RESEARCH INTERESTS
My research focuses on colonial Latin America, with particular attention to borderlands, ethnicity, territoriality, and geographical knowledge production. My regional focus is the Río de la Plata (Uruguay, Northeast Argentina, and Southern Brazil), but I am also interested broadly in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world and Iberian empires.
BOOK MANUSCRIPT
My book project assesses the ways autonomous native communities responded to Iberian attempts to create a border between Brazil and the Spanish South America. I argue that in mapping the border, Spanish and Portuguese geographers projected imperial possession over territories effectively controlled by indigenous peoples rather than the two crowns. Despite this contradiction, native peoples exploited the newly imagined border by developing new kinship ties and by moving back and forth across it for trade and for defense. I focus primarily on the southernmost portion of the border, which ran through the Río de la Plata, and native peoples known as Charrúas and Minuanes.
This project builds upon several years of field research in Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Portugal, Spain, the United States, and Uruguay. Using GIS software and manuscript materials from 27 different archives, I aim to show the centrality of Charrúas, Minuanes, and others to a regional past from which they have remained invisible or peripheral. While most historians depict this borderland principally as a Luso-Hispanic battleground, I demonstrate that the interimperial conflict was one piece of a more complex interethnic landscape.
My research focuses on colonial Latin America, with particular attention to borderlands, ethnicity, territoriality, and geographical knowledge production. My regional focus is the Río de la Plata (Uruguay, Northeast Argentina, and Southern Brazil), but I am also interested broadly in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world and Iberian empires.
BOOK MANUSCRIPT
My book project assesses the ways autonomous native communities responded to Iberian attempts to create a border between Brazil and the Spanish South America. I argue that in mapping the border, Spanish and Portuguese geographers projected imperial possession over territories effectively controlled by indigenous peoples rather than the two crowns. Despite this contradiction, native peoples exploited the newly imagined border by developing new kinship ties and by moving back and forth across it for trade and for defense. I focus primarily on the southernmost portion of the border, which ran through the Río de la Plata, and native peoples known as Charrúas and Minuanes.
This project builds upon several years of field research in Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Portugal, Spain, the United States, and Uruguay. Using GIS software and manuscript materials from 27 different archives, I aim to show the centrality of Charrúas, Minuanes, and others to a regional past from which they have remained invisible or peripheral. While most historians depict this borderland principally as a Luso-Hispanic battleground, I demonstrate that the interimperial conflict was one piece of a more complex interethnic landscape.
PUBLICATIONS
“Borderline Offerings: Tolderías and Mapmakers in the Eighteenth-Century Río de la Plata” Hispanic American Historical Review 96, no. 3 (2016): 445-480 (article download | digital map component)
Abstract: During the second half of the eighteenth century, Portugal and Spain commissioned two mapping expeditions to determine a border between Brazil and Spanish viceroyalties, agreeing for the first time to define territorial possession through collaborative cartographic efforts. These efforts were mediated by autonomous indigenous communities, who asserted their own land claims. This article explores this dynamic at the borderline’s southernmost portion, an area corresponding to present-day Uruguay, northeastern Argentina, and southern Brazil. I argue that native peoples known as Charrúas and Minuanes appropriated imperial border-making efforts for their own purposes. As royal officials sought to materialize a border in lands that they did not effectively control, they solicited native agents’ support. In response, Charrúas and Minuanes took up arms, crisscrossed the border to develop informal economies or elude imperial armies, or sought to incorporate new settlers into indigenous sociopolitical networks. These actions undermined imperial designs yet made the border a meaningful form of territorial organization.
“Borderline Offerings: Tolderías and Mapmakers in the Eighteenth-Century Río de la Plata” Hispanic American Historical Review 96, no. 3 (2016): 445-480 (article download | digital map component)
Abstract: During the second half of the eighteenth century, Portugal and Spain commissioned two mapping expeditions to determine a border between Brazil and Spanish viceroyalties, agreeing for the first time to define territorial possession through collaborative cartographic efforts. These efforts were mediated by autonomous indigenous communities, who asserted their own land claims. This article explores this dynamic at the borderline’s southernmost portion, an area corresponding to present-day Uruguay, northeastern Argentina, and southern Brazil. I argue that native peoples known as Charrúas and Minuanes appropriated imperial border-making efforts for their own purposes. As royal officials sought to materialize a border in lands that they did not effectively control, they solicited native agents’ support. In response, Charrúas and Minuanes took up arms, crisscrossed the border to develop informal economies or elude imperial armies, or sought to incorporate new settlers into indigenous sociopolitical networks. These actions undermined imperial designs yet made the border a meaningful form of territorial organization.
"Property Mapping in Spanish America," in The History of Cartography: Cartography in the Nineteenth Century,
Roger Kain, ed., v. 5. Chicago: University of Chicago Press (forthcoming, 2022)
"Entre plazas y tolderías: Mapas, nómades y territorialidad en el Río de la Plata, 1700-1805” Memoria, presente y porvenir en América Latina (Actas del Congreso de CEISAL; forthcoming) (descargar)
Resumen: Esta ponencia analiza los vínculos entre relaciones interétnicas y territorialidad en el Río de la Plata durante el siglo XVIII. Argumenta que el poblamiento regional en ese momento se debe entender como un archipiélago de plazas y tolderías, y no como estados territoriales contiguos. Residentes de plazas (pueblos/presidios/ misiones) ejercían poco control territorial, mientras que tolderías de charrúas y minuanos se situaron como árbitros del acceso al campo e intermediarios entre locales distantes. Las expediciones demarcadoras de los tratados de Madrid (1750) y de San Ildefonso (1777) reflejaron e interrumpieron simultáneamente esta dinámica territorial. A pesar de que los geógrafos dependían de poblaciones locales, produjeron un aparato legal y discursivo para avanzar los conceptos de posesión universal, estados poligonales y límites claros. Estas ideas alteraron relaciones interétnicas y todavía estructuran perspectivas históricas.
Resumen: Esta ponencia analiza los vínculos entre relaciones interétnicas y territorialidad en el Río de la Plata durante el siglo XVIII. Argumenta que el poblamiento regional en ese momento se debe entender como un archipiélago de plazas y tolderías, y no como estados territoriales contiguos. Residentes de plazas (pueblos/presidios/ misiones) ejercían poco control territorial, mientras que tolderías de charrúas y minuanos se situaron como árbitros del acceso al campo e intermediarios entre locales distantes. Las expediciones demarcadoras de los tratados de Madrid (1750) y de San Ildefonso (1777) reflejaron e interrumpieron simultáneamente esta dinámica territorial. A pesar de que los geógrafos dependían de poblaciones locales, produjeron un aparato legal y discursivo para avanzar los conceptos de posesión universal, estados poligonales y límites claros. Estas ideas alteraron relaciones interétnicas y todavía estructuran perspectivas históricas.
"Imperial Lines, Indigenous Lands: Transforming Territorialities of the Río de la Plata, 1680-1805," Dissertation, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2015. (download)
- Recipient of the 2016 Dean's Distinguished Dissertation Award in Humanities & Fine Arts (UNC-Chapel Hill)
- Finalist for the 2017 Maureen Ahern Doctoral Dissertation Award (Colonial Section of LASA)
Review of Distance and Documents at the Spanish Empire's Periphery, by Sylvia Sellers-García. Hispanic American Historical Review 97, no. 1 (2017): 158-160 (download)
WORKS IN PROGRESS
“Onde nômades e geógrafos se encontram: charruas, minuanes e a demarcação de limites no Rio da Prata” em Produzindo Fronteiras: entrecruzando escalas, povos e impérios na América portuguesa (XVII-XIX). Íris Kantor e Diogo Ramada Curto, eds. (under review)
“Onde nômades e geógrafos se encontram: charruas, minuanes e a demarcação de limites no Rio da Prata” em Produzindo Fronteiras: entrecruzando escalas, povos e impérios na América portuguesa (XVII-XIX). Íris Kantor e Diogo Ramada Curto, eds. (under review)
“Across Archival Limits: Imperial Records, Changing Ethnonyms, and Geographies of Knowledge,” with Sergio Latini (working paper)
Abstract: This article assesses 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, we argue that the structure of regional archives has contributed to their subordination in regional histories.
Abstract: This article assesses 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, we argue that the structure of regional archives has contributed to their subordination in regional histories.
