failed.26 The Portuguese officials who interacted with visiting Guaikurú after 1791 found that they disconcertingly mirrored colonial attitudes and aims. Ricardo Franco de Almeida Serra, the commander at Coimbra, fulminated that the Guaikurú considered themselves “the first and dominant nation of Indians, counting all others as their captives, not judging themselves inferior even to the Spanish and Portuguese.” Even more provocatively, they went around “boasting daily that even though we [the Portuguese] are very fierce, they know how to tame us.”27 The Guaikurú, it seems, had turned the colonial narrative of pacification on its head: they were the ones taming, or pacifying, the whites.28 Using the discourse of friendship and alliance, the Guaikurú visited the Portuguese forts and even the capital of Vila Bela to obtain tobacco and aguardente as well as information. Serra claimed that the visiting Guaikurú spoke fluent Portuguese only when they were intoxicated; at all other times, they pretended not to speak or understand even a word of it, so as to better eavesdrop upon their “friends.” He also suggested that they had a kind of secret pidgin language, one that could not even be understood by non-Guaikurú who had lived in their company for many years; he thought they used it

Autonomous Indian Nations and Peacemaking   647

Figure 26.1.  This engraving by Jean Baptiste Debret titled “Chief of the Gouaycourous departing to go trade with the Europeans” provides an idealized portrait of the Guaikurú Indians, who allied with the Portuguese in the late eighteenth century. The Guaikurú are known today as the Kadiwéu. Jean- Baptiste Debret, Voyage pittoresque et historique au Brésil. . . Tome premier (Paris: Firmin Didot Frères, 1834).

whenever they were discussing particularly sensitive matters.29 Interestingly, the Mura were also thought to have a secret, guttural language that they used in plotting rebellion, thefts, or murders.30 More than twenty years after the peace agreement with the Guaikurú, another Coimbra commander was convinced that one of the main protagonists of the 1791 treaty—the chief Paulo Joaquim José Ferreira—was still living as a spy among the Portuguese. Too old to go raiding in Spanish territories with the rest of his band, he remained at the fort, eager “to spread to the entire nation all [the intelligence] that he can gather around here.”31 The irony was, of course, that the Portuguese wanted to keep the Guaikurú under surveillance at the fort but found this difficult, given their frequent absences and tendency to dissimulate about their plans. Though tinged with Portuguese paranoia, these descriptions nonetheless suggest that the Guaikurú saw peace not simply as a survival strategy, but as an initiative by which they could appropriate Portuguese goods, power, and knowledge. In the Amazonian borderlands, the Mura made peace with the Portuguese after more than half a century of warfare. Reconstructing why this unfolded between 1784 and 1787—just after Mura attacks had achieved maximum terror among colonial travelers and villagers across a vast area of the upper and middle Amazon—tells more about

648   Borderlands of the Iberian World shifting native priorities than it does about Portuguese policy. In fact, as David Sweet notes, Mura overtures of friendship were “so unexpected by the Portuguese that they were incredulous at first, and then unanimous in attributing it to divine intervention.”32 Like the Guaikurú, the Mura were composed of highly mobile bands that had incorporated many people from other groups, whether by force or attraction. Originally based in the Madeira River valley, the Mura had migrated downriver by the mid eighteenth century to inhabit the central Amazonian territory of the Autazes, a labyrinthine region of seasonally flooded islands and beaches near the heavily trafficked main channel of the Amazon. Having expanded the range and intensity of their attacks after midcentury, the Mura seemed to the Portuguese to have acquired “gigantic” dimensions, both in terms of demography and territory.33 For colonial populations, “Mura” became a catch-all term for any hostile Indian group in the broader region, and other recalcitrant native Amazonian groups were often compared with the Mura in the writings of Portuguese officials.34 Countless others must have seen the Mura as offering a viable alternative to the colonial system. Their widely dispersed, canoe-borne “empire” included not only female and child captives taken from colonial settlements in the captaincies of Pará and the Rio Negro, but also remnants of other tribal groups and runaway Indians and fugitive blacks who had joined the Mura voluntarily (Figure 26.2).35 For the ethnically complex Mura, the shift toward peacemaking in 1784 seems to have been driven largely by social connections, old and new, to the world of the colonial Indian villages. Dotted all along the main tributaries of the Portuguese Amazon, most of these villages were former missions, secularized in 1757 under the power of the colonial state. They had individual Portuguese “directors” (under the so-called Indian Directorate) but maintained native leadership structures and traditions of local autonomy until the end of the eighteenth century. The Directorate villages imposed the menacing demands of draft labor and corporal punishment, but they also offered the relative security of residence in a state-sponsored, corporate community.36 The Mura were familiar with these settlements because they had a long history of raiding them for people and goods, and also because many “Mura” were Indians who had been born and raised in these communities. The peace process was, in fact, initiated by a group of “Murified” Indians, former residents of the colonial villages who had been incorporated into the Mura. These former villagers appeared in the frontier outpost of Santo Antônio de Maripí on the Japurá River, where they met peacefully with the village director, Mathias Fernandes, who had led punitive expeditions against the Mura in the past.37 In the peace negotiations that followed over the course of the next several years, the main protagonist was also a Murified Indian, named Ambrósio, who led a band of Mura on the lower Japurá River. His family had fled from the village of Nogueira when it was still a mission (i.e., before 1757). Attacked by the Mura while living in a fugitive community, the men in the family were killed, but the women and children, including the young Ambrósio and his mother Joana, had been adopted into Mura families. Now Ambrósio (relying on Joana as a translator) offered peace to the Portuguese and embraced the role of “chief reconciler of the Mura.”38 In 1785, Ambrósio and his band visited Nogueira, his family’s former village, where one of their relatives served as a native officer. After

Autonomous Indian Nations and Peacemaking   649

Figure 26.2. A stylized Mura portrait by Édouard Riou (1869). The Mura representative Ambrósio was described with similar facial ornaments, made of animal teeth or the bones of a large fish. Paul Marcoy, Voyage à travers L’Amérique du Sud, de L’Océan Pacifique à L’Océan Atlantique, vol. 2 (Paris: L. Hachette, 1869), 398.

several days of dancing and celebrating on the village beach, the Mura offered a large group of their children for baptism. The freedom to visit old friends and kin in the colonial villages was clearly important to the peacemaking Mura, and especially to the women, many of whom gravitated toward the rituals and festivities of the village churches.39 Sweet argues that in the context of a brutal, decades-long war with the Portuguese, and especially at a moment in which Iberian representatives were gathering in large numbers at the border demarcation headquarters of Ega on the Rio Solimões, the Mura may have been on the lookout for alternatives. Mura women, in particular, may have convinced their warrior-husbands to consider the benefits of peace.40 Peace also afforded opportunities to continue what the Mura already did very well, which was incorporating other Indian nations into their network of bands and mobile settlements. Ambrósio and his brother-in-law were active in persuading (or coercing) other bands of Mura as well as Indian nations like the Xumana, Torá, and Iruri to join them in making peace and forming large settlements in locations closer to the Portuguese.41 Not surprisingly, colonial authors often credited external forces with “pushing” Indians to make peace. The governor of Pará, Francisco de Souza Coutinho, for

650   Borderlands of the Iberian World example, asserted that the Mura were driven to negotiate resettlement because of the threat they faced from their expansionist enemies, the Mundurukú—despite the fact that the Mundurukú offensive began in 1786, in a region hundreds of miles from the place where the Mura first offered peace in 1784. The appeal of such an analysis lay in its reassurance that Indian nations negotiated from a position of vulnerability or weakness, and in its suggestion that, in the not-too-distant future, such people could be turned into useful vassals.42 The cases of the Guaikurú and Mura, however, work against these colonial assumptions and highlight the importance of examining the peacemaking process from a native perspective and through the lens of ground-level sources. Although epidemics, threats from indigenous and European enemies, resource shortages, territorial losses, and other forces beyond Indians’ control are crucial factors for understanding changes in indigenous strategies, they do not fully explain why some groups at the height of their military prowess chose to establish peaceful relations with Iberian powers. Social ties, trading opportunities, and the chance to gather intelligence about Europeans—without ceding autonomy—are also crucial to understanding why Indians might decide to extend or accept offers of peace.

Native Practices of Peace A number of recent histories of indigenous peacemaking in the Iberian borderlands have emphasized that peace, for Indians, “was not a static state of coexistence two parties agreed upon at once, but rather a tenuous condition that needed to be continuously reaffirmed through words and deeds.” It was, in other words, subject to ongoing negotiation and reevaluation.43 As Hal Langfur has stated, celebratory narratives of pacification, often found in high-level official correspondence or chronicles, tend to veil this long-term process of maintaining a fragile peace.44 To see it more clearly, reports from the frontlines of colonial contact with independent Indian nations must be examined. It is these sources—with their palpable expressions of frustration and then accommodation in the face of native customs and demands—that show Europeans having to play by indigenous rules of peacemaking. Concessions and compromise are most obvious in two main arenas of long-term interaction: peace talks and gifting. Peace talks between Indians and Iberians were culturally hybrid affairs, drawing on symbols, rituals, and modes of speech taken from the traditions of both parties and to some extent made intelligible to each side.45 Juliana Barr has eloquently described for the Texas borderlands of the late eighteenth century how martial rituals and symbols found resonance in the warrior cultures of Comanches and Wichitas, as well as of the Spaniards. Spanish military titles were bestowed on native leaders, promises were made to fight common enemies, and “rituals of respect functioned as the redemptive erasures of past slurs on the battlefield.”46 Similarly, the two Guaikurú chiefs who went to the Portuguese capital of Vila Bela to formalize the peace agreement of 1791 received ­military uniforms and decorations fit for high officers; staffs of office; the military titles

Autonomous Indian Nations and Peacemaking   651 of Capitão; military commissions (patentes); and honorific Portuguese names. The cacique Caimá was thereafter known as Capitão João Queima de Albuquerque, after the governor of Mato Grosso; the other cacique, Emavidi Xané, gained the title of Capitão Paulo Joaquim José Ferreira, after the commander of Coimbra.47 The titles, patentes, and symbolic items all fit well into Guaikurú hierarchies of leadership. The Indians distinguished “small” and “great” captains among themselves, and they also applied these gradations to the Portuguese officials with whom they interacted.48 Revealingly, when they believed that the Portuguese had breached their peace agreement—as happened in 1798 due to rumors circulating about Portuguese imprisonment of another indigenous group in western Brazil, the Bororo—the Guaikurú turned their indignation upon these symbols first. Serra described how one of his officials encountered a cacique who was preparing to desert Portuguese territories “with his uniform and his patente ready to send back to me, or to be the first things to feel his wrath, if the Portuguese came after him.”49 Peace talks were almost always conducted through interpreters, despite the fact that many participating Indians knew Spanish or Portuguese, either through long-term contacts with colonial populations, or because they had been born into colonial society and then later incorporated into tribal society. According to José Manuel Zavala, the significance of forcing Spaniards to depend on interpreters in their peace talks with Mapuches is “that these events never in any way obligated the Mapuche to express themselves outside of their linguistic and cultural context.”50 Indians also tended to choose their own interpreters and maintain them over time as trusted intermediaries. In their meetings with the Portuguese, the Guaikurú insisted on the presence of a black woman named Vitória, whom they had captured as she was fleeing from colonial slavery along the Paraguay River. She appears frequently in the documentation from the first peace talks in 1791 through at least 1801, which speaks to her centrality in the ongoing negotiations around peace, settlement, provisioning, defense, and border crossings. Portuguese commanders like Serra also came to depend on Vitória and reward her services as an ­informant, but they never seemed entirely certain of where her loyalties lay.51 In their peace agreements, Indians imposed conditions, extracted concessions, and often interpreted the terms of the agreements in ways that were highly selective in the eyes of their Spanish or Portuguese allies. In their (unwritten) agreement with the Portuguese, it is clear that the Mura expected a steady supply of tools and foodstuffs, in exchange for the cessation of hostilities and for their continuing efforts to attract other Mura and unincorporated Indians into the colonial sphere. They also expected freedom of travel and unfettered access to fishing and hunting grounds, though this remained an area of regular conflict. For example, when a band of Mura led by Ambrósio were confronted in 1787 for their unauthorized hunting of turtles at the royal beaches of Jauabó—which were considered the property of the king—they indignantly replied that “they had lots of arrows, and they had no fear, for the whites were few, and they were many.”52 In the negotiations around resettlement, the Mura insisted on resettlement sites of their own choosing, often conveniently close to the very royal fishing and turtlehunting grounds that they were told to avoid. They maintained their seasonal patterns of

652   Borderlands of the Iberian World mobility, frequently leaving the settlements empty, and they refused to participate in nearly all types of colonial labor.53 The governor concluded that any orders on settlement “must be communicated to them gently, so that they do not become distrustful; and they must not be forced in any way, if they do not want to go or move themselves.”54 Statements like these, made several years after the initial peace talks, show that at least some colonial officials saw peace as a delicate, unstable arrangement requiring both tact and patience. In the written treaty signed between the Portuguese and the two bands of Guaikurú in 1791, the Indians promised to uphold “the most intimate peace and friendship” with the Portuguese and to give their “loyalty and obedience” to the King. In exchange, the governor promised to always protect the Guaikurú and do all that was needed for their spiritual and material satisfaction. This was certainly not a treaty of capitulation.55 From the perspective of the Guaikurú, it was likely a sign of respect for (and even tribute to) their power and status. Indeed, over the course of the next several decades, as gifts flowed from colonial warehouses into the hands of the Guaikurú, Portuguese officials began to wonder if they were in fact paying tribute to an Indian nation.56 The Guaikurú certainly did nothing to discourage this impression. When Serra convened all of the allied Guaikurú caciques together to read the king’s and governor’s orders on settlement and intermarriage, and also warned that supply shortages at Coimbra meant that they needed to plant corn, beans, and raise pigs for their own sustenance (and for which they would be given tools, cloth, sugar, and aguardente), the Guaikurú did not accept the terms unconditionally: They had a large meeting amongst themselves, at the end of which Capitão Paulo, in the name of all, responded that all of this was very good and what they wanted. But [they wanted to know] how many slaves would be sent by His Excellency to make those plantations, for they themselves were not slaves. They said the same with respect to the houses; the wood was for them very hard, and it hurt their shoulders; they all wanted [the houses], but the Portuguese would have to come make them for them. With regard to the marriages, they all said that they wanted Portuguese wives. But they thought it unacceptable, as well as unnecessary, to impose the condition that they could not part until death, or [require] that they should be baptized before contracting such marriages.57

Serra recounted this anecdote years later to paint a picture of Guaikurú pride and arrogance (soberba), and it is likely exaggerated. He also did not admit whether he agreed to any of these conditions. Nonetheless, it tells us something about how Indians positioned themselves in their negotiations with the Portuguese, and how they sought to dictate the terms of their peace accords. All of the evidence points to the Mura and the Guaikurú wanting to decide the details of where they might live or travel and how they would gain their subsistence; what rules of conduct they would observe in their relations with the Portuguese; and how much their friendship would cost. In David Weber’s hemispheric survey of Spanish American attitudes and policies toward independent Indians, he notes that “officials in charge of distributing gifts

Autonomous Indian Nations and Peacemaking   653 seemed caught perpetually between the crown’s demands for frugality and Indians’ demands for generosity.” Eighteenth-century Iberian officials generally spent more extravagant sums of money on gifts for Indians whose cooperation was needed to meet important crown objectives, and especially when other European powers competed for native loyalties.58 The Guaikurú certainly used their long history of trading and gifting with the Spaniards in their forging of advantageous exchange relations with the Portuguese. “The greatest difficulty that I find,” wrote a Portuguese governor who had been negotiating with the Guaikurú, “has to do with the locale in which they live— between Portuguese and Spaniards, who ceaselessly seek to attract them into friendship. They manipulate these contrary aims with great shrewdness, and in this way they obtain what they want from both, without either work or subjection.”59 Portuguese fort commanders found themselves under heavy pressure to give the Guaikurú guns instead of knives (though the governor reminded them that it was against the law and also foolish); to host dozens of elite Indians at their own dinner tables on a daily basis; and to provide abundant supplies of aguardente and tobacco.60 If any of these things were denied (especially the aguardente and tobacco), the Guaikurú “grow melancholy, and [then] they shout that it must be given to them, because Your Excellency only sends it for them.” To quell these protests, fort commanders sometimes had to show Indians the empty warehouses.61 That these were depleted should come as no surprise: by the end of the century, there were some eight hundred Guaikurú living in the vicinity of Coimbra and visiting the fort regularly, along with about six hundred allied Guaná. The total number of Indian allies (including their captives) nearly doubled several years later. At that point, in 1803, the Portuguese estimated that the Guaikurú had received some sixteen thousand to twenty thousand cruzados over their twelve years of living “in the most intimate friendship” with the Portuguese.62 “They are quite skilled in the art of demanding,” noted Serra of the Guaikurú, but he also acknowledged higher orders to continue to gratify them, in light of recent desertions to the Spanish side of the border.63 A Portuguese official, stationed in a remote Amazonian town, put it this way: peace with the Mura would only be kept “by following, for now, the path of patiently suffering the lack of persistence that one always sees in them.”64 Portuguese officials also had to learn how to give gifts. When Ambrósio and his band of Mura showed up in the town of Ega to meet with the Portuguese boundary commissioner there, the latter was wise enough not to object when the turtles given to him as “presents” were promptly eaten by the Mura themselves (whether the commissioner was expected to join in this feast is not clear). He still distributed cloth and other “rewards” to the visitors, who promised to continue their efforts to bring unincorporated Indian groups into friendly contact with the Portuguese.65 Officials also had to learn to play by the rules of the complex interethnic hierarchy that bound the Guaikurú to the Guaná, their subservient allies (who also made peace with the Portuguese). Serra, for example, made sure to give ten times more aguardente to the former; and at his dining table in the fort, the Guaikuru elites were served the same food as Serra, while the Guaná capitães were given only plates of beans or leftover food and had to sit on the floor.66 As the governor noted after entertaining two Guaná elites in the capital, adherence to this

654   Borderlands of the Iberian World proportional division of goods was necessary, so as not to “scandalize” the Guaikurú, who considered the Guaná to be their captives or servants.67 It is revealing that such attempts to abide by native expectations of gifting were made over the course of decades, not just in initial peace talks.

Outcomes and Legacies Both Spain and Portugal devised cynical policies toward independent Indian nations in the late eighteenth century, leading one Spanish viceroy to describe the overall strategy as “peace by deceit.” Some of these policies were of Iberian design; others were clearly inspired by English and French methods for increasing native dependency on European trade items (especially “vices” like alcohol and tobacco) and thus weakening native cultural defenses. The principal aim of peace treaties, as many scholars have shown, was to neutralize the threat presented by autonomous Indians and to make them into obedient and loyal subjects whose land could be appropriated.68 This comes across clearly in high-level official correspondence from Brazil, which condescendingly referred to Indians as people who could be duped—through gifts and promises—into accepting peace. As one governor instructed an official in charge of negotiating with a band of autonomous Bororo in Mato Grosso: By every means possible you will try to find out the number of individuals that compose [their group], inquiring as to whether they are just one nation under a single cacique, or whether they have different chiefs [. . . ] Take care that they do not distrust the reason for this examination, and tell them that the motive for wanting to know how many they are, is that we want to know how many houses to make for them, and how many tools to have prepared for them.69

Throughout the late colonial period, Crown authorities advocated dissimilation and manipulation as the best strategies for making peace with autonomous Indian nations and for turning them into obedient subjects. Scholarship on Iberian-indigenous peacemaking has shown, however, that there were real limits on these colonial dreams of top-down “pacification.” Iberian officials stationed in the borderlands had to be pragmatic in the face of resource shortages, and many Indian nations had their own bargaining chips: they could threaten a return to war, or cross over borders to imperial rivals. In his prolific correspondence from Coimbra fort, Serra compared the Mbayá-Guaikurú to small European nations that sought to ensure their security and independence by “selling their friendship” to rival nations, “and the more fickle (vacilante) it is shown to be, the more expensively it is sold.” What the Portuguese called native “inconstancy,” he added, could actually be “necessary prudence” in the face of the contradictory messages that the Guaikurú received from the rival Iberian powers.70 In this context, Indians’ political strategies had to be taken

Autonomous Indian Nations and Peacemaking   655 seriously, and their practices of peace learned and observed, by colonial officials on the ground. These were always considered temporary accommodations, of course; Iberians never intended to continue making concessions to Indians. But they lasted longer than expected, in large part because Indians demanded them. It should come as no surprise that traditions of resistance and defiance remained strong among the descendants of the powerful nations that had made peace in the late colonial period. As the balance of power shifted toward the Luso-Brazilian state in the nineteenth century, Indians switched imperial sides to make war against their former allies; joined broader, regional rebellions; and split into groups that pursued radically different relationships with the state.71 Mary Karasch highlights these patterns among indigenous groups in central Brazil, while in the north and west, factions of both the Mura and the Guaikurú openly rebelled in the post-1822 period.72 According to one anonymous observer in 1826, the Mura were convinced that the “magistrates” were out to enslave them, and they remained “distrustful and disloyal.”73 A few years later, they were accused of killing people of Portuguese descent and carrying off female captives, leading authorities to request the help of the Mura’s traditional enemies, the Mundurukú, in subduing them. Later, some bands of Mura joined the Cabanagem Rebellion (1835–1840) that engulfed much of northern Brazil, using their knowledge of the labyrinthine river system to launch surprise attacks on imperial forces. (Again, the Mundurukú served on punitive expeditions against the rebels.)74 The Guaikurú, for their part, turned against the Luso-Brazilians in 1826 and 1827, attacking Coimbra and Miranda and raiding ranches on the Brazilian side of the border.75 The formation of selective, short-lived alliances also remained a key strategy for indigenous groups seeking to maintain autonomy and territorial control during the nineteenth century. The Guaikurú fought on the Brazilian side of the Paraguayan War (1864–1870), inflicting heavy losses on their longtime enemies in Paraguay. Brazilian officials, like their Portuguese predecessors, were ambivalent about relying on Guaikurú spies, scouts, and soldiers in the war. As one provincial president complained, they “carry out only surprise attacks and do not enter into regular combat until after the conflict is already won, and then it is difficult to curb their excesses [in] killing and pillaging the losers.”76 From the perspective of the Guaikurú, as Maria de Fátima Costa shows, they were fighting a war within the broader war against the Paraguayans: their goal was to regain control over territory that had been lost over the decades. The demarcation of their land in Brazil was finally carried out in 1899 and recognized by the state of Mato Grosso in 1903.77 The Kadiwéu, the largest descendant group in the nineteenth century, struggled to maintain control over their pastures and herds—which they were often accused of stealing—and frequently exchanged hostilities with their land-hungry neighbors. Revealingly, though, they continued to maintain strategically friendly relations with individual ranchers and strongmen. It is a dynamic that can be seen even in contemporary Kadiwéu relations with local power brokers and state representatives.78 For most nineteenth-century writers, indigenous mobility was still strongly associated with fickleness or inconstancy. Foreign travelers described the Mura, for example, as living in ragged bands along the main rivers, subsisting on fish, turtle, and the occasional petty

656   Borderlands of the Iberian World theft. Under (rather ineffective) state surveillance for the unauthorized hunting of turtle eggs, they were “in some way gypsies among Indians, without a fixed home [. . .] and we could encounter them as friends or as enemies, depending on the occasion.” Yet the same travelers noted how the Mura formed relationships of reciprocity with particular whites who had earned their trust and respect.79 To this day, as Marta Amoroso has emphasized, Mura communities show a marked tendency toward incorporating other ethnic groups through marriage and formal “pacts of collaboration,” building on their earlier histories of “Murification.”80 In the eighteenth century and well into the nineteenth, indigenous nations like the Mbayá-Guaikurú and Mura sought to teach their Iberian interlocutors a series of ­lessons in borderlands politics. For one, interdependence and alliance-making were not necessarily signs of weakness; instead, they could be markers of strength.81 Second, peaceful relations were not made in a day, nor could they be taken for granted. And finally, a return to war was always possible. Luso-Brazilians may have ignored or forgotten these lessons over time, but they did so at their own peril. Famous native “guerreiros” continued to live in their midst: they passed through Brazilian towns, temporarily resided in missions, showed up uninvited at settlers’ ranches, and used the same fishing and hunting grounds.82 Using strategies and modes of interaction developed over their centuries of contact with non-Indians, and honed during the era of peacemaking with the Portuguese, these indigenous nations nurtured their independence in the postcolonial period.

Notes Archives AHU: Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino, Lisbon (Portugal) APEP: Arquivo Público do Estado do Pará, Belém (Brazil) APMT: Arquivo Público do Estado de Mato Grosso, Cuiabá (Brazil) Biblioteca Nacional, Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) 1. Mary Karasch, “Rethinking the Conquest of Goiás, 1775–1819,” The Americas 61, no. 3 (2005): 474–477; Marta Rosa Amoroso, “Guerra e Mercadorias: Os Kaingang nas Cenas da ‘Conquista de Guarapuava,” in Do Contato ao Confronto: A Conquista de Guarapuava no Século XVIII, ed. Ana Maria de Moraes Belluzzo et al. (São Paulo: BNP Paribas, 2003), 29–31. 2. For “practices of peace,” see Juliana Barr, Peace Came in the Form of a Woman: Indians and Spaniards in the Texas Borderlands (Chapel Hill: UNC, 2007). 3. On patterns of frontier negotiation involving symbolic and material exchanges between Indians and Spaniards who were otherwise at war, see David J. Weber, Bárbaros: Spaniards and Their Savages in the Age of Enlightenment (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 178–220; Luz María Méndez Beltrán, “La organización de los parlamentos de indios en el siglo XVIII,” in Relaciones fronterizas en la Araucanía, ed. Sergio Villalobos, Carlos

Autonomous Indian Nations and Peacemaking   657 Aldunate et al. (Santiago: Ediciones Universidad Católica de Chile, 1982), 107–174; Raúl Mandrini and Sara Ortelli, “Los ‘Araucanos’ en las Pampas (c. 1700–1850),” in Colonización, resistencia, y mestizaje en las Américas (siglos XVI–XX), ed. Guillaume Boccara (Quito: Editorial Abya Yala, 2002), 237–257. Written treaties reveal some of these conventions and patterns of interaction in Abelardo Levaggi, Diplomacia hispano-indígena en las fronteras de América: historia de los tratados entre la monarquía española y las comunidades aborígenes (Madrid: CEPC, 2002). 4. Tamar Herzog, Frontiers of Possession: Spain and Portugal in Europe and the Americas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 99–101 shows the formulaic nature of peacemaking narratives in Brazil, and the ways in which narratives were modified in higher-level correspondence. Lidia R. Nacuzzi and Carina Lucaioli, “ ‘Y sobre las armas se concertaron las paces’: explorando las rutinas de los acuerdos diplomáticos coloniales.” Revista CUHSO (Cultura—Hombre—Sociedad) 15, no. 2 (2008): 61–74 emphasizes the wide variety of agreements, written and unwritten, between Indians and Spaniards. 5. Florencia Roulet, “Con la pluma y la palabra: el lado oscuro de las negociaciones de paz entre españoles e indígenas,” Revista de Indias 64, no. 231 (2004): 316, 321, 337. 6. Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, The Inconstancy of the Indian Soul: The Encounter of Catholics and Cannibals in 16th-Century Brazil (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2011) analyzes the term, going back to its origins in Jesuit discourse in the sixteenth century. 7. João Batista Mardel to governor, Barcelos, July 1, 1786, Arquivo Público do Estado do Pará, Belém, Brazil (hereafter, APEP), Códice (Cod.) 429, Documento (Doc.) 5. 8. Elisa Frühauf Garcia, As Diversas Formas de Ser Índio: Políticas Indígenas e Políticas Indigenistas no Extremo Sul da América Portuguesa (Rio de Janeiro: Arquivo Nacional, 2009), 247; Herzog, Frontiers of Possession, 108. 9. The Portuguese classified Indian “nations” using territorial, linguistic, political, and phenotypic criteria. On ethnic categories as inaccurate but historically meaningful, see John Monteiro, Tupis, Tapuias e Historiadores: Estudos de História Indígena e do Indigenismo (São Paulo: UNICAMP, 2001), 57–58. The most generic classifications were often applied to “enemy” or “rebel” Indians in the Iberian borderlands; see Christophe Giudicelli, “ ‘Identidades’ rebeldes. Soberanía colonial y poder de clasificación: sobre la categoría calchaquí (Tucumán, Santa Fe, siglos XVI–XVII),” in América colonial: Denominaciones, clasificaciones e identidades, ed. Alejandra Araya Espinoza and Jaime Valenzuela Márquez (Santiago de Chile: RIL Editores, 2010), 137–172. Cecilia Sheridan, “Social Control and Native Territoriality in Northeastern New Spain,” in Choice, Persuasion, and Coercion: Social Control on Spain’s North American Frontiers, ed. Jesús F. de la Teja and Ross Frank (Albuquerque: UNM, 2005), 125, 143, notes that ethnic group names proliferated at the peak of Spanish–Indian negotiation and conflict, but many disappeared in the process of native deterritorialization. Those remaining in the historical record belonged to groups that were more successful in exerting control over others: Marta Rosa Amoroso, “Documentos de Henrique João Wilckens: Introdução,” in Relatos da Fronteira Amazônica no Século XVIII: Alexandre Rodrigues Ferreira e Henrique João Wilckens, ed. Marta Rosa Amoroso and Nádia Farage (São Paulo: Núcleo de História Indígena e do IndigenismoUSP, 1994), 11–13. 10. Heather F. Roller, Amazonian Routes: Indigenous Mobility and Colonial Communities in Northern Brazil (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014), 93 and 104 explains royal funding for expeditions to contact independent native groups.

658   Borderlands of the Iberian World 11. A singular linguistic family, the Mura originally inhabited the Madeira River and gradually moved closer to the main channel of the Amazon over the course of the eighteenth century, in what Nimuendajú characterized as a “warlike expansion” toward the colonial settlements in the Portuguese Amazon. They came to occupy the rivers and lakes of the Autaz region in the central Amazon, and this remains their center of population. Curt Nimuendajú, “The Mura and Pirahã,” in Handbook of South American Indians, vol. 3, ed. Julian H. Steward (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1946), 255–268. A key early ethnography is Constantin Tastevin, Tastevin e a etnografia indígena: coletânea de traduções de textos produzidos em Tefé, ed. Priscila Faulhaber and Ruth Monserrat (Rio de Janeiro: Museo do Índio–FUNAI, 2008); Part of the larger Guaikurú linguistic family in the Chaco (encompassing the Abipón, Mocovi, Toba, Pilagá, Payaguá, and Mbayá), the Mbayá occupied the most northern territories; they moved north and east into Portugueseclaimed territories in the late eighteenth century. While Mbayá remained the preferred Spanish ethnonym for this group, the Portuguese referred to them as Guaikurú or as índios cavaleiros, “horsemen Indians.” Following the lead of Ana Lucia Herberts, “Panorama Histórico dos Mbayá-Guaikuru entre os Séculos XVI e XIX,” in Kadiwéu: Senhoras da Arte, Senhores da Guerra, ed. Giovani José da Silva (Curitiba: Editora CRV, 2011), 17–19, and others, this group is here referred to as “Mbayá-Guaikurú,” or simply Guaikurú. The surviving descendant group, the Kadiwéu, are described in several ethnographies from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: Guido Boggiani, Os Caduveos (Belo Horizonte: Editora Itatiaia, 1975); Emilio Rivasseau, A Vida dos Indios Guaycurús, Quinze Dias nas Suas Aldeias (Sul de Matto-Grosso) (São Paulo: Companhia Editora Nacional, 1936); Darcy Ribeiro, Kadiwéu: Ensaios Etnológicos sobre o Saber, o Azar e a Beleza (Petrópolis: Vozes, 1980); Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques (New York: Penguin, 2012), 168–197. 12. Herzog, Frontiers of Possession, 95–97. The most complete discussion of the advantages sought by Bourbon-era Spanish administrators in their peace agreements with autonomous Indians can be found in Weber, Bárbaros, 205–214; see also Carlos Lázaro Ávila, “Conquista, control y convicción: el papel de los parlamentos indígenas en México, El Chaco y Norteamérica,” Revista de Indias 59, no. 217 (1999): 645–673. For western Brazil, see Francismar Alex Lopes de Carvalho, “Lealdades Negociadas: Povos Indígenas e a Expansão dos Impérios Ibéricos nas Regiões Centrais da América do Sul” (PhD diss., Universidade de São Paulo, 2012), chapter 6; for northwestern Amazonia, see Nádia Farage, As Muralhas dos Sertões: os Povos Indígenas no Rio Branco e a Colonização (Rio de Janeiro: ANPOCS, 1991); and on southern Brazil, see Garcia, As Diversas Formas de Ser Índio. 13. Amy Turner Bushnell, “ ‘Gastos de indios’: The Crown and the Chiefdom-Presidio Compact in Florida,” in El gran Norte mexicano: indios, misioneros y pobladores entre el mito y la historia, ed. Salvador Bernabéu Albert (Seville: CSIC, 2009), 137–163; Carvalho, “Lealdades Negociadas,” 223–228. 14. Kristine  L.  Jones, “Comparative Raiding Economies, North and South,” in Contested Ground: Comparative Frontiers on the Northern and Southern Edges of the Spanish Empire, ed. Donna J. Guy and Thomas E. Sheridan (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1998), 102–107; Weber, Bárbaros, 180–183. For trade networks linking different groups of Europeans with both colonized and uncolonized indigenous groups in Caribbean Central America, see Alejandra Boza and Juan Carlos Solórzano, “Indigenous Trade in Caribbean Central America, 1700s-1800s,” in The Oxford Handbook of Borderlands of the Iberian World, ed. Danna  A.  Levin Rojo and Cynthia Radding, 239–265 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019).

Autonomous Indian Nations and Peacemaking   659 15. On indigenous allies and military auxiliaries, see Ávila, “Conquista, control y convicción,” 672–673; Carvalho, “Lealdades Negociadas,” 381–405; Roller, Amazonian Routes, 120–126. 16. Chiara Vangelista, “Los guaykurú, españoles y portugueses en una región de frontera: Mato Grosso, 1770–1830,” Boletín del Instituto de Historia Argentina y Americana Dr. Emilio Ravignani 8, no. 39 (1993): 74; Carvalho, “Lealdades Negociadas,” 231–232. 17. Odair Giraldin, Cayapó e Panará: Luta e Sobrevivência de um Povo Jê no Brasil Central. (Campinas: UNICAMP, 1997), 94. 18. Garcia, As Diversas Formas de Ser Índio, 246–247, 262, 291. On the role of native historical memory in the formation of Indian-European alliances in New Spain, see Sean McEnroe, “The Indian Garrison Colonies of New Spain and Central America,” in The Oxford Handbook of Borderlands of the Iberian World, ed. Danna  A.  Levin Rojo and Cynthia Radding, 163–182 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), and Danna A. Levin Rojo, Return to Aztlan: Indians, Spaniards, and the Invention of Nuevo México (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2014). 19. Lidia  R.  Nacuzzi, “Los cacicazgos del siglo XVIII en ámbitos de frontera de PampaPatagonia y el Chaco,” in De los cacicazgos a la ciudadanía: sistemas políticos en la frontera, Rio de la Plata, siglos XVIII–XX, ed. Mónica Quijada (Berlin: Gebr. Mann Verlag, 2011), 64; Carina P. Lucaioli, “Alianzas y estrategias de los líderes indígenas abipones en un espacio fronterizo colonial (Chaco, siglo XVIII),” Revista Española de Antropología Americana 39, no. 1 (2009): 80; Nacuzzi and Lucaioli, “ ‘Y sobre las armas se concertaron las paces,’ ” 61–74; Guillaume Boccara, “Etnogénesis mapuche: resistencia y reestructuración entre los indígenas del centro-sur de Chile (siglos XVI–XVIII),” Hispanic American Historical Review 79, no. 3 (1999): 425–461; José Manuel Zavala, Los mapuches del siglo XVIII: dinámica interétnica y estrategias de resistencia (Santiago: Editorial Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana, 2008), 26. 20. Mary C. Karasch, “Interethnic Conflict and Survival Strategies on the Tocantins-Araguaia Frontier, 1750–1890,” in Contested Ground: Comparative Frontiers on the Northern and Southern Edges of the Spanish Empire, ed. Donna J. Guy and Thomas E. Sheridan (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1998), 129–132; David Louis Mead, Caiapó do Sul, an Ethnohistory (1610–1920) (PhD diss., University of Florida, 2010), 265–266, on how the Kayapó sent their children to live temporarily in white homes to “observe and learn” what they could. 21. Amy Turner Bushnell, “Indigenous America and the Limits of the Atlantic World, 1493– 1825,” in Atlantic History: A Critical Appraisal, ed. Jack  P.  Greene and Philip Morgan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 208. 22. The quote is from Weber, Bárbaros, 201. For background on the shifting relationships between the Guaikurú, Spaniards, and Portuguese in the eighteenth century, see José Sánchez Labrador, S.J., El Paraguay Católico, vol. 2 (Buenos Aires: Imprensa de Coni Hermanos, 1910), 55–90; Branislava Susnik, El indio colonial del Paraguay: el chaqueño, vol. 3, part 1 (Asunción, Paraguay: Museo Etnográfico Andrés Barbero, 1971), 12–100; Vangelista, “Los guaykurú, españoles y portugueses,” 60–69; Nidia Areces, “Paraguayos, portugueses y mbayás en Concepción, 1773–1840,” Memoria Americana 8 (1999): 11–44; James Schofield Saeger, The Chaco Mission Frontier: The Guaycuruan Experience (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2000), 34–38; Herberts, “Panorama Histórico,” 17–47. 23. The 1791 peace treaty and the carta patente for the two Guaikurú chiefs are reproduced in Francisco Rodrigues do Prado, História dos Índios Cavaleiros ou da Nação Guaycurú (1795) (Campo Grande: Instituto Histórico e Geográfico do Mato Grosso do Sul, 2006), 58–60.

660   Borderlands of the Iberian World 24. Carvalho, “Lealdades Negociadas,” 16. On Guaikurú territorial occupation during the eighteenth century, see Uacury Ribeiro de A.  Bastos, Expansão Territorial do Brasil Colónia no Vale do Paraguai (1767–1801) (São Paulo: USP, 1978), 126–135. 25. On Guaikurú captive-taking and their relationship with the Guaná (late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries), see Alexandre Rodrigues Ferreira, “Carta dirigida ao Governador e Capitão-General João de Albuquerque de Melo Pereira e Cáceres,” in Viagem ao Brasil de Alexandre Rodrigues Ferreira: Coleção Etnográfica, ed. José Paulo Monteiro Soares and Cristina Ferrão (São Paulo: Kapa Editorial, 2005), vol. 3, 19–27; Ricardo Franco de Almeida Serra, “Parecer sobre o Aldeamento dos Índios Uaicurus e Guanás com a Descripção dos Seus Usos, Religião, Estabilidade e Costumes (1803),” Revista do Instituto Histórico e Geográfico Brasileiro 7 (1845): 210. For scholarly discussions, see Fernando Santos-Granero, Vital Enemies: Slavery, Predation and the Amerindian Political Economy of Life (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009), 92–99; John Hemming, Red Gold: The Conquest of the Brazilian Indians (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), 394–395. 26. Failed efforts to control Guaikurú mobility and border crossings are described in Francisco Rodrigues do Prado to governor, Coimbra, November 22, 1795, Arquivo Público do Estado de Mato Grosso, Cuiabá, Brazil (hereafter, APMT), FC.CA, Caixa (Cx.) 4, Documento (Doc.) 209; Ricardo Franco de Almeida Serra to governor, Coimbra, December 29, 1798, APMT, Brazil, FC.CA, Cx. 6, Doc. 352; Francisco Rodrigues do Prado to governor, Coimbra, January 10, 1799, APMT, Brazil, FC.CA, Cx. 7, Doc. 365; Francisco Rodrigues do Prado to governor, Coimbra, February 5, 1801, APMT, Brazil, FC.CA, Cx. 8, Doc. 416; Francisco Rodrigues do Prado to governor, Coimbra, March 26, 1803, APMT, Brazil, FC. CA, Cx. 10, Doc. 540. On the opportunities that autonomous native groups found in the similarly fluid border zone of the Río de la Plata in this same period, see Jeffrey A. Erbig, “Borderline Offerings: Tolderías and Mapmakers in the Eighteenth-Century Río de la Plata,” Hispanic American Historical Review 96, no. 3 (2016): 445–480. 27. Serra, “Parecer,” 204–205; Prado, História dos índios cavaleiros, 40. 28. Similar narratives of “pacifying the whites” exist among some contemporary native groups in the Amazon. See Bruce Albert and Alcida Ramos, ed., Pacificando o Branco: Cosmologias do Contato no Norte-Amazônico (São Paulo: UNESP, 2002). 29. Ricardo Franco de Almeida Serra to governor, Coimbra, May 30, 1798, APMT, Brazil, FC.CA, Cx. 6, Doc. 328; on his suspicions that the Guaikurú used a secretive “gíria ­particular,” see Ricardo Franco de Almeida Serra, “Continuação do Parecer sobre os Índios Uaicurús e Guanás,” Revista do Instituto Histórico e Geográfico Brasileiro 13 (1850): 373. 30. Anonymous, “Observacções Addicionaes a Illustração sobre o Gentio Mura, Escripta por hum Anônimo no Anno de 1826,” in Índios da Amazônia, de maioria a minoria, ed. Carlos de Araújo Moreira Neto (Petrópolis: Vozes, 1988), 264. 31. António José Rodrigues to governor, Coimbra, November 15, 1813, APMT, Brazil, FC.CA, Cx. 13, Doc. 816. 32. David G. Sweet, “Native Resistance in Eighteenth-Century Amazonia: The ‘Abominable Muras’ in War and Peace,” Radical History Review 53, no. 1 (1992): 64. 33. Marta Rosa Amoroso, “Guerra Mura no Século XVIII: Versos e Versões, Representações dos Mura no Imaginário Colonial” (MA diss., Universidade Estadual de Campinas, 1991), 111–112, 114–116. The idea that the Mura were “everywhere” and greater in number than the colonial residents appears repeatedly in the documentation; see, for example, Mathias Fernandes to governor, São Mathias do Japurá, April 12, 1778, APEP, Brazil, Cód. 340, Doc. 9.

Autonomous Indian Nations and Peacemaking   661 34. See, for example, João Pedro Marçal da Silva to governor, Baião, 7 March 1777, APEP, Brazil, Cod. 271, Doc. 11; José Gonçalves Marqués to governor, Porto de Moz, 2 December 1764, APEP, Brazil, Cod. 140, Doc. 44. 35. On “Murification,” see Sweet, “Native Resistance,” 63–64; Amoroso, “Corsários,” 306–307. 36. On the Directorate villages of Amazonia, see Roller, Amazonian Routes; Barbara Sommer, “Negotiated Settlements: Native Amazonians and Portuguese Policy in Pará, Brazil, 1758–1798” (PhD diss., University of New Mexico, 2000); Patrícia Maria Melo Sampaio, “Espelhos Partidos: Etnia, Legislação e Desigualdade na Colônia Sertões do Grão-Pará, c. 1755–1823” (PhD diss., Universidade Federal Fluminense, 2001); Ângela Domingues, Quando os Índios Eram Vassalos: Colonização e Relações de Poder no Norte do Brasil na Segunda Metade do Século XVIII (Lisbon: Comissão Nacional para as Comemorações dos Descobrimentos Portugueses, 2000). The Directorate was extended to the main Estado do Brasil in 1758. Maria Regina Celestino de Almeida, Metamorfoses Indígenas: Identidade e Cultura nas Aldeias Coloniais do Rio de Janeiro (Rio de Janeiro: Arquivo Nacional, 2003), 102 emphasizes the security Directorate villages represented in a dangerous colonial world. 37. Sweet, “Native Resistance,” 65. 38. Henrique João Wilckens to General João Pereira Caldas, Ega, 25 February 1788, in Amoroso and Farage, ed., Relatos da Fronteira, 57. 39. On Ambrósio, his family history, and the attraction of Mura women to churchgoing and the “old domestic Indian way of life,” see Marta Rosa Amoroso, “Corsários no Caminho Fluvial: os Mura do Rio Madeira,” in História dos Índios no Brasil, ed. Manuela Carneiro da Cunha (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1992), 306–307; Sweet, “Native Resistance,” 70–72. 40. Sweet, “Native Resistance,” 77. 41. João Batista Mardel to governor, Ega, March 15, 1785, in Soares and Ferrão, ed., Viagem ao Brasil, 42; João Batista Mardel to governor, Ega, April 17, 1785, in Viagem ao Brasil, 45; João Batista Mardel to governor, Barcelos, July 1, 1786, APEP, Brazil, Cod. 429, Doc. 5; Sweet, “Native Resistance,” 72. 42. Governor Francisco de Souza Coutinho to Rodrigo de Souza Coutinho, Informação sobre a civilização dos índios do Pará, Belém, August 2, 1797, Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino, Lisbon, Portugal (hereafter, AHU), Pará Avulsos, Cx. 109, Doc. 8610, paragraph 40. The governor claimed that, being at peace, the Mura would soon become useful to the Portuguese state. Sweet, “Native Resistance,” 77, argues that the Mundurukú were not a significant factor in the Mura decision to make peace. 43. The quote is from Pekka Hämäläinen, The Comanche Empire (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press), 47. See also Barr, Peace Came in the Form of a Woman, 210–211 and 280–283; Almeida, Metamorfoses Indígenas, 99–101; Garcia, As Diversas Formas de Ser Índio, 235; Nacuzzi and Lucaioli, “ ‘Y sobre las armas se concertaron las paces,’ ” 71; Richard White’s pioneering discussion of French-Algonquian alliances, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (New York: Cambridge University Press), 185. 44. Hal Langfur, “Myths of Pacification: Brazilian Frontier Settlement and the Subjugation of the Bororo Indians,” Journal of Social History 32, no. 4 (1999): 879–905; Herzog, Frontiers of Possession, 102, 106. 45. Zavala, Los mapuches, 159–187; Beltrán, “La organización de los parlamentos,” 173–174; Karasch, “Rethinking the Conquest of Goiás,” 474–480.

662   Borderlands of the Iberian World 46. Barr, Peace Came in the Form of a Woman, 210. 47. Governor João de Albuquerque de Melo Pereira e Cáceres to Martinho de Melo e Castro, Vila Bela, September 9, 1791, AHU, Portugal, Mato Grosso Avulsos, Cx. 28, Doc. 1617; see also Carvalho, “Lealdades Negociadas,” 207–208. 48. Ricardo Franco de Almeida Serra to governor, Coimbra, December 29, 1798, APMT, Brazil, FC.CA, Cx. 6, Doc. 352. 49. Ricardo Franco de Almeida Serra to governor, Coimbra, September 29, 1798, APMT, Brazil, FC.CA, Cx. 6, Doc. 346. Perhaps this concern about the fates of the Bororo can be traced to the incorporation of Bororo captives into Guaikurú society; Prado, História dos Índios Cavaleiros, 40, notes that the Guaikurú at Coimbra included Indians from nine different nations, including the Bororo. 50. Zavala, Los mapuches, 166. 51. Numerous sources on Vitória can be found in APMT, Brazil. Her role in the 1791 peace treaty negotiations is described in João de Albuquerque de Melo Pereira e Cáceres to Martinho de Melo e Castro, Vila Bela, September 9, 1791, AHU, Portugal, Mato Grosso Avulsos, Cx. 28, Doc. 1617. On her trajectory from slavery in Cuiabá to captivity under the Guaikurú, see Ferreira, “Carta dirigida ao Governador,” 27. On concerns about what she would tell the Guaikurú of Portuguese plans, see Francisco Rodrigues do Prado to the Alferes da Companhia de Pedestres, Coimbra, December 30, 1793, APMT, Brazil, FC.CA, Cx. 3, Doc. 186. On interpreters, see Alida C. Metcalf, Go-Betweens and the Colonization of Brazil, 1500–1600 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005). 52. António Rodrigues Cardoso to Henrique João Wilckens, Royal Fishery of Jauabó, November 23, 1787, APEP, Brazil, Cod. 443, Doc. 60. 53. Sebastião Pereira de Castro to governor, Real Pesqueiro do Caldeirão, July 3, 1786, APEP, Brazil, Cod. 431, Doc. 47; Sweet, “Native Resistance,” 73–74. 54. Governor João Pereira Caldas to Cabo de Esquadra João Pedro da Costa, Barcelos, July 23, 1787, APEP, Brazil, Cod. 443, Doc. 21. 55. Weber, Bárbaros, 207–208 distinguishes between Spanish treaties of “capitulation” (signed with relatively weak Indian nations) and those recognizing indigenous sovereignty (signed with more formidable native groups). The latter might be formally defined as vassals of Spain, but they could still retain a kind of “de facto independence.” 56. On colonial gifts perceived as tribute by independent Indians, see Weber, Bárbaros, 192; Carvalho, “Lealdades Negociadas,” 211, 227–228, who shows that both Portuguese and Spanish officials complained about this; Bushnell, “ ‘Gastos de indios’ ” 146–147. On the symbolic, rather than purely functional, value of European goods to Indian nations, see Farage, As Muralhas dos Sertões, 115–116; Amoroso, “Guerra e Mercadorias,” 28. 57. Serra, “Continuação do Parecer,” 349. Hemming, Red Gold, 392 discusses this passage. 58. Weber, Bárbaros, 191. 59. Governor Caetano Pinto de Miranda Montenegro to Ricardo Franco de Almeida Serra, Cuiabá, April 5, 1803, reproduced in Serra, “Parecer,” 217. For a similar appraisal, Ricardo Franco de Almeida Serra to governor, Coimbra, February 5, 1801, APMT, Brazil, FC.CA, Cx. 8, Doc. 417. 60. Governor Caetano Pinto de Miranda Montenegro to Ricardo Franco de Almeida Serra, Vila Bela, September 5, 1798, APMT, Brazil, Cod. 37, folios (fls.) 145v-146 (for the order not to trade guns with such a “brave warrior nation”); Ricardo Franco de Almeida Serra to governor, Coimbra, September 29, 1798, APMT, Brazil, FC.CA, Cx. 6, Doc. 346 (on how 27 Guaikurú elites, including 11 “capitães,” were eating at the commander’s table). For a list

Autonomous Indian Nations and Peacemaking   663 of goods given to visiting Guaikurú, Guaná, and Guató Indians at Coimbra between 1800 and 1802, APMT, Brazil, PRFIO.MP, Cx. 8, Doc. 426. On how Spanish officials sought to abide by native expectations and preferences for gifts, see Beltrán, “La organización de los parlamentos,” 167–168; Weber, Bárbaros, 186. 61. The quote is from Ricardo Franco de Almeida Serra to governor, Coimbra, May 30, 1798, APMT, Brazil, FC.CA, Cx. 6, Doc. 328. On showing the Guaikurú the empty warehouses, see Serra, “Continuação do Parecer,” 394. 62. Serra, “Parecer,” 206 reported demographic numbers. The total of 1,400 Guaikurú and Guaná increased over four years (c. 1799–1803) to about 2,600, as the Guaikurú amassed hundreds of Chamacoco captives and as additional bands of Guaikurú (from the Kadiweú subgroup) crossed into Portuguese territories. Serra, “Continuação do Parecer,” 384, estimated the funds spent. 63. Ricardo Franco de Almeida Serra to governor, Coimbra, December 2, 1801, APMT, Brazil, FC.CA, Cx. 8, Doc. 446. 64. João Batista Mardel to governor, Barcelos, July 1, 1786, APEP, Brazil, Cod. 429, Doc. 5. 65. Henrique João Wilckens to General João Pereira Caldas, Ega, February 25, 1788, in Amoroso and Farage, ed., Relatos da Fronteira, 57; Amoroso, “Corsários,” 307. 66. Ricardo Franco de Almeida Serra to governor, Coimbra, September 29, 1798, APMT, Brazil, FC.CA, Cx. 6, Doc. 346. Serra noted, however, that he “furtively” (às escondidas) gave additional goods to one favored Guaná, Captain Aires Pinto. 67. Governor Caetano Pinto de Miranda Montenegro to Ricardo Franco de Almeida Serra, Vila Bela, November 22, 1798, APMT, Brazil, Cod. 37, fls. 181–181v; Garcia, As Diversas Formas de Ser Índio, 242, notes that the quantity of gifts may not have been as important in cementing alliances as the mode of giving, (i.e., whether gifts were transferred according to native rituals). 68. “Peace by deceit” tactics in David J. Weber, The Spanish Frontier in North America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), 229–230; Carvalho, “Lealdades Negociadas,” 187–188, 233–245 on Indian-Iberian treaties as part of broader state efforts to extend hegemonic control over Indian nations in the borderlands. 69. Governor Caetano Pinto de Miranda Montenegro to José Teixeira Cabral, Vila Bela, January 16, 1797, APMT, Brazil, Cod. 37, fls. 10–11v. 70. Serra, “Continuação do Parecer,” 390 and 391. 7 1. On the hardening frontier policies and the revival of official Indian wars in Brazil after 1808, see Hal Langfur, “The Return of the Bandeira: Economic Calamity, Historical Memory, and Armed Expeditions to the Sertão in Minas Gerais, Brazil, 1750–1808,” The Americas 61, no. 3 (2005): 429–461; Izabel Missagia de Mattos, “Colonization, Mediation, and Mestizaje in the Borderlands of Nineteenth-Century Minas Gerais, Brazil,” in The Oxford Handbook of Borderlands of the Iberian World, ed. Danna  A.  Levin Rojo and Cynthia Radding, 413–440 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019). See Langfur, “Myths of Pacification” for an interesting case study that places Bororo choices and actions in the context of changing frontier realities. 72. Mary Karasch, “Riverine Borderlands and Multicultural Contacts in Central Brazil, 1775–1835,” in The Oxford Handbook of Borderlands of the Iberian World, ed. Danna A. Levin Rojo and Cynthia Radding, 591–612 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019). 73. Anonymous, “Illustração Necessária e Interessante, Relativa ao Gentio da Nação Mura, Habitador dos Rios Madeira, Trombeta, Guatazes, Cadajazes, Purus, Mamiá, Coarí, Paruá e Copacá, na Capitania do Rio Negro, Feita por um Anônimo em 1826,” in Índios da

664   Borderlands of the Iberian World Amazônia, de Maioria a Minoria, ed. Carlos de Araújo Moreira Neto (Petrópolis: Vozes, 1988), 253. 74. Documents describing Mura raids in 1833 are in Cod. 947, APEP, Brazil. On Mura participation in the Cabanagem, see Índios da Amazônia, de Maioria a Minoria, ed. Carlos de Araújo Moreira Neto (Petrópolis: Vozes, 1988), 108–111; Nimuendajú, “The Mura and Pirahã,” 257; Mark Harris, Rebellion on the Amazon: Race, Popular Culture and the Cabanagem in the North of Brazil, 1798–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 210–211; on contemporary Mura narratives of the Cabanagem and its repression, Marcia Leila de Castro Pereira, “Rios de História: Guerra, Tempo e Espaço entre os Mura do Baixo Madeira” (PhD diss., Universidade de Brasília, 2009). 75. Vangelista, “Los guaykurú,” 70; Luiz D’Alincourt, “Reflexões sobre o systema que se deve adoptar na fronteirado Paraguay, em consequencia da revolta e dos insultos praticados ultimamente pela nação dos índios Guaicurus ou cavalleiros (1826),” Revista do Instituto Histórico e Geográfico Brasileiro 20 (1857), 360–365. 76. Quoted in María de Fátima Costa, “Indigenous Peoples of Brazil and the War of the Triple Alliance, 1864–1870,” in Military Struggle and Identity Formation in Latin America: Race, Nation, and Community During the Liberal Period, ed. Nicola Foote and René D. Harder Horst (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2010), 168. 77. Costa, “Indigenous Peoples of Brazil,” 170–172. 78. Sílvia Schmuziger Carvalho, “Chaco: Encruzilhada dos Povos e ‘Melting Pot’ Cultural, suas Relações com a Bacia do Paraná e o Sul Mato-grossense,” in História dos Índios do Brasil, ed. Manuela Carneiro da Cunha (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1992), 469–470; Herbert Baldus, “Introdução,” in Boggiani, Os Caduveos, 36–46; Susnik, El indio colonial del Paraguay, 98–99; Giovani José da Silva, “A Reserva Indígena Kadiwéu (1899–1984): Demarcações e Conflitos pela Posse da Terra,” in Kadiwéu: Senhoras da Arte, Senhores da Guerra, ed. Giovani José da Silva (Curitiba: Editora CRV, 2011), 49–72. For an eloquent Kadiwéu statement of defense against allegations of stealing livestock, dating to the end of the nineteenth century, see Rivasseau, A Vida dos Indios Guaycurús, 64–65. 79. Johann Baptist von Spix and Carl Friendrich Phillipp von Martius, Viagem pelo Brasil (1817–1820), vol. 3, trad. Lúcia Furquim Lahmeyer (Belo Horizonte: Editora Itatiaia, 1981), 98 (for the quote), and 120–121, 149–150 (on Mura relationships with individual settlers). Similar observations by the priest André Fernandes de Souza can be found in “Notícias Geográficas da Capitania do Rio Negro,” Biblioteca Nacional (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil), I-31-17-5. 80. Marta Rosa Amoroso, “Os Mura Tentam Recuperar Terras Loteadas e Reduzidas no Passado,” in Povos Indigenas no Brasil, 1996–2000, ed. Carlos Alberto Ricardo (São Paulo: Instituto Socioambiental, 2000), 467–468, and “O Nascimento da Aldeia Mura: Sentidos e Modos de Habitar a Beira,” in Paisagens Ameríndias: Lugares, Circuitos e Modos de Vida na Amazônia, ed. Marta Rosa Amoroso and Gilton Mendes dos Santos (São Paulo: Editora Terceiro Nome, 2013), 97, 100. 81. For an eloquent statement of this point with reference to the indigenous nations of the Arkansas Valley, see Kathleen DuVal, The Native Ground: Indians and Colonists in the Heart of the Continent (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 8; for the Iroquois, see Daniel K. Richter, Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 149. 82. On famous warriors living in missions, see Amoroso, “Guerra e Mercadorias,” 34–35.

Autonomous Indian Nations and Peacemaking   665

Bibliography Almeida, Maria Regina Celestino de. Metamorfoses Indígenas: Identidade e Cultura nas Aldeias Coloniais do Rio de Janeiro. Rio de Janeiro: Arquivo Nacional, 2003. Amoroso, Marta Rosa. “Guerra e Mercadorias: Os Kaingang nas Cenas da ‘Conquista de Guarapuava.” In Do Contato ao Confronto: A Conquista de Guarapuava no Século XVIII, edited by Ana Maria de Moraes Belluzzo, Marta Rosa Amoroso, Nicolau Sevcenko, and Valéria Piccoli, 26–41. São Paulo: BNP Paribas, 2003. Amoroso, Marta Rosa. “Corsários no Caminho Fluvial: os Mura do rio Madeira.” In História dos Ìndios no Brasil, edited by Manuela Carneiro da Cunha, 297–310. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1992. Ávila, Carlos Lázaro. “Conquista, control y convicción: el papel de los parlamentos indígenas en México, El Chaco y Norteamérica.” Revista de Indias 59, no. 217 (1999): 645–673. Barr, Juliana. Peace Came in the Form of a Woman: Indians and Spaniards in the Texas Borderlands. Chapel Hill: UNC, 2007. Beltrán, Luz María Méndez. “La organización de los parlamentos de indios en el siglo XVIII.” In Relaciones fronterizas en la Araucanía, edited by Sergio Villalobos, Carlos Aldunate, Horacio Zapater, Luz María Méndez, and Carlos Bascuñán, 107–174. Santiago: Ediciones UC, 1982. Boggiani, Guido. Os Caduveos. Belo Horizonte: Editora Itatiaia, 1975. Bushnell, Amy Turner. “ ‘Gastos de indios’: The Crown and the Chiefdom-Presidio Compact in Florida.” In El gran Norte mexicano: indios, misioneros y pobladores entre el mito y la historia, edited by Salvador Bernabéu Albert, 137–163. Seville: CSIC, 2009. Carvalho, Francismar Alex Lopes de. “Lealdades Negociadas: Povos Indígenas e a Expansão dos Impérios Ibéricos nas Regiões Centrais da América do Sul.” PhD diss., Universidade de São Paulo, 2012. Costa, María de Fátima. “Indigenous Peoples of Brazil and the War of the Triple Alliance, 1864–1870.” In Military Struggle and Identity Formation in Latin America: Race, Nation, and Community During the Liberal Period, edited by Nicola Foote and René D. Harder Horst, 159–174. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2010. Farage, Nádia. As Muralhas dos Sertões: os Povos Indígenas no Rio Branco e a Colonização. Rio de Janeiro: ANPOCS, 1991. Garcia, Elisa Frühauf. As Diversas Formas de Ser Índio: Políticas Indígenas e Políticas Indigenistas no Extremo Sul da América Portuguesa. Rio de Janeiro: Arquivo Nacional, 2009. Harris, Mark. Rebellion on the Amazon: Race, Popular Culture and the Cabanagem in the North of Brazil, 1798–1840. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Hemming, John. Red Gold: The Conquest of the Brazilian Indians. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978. Herberts, Ana Lucia. “Panorama Histórico dos Mbayá-Guaikuru entre os Séculos XVI e XIX.” In Kadiwéu: Senhoras da Arte, Senhores da Guerra, edited by Giovani José da Silva, 17–47. Curitiba: Editora CRV, 2011. Herzog, Tamar. Frontiers of Possession: Spain and Portugal in Europe and the Americas. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015. Karasch, Mary  C. “Rethinking the Conquest of Goiás, 1775–1819.” The Americas 61, no. 3 (2005): 463–492.

666   Borderlands of the Iberian World Langfur, Hal. “Myths of Pacification: Brazilian Frontier Settlement and the Subjugation of the Bororo Indians.” Journal of Social History 32 (1999): 879–905. Nacuzzi, Lidia R., and Carina Lucaioli. “ ‘Y sobre las armas se concertaron las paces’: explorando las rutinas de los acuerdos diplomáticos coloniales.” Revista CUHSO (Cultura— Hombre—Sociedad) 15, no. 2 (2008): 61–74. Nimuendajú, Curt. “The Mura and Pirahã.” In Handbook of South American Indians, vol. 3, edited by Julian H. Steward, 255–268. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1946. Prado, Francisco Rodrigues do. História dos Índios Cavaleiros ou da Nação Guaycurú (1795). Campo Grande: Instituto Histórico e Geográfico do Mato Grosso do Sul, 2006. Rivasseau, Emilio. A Vida dos Indios Guaycurús, Quinze Dias nas Suas Aldeias (Sul de MattoGrosso). São Paulo: Companhia Editora Nacional, 1936. Roller, Heather  F. Amazonian Routes: Indigenous Mobility and Colonial Communities in Northern Brazil. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014. Serra, Ricardo Franco de Almeida. “Continuação do Parecer sobre os Índios Uaicurús e Guanás.” Revista do Instituto Histórico e Geográfico Brasileiro 13 (1850): 348–395. Serra, Ricardo Franco de Almeida. “Parecer sobre o Aldeamento dos Índios Uaicurus e Guanás com a Descripção dos Seus Usos, Religião, Estabilidade e Costumes (1803).” Revista do Instituto Histórico e Geográfico Brasileiro 7 (1845): 204–218. Soares, José Paulo Monteiro, and Cristina Ferrão, ed. Viagem ao Brasil de Alexandre Rodrigues Ferreira: Coleção Etnográfica, vol. 3. São Paulo: Kapa Editorial, 2005. Susnik, Branislava. El indio colonial del Paraguay: el chaqueño, vol. 3, part 1. Asunción, Paraguay: Museo Etnográfico Andrés Barbero, 1971. Sweet, David  G. “Native Resistance in Eighteenth-Century Amazonia: The ‘Abominable Muras’ in War and Peace.” Radical History Review 53, no. 1 (1992): 49–80. Vangelista, Chiara. “Los guaykurú, españoles y portugueses en una región de frontera: Mato Grosso, 1770–1830.” Boletín del Instituto de Historia Argentina y Americana Dr. Emilio Ravignani 8, no. 39 (1993): 55–76. Weber, David  J. Bárbaros: Spaniards and Their Savages in the Age of Enlightenment. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005. Zavala, José Manuel. Los mapuches del siglo XVIII: dinámica interétnica y estrategias de resistencia. Santiago: Editorial Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana, 2008.

pa rt I I I

I M PE R I A L BOR DE R L A N DS A N D T R A NS- O C E A N IC E XC H A NGE S : S OM E PE R SPE C T I V E S

chapter 27

Tr a ns-Imper i a l I n ter action a n d th e R io de l a Pl ata as a n Atl a n tic Bor der l a n d FabrÍcIo Prado

The Portuguese port-city of Colônia do Sacramento (1680–1777) was crucial to the ­process of territorial occupation and incorporation of the North Bank of the Rio de la Plata (roughly the territory of present day Uruguay), and its peoples, into the Atlantic world, as well as to the creation of powerful trans-Atlantic trade networks during the first half of the eighteenth century. The foundation of Colônia do Sacramento resulted in the creation of a borderland region between Spain and Portugal in the Americas; its role as an Atlantic port allowed for regular interactions with other foreign agents that circulated in the Atlantic Ocean. Despite the formal Spanish and Portuguese ban on trade with foreigners in the New World, illicit trade flourished in the Iberian American ports in general and, specifically, in Rio de la Plata. Furthermore, the presence of several indigenous groups added layers of complexity in this fluid ethnic frontier that brought together Spanish and Portuguese subjects with Amerindian peoples. The continuous interactions among Spanish, Portuguese, foreign merchants, and indigenous peoples in the river estuary and in the interior of the North Bank shaped political institutions, social practices, and the integration of the region into the Atlantic world.1 By focusing on the territorial occupation of the North Bank and the creation of trans-imperial networks between Spanish territories and Colônia, one can see that cross-border connections, although defying imperial regulations, were the engine of the region’s political, economic, and social development. Such analysis requires, first, an examination of the role of port cities in colonial Latin America as hot spots of transimperial interaction. Port cities were crucial hubs connecting interior regions to Atlantic ­processes; for this reason they are better understood as interaction zones where long-­ standing linkages among Iberian colonists, indigenous groups, and other overseas agents

670   Borderlands of the Iberian World were integral to their very formation as porous oceanic borderland spaces. The urban development of Colônia do Sacramento in the first half of the eighteenth century as well as the economic and social impact of this Luso-Brazilian port city in the interior of the North Bank (Banda Norte) is illustrative of this process. Sacramento’s position as an Atlantic port accelerated the exploitation of the countryside (by Europeans and indigenous groups alike), and it exacerbated the growing imperial competition between Spain and Portugal that led to the foundation of new Iberian settlements in the Banda Norte. The commercial and political networks that crossed imperial limits and connected Portuguese, Spanish, and British subjects in the region included contraband activities involving merchants and authorities. As shown in many documented instances, transimperial interactions among diverse agents (locals or foreigners), regardless of political boundaries, played an integral role in the development of local economies and political institutions of the Iberian monarchies in the Rio de la Plata oceanic borderland.

Port Cities, Borderlands, Interaction Zones With the increased flow of people, capital, goods and information across imperial limits in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world, port cities became crucial spaces that mediated contacts between agents located overseas and peoples in the interior of the Americas. Port cities were critical for metropolitan projects, since they could function as centers of imperial administration, commerce, information, and population bastions that provided the logistics for further occupation of interior regions.2 Furthermore, the distinctive characteristic of bordering the sea allowed cities like Colônia, Rio de Janeiro, Cartagena, La Guaira, Veracruz, Buenos Aires, Havana, and Manila to emerge as pivotal points of trans-imperial interactions, where an unlimited number of commercial agents from diverse origins and backgrounds intermingled.3 Before going further, it is important to clarify the meaning of the terms “borderlands,” “frontiers,” and “port cities.” “Frontier” and “borderlands” are loaded terms in Latin American historiography.4 This is due partly to the subtleties of the translation of the terms frontera and fronteira from Spanish and Portuguese into English, which is multifaceted, since the term carries plural meanings such as frontier, wilderness, border, boundary, and limit in the two Iberian languages. In colonial Iberian America, in addition to the terms frontera/fronteira to define regions of contact between different ethnic groups and European/criollo societies, the words campanha, tierra adentro, and sertões also appear repeatedly in contemporary records. Although similar in meaning to frontera/fronteira, these terms also relate to wilderness, unpopulated lands, and colonial peripheries as well as to areas for commercial interactions among different groups.5 In 1748, Portuguese author Simão Pereira de Sá employed fronteira and campanha to designate the space over which Spaniards and

Trans-Imperial Interaction   671 Portuguese disputed control over resources and sovereignty and where interactions with Minuane Indians unfolded.6 While the term frontera/fronteira held the dual meanings of limits and fluidity in borderlands, the terms tierra adentro, campanha, or sertões implied a reference to the physical landscape of these areas and their spatial location. As used here, the term “borderlands” refers both to the fluid space where subjects of imperial empires disputed sovereignty and territory and to the areas where they interacted with sovereign indigenous groups that occupied the territory. Mary Karasch aptly describes these areas as “transitional zones with networks of exchange” in different areas of the Americas.7 Meanwhile, the term campanha is used to refer to the territories in the interior of the North Bank. These continental borderlands were linked to the port cities where trans-imperial and extra-imperial exchanges with overseas agents unfolded at different times through competition, cooperation, or warfare. The central role of port cities in connecting Iberian metropoles to their American territories and in linking local communities to agents of other Atlantic empires has received substantial attention by historians.8 In Iberian America, coastal regions in the peripheries of the Spanish and Portuguese commercial systems developed strong regional connections with a large degree of commercial autonomy, allowing for a significant economic role of direct trade with foreigners.9 Beyond the function of port cities as imperial hubs, Linda Rupert calls attention to the fact that imperial administrators did not have complete control over the foreign agents who circulated in these spaces.10 John Russell-Wood similarly recognized the importance of port cities as regional axes in the Portuguese Atlantic. He emphasized that port cities exerted a strong influence over their Continental hinterlands as well as over distant coastal regions. More recently, a vibrant scholarship has emphasized the prominent role of commercial networks linking different regions of Portuguese America.11 Colonial commercial centers were, in fact, crucial spaces in articulating inter-regional circuits and connecting regions geographically distant from each other, often bypassing metropolitan centers. Port cities shaped the “pattern of gathering and use of resources” in the most efficient ways according to the interests of the involved parties.12 The development of transoceanic linkages shaped the development of South American communities, oftentimes in accord with their relationships with distant regions. The deep economic and political connections between Rio de Janeiro and Luanda (based on an intense slave trade), for instance, made these distant colonies more interdependent between themselves than to other territories geographically closer, such as Salvador da Bahia in Brazil, and Costa da Mina, in Africa. The profound impact of the Rio de Janeiro slave trade, in turn, dramatically affected social and economic dynamics in the interior regions of Portuguese America. Furthermore, colonial agents developed their own inter-imperial networks and managed local justice according to local interests.13 Strong networks of trade also linked Rio de Janeiro to Spanish markets providing stable access to the silver from Rio de la Plata. In port cities located in imperial borderlands, powerful colonial elites were instrumental for empire building since Spain and Portugal progressively relied on them to maintain dominion and sovereignty over their American territories. Simultaneously, however, colonists in these oceanic borderlands sought their own private interests, which

672   Borderlands of the Iberian World often did not coincide with those of the Iberian metropoles. Such dependence allowed room for negotiation regarding trading practices and for building colonial institutions. The emergence of powerful interests in the colonies and high levels of autonomy of colonial subjects called for a more flexible and dynamic relationship between the ­colonies and their metropoles, in what Amy Bushnell and Jack Greene describe as “negotiated authorities.”14 In the eighteenth century, regulation of colonial ports posed increasing challenges for imperial authorities, especially port cities located in imperial borderlands, since with the increase of trans-imperial exchanges, smuggling became a general practice in Iberian American ports and counted on the participation of authorities and merchants among other colonial groups.15 While Veracruz, Callao, Rio de Janeiro, or Salvador da Bahia were ports that serviced imperial administrative centers within the Spanish and Portuguese Americas, smaller ports in commercial peripheries, such as La Guaira, Buenos Aires, or Concepción de Chile, enjoyed even more diversified economic opportunities for direct trade with foreigners. In addition to merchants and colonial authorities, illicit trade operations involved fishermen, indigenous peoples, petty traders, artisans, other plebeian groups, and slaves. In these peripheral ports within the Iberian commercial systems, smuggled shipments of textiles, wheat, sugar, rum, and even slaves supplied local communities with labor and commodities. In the Caribbean, Jesse Cromwell has found even slaves actively participating in smuggling enterprises between Venezuela and Curaçao. In port cities located in imperial borderlands, trans-imperial interactions were part of the daily life of all segments of society. Port cities were nominally integrated into an Atlantic imperial sphere, but the presence of extra-imperial agents was a part of the economic life of these oceanic borderlands. Using the right of emergency landing, foreign ships routinely claimed the need for repair and resupply to enter Iberian American ports. In Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, Montevideo, Cartagena, Havana and Veracruz, arribadas were commonplace. Usually ship captains could sell part or all of their cargos in the local market to pay for repairs. Such a practice was so normal that Rio de la Plata merchants sent ships with products to sell in Rio de Janeiro taking for granted their admission into the Portuguese port. In Rio de la Plata, Iberian subjects sought out their foreign neighbors to create long-standing trans-imperial networks integral to local economies and societies. Port cities in contested regions are better understood as interaction zones, a term that captures the importance of trans-imperial interaction as a main variable in the formation of coastal borderland societies. These encompassed port cities in porous and fluid borderland regions and/or frontiers that connected intra-imperial and trans-imperial agents and economies. Mary Louise Pratt coined the term contact zone to explain exchanges between European agents and local groups in non-European regions. In Pratt’s rendering of the term, however, imperial agents were “passive observers,” travelers who were not able to capture colonial landscapes and the subtleties of colonial societies.16 Pratt’s concept falls short in capturing the complex social relationships between agents of multiple polities in long-established colonial settings. In the eighteenth-century southern Caribbean, specifically pointing to the connections between Spanish and

Trans-Imperial Interaction   673 Dutch agents in Tierra Firme and Curaçao, Rupert suggests the region could be better understood as an exchange zone.17 Due to the significance of multiple cross-border exchanges, the dealings between subjects of different empires created strong cross-­ border linkages allowing for mutual influence between communities under diverse political sovereignties in the Caribbean. Notwithstanding the durability of commercial exchanges, warfare and violence were also part and parcel of the relationships among coastal borderland societies. In Rio de la Plata, for example, beyond mere exchange between different colonial communities, trans-imperial interactions were integral to the formation of all groups involved (Spanish, Portuguese, Amerindian). Port cities in colonial borderlands functioned as catalysts of economic and social transformation due to their role as gateways for external processes, and their effects on the spatial organization and social construction of the landscape.18 As a result, trans-imperial interaction must be understood as occurring at the genesis of the social production of the space, shaping societies that dynamically adapted to the actions and interests of the different local groups and overseas agents. Thus, Portuguese, Spanish, indigenous peoples, and foreign European agents created networks of trade, kinship, religion, and friendship that allowed for the emergence of entangled communities in the North Bank of Rio de la Plata. Interaction zones were regions with longstanding European colonial presence, in which the elites were European or of European descent, and agents from different geographical and ethnic origins lived in shifting relationships with one another. In interaction zones, subjects shared territories and faced the differences of the “other,” “the foreigner,” yet they simultaneously shared or understood the other’s social and economic dynamics, cultural codes and political institutions. Here, the subjects crossing borders were more than mere observers, travelers, or itinerant merchants. Foreigners would marry local women, imperial agents would create local roots, and natives would selectively and opportunistically explore the limits of imperial regulations, commerce and institutions. In the Rio de la Plata, trans-imperial interaction was the nexus that articulated the integration of the region into the Atlantic world and shaped the development of communities within and beyond the domains of the Iberian empires.

Colônia do Sacramento and the Contested Incorporation of the North Bank into the Atlantic World In February of 1680, don Manuel Lobo, governor of Rio de Janeiro, landed on the Bay of San Gabriel, in the Rio de la Plata, and founded a Portuguese settlement. The Colônia do Santíssimo Sacramento was located on the northern bank of the river, across from Buenos Aires.19 Its foundation represented Portuguese commercial and territorial expansion furthest south in the Americas and was the beginning of almost a century-long

674   Borderlands of the Iberian World Portuguese colonial presence in the Rio de la Plata. Sacramento was the effort to ­reestablish profitable commercial routes between the Rio de la Plata and Portuguese America that had flourished during the Iberian Union (1580–1640).20 It meant the formal Portuguese disregard of the territorial and diplomatic aspects of the Treaty of Tordesillas (1494). As a result, the port city became the object of diplomatic and military dispute between the two Iberian empires in an area also populated by indigenous groups (Guaraní, Charrua, Minuane). During the eighteenth century, Colônia was the subject of five European diplomatic treaties.21 Notwithstanding the impact of the military and diplomatic disputes, throughout the era of Portuguese Colônia do Sacramento, LusoBrazilian and Spanish-American subjects as well as indigenous peoples developed intense commercial and social relationships. This process of expanding Atlantic connections shaped the peoples and the environment of the otra banda.22 Buenos Aires elites received the establishment of Colônia do Sacramento, in 1680, with strong protests and military action. That year a fierce attack killed more than six  hundred Portuguese troops and obliterated the enterprise. In 1681, however, the Portuguese re-founded the colony in the place that had been returned by Spain through diplomatic negotiations. In the following decades Luso-Brazilian settlers established commercial connections with merchants from Buenos Aires, and Colônia developed a significant agricultural production, especially hides and wheat.23 Attesting to the importance of the Atlantic dynamics and the delicate balance of power in contested areas, the war of Spanish Succession triggered a new violent Spanish offensive that led to the conquest of Colônia by Buenos Aires forces in 1705. The second Treaty of Utrecht (1715) marked the return of the Luso-Brazilians to the Rio de la Plata with the re-occupation of Colônia, which was now supposed to constitute a commercial and population stronghold in the region. As a result the Portuguese Crown developed policies for stimulating trade and promoting the direct occupation and exploitation of resources of the Banda Norte. After 1716, it not only supported standing garrisons and militias but also stimulated the migration of Crown-sponsored settlers from continental Portugal (Trás os Montes) and the Atlantic Islands (Azores). In the relatively peaceful decades of 1720s and 1730s, Colônia’s population grew from 1,388 inhabitants in 1722, to approximately three thousand inhabitants in 1732 (Figure 27.1). During this period, Portuguese traders developed a thriving commerce with Buenos Aires, including slaves, and owned pulperias (general stores) in the countryside along the interior roads.24 Despite Spanish imperial prohibitions, Portuguese traders and settlers were integrated into the landscape of the region both in urban and rural environments and interacted with Spaniards and indigenous peoples in the interior of Spanish territories. Colônia’s successful re-foundation and subsequent fast-paced growth led to an acceleration of territorial occupation by both Spanish and Portuguese colonists. In 1723, a  Luso-Brazilian expedition from Santos, led by mestre de campo Manuel Freitas da Fonseca, founded a fort on the Bay of Montevideo. In the following year, troops under the governor of Buenos Aires, Bruno Mauricio de Zavala, expelled the Portuguese and subsequently founded the Spanish presidio of San Felipe de Montevideo.25 In 1729, the Spanish Crown sent sponsored settlers from the Canary Islands and established Montevideo’s cabildo.

Trans-Imperial Interaction   675

Figure 27.1. The Carta Topographica of Colônia do Sacramento (1731), drawn by Diogo Soares, shows the developed urban area and the neighborhoods beyond the city walls. Mapoteca do Arquivo Histórico do Exército Brasileiro—Seção Colônia do Sacramento.

The foundation of Montevideo constituted a strong Spanish response to Portuguese expansionism; yet, it created a new outlet for interactions between Spanish and Portuguese settlers in the area. Between 1726 and 1730, no laws prohibited contact between the populations of Montevideo and Colônia do Sacramento, but in 1730, the governor of Buenos Aires issued a decree forbidding Portuguese subjects to settle in Montevideo in an attempt to regulate the flow of people in the countryside of Banda Norte. The Bando (proclamation) of 1730 was a reaction to the involvement of the Portuguese Domingo Martinez in the assassination of a Minuane Indian. After the ­killing, Martinez fled to Colônia do Sacramento in order to avoid punishment.26 As a result of the incident, the Minuane raided the suburbs of Montevideo. Nevertheless, contacts between the inhabitants of both cities remained commonplace. During the 1740s, the arrest of a Spanish subject charged with contraband for introducing cattle into Colônia do Sacramento revealed that such interactions were normal during the period.27 The geographical proximity and the necessity of obtaining supplies led the Cabildo of Montevideo to allow Spanish subjects from Montevideo to acquire foodstuffs and other basic goods in Colônia.28 This measure created an official trade channel between the two cities, allowing an increase in the flow of goods and people crossing imperial boundaries. The new route could, of course, be used for legal and illegal exchanges. The presence of Portuguese subjects residing in Montevideo was also notable. In his magisterial work, Génesis de la familia uruguaya, historian Alejandro Apoland recorded that between 1726 and 1753, twenty-seven of the 260 men appearing in marriage registers

676   Borderlands of the Iberian World (10.4 percent) were Portuguese subjects who lived in Montevideo; most of them wed Spanish subjects, including official settlers from the Canary Islands.29 Conversely, 12 percent of the women bearing children in Colônia in the decade of 1760 were, originally, from Buenos Aires.30 The fast-paced urban and demographic development of Sacramento led to deep changes not only in the patterns of Spanish settlement in the region but also in the countryside of the Banda Norte. According to an anonymous Portuguese chronicler, in 1731, there were Portuguese farms and pulperias more than twenty leagues into the countryside.31 Furthermore, the extension of Portuguese occupation is revealed by an anonymous map (Figure 27.2), produced in the beginning of the 1730s. Between 1716 and 1735, Sacramento developed its own agrarian suburbs and a significant agricultural production. Map 2 shows thirty-two farms belonging to Luso-Brazilian colonists located up to twenty miles into the countryside. According to governor Vasconcelos, by 1735 there were 240 houses and farms outside the city walls, two chapels, mills, a tile factory, and several estancias.32 Among the properties, Vasconcelos highlighted the existence of luxurious premises with values ranging from the considerable sums of 9:704$500 to 26:264$250 (12,940 pesos to 35,020 pesos).33 The map also shows the existence of the Arrayal de Veras, a neighborhood located in the north coast of

Figure 27.2. This Map of Nova Colônia do Sacramento, drawn c. 1734 by an unknown cartographer shows Portuguese agricultural properties in the countryside of Banda Norte several miles beyond Sacramento’s official territorial limit. Mapoteca do Arquivo Histórico do Exército Brasileiro—Seção Colônia do Sacramento, map 7.

Trans-Imperial Interaction   677 Sacramento’s beach, connected to Sacramento through a series of roads.34 Facilities close to the Arrayal had an important role in the town’s economy, for example the Governor’s corral, where the town’s meat supply was managed; a lime kiln, which was fundamental to construction works, and mills to produce flour. Agricultural goods ­produced in Sacramento’s suburbs included wheat, flax, rye, and barley. Colônia’s tax records suggest that the suburbs’ production was commercialized in the city, wheat being the most important crop.35 According to tithe records, wheat production amounted to 79,120 alqueires (bushels) between 1718 and 1734. Nevertheless, it is most likely that these numbers do not reflect the total production, since they do not account for the portion that was not sent to the market or registered for taxation. Wheat production grew during the 1720s, reaching a peak of 20,200 fanegas (13,467 bushels). In the late 1720s and early 1730s, Sacramento exported wheat to both Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro.36 Since the 1720s, the Portuguese Crown officially sanctioned wheat exports from Colônia to Rio de Janeiro, and after 1731, Rio de Janeiro merchants acquired the royal contracts for collecting the wheat tithe in Colônia. These taxing arrangements reveal a deep connection between agricultural production in the countryside and Luso-Brazilian markets. Sacramento’s wheat production also supplied Buenos Aires. During the prolonged drought of 1731 and 1732, the city’s authorities approved the exporting of grain to Buenos Aires. These trans-imperial interactions enjoyed the sanction of local authorities. In addition to cultivating grain and produce, the production and acquisition of hides and other cattle goods were crucial economic enterprises for the Portuguese settlers and merchants in the Rio de la Plata. Sacramento cattle industry produced hides, tallow, grease, salted meat for export, and meat supply for the town’s inhabitants.37 In 1735, according to Governor Vasconcelos, just in the Corral of the King, located twenty miles North of Sacramento, there were 85,018 bovines, 4,000 mares and 800 horses.38 The records of the hides produced in the King’s Corral (Table 27.1) show approximately 3,000 animals slaughtered per annum to meet the needs of Sacramento’s population.39 A consequence of the growing exploitation of the countryside was the diminishing number of cattle in the surrounding region. In 1726, Governor Vasconcelos reported the absence of cattle within “thirty miles into the countryside,” noting that five years earlier cattle herds “were common near the city walls.”40 As a result, Portuguese subjects had to rely on commercial contacts with Spaniards or Minuane Indians to secure a satisfactory supply of cattle and horses. Colônia’s Governor reported that in order to ensure the “safety of the inhabitants’ production,” he acquired twelve thousand cattle from Spaniards from the Banda Norte. Additionally, he had purchased eight hundred mares from Spaniards from Santa Fe, justifying such a procedure because “the Castilians extinguished all horse herds in the countryside” after the foundation of Montevideo.41 The Portuguese also acquired cattle and horses from Minuane Indians.42 According to the Spanish commander of Montevideo, the Minuane had their tolderias near Colônia, and were freely trading with the Portuguese with the consent of the governor.43 In addition, Portuguese merchants also conducted business directly with indigenous agents

678   Borderlands of the Iberian World Table 27.1. The production of tanned cattle hides in Sacramento’s corral reveals the free access of the Portuguese to the countryside of Banda Oriental. Produced by author. Source: AHU—Colônia do Sacramento—Docs. 228, 240, 263, 302. The exchange rate in Rio de la Plata in the first half of the 18th century: 1 Spanish Peso = $750 Portuguese Réis. The Portuguese notation for réis mark one thousand réis as “mil-réis” (e.g.:1$000), and one thousand mil-réis was referred to as one “conto" de réis (e.g.:1:000$000rs). Hides from Sacramento’s Corral Year 1730 1731 1732 1733 1734

Hides 2934 3025

Value in Réis 938$000 713$135

2810 2710

1:053$750 1:395$650

Source: AHU—Colônia do Sacramento—Docs. 228, 240, 263, 302.

without abiding by royal regulations. In one occasion, for example, six thousand hides acquired from Minuane Indians by Sacramento’s merchant Cristóvão Pereira de Abreu were confiscated. Pereira de Abreu had acquired these hides in order to sell them to British traders who were anchored outside Sacramento’s bar. The cargo was confiscated when royal authorities surprised the merchant’s crew loading it on board the British ship Cambridge. In the 1720s, Portuguese authorities repeatedly provided the Minuane with tobacco, aguardiente, and other Atlantic goods, in order to maintain the favor of the equestrian nomadic group.44 During moments of military distress, when Spaniards besieged the Portuguese town, Minuanes were crucial agents for smuggling foodstuff and hides, helping to undermine Spanish efforts to prevent the Portuguese from directly exploiting the countryside. Records of the quinto dos couros (20 percent export tax on all hides) from Sacramento to Portuguese America reveal that Luso-Brazilian traders depended on other regional suppliers (Figure 27.3), namely the Spanish and the Minuanes. The number of taxed hides exported from Colônia do Sacramento in the 1720s ranged from twenty to ­seventy-five thousand hides per year, and Figure 1 presents a number of hides paid to the Crown as the quinto dos couros. This data allow us to estimate a maximum export of approximately a hundred thousand hides in 1731, which does not include smuggled hides. After this peak, the exports drop reaching a nadir in the year 1733. This decline may be associated with the prolonged drought between 1731 and 1732, as well as increased competition from other producers and traders operating in the North Band of the Rio de la Plata. It is important to note that these records are based exclusively on official

Trans-Imperial Interaction   679 25000 20000 15000 10000 5000

34 17

32 17

30 17

28 17

26 17

24 17

22 17

20 17

17

18

0

Figure 27.3.  Export tax on tanned hides paid in Sacramento during the early eighteenth century. AHU- Colônia do Sacramento—Docs. 64,100, 155, 211, 215, 263.

­ gures; large smuggling operations are not counted, forcing us to consider that the actual fi figures exceeded those recorded by Portuguese officials. Despite Buenos Aires merchants’ willingness to be informal commercial partners of their Luso-Brazilian neighbors, Porteño elites constantly sought to prevent the Portuguese from penetrating into the countryside in the Banda Norte, actively maneuvering to force Sacramento merchants to depend on their Spanish counterparts for acquiring hides. The direct exploitation of the wild herds and free access to roads into the countryside surfaced as the most conflictive element in the relationship between the elites of Colônia do Sacramento and Buenos Aires. In 1734, the new Governor of Buenos Aires, don Miguel de Salcedo, with strong support of the city’s cabildo, imposed a two-year military siege on Sacramento to prevent the Luso-Brazilians from having direct access into the countryside.45 The blockading troops included approximately six hundred Spanish troops and more than three thousand Guaraní Indians from the Jesuit Missions who provided the bulk of the military strength. During the siege, the Portuguese counted on Minuane Indians to break Spanish lines and introduce foodstuff and supplies for Colônia. According to an eyewitness observer, Minuanes were able to introduce cattle and horses during the night into the besieged citadel.46 The development of a Luso-Brazilian port city on the Rio de la Plata borderlands led not only to the accelerated integration of the region into the Atlantic world but also to the escalation of competition for the control of resources in the countryside between Spanish and Portuguese subjects. At the end of the conflict, the Portuguese were able to maintain their position in the Rio de la Plata, but the Spaniards effectively established control over the countryside and restricted Portuguese direct exploitation of cattle herds. Thereafter, Luso-Brazilian merchants had to rely more heavily on the Porteño traders for supplies and hides. For Buenos Aires merchants, the new commercial arrangement in the estuary ensured they could use hides and foodstuffs, in addition to silver, to trade with Luso-Brazilian merchants. As a result, powerful trans-imperial networks connecting Sacramento to  Buenos Aires acquired even more importance in the regional context, and the

680   Borderlands of the Iberian World arrangement also shaped the integration of the region into Atlantic processes. In the regional architecture of smuggling, merchants and authorities played crucial roles in informally regulating access to contraband trade.

Authority, Corruption, and Trans-Imperial Trade Although Spanish laws forbade direct trade between Sacramento and Buenos Aires, enduring commercial and social networks linked the communities on both margins of the Rio de la Plata. Historian Zacarias Moutoukias emphasizes the significance of these networks by suggesting that both urban centers played complementary roles in the regional market rather than engaging in detrimental competition.47 Furthermore, Fernando Jumar argues for the understanding of both urban centers as part of the Rio de la Plata port complex, which reached its full development with the addition of Montevideo in the eighteenth century.48 During the first half of the 1700s, enduring networks of trans-imperial commerce actively involved Spanish and Portuguese authorities and merchants on both margins of the estuary connecting Sacramento and Buenos Aires commercial communities.49 Therefore, trans-imperial interactions were part and parcel of the enforcement of imperial authority in the region. Smuggling activities in Colônia often required Luso-Brazilian traders to deliver merchandise on islands and isolated beaches, or to introduce it in the port of Buenos Aires itself. A recurrent method for Portuguese sailors was to enter the port of Buenos Aires bearing a passport issued by Colônia’s port authorities endorsing the passage of merchants to Buenos Aires for acquiring foodstuffs. Since the treaty of Utrecht formally prevented Colônia do Sacramento’s population from settling the interior lands beyond the distance of a cannon shot, Portuguese authorities were legally allowed to purchase basic foodstuffs for the town’s survival from Buenos Aires. Portuguese sailors commonly used the clause as pretext for conducting illegal trade, including the slave trade. In Colônia do Sacramento, local authorities used the issuing of passports in a strategic way, charging “fees” and benefiting their commercial partners with privileged access to the Spanish markets.50 The frequent and recurrent entrance of Portuguese smugglers in Buenos Aires under false pretexts caused unrest and scandal in segments of the city’s commercial elites. According to Buenos Aires governor Joseph Andonaegui, Portuguese sailors jumped off their boats carrying bags of goods right at the entrance of the harbor. Semi-official commercial interactions between Colônia and Buenos Aires flourished in the first half of the eighteenth century. Buenos Aires governors repeatedly sent letters to their Portuguese counterparts protesting the recurrence of vessels entering Buenos Aires from Colônia under the false pretext of acquiring foodstuffs. In 1742, Buenos Aires authorities reported the arrival of six vessels from Colônia looking for supplies on the same day.51 According to Spanish officials, these ships introduced illegal goods,

Trans-Imperial Interaction   681 transported Portuguese petty traders, dealers, smuggled slaves, and merchants disguised as sailors to conduct illegal trade in Buenos Aires. On most occasions, Buenos Aires authorities sent arrested Portuguese smugglers back to Sacramento. Another method of smuggling was to transfer goods on islands and isolated beaches that abounded along the North Bank of the Rio de la Plata. These introductions, unlike those using the previously mentioned passports, lacked any official cover up  justifying commercial operations between Portuguese and Spanish subjects. The confession of a petty trader involved in illegal trade provides further details on the logistics of illegal operations in the Rio de la Plata interaction zone. In 1720, Spanish Royal Officials arrested Nicolas Carense and seized four packages containing rags, paper, gloves and other manufactured items, in Las Barracas, practically at the entrance of the Buenos Aires harbor. The ensuing investigation involved more than a dozen confessions and statements and provided a rich description of a smuggling circuit, involving relatively modest volume of goods and money. Nicolas Carense, a Genoese resident in Buenos Aires, confessed to having purchased fifteen hundred pesos worth of textiles, sugar, and tobacco from a Colônia merchant.52 Carense also stated that he crossed to the North Bank of the Rio de la Plata with a group of workers to cut firewood at Las Hermanas beach, a few miles north of Colônia. Once on the North Bank, Nicolas Carense left his fellow workers and headed to Colônia, where he acquired ­merchandise from a Portuguese known as don Cristóbal.53 Carense arranged the delivery to be at the Island of Martin Garcia, where he hid the illicit goods for a few days. Subsequently, he proceeded to transport the merchandise into Buenos Aires on board a small boat. Carense was arrested while trying to enter the port of Buenos Aires. At the end of the proceedings, the confiscated goods and boat went for public auction (almoneda pública). As for Nicolas Carense and another smuggler Francisco Valentin, both were banned for life from Spanish territories in the Americas. Nicolas Carense’s story was far from an extraordinary occurrence in the Rio de la Plata interaction zone. The sources provide repetitive examples of illegal goods and small boats seized on Barracas, Recoleta, Riachuelo, El Tigre, San Isidro, and other beaches near Buenos Aires. Authorities from Colônia repeatedly petitioned Spanish authorities for the devolution of confiscated canoes, sloops, smacks, rowboats, and speedboats that were supposed to be auctioned in Buenos Aires. Direct trade between Colônia do Sacramento and Buenos Aires was so widespread that according to a Spanish authority “all vassals in these lands are addicted to smuggling.”54 Illicit trade in Rio de la Plata also involved high-ranking officers, colonial authorities and wealthy merchants. In the early 1730s, a change of governors in Buenos Aires marked the beginning of a conflict between two local political factions and revealed the strength and significance of trans-imperial networks of trade. The replacement of Bruno Maurício de Zavala, who had governed the Rio de la Plata Provinces since the early 1720s, by Miguel de Salcedo triggered a series of criminal investigations opposing two powerful local commercial factions involved in trans-imperial trade. As soon as Mauricio de Zavala left office, the Real Hacienda Officers—authorities in charge of collecting custom taxes and inspecting the merchant ships arriving in Buenos

682   Borderlands of the Iberian World Aires—that worked under him were imprisoned. The accusations stated that Real Hacienda Officers don Diego de Sorarte, and don Alonzo de Arce y Arcos controlled several contraband enterprises in association with the British and the Luso-Brazilians of Colônia do Sacramento.55 The denounced scheme exposed the connections between the Real Hacienda Officers and the former governor with Portuguese and British traders. The officers were accused of participating in banquets, gatherings, and parties at the South Sea Company’s warehouses. Furthermore, they were accused of receiving amounts of around six thousand pesos to allow British ships to dock in Buenos Aires under some pretext. The peninsular judge who investigated the accusations stated that Royal Officers used to delay between one to three days the inspections on board merchant ships. This time would be enough for disembarking illegal goods on the islands of the Rio de la Plata, or to have them stored in Colônia or in other coves of the North Bank, thereby allowing English vessels to have only declared cargo on board at the moment of the customs inspection by the Royal Officer. Further investigation exposed the local tentacles of the contraband enterprise in Buenos Aires. The son-in-law of the arrested Royal Officer Diego de Sorarte, Adrian Pedro Warnes, a Flemish merchant established in Buenos Aires, was accused of involvement in the introduction of various contraband goods in the city’s market. Adrian Pedro Warnes, who arrived in the city two decades earlier, was married to Savina Sorarte, and had developed a successful commercial career in the region. Warnes’s allegedly contraband merchandise from Colônia do Sacramento was commercialized in Buenos Aires by another trader, named Juan de Mosqueria. The latter owned a store popularly known as “Noah’s arc” because it carried all imaginable goods, mostly of contraband articles.56 The group, centered on Diego de Sorarte and his daughter Savina, would give rise to an important merchant family of colonial Buenos Aires, testifying to the strength of transimperial networks in the region. Nevertheless, both men spent more than a year in jail, and were dismissed from their positions as Real Hacienda Officers. The significance of contraband trade in shaping the social and economic processes in the region is further corroborated by the doings of the rival merchant who denounced the Real Hacienda Officers, don Francisco de Alzaybar, a prominent Buenos Aires trader who owned several merchant ships in the Rio de la Plata, became one of the first settlers and largest land owners in the Banda Norte. Alzaybar also held licenses to repress smugglers in the estuary and had two corsarias deployed to patrol navigation in the river. In the following years, he successfully obtained authorization to provide hides for the British Asiento and acquired two shipping licenses between Spain and Rio de la Plata.57 Nonetheless, by the end of the 1740s, he was also charged with involvement in contraband trade with Colônia do Sacramento by using his “corsarias” to move illegal goods from Colônia to Montevideo and Buenos Aires.58 According to the accusations, Alzaybar’s boats allegedly went to coves and islands near Colônia to gather sand for ballast. Nevertheless, the sailors used the opportunity to conduct a thriving smuggling operation.59 As these examples show, contraband trade in the Rio de la Plata was integral to the formation of a porous region criss-crossed by trans-imperial networks, as well as for connecting local agents to overseas economic and political processes.

Trans-Imperial Interaction   683 The corruption scandal of the early 1730s in Buenos Aires reverberated elsewhere on the Rio de la Plata shore. According to Sacramento merchant José Meira da Rocha, an agent of the influential Lisbon trader Francisco Pinheiro, the arrival of the new governor of Buenos Aires, Miguel de Salcedo, disrupted powerful contraband networks in the estuary.60 The governor and his higher-ranking officers, Meira da Rocha contended, received extraordinary sums of around 4:800$000 réis (6,400 pesos) to allow the presence of English ships in Colônia’s harbor. The Portuguese merchant also denounced the “great scandal of the numerous dinners and banquets” in which the principal merchants and authorities of Colônia participated with Governor Vasconcelos, and British officers and merchants. In the face of the denunciations, Gomes Freire de Andrade, governor of Rio de Janeiro and the southern provinces, ordered a discrete investigation concerning the businesses of Sacramento’s governor, Vasconcelos. The investigation revealed the “Royal Treasury had suffered large losses due to the Governor’s dissimulation or leniency towards the  activities of Colônia’s Field Marshall, who also served as judge of customs.”61 Furthermore, not only the governor and his allies were involved in illegal activities, but they had also sent “huge sums” of money to Europe through the Portuguese Jesuits stationed in Colônia and Rio de Janeiro. Gomes Freire’s advice to Lisbon’s Overseas Council, however, was to take no action against Vasconcelos and his officers because his absence from Colônia’s governorship could generate more drawbacks than benefits for the Crown. Vasconcelos acquired a strong reputation for leading the resistance, and successfully repelling the Spanish siege during 1735–1737, as well as securing conditions favorable to Portuguese commerce between Rio de la Plata and Portuguese America. In the eyes of Gomes Freire, he was the only administrator able to maintain Portuguese authority and commercial activities in the southernmost Portuguese settlement in the Americas due to his connections with local factions, both in Colônia and in Buenos Aires.62 Meira da Rocha’s accusations and their outcome reveal that merchants and authorities were deeply involved in legal and illegal enterprises in Colônia. More telling is the lack of legal consequences against Governor Vasconcelos and his officers in the face of their administrative misconduct. The leniency of the Portuguese Crown toward individuals involved in contraband reveals the importance of trans-imperial networks of trade, politics, and family for the empire’s viability in the region. Likewise, the involvement of the governor, authorities, and merchants shows the significance of trans-imperial networks in shaping imperial administration, institutions, and society in the Rio de la Plata borderlands. The connections between royal administrative agents and local mercantile elites were at the core of the very maintenance of Sacramento as a Portuguese territory. Sacramento’s governmental apparatus relied on local merchants for cash advances to pay salaries, troops, and operational expenses. In return they received bonds to be paid by the Royal Treasury of Rio de Janeiro.63 Money advances from merchants for financing Colônia’s administrative expenses became normal practice since at least 1719, when Jeronimo de Ceuta lent the local government 8:000$000 réis (10,666 pesos). In arriving at Colônia in

684   Borderlands of the Iberian World 1722, Governor Vasconcelos made formal arrangements with the authorities in Rio de Janeiro and Lisbon to ensure “all the necessary funds from the local businessmen in order to pay troops and all other necessary expenses [. . .] in exchange for letters of credit to be honored by Royal Treasury in Rio de Janeiro.”64 In the mid-1720s, the letters of credit issued to local merchants by the Sacramento Governor totaled the significant amount of 20:288$193 réis (27,050 pesos), to be collected by the associates of Sacramento’s merchants in Rio de Janeiro. The Portuguese administration, therefore, counted on contraband trade to finance its colonial apparatus in Sacramento. Merchants involved in financing the local government often times held military posts and offices in the imperial bureaucracy. Such was the case of Manuel Botelho de Lacerda, whose trajectory illustrates the connections between imperial administration and trans-imperial networks in the Rio de la Plata interaction zone. In the first half of the ­eighteenth century, Botelho de Lacerda became the head of one of the most powerful families in Sacramento, with diversified commercial interests and control over key administrative offices.65 Manuel Botelho de Lacerda arrived in Sacramento as sergeant major of an infantry company in 1718. In his first two years in Colônia, he supplied his garrison with two thousand cruzados ($1066 pesos) from his own estate for purchasing food supplies and paying salaries and was responsible, as Colônia’s sargento-mor since 1720, for official contacts between the governments of Colônia and Buenos Aires. This year, Botelho de Lacerda went to Buenos Aires for two months to negotiate the restitution of an amount of silver confiscated in the occasion of a shipwreck of the Portuguese ship Caravela in the Rio de la Plata. Even though trade between Spanish and Portuguese colonies was forbidden, and especially trans-imperial trade in silver, official negotiations were successful in ensuring the restitution of a part of the smuggled silver on the ship. When the newly appointed Governor Antonio Pedro de Vasconcelos arrived in Colônia in 1722, Manuel Botelho de Lacerda became one of his main advisors. He introduced the new Governor to both legal and illegal local networks, and provided him expert advice on Rio de la Plata commercial dynamics. Botelho de Lacerda positioned himself in a strategic role as the right-hand man of Colônia’s Governor, which allowed him to develop commercial and political networks in key trans-imperial trading centers, namely Rio de Janeiro and Buenos Aires. In 1725 he traveled to Portugal via Rio de Janeiro to attend personal business and was back in Buenos Aires by 1729 on an official mission following the governor’s orders. In the same year, Botelho took office as Sacramento’s judge of customs. The accumulation of key positions in the local power structure granted him fiscal exemptions, privileges, and control over stipulating the legality, fees, and taxes on the goods moved through Sacramento’s customs. Furthermore, his role as the officer responsible for contact between the governments of Buenos Aires and Colônia allowed him to attain a privileged position for the control of an official communication channel with Buenos Aires. Botelho de Lacerda’s activities in Buenos Aires also allowed him to become a prominent member of Sacramento’s community. In late 1729 and the early 1730s, he sponsored the construction of a chapel devoted to Santa Rita. The images and itobal silver

Trans-Imperial Interaction   685 objects used to decorate the chapel were bought in Buenos Aires. The smuggled jewelry, sacred art and other expensive ornaments employed reveal the significance of transimperial interactions that shaped the regional economy and became an integral part of the urban and social development of local communities. Botelho de Lacerda’s ascending career continued during the decades of 1730 and 1740. During the “Great Siege,” when the Spaniards blockaded Sacramento for almost two years (1735–1737), he was interim governor and advanced money to the Crown as a contribution to cover the cost of the war. In the following years, he obtained the prestigious rank of Field Marshal of the Colônia’s infantry Terço. In 1743, during an impediment of Vasconcelos, Botelho de Lacerda governed Sacramento once again for half a year. The pinnacle of his political career coincided with the expansion of his commercial networks. In 1743, his daughter, Rita Botelho Trindade, married an English merchant named João Burrish, who had resided in Sacramento since the period of the British Asiento in the region (1717–1737) and had deep connections to the British mercantile community. Under the Asiento, Botelho de Lacerda and Governor Vasconcelos charged 6:000$000 réis (8,000 pesos) for allowing British ships to enter the harbor.66 The prestige and influence of the Botelho family proved to be long-lasting. The ­trajectory of Manuel Botelho’s brother, captain Pedro Lobo Botelho provides strong evidence of the maintenance of the networks connecting the Botelho family to the principal authorities in Sacramento even after the replacement of Governor Vasconcelos. Lobo Botelho also lived in Sacramento and, in the late 1740s, acted as the interlocutor between the governors of Colônia and Buenos Aires. According to Buenos Aires’ g­ overnor, Joseph Andonaegui, Lobo Botelho was “a most honorable person who deserves most distinguished consideration.”67 In 1753, the Governor of Rio de Janeiro, Gomes Freire de Andrade, referred to him as the “captain ambassador” of Colônia for Buenos Aires.68 During these years, Lobo Botelho was also the person responsible for the insertion of the new governor, Garcia de Bivar (1749–1759), into the transactions with la otra banda. The succession of governors in Colônia provides further evidence of the centrality of trans-imperial networks in the Rio de la Plata interaction zone. Governor Bivar, like his predecessor, was also accused by dissatisfied local merchants of utilizing royal vessels for smuggling goods into Buenos Aires. The alleged contraband scheme involved the payment of bribes of up to 3:500$000 réis (4,666 pesos), for Sacramento merchants to obtain passports to enter Buenos Aires under the pretext of purchasing foodstuffs, and the use of royal vessels for the illegal operations.69 In October of 1753, the Chancellor of Rio’s Court of Appeals ordered a full investigation of Governor Bivar’s activities. Not surprisingly, Royal authorities concluded that Bivar was effectively receiving bribes to facilitate contraband trade and favoring his local allies. Nevertheless, once again Crown authorities considered it in their best interest not to prosecute the governor in order to ensure the flow of Colônia’s commerce.70 As historian Fabio Kuhn has shown, Governor Bivar belonged to a merchant community connected to Rio de Janeiro that introduced textiles, manufactures, sugar, cachaça, and tobacco in Rio de la Plata, and was responsible for a thriving slave trade.71 Bivar’s involvement in contraband trade operations, however, did not prevent him from being rewarded by the Crown, in 1755, for his services to the King as governor of Colônia.72

686   Borderlands of the Iberian World Despite official regulations prohibiting trade between Spanish and Portuguese subjects, protecting contraband trade was at the core of the Portuguese efforts in maintaining Sacramento. Evidence from legal cases carried against the principal authorities of Colônia reveals the deep connections between political power, the financing of local bureaucracy, and illicit trade. In Colônia do Sacramento, the administrative architecture was designed around illegal trade. As a result, beyond its economic impact, transimperial trade, legal and illegal, was integral to the building of political institutions and was at the core of the formation of the Rio de la Plata interaction zone. The third foundation of Portuguese Colônia do Sacramento, in 1716, triggered a new phase in the articulation of the Rio de la Plata region. The development of an Atlantic port city in the North Bank of the river estuary accelerated imperial competition and the process of integrating the area into the Atlantic world. Colônia do Sacramento played a crucial role in shaping this riverine space as a conduit between the two Iberian empires; in addition, it maintained an open frontier with indigenous groups and fostered territorial occupation and dispute for cattle herds in the countryside of the North Bank. Simultaneously, as an Atlantic port, Sacramento became a hub for transatlantic interactions, giving the Rio de la Plata borderlands a fluid oceanic character. Sacramento’s growth as a port city led to the expansion of roads, paths, agricultural production, and the foundation of new Spanish and Portuguese settlements in the region. In the first half of eighteenth-century Rio de la Plata, Spanish, Portuguese, and British subjects developed commercial and political networks that enabled trade beyond imperial boundaries. The involvement of merchants and imperial authorities in trans-imperial trade, the leniency of Royal authorities, and the crucial role of local merchants in financing the local bureaucratic apparatus reveal that smuggling shaped local economic circuits, societal practices, and institutions in the Rio de la Plata interaction zone. Commerce centered on Côlonia do Sacramento, Buenos Aires, and Montevideo, produced a vibrant trans-imperial and multi-ethnic borderland.

Notes Archives AGNA: Archivo General de la Nación, Buenos Aires (Argentina) AGNU: Archivo General de la Nación, Montevideo (Uruguay) AHU: Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino, Lisbon (Portugal) Arquivo da Curia Metropolitana do Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) Arquivo Histórico do Exército Brasileiro, Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) 1. For the significance, products, and routes of contraband trade in Rio de la Plata see: Zacarías Moutoukias, Contrabando y control colonial en el siglo XVII (Buenos Aires: Centro Editor de América Latina, 1988); Fabrício Prado, A Colônia do Sacramento—o Extremo Sul da América Portuguesa (Porto Alegre: Fumproarte, 2002); Fernando Jumar, “Le commerce

Trans-Imperial Interaction   687 Atlanqique au Rio de la Plata” (PhD diss., École des Hautes Études en Science Sociales, 2000); Jorge Gelman, De mercanchifle a gran comerciante (La Rábida: Universidad Internacional de Andalucía, 1996). 2. For a general overview of the economic and social role of Iberian American port cities: Franklin W. Knight and Peggy K. Liss, Atlantic Port Cities: Economy, Culture, and Society in the Atlantic World, 1650–1850 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991); Catherine Lugar, “Port Cities,” in Cities and Society in Colonial Latin America, ed. Louisa Schell Hoberman and Susan Migden Socolow (Albuquerque: UNM, 1996). More recently, regarding the role of port cities for imperial administration and merchants as hubs of information: Jeremy Baskes, “Communication Breakdown: Information and Risk in the Spanish Atlantic World” Colonial Latin American Review 20, no. 1 (2011): 36–37. 3. For a discussion of the multiple overseas agents in port cities: Lauren Benton A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Empire in European Empires 1500–1900 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 160–161. For the role of port cities as gateways for overseas interactions and consequences to the hinterland on the coast of Africa: Christopher DeCorse, An Archeology of Elmina (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 2001), 44–101. 4. On interior borderlands in river valleys and riverine communities in the interior of South America, see Mary Karasch, “Riverine Borderlands and Multicultural Contacts in Central Brazil, 1775–1835,” and Barbara Sommer, “Rivers of Exchange, Forests of Refuge: Migration, Identity, and Place in Eighteenth-Century Amazonia,” both in The Oxford Handbook of Borderlands of the Iberian World, ed. Danna A. Levin Rojo and Cynthia Radding (New York: Oxford University, 2019), 591–612 and 613–634. On the frontier dynamics of shaping imperial institutions in Brazilian borderlands see Hal Langfur “Native Informants and the Limits of Royal Dominion in Late-Colonial Brazi,” in The Oxford Handbook of Borderlands of the Iberian World, ed. Danna A. Levin Rojo and Cynthia Radding, 209–234 (New York: Oxford University, 2019). 5. Hal Langfur, Forbidden Lands: Colonial Identity, Frontier Violence, and the Persistence of Brazil’s Eastern Indians, 1750–1830 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006), 4. 6. Simão Pereira de Sá, História Topográfica e Bélica da Nova Colônia do Sacramento do Rio da Prata, Escrita por Ordem do Governador e Capitão Geral do Rio de Janeiro em 1737 e 1777 [1747] (Porto Alegre, Arcano 17, 1992), 102. 7. Karasch, “Riverine Borderlands and Multicultural Contacts, 591.” 8. Knight and Liss, Port Cities, 10. 9. Knight and Liss, Port Cities, 10–13. 10. Linda Rupert, “Shaping an Inter-imperial Exchange Zone: Smugglers, Runaway Slaves, and Itinerant Priests in the Southern Caribbean,” in The Oxford Handbook of Borderlands of the Iberian World, eds. Danna A. Levin Rojo and Cynthia Radding, 741–764 (New York: Oxford University, 2019). 11. Joao Fragoso and Antonio Jucá de Sampaio, Monarquia Pluricontinental: Governança da Terra no Ultramar Luso (Rio de Janeiro: Mauad, 2012). 12. Lourdes de Ita Rubio, Organización del espacio en México colonial: puertos, ciudades y caminos. (Michoacan: IIH-UNAM, UMSNH, 2012), 10. 13. Fragoso and Sampaio, Monarquia Pluricontinental, 7–16. 14. Jack Greene and Amy Bushnell “Peripheries, Centers and the Construction of Early American Empires: an Introduction,” in Negotiated Empires: Centers and Peripheries in the Americas, ed. Christine Daniels and Michael Kennedy (New York and London: Routledge,

688   Borderlands of the Iberian World 2002), 1–14; Pedro Cardim et al., Policentric Monarchies: How did Early Modern Spain and Portugal Achieve and Maintain a Global Hegemony? (Brighton, UK: Sussex Academic Press, 2012), 6–12. 15. On contraband trade in colonial ports see: Wim Klooster, Illicit Riches (Leiden: KITLV Press, 1998); Linda Rupert, Creolization and Contraband (Athens: UGA Press, 2012); Ernst Pijning, “Contraband and Mentality in Rio de Janeiro” (PhD diss., Johns Hopkins University, 1997). A special volume of the Colonial Latin American Review 20, no. 1 (2011), brought together works on Rio de la Plata, by Alex Borucki; on Colombia, by Kris Lane; on Brazil, by Chris Ebert, who argue for the common place of illegal trade and its significance for the economic and social development of local communities. While previous authors emphasized the impact of smuggling on commercial imperial systems, these authors emphasize how contraband trade networks affected local communities. Jesse Cromwell, The Smugglers’ World - Illicit Trade and Atlantic Communities in Eighteenth Century Venezuela (Williamsburg: Omohundro Institute; Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2018) 239–242. 16. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), 6–9. Using primarily travel literature from early encounters between Europeans and indigenous groups, the author suggests that travelers exoticized the “other” and used European categories to describe non-European behaviors. 17. Rupert, “Shaping an Inter-imperial Exchange Zone.” 18. Ita Rubio, Organización del espacio, 11. 19. Aníbal Riveros Tula, Historia de la Colonia del Sacramento (Montevideo: IHGU, 1951); Luis E. Azarola Gil, La epopeya de Manuel Lobo (Buenos Aires: Compañía Ibero Americana de Publicaciones, 1931); Mario Rodriguez, “Don Pedro de Braganza and Colônia do Sacramento, 1680–1705,” Hispanic American Historical Review 8, no. 2 (1958): 179–208. 20. Alice Pifer Canabrava, O Comércio Português no Rio da Prata (1580–1640) (São Paulo: EDUSP, 1984). 21. Utrecht (1715), Paris (1737), Madrid (1750), El Pardo (1762), and Santo Ildefonso (1777). 22. Jônathas da Costa Rego Monteiro, A Colônia do Sacramento 1680–1777 (Porto Alegre: Globo, 1937). 23. Sebastião da Veiga Cabral, “Descrição Corográfica e Coleção Histórica do Continente da Nova Colônia da Cidade do Sacramento [1713],” Revista del Instituto Histórico y Geográfico del Uruguay XXIV (1965). 24. Instituto Histórico e Geográfico Brasileiro, Coleção Instituto Histórico, Lata 25 Doc. 02. 25. Carta de Vasconcelos a o Conselho, April 28, 1725. Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino, Lisbon, Portugal (hereafter AHU). Documentos Avulsos, Projeto Resgate Barão do Rio Branco– Colonia do Sacramento, Doc. 133. 26. Archivo General de la Nación, Buenos Aires, Argentina (hereafter AGNA)—Sala IX 4.3.1, February 5, 1747, November 3, 1746, and October 24, 1746. 27. Juan Alejandro Apoland, Génesis de la familia uruguaya, vol. 1 (Montevideo: n.p., 1975), 246. Also AGNA— Sala IX Montevideo 2.1.4, September 27, 1730 and August 22, 1729. 28. Archivo General de la Nación, Montevideo, Uruguay—AGA, Caja 2, Exp 15. 29. Apoland, Génesis. I was able to identify 21 Portuguese subjects married to Spanish women. 30. Arquivo da Curia Metropolitana do Rio de Janeiro. Colonia do Sacramento, Livro 3 de Baptismos. 31. Sá, História Topográfica, 98–110. 32. “Extrato das Perdas e Danos Executadas pelas Tropas Espanhollas Mandadas pelo Governador de Buenos Ayres D. Miguel de Salsedo nas Campanhas e Dominios da Prasa da Nova Collonia do Sacramento (cuja Prasa he Estabellecida nas Terras da Cappitania de

Trans-Imperial Interaction   689 S. Vicente) desde 29 de Julho do Anno Proximo Passado de 1735 de o Prezente que Corre de 1736, Sendo a Maior Parte deste Saque Logrado pelo Inimigo no dia 20 de Outubro do dito Anno de 1735,” Revista do Instituto Histórico e Geográfico do Rio Grande do Sul, Separata 99 (1945). 33. Exchange rate between pesos and Portuguese real (plural réis)1ps = $750 réis. Standard Portuguese notation uses milréis as a basic unit, thousands are expressed in contos (e.g., 10.000 pesos = 7:500$000, which reads seven contos and five hundred milréis). 34. Arraial was a small group of houses, usually located in surrounding areas of the Portuguese colonial towns. 35. AHU—Rio de Janeiro, Doc. 04081. 36. AHU—Colônia do Sacramento, Doc. 227, 6 April 1731. 37. AHU—Colônia do Sacramento, Doc. 155, 23 March 1726. See also Jumar, “Le Commerce,” 306. 38. “Extrato das Perdas,” 13–16. 39. AHU—Colônia do Sacramento, Doc. 228, 8 April 1731; Doc. 240, 30 March 1732; Doc. 263, April 13, 1733; Doc. 302, January 28, 1735. 40. AHU—Colônia do Sacramento, Doc. 158, May 4, 1726. 41. AHU—Colônia do Sacramento, Doc. 158, May 4, 1726. 42. Regarding the trade with the Minuane Indians, see also AGNA—Sala IX Montevideo 2.4.1 n. d. 43. AGNA—Sala IX Montevideo 2.4.1, n. d. 44. For more on nomadic equestrian societies and the Minuane in special, see: Jeff Erbig Jr., “Imperial Lines, Indigenous Lands: Transforming Territorialities of the Río de la Plata, 1680–1805” (PhD diss., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2015). 45. Jumar, “Le Commerce,” 185–235. 46. Silvestre Ferreira da Silva, Relação do Sítio da Nova Colônia do Sacramento (Porto Alegre: Arcano 17, 1992). 47. Moutoukias, Contrabando y control, 206–210. 48. Jumar, “Le commerce,” 185–235. 49. Prado, A Colônia, 76–185. 50. The bribes charged for “passports” to sail to Buenos Aires could reach the sum of $3,500 pesos. AHU—Colonia do Sacramento, Doc. 480, c.1754. 51. AGNA—Sala IX Montevideo 3.4.1, November 15, 1742. 52. AGNA—Sala IX Contrabando y Comisos 11.1.5, August 18, 1720. 53. According to Thomás Eyguzen, a partner of Nicolas Carense, “the reason for introducing illicit godos [. . .] was to make money to help cover his necessities.” AGNA—Sala IX Contrabando y Comisos 11.1.5, August 1, 1720. 54. Sobre lo viciado que estan esos vassalos en executar y abrigar el trato ilícito (on how these vassals are addicted to smuggling and protecting illicit trade). AGNA—Sala IX Reales Ordenes 24.10.11, May 14, 1747. 55. AGNA—Sala IX Tribunales 39.9.4, Exp. 01. 56. AGNA—Sala IX Tribunales 39.9.4, Exp. 01. 57. AGNA—Sala IX 9.1.8, Archivo del Cabildo 1720–1734; 19.2.3, Archivo del Cabildo 1747–1750. 58. AGNA—Sala IX 19.2.3, Archivo del Cabildo 1747–1750. 59. AGNA—Sala IX 19.2.3, Archivo del Cabildo 1747–1750. 60. Luis Lisanti Filho, Negócios Coloniais (Rio de Janeiro: Casa da Moeda, 1973), 337. 61. AHU—Rio de Janeiro, Doc. 3081, 25 February 1737. 62. AHU—Rio de Janeiro, Doc. 3081, 25 February 1737.

690   Borderlands of the Iberian World 63. AHU—Colônia do Sacramento, Doc. 54, 18 October 1719. AHU—Colônia do Sacramento, Doc. 71, May 3, 1722. 64. AHU—Colônia do Sacramento, Doc. 81, October 18, 1722. The homens de negocios who financed the administrative structure of Colonia before the arrival of Vasconcelos were: Jerônimo de Ceuta Freire (8:550$000 réis), and the almoxarife of Colonia at that time, Luiz de Almeida Ramos (1:389$815 réis). Jerônimo de Ceuta became Judge of Orphans of Colonia do Sacramento in the following years. 65. Manuel Botelho had written many letters of recommendation for his subordinates when they tried to obtain higher positions in the Portuguese bureaucracy. The letters of Botelho de Lacerda normally appeared cited together with letters of other governors. AHU— Colônia do Sacramento, Doc. 514, [Ant.] April 19, 1760. 66. AHU—Colônia do Sacramento, Doc. 460. 1752. 67. AGNA—Colônia do Sacramento. Sala IX 3.8.2, March 12, 1749. 68. AGNA—Colônia do Sacramento. Sala IX 3.8.2, March 27, 1753. 69. AHU—Rio de Janeiro, Doc. 4546, September 22, 1751. 70. AHU—Rio de Janeiro, Doc. 4724, October 15, 1753. 7 1. Fabio Kuhn “Clandestino e Ilegal: o Contrabando de Escravos na Colonia do Sacramento,” in Escravidão e Liberdade, ed. Regina Xavier (Porto Alegre: Ed. Alameda, 2010), 22–28. 72. AHU—Rio de Janeiro, Doc. 4938, November 11, 1755.

Bibliography Apoland, Juan Alejandro. Génesis de la familia uruguaya, vol 1. Montevideo: n.p., 1975. Azarola Gil, Luis E. La epopeya de Manuel Lobo. Buenos Aires: Compañía Ibero Americana de Publicaciones, 1931. Fragoso, João, and Antonio Jucá de Sampaio. Monarquia Pluricontinental: Governança da Terra no Ultramar Luso. Rio de Janeiro: Mauad, 2012. Greene, Jack, and Amy Bushnell. “Peripheries, Centers and the Construction of Early American Empires: an Introduction.” In Negotiated Empires: Centers and Peripheries in the Americas. Edited by Christine Daniels and Michael Kennedy, 1–15. New York and London: Routledge, 2002. Ita Rubio, Lourdes de. Organización del espacio en México colonial: puertos, ciudades y caminos. Michoacan: IIH-UNAM, UMSNH, 2012. Jumar, Fernando. “Le commerce Atlanqique au Rio de la Plata.” PhD diss., École des Hautes Études en Science Sociales, 2000. Knight, Franklin W., and Peggy K. Liss. Atlantic Port Cities: Economy, Culture, and Society in the Atlantic World, 1650–1850. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991. Kuhn, Fabio. “Clandestino e Ilegal: o Contrabando de Escravos na Colonia do Sacramento.” In Escravidão e Liberdade, edited by Regina Xavier, 179–206. Porto Alegre: Ed. Alameda, 2010. Moutoukias, Zacarías. Contrabando y control colonial en el siglo XVII. Buenos Aires: Centro Editor de América Latina, 1988. Prado, Fabrício. A Colônia do Sacramento—o Extremo Sul da América Portuguesa. Porto Alegre: Fumproarte, 2002. Rupert, Linda. “Shaping an Inter-imperial Exchange Zone: Smugglers, Runaway Slaves, and Itinerant Priests in the Southern Caribbean,” in The Oxford Handbook of Borderlands of the Iberian World, eds. Danna A. Levin Rojo and Cynthia Radding, 741–764 (New York: Oxford University, 2019).

chapter 28

The Construction of a Fron tier Space Inter-Ethnic Relations in Northern Bolivia Pilar García Jordán and Anna Guiteras Mombiola Translated by David Frye

Bolivia is an Andean country in the popular imaginary, though roughly half its ­­territory consists of lowlands: the Chaco region in the south; the eastern region traditionally known as Oriente; and the Amazonian region in the north. The Amazonian territory was the object of numerous expeditions from the mid-sixteenth century on. Perceived at first as a region of exuberant foliage but scant natural resources, it gradually came to be seen as a borderlands on the fringes of “civilization,” so that its inhabitants, in all their great ethnic variety, were conceptualized as “barbarians,” distant from and marginal to the society of the colony and, later, that of the republic. According to the cultural, ideological, economic, and geopolitical objectives of the Spanish Crown, these communities had to be “evangelized” and “civilized.” The Amazonian region was the stage on which the colonial state—and, after independence, the republican state—first acted through its civil servants, as well as a few sectors of society that had an interest in exploiting the territory. The Catholic Church also operated in this zone through missions primarily developed by the Jesuits and, from the late eighteenth century, by the Franciscan order.1 The historiography on Andean Amazonia is recent and has broadly resulted in a rethinking of the historical studies produced in Peru, above all, as well as in Ecuador,

692   Borderlands of the Iberian World Bolivia, and Colombia. Setting aside such dichotomies as “state versus society,” in the formulation of Pierre Clastres, or “dominators versus dominated,” the emergence of Amazonia as an object of study is a result of an interest in understanding the historical (social, economic, political, ideological) processes produced in this region in the context of the countries of the Americas.2 This has led to reconstructing the history of indigenous groups, both before the arrival of Europeans and afterward, throughout the colonial era and then throughout the independence period. More recently, the perspective offered by subaltern studies has led to the analysis of indigenous people as historical subjects. As a consequence, the practices and attitudes of indigenous peoples are understood in their social, political, and economic context, analyzing the relations between different ethnic groups through their constant processes of negotiation, conflict, and agreement.3 Since the 1990s Amazonian studies have been undergoing a historical revision that reevaluates traditional documentary sources and incorporates other, newer sources that have made it possible to conduct deeper analyses of processes, the particulars of which remain nevertheless to a large extent unknown. For a better understanding of such processes legislative documents produced by local, regional, and state administrations; reports by civil servants, missionaries, travelers, and other social actors; periodical publications (newspapers, bulletins, and magazines); and a varied array of documents preserved mainly in Bolivian archives and the Vatican must be combined with a panoramic review of the most significant studies on frontier relations and policies in the Bolivian Amazon during the colonial and republican periods. Working from the existing literature and new original research, we examine the emergence of the Bolivian state in Amazonia, focusing on the indigenous communities in the region and their relations with the republican state and society.

Frontier Relations and Policies in Bolivian Amazonia From the beginnings of the colonial period, Amazonia was a frontier for Europeans.4 Most of the region remained uncharted territory well into the nineteenth century. It was largely as a consequence of this lack of knowledge that an imaginary was formed and sustained in which fear of the unknown mingled with the attraction of supposedly abundant riches, giving rise to beliefs in mythical kingdoms such as El Dorado, Candire, El Gran Mojos, and Paititi.5 The search for these kingdoms inspired successive attempts to explore, discover, and conquer the region, most of which started out from the newly founded outpost of Santa Cruz de la Sierra. By the early 1600s, however, plans to conquer and settle the region were gradually abandoned after repeated failures.6 In practice, the religious orders were the first and most successful of the European agents to penetrate Amazonia from the Audiencia of Charcas. There has been little

The Construction of a Frontier Space   693 research into Augustinian activity in the Apolobamba region, where Augustinian friars carried out a number of unsuccessful expeditions over the course of the seventeenth century; following them, the Franciscans succeeded in concentrating the indigenous population of the region into eight missions in the eighteenth century.7 In the last years of the colonial period the Franciscans were also charged with pacifying the “barbarous” Guarayos who attacked the route between Santa Cruz and Mojos. The Jesuits, for their part, made contact with many native groups in the savannah and subtropical forest region, concentrating them into the well-known missions of Mojos and Chiquitos in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The spiritual conquest, the legal and administrative organization, and the socioeconomic control exercised by the missionaries is one of the most analyzed historical processes in this region. The classic literature focuses on the difficulties encountered and overcome by the friars, and ultimately on the success of the missionary project implemented by the Jesuits.8 In recent decades, the analysis of interethnic relations within the Jesuit missions has been enriched, providing essential contributions to the understanding of native practices developed in later years. For the Mojos mission, the work of David Block stands out.9 Block argues that the reducción (“pacification” and usually forced resettlement into a concentrated agricultural village) of ethnic groups with widely varying languages and cultural practices gave rise to an amalgamation and reworking of native organizational systems combined with European ones. This led to a missionary culture characterized by an urban legal code, agricultural and manufacturing activity, local government, a hierarchical social organization, and the conservation of native languages.10 This thesis has been accepted by other researchers on this period and has largely been incorporated into the literature on the Chiquitos missions. Breaking with the traditional historiography of the field, the work of José Luis García Recio offers fundamental tools for understanding the colonial socioeconomic reality in the Santa Cruz region where the missions developed.11 This fact was recognized by Roberto Tomichá.12 His research on social and cultural transformations in the Chiquitos missions and the formation of the Chiquitano people focused on the sociocultural and symbolic relationships between Europeans and native peoples, including the indigenous– European dimension (the intercultural process) and the indigenous–indigenous dimension (the intracultural process). Tomichá regarded the peaceful coexistence of different cultures, based on the articulation of mission activity, the native population, and colonial society, as a positive experience; this articulation gave rise to a cultural identity that, as Block also shows for Mojos, did not vanish but rather was consolidated after the expulsion of the Jesuits in 1767. Cynthia Radding has studied Chiquitos from a comparative perspective that combines cultural and environmental history, dealing with the most significant aspects relative to the frontier of Bolivia’s Oriente (Chiquitos) and northwestern Mexico (Sonora) from the mid-eighteenth century to the early i­ndependence period.13 Her analysis showed, first, the complexity of the inter-ethnic relationships that developed in this colonial frontier region during the transition to independence as a result of contacts and ties among indigenous populations, missionaries, civil servants, hacienda owners, and merchants; and, second, the important roles played by the

694   Borderlands of the Iberian World environment, technology, and the cultures of the populations involved in forming those frontiers. The expulsion of the Jesuits and the replacement of the Jesuit regime brought about important changes in regard to the frontier policies that would remain in place to the end of the colonial period, in the context of what Lucena Giraldo termed the “frontier reformism” (reformismo de frontera) that arose in the mid-eighteenth century in the context of the boundary disputes between the Spanish and Portuguese empires in South America.14 In the Audiencia of Charcas, following the Jesuit expulsion, the internal frontier was pushed significantly forward in the last decades of the eighteenth century and the first years of the nineteenth century. It advanced particularly to the northnorthwest, following the course of the tributaries of the Madeira River in the Caupolicán and Mojos regions.15 In addition, the frontier extended to the area occupied by the Yuracarés in the tropical Cochabamba region and by the Guarayos to the north of Santa Cruz de la Sierra.16 With regard to the latter two areas and the settlers there, a Real Cédula dated November 20, 1792, called for the foundation of a school for missionaries in Tarata to whom the conquest and reducción of the Yuracarés and Guarayos would be entrusted.17 The functions to be carried out by the missions founded in this period, run now by Franciscans, were similar to those performed by the Jesuit missions decades earlier.18 After the expulsion of the Jesuits, the mission towns were turned over to parish priests or to Franciscan friars, who became an essential element of control; it was a matter of successfully expanding the internal frontier—economic, social, political—and securing the defense of the external frontier. The mission became a frontier institution whose ultimate purpose was to consolidate Spanish control over a virtually unknown territory.19 However, as Daniel J. Santamaría noted, the wide dispersal of settlements and the large number of non-subjugated ethnic groups gave rise to a “mobile frontier” that proved an obstacle to controlling and effectively occupying the region, to which the growing inability of the crown, from the late 1700s through the early 1800s, to implement its colonial policies must be added.20 In the early years of Bolivian independence, achieved in 1825, vast regions of the north-northwest (Amazonia) and the south-southeast (Chaco) of the country were still unexplored. The common denominators between these regions were ignorance of their geography, scarcity or total absence of roads connecting them to the rest of Bolivian territory, and the presence of a population of unconquered nomadic or semi-nomadic indigenous peoples. Successive governments attempted to extend their political and ­fiscal control over the reducciones of Chiquitos and Mojos.21 However, they did not consider it a priority to conquer and occupy new territories—at least, not until José Ballivián became president in 1841. The pioneering study of Ballivián’s project in Oriente was done by Janet Groff Greever.22 In her research she covered the laws Ballivián passed relating to the political, administrative, and socioeconomic organization of the l­owlands as well as those he directed at promoting their colonization, at least from the legal point of view. In the same vein, though from the perspective of the nation-state comparison

The Construction of a Frontier Space   695 provided by the cases of Peru and Bolivia, Pilar García Jordán analyzed the ­frontier-related policies that were designed and implemented by ruling groups from the late colonial period well into the twentieth century.23 She argued that the basic components of those policies were, first, exploring the region and opening and maintaining routes to connect the highlands and peripheral valleys with the lowlands; and second, demarcating the political and administrative borders of the region and consolidating a state presence there by founding forts, Catholic missions, rubber camps, and agricultural haciendas, making it possible to control and exploit the territory and its indigenous populations for economic gain. With respect to the Guarayos, there are only a few works on either the people or their inter-ethnic relations. These works, focused on the reducción of the population first by the priests and later by the Franciscan missionaries, have established three periods: pre-mission (free, nomadic); mission (“reduced” and acculturated); and incorporated into the Bolivian state.24 The most systematic study was carried out by Walter Hermosa Virreira.25 This study centered on the history of the Guarayo peoples during the mission period and the changes that occurred after the secularization of the missions. Despite a dearth of sources, this author was able to demonstrate the important contribution of the missions to expanding the internal frontier; his research was much less significant with respect to the relations between the Guarayos and the external society. More recently, García Jordán has carried out an exhaustive study using a wide and varied set of sources, including the use of photographs as historical documents.26 Her study recognizes the fundamental role played by the Franciscan missions as an instrument for controlling the territory and the population in the service of the Bolivian state. With respect to the relations between the Guarayos and the outside world, she argues that the mission project helped give a new significance to Guarayo identity; it failed, however, to transform the “barbarous” Guarayos into “citizens.” At the same time, José Luis Roca has studied the role played by economic agents from Santa Cruz in integrating Amazonia socially, economically, and culturally into the Bolivian state.27 In the field of geography, Valerie Fifer and Jean Claude Roux have examined the consolidation of the external frontier by means of border treaties with neighboring countries and the expansion of the internal frontier by the rubber barons.28 The role played by these entrepreneurs during the long rubber boom and in defense of Bolivian sovereignty in the Amazonian north of the country has been studied by Valerie Fifer and Pilar Gamarra.29 The latter delves into the question of how the Amazonian north became articulated with the rest of the country through the participation of the state in the rubber industry, the price fluctuations of that commodity in the international market, and the labor system of the rubber camps. Most of these studies agree that contact between the state together with Bolivian economic agents—merchants, hacienda owners, rubber barons—and the diverse native groups in the region led to the break-up and, in some cases, the disappearance of the latter as cultural and ethnic groups.30 Although this thesis is correct in some cases, a few recent works have qualified it and even called it into question. One such study, by Anna

696   Borderlands of the Iberian World Guiteras Mombiola, is a socioeconomic analysis of Beni, where indigenous populations played a role from the mid-nineteenth century through the first third of the twentieth century.31 Similarly, Gary Van Valen has studied the impact on the Mojo natives (the mojeños) of being incorporated into Bolivian society through the rubber economy.32 This group responded by developing a millenarian movement that sought to maintain their special characteristics by leaving in search of what some writers have called the Holy Mountain (la Loma Santa).33 For his part, Frederic Vallvé has studied the impact of the extraction economy among native groups, analyzing the cultural transformation of rubber camp workers, most of them indigenous people from throughout the lowlands. Francis Ferrié has reconstructed the ethnohistory of the Apolobamba–Caupolicán region and argued that mission activity—by Augustinians in the seventeenth century, Franciscans in the eighteenth—favored ethnic and cultural processes of mestizaje among Quechua speakers, Lecos, and Aguachiles, which gave rise to a new “Apolista” or “Apoleña” ethnic identity that all the inhabitants of those missions adopted.34 The Panospeaking groups—Araonas, Pacaguaras, and Chacobos—of northern Bolivia have been studied by Lorena Córdoba, who looks at their relations with the missionized natives— Tacanas, Cayubabas—and their contacts with rubber tappers and missionaries; contacts that did not imply their adoption of Western cultural patterns and that were subordinated to the needs of the Pano-speaking groups.35 Another focus of study has been the conduct of the state and of Bolivian society with regard to the reducción and control of the Sirionó people since the 1920s.36 These studies address inter-ethnic relations, albeit tangentially, by noting how the Sirionó people rejected the projects developed by evangelizing groups and Franciscan missionaries, as well as the meager results the latter attained.37

Indigenous Participation in Constructing Beniano Space The department of Beni emerged from the Mojos missions, which had been formed into a province after the expulsion of the Jesuits and remained under the administrative control of Santa Cruz until after Bolivian independence.38 Its creation reflected the interests of the Bolivian state in controlling the northern Amazonian frontier and adjusting the legal status of its inhabitants to accord with the new liberal constitutional order. Among the various laws that were passed to address these issues the decree of August 6, 1842, extended citizenship and the rights conferred by it—freedom, equality, and property— to all the settlers in the region, as guaranteed to Bolivians by the constitution.39 Some writers have argued that implementing this decree had no practical effect on the native people and merely made it easier to expropriate the land they occupied.40 Quite to the contrary however, far from being worthless cant, this measure was heard, interpreted, and adopted by the native people of Beni to meet their needs and further their personal

The Construction of a Frontier Space   697 and collective interests. The new type of relationships being developed between the native population and the white-mestizo groups that moved to the department in the nineteenth century must be taken into account to understand the implications that access to citizenship—particularly in regard to political representation on the local level—and land titling had for indigenous people. In the 1840s, the population of the region was almost exclusively indigenous.41 Some of the people belonged to several unconquered ethnic groups. The rest consisted of various ethnolinguistic groups that had been “reduced to Christian civility” by the Jesuits in the missions of the Mojos plains, where through a process of ethnogenesis they came to identify as Mojeños, Cayubabas, Canichanas, Mobimas, Itonamas, and Baures.42 Usually known as “Mojeño” or “Beniano” indigenous people, these natives were elevated to the rank of citizens when they were deemed ready to join the national society, since their mission past confirmed their “civilization.” Though ethnic inequality among Bolivians had not been established through legislation, social practices were indeed discriminatory. The perpetuation of colonial habits and practices kept the uniform citizenship pursued by the liberal vision in a fragile equilibrium. The concession of citizenship allowed the native people to participate actively in the economy of the department as a labor force. However, the coexistence of economically compensated labor with unpaid services led to a collusion of public and private interests that left room for the abuse and over-exploitation of the natives, and at the same time ignored their constitutional rights. This was possible because of the modification and reintroduction, over the course of the nineteenth century, of labor recruitment norms that facilitated employers’ access to the work force and gave rise to a new framework for inter-ethnic relations with white-mestizo power groups.43 It is worth noting, however, that there was a clear distinction at that time between legal equality and social equity and that social inequality was compatible with the exercise of citizenship.44 From 1839 to 1952, Bolivia was ruled by a concept of citizenship based on census. It was understood that citizenship was a faculty to be learned and a privilege to be won through actions taken for the common good and publicly recognized by the community, such as working and paying tribute.45 In a context where citizenship was grounded in census categories, enjoying the rights of a citizen was conditional on fulfilling a citizen’s duties. According to the text of the constitution, citizenship was reserved for males who were of age or married, could read and write, paid taxes, and took in an income above a certain minimum, derived either from land rents or from work other than domestic labor. The local nature of recognition as a citizen and the “civilized” status attributed to indigenous Benianos helped them to be recognized as educated and therefore qualified to understand the law and know their rights and duties. Moreover, access to ownership of land for anyone who wanted to acquire it—plus the work consequently generated—and an annual payment of a tax of two pesos for those who received land, or one peso for those who had no such allotment.46 This certified the indigenous Benianos’ right to citizenship. According to these principles of conditional citizenship, over the course of the nineteenth century new local measures were passed to promote the exercise of citizenship

698   Borderlands of the Iberian World among the “outstanding,” “most exceptional,” “industrious and civilized” indigenous men in order to further progress in the region.47 The skills and capabilities that were recognized and the need to have them in order to exercise citizenship enabled a ­portion of the native population to participate in local and regional public institutions, even though the decree of August 6, 1842, placed more emphasis on civil than on political rights. The demographic prominence of the native population in the mid-nineteenth century and the fulfilment of the legal requirements for taking part in public life facilitated their participation at the local level. Some indigenous men took part in elections in the 1820s and 1830s.48 And following the creation of the department in 1842 the civil registers recorded more native men as citizens with the right to vote, and more of them standing for election as electors or for municipal councils and boards. By the end of the 1840s, a list of electors for the president of the republic included a large number of indigenous men in the cantons that at the time had municipal boards.49 Later, after a sizeable whitemestizo population had moved into the region, the list of electors for the years 1857 and 1860 include a significant number of indigenous surnames; whereas native men represented a quarter of all voters in the department capital, in smaller towns and villages they made up a third or even half of the voting population.50 Though this fact supports the notion that indigenous people took part in public life, their degree of participation depended on their skill level and the relative size of the criollo population. In any case, while an indigenous presence on local municipal boards has been demonstrated, in the documents only one indigenous man appears in a minor post on the municipal council of the department capital in the mid-1850s.51 It should be pointed out that not all natives could exercise the right to vote. Since the Jesuit era, indigenous society in Mojos was divided into two categories: el pueblo, consisting of people engaged in productive endeavors and organized into ethnic bands or parcialidades, and la familia, divided into bands according to their craft: artisans, musicians, assistants in liturgical rites, and the native elite. The latter enjoyed a certain prestige because they could speak and write in Spanish, wore European clothes, and were members of the indigenous cabildos, the communal governments of native groups, whose highest authority in the nineteenth century was the cacique.52 Thus most of the indigenous men registered on the voter rolls were—or would have been—cabildo members or landowners.53 This fulfilled the requirement of having independence of judgment (being literate) and freedom of action (as property owners), which guaranteed that they would cast their votes responsibly.54 Their role in the cabildos and their new status allowed many of them to assert their leadership roles under the liberal regime and to consolidate their social recognition among the natives and before the white-mestizos, implementing a new type of relations with Bolivian society. The cabildo remained the highest level of government in native society on the plains of Mojos and Chiquitos throughout the nineteenth century.55 However, its organizational chart was slightly modified in Beni as a consequence of changes caused by the ­creation of the department.56 Between 1858 and 1863, in an effort to mitigate the possible negative effects of the new political and administrative organization, new norms were approved to reconcile liberalism and corporatism. First, the traditional authorities

The Construction of a Frontier Space   699 were again named for distributing land, labor, and products among the members of the parcialidades, which at that point were practically obsolete.57 However, the parcialidades went on to play a role in organizing the population, while ceasing to reflect the hierarchical order in which native society was structured.58 Second, the various functions of the cabildo members were regulated, leading to a loss of their power and autonomy and the displacement of their traditional mediating functions. They would thereafter take orders from the corregidor, a post held by a public servant, usually not indigenous; indeed, the only indigenous men who occupied the post at various times were Frutos Nosa in Trinidad and José Gregorio Acuruza in Exaltación.59 Similarly, inauguration ceremonies for the cabildos were now to take place in a public ceremony sponsored by the department government.60 In this sense, the official sanctioning of local power and the responsibilities of the cabildo became a display of state recognition for native authorities and of their integration into the institutional structure of the department. The relationship that had arisen between the white-mestizo population and the native elite strengthened their prominence within the community, in part because it gave them access to more economic resources. This change inside the community was reflected in marriages between members of the native elite and white-mestizo economic agents and in the declining importance of traditional moral authorities in leading the communal government.61 A traveler from the United States noted the latter point, writing that “Cayuba was the wise man of the Mojo tribe. He was respected for his intelligence, while Fratos [sic] claimed rank over him on account of his wealth.”62 In spite of everything, these changes did not prevent the cabildo from playing an active and prominent role in the defense of indigenous society; as long as white-mestizos considered the cabildo the legitimate representative of the native population, it was needed, until the end of the nineteenth century, for deciding various sorts of conflicts. The cabildo was called on, in particular, to report on the appropriateness of requests for land and to uphold the indigenous people’s property rights. Access to legal land ownership was the right most in demand, since the land titles issued after the decree of August 1842, mentioned above, attested only to the possessors’ use rights (as usufructuarios) and never granted full ownership of land. Over the course of the nineteenth century, there were three great waves of petitions for land titles on the part of the indigenous people taking advantages of loopholes in the law.63 The first wave occurred in the 1840s. Petitioners referred to their desire to own a piece of land that would ensure their family’s survival and that they might pass on to their heirs. These petitions were filed by people who could afford to purchase the land and who enhanced their social rank by claiming to be caciques and/or identifying themselves as citizens. The second wave occurred in the 1860s and 1870s. The petitions were presented by indigenous commoners who based their cases on the services they had performed for the community and on their lack of, or their loss of, the original land titles that had been issued in 1842. Without exception, these natives asserted that they wished to legalize their smallholdings in order to insure themselves of a piece of land where they could provide for their families and thereby halt the pressure from the increasingly numerous

700   Borderlands of the Iberian World white-mestizo pioneers. In this way, indigenous people who did not belong to the elite adopted mechanisms that brought them closer to exercising citizenship, mechanisms they would deploy after 1880, in the third wave of land petitions. At that time the law of November 24, 1883, would declare that “the indigenous Benianos are absolute owners” of their land, title to which they could obtain free of charge.64 The main concern of the natives was the absence of public documentation of their land ownership. In their briefs they said that they had been living on and working these plots of land uninterruptedly for years, and they emphasized how important it was for them to gain legal titles that would guarantee their rights against outside parties.65 Ultimately the decree of August 1842, confirmed by the 1883 law, made it possible for the indigenous population of Beni in the late nineteenth century to have their rights to land ownership guaranteed, allowing them to act as full citizens. This exercise of citizenship would be cut back from the 1890s onward. The land laws approved from that time on encouraged the arrival of more colonizers while at the same time limiting indigenous property rights. By setting high fees for each hectare of land requested, new laws prevented most indigenous people from continuing to request allotments of land and led to a final assault on the land by white-mestizos, who gradually amassed vast extensions of territory.66 Many indigenous people sold their land.67 And only a few families added to their holdings, becoming some of the large hacienda owners in the region in the first half of the twentieth century.68 At the same time, the cabildo lost its erstwhile importance, its sphere of action being limited now to the indigenous community. This diminishing authority in the spheres of power and decision-making spaces became clear with the disappearance of indigenous surnames from the voter rolls, as indigenous people were definitively excluded from power at the municipio level.69 Nevertheless, over the course of the nineteenth century the indigenous people of Beni participated in department life both as a labor force in a number of activities and as members of the political leadership of their communities. By appealing to the laws that guaranteed their civil rights and using the legal mechanisms established by the Bolivian administration, for one thing, the native elite took part in the political future of Beni on par with the criollos; and for another, all the members of the community developed strategies for occupying the land that allowed them to participate in the regional economy and thereby contribute to enlarging the internal frontier in Amazonia. Far from maintaining a passive attitude, indigenous populations participated actively and played a significant role in constructing society in the department of Beni.

The Guarayos, from Bárbaros to “Useful Citizens” The first reducción projects aimed at the Guarayos living along the banks of the San Miguel and Sapocós Rivers date back to the early eighteenth century, though it was only toward the end of that century that the first systematic attempts to conquer and reduce

The Construction of a Frontier Space   701 them were undertaken.70 The reason was that the Crown and regional authorities were interested in creating a route between the provinces of Chiquitos and Mojos. The parish priest of San Javier (Chiquitos), with the help of colonial authorities, attempted repeatedly to reduce the Guarayos in number. In 1793 he succeeded in concentrating about three hundred Guarayos in San Pablo, eight leagues from San Javier; later, in 1807, he concentrated a few indigenous people in San Luis, but only for three years; somewhat later, in 1811, he founded San Joaquín near what years later would be Ascensión. These attempts all failed because the indigenous people always returned to the countryside. It was only in 1820 that, at the request of some Guarayos who feared being captured and taken far away, the settlements of Santa Cruz and Trinidad were founded, and it was suggested to the governor of Santa Cruz that it would be a good idea to put the Franciscans in charge of reducing the group. Thus, the Guarayos saw their concentration in the missions as a defense mechanism against the threat implied by the arrival of white-mestizo pioneers.71 The task of conquering the Guarayos and administering their missions was entrusted to Franciscans from the missionary school in Tarata; in 1823 Francisco Lacueva arrived as the prefect of missions, along with a number of friars.72 At the same time that they studied the Guarayo language, the Franciscans opened a route to the province of Mojos, surveyed the territory, and “took a census of the nation, down to its most far-flung rancho, which extended through the forest some 40 leagues in length by some 10 or 12 in width,” concentrating the families; and “chapels, houses, fields, and a small cattle ranch were built,” while the craft of weaving allowed them to obtain clothing for “dressing the people, who were not ashamed of their total nakedness,” and later on trades such as blacksmithing and carpentry were introduced.73 This situation was abruptly altered when the Audiencia of Charcas became the independent republic of Bolivia in 1825, at which time most Spanish missionaries, with the exception of Lacueva, departed the region, as a result of which part of the Guarayo population left the missions and went back to the woods. Indeed, the Guarayos were completely conquered and “reduced” only after 1840, when President José Miguel de Velasco personally intervened to bring two Franciscans attached to the Colegio de Propaganda Fide in Sucre, Manuel Viudez and José Cors, to the region. The reducción process was backed up by a small armed contingent for controlling the most reluctant Guarayos and capturing those who fled, since running away had up to that point been the indigenous people’s most basic form of resistance. This process was concluded in 1845.74 Afterward, the mission project was gradually consolidated: this was possible for reasons both external and internal to the missions. Among the external reasons we must consider various interests: first, groups from Santa Cruz and Beni had an interest in keeping open a route to facilitate the movement of cattle, goods, and labor to Amazonia; second, the Holy See and the Franciscans had an interest in proving themselves useful in the task of “bringing civilization”; finally, the still fragile and unstable Bolivian state had an interest in making itself present in regions that had up until then escaped its control. With regard to internal reasons, as Cors and Viudez noted, the settlements were located in hilly terrain unsuited to agriculture and near the forests where those who rejected the mission project sought refuge.75 So the friars were convinced to relocate to open terrain with the proper type of land for planting crops and

702   Borderlands of the Iberian World raising cattle “in order to assure them their livelihood and so keep them tied down.”76 Thus it was the effort to sedentarize the Guarayos that caused the mission settlements to be relocated.77 In the middle of the nineteenth century the number of “reduced” Guarayos was ­estimated at about three thousand individuals.78 They were distributed among the four missions of Ascensión, Urubichá, Yaguarú and Yotaú located in the northwest of the department of Santa Cruz, halfway between Santa Cruz de la Sierra and Trinidad (Beni). The final consolidation of these populations was helped along by the Reglamento de ­misiones de infieles en el territorio de Bolivia (regulation for the missions among infidels in the territory of Bolivia), passed by the administration of Agustín Morales on September 13, 1871, and by the socioeconomic and political changes that allowed Bolivia to become a nation-state in the 1880s.79 In this regulation, the state granted the Franciscans a monopoly on socializing the indigenous people by establishing the Catholic belief system and a new social praxis. The legal text was in response to a request sent by the Tarija mission prefect, Fray Alejandro Ercole, to the Bolivian government for a set of rules for establishing and administering missions that would regulate their relations with the outside world and allow the missionaries to “spread the kingdom of Jesus Christ among the barbarian tribes, and allow us to add territory in order to increase the number of children of the Church and of useful citizens for the Country.” This regulation recognized the missionary as the highest authority inside the mission, in charge of all aspects of the system—economic, social, political, religious—and in a position to mediate contacts between the Guarayos and the Bolivian state and society.80 While missionaries had traditionally been entrusted with managing the reducción process—in order to further the “evangelization” and “civilization” of indigenous people—beginning in the 1880s the missions began to form part of the Bolivian state’s strategy for conquering, colonizing, and exploiting the lowlands. Based on the law of November 13, 1886, the conservative administrations (1880–1899) and the liberal and republican administrations after them (1899–1932) considered the missions their primary tool for colonization, helping both to expand the internal frontier and to defend the external border, therefore making them the favored method of nationalizing territory and populations.81 The function of the missions as a tool for the “Bolivianization” of the borderlands achieved significant results in the mission prefecture of Guarayos, where a sharp rise in population reached its peak in 1934, when an estimated 7,154 Guarayos lived there. This population growth paralleled good economic progress in the missions; there were five missions by 1900, after San Pablo was founded near Ascensión. The development of agriculture, livestock raising, and handicrafts resulted in a broad range of products that were consumed both in the missions and beyond.82 A fundamental factor in commercializing the surplus production of the missions was their location on the road between Santa Cruz and Beni, which favored the development of an active trade between the two regions. These settlements became important supply centers for merchants, ranchers, and travelers in general; but most of all they were an important reservoir of labor for the

The Construction of a Frontier Space   703 private sector—for driving cattle, working on haciendas, and rubber tapping—and for the public sector, particularly for building construction and for building and maintaining roads and riverways. The same factors that allowed the Guarayo settlements to flourish, however, also led to a steady pressure for secularizing the missions from certain merchants, rubber barons, and livestock ranchers interested in gaining access to indigenous labor without going through missionary middlemen.83 Unlike what occurred elsewhere in the Amazonian north of Bolivia, here the mediation of the missionaries protected the Guarayo people, largely through the institution known as the “Guarayo republic” (república guaraya), from the overexploitation to which other indigenous populations were subjected.84 This república was a cultural-ideological project and not a political formation, promoted by a group of Franciscans who arrived in Guarayos in the 1880s after witnessing the abuses that the indigenous people suffered, especially those who had been captured to work in the rubber camps. Inspired by the once flourishing missions of Paraguay, Mojos, and Chiquitos, these friars implemented a segregationist project based on a Guarayo identity that was given new meaning based on a new Catholic faith.85 The main ingredient in this identity was the conservation of the Guarayo language and the very limited use of Spanish among the population. The república guaraya remained active up until the first decade of the twentieth century, when in practice it disappeared due to pressure from Franciscan superiors and from department and state authorities that insisted on the necessity of teaching the Guarayos Spanish to facilitate their cultural and political integration into the Bolivian nation. The more significant problem was really not the Guarayos’ limited Spanish literacy, however, but the Franciscans’ mediation between the indigenous workers and white-mestizo society. In the first decades of the twentieth century, several socioeconomic sectors in Santa Cruz and Beni steadily pressured national administrations to secularize the Guarayo missions—that is, to replace the Franciscans with priests, turn the missions into parishes, and incorporate their settlements into the political and administrative profile of the rest of the country. This process reflected, first, the interest of the economic elites in gaining access to the labor force without missionaries mediating, especially after the end of the Chaco War (1932–1935).86 Hacienda owners, livestock ranchers, and merchants accused the friars of hindering economic activity, unfairly increasing the prices of supplies sold to travelers, traders, and others, and “trafficking” in indigenous workers.87 Second, it reflected the political initiative launched by military, socialist, and nationalist reformers in 1936 under the administrations of David Toro and Germán Busch. The secularization of the missions finally took place in 1938–1939.88 On May 10, 1938, a local government was created, the Delegación Nacional de Guarayos, led by an administrative delegate who was to exercise authority over the mission settlements and ensure compliance with mission regulations. Then on June 14, 1939, a law was passed to regularize the earlier decree, establishing the borders, territorial jurisdiction, and powers of the Delegación Nacional. This measure, after noting the need to “attain the incorporation of the indigenous settlers under the effective control of the Nation,” made the delegate the highest governmental authority in Guarayos, placing him above all other public officials

704   Borderlands of the Iberian World and above the missionaries, who were left in charge of pastoral work and defending the Guarayos before the authorities. The delegate became the primary guarantor of freedom of trade, industry, and movement through the region, empowered to authorize the establishment of “persons, societies, and corporations” inside the territory of the Delegación; he was also supposed to ensure that labor recruiting functioned properly, “guaranteeing the system of human labor that may be imposed on the Guarayos, and the wages that they are to be paid,” which he was to receive for later distribution to the workers. Finally, the decree confirmed that the entire administrative, judicial, and punitive system was the responsibility of the delegate, thereby legally investing him with the authority over indigenous land and people that the friars had previously exercised. In the end, the Guarayos continued to be considered legal minors and wards of the state. The final episode in the secularizing process came when the missionaries, now parish priests, handed over the mission properties, now termed state property, to the new civil administrators in charge of governing the five settlements. The latter, who were named by the delegate, were the new political, economic, and social governors of the former missions, now civil settlements, that made up the Delegación Nacional de Guarayos, subsequently renamed the Intendencia Delegacional de Guarayos.89 The arrival of the new public officials—army officers, civil administrators, teachers— and of white-mestizo settlers (colonos) brought about a substantial transformation of Guarayo local space and inter-ethnic relations. While the officials and colonos became an embryonic ruling clique, the Guarayos were the object of abuse, overexploitation, and larceny; in the words of the Inspector of Colonization, Nataniel Prado Barrientos, sent by the federal government in 1945 to report on the complaints lodged against the members of this new ruling group: Today, the Guarayo family consists of nothing but a conglomeration of sick people, alcoholic and starving, whose rebelliousness and abhorrence of the white man translates into labor strikes and a systematic sabotage of administrative measures. To this must be added the pernicious influence of the mestizo element (“el Caray”) that has gone to settle in that area, who seem by divine curse to have been selfselected from among the least desirable people in the republic. . . . This mob of hustlers, masquerading behind all sorts of activities and under no administrative control, have completely upset the public peace and, what is worse, the people’s moral condition. . . . The enormous distance that lies between La Paz and Guarayos, and the lack of overland or wireless communication links, has allowed the excesses and larcenies committed by the very people charged with overseeing public affairs to go unpunished. To make matters worse, several of them continue to carry on in Santa Cruz, Beni, and even in the missions themselves, with the smugness of people invulnerable to the actions of justice.90

Indeed, the carai, as the Guarayos called the white-mestizos, came from the working and middle-class sectors of Santa Cruz and Beni. In the political context of the 1940s, the military and civilian officials who operated under the Intendencia Delegacional in

The Construction of a Frontier Space   705 Guarayos regularly disregarded the law and appropriated trade, labor, and finally land for the benefit of themselves and their allies. To this end they developed a number of strategies that they could put into practice thanks to the powers they had been granted by the state in an atmosphere of total intermingling of private and public.91 This was possible because of the incompetence, lack of political will, and negligence of Bolivian administrations, for whose members the Guarayo people and their territory were too far away geographically and too distant in their imaginaries.92 The turmoil of Bolivian politics in the 1940s effectively prevented the government in La Paz from taking initiatives to put an end to the disastrous situation in Guarayos. It was only under the administration of Enrique Hertzog that, by a decree of December 11, 1947, the Intendencia Delegacional was abolished, effective January 1, 1948. The administration offered two reasons for this measure. First, the need to establish a government that would facilitate the incorporation of the natives into the nation and get them to act independently as “citizens of the Republic”; second, the exploitation of the “labor of the Natives in inhuman fashion with no benefit to the community and solely for personal profit.”93 The measure entailed incorporating all the Guarayo settlements into the political-administrative organization of Ñuflo de Chávez (Santa Cruz) under the administration of the subprefecture, and distributing urban and rural plots of land with proper land titles to the Guarayos. In sum, this was when the Guarayos overcame the legal status of being “minors” or “wards of the state” and acquired full enjoyment of their civil rights—that is, civil citizenship.94 After the Intendencia Delegacional was abolished, its administrators were replaced by corregidores, but Guarayo living conditions did not seem to improve.95 The Guarayos themselves abandoned their “Native homes” when they found themselves “crushed and extorted by the crowd of whites and mestizos who promptly moved in among them, prompted by their eagerness to profit at their expense.”96 The basic reason was that, deprived of the guardianship of the friars—who had not introduced the basic habits of a market economy among the natives—the Guarayos found themselves drawn into a reality where the carai were in charge and in which they basically participated as agricultural producers and as a labor supply. In conclusion, living under a mission system determined access to civil citizenship for Guarayos and Benianos. The status of the latter as “civilized” made it possible, after 1842, for some of them to participate in the economic development of the region, and to a lesser extent in its political development, by exercising the constitutional rights granted all Bolivians. At the same time, the Guarayos, kept under the friars’ guardianship as “minors” or “wards,” participated in the regional economy as laborers and only gained “full enjoyment of their civil rights” in 1947–1948. The social and political crisis of the 1940s in Bolivia opened the way, after the revolution of April 9, 1952, for the Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario (MNR) to take power. It was then that Guarayos and Benianos obtained political citizenship, even if, like a large number of other indigenous people in the lowlands, many of them remained off the voting rolls for lack of the proper identity documents.97

706   Borderlands of the Iberian World

Notes Archives ABNB: AGI: AHL: ALP: BVM: ACCB: MHSC: AASC: APHMAB:  AGFM:

Archivo y Biblioteca Nacional de Bolivia, Sucre (Bolivia) Archivo General de Indias, Seville (Spain) Archivo Histórico de Límites, Lima (Peru) Archivo Histórico de La Paz, La Paz (Bolivia) Private Library of Vázquez Machicado, La Paz (Bolivia) Archivo de la Casa de la Cultura del Beni, Trinidad (Bolivia) Archivo del Museo de Historia de Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz (Bolivia) Archivo Arquidiocesano Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Santa Cruz (Bolivia) Archivo Histórico de la Provincia Misionera de San Antonio de Charcas, Cochabamba (Bolivia) General Archive of the Order of Friars Minor, Vatican City (Rome)

1. On the role of missions, see Guillermo Wilde, “Frontier Missions in South America: Impositions, Adaptations, and Appropriations;” on inter-ethnic relations related to the actions of missionaries, settlers, and South American states from the end of the colonial regime to the mid-nineteenth century see Izabel Missagia de Mattos, “Colonization, mediation, and mestizaje in the borderlands of Nineteenth-Century Minas Gerais, Brazil.” Both articles published in The Oxford Handbook of Borderlands of the Iberian World, ed. Danna A. Levin Rojo and Cynthia Radding (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019). 2. Pierre Clastres, Society against The State: Essays in Political Anthropology (New York: Zone Books, 1987) and Hélène Clastres, The Land-without-Evil: Tupi-Guaraní Prophetism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995). 3. For the Andean world Josefa Salmón and Guillermo Delgado, ed., Identidad, ciudadanía y participación popular desde la colonia al siglo XX (La Paz: Plural Editores, 2003); Marta Irurozqui, ed., La mirada esquiva. Reflexiones históricas sobre la interacción del Estado y la ciudadanía en los Andes (Bolivia, Ecuador y Perú, siglo XIX) (Madrid: CSIC, 2005): Rossana Barragán, Indios, mujeres y ciudadanos: Legislación y ejercicio de la ciudadanía en Bolivia (siglo XIX) (La Paz: Fundación Diálogo, Embajada del Reino de Dinamarca en Bolivia, 1999); Marta Irurozqui, A bala, piedra y palo: La construcción de la ciudadanía política en Bolivia, 1826–1952 (Seville: Diputación de Sevilla, 2000) and “El espejismo de la exclusión: Reflexiones conceptuales acerca de la ciudadanía y el sufragio censitario a partir del caso boliviano,” Ayer 70 (2008): 57–92; Tristan Platt, “Tributo y ciudadanía en Potosí, Bolivia. Consentimiento y libertad entre los ayllus de la Provincia de Porco, 1830–1840,” in Dinámicas del poder local en América Latina, siglos XIX–XXI, ed. Pilar García Jordán (Barcelona: Publicacions de la UB, 2008), 109–163; Laura Gotkowitz, A Revolution for Our Rights: Indigenous Struggles for Land and Justice in Bolivia, 1880–1952 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), and Histories of Race and Racism: The Andes and Mesoamerica from Colonial Times to the Present (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2011). For other Latin American countries, see Sonia Alda, La participación indígena en la construcción de la república de Guatemala, s. XIX (Madrid: Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, 1999);

The Construction of a Frontier Space   707 Cecilia Méndez, The Plebeian Republic. The Huanta Rebellion and the Making of the Peruvian State, 1820–1850 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005); Antonio Escobar, ed. Los pueblos indios en los tiempos de Benito Juárez (México: Universidad Autónoma “Benito Juárez” de Oaxaca, UAM, 2007); Marisol De la Cadena, Formaciones de indianidad: articulaciones raciales, mestizaje y nación en América Latina (Popayan: Evión, 2008), and Mónica Quijada, “La lenta configuración de una ‘ciudadanía cívica’ de frontera: los indios amigos de Buenos Aires, 1820–1879 (con un estudio comparativo Estados Unidos-Argentina),” in De los cacicazgos a la ciudadanía: sistemas políticos en la frontera, Río de la Plata, siglos XVIII–XX, ed. Mónica Quijada (Berlin: Iberoamericana, 2011), 149–307. 4. Frontier means a political, socioeconomic, and cultural dividing line, neither continuous nor permanent in time or space, between two communities. Among the bibliography on the concept of border/frontier/borderland, see David J. Weber and Jane M. Rausch, Where Cultures Meet: Frontiers in Latin American History (Wilmington, DE: SR Books, 1994); Francisco Solano and Salvador Bernabeu, comp., Estudios (nuevos y viejos) sobre la frontera (Madrid: CSIC, 1997); Thomas Wilson and Hastings Donnan, Border Identities (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Alejandro Grimson, ed., Fronteras, naciones e identidades (Buenos Aires: Ciccus, La Crujía, 2000); Pablo Vila, Crossing Borders, Reinforcing Borders (Austin: Austin University Press, 2000); Clara Inés García, ed., Fronteras: territorios y metáforas (Medellín: Hombre Nuevo Editores, 2003). 5. Recent studies on this topic include Martti Pärssinen and Ari Siiriänen, Andes orientales y Amazonía occidental. Ensayos entre la historia y la arqueología de Bolivia, Brasil y Perú (La Paz: CIMA, 2003); Vera Tyuleneva, Cuatro viajes a la Amazonía Boliviana (La Paz: FOBOMADE, 2010); Isabelle Combès and Vera Tyuleneva, ed., Paititi: Ensayos y documentos (Cochabamba: Instituto de Misionología, Itinerarios, 2011). 6. Enrique Finot, Historia de la conquista del Oriente boliviano (Buenos Aires: Librería Cervantes, 1939) and Hernando Sanabria, En busca de El Dorado (La Paz: Editorial Juventud, 1988 [1958]). 7. For the Augustinians and Franciscans in Apolobamba see Francis Ferrié, “Renaissance des Leco perdus. Etnohistoire du piémont bolivien d’Apolobamba à Larecaja” (PhD diss., Université Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense, 2014). 8. See Gabriel-René Moreno, Catálogo del Archivo de Moxos y Chiquitos (La Paz: Editorial Juventud, 1973 [1888]); Alcides Parejas, Historia de moxos y chiquitos a fines del siglo XVIII (La Paz: Instituto Boliviano de Cultura, 1976); José Chávez Suárez, Historia de Mojos (La Paz: Editorial Don Bosco, 1986 [1944]). 9. David Block, Mission Culture on the Upper Amazon: Native Tradition, Jesuit Enterprise, and Secular Policy in Moxos, 1660–1880 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994); Spanish translation: La cultura reduccional de los Llanos de Mojos (Sucre: Historia Boliviana, 1997). 10. Wilde, “Frontier Missions” takes up these contributions and incorporates the relevance of the visual elements (images, decorations), music, and dance in native cultures in the construction of what he calls “missionary memory.” 11. José Luis García Recio, Análisis de una sociedad de frontera: Santa Cruz de la Sierra en los siglos XVI y XVII (Seville: Excma. Diputación Provincial de Sevilla, 1998). 12. Roberto Tomichá, La primera evangelización en las reducciones de Chiquitos, Bolivia (1691–1767) (Cochabamba: Verbo Divino, Instituto de Misionología, 2002), and “Población indígena y diversidad cultural en Chiquitos (siglo XVIII). Algunas consideraciones,”

708   Borderlands of the Iberian World in Las Tierras Bajas de Bolivia: Miradas históricas y antropológicas, ed. Isabelle Combès and Diego Villar (Santa Cruz: El País, Museo de historia de la UAGRM, 2012), 239–281. 13. Cynthia Radding, Landscapes of Power and Identity: Comparative Histories in the Sonoran Desert and the Forests of Amazonia from Colony to Republic (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005). 14. Manuel Lucena Giraldo, ed., Ilustrados y bárbaros. Diario de la exploración de límites al Amazonas (1782) (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1991); This “frontier reformism” began with the Treaty of Madrid (1750), although annulled by Charles III of Spain in 1760; it continued with the Treaties of San Ildefonso (1777) and El Pardo (1778), the implementation of which regarding the establishment of a dividing line between the two empires in the Americas was charged to commissions established for the purpose. This subject had special relevance in the Marañón River basin. 15. Pilar García Jordán, Cruz y arado, fusiles y discursos: la construcción de los Orientes en el Perú y Bolivia (Lima: IFEA, IEP, 2001). 16. The interest in the Yuracarés region arose from the need to find a route for bringing troops to Mojos and the economic projects of Intendent Francisco de Viedma in the late ­eighteenth century. Gustavo Rodríguez Ostria, “ ‘Recordando la libertad de los bosques’: Yuracarés, misiones y Estado en la frontera cochabambina, 1768–1920,” Memoria Americana 5 (1995): 97–122; Carlos Pérez, “Yuracarés y su territorio en la mira(da) del otro durante el gobierno de Francisco de Viedma (1784–1809),” Anuario (1999): 331–350. 17. “Real Cédula sobre la fundación de un colegio de misioneros en Tarata,” Mercurio Peruano, 605 [405] (September-December 1794, published 1795]), tomo XII: 185–192. 18. This missionary policy responded to numerous reports by governors and intendants, and petitions by hacienda owners and merchants stating the need to open new routes and to found settlements for “reducing” and evangelizing the native peoples. The reasons adduced favored the transportation of troops to defend against Portuguese expansion and to facilitate the economic exploitation of natural resources and regional trade. Archivo General de Indias (AGI): Audiencia de Charcas, Eclesiástico, Estante 121, Cajón 2, Leg. 11; Cajón 1, Leg. 17; and Audiencia de Buenos Aires, Eclesiástico, Estante 125, Caja 7, Leg. 6. Some copies were consulted in the Archivo Histórico de Límites de Lima (AHL): LB-664, Caja 272; LB-706, Caja 274; LB-742, Caja 275; LB-791, Caja 276; LB-771, Caja 276; LB-551, Caja 268; VA-257, Caja 529. Documents used in García Jordán, Cruz y arado, 36–39. 19. Francisco Pifarré, “Historia de un pueblo,” in Los Guaraní-Chiriguano, vol. 2 (La Paz: CIPCA, 1989). 20. Daniel J. Santamaría, “Fronteras indígenas del Oriente Boliviano. La dominación colonial en Moxos y Chiquitos, 1675–1810,” Boletín Americanista 36 (1986): 197–228; “Población y economía en el Pedemonte andino de Bolivia: las misiones de Apolobamba, Mosetenes y Yurakares en el siglo XVIII,” Revista de Indias 50, no. 190 (1990): 741–766; “Comercio y tributo en Apolobamba. La crítica ilustrada a las órdenes misioneras,” Anuario de estudios americanos 62 (2005): 137–161; and “El rol de las alianzas entre misioneros e indígenas en la conquista de Apolobamba (siglos XVI–XVII),” Revista de Indias 66 (2006): 329–346. 21. Radding, Landscapes, 245–253, 298–306; Block, La cultura reduccional. 22. Janet Groff Greever, José Ballivián y el Oriente Boliviano (La Paz: Editoral el Siglo, 1987 [1954]). 23. García Jordán, Cruz y arado. 24. See José Perasso, Los guarayú. Guaraníes del oriente boliviano (Asunción: EP Ediciones, 1988); Hugo Pereira Soruco, Sociología de la historia del pueblo guarayo en la realidad

The Construction of a Frontier Space   709 actual (Santa Cruz: Mimeograph, 1998); Tania Melgar, Guarayos de Moxos: comunidad Naranjito (Trinidad: CIDEBENI, 2002). 25. Walter Hermosa Virreira, Los pueblos guarayos (La Paz: Editorial Universo, 1950); revised and expanded by the author as Los pueblos guarayos: una tribu del Oriente boliviano (La Paz: Academia Nacional de Ciencias de Bolivia, 1972). 26. Pilar García Jordán, “Yo soy libre y no indio: soy guarayo.” Para una historia de Guarayos, 1790–1948 (Lima: IFEA, PIEB, IRD, TEIAA, 2006), and Unas fotografías para dar a conocer al mundo la civilización de la república guaraya (Madrid: CSIC, 2009). 27. José Luis Roca, Economía y sociedad en el Oriente boliviano (siglos XVI–XX) (Santa Cruz: COTAS Ltd., 2001). 28. Valerie Fifer, “Bolivia’s Boundary with Brazil: A Century of Evolution,” The Geographical Journal 132 (1966): 360–372; Bolivia: Land, Location, and Politics since 1825 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1972); and “The Search of a Series of Small Successes: Frontiers of Settlement in Eastern Bolivia,” Journal of Latin American Studies 14 (1982): 402–432; Jean Claude Roux, La Bolivie orientale: Confis inexplorés, battues aux Indiens et économie de pillage (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2000). 29. J. Valerie Fifer, “The Empire Builders: A History of the Bolivian Rubber Boom and the Rise of the House of Suárez,” Journal of Latin American Studies 2 (1970): 113–146; Pilar Gamarra, Amazonía Norte de Bolivia, economía gomera, 1870–1940: Bases económicas de un poder regional, la Casa Suárez (La Paz: CNHB, Producciones CIMA Editores, 2007). 30. Fifer, Bolivia, and “The Empire Builders”; Groff Greever, José Ballivián; Roux, La Bolivie orientale; Roca, Economía y sociedad; Gamarra, Amazonía Norte. 31. Anna Guiteras Mombiola, De los llanos de Mojos a las cachuelas del Beni, 1842–1938: Conflictos locales, recursos naturales y participación indígena en la Amazonía boliviana (Cochabamba: Instituto de Misionología, Itinerarios, ABNB, 2012). 32. Gary Van Valen, Indigenous Agency in the Amazon: The Mojos in Liberal and Rubber-Boom Bolivia, 1842–1932 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2013). 33. Jürgen Riester, En busca de la Loma Santa (La Paz: Editorial Los Amigos de Libro, 1976); Zulema Lehm, La búsqueda de la Loma Santa y la Marcha indígena por el territorio y la dignidad (Santa Cruz: APCOB, CIDDEBENI, OXFAM América, 1999). 34. Frederic Vallvé, “The Impact of the Rubber Boom on the Indigenous Peoples of the Bolivian Lowlands (1850–1920)” (PhD diss., Georgetown University, 2010), and “La barraca gomera boliviana: etnicidad, mano de obra y aculturación (1880–1920),” Boletín Americanista 65 (2012): 61–83; Francis Ferrié, “El Tuichi o el deslizamiento de una frontera,” in Las Tierras Bajas de Bolivia: Miradas históricas y antropológicas, ed. Isabelle Combès and Diego Villar (Santa Cruz: El País, Museo de historia de la UAGRM, 2012), 107–119, and “Renaissance des Leco perdus”; The Tuichi River served as a border between the north, inhabited by the “Chunchos” or “savages,” and the south, occupied by the “Apolistas” or “Apoleños.” 35. Diego Villar, Lorena Córdoba and Isabelle Combès, La reducción imposible. Las expediciones del padre Negrete a los pacaguaras (1795–1800) (Cochabamba: Instituto de Misionología, 2009); Lorena Córdoba, “El boom cauchero en la Amazonía boliviana: encuentros y desencuentros con una sociedad indígena (1869–1912),” in Las Tierras Bajas de Bolivia: Miradas históricas y antropológicas, ed. Isabelle Combès and Diego Villar (Santa Cruz: El País, Museo de Historia de la UAGRM, 2012), 125–156, and “Misioneros-patrones e indígenas-siringueros: el caucho entre los chacobos del Beni (siglo XX),” Boletín Americanista 65 (2012): 85–106.

710   Borderlands of the Iberian World 36. Not considered here are the markedly anthropological studies on this group, including those by Allan R. Holmberg, Stig Rydén, Allyn MacLean Stearman, and Mario Califano. 37. Zulema Lehm, Bolivia: Estrategias, problemas y desafíos en la gestión del territorio indígena sirionó (Copenhagen: IWGIA, CIDDEBENI, 2004); Pilar García Jordán, Para una historia de los Sirionó (Cochabamba: Instituto de Misionología, Itinerarios, 2011); Emilia Varela Laguna, Ni son diez ni son selvícolas (La Paz: CIPCA, 2007). 38. On the late colonial period in the Mojos plains, particularly the frictions arising between the new colonial administrators and the native groups, see Block, La cultura reduccional; Antonio Carvalho Urey, Pedro Ignacio Muiba, el héroe (Trinidad: Ed. Serrano, 1975); José Luis Roca “Mojos en los albores de la Independencia boliviana (1810–1811),” Historia y Cultura XXI–XXII (1992): 187–244, and “Insurrección de los indios de Mojos,” Revista Ciencia y Cultura 10, no. 23 (2009): 219–257. 39. Manuel Limpias Saucedo, Los gobernadores de Mojos (Trinidad: Prefectura del Beni, 2005 [1942]), 3–4. The original document is in Archivo Histórico de La Paz (ALP), Sociedad Geográfica de La Paz (SGL), 1842, 3/30. 40. Groff Greever, José Ballivián; Block, La cultura reduccional; Zulema Lehm, “Diagnóstico de la situación actual de los indígenas de Trinidad y áreas cercanas,” in Simposio sobre las misiones jesuitas en Bolivia, ed. Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores y Culto (La Paz: Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores y Culto, 1987), 105–203, and La búsqueda de la Loma Santa. 41. Guiteras Mombiola, De los llanos de Mojos, 72–75. 42. Jonathan D. Hill, ed., History, Power and Identity: Ethnogenesis in the Americas, 1492–1992 (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1996), and “History, Power, and Identity: Amazonian Perspectives,” Acta Historica Universitatis Klaipedensis XIX, Studia Anthropologica III (2009): 25–47 argues that the concept of ethnogenesis is a useful analytical tool that takes into account cultural and political struggles by people under colonial rule and, in a general context of radical change, allow for the rise of lasting identities; Zulema Lehm, Matrimonios interétnicos: Reproducción de los grupos étnicos y relaciones de género en los Llanos de Mojos (La Paz: PIEB, 2002), 10, 158, 247. 43. Vallvé, “The Impact of the Rubber Boom,” 337–349, 378–439; Van Valen, Indigenous Agency, 28–88. 44. Barragán, Indios, mujeres y ciudadanos; Radding, Landscapes, 325–339; Marta Irurozqui, “Sobre el tributo y otros atributos ciudadanos. Sufragio censitario, fiscalidad y comunidades indígenas en Bolivia, 1825–1839,” Bicentenario: Revista de Historia y de Ciencias Sociales 6 (2006): 35–66. 45. Irurozqui, A bala, piedra y palo; La mirada esquiva; and “El espejismo.” 46. Articles 3, 4, and 5 in Limpias Saucedo, Los gobernadores, 4. See also the Instrucción of September 21, 1842 in ALP, SGL, 1842, 3/33. 47. See the orders of April 20, 1847 and of December 4, 1868 in Limpias Saucedo, Los gobernadores, 43–46, 161–162, and Providencias de policía y Gobierno, culto e instrucción. San Ignacio, January 12; San Pedro, February 18; San Ramón, February 23; Magdalena, February 28; Huacaraje, March 3; Baures, March 4; Carmen, March 8; San Joaquín, March 22; Loreto, April 16; and Exaltación, August 4, 1856, in Private Library of Vázquez Machicado (BVM), unsigned. 48. Elecciones de la Provincia de Mojos. Años 1825, 28, 32 y 37, in Archivo del Museo de Historia de Santa Cruz (MHSC), Provincias, Municipios y Cantones, serie Mojos (PMC-MJ), caja 0/04–06, 1–27.

The Construction of a Frontier Space   711 49. Escrutinios de votos emitidos. Baures, April 22, 1849; Reyes, May 29, 1849; Magdalena, San Joaquín, Santa Ana, June 10, 1849, unsigned, in Archivo y Biblioteca Nacional de Bolivia (ABNB), Ministerio del Interior (MI), Prefectura del Beni (PB), 130/25. 50. Lista de individuos calificados que tienen derecho a sufragar en esta capital. Trinidad, March 29, 1857; Escrutinio general de los votos emitidos por los sufragantes para munícipes de los cantones de Carmen, Loreto, Santa Ana, San Joaquín y Trinidad. March 16–28, 1860, in Archivo de la Casa de la Cultura del Beni (ACCB), unsigned. 51. Informe del Concejo Municipal del Departamento. Trinidad, February 3, 1850; March 6, 1850, unsigned, in ABNB, MI/PB, 134/36. 52. Block, La cultura reduccional, 79, 136–137, 144–154, 181, 205, 230; Van Valen, Indigenous Agency, 31–32, 44, 47–52, 95–96. Akira Saito, “Creation of Indian Republics in Spanish South America,” Bulletin of the National Museum of Ethnology 31 (2007): 443–477, and “Guerra y evangelización en las misiones jesuíticas de Moxos,” Boletín Americanista 70 (2015): 35–56 argues that under Jesuit rule there was no hierarchical order among these two groups; rather they referred to distinct groups that shared a single lineage and had agreed to be reduced to the missions, each group identified by its own name, or to “infidels” who had been captured and brought to the missions, where they became “domestics” and were taught the skills needed to work as the Jesuits’ assistants. These skills allowed them to gain importance within each community, and after the expulsion of the Jesuits, to be described in Spanish reports as “nobles” or a “native” elite. In this way, a hierarchical relationship was established in the heart of the community. 53. Guiteras Mombiola, De los llanos de Mojos, 64–65, 168–171. 54. Irurozqui, A bala, piedra y palo, 58–59, 145. 55. Radding, Landscapes, 333–334. 56. See the Instrucción of August 8, 1842, in ALP, SGL, 1842, 3/31. 57. Limpias Saucedo, Los gobernadores, 132–133, 132–136, 148. 58. Van Valen, Indigenous Agency, 51–52. 59. Characterizations of both men are found in Van Valen, Indigenous Agency, 31, 44, 95–96. 60. The regulations assert that “the former Cabildos should remain in place after any needed reforms, both because these institutions are the necessary cogs in the industrious machinery for the community system in the areas of economy, agriculture, animal husbandry, and architecture, and because in the family patriarchal governmental system, under the term parcialidad, they are the beacon and point of departure for public law and order.” Limpias Saucedo, Los gobernadores, 134–136, 148. 61. See the census rolls for the settlements of Baures and Exaltación in ABNB, Tribunal Nacional de Cuentas-Revisitas (TNC-Rv), Beni 2, 1862; Magdalena 8, 1867; Sécure 12, 1867; Cercado, Magdalena y Sécure 6, 1874. 62. Lardner Gibbon, Exploration of the Valley of the Amazon, Made under Direction of the Navy Department, vol. 2 (Washington, DC: R. Armstrong Public Printer, 1854), 246. 63. The land tenure files examined are found in the Instituto Nacional de Colonización fondo (IC) of the ABNB and in the lists of documents from the archives of the prefecture of Beni, held by the ACCB and remain uncatalogued. 64. “Ley de 24 de noviembre de 1883,” in República de Bolivia, Anuario de Leyes y Supremas Disposiciones de 1883 (La Paz: Imprenta de El Comercio, 1884), 285–286. 65. Guiteras Mombiola, De los llanos de Mojos, 166–185, 328–331 presents a detailed account of the files and lists of documents consulted with precise archival citations.

712   Borderlands of the Iberian World 66. Guiteras Mombiola, De los llanos de Mojos, 217–248. 67. Lehm, “Diagnóstico,” 205–210. 68. See Catastros rústicos y resúmenes de títulos de propiedad, in ABNB, Tribunal Nacional de Cuentas-Catastros (TNC-Ctro) Ben1b 1901; Ben2d 1902; Ben1º 1914; Ben4 1915; and Catastros agropecuarios, for 1907, 1920, 1927, 1936, 1937 and 1939, in ACCB, unsigned. 69. Elecciones a munícipes en Magdalena. Magdalena, December 13, 1885; January 2–12, 1886, 47, 74–80 in ABNB, MI/PB, 228/59. 70. Several groups in Bolivia have been termed Guarayos; the group most widely given that name, the one under discussion, traditionally occupied the banks of the San Miguel and Sapocós rivers. It came to the region from the east in a migratory process that some ­attribute to the search for the so-called Land without Evil. Many Guarayos currently live in the municipios of Ascensión de Guarayos and Urubichá in the province of Guarayos, in accordance with the law of March 6, 1990; census estimates from 1998 list approximately 9,520 individuals in the group. José Teijeiro et al., Atlas étnico de investigaciones antropológicas “Amazonía boliviana” (La Paz: Dirección Nacional de Arqueología y Antropología, 2001), 104. 7 1. According to the reports by Padre Francisco Lacueva, succinctly gathered by Alcides d’Orbigny, Viaje a la América Meridional, vol. 3 (La Paz: IFEA, Plural Editores, 2002), 1352; expanded upon by José Cors, “Apuntes sobre Guarayos,” Archivo Comisaría Franciscana de Bolivia 3, no. 36 (1911): 836–837, and collected by José Cardús, Las misiones franciscanas entre los infieles de Bolivia (Barcelona: Librería de la Inmaculada Concepción, 1886), 94. The Guarayos feared that the arrival in the region of an expedition mounted by the governor of Mojos, Francisco Javier Velasco—aimed at studying the navigability of the San Miguel River to open a waterway between the provinces of Mojos and Chiquitos—might lead to the capture of members of their group. 72. Cardús, Las misiones franciscanas, 97–100. 73. Report sent by Fray Francisco Lacueva to the bishop elect of Santa Cruz, Manuel Angel del Prado (Yaguarú, May 24, 1845), in Archivo Arquidiocesano, Santa Cruz de la Sierra (AASC). 74. In that year, an expedition led by Viudez with the assistance of the settlers of Ascensión, Ubaimini and Yaguarú, achieved “the complete reunification of all Guarayos, and the consequence was their final reducción and conversion.” Cardús, Las misiones franciscanas, 115. 75. According to Viudez, neither settlement, Santa Cruz or Trinidad, was suitable for implementing the project, since they lacked enough land adequate for agriculture and livestock, a fact that prevented the fully sedentary settlement of the population and threatened its economic viability. Santa Cruz also lacked the flat land needed to build a concentrated settlement for housing all its inhabitants. Manuel Viudez, “Guarayos. Descripción de sus habitantes, tierras, costumbres, religión,” in Guía General, ed. E. Rück (Sucre: Impresora Boliviana, 1865), XX. The full Viudez text is found on pages xiv–xxxiv. 76. Cors, “Noticias de Guarayos,” in Perasso, Los guarayú, 56. 77. Friars Cors and Viudez changed reducción strategies, and Cors systematized their mission policy in his “regulations for the better governance of these Guarayo Missions,” dated Yaguarú, September 28, 1854, and sent with minor additions made in 1856, 1857, 1860, and 1861 by the comisario prefecto de misiones, Fray Querubín Francescangeli (Tarata, April 11, 1861) to the general minister of the Franciscan Order, Ireneo Piani. General Archive of the Order of Friars Minor (AGFM), Bolivia, Collegia, M/121, 1f. anv. The full text is on this unnumbered folio, +836 anv. –838 rev. 78. Cardús, Las misiones franciscanas, 69.

The Construction of a Frontier Space   713 79. The first set of regulations—the one signed by President José Ballivián (February 22, 1845) and never implemented—would have maintained the role the missions played in the colonial period. The regulations proposed by Fray Alejandro Ercole were approved by the Constituent Assembly (September 9, 1871) and signed by Ballivián the following day. See the law and the governmental resolution referring to it in Anuario, 1872: 82–85. The regulations, collected in Alejandro Ercole, Reglamento de misiones de infieles en el territorio de Bolivia (Sucre: Impresa de Pedro España, 1871), 19–24. For a study of the changes introduced into these regulations, see Pilar García Jordán, “Estado boliviano, misiones católicas e indígenas amazónicos: una reflexión sobre los reglamentos misioneros y la secularización en la prefectura de Guarayos (1871–1939),” in Actas del XI Congreso Internacional de AHILA, t. V.I, ed. J.R.  Fisher (Liverpool: AHILA, Instituto Estudios Latinoamericanos, Universidad Liverpool 1998), 248–265. These regulations remained in force until the Liberal Party approved a new set after their access to power (1901); redrafted again in 1905, this legislation remained in force until 1937, when it was replaced by another approved by the military government of Germán Busch; It is our view that after ­independence, Bolivia and much of Latin America lacked an equivalence between state and nation. A state arises, but there are a variety of projects for the nation (a political project, an economic project, a social project, and so on). Only after the mid-nineteenth century, in the context of changes in their economies and societies and in the international setting, that the groups that had been contending for power saw a need to reach an agreement that would allow them to join the international economy and create the political stability needed to introduce the changes required. That is when the project of the nation-state formed in Latin America under the direction of social groups that became hegemonic. In the case of Bolivia, this process did not begin until 1880. 80. Ercole, Reglamento, 4–6. Italics added. 81. Herbert  S.  Klein, Bolivia: The Evolution of a Multi-Ethnic Society, second edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 149–166; and Marta Irurozqui, La armonía de las desigualdades. Élites y conflictos de poder en Bolivia, 1880–1920 (Cuzco: CSIC, CERA, 1994), 27–102 argue that the Bolivian nation-state was formed at the beginning of the 1880s, with the rise to power of the conservative oligarchy, made up primarily of mining businessmen, under whose rule the economy and politics of Bolivia were progressively modernized. 82. García Jordán, Yo soy libre y no indio, 254, 256–262. 83. The historiography shows that one of the fundamental obstacles to consolidating the mission project was that after a typically short opening stage of reducción, the pressure of landowners and merchants to grab land and access indigenous labor unleashed a serious conflict with the missionaries. After the initial “conquest” phase, the land owners and merchants, often in collusion with the department authorities, pressed for the abolition of the mission system and the transformation of missions into “secularized” parishes, which meant that the missionaries disappeared as mediators, giving agricultural entrepreneurs and merchants direct access to the indigenous people and thus letting them set the conditions for recruiting Indians as farm hands, developing trade, and acquiring mission land. This “secularizing” pressure was first felt in Guarayos in the 1880s and it increased progressively thereafter. 84. The principal ideologist of the república guaraya was Fray Bernardino J. Pesciotti. García Jordán, Yo soy libre y no indio, 367–403. 85. This faith was long compatible with the survival of a few elements of the traditional worldview, the most important of which was the origin myth about Tamoi, the Grandfather.

714   Borderlands of the Iberian World 86. During the Chaco War, the Bolivian government, acting through its regional military command, the Comandancia de Etapas, engineered a significant increase in the number of Guarayo laborers working in agriculture, thus contributing to food production for the troops and for the population of Santa Cruz in general. After the end of the military conflict the missionaries rejected numerous requests for labor contracts, asserting that they would undermine the settlements’ survival. García Jordán, Yo soy libre y no indio, 236–240. 87. The mission prefect of Guarayos, Alfredo Hoeller, countered with the argument that the sharp rise in grain prices in the region had led to an expansion of hacienda production generating a significant increase in demand for farm laborers, whom the hacienda owners attempted to obtain from Guarayo settlements. Alfredo Hoeller, Informe anual que presenta al Supremo Gobierno el Prefecto de las misiones de Guarayos P.—. O.F.M. (Ascensión: Tipología Franciscana, 1936), 4. 88. Decrees in Anuario Administrativo de 1938 (La Paz: Litografías e Imprentas Unidas, 1938), 941–942, and Hermosa Virreira, Los pueblos guarayos, 160–166. 89. The ceremonial hand-over of property rights to mission assets carried out in August, 1939 normally took place in the parish rectory of each town. The documents recording these events were signed by the national delegate, Colonel R. Moreno Suárez; the manager of the Comptroller General’s office in Guarayos, Aurelio Vaca Ribera; the person named in the document as the outgoing administrator of the assets (el conversor); and the incoming administrator, a local civil servant. 90. Informe de las Misiones de Guarayos, dated La Paz, November 30, 1945, in Archivo Misional de Guarayos (now located in the Archivo Histórico de la Provincia Misionera de San Antonio de Charcas APHMAB). Uncatalogued text, 32. The quotation is found on p. 3. 91. These changes were analyzed by Pilar García Jordán, El Estado propone, los carai disponen y los guarayos devienen ciudadanos. El impacto de la secularización en Guarayos, 1939–1953 (Cochabamba: ILAM, Itinerarios, 2015). 92. This is more apparent when considering that the government sent inspectors from the Ministry of Colonization and delegates from the Comptroller General’s office to the region to report on repeated complaints by intellectuals, politicians, and even some major landowners about the abuses, exploitation, and larcenies carried out against the Guarayos by these administrators. 93. Decree, a copy of which is found in Archivo de San José de Tarata, Fondo Misional de Guarayos (now part of APHMAB) Libro Azul, 2, printed in García Jordán, Yo soy libre y no indio, 589–590. 94. There is no documentary reference to mobilization of Guarayos for gaining access to either political or civil citizenship. 95. The demographic census of 1950 counts the total population in Guarayo settlements as 5,761 inhabitants, including 2,591 in the canton of Padre Carvallo (Yaguarú and Urubichá) and 3,169 in the canton of Añez (Ascensión, San Pablo, Yotaú). No data are included from the cantons of Saucedo or El Puente. Censo Demográfico 1950 (La Paz: Ministerio de Hacienda y Estadística, Dirección General de Estadística y Censos, Editorial Argote, 1950), 38. 96. Antonio Jordán Sevilla, “El idioma guaraní en Bolivia,” Boletín de la Sociedad de Estudios Históricos y Geográficos 33–34 (1951): 51.

The Construction of a Frontier Space   715 97. The issuance of state identity cards (“carnetización”) to lowland indigenous people was one of the aims of the Law of Popular Participation enacted in April 1994 under President Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada. Ana María Lema, De la huella al impacto: la participación popular en municipios con población indígena (Urubichá, Gutiérrez, Villa Montes) (La Paz: Programa de Investigación Estratégica en Bolivia, 2001) studied the impact of this measure in three municipios with indigenous population (Urubichá and Gutiérrez in the department of Santa Cruz and Villa Montes in the department of Tarija).

Bibliography Barragán, Rossana. Indios, mujeres y ciudadanos. Legislación y ejercicio de la ciudadanía en Bolivia (siglo XIX). La Paz: Fundación Diálogo, Embajada del Reino de Dinamarca en Bolivia, 1999. Block, David. La cultura reduccional de los Llanos de Mojos. Sucre: Historia Boliviana, 1997. Cardús, José. Las misiones franciscanas entre los infieles de Bolivia. Barcelona: Librería de la Inmaculada Concepción, 1886. Ercole, Alejandro. Reglamento de misiones de infieles en el territorio de Bolivia. Sucre: Impresa de Pedro España, 1871. Ferrié, Francis. “Renaissance des Leco perdus. Etnohistoire du piémont bolivien d’Apolobamba à Larecaja.” PhD diss., Université Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense, 2014. Fifer, Valerie. “The Empire Builders. A History of the Bolivian Rubber Boom and the Rise of the House of Suarez.” Journal of Latin American Studies 2 (1970): 113–146. Fifer, Valerie. Bolivia: Land, Location, and Politics since 1825. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1972. Gamarra, Pilar. Amazonía Norte de Bolivia. Economía Gomera, 1870–1940. Bases económicas de un poder regional: la Casa Suárez. La Paz: CNHB, Producciones CIMA Editores, 2007. García Jordán, Pilar. Cruz y arado, fusiles y discursos. La construcción de los Orientes en el Perú y Bolivia. Lima: IFEA, IEP, 2001. García Jordán, Pilar. “Yo soy libre y no indio: soy guarayo.” Para una historia de Guarayos, 1790–1948. Lima: IFEA, Programa de Investigación Estratégica en Bolivia, Institut de  recherche pour le développement, Taller de Estudios e Investigaciones AndinoAmazónicas, 2006. Groff Greever, Janet. José Ballivián y el Oriente Boliviano. La Paz: Editorial el Siglo, 1987 [1954]. Guiteras Mombiola, Anna. De los llanos de Mojos a las cachuelas del Beni, 1842–1938. Conflictos locales, recursos naturales y participación indígena en la Amazonía boliviana. Cochabamba: Instituto de Misionología, Itinerarios, ABNB, 2012. Hermosa Virreira, Walter. Los Pueblos Guarayos. La Paz: Ed. Universo, 1950. Irurozqui, Marta. A bala, piedra y palo. La construcción de la ciudadanía política en Bolivia, 1826–1952. Seville: Diputación de Sevilla, 2000. Irurozqui, Marta, ed. La mirada esquiva. Reflexiones históricas sobre la interacción del Estado y la ciudadanía en los Andes (Bolivia, Ecuador y Perú, siglo XIX.) Madrid: CSIC, 2005. Irurozqui, Marta. “El espejismo de la exclusión. Reflexiones conceptuales acerca de la ­ciudadanía y el sufragio censitario a partir del caso boliviano.” Ayer 70 (2008): 57–92. Lehm, Zulema. La búsqueda de la Loma Santa y la Marcha indígena por el territorio y la dignidad. Santa Cruz de la Sierra: APCOB, CIDDEBENI, OXFAM América, 1999.

716   Borderlands of the Iberian World Limpias Saucedo, Manuel. Los gobernadores de Mojos. Trinidad: Prefectura del Beni, 2005 [1942]. Perasso, José. Los guarayú. Guaraníes del oriente boliviano. Asunción: EP Ediciones, 1988. Radding, Cynthia. Landscapes of Power and Identity: Comparative Histories in the Sonoran Desert and the Forests of Amazonia from Colony to Republic. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005. Roca, José Luis. Economía y sociedad en el Oriente boliviano (siglos XVI–XX). Santa Cruz: COTAS, Ltda., 2001. Roux, Jean Claude. La Bolivie orientale. Confis inexplorés, battues aux Indiens et économie de pillage. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2000. Teijeiro, José, Teófilo Laime, Sotero Ajacopa, and Freddy Santalla. Atlas étnico de investigaciones antropológicas “Amazonía boliviana.” La Paz: Dirección Nacional de Arqueología y Antropología, 2001. Vallvé, Frederic. “The Impact of the Rubber boom on the Indigenous Peoples of the Bolivian Lowlands (1850–1920).” PhD diss., Georgetown University, 2010. Van Valen, Gary. Indigenous Agency in the Amazon. The Mojos in Liberal and Rubber-Boom Bolivia, 1842–1932. Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 2013. Wilde, Guillermo. “Frontier Missions in South America: Impositions, Adaptations, and Appropriations,” in The Oxford Handbook of Borderlands of the Iberian World, edited by Danna  A.  Levin Rojo and Cynthia Radding, 545–567. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019.

chapter 29

The Spa n ish Empir e’s Sou ther nmost Fron tiers From Arauco to the Strait of Magellan Elizabeth Montanez-Sanabria and María Ximena Urbina Carrasco

The Uniqueness of the Spanish Southernmost Frontier The Spanish conquest and occupation of the territory known today as Chile started with the advance toward the Inca Empire’s southern frontier. When taking possession of new lands on behalf of the Spanish Crown, conquerors founded cities, which became centers of power. From there, they explored the margins of new provinces to learn about distant peoples and lands and to establish physical presence on the borders. The Spanish expansion based on centers and peripheries—peripheries that later became centers of new peripheries—was analyzed by Francisco Morales Padrón, who wrote about “nucleus and lines of penetration.”1 The model put forward by this Canary Island historian fits the Chilean frontier well. The southernmost terrestrial and maritime frontiers of Spanish South America made for a unique borderland because they remained contested throughout the three centuries of formal imperial dominion. Three successive frontiers extending from the Arauco to the Strait of Magellan and the Tierra del Fuego constituted a series of peripheral settlements and forts that became points of contention involving Spanish expeditionaries and settlers, autonomous indigenous groups, rival European powers, and privateers. Many of the places identified in the colonial sources became the subjects of romantic

718   Borderlands of the Iberian World literature and legend. Yet, their very notoriety emerged from historical processes of ­settlement and dispersal, shifting alliances, commercial transactions, enslavement, territorial displacement, and open warfare. The narrative of these processes reveals at once the tenuous character of Spanish hegemony in these vast borderlands and the strength of native cultural resilience. Historiography has highlighted the singularity of the Chilean case and acknowledged it as the Spanish American frontier par excellence.2 During its colonial development people spoke about a “land of peace” and a “land of war,” whose limit was the Bío Bío River.3 In a similar fashion, Concepción and its surroundings were known as “The Frontier” (La Frontera) such that the governor of Concepción held a military title and led defensive and offensive actions toward the south. In 1535, when Diego de Almagro led his troops to the Inca Empire’s southern frontier, where he took possession of the lands of Chile on behalf of the Spanish king, fifteen years had passed since Ferdinand Magellan’s expedition to the strait that takes his name. The longitudinal extension of the new continent was known, except for the Tierra del Fuego, land that Antonio Pigaffeta (1491–1531) mapped for the first time by 1520, but it was uncertain whether this land was a new continent or an island. For this reason, when Pedro de Valdivia founded the first city, Santiago de Chile, in 1541, he envisioned further expansion toward the south, taking into account the southernmost reference from Pigaffeta’s map. In 1544 the emperor Charles V granted Pedro de Valdivia’s jurisdiction in an ill-defined territory extending to the Strait of Magellan.4 Under Pedro de Valdivia’s patronage, Francisco de Ulloa explored the strait in 1552, but not for geopolitical reasons to learn about unexplored territories or discover a potential Terra Australis Incógnita. Instead, the main goal of this expedition was to find gold. The craving for gold was behind Spanish expeditions in the region. In fact, Diego de Almagro and Pedro de Valdivia’s excursions were based on news they received from Peruvian Indians. In the explorers’ view, Santiago de Chile was the entrance to a territory rich in gold and from this city expeditions of conquest toward southern Chile were ­organized. However, these lands were populated by Mapuches, or Araucanos according to Spanish colonial documents, who successfully resisted Inca attempts of conquering them a century before. Despite the fact that these lands were colder and more humid than those in central Chile and Peru, and consequently less suitable for agriculture, the Spanish desire for gold motivated the conquest of southern peoples in a territory full of cold forests, rivers, and lakes. Their determination to find gold helps to explain the unequal proportion of cities in northern and central Chile—La Serena, Santiago, and Concepción—in comparison to the south, where the Spanish founded nine cities in nine hundred kilometers—Cañete, Arauco, Santa Cruz de Coya, San Andrés de Los Infantes (Angol), La Imperial, Villarrica, Valdivia, Osorno, and Castro. From these latter cities, Spaniards attempted to control the Mapuches and their southern neighbors, the Huilliches, by using the encomienda system. With exception of Chiloé Island, however, the Spanish could never fully subjugate them. In December 1598, a coalition of natives from Bío Bío to Chacao Canal, mostly Mapuches and Huilliches, attacked the Spanish and expelled them to northern Bío Bío

The Spanish Empire’s Southernmost Frontiers   719 River, where the city of Concepción was located. From that event to the end of the colonial period, the Spanish Crown could never recover the lost territory. In fact, the only significant Spanish presence was limited to a few fortifications and missions in the southern side of Bío Bío, a territory known as Arauco. The Spanish reversal as a result of the Mapuche–Huilliche coalition stands as one of the most significant events in Chilean colonial history. Despite Spanish military efforts to recover Arauco, the Chilean territory was reduced to half its initial size and natives kept their independence, even though Indian slavery was allowed.5 This exceptional situation led the famous Jesuit Diego de Rosales to name Chile as Flandes Indiano.6 Furthermore, during the whole colonial period the Crown maintained a defensive system controlled by Spanish soldiers and officials, who were funded thanks to the royal treasury of Potosi.7 This was known as “the Frontier Army,” whose main purpose was to restrain the “Arauco State.” In the vast territory from Concepción to the Strait of Magellan—with exception of the province of Chiloé—Spain only had nominal presence but not real control, as it faced both internal and external enemies, as Gabriel Guarda has shown.8 For the capital, Santiago, the priority was to protect the city and surroundings by restraining Araucanos in the line of Bío Bío. However, the Chilean frontier was not limited to Arauco. Between Concepción and the Strait of Magellan there were three frontiers during the colonial period. In other words, although the Spanish monarchy claimed these territories as part of its jurisdiction, these were spaces where native peoples interacted outside of Spanish control, in ways that compare with the indigenous trade patterns in Central America analyzed by Juan Carlos Solórzano and Alejandra Boza.9

Arauco: La Frontera Conceptions of that time considered that the North started in the territory that nowadays is the South. Following this understanding, La Frontera, or Arauco, was the first one. This was the most important Chilean frontier because it ensured the stability of the kingdom’s capital. In fact, most of the Spanish population, as well as the colony’s political and economic institutions, were established in Santiago. Nineteenth- and twentiethcentury historiography, following centralist views from Santiago’s perspective, had called “The Frontier” the territory between Concepción and Chiloé, where the siete ciudades de arriba (seven upper cities) lay destroyed. Conversely, traditional historiography completely overlooked the territory between Chiloé and the southern end. It is possible to distinguish two areas within the territory between Concepción and Chiloé. One around Concepción was considered the most important for securing the kingdom. The second one, south of Concepción, constituted a territory of native peoples, including Huilliches, Juncos, and Chauracaguines, who spoke Mapudungun and were part of the Mapuche culture. Nevertheless, Mapuche people did not consider them as their equals, nor their northern neighbors, the Picunches. As a consequence, the Spaniards

720   Borderlands of the Iberian World thought they were different peoples.10 In fact, the border between Araucanos and other peoples, such as Juncos and Osornos, was the Toltén River, approximately 270 kilometers south of the Bío Bío River. This territory between Bío Bío and Toltén River was known as La Frontera among Spaniards in Chile. It was precisely in Toltén where most of the battles between Araucanos and Spaniards took place during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. As the historian Sergio Villalobos asserted, the Arauco War was not permanent during the colonial period.11 Bellicose relations coexisted with non-bellicose ones from both sides, although the nature of these relations depended completely on whether Araucanos accepted to keep them or not. The immediate response from Spanish authorities in Chile to the 1598 Indian rebellion, known as “disaster of Curalaba,” was to punish Indian enemies and recover the “seven upper cities.” They expected to restore king’s authority and prevent native rebels from devastating the kingdom. To achieve their goals, the Spaniards led several military campaigns that accomplished little and exhausted both sides. As open war failed, Spaniards employed other strategies, including the establishment of forts and Jesuit missions. However, this tactic did not assure a stable Spanish presence in the area as those military and religious settlements were many times destroyed and then restored. Despite Spanish attempts to colonize the region, the Arauco frontier remained as a space of interaction, or border relations, since the mid-seventeenth century.12 In 1607, the Society of Jesus achieved authorization to evangelize the natives by establishing missions in southern Bío Bío River.13 By employing evangelization, the colonial state sought to subjugate Indian rebels. Although the use of peaceful means to “civilize” frontier peoples has become a common practice since the reign of Philip III, Spaniards continued using military strategies.14 Araucanos prevented Spaniards from colonizing them, however, and from expanding their territory further south (Figure 29.1). In spite of this tense situation, there was some communication between Mapuches and the Spanish and Creole settlers, especially when the Indians sensed that they could benefit from that interaction.15 This was the case of commerce with itinerant merchants, trade fairs, and ritual exchanges of captives known as parliaments, and negotiations with capitanes amigos.16 These peaceful encounters show how this frontier became a space of interaction where Spaniards and Araucanos adapted to one another, although there were some episodes in which natives revolted and broke this fragile peace.17 Furthermore, La Frontera’s forts were spaces of coexistence, although during most of the seventeenth century these were the places from which Spaniards conducted malocas, or expeditions to kill, harm, or enslave Indians, a legal practice until 1680. This might explain why La Frontera’s forts were the target of Araucanos’ malones, or fast surprise attacks. Forts had a key role in the region as their presence justified the arrival of real situado, or royal revenue from the viceroyalty of Peru to finance the Spanish army in Chile, including the payment of soldiers’ salaries. Even in the face of intermittent hostilities, moreover, the forts fostered biological and cultural mestizaje.18 By mid-eighteenth century, Spanish authorities tried to integrate the region between Concepción and Valdivia—the latter city refounded in 1645—by relocating Araucanos and Pehuenches in Indians towns, a practice known as reducción. Although the goal

The Spanish Empire’s Southernmost Frontiers   721

Figure 29.1.  “Tabula Geographica Regni Chile.” Map of the kingdom of Chile drawn by Jesuit Alonso de Ovalle in 1646. This map represents populations, geography, and nature of the southernmost continent’s frontier. Courtesy of the Biblioteca Nacional de Chile.

behind this strategy was to control the territory and the native inhabitants, this policy failed as the Indians violently resisted and ended any attempt at control.19 It was only in the second half of the nineteenth century that La Frontera opened to free transit to non-Araucanos and formal institutions, when the Chilean state definitively penetrated the territory with military campaigns.20

The Other Frontier: La Frontera de Arriba According to colonial Spanish classifications the Frontier, or Arauco, was the entrance to another territory, one populated by Osornos and Juncos. This territory, south of the Toltén River, faces Chiloé Island, an insular, poor, isolated province that played a pivotal role in protecting this frontier.21 The island’s natives, known as Huilliche or Veliche, were under Spanish colonial domination; they did not join the 1598 rebellion, nor did

722   Borderlands of the Iberian World they destroy Santiago de Castro, the only city in Chiloé founded in 1567.22 In fact, when Valdivia’s population escaped the rebellion by boat, fleeing to the north, the island’s inhabitants assisted the Osornos.23 Governor Alonso de Ribera, ordered people to resettle in Chiloé in order to establish two forts, San Antonio de Ribera de Caremalpu and San Miguel de Calbuco, to serve as a bulwark against southern enemies and prevent any possible attack on the island. Surviving vecinos (Hispanic colonial settlers) of Osorno, along with local Indians and Spaniards from Chiloé, not only restrained Junco and Huilliche natives but also conducted malocas and took prisoners in the same way that was customary in Arauco.24 Soldiers were not the only ones who penetrated the Frontera de Arriba. Vecinos themselves did it to protect their province and achieve merits to support their later requests for benefits, including encomiendas.25 In this regard, this frontier’s dynamic is similar to those established at the early stages of Spanish colonization.26 The presence of the “Arauco State” defined the military character of Chile. While the northern frontier of Arauco faced the city of Concepción, the southern Frontera de de Arriba faced Chiloé. The protection of the northern frontier was fundamental to secure Santiago, and for that reason most resources and efforts were destined to defend it. The protection of the southern frontier, in contrast, was the sole responsibility of Chiloé’s Spaniards and Creoles and their soldiers. This front was known as “the other fire,” “up third” or the “Carelmapu’s frontier.” While the 1598–1603 Indian rebellion took place, the Dutch Simon de Cordes led an expedition to southern Chile. In 1600, De Cordes reached Chiloé and took Santiago de Castro. The Corregidor of Castro faced the enemies and expelled them, despite the poor defense of the city and the lack of reinforcements.27 A second Dutch expedition arrived in Chile in 1643 with the goal of founding a settlement and establishing commerce with the natives. This was the period in which the Dutch had established settlements in New Amsterdam to trade in furs with indigenous peoples, in Curaçao to distribute European goods in the Caribbean and along part of the Brazilian coast to cultivate sugar. To establish a position in the South Pacific was strategic from Dutch perspective. This explains why the expedition led by Hendrick Brouwer had settled in former Valdivia, after attacking Carelmapu and burning Castro. A few months later, the situation in Valdivia became unsustainable for the Dutch occupiers as they lacked strong support from their Indian allies; in a council held in mid-October 1643, they decided to return to Brazil.28 As a result of this expedition, the viceroyalty of Peru decided reestablish the city of Valdivia in 1645 but now as a plaza fuerte, or garrison, which remained the only Spanish fort in the region during the colonial period.29 This garrison, a fluvial port on the coast, was the watchtower against the external enemy. Because of this important role, the fort kept good relations with native groups inland, and even acquired lands from local caciques. Beginning in the decade of 1780s, Franciscan friars succeeded in founding some forts that became spaces of inter-ethnic interaction.30 Valdivia followed the same strategies of rapprochements that Arauco had with Mapuches: agreements and alliances with caciques, establishment of commerce, capitanes amigos, and parliaments. By doing so, Spaniards hoped to connect the south with Concepción.31

The Spanish Empire’s Southernmost Frontiers   723 Nevertheless, important differences emerged among the three borderland areas of southern Chile. While Arauco’s northern frontier was defined, the southern one remained unclear at that time. It was believed to be at any point near Valdivia. By way of contrast, the Frontera de Arriba had its boundaries clearly defined: Valdivia at the north, Chiloé’s forts at the south. This determined the relation of Spaniards with local native groups, who never attacked Iberian settlements after the reestablishment of Valdivia. Looking even further south, the territories between Chiloé and the Strait of Magellan became a mobile frontier. By mid-eighteenth century, Spanish colonists in Valdivia and Chiloé conceived strategies to establish communications between them and penetrate the intervening territory. However, their tactics differed enormously. While the vecinos of Valdivia sought to establish a road to connect with Chiloé based on “peace and friendship” with native inhabitants, those in Chiloé sought to connect Valdivia based on “blood and fire” in order to recover the ruins of the former city of Osorno.32 In 1788, a road was established thanks to the military campaigns led by Francisco Hurtado, the governor of Chiloé. Hurtado succeeded in recovering Osorno, which the general captain of Chile, Ambrosio O’Higgins, ordered to refound in 1796.

The “Endless Islands to the Strait”: The Mobile Frontier of Aysén By 1598, the territory of Chile between southern Chiloé Island—an enclave in a region outside Spanish control—and the continental edge was absolutely beyond Castilian rule. In this area there were no cities or forts, nor were the natives subjugated to Spaniards. The strait discovered in 1520 by Ferdinand de Magellan had been explored in the western side. From Concepción, Pedro de Valdivia ordered Francisco de Ulloa and Hernán Gallego to lead an expedition in 1552–1553, and later, in 1557–1558, Governor García Hurtado de Mendoza commanded Juan de Ladrillero, along with Francisco Cortés Ojea, to undertake another expedition.33 Only after Francis Drake’s incursion in the South Sea in 1578, there was a real interest from the monarchy to protect this path to the Pacific Ocean. In fact, the project of protecting the Strait of Magellan arose from the efforts of Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa (1532–1592), who traveled from Lima to the court of Madrid to obtain royal support.34 As a result, in 1584 two cities were founded on the northern section of the strait and populated with Spanish colonists in order to protect and guard this maritime entrance to the South Sea and to prevent new pirate incursions. This ambitious project failed a year later, however, due to the impossibility of survival in these settlements, which were completely dependent on provisions from Spain and cut off from the rest of the continent. Colonists either died or migrated to the northern pampas, mixing with natives. This brief project of colonization was the only Spanish

724   Borderlands of the Iberian World attempt to occupy this enormous territory. The monarchy’s lack of interest was due to Spanish views of this land as unattractive in economic terms and of its inhabitants as uncivilized. Although Drake’s incursion put in evidence the vulnerability of these lands, as later the English and Dutch demonstrated by attempting to attack and colonize the region, the Spanish monarchy relied on its hostile geography for the defense of this territory.35 Despite the meager Spanish presence in the area, these lands were part of Chiloé’s province as they were under its jurisdiction since the foundation of Castro.36 Chiloé was responsible for exploring and guarding this territory from Spain’s imperial enemies, who crossed the strait and reached the Pacific Ocean in order to attack Peru and take its wealth, to smuggle, or to control the South Sea. This pivotal role made of Chiloé the “key to the South Sea.” Chiloé had jurisdiction over the “endless islands to the strait,” a term used at the time to name this mobile frontier, where there was no permanent Spanish presence. Maritime hunter-gatherer natives populated the coasts of this frontier, which were commonly named austral canoeros. This category included, among others, Chono, Caucahué (or Kaweskar) and Yagane natives, who spoke different languages.37 During the colonial period, the interest of Chiloé over these territories had different phases.38 From late sixteenth century to mid seventeenth century, Spaniards from Chiloé and their native collaborators attacked the archipelago of Chonos to capture Indians and sell them as slaves in Chiloé. In frontier areas this was a common practice to contain enemies.39 To protect the Chonos from enslavement, in 1608 the Jesuits tried to group them in settlements and evangelize them by establishing missions in Guaitecas Islands, in southern Chiloé. The Jesuits failed to keep them in the area, especially because the missionaries were few in number to manage the native population, so they abandoned the mission in 1630.40 A century later, in 1742 new evangelical projects took place, but this time Jesuits sought Caucahués and other natives in the southern Penas Golf. Jesuits took natives to some islands close to Chiloé, where they founded a mission in Cailin Island in 1764. In 1741, a ship from George Anson’s fleet, the HMS Wager, wrecked in the Guayaneco archipelago. This alerted Spanish authorities to extend their defense works south of Chiloé, by using an indigenous route via Taitao peninsula.41 This shipwreck was the only English presence in the endless islands of the strait.42 In fact, Spaniards in Chiloé learned about this event when a Chono cacique took four starving English survivors to the island.43 The episode suggests that Chono Indians, who were friends of the Spaniards in Chiloé, were responsible for watching over the southernmost territories and, as compensation, they received rewards. Furthermore, it demonstrates that Europeans could hardly survive in the region without native support. Although Chono Indians were a pivotal group in the area, they were not the only ones in the region, especially in the southern Penas Gulf, where autonomous natives inhabited. The defense of the region was fundamental especially when news from England informed that a fleet was about to sail to take possession of the island where in 1741, George Anson’s fleet had stocked up on water and supplies in the Taitao peninsula. When this news reached the court of Madrid, it communicated with the viceroy of Peru who, along with the governor of Chile, ordered Chiloé’s authorities to build a fort

The Spanish Empire’s Southernmost Frontiers   725 in the mentioned island. This wooden fortress endured for eighteenth months; after that, it was dismantled as it was considered a “point in the middle of the southernmost immensity.”44 This remote region housed some of the most famous legends during colonial times. One of them was the existence of the City of Caesars, a mythic lost city in Patagonia that surviving crewmembers of some Spanish expeditions, including Gutierre de Vargas Carvajal and Sarmiento de Gamboa, founded. This city supposedly was a bastion where Spaniards were able to survive in the southernmost immensity to the extent that the search for it lasted until late eighteenth century. Explorations also included the search for foreign colonies and unknown or exotic Indians, such as the Patagones, or giant natives, whose presence was recorded by both Spanish and English navigators. These stories encouraged ten expeditions composed of officials, soldiers, missionaries, and Indian oarsmen that departed from Chiloé to explore the southern archipelagos during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. These early expeditions in Aysén constituted the initial stage of a series of geographical expeditions that ended in the nineteenth century, when the Chilean army explored the region.45 Maritime explorations were not the only ones undertaken. In 1670, the Jesuit Nicolas de Mascardi explored the area around Nahuelhuapi Lake, in northeast Chiloé, an entrance to the Patagonian pampas that led to the Strait of Magellan.46 The immensity of the region, described as “never-ending pampas,” was comparable to the endless islands of Aysén, as both of them led to the southernmost part of the continent. Chiloé was the door to both routes, for Spaniards expected that by using the land route of Nahuelhuapi and crossing the archipelagos by sea, they could learn about these lands and find the City of Caesars.47 In this way, the third Chilean frontier corresponds to the territory between Chiloé and Magellan Strait or Cape Horn. This area had as a center the province of Chiloé that was both a maritime and continental frontier that protected Spanish America from external enemies (pirates) and internal ones (unknown natives, potentially hostile). Its role as a frontier was more significant for the governor of Chiloé and the viceroy of Peru than for the governor of Chile, who focused on the defense of the Araucanian frontier. In contrast, for the viceroy of Peru, the control of this southernmost borderland was fundamental to prevent the arrival of English, Dutch, and French enemies who could assault the port of Callao and the Peruvian mines. The strategic role of Chiloé in keeping the viceroyalty’s stability was used by its governors to demand more resources and ­compensate their political and economic isolation.

Spain’s Enemies in the Chilean Borderlands Stories about the discovery, conquest, and colonization of the Indies were enormously popular during early modern times. Furthermore, the arrival of treasures from the

726   Borderlands of the Iberian World Indies, especially from Peru and the well-known mine of Potosi, had a strong impact in Europe inspiring oral and printed accounts about the New World and helping to fuel the lure of the Indies’ wealth.48 As legends and stories about Peru’s wealth were increasingly popular, accounts discrediting Spanish rule in the Indies were spreading widely in Europe. The Black Legend of the tyrannical and barbarous Spanish rule in the Indies was particularly popular in England and the Netherlands, two enemy countries of the Iberian monarchy.49 This negative representation of Spain played a key role in the English and French monarchy as well as the Dutch republic; it was frequently used to justify their expeditions in Spanish America.50 For the Spanish monarchy, pirates were understood broadly as “Protestant foreigners who attacked and robbed their coastal settlements.”51 Consequently, Spanish officials included under this definition categories that although related are not equivalent, such as privateer, buccaneer, and filibuster. Although Spain’s enemies claimed that their privateers, including the English Francis Drake, the Dutch Jacques L’Hermite, and the British George Anson, were not pirates, Spanish authorities defined them as pirates because they committed violent acts of piracy, such as attacking populations, seizing shipments, and taking hostages in exchange for ransom.52 Pirate expeditions in the southernmost frontier started in 1578, when Francis Drake succeeded in crossing the Strait of Magellan and reaching the Pacific Ocean, being the first Englishman to achieve this feat. Until then, the South Sea was known as the “Spanish Lake” because it was naturally protected by the hostile geography and climate of the Isthmus of Panama, or Tierra Firme, and the treacherous route through the Strait of Magellan.53 Those were the “locks” of the South Sea, strategic gateways located in the peripheries of the viceroyalty of Peru, the strongest Iberian presence in the Pacific. From 1578 to 1740, numerous pirate expeditions reached the southern coasts of the Peruvian viceroyalty. Generally speaking, these expeditions took place in three key phases as ­outlined below:

Phase 1: Elizabethan Privateers (1578–1594) Between 1578 and 1594, political tensions between Spain and England prompted Queen Elizabeth to sponsor pirate expeditions—or “sea dogs,” according to Spanish authorities— to break into the Spanish Lake and undermine England’s rival in the Indies. By the 1570s, Francis Drake gained a reputation as an outstanding seaman and commander. In early 1577, the English Crown developed an ambitious expedition to Spanish America. Although the true purpose of this voyage remains unclear,54 scholars suggest that after a conversation with Queen Elizabeth, Drake decided to reach the South Sea via the Strait of Magellan in order to acquire loot at the expense of Spain while inflicting as much damage as possible on the undefended Pacific coast of the Indies.55 Later that same year, Francis Drake departed from Plymouth with 164 men and five ships, but they had only a map from a relation of Magellan’s voyage to guide their navigation.56 To make up the lack of information, they captured pilots such as the

The Spanish Empire’s Southernmost Frontiers   727 Portuguese Nuno da Silva. Their arrival near the Strait of Magellan during the winter resulted in the desertion of The Elizabeth, which returned to England.57 Only Drake’s ship, The Golden Hind, and The Marigold were able to reach the South Sea. In September 1578, Drake and his crew were the first non-Spaniards to cross the Strait of Magellan and reach the previously unperturbed Spanish Lake. The South Sea, however, seemed far different from the Mare Pacificum that Magellan had described. In fact, Drake’s crew named it Mare Furiosum because of the terrible storms they faced, which caused the tragic sinking of The Marigold. Drake and his men reached Mocha Island, where Indians attacked them. After that, they navigated the coasts of Chile and adopted the tactic of passing themselves off as a Spanish crew. Believing they were Spaniards, the crew of a vessel near Valparaiso allowed them to board. Drake not only stole twenty-five thousand pesos of gold and valuable jewels but also forced the pilot Juan Griego to guide them through the coasts of Chile. Because the inhabitants of the viceroyalty of Peru assumed the arrival of pirates in the South Sea was impossible, their ports were poorly defended, and Drake and his men easily robbed them.58 After attacking Tarapacá and Arica, moving northward Drake reached Callao, the port of Lima, on February 15, 1579, surprising its inhabitants. Although he could not cause much damage in Lima, Drake succeeded in pillaging the coasts of Peru, taking rich plunder and becoming the first Englishman to circumnavigate the world. After this excursion, Sarmiento de Gamboa undertook the project of establishing permanent bases in the strait by founding two cities, Nombre de Dios and Rey Don Felipe, in 1584, which ultimately failed.59 The failure of Gamboa’s Patagonian colonies did not discourage Spain’s enemies, who found inspiration in Drake’s success. Other Englishmen tried unsuccessfully to imitate Drake’s path on the coasts of the viceroyalty of Peru: Edward Fenton, in 1582–1583; George Clifford, in 1586–1587; John Chidley and Andrew Merrick, in 1589–1590.60 Only two English privateers succeeded in reaching Lima, although with different results. On the one hand, Thomas Cavendish (known variously in Spanish sources as Candi) attacked and pillaged the coasts of the viceroyalty in 1587 and circumnavigated the world for the third time, while Richard Hawkins crossed the strait without difficulties and assaulted Valparaiso, but in 1594 he was taken prisoner by the Spaniards on the coasts of Atacama.61 By the turn of the seventeenth century, the panorama was quite uneven for these contested imperial spheres. The Spanish monarchy under Phillip III ignored the detailed knowledge about the Strait of Magellan that Sarmiento de Gamboa had produced, and the Crown rejected a new attempt to establish a strategic spot near the strait, trusting the protection of the Spanish Lake to the difficult geography of the channel and the small Armada. Drake’s successful navigating ventures challenged Spanish security in the South Sea by generating a new corpus of knowledge about the straits. Non-Spanish maps, including the standard sixteenth-century Ortelius chart, showed a narrow path between Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego. Bernardino de Mendoza, Spanish ambassador in London, however, reported that an informer had seen Drake’s own chart, which showed that “there was the open sea beyond Tierra del Fuego.”62 The southern lock to the South Sea had been broken.

728   Borderlands of the Iberian World

Phase 2: Dutch Privateers (1599–1645) After fifteen years of war between England and Spain, both monarchies signed a peace treaty in 1604, ending the era of Elizabethan sea dogs in the Indies.63 Nevertheless, the Spanish Crown continued to confront another threat from the rebel provinces of the Low Countries, which extended from Europe to South America and the Caribbean. During the Eighty Years’ War (1568–1648), the Republic of the Seven United Netherlands maintained hostilities against the Spanish monarchy in pursuit of independence from the Habsburg dynastic dominion. It was not a coincidence that Antwerp and Amsterdam publishers put out a great number of books about the cruelty of Spaniards in the Indies.64 Moreover, news about the 1598 Mapuche rebellion circulated in Europe, especially thanks to Alonso de Ercilla’s La Araucana, published in Dutch in 1619, which narrates the valorous struggle of these natives against Spaniards. Ercilla’s poem found an enthusiastic audience among Dutch readers and further cemented Netherlanders’ positive views of liberty-loving Indians who struggled against the Spanish.65 Dutch political ambitions operated in concert with their mercantile aspirations as they mainly operated with two commercial companies: The East India Company (VOC), founded in 1602, and the West India Company (WIC), established in 1621.66 With support of the States General, Dutch commercial companies organized expeditions to the Indies, especially to the Viceroyalty of Peru. Their main objective was to establish strategic colonies near the Strait of Magellan in order to control access to the South Sea, challenge the Spanish monopoly of the Pacific, and open a new commercial route to Asian markets. In 1600, Jacques Mahu and Simon de Cordes led an expedition that reached Chile when the events in Araucanía described by Ercilla were very recent. De Cordes tried to contact southernmost natives—Patagones, according their accounts—but they seemed unfriendly to them.67 However, the Huilliches’ leaders—whom captain Balthazar de Cordes called “Chileans”—were disposed to forge an alliance with them to assault Santiago de Castro.68 Twenty-five Dutch and twenty-five “Chileans” went by sea from Punta Felipe to Castro, whereas cacique Don Felipe led another three hundred Indians by land. Besides the native support, the Dutch took advantage of three Spanish traitors who informed them about the situation and the state of defenses in Chiloé.69 Although De Cordes took Castro, a small Spanish army arrived and recaptured the city. Thirtyeight Netherlanders died in the battle and the Spanish executed three hundred of their indigenous allies. De Cordes and his remaining men abandoned Castro, leaving their weapons and provisions, and sailed toward the East Indies (Figure 29.2). Between 1599 and 1630, the Dutch organized expeditions to explore the region and acquire detailed geographical and cartographical knowledge. Outstanding among them were the expeditions led by Olivier Van Noort in 1599–1600, Joris Van Spilbergen in 1614–1615, and Jacob Le Maire and Willem Schouten who, in 1616, discovered a new passage that proved it possible to reach the South Sea without having to enter the Strait of Magellan. The most ambitious Dutch expedition was led by Hendrick Brouwer,

The Spanish Empire’s Southernmost Frontiers   729

Figure 29.2. “Chili”, c. 1600. This Dutch map drawn by Guiljelmus Blaeuw and published in Joannes de Laet’s History of the New World (1625) is a fine example of the Dutch West India Company’s cartographic knowledge. Courtesy of the Biblioteca Nacional de Chile.

who proposed the WIC forge an alliance with the “Chileans” and establish a colonial settlement. The WIC supported this project and ordered the Dutch Brazilian base in Salvador to contribute material support to the expedition.70 Once they reached the coasts of Chile, Brouwer anchored in the same port as De Cordes. The Dutch newcomers expected to be received with joy, but were greeted instead with indifference as Indian contacts rejected their gifts. The Dutch interpreted this unexpected response as loyalty to Spaniards. Different interpretations, however, may explain their demeanor. Memories of the punishment that De Cordes’s allies had received fifteen years earlier should still have been common among the Indians. In an effort to forge alliances with the natives, the Dutchmen crossed the Chacao channel where they found a Spanish fort in Carelmapu, whose garrison tried unsuccessfully to repel them. After this victory, the privateers decided to take Castro, but they founded it uninhabited and destroyed. After these maneuvers, only two local caciques, Don Diego and Don Felipe, formed an alliance with the newcomers.71 The Dutch offered weapons in exchange for local commodities; the natives agreed to assist them, especially in their goal of taking Valdivia. Meanwhile, Brouwer, who felt ill in the attack on Castro, died and vice-admiral Elias

730   Borderlands of the Iberian World Herckmans took the command. Under Herckmans, 470 native allies and 350 Hollanders sailed to the ruins of what once was the city of Valdivia, which remained under Dutch control for two months. In Valdivia, Herckmans contacted local Indians, using a Spanish prisoner as an interpreter. In order to establish an alliance with the Valdivia caciques, the general presented the gifts and his credentials from the Prince of Orange. Furthermore, he asserted that Dutch had a strong position in Brazil, from which they would send reinforcements to fight against the Spaniards. The local chiefs responded that in order to establish a confederation they would have to consult with the people of Osorno and Junco, who were on their way to Valdivia. When the native leaders arrived, along with another twelve hundred men, the alliance was established. Despite this agreement, native leaders disliked Dutch interest in exchanging their goods for gold. The Indians knew that when they resisted the Spanish gold taxation, they had their ears and noses cut off as a punishment. Indeed, it is highly probable that this issue damaged the alliance between Chileans and Netherlanders, as two weeks later most of caciques refused to send them more provisions. The loss of native support forced the foreigners to leave the region.72 Even so, this Dutch incursion convinced Spanish authorities to reinforce their presence in Valdivia, refounding it as a fortress with an annual subvention (situado) from the royal treasury, and to send Jesuits to the area to evangelize the Indians.

Phase 3: Privateers, Buccaneers, and Smugglers (1670–1740) The Dutch achieved a significant corpus of knowledge about the “southern lock,” but after their failed projects in the viceroyalty of Peru they focused on their possessions in the East Indies. During the second half of the seventeenth century, however, buccaneers, traders, and royal agents from England and France undertook expeditions to this part of the Indies. Like their Dutch predecessors, the English monarchy sought to expand its influence into the South Sea by establishing a commercial station near the Strait of Magellan and opening a trading route with Asia. In 1669, the Admiral of Great Britain, the Duke of York, sent two ships to the South Sea under the command of John Narborough with the mission of “making a discovery both of the seas and coasts of that part of the world, and if possible to lay the foundation of a trade there.”73 Between 1669 and 1671, Narborough explored and mapped in detail the coasts, bays, harbors, and islands of South America. He concluded that the most convenient place to establish a trading post was Valdivia not only for its strategic location and extraordinary conditions as a port but also due to evidence of abundant gold and silver in the area.74 While Narborough’s orders allowed him to make contact with the natives, they prohibited attacks on Spanish possessions. The English needed to reach Spanish ports, however, in order to obtain supplies, including water and food. For this reason, Narborough sent a boat to Valdivia with some of his men, including the enigmatic Don Carlos,

The Spanish Empire’s Southernmost Frontiers   731 a shadowy figure who told the Spanish that he was an illegitimate son of Prince Rupert, Count Palatinate of the Rhine.75 Spanish authorities intercepted the boat, and although the crew asserted they were heading to China, they were arrested until the Spaniards could communicate with their captain. Assuming this was a ruse to draw him in (which it was), Narborough decided to set sail from Valdivia and return to England via the Strait of Magellan, leaving behind the captured crew members.76 Despite the detailed information that Narborough brought to England, King Charles II did not authorize another expedition until 1689, when John Strong discovered the Falkland Islands on his way to the Strait of Magellan. During these same years buccaneers menaced Spanish cities and villages in the Caribbean and on both the Atlantic and Pacific coasts of Central America. Their presence in the South Sea was particularly intense between 1680 and 1694, as a consequence of royal policies to suppress piracy in the Caribbean. Spanish authorities in Chile had to face attacks from buccaneers who reached the South Sea either via Tierra Firme or the Strait of Magellan. A notorious example was Bartholomew Sharp, who crossed the Isthmus of Panama and led a confederation of 150 pirates that attacked the coasts of the viceroyalty of Peru, paralyzing local commerce in the region for more than a year. During his voyage, Sharp seized a set of Spanish nautical charts and maps of the coasts of the South Sea that helped him return to England via the southern lock. As Sharp’s return voyage demonstrated, the Strait of Magellan’s reputation as a dangerous path did not prevent pirates from using it. This was the case of buccaneers John Cook, William Dampier, Edward Davis, Lionel Wafer, and Ambrose Cowley, who— disgruntled with Sharp’s command—sailed from Virginia, stopped at Cape Verde and Sierra Leone, and crossed the Strait Le Maire and Cape Horn in 1684.77 Once they reached the South Sea, they sailed in convoy toward the Juan Fernandez Islands, a spot that the pirate Watling had used to supply and recover after crossing the Strait of Magellan in 1681. Pirate presence in this region inspired Daniel Defoe’s character of Robinson Crusoe. In fact, Defoe based his story on Alexander Selkirk, a buccaneer from Dampier’s crew who spent more than four years, between 1704 and 1709, as a castaway in one of the Juan Fernandez Islands. At the turn of the eighteenth century French imperial interests in the South Sea grew, even though until then only a few French pirates had crossed the Strait of Magellan. The French monarchy commissioned Monsieur de Gennes to undertake an expedition to take possession in Chile, either in the coast of Valdivia or the island of Juan Fernandez. In 1695, the French captain entered into the Strait of Magellan and reached Port Famine, but had to sail back out of the strait because bad weather conditions prevented him from sailing any further.78 A second attempt took place in 1698, with the creation of La Compagnie Royale de la Mer du Sud whose goal was to open French commerce in the South Sea, especially on the coasts of Chile and Peru.79 In 1699, Jacques de Beauchêne led an expedition that was bound to fail: Only two out of four vessels reached the strait, and although the French succeeded in making contact with local indigenous people, they were forced to spend winter in the strait as strong winds prevented continued navigation.

732   Borderlands of the Iberian World Finally, in January 1700, they reached the South Sea and continued their voyage on the coasts of Chile and Peru. On the coasts of Valdivia, local inhabitants attacked them believing they were pirates, but in Arica the French were able to sell smuggled goods to local merchants, including the authorities.80 The treaty of Utrecht, in 1713, greatly benefited Great Britain as it received a series of strategic territories in both the Old and New Worlds. Geopolitical conflicts continued, however, and Spain and Great Britain began a new war that lasted from 1739 to 1748. Under the pretext of the War of Jenkins’ Ear, Great Britain developed the ambitious plan of using the Royal Navy to attack Spanish America’s strategic places. In 1739, George Anson received command of a squadron “to capture the port of Callao, to attack the capital of the viceroyalty, to take the Lima fleet, to settle some islands in the South Sea, to succeed in a descent on Peru, to take Panama and their treasure, to take the Acapulco ship, and to induce the Peruvians to throw off their obedience to the King of Spain.”81 Using published narratives of earlier voyages, Anson undertook the expedition to the South Sea in 1740. Before arriving in Cape Horn, however, the crew faced several problems, including diseases such as typhus, dysentery, and scurvy that caused several deaths. To complicate their situation, they arrived at the Strait Le Maire after summer, an inappropriate time to cross it. Only Anson’s Centurion, the small Tryal, and the Gloucester survived. The loss of the other vessels and men weakened the British expedition because the missing ships carried soldiers, weapons, and ammunition. In addition, the ships that did reach the South Sea had a significant number of sick people. At Juan Fernandez Islands, the English recovered from the voyage and Anson reformulated the mission. Their first objective in the South Sea was to capture Valdivia.82 The English government learned from their informers that Valdivia was particularly vulnerable after the earthquake of 1737, which had destroyed the city and damaged its fortifications. Moreover, as rebel Indians blocked access to supplies, the British believed that it would be easy to take the city and establish a base for the squadron.83 However Anson’s squadron was not in any condition to confront the viceregal forces, especially after the Viceroy of Peru sent four armed vessels to Concepción and Valdivia, which forced Anson to abandon his original plan.84 Although Anson did not achieve the ambitious goal of establishing British bases on the coasts of Chile and Peru, in the following decade other Europeans explored the region, including Englishmen John Byron and Captain James Cook and Frenchman Louis Antoine de Bougainville.85 While those expeditions are usually defined as scientific, one should not underestimate their political and commercial dimensions. John Byron, for instance, not only participated in Anson’s circumnavigation but also claimed West Falkland Island for the British king in 1765, while Bougainville claimed East Falkland Island for the French monarch the previous year. Spain’s European imperial rivals did not achieve their political and commercial goals in South Sea via the Strait of Magellan and Cape Horn; nevertheless their expeditions had the unintended consequence of transforming the Spanish Lake from a Mare Clausum into a Mare Liberum.86

The Spanish Empire’s Southernmost Frontiers   733 After the rebellion of Mapuches and Huilliches that started in 1598 and caused the destruction of the “seven upward cities,” Spanish Chile withdrew to northern Bío Bío River. Between this river and Chiloé Island, the territory was exclusively indigenous—with exception of Valdivia, founded as a plaza fuerte, or garrison, but in western historical terms, this region did not play a significant role due to the lack of Spanish presence. The traditional historical literature refers to the Araucanía as the only Chilean frontier, but our analysis demonstrates that the territory between Bío Bío River and the Strait of Magellan constituted a complex series of borderlands on land and sea. The Spanish Empire’s southernmost frontier was a set of three regions defined not only by its strategic geography but also by the complicated sets of overlapping relations between native peoples and outsiders. In fact, these frontiers determined the dynamic of the Spanish imperial sphere in the region, especially regarding its protection from potential internal and external enemies. The main concern of the governors of the Kingdom of Chile in Santiago was to secure the Arauco frontier, while Chiloé’s local authorities were focused on the frontera de arriba, and the viceroy of Peru gave priority to defending the Strait of Magellan as an entrance to the South Sea employed by pirates who jeopardized the stability of the viceroyalty. A combination of representations, knowledge, and political and commercial interests fueled the ambition of Spain’s enemies in the region. The first English incursions set out to undermine Spanish wealth in the Indies, as Elizabethan privateers sought to join in its profits. In contrast, Dutch expeditions had a strong political and commercial basis, since they attempted to establish permanent bases in southern Chile, where Araucanos were seen as potential allies against Spanish tyranny. While buccaneers proved that the Strait of Magellan was no longer an inaccessible entrance to the South Sea, French and English projects demonstrated the strategic role of this region on an imperial scale. For all of these reasons, it is not surprising that Chile was considered “the frontier,” a nearly permanent borderland, in the Spanish–American Empire.

Notes Archives AGI:  Archivo General de Indias, Seville (Spain) BL: British Library, London (UK) 1. Francisco Morales Padrón, Historia del descubrimiento y conquista de América (Madrid: Editorial Gredos, 1990), 259. 2. David Weber, “Borbones y bárbaros. Centro y periferia en la reformulación de la política de España hacia los indígenas no sometidos,” Anuario IEHS 13 (1998): 147–171. 3. Armando de Ramón and José Manuel Larraín, Orígenes de la vida económica chilena, 1659–1808 (Santiago: Centro de Estudios Públicos, 1982). 4. Mateo Martinic, Historia de la región magallánica, vol. 1 (Punta Arenas: Universidad de Magallanes, 1992), 163.

734   Borderlands of the Iberian World 5. Andrés Reséndez, “Borderlands of Bondage,” in The Oxford Handbook of Borderlands of the Iberian World, ed. Danna A. Levin Rojo and Cynthia Radding, 571–589 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019); Walter Hanisch, “Esclavitud y libertad de los indios en Chile,” Historia 16 (1981): 5–60. 6. Diego de Rosales, Historia General del Reino de Chile, Flandes indiano (Valparaíso: Imprenta del Mercurio, 1877). 7. Álvaro Jara, Guerra y sociedad en Chile (Santiago: Editorial Universitaria, 1971); Juan Eduardo Vargas, “Financiamiento del ejército de Chile en el siglo XVII,” Historia 19 (1984): 159–201. 8. Gabriel Guarda, Flandes Indiano, las fortificaciones del reino de Chile (Santiago: Ediciones UC, 1990). 9. Alejandra Boza and Juan Carlos Solórzano, “Indigenous Trade in Caribbean Central America, 1700s–1800s,” in The Oxford Handbook of Borderlands of the Iberian World, ed. Danna A. Levin Rojo and Cynthia Radding, 239-265 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019). 10. Rafael Sagredo Baeza, Historia mínima de Chile (Madrid and Mexico: Turner Publicaciones, El Colegio de México, 2014), 35. 11. Sergio Villalobos, Carlos Aldunate, Horacio Zapater, Luz María Méndez, and Carlos Bascuñán, ed. Relaciones fronterizas en la Araucanía (Santiago: Ediciones UC, 1982). 12. Sergio Villalobos, Vida fronteriza en la Araucanía. El mito de la guerra de Arauco (Santiago: Editorial Antártica, 1995). 13. Rolf Foerster, Jesuitas y mapuches: 1593–1767 (Santiago: Editorial Universitaria, 1996). 14. Fernando Casanueva, “La evangelización periférica en el reino de Chile,” Nueva Historia 5, no. 2 (1982): 5–30; José Manuel Díaz Blanco, Razón de Estado y Buen Gobierno. La Guerra Defensiva y el imperialismo español en tiempos de Felipe III (Seville: Universidad de Sevilla, 2010). 15. Guillaume Boccara, Los vencedores. Historia del pueblo mapuche en la época colonial (Santiago: Línea Editorial IIAM, Universidad de Chile, 2007); José Manuel Zavala, Los mapuche del siglo XVIII: dinámica interétnica y estrategias de resistencia (Santiago: Ediciones Universidad Bolivariana, 2008). 16. Leonardo León, Maloqueros y conchavadores en la Araucanía y las pampas, 1700–1800 (Temuco: Ediciones UFRO, 1990); Luz María Méndez, “Organización de parlamentos de indios en el siglo XVIII,” in Villalobos et al., ed., Relaciones fronterizas en la Araucanía, 107–173; Abelardo Levaggi, Diplomacia hispano-indígena en las fronteras de América. Historia de los tratados entre la monarquía española y las comunidades aborígenes (Madrid: CEPC, 2002); José Manuel Zavala ed., Los parlamentos hispano-mapuches, 1593–1803: textos fundamentales (Temuco: Ediciones Universidad Católica de Temuco, 2015); Sergio Villalobos, “Tipos fronterizos en el ejército de Arauco,” in Villalobos et al ed., Relaciones fronterizas en la Araucanía, 175–209; Andrea Ruiz-Ezquide, Los indios amigos en la frontera araucana (Santiago: DIBAM, Centro de Investigaciones Diego Barros Arana, 1993); Osvaldo Silva, “Acerca de los capitanes de amigos: un documento y un comentario,” Cuadernos de Historia 11 (1991): 29–45. 17. Sergio Villalobos, “Tres siglos y medio de vida fronteriza,” in Estudios (nuevos y viejos) sobre la frontera, ed. Francisco de Solano and Salvador Bernabéu (Madrid: CSIC, 1991), 289–359. 18. Villalobos, Vida fronteriza en la Araucanía. 19. Boris Oses, “Los esfuerzos por integrar en pueblos a los araucanos en el siglo XVIII,” Revista de Indias 83, no. 21 (1961): 39–62.

The Spanish Empire’s Southernmost Frontiers   735 20. José Bengoa, Historia del pueblo mapuche (siglos XIX y XX) (Santiago: Ediciones Sur, 1985); Jorge Pinto, La formación del Estado y la nación, y el pueblo mapuche. De la inclusión a la exclusión (Santiago: DIBAM- Centro de Investigación Diego Barros Arana, 2003). 21. Rodolfo Urbina Burgos, La periferia meridional indiana. Chiloé en el siglo XVIII (Valparaíso: Ediciones Universitarias de Valparaíso, 1983). 22. Rodolfo Urbina Burgos, Población indígena, encomienda y tributo en Chiloé: 1567–1813 (Valparaíso: Ediciones Universitarias de Valparaíso, 2004). 23. Gabriel Guarda, Nueva historia de Valdivia (Santiago: Ediciones UC, 2001), chapter 2. 24. María Ximena Urbina, “La tierra firme de Carelmapu, o área continental norte de la jurisdicción de Chiloé en el periodo colonial,” in ¿A dónde se fue mi gente? Memorias y realidades en la construcción de Chiloé (siglos XVI al XXI), ed. Esteban Barruel, Sandra Hernández, Sergio Mansilla, José Ulloa, and María Ximena Urbina (Osorno: Programa de Estudios y Documentación en Ciencias Humanas, Universidad de los Lagos, 2009), 21–42. 25. Gabriel Guarda, Los encomenderos de Chiloé (Santiago: Ediciones UC, 2002). 26. María Ximena Urbina, La frontera de arriba en Chile Colonial. Interacción hispano-indígena en el territorio entre Valdivia y Chiloé e imaginario de sus bordes geográficos, 1600–1800 (Valparaíso: DIBAM- Centro de Estudios Diego Barros Arana, Ediciones Universitarias de Valparaíso, PUCV, 2009). 27. Isidoro Vázquez de Acuña, Las incursiones corsarias holandesas en Chiloé (Santiago: Universidad de Santiago, 1992). 28. James Burney, A Chronological History of the Discoveries in the South Sea or Pacific Ocean, vol. 2 (London: Printed by Luke Hansard, 1806), 142. 29. Guarda, Nueva historia de Valdivia. 30. María Pía Poblete, “Mapuche-huilliches e hispano-criollos en Valdivia. Cartas de petición y procesos de articulación en el período colonial tardío,” CUHSO. Cultura, hombre, sociedad 15, no. 2 (2008): 49–60. 31. Jorge Iván Vergara, La herencia colonial del Leviatán. El Estado y los mapuche-huilliches (1750–1881) (Iquique: Ediciones del Instituto de Estudios Andinos, Universidad Arturo Prat, 2005). 32. María Ximena Urbina, “La frontera ‘de arriba’ chilena y el camino de Chiloé a Valdivia, 1786–1788,” Temas Americanistas 18 (2006): 30–40. 33. José Barros, “Expedición al estrecho de Magallanes en 1553: Gerónimo de Vivar y Hernando Gallegos,” Anales del Instituto de la Patagonia 12 (1981): 31–40; Nuriluz Hermosilla and José Ramírez, “Reconstrucción autorizada de la expedición de Juan de Ladrillero a la Patagonia Occidental: 1557–1599,” Anales del Instituto de la Patagonia 13 (1982): 59–71; Julián González-Barrera, “La derrota a través del Estrecho de Magallanes: el viaje olvidado de Juan Ladrillero (1557-1559),” Atenea 501 (2010): 11–33. 34. Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa was a Spanish military expeditionary, historian, and cosmographer. The viceroy of Peru, Francisco de Toledo, commissioned him to write a history of the Incas (1570–1572) and, after the failed Drake attack in Lima, he led an expedition to fortify the Strait of Magellan (1579). 35. Mateo Martinic, Los británicos en la región magallánica (Valparaíso: Universidad de Magallanes, Editorial Puntángeles, 2007); Guarda, Flandes Indiano; Isidoro Vázquez de Acuña and Ana Durruty, Historia naval del Reino de Chile, 1520–1826 (Valparaíso: Compañía Sudamericana de Vapores, 2004). 36. Isidoro Vázquez de Acuña, “La jurisdicción de Chiloé (siglos XVI al XX). Su extensión, exploración y dominio,” Boletín de la Academia Chilena de la Historia 103 (1993): 111–191.

736   Borderlands of the Iberian World 37. Joseph Emperaire, Los nómades del mar (Santiago: Ediciones de la Universidad de Chile, 1963); Francisco Mena, “Presencia indígena en el litoral de Aisén,” Trapananda 5 (1985): 203–213; John Cooper, “The Chonos,” in Julian Steward, ed., Handbook of South American Indians Bulletin 143, no. 1 (1946): 81–106; Nicolás Lira and Dominique Legoupil, “Navegantes del sur y las regiones australes,” in Mar de Chile, ed. Carlos Aldunate del Solar (Santiago: Museo Chileno de Arte Precolombino, Banco Santander, 2014); Ricardo Álvarez, “Reflexiones en torno a las identidades de las poblaciones canoeras situadas entre los 44º y 48º de latitud sur, denominadas “chonos,” Anales del Instituto de la Patagonia 30 (2002): 79–86. 38. María Ximena Urbina, “Expediciones a las costas de la Patagonia occidental en el período colonial,” Magallania 41, no. 2 (2013): 51–84. 39. María Ximena Urbina, “Traslados de indígenas de la Patagonia occidental insular a Chiloé en los siglos XVI, XVII y XVIII,” in América en diásporas: Esclavitudes y migraciones forzadas (siglos XVI–XIX), ed. Jaime Valenzuela (Santiago: Instituto de Historia-PUC, RIL Editores, 2017), 381–411. See also Reséndez, “Borderlands of Bondage.” 40. Rodolfo Urbina, “El pueblo chono: de vagabundo y pagano alzado a cristiano y sedentario amestizado,” in Orbis Incognitus. Avisos y legajos en el Nuevo Mundo. Homenaje al profesor Luis Navarro García, vol. I, ed. Fernando Navarro (Huelva: Publicaciones de la Universidad de Huelva, 2007), 325–346. 41. María Ximena Urbina, “La navegación por los canales australes en la Patagonia occidental insular en los siglos coloniales: la ruta del istmo de Ofqui,” Magallania 38, no. 2 (2010): 41–67. 42. Both Jesuits and Chiloe’s authorities tried to collect the Wager’s wreckage as metal was a valuable good in Chiloe. María Ximena Urbina, “El naufragio de la Wager en el Pacífico austral y el conflicto del hierro en Chiloé,” in El Mar de Sur en la historia. Ciencia, expansión, representación y poder en el Pacífico, ed. Rafael Sagredo and Rodrigo Moreno (Santiago: DIBAM-Centro de Investigaciones Diego Barros Arana, Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez, 2015), 239–278. 43. María Ximena Urbina, “Interacciones entre españoles de Chiloé y chonos en los siglos XVII y XVIII: Pedro y Francisco Delco, Ignacio y Cristóbal Talcapillán, y Martín Olleta,” Chungara 48, no. 1 (2016): 103–114. 44. María Ximena Urbina, “El frustrado fuerte de Tenquehuén en el archipiélago de los Chonos, 1750: dimensión chilota de un conflicto hispano-británico,” Historia 47, no. 1 (2014): 133–155. 45. Mateo Martinic, De la Trapananda al Aysén (Santiago: Pehuén Editores, 2005). 46. Giuseppe Rosso, “Nicolo Mascardo. Missionario Gesuita Esploratore del Cile e della Patagonia (1624–1674),” Archivum Historicum Societatis Iesu 29 (1950): 1–74. 47. María Ximena Urbina, “La frustrada misión estratégica de Nahuelhuapi, un punto en la inmensidad de la Patagonia,” Magallania 36, no. 1 (2008): 5–30. 48. See Peter Bradley, The Lure of Peru: Maritime Intrusion into the South Sea, 1598–1701 (Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1989). 49. Although the famous writer Francisco de Quevedo called the attention on the negative writings about Spain in his España defendida y los tiempos de ahora, de las calumnias de los noveleros sediciosos (1609), it was Julián Juderías who coined the term “Black Legend” in La leyenda negra y la verdad histórica (Madrid: Tipología de la Revista de Archivos, 1914). 50. Elizabeth Montanez Sanabria, “Challenging the Pacific Spanish Empire. Pirates in the Viceroyalty of Peru, 1570–1750.” (PhD diss., University of California, Davis, 2014), 51. 51. Dionisio Alsedo y Herrera, Piratería y agresiones de los ingleses y de otros pueblos de Europa en la América Española desde el siglo XVI al XVIII. (Madrid: Imprenta de Manuel Ginés Hernández, 1883), 1.

The Spanish Empire’s Southernmost Frontiers   737 52. Montanez Sanabria, “Challenging the Pacific Spanish Empire,” 13–14. 53. See Oskar H. K. Spate, The Spanish Lake (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1979). About the northern lock Elizabeth Montanez-Sanabria “La quimera del control en el imperio español: Darién, 1670–1750” in El Virreinato del Perú en la encrucijada de dos épocas (1680–1750), ed. Bernard Lavallé and Claudia Rosas (Lima: IFEA, Instituto RivaAgüero-PUCP, forthcoming). 54. Peter Gerhard, Pirates of the Pacific, 1575–1742 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1960), 62; Manuel Lucena Salmoral, Piratas, corsarios, bucaneros y filibusteros (Madrid: Editorial Síntesis, 2005), 110. 55. Lucena Salmoral, Piratas, corsarios, bucaneros y filibusteros, 217. Despite this information, scholars do not agree about the true goal of this voyage as commercial, political, economic, and even religious interests intersect in this project. 56. About Drake’s circumnavigation: Francis Fletcher, The World Encompassed by Sir Francis Drake (London: 1652). 57. When they reached the strait’s mouth, The Swan and The Christopher had already separated from the fleet. 58. Lucena Salmoral, Piratas, corsarios, bucaneros y filibusteros, 111. 59. About the history of the city of Rey Don Felipe see Mateo Martinic, Rey Don Felipe. Acontecimientos históricos (Santiago: Ministerio de Bienes Nacionales, 2000). 60. Those pirates succeeded in crossing to the South Sea but not in attacking Lima. Peter Bradley, Pirates on the Coasts of Peru, 1598–1701 (np: Lulu Enterprises, 2010), 2; Spate, The Spanish Lake, 278–285. 61. In 1587, Cavendish’s expedition stopped in the former city Rey Don Felipe, where they found shelter in the remaining houses. Although they found plenty water and wood, they saw a devastating panorama of bodies left unburied. For that reason, Cavendish renamed it Puerto del Hambre or Port Famine. 62. Spate, The Spanish Lake, 250. 63. Between 1589 and 1604, England sent privateers to the Indies and Spain to intercept as many silver ships as possible with the purpose of undermining Spanish economic power. 64. From this literature, the most famous text was Bartolomé de Las Casas’s Brevísima relación de destrucción de las Indias, written in 1552 and translated into Dutch, in 1578, as The Mirror of the Spanish Tyranny in the West Indies. 65. Benjamin Schmidt, Innocence Abroad: The Dutch Imagination and the New World, 1570–1670 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 205–206. 66. Before the creation of those companies, smaller companies focused on specific regions with the financial support of Dutch cities, including the Magellan Company (1598–1601). 67. English and Dutch privateers claimed to have seen the famous Patagones that Magellan expedition reported. 68. Near Santa Maria Island, Indians killed Simon de Cordes and twenty-three more men who were looking for provisions. Balthazar de Cordes, Simon’s brother, became the new expedition leader. The Dutch believed that this attack was due to Spanish instigation. Burney, A Chronological History of the Discoveries in the South Sea, vol. 2 (1806), 193. 69. Vázquez de Acuña, Las incursiones corsarias holandesas en Chiloé, 27. 70. From 1624 to 1654, the Dutch controlled Salvador de Bahia, an important sugarcane production center. About this colony see Charles Boxer, The Dutch in Brazil, 1624–1654 (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1957). 7 1. Brouwer mentioned that those caciques brought to him the head of a Spaniard they had cut off days before, an action that Brouwer praised.

738   Borderlands of the Iberian World 72. Burney, A Chronological History of the Discoveries in the South Sea, vol. 3 (1813), 142. 73. John Narborough, Jasmen Tasman, John Wood, and Frederick Marten, An Account of Several Voyages and Discoveries to the South and North towards the Strait of Magellan (London: D. Brown, 1694), 10. 74. After Brouwer, Spanish authorities reported continuous Indian attacks in Valdivia and surrounding area. Furthermore, Narborough asserted Valdivia lacked proper defenses. Bradley, Pirates on the Coasts of Peru, 87–107. 75. De remitir a la casa de la contratación de la ciudad de Sevilla los ingleses que el Gobernador de Valdivia detuvo, May 29, 1672, Archivo General de Indias, Lima 72; Bradley, Pirates on the Coasts of Peru, 101. 76. María Ximena Urbina “La sospecha de ingleses en el extremo sur de Chile, 1669–1683: actitudes imperiales y locales como consecuencia de la expedición de John Narborough,” Magallania 44, no. 1 (2016): 15–40 and “La expedición de John Narborough a Chile, 1670: la defensa de Valdivia, los rumores de indios, las informaciones de los prisioneros y la creencia en la Ciudad de los Césares,” Magallania 45, no. 2 (2017): 11–36. 77. Burney, A Chronological History of the Discoveries in the South Sea, vol. 4 (1816), 132. 78. Burney, A Chronological History of the Discoveries in the South Sea, vol. 4 (1816), 338–343; Javier Oyarzun, Expediciones españolas al estrecho de Magallanes y Tierra del Fuego (Madrid: AECI, Ediciones de Cultura Hispánica, 1999), 227–228. 79. Burney, A Chronological History of the Discoveries in the South Sea, vol. 4 (1816), 375. 80. Beauchesne returned to France via Cape Horn as he missed the west entrance of the Strait of Magellan. Burney, A Chronological History of the Discoveries in the South Sea, vol. 4 (1816), 380–381. 81. According to Glyn Williams, The Prize of All the Oceans: The Triumph and Tragedy of Anson’s. Voyage round the World (New York: Viking, 1999), 10–11, Anson was instructed to be discrete with his plan. 82. Original Book of Orders and Letters of Commodore George Anson during his voyage around the world in the Centurion, 1740–1743. British Library (BL), Mss. 15855. 83. Original Book of Orders, 37. BL, Mss. 15855. 84. After pillaging Paita, Anson headed to Acapulco and later to Manila, where he intercepted the galleon Nuestra Señora de Covadonga in 1743, being one of the two Englishmen in achieving that. 85. The Spanish monarchy promoted two expeditions under Antonio de Córdoba Laso de la Vega (1785–1786), and Alejandro Malaspina (1789–1794). Mateo Martinic, Breve Historia de Magallanes (Punta Arenas: Ediciones Universidad de Magallanes, 2002), 34–35. 86. Montanez Sanabria, “Challenging the Pacific Spanish Empire,” 190.

Bibliography Bradley, Peter. Pirates on the Coasts of Peru, 1598–1701. Morrisville: Lulu Enterprises, 2010. Burney, James. A Chronological History of the Discoveries in the South Sea or Pacific Ocean, vols. 2–4. London: Luke Hansard, 1806, 1813, 1816. Fletcher, Francis. The World Encompassed by Sir Francis Drake. London: 1652. Guarda, Gabriel. Flandes Indiano, las fortificaciones del reino de Chile. Santiago: Ediciones UC, 1990. Guarda, Gabriel. Nueva historia de Valdivia. Santiago: Ediciones UC, 2001.

The Spanish Empire’s Southernmost Frontiers   739 Lucena Salmoral, Manuel. Piratas, corsarios, bucaneros y filibusteros. Madrid: Editorial Síntesis, 2005. Montanez Sanabria, Elizabeth. “Challenging the Pacific Spanish Empire. Pirates in the Viceroyalty of Peru, 1570–1750.” (PhD diss., University of California, Davis, 2014). Reséndez, Andrés. “Borderlands of Bondage,” in The Oxford Handbook of Borderlands of the Iberian World, edited by Danna A. Levin Rojo and Cynthia Radding, 571–589. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. Schmidt, Benjamin. Innocence Abroad: The Dutch Imagination and the New World, 1570–1670. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Spate, Oskar H. K. The Spanish Lake. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1979. Urbina Burgos, Rodolfo. Gobierno y sociedad en Chiloé colonial. Valparaíso: Ediciones Universitarias de Valparaíso, 2013. Urbina, María Ximena. La frontera de arriba en Chile colonial. Interacción hispano-indígena en el territorio entre Valdivia y Chiloé e imaginario de sus bordes geográficos, 1600–1800. Valparaíso: DIBAM- Centro de Estudios Diego Barros Arana, Ediciones Universitarias de Valparaíso, PUCV, 2009. Vázquez de Acuña, Isidoro. Las incursiones corsarias holandesas en Chiloé. Santiago: Universidad de Santiago, 1992. Villalobos, Sergio. Vida fronteriza en la Araucanía. El mito de la guerra de Arauco. Santiago: Editorial Antártica, 1995. Villalobos, Sergio, Carlos Aldunate, Horacio Zapater, Luz María Méndez, and Carlos Bascuñán, ed. Relaciones fronterizas en la Araucanía. Santiago: Ediciones UC, 1982.

chapter 30

Sh a pi ng a n I n ter-I mper i a l Exch a nge Zon e Smugglers, Runaway Slaves, and Itinerant Priests in the Southern Caribbean Linda M. Rupert

When the Dutch seized the small Caribbean islands of Aruba, Bonaire, and Curaçao from the Spanish in 1634 it was, by all counts, a successful takeover. Several Spanish attempts to reclaim the so-called ABC islands failed. After the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 the political demarcation between the Dutch islands and the proximate Spanish mainland was never seriously questioned. Imperial jurisdiction, however, is only part of the story. Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the colonial denizens of Curaçao, the most prosperous and populous of the three islands, developed especially close ties with those in the Province of Venezuela on the nearby Spanish American mainland (known as Tierra Firme). These links were facilitated by the different roles the two colonial areas played in their respective empires, as well as by the economic and ­religious frameworks that developed alongside and somewhat intertwined with imperial political constructions. Together, the interplay between these imperial political, economic, and religious structures defined the opportunities that were available to colonial denizens, who sometimes took advantage of them on their own terms. Close ties between the inhabitants of Curaçao and Tierra Firme predated European contact with the region. They were closely linked to the area’s geography. Curaçao is part of a string of over a dozen largely uninhabited small islands and atolls that stretch along the northern coast of South America and belong to the same environmental zone as the mainland. Geographically, one can envision the entire area as a unified space, a continuum connected by the sea, rather than as a series of separate, autonomous units.1 The islands’ proximity to the continent; the steady easterly trade winds and ocean currents; and the

742   Borderlands of the Iberian World fact that the southern Caribbean is outside the hurricane belt allowed indigenous people to sail regularly across the calm waters between the islands and the mainland in simple dugout canoes, or piraguas.2 Such coastal sailing characterized much of the indigenous maritime trade around the Caribbean.3 The native inhabitants of the islands and the mainland were members of the same linguistic and ethnic group of Caquetios, a group of Arawaks.4 Although the evidence seems to indicate that the island Caquetios were independent of the mainland political structure, archaeological data and early Spanish accounts suggest that there were close economic and cultural connections between the two groups.5 Ceramics found at archaeological sites on Curaçao show that locals regularly traded with a string of communities along the mainland coast.6 Prevailing winds and currents made their ties especially close with communities on the Paraguaná Peninsula, to the southwest. The islands and the mainland were administratively linked during the 135 years they were all under Spanish control (1499–1634). While Curaçao was governed separately during the German Welser grant (1528–1556), thereafter it became part of the Province of Venezuela, which fell under the Audiencia of Santo Domingo, located on the island of Hispaniola, hundreds of miles to the north. The Roman Catholic Church grouped the islands and mainland together from the beginning. Initially they were also under the religious jurisdiction of Santo Domingo. After 1531 they all became part of the newlycreated Diocese of Venezuela, which first was located in the town of Coro, at the base of the Paraguaná Peninsula. Throughout most of the sixteenth century, then, Spanish colonial religious power was centralized in the immediate area, while the seat of political control was far removed. The Crown noted the common language and culture of the area’s indigenous inhabitants as a reason for including them all under a single religious umbrella.7 The Bishop of Caracas took a special interest in the native peoples of the ABC islands, in spite of their small numbers, although, given the island’s small population, itinerant priests from the mainland carried out much of the church’s work.8 Indigenous geographies that had developed long before the arrival of Europeans left their imprint on the emerging Spanish political and religious configurations of the region.9 At the same time, the Spanish violently disrupted and reconfigured these links. In 1513 Diego Colón declared the ABC islands to be “islas inútiles,” that is, devoid of gold or other precious metals, which allowed the Spanish to deport Curaçao’s entire native population, numbering approximately two thousand, to Hispaniola and Tierra Firme. In subsequent decades several hundred Caquetios returned and resettled into small, semi-autonomous communities under close Spanish supervision.10 It is not clear from the available documentary evidence to what extent these migrations back to the island were voluntary; at least some of them were from the mainland. In contrast, the extensive, dispersed Caquetio settlements of Tierra Firme remained outside the encomienda system and retained virtual autonomy well into the eighteenth century. The Spanish repeatedly commented on the Caquetios’s sailing skills and made use of their extensive knowledge of the region’s waters and coastlines.11 Caquetios in both places maintained close contact with each other throughout the Spanish period.12 A piragua could make the forty-three miles crossing in less than a day.13

Shaping an Inter-Imperial Exchange Zone   743 Although Tierra Firme briefly had an important role in the early Spanish American empire as a starting point for inland exploration, after the discovery of silver in Mexico and Peru the area became marginal to the Crown’s economic interests. The Spanish convoys that sailed regularly between Havana and Europe neglected the entire southern Caribbean. Even the fleets that visited Cartagena, Colombia by-passed the Venezuelan coast.14 By the mid-sixteenth century the inhabitants of the small seaside towns increasingly depended on trade with English, French, and Dutch privateers to sell their agricultural products and purchase European commodities. The ABC islands were also peripheral to the Spanish Empire. Their poor soil and scant rainfall made them unsuitable for large scale agriculture. The Spanish virtually ignored Aruba and Bonaire. By the mid-1500s they had transformed sparsely populated Curaçao into a livestock ranch, producing thousands of hides that were shipped to Europe for processing.15 The hide industry left Curaçao with abundant fresh meat, which provisioned the same English, French, and Dutch adventurers who had begun to frequent the neglected settlements of the nearby coast.16 By the second half of the sixteenth century foreign interlopers were regularly visiting Curaçao and the adjacent mainland, where they found eager trade partners in spite of strict Spanish prohibitions.17 Because all extra-imperial commerce directly violated Spanish policy it is sometimes difficult to tell from the accounts when the Spanish colonists willingly traded with foreigners and when they were forced to do so.18 Colonial authorities were in an especially difficult situation, as they juggled their roles as representatives of empire with their awareness of local economic needs. As one admitted, illicit trade was “a business of some importance.”19 Contraband trade also raised security concerns for the Crown.20 In spite of royal neglect the southern Caribbean remained strategically important, serving as a buffer to protect Spain’s more valuable possessions against foreign incursions. In their unsuccessful attempts to reign in illicit trade, the Spanish recruited Caquetios to spy on foreign vessels, taking advantage of the natives’ extensive knowledge of local waters and the fact that their small, unobtrusive piraguas could quietly slip by larger sailing ships unnoticed.21 After the Dutch seized the ABC islands from the Spanish in 1634, they gradually transformed Curaçao’s role in the region (Aruba and Bonaire remained sparsely populated and subordinate to Curaçao). While all the small Spanish settlements on the island had been inland, and had not included a single fortification, the Dutch immediately constructed two forts at the entrance to one of Curaçao’s most capacious bays, and founded a small town, Willemstad, in their shadow. Located on the sheltered southern coast, this Dutch base was within sight of the mainland, just forty-four miles away. The larger of the two structures, Ft. Amsterdam, served simultaneously as the seat of government and as the headquarters of the Dutch West India Company (WIC), a merchant federation that administered the island until 1791 and also dominated its economy. Strategically located and with an excellent natural deep-water harbor, Curaçao became a nodal point in the Dutch Atlantic and global commercial systems. The Dutch maintained tight political jurisdiction over the tiny island, centralizing population, politics, and economics in the port of Willemstad. At the same time, they used this base to cast a

744   Borderlands of the Iberian World wide regional economic net via extensive inter-colonial trade circuits. In 1675 the Dutch declared Curaçao a free port, the first—and for many decades the only—one in the region. Thereafter, the island welcomed ships flying any flag, provided they paid a flat tax on the value of their cargo. Between the 1660s and the 1680s Curaçao briefly served as a significant trans-shipment center for the burgeoning transatlantic slave trade, as the WIC supplied a significant number of slaves for the asiento de negros (the contract that regulated the legal import of slaves into Spanish America).22 By the end of the seventeenth century the WIC had transformed the island into a Caribbean and Atlantic entrepôt, trading goods around the region between Dutch, French, English, Danish, and Spanish possessions. While such inter-imperial commerce was an integral part of the emerging Dutch colonial system, it violated the established mercantilist policies of the other European overseas empires. The island became known as a Caribbean contraband center, even when this trade was legal from the Dutch perspective and often conducted by well-established merchants. This was an extension of the WIC’s wider activities, as it established a series of strategic economic points in the Atlantic, Africa and the Americas, along the “fort and port” model.23 Curaçao was not unusual here; small islands have often had disproportionally large roles in wider networks that required their inhabitants to be part of a more extensive maritime world.24 This commercial activity also made Curaçao a major regional transportation hub, linking the southern Caribbean with points around the Americas and the Atlantic. As trade flourished Willemstad grew into a bustling, cosmopolitan Caribbean port. Its population was clearly divided along intertwined lines of social class, race/ethnicity, and religion, with the small Dutch Protestant elite at the top, a rising group of Sephardic Jewish merchants in the middle, and a Catholic black majority composed of slaves and free people of color at the bottom of the social and economic hierarchy.25 There were also a variety of small middling groups including small scale merchants, itinerant seafarers and a small population of European Catholics.26 In contrast, the Province of Venezuela continued to occupy a relatively marginal role in the Spanish Empire. Spain neither exercised effective territorial hegemony nor controlled the external commercial circuits of this vast, fertile, and sparsely populated area. Entire parts of Tierra Firme were only nominally under Spanish control.27 Ineffective and unclear lines of political authority exacerbated the problem. Until the early e­ ighteenth century Venezuela remained under the jurisdiction of Santo Domingo, making close imperial supervision virtually impossible, and effectively allowing local colonial officials a great deal of autonomy in their dealings. Intermediate levels of imperial power became even more confusing throughout the eighteenth century, as Venezuela repeatedly bounced back-and-forth between Santo Domingo and the viceroyalty of Nueva Granada (seated in present-day Columbia), which was formed in 1717. This created administrative confusion and chaotic governance.28 Colonial authorities themselves were often uncertain as to the exact lines of authority. Such political ambiguity provided additional incentives and opportunities for smugglers to meet the economic needs of the area’s underserved inhabitants. Dozens of small settlements that were scattered along the hundreds of miles of the Caribbean coast continued to welcome visits by

Shaping an Inter-Imperial Exchange Zone   745 foreigner interlopers, as they had since the sixteenth century.29 Venezuela’s shoreline provided a variety of environments that were conducive to smuggling, ranging from sheltered coves to thick mangrove swamps to desolate desert strands. The numerous atolls and small uninhabited islands just offshore were excellent places to stash contraband goods and arrange surreptitious rendezvous.

Economic and Religious Control in a Trans-Imperial Borderland With the Dutch takeover of Curaçao the centuries-old connections between inhabitants of the island and the mainland took on a trans-imperial character. The new political demarcations especially disrupted the lives of the region’s original inhabitants, who became embroiled in imperial power dynamics. Like the Spanish invasion 135 years earlier, the Dutch conquest forced the Caquetios to adapt to new power configurations. The Dutch almost immediately deported to Coro all but about seventy-five of the five hundred Caquetios who were still living on the island.30 Three decades later there were no more than one hundred adult Caquetios on Curaçao; their numbers likely did not increase much thereafter, although a small indigenous population remained until at least the eighteenth century.31 Caquetios in Venezuela were not required to live under the tribute-paying encomienda system, and they continued residing in relatively autonomous settlements throughout the eighteenth century. They made up over a quarter of the population of Coro, where they were only outnumbered by people of African descent.32 The Spanish regularly used mainland Caquetios to spy on the Dutch in Curaçao because their small canoes could slip unobtrusively ashore to gather information.33 Therefore, the Dutch were suspicious of any native people who traveled between the two areas, concerned that they were either spying for the Spanish or plotting an uprising with local slaves.34 Even though the natives of the mainland and the island now lived in different imperial realms, they maintained contact and continued to travel between the two areas.35 But in doing so they now violated a demarcated political boundary. Curiously, Curaçao remained under the religious jurisdiction of the Roman Catholic Church in Venezuela. Just three years after the Dutch takeover, in 1637, the Spanish transferred the ABC islands from the Diocese of Coro to the newly-created Archdiocese of Caracas, located in the capital of the Province of Venezuela. This placed religious oversight of the island adjacent to the seat of regional Spanish political administration.36 Apparently the Dutch West India Company, which was governed by Calvinist merchants, tacitly accepted this arrangement. The Dutch did, however, impose some restrictions. Initially the WIC prohibited the open practice of Catholicism in all Dutch territories.37 In 1661 the Dutch States General decided that no priest could settle on Curaçao without first obtaining a permit from the WIC, a requirement it reissued in 1705.38 But the

746   Borderlands of the Iberian World Roman Catholic Church would not be thwarted in its efforts to evangelize the island’s inhabitants, especially Caquetios and the growing population of enslaved Africans. In 1677 the Bishop of Caracas issued an extensive pastoral letter authorizing any priests who set foot on Curaçao and was “not affiliated with an enemy of the church” to celebrate mass, perform sacraments, and generally attend to the spiritual needs of local Catholics without needing prior or formal approval from the Church hierarchy.39 He authorized two priests from Coro, Juan Gomez Manzo and Nicolás Caldera de Quiñones, to travel immediately and clandestinely to the island with a p ­ ortable altar to perform baptisms, marriages, and other sacraments in secret, and even to wear secular clothing, if necessary, to escape detection. In their two months on the island Gomez and Caldera baptized 320 people, including 209 slaves, fifteen free blacks and mulattos, approximately 100 Caquetios, and a few Europeans.40 Although this was apparently the first officially sanctioned visit of clerics from Venezuela to the Dutch island, there is evidence that priests had been visiting clandestinely for at least several decades before.41 Economic interests and the need to maintain good relations with the Spanish sometimes overrode Dutch religious sensibility. For example, between 1684 and 1689, when the House of Coymans (Coymans merchant house) administered the asiento de negros via Curaçao, the WIC allowed two Capuchin priests openly to reside on the island and to move about freely, dressed in full habit. They even installed a small chapel in a merchant house adjacent to the docks. Although this was a direct violation of established Dutch policies, it met Spanish requirements that the asiento holders minister to the spiritual needs of their captives.42 For the same reason, the Dutch also allowed Roman Catholic priests on some of their slaving vessels that crossed the Atlantic from Africa to Curaçao.43 Together, the WIC’s insistence that priests obtain a permit to settle on Curaçao, and the Bishop’s subsequent blanket invitation to priests to evangelize there, placed the primary duties of the Roman Catholic Church on itinerant clerics like Gomez and Caldera. Individual priests and the Roman Catholic hierarchy in Caracas alike repeatedly invoked the Bishop’s authorization over the coming decades. Between 1680 and 1707 over fifty priests visited the island from Tierra Firme; dozens more came throughout the eighteenth century.44 Records are incomplete due to the semi-clandestine nature of their work. Many were passing through en route to other destinations, taking advantage of Curaçao’s role as the major transportation hub in the southern Caribbean.45 Most of them came from Coro, since it was relatively easy to find space on one of the numerous small craft that regularly sailed between the two areas. By 1715 Curaçao had become important enough to the Roman Catholic Church that it became a separate apostolic prefecture, although it remained under the umbrella of the Bishopric of Caracas through the end of the century.46 Several religious orders, including Jesuits, Franciscans, Augustinians, and Dominicans, maintained small permanent posts on the island throughout the eighteenth century.47 Clergy ministered to the island’s growing number of slaves and free blacks, and to the small Caquetio population, as well as to the tiny minority of white Catholics.48 By the last quarter of the seventeenth century and thereafter virtually the entire black population of Curaçao, enslaved and free, lived as practicing Roman Catholics, as numerous clerics and others repeatedly observed.49

Shaping an Inter-Imperial Exchange Zone   747 Maintaining Curaçao under the jurisdiction of the Archdiocese of Caracas and giving itinerant priests the freedom to visit and proselytize there, proved to be an effective way for the Roman Catholic Church to have oversight over the majority population of a colony that was governed by Protestants. Moreover, because propagation of the Roman Catholic faith was a major aim of the Spanish, this arrangement allowed the empire to exercise a certain degree of control over the inhabitants of a Dutch possession. Whenever clergy visited the island and performed sacraments they represented not only the apparatus of the Roman Catholic Church but also the shadow of the Spanish Crown, encroaching on the subjects of a rival empire without any need for messy political claims or costly military incursions. Smuggling and smugglers played a similar role for the Dutch. Here, too, a major goal of empire, economic gain, was accomplished in the colony of a rival power, without ­formally challenging established imperial power structures or investing heavily in the military apparatus and manpower needed for effective occupation. Although historians have debated the importance of territorial control in the Dutch imperial project, there is no doubt that the control of extensive regional, Atlantic, and global commercial circuits across political boundaries played a central role.50 Lauren Benton has argued that, more generally, territorial control often was an “incidental aim of imperial expansion.”51 Flagrantly illegal from the Spanish perspective, but completely legitimate for the Dutch, inter-imperial trade played a different role in the designs of the two European powers, promoting Dutch interests while threatening those of the Spanish. The proximity of the small Dutch entrepôt to the vast northern coast of Spanish America, and the historically close ties between the two areas, resulted in deepening economic connections across political boundaries, even as imperial configurations tightened throughout the ­eighteenth century. In effect, Venezuela became Curaçao’s economic hinterland. Because the island lacked the climate and the soil to sustain plantations its merchants looked to the nearby mainland to supply the agricultural goods they traded around the region and beyond. The Province of Venezuela produced a wide range of commodities for Atlantic markets, especially cacao, tobacco, hides, and mules but lacked the shipping connections to distribute these goods.52 A sailing vessel could travel from Curaçao to the coast of Coro in about six hours, propelled by steady, favorable winds and currents53 (although the seas were generally calm, occasional stormy weather could make the voyage lengthy and treacherous, or even deadly54). By the second half of the eighteenth century fully half of Curaçao’s total shipping was with the Province of Venezuela.55 Entire parts of Venezuela were much more closely linked to the Dutch island than to the Spanish orbit.56 The tentacles of Dutch economic control penetrated deep into the Venezuelan interior via smuggling routes. Spanish colonial denizens who transported goods to the coast became, in effect, economic agents of the Dutch empire. Through them the Dutch were able to exercise a degree of economic control in areas where the Spanish themselves had no effective power or presence. Smuggling simultaneously served and violated empire. Every act directly breached political boundaries, which were foremost in the minds of imperial authorities, if not

748   Borderlands of the Iberian World always in those of colonial denizens. Illicit trade thus weakened the overall Spanish imperial project as it promoted Dutch interests. Smuggling bolstered the Dutch hold on Curaçao by strengthening the island’s economy, while undermining Spanish control of Tierra Firme. For the Spanish these trans-imperial commercial circuits represented a failure to protect both the territorial integrity of their realm and the Crown’s exclusive economic claim to its possessions. Spain recognized that controlling movement through the adjacent sea space was vital to protecting its colonial hegemony on land. Throughout the eighteenth century the Crown implemented a series of measures off the coast of Venezuela and beyond in an attempt to thwart the burgeoning contraband trade. The Real Compañía Guipuzcoana de Caracas (or Caracas Company, as it is known in English) served as an effective guardacostas, regularly patrolling the waters off the northern coast of Venezuela between1730 and 1784.57 In 1734 the Crown issued a Royal Decree authorizing the confiscation of any foreign vessel in the Caribbean that was “sailing suspicious routes” (navegando en rubos sospechosos), with an accompanying map and report detailing the particularly egregious itineraries of the Dutch around the region.58 These efforts were somewhat successful, even if they did not completely halt smuggling.59 Intermediate groups played vital, if different, roles in their respective political spheres. In Spanish Venezuela, colonial officials continued to be caught in the middle, struggling to balance their roles as representatives of empire with their keen awareness of local and regional economic needs. Many authorities were complicit in contraband, either by participating directly or looking the other way.60 In Curaçao the Dutch relied heavily on middling merchant groups, especially Sephardic Jews, to negotiate and carry out the trade with Venezuela and around the wider Caribbean. While Dutch merchants affiliated with the WIC controlled most of Curaçao’s transatlantic trade, it was usually up-and-­ coming small scale traders who sailed to Tierra Firme (and elsewhere around the region), made the necessary contacts, and took the risk in procuring the goods. The island’s Sephardic Jewish population, the largest in the Americas, played a particularly key role in the island’s trade. They were agents of empire even as they remained somewhat independent.61 Smugglers did not only aid the aims of the Dutch empire. The particular roles that Curaçao and Tierra Firme each played in its respective empire allowed local inhabitants to develop inter-imperial exchanges partly on their own terms. Contraband trade knit together the inhabitants of both places in extensive trans-imperial networks, involving a variety of people across the socioeconomic spectrum. Within Tierra Firme an extensive web of production and distribution stretched along the coast and deep into the interior, affecting hundreds of people who were not directly involved in moving goods across the political divide.62 Although records are sparse, there is evidence that Caquetios sometimes participated in smuggling networks. Some apparently were maritime workers. Several Curaçaoan vessels that were caught smuggling off the coast of Venezuela had Caquetios among their crew, including one that had “fourteen Spanish Indians and Molattoes.”63 Smugglers often used indigenous vessels or sailing techniques to evade capture. Piraguas were

Shaping an Inter-Imperial Exchange Zone   749 particularly suited to the geography of smuggling. They could carry small amounts of goods; outmaneuver larger sailing vessels; disappear quickly into the dark; slip through the tangles of mangrove swamps; and come ashore virtually anywhere on the coast. People of African descent had a central role in contraband, participating as commodities, laborers, and traders.64 Slaves were one of the earliest commodities that were smuggled into Tierra Firme by Dutch and Curaçaoan traders.65 This clandestine commerce in human cargo opened the door for other forms of smuggling. Enslaved and free men of African descent worked on the docks of Willemstad and manned the vessels that plied the Venezuelan coast. By the mid-eighteenth century at least two thirds of Curaçao’s sailors were of African descent.66 Often they were the ones who were entrusted to go ashore and engage in the risky behavior of seeking out contacts and negotiating deals.67 In Venezuela enslaved and free people of African descent cultivated crops for contraband; conducted the mule trains that transported goods to the coast; and made contact with foreign vessels.68 Slaves also regularly smuggled themselves to freedom on the numerous vessels that sailed between Curaçao and Tierra Firme.69 While such migrations had occurred since the earliest years of the Dutch takeover they acquired a new vigor in the eighteenth century, with the increase in contraband trade.70 By the end of the century over a thousand Curaçaoan slaves had made the crossing to make new lives in Tierra Firme.71 Fugitives required transportation to escape across the water. Some commandeered their own small sea craft; others brazenly posed as freemen and women or surreptitiously stowed away to make their escape.72 Most took advantage of the numerous sailing vessels that regularly plied the waters between Curaçao and the Spanish mainland. Captains who were already smuggling had little problem accepting stowaways. It is no coincidence that runaway slaves gravitated to the same areas that were contraband hubs. Ninetyfive percent of the island’s slaves who were reported missing in 1775 were thought to have fled to Coro.73 By the mid-eighteenth century the town of Coro and settlements in the surrounding mountains were home to at least four hundred Afro-Curaçaoan fugitives, representing, by one estimate, 14 percent of the town’s black population.74 Curiepe, a coastal town east of Caracas, was another enclave.75 Migrants joined local communities of free blacks, colonial militias, and religious brotherhoods. Many continued to participate in smuggling networks and maintained close ties with Curaçao.76 In the 1730s alone the Spanish captured at least fifty-six Curaçaoan slaves who were engaged in contraband trade with the mainland.77 One might say that Roman Catholic priests smuggled themselves into Curaçao, much as runaway slaves smuggled themselves in the opposite direction. Throughout the ­eighteenth century dozens of priests freely crossed the imperial divide, just as Curaçaoan merchants openly traveled to Venezuela to trade. The Dutch tacitly accepted their presence on the island, just as Venezuelan colonial authorities allowed smugglers to operate freely, even if they violated imperial norms. Clergy traveled somewhat more freely than smugglers, bolstered by the mantle of legitimacy afforded by their vestments. These very garments provided ample space for concealing contraband goods, as did their portable altars and trunks ostensibly filled with religious accouterments. As early as 1657 the

750   Borderlands of the Iberian World governor of Curaçao reported that a certain Fray Francisco had arrived on the island to illicitly purchase slaves and sundry goods.78 Some clergy who came to the island to evangelize took advantage of the island’s status as a free port to acquire goods to smuggle back to the mainland.79 Miguel Alexis Schabel, a Bohemian Jesuit, wrote extensively of his illicit inter-imperial trade, and that of several other priests, in the first decade of the eighteenth century.80 His contemporary, Father Augustín Beltrán Caicedo was expelled from Spanish territories after Venezuelan authorities caught him smuggling tobacco to Curaçao. This did not preclude his appointment as the island’s first Apostolic Prefect in 1715, a position he retained until his death in 1738.81 Catholic clergy who regularly visited Curaçao from the mainland played a vital intermediary role in inter-imperial dynamics. Their close contact with the Church hierarchy strengthened Spain’s religious control over the colonial inhabitants of a rival empire, even as their smuggling undermined the Crown’s economic hold on its own possession. At the same time, they opened religious networks between the island and the mainland that were then developed more fully by the area’s black majority. By the second half of the eighteenth century people of African descent had developed their own trans-imperial religious networks via black brotherhoods, or cofradías. The various cofradías in Coro maintained especially close ties to Curaçao; some even had members who lived on the island. On at least one occasion the Cofradía del Carmen sent a delegation to the island, where it remained for six months.82 It is likely that some of the brotherhoods in Coro included runaway slaves from Curaçao or their descendants. It would not be surprising if at least some of them clandestinely carried trade goods between the two areas. The role of contraband trade in knitting together the inhabitants of Curaçao and Tierra Firme was far from unique. The close proximity of islands belonging to competing European powers made the entire circum-Caribbean a hotbed of inter-imperial smuggling throughout the early modern era. Such illicit trade has been a central economic activity in liminal areas across human history.83 If historians have struggled with the challenges of quantifying such extra-legal economic activity, they find it easier to assert its qualitative dimensions and its impact well beyond the economic realm, as it opened up opportunities for a variety of socio-cultural exchanges across political boundaries.84

Contraband, Imperial Structures, and the Sea as a Fluvial Border Smuggling’s relationship to empire was complex, problematic, and historically specific. It was simultaneously a violation of imperial geographies and legal frameworks and an implicit acknowledgment of them. In particular times and places such trade had a decidedly imperial agenda. Throughout much of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Atlantic World, for example, it was a relatively less aggressive and more profitable way for emerging powers to chip away at Spanish hegemony.85 As empires matured, smuggling began to reflect growing tensions and different interests between imperial and

Shaping an Inter-Imperial Exchange Zone   751 colonial authorities, as well the diverging interests of merchants.86 At its simplest, smuggling was entirely a legal construct of empire; its parameters could be and often were expanded or contracted at the stroke of a pen. Every decision to confront smugglers was, at its root, an imperial decision to defend some kind of imperial boundary, be it legal, political, or economic. Yet such a narrow definition overlooks the complex interplay between imperial and colonial interests that often played out via smuggling, as well as the multi-faceted human encounters that were required for such trade to succeed. Smugglers often served larger imperial goals even as they pursued their own immediate economic interests.87 At the same time, as Alan Karras has pointed out, colonial denizens used smuggling as a “vehicle for gaining leverage against a state.”88 Contraband traders were often central actors in maritime spaces. For many inhabitants of Curaçao and Venezuela, as well as many other places around the Caribbean and beyond, contraband trade was far from marginal; it was the lifeblood of local and regional economies, just as borderlands were central rather than marginal places for their inhabitants. The historiography of contraband trade has all too often ignored the implications of this rich tension between imperial power structures and colonial actors, instead framing smuggling simply as the violation of imperial structures and norms, with relatively little consideration of its own internal, local, and regional logic. Thus, the study of smuggling has fallen into some of the same pitfalls as the histories of frontiers and borderlands, either prioritizing imperial narratives and top-down views or focusing too intensely on human agency with little concern for overarching power structures. The study of contraband faces the challenge of addressing the “interplay of individuals with structures and institutions,” as Christopher Ebert has noted.89 Smugglers who traded between Curaçao and Tierra Firme by necessity crossed a sea space, adding a particular geographic dimension to their activities. The role of seas and oceans as liminal sites of exchange is an issue that remains ripe for further conceptual exploration.90 Fernand Braudel noted that seas and oceans initially divided peoples and, if, as geographers have observed more recently, “oceans connect,” it is human movement that transformed them from barriers into unifying spaces.91 In the early modern era empires often led the way in transforming the world’s largest bodies of water into sites of human contact and exchange.92 Even if European powers did not seriously attempt to claim entire oceans, they recognized the importance of managing sea spaces that were proximate to their territories. Spain certainly did not envision the waters off the coast of Venezuela as a neutral space. The guardacostas of the Caracas Company in effect exercised a degree of Spanish jurisdiction beyond the shoreline. Extending terrestrial control into the sea presented particular challenges. As Lauren Benton has noted, even as oceans were a “backdrop” in the narrative of European imperial expansion, like land masses, they also were “variegated spaces transected by law” rather than sites of uniform imperial control.93 The problem, as one historian of the South China Sea has eloquently phrased it, was one of “liquefying sovereignty.”94 But it was not only imperially driven movement that made maritime spaces sites of connection. Even as oceans became the chief conduit for imperial wealth and might in the Age of Empires, they were also the space through which many trans-imperial

752   Borderlands of the Iberian World networks were built and sustained. Diasporas and migrant groups often traveled by sea.95 In the case of the Caribbean, Europeans built on the routes that were first developed by indigenous people and, as seen in the case of Curaçao and Tierra Firme, indigenous approaches to the maritime space continued to leave their mark on imperial and colonial actions. Similarly, coastal peoples were key links in the extensive trade networks that joined interior hinterlands to maritime trade, and they often had a major impact in shaping larger economies and polities. Littorals and their inhabitants figure prominently in the literatures of both smuggling and borderlands.96 Seas were also transected by the ships that sailed them, which could be either microcosms of empire, sites of autonomous human agency, or some combination. If the Spanish guardacostas clearly were agents of empire, empowered and emboldened to defend the Crown’s territorial and economic integrity, the role of the sailing vessels that departed from Curaçao to engage in contraband trade with the mainland was somewhat more complicated. On the one hand the flags they flew clearly indicated that they represented the interests of the Dutch realm. On the other hand, with their multi-ethnic and multi-lingual crews they were also spaces of colonial accommodation, and the choices their captains made in specific trade situations were often dictated by the more immediate interests of their colonial workers rather than by imperial aims. As the ties between Curaçao and Venezuela clearly demonstrate, the Caribbean’s maritime and terrestrial spaces were not discrete and autonomous; rather, they were part of a well-integrated “continuum connected by the sea,” in the words of two Caribbean geographers.97 Donald Meinig has illustrated a similar phenomenon on a much larger scale for the entire Atlantic World, mapping the ocean as a conduit of exchange between Europe and the Americas with varying degrees of contact and influence fanning out along a spectrum.98 Braudel’s study of the Mediterranean is the classic study of a smaller, enclosed sea space linking peoples from different political spheres and is a useful model for the early modern Caribbean, with its porous boundaries and overlapping connections between land and sea.99 In spite of some obvious differences maritime spaces have faced some of the same problems that have affected terrestrial borderlands, including unclear and shifting spatial boundaries and overlap, corresponding in part to changing political and economic structures. If, as Jerry Bentley has suggested, they were discrete and historically changing spaces that were created through cross-cultural interaction, then seas and oceans can be seen as watery borderlands.100 But, as Pekka Hämäläinen and Samuel Truett have observed, the very term “borderland,” is geographically problematic here, turning the historian’s eye towards “spatially adjacent, land-based relations,” at the expense of the particularities of maritime connections.101 Open waters had neither borders nor land, even as their waves lapped both. Perhaps one could find less awkward terminology that more accurately reflects their literally fluid geographic characteristics. One historian of the Pacific has charted what he calls the “long watery pathway” that linked spatially removed but interconnected peoples from Hawaii to California as “nodes in a network of global processes.”102 The distinction between frontiers as “borderless lands” (or at least areas where lines of power were not clearly demarcated)

Shaping an Inter-Imperial Exchange Zone   753 and borderlands as areas where boundaries were contested provides an initial entry point for mapping the intersection of clearly contested terrestrial areas and relatively open sea spaces throughout the early modern world.103 Michael Jarvis’s notion of the Atlantic Commons holds promise here, with its examination of “extranational maritime places” on land and at sea that remained outside effective imperial control and were vibrant sites of intercultural and economic exchange.104 Arguably, the sea space between Curaçao and Tierra Firme, and much of the Caribbean, functioned like such a commons, but only to the extent that smugglers and others were able to escape the reaches of the Spanish guardacostas. As they traversed the waters between the Dutch island and the Spanish mainland, smugglers, runaway slaves and itinerant priests created a “web of contesting agencies.”105 Colonial contestation is at the heart of the definition of borderlands throughout the early modern Americas and beyond.106 To some degree, the relative roles of states and the individuals who inhabited them seem straightforward: borders were state-imagined and drawn, while borderlands were shaped by the people in them.107 One could argue that trans-imperial colonial networks challenged imperial demarcations just as surely as did acts of overt conflict. Yet, at the same time, the very act of violating the neatly imagined boundaries of empire was to some extent a tacit acknowledgement of the legitimacy of imperial power. In this sense, as Pekka Hämäläinen and Samuel Truett have noted, borderlands (like smuggling, I might add) simultaneously “embodied and undermined state power.”108 The tension between imperial structures and colonial agency has often been set up as a dichotomy, harking back to the core/periphery model. This model still has some usefulness for conceptualizing relative power dynamics. Arguably, Curaçao operated as a colonial center, not only within the Dutch realm but also as a site of trans-imperial exchanges throughout the region.109 John TePaske conceived of Tierra Firme as one of Spain’s “vital peripheries”—colonial areas that were marginal to Spain’s wider imperial interests except for their strategic location and as a source of agricultural commodities.110 Such a modified center/periphery model is useful for understanding the Dutch port/ Spanish hinterland phenomenon, although it is perhaps more limited for explaining the character of the trans-imperial connections the inhabitants of these two areas developed.111 This model acknowledges the role of imperial power and competition in outlining the shapes and circumstances of borderlands, a role that sometimes has been given short shrift in the rush to center indigenous peoples and other marginalized colonial actors whose daily lives seemed far removed from imperial power struggles.112 Imperial power was real, even when it was contested.113 The particular configurations of power in a specific place and time shaped the ways in which colonial people lived their lives, even in borderlands. But where to fit in messier forms of control, such as Dutch economic dominance over much of Tierra Firme via smuggling circuits based in Curaçao, and Spanish religious control over the majority of Curaçao’s population via a seat of the Roman Catholic Church in Venezuela? In both cases what made the control real was effective inter-colonial networks, which were influenced by, but operated somewhat independently of, the established hierarchy of power. Together with the particularities

754   Borderlands of the Iberian World of the region’s geography, these provided the framework in which colonial denizens carved out their own somewhat autonomous spaces. Imperial demarcations were not always as neatly imposed from above as the concept of borders and borderlands might imply. Lauren Benton argues that European control was often exercised along corridors and enclaves, which allowed multiple empires to operate in the same space without actually competing directly.114 Benton’s model helps explain the seemingly anomalous economic and religious corridors that crisscrossed the seemingly neat political demarcations between Curaçao and Tierra Firme. Elija Gould’s notion of the entangled histories of empires provides another way of conceptualizing power in borderlands and one that further illuminates some of the dynamics that influenced colonial ties between Curaçao and Tierra Firme.115 It seems especially relevant for understanding the phenomenon of a Dutch colonial port tied to a Spanish colonial hinterland, as two interconnected parts of a single and “deeply asymmetrical” system. Conceptualizing empires as entangled seems a promising way to keep some emphasis on the importance of imperial power structures and inter-imperial rivalries without losing sight of colonial dynamics and actors. Gould, like Benton, reminds us that it was not only in colonial peripheries where power dynamics were messy, contingent, and intertwined but rather that these characteristics were the essence of early modern empires. Entangling borderlands, however, does not eliminate the problem of teasing out the relative importance of different areas, or the danger of over-emphasizing connections at the seat of power at the expense of colonial dynamics.116 Gould argues that so-called peripheries were often the sites of the most intense expression of imperial identities, and thus even entangled colonial histories were not independent of those of their corresponding metropoles.117 In addressing the power dynamics of empires and colonies, historians of borderlands and entanglements alike seem unable to avoid the terminology of centers and peripheries. Yet, as historians of another borderland region have noted, a core/periphery can impede our understanding of the internal dynamics of these areas.118 The dynamics between Curaçao and the Province of Venezuela show how unclear colonial borderareas were shaped by a multifaceted interplay between imperial claims and imaginings, on the one hand, and the actions and needs of colonial subjects, on the other. The trans-imperial economic and religious systems that the Spanish and Dutch empires, respectively, tacitly allowed were simultaneously intertwined with, parallel to, and somewhat independent of political lines of authority, and together created particular opportunities for a variety of colonial denizens on both sides of the imperial divide. As Tamar Herzog has argued, writing the history of a borderland exclusively from either above or below creates an artificial dichotomy between imperial power and the agency of colonial actors. Herzog envisions “polycentric entities” who operated in networks around multiple focal points, with no clear centers or peripheries.119As the relationship between Curaçao and the Province of Venezuela shows, colonial actors created their own spaces and effectively claimed territory for their own use, developing connections that were influenced by (but also somewhat independent of) imperial

Shaping an Inter-Imperial Exchange Zone   755 imaginings and formal imperial demarcations. Herzog argues that colonial actors together created a “cacophony rather than a dialogue.”120 In the southern Caribbean a dialectical dance seems to have taken place instead, as smugglers, runaway slaves, itinerant priests, and others constantly moved around each other, within entangled imperial frameworks, across adjoining land and sea spaces, and through the murky waters in between. Knowing exactly where they were on the various continuums of intertwined imperial political, economic, and religious control was essential for shaping their choices, and it could be vital for their very survival. The inter-imperial exchange zone encompassed island, mainland, and sea, and it was shaped by the interplay between imperial powers and a variety of colonial agents. The structures created by imperial powers not only constrained the actions of colonial denizens on the ground—and in the water—they also helped create new opportunities for inter-imperial interactions. The variety of colonial actors, in turn, acted on this space on their own terms and for their own purposes, and, in doing so, they helped shape the contours of empire.

Notes Archives AGI: AGS: AGN: AHN: NAN: NANA:

Archivo de Falcón (Formerly Archivo Histórico de Coro) Coro, (Venezuela) Archivo General de Indias, Seville (Spain) Archivo General de Simancas, Simancas (Spain) Archivo General de la Nación, Caracas (Venezuela) Archivo Histórico Nacional, Madrid (Spain) Archivo de la Academia Nacional de la Historia, Caracas (Venezuela) Nationaal Archief Nederland, The Hague (The Netherlands) National Archives of the Netherlands Antilles, Willemstad (Curaçao)

1. Joshua M. Torres and Reniel Rodríguez Ramos, “The Caribbean: A Continent Divided by Water,” in Archaeology and Geoinformatics: Case Studies from the Caribbean, ed. Basil A. Reid (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2008). 2. Juan de Castellanos, Elegías de varones ilustres de Indias (1589), introduction and notes by Isaac J. Pardo (Caracas: Biblioteca de la Academia Nacional de la Historia, 1962), 173; Pedro de Aguado, Historia de Venezuela [1581]. Prologue, notes, and appendices by Jerónimo Bécker (Madrid: Establecimiento Tipográfico de Jaime Ratés, 1918), 52–55. 3. Louise Allaire, “Agricultural Societies in the Caribbean: the Lesser Antilles,” in Autochthonous Societies: General History of the Caribbean, vol. 1, ed. Jalil Sued-Badillo (Paris: UNESCO, 2003), 98. 4. Jay B. Haviser, “Amerindian Cultural Geography on Curaçao” (PhD diss., Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, 1987), 146, 148. 5. Carta del factor de Santo Domingo, Juan de Ampies, a Su Magestad (undated). Archivo General de Indias, Seville, Spain (hereafter AGI) Indiferente P18 R3; report by Rodrigo de Figueroa [1520], in Colección de documentos inéditos relativos al descubrimiento, conquista,

756   Borderlands of the Iberian World y colonización de las posesiones españolas en América y Oceanía sacados, en su mayor parte, del Real Archivo de Indias, vol. 1, ed. Joaquín Francisco Pacheco (Madrid: M. Bernaldo de Quirós, 1864), 379–85. 6. Haviser, “Amerindian Cultural Geography,” 146, 148. 7. AGI Santo Domingo (SD) legajo 218, cited in Carlos Felice Cardot, Curazao hispánico: Antagonismo flamenco-español (Caracas: Ediciones de la Presidencia de la República, 1982), 52. 8. Felice, Curazao hispánico, 51–55, 389–391. 9. Linda  M.  Rupert, Creolization and Contraband: Curaçao in the Early Modern Atlantic World (Athens: University of Georgia Press Early American Places, 2012), Chapter 1; Haviser, “Amerindian Cultural Geography;” Francisco Watlington, “The Physical Environment: Biogeographical Teleconnections in Caribbean Prehistory,” in Autochthonous Societies: General History of the Caribbean, vol. 1, ed. Jalil Sued-Badillo (Paris: UNESCO, 2003); Allaire, “Agricultural Societies in the Caribbean.” 10. Haviser, “Amerindian Cultural Geography,” 149–150. 11. Royal Decree signed in Toledo (June 26, 1539), in Cedularios de la Monarquía Española Relativos a la Provincia de Venezuela (Caracas: Fundación John Boulton and Fundación Eugenio Mendoza, 1959), 99–101; Castellanos, Elegías, 173; Felice, Curazao hispánico, 44–45. 12. Felice, Curazao hispánico, 13, 52. 13. José Luis de Cisneros, Descripción exacta de la Provincia de Venezuela (Caracas: Biblioteca de la Academia Nacional de la Historia, 1981), 167. 14. Pedro José de Olavarriaga, Instrucción General y Particular del Estado Presente de la Provincia de Venezuela en los Años de 1720 y 1721 (Caracas: Biblioteca de la Academia Nacional de la Historia, 1965), 294; Henry Kamen, Empire: How Spain Became a World Power, 1492–1763 (New York: HarperCollins, 2003), 472. 15. AGI Mapas y Planos Venezuela, 17 (1634); AGI SD 221:69 (1620); Aguado, Historia, 22. 16. Irene Wright, comp., Spanish Documents, nos. 18–24, 107–127; John Hawkins, “The Voyage Made by the Worshipful M. John Hawkins, Esquire, now Knight Captaine of the Jesus of Lubek . . . begun in An. Dom. 1564,” in The Hawkins’ Voyages during the Reigns of Henry VII, Queen Elizabeth, and James I, ed. Clements R. Markham (London: the Hakluyt Society, 1878), 36. 17. Compiled in Irene Wright, comp. Nederlandsche Zeevaarders op de Eilanden in de Caribische Zee en aan de Kust van Colombia en Venezuela Gedurende de Jaren 1621–1648(9): Documenten hoofdzakelijk uit het Archivo General de Indias te Sevilla, vol. 1: 1621–1641 (Utrecht: Kemink en Zoon, 1935): #16 (June 23, 1567), 95–100; #17 (July 9, 1567), 101–106; #21 (April 21, 1568), 114; #22 (September 26, 1568), 118–119. 18. For example, “City of Nombre de Dios to the Crown, May 14, 1573,” in Irene Wright, comp., Documents Concerning English Voyages to the Spanish Main, 1569–1580, 2nd series, vol. 81 (London: Hakluyt Society, 1932), 72–73. 19. “Carta del Licenciado Santiago de Riego, 8 July 1568,” in Ermila de Veracoechea Troconis, comp., Documentos para el estudio de los esclavos negros en Venezuela (Caracas: Biblioteca de la Academia Nacional de la Historia, 1969), 29. 20. AGI SD 899 (1569); Wright, Spanish Documents Concerning English Voyages to the Caribbean¸1527–1568, 2nd series, vol. 62 (London: Hakluyt Society, 1929): 18–24, 107–127; “Report of Cumberland’s Seventh Voyage,” in Kenneth  R.  Andrews, comp. English Privateering Voyages to the West Indies, 1588–1595. Documents Relating to English Voyages to the West Indies from the Defeat of the Armada to the Last Voyage of Sir Francis Drake,

Shaping an Inter-Imperial Exchange Zone   757 Including Spanish Documents Contributed by Irene A. Wright (Cambridge, UK: Hakluyt Society, Cambridge University Press, 1959), 248; Felice, Curazao hispánico, 72. 21. “Francisco Nuñez Melián to Pedro de Llovera, La Guaira, 12 October, 1633,” in Wright, Nederlandsche Zeevaarders, 183–85. 22. Johannes Postma, The Dutch in the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1600–1815 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Cornelius C. Goslinga, The Dutch in the Caribbean and in the Guianas, 1680–1791 (Assen and Maastricht: van Gorcum, 1985), chap. 5. 23. Henk den Heijer, “The Dutch West India Company, 1621–1791,” in Riches from Atlantic Commerce: Dutch Transatlantic Trade and Shipping, 1585–1817, ed. Johannes Postma and Victor Enthoven (Leiden: Brill, 2003), 77–112. 24. Karen Fog Olwig, ed. Small Islands, Large Questions: Society, Culture and Resistance in the Post-Emancipation Caribbean (London: Frank Cass, 1995); Jarvis, Michael J. In the Eye of All Trade: Bermuda, Bermudians, and the Maritime Atlantic World, 1680–1783 (Chapel Hill: UNC, 2010). 25. Harry Hoetink, Het patroon van de oude Curaçaose samenleving (Amsterdam: S. Emmering, 1987 [1958]), 164–168. 26. Rupert, Creolization and Contraband, 136. 27. Jeremy David Cohen, “Informal Commercial Networks, Social Control, and Political Power in the Province of Venezuela, 1700–1757” (PhD diss. University of Florida, 2003). 28. Mario Briceño Perozo, “Estudio Preliminar.” In Instrucción General y Particular del Estado Presente de la Provincia de Venezuela en los Años de 1720 y 1721, Pedro José de Olavarriaga (Caracas: Biblioteca de la Academia Nacional de la Historia, 1965), 41–51. 29. Olavarriaga, Instrucción General y Particular, 221–48; Lucas Guillermo Castillo Lara, Curiepe: orígenes históricos (Caracas: Biblioteca de la Academia Nacional de Historia, 1981), 113; Robert J. Ferry, The Colonial Elite of Early Caracas: Formation and Crisis, 1567–1767 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 114–117. 30. AGI Mapas y Planos, Venezuela 17 (1634); Felice, Curazao hispánico, 212; Cornelius  C. Goslinga, The Dutch in the Caribbean and on the Wild Coast, 1580–1680 (Assen: van Gorcum, 1971), 267, 269. 31. R. H. Nooijen, De slavenparochie van Curaçao rond het jaar 1750: Een demografie van het katholieke volksdeel (Curaçao: Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology of the Netherlands Antilles, Report no. 11. 1995), 68–69, 111–115. 32. Rupert, Creolization and Contraband, 195. 33. AGI IG 2569, 134r–136v (January 1635); AGI SD 194: Cartas y expedientes Gobernadores de Caracas y Venezuela, 1621–39, R3 and R4. Wright, Nederlandsche Zeevaarders: “Francisco Nuñez Melián to the Spanish Crown (11 February 1635),” 200; “Francisco Nuñez Melián to the Spanish Crown (15 July 1635),” 211; “Domingo Antonio Francisco, Caracas (12–13 July 1635),” 215–16; “Juan Mateos, Caracas (19 October 1635),” 227–228; “Memorandum (July (?) 1641),” 248. 34. Peter Stuyvesant et al., “Resolution (31 March 1643),” in New Netherland Documents, vol. 17: Curaçao Papers 1640–1665, comp. Charles T. Gehring and J. A. Schiltkamp (Interlaken: Heart of the Lakes, 1987), 22; Peter Stuyvesant et al., “Resolution (19 May 1643),” in New Netherland Documents, 23. 35. “Alonso Diaz, Coro, 3 January 1635,” in Wright, Nederlandsche Zeevaarders #58, 193–194; “Pedro Ortiz, Caracas, 11 February 1636,” in Wright, Nederlandsche Zeevaarders #65, 239; Carlos González Batista, Antillas y Tierra Firme: historia de la influencia de Curazao en la arquitectura antigua de Venezuela (Caracas: Refinería Isla Curazao S.A., 1990), 32.

758   Borderlands of the Iberian World 36. See Father Brada, O.P., Bisdom Coro (1531–1637) (Willemstad: n.p., 1953). 37. “Reglement voor de West-Indische Compagnie (26 April 1634),” cited in Christine W. M. Schunk, “The Lost Catholic Houses of Prayer in Curaçao,” in Building Up the Future from the Past: Studies on the Architecture and Historic Monuments in the Dutch Caribbean, ed. Henry E. Coomans, et al. (Zutphen: De Walburg Press, 1990), 129. 38. Schunk, “The Lost Catholic Houses of Prayer in Curaçao,” 129; Father Brada, O.P., Prefect Caysedo 1715–1738 (Willemstad: n.p., 1956). 39. “Bishop of Caracas (8 January 1779),” in Felice, Curazao hispánico, 393–395. 40. Nooijen, De slavenparochie van Curaçao, 68–69. 41. Matthias Beck to Amsterdam directors (28 July 1657), in New Netherland Documents, vol. 17, 103; González, Antillas y Tierra Firme, 41; Felice, Curazao hispánico, 392. 42. Schunk, “The Lost Catholic Houses of Prayer in Curaçao,” 130–32; Father Brada, O.P., Pater Schabel, S.J., 1704–1713 (Willemstad: n/p,1965), 61; Father Brada, O.P., Kerkgeschiedenis Curaçao 1680–1707 (Willemsta: n.p., 1961), 9. 43. Felice, Curazao hispánico, 397. 44. Felice, Curazao hispánico, 394–96n13; Nooijen, De slavenparochie van Curaçao, 4–5; Armando Lampe, Mission or Submission? Moravian and Catholic Missionaries in the Dutch Caribbean during the 19th Century (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2001), 108–9. 45. Felice, Curazao hispánico, 393; Schunk, “The Lost Catholic Houses of Prayer in Curaçao,” 129; Armando Lampe, “Christianity and Slavery in the Dutch Caribbean,” in Christianity in the Caribbean: Essays on Church History, ed. Armando Lampe (Barbados: University of the West Indies Press, 2001), 131. 46. Brada, Bisdom Coro. 47. Rupert, Creolization and Contraband, 148–153. 48. “Matthias Beck to Amsterdam directors (28 July 1657),” in New Netherland Documents, 103; González, Antillas y Tierra Firme, 41; Felice, Curazao hispánico, 391–392. 49. Michael Alexius Schabel, Dagboek-Fragment van Pater Michael Alexius Schabel Societatis Jesu Missionaris op het eiland Curaçao loopend van 21 October 1707 tot 4 Februari 1708, National Archives of the Netherlands Antilles, Willemstad, Curaçao (hereafter NANA); Petizion de Santiago Musnier, Director General del Asiento, Caracas 18 de mayo de 1708, AGI SD Leg 793 Libro 1 f69v; Report by Manuel de Carrera to the Governor of Caracas (26 September 1796), Archivo de la Academia Nacional de la Historia, Caracas, Venezuela: A16-e54-D11182. 50. Pieter Emmer and Wim Klooster, “The Dutch Atlantic, 1600–1900: Expansion without Empire,” Itinerario 23, no. 2 (1999): 48–66; Benjamin Schmidt, “The Dutch Atlantic: From Provincialism to Globalism,” in Atlantic History: A Critical Appraisal, ed. Jack P. Greene and Philip D. Morgan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 163–187; Victor Enthoven, “Early Dutch Expansion in the Atlantic Region, 1585–1621,” in Riches from Atlantic Commerce: Dutch Transatlantic Trade and Shipping, 1585–1817, ed. Jonannas Postma and Victor Enthoven (Leiden: Brill, 2003), 17–47; and Patricia Seed, Ceremonies of Possession in Europe’s Conquest of the New World, 1492–1640 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 154–160. 51. Lauren Benton, A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400–1900 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 2. 52. Rupert, Creolization and Contraband, chap. 5; Wim Klooster, Illicit Riches: Dutch Trade in the Caribbean 1648–1795 (Leiden: KITLV Press, 1998); Ramón Aizpurua, Curazao y la costa

Shaping an Inter-Imperial Exchange Zone   759 de Caracas: introducción al estudio del contrabando de la provincia de Venezuela en tiempos de la Compañía Guipuzcoana 1730–1788 (Caracas: Biblioteca de la Academia Nacional de la Historia, 1993); Goslinga, The Dutch in the Caribbean and in the Guianas, chap. 6. 53. Cisneros, Descripción exacta, 167. 54. Archivo de Falcón, Coro, Venezuela: Causas Civiles #914 (September 9, 1688). 55. Klooster, Illicit Riches, 175. 56. Aizpurua, Curazao y la costa de Caracas, 293. 57. Archivo General de la Nación, Caracas, Venezuela (hereafter AGN), Diversos XVII: 1734–1748; Gerardo Vivas Pineda, La aventura naval de la Compañía Guipuzcoana de Caracas (Caracas: Editorial Exlibris, 1998). 58. Archivo Histórico Nacional, Madrid, Spain (hereafter AHN) Diversos 30:12:1:120 (May 30, 1734); Archivo General de Simancas, Simancas, Spain (hereafter AGS,) Estado Legajo 6361 (May 28, 1739); AGS Mapas y Planos 05–177; AGI Indiferente General 1596: 25 (May 28, 1739). 59. Gov. Faesch to Amsterdam chamber (18 October 1750), Nationaal Archief Nederland, The Hague, the Netherlands (hereafter NAN); Gov. Faesch to Amsterdam chamber (27 February 1751), NAN Nieuwe West Indische Compagnie (NWIC) 1160: 89; Aizpurua, Curazao y la costa de Caracas, chap. 2. 60.  Antonio José Álvarez Abreu, “Instrucción, 1715,” in Álvarez Abreu y su extraordinaria ­misión en Indias, ed. Analola Borges (Tenerife: IEHC, 1963), 68–165; Jeremy David Cohen, “Cultural and Commercial Intermediaries in an Extra-Legal System of Exchange. The Prácticos of the Venezuelan Littoral in the Eighteenth Century,” Itinerario 27, no. 2 (2003): 105–124; Linda  M.  Rupert, “Contraband Trade and the Shaping of Colonial Societies,” Itinerario 30, no. 3 (2006): 35–54. 61. Olavarriaga, Instrucción General y Particular, 302, NAN Oude Archief Curaçao (OAC) 820, no. 11 (January 6, 1749); Isaac S. Emmanuel and Suzanne Emmanuel, History of the Jews of the Netherlands Antilles (Cincinnati: American Jewish Archives, 1970), 69–70, 81–83, 222–226. 62. Cohen, Informal Commercial Networks; Aizpurua, Curazao y la costa de Caracas, especially chapter 3. 63. “Reprisal v. Hope, 1745,” in Records of the Vice-Admiralty Court of Rhode Island, 1716–1752 ed. D. S. Towle (Washington, DC: AHA, 1936), 329; “Polly v. Pearl,” in Records of the Vice-Admiralty Court of Rhode Island, ed. Towle., 343. 64. Rupert, Creolization and Contraband, 193–211. 65. Postma, The Dutch in the Atlantic Slave Trade, 29–36. 66. Klooster, Illicit Riches, 68. 67. Rupert, Creolization and Contraband, chap. 4. 68. Aizpurua, Curazao y la costa de Caracas; Cohen, “Cultural and Commercial Intermediaries.” 69. Linda M. Rupert, “Curaçaoan Maroons in Venezuela,” in Sociétés marrones des Amériques, ed. Jean Moomou (Guadaloupe: Ibis Rouge, 2015), 139–151, and “Inter-Colonial Networks and Revolutionary Ferment in Eighteenth-Century Curaçao and Tierra Firme,” in Curaçao in the Age of Revolutions, 1795–1800, ed. Wim Klooster and Gert Oostindie (Leiden: KITLV Press, 2011), 75–96. 70. For the seventeenth century, among others: AGN Diversos I f409-427 (1690); “Instructie voor Jacob Pietersz Tolck, Direkteur van Curaçao (1638),” in West Indisch Plakaatboek: Publicaties en andere Wetten alsmede de oudste Resoluties Betrekking hebbende op Curaçao,

760   Borderlands of the Iberian World Aruba, Bonaire, vol. 1, comp. J. A. Schiltkamp and J. T. Smidt (Amsterdam: S. Emmering, 1978), 6; “Governor Fuenmayor (20 April 1638),” cited in Ramón Aizpurua, “En busca de la libertad: los esclavos fugados de Curazao a Coro en el siglo XVIII,” in Influencias africanas en las culturas tradicionales de los países andinos. Memorias (Bogotá: Dipligráficas, 2001), 75; and the following in New Netherland Documents, Gehring and Schiltkamp, comp.: “Resolution of island directors of Curaçao (26 May 1644),” 39; “L. Rodenburch to Amsterdam Directors (April 2, 1654),” 59; “Governor of Curaçao to Directors of the West India Company (June 11, 1657),” 98. 71. NAN NWIC 1166:124 (July 7, 1775); NAN NWIC 610, 292–301; Aizpurua, “En busca de la libertad,” 98. 72. Klooster, Illicit Riches, 68–69. 73. NAN NWIC 1166:124 (July 7, 1775). 74. AGN CG D XL, 1770 #8, 174–205; AGN CG D XLI, 1771 #3, 24–51; Obispo Mariano Martí, Documentos relativos a su visita pastoral de la Diócesis de Caracas, 1771–1784 (Caracas: Biblioteca de la Academia Nacional de la Historia, 1969), V: 62, 64 and 7: 205–206. 75. AGN Archivo del Registro del Distrito Federal, Tierras 1767-M #1; NAN OAC 1548: 60 (14-01-1739); AGI SD 782, 1732–33; AGN D VXIII #10, 1736; Castillo, Curiepe, 55, 103, 173. 76. Rupert, “Curaçaoan Maroons in Venezuela.” 77. NAN OAC 806:296 (June 22, 1737). 78. “Matthias Beck to Amsterdam directors (28 July 1657),” in New Netherland Documents, 103. 79. Felice, Curazao hispánico, 392; González, Antillas y Tierra Firme, 36, 41. 80. Schabel, Dagboek-Fragment, NANA; Christine  W.  M.  Schunk, “Michael Johannes Schabel, ‘Notitia de Coraçao, Bonayre, Oruba,’ 1705 and ‘Diurnum (1707–1708).” Archivum Historicum Societatis Iesu 66, no. 131 (1997): 96, 100. 81. Brada, Prefect Caysedo, 132–133. 82. González, Antillas y Tierra Firme, 38. 83. Alan Karras, Smuggling: Contraband and Corruption in World History (Plymouth, UK: Rowman and Littlefield, 2010). 84. Christopher Ebert, “From Gold to Manioc: Contraband Trade in Brazil during the Golden Age, 1700–1750,” Colonial Latin American Review 20, no. 1 (2011): 112, 118; Rupert, Creolization and Contraband. 85. J. H. Parry, Trade and Dominion: The European Overseas Empires in the Eighteenth Century (London: Phoenix Press, 1971), 94. 86. Parry, Trade and Dominion, 108; Jeremy Baskes, “Communication Breakdown: Information and Risk in Spanish Atlantic World Trade during an Era of ‘Free Trade’ and War,” Colonial Latin American Review 20, no. 1 (2011): 35–60. 87. Jarvis, In the Eye of All Trade, 119. 88. Karras, Smuggling, 131. 89. Ebert, “From Gold to Manioc,” 112. 90. See, respectively, Tracy Goode, “The Pacific Borderlands of the Spanish Empire,” and Brandon Bayne, “Converting the Pacific: Jesuit Networks Between New Spain and Asia,” both in The Oxford Handbook of Borderlands of the Iberian World, ed. Danna A. Levin Rojo and Cynthia Radding (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 765–788 and 789–816 respectively. 91. Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, vol. 1 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995 [1949]), 276; Special issue, Oceans Connect: The Geographical Review 89, no. 2 (1999). 92. Jerry H. Bentley, “Sea and Ocean Basins as Frameworks of Analysis,” Geographic Review 89, no. 2 (1999): 220–221.

Shaping an Inter-Imperial Exchange Zone   761 93. Benton, A Search for Sovereignty, 104, 105. 94. Kenneth MacLean, “From Land to Water: Fixing Fluid Frontiers and the Politics of Lines in the South China/Eastern Sea,” in China’s Encounters on the South and Southwest: Reforging the Fiery Frontier Over Two Millennia, ed. James  A.  Anderson and John K. Whitmore (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 376. 95. David A. Chang, “Borderlands in a World at Sea: Concow Indians, Native Hawaiians, and South Chinese in Indigenous, Global, and National Spaces,” Journal of American History 98, no. 2 (2011): 384. 96. James  A.  Anderson, “ ‘Slipping Through Holes’: The Late Tenth and Early EleventhCentury Sino-Vietnamese Coastal Frontier as a Subaltern Trade Network,” in The Tongking Gulf Through History, ed. Nola Cook et al. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 89, 93, 99. 97. Torres and Rodríguez, “Caribbean.” 98. D. W. Meinig, The Shaping of America: A Geographical Perspective on 500 Years of History, vol. 1: Atlantic America, 1492–1800 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986). 99. Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World. 100. Bentley, “Sea and Ocean Basins as Frameworks of Analysis,” 218. 101. Pekka Hämäläinen and Samuel Truett, “On Borderlands,” Journal of American History 98, no. 2 (2011): 353. 102. Chang, “Borderlands in a World at Sea,” 393, 384. 103. Jeremy Adelman and Stephen Aron, “From Borderlands to Borders: Empires, NationStates, and the Peoples in Between in North American History,” American Historical Review 104 (1999): 815–816. 104. Jarvis, In the Eye of all Trade, 256. 105. See Danna A. Levin Rojo and Cynthia Radding, “Introduction: Borderlands, a Working Definition,” in The Oxford Handbook of Borderlands of the Iberian World, ed. Danna A. Levin Rojo and Cynthia Radding (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019). 106. Adelman and Aaron, “From Borderlands to Borders,” 816. 107. Michiel Baud and Willem van Schendel, “Toward a Comparative History of Borderlands,” Journal of World History 8, no. 2 (1997): 219. 108. Hämäläinen and Truett, “On Borderlands,” 348. 109. Amy Turner Bushnell and Jack P. Green, “Peripheries, Centers, and the Construction of Early Modern American Empires,” in Negotiated Empires: Centers and Peripheries in the Americas, 1500–1820, ed. Christine Daniels and Michael  V.  Kennedy (New York: Routledge, 2002), 1–14. 110. John Jay TePaske, “Integral to Empire: The Vital Peripheries of Colonial Spanish America,” in Negotiated Empires: Centers and Peripheries in the Americas, 1500–1820, ed. Christine Daniels and Michael V. Kennedy (New York: Routledge, 2002), 30–36. 111. Fabrício Prado, “Trans-Imperial Interaction and the Rio de la Plata as an Atlantic Borderland,” in The Oxford Handbook of Borderlands of the Iberian World, ed. Danna  A.  Levin Rojo and Cynthia Radding, 669–690 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019). 112. Adelman and Aaron, “From Borderlands to Borders,” 815. 113. Hämäläinen and Truett, “On Borderlands,” 340, 344. 114. Benton, A Search for Sovereignty, 37. 115. Elija Gould, “Entangled Histories, Entangled Worlds: The English-Speaking Atlantic as a Spanish Periphery,” American Historical Review 112, no. 3 (2007): 767–768. 116. See the discussion that played out in the American Historical Review: Gould, “Entangled Histories, Entangled Worlds;” Jorge Cañizares Esguerra, “Entangled Histories:

762   Borderlands of the Iberian World

117. 118. 119. 120.

Borderland Historiographies in New Clothes?,” American Historical Review 112, no. 3 (2007): 787–799; and Gould, “Entangled Atlantic Histories: A Response from the AngloAmerican Periphery,” American Historical Review 112, no. 5 (2007): 1415–1422. Gould, “Entangled Atlantic Histories,” 1416. James A. Anderson and John K. Whitmore, “Introduction: The Fiery Frontier and the Dong World,” in China’s Encounters on the South and Southwest: Reforging the Fiery Frontier Over Two Millennia, ed. James A. Anderson and John Whitmore (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 11–12. Tamar Herzog, Frontiers of Possession: Spain and Portugal in Europe and the Americas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 5, 254. Herzog, Frontiers of Possession, 1.

Bibliography Adelman, Jeremy, and Stephen Aron. “From Borderlands to Borders: Empires, Nation-States, and the Peoples in Between in North American History.” American Historical Review 104 (1999): 814–841. Aguado, Pedro de. Historia de Venezuela. Prologue, notes, and appendices by Jerónimo Bécker. Madrid: Establecimiento Tipográfico de Jaime Ratés, 1918 [1581]. Aizpurua, Ramón. “En busca de la libertad: los esclavos fugados de Curazao a Coro en el siglo XVIII.” In Influencias africanas en las culturas tradicionales de los países andinos. Memorias, 69–102. Bogotá: Dipligráficas, 2001. Aizpurua, Ramón. Curazao y la costa de Caracas: introducción al estudio del contrabando de la provincia de Venezuela en tiempos de la Compañía Guipuzcoana 1730–1788. Caracas: Biblioteca de la Academia Nacional de la Historia, 1993. Allaire, Louise. “Agricultural Societies in the Caribbean: the Lesser Antilles.” In Autochthonous Societies: General History of the Caribbean, vol. 1, edited by Jalil Sued-Badillo, 195–227. Paris: UNESCO, 2003. Bentley, Jerry H. “Sea and Ocean Basins as Frameworks of Analysis.” Geographic Review 89, no. 2 (1999): 215–224. Benton, Lauren. A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400–1900. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Brada, Father, O. P. Bisdom Coro (1531–1637). Willemstad: n.p., 1953. Brada, Father, O. P. Prefect Caysedo 1715–1738. Willemstad: n. p., 1956. Braudel, Fernand. The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, vol. 1. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. Briceño Perozo, Mario. “Estudio Preliminar.” In Instrucción General y Particular del Estado Presente de la Provincia de Venezuela en los Años de 1720 y 1721, Pedro José de Olavarriaga, 11–207. Caracas: Biblioteca de la Academia Nacional de la Historia, 1965. Castellanos, Juan de. Elegías de varones ilustres de Indias. Introduction and notes by Isaac J. Pardo. Caracas: Biblioteca de la Academia Nacional de la Historia, 1962. Chang, David  A. “Borderlands in a World at Sea: Concow Indians, Native Hawaiians, and South Chinese in Indigenous, Global, and National Spaces.” Journal of American History 98, no. 2 (2011): 384–403. Cisneros, José Luis de. Descripción exacta de la Provincia de Venezuela. Caracas: Biblioteca de la Academia Nacional de la Historia, 1981.

Shaping an Inter-Imperial Exchange Zone   763 Cohen, Jeremy David. “Cultural and Commercial Intermediaries in an Extra-Legal System of Exchange. The Prácticos of the Venezuelan Littoral in the Eighteenth Century.” Itinerario 27, no. 2 (2003): 105–24. Cohen, Jeremy David. “Informal Commercial Networks, Social Control, and Political Power in the Province of Venezuela, 1700–1757.” PhD diss., University of Florida, 2003. Ebert, Christopher. “From Gold to Manioc: Contraband Trade in Brazil during the Golden Age, 1700–1750.” Colonial Latin American Review 20, no. 1 (2011): 112–118. Felice Cardot, Carlos. Curazao hispánico (Antagonismo flamenco-español). Caracas: Ediciones de la Presidencia de la República, 1982. Gehring, Charles T., and J. A. Schiltkamp, comp. New Netherland Documents, vol. 17: Curaçao Papers 1640–1665. Interlaken: Heart of the Lakes, 1987. González Batista, Carlos. Antillas y Tierra Firme: historia de la influencia de Curazao en la arquitectura antigua de Venezuela. Caracas: Refinería Isla (Curazao) S.A., 1990. Goslinga, Cornelius C. The Dutch in the Caribbean and on the Wild Coast, 1580–1680. Assen: van Gorcum, 1971. Goslinga, Cornelius C. The Dutch in the Caribbean and in the Guianas, 1680–1791. Assen and Maastricht: van Gorcum, 1985. Gould, Elija. “Entangled Atlantic Histories: A Response from the Anglo-American Periphery.” American Historical Review 112, no. 5 (2007): 1415–1422. Gould, Elija. “Entangled Histories, Entangled Worlds: The English-Speaking Atlantic as a Spanish Periphery.” American Historical Review 112, no. 3 (2007): 764–786. Hämäläinen, Pekka, and Samuel Truett, “On Borderlands.” Journal of American History 98, no. 2 (2011): 338–361. Haviser, Jay  B. “Amerindian Cultural Geography on Curaçao.” PhD diss., Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, 1987. Herzog, Tamar. Frontiers of Possession: Spain and Portugal in Europe and the Americas. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015. Jarvis, Michael J. In the Eye of All Trade: Bermuda, Bermudians, and the Maritime Atlantic World, 1680–1783. Chapel Hill: UNC, 2010. Karras, Alan. Smuggling: Contraband and Corruption in World History. Plymouth, UK: Rowman and Littlefield, 2010. Klooster, Wim. Illicit Riches: Dutch Trade in the Caribbean 1648–1795. Leiden: KITLV Press, 1998. Nooijen, R.  H. De slavenparochie van Curaçao rond het jaar 1750: Een demografie van het katholieke volksdeel. Curaçao: Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology of the Netherlands Antilles, 1995. Olavarriaga, Pedro José de. Instrucción General y Particular del Estado Presente de la Provincia de Venezuela en los Años de 1720 y 1721. Caracas: Biblioteca de la Academia Nacional de la Historia, 1965. Parry, J. H. Trade and Dominion: The European Overseas Empires in the Eighteenth Century. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971. Postma, Johannes. The Dutch in the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1600–1815. Cambridge, UK: Cam­bridge University Press, 1990. Rupert, Linda M. Creolization and Contraband: Curaçao in the Early Modern Atlantic World. Athens: University of Georgia Press, Early American Places, 2012. Rupert, Linda M. “Curaçaoan Maroons in Venezuela.” In Sociétés marrones des Amériques, edited by Jean Moomou, 139–151. Guadaloupe: Ibis Rouge, 2015.

764   Borderlands of the Iberian World Schunk, Christine W. M. “The Lost Catholic Houses of Prayer in Curaçao.” In Building up the Future from the Past: Studies on the Architecture and Historic Monuments in the Dutch Caribbean, edited by Henry E. Coomans, Michael A. Newton, and Maritza Coomans-Eustatia, 128–135. Zutphen: De Walburg Press, 1990. Torres, Joshua  M., and Reniel Rodríguez Ramos. “The Caribbean: A Continent Divided by  Water.” In Archaeology and Geoinformatics: Case Studies from the Caribbean, edited by Basil A. Reid, 13–29. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2008. Wright, Irene, comp. Nederlandsche Zeevaarders op de Eilanden in de Caribische Zee en aan de Kust van Colombia en Venezuela Gedurende de Jaren 1621–1648(9): Documenten hoofdzakelijk uit het Archivo General de Indias te Sevilla, vol. 1: 1621–1641. Utrecht: Kemink en Zoon, 1935.

chapter 31

The Pacific Bor der l a n ds of the Spa n ish Empir e Catherine Tracy Goode

Oceans are often imagined as boundaries that mark the absolute edge of a territory. However, a small shift in thinking allows such a space to be conceptualized as a series of waterways, corridors, or thoroughfares that connect regions. From this perspective, oceanic borderlands begin to form a connective web rather than the limit of empire. While arduous and lengthy, the voyage across the Pacific between the powerhouse economy of Asia and the Spanish Empire in the Americas became an important source of exchange—especially of specie and luxury products but also of peoples and ideas—that proved profitable for the actors on both sides of this vast ocean. A renewed interest in Pacific trade and the connections between Asia and colonial Latin America is shifting an Atlantic-centric perspective in the historiography, revealing the importance of the access that the Spanish enjoyed to the Asian economy through the supply of silver from their American colonies. Defining an ocean as a unit of study is a peculiar historiographical challenge. Traditional maritime historiography, in many regions across the world, largely considers the military presence of ships with some attention to commercial activities. The history of piracy in the early modern period is a particular favorite. But a divide exists between the land and the sea; even when considering port cities the ocean is seen as a limit not an extension of the space. Instead, scholars should recognize the contingent nature of the relationship between land and sea.1 While there is little dispute that the Mediterranean, the Indian Ocean, even the Atlantic, comprise contiguous spaces that warrant study, the Pacific is a latecomer to the scholarship. O.H.K. Spate posits that it was impossible to theorize the “Pacific” before the outer edges of the great ocean were defined by European colonization, bringing a measure of continuity to the diverse regions.2 The very heterogeneity of the populations and polities that ring this ocean and create connections across

766   Borderlands of the Iberian World it has also been a cause of the neglect in considering the area as a whole. Europeans imposed a cultural homogeneity across the Atlantic as they settled along both sides, historian Jean Heffer argues, creating a conceptual coherency that the “Pacific” does not enjoy.3 But, must an “ocean world” be defined by cultural homogeneity along the coasts? And what if this is an imagined homogeneity that was imposed by colonial projects, like the Atlantic? In fact, the very diversity of the Asian–New Spain connections is what made the links across the vast Pacific so profitable. It is striking that the importance of American silver to the Asian economy of the early modern period is central to the narratives of World and Asian history but plays a peripheral role in the histories of Spain, the Spanish Empire, and Europe as a whole.4 Historians of Latin America have long made the mistake of assuming that the economy of the Pacific is simply an extension of the larger Atlantic economy. Immanuel Wallerstein, in his seminal world-systems analysis, went so far as to call the Asian economy the “external arena” of the true world economy that was centered in the Atlantic.5 Histories that position New Spain in a global context often argue that the relationship of New Spain to Asia was largely transatlantic.6 Thus the transpacific nature of the trade is denied, ignoring New Spain’s central role in the export of silver directly to Asia through the port of Manila and the importation of myriad goods from India, China, Japan, and the Southeast Asian islands. Subsuming the “China trade” within the notion of an “Atlantic system” leaves New Spain on the periphery of a European-led global economy. When the Pacific economy is understood to complement its Atlantic counterpart, New Spain takes center stage in the negotiation between Asian and European markets seeking American resources. Current estimates suggest that up to 70 percent of silver from New Spain and Peru was shipped to Europe, with approximately 40 percent of that amount moving on to Asia through various European exchanges. Existing research suggests that at least 20 to 30 percent of American silver went straight to Asia via the Manila Galleon trade, demonstrating that a significant amount of silver from the Americas made the journey across the Pacific.7 A single ship could carry well over one million pesos in coins, plus silver bullion and myriad merchandise, on the most direct route running between Acapulco and Manila.8 Additionally, the galleons carried both legal and contraband trade. Fraud in the bureaucratic procedures or contraband trade beyond the legal proscriptions set by the Crown (trade with foreigners, etc.) constituted a significant, although difficult to quantify, part of commerce in the Pacific.9 The Pacific borderlands as a space contributed to this tendency as goods could be offloaded at many unofficial ports coming south from Alta California before arriving in the legally sanctioned port of Acapulco—avoiding detection, regulation, and tax collection.10 While the very nature of contraband trade makes it notoriously difficult to track, scholars estimate that a great deal of silver and other merchandise was transferred through the Pacific borderlands, a hallmark of such spaces.11 The point is not that transpacific trade trumped the transatlantic but rather to understand how New Spain was a nexus between the two oceans. As Asia’s most direct access to silver was through the Pacific via Acapulco, this positioned colonial merchantbureaucrats in New Spain to take advantage of their crucial location between the Asian and European markets that were hungry for American silver.

Pacific Borderlands of the Spanish Empire   767 The economic connections between the Spanish Empire in the Americas and the core Asian economy that encompassed China, India, and Southeast Asia, involved both local and colonial powers.12 The Gallo de Pardiñas family lived and worked in the Pacific borderlands of New Spain from where they established an extended network of relatives to take advantage of the global economy. As bureaucrats in Acapulco with direct access to the economic structure of the Manila Galleon trade, they could import and export goods for extraordinary profits. The Gallos held sway in Acapulco politics for some seventy years; empowered in both civil and military matters, they used the features of the borderlands to manipulate the system to their benefit. Combining bureaucratic power with fraud and contraband across a wide web of family members, they created a multigenerational, multifamily fortune in the Pacific borderlands.

Historiography of an Oceanic Borderland The four main schools of historiography focusing on the economic aspects of the Spanish Empire’s Pacific connections are: “Great Men, Great Ships,” “Filipinas Drains the Coffers,” “New Spain from the Pacific Point of View,” and the “Vital Pacific Borderlands.”13 The “Great Men, Great Ships” paradigm focuses on the “explorers” of the islands for Spanish and Portuguese interests who eventually laid claim to them for Spain in 1570, with the Manila Galleon as part of the program of Spanish expansion. The Seville-centered work of scholars who rely heavily on the documentation in the Archivo General de Indias (AGI) informs the category of the “Filipinas Drains the Coffers,” postulating that the Philippines were an economic drag on the empire as a whole. Emerging at the same time, with the same documentary base, are those who saw “New Spain from the Pacific Point of View.” Taking the Philippines as their starting place shifted the focus, but they often came to many of the same conclusions about the economic viability of the Pacific trade. Currently, a new generation of scholars in Mexico and the United States are expanding the historiography as they explore the “Vital Pacific Borderlands,” positing the importance of the Asian connections for the Spanish colonies in the Americas. This new work builds on earlier studies but challenges the assumption that the Pacific was of little or negative importance to the empire, arguing rather that the Spanish Empire benefited from the economic relationship that existed across this ocean in countless ways. The classic works that highlight the conquest of the archipelago or the convoys of ships making their way from Acapulco to Manila focus on the idea of “Great Men, Great Ships.” Miguel López de Legazpi is credited with successfully colonizing the Philippines, arriving in 1565 and finally claiming the city of Manila for the Spanish Crown in 1570.14 Andrés de Urdaneta has received a great deal of coverage, as the Augustinian who accompanied Legazpi and made the first return voyage to Acapulco in 1565, while

768   Borderlands of the Iberian World Antonio de Morga’s 1609 account of the history of the Philippines has been reprinted many times.15 William Shurz’s classic The Manila Galleon, stands as the single Englishlanguage, book-length treatment of the ships that traded goods between Manila and mainland New Spain.16 Despite its age, and lack of documentation, it is still the source most likely to be cited by Latin Americanists in the United States who mention the Pacific trade. Mexicans made a better show in their early studies on these men and ships, with Manuel Carrera Stampa’s article “La nao de china” and a book of the same name by Francisco Santiago Cruz. While they take a similar tack by focusing on the explorers and the galleons, both are documented with sources from Mexico and Spain.17 This approach would be subsumed in the late 1960s through the 1990s by two different historiographical perspectives, one from Spain the other from the Philippines, with similar conclusions as to the significance of the Asian outpost. The first phase of historiography to present a different perspective on Spain’s Pacific borderlands emerged with a series of studies that were driven by the imperial-level documentation available in Spain. While ease of access for the many scholars who came through the Escuela de Estudios Hispano-Americanos in Seville explains part of the trend, a lack of local documentation prior to the late eighteenth century in Manila and Acapulco (despite a wealth of sources in Mexico City) led many to the vast collections of the AGI, Archivo Histórico Nacional (Madrid), and Archivo General de Simancas (Valladolid). However, reliance on this documentation led these scholars to stress imperial concerns, mirroring the sources themselves, to argue that the Philippines cost Spain more than it provided. María Lourdes Díaz-Trechuelo emerged as one of the first and most prolific of scholars at the Escuela to work on the Philippines.18 While her work and that of her students is exhaustively researched, it reinforces the perspective of the empire, pitting the Philippines against the Crown as an economic problem.19 A recent example of this tendency is El costo del imperio asiático by Luis Alonso Álvarez.20 As the title suggests, the author’s economic analysis takes the position of the Crown and calculates losses based on imperial-level complaints about the cost of maintaining the Spanish population in Manila. No doubt, the Philippines would be described as a loss leader in modern parlance—an investment that brought little direct return for the Crown’s coffers but in the end produced massive profits for Spanish interests. As Latin Americanists have adeptly demonstrated through more than three decades of research, an economic loss for the Crown in Spain was not necessarily a loss for the empire as a whole.21 Conceptually originating on the other side of the Pacific, based on the same corpus of sources from Spain but beginning to utilize the rich resources available in Mexico, “New Spain from the Pacific Point of View” constitutes a valuable historiographic tradition but offers many of the same conclusions as the Seville-based approach. These works run the gamut from the earliest broad studies that conceptualized the Pacific as a single unit to the local studies of colonial state formation in the Philippines.22 While making up a small fraction of the total scholarship of this category, those that visualize the Pacific as a space worthy of study have led the way for re-conceptualizing this region as a borderlands today. Pierre Chaunu’s Les Philippines et le Pacifique des Ibériques in the Annales tradition of longue durée history is by far the most empirically based of the works, utilizing the Spanish sources in Seville to great effect.23 Two more studies in the same vein were

Pacific Borderlands of the Spanish Empire   769 written on opposite sides of the Pacific: The Spanish Lake by O.H.K. Spate and El gran océano by Rafael Bernal.24 Spate was a British geographer by training who worked in Australia for most of his career. Countering the difficulties inherent in conceptually navigating the vastness of the Pacific, he adopted the notion of the “Spanish Lake” to highlight the connections rather than the obstacles.25 Bernal’s El gran océano takes a wider view of the Pacific, looking beyond the Spanish Empire to consider the interactions between Chinese, Japanese, Southeast Asian, and European kingdoms. While the title invokes the expanse of the Pacific, the work focuses primarily on the Asian context but posits that the ocean was a medium for “transculturation.”26 Moving from the broad expanse to the local, Mexican historian Carmen Yuste became one of the most prolific scholars working on the Pacific.27 Her studies investigate the flow of commerce through the city of Acapulco, family and political networks based in both port cities on either side of the Pacific, and their connections to Mexico City. While she uses documentation from the AGI, she has also extensively mined the Archivo General de la Nación de México (AGN). Through the lens of merchants and the networks they created to participate in the profitable China trade, her work has evolved from a focus on the economics of trade to address the social history of merchants from New Spain playing a role in the global economy. Emporios transpacíficos: Comerciantes mexicanos en Manila, 1710–1815, centers on merchants in the Spanish Empire as actors in the larger global economy and challenges the assumption that New Spain was a passive player. Bridging two historiographical trends, Yuste’s current work complements a new tendency in the scholarship to document the economic potency and the multiplicity of ways in which mainland New Spain was connected to Asia. Emerging in the late 1990s, a new perspective on the relationship of the Philippines to mainland New Spain challenged the narrative of economic stagnation, arguing instead that the Manila Galleon trade was fundamental to the global economy. This historiographical trend, the “Vital Pacific Borderlands,” started with the work of the economist Dennis O. Flynn and the historian Arturo Giráldez who argued that 1571, the year the Manila Galleon trade began, marked the genesis of globalization.28 In a series of publications they demonstrated how profitable the Manila Galleon trade was, on both sides of the Pacific, arguing that the failure to take Spanish America seriously as a part of the global economy was simple Euro-centrism.29 Building on the Asian historiography and placing Latin America in a global context, the Flynn/Giráldez team laid a foundation for re-conceptualizing the relationship of the Americas to Asia in the early modern period.30 In The Age of Trade: The Manila Galleons and the Dawn of the Global Economy, Giráldez presents an overview of the trade in a world history context.31 He follows the ships across the Pacific, considering the diversity of the Asian context, the impact of the trade in silver on the Spanish colonies, and the implications for globalization. The last two decades have seen a renewed focus on the Pacific borderlands of the Spanish Empire, particularly in the United States and Mexico, but work continues in Spain and the Philippines as well. Between 2013 and 2015, conferences and symposiums held in Mexico City and Guadalajara brought together scholars from Mexico, Spain, and the Philippines to exchange ideas on the religious, political, and economic aspects of this history.32 New museum exhibits at the Museo Nacional del Virreinato in

770   Borderlands of the Iberian World Tepotzotlán, Mexico and the Casa de América in Madrid, as well as the traveling exposition “Pacífico: España y la aventura de la mar del sur,” called attention to the material culture of the transpacific connections.33 In the United States, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts staged the exhibit “Made in the Americas: The New World Discovers Asia” in late 2015.34 The exhibit focused specifically on the material culture of the Spanish and Portuguese Pacific trade routes and was scheduled to coincide with the 450th anniversary of the first return voyage led by Urdaneta in 1565.35 In addition to reevaluating the economic importance of the Pacific, recently published scholarship also sheds lights on the movement of people across the ocean and the development of the military in this borderlands region.36 Three scholars are emblematic of the historiographical category of the “Vital Pacific Borderlands.” Mariano Bonialian’s comprehensive study of the trade that connected New Spain, Peru, and various regions of Asia, based on extensive archival research in Spain, Mexico, Peru, and Chile illuminates the vast networks that linked the Spanish Empire to the global economy.37 He highlights the “centrality of the marginal” in recognizing the significance of the Pacific borderlands to the success and survival of the Spanish Empire. Much of the extant literature focuses on the goods—silver, porcelains, and spices—that filled the galleons sailing between Acapulco and Manila, while the human dimension is often ignored. In her groundbreaking studies, Tatiana Seijas has placed the people that crossed the ocean at the center of the story.38 Detailed archival work in Mexico City, Puebla, and Seville allowed Seijas to reconstruct a history of a diverse population brought as chattel to mainland New Spain where they were reduced to a new identity of “chinos” or “indios chinos.”39 Starting in Asia, her book traces the journey of the more than eight thousand Asian slaves as they negotiated their new lives in Mexico in bondage and freedom, and the effect of their presence on the Spanish colonial project.40 Finally, Guadalupe Pinzón Ríos takes on the traditional topic of the military installations along the Pacific frontier of mainland New Spain but places the development of these defense structures within a larger context of global trade and the local particularities of Acapulco and the Pacific coast.41 By tracking the implementation of defensive systems, her study provides a detailed discussion of the development of society in this littoral region, a significant conduit between two centers of power, using archival sources from Spain, the United States, and various collections across Mexico. Building on these historical approaches to the Pacific borderlands, the study of the Gallo de Pardiñas family undertaken here exemplifies the transoceanic networks of family and empire, centered on the nexus created by the commercial and cultural routes that connected mainland New Spain to the Philippines and Asia.

“Gallos de alto poder” in Acapulco Miguel Gallo traversed the Iberian borderlands, with his family in tow, from the Atlantic to the Pacific. In 1688, he was the top military official in Gibraltar, but a promotion to the

Pacific Borderlands of the Spanish Empire   771 position of castellano and alcalde mayor for Acapulco offered many rewards, both professionally and economically.42 Born in 1646, Miguel Gallo hailed from a newly noble family in Puerto de Santa María (Cádiz), Spain. By marrying Claudia Tomasa de Pardiñas Villar de Francos, a noble family lineage with its roots in Galicia but firmly established in the port city of Cádiz, Miguel positioned himself for greater advancement.43 In 1678, they married and took up residence in Gibraltar where Miguel held the post of sargento mayor and alcalde of the castle fortifications. Located on the periphery of the Iberian peninsula, Gibraltar was a military stronghold and thus Miguel served to protect the Crown from foreign invasions during his tenure.44 Here, the family grew by two, and in his petition for passage to mainland New Spain, Miguel listed his wife Claudia, son Juan Eusebio, and daughter Nicolasa María who would accompany him, as the family prepared to exchange the Iberian outpost of Gibraltar for the Pacific coast borderlands of New Spain.45 The Gallo de Pardiñas clan lorded over the political and economic life of Acapulco for close to seventy years, arriving just before a surge in the Pacific trade in the eighteenth century. By then, the Manila Galleon trade was well established, having gone through a foundation period (1571–1630) and early attempts to limit and manage the trade (1630–1700). Beginning in 1571, between one and four galleons a year sailed from Acapulco to Manila until the Crown disbanded the trade route in 1815 in the face of the wars for independence. The uptick in the early eighteenth century (1700–1760) was followed by another period of reform in the final decades of the colonial period (1760–1815). Although shipwrecks and pirate attacks sometimes impeded arrival, the Manila Galleon constituted a remarkably reliable commercial system.46 Two interrelated issues help to shape establishing the broad periodization of the trade: silver cycles and royal regulation. With silver as the single most sought after commodity in the Pacific, the trade closely followed the highs and lows in the extraction of the precious metal. Thus, the first attempts at managing the new trade ties coincided with the Potosí cycle from 1540 to 1640, while the Mexico cycle from 1700 to 1750 shaped the thriving years of the trade in the early eighteenth century.47 Boom years in silver mining made for particularly strong commercial ties between Manila and Acapulco, while attempts to control the profits, participation, and the royal share marked changes over time as well. Crown regulations demonstrated an early preoccupation with the trade. The first attempts to bring order came about in the seventeenth century, especially as Iberian manufacturers (particularly of textiles) felt that the new trade route damaged their potential to sell wares in the colonies. The earliest regulations began in 1593 limiting the total weight of goods (the permiso) on the ships and the total value of pesos, which ended twenty-two years of essentially unfettered trade.48 The Crown also established Acapulco as the sole legal port of entry and in 1634 outlawed direct exchanges between the viceroyalties. Some increases to the permiso were established in the seventeenth century, but the years in between 1680 and 1700 mark two major changes to the Pacific trade. New laws in 1680 attempted to severely restrict the quantities of goods imported to mainland New Spain.49 And the abolition of slavery in 1700 ended the Asian slave trade.50 The early years of the eighteenth century saw a return to and an increase in the

772   Borderlands of the Iberian World permiso, with a series of royal decrees from 1700 to 1734 that mandated changes to the distribution of lading space, restrictions on the quantity and quality of textiles, and a brief reopening of the trade between mainland New Spain and Peru.51 After 1760, Bourbon reforms brought the trade more firmly under the control of the Crown while also increasing profits under the banner of “free trade.”52 Yet the periodization of the Pacific as a borderland is not based simply on economic factors but also on the particular preoccupations of European incursions and contraband.53 Policing the vast space, both to keep “foreign enemies” out and to stop contraband trade, often perpetrated by the Crown’s own subjects in New Spain (on both sides of the Pacific), proved to be an ongoing battle. One of the earliest attempts to tackle both issues was the establishment of Acapulco as the sole official Pacific port of entry.54 While the harbor at Acapulco was especially suited to the large ships of the Manila Galleon trade, this was also a way to limit the area in need of protection from European rivals and smugglers, foreign and domestic. The construction of coastal military installations began like San Diego in Acapulco in the sixteenth century and later the port of San Blas (Nayarit) in the early eighteenth.55 European attacks, like that of the Dutch in 1624, were relatively infrequent but foreign ships were regularly present in the waters of the Pacific borderlands of New Spain. While this officially represented an “unjustified penetration,”56 these ships were also part of the contraband trade that defined the region. Foreign friends, like the Catholic French, received permission to sail in the Spanish waters of the Pacific throughout the seventeenth century until 1710, when imperial restrictions attempted to limit the ever-present but technically illegal trade outsiders engaged in along the coast.57 European attacks and contraband trade intensified in the eighteenth century, but money to maintain the fortification of San Diego was rarely forthcoming from the viceregal or royal coffers, not to be remedied until the last decades of the colonial period.58 Demonstrative of another inter-related feature of the Iberian borderlands, metropolitan officials frequently decried the corruption and crimes far from their location but provided little in the way of support as a counter. Furthermore, stamping out contraband trade was better as a rhetorical strategy than a practical endeavor as so many royal subjects in New Spain profited handsomely from these exchanges. As the castellano and alcalde mayor, Miguel Gallo and later his son Juan Eusebio Gallo “protected” the Pacific borderlands in regard to the twin concerns of safety and regulating trade from their roost in Acapulco. The fact that they were also central players in these commercial networks meant that the Gallo de Pardiñas family represented both the power of the Crown on the ground and the fluidity of official positions in regard to fraudulent trading practices. As was common in the borderlands of New Spain, Miguel Gallo held both civil and military authority. Invested with the highest civil authority, the alcalde mayor oversaw most aspects of the Manila Galleon trade, principally provisioning and repairing ships, registering embarkations, assuring that royal taxes were paid, and organizing the yearly trade fairs.59 As the leading military commander along the Pacific littoral, the castellano was charged with defending the entire coast from enemy attacks, including the maintenance of soldiers and fortifications. Beginning with his arrival in the 1690s, Miguel Gallo established a family network that

Pacific Borderlands of the Spanish Empire   773 included relatives of his wife, his sons, and eventually the family of a son-in-law, in order to take advantage of their wide-ranging powers over the civil, economic, and military functions of the port of Acapulco.60 Before his sons were old enough to take power in his name, Miguel Gallo called on other family members to step in. Claudia Tomasa Pardiñas Villar de Francos connected Miguel to the powerful members of her family in mainland New Spain, allowing him to create extensive commercial and social networks.61 When Miguel took up his new post in the 1690s, his brother-in-law Juan Isidro de Pardiñas Villar de Francos served as the governor and captain general of Nueva Vizcaya, a strategic location that included the mines in Parral (at their height of production from 1630 to 1680), the many Franciscan and Jesuits missions of the province, and a direct route to the furthest outpost of Santa Fe, New Mexico. After dealing with Indian rebellions and other threats to security, Juan Isidro left his post in Nueva Vizcaya and joined his sister’s family in Acapulco.62 In 1701, as the acting castellano and alcalde mayor of Acapulco, he stepped in for his brotherin-law Miguel and authorized the registro of the shipment of goods to Manila.63 Vecinos of mainland New Spain reexported Iberian “necessities” for the small Spanish population in Asia such as wine, olive oil, guns, and iron implements, along with Mexican products like chocolate and most importantly silver.64 When Pardiñas Villar de Francos registered the galleon upon its return to Acapulco later that year, it was laden with fabrics—mainly clothing and handkerchiefs, but it also included raw silk threads ready for weaving— cinnamon and pepper, thousands of porcelain cups for chocolate, fans, and furniture, the total value of which easily came to more than one million pesos.65 Theoretically, manileños exported those goods to then be sold at the yearly fair in Acapulco to mainland buyers, all under the watchful gaze of local officials. But the actions of the Gallo de Pardiñas extended family reveal how they used their control of bureaucratic processes in the context of the Pacific borderlands to their own benefit and allowed this particular form of contraband trade to flourish. The children of Miguel and Claudia Tomasa, including at least three more children born after their arrival, were vital to the success of the Gallo de Pardiñas family in the Pacific borderlands.66 Their oldest, Juan Eusebio served as acting castellano and alcalde mayor on various occasions when his father was called out of the city or left for health reasons, before assuming the position permanently from the early 1720s to 1760.67 Miguel Ventura Gallo de Pardiñas rose to the office of prebend at the Cathedral in Mexico City and acted as the family representative in the capital, managing their business and property interests.68 Claudia Gallo de Pardiñas was the conduit between two families, marrying Manuel San Juan de Santa Cruz in 1714, allowing for Miguel Gallo to expand his reach and for the San Juan de Santa Cruz family to rise in the colonial ­bureaucracy well beyond the dictates of their middling-class background.69 Once Miguel Gallo was installed in Acapulco, he needed contacts in Manila. While he no doubt had multiple connections in Manila by the 1710s, the best documented cases are those of his son Juan Eusebio and, at the time, future son-in-law Manuel. Both served in military posts in the heavily fortified capital of the Philippines, where the small Spanish population was always outnumbered by the vast network of Asian trading

774   Borderlands of the Iberian World enclaves.70 Both men returned to mainland New Spain from Manila in 1709, bringing vast amounts of trade goods (legal and illegal).71 Manuel spent three months in Acapulco, where he evidently met the young Claudia for the first time, before settling in Mexico City from mid-1709 to 1714.72 Juan Eusebio remained in Acapulco where he served his father in a variety of capacities, officially and unofficially. As well as taking the reins of the city on a temporary basis several times, he also functioned as an importer for his family, bringing in thousands of pesos worth of stock from Asia. This trade in Asian merchandise dominated all aspects of the life of Acapulco. As the leading family in the city, the Gallo de Pardiñas clan not only participated in the trade but also regulated it as representatives of the Crown. This was illegal on a number of levels but also perfectly common in practice. One of the primary responsibilities of the castellano and alcalde mayor of the only official port city in the Pacific borderlands was to register the embarking galleons. The registro took account of the investors (technically restricted to manileño exporters and members of the crew on the ship) and the goods imported. This accounting of people, goods, and money provided the cover to hide the fraudulent practices of merchants from mainland New Spain acting as importers.73 Registros from 1704, 1707, 1709, 1710, and 1712 conducted by Miguel Gallo, exemplify the practices of the Gallo de Pardiñas extended family that included using members of the crew as fronts for local importers and registering trade goods as nothing but gifts from remarkably “generous” manileños. These actions reveal the usual disregard for prohibitions on bureaucrats participating in the very commerce they were responsible to oversee. As contraband is notoriously difficult to document, we know of the “success” of the extended family because the patriarch Miguel Gallo was charged with misconduct in the registration of the galleon in 1712. This case against him is folded into a larger report, initiated in 1711 by the oidor from the Audiencia of México Juan Díaz de Bracamonte.74 The viceroy directed Bracamonte to study the Manila Galleon trade, citing irregularities in most of the previous ten years: “[. . .] because the commerce of the Philippines is not regulated according to the law.” Gallo could not account for more than fifty thousand pesos that mysteriously went missing at the time the nao Nuestra Señora de la Begoña embarked from Acapulco in March 1712, after a three-month stopover. When the ship reached Acapulco in late 1711, it held goods from all over Asia, including Chinese silks, spices from Southeast Asia, and furniture from Japan.75 Over seventy men and women were listed as stakeholders in the goods on this ship; among them was one Manuel San Juan de Santa Cruz. The earlier shipment from 1709 lists not only Manuel but also Miguel Gallo himself and his son Juan Eusebio Gallo de Pardiñas.76 As bureaucrats and vecinos of cities in mainland New Spain they were legally forbidden to participate as merchants in this trade. Nonetheless, the three men, among many other merchants in mainland New Spain, evaded the middlemen manileños and imported goods directly. When Miguel Gallo allowed the ship to leave again in March of 1712, he registered it with 257,100 pesos worth of goods purchased at the fair by vecinos of Oaxaca, Puebla, Zacatecas, and Guanajuato, among others—a small sum compared to figures for other shipments that ranged from five hundred thousand to one million pesos.77 The missing fifty thousand pesos comprised only the tip of the iceberg, as his false registration of the

Pacific Borderlands of the Spanish Empire   775 imported and exported goods in 1712 concealed his family’s fraudulent participation in this lucrative trade. Beyond the machinations of officials on the ground in a port city, the manipulation of the crew of the ships proved to be an important strategy as well. The registros from the arrival of the nao in 1709 and 1712 provided the names of officials and employees of the galleon who imported massive amounts of goods into Acapulco. These “generous” souls then gifted almost all of this merchandise to the merchant vecinos of mainland New Spain. Early regulations established that the employees of the Manila Galleon were allotted space on the ship to import goods, the only group granted the privilege other than manileños.78 Both the viceroy of New Spain and the governor of the Philippines selected personnel for the ships and these appointments were often sold to relatives or friends, in the same manner that many bureaucratic posts were purchased throughout the colonies.79 And just as the sale of office opened up the possibility for exploitation, the practice in the case of the Manila Galleon provided a loophole to evade the proscriptions barring specific groups from participating. In 1709, Juan Eusebio Gallo was one of those officials on the galleon, acting as the importer for himself, Manuel, and two other Spaniards.80 In 1712, Captain Simón de Amechesurra was Manuel’s chosen importer— joining twelve others, including the Bishop of Nueva Segovia.81 Miguel Gallo designated the majority of the goods on the registro, imported by members of the crew, as gifts to many different mainland New Spain merchants.82 Among the many items Gallo asked viceregal officials (and us as readers in the twenty-first century) to categorize as gifts were thousands of cups for chocolate (tazas para chocolate) and over two hundred Japanese painted desks.83 The practice of listing goods as gifts allowed the excluded vecinos of mainland New Spain to participate as importers of Asian goods skirting around the regulations. These manipulations stand out as an important part of the local strategies employed by the Gallo de Pardiñas extended family. The case against Miguel Gallo caused little reaction in Mexico City, despite the report by Bracamonte. Although Gallo was sidelined for a short time, his extended family continued to control Acapulco until he returned to his post.84 Following in this vein, the Bracamonte report concluded by placing the primary blame on the manileños for the problems in the Manila Galleon trade. Rather than charge Crown officials with bureaucratic mismanagement, he accused the manileños of collaborating with Chinese merchants to the detriment of Spanish trade and industry. The report stated that although the local officials allowed the entrance of goods in excess of the permiso, they did their job as prescribed by collecting taxes on the whole lot: “[. . .] [local officials] allowed the embarkation of quantities exceeding the permiso, paying, as they say publicly, 10 to 12 percent [in different royal taxes].”85 This conclusion was not born out by the evidence culled by Bracamonte, in which witnesses reported that the permiso was regularly exceeded, unauthorized merchants regularly imported and sold their wares across mainland New Spain, and these practices were in fact harmful to the manileños who depended on the Manila Galleon trade for their livelihoods.86 The case against Gallo, conserved in the Bracamonte report, suggests that his actions as castellano and alcalde mayor formed part of a larger pattern that was not limited to his family alone. From 1709

776   Borderlands of the Iberian World to 1712, the Gallo de Pardiñas extended family network succeeded in importing Asian products bound for sale in New Spain by exploiting their position in Acapulco, with little interference from the authorities in Mexico City who turned a blind eye to the whole affair. Members of the Gallo de Pardiñas family, particularly Juan Eusebio and Miguel Ventura, achieved great economic success in the colonies. Juan Eusebio, like his brotherin-law Manuel San Juan de Santa Cruz, traveled between Manila and Acapulco and traded in Asian imports, despite being a vecino of Acapulco who was theoretically prohibited from participating in this trade.87 Juan Eusebio owned extensive properties across mainland New Spain and was a generous supporter of the church, endowing numerous pious works.88 As a highly placed priest, Miguel Ventura also amassed a large landholding, evidenced by various disputes in the Audiencia of Mexico over water and indigenous labor on his haciendas.89 In 1747, Miguel Ventura took a new post in the archbishopric of Manila, where he would die in 1752, demonstrating his family’s continued ties to the Philippines.90 The San Juan de Santa Cruz branch of the extended family, in the person of Manuel brought to the table new northern connections and a direct link to the Atlantic economy. While the Gallo de Pardiñas family distributed “gifts” in Acapulco, Manuel and his older brother Francisco took up the posts of the Governor of Nueva Vizcaya and Royal Treasurer in Veracruz, respectively. Manuel collaborated with his father- and brothers-in-law, who acted as his conduits to Asian commerce through their official control of the Manila Galleon trade, at the same time that he and his brother were expanding the reach of the extended family to the new silver mines of Chihuahua and trade in the official Atlantic port city. Moreover, Juan Eusebio and Miguel served as trusted overseers of Manuel’s Pacific and metropolitan business dealings, managing his concerns in Acapulco and Mexico City while he and their sister Claudia, whom he married in 1714, lived in the northern province of Nueva Vizcaya.91 By the mid-eighteenth century, the two families boasted two Knights of Santiago, as well as mines, haciendas, and homes across mainland New Spain. The alliance and partnerships built in the Pacific borderlands served them remarkably well.92

From the Pacific Borderlands to the Global Economy The Pacific functioned as a borderland, albeit an oceanic one, of the Spanish Empire in that it connected disparate spaces and existed beyond the direct control of the central bureaucracy in Mexico City, Lima, or Seville.93 Out of necessity, different patterns of economic, political, social, and cultural life emerged in this in-between space for those who lived on the edges of or traversed the Pacific. The extended family networks of merchants and bureaucrats in Acapulco, like the Gallo de Pardiñas and San Juan de Santa Cruz

Pacific Borderlands of the Spanish Empire   777 families, are illustrative of the ways that elite Spaniards adapted to these circumstances and thrived in the Pacific borderlands, linking their enterprises to the global economy. The Pacific Borderlands presents a series of unique circumstances for conceptualizing the ways in which new ties were forged. The port cities of Acapulco and Manila ­represent the closest physical links between centers of political and economic power in the American and Asian imperial spheres. While the coastal cities functioned as points on the axis that connected mainland New Spain to Asia, they also existed as frontier regions in and of themselves within their respective regions of influence. Located on the geographic fringes of Asia, the Philippines was not a producer of valuable goods itself, but Manila nonetheless served as a fundamental conduit for precious Asian commodities and a portal for American silver. Acapulco was a backwater of mainland New Spain, except for the few weeks a year after the ships disembarked. Both cities relied almost entirely on the Manila Galleon trade and given the distance to the centers of imperial political authority, local vecinos relied heavily on the ties forged in the borderlands. Acapulco survived as a conduit between mainland New Spain and goods, peoples, and ideas making their way from Asia, with manileños negotiating their part in the Asian economy in a large, cosmopolitan city in which they were far outnumbered. Like other port cities, Manila and Acapulco served as the connective tissue of the empire in the borderlands.94 Distance from the center does not diminish the importance of the frontier; rather the two must be understood in relation, in that cores rely on peripheries as much as the reverse is true. Much of the preoccupation with the significance of the Pacific borderlands of New Spain deals with distance. Given the great expanse across this vast ocean, it simply cannot be measured in practical terms unlike the Atlantic, the Indian Ocean, or the Mediterranean, spaces that dominate the historiography of their respective regions. A  noted historian of Central America argues that the Pacific (including Peru) was beyond the reasonable distances of the near and far Atlantics: “If [. . .] Mexico and Panama were the far Atlantic, what of Peru? That area should perhaps be called the remote Atlantic. As for Manila, that distant administrative outlier of and appendage to New Spain, journeys to and from had to cross two oceans and a continent. Measured in time, the Philippines were much more remote than the moon is today.”95 Yet, the evidence shows that the Spanish continued to make those voyages, despite the distance, difficulty of the passage, and constant complaints on the part of the Crown. As French historian Jean Heffer points out “gargantuan” is not impassable.96 We must take care not to impose an anachronistic presumption that a trip that would take three to six months (depending on which leg) was unrealistically long. The desire for silver and luxury goods on the one hand, and the necessary economic stimulus provided by the trade for the vecinos of Acapulco and Manila on the other, were more than enough to encourage what today may seem “too far to go” for textiles and spices. And, while economic factors might have driven the willingness to embark on such arduous journeys, neither should we underestimate the importance of the political capital accrued by maintaining a Spanish presence in Asia and the links this provided for religious and cultural exchange.

778   Borderlands of the Iberian World A key issue in assessing the Pacific economy as a success or failure is a simple question: who benefited? Much of the scholarship in the first three historiographical categories described at the beginning of this chapter reifies the imperial perspective that if trade across the Pacific was not of direct benefit to the Crown it was thus a detriment to the overall imperial economy. But the newest turn in the scholarship demonstrates that by focusing the lens squarely on the economy of New Spain, a different perspective emerges: European (and some local) merchants, high- and low-level bureaucrats (some of whom were merchants themselves), and their Asian counterparts were the beneficiaries of a thriving economy that found Mexico City at the nexus of the Pacific and Atlantic networks, connecting Asia, South America, and Europe.97 This innovative historiographical trend counters the imperial rhetoric about the value of the Pacific borderlands to the empire by reimagining the scope of the political and economic power of the Crown, recognizing New Spain and in particular Mexico City as a center of gravity beyond the control of Seville. Andre Gunder Frank, sociologist and notable proponent of dependency and world systems theory, jettisoned much of his earlier interpretations with the publication of ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age.98 For decades, he had written eloquently about the way that the European core had devastated the American periphery. This view, in line with the earlier incarnations of these theories, ignored the Asian presence in the early modern global economy. He and others argued that interactions between Europe and Asia did not represent fundamental commercial relationships but rather inconsequential trade in frivolous luxury goods.99 In their view, Europe was centered and the Americas constituted the periphery from which goods were extracted while Asia remained beyond these networks in Wallerstein’s “external arena.” Gunder Frank’s ReOrient built on the work of scholars like Flynn and Giráldez to demonstrate the Asian center of gravity in the global economy. This shift did more than simply change the focus from Europe to Asia. In recognizing the economic importance not only of the core economies but also the actors in between, the Americas move to the middle rather than being pushed off to the edge. When Flynn and Giráldez linked the “birth of globalization” to the start of the Manila Galleon trade in 1571, they centered the Americas in a world economy sustained by silver that was mined, minted, and traded in New Spain.100 John Tutino has recently argued: “In most discussions and debates, the Americas appear as appendages of Europe. [ . . . ] Yet if silver was essential to early globalization, should we presume that the American societies that produced it in prodigious quantities were peripheral to global dynamism?”101 Moving from the center of the viceroyalty to the Pacific (and Atlantic) borderlands, Spanish merchants and bureaucrats were the conduit through which silver flowed into the world economy. The strategies they created in order to adapt to the peculiarities of the oceanic borderlands speak to the very global dynamism Tutino references above. The men and women of the Gallo de Pardiñas and San Juan de Santa Cruz families created wealth for themselves, the viceroyalty, and the Crown. Their story offers evidence for a shifting paradigm that incorporates the Pacific borderlands into the history of the Spanish Empire.

Pacific Borderlands of the Spanish Empire   779

Notes Archives AGI: AGN: AHN: NAP:

Archivo General de Indias, Seville (Spain) Archivo General de la Nación, Mexico City (Mexico) Archivo Histórico de la Nación, Madrid (Spain) National Archive of the Philippines, Manila (Philippines) Archivo Histórico Municipal de Parral, Hidalgo del Parral, Chihuahua (Mexico)

1. Ashin Das Gupta and M. N. Pearson ed., India and the Indian Ocean (Calcutta: Oxford University Press, 1987), 5. 2. Das Gupta and Pearson, India and the Indian Ocean, 5. They describe the relationship as “. . . symbiotic, but asymmetric.” 3. Jean Heffer, The United States and the Pacific: History of a Frontier, trans., W. Donald Wilson (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002), 5. 4. See the following works on Chinese silver consumption: William S. Atwell, “Another Look at Silver Imports into China, ca. 1635–1644,” Journal of World History 16, no. 4 (2005): 467–489, and “International Bullion Flows and the Chinese Economy Circa 1530–1650,” Past and Present 95 (1982): 68–90; Ward Barrett, “World Bullion Flows, 1450–1800,” in The Rise of Merchant Empires: Long–Distance Trade in the Early Modern World 1350–1750, ed. James D. Tracy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 224–254; Dennis O. Flynn and Arturo Giráldez, China and the Birth of Globalization in the 16th Century (Burlington: Ashgate, 2010); Anthony Reid, Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, 1450–1680, vol. 2: Expansion and Crisis (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), chap. 1. For a discussion of silver flows from the perspective of the Spanish colonies in the Americas see: Carlos Marichal, “The Spanish–American Silver Peso: Export Commodity and Global Money of the Ancien Regime, 1550–1800,” in From Silver to Cocaine: Latin American Commodity Chains and the Building of the World Economy, 1500–2000, ed. Carlos Marichal et al. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 25–52. 5. Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World System I: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World–Economy in the Sixteenth (New York: Academic Press, 1974), chap. 6. 6. Stanley  J.  Stein and Barbara  H.  Stein, Silver, Trade, and War: Spain and America in the Making of the Early Modern Europe (Baltimore: JHU, 2000), 17. See similar interpretations in: Alison Games, “Atlantic History: Definitions, Challenges, and Opportunities,” American Historical Association 111, no. 3 (2006): 741–757; Stuart B. Schwartz, “The Iberian Atlantic to 1650,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Atlantic World, 1450–1850, ed. Nicholas Canny and Philip Morgan (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 147–164. 7. Frank, ReOrient, 142–149. Low–end estimates suggest 20 percent of American silver arrived in Asia via Manila while high–end estimates are in the 30 percent range. See Frank’s discussion of “stock and flows of money” in chapter 2; Mariano Bonialian, El Pacífico hispanoamericano: Política y comercio asiático en el Imperio Español (1680–1784) (Mexico: El Colegio de México, 2012), 29–52; Dennis  O.  Flynn and Arturo Giráldez, “Spanish Profitability in the Pacific: The Philippines in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” in Pacific Centuries: Pacific and Pacific Rim Economic History since the Sixteenth Century, ed.

780   Borderlands of the Iberian World Lionel Frost et al. (London: Routledge, 1999), 23–37; and Tatiana Seijas, “Inns, Mules, and Hardtack for the Voyage: The Local Economy of the Manila Galleon in Mexico,” Colonial Latin America Review 25, no. 1 (2016): 1–21. 8. Eugene Lyon, “Track of the Manila Galleons,” National Geographic 178, no. 3 (1990): 23, 42–43. Note that there were often various ships sailing each year as part of the Manila Galleon voyage, not to mention the contraband voyages from both New Spain and Peru. Also see: Dennis O. Flynn and Arturo Giráldez, “Born with a ‘Silver Spoon:’ The Origin of World Trade in 1571,” Journal of World History 6, no. 2 (1995): 201–221. 9. Bonialian, El Pacífico hispanoamericano, 165. Not properly registering goods upon the arrival of a ship (fuera de registro) was labeled as fraud while illicit commerce was the trade in goods beyond the legal bounds set by the Crown. 10. Guadalupe Pinzón Ríos, Acciones y reacciones en los puertos del mar del sur: Desarrollo portuario del Pacífico novohispano a partir de sus políticas defensivas (1713–1789) (Mexico: IIH–UNAM, Instituto Mora, 2011), 226–233. 11. In a section entitled “El fraude y el contrabando: Una aproximación,” Bonialian posits that scholars must not assume that fraud and contraband trade were in opposition to legal commerce, but rather that they complemented one another. Bonialian, El Pacífico hispanoamericano, 165–175. 12. For the extensive historiography that focuses on the religious aspects of the Spanish presence in Asia see Brandon L. Bayne, “Converting the Pacific: Jesuit Networks between New Spain and Asia,” in The Oxford Handbook of Borderlands of the Iberian World, ed. Danna  A.  Levin Rojo and Cynthia Radding, 789–816 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019). 13. These categories are roughly chronological, but scholars continue to reinterpret earlier topics and themes as the historiography changes. 14. Nicholas P. Cushner, “Legazpi 1564–1572,” Philippine Studies 13, no. 2 (1965); Luis Muro, La expedición Legazpi–Urdaneta a las Filipinas (1557–1564) (Mexico: SEP, 1975); Isacio R. Rodríguez, “A Bibliography on Legazpi and Urdaneta and their Joint Expedition,” Philippine Studies 13, no. 2 (1965); José Sanz y Díaz, López de Legazpi. Fundador de Manila, 1571–1971 (Madrid: Publicaciones Españolas, 1971). 15. Mariano Cuevas, Monje y marino: La vida y los tiempos de fray Andrés de Urdaneta (Mexico: Editorial Galatea, 1943); Antonio de Morga, Sucesos de las Islas Filipinas: Edición crítica y comentada y estudio preliminar de Francisca Perujo (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2007). 16. William Shurz, The Manila Galleon (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1939). Additionally, Woodrow Borah’s 1954 study of the interviceregal trade argues that said trade was superseded by the emerging Pacific trade after 1585. Woodrow Borah, Early Colonial Trade and Navigation Between Mexico and Peru (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1954), 116–130. Several edited volumes about the Galleon provide a more complete picture of the impact of the trade: Javier Wimer, ed., El galeón del Pacífico. Acapulco–Manila. 1565–1815 (Mexico: Gobierno Constitucional del Estado de Guerrero, 1992); Marita Martínez del Río de Prado, ed., El Galeón de Acapulco (Mexico: INAH, 1988). 17. Manuel Carrera Stampa, “La Nao de la China,” Historia Mexicana 9, no. 33 (1959): 97–118; Francisco Santiago Cruz, La nao de China (Mexico: Editorial Jus, 1962). 18. María Lourdes Díaz–Trechuelo, La Real Compañía de Filipinas (Seville: EEHA, 1965); “El municipio indígena en Filipinas: Su evolución desde la conquista hasta el final de la soberanía española,” in Homenaje a Alberto de la Hera, ed. José Luis Soberanes Fernández and Rosa

Pacific Borderlands of the Spanish Empire   781 María Martínez de Codes (Mexico: UNAM, 2008), 257–273; and Filipinas: La gran desconocida, 1565–1898 (Pamplona: Ediciones Universidad de Navarra, 2001). 19. For further examples, see: Concepción Pajarón Parody, El gobierno en Filipinas de Don Fernando Manuel de Bustamante y Bustillo (1717–1719) (Seville: EEHA, 1964); María Luisa Rodríguez Baena, La Sociedad Económica de Amigos del País de Manila en el siglo XVIII (Seville: EEHA, 1966); L. Javier Ortiz de la Tabla Ducasse, El Marqués de Ovando, Gobernador de Filipinas (1750–1754) (Seville: EEHA, 1974); Ana Maria Prieto Lucena, Filipinas durante el gobierno de Manrique de Lara, 1653–1663 (Seville: EEHA, 1984). 20. Luis Alfonso Álvarez, El costo del imperio asiático: La formación colonial de las islas Filipinas bajo domino español, 1565–1800 (A Coruña and Mexico: Universidad de A Coruña, Instituto Mora, 2009); and “La inviabilidad de la hacienda asiática: Coacción y mercado en la formación del modelo colonial en las Islas Filipinas, 1565–1595,” in Imperios y naciones en el Pacífico, vol. 1: La formación de una colonia, Filipinas, ed. Dolores Elizalde Pérez–Grueso, et al (Madrid: CSIC, 2011), 181–205. 21. For examples of this argument for the Atlantic see: Zacarías Moutoukias, Contrabando y control colonial en el siglo XVII: Buenos Aires, el Atlántico y el espacio peruano (Buenos Aires: Centro Editor de América Latina, 1988); Louisa Hoberman, Mexico’s Merchant Elite, 1550–1660: Silver, State and Society (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991). 22. Antonio Álvarez de Abreu, Extracto historial del comercio entre China, Filipinas, y Nueva España (Mexico: Instituto Mexicano de Comercio Exterior, 1977); Leslie E. Bauzon, Deficit Government: Mexico and the Philippine Situado, 1606–1804 (Tokyo: The Centre for East Asian Cultural Studies, 1981); Katharine Bjork, “The Link that Kept the Philippines Spanish: Mexican Merchant Interests and the Manila Trade, 1571–1815,” Journal of World History 9, no. 1 (1998): 25–50; Nicholas P. Cushner, Landed Estates in the Colonial Philippines (New Haven: Yale University Southeast Asia Studies, 1976); F. Landa Jocano, The Philippines at the Spanish Contact: Some Major Accounts of Early Filipino Society and Culture (Manila: MCS Enterprises, 1975); Antonio  M.  Molina Memije, América en Filipinas (Madrid: Editorial MAPFRE, 1992); Patricio Hidalgo Nuchera, Encomienda, tributo y trabajo en Filipinas, 1570–1608 (Madrid: Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Ediciones Polifemo, 1995); John Leddy Phelan, The Hispanization of the Philippines: Spanish Aims and Filipino Responses (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1959); William Henry Scott, Cracks in the Parchment Curtain and Other Essays in Philippine History (Quezon City: New Day, 1985); and Vera Valdés Lakowsky, De las minas al mar. Historia de la plata mexicana en Asia, 1565–1834 (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1987); Gemma Cruz Guerrero, et al., eds., El Galeón de Manila. Un mar de historias (Mexico: JGH Editores, 1997). 23. Pierre Chaunu, Les Philippines et le Pacifique des Ibériques, XVI, XVII, XVIII siécles: Introduction méthodolique et indeces d’activité (Paris: S.E.V.P.E.N., 1960–1966). An abbreviated version of the multi–volume study was published in Spanish: Pierre Chaunu, Las Filipinas y el Pacífico de los Ibéricos, siglos XVI–XVII–XVIII: Estadísticas y atlas (Mexico: Instituto Mexicano de Comercio Exterior, 1974). 24. Rafael Bernal, El gran océano (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2012); O. H. K. Spate, The Spanish Lake (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1979). 25. Spate, The Spanish Lake, ix. His work is an early exception to the rule that the Philippines were an economic drain on the Spanish Empire. 26. Prior to his sweeping history of the Pacific, Bernal wrote on the Spanish in the Philippines: Rafael Bernal, México en Filipinas: Estudio de una transculturación (Mexico: UNAM, 1965) and Prologue to Philippine History (Manila: Solidaridad, 1967).

782   Borderlands of the Iberian World 27. Carmen Yuste, El comercio de la Nueva España con Filipinas, 1590–1785 (Mexico: INAH, 1984); “El eje comercial transpacífico en el siglo XVIII. La disolución imperial de una alternativa colonial,” in Comercio y poder en America colonial: Los consulados de comerciantes, siglos XVII–XIX, ed. Bernd Hausberger and Antonio Ibarra (Frankfurt am Main: Iberoamericana, 2003); Emporios transpacíficos: Comerciantes mexicanos en Manila, 1710–1815 (Mexico: UNAM, 2007); “Las familias de comerciantes en el tráfico transpacífico en el siglo XVIII,” in Familia y poder en Nueva España: Memoria del tercer simposio de historia de las mentalidades, ed. Solange Alberro (Mexico: INAH, 1991), 63–74; “Los comerciantes mexicanos en la formación del consulado filipino,” in Un hombre de libros: Homenaje a Ernesto de la Torre Villar, ed. Alicia Mayer (Mexico: IIH–UNAM, 2012), 177–202; “Nueva España: El cabo americano del Galeón de Manila,” in Los orígenes de la globalización: El Galeón de Manila, ed. Dolors Folch et al (Shangai: Biblioteca Miguel de Cervnates de Shangai, 2013), 105–126. 28. Dennis O. Flynn and Arturo Giráldez, “Born Again: Globalization’s Sixteenth–Century Origins,” Pacific Economic Review 13, no. 3 (2008): 359–387; “Born with a ‘Silver Spoon;’ ” China and the Birth of Globalization in the 16th Century; “China and the Manila Galleons”; “Cycles of Silver: Global Economic Unity through the Mid–Eighteenth Century,” Journal of World History 13, no. 2 (2002): 391–427; and “Spanish Profitability in the Pacific.” 29. Flynn and Giráldez, “Cycles of Silver,” 398. 30. In ReOrient, Gunder Frank also took up this challenge, building on the work of Flynn and Giráldez in his 1998 critique of the Euro–centric approach to world–systems theory of which he had long been a proponent. 31. Arturo Giráldez, The Age of Trade: The Manila Galleons and the Dawn of the Global Economy (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015). 32. Colloquium “Vislumbraron el Pacífico y pusieron a México en el Centro del Mundo, 1513–2013,” Archivo General de la Nación and Centro de Estudios de Historia de México Carso Fundación, September 24–26, 2013, Mexico City; International seminar “Familias y mestizaje entre México y Filipinas,” IIH–UNAM, October 28, 2014, Mexico City; Congreso internacional “450 años del viaje de Miguel López de Legazpi a las Filipinas,” El Colegio de Jalisco, November 24–25, 2014, Guadalajara; Seminario internacional “Nueva España: Puerta americana al Pacífico asiático (siglos XVI–XVIII),” IIH–UNAM, October 13–14, 2015, Mexico City. 33. Permanent exhibit “Oriente en Nueva España,” Museo Nacional del Virreinato Tepotzotlán, Mexico; Temporary exhibit “La exploración del Pacífico: 500 años de historia,” Casa de América Madrid, Spain, October 2, 2013–February 2, 2014. A temporary exhibit spearheaded by Acción Cultura Española, the Archivo General de las Indias, and various government ministries, traveled to Spain, the Philippines, and several Latin American countries. See the exhibit catalog: Antonio Sánchez de Mora, ed., Pacífico: España y la aventura de la mar del sur (Madrid: Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y Deporte, 2013). 34. Temporary exhibit “Made in the Americas: The New World Discovers Asia,” The Boston Museum of Fine Art, Boston, August 18, 2015–February 15, 2016. See also: Dennis Carr, et al., ed., Made in the Americas: The New World Discovers Asia (Boston: MFA Publications, 2015). 35. These new exhibits represent a major shift from the 2004 exhibit at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London called “Encounters: The Meeting of Asia and Europe 1500–1800,” in which Spain received no mention. Passing reference was made to the fact that “American silver” fueled this trade, but the Spanish presence and the way that Spanish colonial policies affected the flow of that silver in Asia was ignored. Anna Jackson and Amin Jaffer,

Pacific Borderlands of the Spanish Empire   783 ed., Encounters: The Meeting of Asia and Europe 1500–1800 (London: Victoria & Albert Museum, 2004). 36. For examples of the newest scholarship, see: María Cristina E. Barrón Soto, ed., Urdaneta novohispano: La inserción del mundo hispano en Asia (Mexico: Universidad Iberoamericana, 2012); Salvador Bernabéu Albert and Carlos Martínez Shaw, ed., Un océano de seda y plata: El universo económico del Galeón de Manila (Seville: CSIC, 2013); Ranier F. Buschmann, et al., eds., Navigating the Spanish Lake: The Pacific in the Iberian World, 1521–1898 (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2014); Robert Richmond Ellis, They Need Nothing: Hispanic–Asian Encounters of the Colonial Period (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012); Jaume Gorriz Abella, Filipinas antes de Filipinas. El archipiélago de San Lázaro en el siglo XVI (Madrid: Ediciones Polifemo, 2010); Ethan  P.  Hawkley, “The Birth of Globalization: The World and the Beginnings of Philippine Sovereignty, 1565–1610” (PhD diss., Northeastern University, 2014); Christina H. Lee, ed., Western Visions of the Far East in a Transpacific Age (1522–1671) (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012); Flor Trejo Rivera and Guadalupe Pinzón, eds., El mar: Percepciones, lectura y contextos. Una mirada cultural a los entornos marítimos (Mexico: IIH–UNAM, INAH, 2015); Mercedes Maroto Camino, Producing the Pacific: Maps and Narratives of Spanish Exploration (1567–1606) (New York: Rodopi, 2005); Patricio Hidalgo, Los autos acordados de la real audiencia de las islas filipinas de 1598–1599 (Madrid: Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, 2012); Kevin Sheehan, “Voyaging in the Spanish Baroque: Science and Patronage in the Pacific Voyage of Pedro Fernández de Quirós, 1605–1606,” in Science in the Spanish and Portuguese Empires, 1500–1800, ed. Daniela Bleichmar et al. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), 233–246; Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “Holding the World in Balance: The Connected Histories of the Iberian Overseas Empires, 1500–1640,” American Historical Review 112, no. 5 (2007): 1359–1385; Birgit M. Tremml, “The Global and the Local: Problematic Dynamics of the Triangular Trade in Early Modern Manila,” Journal of World History 23, no. 3 (2012): 555–586. 37. Mariano Bonialian, China en la América colonial. Bienes, mercados, comercio y cultura del consumo desde México hasta Buenos Aires (Buenos Aires and Mexico: Editorial Biblos, Instituto Mora, 2014); El Pacífico hispanoamericano; and “México: Epicentro semi–informal del comercio hispanoamericano, 1680–1740,” América Latina en la Historia Económica 18, no. 35 (2011): 7–27. 38. Tatiana Seijas, Asian Slaves in Colonial Mexico: From Chinos to Indios (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014); “Native Vassals: Chinos, Indigenous Identity, and Legal Protection in Early Modern Spain,” in Western Visions of the Far East in a Transpacific Age (1522–1671), ed. Christina H. Lee (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012), 153–164; and “Inns, Mules, and Hardtack.” 39. The latter was reserved only for native Filipinos. Scholars tend to use the terms interchangeably, but Seijas demonstrates that the term “indio chino” was distinct in usage. 40. A sizeable number of individuals also arrived in mainland New Spain as free peoples. Matthew J. Furlong, “Peasants, Servants and Sojourners: Itinerant Asians in Colonial New Spain, 1571–1720” (PhD diss., University of Arizona, 2014). 41. Guadalupe Pinzón Ríos, “Desde tierra y hacia el horizonte marítimo. Una reflexión sobre la relevancia de los establecimientos portuarios del Pacífico novohispano,” México y la cuenca del Pacífico 3, no. 7 (2014): 67–87; Hombres de mar en las costas novohispanas: Trabajos, trabajadores y vida portuaria en el departamento marítimo de San Blas (siglo XVIII) (Mexico: IIH–UNAM, 2014); “Una descripción de las costas del Pacífico novohispano del siglo XVIII,” Estudios de Historia Novohispana 39 (2008): 157–182; “Quinto Real, licencias

784   Borderlands of the Iberian World y asientos en torno a la extracción de perlas en el Pacífico novohispano,” in La fiscalidad novohispana en el Imperio español. Conceptualizaciones, proyectos y contradicciones, ed. Pilar Martínez, et al. (Mexico: IIH–UNAM, Instituto Mora, 2015), 139–165; and Acciones y reacciones. 42. Real cédula naming Miguel Gallo as castellano and alcalde mayor of Acapulco, 1688, Archivo General de la Nación, Mexico (henceforth AGN), Reales Cédulas, vol. 22, exp. 66. 43. Jaime Bugallal y Vela and Jesús Ángel Sánchez García, “Villardefrancos. Reconsideración de un gran pazo y su linaje,” Quintana 1 (2002): 153–176. 44. By 1713, the Spanish Crown lost control of the island when it was ceded to the British with the Treaty of Utrecht. Iván Escamilla González, Matilde Souto Mantecón, and Guadalupe Pinzón Ríos, ed., Resonancias imperiales: América y el Tratado de Utrecht 1713–2013 (Mexico: IIH–UNAM, Instituto Mora, 2015). 45. Request for passage by Miguel Gallo, 1688, Archivo General de Indias (henceforth AGI), Contratación, 5450, N. 68. 46. During the period that the Manila Galleons sailed, forty–two shipwrecked. William  J. McCarthy, “Gambling on Empire: The Economic Role of Shipwreck in the Age of Discovery,” International Journal of Maritime History 23, no. 2 (2011): 83. For a list of the Galleons, see: Shirley Fish, The Manila–Acapulco Galleons: Treasure Ships of the Pacific (Central Milton Keynes: AuthorHouse, 2011), 499–523. 47. Flynn and Giráldez, “Cycles of Silver,” 392. 48. Bonialian, El Pacífico hispanoamericano, 59–60. The total tonnage was limited to three hundred tons, while they were allowed two hundred and fifty thousand pesos in goods from Manila to mainland New Spain and five hundred thousand pesos in silver for the return voyage. 49. Bonialian, El Pacífico hispanoamericano, 65–66. 50. Seijas, Asian Slaves, chapter 7. The final chapter analyzes the late seventeenth–century abolition campaigns aimed at indigenous slavery practices and how chino slavery was incorporated into these debates. 51. Bonialian, El Pacífico hispanoamericano, 66–70. The permiso was raised to five hundred thousand pesos in goods going to mainland New Spain and a million pesos in silver to Asia. 52. Bonialian, El Pacífico hispanoamericano, 394–397. 53. Pinzón Ríos, Acciones y reacciones, 99. The Pacific borderlands of mainland New Spain stretched from Alta California to Central America. 54. Pinzón Ríos, Acciones y reacciones, 31. There were more than five possible ports in the general zone, taking into account the coast between the modern states of Jalisco and Oaxaca, with more ports to the north and south. 55. Pinzón Ríos, Acciones y reacciones, 137–138. 56. Pinzón Ríos, Acciones y reacciones, 99. 57. Pinzón Ríos, Acciones y reacciones, 105–106. 58. Pinzón Ríos, Acciones y reacciones, 140–143. Approval for the new fortification was granted in 1777, complemented by the new installation at San Blas. 59. Pinzón Ríos, Acciones y reacciones, 138. Along with these duties, he was also responsible for the management of the small population of Acapulco year round. For example, in 1743, Juan Eusebio Gallo de Pardiñas sent a report to the viceroy indicating that four hundred families of mulatos, pardos, and some chinos lived in Acapulco. Pinzón Ríos, Acciones y reacciones, 75. 60. Yuste López, Emporios transpacíficos, 318–319.

Pacific Borderlands of the Spanish Empire   785 61. Petition for Caballero de Santiago by Juan Eusebio Gallo de Pardiñas, 1719, Archivo Histórico de la Nación Madrid (henceforth AHN), Ordenes Militares, Santiago, exp. 3233. 62. Genealogists claim that he held the position of castellano, alcalde mayor, and capitán de guerra in Acapulco (as well as a similar position in Puebla) before taking the post in Nueva Vizcaya. No corroborating documentation has been found to date to verify the claim. Bugallal y Vela and Sánchez García, “Villardefrancos,” 169. 63. Registration of the Nao Nuestra Señora del Rosario, Acapulco, 1701, National Archive of the Philippines (henceforth NAP), Acapulco 1701–1712, Book 1. 64. Registration of the Nao Nuestra Señora del Rosario, Acapulco, 1701, NAP, Acapulco 1701–1712, Book 1. 65. Registration de la Nao Nuestra Señora del Rosario, Acapulco, 1701, NAP, Acapulco 1701–1712, Book 2. 66. Other children mentioned include Nicolasa, born in Cádiz, and Sebastián and Baltazar both born in New Spain. References to all three are scarce. Sebastián, like his brother Juan Eusebio, did hold office in Acapulco but the scarcity of documentation about his tenure suggest he was a temporary replacement. See: Autos covering the inventory of the property of Juan Serrano [who died] intestate, ordered by the alcalde mayor Capitan José Sebastián Gallo, 1711, AGN, Intestados, vol. 9, exp. 9, 166–180v. 67. Retirement of Juan Eusebio Gallo de Pardiñas in Acapulco, 1760, AGN, Filipinas, vol. 6, folio 112. 68. Doctor Don Miguel Ventura Gallo de Pardiñas, prebend, about an irregular deposit, 1731, AGN, Bienes Nacionales, vol. 449, exp. 24; Transfer of Manuel San Juan de Santa Cruz’s Power of Attorney from Felipe de Iparraguirre to Miguel Gallo de Pardiñas, 1719, Archivo Histórico Municipal de Parral, r. 1720B; The indigenous of the pueblo of San Francisco Magu (Tlanepantla, jurisdiction Estado de México), against Manuel de Santacruz and Miguel Ventura Gallo, owners of the hacienda of Lanzarote, about water rights, 1744, AGN, Tierras, vol. 1591, exp. 10. 69. For more information on the San Juan de Santa Cruz family, see: Catherine Tracy Goode, “Power in the Peripheries: Family Business and the Global Reach of the 18th–century Spanish Empire” (PhD diss., University of Arizona, 2012). 70. Yuste López, Emporios transpacíficos, 126; Luis Muro, “Soldados de Nueva España a Filipinas (1575),” Historia Mexicana 19, no. 4 (1970): 466–491. 7 1. Juan Eusebio, a vecino of Acapulco, was listed as an official on the galleon that year. Case against Miguel Gallo, castellano and alcalde mayor of Acapulco, 1712, AGI, Escribanía 264A. 72. For information on his first year in Mexico City, see the following letters between Manuel and his older brother Francisco in Veracruz: Manuel San Juan de Santa Cruz to Francisco San Juan de Santa Cruz, Mexico City, January 23, 1709, AGI, Audiencia de México, leg. 2769; Manuel San Juan de Santa Cruz to Francisco San Juan de Santa Cruz, Acapulco, March 30, 1709, AGI, Audiencia de México, leg. 2769; Manuel San Juan de Santa Cruz to Francisco San Juan de Santa Cruz, Mexico City, May 22, 1709, AGI, Audiencia de México, leg. 2769. 73. For a discussion of these practices in the mid–sixteenth century, see: William J. McCarthy, “Between Policy and Prerogative: Malfeasance in the Inspection of the Manila Galleons at Acapulco, 1637,” Colonial Latin American Historical Review 2, no. 2 (1993): 163–183. 74. The report is wide–ranging, including historical documentation and a series of interrogatories of Mexico City merchants, in two full legajos. Report by the Fiscal, consultant to Juan Díaz de Bracamonte, to the Viceroy, 1712, AGI, Escribanía 264A.

786   Borderlands of the Iberian World 75. Report by the Fiscal, 1712, AGI, Escribanía 264B. 76. Report by the Fiscal, 1712, AGI, Escribanía 264A. 77. Report by the Fiscal, 1712, AGI, Escribanía 264A. 78. Yuste López, Emporios transpacíficos, 133. 79. Shurz, The Manila Galleon, 202. 80. Report by the Fiscal, 1712, AGI, Escribanía 264A. He also made a payment in the amount of fifteen thousand pesos to his father, but the purpose of the payment is not explained in the documentation. 81. Report by the Fiscal, 1712, AGI, Escribanía 264A. Both registros list the space each importer contracted on the ship; Manuel had one chest and one bundle (a chest could hold as much as two hundred fifty pounds of Chinese silks, or one thousand one hundred forty pairs of stockings, weighing about two hundred thirty pounds). For more information on the allotment of space on the ships in the early seventeenth century see: Bonialian, El Pacífico hispanoamericano, 67; Lyon, “Track of the Manila Galleons,” 42–43. For further information on the provisioning of the galleons, see: Seijas, “Inns, Mules, and Hardtack.” 82. As the manifest of goods is a separate document from the list of exporters/importers and their piezas, it is difficult to correlate the goods each merchant imported; all that can be determined for an individual is the space allotted on the ship. 83. Catherine Tracy Goode, “Merchant-Bureaucrats, Unwritten Contracts, and Fraud in the Manila Galleon Trade,” in Corruption in the Iberian Empires: Greed, Custom, and Colonial Networks, ed. Christoph Rosenmüller (Albuquerque: UNM, 2017), 183–189. 84. A single reference to the case, in late 1712, mentions the need for a temporary castellano, because Gallo was in prison, presumably due to these charges. Appointment of Juan de Guzmán as interim castellano, Acapulco, 1712, AGN, Tierras, vol. 2986, exp. 4. 85. Report by the Fiscal, 1712, AGI, Escribanía 264A. 86. Report by the Fiscal, 1712, AGI, Escribanía 264A. Note that the majority of the “witnesses” were Mexico City vecinos that had never been to Acapulco, let alone Manila. 87. Report by the Fiscal, 1712, AGI, Escribanía, 264A. 88. Juan Eusebio Gallo de Pardiñas against Jose Mateo Herrera, and Juan Antonio Velázquez over ownership of territory, 1715, AGN, Tierras, vols. 409–411; Juan Eusebio Gallo De Pardiñas against the vecinos of the villas de Santa Ana de Camargo and of Mier (jurisdiction Tamaulipas and Nuevo León) over ownership of territory, 1756, AGN, Tierras, vol. 817, exp. 3; The indigenous of the pueblo of San Juan Bautista Jalapa against the heirs of Juan Eusebio Gallo, owners of the hacienda of San Marcos (jurisdiction Guerrero), over ownership of territory, 1765, AGN, Tierras, vol. 910, exp. 2; Testimony of the autos for the foundation of a capellanía instituted and endowed by General Don Juan Eusebio Gallo de Pardiñas, Knight of the Order of Santiago and castellano of the port of Acapulco, 1754, AGN, Bienes Nacionales, vol. 238, exp. 6. 89. Miguel Ventura was a wealthy priest, but in debt and embroiled in various conflicts over his properties: Debts of Miguel Ventura Gallo, 1737, AGN, Capellanías, vol. 86, exp. 662; Concerning the survey of said hacienda that resolved the dispossession of Doctor Don Miguel Ventura Gallo de Pardiñas, prebend of this Holy Church as the owner of the hacienda San Nicolás Lanzarote, 1736, AGN, Tierras, vol. 566, exp. 1; Dr. Don Miguel Gallo canon of this Holy Church concerning the permission to sell the ranch Tecoloacan, 1736, AGN, Tierras, vol. 3114, exp. 4.

Pacific Borderlands of the Spanish Empire   787 90. This may well have been a punishment, given his legal problems. Oath of Dr. Don Miguel Ventura Gallo de Pardiñas to be the Ordinary of the Archbishop of Manila, 1747, AGN, Inquisición, vol. 847, exp. 913. News of the death of Don Miguel Gallo in Manila. 1752, AGN, Inquisición, vol. 1151, exp. 5. 91. Manuel continued to exploit the close association with Claudia’s family until his death in 1749, evidenced when Claudia stepped in to mediate between the families concerning a dispute about finances in 1723. She was aware of her husband’s creative financing and the letter suggests that she was actively involved in those dealings. It is not clear whether she approved of the illegal activity, only that she is concerned for her parents. Claudia Gallo de Pardiñas to Francisco San Juan de Santa Cruz, 1723, AGI, Audiencia de México, leg. 2769. 92. Petition for Caballero de Santiago by Manuel San Juan de Santa Cruz, November 28, 1711, AHN, Ordenes Militares, Santiago, exp. 7519; Petition for Caballero de Santiago by Juan Eusebio Gallo de Pardiñas, 1719, AHN, Ordenes Militares, Santiago, exp. 3233. Juan Isidro gained the title of Caballero de Santiago in 1680 before the family network discussed here existed. Bugallal y Vela and Sánchez García, “Villardefrancos,” 169. 93. The following recent works employ the term “frontera” for the Spanish Pacific: María Fernanda García de los Arcos, “Las relaciones de Filipinas con el centro del virreinato,” in México en el mundo hispánico, vol. 1, ed. Oscar Mazín Gómez, (Zamora: El Colegio de Michoacán, 2000), 51–67; Lourdes de Ita Rubio, “Los puertos novohispanos, su hinterland y su foreland durante el siglo XVI,” in Territorio, frontera y región en la historia de América. Siglos XVI al XX, ed. Marco Antonio Landavazo (Mexico: Editorial Porrúa, Instituto de Investigaciones Históricas–UMSNH, 2003), 3–32; Marta María Manchado López and Miguel Luque Talaván, ed., Fronteras del mundo hispánico: Filipinas en el contexto de las regiones liminares novohispanos (Córdoba: Universidad de Córdoba, 2011); Pinzón Ríos, Acciones y reacciones, 99. 94. Das Gupta, India and the Indian Ocean, 13. 95. Murdo  J.  MacLeod, “Spain and America: The Atlantic Trade, 1492–1720,” in The Cambridge History of Latin America, vol. 1, ed. Leslie Bethell (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 354. 96. Heffer, The United States and the Pacific, 6. 97. Certainly few enjoyed this economic success; yet, under the constraints of the colonial economy that excluded the majority, one can assess the success of merchant activities as they pertain to mainland New Spain and the Pacific borderlands. 98. Frank, ReOrient. 99. Wallerstein, The Modern World System I, 333. 100. Flynn and Giráldez, “Born with a ‘Silver Spoon,’ ” 201. 101. John Tutino, Making a New World: Founding Capitalism in the Bajío and Spanish North America (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 2–3.

Bibliography Atwell, William  S. “Another Look at Silver Imports into China, ca. 1635–1644.” Journal of World History 16, no. 4 (2005): 467–489. Bernabéu Albert, Salvador, and Carlos Martínez Shaw, ed. Un océano de seda y plata: El universo económico del Galeón de Manila. Seville: CSIC, 2013.

788   Borderlands of the Iberian World Bonialian, Mariano. El Pacífico hispanoamericano: Política y comercio asiático en el Imperio Español (1680–1784). Mexico: El Colegio de México, 2012. Bonialian, Mariano. China en la América colonial: Bienes, mercados, comercio y cultura del consumo desde México hasta Buenos Aires. Buenos Aires and Mexico: Editorial Biblos, Instituto Mora, 2014. Buschmann, Ranier F., et al, eds. Navigating the Spanish Lake: The Pacific in the Iberian World, 1521–1898. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2014. Carr, Dennis, et al., eds. Made in the Americas: The New World Discovers Asia. Boston: MFA Publications, 2015. Flynn, Dennis  O., and Arturo Giráldez. “Born with a ‘Silver Spoon:’ The Origin of World Trade in 1571.” Journal of World History 6, no. 2 (1995): 201–221. Flynn, Dennis O., and Arturo Giráldez. “Cycles of Silver: Global Economic Unity through the Mid-Eighteenth Century.” Journal of World History 13, no. 2 (2002): 391–427. Frank, Andre Gunder. ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Giráldez, Arturo. The Age of Trade: The Manila Galleons and the Dawn of the Global Economy. New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015. Goode, Catherine Tracy. “Merchant-Bureaucrats, Unwritten Contracts, and Fraud in the Manila Galleon Trade.” In Corruption in the Iberian Empires: Greed, Custom, and Colonial Networks, ed. Christoph Rosenmüller, 171–195. Albuquerque: UNM, 2017. Lee, Christina H., ed. Western Visions of the Far East in a Transpacific Age (1522–1671). Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012. Lyon, Eugene. “Track of the Manila Galleons.” National Geographic 178, no. 3 (1990): 5–38. Pinzón Ríos, Guadalupe. Acciones y reacciones en los puertos del mar del sur. Desarrollo portuario del Pacífico novohispano a partir de sus políticas defensivas (1713–1789). Mexico: IIH-UNAM, Instituto Mora, 2011. Seijas, Tatiana. Asian Slaves in Colonial Mexico: From Chinos to Indios. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Seijas, Tatiana. “Inns, Mules, and Hardtack for the Voyage: The Local Economy of the Manila Galleon in Mexio.” Colonial Latin America Review 25, no. 1 (2016): 1–21. Trejo Rivera, Flor and Guadalupe Pinzón, eds. El mar: Percepciones, lectura y contextos. Una mirada cultural a los entornos marítimos. Mexico: IIH-UNAM, INAH, 2015. Yuste, Carmen. El comercio de la Nueva España con Filipinas, 1590–1785. Mexico: INAH, 1984. Yuste, Carmen. Emporios transpacíficos. Comerciantes mexicanos en Manila, 1710–1815. Mexico: UNAM, 2007.

chapter 32

Con v erti ng the Pacific Jesuit Networks Between New Spain and Asia Brandon Bayne

A Trans-Pacific Network As an early modern global enterprise, the Society of Jesus famously established ­networks that relayed information vertically from far-flung missionaries up to superiors in metropolitan centers. At the same time, Jesuits linked horizontally to colleagues serving in other continents by sharing letters, histories, maps, and devotional objects that helped forge a worldwide imagined community. Through these less formal means, missionaries in New Spain and Asia developed particularly strong ties, reinforced by a shared history of colonization, trade, and inevitable competition for resources. Accounts focused on direct relations between discrete peripheries and hierarchical centers have sometimes missed the extent to which intercolonial communication influenced historical developments across fields. Yet the viceroyalty of New Spain was a trans-oceanic contact zone for European, Asian, and indigenous cultures, in which Jesuit networks gathered information, fostered comparison, and generated competition. As the Manila Galleons ferried them back and forth across the Pacific, missionaries shared knowledge and increasingly compared their experiences in ways that directly shaped their evangelistic approaches, devotional practices, and intellectual production. In recent years, scholars have highlighted extensive intercultural contact across the early modern Pacific. In his work on the subject, Lothar Knauth characterized the relationship between Japan, China, Southeast Asia, and the Americas as fraught with confrontation and riven by imperial competition.1 Several have followed Knauth’s lead, tracking both the complex political maneuvering and international conflicts that marked the Pacific from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries.2 Martha Ortega has

790   Borderlands of the Iberian World extended the analysis to unpack the wider significance of Spanish and Russian contestations in the northern Pacific, reflecting on the pacification of indigenous people as a marker of imperial borders.3 Others have highlighted the enormous quantity and variety of biological, material, and cultural exchanges between Asia and the Americas.4 Art historians, in particular, have increasingly called attention on the wonderfully hybrid visual culture arising from these encounters.5 Historians of colonial Latin America have built upon these interests in both transpacific political contestations and cultural combinations. Tatiana Seijas, for example, has tracked the transfer of bodies along with the systemic exchange of material resources, cultural imaginations and religious devotions in her study of the transpacific slave trade.6 A growing collection of scholarship reflects this multivalent and multi-sited approach to the study of the early modern Pacific.7 In a historiographical essay, Evelyn Hu-Dehart surveyed the long history of conflict and exchange across the Pacific, and persuasively reasoned that the English “confrontation” and Spanish confrontación represent different ways of imagining the transpacific encounter. She contended that the former signified a face-off between adversaries, while the latter suggested a “collation or affinity, of comparison and bringing together different interests.”8 Together, the terms remind us that early modern networks between Asia and the Americas fostered both competition and comparison. In similar fashion, specialists in Jesuit studies have outlined the wide-ranging and multi-directional missionary networks of the Society of Jesus to understand better the advent of globalization in Iberian empires. Many have focused on the formal Jesuit institutional networks and hierarchies that connected provinces to Rome, tracking reports from the margins directly back to royal officials and the Society’s Generals.9 Fascination with these structures is understandable, as most modern archives reflect these routes of communication, with the documents usually concentrated in metropolitan centers like Lisbon or Madrid, Lima, or Mexico City or other key nodal points along the way. These studies have shown how missionaries, viceroys, councils, and generals communicated up and down a ladder of authority that included rungs of rectors, visitors, governors, provincials, and secretaries. More recently, José Gabriel Martínez-Serna has highlighted the understudied roll of procurators as the chief engine that propelled the motors of Jesuit global operations. In their work as the material managers of the Society, procurators helped streamline communication and forged both horizontal and vertical networks that allowed multidirectional exchanges in a way unmatched by other religious orders or secular officials.10 Similarly, Frederik Vermote has outlined the Jesuit financial and logistical connections between Asia and Portugal, charting the local negotiations that made such a far-flung enterprise possible.11 Working to further expand knowledge of Jesuit networks, Luke Clossey has argued that the nature of the archives has diverted our attention away from communication across mission fields. Concentrating largely on the seventeenth century, Clossey consulted around twelve hundred written exchanges among fifty-three Jesuits in Germany, Mexico, and China.12 By accessing this “horizontal global network,” he charted the trade of financial, informational, and religious commodities between ­missionaries in ways that transcend a strictly vertical accounting of the Company’s

Converting the Pacific   791 connections. Among the promising fruits of this approach, Clossey argued that the Society represented an early modern form of globalization, opening up formal and informal routes for communication between Asia and the Americas that were facilitated by the Society’s Provincial governance as much as personal connections between missionaries, patrons, families, and colleges.13 Together, this research has advanced studies of Jesuit missions traditionally focused on singular locations, by directing attention to trans-oceanic networks of exchange that moved textual, material, human, and economic resources across the globe. These recent studies confirm John O’Malley and Dauril Alden’s contention that the Society had centrifugal dynamics in addition to centralizing forces, which not only allowed but compelled competition and the crossing of regional lines beyond the strict provincial system.14 The complex history of the term “borderlands” shows that it can take on several meanings in the hands of diverse scholars. Nevertheless, at minimum, it implies borders and lands.15 The encounters herein outlined however, took place across empires and oceans, in contexts in which Europeans sometimes found themselves at the mercy of local rulers—daimyos, shoguns, and emperors—and at other times exerted political, military and cultural power in an attempt to transform indigenous populations.16 Due to the wide expanses and diverse situations described, portraying clashes of cultures in grounded zones of contact in a few pages is less fruitful than looking at trans-oceanic confrontaciones made possible by newly global networks of transportation, communication, and aspiration.17 Jesuit networks facilitated intercultural comparisons and contestations that are remarkable for the distances bridged more so than the spaces occupied. In this, they conform to Tracy Goode’s argument that the early modern Pacific did not represent a “limit of empire,” but a “connective web” that enabled material and cultural exchange, combination and transformation.18 Building on these interventions in the study of the Pacific, Jesuit missions and early modern globalization allow us to map a few specific exchanges between Jesuits in the viceroyalty of New Spain (including the Marianas and Philippines) and other parts of Asia from the time of their arrival in the late sixteenth century to their expulsion in the 1760s.

Debating Conquest and Accommodation On July 26, 1586, the most important political and ecclesiastical leaders of the Philippines signed a memorial to be sent to the Council of the Indies and Philip II.19 In the document the Estates of Manila proposed the forceful conquest of China, to be accomplished with a combined army of twelve thousand Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish soldiers along with the possible assistance of the Japanese daimyo Toyotomi Hideyoshi. They pitched the planned invasion to the Crown with the enticing trinity of gold, glory, and God, or in their words “riches and eternal fame” as well as the “restoration of myriad souls, created

792   Borderlands of the Iberian World for (Christ), and redeemed by His blood and now deluded and possessed by the devil.”20 To the Spanish Jesuit Alonso Sánchez, whom the writers entrusted with drafting and delivering the memorial to Philip II, it seemed like the most logical and practical method to open up China to missionary work, the next step in the global advancement of Christianity through Iberian imperial expansion.21 The proposal had personal resonance for him. After a few years as a seminary rector in Mexico, Sánchez had arrived in Manila in 1581 as a counselor to Bishop Domingo de Salazar and part of the first delegation of Jesuits to the island. As such he witnessed what he believed was the continuation of a natural process of spreading Christianity, begun in New Spain and extended to the Philippines, through the tried and true method of pacification, colonization, and evangelization.22 However, Sánchez had experienced personal setbacks when he attempted evangelization in Canton, twice being rebuffed and forced to return to the Philippines.23 As would be the case with Japan in the coming years, China feared Iberian ambitions in the Pacific and regarded missionaries as a first prong in a potential attack. For this reason when missionaries like Sánchez attempted to set up sites for trade, political embassy, and evangelization through diplomacy, they experienced rejection. Faced with repeated opposition to peaceful entry, Sánchez decided that Spain should give China what they feared. For both historical and personal reasons, he became one of the chief advocates of using force to subdue China and open it up to evangelization. However, he was not just a “loose cannon” advocating war. Rather, Manila’s episcopal overseers and civil magistrates joined Sánchez and charged him with presenting their case in Mexico to the Viceroy-Archbishop Pedro Moya de Contreras and Jesuit Provincial Antonio de Mendoza, in Madrid to Philip II and the Council, and in Rome to the Society’s General Claudio Aquaviva and Pope Sixtus V.24 Unfortunately for Sánchez, word of the Manila proposal preceded his travels and he quickly encountered opposition on multiple fronts. Alessandro Valignano, the Neopolitan head of the Jesuit mission in the Far East, quickly wrote General Aquaviva in April 1585 to warn against the attempts of Spanish Jesuits to enter China. He claimed that Sánchez had already offended the Chinese with several “indiscretions” during his 1582 diplomatic trip and that, in general, Jesuits coming from Mexico threatened the more careful attempts of the Macao based Portuguese mission. Valignano’s general mistrust of the Spanish evangelistic approach was not limited to Sánchez. In several letters throughout the 1590s he wrote to Aquaviva to complain about castellanos and their methods, and instead emphasized the need for an accommodating approach to Chinese culture as he himself had attempted to fashion in Japan.25 For his part, Aquaviva directly cautioned Spanish Jesuits against going to Macao or China, as it would confuse the Spanish and Portuguese routes to the east and upset a delicate balance between these two imperial powers. Likewise, when Philip II took the Portuguese Crown, he forbade Spanish Jesuits from crossing over through the Philippines into China.26 The Manila proposal for an armed entrada threatened this territorial division. Trouble followed Sánchez across the ocean to New Spain. Before he even arrived, he faced resistance from the Jesuit Provincial, Antonio de Mendoza, as well as the theologian and historian José de Acosta. Together they mounted a two-pronged attack on their

Converting the Pacific   793 fellow Jesuit and his proposal to extend the New World model to the Far East, Mendoza using institutional means to thwart his success and Acosta challenging the theological justification and methodological appropriateness of the entrada through disputation. When Sánchez arrived in Mexico in 1587, Mendoza immediately barred him from proceeding with his task on the basis that a Jesuit should not serve in a specifically political role and was therefore operating outside his vocation. More generally, Mendoza opposed the very idea of an invasion, instead supporting the method of accommodation and gradual persuasion that Valignano and Ricci advocated.27 In his carta annua of 1585, Mendoza warned the Society’s Father General that Sánchez’s proposal was not only a wrongheaded extension of the conquest model of evangelization but that it had been published in Manila and would surely circulate around the Pacific, which would ­confirm fears in both China and Japan that “the Spanish make war.” In China, it would endanger the promising work of Matteo Ricci and Michele Ruggieri, risking expulsion or even execution.28 As a final step to prevent Sánchez’s success, Mendoza designated Acosta as the former’s immediate superior, charged with supervising him on the voyage to Madrid. Having arrived in Mexico just a year before Sánchez, Acosta had spent his time collecting information on pre-conquest Mexican culture and developing his thoughts on the proper method to evangelize diverse peoples. The first set of resources led to his well-known Historia natural y moral de las Indias, published in 1590 in Madrid. Acosta saw the Natural and Moral History as a prequel to the more important work of developing a missionary strategy to reach the indigenous peoples of the Americas. Beyond intellectual interest, ethnographic information about the native cultures of North and South America could aid the Jesuits in determining the most successful approach to Christianizing particular native communities.29 He developed his argument for differential methodologies according to civilization in De procuranda Indorum salute (On Providing for the Salvation of the Indies).30 Although still unpublished in 1587 when Sánchez arrived from Manila, De Procuranda served as the basis for two statements, which Acosta issued to challenge the Manila proposal.31 What would emerge later was an adaptable approach to evangelization that varied, depending on the target population’s attainment of civilization, as defined by European standards. Much like Valignano, Acosta argued that missionary methods should take into account the society they are aimed at and outlined three levels of culture based on the presence of written language, cities, and governance. China and Japan sat toward the top of the hierarchy with writing, cities, and government; Mexico and Peru came next with substantial urban, political, and cultural organization but no alphabetic system of writing; and the indigenous inhabitants of northern New Spain or Amazonia fell last, characterized by their ­perceived lack of civilization.32 In this light, Acosta argued in two letters about “the war in China,” that neither Japan nor China should be approached with arms, as their societies did not demand reorganization and soldiers would not be needed to protect missionaries.33 While the evangelists of the Americas were likely to suffer several trials and dangers among “savage” people without knowledge or rule of law, missionaries across the Pacific should attempt to gain

794   Borderlands of the Iberian World support and protection from rulers. Conquest had become a necessary evil, Acosta conceded, that set the conditions for pacification, civilization, and eventually conversion in the Americas. Even as he accepted that reality, he believed the sword had been an impediment to the Christian message of peace in the Americas. An armed entrada in China would be an even worse “scandal” for the Christian religion, a stumbling block and scourge to all future work in Asia.34 Once more, he considered it impractical as it had a low likelihood of success and the conditions that led to the conquests of Peru and Mexico could not be duplicated. While the assumption of stability would be tested in the ensuing decade in Japan, Acosta’s argument persuaded Sánchez, causing him to modify his proposal upon arrival in Madrid. No longer advocating outright invasion, the proposal ultimately presented to Philip II in the spring of 1588 advocated the use of soldiers as armed guards for the missionaries, but not outright war.35 Acosta’s influence on the Manila plan along with Sánchez’s initial use of Peru, Mexico, and the Philippines as models for China, illustrates the transpacific nature of debates often cast as direct channels of communication between periphery and center. The question of how to ­proceed in China was not exclusive to the planning of Ricci and Ruggieri in Macao or Valignano in Japan. Rather it became an issue about which Jesuits in the Philippines, Peru, and Mexico believed they had something crucial at stake. Drawing on his wide experience across the Pacific, Sánchez concluded that confrontation—in the violent sense—was the only way to extend Christendom. Conversely, Acosta advocated comparing cultures, a confrontación, which should caution his fellow Jesuits in Asia from too quickly following the American example.

Rival Martyrs: Transpacific Devotion and Competition In the wake of the controversy surrounding the Manila proposal, the situation of missionaries in the Far East became increasingly perilous, as both China and Japan feared the extension of Iberian ambitions in the Pacific. Most notably, Japan’s regent Hideyoshi, upon whom Sánchez and the Manila estates had pinned their hopes of a Chinese invasion, reversed his initial tolerance of Christianity and increased persecutions against both Kirishitans and European missionaries. In 1587, Hideyoshi issued an edict of expulsion against the Jesuits in his territories. The ramping up of persecution had multiple internal and external causes, but was primarily driven by suspicion of a Spanish invasion led by missionaries from the Philippines. Before Sánchez’s proposal, the Jesuit superior in Japan, Gaspar Coelho had first roused Hideyoshi’s suspicions when he proposed to the daimyo, in 1586, a joint Iberian–Japanese invasion of China and later ­organized armed resistance to restrictions in Japan.36 While the affair did not lead to immediate persecution of the order, it had alerted Hideyoshi so that once he achieved centralized power he set out to curb Iberian missionary presence. This was

Converting the Pacific   795 solidified in October 1596, when a Spanish galleon on its way from Manila to Acapulco wrecked in Urado Bay. When Hideyoshi took charge of the ships contents, he discovered arms and Franciscans, which he took to be evidence of an impending assault.37 Less than a year later on February 5, 1597, when twenty-six Christians, six Franciscans (four from Spain, one from Mexico, and one from India) who had come from the Philippines, three Japanese Jesuits and seventeen Japanese Third Order Franciscans were tortured, speared, and crucified in Nagasaki. The martyrdoms confirmed the worst fears of Valignano, Ricci, Mendoza, and Acosta. An aggressive missionary confrontation with Hideyoshi had violently halted Jesuit efforts that had begun in 1549 under Xavier and dramatically expanded under Valignano in ensuing decades. The deaths of Paul Miki, John de Goto, and James Kisai were especially troubling to accommodationists. As three prominent Japanese converts, they embodied a patient approach to spreading the religion and their loss seemed to undermine its aims.38 Even as the Nagasaki martyrs represented a severe setback to the Japanese mission, they inaugurated a devotional renaissance across the Pacific. In Peru and Mexico word of the deaths provoked reverence for the victims. In particular, the Mexican Franciscan Felipe de Jesús and the Japanese Jesuits Miki, Kisai, and Goto modeled the sacrificial labors of European missionaries and the hope of Asian conversions. They also revealed the potential of American and Asian Christians to function as celestial intermediaries, advocating in heaven for the conversion of their respective regions. The tie between the Society’s mission and the Nagasaki Martyrs grew especially in the 1620s as three Jesuit founders were canonized and the Asian martyrs were beatified. In 1622, Pope Gregory XV made saints of the founder Ignatius of Loyola, the Society’s first missionary Francis Xavier, and the famed aristocrat and third General Francis Borgia. For the Jesuits of Asia and the Americas, the latter were particularly important as Xavier pioneered the work in India, Japan, and China while Borgia had inaugurated the missions of the viceroyalties of Peru and New Spain. Five years later, Gregory XV’s successor, Urban VIII beatified the Japanese Martyrs. Although devotion to both the founders and martyrs preceded official recognition, the pronouncements drew together both as necessary parts of the Jesuits’ global mission. Two pieces of art from separate Jesuit churches in Peru and northern New Spain demonstrate this convergence. The first, the Alegoría de la la Compañía de Jesús y su labor misional en los cuatro continentes (Figure  32.1) resides in the former Jesuit church of Lima, Iglesia de San Pedro, and dates from the eighteenth century.39 The anonymous painter’s goal of tying the Society to Iberian expansion and Christian mission is clear. Featuring a larger than life Ignatius on a central pedestal, with Xavier and Borgia standing to his lower right and left, the painting makes the three saints the central focus of the allegory. The Jesuits are pictured as the fulfillment of messianic biblical prophecy, framed by texts from the New Testament and the Psalms that both command and foretell the conversion of the world. With representatives from all four continents praying at their feet, the holy triumvirate has ushered in a glorious eschatological scene through writing (Loyola), preaching (Xavier) and sacramental devotion (Borgia).

Figure 32.1.  This anonymous “Allegory of the Society of Jesus” and its missionary work in the four continents belongs to the Church of San Pedro in Lima, Peru. In addition to the founding Jesuit saints Ignatius of Loyola, Francis Xavier, and Francis Borgia, the eighteenth-century portrait celebrates the Society’s Asian efforts by featuring missionaries to China like Matteo Ricci and Adam Schall as well as the Japanese martyrs Paul Miki, John de Goto, and James Kisai. Photograph courtesy of Daniel Giannoni and Proyecto Estudios Indianos. Accessed June 15, 2015, http://­ estudiosindianos.org/glosario-de-indias/alegoria-del-triunfo-de-los-jesuitas-en-las-cuatro-partes-del-mundo/.

Converting the Pacific   797 What may be less apparent on first glance are the smaller figures that surround the founders both horizontally and vertically, all of them famous missionaries to Asia. The great symbols of cultural accommodation and scientific achievement in China, Matteo Ricci and Adam Schall stand to the right and left of Loyola’s pedestal.40 To the viewer’s left behind Borgia, João de Britto, the Portuguese missionary to Madurai (India) carries the signs of his poverty and his adoption of Brahmin dress. On the opposite side behind Xavier, stands Alexander de Rhodes, the French Jesuit who had translated several books into Vietnamese and provided some of the first maps and histories of Indochina.41 While the central figures of Borgia and Xavier may stand respectively for the missions to the Americas and Asia, all of the surrounding missionary heroes come from the latter. The Asian content continues in the top third of the image. Residing with numerous cherubim in the celestial realm, three men carry crucifixes and martyr palms and three others hold palms and hands to their chest. The three to the left are the Nagasaki Martyrs of 1597 (Miki, Kisai, and Goto). With crucifixes, spears, and palms, they look up toward heaven, acting as intercessors and bridges between the earthly mission and the divine will. The three to the right represent the celebrated triad of European boy saints, John Berchmans, Aloysius Gonzaga, and Stanislaus Kostka.42 No references to missionaries, martyrs or saints associated with the Americas appear in the Alegoría. In her discussion of a painting at San Ignacio, a mission to the Tarahumara and visita of Huejotitán in northern New Spain, Clara Bargellini has described a similar depiction of the Asian mission. Although the painting has since been lost, contemporary accounts described Jesus handing down crowns of martyrdom to angels who pass them on to St. Francis Xavier, who then distributes them among the Japanese Jesuit martyrs and the Franciscan Felipe de Jesús, the patron of New Spain.43 The presence of the protomissionaries and proto-martyrs of Asia on this northern frontier, linked the Tarahumara mission to a global labor even as it hoped to access celestial intercessors. Similarly, Jesuits in Sonora named Los Santos Mártires del Japón the patrons of one of four rectorships, alongside devotional luminaries like San Francisco de Borja, San Francisco Xavier, and Nuestra Señora de los Dolores. For missionaries in New Spain, the Japanese martyrs joined the Society’s founders and the Virgin as the highest representatives of spiritual aspiration. More broadly, devotion to missionary and martyr saints from Asia became the general pattern, rather than the exception. By the early seventeenth century Miki, Kisai, and Goto replaced ancient saints as the most prominent martyrs depicted in Jesuit visual art throughout the Americas.44 Conversely, few Jesuits who died in New Spain were represented in devotional art. This was not because they had none. From the death of Juan Bautista de Segura and his seven companions in Ajacán in 1570 to Gonzalo de Tapia in Sinaloa in 1594 and eight martyrs of the Tepehuán Revolt in 1616, several of the Society’s missionaries could lay claim to similar sufferings by the mid-seventeenth century. Jesuits in New Spain memorialized these colleagues’ deaths in martyrologies, histories, letters, reliquaries, and portraits. Nevertheless, they never achieved the widespread support, popular devotion, or canonical advancement of the Japanese martyrs.45 What was it about the Asian context or situation that created recognizable saints and sustained devotion in the Americas

798   Borderlands of the Iberian World when missionaries who died there rarely gained notice outside of the writings of their associates? Part of the reason for their popularity surely derives from their beatification in 1627, which allowed their ritual veneration at a time when the Papacy and Holy Office were centralizing the canonization process and censoring unauthorized cults.46 As several studies of early modern canonization have made clear, though, saintly recognition was a complicated process that demanded local, regional and central support.47 For this reason, hagiographic production and veneration were not strictly hierarchical, but  rather multi-directional processes that relied on coordination and interchange. Canonization relied upon a “sacred economy,” characterized by dynamic exchanges of rituals, relics, epistles, and prayers.48 While canonical recognition determined the content of many portraits, the prominent missionaries of Asia featured in the Alegoría misional did not depend on official sanction. None of those evangelists were made saints until Jõao de Britto in 1947. Yet, they still represented something powerful to Jesuits in Lima, who featured them prominently in their central church.49 Both connections and distance might explain the presence of the Asian mission in American cultural imagination. Transpacific networks spread devotions through exchanges of hagiographies, histories, relics, and art. At the same time, geographic distance may have protected these goods from rigorous historical investigation. The case of San Felipe de Jesús, the Mexican Franciscan martyred in Japan helps illustrate the point. His beatification came about through a long process of written biography and devotional production that began in Manila and ended in Europe but had little to do with his life in Mexico.50 If anything, his unknown upbringing in Mexico, profligate life in Manila, and lack of constancy in Japan undermined widespread enthusiasm for his cult.51 As Cornelius Conover has explained, Franciscans had campaigned for his recognition solely as a part of the larger group of Nagasaki Martyrs, and his elevation came somewhat as a surprise to clergy in New Spain. Nevertheless, both religious and secular leaders tried to capitalize on the first creole beato (holy man), declaring him the patron of Mexico City in 1630. They marked his first feast day of February 5 with elaborate processions and sermons that expressed hope in the celestial intercession of this mostly unknown martyr. The devotion, however, gained little traction in ensuing years as questions about his piety persisted. Even though his family still lived in New Spain at the time of his recognition, for example, nobody interviewed them, sought to collect relics, or marked important locations from his childhood.52 Rather, devotion to San Felipe de Jesús only grew among Oratorians, silversmiths and some aristocrats in later decades in the relative absence of specifics and haze of time.53 His death in a distant land in the form of crucifixion at the hands of a cruel ruler out of hatred for the faith fulfilled ­martyrological typologies, even if the specifics of his life garnered little enthusiasm. Rivalry also fueled the devotions. Jesuits in Mexico vehemently opposed the memorialization of Felipe de Jesús, as he embodied the Franciscan intrusion into what they believed was their territory and the beginning of widespread persecution in Asia. Instead, they promoted their own Nagasaki Martyrs, celebrating rival feast days and commissioning artistic representations.54 Japanese Christians who reportedly suffered death with unwavering stoicism and loyalty, San Pablo Miki and his companions

Converting the Pacific   799 embodied Jesuit confidence in the superiority of their evangelistic method. Once more, they avoided the problematic issues raised by the murders of Fathers Tapia, Orozco, or Cisneros in New Spain. The missionaries who perished in New Spain were Europeans engaged in imperial pacification, who died in the context of indigenous revolts. The Japanese martyrdoms presented the opposite situation. They conformed to the ancient pattern of marginalized Christians suffering persecution at the hands of a cruel tyrant, while simultaneously providing a geographic distance akin to the chronological remoteness of ancient martyr tales. If they could also bolster Jesuit feelings of superiority to rival Franciscans in Mexico, that was all the better. The Society’s missionaries and martyrs from Asia served another purpose for devotees that may not have been necessary in the Americas. As Ines Županov argues, Jesuit missionaries helped build the Portuguese “Shadow Empire” in the east by extending imperial borders in European imagination beyond the small territories where they actually held territorial sovereignty.55 Missionaries like Britto, Ricci, Schall, and Rhodes as well as martyrs like Miki, Goto, Kisai represented the expansion of Christendom around the globe, even if actual European dominion in India, China, Indochina, and Japan barely extended beyond trading posts. Like other early modern saints, they served a propagandistic function that triumphantly asserted Catholic universalism. Distinctively for the Jesuits, they believed victory came through cultural accommodation and sacrificial labor.56 Through their clothes, symbols of adaptation and sometimes their very ethnicity (in the case of the Japanese martyrs), the Jesuits of Asia marked Christendom’s aspirations of global expansion, even where it held little territorial dominion.57 In Mexico, these symbolic triumphs consoled isolated missionaries like Jacob Baegert, a German who served in California for almost two decades. It assured him of the truth of his cause, even when he grew pessimistic about the results of his own evangelistic work. In his book Observations on Lower California, Baegert displaced his own frustrations with the failure of conversion efforts among the peninsula’s indigenous inhabitants by posing mocking questions about the paucity of Protestant missionaries and martyrs in Asia. “For a long time Catholic circles have been waiting for the first volume of edifying letters from Protestant missionaries, or for a martyrology of Lutheran and Calvinistic preachers who became martyrs in India,” Baegert teased. In the meantime Catholics had produced “more than thirty volumes of edifying letters (that) have already been published by the Jesuits alone.” The Society was not as old or as large as Protestantism, and yet, “In their book of martyrs, almost a thousand blood-witnesses can be counted.”58 For Baegert, the martyrs of Asia were especially important in the context of the growing power of Protestant maritime empires in the eighteenth century. While Dutch and English commercial networks should have assured Protestant evangelism in the transpacific, Jesuit missionaries and martyrs had born witness to the universal veracity of Catholicism. In the context of a book on northern New Spain, the martyrs of Asia validated a disappointing mission through the sacrifices of his transpacific peers. As much as they looked west, Jesuits in New Spain still promoted their own martyrs, knowing their value in securing future recruits. They also understood that most novices preferred an assignment in China, inspired by the feats of Fathers Matteo Ricci and

800   Borderlands of the Iberian World Adam Schall and eager to ply their years of education.59 To counter this tendency, superiors in New Spain pitched the relative isolation and danger of the American mission as its own reward, a chance to more fully imitate Christ. They did so by celebrating their “red martyrs” who had spilled their blood, but also “white martyrs” who poured out their sweat and tears in lonely and risky missions.60 The Provincial of New Spain, Andres Pérez de Ribas argued in his 1645 book History of the Triumphs of Our Holy Faith that the New World assignment offered the best hope of dying in hatred of the faith.61 And even those who labored without such an opportunity prevailed through their suffering ­service.62 Beginning with a eulogy for Father Gonzalo de Tapia and an encomium for his companion Pedro Méndez, his History alternated between Jesus’s “valiant soldiers,” who had “spilled their blood at the hands of infidels for preaching the Gospel,” and the members of Christ’s militia whose “heroic deeds and evangelical labors” achieved victories by exposure “to an infinite number of other hardships, including hunger, thirst, very rough roads, etc.”63 Together these “red” and “white” cases of edification provided for the occidental Indies, what others had done for “the Indies of the east,” giving a full account of Jesuit apostolic labors in the Americas.64 While some might have regarded the East Indies as more prestigious, Pérez de Ribas turned that logic on its head, suggesting that the “barbarous and fierce” nature of the New World ensured “triumphs” not available in Asia.

Forging a Way to China from California On the other side of the ocean, leaders knew they were competing for the attention of those same novices. For this reason the China Procurator Father Ferdinand Verbiest sent a circular letter to the Society’s colleges in Europe in 1678 that described a Chinese mission that entailed both promise and peril.65 In contrast with New Spain, he argued that China provided the opportunity of applying the full breadth of Jesuit education to a relatively comparable civilization. In order to have success at the Imperial court, future missionaries must prepare for years in the best European universities, so that they could serve the emperor as astronomers, cartographers, and mathematicians. Nevertheless, Verbiest worried that the “generous soldiers of the Society of Jesus, most resolute sons of our leader Saint Ignatius and brothers of so many illustrious martyrs,” viewed martyrdom as essential to missions and would see the safety of China as less apostolic. To this he responded that although their mission enjoyed privilege for the moment, it depended on the emperor’s good will and oppression might return at any moment. Once more, the much longer sea journey would be its own form of extended martyrdom, complete with great hunger, pain, and perhaps death. Whether through systematic persecution or sea journey, ministers to China must be willing to train in languages, mathematics, and science for more than thirteen years, and then sacrifice that training and their lives should

Converting the Pacific   801 circumstance and the Lord demand. They must be what Florence Hsia has called “mathematical martyrs,” ready to serve in both life and death.66 While New Spain may boast a greater chance of death, the sacrifice of such extraordinary effort afforded greater human tragedy and commensurate eternal glory to workers in China. For a young Tyrolese novice named Eusebio Kino, the Procurator’s letter was like Jesus himself calling him to drop his nets and follow. Accounts of the imprisonment, persecution and near execution of Verbeist and his predecessor Adam Schall in China as well as the martyrdom of Charles Spinola in Japan had inspired Kino to study mathematics and pursue a missionary vocation.67 Hewing closely to the letter’s recommended course of training, he mastered languages, cartography, mathematics, and astronomy to prepare himself for the East. He also had more personal connections to the Asian mission. His second cousin Martino Martini was a famous missionary, historian, and geographer of China. In fact, on a return trip to Europe to defend the Jesuits in the midst of the Chinese Rites Controversy, Martini visited his nine-year-old cousin in 1655, the same year he published his comprehensive geography of China, Novus Atlas Sinensis.68 Kino attributed this encounter with awakening his initial desire to be a missionary in Asia.69 The aspiration only grew when he saw his theology and geography professors from the University of Ingolstadt assigned to China. In his application to be sent on missions, he explained to the Jesuit General Giovanni Paolo Oliva: “From the moment I heard that Fathers Beatus Amrhyn and Adam Aigenler were appointed to China [. . .] desires arose in me of obtaining a similar mission such that I could scarcely be satisfied until the matter had been commended to God and to my most reverend Father.”70 To his delight, his request was granted in 1677. On the eve of his departure, however, he suffered a cruel twist of fate. General Oliva had decided to send both Kino and another newly ordained priest from Austria, Father Antonio Kerschpamer, to the foreign missions, but only one could go to the Mariana Islands with the chance of moving on to China. The other would be assigned to New Spain, and the Father General left the missionaries to determine their destiny. With customary humility, each deferred to the other to the point that they decided to draw lots. To his great disappointment, Kino literally drew the short end of the stick. For a few months he took the news hard, praying regularly for peace and the ability to obey.71 Then, he resorted to martyrological metaphors to conclude that all missions began with “crosses, suffering, and adversities.” He entrusted the Asian mission to God’s providence and the intercession of celestial patrons, concluding that Asia would not be abandoned because “it had already been seeded with the precious blood of martyrs.”72 For Kino, the Mexican assignment represented a sort of martyrdom. He had prepared for so long and turned down so many prestigious opportunities in Europe in pursuit of this vocation, even giving up a chair in mathematical sciences offered by the Duke of Bavaria at the University of Ingolstadt.73 In a final attempt to rescue his plans, he sent numerous letters to a patroness, the Duchess of Aveiro, indirectly pleading for her intercession with his superiors. As a Jesuit he could not insist on a change himself and still fulfill his vow of obedience. He stoically conceded, “Only the obedience which est melior quam victima (“is better than sacrifice”) could mitigate (my) disappointment that some

802   Borderlands of the Iberian World of us were ordered from Rome for service in New Spain.”74 In response, Aveiro consoled Kino by predicting his very own martyrdom in New Spain, to which the young Jesuit responded with delight, “It would be good for your grace and it would be good for me because your Grace would be a prophet and I would be a martyr.”75 Martyrological aspiration helped Kino bridge the geographical distance between New Spain and China. If not in living service, he would be joined to brothers across the Pacific by holy death. Still, Kino dreamed of more pragmatic contributions to the Asian missions by linking his North American efforts to those in Japan and China through personal, logistical, and even physical bonds. He cited his personal connections to China throughout his Pimería Alta mission history, Favores Celestiales, recalling his relative Martini and his own long-held desire to go there.76 He also quoted letters between missionaries in Asia and his colleagues in northern New Spain to demonstrate common cause. Kino delighted in a letter from a former missionary to the Tarahumara, Father Pedro Van Hamme, who wrote from Haquan (Hong Kong) to Father Guilielmo y Cinzer, a missionary in Chínipas, updating them of progress in Shangchuan Island, the site of Francis Xavier’s death.77 Xavier was not only the ultimate model for the “prolonged martyrdom” of missionary life but also Kino’s personal saint and patron of the Pimería Alta.78 Once more, Van Hamme represented the transpacific transition Kino longed for. In addition to this letter, Kino quoted from the correspondence between Father Antonio Cundari of the Marianas and Father Maria Francisco Piccolo of California, who had served together in Mexico City before departing to their respective missions. He copied a letter in which Cundari commiserated with Piccolo over the ambiguities of indigenous conversion, the setbacks of mission building, and the trials of living in the isolation of remote islands.79 He asked Piccolo to continue his support from across the ocean through his own continual labor and supplications.80 United by shared missionaries, saints, and frustrations, Kino envisioned the Jesuit work in New Spain not only mirroring that of Asia, but participating in a spiritual transfer back and forth across the Pacific. Building on these letters, Kino explicitly placed the missions in confrontación, comparing “these new American missions of this Unknown North America with the Asiatic Missions of the Marianas Islands and of Great China.” Although admitting to the aphorism that, “all comparison is loathsome,” he proceeded to enumerate the benefits or “celestial favors” of the North American missions, while conceding “the greatness and glory of so many and so apostolic, heroic, and holy Asiatic missions with so many glorious martyrs and most sublime triumphs of our Holy Catholic Faith.”81 That said, Kino listed several advantages of the North American missions that boasted plenty of physical supplies, crops, as well as “industrious, docile, and affable Indians,” who begged for missionaries. Whereas Peréz de Ribas had emphasized the “barbarous and fierce peoples of the New World,” Kino contended that indigenous communities in northern New Spain opened their towns to preaching, even welcoming Jesuits with gifts, crosses, “festive arches, dances and singing, and provisions with the greatest generosity and most singular love and desire to be Christians.” All of this he contrasted to the difficulty of reaching, entering, procuring permission and surviving in China and Japan where the

Converting the Pacific   803 Jesuits endured so much opposition.82 Kino had made his peace with New Spain and now attempted to woo new recruits with its comparative advantages. Furthermore, he reasoned that the North American missions could forge a crucial link between “Cadiz, Seville, Madrid, Paris, Rome” and the Philippines, Marianas, China, Japan and Great Tartary. The Pimería Alta was a frontier that he hoped to bring firmly into Christendom so that “the triumphal car of our Holy Catholic Faith will travel with the sun from east to west, until by the divine grace, all the world shall be converted, Et fiat unum ovile et unus Pastor.”83 He fleshed out this plan in more detail in a letter to the viceroy of New Spain in 1703. Requesting support to expand his missionary work north into what is now Arizona and west into what he named “Upper California,” Kino argued that Jesuit effort would not only convert “this northernmost rim of the empire” but might connect to New Mexico and possibly New France to the northeast, while supplying the Manila Galleons in the west. If pushed far enough, Kino even hoped they might reach “the land called Yeso (Alaska) [. . .] and even as far as the territory close to Japan.”84 When realized, the new settlements would play a vital role in supplying the Manila Galleons as they made their way from Cape Mendocino to Acapulco. If so, he might finally fulfill his dream of evangelizing Asia by connecting physically to Japan and establishing vital North American nodes in the Jesuit trans-Pacific network.85

Converting the Pacific Building upon Kino’s vision, the Jesuit scholar Andrés Marcos Burriel placed two remarkable maps at the beginning and end of his three-volume edition of Miguel Venegas’s Noticia de la California, published in Madrid in 1757.86 The first, a map of California, he based on the previous efforts of missionary explorers like Kino, Ferdinand Consag, and Jacob Sedelmayr. In his description of the Mapa de California, su Golfo y Provincias fronteras en el Continente de Nueva España (Figure 32.2), Burriel argued that the map represented exhaustive knowledge of northwestern New Spain, gained through the arduous labor of his fellow Jesuits in discovering, describing, pacifying, and converting the region.87 To make this verbal link visually explicit, Burriel placed several images along the sides of the map, including depictions of California’s animals, indigenous inhabitants, healing practices, and religious practitioners. In addition to these markers of Jesuit natural history and cartography, he included hagiographic scenes of martyrdom, meant to illustrate the deaths of Fathers Lorenzo Carranco and Nicolas Tamaral during the 1734 Pericú Revolt. Placed together, the map and the pictures reinforced the key theme of Venegas’s text. The Jesuits’ witness had laid claim to California through both scientific observation and sacrificial testimony.88 To expand this argument, the Noticia included another map at the end of the last volume (Figure 32.3). The image bookended the entire work and thus paralleled the first map of California, even as it pointed well beyond the peninsula. The Mapa de la America Septentrional, Asia Oriental y Mar del Sur panned out to the larger scene of the transpacific

804   Borderlands of the Iberian World

Figure 32.2.  Jesuit Andrés Marcos Burriel included this “Map of California” in his edition of Miguel Venegas’s Noticia de la California (1757). It renders in admirable detail the settlements of both mainland Sonora and Baja California, while the surrounding figures portray imagined scenes from the ecological and cultural settings of Baja California and the 1734 Pericú uprising that claimed the lives of two missionaries. Miguel Venegas, Noticias de California, 1757. Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University.

northern hemisphere.89 The drawing depicts both the expansion and instability of ­eighteenth-century geographic knowledge of East Asia, the Pacific and North America; from western China on the left to New England on the right. In a long appendix, Burriel quibbled with some of the map’s inaccuracies, including a massive “Bay of the West”

Converting the Pacific   805

Figure 32.3.  This map of North America, Eastern Asia, and the Southern Sea (Mapa de la America Septentrional. Asia Oriental y Mar del Sur . . .) was drawn by Manuel Rodríguez c. 1754 and included by Andrés Marcos Burriel in his 1757 edition of Miguel Venegas’s Noticia de la California. The map connects the imperial dominions of Bourbon Spain with the transcontinental mission of the Society of Jesus, spanning the Pacific Ocean. Miguel Venegas, Noticias de California, 1757. Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University.

(near present-day San Francisco), which purportedly allowed a northwest passage to Hudson Bay. This innovation, Burriel scoffed, followed the fantastic report of a fictitious Spanish Admiral Bartolomé de Fonte.90 He nevertheless argued that the wider panorama reinforced California’s centrality to Spain’s imperial networks. Given the harshness of its environment and the difficulty of converting its inhabitants, readers of the Noticia might rightly have questioned the wisdom of investing so much in its occupation and evangelism. Faced with such doubts, Jesuit missionary explorers like Fernando Consag, Jacobo Sedelmayr and Eusebio Kino had proved that California was a peninsula, attached to the rest of North America, and therefore indispensable in warding off Dutch, English, Russian or buccaneer incursion. In addition, the map specifically noted that Father Sigismundo Taraval had charted its ports and islands in 1732, information that would be crucial not only in defense, but in supplying trade and exploiting natural resources. In so doing, the Society’s cartographers had established California’s strategic importance to Spain’s ambitions in both North America and the Pacific.

806   Borderlands of the Iberian World Beyond secular advantage, Burriel believed that the explorations brought the Pacific Rim into Christendom.91 He emphasized the point in a box below the map, which included several pictorial representations surrounding three cartouches. On the right, the images depict figures resembling the California Indians, fauna, and animals of the first map, now pointing European patrons to a central cartouche with a title, and beyond to a series of Asian figures. The scene links Asians and indigenous Americans to the European quest to fully comprehend this side of the globe. In the two cartouches to the right and left of the title, the map connected this scientific enterprise to the royal patronage that made it possible. It dedicates the cartographic and evangelistic work, “To the King Don Ferdinand VI, most liberal patron of all the Missions in his dominions.” As a royal archivist, Burriel had the king as personal patron. He also felt a special obligation to California, where he had once vowed to serve as a missionary, before his health had prevented the fulfillment of this promise. Instead, he hoped his scholarly contributions could aid the cause.92 As he explained to his censors, “Now that the devil and my sins years ago prevented my destiny to go to California, I desired to help her from here with my pen.”93 By dedicating the map to Ferdinand VI, he sought to solidify the Crown’s support for the Society’s work in California at a time of increasing pressure. He reinforced this point in the left cartouche, which reads, “the Mexican Province of the Company of IHS consecrates and dedicates this Map in recognition of his beneficence,” thus moving beyond literary formality to religious proclamation, from “dedication” to “consecration.” Through their sacrificial labors, the Jesuits had converted the Pacific. Implicitly, the Noticia and the maps also pointed to the archives, maps, and histories that allowed Jesuits to display new discoveries for the benefit of European audiences. They represented the accumulation of knowledge made possible by the missionary endeavor. Burriel objected to publications by royal academies in Paris and London that relied heavily on the Society’s networks but did not recognize the contributions of missionaries or the circuits of communication that had brought their discoveries back to Europe.94 These networks were hard won, obtained through years of effort on both sides of the Pacific. Since the time of Francis Xavier in the mid-sixteenth century, Jesuits had found themselves at the forefront of evangelism in Asia, opening up new fields in India, Japan, and China via the eastward routes of the Portuguese Empire. Soon after, Jesuits from Mexico made their way west from Mexico to the Philippines via the newly established Manila Galleons, eager to apply their New World experience to new conversions. These confrontations and exchanges led to fierce debates about evangelistic approach, sporadic persecutions, shared cultures of martyrological devotion, competition over new recruits, and ultimately a common vision of a global missionary network forged through pragmatic bonds and personal sacrifice.

Notes 1. Lothar Knauth, Confrontación transpacífica: el Japón y el Nuevo Mundo Hispánico, 1542–1639 (Mexico: UNAM, 1972). 2. C. R. Boxer, The Portuguese Seaborne Empire, 1415–1825 (Lisbon: Carcanet, 1991); Mariano Ardash Bonialian, El pacífico hispanoamericano: política y comercio asiático en el imperio

Converting the Pacific   807 español, 1680–1784 (Mexico: El Colegio de México, 2012); Maria Cristina Barrón, ed., La presencia novohispana en el Pacífico insular (Mexico: Universidad Iberoamericana, 1992). 3. Martha Ortega, “The Impact of the Russian Incursion in the northern Pacific on the Spanish Empire, 1741–1821,” in The Oxford Handbook of Borderlands of the Iberian World, ed. Danna A. Levin Rojo and Cynthia Radding, 841–862 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019). 4. Alfred W. Crosby Jr., The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1972). 5. Donna Pierce and Ronald Otsuka, ed., Asia and Spanish America: Trans-Pacific Artistic and Cultural Exchange, 1500–1850 (Denver: Denver Art Museum, 2006); Dana Liebsohn, Vistas: Visual Culture in Spanish America, 1520–1820. Accessed August 28, 2015, http:// www.smith.edu/vistas; Dennis Carr, Made in the Americas: The New World Discovers Asia (Boston: MFA Publications, 2015); Gauvin Alexander Bailey, Art of Colonial Latin America (London: Phaidon, 2005); Gauvin Alexander Bailey, Art on the Jesuit Missions in Asia and Latin America, 1542–1773 (Toronto: University of Toronto, 2001). 6. Tatiana Seijas, Asian Slaves in Colonial Mexico: From Chinos to Indians (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2014). 7. Christian G. De Vito, “Review Essay: Toward the Global Spanish Pacific,” International Review of Social History 60 (2015): 449–462. 8. Evelyn Hu-Dehart, “Introduction: Transpacific Confrontation/Confrontación transpacífica,” Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas 39, no. 1 (2006): 3–12. 9. John W. O’Malley, The First Jesuits (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), 52–62; Charles  W.  Polzer, Rules and Precepts of the Jesuit Missions of Northwestern New Spain (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1976), 3–32; Luke Clossey, Salvation and Globalization in the Early Jesuit Missions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 23–44. 10. J. Gabriel Martínez-Serna, “Procurators and the Making of the Jesuits’ Atlantic Network,” in Soundings in Atlantic History: Latent Structures and Intellectual Currents, 1500–1830, ed. Bernard Bailyn and Patricia L. Denault (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009) reconstructs the systems that connected New Spain and Peru to European superiors and provinces in Asia. 11. Frederik Vermote, “The Role of Urban Real Estate in Jesuit Finances and Networks Between Europe and China, 1612–1778” (PhD diss., University of British Columbia, 2013), 311 charted the waxing and waning of regional and national financial connections to the Chinese mission. 12. Clossey, Salvation and Globalization, 17–19. The connection of German Jesuits to both New Spain and Asia has garnered increased scholarly tradition. See Karl Kohut and Maria Cristina Torales Pacheco, ed., Desde los confines de los imperios ibéricos: los jesuitas de habla alemana en las misiones americanas (Frankfurt and Madrid: Iberoamericana, Vervuert, 2007), xvi–xx, 610–616; Albrecht Classen, Early History of the Southwest Through the Eyes of German-speaking Jesuit Missionaries: A Transcultural Experience in the Eighteenth Century (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2013), 55, 75–78; Raymond H. Thompson, ed., and Werner S. Zimmt and Robert E. Dahlquist, trans., A Jesuit Missionary in EighteenthCentury Sonora: The Family Correspondence of Philipp Segesser (Albuquerque: UNM, 2014), 61, 66, 70, 88–89. 13. Thompson et. al., A Jesuit Missionary; Guillermo Zermeño, ed., Cartas edificantes y curiosas de algunos misioneros jesuitas del siglo XVIII: travesías, itinerarios, testimonios (Mexico: Universidad Iberoamericana, 2012); R. Po-Chia Hsia, Noble Patronage and Jesuit Missions: Maria Theresia von Fugger-Wellenburg (1690–1762) and Jesuit Missionaries in China and

808   Borderlands of the Iberian World Vietnam (Rome: IHSI, 2006); Allan Greer, “A Wandering Jesuit in Europe and America: Father Chaumonot Finds a Home,” in Empires of God: Religious Encounters in the Early Modern Atlantic, ed. Linda Gregerson and Susan Juster (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 2011), 107, has argued that only in more p ­ ersonal communications the self-representation and assured coherence of the Jesuit Relations and cartas annuas can be bridged, to find slippages, inconsistencies and discontinuities. 14. John O’Malley, “Mission and the Early Jesuits,” Ignatian Spirituality and Mission. The Way 79 (1994): 9; Dauril Alden, The Making of an Enterprise: The Society of Jesus in Portugal, Its Empire, and Beyond, 1540–1750 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), 653; Clossey, Salvation and Globalization, 67. 15. For one influential, but contested definition, see Jeremy Adelman and Stephen Aron, “From Borderlands to Borders: Empires, Nation-States and the Peoples in Between in North American History,” The American Historical Review 104, no. 3 (1999): 814–841. 16. Each of these political entities experienced flux in early modern Japan. In general, the daimyo were military lords who established control over local territories. They usually held their position through inheritance and ruled through clan networks but also relied on military conquest through warriors (samurai). By the late seventeenth century, a powerful daimyo Toyotomi Hideyoshi increasingly consolidated control over the country, preparing the foundations for a unified Japan with multiple daimyo under a centralized military regent for the nominal emperor. While hereditary military commanders called Shoguns existed since the ninth century, their power waned in the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries. However, in 1603 Tokugawa Ieyasu built upon Hideyoshi’s foundations, established a central government in Edo (later Tokyo), and obtained the title of Shogun. Tokugawa shoguns ruled until the Meiji Restoration in 1868. John Whitney Hall “Introduction,” in The Cambridge History of Japan, vol. 4: Early Modern Japan (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 1–31; George Ellison, Deus Destroyed: The Image of Christianity in Early Modern Japan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973), 1–5. 17. On early modern networks of exchange, see Anne Gerritsen and Giorgio Riello, “Introduction,” in The Global Lives of Things: The Material Culture of Connections in the Early Modern World, ed. Anne Gerritsen and Giogrio Riello (New York: Routledge, 2015). On early modern or “proto-globalization,” see Globalization in World History, ed. A. G. Hopkins (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003), 5–7; C. A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914 (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004), 42–52. 18. Tracy Goode, “The Pacific Borderlands of the Spanish Empire,” in The Oxford of Borderlands of the Iberian World, ed. Danna A. Levin Rojo and Cynthia Radding, 765–788 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019). Although not explicitly tied to articulations of Actor-Network Theory (ANT), the use of the term network corresponds to some of the elements asserted by Bruno Latour, including the necessary transience, transformation, and translation inherent in networks as well as the illusion of coherence and possibility of conflicts. Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). 19. “Memorial to the Council by Citizens of the Filipinas,” in The Philippine Islands, 1493–1898, ed. Emma Helen Blair and James Alexander Robinson, vol. 6 (Cleveland: A. H. Clark, 1909), 157–230. For the complete text of the Memorial in Spanish, see Francisco Colin and Pablo Pastells, ed. Labor evangélica, ministerios apostólicos de los obreros de la Compañía de Jesús in las Islas Filipinas (Barcelona: Henrich y Compañia, 1902). For a discussion of Sánchez (who wrote the document) and the memorial, see John M. Headley,

Converting the Pacific   809 “Spain’s Asian Presence, 1565–1590: Structures and Aspirations,” The Hispanic American Historical Review 75, no. 4 (1995): 638–641. 20. “Memorial to the Council,” 197. 21. Sánchez was not unique in believing the Philippines were primarily valuable as a base for missions in Japan and China. This conviction was shared by the Congregación Provincial de Nueva España, which cited the other locations in 1577 when deciding to send Jesuits to Manila. Pierre-Antoin Fabre, “Ensayo de geopolítica de las corrientes espirituales: Alonso Sánchez entre Madrid, Nueva España, Filipinas, las costas de China y Roma, 1579–1593,” in Órdenes religiosas entre América y Asia: ideas para una historia misionera, ed. Elisabetta Corsi (Mexico: El Colegio de México, 2009), 86–87. 22. For an extensive treatment of the controversy, see Patrick Provost-Smith, “Macao, Manila, Mexico, Madrid: Jesuit Controversies over Strategies for the Christianization of China, 1580–1600” (PhD diss., Johns Hopkins University, 2002). 23. Headley, “Spain’s Asian Presence,” 638; Provost-Smith, “Macao, Manila, Mexico,” 117. 24. Headley, “Spain’s Asian Presence,” 640; Provost-Smith, “Macao, Manila, Mexico,” 119; Ana Carolina Hosne, The Jesuit Missions to China and Peru, 1570–1610: Expectations and Appraisals of Expansionism (New York: Routledge, 2013), 55; and Provost-Smith, “Macao, Manila, Mexico,” 125–128. 25. On Valignano’s critique of Sánchez, see Headley, “Spain’s Asian Presence,” 639. On his general distrust for castellanos and the influence of the Americas model on the Asian mission, see Hosne, The Jesuit Missions, 56–60 and Andrew Ross, “Alessandro Valignano: The Jesuits and Culture in the East,” in The Jesuits: Cultures, Sciences, and the Arts, 1540–1773, vol. 1, ed. John W. O’Malley (Toronto: University of Toronto Press), 345–349. 26. Hosne, The Jesuit Missions, 55–56. 27. Provost-Smith, “Macao, Manila, Mexico,” 195–196. 28. Félix Zubillaga, Monumenta Mexicana (1581–1585), vol. II (Rome: Monumenta Historica Societatis Iesu, 1956), 718–719. 29. Acosta did not provide “ethnographic” information in the modern sense, but he did carefully collect information on diverse indigenous practices for the sake of improving evangelistic method, providing the model for later comparative ethnology. Anthony Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 146–197. 30. José de Acosta, De procuranda Indorum salute (Salamanca: Guillelmum Foquel, 1589); Fermín del Pino Díaz, “El misionero español José de Acosta y la evangelizaci6n de las Indias orientales,” Missionalia hispanica 42, no. 122 (1985): 275–298. 31. He published De Procuranda in Salamanca in 1588, but had already circulated it Peru, Madrid, and Rome as early as 1576. Provost-Smith, “Macao, Manila, Mexico,” 122. 32. Acosta posits several types of “barbarians.” Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man, 191. 33. Dated to March, 1586, the two letters “Parecer sobre la guerra contra la China” and “Respuesto de los fundamentos que justifican la guerra contra la China” are contained in Obras de P. Jose de Acosta, Biblioteca de autores españoles, vol. 73, ed. Francisco Mateos (Madrid: Ediciones Atlas, 1954), 331–339. 34. Headley, “Spain’s Asian Presence,” 641; Provost-Smith, “Macao, Manila, Mexico,” 196–201. 35. Provost-Smith, “Macao, Manila, Mexico,” 31. 36. In October 1586, Hideyoshi sought Coelho’s assistance in securing Portuguese ships for a planned invasion of Korea and Japan. In exchange, he offered Coelho the chance “to build churches up and down [their] coast.” Coelho agreed and proposed a more ambitious joint

810   Borderlands of the Iberian World venture between Philip II and Hideyoshi, along the lines of the Manila memorial. This raised Hideyoshi’s suspicions, however, and prompted a series of investigations, leading to the banishment of the society in 1587. Coelho, for his part, attempted to organize r­ esistance to Hideyoshi from sympathetic daimyos. Ultimately, Valignano intervened in opposition and Coelho stepped down. Hideyoshi relented and allowed the Jesuits to stay as long as they ceased provoking Buddhists and acknowledged his sovereignty. Donald F. Lach, Asia in the Making of Europe, vol. 1: The Century of Discovery (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 304–306. 37. The ship’s captain threatened Spanish intervention if not compensated for his ship and goods. Hosne, The Jesuit Missions, 58. 38. None of them were priests, but Miki had been a Jesuit for ten years and was training for the priesthood. Kisai was a lay brother and Goto a catechist on the cusp of formally joining the Society. J. F. Moran, The Japanese and the Jesuits: Alessandro Valignano in Sixteenth Century Japan (London: Routledge, 1993), 89–93. 39. Anonymous, Alegoria de la Compañía de Jesús y su labor misional en los cuatro ­continentes, eighteenth century. Iglesia de San Pedro, Lima, Peru. Photograph courtesy of  Daniel Giannoni and Proyecto Estudios Indianos. Accessed June 15, 2015, http://­ estudiosindianos.org/glosario-de-indias/alegoria-del-triunfo-de-los-jesuitas-en-las-cuatropartes-del-mundo/ 40. The image is based on the frontispiece of Athanasius Kirchner’s China illustrata (Amsterdam: Jacobum à Meurs, 1667). 41. While helpfully unpacking the portrait’s broad significance, Luis Alfredo Agusti PachecoBenavides misidentifies Britto (labeled as Roberto de Nobili) and Rhodes (labeled as Paul Miki) and neglects the Japanese martyrs to the top left and European novices in the top right. “Iconografía y agenda ignaciana: la ‘Alegoría del triunfo de los jesuitas en los cuatro partes del mundo,’ ” Punto de Equilibrio 98 (2008): 53–55. 42. Gonzaga, Berchmans and Kostka are collectively known as The Patrons of Holy Youth. Along with Loyola and Xavier, they became subjects of increasingly triumphalist Jesuit art in the eighteenth century. Bailey, Art on the Jesuit Missions, 45; Luisa Elena Alcalá, Fundaciones Jesuíticas en Iberoamérica (Madrid: Fundación Iberdrola), 39. 43. Clara Bargellini, “At the Center on the Frontier: The Jesuit Tarahumara Missions of New Spain,” in Time and Place: The Geohistory of Art, ed. Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann and Elizabeth Pilliod (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2005), 119. 44. Alcalá, Fundaciones Jesuíticas, 41–45. 45. Maureen Ahern, “Martyrs and Idols: Performing Ritual Warfare on Early Missionary Frontiers in the Northwest,” in Religion in New Spain, ed. Susan Schroeder and Stafford Poole (Albuquerque: UNM, 2005), 279–296; Brandon Bayne, “A Passionate Pacification: Salvation and Suffering in the Jesuit Missions of Northwestern New Spain” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 2012). 46. Simon Ditchfield, “Tridentine Worship and the Cult of Saints,” in Cambridge History of Christianity, vol. 6: Reform and Expansion, 1500–1600, ed. R. Po-Chia Hsia (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007), and Liturgy, Sanctity, and History in Tridentine Italy: Pietro Maria Campi and the Preservation of the Particular (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 5–99; Bayne, “A Passionate Pacification,” 129. 47. Religious orders adeptly fostered canonization advocacy and devotion across locales through hagiographies, images, and relics. Peter Burke, “How to Be a Counter-Reformation Saint,” in The Historical Anthropology of Early Modern Italy: Essays on Perception and

Converting the Pacific   811 Communication, ed. Peter Burke (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 48–62. On spectrums of sanctity and devotion, see William Christian, Local Religion in Sixteenth-Century Spain (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989); Allan Greer and Jodi Bilinkoff, ed. Colonial Saints: Discovering the Holy in the Americas (New York: Routledge, 2002). 48. Clossey, Salvation and Globalization, 216–237. 49. The painting hangs in the transept of the Iglesia de San Pedro, the former principal Jesuit church in Lima. Pacheco-Benavides, “Iconografía y agenda ignaciana, 53–55. 50. Cornelius Conover, “Saintly Biography and the Cult of San Felipe de Jesús in Mexico City, 1597–1697,” The Americas 67, no. 4 (2011): 441–466. 51. Born in Mexico City in 1572, Felipe de las Casas traveled to Manila as a merchant in 1591, where according to his own report, he “got carried away in satisfying pleasures and living with some liberty.” However, he had an awakening in 1593 and determined to enter the order of Discalced Franciscans. Without a bishop in the Philippines, he decided to return to Mexico to profess his final vows, boarding the galleon San Felipe in 1596. After a shipwreck in Japan and a series of confrontations with Hideyoshi, Felipe was crucified along with twenty-five others in Nagasaki. He was beatified in 1627 along with five fellow Franciscans and twenty Japanese Christians, including three Jesuits. Conover, “Saintly Biography,” 442–444. 52. Conover, “Saintly Biography,” 451. 53. Initially enthusiastic, Franciscans eventually abandoned devotion to San Felipe de Jesús as compromising details about his life emerged. Conversely, Oratorians increasingly cultivated his devotion as absence of details about his early life allowed them to associate the saint with their churches and namesake, San Felipe Neri. Conover, “Saintly Biography,” 463–466. 54. Conover, “Saintly Biography,” 445, 449–455. 55. Inés G. Županov, “Borderlands of knowledge in the Estado da Índia (sixteenth-eighteenth centuries),” in The Oxford Handbook of Borderlands of the Iberian World, ed. Danna A. Levin Rojo and Cynthia Radding (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019). 56. On the propagandistic function of baroque religious aesthetics, see Simon Ditchfield, “Thinking with Saints: Sanctity and Society in the Early Modern World,” Critical Inquiry 35, no. 3 (2009): 552–584. 57. Jesuits hoped to encompass global differences in their universal networks. Alfonso Alfaro, “Hombres paradójicos: la experiencia de alteridad,” Artes de Mexico: Misiones jesuitas 65 (2003): 8–27. 58. Johann Jakob Baegert, Observations in Lower California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), 157–158. 59. Paula Findlen, “De Asia a las Américas: las visiones enciclopédicas de Athanasius Kircher y su recepción,” in Corsi, Órdenes religiosas, 105. 60. The notion of evangelism as a “white martyrdom” traces to the second chapter of Philippians, where Paul writes of his pastoral labor “being poured out as a libation over the sacrifice and the offering” for their faith, (Phil. 2:17). Associations of asceticism, piety, chastity, and labor with “white martyrdom” spread widely through ritual and hagiography in the late Middle Ages with fewer opportunities for red martyrdom. Brad Gregory, Salvation at Stake: Christian Martyrdom in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 41–62. Emerging from this context, the Society of Jesus applied the label to its proto-missionary Saint Francis Xavier, who died of illness en route

812   Borderlands of the Iberian World to China. Ines Županov, Missionary Tropics: The Catholic Frontier in India, 16th and 17th  Centuries (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), 147–148, 158; Clossey, Salvation and Globalization, 83. 61. Andrés Pérez de Ribas, History of the Triumphs of Our Holy Faith Amongst the Most Barbarous and Fierce Peoples of the New World, ed. and trans. Daniel T. Reff et al, 443–461 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1999), 719–722. 62. Pérez de Ribas, History of the Triumphs, 64; In 1566, Father Pedro Martinez (later the protomartyr of the Florida mission) petitioned the Jesuit General Borgia for plenary indulgences and papal benedictions for all missionaries who risked their lives, whether they were killed by natives or by the harsh conditions of the New World. Félix Zubillaga, Monumenta Antiquae Floridae (1566–1572), vol. 3 (Rome: Monumenta Historica Societas Iesu, 1946), 107, 692. 63. Pérez de Ribas, History of the Triumphs, 65. 64. Cecila Sheridan makes a similar argument about the rhetorical function of “martyrdoms without death” for Franciscans in northern New Spain, in, “Franciscan Mysticism on New Spain’s Northern Frontier,” in The Oxford Handbook of Borderlands of the Iberian World, ed. Danna A. Levin Rojo and Cynthia Radding, 509–524 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019). 65. For his mathematical, cartographical, and linguistic skills, the Flemish Jesuit had become an intimate advisor of the Kangxi Emperor. Florence  C.  Hsia, Sojourners in a Strange Land: Jesuits and Their Scientific Missions in Late Imperial China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 28; “Epistola ad Socios Europae (“Letter to fellow fathers in Europe”) of August, 15th, 1678,” quoted in Noel Golvers, “The Missionary and his Concern about Consolidation and Continuity,” in A Lifelong Dedication to the China Mission: Essays Presented in Honor of Father Jeroom Heyndrickx, CICM, ed. Noel Golvers and Sara Lievens, Leuven Chinese Studies, XVII (Leuven: Ferdinand Verbiest Institute, 2000), 358–360; English translated from the French, “Lettre du P. Ferdinand Verbiest, vice-provincial de la mission de Chine, a ses confreres de la Societe en Europe, le 15 aout 1678, de la residence imperial de Beijing,” trans. Noel Golvers, Courier Verbiest, vol. 5 (Leuven: Ferdinand Verbiest Institute, 1993), 5–6. 66. Hsia, Sojourners in a Strange Land, 32; Florence Hsia, “Mathematical Martyrs, Mandarin Missionaries, and Apostolic Academicians: Telling Institutional Lives,” in Institutional Culture in Early Modern Society, ed. Anne Goldgar and Robert  I.  Frost (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 17–21. 67. Eusebio Kino, Cadiz, to Maria de Guadalupe Lancastre, Duchess of Aveiro, December 6, 1680, Kino Letters, Huntington Manuscripts (HM) 9984, Huntington Library (HL), San Marino, CA; Ernest J. Burrus, S. J., ed., Kino Writes to the Duchess (Rome and St. Louis: Jesuit Historical Institute, 1965), 7, 87. Kino referred to Verbiest’s letter of August 15, 1678 as his call. For the letter see Ferdinand Verbiest, Correspondance de Ferdinand Verbiest de la Compagnie de Jésus (Brussels: Palais des académies), 232–250. On Verbiest’s ideal of the “mathematician as martyr,” see Hsia, Sojourners in a Strange Land, 30–33, 62; R. Po-chia Hsia, The World of Catholic Renewal, 1540–1770 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 1, 213–214. 68. The Chinese Rites Controversy centered on a series of debates between Jesuit, Dominican and Franciscan missionaries in Asia over the extent to which the Catholic Church should accommodate practices associated with Confucian, Buddhist and ancestral religious traditions. In general, Jesuits like Martini favored accommodation while Dominican

Converting the Pacific   813 opponents regarded ancestral rites as “idolatry.” Each side scored victories with Rome in the seventeenth century, but the rites were ultimately condemned in the eighteenth century and subsequently led to Chinese prohibition of Catholic missions. Paul Rule, “Towards a  History of the Chinese Rites Controversy,” in The Chinese Rites Controversy, ed. D. E. Mungello (Bonn: Monumenta Serica, 1994), 249–266; Hsia, The World of Catholic Renewal, 91–105; On Martini’s Novus Atlas Sinensis, see David Mungello, Curious Land: Jesuit Accommodation and the Origin of Sinology (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1989), 108. 69. “I have always had an especially strong leaning toward the conversions of Great China, and at the suggestion of the superiors I applied myself to the mathematical sciences, which are very general there, and in the beginning I asked to go to the missions there, because in that great vineyard of the Lord had lived and worked my relative, Father Martin Martini, who wrote those celebrated volumes and geographical maps of the great empire and monarch of Great China.” Kino, Historical Memoir of the Pimería Alta, vol. 2, ed. and trans. Herbert Bolton (Cleveland: Arthur H. Clark, 1919) 77–78; Ernest J. Burrus, “Kino’s Relative, Father Martino Martini, A Comparison of Two Outstanding Missionaries,” Neue Zeitschrift für Missionswissenschaft 31 (1975): 100–109. 70. Clossey, Salvation and Globalization, 139; Herbert Eugene Bolton, Rim of Christendom. A Biography of Eusebio Francisco Kino, Pacific Coast Pioneer (New York: Macmillan, 1936), 32. 7 1. Bolton, Rim of Christendom, 37–39. 72. “Ni parece me podrá ser que Nuestro Señor desampare aquella Cristiandad, ya sembrada con la preciosa sangre de los mártires,” Kino to Lancastre, Cadiz, 15 September, 1680, HL, 9980; Kino Writes to the Duchess, 73–74. 73. Kino, Historical Memoir, vol. 1, 333. 74. 1 Samuel 15:22 75. “Kino to Lancastre, Cadiz, December 6, 1680,” in Kino Writes to the Duchess, 225. 76. Bolton, Rim of Christendom, 37–39. 77. “Father Pedro Van Hamme, Letter to Father Guilielmo y Cinzer, Haquan, December 17, 1700,” in Kino, Historical Memoir, vol. 2, 78. 78. Kino built chapels to Xavier in all the churches built under his supervision and often dedicated them on his saint’s day, December 3. Kino, Historical Memoir, vol. 1, 378 and vol. 2, 230; Eusebio Kino, Kino’s Biography of Saeta, ed. Ernest J. Burrus, S. J. and trans. Charles Polzer, S. J. (Rome and St. Louis: Jesuit Historical Institute, 1971), 217. 79. In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, most geographers considered California to be an island (although several sixteenth-century maps showed a peninsula). Kino played a crucial role in overturning the island theory through his exploration and maps. Ernest J. Burrus, Kino and the Cartography of Northern New Spain (Tucson: Arizona Pioneers Historical Society, 1965), 68. 80. Burrus, Kino and the Cartography, 139–142. 81. Burrus, Kino and the Cartography, 143. 82. Kino, Historical Memoir, vol. 2, 145–146. 83. Kino, Historical Memoir, vol. 2, 144; “And let there be one fold and one Shepherd.” (John 10:16). The reference to the triumphal car likely refers to a frequent motif in seventeenthand eighteenth-century Jesuit art, in which Jesuit leaders, missionaries and martyrs led a triumphal wagon across the world. See, for example José Rodríguez Carnero’s eighteenth century mural, Carro Triunfal de la Iglesia guiado por los jesuitas, which hangs in the sacristy of the Iglesia del Espíritu Santo, Puebla, Mexico; María Bernal Martín, “El triunfo

814   Borderlands of the Iberian World de S.  Ignacio y S.  Francisco Javier,” Parnaseo. Revista 1 (2005). Accessed July 15, 2015, http://parnaseo.uv.es/ars/teatresco/revista/Revista1/MBernalTriunfodeIgnacioySFcoJ. htm; Alcalá, Fundaciones Jesuíticas, 305–306. 84. Though overly ambitious in retrospect, Kino’s 1703 plan outlined much of what Franciscans would execute in California almost seven decades later under Father Junipero Serra. Eusebio Kino, Kino’s Plan for the Development of Pimería Alta, Arizona and Upper California: A Report to the Mexican Viceroy, trans. and notes, Ernest J. Burrus (Tucson: Arizona Pioneers’ Historical Society, 1961), 24, 33. 85. On the legacy of Jesuit, Franciscan, and Spanish plans for expansion in the north and its complicated relationship to indigenous inhabitants of Sonora, the Pimeria, and California, see José Refugio de la Torre Curiel, “Tierra Incognita: Cartography and Projects of Territorial Expansion in Sonora and Arizona, Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” in The Oxford Handbook of Borderlands of the Iberian World, ed. Danna A. Levin Rojo and Cynthia Radding, 463–488 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019). 86. Miguel Venegas, Noticia de la California, y de su conquista temporal, y espiritual hasta el tiempo presente. Sacada de la historia manuscrita, formada en México año de 1739 por el Padre Miguèl Venegas, de la Compañía de Jesús; y de otras Noticias, y Relaciones antiguas, y modernas. Añadida de algunos mapas particulares, y uno general de la América Septentrional, Assia Oriental, y Mar del Sùr intermedio, formados sobre las Memorias mas recientes, y exactas, que se publìcan juntamente. Dedicada al Rey Ntro. Señor por la Provincia de Nueva-España, de la Compañia de Jesus, ed. Andrés Marcos Burriel, 3 vols. (Madrid: Imprenta de la Viuda de Manuel Fernández, y del Supremo Consejo de la Inquisición, 1757). 87. Venegas, Noticia de la California, vol. 1, 21–22, 39–30; vol. 2, 551–552; vol. 3, 279, 287–292. 88. Derived from the Greek word, marturos, the term martyr literally means “witness.” Burriel’s Map of California marked Jesuit witnessing through both scientific contribution and sacrificial action. “μάρτυς, μάρτυρος” in Frederick William Banker and Walter Bauer, A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). 89. Burriel labeled the first map of California the mapa particular, introducing his more specific focus in the Venegas Noticia. He called the second the mapa general, meant to display the wider theater of the Pacific. “Mapa de la América Septentrional, Asia Oriental y Mar del Sur, intermedio formado sobre las Memorias más recientes y exactas hasta el año de 1754,” in Venegas, Noticia de la California, vol. 3, 1, 287–289 90. Burriel expressed frustration with the final map included in Venegas, as it ignored Burriel’s own general map of the Pacific (now lost) and instead relied heavily on the work of French cartographers Jacques-Nicolas Bellin, Joseph Nicolas Delisle and Phelippe Buache, especially the 1752, “Carte De Nouvelles Decouvertes Au Nord De La Mer De Sud.” Both maps contain several elements that reflect the supposed discoveries of the Spanish Admiral Bartolomé de Fonte (Fuentes) in North America, including an enormous “Bahia del Oeste” near present San Francisco linked to the Hudson Bay through a series of rivers, creating a possible northwest passage. Having full access to Spanish archives, Burriel asserted that there was no evidence that Fonte ever existed, and he mocked (“me burlo de”) Delisle for taking the report seriously. Venegas, Noticia de la California, vol. 3, 16–20, 293; “Andrés Marcos Burriel sobre los mapas de Baja California” (Carta del P. Burriel a Ignacio de Hermosilla y de Sandoval) in Ernest  J.  Burrus, La obra cartográfica de la provincia mexicana de la Compañía de Jesús, 1567–1967, vol. 1 (Madrid: Ediciones José Purrúa Turanzas, 1967), 209–214; Fidel Fita, “Obra anónima del P.  Burriel,” Boletín de la Real

Converting the Pacific   815 Academia de la Historia 52 (1908): 416–420; Miguel León-Portilla, Cartografía y crónicas de la antigua California (Mexico: UNAM, 1989), 145–150. 91. Venegas, Noticia de la California, 68, 359–366, 525–534. 92. Instead, he had taken up the life of a successful scholar, and after several academic posts had been appointed the head of the Comisión de Archivos by Ferdinand VI and the Real Academia de la Historia in 1750. Alfonso Echánove Tuero, La preparación intelectual del P. Andrés Marcos Burriel, S.J., 1731–1750 (Madrid: CSIC, 1971). On Burriel’s possible motive of securing Jesuit royal patronage over and against Creole Spaniards in New Spain, see Jorge Cañizares How to Write the History of the New World (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 145. In a similar attempt to catalog Spain’s imperial dominion, the criollo scholar José Antonio Villaseñor y Sánchez dedicated his Theatro Americano to Felipe V and Fernando VI in 1746. Villaseñor y Sánchez, Theatro Americano, descripción general de los reinos y provincias de la Nueva España y sus jurisdicciones (1746–1748, 2 vols., 2nd ed. 1952). 93. “Andrés Marcos Burriel sobre los mapas de Baja California,” in Burrus, Obra cartográfica, 210. 94. Guillaume Delisle, for example, used Kino’s maps without citation in his 1722 Carte d’ Amerique. Many European geographers and historians who relied on Kino’s work did the same. Burrus, Kino and the Cartography, 68.

Bibliography Alcalá, Luisa Elena. Fundaciones Jesuíticas en Iberamérica. Madrid: Fundación Iberdrola. Anonymous. “Alegoría de la Compañia de Jesús y su labor misional en los cuatro continentes. Lima, Peru, 18th Century.” Bicentenário da restauração da Companhia de Jesus (1814–2014). Accessed June 15, 2015, http://www.bicentenariosj.com.br/sys/conteudo/visualiza_lo07.php ?pag=;bicentenariosj;paginas;visualiza_lo07&cod=6973&secao=409. Bailey, Gauvin Alexander. Art on the Jesuit Misssions in Asia and Latin America, 1542–1773. Toronto: University of Toronto, 2001. Bayne, Brandon. “A Passionate Pacification: Salvation and Suffering in the Jesuit Missions of Northwestern New Spain.” PhD diss., Harvard University, 2012. Bolton, Herbert Eugene. Rim of Christendom. A biography of Eusebio Francisco Kino, Pacific coast pioneer. New York: Macmillan, 1936. Burrus, Ernest  J., S.J. Kino and the Cartography of Northern New Spain. Tucson: Arizona Pioneers Historical Society, 1965. Burrus, Ernest. S. J. La obra cartográfica de la provincia mexicana de la Compañía de Jesús, 1567–1967, vol. 1. Madrid: Ediciones José Porrúa Turranzas, 1967. Clossey, Luke. Salvation and Globalization in the Early Jesuit Missions. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Conover, Cornelius. “Saintly Biography and the Cult of San Felipe de Jesús in Mexico City, 1597–1697.” The Americas, 67, no. 4 (2011): 441–466. Headley, John  M. “Spain’s Asian Presence, 1565–1590: Structures and Aspirations.” The Hispanic American Historical Review 75, no. 4 (1995): 638–641. Hosne, Ana Carolina. The Jesuit Missions to China and Peru, 1570–1610: Expectations and Appraisals of Expansionism. New York: Routledge, 2013. Hsia, Florence C. Sojourners in a Strange Land: Jesuits and Their Scientific Missions in Late Imperial China. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009.

816   Borderlands of the Iberian World Hsia, R.  Po-chia. The World of Catholic Renewal, 1540–1770. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Kino, Eusebio. Historical Memoir of the Pimería Alta, vol. 2. Edited and translated by Herbert Bolton. Cleveland: Arthur H. Clark, 1919. Kino, Eusebio. Kino Writes to the Duchess. Edited by Ernest J. Burrus, S. J. Rome and St. Louis: Jesuit Historical Institute, 1965. Pacheco-Benavides, Luis Alfredo Agusti. “Iconografía y agenda ignaciana: la ‘Alegoría del triunfo de los jesuitas en los cuatro partes del mundo.’ ” Punto de Equilibrio 98 (2008): 53–55. Pagden, Anthony. The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Pérez de Ribas, Andrés. History of the Triumphs of Our Holy Faith Amongst the Most Barbarous and Fierce Peoples of the New World. Translated by Daniel  T.  Reff, Maureen Ahern and Richard  K.  Danford, and Annnotated by Daniel  T.  Reff. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1999. Pierce, Donna, and Ronald Otsuka, ed. Asia and Spanish America: Trans-Pacific Artistic and Cultural Exchange, 1500–1850. Denver: Denver Art Museum, 2006. Provost-Smith, Patrick. “Macao, Manila, Mexico, Madrid: Jesuit Controversies over Strategies for the Christianization of China, 1580–1600.” PhD diss., Johns Hopkins University, 2002. Thompson, Raymond H. ed., and Werner S. Zimmt and Robert E. Dahlquist, trans. A Jesuit Missionary in Eighteenth-Century Sonora: The Family Correspondence of Philipp Segesser. Albuquerque: UNM, 2014. Venegas, Miguel. Noticia de la California, y de su conquista temporal, y espiritual hasta el tiempo presente. Sacada de la historia manuscrita, formada en México año de 1739 por el Padre Miguél Venegas, de la Compañía de Jesús; y de otras Noticias, y Relaciones antiguas, y modernas. Añadida de algunos mapas particulares, y uno general de la América Septentrional, Assia Oriental, y Mar del Sùr intermedio, formados sobre las Memorias mas recientes, y exactas, que se publícan juntamente. Dedicada al Rey Ntro. Señor por la Provincia de Nueva-España, de la Compañia de Jesus. Edited by Andrés Marcos Burriel, S. J. Madrid: Imprenta de la Viuda de Manuel Fernández, y del Supremo Consejo de la Inquisicion, 1757.

chapter 33

I n digenous Di aspor a, Bon dage , a n d Fr eedom i n Col on i a l Cu ba Jason M. Yaremko

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 various regions in the continental Americas to the European colonies of the Caribbean: they came to trade, negotiate, and seek sanctuary from the carnage of colonial wars; many others came to work as laborers, free and unfree. Cuba became the principal destination for a massive influx of indigenous peoples from the mainland colonies of New Spain and, later, the independent republic of Mexico. Through the analysis of historical, anthropological, and archaeological evidence one can observe the fluid, multidimensional dynamic of diasporic indigenous peoples and their struggles to negotiate in defense of their interests under varied conditions in a territory to which they were forcibly relocated. Indigenous, African, and European worlds, on the one hand, and freedom and bondage, on the other, overlapped in complex and nuanced ways as forced indigenous labor developed in Cuba through contending spheres of power at several levels: among imperial, colonial, and national states; settler populations, and indigenous peoples; and peoples both of the indigenous immigrant and host cultures. Due to such historical, social, political, and intercultural contexts, these Caribbean borderlands must be understood as a transitional zone of transculturation. The dynamic tensions and struggles of indigenous slaves and forced laborers in the Caribbean, intrinsically and in relation to other systems of slavery, unfolded in what is referred to as the borderlands, akin to Richard White’s middle ground, or the place “in between cultures, peoples, and in between empires and the non-state world of villages.”1 Yet this is a place arguably even more complex, one where various cultural and other boundaries are simultaneously struck, reinforced, challenged, manipulated, and crossed over so often that, as peoples and cultures interacted and intermingled, the lines sometimes blurred. Indigenous peoples did not always prevail, but nor did they relent in their struggles to adapt and survive.

818   Borderlands of the Iberian World

Historiography: Between Slavery and Forced Labor Histories of human bondage in the Americas have characteristically and understandably been dominated by myriad studies of the African slave trade. These systems were quantitatively and qualitatively the most substantial in the formation of the societies of the western hemisphere and as Robin Blackburn and others have argued, in the “savage birth” and development of global capitalism.2 Though the magnitude and depth of this historiography are impossible to convey adequately, it has penetrated every conceivable perspective of slavery, from demographic questions of slave populations to slave and slaveholder agency in the system and efforts to escape, resist, or abolish it. The continuing cutting-edge research undertaken in the study of slavery in the Americas signifies its profundity, as shown in the scholarly advances over the last half-century. Though indigenous peoples have constituted the object of a substantial literature comparable to that of slavery in the Americas, their confluence in a historiography of indigenous peoples and slavery as well as other forms of human bondage is considerably less developed, despite seminal works by Fernando Ortiz, Silvio Zavala, and Christon Archer.3 This has been remedied only recently by the scholars like David J. Weber, James Brooks, Alan Gallay, Brett Rushforth, Mark Santiago, Lourdes S. Domínguez, William Merrill, Carlos M. Valdés Dávila, and Hernán M. Venegas Delgado.4 This emerging historiography focuses on a vital and as yet understudied history of American indigenous peoples in diverse forms of human bondage, both within and among indigenous cultures and between indigenous and European imperial systems. As the historiographical lens shifts from the continents to the Caribbean, the connection between the latter region and tierra firme from the perspective of indigenous slavery and bondage is gradually becoming clearer: there is just as significant a bond between the two regions as that which exists in the context of African slavery. As the largest island in the Caribbean, Cuba has been the focus of a substantial traffic in indigenous slaves and forzados or forced laborers but as yet a very limited number of smaller studies exist, with a tendency toward emphasis on the diplomacy and policies of “Indian trafficking.”5 With few exceptions, the historiography of the indigenous diaspora in Cuba and the Caribbean, focused on indigenous slavery and forced labor, remains overwhelmingly in the shadow of the Black Atlantic.6 Opening the field to further investigation can be achieved by examining concrete cases of slavery and other forms of bondage and forced labor involving indigenous peoples of North America in Cuba, an island with an extensive and deep history in both African and Amerindian slavery and servitude. These slave histories intersect, especially after the sixteenth century when the enslavement of indigenous peoples was outlawed by the Spanish Crown, indigenous populations dwindled, and the labor of African slaves gradually replaced them. In the succeeding centuries in Cuba, slaves from the African continent were supplemented by enslaved and smaller but significant contingents of

Indigenous Diaspora, Bondage, and Freedom   819 Apache, Maya, Nahua, and other indigenous laborers. Among the many indigenous peoples transported to the island through half a millennium, the journeys of Yucatec Mayas appear as the most prevalent and the most prolonged. Further, while slaves from Africa well-outnumbered indigenous slaves and forzados, the latter presaged the former in the history of slave or forced labor in Cuba and the Caribbean. In both cases the coordination, organization, and processing of human trafficking drew in states and private interests at several levels and in different land masses, and often contended as much as cooperated with one another. At the same time, what the two forms of slavery shared systemically they also shared in the context of the agency of the slaves themselves: the struggle to adapt, cope, negotiate, and resist.

Spanish Colonization, Amerindian Slavery, and the Founding of Havana The abduction and transporting of indigenous peoples away from their homelands began within several years of Spanish arrival in the “New” world: witness Cristobal Colon’s reports on the indigenous aptitude for servitude and his enslavement and shipment of several hundred Arawak Taíno “rebels” from the Spanish settlement La Isabela in Hispaniola to Spain in 1494–1495.7 By the early sixteenth century, the systematic exploitation and enslavement of native Caribbean inhabitants through the colonial abuses of tributary labor systems in tandem with the first Spanish campaigns of continental conquest, initiated a more massive enslavement of indigenous peoples. The concomitant principal of “social categories of servitude” included: encomienda or the system of “commending,” royal grants of indigenous laborers to conquistadores as rewards for their contributions to conquest, on condition that the latter ensure the well-being (including Christian instruction) and freedom of their indigenous wards to care for their own fields and families; indigenous slaves, state and privately owned; and naborías, or Amerindians bound to personal service.8 These conditions coincided with another dynamic: Spanish expeditions continually moved westward, to the largest island in the region, and, eventually, to the continents, as the endemic abuse, exhaustion, and devastation of the insular indigenous labor supply generated a search for replacements. The earliest expeditions to tierra firme secured many more Amerindian slaves, both preceding and succeeding the conquest of the Mexica-Aztecs. At least as early as 1515, slaving campaigns raided the coasts of Yucatan, the Bay islands, and the northern coast of Honduras, each ship returning to Cuba with hundreds of indigenous captives in their holds.9 This human traffic was supplemented by the massive enslavement of Huastecos in the coastal region of Pánuco who were sent to Cuba and Hispaniola by the conquistador Nuño de Guzmán (1527–1529) while he held the governorship of the province before becoming president of the Audiencia de México.The conquistador Francisco de

820   Borderlands of the Iberian World Montejo, in merely one of a series of expeditions, sent some one thousand Mayas to the Antilles as slaves; many, if not most, arrived in Cuba.10 As Mexico and then Central America succumbed to Spanish conquest and colonization, the Caribbean–continental (and isthmian) nexus became a central network for the incipient colonial indigenous slave trade. According to reports to the Spanish Crown, from the 1510s to the late 1540s, after the New Laws (1542) officially abolished Amerindian slavery (save for those “rebels” who resisted conquest and colonization), an estimated ten thousand indigenous slaves were captured and shipped annually from this region to the Caribbean islands; many were sent to work in Cuba.11 By the mid-sixteenth century, the Spanish Crown’s recognition of Cuba as a strategic shipping terminal and defence position, punctuated by a royal order in 1553 for the governor’s relocation to Havana from the waning capital Santiago de Cuba, resuscitated an economy and society stagnating both from the earlier diversion of the imperial government’s gaze and resources and the departure of much of the settler population to the newly conquered continents. As the island colony recovered, Havana became the “shipping, commercial, and military center of the Spanish Atlantic.” The city and regional producers now provided a service economy to supply the fleets. Therefore commerce and trade based in the products of agriculture, livestock, mining, and later, shipbuilding flourished.12 As the economy grew, so too did the demand for labor. This was a challenge, considering the surging and magnetic appeal of the resource-rich continents as well as the “precipitous decline” of the indigenous Caribbean population.13 A recurring theme in Cuba’s history, neither African slave labor nor immigrants from Europe would suffice to sate the recovering economy’s labor needs. Hundreds of Yucatec Mayas, captives in a war that consumed two decades from the 1520s to the 1540s, constituted one of the earliest, most substantial waves of immigrant Amerindian forzados imported into colonial Cuba.14 Although the cabildo records of Havana indicate the presence of indigenous yucatecos by the early 1560s, their arrival was much earlier, as confirmed in the accounts of Montejo and other conquistadores in their campaigns against the Mayas, as well as those of Spanish slavers from the Caribbean colonies who, since the mid-1510s, had raided the coasts of the Yucatan peninsula to feed Cuba’s indigenous labor force.15 This traffic explains the "relative abundance of Indians of Yucatan among the first settlers of Cuban cities, “from Havana in the west to Puerto Principe in the east.16 At the same time, the “Indians of Yucatan” were accompanied by other indigenous captives. By the mid-sixteenth century, indigenous peoples like the Huastecos of Pánuco were also among the insular population, the outcome of yet another, massive movement of indigenous slaves from the continent. In August 1529, the Bishop of Mexico Juan de Zumárraga reported to the Crown that Nuño de Guzmán had devastated the indigenous communities of Pánuco, taken “nine or ten thousand souls branded as slaves, and sent them to the islands.”17 Recent scholarship has demonstrated that the bishop’s estimate was not far from the mark: many of these ships made several trips each year.18 Cuba and Hispaniola appear to have been the central, though not exclusive, destinations. Cuba’s governor Gonzalo de Guzmán, a kinsman and ally of Nuño de Guzmán, likely welcomed

Indigenous Diaspora, Bondage, and Freedom   821 the sorely needed labor (in exchange for horses, livestock, and island produce). The distribution of these indigenous captives among the islands, however, is unclear. Further, available reports of “Yucatan Indians” in Cuban towns and settlements are more widespread than those from Pánuco that, by 1533, for example, indicated some sixty Indian slaves in Baracoa from Pánuco as well as from the Yucatan peninsula and other islands.19 From an insular perspective, this can be explained in part by officials’ confusion of indigenous cultures. It is perhaps also, however, a function of a trade that had a brief but devastating impact on the Huastecos, resulting in a reduction of the indigenous population of Pánuco by some 40 percent, aggravated by disease, the despoilment of Huasteco fields by the same livestock they were being traded for, and lingering indigenous rebellion against the conquest.20 To these one can add the discrediting, incarceration, dismissal, and death of Nuño de Guzmán.21 While comparable to the plight of Yucatec Mayas, by the 1540s the Huasteco traffic appeared to have abated. Meanwhile, according to reports from Governor Manuel de Rojas to the king, the vecinos of Cuba continued to maintain a “frequent trade with those of Yucatan,” exchanging various goods for “Indian slaves” from the peninsula, a trade that continued through the 1530s and 1540s (and later), when the island colony “abounded with esclavos yucatecos.”22 With a much larger population for the Spanish to exploit, Yucatec Mayas’ journeys to Cuba endured for the remainder of the sixteenth and succeeding centuries. Mayas made some of their earliest contributions to the initial stages of Cuba’s colonial development, applying their labors early on through the construction and maintenance of its fledging capital and one of the world’s greatest cities. Particularly significant in this context was their role in building and inhabiting one of the two founding barrios of Havana: the barrio of Campeche.23 The second barrio, La Punta, was occupied by the Spanish; in the barrio of Campeche, “los indios de Campeche” prevailed.24 The council records of Havana indicate that “los indios de Campeche” were often directed to work sites in and around the city, not infrequently with other indigenous residents. The Mayas of Havana, together with indigenous peoples like the Arawak Taíno, supplied much of the city’s chief labor requirements. Not unlike their indigenous Cuban counterparts, Mayas occupied several categories of servitude: although arriving as slaves, the evidence suggests that, after the New Laws (1542), Mayas lived as “Indios libres” in their own dwellings, subject to obligatory service under the Spanish Crown. The predominant form of servitude was indentured labor: “ownership” was therefore vested in the employer for periods of six months to several years. Through the cabildo in the early times, or later through the office of the Protector of Indians, or, under their own aegis with the aid of a clerk or notary public (escribano), Mayas were contracted out for various labors, from domestic service (criado) to agriculture and public works. The cabildo organized and then ordered labor drafts and work duties, allocating indigenous labor to sites in Havana and environs.25 Maya and other indigenous workers labored in a range of projects that included the construction, repair, and maintenance of fortifications, munitions depots, blacksmith shops, and roads. Cabildo records for the period indicate that Maya and other indigenous immigrant labor played a substantive role in the gradual expansion and development

822   Borderlands of the Iberian World of Havana. In the late 1560s, and throughout the 1570s, these “Indios” also worked in state public works projects in the areas of defense and transportation. This included undertaking repairs at Morro fortress and expanding roads linking the fledgling capital city with the rest of the region. Thus, this forced Indian labor maintained infrastructure, shored up defenses, and facilitated the economic development of the colony.26 According to the reports of Crown representatives in Cuba for debt collection or inspection, from the mid- to late-sixteenth century, Mayas and other “Indians who were not native born” accounted for a considerable proportion—sometimes 10 percent or more—of the thousands of Amerindians living and working in the island colony.27 Upon inspection, colonial officials not infrequently confused the two, as intermarriage blurred the line (for Spanish officials) between, for example, Maya and Arawak.28 Mayas and other indigenous laborers worked in tandem, furthermore, with African slave laborers sanctioned by the Crown to labor in the city and environs after 1518.29 These worksites became loci of culturally—and occupationally—mixed but categorically congruent labor forms: forced labor within a range of human bondage. Contingents of slaves “who were blacks and Yucatan Indians” lived in towns and settlements throughout western and eastern Cuba.30 During the last decade of the sixteenth century, someone thousand slaves entered Havana alone, although this is probably a conservative figure given a lively contraband trade that likely brought in even more.31 The “wave of fort and naval construction” during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries not only spurred economic growth in the island colony; it also reinforced the growing trend of a multifaceted and multicultural enslaved labor force in the insular economy.32 At the same time, enslaved labor, though increasingly dominated by African slaves, also tended to reinforce the need for unfree labor in general, including Amerindian labor, from various areas of the Spanish mainland. Amerindians like the Mayas from Yucatan and Huastecos from Pánuco who were forcibly imported into Cuba worked alongside and intermarried with indigenous residents, as well as African and African-descended slaves. Their status relative to African slaves is less clear, many of whom exercised the option of coartación or self-purchase for freedom. As Evelyn Powell Jennings noted, among state-owned and -employed slave workers in Cuba, there was a great diversity in the organization, status, and living and working conditions.33 The status and social identity of enslaved workers like the Mayas and other indigenous laborers very likely underwent some evolution especially as they interacted and intermingled with African and African-descended slaves, and others, with whom they often worked in different projects and at various sites in and around Havana. As María Elena Díaz observed of the royal slaves of El Cobre in eastern Cuba, during the early colonial period, the line between freedom and slavery was tested in different areas of local life, and the concomitant social identity “was reinvented in small events and large incidents, imagined through social practices and interactions, carved out of improvised solutions and concessions, and asserted politically and disputed in unexpected exchanges as well as in particular claims and concerted action.”34 As construction for defense and infrastructure continued through the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in western Cuba, the work gangs dedicated to them remained a

Indigenous Diaspora, Bondage, and Freedom   823 mixture predominated by African and Creole slaves, but including galley slaves, convicts, and other indigenous laborers from Mexico, known in Cuba as “guachinangos.”35 While the intimate, quotidian interactions among these forzados are often difficult to assess, what might be referred to as their common social state is suggested within the context of labor and in the social practices evidenced in marriage patterns, as Mayas became spouses and godparents of African and African-descended slaves.36 The implications of marriage between a Yucatec Maya and black slave, in addition to mestizaje and the “mark” of slavery inherited by the offspring of enslaved parents, could also facilitate a level of stability for the incipient system of slavery in Cuba: masters often approved and facilitated marriages, while married slaves came to inhabit various circles of relations, both those imposed by the patron and those they formed, reproducing and reinforcing existing power relations.37 The conditions of enslaved laborers like the Mayas, Huastecos, Chichimecas, and other indigenous peoples forcibly imported to Cuba from New Spain corresponded in a number of ways to that of enslaved African and African-descended slaves in the island colony.

British Occupation, Social Transformation, and State Enslavement By the eighteenth century, Spain faced repeated challenges to its hegemony in the Caribbean, climaxing with the British invasion and occupation of Havana (1762–1763). The imperial government reinforced the island’s defenses following the recovery of the capital in exchange for relinquishing Florida. From 1763 to 1789 work on new and antiquated fortifications was ordered, necessitating the organization of some forty-five hundred slaves along with more than twenty-five hundred forzados: the large majority were presidio prisoners transported from New Spain.38 The significance of these enslaved workers comes from their diversity, the “sizeable portion of Havana’s population of enslaved workers” that they represented, and their role in contributing to the reorientation of the Cuban economy toward a plantation complex.39 In turn, enslaved indigenous laborers represented a significant proportion of the Crown’s enslaved contingent, both recently imported and those already on the island. Indigenous peoples continued to be represented among prisoners transported to Cuba throughout the eighteenth century. Mayas, many convicted in Yucatan after the revolt of 1761, were transported along with Nahuas and other natives from central Mexico.40 During the 1760s through the 1780s and later, colonial officials imported hundreds of Amerindians or “indios guachinangos” into Cuba. One order alone in early 1763 included some three hundred Amerindian laborers; they arrived in Cuba the following autumn. Shipments of forzado work gangs date back to 1761, when the new captain-general Prado Portocarrero arrived with wide-ranging orders to improve the

824   Borderlands of the Iberian World island’s defenses. More would come. In 1775, the island colony’s labor needs continued to beckon: in November, the commander of the Marina of Havana, Manuel de Guirior, submitted an order for the shipment of various enslaved “guachinango” Indians to Cuba for the work of gathering and transporting the wood needed for Havana’s shipyards.41 These enslaved indigenous workers from the continent add an important element rarely if ever commented on in the context of the diversity of free and unfree labor forms that coexisted in Cuba. As numerous studies have demonstrated, in the context of the latently evolved plantation economy in Cuba, African and African-descended slaves often worked in close proximity to freed persons, a reality that contributed to a number of other factors in the evolution and eventual abolition of slavery in the island. A parallel dynamic is evident in the context of imported indigenous slave labor in Cuba. That is, free and enslaved Indian labor coexisted with the African slave system: Mayas and other Mesoamericans, accompanied, by the end of the eighteenth century, by other indigenous importees like captured Apaches from northern New Spain, worked along with voluntarily immigrating peoples like the Uchisi of Florida, many of whom visited for extended periods treating with colonial officials and trading locally, and others who settled in Cuba after 1763. As Cuba underwent what Sherri Johnson described as a social transformation into a plantation economy, the island also received several waves of Amerindians who did not arrive as convicted and enslaved laborers: free and i­ ndependent Amerindian leaders, diplomats, traders, and their families and/or communities arrived under varied circumstances and conditions, many from Florida, others from New Spain. Local cabildo records like those of the Cuban city of Matanzas indicate the presence of a freed population of Mayas, identified as “indios naturales de Mérida,” living as individuals or as families and working within the colonial economy.42 Like their Africandescended freed-person counterparts, they coexisted with the enslaved indigenous cohorts, some possibly even working alongside or in close proximity to them. Indigenous workers continued to rank among the thousands of forzados deployed in constructing and shoring up the island’s defenses and infrastructure throughout the late eighteenth century. During the 1760s, hundreds of “Guachinangos” worked in Havana and environs, reinforced by additional orders for more of the same in 1763 and later.43 Repeated references in documents like the revistas or labor reviews to these “Guachinango” Indians are often alternated, interchanged, or paired with classifications like presidiarios, among other forzados, and tend to muddy the waters of identity. At the same time, ­however, the detailed records of royal court and sentencing reports, among other legal documents, complement the quantitatively rich but qualitatively vague data of the revistas. Through the sentencing records of the Real Sala de Crimen, it is clear that indigenous laborers numbered among the many prisoners sentenced to labor in Havana and its environs; throughout the 1770s, 1780s, and later, many of these “Indios” came from Mexico’s central and southern regions. According to several sentencing reports for 1780, more than twenty indigenous forzados from the Valley of Mexico and environs were sent to Havana.44 The communities in which many of them originated and/or resided ranged from Actopan to Oaxaca, and from Toluca to Orizaba, and various localities in between.45 These were Mesoamerican peoples, among them probably Nahuas and

Indigenous Diaspora, Bondage, and Freedom   825 Otomís, as well as Yucatec Mayas, who worked in Cuba as convict labor, their offences minor or severe, their sentences from two years to ten, or longer. One case in December 1780 saw Pedro Gómez, “Indio natural del Pueblo de Actopan” and probably Otomí, seller of pulque, convicted for the death of Augustín de Santiago and sentenced to ten years labor in El Morro fortress in Havana. In this case the court also warned Gómez against any further violation on pain of an extension to a life sentence, presumably in the royal works of the island colony.46 The living and working conditions of these indigenous forzados may be deduced from fragmentary evidence contained in the records of the cabildo of Havana and correspondence of the captain-general of Cuba. According to statements by colonial government officials during the 1760s, rates of escape of Amerindian and other workers appear to have been relatively high. Throughout the latter part of 1762, the cabildo of Havana dedicated its attention to the problem of the “many escaped Blacks, Slaves, and Guachinangos,” their capture, and return to the city.47 The simple fact of escape can attest to the harsh conditions of enslavement. A factor that would endure into the nineteenth century, Amerindian forzados often lacked recourse to rights enshrined in Spanish slave law but were still subject to the punishments: if apprehended, fugitives escapees faced two hundred lashes and imprisonment.48 Conditions for these forzados resembled some of the worst endured by their African co-enslaved, a reality that was periodically acknowledged by Spanish officials. Sebastian de Peñalver Angulo, a militia colonel, testified to the cabildo of Havana on the “miserable and unhappy poverty and constitution” of the Amerindians, and the duality of their misery, facing punishment for their offenses in New Spain by forced exile, and punishment again through forced labor in Cuba “more or less according to the gravity of their excess.”49 Under such conditions, resistance often took the form of flight and also desperate, physical resistance to recapture; less evident are attempts to exercise any alternative recourse such as those had by African and African-descended slaves in Cuba under Spanish law, such as the right to press for claims.50 Whether state-or privately-owned, the legal status of imported indigenous labor remained ambiguous and ambivalent in both theory and practice well into the nineteenth century. “Guachinangos” were accompanied by the first recorded arrivals of “Mecos” or Apache and other indigenous prisoners of war in Havana in the 1780s, living testimonies of a struggling and often inconsistent Spanish policy determined to colonize the northernmost frontier of its American domains, and the determination of the indigenous inhabitants to resist. From Francisco Vázquez de Coronado’s sixteenth-century expeditions through Jacobo Ugarte’s governorship in the scattered presidios (garrisons) and settlements of the interior provinces in the eighteenth, Spanish colonial policy at the frontier remained fundamentally military. Its eventual strategy for combatting Apache resistance relied on a dual approach often inconsistently applied: reward cooperation and kill and/or capture and deport the intransigent.51 By the 1780s, the growing consensus within the Spanish military command for the permanent deportation of Apache resisters was answered with Spanish Crown authorization in 1783 to send some one hundred Apache prisoners to Cuba.52 The response of colonial officials was swift: additional

826   Borderlands of the Iberian World deportations of Apache men, women, and children followed for the duration of the 1780s, continued through the 1790s and, after a royal decree in 1799 reaffirmed what had by then become de facto procedure, into the next century. Estimates based on admittedly incomplete records suggest that of more than twenty-two hundred Apaches deported to Mexico City and Veracruz from the 1780s to the late 1810s, more than half (or over eleven hundred) were sent on to Cuba.53 Counted as piezas, a Spanish term also applied to African slaves, Apache peoples were force marched in colleras or chain gangs to port cities and, deported as “prisoners of war,” transported in Spanish warships to Cuba. In Havana, Apache deportees were divided up and distributed by colonial officials: men for work on fortifications, roads, and other public works, women (and some men) for domestic service in the homes of habaneros, for which demand was considerable. In addition, various organizations and institutions acquired Amerindian workers, from cigar factories to churches. Apache youth were in particular demand by certain Catholic orders seeking to Christianize young Amerindians, as they always had, in order to transform them into assimilated, productive citizens. Officially, conditions for the granting of Apache and any other “Meco” deportees for service included their good treatment and Christian education as indigenous wards. The extent to which the grantees of Apache forzados followed through in their duties to ensure the well-being of their wards as opposed to ruthlessly exploiting them is somewhat less clear.54 Those designated for fortifications and other royal works, as “Indios prisioneros de guerra,” were treated accordingly; out of conditions of bondage arose the will to resist. Apache deportees had a long history of aggressively resisting Spanish incursions into the arid deserts and mountain regions of northern New Spain. Reports by Spanish military escorts described the frequent and violent attempts, some successful, of Apache men and women to escape their captors in the colleras en route to deportation, acts of resistance that did not cease once within the confines of the island colony. While some Apache forzados may have succumbed to the imposed labor regime, others actively endeavored to regain their freedom: those who escaped also attacked and plundered the settlements, mills, and other enterprises, wreaking havoc with the stability of local colonial life on the island. Nor did they do so alone. Some Apache escapees joined forces with fugitive African and African-descended slaves. The presence and exploits of “Indios bravos” or “Indios Mexicanos” were reported in various parts of the island, from the western region surrounding Havana and Matanzas, to Puerto Príncipe in the east, as government-designated slave hunters pursued them across el llano and monte.55 As documented in studies of slavery, daily working conditions in urban households and institutions tended to be relatively less harsh than in other worksites (field, mines, public works). If precedents in New Spain were of any influence, Amerindian servants worked relatively cooperatively and, in some cases, came to be seen less as servants or slaves than as adopted family members.56 Plausibly, a similar condition may have been reproduced among Apache servants, men and women, in Cuba. Further, the category of criado or house servant may represent the rare instance where indigenous workers were entitled to some of the same protection under Spanish law as African and Africandescended slaves, a factor which may also have contributed to relative conformity

Indigenous Diaspora, Bondage, and Freedom   827 among Apache and other Amerindian servants.57 This does not discount resistance in the form of covert, subtle behaviors that encompassed a range of quietly defiant acts, from foot-dragging to gossip, which, as James Scott noted, constituted the “hidden transcript” of subaltern resistance.58 Colonial records are more likely to evidence the more overt, public acts of defiance and resistance; the likelihood or incidence of Apache appeals (and access) to Spanish laws is less clear. Other Amerindian forzados clearly appropriated Spanish legislation in defense of their interests and legal rights. Though this is presently more inferential in the context of the so-called Mecos servants in Havana, it is more evident in the case of Yucatec Maya and mestizo peasants forcibly relocated to Cuba in the nineteenth century.

Indians, Emperors, and Republics: Between Slavery and Free Labor Independence wars ended Spanish imperial hegemony in the Americas. Barely two decades after the emergence of Mexico’s new republic, despite the publicly declared accoutrements of classical liberal philosophy and government and the official abolition of slavery, the specter of enslavement threatened once again as captive Mayas were ­forcibly transported to the island colony and surviving “pearl” of Spain’s remnant Caribbean empire. By the mid-nineteenth century, in the midst of a booming plantation economy dependent on an increasingly scarce and expensive slave trade actively policed by the British government and its navy, Cuba needed laborers. Meanwhile, Mexico suffered the struggles of a fledgling nation, a central government in Mexico City desperately attempting to reign in the challenges of regional interests and demands. Yucatan had proven particularly insistent on state rights, asserting independence from the central government. The southern state also faced its own struggles from within, as liberal reforms with colonial holdovers such as head taxes and forced labor regimes, and none of the colonial protections, ultimately enraged the Yucatecan Maya peasantry, generating, by the 1840s, the so-called Caste War, a rebellion that at one point engulfed most of the state. The remedy of the Yucatecan government: deport the Maya rebels to Cuba.59 After initial opposition from Mexico against the virtual slave conditions of some of the first Mayas shipped to Cuba had been calmed by reform laws that, in theory at least, assured their protection, another phase of human traffic ensued, both legal and illicit, between Mexico and the island colony (estimates vary from about a thousand to ten thousand Yucatecos). This traffic would endure almost two decades until the official, if not de facto, cessation in 1861. In fact, not all Mayas transported to Cuba during the Caste War were combatants or relatives; rather, some Maya debtors were forcibly sent in secret to the island, at times with the collusion of government officials.60 Policies and regulations to ensure both the orderly processing and monitoring of Maya traffic to Cuba were the product of a struggle and ultimate compromise between

828   Borderlands of the Iberian World national and regional governments in Mexico apparently concerning the well-being of Yucatec Mayas, a conflict that Spain sought to defuse to protect the labor regime in one of its last remaining, productive American colonies. Yet problems persisted: the lack of international coordination (and cooperation) in oversight and monitoring of transports of Mayas to Cuba led to substantial gaps in transit records, departures and arrivals, and considerable confusion on the part of government officials about the numbers and status of the Mayas in Cuba. At the same time, the adherence of the patrón to regulations such as the reforms of 1854, specifying the requisite contractual working and living conditions for the so-called Maya colonos, appears to have been more consistent in the sanctioned penalties (e.g., lashings) than in ensuring workers’ well-being. Irrespective of the work site, whether the plantations and sugar mills of Matanzas or the households of habaneros, Maya men, women, and children in Cuba (ostensibly “free” laborers) endured harsh work burdens. According to both government reports and the testimonies of Maya workers, labor regimes often bordered on enslavement, while patrón abuses were many and included various cases of maltreatment in the form of unwarranted corporal punishment, withholding of rations, and negligence (lack of contract and/or remuneration). Parallels with African slavery were not uncommon: according to Maya testimonies, families were sometimes forcibly separated. In one case, representative of the prevalence of employer abuses, in 1862 “la india” Juana Alcántara formally submitted a complaint against her patrón, accusing him of a string of abuses that ranged from excessive punishment to separating her from her son.61 In fact, patrón transgressions against Maya workers in Cuba began well before the latter’s arrival in the island colony, as a number of employers, many of them plantation owners and slaveholders, alternately mislead Mayas (and governments) about their contracts and/or initiated an illicit traffic in Maya laborers.62 From departure to destination, Maya workers confronted a spectrum of affronts, deceptions, along with physical, psychological, and emotional abuse at the hands of employers. Scholars of slave systems argue that it could not have been otherwise: Maya workers found themselves in the midst of a society based in slavery, with all of the ­attendant behaviors, reinforced by racialist ideologies. Plantation owners, who employed many if not most Maya laborers in Cuba, were, after all, the products of several generations of socialization under slavery in Cuba’s plantation economy and society. By the mid-nineteenth century, the ethos of slavery continued to dominate labor relations in Cuba, and a mentalité anchored in plantation slavery did not easily give way to accommodate other forms of labor, regardless of the ongoing transition and increasing frequency and normalcy of free and unfree labor working side by side.63 On the subject of slavery in any form or under any pretense, abolitionist England was clear: Spain was bound to the anti-slavery treaties of 1817 and 1835. The Spanish imperial government, however, begged to differ. To the Minister of State, Pedro Pidal, the treaties applied “exclusively” to the trade in Africans and contained not the “slightest relation” to Maya laborers in Cuba.64 Having enacted the 1854 reforms, and with a war still raging in the Yucatán peninsula, Mexico largely concurred. While the latter two positions were grounded in more practical concerns of meeting labor needs and re-imposing stability,

Indigenous Diaspora, Bondage, and Freedom   829 they were also based in understandings of the social place or station of Mayas specifically and of “indios” more generally. On their general “laziness” both colonial and imperial officials agreed, just as they did on indigenous peoples’ potential for productivity, if closely directed and regulated. Of the need for control and discipline there was no question: the captain general of Cuba strongly recommended “the tools of slavery”—here, too, the imperial government assented.65 Despite the ostensibly humanizing reforms of 1854, Cuban planters continued to utilize forms of corporal punishment clearly betraying the official status of Maya workers as “colonos libres.” Exposure of the maltreatment of Mayas came in large part through the courage of the yucatecos themselves who filed complaints against abuses, along with the investigations of scrupulous colonial government officials (with occasional prodding by the Mexican consulate).66 Maya claims, petitions, and testimonies, and concomitant government investigations, expose the range of patrón abuses and transgressions, official collusion (although this is often more implicit), and Maya conditions and responses.67 According to the testimonies, Mayas themselves were often deceived about their journeys to the island. It was clear to Maya workers that, for their part, they were not slaves and refused to be treated as such. While the precise magnitude of the claims and protests of “los indios yucatecos” is less clear, they were frequent enough to draw the attention of colonial and Mexican government officials, and continuous enough to employ government officials in generating reports and investigations from the 1850s through 1860s, beyond the official Mexican cessation of the traffic and beginning of a new free immigration policy in Cuba.68 Mayas in Cuba met the range of challenges and abuses that they confronted with an array of responses. These were consistent with precedents in Yucatan, especially as war and government continued to displace the Mayas from their lands in the peninsula, forcing many to work for exploitative and unscrupulous hacendados.69 As in Yucatan, violence was one response of Maya workers in Cuba chafing under the injustices of abusive planters and other employers. Arson, assaults on the patrón, robbery, vandalism, and flight represented some of the more explicit forms of resistance practiced by Mayas in Mexico and Cuba.70 Yet these were neither exclusive nor even the predominant forms: considerably more evidence strongly suggests that the principal type of resistance undertaken by Mayas in Cuba came in the form of negotiation and legal actions. Dozens of complaints were formally submitted by Maya colonos and domestic servants citing maltreatment at the hands of abusive employers, corresponding to the range of aforementioned violations that ran the gamut from physical abuse to falsification and illegal extension or sale of contracts. Further, it was not uncommon for colonial officials to investigate and even rule in favor of Maya claimants, generating a richly informative documentation over two decades. Maya recourse to legal action could be as persistent as the abuses of the patrón.71 Maya actions in Cuba had precedents in their peninsular homelands that were complemented and conceivably reinforced by African and African-descended slaves (and vice versa) in work sites where they encountered one another. Further, Mayas and slaves who shared the burdens imposed on them by a system of slavery in its autumn acquired a sense of their mutual conditions. In one instance, a yucateca laundress from

830   Borderlands of the Iberian World Campeche worked in a habanero home as a servant, alongside a “slave of the house.” The yucateca’s protests included the common charge of deficient food rations and lack of remuneration.72 Under such conditions, Yucatec women and African or Africandescended house servants likely interacted fairly regularly as coworkers. Not surprisingly, Maya interactions with Cubans went even deeper, including sexual relations and intermarriage. This included long-term relationships with descendants of the original Cubans, indigenous Arawak Taíno still resident on the island colony. Some of the more notable examples of such mixed families and communities occupied parts of the southern region of Matanzas province, one of these in Hanabana Quemada, ­formerly an ancient Arawak Taíno chiefdom or cacicazgo.73 While the inter-ethnic relationships of resident Mayas contributed to the process of mestizaje in Cuba, the children of these mixed Amerindian families grew up “with biological roots in both societies.”74 At the same time, the new generations of mixed Mayas and Arawak Taíno heritage also augmented, at least in degrees, the Amerindian composition of the island colony’s population, therefore reinforcing the endurance of the indigenous presence in Cuba.75 The Maya presence in Cuba was sustained well beyond Mexico’s official termination of the traffic to Cuba in 1861 by a number of factors. These included, as noted, the progeny of Mayas, as numerous yucatecos chose to remain on the island, and the continued migration of Mayas from the Yucatan peninsula. This is especially notable in light of the working conditions often protested by some of the same Maya workers. In either case, the explanation may be rooted in contemporaneous circumstances in Cuba and Yucatan. Mayas who chose to reside in Cuba often took the initiative by renewing their contracts, signing new ones with different employers, or, upon fulfillment, seeking employment elsewhere in the island as free wage laborers. They continued to labor in the sugar mills and plantations, farming, and domestic service, but individuals also took on work in Cuba’s towns and cities in a range of jobs, from bakeries to cemeteries.76 At the same time, the colonial government and many planters, increasingly disillusioned with indentured Chinese workers and alarmed at the rising rates of (contraband) slave prices and revolts in a climate of intensified abolitionism and nagging labor shortages, enacted new labor legislation with particular emphasis on recruiting willing Yucatec Maya and other indigenous workers. Meanwhile, the Caste War was “very much alive” in the eastern region of Yucatan, where most if not all Maya workers in Cuba originated. Rapid land concentration in Yucatan, generated by the expansion of sugar plantations and henequen production, consumed tens of thousands of hectares of subsistence agricultural lands, forcing the dispossession and relocation of thousands of Maya peasants to the northwest.77 This, as new laws rooted in colonial forms of exploitation absent the legal protections and social obligations, “authorized landowners and administrators to 'sanction' the offenses of their peons” for the slightest of infractions with brutal corporal punishment.78 Cuba therefore remained attractive for a number of Yucatec Mayas who, along with indigenous peoples from other regions of the Americas remained a small but significant sector of Cuba’s population. Furthermore, like indigenous Arawak Taíno, Mayas in

Indigenous Diaspora, Bondage, and Freedom   831 Cuba lived both intermixed among and apart from the general population. Like the indígenas of Caridad de los Indios or Yateras in eastern Cuba, communities that remained largely isolated until the present, Mayas sometimes lived in separate settlements in Cuba well into the twentieth century, as in the community at Madruga in the west.79 To varying degrees, such communities represent the dynamic of Maya migration to and eventual settlement in Cuba, where Mayas and other indigenous immigrants had worked, endured the burdens of forced labor, defended their interests and those of the families they sometimes brought with them, and, in numerous cases, eventually chose to reside on the island, some intermarrying, many engaging in various occupations and livelihoods beyond agricultural work (although this remained the primary area). With the official abolition of slavery in 1886, Mayas and former slaves likely competed more openly with one another in the Cuban job market, although many of the latter remained as emancipados working on the same plantations. By the late nineteenth century, the labor category of “colono” by which Maya and other indigenous workers were classified had become a very heterogeneous group, expanding to include cane planters, former slaves granted or leased a small plot of land on their former owners’ plantation, tenants, and other smallholders.80 Mayas in Cuba might occupy any or even all of these categories. By the twentieth century, their descendants continued to reside in Cuba, variously distributed at different levels of society, the latest generation of an indigenous diaspora begun centuries earlier. The human experiences and social systems that comprised the borderlands between the Caribbean and the continental Americas, and within the basin itself, evolved out of the first permanent European settlements under the Spanish as well as early encounters and sustained relations between indigenous peoples and Iberian Europeans. Tragically, one of the earliest and most predominant themes of these relations was indigenous ­servitude. In spite of the Spanish crown’s sixteenth-century sanctions against indigenous slavery (excepting “rebellious” Amerindians), bondage remained a reality for many of the various North American Amerindian peoples who were transported to Cuba to serve in the colonial economy. The forced labor of indigenous peoples like the Yucatec Mayas, Apaches from Spain’s northern provinces, and other forzados facilitated the social transformation of Cuba’s economy and society. Later it coincided with the use of African slave labor, as indigenous laborers toiled side by side with African and Africandescended slaves in the fields and households of the growing island colony. A smaller indigenous diaspora became entangled with a more massive African diaspora, setting in motion a dynamic that was reinforced by the mid- to late-nineteenth century with the resumption of human traffic from Yucatan under the fledgling Mexican republic. The lines between bondage and freedom in Cuba’s plantation society often blurred, as indentured Maya workers, like their freed person counterparts, mixed with African and/or African-descended slaves, in labor and resistance, a dynamic that endured down to the abolition of slavery in Cuba. Transnational experiences led to transcultural transformations, or, perhaps more accurately, to transformations in the cultural landscape rooted in a culturally diverse indigenous mosaic, one that forged a Cuban, and Caribbean, middle ground considerably more complex than formerly thought.

832   Borderlands of the Iberian World

Notes Archives AGI: AGN: AHPM: AMCH: ANC: BNE:

Archivo General de Indias, Seville (Spain) Archivo General de la Nación, Mexico City (Mexico) Archivo Histórico Provincial de Matanzas, Matanzas (Cuba) Archivo del Museo de la Ciudad de la Habana, Havana (Cuba) Archivo Nacional de Cuba, Havana (Cuba) Biblioteca Nacional de España, Madrid (Spain)

1. Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999), x–xi. 2. See Robin Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery (London: Verso, 1997). 3. Fernando Ortiz, Cuban Counterpoint, Tobacco and Sugar (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995, reprint of 1947 edition); Silvio Zavala, “Nuño de Guzmán y la esclavitud de los indios,” Historia Mexicana 1, no. 3 (1951): 411–428; Christon Archer, “The Deportation of Barbarian Indians from the internal Provinces of New Spain, 1789–1810,” The Americas 29 (1973): 376–395. 4. See James F. Brooks, Captives and Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest Borderlands (Chapel Hill: UNC, 2002); Alan Gallay, The Indian Slave Trade: The Rise of the English Empire in the American South, 1670–1717 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002); Brett Rushforth, Bonds of Alliance: Indigenous and Atlantic Slaveries in New France (Chapel Hill: UNC, 2012); Mark Santiago, The Jar of Severed Hands: Spanish Deportation of Apache Prisoners of War, 1770–1810 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2011); Lourdes S.  Domínguez and William Merrill, “Deportación de indígenas de la mal llamada etnia apache a Cuba a finales del siglo XVIII y principios del XIX” (paper presented at the III Simposio de Antropología Física Luis Montané, Havana, Universidad de la Habana, 1992); Carlos  M.  Valdés Dávila and Hernán M.  Venegas Delgado, “Esclavos indios del noreste mexicano vendidos en las Antillas y Nueva España,” in Las regiones en Latinoamérica. Nuevos talleres internacionales de estudios regionales y locales, vol. 2, coord. Hernán Venegas Delgado et al. (Mexico: Universidad de Guadalajara Cualtos, Universidad Maria Abreu de las Villas, Universidad Intercultural de Chiapas and Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila, 2010), 55–81; and Nancy  E.  van Deusen, Global Indios: The Indigenous Struggle for Justice in Sixteenth-Century Spain (Durham: Duke University Press,  2015). See also Andrés Reséndez,“Borderlands of Bondage,” in The Oxford Handbook of Borderlands of the Iberian World, ed. Danna A. Levin Rojo and Cynthia Radding, 571–589 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019). 5. Earlier studies include José Luis Mirafuentes Galván, “Los seris en 1780: Sobre la necesidad de su deportación a La Habana,” Históricas 20 (1986): 23–36; Max Moorhead, “Spanish Deportation of Hostile Apaches: The Policy and the Practice,” Journal of the Southwest 17 (1975): 205–220; Christon Archer, “The Deportation of Barbarian Indians,” 376–395, and Moisés González Navarro, “La guerra de castas en Yucatán y la venta de mayas a Cuba,” Historia Mexicana 18 (1973): 11–34. More recent studies include Manuel Jesús Uc Sánchez, “Tráfico de indígenas mayas a Cuba,” Gaceta Universitaria. Cuadernos de Información y

Indigenous Diaspora, Bondage, and Freedom   833 Análisis Académico 21 (Merida: Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán, 2011), 42–51; Jorge Victoria Ojeda, “Los indígenas Mayas del servicio doméstico en Cuba, 1847–1853,” Chacmool: cuadernos de trabajo cubano-mexicanos 1 (2003): 335–365; Alejandro García Álvarez, “Traficantes en el Golfo,” Historia Social 117 (1993): 33–46; Antonio Santamaría García and Sigfrido Vázquez Cienfuegos, “Indios foráneos en Cuba a principios del siglo XIX: Historia de un suceso en el contexto de la movilidad poblacional y la geoestrategia del imperio español,” Colonial Latin American Historical Review 1 (2013): 1–34; and Jason Yaremko, “De Campeche a la Guerra de castas: la presencia maya en Cuba, del siglo XVI al XIX,” Chacmool: cuadernos de trabajo cubano-mexicanos 6 (2010): 85–114, and “Colonial Wars and Indigenous Geopolitics: Aboriginal Agency, the Cuba-Florida-Mexico Nexus, and the Other Diaspora,” Canadian Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Studies 35 (2011): 165–196. 6. Recent studies in the vast and still developing literature on slavery include Manuel Barcia’s Seeds of Insurrection: Domination and Resistance on Western Cuban Plantations, 1808–1845 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008), and The Great African Slave Revolt of 1825: Cuba and the Fight for Freedom in Matanzas (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 2012); Michele Reid-Vazquez, The Year of the Lash: Free People of Color in Cuba and the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011); Herbert S. Klein and Ben Vinson III, African Slavery in Latin America and the Caribbean, 2nd, Revised Edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); María del Carmen Barcia, La otra familia: parientes, redes, y descendencia de los esclavos en Cuba (Havana: Casa de las Américas, 2003); Daniel Walker, No More, No More: Slavery and Cultural Resistance in Havana and New Orleans (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006); Ada Ferrer, Freedom’s Mirror: Cuba and Haiti in the Age of Revolution (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014); and Solimar Otero, Afro-Cuban Diasporas in the Atlantic World (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2010). 7. Irving Rouse, The Tainos: Rise and Decline of the People Who Greeted Columbus (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), 151. 8. See Jalil Sued Badillo, “Beatriz, India Cubana Cimarrona,” Caribbean Studies 21 (1988): 194–199. 9. Murdo MacLeod, Spanish Central America: A Socio-Economic History, 1520–1720 (Austin: University of Texas Press), 50. 10. Residencia tomada al adelantado Francisco de Montejo, 1544–1553, Archivo General de Indias (hereafter AGI), Justicia 300; citations in Carlos Bojórquez Urzaiz, “El Barrio de Campeche en La Habana,” Cuadernos culturales 5 (1994): 30; Julio Le Riverend Brusone, “Relaciones entre Nueva España y Cuba (1518–1820),” Revista de Historia de América 37–38 (1954): 97. 11. Cited in MacLeod, Spanish Central America, 50–52. 12. Alejandro de la Fuente, Havana and the Atlantic in the Sixteenth Century (Chapel Hill: UNC, 2008), 50–146. 13. Louis  A.  Pérez Jr., Cuba: Between Reform and Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 35–39; Evelyn Powell Jennings, “State Enslavement in Colonial Havana, 1763–1790,” in Slavery Without Sugar: Diversity in Caribbean Economy and Society Since the Seventeenth Century, ed. Verene Shepherd (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002), 153–154. 14. Cited in Bojórquez, “El Barrio de Campeche en La Habana,” 29–30.

834   Borderlands of the Iberian World 15. Cabildo de 6 de Abril de 1564, Actas Capitulares del Ayuntamiento de La Habana (1550), Archivo del Museo de la Ciudad de la Habana (hereafter AMCH), Havana, Cuba. See also Residencia tomada al adelantado Francisco de Montejo, 1544–1553, AGI. See also citations in Carlos Bojórquez Urzaiz, “El Barrio de Campeche en La Habana,” 30, and Julio Le Riverend Brusone, “Relaciones entre Nueva España y Cuba (1518–1820), 97. 16. Cited in Le Riverend, “Relaciones entre Nueva España y Cuba (1518–1820),” 97–98. See also Ramiro Guerra y Sánchez, Historia de Cuba, vol. 1, 1492–1607 (Havana: Imprenta “El Siglo XX,” 1921), 368–369. 17. Carta á Su Majestad, del Electo Obispo de México, D. Fr. Juan de Zumárraga, August 27, 1529, “Documentos,” in Joaquín García Icazbalceta, Don Fray Juan de Zumárraga, Primer Obispo y Arzobispo de México: estudio biográfico y bibliográfico (Mexico: Antigua Librería de Andrade y Morales, 1881), 24. For more recent scholarship on Guzmán’s expeditions, see Danna A. Levin Rojo, Return to Aztlan: Indians, Spaniards, and the Invention of Nuevo México (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2014), 66–69. 18. Adrián Blázquez and Thomas Calvo, Guadalajara y el nuevo mundo. Nuño Beltrán de Guzmán: semblanza de un conquistador (Guadalajara: Institución provincial de cultura Marqués de Santillana, 1992), 115–117. 19. Autos de la visita de los vecinos, caciques y indios de la villa de la Asunción de Cuba, hecha por Manuel de Rojas, Teniente Gobernador, January 13, 1533, Colección de documentos inéditos relativos al descubrimiento, conquista y organización de las antiguas posesiones españolas de ultramar, t. 4, II: De la isla de Cuba (Madrid: Est. Tipográfico, 1888), 309. Also cited in Le Riverend, “Relaciones entre Nueva España y Cuba (1518–1820),”97. For the destinations of the Huastecos, in his detailed letter of August 1529, Zumárraga refers once to Cuba and Hispaniola and a number of times to “the islands.” Other sources, primary and secondary, tend to focus more on Nuño de Guzmán and the trade, and on conditions for Huastecos up to their exit from Pánuco, less on the insular dynamics. More research remains to be done in this area. 20. Blázquez and Calvo, Guadalajara y el nuevo mundo, 105; Zavala, “Nuño de Guzmán y el esclavitud de los indios,” 415; Juan Manuel Pérez Zevallos, “Las visitas como fuente de estudio del tributo y población de la huasteca (siglo XVI),” Itinerarios 12 (2010): 52; Jesús Ruvalcaba Mercado, “Vacas, mulas, azúcar y café: los efectos de su introducción en la Huasteca, México,” Revista Española de Antropologia Americana 26 (1996): 124–125. As Blázquez and Calvo and others have pointed out, this human traffic was supplanted by the enslavement of other indigenous peoples with the northward expansion of the conquest. 21. Nora Reyes Costilla, “Veracruz y el Caribe en la época colonial: notas sobre algunas casos de contacto,” Anuario VIII (1991): 122. 22. Cited in Ramiro Guerra y Sánchez, Historia de Cuba, 2 vols. (Havana: Imprenta “El Siglo XX,” 1921) vol 1: 1492–1607, 369. 23. This is a reference to the primary point of departure for these Mayas, namely the port of Campeche, Yucatan. 24. Fernando Ortiz, Nuevo Catauro de cubanismo (Havana: Ed. Ciencias Sociales, 1985), 196. See Bojórquez, “El Barrio de Campeche.” Given the conditions around Havana and most other Cuban towns and settlements during the mid to late sixteenth century, when the island had become substantially depopulated because of settler exodus in the wake of the successive conquests of Mexico and Peru, this is probable. See Pérez, Cuba, 32–34. 25. See Marcos Arriaga Mesa, La Habana, 1550–1600: tierra, hombres y mercado (Madrid: Sílex ediciones S.I., 2014), 68–69, 214–218.

Indigenous Diaspora, Bondage, and Freedom   835 26. See Cabildo del 14 de febrero de 1575, Actas Capitulares del Ayuntamiento de La Habana, February 14, 1575, AMCH, p. 93; Jácobo de la Pezuela, Historia de la Isla de Cuba, t. II (Madrid: Ed. Bally-Bailliere, 1868), 189. Also cited in Bojórquez, “El Barrio de Campeche,” 32. 27. Cited in I.A. Wright, The Early History of Cuba, 1492–1586 (New York: Macmillan, 1916), 135, 185–186. 28. Cited in Wright, The Early History of Cuba, 186. 29. Jennings, “State Enslavement in Colonial Havana,” 153–154. 30. Wright, The Early History of Cuba, 193–194. 31. Evelyn Powell Jennings, “State Slavery in the Atlantic Economy: the Case of Cuba in the Late Eighteenth Century” (paper presented at the Conference of the Program in Early American Economy and Society, Philadelphia, Library Company of Philadelphia, September 19, 2003), 5. 32. Jennings, “State Slavery in the Atlantic Economy,” 5; De la Fuente, Havana and the Atlantic, 51–80, 151–161. 33. Evelyn Powell Jennings, “Some Unhappy Indians Trafficked by Force: Race, Status, and Work Discipline in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Cuba,” in Human Bondage in the Cultural Contact Zone: Transdisciplinary Perspectives on Slavery and Its Discourses, ed. Raphael Hormann and Gesa Mackenthun (New York: Waxmann, 2010), 212. 34. María Elena Díaz, The Virgin, the King, and the Royal Slaves of El Cobre: Negotiating Freedom in Colonial Cuba, 1670–1870 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 55. 35. Jácobo de la Pezuela, Historia de la isla de Cuba, 160–178. See also Sergio O. Valdéz Bernal, “El aporte Maya y Nahua a la modalidad cubana de la lengua española,” Signos Lingüísticos 8, 16 (2012): 59–96. According to Cuban scholars, the term “guachinango” was used by Cubans to refer to immigrants, particularly Amerindians and mestizos, from Mexico. Evidence from the Papeles de Cuba in the AGI indicates that colonial officials in Cuba categorized Amerindians and mestizos specifically as Guachinangos, and as clearly distinct from white, black, and other forzados. See for example, Don Francisco Xavier de Ripalda, Conde de Ripalda, Capitán del Regimiento Infantería de Lombardia teniente de Governador, y Capitán de Guerra de esta Ciudad de la Trinidad y villas anexas Juez Subdelegado de la Intendencia General de Ejército y Real Hacienda por Su Magestad de España, al Capt.-Gen. de Cuba, Marqués de la Torre, report, Trinidad, Cuba, nd (1772), AGI, Papeles de Cuba 1174. See also Enrique Sosa Rodríguez, “Aproximaciones al estudio de la presencia yucateca en La Habana a partir de algunos libros en archivos parroquiales: apreciaciones,” in Habanero Campechano, ed. Enrique Sosa Rodríguez et al., (Merida: Ediciones de la Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán, 1991), 29–30. The precise origin of the term continues to be debated. Danna Levin Rojo and Sergio O. Valdéz Bernal agree that “Guachinango” is a Náhuatl derivative. Levin Rojo, however, argues further that it is a mispronunciation of the Náhuatl word Cuauchinanco, the name of an important settlement in the region of Pánuco today called Huauchinango (another mispronunciation), and that the word may have arrived in Cuba in association with the enslaved Huastecos, this probably being the reason why it was adopted on the island as a more general nickname (personal communication, August 2015). 36. Cited in Antonio J. Valdés, Historia de la Isla de Cuba y en especial de la Habana, vol. 1 (Havana: Oficina de a Cena,  1813), 342. See also Sosa Rodríguez, “Aproximaciones al estudio de la presencia yucateca en La Habana,” 35–36. 37. Van Deusen, Global Indios, 85–86.

836   Borderlands of the Iberian World 38. Francisco Pérez Guzmán, “Las fortalezas de La Habana, 1538–1789,” in La Habana/ Veracruz, Veracruz/La Habana: las dos orillas, ed. Bernardo García Díaz and Sergio Guerra Vilaboy (Veracruz: Universidad Veracruzana, 2002), 146–147. 39. Jennings, “State Enslavement in Colonial Havana,” 153. 40. Robert Patch, Maya Revolt and Revolution in the Eighteenth Century (New York: M.E. Sharpe, 2002), 126–182 on the 1761 Maya rebellion led by Jacinto Uc. 41. Cited in Jennings, “State Enslavement in Colonial Havana,” 154, 162. See also citation in Le Riverend, “Relaciones entre Nueva España y Cuba (1518–1820),” 99. Notably, concerning the broader dynamic of indigenous slave importation, Le Riverend refers to “el tráfico de esclavos y semiesclavos” from New Spain to Cuba. See, for example, p. 96. 42. See Actas de cabildo de Matanzas, c. 1790 Archivo Histórico Provincial de Matanzas, Cuba (AHPM). 43. Cited in Emilio Roig de Leuchsenring, ed., La dominación inglesa en La Habana. Libro de Cabildos, 1762–1763 (Havana: Oficina del Historiador de la Ciudad de La Habana, 1962), 72–73. See also, the numerous Revista de Estado reports for the 1760s through 1780s, AGI, Santo Domingo 1222; Cited in Jennings, “State Enslavement in Colonial Havana,” 162–163. 44. This is the criminal section of the audiencia or royal court. Colin MacLachlan, Criminal Justice in Eighteenth Century Mexico (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), 21–36; See, for example, court records for October and December 1780, Archivo General de la Nación (hereafter AGN), Expediente 019, Criminal, Caja 5723, Instituciones Coloniales/Indiferente Virreinal. 45. Other locations include Texcoco, Puebla, Guanajuato, and Querétaro. 46. Lista de los reos que por la Real Sala de Crimen de esta Nueva España se hallan posteriormente determinados al servicio de S.M. en las fortificaciones de La Havana, December 22, 1780, AGN, Expediente 019. For a more detailed discussion of this dynamic, see Jason Yaremko, Indigenous Passages to Cuba, 1515–1900 (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2016), 98–104. 47. Cited in Roig de Leuchsenring, Libro de Cabildos, 72–75, 80–82. See also Francisco Pérez de la Riva, “Cuban Palenques,” in Maroon Societies: Rebel Slave Communities in the Americas, Richard Price, ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University, 1979, 2nd ed.), 50–57. 48. Roig de Leuchsenring, Libro de Cabildos, 74. 49. Roig de Leuchsenring, Libro de Cabildos, 116–117. 50. Alejandro de la Fuente, “Slaves and the Creation of Legal Right in Cuba: Coartación and Papel,” Hispanic American Historical Review 87, no. 4 (2007): 659–692. 51. For a more thorough treatment of Spanish policy and indigenous struggles with colonial rule in the northern provinces, see Max Moorhead, “Spanish Deportation of Hostile Apaches,” 205–220; William Griffen, Apaches at War and Peace: The Janos Presidio, 1750–1858 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998, reprint of 1988 edition); Cynthia Radding, Wandering Peoples: Colonialism, Ethnic Spaces, and Ecological Frontiers in Northwestern Mexico, 1700–1850 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997); Mark Santiago, The Jar of Severed Hands; Juliana Barr, Peace Came in the Form of a Woman: Indians and Spaniards in the Texas Borderlands (Chapel Hill: UNC, 2007), and Sara Ortelli, Trama de una guerra conveniente: Nueva Vizcaya y la sombra de los apaches, 1748–1790 (Mexico: El Colegio de México, 2009). See also Andrés Reséndez, “Borderlands of Bondage.” 52. Christon Archer, “The Deportation of Barbarian Indians,” 377.

Indigenous Diaspora, Bondage, and Freedom   837 53. Santiago, The Jar of Severed Hands, 201–202. 5 4. Noticia del Repartimiento de Mecos y Mecas Remitiendo en el Navio de Guerra San Ramon, nd (ca. 1801), AGI, Papeles de Cuba 1716. 55. See, for example, Gabino La Rosa Corzo, Runaway Slave Settlements in Cuba: Resistance and Repression (Chapel Hill: UNC, 1988), 88–89. 56. David Weber, Bárbaros: Spaniards and Their Savages in the Age of Enlightenment (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 238. 57. Weber, Bárbaros, 238. 58. James Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990). 59. See Nelson Reed, The Caste War of Yucatan (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1964); Javier Rodríguez Piña, Guerra de castas: la venta de los indios mayas a Cuba, 1848–1861 (Mexico: CONACULTA, 1990); Izaskun Álvarez Cuartero, “De Tihosuco a la habana: la venta de indios Yucatecos a Cuba durante la guerra de castas,” Studia Historica. Historia Antigua 25 (2007): 559–576, and Terry Rugeley, Rebellion Now and Forever: Maya, Hispanics, and Caste War Violence in Yucatán, 1800–1880 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009). 60. Declarations of proceedings held in 1860 in Campeche: Testimonios, c. 1860, AGN, Justicia, exp. 274, vol. 149. 61. Letter to Gobierno Superior Civil, January 20, 1862; Fernando de Levan to Gobierno Superior Civil, November 2, 1862, Archivo Nacional de Cuba (hereafter ANC), legajo 643, n. 20318, Gobierno Superior Civil. 62. “Havana,” in Correspondence with the British Commissioners at Sierra Leone, Havana, the Cape of Good Hope, and Loanda, and Reports from British Vice-Admiralty Courts and from British Naval Officers Relating to the Slave Trade, April 1, 1859 to March 31, 1860 (London: Harrison and Sons, 1860), 14. 63. Laird W. Bergad, Cuban Rural Society in the Nineteenth Century: The Social and Economic History of Monoculture in Matanzas (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 259. 64. Colonos Yucatecos, June 9, 1849, Biblioteca Nacional de España (hereafter BNE), MSS 13857, fols. 154–155, pp. 149–150. 65. See Colonos Yucatecos, 1948–1949, BNE, MSS 13857. See also Jennings, “Some Unhappy Indians Trafficked by Force,” 219–220. 66. Testimonios, c. 1860, AGN, Justicia, exp. 274, vol. 149. 67. Manuel Arroyas to Governor-Captain-General of Cuba, August 20, 1859, ANC, legajo 640, no. 20225, Gobierno Superior Civil; González Navarro, Raza y tierra: la Guerra de castas y el henequén (Mexico: El Colegio de México, 1970), 127–129. 68. See, for example, Ultramar, Presidencia del Consejo de Ministros to Governor—CaptainGeneral, November 11, 1853, ANC, legajo 172, no. 327, Reales Cédulas y Ordenes; Sección de Fomento, [1860], ANC legajo 641, no. 20249, Gobierno Superior Civil. 69. Karen  D.  Caplan, Indigenous Citizens: Local Liberalism in Early National Oaxaca and Yucatan (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), 200–210. 70. José Arturo Güemez Pineda, “Everyday Forms of Maya Resistance: Cattle Rustling in Northwestern Yucatan," in Land, Labor and Capital in Modern Yucatan: Essays in Regional History and Political Economy, ed. Jeffrey T. Brannon and Gilbert M. Joseph (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1991). 7 1. Ultramar, Presidencia del Consejo de Ministros to Governor—Captain-General, November 11, 1853, ANC, legajo 172, no. 327, Reales Cédulas y Ordenes; to Gobierno Politico,

838   Borderlands of the Iberian World [1860], ANC legajo 641, no. 20249, Gobierno Superior Civil. See also Yaremko, Indigenous Passages, chapter 5. For more on indigenous use of legal recourse see Brian Owensby, Empire of Law and Indian Justice in Colonial Mexico (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008) and Ethelia Ruiz Medrano, Mexico’s Indigenous Communities: Their Lands and Histories, 1500–2010 (Boulder: University of Colorado Press, 2010). 72. Declaración de Da. María Lucía Cámara, July 13, 1861, ANC, legajo 640, no. 20224, Gobierno Superior Civil. 73. Juan A. Cosculluela, Cuatro años en la Ciénaga de Zapata (Havana: Impresa y Papelería “La Universal,” de Ruiz y Ca., 1918), 238–240. 74. Deborah E. Kanter, “Their Hair Was Curly: Afro-Mexicans in Indian Villages, 1700–1820,” in Crossing Waters, Crossing Worlds: The African Diaspora in Indian Country, ed. Tiya Miles and Sharon  P.  Holland (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 169; Yaremko, Indigenous Passages, 165–169. 75. Cosculluela, Cuatro años en la Ciénaga de Zapata, 238–240. 76. Secretaría Política to Governor—Captain-General of Cuba, July 20, 1859; Jefatura Superior de Policia to Governor—Captain-General, November 23, 1859, ANC legajo 640, no. 20225, Gobierno Superior Civil. See also the series of correspondence and reports in ANC legajo 641, no. 20248, Gobierno Superior Civil. 77. Lee  J.  Alston, Shannon Mattiace, and Tomas Nonnenmacher, “Coercion, Culture, and Contracts: Labor and Debt on Henequen Haciendas in Yucatan, Mexico, 1870–1915,” The Journal of Economic History, 69 (2009): 108–110; Inés de Castro, Cantones y comandantes: una visión diferente de la guerra de castas desde la región de los pacíficos del sur (Campeche: Publicaciones de la Universidad Autónoma de Campeche, 2007), 131–174; Piedad Peniche Rivero, La historia secreta de la hacienda henequenera de Yucatán: deudas, migración, y resistencia maya, 1879–1915 (Merida: Instituto de Cultura de Yucatán, 2010), and Renán Irigoyen, “El henequén en el época colonial,” in Yucatán: Historia y cultura henequenera— Surgimiento, auge, revolución y reforma, ed. Eric Villanueva Mukul (Merida: Instituto de Cultura de Yucatán, 2010). 78. Wolfgang Gabbert, Becoming Maya: Ethnicity and Social Inequality in Yucatán since 1500 (Tucson: University of Arizona, 2004), 70. 79. Karen Mahé Lugo Romera and Sonia Menéndez Castro, “Yucatán en la Habana: migraciones, encuentros, y desarraigos,” La Jiribilla: revista de cultura cubana, September (2007). Accessed July 2010, http://www.lajiribilla.co.cu/2007/n333_09/333_04.html; Victoria Novelo, Yucatecos en Cuba (Mexico: Casa Chata, CIESAS, Instituto Cultura de Yucatán, 2009), 111–117. 80. Rebecca  J.  Scott, Slave Emancipation in Cuba: The Transition to Free Labor, 1860–1899 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), 212.

Bibliography Archer, Christon. “The Deportation of Barbarian Indians from the Internal Provinces of New Spain, 1789–1810.” The Americas 29 (1973): 376–395. Blackburn, Robin. The Making of New World Slavery. London: Verso, 1997. Bojórquez Urzaiz, Carlos. “El Barrio de Campeche en La Habana.” Cuadernos culturales 5 (1994): 19–34.

Indigenous Diaspora, Bondage, and Freedom   839 Cosculluela, Juan A. Cuatro años en la Ciénaga de Zapata. Havana: Impresa y Papelería “La Universal,” de Ruiz y Ca., 1918. De la Pezuela, Jácobo. Historia de la Isla de Cuba, t. 2. Madrid: Ed. Bally-Bailliere, 1868. Jennings, Evelyn Powell. “Some Unhappy Indians Trafficked by Force: Race, Status, and Work Discipline in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Cuba.” In Human Bondage in the Cultural Contact Zone: Transdisciplinary Perspectives on Slavery and Its Discourses, edited by Raphael Hormann and Gesa Mackenthun, 209–226. New York: Waxmann, 2010. Jennings, Evelyn Powell. “State Enslavement in Colonial Havana, 1763–1790.” In Slavery Without Sugar: Diversity in Caribbean Economy and Society Since the Seventeenth Century, edited by Verene Shepherd, 152–182. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002. Jennings, Evelyn Powell. “State Slavery in the Atlantic Economy: the Case of Cuba in the Late Eighteenth Century.” Paper presented at the Conference of the Program in Early American Economy and Society, Philadelphia, Library Company of Philadelphia, September 19, 2003. LeRiverend Brusone, Julio. “Relaciones entre Nueva España y Cuba (1518–1820).” Revista de Historia de América 37–38 (1954): 45–108. MacLeod, Murdo. Spanish Central America: A Socio-Economic History, 1520–1720. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010. Moorhead, Max. “Spanish Deportation of Hostile Apaches: The Policy and the Practice.” Journal of the Southwest 17 (1975): 205–220. Reséndez, Andrés. “Borderlands of Bondage,” in The Oxford Handbook of Borderlands of the Iberian World, edited by Danna A. Levin Rojo and Cynthia Radding, 571–589. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019. Roig de Leuchsenring, Emilio ed. La dominación inglesa en La Habana. Libro de Cabildos, 1762–1763. Havana: Oficina del Historiador de la Ciudad de La Habana, 1962. Rushforth, Brett. Bonds of Alliance: Indigenous and Atlantic Slaveries in New France. Chapel Hill: UNC, 2012. Santiago, Mark. The Jar of Severed Hands: Spanish Deportation of Apache Prisoners of War, 1770–1810. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2011. Sosa Rodríguez, Enrique. “Aproximaciones al estudio de la presencia yucateca en La Habana a partir de algunos libros en archivos parroquiales: apreciaciones.” In Habanero Campechano, edited by Enrique Sosa Rodríguez, Carlos  E.  Bojórquez Urzaiz and Luis Millet Cámara, 27–62. Mérida: Ediciones de la Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán, 1991. Valdés, Antonio J. Historia de la Isla de Cuba y en especial de la Habana, vol. 1. Havana: Oficina de a Cena, 1813. Van Deusen, Nancy E. Global Indios: The Indigenous Struggle for Justice in Sixteenth-Century Spain. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015. Wright, I. A. The Early History of Cuba, 1492–1586. New York: Macmillan, 1916. Zavala, Silvio. “Nuño de Guzmán y la esclavitud de los indios.” Historia Mexicana 1, no. 3 (1951): 411–428.

chapter 34

Im pact on th e Spa n ish Empir e of th e Russi a n I ncu rsion i n to the North Pacific, 174 1–1821 Martha Ortega Soto Translated by Pilar Ortega

In the first decades of the eighteenth century, the Northwestern border of the Spanish Empire was not clearly defined. Spaniards considered that their colonization of the provinces of Sonora and Antigua California was not yet complete, while there were hardly explored territories farther North where they wanted to establish new settlements. The Spanish occupation of this region took place gradually and was supported mainly by two institutions: missions and presidios. The alliance between the Spanish Empire and France during the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763) allowed Spaniards to learn about the presence of Russian hunters and traders in the Aleutian Islands and small continental enclaves. Once the war was over, the Spanish metropolitan government launched reforms aimed at strengthening its imperial structures. One of the many problems to be solved was the protection of the northwest provinces of New Spain from potential Russian invasions. Neither the Spanish nor the Russian governments knew exactly how close their settlements were, but Spain claimed that Russians were invading its territory in northwestern America. By the early 1770s, Russian hunters had explored and exploited the Aleutian Islands, the Privilov Islands, the Shumagin Islands, the Kodiak Island, and the Alaskan coast near the last two, besides carrying out some operations at the Yakutat Bay. That is, they had not yet explored lands south of the 70° North latitude, approximately. The lack of real knowledge of the northwestern coast of North America resulted

842   Borderlands of the Iberian World in a territorial dispute leading the Spanish Crown to colonize the land north of the California Peninsula and to explore the northwestern Pacific coast, in order to locate Russian settlements and take control of places unoccupied by Europeans. Marine expeditions to this American coastal area (expediciones de altura) showed the enormous distance between Russian settlements and Alta California missions and presidios. The first expedition, commanded by navy second lieutenant Juan Pérez, took place in 1774. The Santiago frigate reached 49° 30’ N, in the Nootka Bay, without finding any Russians. The second marine expedition to this region was carried out the following year. Navy lieutenant Bruno de Heceta was in command of the expedition, accompanied by Juan Pérez as second pilot, again in the frigate Santiago; it was accompanied by a consort vessel, the Sonora, commanded by lieutenant Francisco de la Bodega y Quadra and Antonio Maurelle as second pilot. The ships got separated, and only de la Bodega y Quadra sailed as far as 58° North, where Mount Edgecombe is located. Again, they found no Russian settlement. A third expedition was conducted in 1779, led by navy lieutenant Ignacio Arteaga in the frigate Nuestra Señora del Rosario, alias La Princesa. Nuestra Señora de los Remedios, alias La Favorita, was the consort ship, commanded by Juan Francisco de la Bodega y Quadra. They sailed up to 57° 8’ North and found no Russian establishment either. In all three journeys Spaniards exchanged trinkets and information with natives—all of them classified as “Indians of the Northwest Coast”—but none of these groups told them anything about the Russians.1 The popularity of James Cook’s journal on his third expedition to the Pacific Ocean (1776–1780), combined with the unsuccessful results of the first eight expeditions and the news about the presence of English traders in northwestern America led Spaniards to carry out a fourth expedition, now commanded by second lieutenant José Esteban Martínez and pilot Gonzalo López de Haro, in 1788.2 They arrived at the Island of Trinidad (55° 44’ N), where they found a Russian settlement. Delarov, their host, told them a Russian colony was about to arrive there, so following De Haro’s recommendation, lieutenant Martínez sought to verify this information. Delarov showed him a map presenting the Russians’ locations. In order to prevent Russians from going southward, the Spanish Crown authorized the founding of a mission in Nootka, in what is currently the Vancouver Island. This decision resulted in a diplomatic conflict with Great Britain, known as the Nootka Controversy that was solved by the signing of the Treaty of El Escorial (1790). This document set the northwest boundary of New Spain, leaving Nootka under British control and the unexplored territory opened for any other country’s occupation. The Russian Imperial government at the same time defended the legitimacy of the penetration of its subjects in America but took no responsibility for their actions. Afterward, in 1799 it approved of the creation of the Russian-American Company (RAC) in order to consolidate its possession of the discovered territories and defend its commercial interests. By the late eighteenth century, there were no conflicts of interest between Russia and Spain. However, difficulties between them reemerged when, in 1812, the Russian-American Company established Fort Ross in Bodega Bay, in the province of Alta

Spanish-Russian Borderlands in the North pacific   843 California. Thus, the border conflict between Russians and Spaniards for Northwestern America has two stages: 1760–1789 and 1812–1821. Explaining the way both imperial governments understood their territorial borders is crucial for a better understanding of how these different visions resulted in conflicts between them. This requires an exploration of how borders were set by traditional empires, which did not clearly define their frontiers but kept them open and relocated them according to the control they exerted upon dominated peoples. This situation changed throughout the eighteenth century as the states involved negotiated and closed their frontiers to prevent the free movement of people and goods and to efficiently control the exploitation of natural resources even at the expense of the inhabitants of the territories under their jurisdiction. A complete picture of the limits between the Russian and Spanish empires in North America must look into the relationships that their subjects and authorities established with native peoples, since the existence of these relations meant natives were considered subjects as well because they lived within the empires’ borders. Such relations played a fundamental role when those empires tried to demonstrate they were in possession of certain territories. The mere presence of Russians and Spaniards in northwestern America was not enough for other governments to consider their territorial claims as legitimate: Both Russians and Spaniards needed to create bonds with the Amerindian peoples and colonize the physical space to make their frontiers visible. The complexity in analyzing how both empires defined politically their frontiers in the context of their territorial dispute makes a profound discussion of their relations with natives a difficult task for a brief article. Nevertheless, identifying the native peoples affected by Russian expansion is important. Aleuts and Inuits were the first Native Americans to coexist with Russians; based on linguistic and anthropological features, these peoples are considered different from American Indians.3 In the period under discussion Tlingits, a group categorized as part of the so-called American Indians of the Pacific Northwest, were also inhabitants of Russian colonies. In addition, the Miwok and the Kashaya Pomo lived in a territory where Russians settled, at Bodega Bay. The period herein covered goes from the arrival of Vitus Bering’s second expedition (1741–1742) in the northwest coast of America to the independence of New Spain from the Spanish Empire. Historiography on this topic has been written at least from three different perspectives: history of Russian America, history of Alta California, and history of the North Pacific. A wide variety of studies has been produced based on these three geographical areas, posing different problems and using diverse methodologies. Many of these works are not aimed at discussing specifically the issue of the frontier as a territorial limit, as a space for exchange, or as a node of human networks.4 But they refer to it indirectly. There is no study of the territories called Alta California or Russian America that overlooks the fact that this was a borderline space far from economic and political centers of power. It is on this basis, therefore, that their history has been constructed. Relevant historiography for the North Pacific Ocean, in turn conceptualized as a place where exploration and trade networks—originating from both Asia and America— crossed and created a link between their coasts, deals with communication between the

844   Borderlands of the Iberian World Asian Russian coast and the settlements in northwestern America as well as with maritime routes in the region. There is still a fourth perspective: one that analyzes the diplomatic relations between the Spanish and Russian empires. Historiography has paid more attention to the way these empires handled foreign affairs in Europe than to their conflicts in the North Pacific. Nonetheless, these works must be studied to understand how both imperial powers conceptualized their borderlines, despite the fact that they neither negotiated nor set a precise limit while Alta California and Russian America existed. The long ­process of conceptualization and creation of an inter-imperial frontier between Russian America and the Spanish Empire has been widely studied in the last twenty years, and a lot of primary sources have also been published. But there are still many unpublished documents in different archives to be commented on. Published sources are mainly written in one of the following languages: English, Russian, or Spanish. Many of the sources originally in Spanish and Russian have been translated into English since they recount the history of territories that are currently part of the United States or Canada; for instance, the journal of the first Russian circumnavigation trip was published in English in 2003.5 Two important collections dealing with the relationship between Californios and Russians, including diplomatic documents published in Spanish in 1990, however, have not been translated.6 As for documents published in Russian, a 1960–1970 collection on nineteenth- and twentieth-century Russian foreign policy is also fundamental for this topic.7

Protection of New Spain’s Northwestern Frontier One feature of the Russian Empire was its territorial expansion eastward. The conquest of Siberia started in the fifteenth century and came to an end in 1649, when the exploration of the Kamchatka Peninsula took place. Trading pelts, from sables and silver foxes, for instance, in Europe and China was a critical factor in accelerating Russian expansion.8 These products were in such demand that Russian hunters and traders decided to venture into the Aleutian Islands and then along the coast of the Alaskan Peninsula to satisfy the demand for furs. Reports from the Governor of Siberia, as well as the pelts that the Tsar received as tax or tribute payment, triggered Peter I’s decision to verify scientifically the geographical connection between Asia and America. Thus, in 1719 he ordered the Academy of Sciences to organize an exploratory expedition. Commanded by Vitus Bering, it took place between 1725 and 1730, and came to be known as the First Kamchatka Expedition. Even though the only finding was that Asia and America were separate pieces of land, Cossacks and traders from Eastern Siberia continued to carry out their own explorations.

Spanish-Russian Borderlands in the North pacific   845 Reports led the Russian Government to order the Second Kamchatka Expedition, also commanded by Bering. Aleksei Chirikov led the consort ship that reached the American coast in 1741. He did not disembark but met some natives sailing their canoes and submitted the first report on the results from the Second Kamchatka Expedition to the Academy of Sciences. Meanwhile, Bering reached the Gulf of Alaska, but shortly afterward his ship sank and the captain died. Georg Steller was one of the survivors who returned to the port of Okhotsk, in Kamchatka.9 He elaborated the first description of a native settlement in the Kayak Island. The recently published book by Lydia T. Black, Russians in Alaska, 1732–1867, presents an innovative interpretation of Russian colonies in America. Black collected a number of sources that allowed her to distinguish the interests of various associations of traders sponsoring and taking part in the discovery and colonization of the Aleutian Islands and the coast of Alaska. She explains how these associations were always in fierce competition and how the state acted as mediator among them. Black succeeded in unraveling the nature of the relations among Eastern Siberia traders, thus shedding new light on previously unclear details of these relations. She also contributed to clarify Russians’ exploitation of both natives and natural resources, precisely on account of their urgent will to gain the highest profits.10 Ilya Vinkovetsky’s approach is also innovative because of his analysis of Russian America as a unique territory within the Russian Empire, since it was located beyond the Pacific Ocean.11 This circumstance required the implementation of policies different from those applied in Asia. The study of the differences between the control exerted by the Russians upon the Asian and American peoples led him to place an emphasis on the influence of Spaniards upon domination strategies used in Russian America. Vinkovetsky also discusses in depth an aspect previously overlooked: The sociopolitical classification of Creoles, a term that Russians learned from Spaniards but applied differently, to mixed-race Russian/Native people, and which they did not use in either Asia or Europe.12 In order to understand the foundations of Russian expansion and the relationships among the peoples in the northwest coast, new approaches analyze the networks existing prior and after such expansion and cross-imperial contact. This is the case of the book edited by Benedict J. Colombi and James F. Brooks.13 This includes papers exploring the Asian and American societies that based their survival on salmon. Becoming aware of their exploitation of a marine resource helps to understand the intercultural interaction of non-agricultural societies from a perspective requiring interdisciplinary research. Once Russian entrepreneurs, both hunters and merchants, learned about the prey in the North Pacific, they began to carry out hunting expeditions to the Aleutian Islands. Between 1742 and 1799, numerous expeditions visited these islands, and from 1789 on, they also reached the coast of the American continent. During this period, trips were financed by traders, whose only purpose was to obtain great amounts of pelts. Russians established transient camps, which they dismantled once they obtained what they wanted. They established relations with natives to make them work on their behalf and pay tribute to the Tsar in the form of pelts. Some works, such as those by Coxe or

846   Borderlands of the Iberian World Tihkmenev, are already classics about this period.14 In his book Empire of Extinction, R.  T.  Jones examines the ecological consequences of the Russian expansion, which affected both natives and Russians themselves.15 He developed a thorough investigation about the fauna and flora that disappeared, and the modification of the ecological landscape when the “sea cow” (rhytina borealis) (as Russians called it) became extinct. The imperial government found the exploitation of pelts a highly profitable business. That is why Russia wanted to keep secret the advance of its subjects in the North Pacific. But that proved to be impossible. In 1761, the Spanish government sent an Ambassador to the Russian Court to verify the still unproven news of the arrival of Russians in America.16 European geographic knowledge at the time was insufficient to ascertain the distance between Spanish possessions and Russian settlements. For this reason, the Spanish Crown thought Russians were invading Spanish territories. In this period, neither the Spanish nor the Russian empires had clearly outlined frontiers. Except for the border negotiated between Russia and China in 1689, the limits of the Russian possessions, like those of the Spanish, were unclear. The vagueness of their borderlines and their ignorance of the northwest coast geography led Spaniards to fear an invasion, while Russians kept going south as long as they did not find any European settlement. Reports confirming rumors reached Madrid. These reports and the respective instructions sent by metropolitan authorities to the viceroys of New Spain have been published in Mexico.17 Since the Spanish Crown considered it urgent to protect its territories in the northwestern region of the viceroyalty, it encouraged the colonization of Alta California with the purpose of establishing a defense barrier against a potential Russian invasion.18 Spaniards also organized naval expeditions, beginning in 1774, with the intention of delineating the coast, from San Francisco Bay to wherever the Russians had arrived, locating their settlements and gaining some knowledge about them. Collected data would allow Spaniards to take necessary action to protect the viceroyalty and, if possible, expel Russians from what the Spanish Crown considered its territory, even if yet unoccupied. Journals from these expeditions can be found at the Archivo General de Indias, in Seville, the Archivo General de la Nación and the Fondo de Origen at the Biblioteca Nacional de Mexico, among other repositories. Thus, research on the North Pacific where exchanges and relations among different native peoples and states interested in the area converged, requires collecting information from diverse archives. A good example is the work by Salvador Bernabéu, who has published, among other documents, the three journals of the well-known Spanish ship pilot Francisco de la Bodega y Quadra.19 Just as they had gained the attention of the Spanish government, Russian activities in the North Pacific and in northwestern America triggered the interest of the British, who were searching for a water passageway from their colonies in North America to the Pacific Ocean. While looking for supplies in his third exploration voyage, James Cook arrived in Onalaska, where he found a Russian settlement and confirmed that hunters obtained pelts from the Aleutian Islands and part of Alaska. Cook also explored and described a significant part of that territory.20 Competition between Russia and England

Spanish-Russian Borderlands in the North pacific   847 for American pelts had an impact on the Spanish Empire, whose officials were already quite aware of British interest in undermining Spanish control of maritime routes between America and Asia across the Pacific.21 When Viceroy Manuel Antonio Flores learned about the reports from the expedition conducted by Martínez and López de Haro in 1788—mentioned in the introduction of the present work—he ordered a colonizing expedition to the port of Santa Cruz de Nutka, as Spaniards called it. This place was chosen because, according to previous explorers, natives were friendly and Delarov told Martínez that people from England and the United States used to go there to trade with its inhabitants, from whom they obtained great quantities of pelts. One interpretation is that Delarov provided Martínez with all this information for two purposes: On the one hand, to impress Spaniards and thus prevent them from obstructing Russian activities; on the other, to depict the British and Americans as shared enemies and propitiate an alliance against them since they competed with Russians for pelts and at the same time purportedly invaded Spanish territory. It seems this was a successful strategy: in May 1789, Martínez and López de Haro arrived at the port and proceeded to found the Spanish town. While the building of the settlement was under way, an expedition commanded by James Colnett, sent by John Meares’s English company arrived bearing instructions to settle precisely in the same place. Martínez made the British prisoners and sent them to the capital of New Spain to be judged as invaders. Martínez’s actions triggered a diplomatic row between Spain and Great Britain.22 The British Government demanded compensation for the damage caused to its subject’s property and to repair the arbitrary actions committed against Colnett. To both Spain and Great Britain, the real problem was essentially setting the limit of the Spanish Empire in Northwestern America. At the beginning of the 1790s, the Spanish Government faced a difficult situation in Europe. Neither the alliance with France against England in the conflict for the possession of Sicily and Sardinia, nor its attempt to recover the Strait of Gibraltar had proved successful. The French Revolution (1789) complicated the situation, since the Spanish government could not decide whether to maintain its alliance with France, remain neutral, or stand against the revolution. Finally, in 1790 it made a pronouncement against the French revolutionaries, but these hesitations weakened its position before the British government. Thus, on October 28, 1790, the Treaty of El Escorial was signed, establishing among other things that British subjects had no right to settle or trade south of the furthest territory effectively colonized by Spaniards. This is why New Spain’s viceroy, the Second Count of Revilla Gigedo, supported the permanence of the town of Santa Cruz de Nutka: effective occupation was necessary to legitimize territorial claims.23 In 1792 a joint Spanish–British expedition was conducted to define the Spanish frontier, with Juan Francisco de la Bodega y Quadra representing the Spanish government and Georges Vancouver representing the British.24 It should be noted that the expedition commanded by Alejandro Malaspina (1789–1794) to that region had purely exploratory purposes, and took no action related to this conflict. Meanwhile, New Spain made extremely expensive efforts to maintain the settlement at Nootka. Once again, the political

848   Borderlands of the Iberian World situation prevailing in Europe had an impact on the situation at northwestern America. Since the government of the French Convention was in war against Spain, its natural ally was Britain, therefore the Spanish government had to concede to British interests concerning Nootka. In 1793 and 1794, both parties signed two agreements; the second forced the Spaniards to leave the town of Santa Cruz, a colonizing enterprise that had been a failure anyway, since the Nootka chiefs never accepted trading with Spaniards or Spanish settlements.25 After the Nootka controversy was solved, the Spanish Crown accepted Bodega Bay as the northwestern border of its American possessions. Permanent Spanish settlements existed there, and the native population was under Spanish control: or, at least, held regular relations with Spanish subjects and authorities. Nonetheless, neither the Treaty of El Escorial nor later agreements set a precise frontier for New Spain in the north. The diplomatic conflict between the Spanish and the Russian empires faded due to the agreements that Spain signed with Great Britain, which led the former to give up the territory located north of Alta California—although a precise limit was not defined. Therefore, the first stage of the dispute over the border between Spain and Russia came to an end even though Russia did not take part in the solution of the conflict.26

The Border of the Russian Empire in America In 1799, the Russian-American Company (RAC) was founded, by authorization of Tsar Paul I. It was Grigori Ivanovich Shelikhov who submitted the proposal for its foundation a decade earlier, in 1788, the same year that Martínez and López de Haro met with the Russians.27 Five years earlier, this merchant from Irkutsk had established a small settlement on the Kodiak Island. Besides organizing hunting parties, he assembled natives to profit from their work while teaching them Russian customs. Shelikhov realized pelt trade was declining due to the growing competition of merchants from England and the United States. The activities of British and American traders had a negative impact on Russians, because they hunted directly and offered the natives more appealing and less expensive products: this made it more difficult for Russians to negotiate and force them to provide a tribute to the Tsar.28 In order to avoid the interference of competitors, Shelikhov asked for the government’s protection by the creation of a trading company that would hold a monopoly on the exploitation of furs in that region. After arduous proceedings and having listened to countless opinions, the Tsar supported the plan presented by Shelikhov and his partner, Ivan Golikov.29 They proposed to integrate natives to the colonial society to be established, applying the Russian experience in their dealings with the peoples from the taiga and tundra during the Russian expansion in Siberia and America itself. The decree issued on July 8, 1799, specified the RAC’s internal organization, the communication mechanisms to be followed with the imperial government, its rights and liabilities, operative regulations and the relations

Spanish-Russian Borderlands in the North pacific   849 it should keep with natives.30 The RAC had the Tsar’s protection, and licenses were granted for twenty years, subject to renewal. The RAC brought about a radical change in the administration of the territories incorporated into the Russian Empire. It was managed by a board of directors based in Irkutsk and later Saint Petersburg. The board was composed of four directors, whose obligation was to inform the Tsar of all the company’s affairs. Since one of the main shareholders was Shelikhov’s widow—he had died in Irkutsk, on July 31, 1795—one of the directors was a man she fully trusted: Mijail Matveevich Buldakov. Nikolai Petrovich Rezanov was appointed representative of the board of directors at Saint Petersburg. He was Shelikhov’s son-in-law and, in practice, he protected the RAC.31 The RAC held the commercial monopoly of pelts both within the empire and with foreign merchants. The company was endowed with the power to establish commercial relations with any state and hire services for navigation or hunting plus carry out any other business related to fur trade. It also had control over natives and held the right to hire them as hunters or purchase from them everything they offered. The RAC could also hire Russian workers or servants. The company had the obligation to integrate natives into colonial society. It was supposed to encourage them to abandon their lifestyle and learn governmental principles.32 The company’s main commitment was to convert natives to Christianity, so it had to establish and support Orthodox missions.33 Russian methods for integrating natives to colonial society were similar to those employed by Spaniards, who also converted them to Christianity and taught them the Iberian way of life. In an interesting book, Kent G. Lightfoot carried out a comparative analysis of Spanish colonization in Alta California and Russian colonization in northwestern America, using both archaeological and historical sources.34 The RAC was authorized to establish towns wherever it was deemed to be relevant. There, Russians, natives, and Creoles would coexist, and foreigners would be excluded. It could also explore and take possession of the lands it discovered on behalf of the Russian Empire south of 55° North latitude, as long as they were not under the control of any other European nation.35 This clause of the decree that created the company shows that this was the frontier acknowledged by the Tsar for its colonies in America because anywhere north of this latitude already belonged to the Russian Empire—therefore the license granting the company rights over that land. The RAC’s board of directors appointed Aleksandr Baranov its manager in America. He had previously worked for Shelikhov and Galikov. Baranov organized the work of Aleut and Inuit hunters, built towns with the purpose of effectively controlling the territory under the jurisdiction of the RAC, and established constant relations with foreign merchants, particularly those from the United States visiting the colonies. He could not totally prevent the hunting and commerce by Americans that Russians regarded as illegal because it occurred within their colonies: that is, in the territory they considered theirs on account of their having discovered it and then subjugated its inhabitants. Nevertheless, Baranov made great efforts to control them. In order to force natives to participate in their hunting activities, Baranov and his men confiscated their boats and only allowed their use when they had to carry out a task assigned by the RAC. Baranov decided where they could hunt, so Aleuts frequently had

850   Borderlands of the Iberian World to work near the continent, in lands they were not familiar with, and whose inhabitants began to harass them for serving the Russians. For instance, the Tlingit, whom the Russians called “Kolosh,” made the hunters sent by Baranov from Kodiak prisoners. Since “slaves,” understood as captives were usually slaughtered in Tlingit ceremonies, Russians struggled to rescue them.36 Besides, the habit of sending natives to different places resulted in their being forced to settle outside their homeland.37 The labor force mainly used by the RAC was composed of Aleuts, who were already subjugated when the company was created.38 The Inuits from the Kodiak Island and Yakutat Bay were already dominated by Shelikhov when he founded a town in the Kodiak Island. Inuits also took part in hunting activities but were not as skilled as Aleuts. Coastal Inuits and northwest Indians negotiated with Russians but did not submit to domination by the company or by the few Russian settlements that had been founded there.39 When the RAC began to administer the Russian colonies, there were still Russian hunters who obtained their furs independently. To purchase them, Baranov had to respect the prices fixed by the board of directors. Sometimes the governor had to pay more in order to prevent Russian hunters from selling their pelts to foreign merchants, who paid higher prices. Little by little, Russian hunters were forced to sell their furs to the RAC, so they wound up working for it. They joined the company as shareholders, so they received a percentage of the profits according to the number of shares they possessed and were paid for their pelts, too.40 The RAC was also responsible for the ever-growing population of Creoles. It had to provide Creoles with housing, clothing, food, and education so they could later work for the company, either in local management or developing agriculture and stock breeding.41 Baranov laid the foundation for the relations with US sailors, who served as carriers of the RAC. One of the worst problems faced by the company was the lack of supplies, since the ships sent from Kamchatka with common food in the Russian diet—such as bread, butter, cream, and tea, among others—frequently wrecked. This shortage worsened when the Napoleonic Wars in Europe started.42 To solve this problem, the board of directors ordered the governor either to build ships in Russian America or to secure transport otherwise. The solution consisted in hiring US sailors, who were neutral concerning the European wars and had previously transported supplies as well as pelts to Russia or Guangzhou. In 1803, Joseph O’Cain proposed to Baranov carrying out a joint hunt in the coast of the Californias.43 O’Cain would provide the ship and the Russian governor would provide Aleuts. They made a deal and this operation proved successful, since California natives very seldom hunted sea mammals. Because hunting expeditions carried out by US sailors and Russians resulted profitable, they continued to take place until 1815. Meanwhile, the authorities from Las Californias reported this situation to their superiors, who responded by increasing the number of soldiers from the Catalonia Company of Volunteers but sent neither ships nor weapons to protect those lands as they had none. Captains of presidios caught some Aleuts, whom they called “Russian Indians,” and made them prisoners as an exemplary punishment. Nonetheless, they stopped detaining them because their sustenance was extremely expensive.44

Spanish-Russian Borderlands in the North pacific   851 Business with US sailors alleviated but did not solve supply shortage in Russian America, therefore Rezanov proposed another solution: to conduct circumnavigation expeditions that would depart from the Baltic Sea, cross via Cape Horn to the Pacific, and go all the way north to Russian America. That would bring food but would not require going through the winding route from Russia to Kamchatka across Siberia and then crossing the North Pacific by ship, a path that was highly dangerous and took two years.45 Some other directors at the RAC also considered it convenient to establish commercial networks with other places in the Pacific such as Japan, the Sandwich Islands, or Alta California, but they only succeeded in the case of the Spanish colonies. When Count Rezanov was sent to Russian America in 1805 he found a hungry population, so he decided to travel to Alta California in order to get food and open trade between both colonies.

Defense of the Spanish Border in Alta California By the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Spanish colonization of Alta California was consolidated. Along the coastal strip occupied by colonizers, there were eighteen missions inhabited by two Franciscan missionaries each and an ever-changing native population, since a lot of neophytes died there, but the friars were always trying to recruit new natives to replace those who died. There were four presidios to ensure safety at the province. Three towns with colonists from Baja California, Nueva Galicia, Sonora, and Sinaloa had been founded. There were also around fourteen ranchos where cattle were raised. Most of their owners were retired presidio soldiers. Settlements were located along the coast, from the port of San Diego to San Francisco Bay. The population, formed by natives at the missions, mestizos as colonists and presidiales, and some Spaniards—such as presidio captains and the Governor of Las Californias—was approximately twenty thousand inhabitants. Land was so fertile that the production of cereals (mainly wheat and corn) legumes, and vegetables was plentiful. Livestock (bovine, ovine, and equine) had grown surprisingly well. The main problem this province faced was that land routes to communicate with the Gobernación of Sonora and Sinaloa as well as with New Mexico were almost exclusively used by natives. The principal path used to reach the viceroyalty was the sea route from San Blas, located north from the Intendencia of Guadalajara, to Monterey. Once a year, one or two supply ships would arrive, with manufactured goods such as clothes, farming implements, religious objects, and foodstuffs like wine, brown sugar, or chocolate. These goods were paid with the sínodo (resources the Crown allocated to the missions) and the situado, which included the wages of presidial soldiers. Supply ships were supposed to purchase products from Alta California and sell them in other provinces of the viceroyalty. Nevertheless, these ships only received a small quantity of products, for there was not a market for them elsewhere in New Spain. Thus, the inhabitants of this region, mainly the colonists, worked

852   Borderlands of the Iberian World for nothing: their stables were filled with grains and dried meat that they were unable to sell so as to acquire manufactured products that would make life easier.46 Both the governor and the friars repeatedly requested viceregal authorities to remedy this situation, arguing that neither colonists, or soldiers or neophytes had any clothing to wear, since there were no craftsmen at Alta California to manufacture goods. During that time, American or English merchants frequently stopped at the coast of Alta California and practiced smuggling. Local inhabitants could not help but take part in this illegal activity, since it was the only way to sell their products and be capable of buying what they needed. It was in this context that Rezanov reached San Francisco Bay in 1805. The count was happily received by locals, eager to purchase the manufactured goods the Russians offered in exchange for food. Governor José Joaquín de Arrillaga objected to the exchange, for it was forbidden by the Spanish Crown. Finally, Arrillaga agreed to a one-time sale of food to the Russian colonies. Upon his return north, Rezanov ordered Baranov to send an expedition to locate a suitable place for establishing a Russian advance party to grow cereals and bring them to the Russian colonies. It should also promote trade between them and Alta California.47 In his report for the Tsar and the company’s board of directors, Rezanov stated that Alta California produced a great amount of cereals that could feed the population of the Russian colonies. He enthusiastically mentioned the large quantity of cattle, a part of which was annually sacrificed to keep manageable herds. He also pointed out that Russians could sell all kinds of manufactured products to Californios. Rezanov also hoped that if the Spanish Crown and the Tsar allowed trade between Russian America and Alta California, US traders would soon be out of business on the northwest coast of America.48 He suggested the foundation of a small settlement on that coast, since the military forces at San Francisco were very weak. He emphasized that this settlement would work for collecting the otter pelts and food bought from Californios before sending them north. In addition, Russians could practice agriculture.49 In 1808, Baranov sent Ivan A. Kuskov, in a ship called Kodiak, in a voyage to explore the coast north from San Francisco and identify a suitable place to build a town devoted to agriculture. Kuskov arrived in Bodega Bay with 40 Russians, 130 Aleuts, and 20 Indians. They built a transient camp. Then, the following year, there was an incursion of Aleuts into San Francisco Bay, where they hunted otters. Even though they were attacked by presidio soldiers, Aleuts returned to Russian America with around 2,350 pelts.50 According to Kuskov, Bodega Bay was the right place to build a fort. Meanwhile, the RAC’s board of directors, with the Tsar’s approval, authorized the establishment of an outpost in Alta California. They were to try to avoid any diplomatic conflicts.51 Thus, in 1810 Kuskov delivered an invitation, signed by the RAC, for Spaniards to trade with Russians, claiming this exchange would benefit both colonies but the authorities of Alta California simply ignored this invitation. The following year, Kuskov returned to Bodega Bay via the ship Chirikov. He was accompanied by two US ships, and the purpose of this voyage was to hunt sea otters. Kuskov established friendly relations with the Miwok and Kashaya Pomo Indians, who inhabited that region. Once he obtained

Spanish-Russian Borderlands in the North pacific   853 the Indians’ consent—communicated by signs—to settle there, the Russian officer started building. On August 30, 1812, Ivan A. Kuskov officially founded Fort Ross, with ninetyfive Russians, a group of Aleuts, and ten cannons.52 It was located in Bodega Bay—called Rumiantsov by Russians—at 38° 30’ North and 123° 15’ West, close to the Slavyanka River. The governor of Alta California reported the event to New Spain’s Viceroy, requesting help to evict the Russians.53 Immediately, the metropolitan government sent protest letters to the Tsar, demanding that Russians vacate the fort since it was located in Spanish territory. Nonetheless, war in Europe prevented the Regency government from exerting further pressure, as it had more urgent problems to solve. Later, the government imposed by Napoleon did not address the matter at all. The ups and downs of war in Europe impeded metropolitan authorities from taking decisive action against the Russians in Alta California. On the contrary, they asked the viceroy to be prudent and avoid problems with Russia, which was allied with Spanish resistance against French occupation. When the Napoleonic Wars ended, the Restoration government revisited this issue and sent a protest note dated April 17, 1817. The Tsar took no responsibility for the establishment and claimed it had been built by the initiative of the RAC in a territory that belonged, ultimately, to natives instead of Spaniards. To support this affirmation, the RAC ordered commander Leontii Hagemeister to go all the way south to Fort Ross during his trip to Russian America and sign a treaty with the Indians by which they ceded the territory occupied by the establishment. Hagemeister achieved it.54 In addition, the Russian ambassador in Madrid asked the Spanish government to cede the occupied lands to the company. The Spanish government could not accept divesting part of its territory.55 In view of the de facto settlement of Fort Ross, in 1820 the Russian representative in Spain sent a letter to his Minister of Foreign Affairs stating that circumstances were favorable to negotiate a trade agreement between both empires.56 Nonetheless, the liberal rebellion in Spain that took place that same year prevented negotiations. The following year, New Spain won its independence from Spain. The lack of military support during the Napoleonic occupation of Spain led the Governor of Alta California to make his own decisions: In 1810 he sent presidio soldiers from San Francisco to Fort Ross, commanded by lieutenant Gabriel Moraga, to find out what Russians were doing and to gauge their willingness to trade. In January 1813, Moraga and his men traveled again to investigate the number, conditions, and precise location of the Russians and took the opportunity to trade with them due the fact that no supply ships had arrived in Alta California since the beginning of the independence war in 1810.57 Thus, there were more than enough agricultural and livestock goods but a lack of manufactured products in that province. Informal trade was therefore established between Alta California and Fort Ross. Californios sold the products that Russians needed, while receiving manufactured goods and technical support. In August of that same year, the viceregal government notified Governor Arrillaga that Russian occupation was illegal, so he was to retake the area. Gabriel Moraga was sent for the third time (1814) to Fort Ross. He carried no weapons and was supposed to meet Kuskov and demand that the Russians leave, since they were invading Spanish territory.58

854   Borderlands of the Iberian World Taking into account the military weakness of the Californios, Kuskov stated that Russian presence at Bodega Bay was legitimate and that he would not leave the fort unless he received specific orders from the governor of Russian America. He also requested the liberation of the Aleuts made prisoners by Spaniards and that they be sent to Fort Ross. The same was to be done with deserters who had asked for the protection of the commander of San Francisco.59 At first, the authorities of Alta California were opposed to this idea, since the hunters had committed a crime. But feeding them was rather expensive, so the governor and commanders pondered that keeping the prisoners as a strategy to exert pressure on the RAC was useless. Therefore, claiming this was a token of friendship, they delivered some prisoners to Captain Otto von Kotzebue in 1816, when he visited Alta California on his first circumnavigation journey.60 Russian sailors’ visits to Alta California resulted in abundant information about the natives of the San Francisco Bay, and even other parts of the province. E. A. Okladinokova has studied the ethnographic information collected by expedition members, pointing out their historical and anthropological richness.61 Fort Ross was inhabited by Russians and surrounded by the homes of Aleuts or “Russian Indians.” Little by little, the Kashaya Pomo joined them as farmers, since neither Russians nor Aleuts knew how to produce food in that environment. They grew cereals—though in small amounts because the land was not suitable—fruits and some vegetables. Otter and seal furs, as well as the products bought in Alta California, were collected in Fort Ross and then sent north when there were available ships. Sea lions, whose meat and fat were consumed by the inhabitants of Fort Ross, were hunted in that area. Eggs were collected—and sent north—at the Farallon Islands, where a tiny Russian factory was located. Farming implements were sold at the fort, and all kinds of repairs were performed, since both Russians and Aleuts were skilled craftsmen. The classic study by Svetlana G. Fedorova offers a demographic reconstruction of Russian America, Fort Ross, and its surroundings. According to her estimates, Fort Ross was inhabited by about twenty-five Russians, a hundred Aleuts, and the natives who worked for them.62 Later, a dock and then a shipyard were built at the site. The ships called Rumiantsov (1818) and Buldakov (1819) were built there. Among the most outstanding craftsmen were saddlers and blacksmiths, essential in the manufacture and fixing of ships and tools.63 There were no workers with similar skills in Alta California; mission Indians made goods for their own usage but none to satisfy the needs of colonists and soldiers.64 In its early years, Fort Ross seemed to meet the expectations of the RAC’s board of directors. Nevertheless, by the end of the decade some naval officers criticized its location because in their opinion the surrounding land was not suitable for growing crops, disembarking at the bay was difficult, and the nearby forest was thin. Thus, Kuskov and Baranov were disqualified because of their decision.65 Despite the fact that Aleksandr Baranov had created the institutional structure of the RAC in America, in 1815 Buldakov decided he should be replaced.66 Meanwhile, Tsar Alexander I wanted the navy to be in charge of the colonies in America on account of the danger the Napoleonic Wars had posed. Thus, he ordered Captain Leontii Hagemeister to travel to Russian America,

Spanish-Russian Borderlands in the North pacific   855 monitor the governor, and dismiss him in case he deemed it necessary. Hagemeister arrived in the American colonies in 1818, and two months later he replaced Baranov.67 But he held the position only for a few months and then appointed Lieutenant Semion I. Ianovski as his successor. From the removal of Baranov on, all governors of Russian America were officers of the imperial fleet. In 1815, Pablo Vicente de Solá became Governor of Las Californias. One of his objectives was to expel Russians from Fort Ross. He sent Boris Tarankov (or Tarasov), who was in prison for organizing the parties of Aleuts that hunted in the Alta California coast, to Mexico City. Solá wanted Tarankov, the highest-ranking Russian captured, to be prosecuted.68 Nonetheless, Viceroy Felix Maria Calleja set him free to avoid problems with the Russian government, which supported the restoration of the Bourbons in Spain. Shortly after Solá held a meeting with Kuskov, a meeting that Captain Otto von Kotzebue also attended. The Russian explorer did not report what happened at the meeting, but Russians did not abandon Fort Ross. Solá and the captain at the San Francisco presidio insisted on the illegal nature of the Russian occupation, quite unsuccessfully since neither Viceroy Calleja nor the king of Spain wanted to risk antagonizing the Tsar. Spanish policy was contradictory: in 1817 the viceroy received a royal order to expel Russians from Fort Ross. In a second report, Solá stated that the execution of this order would be impossible unless he was sent weapons in good condition and infantry reinforcements.69 As he received no favorable answer, Solá freed all imprisoned Russians and “Coriacs or Koriaques.”70 Two years later, the governor was ordered to monitor hunters and tell them, when they approached Spanish territory, that the Spanish g­ overnment disagreed with their actions, so in the future the Russians could not affirm that the Crown had accepted their presence. Yet no positive action was taken to expel them.71 Californios adapted to the situation and even took advantage, as they had to trade with foreigners in order to live according to Spanish standards. In 1819, the RAC requested the Tsar to renew its privileges. The government considered it necessary to define the frontier of its possessions in America and to establish regulations for trade with foreigners.72 That same year, the Spanish monarchy signed the Transcontinental Treaty with the US government, setting the northern border limit of New Spain. Fort Ross was within the Spanish border, so the delimitation of the northern frontier of New Spain did not solve the problem of the Russian invasion. When in 1821 the RAC got the renewal of its privileges for twenty more years, the company no longer struggled with the Spanish government because Mexico had gained its independence. Thus, this second stage of the disputes concerning the frontiers ended, just like the first, without effective negotiations between the representatives of Spain and the Tsar of Russia. Problems between them disappeared because, due to third parties’ interests, the definition of the northwestern frontier of New Spain was negotiated first with the British and over twenty years later with the United States. Such ambiguity is explained by the fact that the concept of a frontier as the demarcation of a territory that establishes who is inside or outside a state only spread and was applied gradually; prior to the eighteenth century this notion was rarely used by traditional states.

856   Borderlands of the Iberian World

Notes Archives AGI: AGN: AVPRI: BNM: RGADA: RGIA:

Archives Archivo General de Indias, Seville (Spain) Archivo General de la Nación, Mexico City (Mexico) Arkhiv Vneshnei Politiki Rossiiskoi Imperii, Moscow (Russia) Biblioteca Nacional de México, Mexico City (Mexico) Rossiiski Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Drevnikh Aktov, Moscow (Russia) Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi Istoricheskii Arkhiv, St. Petersburg (Russia)

1. Salvador Bernabéu Albert, Viajes marítimos y expediciones científicas españolas en el Pacífico septentrional (1767–1788) (PhD diss., Universidad Complutense de Madrid, 1989). Bernabéu’s work on the North Pacific and Northwest America is comprehensive and thorough. 2. Breve informe de Gonzalo López de Haro sobre los acontecimientos acaecidos durante el viaje de exploración al noroeste de América en el que se desempeñó como capitán del paquebote El Filipino, enviado al virrey de Nueva España, San Blas, 28 de octubre de 1788. Copia México 26 de diciembre de 1788 certificada por Bonilla. Biblioteca Nacional de México (BNM), Fondo de origen, 1638, 47 pages. 3. See Amy Turner Bushnell, “Patterns of Food Security in the Prehispanic Americas,” in The Oxford Handbook of Borderlands of the Iberian World, edited by Danna A. Levin Rojo and Cynthia Radding, 31–55 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019). 4. J. R. McNeill and William H. McNeill, Las redes humanas. Una historia global del mundo (Barcelona: Crítica, 2004), 1. 5. The First Russian Voyage Around the World. The Journal of Hermann Ludwig von Löwenstern, (1803–1806), trans. Victoria Joan Moessner (Fairbanks: University of Alaska Press, 2003). 6. Miguel Mathes, La frontera Ruso-Mexicana. Documentos mexicanos para la historia del establecimiento ruso en California 1808–1842 (Mexico: SRE, 1990); Martha Ortega and Aleksander Sisonenko, comp., México y Rusia en la primera mitad del siglo XIX., prol. Héctor Cárdenas (Mexico: SRE, 1990). 7. Ministerstvo Inostrannikh Del SSSR, Vneshniaia politika Rossii XIX i nachala XX beka. Dokumenti Rossiiskogo Ministerstva Inostrannikh Del. 1 seria, t. I–VIII (Moscow: Gosudasrvennoe izdateltsvo politicheskoi literaturi, 1960–1970). 8. Martha Ortega Soto, “Origen de un imperio: cómo el estado ruso llegó a la cuenca del Pacífico” (PhD diss., Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana Unidad Iztapalapa, 2014). 9. Steller, G.B., Iz Kamchatki v Ameriku. Byt i nraby kamchadalov v XVII veke (Leningrad: Izdatel’stvo, [1928]). 10. Lydia T. Black, Russians in Alaska 1732–1867 (Fairbanks: University of Alaska Press, 2004). 11. Ilya Vinkovetsky, Russian America. An Overseas Colony of a Continental Empire, 1804–1867 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). 12. Vinkovetsky, Russian America, 46, 142–149. 13. Benedict J. Colombi and James F. Brooks, eds., Keystone Nations. Indigenous Peoples and Salmon across the North Pacific (Santa Fe: SAR Press, 2012). 14. William Coxe, Account of the Russian Discoveries between Asia and America to Which are Added, the Conquest of Siberia, and the History of the Transactions and Commerce between Russia and China (New York: University Microfilms, 1966); P. A. Tikhmenev, A History of

Spanish-Russian Borderlands in the North pacific   857 the Russian-American Company, trans. and ed. Richard A. Pierce and Alton S. Donnelly (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 1978). 15. Ryan Trucker Jones, Empire of Extinction. Russians and the North Pacific’s Strange Beast of the Sea, 1741–1867 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). 16. Martha Ortega Soto, “En busca de los rusos: expediciones novohispanas al noroeste del Pacífico 1774–1788,” in La presencia novohispana en el Pacífico insular, coord. Ma. Cristina Barrón and Rafael Rodríguez Ponga (Mexico: Universidad Iberoamericana, Embajada de España en México, Comisión Puebla V Centenario, Pinacoteca Virreinal 1990), 127–128. 17. Enrique Arriola Woog, Sobre rusos y Rusia. Antología documental (Mexico: Lotería Nacional para la Asistencia Pública, 1994), 25–34. 18. Íñigo Abbad y Lasierra, Descripción de las costas de California, ed. and study by Sylvia L. Hilton (Madrid: CSIC, Instituto “Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo,” 1981), 32–80 and 119– 180; Martha Ortega Soto, Alta California: una frontera olvidada del noroeste de México 1769–1846 (Mexico: UAM-Iztapalapa, Plaza y Valdés, 2001), 23–80. 19. Juan Francisco de la Bodega y Quadra, El descubrimiento del fin del mundo (1775–1792), ed., intro. and notes Salvador Bernabéu Albert (Madrid: Sociedad Quinto Centenario, Alianza Editorial, 1990). 20. James Cook, A Voyage to the Pacific Ocean Undertaken by the Command of His Majesty, for Making Discoveries in the Northern Hemisphere. Performed Under the Direction of Captains Cook, Clerke, and Gore. In His Majesty’s Ships the Resolution and Discovery in the Years 1776, 1777, 1778, 1779 and 1780, v. II (London: Printed by H. Huges, 1785); Martha Ortega Soto, “Crisis en Nutka: el ocaso de las Bulas Alejandrinas,” in La presencia novohispana en el Pacífico insular, coord. Ma. Cristina Barrón and Rafael Rodríguez Ponga (Mexico: INBA, CONACULTA, Embajada de España en México, Comisión Puebla V Centenario, Centro de Estudios de Historia de México, Condumex, Universidad Iberoamericana, 1992). 21. For the competition between Russians and the British see John R. Bockestoce, Furs and Frontiers in the Far North. The Conquest among Native and Foreign Nations for the Bering Strait Fur Trade (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009). 22. Héctor Cárdenas and Evgeni Dik, Historia de las relaciones entre México y Rusia (Mexico: SRE, Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1993), 31–50. 23. Martha Ortega Soto, “Nutka: punto estratégico de comercio y colonización,” Signos. Anuario de Humanidades VII, I (1993): 51–69. 24. Voyage to the Northwest Coast of America, 1792. Juan Francisco de la Bodega y Quadra and the Nootka Sound Controversy, trans. Freeman M. Tovell, ed. Freeman M. Tovell, Robin Inglis, and Iris H. W. Engstrand, foreword Chief Michael Maquinna (Norman: The Arthur H. Clark Company, 2012). The editor made and published this translation because he considers it an essential document for the northwest frontier of the Spanish Empire in America. 25. Under the heading “Noticias de Nutka,” between 1957 and 1958 the Boletín del Archivo General de la Nación, México published these documents, in three parts; they are preserved in the Archivo General de la Nación, México (hereafter AGN) Ramo de Historia, vol. 31, 275–317v. The author’s name is missing, but it collects news from Cook’s journal for the information of the captains of the 1788 expedition mentioned above. “Noticias de Nutka,” Boletín del Archivo General de la Nación (México: Secretaría de Gobernación, 1957– 1958), vol. XXVIII, no. 4: 707–736; “Noticias de Nutka,” Boletín del Archivo General de la Nación (México: Secretaría de Gobernación, 1958, vol. XXIX, no. 1: 70–81; “Noticias de Nutka,” Boletín del Archivo General de la Nación (México: Secretaría de Gobernación, 1958, vol. XXIX, no. 2: 269–292.

858   Borderlands of the Iberian World 26. Ignacio Ruiz Rodríguez, La formación de las fronteras estadounidenses en América española (Madrid: Dykinson, 2013) shows how Spain gradually moved its North American frontier southward. 27. G. Shelikhov, Puteshestvie G. Shelikhova s 1783 no 1790 god iz Okhotska po Vostochnomu Okeanu k amerikanskim beregam (Saint Petersburg: V Tipografii Gubernskago Pravleniia, 1812). 28. Tikhmenev, A History of the Russian-American Company, 12. 29. All the documents from the lengthy proceedings and opinions that Shelikhov’s request elicited, especially from the Governor of Ikutsk but also from other officials that were written down so that the Tsar or his ministers could study or sign them are kept at the Russian State Archive for Ancient Acts, based in Moscow. The opinions from the governors of Irkutsk were the most sought after by the imperial government. See Copii dbukh donesenii general-gubernatora Irkutskovo i Kolyvansovo namestnichestv Ivana Adgapas’evla Pilia Ekaterine II o torgovoi kompanii puteshestvennikov Grigorie Ivanovicha Shelikhova i Golikova, otkpabshikh berega Ameriki i Aleutskie ostrova. 1 to 13 February 1790. Rossiiski Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Drevnikh Aktov -Russian State Archive for Ancient Acts- (hereafter RGADA), f. Vorontsovykh, op. 1, d. 1433. 30. Akt ob uchrezhdenii Rossisko-Amerikanskoi torgoboi kompania. August 3, 1798, RGADA, f. Vorontsovykh (1261), op. 1, d. 794, gody 1798. This is a draft of the final document. 31. Natalia Shelikhova, Russian Oligarch of Alaska Commerce, ed. and trans. Dawn Black and Alexander Yu Petrov (Fairbanks: University of Alaska Press, 2010); N. N. Bolkhavitinov, Stanovlenie russko-amerikanskie otnoshenii 1775–1815 (Moscow: Nauka, 1966), 307. 32. Doklad’ kommerts’-kollegii po irodmetu uchrenideniia Rossisko-Amerikanskoi Kompanii. January 11, 1799, RGADA, f. Vorontsevykh (1261), op. 1, d. 797, 10. 33. In fact, the Articles of Incorporation stated, as the first one, that the purpose of the RAC was to convert American natives to Christianity, Akt ob uchrezhdenii Rossisko-Amerikanskoi torgoboi kompania. 3 avgusta 1798, RGADA, f. Vorontsovykh (1261), op. 1, d. 794, g. 1798. 34. Kent G. Lightfoot, Indians, Missionaries, and Merchants. The Legacy of Colonial Encounters on the California Frontiers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006). 35. Bolkhavitinov, Stanovlenie russko-amerikanskie otnoshenii 1775–1815, 306; Tikhmenev, A History of the Russian-American Company, 54–55. 36. Tikhmenev, A History of the Russian-American Company, 68, 113, 143. 37. R. G. Liapunova, “Primeros contactos con los aleutianos,” in Destinos cruzados: cinco siglos de encuentros con los amerindios, ed. Joëlle Rostkowski and Silvie Deveres (Mexico: UNESCO, Siglo XXI, 1996), 402. 38. James  R.  Gibson, “European Dependence upon America Natives: The Case of Russian America,” Ethnohistory, 25, no. 4 (1978): 362–364. 39. R. G. Liapunova and Federica de Laguna figure among the most well-known and productive writers who work on the peoples that interacted with Russians. For a first approach to the American Indians, see Carl Waldman, Atlas of the North American Indian (New York: Checkmark Books, 2000). A suitable text to begin the study of this topic is Erna Gunther, Indian Life on the Northwest Coast of North America. As Seen by the Early Explorers and Fur Traders During the Last Decades of the Eighteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972). 40. Doklad’ kommerts’-kollegii po irodmetu uchrenideniia Rossisko-Amerikanskoi Kompanii. January 11, 1799, RGADA, f. Vorontsevykh (1261), op. 1, d. 797, fs.5 y 15. This report on the RAC one year after its creation deals with the installment of the company, the circumstances

Spanish-Russian Borderlands in the North pacific   859 prevailing in the Russian colonies prior to its founding, and relations among merchants from Eastern Siberia and Russian hunters. 41. Tikhmenev, A History of the Russian-American Company, 144. 42. N. N. Bolkhavitinov, Rusia y América (ca. 1523–1867) (Madrid: Edit. Mapfre, 1992), 194. 43. Ortega, Alta California: una frontera olvidada del noroeste de México 1769–1846, 179–182. 44. Miguel Mathes, La frontera Ruso-Mexicana, 65–80; Ortega and Sisonenko, México y Rusia en la primera mitad del siglo XIX. 45. “Doklad Ministra Kommertsii N. P. Rumiantzeba Aleksandru I. 27 March (8 April) 1803,” in Ministerstvo Inostrannikh Del SSSR, Vneshniaia politika Rossii XIX i nachala XX beka. Dokumenti Rossiiskogo Ministerstva Inostrannikh Del, t. I, doc. 166, 403–405. 46. Ortega, Alta California: una frontera olvidada del Noroeste de México, 1769–1846, 23–185; Stephen  G.  Hyslop, Contest for California from Spanish Colonization to the American Conquest (Norman: Oklahoma, The Arthur H. Clark Company, 2012), 33–110. 47. Ortega, Alta California: una frontera olvidada del Noroeste de México, 1769–1846, 182–183. 48. Report with no title or signature [1808], in: Archive of Foreign Policy of the Russian Empire (hereafter AVPRI), f. Glavi. Arj. II-3, 1805–1811, d. 8, op. 34, 6–12. 49. Lightfoot, Indians, Missionaries, and Merchants. The Legacy of Colonial Encounters on the California Frontiers, 119. 50. Mathes, La frontera Ruso-Mexicana, 6. 51. Bolkhavitinov, Rusia y América (ca. 1523–1867), 206. 52. Diane Spencer-Hancock and William E. Pritchard, “Notes to the 1817 Treaty Between the Russian American Company and the Kashaya Pomo Indians,” California Historical Quarterly 59, no. 4 (1980–1981): 306–313. 53. For a brief overview of the differences between the Russian and Spanish colonization, see Martha Ortega, “Ross: la colonización rusa frente a la Española,” in El septentrión novohispano: ecohistoria, sociedades e imágenes de frontera, ed. Salvador Bernabéu Albert (Madrid: CSIC, 2000), 123–137. For a detailed analysis of the coexistence among Indians, Spaniards, and Russians, see Lightfoot, Indians, Missionaries, and Merchants. The Legacy of Colonial Encounters on the California Frontiers. 54. Tikhmenev, A History of the Russian-American Company, 140; A los indios Gu-gu-an’, amantan’, chem’-le y otros. Fuerte Ross a 22 de septiembre de 1817, AVPRI, f. RAK, d. 308, fs. 11–12. 55. S. B. Okun’, Rossiiko-amerikanskaia companiia (Moscow and Leningrad: Leningradvskii Gasudartviennii Universitet, Istoricheskii Facultet Gasudasrvennoe Sotzialnoeconomicheskoe Izdatelstvo, 1939), 124–125. 56. Tatishev’s letter to Nesselrode. [Madrid], February 1820, AVPRI, f. Cancillería, d. 7562, fs. 54–55. 57. Ortega and Sisonenko, México y Rusia en la primera mitad del siglo XIX, documents 10–23, 39–60; Mathes, La frontera ruso-mexicana, documents 3–9, 73–79. James  R.  Gibson, (comp., trans and ed.), assistance of Aleksei A. Istomin, California through Russian Eyes 1806–1848 (Norman: The Arthur H. Clark Company, 2013) reproduces fragments of Russian documents referring to Alta California in English. 58. Hubert Howe Bancroft, “History of California 1801–1824,” vol. 2, in The Works, vol.19 (San Francisco: A. L. Brancroft and Company, Publishers, 1885), 303–304. 59. Mathes, La frontera ruso-mexicana, d. 16, 81–82. 60. Martha Ortega Soto, “América hispánica antes y después de la Independencia. Las visitas de Otto von Kotzebue a la Alta California, 1816 y 1824,” in A través del espejo: viajes, viajeros,

860   Borderlands of the Iberian World y la construcción de la alteridad en América Latina, coord. Lourdes de Ita and Gerardo Sánchez Díaz (Morelia: IIH-UMSNH, 2005): 321–332. 61. E. A. Okladnikova, “Etnograficheskie nabliudeniia russkikh moriakov, puteshestvennikov, diplomatov i uchenikh v Kalifornii v nachale i serednine XIX v,” in Russkaiia Amerika: no lichnym bpechatleniiam missionerob, zemleprokhodtzev, moriakov, issledovatelei I drygilh ochevidtzev, ed. A.D. Dridzo and R.V. Kinzhalov (Moscow: Mycl’, 1994), 244–343. 62. S.G. Federova, Russkoe naselenie Alaski i Kalifornii konetz XVIII veka-1867 g. (Moscow: Nauka, 1971), 183; English translation: The Russian Population in Alaska and California, Late 18th Century-1867 (Kingston: Limestone Press, 1973). 63. Okun’, Rossiiko-amerikanskaia companiia, 117; Tikhmenev, A History of the RussianAmerican Company, 134–136. 64. Among other documents corroborating this are the following: Informe de fray Isidro Alonso de Salazar al virrey Branciforte, México, May 11, 1796, AGN, Californias, vol. 49, primera parte, exp. 4, f. 193; Informe de Felipe de Goycoechea al Real Tribunal de Hacienda, S/L, August 23, 1803, AGN, Californias, vol. 49, primera parte, f. 450–450v; Informe de Arrillaga al virrey, Loreto, November 15, 1802, AGN, Californias, vol. 60, exp. 21, f. 272. 65. Fiodor F. Matiushkin, “Diario” quoted in Fiodor P. Wrangel, De Sitka a San Petersburgo al través de México. Diario de una expedición (13-X-1835 a 22-V-1836) (Mexico: SEP, 1975), 21–22. 66. O zagovore zdelannom’ v Amerike. Podpisali: Pervekstvuiushtii Direktor i Kavaler’ Mikhaili Buldakov’, Direktor’ Venedik’ Kamer’, Direktor’ Andrei Severin’, Provitel’ Kanzeliarii Zemnskii [1815] in: Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi Istoricheskii Arkhiv -Russian State Historical Archive-, Saint Petersburg (RGIA) f. 18, op. 5, d. 1224, 1815–1816, fs. 1–3. 67. Tikhmenev, A History of the Russian-American Company, 156–157. 68. Mathes, La frontera ruso-mexicana, d. 31, 49 and 50, 100, 118–119. 69. Juan Ruiz de Apodaca al Sr. Ministro de Estado. México, 30 de septiembre de 1818; Informe de Pablo Vicente de Solá al virrey. Monterrey, 3 de abril de 1818, In Archivo General de Indias (AGI), f. Estado, no. 32, 7–16. 70. Mathes, La frontera ruso-mexicana, d.53 and 54, 122–123. 7 1. Oficio dirigido al [virrey] firmado por Velasco, México, 5 de junio de 1819, AGN, ramo Californias, v. 37, pages 392, 395–396. 72. Protokol zasedania Komiteta v Sostave Ministra Finasov D. A. Gur’eva, i pravliaiusht evo Ministerstvom Bnutrenyj Del B. P. Kochybeia, upravliaiushtevo Ministerstvom Inostrannij Del  K.  B.  Nessel’rode and M.  M.  Speransovo. 22 August (3 September) 1821. In: SSSR, Vneshniaia polítika. . . , 2nd series, vol. 4, 267–270; Regulations Attached to the Ukase of September 13, 1821 (Extract) in: U.S. Senate Documents, v. 15, Alaskan Boundary Tribunal. Proceedings of the Alaskan Boundary Tribunal, Convened at London, under the Treaty between the United States of America and Great Britain, Concluded at Washington, January 24, 1903, for the Settlement of Questions between the Two Countries with Respect to the Boundary Line between the Territory of Alaska and the British Possessions in North America. 8 vols., part I. Appendix, 58th Congress, 2nd session, d. 162, 28.

Bibliography Bolkhavitinov, N. N. Rusia y América (ca. 1523–1867). Madrid: Edit. Mapfre, 1992. Bolkhavitinov, N. N. Stanovlenie russko-amerikanskie otnoshenii 1775–1815. Moscow: Nauka, 1966.

Spanish-Russian Borderlands in the North pacific   861 Lightfoot, Kent G. Indians, Missionaries, and Merchants. The Legacy of Colonial Encounters on the California Frontiers. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. Mathes, Miguel. La frontera ruso-mexicana. Documentos mexicanos para la historia del establecimiento ruso en California 1808–1842. Mexico: SRE, 1990. Ministerstvo Inostrannikh Del SSSR. Vneshniaia politika Rossii XIX i nachala XX beka. Dokumenti Rossiiskogo Ministerstva Inostrannikh Del. 1 seria. t. I–VIII, 2 seria. t. I–IV. Moscow: Gosudasrvennoe izdateltsvo politicheskoi literaturi, 1960–1970. “Noticias de Nutka,” Boletín del Archivo General de la Nación. México: Secretaría de Gobernación, 1957, t. XXVIII, no. 4: 707–736. “Noticias de Nutka,” Boletín del Archivo General de la Nación. México: Secretaría de Gobernación, 1958, t. XXIX, no. 1: 70–81. “Noticias de Nutka,” Boletín del Archivo General de la Nación. México: Secretaría de Gobernación, 1958, t. XXIX, no. 2: 269–292. Okun’, S.  B. Rossiiko-amerikanskaia companiia. Moscow and Leningrad: Leningradvskii Gasudartviennii Universitet, Istoricheskii Facultet Gasudasrvennoe Sotzialnoeconomicheskoe Izdatelstvo, 1939. Ortega, Martha, and Aleksander Sisonenko, comp. México y Rusia en la primera mitad del siglo XIX. Prologue by Héctor Cárdenas. Mexico: SRE, 1990. Ortega Soto, Martha. Alta California: una frontera olvidada del noroeste de México 1769–1846. Mexico: UAM-Iztapalapa, Plaza y Valdés, 2001. Shelikhov, G. Puteshestvie G. Shelikhova s 1783 no 1790 god iz Okhotska po Vostochnomu Okeanu k amerikanskim beregam . . . Saint Petersburg: V Tipografii Gubernskago Pravleniia, 1812. Tikhmenev, P. A. A History of the Russian-American Company. Translated and edited by Richard A. Pierce and Alton S. Donnelly. Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 1978. Trucker Jones, Ryan. Empire of Extinction. Russians and the North Pacific’s Strange Beast of the Sea, 1741–1867. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. US Senate, 58th Congress, 1903. Alaskan Boundary Tribunal. Proceedings of the Alaskan Boundary Tribunal, Convened at London, under the Treaty between the United States of America and Great Britain, Concluded at Washington, January 24, 1903, for the Settlement of Questions between the Two Countries with Respect to the Boundary Line between the Territory of Alaska and the British Possessions in North America. 8 vols. (Senate Documents, 58th Congress, 2d Session. Doc. No. 162, 15–20 vols.). Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1903–1904. Vinkovetsky, Ilya. Russian America. An Overseas Colony of a Continental Empire, 1804–1867. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.

Glossary

Acequia: Community irrigation canal or system of ditches with local governing regulations. Agroforestry: Long-fallow agriculture in the form of shifting cultivation, also known as forest colonizing. Aguardente (Portuguese): Alcohol made with sugar cane. Alcabala: Sales or excise taxes. Alcalde mayor: Political authority inferior to the governor, with jurisdiction over a province or district. In some cases, the alcalde mayor also had military authority. Aldeamento (Portuguese): A nuclear settlement in the colonial sphere, overseen by missionaries or civil authorities. Amo: Employer, master. Aviadores: Creditors who financed mining production. Azoguero: Ore refiner who manipulates mercury in a particular refining technique widely used in the Americas during colonial times. Barretero: Mining ore excavator. Biome: Plant and animal community of a major climatic zone or habitat. Boiling stones: A method used to boil water quickly with hot stones or balls of fired clay in order to cook food, including liquids. Cabecera: Head town or village within a mission province (cabecera de doctrina) or a locally governed indigenous jurisdiction (cabecera de gobierno), usually with religious or administrative faculties over a number of dependent settlements or sujetos. Some towns were both cabecera de doctrina and cabecera de gobierno. Cabildo: Town council. Cacique: Caribbean term for Indian chief that was disseminated throughout Spanish America. Capitulaciones: Contracts between the Monarch and individuals to carry out expeditions. Catchment area: A space that a collector would walk for a day to gather food supplies and break even in terms of energy expenditure. Collera: Chain gang of unfree laborers. Cuadrillas: Labor teams, often used in reference to mining.

864   glossary Cull killing: Practices among hunter and gatherer societies to reduce their longevity, including human sacrifice, lethal witchcraft, homicide, suicide, and senilicide. Ecotone: A transitional area between two or more ecological communities. Encomienda: A grant of native people for tribute or service to a colonial grantee with the requirement of providing for their needs including Christian doctrine. Enganchadores: Mine labor recruiters. Entrada: Conquest expedition. Forzado (noun): Forced laborer. Frontera de Arriba: Territory south of Araucanía, bordered by the Tolten River. Huilliches, Osornos, and Juncos inhabited this region, whose only Spanish presence was in Chiloe Island. Gastos de indios: “Indian expenses.” It refers to a budgetary category in Spanish America to pay for the expenses incurred by colonial authorities for hosting and entertaining visiting Indians in order to maintain peace. Gente de razón: “People of reason.” Non-indigenous peoples. In Sonora, Mexico, it referred to people who were not subject to the authority of the missionary. Gentío (Portuguese): Literally, “gentiles,” referring to non-Christian Indians. Guachinango: Colonial Cuban term for indigenous or mestizo migrant from New Spain/ Mexico. Hacienda de minas: Silver refining plant. Hidalgo/Hijodalgo: Lower nobility title that came from male linage and gave its holders certain privileges such as tax exemptions. Kelp highway: A sea route with marine resources. Landscape: Lived spaces created by human labor that hold both material and symbolic significance for their inhabitants. Lienzo: Indigenous pictorial document drawn on cotton or agave cloth. Língua geral (Portuguese): The Tupi-based lingua franca devised by the Jesuits in the sixteenth century and widely used in the Brazilian Amazon through the eighteenth century. Living fencerows: A line of trees planted along a riverbed in order to protect agricultural fields from floodwater, to trap sediment, shelter insect-eating birds, and to provide firewood. Maloca: An extended family group or band. In the South American frontiers the term also referred to expeditions cinducted by the Spanish to kill, harm or enslave Indians. Malones: Fast surprise attacks that Araucanos and other autonomous indigenous groups conducted against Spanish forts in the South American borderlands. Mato (Portuguese): Forest or jungle. Milpa: Cultivated plot of land, in which maize is intercropped with other cultigens.

glossary   865 Minero: The owner of a mine or a silver refining plant. Mobile of Aysén: Name given to the “endless islands to the Strait of Magellan,” or the insular southernmost part of South America, which was inhabited by maritime hunter-gatherer natives commonly known as austral canoeros. Nação (Portuguese): An Indian nation, based on the classification of indigenous groups according to phenotypic, territorial, or linguistic criteria. Nahuatlato: Native language interpreter in New Spain. The term derives from Náhuatl, the language that was adopted as lingua franca in this viceroyalty. Nixtamalization: Alkalinizing process by which dried maize is turned into hominy by boiling it in a weak solution of potash, lime, or alkaline salts to remove the pericarp. Padrón: Civil or ecclesiastical census. Partido (pepena): As part of their labor arrangement, a laborer’s share of ore. Patente: A military commission, often bestowed upon indigenous leaders who allied with the Portuguese. Postura: The price on goods set by authorities. Presidios: Frontier military garrisons. Principal: A native headman or ruler. Pueblo: Town. Pueblos sujetos: Villages under the jurisdiction of a head village, or cabecera. Raised fields: Orderly rows of elevated soil, with swales for drainage, that enabled the cultivation of swampy or seasonally flooded land and maintained it fertile. Rancherías: Name given by Spaniards to small non- or semi-sedentary indigenous settlements. Rancho de carbón: Charcoal production site. Real cédula: Royal charter or ruling. Real de minas: Mining camp, center for processing mining ore. Real Sala de Crimen: Royal criminal chamber of the high court. Real situado: Royal revenues that the viceroyalties of Peru, New Spain, New Granada, and Río de la Plata destined to finance frontier defenses against internal and external enemies. Reducción: The concentration or resettlement of indigenous peoples into villages or  mission pueblos. Regidor: An officer of a Hispanic town council who assists the alcalde in the administration of the town. Relación de méritos: Service and merit record usually presented in proceedings related to support the request made by a petitioner to the Crown.

866   glossary Repartimiento: Forced recruitment of indigenous peoples to labor in haciendas and mines for stipulated periods of time and a statutory wage. República de indios: A jurisdictional and administrative entity by which indigenous peoples were ruled. Road food: Rations of food supply packed by hunters and travelers, which allowed them to last weeks or months in their expeditions. Saçemis: Organized physical fighting between native peoples. Sertão (Portuguese): Backlands, wilderness, or frontier. Síndico: A member of the town council (cabildo), who defended the interests of the vecinos. Subsistence routines: Survival practices that use natural resources through foraging, hunting, land-based gathering, maritime gathering, swiddening, and nomadic pastoralism. Swidden: Small forest clearings with alternating periods of planting and fallow. Tenatero: Carrier of ore. Terracing: Soil management system for planting crops on mountain slopes, by erecting stone and rubble dikes or building dams across ravines to trap fertile earth and silt. Theorem of net energy: Principle used by anthropologists to define the limits of a human catchment area. It states that the energy expended to obtain a food cannot exceed the energy generated metabolically. Tierra adentro: The northern interior provinces, used primarily in New Spain. Toldería: A semi-sedentary indigenous village in the Spanish American southern frontier. The term comes from toldo, which is a tent built with a wooden structure covered with hides. Vecino: In relation to a census, a householder; non-indigenous landholder with civic status. Visita: Administrative tour inspection done by representatives of the Crown or ecclesiastical authority. Visitador: Inspector of a high court or district, diocese or religious order.

Index

Note: Tables and figures are indicated by an italic ‘t’ and ‘f ’, respectively, following the page number.

A

Abbeville, Claude d’  397, 405, 406 ABC islands  741–743, 745 See also Aruba, Bonaire, and Curaçao Acapulco  6, 299, 766–777, 784n59, 785n62, 795, 803 Acaxee, Indians  89, 90, 97, 103n46, 113, 116, 346, 347, 348, 349, 350, 379 Acazitli, Francisco Sandoval  144–145 acequia  69, 474, 477 Acosta, José de  510, 792, 793, 794, 795, 809n29 action-network theory  808n18 Actopan 824–825 Acuruza, José Gregorio  699 Africans  6, 9, 15, 163, 209, 241, 373, 384, 387, 400, 492, 745, 749–750, 817 bondage and  19 Cuban culture and  20n18, 183 diaspora  8, 831 fugitives  599, 604, 615 miscenegation and  242–243, 344, 359n3, 614–615 musical tradition and culture  527, 616 settlers  252, 593, 619, 822 slaves and free laborers  62, 63, 67, 242, 252, 299, 375, 378, 383, 384, 387, 420, 424, 571, 579, 582, 591, 593, 597–599, 614–615, 619–620, 622, 746, 818, 820, 822–826, 828–831 See also labor agaves  36, 38, 43, 59, 67, 864 Ágreda, María de Jesús de  511, 513, 515–519 Ágreda, Spain  513, 515, 516 agro-pastoral economy  598

Aguascalientes, Mexican state of  88, 142, 154n38 Ahumada, Pedro de  147 Aimoré, Indians  402 Akbar, Mughal Emperor  443 Akroá, Indians  592, 594–595, 597, 599, 602 Alaska  41, 803, 845, 846 Albuquerque, Alfonso de  445 Alcántara, Juana  828 alcohol  221, 386, 654, 704 aguardente  220, 420, 436n54, 598, 646, 652–653 drunkenness  186, 354 aldeias  214, 217, 597, 604 See also Brazil Aleutian Islands  32, 841, 844–846 Aleuts  32, 843, 849–850, 852–855 alliances among Native American groups  11, 15, 97, 246, 248, 325–326, 329, 332, 338n65, 415, 423, 653, 705 between Native Americans and Europeans, see Indian allies between Spain and France  252, 841, 847 between Spaniards and Russians  847 between Spaniards in Chile and Dutch  728–729, 730 interethnic  15, 133, 254 Alta Vista, archaeological site  89–90 Alvarado, Jorge  134 Alvarado, José Manuel de  280, 290n69 Alvarado, Pedro de  133, 136, 140, 143, 155n53, 157n74, 158n80, 164–165, 175, 179n34 Álvarez, Phelipe de Jesús  188, 190, 200 Álvarez, Nicolás María  188, 196, 200

868   index Alzaybar, Francisco de  682 Alzola, Domingo de, Bishop  509 amaranthus  38, 59, 67 Amazonia  34–35, 37, 42, 269, 405, 592, 597, 613–628, 653, 691–692, 700–701, 793 Amazon basin  61, 67, 70, 72, 209, 296, 613, 621, 624 Amazon river  6, 33, 40, 41, 593, 600, 613–615, 620, 623, 624, 647 Amazonian ethnography  415, 658n11 Andean Amazonia  691 Bolivian Amazonia  692–696, 703 central Amazon  626, 644–648 Portuguese Amazonia  613–628, 648 tropical lowlands and rain forest of  2, 60–61, 62, 614 Americas  1–9, 12, 14, 17–19, 31, 33, 35–41, 46, 57–58, 62, 64, 68, 73, 210, 242–243, 246, 249, 375, 397–398, 400, 406–408, 510–511, 513–514, 517, 519, 526–527, 529, 547, 571, 574, 578–581, 614, 621, 669–673, 681, 683, 692, 744, 748, 752–753, 765–767, 769–770, 778, 789–791, 793–795, 797, 799–800, 817–818, 827, 830–831 Analco, neighborhood in the city of Durango  494–495, 535 Anchieta, José de  400 Andes / Andean region  33, 63, 68, 73, 268, 269, 280, 283, 319, 321–322, 324, 545, 615 agriculture in  38, 40, 42, 59, 60, 68 cordillera  5, 11, 60, 71, 269, 271, 282–284 environmental history of  59, 60, 271 high inter-Andean valleys  321–322, 328 highlands  39, 42, 60, 72, 267–269, 271–272, 284, 695 puna  32–33, 44 South Andean space  19, 267–284, 333 trade routes and marketplaces in  3, 269, 272 See also Camino Real (capacñam) Andonaegui, Joseph  680, 685 Ángeles, Francisca de los  511, 513, 518–519 Anson, George  724, 726, 732 Apaches, Indians  123, 125, 165, 186, 199 map, 355, 464, 469–470, 474 map, 476, 529, 576 Apache frontier  170, 194, 358, 359

Apache threat  351, 478, 485n49 Apachería 477–478 captives  356, 576, 824 deported to Cuba  819, 824–827, 831 raids by  189, 198, 348, 485n46 and 49 Spanish compacts / alliances with  142, 195 war / defense against  174, 187, 190, 196 Apinaje, Indians  593–595, 596, 600, 602 Aquaviva, Claudio  792 Aquibuamea, Luis  188 Araguaia River, Brazil  593–595, 599, 601 Aranã, Indians  415, 423 Arana, Catalina de  513 Araucanía  9, 11–12, 13, 725, 728, 733 Araucanos  12, 718, 719, 720, 733 Arauco  11, 717, 718, 719–722, 723, 733 See also Frontier of Arauco Arawaks, Indians  51n89, 563n17, 619, 622, 742, 819, 821–822, 830 Argentina  11, 16, 267–268, 283–284, 417–418 Arica  280, 290n72, 727, 732 Arizona  2, 15, 43, 91, 92, 94, 96–98, 463, 474 map, 803 Arlegui, Joseph de  513 armed forces and militias  18, 41, 119, 141–144, 164–65, 172–174, 185, 213–214, 273–274, 278, 351, 550, 560, 598–599, 674, 704, 719–720, 728, 749, 800, 825 See also warfare Arricivita, Juan Domingo  517–518 Arrillaga, José Joaquín de  852, 853 Arteaga, Ignacio, lieutenant  842 Aruã (Aruans), Indians  619, 622 Aruba  741, 743 Ascencio, Alonso  536 Ascensión, mission among the Guarayos  701, 702 Asia  6–7, 15, 19, 46, 108, 299, 387, 400, 445–448, 450–455, 457, 513, 582, 598, 728, 730, 765–771, 773–778, 782n35, 784n50, 789–806, 843–847 See also South Asia Asiento  682, 685, 744, 746 Asiento de negros  744, 746 Asunción, María Clara de la  518 Atacama  268, 271, 283, 291n90, 292n100, 727 Athabaskan, Indians  32, 41

index   869 Atlantic Ocean  7, 11, 218, 353, 615, 669 and transatlantic economy  374, 599, 776 and transatlantic empires  168, 445, 449, 671, 672 Atlantic port  280, 669, 670 Atlantic world  210, 377, 579, 598, 669–670, 673–674, 686, 750, 752–753, 765–766, 777 Dutch Atlantic  743–744 islands  6, 674 transatlantic commerce  669, 747–748, 766 transatlantic eclesiastic networks  534, 746 transatlantic slave trade  44, 579–580, 744 See also transoceanic and riverine networks Augustinian, friars and missions  247, 509, 693, 696, 746, 767 autonomy, of indigenous peoples  3, 12, 17, 31, 46, 61, 136, 166–167, 170, 173, 184, 186, 193, 249, 252, 319, 321–325, 331–333, 347–348, 387, 414–415, 548, 550, 552, 556–557, 560, 600, 616, 623, 641, 648, 650, 655, 671–672, 699, 742, 744 Avá-Canoeiro, see Canoeiro Aztatlan, archaeological cultural ­complex  88–90, 92 Aztecs  35, 42–43, 819 Aztlan  90, 99

B

Bacerac, Sonora  187–189, 192–193, 194, 195, 198, 199 map Baegert, Jacob  799, 811n58 Baheca, Hipólito  188, 200 Bahia, Brazil  209, 214, 230n21, 400, 414, 421, 423, 449, 593 Salvador da Bahia  598, 671, 672, 737n70 Bajío, region in Mexico  87, 119, 124, 138, 139, 141, 376 Ballivián, José  694 Bananal Island, Brazil  593, 594 map, 595, 602 bandeiras and bandeirantes  213, 215, 318, 424, 438n73, 592–593, 595–599, 601, 603–604 baptism  141, 380, 402, 512, 513, 515, 518, 521n21, 548, 551, 552, 556, 649, 746 Baranov, Aleksander  849–850, 852, 854–855 Barbosa, Duarte  448 Barcelos, town in Brazil  613, 620

Barrios, Juan Evangelista  196, 199t Bautista de la Cruz, Juan Valerio  139–141, 148–149, 155, 156n53 beatas / beaterio  511, 517–519 Beauchêne, Jacques de  731 Belém, city and captaincy of Pará, Brazil  401, 474 map, 593, 595, 597, 613–615, 617–619, 621–622, 625, 627–628 Belize  244, 249, 250 bells  533–534, 537 archaeological copper bells  91–92 liturgical bell ringing  528–529, 533, 551 Benavente, Toribio de (Motolinia)  45, 512 Benavides, Alonso de  511, 513, 515–516, 525, 533 Bengal, Bay of  443–445, 447 Beni, Department of, Bolivia  16, 70, 696–698, 700–704 Benianos  697, 700, 705 Berger, Luis  554–555 Bering, Vitus  843–844 Beringia 32 Billoni, Santiago  535 Bío Bío River, Chile  11, 319, 718, 719, 720, 733 Black River, Honduras-Nicaragua  240, 243, 249, 251 Bodega Bay  842–843, 848, 852–854 Bodega y Quadra, Juan Francisco de la, lieutenant  842, 846–847 body paint  624 Bohorquez, Pedro  326, 332 boiling stones  36, 863 Bolivia  10, 16, 17, 70, 267, 279, 283–284, 350, 534, 695, 703 highlands of  281, 291n79 interethnic relations in  691–692, 696 lowlands of  60, 68 mining centers in  279–281, 576 nation-state and citizenship in  697, 701–703, 705, 713n79 port of  291n89 Bolton, Herbert E.  2, 15, 299, 344, 545 Bonaire  741, 743 Borderlands as contact zones  3–4 as contested spaces  17–18 as interaction zones  308n7, 348, 383, 537, 641, 686, 752

870   index Borderlands (Continued) cannibalism and barbarity related to  12–13, 417, 691, 700 concepts of  1–4, 100n1, 753, 761n101 and n104, 762–763, 791, 808n15, 817 confrontations in  333 contrasted with frontiers  4, 7, 670–671 economies of  18–19, 240–241, 255n4, 267, 308n9, 583n3, 658n14, 672, 734n9, 769, 778, 787n97 gender and  354, 366n68, and n69, 384–385, 542n53, 582n1, 659n22, 665, 836n51 historiography of  2, 8–18, 59, 105n64, 133, 334n3, 360n9, 364n44, 370, 373, 388n5, 751–752, 767–770, 778 imperial borderlands  6, 31, 57, 63–65, 313n48, 442–443, 446, 449, 454, 456–457, 463, 465, 468, 479–480, 489, 519, 525–526, 535, 561n7, 628n2, 644, 654, 657n9, 663n68, 671–673, 679, 683, 687n4, 725, 754, 770–772, 811n55, 831 indigenous borderlands  31, 97, 240–241, 245, 297, 318, 339n66, 362n15, 366n67, 375, 411n27, 616, 642, 650, 656, 706n1, 733 internal borderlands  4–5, 16–17, 60, 67, 671 narratives of  3–4, 12, 14–16, 64, 463, 659n18, 718 Boroa, Diego  555 Boruca, reducción and indigenous group in Panama  243, 245, 248, 517 Borum, Botocudo Indians-self ­designation  425, 432n14 Botelho de Lacerda, Manuel  684–685 Botocudos / Botocudo, Indians  214, 415–417, 419–421, 423, 425–430 Bourbon reforms  167–173, 772 bow and arrow  41, 86, 141, 145, 148, 216, 304, 404, 600, 626, 643 Brahmans 453–455 Brazil  16, 38, 67, 71, 209–225, 244, 397–408, 413–430, 591–605, 613–628, 641–656 and Portugal’s European rivals  402–403, 615–620, 622 Atlantic coast of  9, 12, 35, 402, 613, 614, 617, 619, 624 Brazilian Atlantic rain-forest  33, 39, 61, 62, 67

colonial borderlands of  209, 211, 234, 333n1, 341, 592, 647, 663n71 independence of  424, 428 intertribal relations in  214, 399, 599–604, 653 Luso-Brazilians  415, 591, 595, 596, 600–604, 617, 643, 655, 666, 674, 676, 678–680, 682 mestizaje as national pacification policy in  418–420, 422, 430 mining in  215, 217, 219, 220–225, 416, 615, 624, 645 missions in  213, 217, 247, 400, 404–405, 422, 597–598, 614–618, 620–621, 623–624, 628, 643–644, 648, 666 Portuguese court in  417 Spanish-Portuguese borders  60, 613, 617, 619, 620, 627, 642 See also bandeiras and bandeirantes Bribri, Indians  243 Brouwer, Hendrick  722, 728–729 Bueno da Silva, Bartolomeu (father and son) 596 Buenos Aires, Argentina  271–274, 277, 280–281, 286n31, 670, 672–677, 679–686 Buitimea, Juan  196, 200 Burgos, Juan de  494–496 burial practices  36, 41, 95, 96, 110, 117, 553, 556 Burriel, Andrés Marcos, S. J.  481n20, 803–806, 814n90 Bustamante, N.L., Mexico  163–164, 176n8

C

Cabécar, Indians  243, 246–247, 251 Cabeza de Vaca, Álvar Núñez  9–11, 13, 16, 22n39, 34, 46, 142–143 cabildo (town council) in Guaraní reductions  550 in Mojos and Chiquitos  698–700 in La Frontera de San Sebastián, Zacatecas 303–304 of Buenos Aires  679 of Cuencamé, Durango  305 of Guatemala  573 of Havana  820, 821, 825 of Matanzas, Cuba  824 of Montevideo  674, 675 of Tlaxcala  135, 165

index   871 of Valladolid Comayagua, Honduras  172 of Zacatecas  380, 385 cacao  36, 246, 250, 252–253, 614, 618–619, 621, 626, 747 Cachoeiras de Macacu, R.J., Brazil  215, 216, 219, 221 cacicazgo / caciques  550, 830 in Brazil  646, 652 in Chile  722, 729–730 in Mojos and Chiquitos  699 in Northern New Spain  193, 346, 349, 491 Calchaquí  323, 330 Guaraní 550 Otomí  138–141, 148, 185 Tule 252 Cáhita, language family  97, 103n46 Cahokia  41, 44 Caicedo, Augustín Beltrán  750 Calchaquí, Juan  322, 327 Calchaquí Valleys and river  319, 321–323, 325–329, 331–333 Calchaquí, Indians  322–329, 331–333, 338n65 Caldera de Quiñones, Nicolás  746 California  2, 17, 32, 36, 37, 41, 119, 196, 253, 473 map, 486n54, 528, 531, 572, 800, 802–806, 841–842, 850 Alta California  65, 108, 115, 517, 526–527, 534, 537, 540n22, 766, 784n53, 842–844, 846, 848–849, 851–855 Baja California  108–109, 113, 190, 357, 475, 529, 804, 851 passage by land to  471–472, 476–477, 481n20, 486n56 Peninsula of  119, 122, 467, 469, 799, 813n79 Callao, Peru  6, 672, 725, 727, 732 Camarão family  402–403, 407 Cametá, Brazil  614, 618 Caminos camino de China 299 Caminho Novo 219 Camino Real (capacñam), in Andean region  268–269, 271, 273, 281–282, 285n15, 286n31 Camino Real de Tierra Adentro  19, 62, 71, 132 map, 295–296, 298–302, 304–307, 307n4, 310n28, 311n37, 354, 381, 518 Camino Real of Soconusco  299

caminos reales  298, 307n2 See also roads Campeche, neighborhood in Havana  821, 830, 834n23 canoes, see watercraft Canoeiro / Avá-Canoeiro  592–593, 594 map, 596, 602–604 canonization  517, 798, 810n47 Cantagalo, Brazil  220–224, 230n22 capacñam, see Camino Real Cape Gracias a Dios  242–243, 249, 251 Cape Horn  725, 731–732, 851 captivity / captives, see enslavement and captivity Capuchin order, friars, and missionaries  247, 397–399, 405–406, 419, 427–431, 520n4, 597, 618, 746 Caquetios, Indians  742–743, 745–746, 748 Caracas, archdiocese of  742, 745–747 Caracas Company (Real Compañía Guipuzcoana de Caracas)  748, 751 Cardiel, José  554, 563n21 Cardim, Fernão  404–405 Cardoso de Oliveira, Roberto  3, 433n21 carey  246, 250–252 Caribbean  6, 8, 33, 38, 50n64, 59, 61, 365n51, 528, 572, 575–576, 580, 615, 672–673, 722, 728, 731, 742, 744, 748, 750–753, 817–820, 823, 827, 831 basin  6, 8 Central America’s Caribbean lands  239, 241, 244–245, 247, 249 islands  249, 741, 820 southern Caribbean  672, 741–746, 755 Carmelite, friars, convents, and missions  217, 231, 513, 622 Cartagena (current Colombia)  252, 670, 672, 743 cartography / maps  230n22, 299, 446, 448, 463–468, 470–475, 477–479, 481n20, 482n26, 483n38, 484n42, 558–560, 566n63, 676, 718, 721, 728–729, 748, 803–806, 814n88 and n90, 842 Carvalho e Melo, Sebastião José de, Marquês de Pombal  613 Casa da Índia  446 Casas Grandes (Paquimé), archaeological site  41, 43, 93, 473–474 maps

872   index Casas, Bartolomé de las  510, 579, 737n64 Caste War (Guerra de Castas)  827, 830 castellano and alcalde mayor, position of  771–775, 785n62, 786n84 Castelo (gold bearing area), Brazil  215, 230n22 Castro, Chile  718, 722, 724, 728–729 Castro, Martinho Melo e  211, 218, 227n5 Catechism  452, 455, 470, 514–515, 521n21, 528, 533, 548, 551 Catechesis  421–428, 430, 435n39 and civilization  421–422 Law of, Brazil (1845)  414, 435n40 Provincial Catechesis Service, Brazil  418, 435n40 catsina dance  532 Caupolicán, region of  694–696 Cayenne  618, 622 Central America  6, 18, 19, 59, 88, 133, 163, 166, 168, 170–171, 239–247, 249–254, 573, 579–581, 719, 731, 777, 820 conquest of  164–166 highlands of  242, 246, 247, 251 New Spain’s borderlands in  784n53 See also Caribbean cerrado  60, 68, 593 Cerrito, El, archaeological site  87–88 Chaco Canyon, archaeological site  92–93 Chaco, Bolivia  10, 16, 33, 36–37, 60, 644–646, 691, 694 Chalchihuites archaeological culture  88–93, 95–97, 101n19, 104n46 as Mesoamerican frontier  59, 111 mines of  147, 372 map, 377 Chalco, Mexico  42, 144–145 Chamacoco, Indians  646, 663n62 Chánguina, Indians  243, 246–247 Charcas, Audiencia of  320, 322, 330, 527–528, 692–694, 701 Charcas, San Luis Potosí  372 map, 385 founding of  376 population of  380, 383, 386 Charles III, King of Spain  173, 523n43, 708n14 Charodos (caste in India)  455 Chaupai, Diego  555 Chichas, province of  271, 273, 277, 279–280 Chichimeca concept / term  85–87, 95

Indians  5, 85, 88, 131, 135, 138–141, 145, 147, 157n70, 185, 304, 512, 520n1, 823 Chichimeca Wars  139, 141, 146 See also Gran Chichimeca Chicomoztoc legendary place  85–87, 90, 99 Chihuahua, Mexico  43, 65, 69, 90, 98, 109, 112, 117, 119, 120–121, 123–125, 196, 346–347, 349–356, 580, 776 Chihuahuan Desert  65, 72 Chile  9, 11–12, 32, 37, 267–268, 279, 320–322, 332, 528, 573–574, 580, 717–733, 770 Chiloé  12, 718–719, 721–725, 728, 733 China  7, 445, 448, 731, 751, 766–69, 779n6, 789–806, 844, 846 evangelizing plans for (Manila ­proposal)  791–794, 813n69 China road, see camino de China chinampa / chinampas  42, 59, 76 Chinapa, Sonora  198–199 Chiquitanía, province  60, 68, 75n19 Chiquitos, region  16, 25n62, 68 Chiquitanos, people  17, 26n68 missions of / reducciones  526–528, 534, 537, 539n11, 541n40, 543, 548–549, 556–557, 564n39, 565n53, 567, 693–694, 698, 701, 703, 712n71 See also music and dance Chirikov, Aleksei  845 Choctaws, Indians  44–45 Christ  163, 404, 448, 457, 493, 496, 500–501, 503, 510, 514, 516–517, 519, 556, 702, 791–792, 800 Corpus Christi  533, 554–555, 558 Chuquisaca (La Plata / Sucre), Bolivia  273–274, 280–281 Cíbola / Seven Cities  131, 133, 135, 143, 145–146, 157n66, 299, 310n31 Cinti, Peru  273, 280 citizenship / citizens  169, 171, 196, 418, 695–700, 702, 705, 714n94, 826 City of Caesars  725 Clastres, Pierre  37, 46, 692 Clovis, New Mexico  32 Clovis-type projectile  32 Coahuila, Mexican state of  65, 109, 113, 115, 165, 187, 346, 358, 361n14 Cobija, Peru  281, 283, 291n89

index   873 Cochabamba, Bolivia (Alto Peru)  272–274, 281, 694 Coçumba, Indians  169 Códice de Jilotepec  139–141, 148–149, 155n45 Códice de Tlatelolco  145–146, 148 cofradías (confraternities)  354, 382, 550, 552, 556, 557, 560, 750 Coimbra, Manoel Soares  211–225 Colegio de Propaganda Fide de la Santa Cruz 518 See also Franciscans colleras  826, 863 Colón, Diego  743 Colônia do Sacramento  669–686 colonos (settlers), in Cuba  67, 704, 828–829 Comanche, Indians  142, 165, 174, 650 Comayagua, Honduras  164–165, 169, 171–172 commerce  10–11, 59, 68, 165, 169, 246, 249, 254, 280, 283, 295–298, 301, 303, 309n16, 350, 352, 410n23, 424, 430, 444, 446, 598, 601, 615, 720, 731, 749, 780n9 and n11, 820 indigenous  297, 308n9 commercial circuits  6, 279, 297, 351, 744, 747–748 commercial networks  240, 271–272, 281, 297, 353, 671, 685, 772, 799, 851 merchants  85, 91, 99, 269, 271–274, 277, 279–283, 288n43, 290n72, 299, 351–352, 374, 379, 409n2, 447–451, 456, 537, 593, 595, 598–599, 644, 666, 669–674, 677, 679, 680–681, 683–685, 687n2, 693, 695, 702–703, 708n18, 713n83, 720, 742, 744–745, 747–749, 751, 769, 774–776, 778, 845, 848–850, 852, 858–859n40 trans-imperial  670–672, 680–681, 683–684, 686, 743–744, 748 See also contraband trade See also Manila Galleon See also transoceanic and riverine networks Compagnie Royale de la Mer du Sud 732 Compostela (current Tepic), Nayarit  142–144, 307n4 Concepción, Chile  12, 556, 672, 718–720, 722–723, 732 Conceptionist Convent  513 Conchos, Indians  187, 348–350, 353

confraternities, see cofradías congregation policy  115, 140, 141, 155n52, 185, 313n51, 354–355, 460n39, 476, 486n62, 521n11, 529, 536, 616 See also reducción / reducciones Consag, Fernando (also Ferdinand)  482n20, 805 contact culture  3, 15 Contraband  2, 169, 211, 213–214, 216, 227n6 and cattle  675 trade and goods  240, 249–251, 253–254, 262n87, 598, 624, 670, 680, 682–686, 686n1, 688n15, 743–745, 748–752, 766–767, 772–774, 780n8 and n11, 822, 830 See also gold, and contraband See also smuggling Cook, James  732, 842, 846 Cora, Indians  89–90, 97, 473 Cordes, Simon de  722, 728–729, 737n68 Córdoba, Argentina  269–270, 280, 321, 322, 323, 327 Core-periphery model  3–4, 753–754, 794 Coro, town of in Paraguaná, Venezuela  688, 742, 745–747, 749–750 Coroado, Indians  210, 214–215, 219, 225, 228n14, 419 Coronel y Arana, María  513 Coropó, Indians  210, 214–215, 219, 225 corregidor  550–551, 563n24, 699, 705, 722 Cors, José  701, 712n77 Cortés, Hernán  9, 134, 135–137, 139–140, 155n53, 164, 175 cosmopolitics  415–416, 425–426, 432n12 Couto, Diogo do  445 Coxi 187 Coymans House  746 creoles, Russian  845, 849–850 Cruz, Juan de la  139, 141, 155n45 Cuba  183, 572, 817–831 Cuauhnochtli, Alonso  145 Cuervo, Francisco Javier  187, 199t Cuiabá, Mato Grosso, city and captaincy  596, 599, 604 Culhuacan, legendary place  86, 99, 145 Culiacán, Sinaloa  9, 88, 142, 143, 144, 145, 185, 345–346 Cunha Matos, Raimundo José da  603

874   index Cunha, Dona Damiana da (Kayapó Indian) 603–604 cunhamenas (mixed-race traders in Portuguese Amazonia)  619–620 Curaçao  240, 244, 672–673, 722 and contraband  747, 748, 750–754 and Roman Catholic Church  745–750 and slave trade  746, 749 Dutch colony  249, 741, 743–745 free port  744, 750 Spanish possession  742–743 curanderismo / curanderas  356, 358 See also shamanism Curiepe, Venezuela  749 Cusihuiriachi (also Cusihuiriachic), Chihuahua  124, 353, 358 Cuzco, Peru  269, 272, 273, 274, 277, 280

D

dance  92, 163, 356, 491, 526–528, 531–532, 537, 553, 564n36, 707n10 guancasco  163, 176n6 matachines  532, 537 moros y cristianos 532 Danesi, Pedro  553 Darién 239–254 Dávalos, Diego  397, 399, 409n2 debt peonage, see labor Delarov  842, 847 Delegación Nacional de Guarayos  703–704 See also Guarayos deforestation  44, 62, 71, 72, 73, 377, 387 demography  57, 108–109, 445, 648 historical demography  63, 72, 107, 109, 112 population control  36 Devil  357–358, 404, 460n34, 493, 512, 516, 519, 532, 792, 806 Diaguitas, Indians  319–322, 324–326, 332–333 diplomacy  164, 355, 388n1, 601–602, 605, 792, 818 See also peacemaking Directorate (Diretório)  417–418, 422, 424–425, 428, 597, 620–627, 648 disease  18, 45, 63, 71, 164, 346–347, 349, 352, 356, 387, 615–616, 821 cholera  107, 112, 128n30, 129n45 climate-related 592

cocolitzli  112, 116 dysentery  112, 732 epidemic  70, 107–113, 115, 117–119, 121, 122–125, 214, 345, 348–349, 400–401, 491, 596–597, 619 kwashiorkor 34 matlazáhuatl  112–113, 116, 119, 121–122, 124, 348 measles  112–113, 115, 116, 119, 121–122, 124–125, 214, 348, 614, 619 pellagra 40 quarantine (cordon sanitaire)  111 smallpox  110, 112, 113, 115, 116, 119, 121–125, 128n30, 129n50, 214, 348, 400, 572, 614, 619, 622 syphilis  112, 128n29 typhus  110, 113, 116, 732 Doce, river  416–417, 419–423, 425–427, 430, 431n8 Dom Manuel, King of Portugal  449 Dominicans  357, 528, 812n68 as authorized missionary order  520n4 in Mosquitia  247 in South Asia  451 on Curaçāo  746 missionary methods  521n21 Dórame, Juan Ignacio, indigenous leader  196 See also Ópatas Dorasque, Indians  243, 246, 248 Drake, Francis  723–724, 726–727, 735n34 dry farming  42, 43 Durango, Mexican state of  59, 65, 69, 88–90, 92, 95–97, 109, 115, 117, 119–125, 132 map, 141–142, 173, 300, 303–305, 345–346, 349, 358, 379, 489–492, 494–496, 498, 503–504, 535–537 Cathedral of  348, 496, 526, 530, 535–537

E

East India Company (VOC)  728 encomienda / encomenderos  12, 117, 134, 140, 143, 148, 164, 167–168, 171–173, 175–176n5, 178n21, 186, 321–324, 329–333, 336n30, 337n53 and n54, 346, 350, 378, 511, 549, 575–579, 580–582, 718, 722, 742, 745, 829 Enríquez, Nicolás  503–504

index   875 enslavement and captivity  244–245, 253, 365n50, 417, 427, 571, 580, 589, 690, 739, 817–824, 826–829, 831, 833n6, 838–839 emancipados 831 piezas 826 See also slave trade environment  2, 57, 60, 64, 68, 71–73, 240, 362n14, 376, 390n31 Calusas and non-agricultural subsistence 68 fallow, short and long  38–39, 41 fencerows  43, 52n97, 80n57, 864 flooding  42, 69–70 Little Ice Age  44 raised fields  42, 44, 59, 70, 614, 865 shell middens  34–35, 514, 621 terracing  42, 59–60, 63, 866 See also deforestation, landscape, kelp highway, swidden agriculture, and várzea epidemics, see disease Ercilla, Alonso de  9, 11–13, 23n44 and 45, 728 Escandell Bonet, Bartolomé  510 Eskimo-Aleuts  32, 41 Espinareda, Pedro de  510 Espinosa, Isidro Felis (Felix) de  517 Espírito Santo, province and mission, Brazil  230n22, 404, 414, 427–428 Ethnicity  136, 185, 201n4, 255n5, 349, 354–359, 384, 623, 625, 744, 799 and gender  354–355, 357, 391n52, 394 ethnic group  2–3, 7, 19, 60, 87, 94, 100n1, 296, 344, 348, 350–351, 381–383, 387, 399, 402, 408, 415, 438n70, 528, 563n17, 619, 622, 624, 656, 657n9, 670, 692–695, 697, 742 ethnocide  399–401, 430 ethnogenesis  15, 19, 183, 198, 227n8, 241–242, 319, 343, 348, 361n13, 397–399, 401–402, 418, 424, 435n40, 546–647, 615, 623, 626, 629n11, 697, 710n42 as concept  546–547 Exaltación, Bolivia  699 expediciones de altura 842

F

famine  43, 46, 122, 278, 400 famine foods  45

Ferreira, Miguel Antunes  216–217 Ferrería, La, archaeological site  90 Florencia, Francisco de  495–496 Flores de Cierra, Antonio  494 flute-player, glyph  91–93 Fonseca, Manuel Freitas da  674 Font, Juan  491–492 Food security  18, 31, 856n3 enamel hypoplasia  41 Liebig’s Law  36 marine resources  32, 34–35, 37, 845, 864 road food  40 secondary subsistence system  31 subsistence calendar  35 theorem of net energy  34 forts  12, 187, 324, 351, 402, 613–614, 617–619, 620, 628, 642, 644, 646–647, 653, 674, 695, 717, 720, 722–724, 729, 743–744, 822 Fort of Coimbra  646–647, 651–655 Fort Ross  842, 853–855 Francis Xavier, Saint  454, 457, 496, 795–797, 802, 806 Franciscans  45, 108, 135, 143, 247, 318, 351, 369, 452, 457, 463–464, 476–477, 515, 577, 597, 617–618, 691, 693–696, 722, 746, 795, 799 missions of  115, 117, 124, 313n51, 345–347, 353, 451, 466–467, 478–479, 510, 517, 526–529, 540n22, 695, 712, 715, 773 missionaries  99, 165, 192, 304, 402–403, 488, 511, 514, 516, 518, 524–525, 532, 534–535, 695–696, 701–703, 812n68, 851 and cartography  471 and Colegio de Propaganda Fide de Querétaro  518, 523n39 and Friar Felipe de Jesús, Mexican martyr and beato  795–798, 811n51 and n53 and mysticism  509–513, 517–519, 522n23, 525, 528, 534, 702, 716, 811 See also Fray Antonio Margil de Jesús, and Sor María de Jesús de Ágreda Francisco Coronel  513 Franks 443 Fresnillo, Zacatecas  372 map, 375–376, 385, 386

876   index Frontiers  1, 8, 9, 15–18, 58, 60, 66, 165, 169–171, 173, 183, 209–211, 225, 283, 296, 298–299, 344, 351, 414, 446, 450, 472, 620, 623, 672, 690, 694, 717, 751–752, 843, 846, 855 contrasted with borderlands  4, 7, 670–671 inter-ethnic frontiers  7, 864 mining frontiers  62, 67 mission frontiers  451–453, 456, 467 of Arauco  719–721, 722 of Aysén and frontera de arriba 721–725 successive frontiers  4–5, 11, 14, 463, 717 Frutes, Francisco de  518 Fuente, Gaspar de la  378, 380, 385–386 Fuerte, river  88, 92 Fuerteños 196

G

galleon  6, 299, 766–769, 771–778, 795 See also Manila Galleon Gallo de Pardiñas, Claudia  771–774, 776, 787n91 Gallo de Pardiñas, Juan Eusebio  771–776 Gallo de Pardiñas, Miguel Ventura  773, 776 Gallo, Miguel  770–775 gender  8, 18, 282, 343–344, 354–359, 361n13, 373, 382, 384, 387, 531, 553, 579 See also ethnicity General Indian Court of New Spain  300–301, 303–305, 312n38 Ghent 495 gifting / gift exchange  9, 190, 191, 213, 220, 222, 245, 248, 251, 328, 338n65, 346, 424, 502, 619, 641–642, 652–654, 729–730, 774–776, 802 Goa  445–447, 449, 451–453, 455–457 Goiás, captaincy and state  67, 209, 591–594, 596, 598–601, 603–604 Goitacá, Indians  214 gold  12, 214–220, 248, 252, 438n73, 445, 460n34, 496, 502, 591–594, 596–597, 599, 718, 727, 730, 742, 791 and contraband  210, 223–224, 229n20 and n21, 232n40, 414 and mining  71, 73, 166, 374–375, 598 green gold  448–449 Gomes, José  217–219, 230n29 Gomez Manzo, Juan  746

Gómez, Pedro  825 Gorízia, Friar Serafim de  429, 439n91 Gracias a Dios, town of, Honduras  163, 243 Gran Chaco  16, 37 Gran Chichimeca  5, 131, 132 map, 139, 141, 143, 148, 167, 371, 388n1 Gran Paititi  332 Gran Quivira, see Quivira Grão-Pará, State of, see Maranhão Guachichiles, Indians  131, 132, 135, 147, 169, 372, 381 Guachinangos (Mesoamerican laborers in Havana)  823–825, 835n35. Guadalajara, Mexico  119, 132 map, 142–143, 304, 372 map, 378, 384, 509, 769, 851 Guadiana (current Durango), Mexico  141 Guadiana Valley, Durango  510 Guaikurú, Indians  641, 644–648, 650–656 alliances of  645 as Kadiwéu  647 Guamares, Indians  131, 132, 372, 381 Guaná, Indians  645–646, 653–654 Guanaceví, Nueva Vizcaya  372 map, 375, 493 Guanajuato, Mexico  71, 88, 235, 300–303, 372 map, 373, 377–378, 774 population of  380–381 guancasco, see dance guano  39, 284n6 Guaraní, Indians  10–11, 16, 25n65, 60, 76n23, 397, 409n2, 525–526, 528, 534, 541n40 and 42, 545, 548, 550–553, 555–557, 559; 561 notes 2, 3, and 8; 563 notes 17, 19, and 23; 565n45 and n48, 566n58, 567, 674, 706n1, 708n19 and n24, 714n96, 715 Guarayos, Indians  693–695, 700–705, 715 guardacostas 753 and Caracas Company  748, 751 as agents of empire  752–753 Guatemala  134–135, 173, 177n15, 181n51, 182, 299, 517 Audiencia of  172 Cabildo of  573 Guaymí, Indians  243 See also Ngöbe Indians Guayrá, Indians  554, 559 Guendulaín, Juan de  495

index   877 Guianas, coasts of  42 Guiana, French  209, 614 Guiana, Dutch  615 Guyana (Guiana), British  622 Güirizo, Juan  198–199 Gurrola, Cristóbal  188, 190, 200 Guzmán, Nuño de  9, 85–88, 99, 134–135, 142–144, 819–821

H

hacienda (agricultural estate)  11, 65, 117–118, 122–124, 242, 244–245, 301–302, 304, 306, 309n16, 323, 343–344, 346–347, 349–351, 353–356, 371, 377, 380, 382–385, 575–576, 693, 695–696, 700, 703, 708n18, 714n87, 776 de minas (mining estate)  371, 372, 385 de beneficio (metal refining plant)  71, 72, 376 Hagemeister, Leontii, captain  853, 854, 855 hallucinogens 36 Hamme, Peter Thomas van (Pedro van Hamme)  495, 802 Hanabana Quemada  830 Havana, Cuba  670, 672, 743, 819–827 healing / healers  9, 36, 355–356, 358, 616, 803 See also shamanism Heceta, Bruno de, lieutenant  842 hechicería 357 see also witchcraft Henriques, Manoel (Mão de Luva)  211, 214–215, 217–220, 230n22, 231n33 Henríquez, Luís  326, 332, 341n96 hides  71, 272, 311n35, 354, 593, 598, 644, 674, 677–679, 682, 743, 747 Hispaniola  742, 819–820, 834n19 Hohokam, archeological culture  43, 91–93, 97 Hopi, Indians  15, 92, 94, 97 Hormuz 445 Huamanga 272 Huasteca, region  99 Huastecos, Indians  118 map, 819–823, 834n19 Hugli  443, 445, 447 map Huichol, Indians (Wixarika)  89–90, 94, 97–98, 379 Huilliches, Indians  11, 718–719, 728, 733 Hideyoshi  791, 794–95, 808n16, 809n36

I

Iberian Peninsula  6, 329, 397, 513, 527, 572, 771 Iberian World, definition of  6 identity   19, 133, 136, 181, 192–195, 197–198, 318–319, 415, 527, 822, 824 and culture / language  184, 401, 432n12, 546–547, 549, 616, 693 and migration  770 Christian / Catholic  528, 531, 538 corporate / communal  303, 532, 537 ethnic  177n15, 241, 345, 350, 356, 373, 439n81, 595, 627–628, 695–696, 703 national  414, 431n3, 705, 715 See also ethnicity idolatry  453, 494, 512, 516, 813n68 Immaculate Conception, Virgin of in Zape, Durango  489–495, 500, 508 n44 order of Franciscan nuns  513, 523 See also Franciscans See also Jesuits India  7, 408, 766–767, 795, 797, 799 Estado da Índia 443–458 See also East India Company (VOC) Indian allies / friends as conquerors  131–133, 148 as colonists / settlers  132–133, 147–148, 165–169, 171–175 historiography and sources  131, 133–135, 150n4, 151n12 and n14–17 in borderlands  5, 18, 131, 133, 135, 151n7, 173–175, 201n14, 334n5, 365n58, 402, 532, 636n115, 639, 645, 655 number of in conquest expeditions  133, 142–144, 154n29, 157n74, 618, 653, 733 of the Dutch  252, 722, 728–730, 733 of the English  240, 241, 243–244, 249, 250, 252 of the Portugese  614, 615, 617–620, 625, 627, 641–643, 645, 651, 653, 655, 683, 685; Bororo 604; Krahô 601; Potiguar  402; Tobajara  402, 617; Tremembé 617; Tupi / Tupinambá  398, 617 of the Spaniards  83–87, 90, 99, 163–165, 183–185, 192–193, 307n3, 331–332, 334n5, 346, 349, 352; Mexica  147, 164, 173, 185; Mixtec  164, 166, 173;

878   index Indian allies / friends (Continued) Otomí  131–132, 135–141, 147–149, 164, 185; Tarascan / Purépecha  131, 135, 143, 147, 158n80, 185; Tlatelolca  135, 145–146; Tlaxcalan  131, 133, 135–137, 141, 164–165, 169, 173–175, 185; Pima, Mayo, Pueblo, Apache  142; Zapotec  144, 164, 166, 173 organization of  144–145, 147, 158n84 recruitment of  133–134, 145, 147–148, 151n14 rights and privileges of  133, 134, 166, 168, 171, 172, 175. See also Mesoamerican allies of the Spaniards Indian Ocean  7, 447, 765, 777 indigenous artisans  295, 306, 557, 698 indigenous informants  18, 87, 136, 211, 213, 215–216, 219, 223, 453, 456, 468, 497, 615, 626, 651 indigenous languages  228n14, 241, 336n28, 382, 549, 557, 616 See also Macro-Gê, Tepiman, and Uto-Aztecan language families See also Kakán See also Nahua speaking peoples infidels / gentiles  327–328, 407, 451, 453–454, 464, 470, 472, 476–477, 479–480, 509–510, 512–514, 547–548, 551, 598, 702, 800, 864 Inquisition, Holy Office of  217, 219, 358, 386, 450–451, 513–516, 518–519, 527, 532 intendants (intendancy sytem)  173, 196, 708n18 Intendencia Delegacional de Guarayos, see Delegación Nacional de Guarayos Inuit  32, 41, 849–850 irrigation  42–44, 59–60, 66, 68–69, 75n12, 96, 863 Isthmus of Panama  517, 726, 731 Itambacuri, city and mission in Minas Gerais  419, 422–423, 425–430 Itapúa, mission  559

J

Jalisco, Mexican state of  88–89, 92, 97, 142–143 Jamaica  240, 244, 249–250 Japan / Japanese  445, 452, 766, 769, 774–775, 789, 791–799, 801–803, 806, 851 Japiaçu, Tupinambá leader  406, 408

Japurá, river  620, 626, 648 Jequitinhonha, river  421–423, 430 Jesuits  117, 318, 346–347, 353, 452, 457, 463–464, 466, 534–535, 773, 799 and cartography  471 and martyrdom  797–799, 811n51 and science  803, 806, 815 as Society of Jesus  187, 332, 465, 467, 470–471, 474, 490, 545, 597, 720, 789, 790, 796, 800, 805 missionaries  769–773, 776–779, 784–785 trans-Pacific networks of  789–795 expulsions of  474, 476, 490, 528, 545, 549, 553, 558–559, 595, 597, 693–694, 696, 791, 793–794 See also St. Thomas Christians Jesús, Gertrudis de  518 Jilotepec, New Spain  139–141, 144, 148–149 Joaquim, indigenous leader  215, 220, 224, 232n40 Juan Andrés  187, 200 Juan Fernández Islands  731–732 Jujuy  270–284, 323 Juruna, Indians  614, 623–627 Jusacamea, Juan Ignacio (Banderas)  196, 200, 203n41, 204n42, 207n87 Jusacamea, Juan María  200, 203n41 Just War  216, 417, 419, 421, 572, 618–619

K

Kadiwéu, Indians  60, 647f, 655, 658n11, 663n62 Kakán, language  321, 326, 332 Kamchatka Peninsula  31, 844–845, 850–851 First Kamchatka Expedition  844 Second Kamchatka Expedition  845 Kangxi 448 Karajá, Indians  592, 594 map, 595–596, 599–602, 641 Kashaya Pomo, Indians  33, 36, 843, 852, 854 Kayapó, Indians  596–597, 602–604 Kayapó do Sul, Indians  592, 594 map, 596, 641, 645 kelp highway  32, 864 Kerala, India  449, 450, 451, 454, 460n39 Kino, Francisco Eusebio  464–473, 481n12 and n18, 801–803, 805, 814n84

index   879 Kodiak Island  841, 848, 850 Konkani, language in India  455, 457 Kotzebue, Otto von  854–855 Krahô, Indians  594–596, 600–602 kruk (Botocudo Indians)  419, 430, 434n32 Kukra, Indians  243, 245–246, 248 Kuna, Indians, see Tule, Indians Kuskov, Ivan A.  852–855

L

L’Hermite, Jacques  726 La Paz, Bolivia  272–274, 280–281, 409n2, 704–705 La Rioja, Argentina  273, 283, 322–325 labor debt peonage  576, 586n24, 828–830 forzados  818–820, 823–827, 831, 835n35. laboríos  576, 578. See also naborias repartimiento (forced labor)  11, 124, 185–186, 297, 346–347, 378, 575, 577–578, 582, 588, 865 and wages  147, 196, 378–379, 382, 420, 618, 620, 704, 830, 851, 865 See also mining See also mita Ladrillero, Juan de  723 Laguna de Mayrán, region  95 Lake Titicaca  33, 42, 44 land tenure  59, 63–64, 67–68, 72, 78n35, 345, 350, 360n10, 365n53, 369, 711n63 landscape cultural landscapes  13, 18, 27, 53, 57–62, 68, 82, 95, 370, 464, 472f, 480, 543, 629, 639, 716 changes in  63, 65, 70–72 colonial landscapes  672 definition of  57 desert landscapes  98 flooded landscapes  592 and hydraulic systems  69 of Araucanía and southern Chile  12 See also environment Larios, Juan  512 law  4–5, 68–69, 307n2, 312n42, 320, 358, 378, 419–420, 422, 513–514, 573, 577–578, 653, 793 law enforcement  2, 225, 751, 774 Law of Catechesis (Brazil, 1845)  414

Law of Landholding (Brazil, 1850)  414, 422 Law of Liberty (Brazil)  213. See also Directorate Law of Missions (Brazil, 1872)  422 Minas Law (Brazil, 1872)  425 and citizenship (Bolivia)  697, 699–700 and enslavement  618, 825–826 and indigneous rights  153n21, 178n24, 197, 205n74, 702–703, 713n79, 715n97 Le Maire, Strait  728, 731–732 Lempira Revolt  165, 169, 174 Lerma-Santiago, river  171 Léry, Jean de  9, 12–13 Lienzo de Tlaxcala  136–138, 153n20, 167 Lima, Peru  11–12, 271–273, 277, 280, 320, 574, 723, 727, 732, 776, 790, 795–796, 798 Linares, Nuevo León  109, 119–122, 124 Língua Geral (Nheengatu)  616, 624 Lisbon  209, 211, 217–219, 224, 404, 456, 598, 614, 617, 683–684, 790 liturgy  451–452, 527, 529, 533, 535, 537, 552–553, 560 Lobo, Manuel  673 Logroño, Spain  516 Loma Alta, archaeological culture  89, 91 Loma San Gabriel, archaeological culture  95 Londres, Argentina  322–325, 327, 338n63 López de Haro, Gonzalo, pilot  842, 847–848 López de Legazpi, Miguel  767 López, Diego  515 Lord of Tlaxcala, see Tlaxcala, Lord of Loreto, place name  473, 559, 563n17 Virgin of  490, 494, 505n3, 557, 565, 566n53 Luso-Brazilians, see Brazil

M

Macacu, river  215 Macau, China  445, 452 Macoyagüi, Pueblo of, (Macoyahuis)  66–67 Macro-Gê, language family  214, 595 Madeira, river  613, 615, 623, 626, 648, 694 Madrid, Spain  37, 494, 515, 526, 574, 613, 723–724, 768, 790, 792–794, 803, 846, 853 Madrid, José María  200, 207n88 Madruga, Cuba  831 Madurai, India  447 map, 452–454, 456, 797

880   index Magellan, Strait of  6, 319, 717–719, 723, 725–728, 730–733 Magellan, Ferdinand de  718, 723, 726–727, 737n66 and 67 Mahu, Jacques  728 Maire, Jacob Le  728 Malabar  447 map, 449, 451, 456, 460n32 Manao, Brazil  615, 619 Mandan, Indians  40 Manila  527, 670, 766–768, 770, 773–774, 777, 779n7, 784n48, 786n86, 791–795, 798 Manila Galleon  6, 299, 766–772, 774–778, 780n8, 780n16, 784n46, 789, 803, 806 Manila Proposal, see China Manileño(s)  773–775, 779 manioc  38–42, 45, 50n64, 59, 63, 400, 419, 595–596, 598–599, 614 Mapuche, Indians  11–12, 398, 573–574, 580, 651, 718–719, 722, 728, 733 rebellion of 1598  728, 733 Marajó Island  42, 614–615, 617, 619–620, 622 Maranhão, captaincy of  398, 402, 405–408, 592–595, 594 f, 602, 617, 619–620 river  596–597, 602 State of Maranhão, founded in 1621  617 State of Grão Pará and Maranhão, founded in 1751  620 Marathi, language in India  457 Margil de Jesús, Antonio  513, 517–519 See also Franciscans Marlière, Guido Thomaz  419–421, 436n46, 437n57 Martínez de la Marcha, Hernando  378–379 Martínez, José Esteban, lieutenant  842, 847–848 Martinho, indigenous leader  221 martyrdom, red and white  800, 811n60 See also Franciscans See also Jesuits mass (catholic religious service)  140, 456, 519, 526, 527, 550–551, 554, 556, 746 matachines, see dance Matina, Costa Rica  242, 245–246, 251 Mato Grosso, Brazil  16, 68, 592, 594–595, 599, 603–604, 613, 620–621, 646, 651, 654–655 Maurelle, Antonio, second pilot  842

Mawé (Maué), Indians  614, 623–627 Mawe, John  224 Maxakali, ethnic group and language  415, 423, 439n81 Maya, Indians Kaqchikel  165, 171 Yucatec 819–831 Mayo, Indians  125, 190–191, 193–194, 197–198, 206n78, 466 Mazapil, Zacatecas  372 map, 378–379, 381, 383, 385–386 Mbayá-Guaikurú, Indians, see Guaikurú Mecos, Indians  825, 827 Mediterranean  6, 752, 765, 777 Medrano, Blas  188–189, 198, 199t, 205n74, 206n79 Medrano, Francisco  188, 198, 199t Mendoza, Antonio de, Viceroy  9, 22n39, 133, 141–146, 157n69 and 70, 792 Meira da Rocha, José  683 Melaka, Strait of  7, 445, 447 Melo, Francisco  515 Mendieta, Jerónimo de  511 Mendonça Furtado, Francisco Xavier de, governor and captain general  613–614, 620 Mendoza, Francisco de  493–494, 496–497, 502 Mercedarians  247, 618 as authorized missionary order  520n4 merchants, see commerce Mérida, Yucatán  824 Mesoamerica culture area  5, 13, 17, 39–40, 43, 59–60, 62, 68, 83–84, 91–92, 95, 96–97, 99, 135, 147, 185, 298 Mesoamerican allies of the Spaniards  84–87, 90, 99, 132, 137, 145, 169, 353 Mesoamerican borderlands / periphery  41, 92, 131 Mesoamerican cultures, groups, and peoples  41, 59, 83–88, 94–96, 98, 101n12, 103–104n46, 141, 308n10, 345, 349, 824 Mesoamerican frontier and frontier fluctuations  59, 83, 88–92 Mesoamerican influence on the US Southwest  10, 308n10

index   881 Mesoamerican painted histories  64 northern Mesoamerica  85–89, 92–93, 95–96, 99, 100n7, 101n16, 201n14 nuclear / core Mesoamerica  10, 87 Messner, Johan  557 mestizaje, cultural and biological  113, 114 map, 115, 125, 319, 331, 344, 354–355, 359, 429, 696, 720, 823, 830 as State policy in Brazil  418–420, 422, 430 concept of  547 mestizos  166, 190, 287n35, 325–326, 328, 343, 347, 351–352, 383, 419, 476, 485n51, 511, 537, 705, 835n35, 851 white-mestizos (carai)  698–700, 704 Mexica Empire  9, 64 Mexica, Indians  41, 86, 88, 90, 92, 101n12, 102n28, 136, 139, 147, 153n19, 154n33, 164, 166, 172–173, 185, 382, 491, 819, 879 Mexicaneros, Indians  89–90 Mexicapa, Honduras  163–165, 171–172 Mexico central  33, 42–43, 63, 69, 71, 87, 88, 93, 101n20, 131–132, 134, 138, 139, 144, 164, 169, 185, 295, 297, 300, 303, 307, 347, 373, 375, 378–379, 382, 491–492, 534, 575, 823 Mexico City  9, 70–71, 142–144, 190, 295–296, 298–300, 304, 306, 312n38, 352, 372 map, 373, 378, 380–381, 463, 467, 491–492, 495, 497–498, 509, 533, 535, 537, 768–770, 773–776, 778, 790, 798, 802, 826–827, 855 northern  2, 9–10, 15, 17–18, 38, 59, 67, 71, 88, 117, 300, 334n5, 373, 391n63, 490, 530 southern  38, 379 Valley of  18, 35, 41, 42, 44, 59, 62, 89, 139, 140, 170, 296, 491, 528, 824 Mezquital, Valle del, New Spain  62–63, 65, 138–139, 147 Michoacán, modern Mexican state  88–91, 93, 99, 134, 142–145, 147, 352, 354, 375, 576 milpa  39, 45, 59, 65–67, 69, 864 Mimbres, archaeological culture  93 Minas Gerais, captaincy and state  67, 209–216, 218–221, 413–431, 592, 599, 603, 615, 624 mining  13, 61–62, 65–67, 71–72, 119, 165, 173, 269, 279–281, 318, 344, 353, 371, 372f , 375–382, 416, 645

Africans in  375 ancient indigenous mining  89 and roads  298–300 Brazil mining boom  215 children, families, and orphans in  380, 383–386 enslaved and forced laborers in  375, 378, 597 environmental impact of  72, 73, 349, 373–377, 387, 390n32 ethnic and language diversity in  373–374, 381–383, 387 free-wage laborers in  378–379, 382 gold mining  215–217, 374, 593, 598–599 illegal operations in Minas Gerais  216–221, 225, 230n21, 231n29 and 38 Indian migration to, and population of, mine districts  108, 117–118, 124, 296, 347, 379–380, 383 indigenous prospectors  375 labor regime  147, 375, 378 mining towns, centers and camps (reales de minas)  13, 123–124, 147, 242, 303, 312n44, 351–354, 356, 358, 371–373, 375–380, 526–527, 537, 581–582, 592, 596, 603–604, 608n33, 615 northern New Spain mining district  375, 378 pepena, partida (ore sharing)  379 silver mining  14, 19, 132, 169, 269, 271–272, 304, 346, 353, 371–393, 771 social fluidity in  382–387 societal norms in  383–385 violence in  386 women’s work in  379, 383–386 See also mita Minuane, Indians  671, 675, 677–679 Miskitu, region and Indians  239–247, 249–254, 257n27n28, 258n33, 263–264 Tawira Miskitu  243, 245, 264 Sambo Miskitu  243, 245, 247, 250, 264 missions and missionaries, see Augustinians, friars and missions; Capuchin order, friars and missions; Carmelite, friars, convents, missions; Directorate (Diretório); Dominicans; Franciscans; Jesuits; reducción / reducciones

882   index mita, forced labor system in Peru  325, 378, 575–576, 577–578, 580 mitotes, suppression of  532 Miwok, native people of Bodega Bay  843, 852 Mixtón War  85, 131, 133, 142–146, 158n84, 173, 520n1, 573 Mocha Island  727 Mochica, Indians  43–44 Mojos (Moxos), region and peoples  16, 70, 526, 528, 534, 545, 548–550, 567, 692–694, 696–698, 701, 703, 715, 716 Momboré-uaçu, Tupinambá elder  397, 399, 405 Monclova, Coahuila  351, 353, 358 Monoxó, Indians  415 Monsieur de Gennes  731 Monte Verde, Chile  32 Monteiro, John  9, 19, 397, 409n1, 422, 436n43, 592, 599 Montejo, Francisco de  165, 171, 819–820 Montes, Juan  187, 189–190 Montevideo, Uruguay  672, 674–677, 680, 682, 686 Moraga, Gabriel  853 Mosquitia  239–250, 253 See also Miskitu Mota y Escobar, Alonso, Bishop  379 Motolinia, see Benavente, Toribio de Moxos, see Mojos Moya, José  376 Moya de Contreras, Pedro  509, 792 Mucuri Commerce and Navigation Company (1847–1861)  419, 424–425 Mucuri, river  422–423, 427 Mughal  443–445, 454–455 mullu (Spondylus princeps) 44 Munduruku (Mundurucú, Mundurukú)  614, 623–627, 634n86 and n87, 641, 650, 655 Muñoz Camargo, Diego  153n20, 168 Muñoz, Juan Bautista  326–332, 340n82, 341n91 Mura, Indians  614, 623–627, 641, 647–656, 658n11 music  8, 19, 356, 367n73, 405, 525–537, 539n15, 548, 554, 557, 564n36 n38, 567, 641 alabados / alabanzas  527, 529–531, 537 chants / chanting  405, 527–528, 531, 533–534, 537, 553–554

musical instruments  527–530, 532–534, 536–537, 541n40, 552–554 See also bells

N

naborias  336n21, 576, 578–579, 585, 819 See also laboríos Nagasaki martyrs  795–798 Miki, Paul  795–799, 810n38 and n41 Kisai, James  795–799, 810n38 Goto, John de  795–799, 810n38 Nahua (Nahuas) / Náhuatl speaking ­peoples  59, 85, 134–139, 145, 147–148, 167, 304, 312n44, 374–375, 382–383, 819, 823–824 as colonists  164–168, 172–175, 334n5 Naknenuk  415, 425–426, 428, 439n81 Nalda, Soria  513 Narborough, John  730–731 net energy, theorem of  34 See also food security New Laws of 1542 (Spanish America)  12, 167, 171, 178n21, 572–575, 580, 820–821 New Laws of 1680  771 New mission history  348 New Mexico / Nuevo México  2, 9, 13–14, 18, 32, 65, 69, 71, 93, 101n12, 109–110, 117–119, 122–125, 133, 135, 142, 143, 187, 296, 299, 347, 355, 466–467, 469, 471–472, 473 map, 476–480, 487, 525, 509, 514–516, 529–530, 532–533, 576, 580, 773, 803, 851 New Spain  5, 15, 19, 62, 65, 68, 71–72, 83–84, 87, 89–90, 98, 107–110, 112–113, 114f, 116t, 117–119, 122, 132–135, 142–143, 146–148, 163, 166, 169–170, 173, 183, 185–186, 194, 242, 305, 311n32, 319, 344, 353, 356, 489–490, 492–495, 502–503, 509–512, 515–516, 518–519, 526, 528, 530–532, 534–537, 793, 817, 823–826, 841–844, 846–848, 851, 853, 855 indigenous enslavement in  572–573, 575–577, 579–580 mapping of  463–479, 482n20, 803 mining in  371–375, 378–379, 381–382, 387 royal roads of  295–298 Viceroyalty of  165, 296, 789, 791, 795

index   883 and Jesuit networks. See Jesuits and Pacific trade  766–77 Ngöbe, Indians  243, 245, 247–248 See also Guaymí Indians Nieremberg, Eusebio  557 nixtamalization 40 Niza, Fray Marcos de  88, 143 Nobili, Roberto  452–454, 456, 810n41 Nochiztlán, Jalisco  145 Nombre de Dios, Durango  109, 132 map, 142, 147–148, 304–306, 727 Noort, Olivier Van  728 Nootka Bay  842, 847–848 Nootka Controversy  842, 848 Nootka Sound  6 Spanish settlement of (S. Cruz de Nutka) 847 Noperi, Ignacio  188, 199 Appendix 7.1 Noperi, Jerónimo  188, 199, Appendix 7.1, 203n37 North Pacific  6, 841–847, 851 Nosa, Frutos  699 Nossa Senhora dos Anjos do Itambacuri Central Settlement  427, 430 Nuestra Señora de la Natividad del Acaray 599 Nueva España. See New Spain Nueva Galicia  107, 115, 134–135, 142–146, 354, 378, 851 conquest of  134–135, 142–146, 154n29 Nueva Granada  744 Nueva Vizcaya  13, 65, 71, 113, 117, 131, 133, 135, 142, 147, 187, 300, 343–354, 358, 467, 476, 478, 489–490, 494, 497, 510, 535, 576, 773, 776 Nuevo León  65, 71, 109, 113, 163, 165, 170, 174 Nusdorffer, Bernard  555

O

O’Cain, Joseph  850 O’odham (Odami), see Pima, Indians Oacpicagigua, Luis  189, 190, 194 Olid, Cristóbal de  155n53, 171 Olivares, Count Duke of (Gaspar de Guzmán y Pimentel)  167, 172–173 Omagua, Indians  40, 614 Ópata, Indians  113, 133, 185, 187–191, 194–199, 350, 465, 475

Orientalism, Catholic  457 Orta, Garcia de  447, 449–451 Ortiz, Fernando  4, 20n18, 183, 818 Ortiz Zapata, Juan  495 Ostimuri, province of  66, 68, 71, 190–191, 474 map Otomí, Indians  64, 72, 85–87, 131–132, 134–139, 141, 147–148, 164, 169, 185, 382, 825 Otoni, Teófilo Benedito  424–425, 438n69 Our Lady of Guadalupe (Nuestra señora de Guadalupe), see Virgin of Ouro Prêto (Vila Rica), city and captaincy of Minas Gerais  219, 223, 414, 416, 419, 428, 599 Ovando, Juan de  167 Oviedo, Juan Antonio de  496 Oxitipa, ancient Mexican polity  99 Ozoró, Indians  215

P

Pacific borderland, see transoceanic and riverine networks Pacific Ocean  7, 11, 119, 271, 723, 724, 726, 805, 842–843, 845–846 Pacó, Domingos Ramos  426 Padilla, Fray Juan de  99 padroado  446, 450–452, 454–456 Panamahka, Indians  243, 246–247, 251 Pantanal  10, 60, 68 Pánuco  83, 99, 142, 170, 819–822 Papasquiaro  343, 494, 494, 496 Paquimé, archaeological site, see Casas Grandes Pará, captaincy  595, 600–602, 613, 617, 619, 621–623, 627, 648–649 Paraguaná Peninsula  742 Paraguay  9, 16, 46, 60, 68, 397, 534, 545–546, 548, 552, 655, 703 river basin  9–10, 33, 60, 645–646, 651 Paraíba  216, 402–403 Paraíba do Sul, river  214–216, 224 Paraná, river  558–559, 593, 604 parcialidades  194, 698–699 Parral, Real del, Chihuahua  71, 80n67, 108–109, 115, 117, 124, 346–347, 352, 357, 372 map, 373, 379–380, 384, 386, 581, 773 Parras, Coahuila  109, 115, 119–121, 124, 353

884   index Pasco, Peru  279 Patagonia  2, 35, 37, 61, 545, 645, 725, 727 Patagones  725, 728 expeditions in search of  725 patriarchy  356, 358–359 Paulinus a Sancto Bartholomaeo  454–455 Paya, Indians (also known as Pech)  243–248, 251, 658 peacemaking  19, 591, 601, 605, 641–645, 648–650, 654, 656 See also diplomacy Pech, Indians, see Paya Indians Peñalver Angulo, Sebastián de  825 Peramás, José  558 Pérez de Ribas, Andrés  101, 192–194, 492–498, 502–503, 533, 800, 802 Pérez, Juan  842 performance ritual  355, 404, 536–537, 554 music and dance  525, 527, 534–537 permiso (trade regulation)  771–772, 775 See also transoceanic and riverine networks, and trans-Pacific trade Pernambuco, Brazil  398, 400, 403, 406–407, 617 Peru  12, 44, 242, 279, 281, 283, 286n31, 325, 332, 397, 528, 574, 695, 724, 793, 794, 795 Alto Peru  269, 270, 272–274, 277–281, 409n2, 548 and maritime trade  770, 772, 777, 780n8 and pirates  727, 731, 732 and Spain’s European enemies  725, 726, 728, 730 Bajo Peru  270, 272, 277–279 disease and population decline in  63, 107 Jesuits in  520n11, 528, 545 Peruvian Current  37 Peruvian highlands  37, 44 silver exports to Europe  766 silver mining  72, 80n68, 269, 290n62, 377, 576 real situado 720 roads in  33, 287n40 Viceroyalty of  319, 417, 548, 722, 725–726 See also mita, forced labor system Philip II, King of Spain  11

Philip III, King of Spain  14, 574, 720 Philip III, King of Portugal (IV of Spain)  403 Philip IV, King of Spain (III of Portugal)  171–173, 516, 525, 574 Philip V, Bourbon monarch of Spain  472 Philippines  7, 299, 767–770, 773–77, 779 Piaxtla, river  92 Pidal, Pedro  828 Pima, Indians  94, 104 map, 142, 185, 187, 189–192, 194–195, 199 map, 347, 350, 464–465, 467–468, 470, 475–477, 532 Pimas Altos  185, 199 map, 204 Pimas Bajos  185, 199 map, 470 Pimería  108, 195, 351, 465–466, 469–472, 475–477, 478f Pinacate desert  94 piraguas, see watercraft pirates  726–728, 730–731 Pires, Francisco  401, 404 Pires, Tomé  448 Pita, Sebastião da Rocha  406 Pizarro, Gonzalo  12, 320 Pojichá, Indians  415, 427–428 Pokrane, Guido  420 Porco, Bolivia  274 port cities  7, 669–673, 765, 769, 777, 826 Port Famine, Chile  731, 737n61 Porto Seguro  402, 421, 423 Portugal  11, 227n6, 436n46, 448, 571, 578, 592, 598, 605 Portuguese Empire  210, 625, 654, 669–671, 674, 684, 790 Spanish rule over (1580–1640)  617 Potiguaçu 402 Potiguar, Indians  402–403, 410n24 Potosí, Bolivia  269, 271–274, 277, 279–283, 320–322, 325, 332–333, 378, 380, 576, 578, 719, 726 presidios  135, 195–196, 203n37, 206n79, 306, 313n51, 355, 419, 437n57, 600, 851–853 Presidio of San Felipe de Montevideo, Rio de la Plata  674 Presidio of San Francisco, Alta California 855 Presidio of Santa Maria do Araguaia, Brazil 602 See also forts

index   885 probanzas de méritos 166 Propaganda Fide  454–455, 457, 460n39, 515, 517–518, 701 Pueblo, Indians  13, 14, 89, 91–92, 97, 114 map, 142, 187, 199 map Puebloans  69, 525, 532 Pueblo revolt  123, 142, 187, 347–348, 478, 532 Pulares, Indians  322, 324–325, 332 Puno, Peru  279–281 Purépecha, Indians  86, 131–132, 134–135, 137 See also Tarascan Indians Puri, Indians  210, 214, 216, 228n14, 415, 437n57

Q

Quemada, La, archaeological site  87–88, 90, 93 Querétaro, Mexican state of  62, 88, 132, 138–141, 165, 301 Querétaro, Santiago de, city in New Spain  87, 141, 517–519 quilombos, fugitive slave c­ ommunities  433n19, 591, 593, 600, 604 See also slavery Quivira  69, 99, 472, 516

R

Rahum, Sonora  189–190, 199 map, 200 Rama, Indians  243–245, 250 Ramírez de Velasco, Juan  320–321, 326–330, 336n36, 339n73 Ramos da Cruz, Félix (and brothers)  423, 425, 437n68 Ramos, river, Durango  96 Ramusio, Giovanni Battista  448 Real Colegio Beaterio de Santa Rosa de Viterbo 518 Real Compañía Guipuzcoana de Caracas, see Caracas Company Real Hacienda  681, 682, 835n35 Real Sala de Crimen  824, 865 reducción / reducciones (reductions)  16, 240–244, 246–248, 251, 253–254, 324, 465, 476, 486n62, 510, 527, 545–546, 548–550, 552, 557–560, 563n17, 645, 693–702, 712n77, 713n83, 720, 865 See also congregation policy

Remedios, Durango  494–495 repartimiento, see labor República Guaraya  703–704, 713n84 República de indios  166, 168, 192–193, 866 Restivo, Paulo  558 Rezanov, Nikolai Petrovich  849, 851–852 Ricci, Matteo  452, 793–797, 799 Rinaldini, Benito  495–498, 503 Rio de Janeiro, captaincy of  417, 420–421, 424, 437 city and province of Brazil  210, 216, 218, 224, 403, 416, 599 as port  671–673, 677, 683–684 Rio de la Plata  3, 6, 10, 16, 60, 209, 273, 333, 546, 669–674, 677–686 Rio Doce Military Division  416–417, 419–421, 430, 433n18 Rio Grande, river in Brazil  216, 422 Rio Grande de Gila (Rio Gila), river  468–469 Rio Grande do Norte, captaincy in Brazil  402 Rio Grande do Sul, captaincy in Brazil  224 Rio Grande Valley, and river in northern New Spain  14, 69, 92, 295, 296 Rio Negro, river  40, 613–616, 618–620, 622, 628, 648 River Plate, region  3, 271–273, 278–280, 556 roads  33, 42, 99, 186, 268–269, 286n31, 381, 414, 592, 674, 679, 694 and epidemic contagion  118–119 as borderlands  296, 392n65, 523 n45 Andean east-west roads  281–282 cart roads  146 construction and maintenance of  309n16, 424, 614, 686, 703, 821, 822, 826 definition 297 in pre-Incaic Andes  267 indigenous pathways  295–296 Pacific Coast road, ancient  89 Royal roads  295–299, 307 Tierra Adentro road, ancient  89–92 See also caminos Rome  454–456, 471, 492, 493, 495, 502, 515, 790, 792, 802, 803 Russian America  843–845, 850–855 Russian American Company (RAC)  842, 848, 849–850, 852–855

886   index

S

Sá, Mem de  400 sacrament manuals  557 Sadeler, Jan  500  501, 503, 507n41 Sahagún, Bernardino de  86–87, 136, 145, 154n30, 510 Salas, Juan de  515 Salcedo, Miguel de  679, 681, 683 Salta, province of  270–284, 322–325, 327–328, 332 Saltillo, Nueva Vizcaya  109, 115, 124, 132 map, 135, 165, 169, 352–354, 357, 372 map Salvador, Frei Vicente do  397, 399 San Bartolomé, Valle de (today Valle de Allende), Chihuahua  117, 119–121, 124, 346 San Demetrio, mines in Zacatecas  372 map, 375–376 San Esteban de la Nueva Tlaxcala, Nueva Vizcaya  135, 165, 169 San Esteban de Saltillo, Nueva Vizcaya  115, 124 San Francisco, Jacinto de, friar  510 San Juan de Santa Cruz, Francisco  776, 785n72 San Juan de Santa Cruz, Manuel  353, 357, 773–774, 776, 785n72, 786n81 San Julián Convent in Ágreda, Spain  513 San Luis Montañés, Nicolás de  141 San Luis Potosí  71–72, 88, 115, 119, 135, 165, 377–386 mining town of (real de minas)  147, 169, 371–373, 388n2 population of  380–382 San Felipe de Jesús (Saint)  795, 798, 811n51 San Miguel Octopán, Guanajuato  301–302, 312n39 San Miguel el Grande, Guanajuato  132 map, 135, 139–141 San Miguel de Aguayo, Nuevo León  163–170, 174 San Miguel de Tucumán, city  322–323, 325, 327–329, 332–333 San Pablo, mission among the Guarayos 701–702 San Pablo de Vicuñer, mission in Sonora 478–479 San Sebastián (Saint)  163

San Sebastián, village in Zacatecas  303–304, 306, 312n44 Santa Bárbara, Nueva Vizcaya  13, 71, 123, 346, 349, 352 Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia  692, 694, 702 Prefectura of  68 Department of  693, 695–696, 701–705 Santa Fe, New Mexico  118, 135, 311, 333, 773 Santa Lucía, devotional image of  163–164 Santa María, Guillermo de  509, 520n1 Santiago de Cuancamé (Cuancamé de Ceniceros), Durango  305–306, 313n51 Santiago, Augustín de  825 Santísima Trinidad, Guaraní reduction  552 Santo Domingo (Hispaniola)  742, 744 Audiencia of  742 Santo Tomé, Guaraní mission  558 São Francisco, river  402, 593 São Luís, Maranhão  398, 401, 617 São Mateus, river  423 São Paulo, captaincy and state  209, 401, 417, 421, 592–593, 595–596, 599, 604, 616 São Tomé de Meliapor (Chennai), South India  447 map, 457 Sáric, Luis de  194–195 Sarmiento de Gamboa, Pedro  725, 727, 735n34 Sassoferrato, Friar Ângelo de  429 Schabel, Miguel Alexis  750 Schmid, Martin, S. J.  534, 557 Schouten, Willem  728 Scott, James C.  46, 584, 827 secondary subsistence system, See food security Sedelmayr, Jacobo, S. J.  470, 803, 805 Sena, Bernardino de  515 Sephardic Jews  744, 748 Sepp, Anton  534, 554 Seris, Indians (Comca’ac)  114 map, 186, 189–190, 345, 395, 466, 475, 480n1 sermons  551, 556–558, 798 Serrano, José  557 sertão (backlands)  216–218, 221, 406–407, 413, 417, 596, 614–616, 620–624, 627, 628n5, 866 drogas do sertão  615, 618 Shahjahan, Mughal emperor  443

index   887 shamanism  36, 44, 111, 356, 358, 401, 415, 426–427, 546, 553 See also healing / healers, curanderismo / curanderas Shelikhov, Grigori Ivanovich  848–850, 858n29 Siberia  31–33, 41, 844–845, 848, 851 Sierra Madre Occidental  9, 65–66, 71, 88–89, 91–92, 94, 98, 123, 307n4, 346, 349–350, 354, 485n49 Silao [de la Victoria], Guanajuato  302, 312n40 Silva, Joaquim da  219 silver  14, 17, 218, 272, 284, 296, 299, 371–388, 443, 554, 573, 576, 578, 671, 679, 684, 730, 743, 765–766, 769–771, 773, 776–778, 779n4 and 7, 782n35, 784n48 and 51 amount of production in New Spain  71, 132, 146 and environment  72–73 currency 289n49 See also mining Sinaloa colonial province  66, 71, 113, 119, 123, 142, 187, 190, 192–194, 196, 346–347, 466, 472, 492, 797, 851 modern Mexican state  9, 69, 88, 125, 345, 349, 379 slave trade  310n26, 365n51, 414, 571, 580, 615, 617, 619–620, 671, 680, 685, 744, 827 African slave trade  818 Asian slave trade  771, 790 indigenous slave trade  820 Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Dtabase  579 Trans-Pacific slave trade  790 See also enslavement and captivity smuggling  210–211, 213, 215–216, 223, 414, 672, 678–682, 685–686, 688n15, 745, 747–753, 852 See also contraband trade Society of Jesus, see Jesuits Solá, Pablo Vicente de  855 Solimões, river  614, 618–620, 626, 628 Sombrerete, Zacatecas  13, 109, 120–121, 141, 147, 303, 312n44, 372 map, 375 Sonora colonial province  71, 108–109, 113, 115, 119, 123, 125, 133, 142, 183–200, 345–347, 351,

356, 359, 366n66, 379, 463–480, 492, 529, 533, 580, 693, 797, 841, 851 highlands  350, 356, 465 modern Mexican state  43, 69, 94, 96–98, 184, 345–347 Sonoran Desert  43, 65, 72, 91 Sorarte, Diego de  682 Sorarte, Savina  682 Sousa, Luís de Vasconcelos e  211, 215–216, 218–224, 227n5 South Asia  7, 443, 445, 447 map, 452, 455, 457 South Sea Company  682 Southwest, US  18, 41, 91, 95, 97, 298, 373, 527 Souza Coutinho, Francisco de  623–624, 649 Spanish Lake  726–727, 732, 769 Spilbergen, Joris Van  728 spiritual conquest  403, 407, 446, 509, 511, 693 Sri Lanka  445, 447, 450, 453 St. Ignatius Loyola  460n39, 491, 496, 503–504 St. Thomas Christians  451–452, 454 Steller, Georg  845 Stephens, Thomas  457 Sumu, Indians, see Twahka, Indians swidden agriculture  38–39, 61, 68 See also environment, fallow

T

Tacna  281, 283 Talamanca, region and people  239–240, 242–248, 251, 255n3 and 8, 256 n23, 257 n27, 258 n33 and 35, 260n57 and 60, 263, 517 Tamarón y Romeral, Pedro  496–498, 503 Tamaulipas, Mexican state of  88, 165 Tapajós chiefdom  41, 623 river  618, 623–625, 627 Tapia, Fernando de (Conni)  140–141 Tarahumara (Rarámuri), Indians  103n46, 109, 114 map, 115, 125, 347–348, 350, 353–354, 357, 384, 464, 534 missions  495, 541n40, 797 Tarascan (Purépecha), Indians  64, 86, 88, 90, 93, 99, 131–132, 134–135, 137, 139, 142–143, 185, 375, 382 Taraval, Sigismundo  481n20, 805 Tarazona, Carmelite convent in  513

888   index Tarija  277, 280, 282, 290n63 Tawantinsuyu 269 taxation  133, 167, 172, 174, 209, 215, 225, 269, 274, 302, 449, 677, 730 and New Laws of 1542  171 See also tribute Tayaoba, Nicolás  555 Tecóac, battle of  136–138 Tello de Sandoval visita  144–145, 158n84 Tenochtitlan  42, 88, 131, 139, 155n42, 158n84 conquest of  136, 144–145, 154n33, 164, 166, 170, 173, 185 Teocalhueyacan  136–138, 154n33 Teotihuacan, archaeological culture  41, 88–92 Tepecanos, Indians  94, 97–98 Tepehuan, Indians (also Tepehuanos and Tepehuanes)  59, 85, 89, 94–98, 101n19, 109, 115, 118 map, 122, 125, 131–132, 313n51, 347–350, 379, 381, 491–492, 494–497, 500–502 Tepiman, culture and language family  85, 94, 97–98, 103n46 Terbi, Indians, see Teribe, Indians Teribe, Indians  243–244, 246–247, 251 territory and diasporic populations  817 of Beni, Bolivia  691–692, 694–695, 700–702, 704–705 of Brazil  210–211, 213–214, 406, 408, 414, 416, 428, 592, 596, 619–620, 624, 626, 643–644, 648, 655 of New Spain  34, 89–91, 93, 95–98, 110, 115, 136–137, 139, 142, 145, 174, 185, 192–194, 295, 297, 299, 304, 464–465, 467, 469–470, 479, 529, 533, 798, 803 of Rio de la Plata  669, 683 of South Asia  446, 449–450, 453–454 unconquered  2, 12, 84–85, 243, 246, 320, 323, 326–327, 332–333, 377, 545, 548, 560, 717–721, 723–725, 733, 864 South Andean territory  268–269, 271–273, 277–279, 282, 284 sovereignty over  4, 671, 754, 765, 841–843, 845–849, 853, 855 Teúl, El, archaeological site  87, 88, 90 Teúl de González Ortega, town in Jalisco, Mexico 87 theology  456, 510, 801

Third Provincial Council of Mexico (1585) 509 Thule Eskimo  41 Tidar, Indians  516 tierra adentro road, see roads Tierra del Fuego  33, 717–718, 727 Titicaca, see Lake Titicaca Tlingit, Indians  843, 850 Tlacateccatl, Martín Cuauhtzin  145 Tlaxcala, Lord of  163–165 Tlaxcalilla, San Luis Potosí  147 Tlaxcalteca (Tlaxcalan), Indians  86, 98, 115, 118 map, 135–137, 145, 164–165, 170, 173–175, 185, 194, 353, 382 Tobajara, Indians  402, 617 Tocantins, river  593, 594–597, 599–603, 614, 617, 619, 626 Tocantins, state  592, 597, 605 Tohono O’odham, see Pima, Indians Toltec, native ancient culture  86–88, 90, 93, 139 Tolteca-Chichimeca, native ancient ­culture  86, 90 Toltén, river  11, 720–721 Toluca, Mexico  138–139, 824 Toro, Pedro Martín de  141 Torre, Andrés de la  516 Torres, Diego de  552 transculturation  4, 16, 183–84, 191, 195, 627, 769, 817 transimperial interaction and colonial networks  669, 673, 677, 679, 682, 684–685, 753 transoceanic and riverine networks  6–7, 60, 264, 369, 591–592, 669–671, 686, 733, 752, 762, 765–767, 771–774, 776–777 peacemaking  639, 641–645, 648–650, 654, 656 Treaty of Madrid (1750)  209, 613, 617–618 Treaty of El Escorial (1790)  842, 847–848 Treaty of San Ildefonso (1777)  613 Treaty of Tordesillas (1494)  617, 674 Treaty of Westphalia (1648)  741 Très Sainte Trinité, Philippe de  454 tribute  12, 110, 133 135–137, 139–141, 143, 148, 166, 168, 172, 174, 185–186, 245–246, 253, 300, 305–306, 347, 352, 378, 545, 549, 559 and citizenship  697 and debt peonage  576

index   889 and encomienda  575, 745, 864 and farman  458 note 2 and Guaikurú  652 and Russian Tsar  844–845, 848 in Alto Peru  409 n2 records of  63 See also taxation Trinidad, Bolivia  698, 701–702 Tucumán, province of  241, 274, 280, 283, 319–333 Tula, archaeological site  88, 93, 139, 141 Tula-Moctezuma-Pánuco, river  83 Tule, Indians  240–245, 247–249, 251–253 See also Kuna, Indians tundra  2, 33, 35, 848 Tungla, Indians  243, 245–246 Tupi, Indians  12, 13, 41, 44, 397–398, 400–401, 404, 596, 616–617, 624 Tupinambá, Indians  13, 41, 397, 398, 404–408, 617 Turner, Frederick Jackson  5, 417, 424 Tursellino, Orazio  494 Tuticorim, South India  447 map, 456 Twahka, Indians  243–251

U

Uacúsechas (Tarascan), Indians  90, 139 Ugarte, Jacobo  825 Ulúa, Valley of, Honduras  169 Ulwa, Indians  243–248, 250–251 Union of Arms  172–174 United Indian Nations, petition of to the King of Portugal (1821)  601 Urban VIII, Pope  515, 795 Urdaneta, Andrés de  767, 770 Urdiñola, Francisco de  165, 169, 353, 357 Urinama, Indians, see Cabécar, Indians Urubichá, mission  693–694, 702, 714n95 Uruguay, river  558 Usacamea, Juan Ignacio (Muni)  187–188, 190, 196, 200, 203n41, 207n88 and n89 Uto-Aztecan, language family  103n46 speakers  41, 42

V

vaccine  110, 112 Valdivia, Chile  332, 718, 720, 722–723, 729–733, 738n74

Valdivia, Pedro de  12, 718, 722–723 Valencia, Martín de  512 Valignano, Alessandro  452, 792, 793, 794, 795, 809n36 Valladolid, Spain  502, 768 Valladolid-Comayagua, Honduras  172 Valle, Juan del  491–492 Varela Ávalos, Juan Manuel  188, 191, 194, 199t, 203n37, 204n44 Varela, Andrés  188, 199t várzea (seasonally flooded land)  42, 614, 615 Vasconcelos, Antônio Pedro de  676–677, 683–685 vassalage / vassals  136, 171, 176n5, 246, 295, 297, 300, 302–306, 400, 402–403, 448, 572, 602, 605, 644, 650, 662n55, 681 Vázquez de Coronado, Francisco  13, 85, 88, 99, 131, 135, 142–146, 157n69, 825 vecindad / vecino(s)  169–170, 172, 190, 305, 320–322, 336, 343, 350, 376, 380, 573, 722–723, 773–777, 786n86, 821, 866 Velasco, José Miguel de  701, 712n71 Velasco, Luis de (the elder), Viceroy of New Spain  135, 140–141, 147, 150n3, 155n53 Veracruz  62, 65, 298, 378, 469, 670, 672, 776, 826 Vieira, Antônio  407, 597, 618 Vila Boa de Goiás, Brazil  592, 594 map, 596–599, 604 Villagrá, Gaspar Pérez de  9, 13–14, 101 Villamanrique, [Marquess of], Viceroy of New Spain  509 Villar de Francos, Claudia Tomasa Pardiñas  771, 773 Villar de Francos, Juan Isidro de  773, 787n92 Virgin Mary  491–494, 496–497, 500–503, 516, 518–519, 523n43, 553 of Aránzazu  490 of Balvanera  490 of Caldas  490 of Guadalupe  489, 493, 517–518, 530–531, 537 of the Immaculate Conception  489–495, 500, 513, 523n43, 553 of Loreto  490 of Sorrows  489, 500, 501f of the Rosary  490

890   index Virgin Mary (Continued) de la Luz  490 del Refugio  490 del Pópulo  490 Viudez, Manuel  701, 712n74, n75 and n77

W

warfare  13, 145 164, 192, 325, 346, 353, 368, 386, 398, 401, 404–405, 417, 465, 591–592, 600, 645, 647, 650, 671, 673, 718 and cull-killing  36 and gender  355–356 inter-ethnic warfare  351, 601–605 watercraft  33, 641 canoes  33, 35, 42, 46, 216–217, 244, 250–251, 401, 404, 593, 595–596, 600, 602–603, 614–616, 618–619, 621, 624, 626–628, 635n96, 646, 648, 681, 742, 745, 845 piraguas  742, 743, 748 Weber, David J.  17–18, 210, 547, 652, 818 West India Company (WIC)  728–729, 729f, 743–748 wheat  140, 672, 674, 677, 851 Willemstad, Curaçao  743–744, 749 witchcraft  36, 357–358, 386, 393n103, 415, 864 see also hechicería women, see gender world-system theory  766, 782n30

X

Xavante, Indians  594–597, 600–603, 641, 645 Xavier, Jerome  454 Xerente, Indians  594–596, 600, 602–603, 645 Xilotepec, Otomí province of, see Jilotepec Ximénez Samaniego, Joseph  514 Ximénez, Alonso  326–328, 331 Xingú, river  623, 626–627 Xixime, Indians  89–90, 97, 103n46, 109, 113, 348–350, 379

Y

Yaguarú, mission  702, 712n74 and n77, 714n95 Yakutat Bay  841, 850 Yaparí, Juan  557 Yapuguay, Nicolás  558 Yaqui, Indians  114 map, 117, 118 map, 123, 125, 128n43, 142, 185, 187–198, 200, 202n26, 207n86, 347, 351, 475, 492 Yaqui, river  192, 194, 197, 465–466 Yarto, José Inasio  530–531, 539n18 Yotaú, mission  702, 714n95 Yuma, Indians (Yumans / Yumanas)  464, 470, 473 map, 474 map, 476, 477, 478, 486n55, 516 Yungas  267–269, 284, 284n1

Z

Zacatecas  13–14, 65, 71–72, 108, 113, 132 map, 141, 169, 173, 300, 303–304, 344, 371–387, 517 mining district  65, 312n44, 372 map, 373, 375–376, 378–379, 381–382, 384–385, 387 Indian pueblos / towns in  376, 382–383 population of  372, 375–376, 378–384, 387 Zacatecos, Indians  131–132, 147, 381 Zape, El, region in Durango, Mexico  95, 489–505 archaeological site  101n12 mission and town  489–498 virgin of  489–490, 492, 495, 498–505 Zapotec, Indians  64, 144, 164, 166, 173 Zavala, Bruno Mauricio de  674, 681 Zipoli, Doménico  534 Zorobabé, Indian chief  402 Zuaque, Indians  185, 192, 194 Zumárraga, Juan de, Bishop  820, 834n19