Mundos entrelaçados: relações de fronteira nos confins meridionais do império espanhol (período colonial tardio)

Abstract

In the middle of the 18th century there were large portions of the Spanish Empire in the Americas that were controlled by Indians not subject to the Spanish Crown. Such spaces became known as “frontiers”, and constituted a source of concern for bourbon managers. The latter were concerned both with independent indigenous people and with attacks from foreign countries in these regions. In such circumstances, the Empire sought to expand its territories, as well as control the natives with different policies, such as: missions, treaties and the insertion of the military. This work aims to investigate one of these colonial frontiers: the Pampa Bonaerense in the mid-eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a period known as late colonial. After an “unsuccessful” missionary experience, built by the Jesuit priests, in 1752 the Crown opted for the “defensive war” in the Buenos Aires campaign and built a series of forts and forts in order to contain the attacks of the “Pampas and Serranos” Indians. In this research, I will use these forts as spaces to investigate the contact processes operated there, emphasizing the performance of different agents, mainly indigenous people, as an essential part of these same processes. Indigenous people from different groups arrived in these places, seeking, among other factors, permission to exchange their products in the city of Buenos Aires; it was also from there that the Spanish expeditions to the land departed. Around the fortifications many caciques arrived with their awnings and settled with their families. These forts were part of a larger reality that was that of the border, and, therefore, they are not considered here as areas of containment, imposition and regulation, as they constituted, in fact, meeting points for people and, above all, spaces of material and symbolic exchanges. For this reason, we call that zone the “agency frontier”, since it was the agents who gave meaning, who acted in different ways in that environment, they who led it, who established ways to live in that place, who recreated, reproduced and created cultural conformations. For this reason, the brokered border becomes the ideal locus to analyze “intercultural relations”. The methodology for this work will be to read the reference literature and research in primary sources.