Native Gender and Kinship As Encomienda in Colonial Paraguay

Modern Paraguay is known as a thoroughly mestizo nation. But the unusual process of mestizaje in Paraguay is reflected in the fact that while nearly all Paraguayans speak Guaraní this does not mark indigenous identity. Over fifty years ago, anthropologist Elman R. Service used the absence of ostensible indigenous traits in modern Paraguay to interpret the colonial past, arguing that Spanish encomenderos devastated Guaraní social and cultural integrity within a few generations. My paper challenges Service’s claims by analyzing social relationships and the encomienda in sixteenth and seventeenth-century Paraguay through litigation records, a previously untapped source for this periodization. I argue that the first version of the encomienda existed at the nexus between native notions of kinship, labor, and sexuality. Paradoxically, the encomienda was both sustained and jeopardized by native marriage practices. Just like other politically distinct native groups, Spaniards received native wives to establish mutually beneficial alliances and kinships networks. These constituted the first encomiendas. But Spaniards did not anticipate that these strategic unions would extend to native groups beyond their encomiendas. Encomenderos attempted to manipulate these unions to protect or augment their encomiendas, but this violated the Council of Trent’s emphasis on free will and a slew of litigation ensued. Between the lines of these disputes, the lives of native men, women, and children emerge. This paper reveals the various paths of ethnogenesis in Paraguay that contradict Jesuit portrayals of society outside the missions which highlight Spanish abuses. My paper complicates our understanding of Paraguayan mestizaje, which traditionally only includes Spaniards and Indians, by analyzing African unions with Guaraní women. By analyzing the nexus between native sexuality, affinity and colonial institutions, my paper will contributed to ethnohistorical approaches to frontiers and borderlands societies in the Atlantic World.