Lost in Space: Mapping, Native Peoples, and the Making of the Banda Oriental, 1750–1838

This paper examines the production of geographic knowledge in the borderlands of the Río de la Plata at the end of the eighteenth century.  Focusing particularly on the mapping expeditions commissioned under the Treaties of Madrid (1750) and San Ildefonso (1777), it analyzes interactions between Spanish and Portuguese geographers and native peoples in what came to be known as the Banda Oriental.  As Iberian officials negotiated and demarcated a linear divide between their South American kingdoms, they aimed to produce static territorial states in a region defined by the fluidity of goods, cattle, and people.  These mapping efforts, legally backed by treaty negotiations, preceded an inter-imperial race to fortify, populate, and police the newly imagined frontier.  At the same time, they conflicted with local realities of the borderland region, namely the fact that much of these lands were claimed and controlled by non-sedentary native peoples, such as the Charrúas and the Minuanes. Although expeditionary geographers relied upon native peoples for labor and knowledge of the local terrain and history, they framed a new territorial unit, the Banda Oriental, which bisected native lands.  By focusing on the production of space and indigenous sovereignty, this study provides a new conceptual perspective for scholarship on the Río de la Plata region at the end of the eighteenth century.  As recent works have marked the significance of its coastal cities in the broader Atlantic World, or the complexity of interethnic relations in its Jesuit-Guaraní missions, the vast plains that divided them remain a relatively unexplored space.  By addressing the process whereby this area discursively transformed from a multiethnic territory into a Luso-Hispanic borderland and territorial state, this study sheds new light on the relationship between mapmaking, native peoples, and historiography in Latin America.