Where Caciques and Mapmakers Met

In this groundbreaking book, Jeffrey Erbig places autonomous Native peoples at the center of imperial border-making enterprises of the late eighteenth century. It would be difficult to overstate the methodological challenges of such a study. The theoretical and juridical debates around Iberian territorial possession are notoriously complex, and the related efforts on the ground to demarcate an imperial border—the collaborative mapping expeditions by Portuguese and Spanish geographers, engineers, and astronomers, each with their own support crews—generated an enormous and geographically scattered corpus of sources. Expedition diarists seldom dwelled on the Native territories that they explored or on the autonomous groups with whom they interacted; these were simply taken for granted as features of this borderlands world, and they might be alluded to briefly or not at all. This book thus required research in some two dozen archives in multiple countries, as the author collected hundreds of documentary fragments that mentioned interactions between mapping expeditions and Native tolderías, or mobile encampments. The use of geographic information systems (GIS) enabled Erbig to track the locations and movements of both tolderías and individual Native leaders as they positioned themselves around an emergent border. These innovative sources and methods allowed Erbig “to develop a new geographical perspective that centers on Native ground” and to trace the participation of tolderías in the production of the imperial borderline (p. 9). The resulting book is richly illuminating for the history of cartography, the field of borderlands studies, and the history of Indigenous South America.The first two chapters introduce the reader to the “archipelago” of colonial settlements and mobile tolderías that made up the Río de la Plata region in the decades before the border demarcation process began. Each toldería developed its own relationships—whether peaceful or violent—with nearby missions and towns, seeking to benefit economically and politically from its position of dominance over the countryside and its resources. Across the region, autonomous Native peoples made themselves impossible to ignore. They blocked river routes, charged tolls of travelers and taxes of ranchers, traded in feral cattle and captives, and served as essential guides and informants. Tolderías also sought a competitive edge against one another, pursuing fragile alliances with Portuguese or Spanish leaders and temporarily using colonial settlements as places of refuge during conflicts with other Native peoples. As the eighteenth century wore on, Iberian administrators became increasingly dissatisfied with this situation and its web of shifting interdependencies. What they wanted was a fixed partition of contiguous territories, unambiguously possessed by one colonial power or the other.It was in this context that imperial mapping emerged as a serious endeavor in the region. After the Treaty of Madrid (1750), Spain and Portugal established joint boundary commissions in South America, which continued in the wake of the Treaty of San Ildefonso (1777). In the third and fourth chapters of the book, these mapping expeditions in the southernmost area of demarcation are revealed as complex interethnic initiatives rather than simply technical exercises or top-down impositions. Erbig describes how the demarcation teams negotiated territorial access with powerful groups like the Minuanes, Charrúas, and Bohanes; hired Indigenous guides who could translate toponyms in Native languages; and hurried through Native territories that would be represented as blank spaces on the maps that they later produced.Tolderías, for their part, found opportunities and room to maneuver as the borderline developed. They developed kinship or patronage ties with newly arrived officials or settlers, took advantage of the neutral lands created along some stretches of the line, aided smuggling as well as policing efforts in the border region, and crossed over to rival imperial territory to avoid retribution for theft or hostility, knowing that colonial agents could not follow. Many individual caciques, or Native leaders, found themselves empowered and emboldened by these activities. Indeed, Erbig finds that autonomous Native groups tended to migrate toward the border area during the second half of the eighteenth century. Conversely, tolderías that positioned themselves farther away from the border tended to face rising territorial pressures and threats to their security. One of the most impressive maps of the book represents these patterns visually, plotting the changing locations of tolderías as gleaned from several hundred manuscript records (p. 125). If Erbig ever regretted his deep dive into historical GIS and spatial analysis, we find no evidence of it here; the maps seem essential to the development of the book's argument.The final chapter looks at the “end of the line”: the dissolution of the borderline during the wars of independence and the elimination or dispersal of tolderías that could no longer find reliable allies or safe refuges in the chaotic years of the early nineteenth century. None of this was predictable, as we come to understand from reading this book. Methodologically innovative and framed by compelling questions, Where Caciques and Mapmakers Met opens up possibilities for comparative research in other borderland regions in South America and beyond. It offers scholars a whole new perspective on imperial and Native territorialities, which competed and intersected in the making of a meaningful border

Archaeology · Cartography · Dozen · Ethnology · Genealogy · Geography · Indigenous · Native american · Portuguese · Possession (linguistics) · TRACE (psycholinguistics) · Historical Studies in Latin America · History · History and Politics in Latin America · Latin American history and culture

• Mapeamento e relações interétnicas na formação das fronteiras

  Open Access•Denise Aparecida Soares De Moura•Tempo•2022

  Incluir item

• Etnopaisagem Jê e reterritorialização do Brasil Meridional (1768-1773)

  Open Access•Denise Aparecida Soares De Moura•Revista Brasileira de História•2021

  Incluir item

• The Colonial Origins of Indigenous Archaeologies

  Lidia R Nacuzzi, Carina Lucaioli et al.•The Oxford Handbook of Global…•2022

  Incluir item

• Comércio, contrabando e demarcação de fronteiras na Amazónia ibérica (c.1780-c.1790)

  Open Access•Carlos Augusto Bastos•Revista de História da Sociedade…•2024

  Incluir item

• Entre a procura do contato e a manutenção da autonomia

  Open Access•Francismar Alex Lopes De Carvalho•Revista Brasileira de História•2022

  Incluir item