Tierra de Indios Enemigos: Imaginacion Cartografica, Despojo Renovado y Entrada en la Historia del Chaco Insurgente (siglos XVI-XX)

Abstract

This research is situated at the intersection of South American colonial studies, cultural studies, visual culture, anthropology, history, and literature. It departs from a broad research question: In what ways have the Indigenous Peoples of the lowlands shaped colonial and national pasts, heritages, and memories? How were their territories defined, inhabited, narrated, contested, and appropriated by the colonial and republican regimes? What are the ties that bind our present to the colonial trajectories that precede and inform the national states? This dissertation looks at three distinctive moments and registries for Chaco history: the initial period of Spanish colonization, the established imperial rule, and the entrance into national historical discourse, as is presented in the first chapter (introduction). The second chapter analyzes colonial cartography and maps as artifacts of knowledge and power, but also as historical fiction to be interpreted, as well as visual technology devices. These last two ways of understanding cartographic objects are at the center of the discussion, articulated in a historical and methodological exercise. This chapter exposes the symbolic and material construction of a space through its cartographic representation, and the concrete war effects that certain representation of indigenous groups enabled during the colonial period. At the same time, a methodological argument is displayed, involving the nature and treatment of cartographic documents in the humanities. Lastly, the initiatives of collective and participative mapping and mapmaking are considered as practices that produce discourses defiant to the hegemonic narrative of the colonial state. The third chapter is based on published and unpublished sources from the beginning and mid eighteenth century, when the imperial rule was as strong as it would be, authored mostly by Spanish (both military and Jesuit) administrators. I explore the possibility to produce legislation combined with the ability to circulate a version of truth that is key to ensuring power over subaltern groups of people. These issues are understood within the theoretical framework of primitive (and ongoing) accumulation as a form of space construction. Here, I critically analyze the correlation between the declaration of war to the Chaco region (and people), and the military appropriation of indigenous peoples (slavery) and their lands during the early eighteenth century with the aid of the Jesuit enterprise. The fourth chapter is dedicated to bureaucratic, visual, and academic records produced during the transition to the Argentine nation-state. This chapter demonstrates the continuity of several colonial structures exposed in the first two chapters of the dissertation within the modern nation state of Argentina. At the same time, it highlights the ways in which the Nation-State included Indigenous Peoples from the Chaco into the national narratives of the past, undermined their presence in the present and neglected them from the national imagination of the future. In the conclusions (chapter five), I reflect on this contribution to the field of colonial studies by proposing a history of the Chaco region and their Indigenous Peoples that moves away from a model of history that postulates acculturation and near extinction of Indigenous Peoples to propose a discursive genealogy of the foundational cultural and symbolic narratives of the Argentine state.