Beyond Dominance and Resistance: Charrúas, Minuanes, and the Making of a Borderline between Brazil and La Plata, 1750–1805

This paper evaluates the participation of mobile native peoples in the making of an interimperial borderline in the Río de la Plata region. Whereas most borderland regions studied by scholars were geographically contoured by the limits of indigenous or imperial territorial control, this border began as a cartographic invention. During the early decades of the eighteenth century, Portuguese, Spanish, and missionary settlements dotted the perimeter of the region – modern day Uruguay, northeastern Argentina, and southern Brazil – while Minuanes, Charrúas, and other native peoples controlled its interior countryside. Over the course of the century, however, the competing Iberian empires sought to gain exclusive legal jurisdiction over the entirety of the region. To resolve their struggle, the two crowns financed joint mapping expeditions to delimit a border and divide the region in two.

These mapping endeavors resolved the issue of legal jurisdiction, but they also revealed its key contradiction. Iberian mapmakers attempted to divide lands that were effectively controlled by Charrúas and Minuanes. This paper uses the vast corpus of documentation produced through the demarcation efforts in order to highlight the local territorial claims that they aimed to overwrite. It focuses particularly on the ways in which Charrúas and Minuanes first disrupted the mapping expeditions yet later used the border to their advantage. While most scholars characterize the production of this border simply as the resolution of an interimperial dispute, I argue that the actions of Minuanes and Charrúas both made the demarcation necessary and contributed to the border’s transformation from a drawing to a material landscape. While they may not have shared the same territorial perspective as their Iberian counterparts, Charrúas and Minuanes simultaneously challenged the border’s existence and exploited the effect that it had upon soldiers, traders, and imperial officials.