Beyond the Archival Gaze: Geographical Imaginations and Ethnohistory in the Río de la Plata

This paper builds upon the “archival turn” of recent years to assess the development and fragmentation of borderland archives. Much like the administrative archives of imperial centers, borderland archives conceal certain pasts while emphasizing others. Specifically, they tend to silence activities that occurred beyond the territorial purview of towns, forts, and missions, and relegate rural actors to historical peripheries, thereby creating an illusion of consolidated territorial control. This is particularly evident in the Río de la Plata region, where the content, organization, and accessibility of source materials and archival collections have contoured historical inquiry and, in turn, have silenced certain native pasts. Focusing on mobile native peoples who lived between the Guaraní missions and the Río de la Plata estuary, I argue that the structure of regional archives has contributed to their subordination in histories of the regional past. On one hand, the use of “Charrúa” and “Minuán” as meaningful and unifying ethnonyms in individual sources and archival collections has led to reified descriptions of diverse native peoples and narratives of eventual decline. On the other hand, the fragmentation of manuscript materials regarding independent indigenous communities has engendered the discursive erasure of the territories that they inhabited and controlled. These two facets of regional archives, when taken together, have resulted in historiographical traditions in which non-mission native actors have occupied either peripheral or subordinate roles. In response, I propose reading beyond the grain of regional sources as a means to identify the ethnic complexity and forgotten territorialities of the Río de la Plata’s regional past.