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Becoming Chiquitano:
Crafting Identities in the Broader Paraguayan River Basin
Justin B. Blanton
A dissertation submitted to the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department
of History.
Chapel Hill 2018
Approved by: Cynthia Radding
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Abstract
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Justin B. Blanton: Becoming Chiquitano: Crafting Identities in the Broader Paraguayan River Basin (Under the direction of Cynthia Radding)
This project poses two basic conceptual problems: How do ethnic and communal identities emerge and how are their meanings expressed by diverse groups of historical actors? To address these problems, my research focuses on indigenous communities who inhabited Catholic missions in the colonial Spanish province of Chiquitos located in portions of present-day southeastern Bolivia and southwestern Brazil. It provides a deeper understanding of the ways in which these native peoples bestowed meaning upon the public dimensions of their
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To Allison and my family.
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Acknowledgments
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This project would not have been possible without the support of many generous people and institutions. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has provided me with the majority of the financial resources necessary for my research. A Tinker Pre-Dissertation Field Research Grant from the Institute for the Study of the Americas made it possible for me to begin field research in Bolivia. Thanks to the history department’s Mowry and Clein Dissertation Fellowship, a Graduate Research Award from the Program for Medieval and Early Modern Studies, and an Off-Campus Dissertation Research Fellowship provided by the Graduate School, I was able to continue research in Bolivia. A combination of funds from the Graduate School’s Summer Research Fellowship and a Mellon Dissertation Fellowship for Latin American Research from the Institute for the Study of the Americas supported a final research trip to Buenos Aires.
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Suarez de Terceros, opened to me the archives of the Catedral de Santa Cruz de la Sierra. My dear friends Junior Pantoja Abrego and Vanessa Salvatierra made me feel at home in Santa Cruz and enriched my life in countless ways. In Sucre, I am indebted to the professional staff of the Archivo y Biblioteca Nacionales de Bolivia. I would also like to thank William Lofstrom, PhD, and Ana María Zamora Lofstrom for welcoming me into their home and supporting me with warm companionship and Julia Flores Colque for looking out for me as her surrogate son. The late Stephen Jacobs, Professor Emeritus, School of Architecture, Tulane University opened so many social and professional doors to me in Sucre and I miss him dearly. In Cuiabá, I am thankful for the assistance of Fernando Tadeu de Miranda Borges and the staff of the Arquivo Público de Mato Grosso. In Buenos Aires, I am grateful for the friendship and professional support of Cecilia Martinez and Guillermo Wilde. The directors and staff of the Archivo General de la Nación in Buenos Aires made my research productive.
My fascination with Latin America began during a study abroad trip to Honduras led by Stewart McCrae who inspired me to begin the path that ultimately led to this dissertation. Visiting Mayan ruins and Spanish colonial towns left an indelible mark on my future and significantly broadened my perception of the world. Upon returning from Honduras, I declared anthropology as my major and set out to learn Spanish. After completing intensive courses, I obtained a proficiency in Spanish that has served to invigorate my love of Latin American culture. Unfortunately, Stewart passed away while I was conducting research in Bolivia and very few days go by without me thinking about his profound influence on my life.
As an undergraduate at the University of Florida, I gained knowledge of cultural
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position in an archaeological field school in Granard, Ireland in the summer of 2002. Under the tutelage of Florin Curta, I spent six weeks learning archaeological theory and methodology while excavating a late-medieval village site. I began my graduate studies at the University of North Florida by enrolling in a Florida history course taught by Daniel Schafer. His mentorship fostered my interest in Spanish colonial history and Latin American. In the fall of 2007, I began a yearlong study of early-modern Spanish paleography under the guidance of J. Michael Francis. With his encouragement and support, I obtained the necessary grants and funding to put my paleography skills into practice conducting archival research at the AGI. During the summer of 2008, I spent three months in Seville researching the expedition of Hernando de Soto. I
examined a number of documents written by men who participated in the expedition in order to obtain a better understanding of Soto’s treatment of the Indian populations he encountered. This introduction to archival research improved my ability to read and interpret challenging early-modern Spanish paleography. Up until this point, all of the primary source documents I used had been either transcriptions or translations. This was the first time that I had the ability to utilize my skills to interpret the intent of the original author. This experience transformed my interest in Latin American history into a passion and affirmed my determination to obtain a doctoral degree.
My graduate education at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, especially in the fields of ethnohistory and Iberian borderlands, prepared me to complete this project. I worked systematically to master the published anthropological and historical literature of Chiquitos while placing an emphasis on the scholarship produced in Latin America. Moreover, I have taken graduate seminars and taught undergrad courses related to Latin American history, anthropology, native peoples and space. Throughout my graduate career at UNC, my committee offered
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unwavering guidance, encouragement and belief in me, carefully read and evaluated every word of my dissertation at every stage, and I owe her a lifetime of gratitude. John Chasteen taught me to be a better writer, helped me to find and convey my voice, and supported me as both a friend and mentor. Kathryn Burns, Kathleen DuVal, and Brandon Bayne provided critical feedback and insightful comments that helped me to strengthen and clarify my assertions. I am also thankful for the generous advice and support of Arturo Escobar and Miguel La Serna. All errors, shortcomings, and facile assessments in my dissertation are mine alone.
I had the great privilege of building relationships with and learning from a talented cohort of graduate students at UNC and Duke University including Jeffery Erbig, Jason Kauffman, Angélica Castillo, Benjamin Reed, Julián Díez, Francisco Brignole, Laurent Corbeil, Yuridia Ramírez, Corinna Zeltsman, Ezekiel Moreno, Samuel Finesurrey, Bonnie Lucero, Elizabeth Ellis, Sarah McNamara, Daniel Giblin , Aaron Hale-Dorrell, Anndal Narayanan, Steven Riegg, Thomas Sheppard, Maikel Farinas Borrego, Joel Hebert, Jeanine Navarrete, Alexandra Ruble, Jeffrey Harris, Mark Hornburg, Shannon James, Daniele Lauro, Jose Manuel Moreno Vega, Daniel Velásquez, Mary Elizabeth Walters, Garrett Wright, Mishio Yamanaka, Anthony Rossodivito, Ann Halbert-Brooks, Gregory Mole, Andrew Ringlee, Ryan Peeks, Sarah Barksdale, Rachel Hynson, Warren Millteer, Philip Stelzel, Robert P. Shapard, Anna Krome-Lukens, Jonathan Hancock, Peter Gengler, and Scott Krause. These friends and colleagues enriched my life in Chapel Hill and made me a better scholar.
Most importantly, I would like to thank my family for their unwavering support. My parents, Donald and Cheryl Blanton, and sister, Christa, have always believed in me and
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Introduction
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Dramatic political, social and economic changes that occurred in Europe during the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries precipitated a revolution in self-understandings. These transformations continued in the Iberian America colonies where imperial administrators formed social hierarchies organized by newly constructed racial classifications that included “indio”. These classifications were further distinguished by smaller ethnolinguistic subsets which often had pre-contact meanings and affiliations among indigenous populations. Within this framework, diverse colonial subjects experienced social interactions delineated by specific obligations and limits conferred upon the group in which they were placed. As colonial subjects lived in accordance with ascribed social terms, they bestowed meaning upon the public dimensions of their communities and transformed imposed categories into identities that they performed and defended. My research shows the particular ways in which the native populations of Chiquitos mediated and influenced these early modern historical processes to formulate and express different ethnolinguistic and communal identities. Most studies on the construction of ethnicity, race and community in the colonial Americas focus on contexts of consolidated imperial control in more densely populated European settlements, but the intercultural and inter-imperial
borderland settings of Chiquitos presented far different conditions.1
Beginning in the late seventeenth century, Jesuit missionaries assigned to Chiquitos made multiple forays into native territories in search of new converts. These expeditions gathered distinct indigenous groups speaking different languages into mission towns founded under early
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modern European norms of civic life. The Jesuits began to use the term “Chiquito” – and later “Chiquitano” – as a general and homogenizing ethnic and linguistic moniker for the diverse populations that moved in and out of the missions. Over time, the mission Indians adopted the ascribed label and “Chiquitano” became a unifying identity that has endured to the present day. Contrary to prevailing understandings of ethnogenesis among the indigenous peoples of
Chiquitos, however, I argue that the development of a unified Chiquitano identity did not occur through a monolithic process that began and ended during a sharply bounded period of time. “Becoming Chiquitano” was, instead, a multivalent set of processes that emerged under the Jesuit regime and continued long after their expulsion. My research shows that these processes of ethnogenesis refracted in different trajectories throughout a protracted era of mission
secularization that altered the spatial, administrative, and sociocultural organization of the Chiquitos mission province and reoriented native communities.
Theoretical Frameworks
This dissertation engages with a number of theoretical frameworks used in both history and anthropology. Its research approach incorporates methods employed by ethnohistorians in order to extract native peoples’ understandings of and reactions to historical change. I analyze discernible indigenous cultural manifestations and performances and consult with historical documentation to interpret the ways in which they ordered their actions.2 My particular practice of ethnohistory follows a model formulated by anthropologist Frank Salomon in his study of indigenous rulers of the northern Andes during the pre-Columbian and Spanish colonial periods. In accordance with Salomon’s model, rather than employing anthropological methods and
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concepts to simply expand the practice of history, I use them to ask anthropological questions of historical processes. That is, to take account of the ways in which the cultures of the various native groups who inhabited the Chiquitos mission towns held different understandings of the relationship between human actions and change over time. Through this perspective, it is possible to show how these “different diachronic senses” shaped the ways in which indigenous peoples crafted ethnolinguistic and communal identities.3
Identity consists of the interplay between external categorizations and self-understanding. As a concept, it is most effectively accessed and understood through the evaluation of historical practices observed in specific times and places.4 I understand identities to be relations that obtain significance and composition in accordance with their perpetual historical construction. By applying this concept of identity to ethnicity, I borrow from anthropologist John Comaroff who maintains that asymmetrical power relations always affect ethnic identities. As is the case with Chiquitos, contention and struggle is often involved in the construction of ethnic identities. Furthermore, ethnic identities assume a powerful significance for the cultures that construct them and take them on. Thus, according to Comaroff, identities often appear “to be natural, essential, [and] primordial.”5
While taking into account the critique that identity is an unwieldy term freighted with reifying connotations, I find the concept useful for researching how conflicts that evolved
3 Frank Salomon, Native Lords of Quito in the Age of the Incas: The Political Economy of North Andean Chiefdoms (Cambridge University Press, 2007), 9.
4 Andrew B. Fisher and Matthew D. O’Hara, “Introduction,” in Imperial Subjects: Race and Identity in Colonial
Latin America, ed. Andrew B. Fisher and Matthew D. O’Hara (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 19–21.
5 John Comaroff, “Ethnicity, Nationalism, and the Politics of Difference,” in The Politics of Difference: Ethnic
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through uneven power relations influenced the development of new ethnolinguistic and communal affiliations.6 Identity frames my research on conflicts that evolved through uneven power relations and influenced the development of new ethnicities.7
To access these historical processes among the indigenous people of Chiquitos, I
examine the native mission councils known as cabildos and analyze the ways in which they used their positions to articulate different identities. Introduced by the Society of Jesus, these councils were comprised of indigenous officers elected by Jesuit missionaries and later by secular priests to govern their communities as representatives of the various language and kin groups that comprised the mission towns. Cabildos were the primary institution of internal mission
governance and political culture that persisted after the Jesuit period to maintain authority and assert distinct ethnolinguistic identities. A critical analysis of archival materials produced after the Jesuit period has yielded valuable information about the motivations of cabildos. I have used this research approach to examine cabildos as spokespersons for the communities they
represented in order to trace evolving articulations of identity over time among the broader Indian population. To this end, I evaluate the cabildos’ interactions with Iberian interlocutors, the methods they used to assert authority, and the political discourse they used to promote the
communities they represented.
My efforts to historicize ethnic identity are inspired by anthropologist Arturo Escobar. His work on African-descendant villages of the Colombian Pacific coast in the modern period reveals the ways in which “black ethnicity” emerged through historical interactions connected to broader power structures that included neoliberal “development projects,” such as palm oil
6 R. Brubaker and F. Cooper, “Beyond ‘Identity,’” Theory and Society 29 (2000): 1–47.
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plantations, the industrial cultivation of shrimp and other intrusive capitalist enterprises
supported by the Colombian state. The reform of the national constitution, along with State-level institutional and political practices shaped by various social activists, led to legislation that provided opportunities for Afro-Colombian communities to construct powerful discursive ethnic identities in the face of hegemonic power structures. According to Escobar, a diverse group of actors involved themselves in this rearticulation of black ethnicity. As such, the production of a new identity was processual and dialectic as it incorporated a number of dynamic interactions linked to wider networks of power.8
Though my research does not directly correspond to Escobar’s study, there are some important linkages that influence my approach. While a minority population shaped by
hegemonic relationships characteristic of a postcolonial environment produced such historical developments as contemporary political consciousness in Escobar’s work, the indigenous groups of Chiquitos constituted a majority population living within a sociocultural, economic and geographical setting shaped by colonialism during the early modern period. Nevertheless, both cases involved asymmetrical power relations that fostered dialogic and relational processes of identity formation marked by struggle, mediation and negotiation. Thus, Escobar’s conceptual interventions offer a pertinent theoretical framework to support my overarching argument.
In perceiving culture and identity as process, my study uses historian Karen Vieira Powers’s concept of “ethnogenesis”, which she defines as a continuous cultural development “that is simultaneously reproductive and transformative.”9 Finally, I follow the path of a number
8 Arturo Escobar, Territories of Difference: Place, Movements, Life, Redes (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 201–11, 217–20.
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of scholars, including Rita de Grandis, who have understood these processes through the concept of “hybridity”, which de Grandis defines as “the coexistence of different conflictive belief
systems, languages, styles, and linguistic consciences.”10 I combine the concepts of hybridity and ethnogenesis to reveal how different permutations of ethnic identities emerged from centuries of interactions between disparate cultures of indigenous groups and Europeans.
Historian Hal Langfur’s work on the Eastern Sertão of colonial Brazil during eighteenth- and nineteenth-centuries examines a different region, time period and set of historical actors, yet contains a number of important parallels and theoretical models that inform my research. His analysis of the dynamic interactions of diverse agents entangled in Portugal’s uneven colonizing efforts on the imperial fringe throws new light on the development of Ibero-American imperial consolidation and the discordant ways in which the different groups involved in that process sought to territorialize their societies and reformulate distinct identities. Langfur argues that keys to understanding the particular transformations that accompanied frontier incorporation can be found in the incompatible ways in which these disparate groups sought to territorialize their distinctive societies – that is, “to construct, sustain, reproduce, and protect those societies” in an unsettled frontier environment. The frontier, Langfur argues, represented an isolated geographic expanse distant from the European core yet central to numerous indigenous societies. Within this setting, territorial consolidation was far from secure and the consequences of “multiethnic
cultural encounters remained in doubt.” According to Langfur, during the ethnically diverse processes involved in contentious territorial expansion, a number of the indigenous groups
10 Rita De Grandis, “Pursuing Hybridity: From the Linguistic to the Symbolic,” in Unforeseeable Americas:
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inhabiting the Sertão took on an imposed identity and became the Botocudo.11 In accordance with this conceptual framework, I argue that ethnolinguistic and communal identities created through the chaotic exchanges involved in the Spanish territorial consolidation of Chiquitos were subsequently taken on and adapted by a number of the indigenous groups living in the region and performed into the nineteenth century.
Following the work of Henri Lefebvre, I understand the Chiquitos province as a
culturally and materially produced space that was altered and transformed over time.12 As such, I examine the articulation and construction of this borderland space and how these historical developments relate to ethnolinguistic and communal identities. Moreover, I argue that Chiquitos as a space was marked by social interactions and functioned as a site for the perception and substantiation of mutual differences. Thus, in the Chiquitos missions, articulations of identity emerged as products of what the various groups inhabiting or visiting the space chose to define and distinguish. More specifically, the groups interacting within Chiquitos constructed discursive articulations reflecting such variables as preconceptions, particular endeavors, cultural
perspectives, political projects and uneven power struggles.13
A number of current theoretical interpretations of Ibero-American borderlands regions that have recently evolved in reaction to debates regarding geographical definition, institutional focus, and ethnic perspective also influence my work. Frederick Jackson Turner’s notion of borderlands as a “meeting point between savagery and civilization,” and Herbert Eugene
11 Hal Langfur, The Forbidden Lands: Colonial Identity, Frontier Violence, and the Persistence of Brazil’s Eastern
Indians, 1750-1830 (Stanford University Press, 2008), 35.
12 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Oxford, OX, UK; Cambridge, Mass., USA: Wiley-Blackwell, 1992), 11, 292.
13 Santa Arias and Mariselle Meléndez, “Space and the Rhetorics of Power in Colonial Spanish America: An
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Bolton’s epic chronicles of “Spanish pathfinders and pioneers,” are no longer the conceptual focal points of contemporary borderlands historians.14 As Susan Deeds noted, these conventional themes “produced static, unidimensional pictures rather than thicker, integrated slices of regional history.”15 Borderlands historians such as Barbara Ganson and David Block have demonstrated the importance of evaluating the impact of indigenous actors and colonial imperial peripheries on the politics of the European metropole.16 As a result of these interventions, far-reaching imperial narratives covering borderlands as a whole and focusing on conquest, political administration, and international rivalries have given way to spatially and regionally focused social, economic, and cultural studies, which account for the various actions of local indigenous populations throughout the Americas.
Synthesizing Iberian borderlands historiography up through the 1990s, Donna Guy and Thomas Sheridan argued that borderlands are places of historical interaction where different polities contended for natural resources and territorial control.17 In the following decade, the borderlands field became interdisciplinary, informed by theoretical frameworks from Native American studies, cultural geography, and comparative history. Borderlands scholars currently use concepts such as regional spatial analysis, environmental change, and social divisions based on class, race, gender, and identity. Building upon these developments, I employ methods from
14 Frederick Turner, Frontier in American History, by Frederick Jackson Turner (H. Holt and Company, 1920), Bolton was far more concerned with the impact of Spaniards on the frontier than in the influence of the frontier on Spaniards and his work focused on the high drama of exploration and heroic figures and largely ignored Indians.
15 Susan M. Deeds, “New Spain’s Far North: A Changing Historiographical Frontier?,” Latin American Research
Review 25, no. 2 (1990): 226–35.
16 Barbara Ganson, The Guarani Under Spanish Rule in the Rio De La Plata (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005). David Block, Mission Culture on the Upper Amazon: Native Tradition, Jesuit Enterprise, and Secular Policy in Moxos, 1660-1810 (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1994).
17 Donna J. Guy and Thomas E. Sheridan, Contested Ground: Comparative Frontiers on the Northern and Southern
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cultural anthropology and environmental history to uncover indigenous practices of reconstituting community, and refashioning identity, in the ecological and imperial frontiers of Chiquitos.
Taking the above contributions as a point of departure, I view the borderland region of Chiquitos as a unique area of focus because it illustrates the fluid qualities of the internal
imperial boundaries of South America; yet it is not as well studied as other borderland regions in the colonial Americas such as the Guaraní mission provinces of the lower Paraguay Basin and the Río de la Plata. In accordance with historians David Weber and Jane Rausch, I conceive of borderlands as regions on the periphery of imperial boundaries where various cultures interact with one another and with their physical environment to produce phenomena that are unique to time and place.18 I argue that the broader historical processes at issue in Chiquitos, including culture as process, the historical construction of identities and the dynamic developments of ethnogenesis, transcend regional boundaries and can be applied to studies of other colonial Ibero-American borderlands. Moreover, this case study viewed over the longue durée has far-reaching implications for the construction of identities and the multivalent meanings of borderlands beyond this particular region.
Traditional scholarship holds that nearly a century of European contact permanently transformed the native groups of Chiquitos through disease, labor exploitation, the mixing of distinct ethnic groups, religious conversion, and forced native participation in the regional political economy. Without denying these factors for change, I explore how the region’s indigenous peoples constructed and presented their own identities in the course of colonial transformations. More specifically, I chart identities among the different native communities of the Chiquitos missions following the basic theoretical premise that ethnolinguistic affiliations were not pre-contact entities
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diluted through colonialism; rather, I argue that the survival of the diverse peoples of Chiquitos was contingent upon their adaptions to colonialism. I explore how ethnolinguistic and communal derivations among the native mission residents of Chiquitos developed vis-à-vis European colonization efforts. To answer this question, my work focuses on indigenous practices of the physical and social reconstitution of communities and on the ways in which they shaped the borderlands. This broadens understandings of the Chiquitos region and its place within Latin American borderlands history while also contributing to conceptual frameworks used by both anthropologists and historians who study colonial cultural interface in different time periods and regions.
Sources and Organization
Four primary questions guide my research: I. How did interactions between the indigenous groups of Chiquitos and Iberian colonial institutions transform native settlement patterns, social structures, political paradigms, leadership practices, and economies? II. In what ways did migration, trade networks, and Iberian territorial and jurisdictional reorganization change indigenous cultures? III. How did indigenous patterns of resistance condition imperial policies? VI. How did Chiquitos become a contested borderland in which ethnolinguistic
differences and communal identities evolved historically? To address these questions, I targeted documents that record the intersections between native peoples and Iberian institutions. During the course of more than fourteen months of fieldwork, I visited six different archives located in Bolivia, Brazil, and Argentina to compile a substantial collection of primary sources including mission censuses and documents containing accounts of indigenous unrest and colonial
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Iberian imperial endeavors, but few of them contain detailed references to Indian agency. Reading them against the grain, however, has enabled me to discern indigenous voices and uncover the variegated processes through which native populations expressed identities in the midst of social and cultural upheaval. The Archivo y Biblioteca Nacional (ABNB), in Sucre, Bolivia is the primary repository for documents related to the lowland imperial borderlands of colonial Charcas. This extensive archive contains important documentary assemblages including the “Gabriel René Moreno” and “Mojos y Chiquitos” collections with documents dealing with mission demographics and indigenous ethnolinguistic affiliations including parcialidades (language and kin groups), native councils and regional politics. The Archivo y Biblioteca de la Universidad Autónoma Gabriel René Moreno (UGRM) and the Archivo de la Catedral, in Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia, contain documentation from the post-Jesuit era of secularization in Chiquitos produced by the diocese of Santa Cruz. Many of these documents provide insights into how the new parish structures and military garrisons established in the missions after the Jesuit expulsion altered the spatial and administrative organization of native communities. Iberian colonial endeavors influenced the present-day location of the documentary sources that support my research. In 1776, the Spanish Crown founded the Viceroyalty of Río de la Plata in Argentina and colonial officials began to transfer records from cities located in what is now Bolivia to the administrative center of Buenos Aires. As a result, the Archivo General de la Nación in Buenos Aires, Argentina now holds large collections of documents concerning the late Spanish colonial period in Chiquitos. Finally, Brazil’s Arquivo Público de Mato Grosso in Cuiabá houses
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Chapter 1
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Shifting Frontiers: Changing Interpretations of Chiquitos
Introduction
This chapter focuses on different historical perceptions of Chiquitos and surveys various depictions of the region that date to the earliest years of Iberian colonization and illustrate its fluid qualities and changing boundaries. The chapter begins with an examination of sixteenth century chronicles written by Spanish explorers before discussing accounts featured in eighteenth century Jesuit missionary records. It then moves on to review nineteenth century travel narratives recorded by European scientists and naturalists whose studies of the region were inspired by expanding imperial and geopolitical competition. The chapter ends with an
evaluation of a selection of modern academic studies of Chiquitos to underscore how their conclusions influence current understandings of the region’s people and history and to assess the particular ways in which these works influence my own research.
Early Chronicles: European Contact in Chiquitos
The Chiquitos region and its people have been the subjects of chronicles, travel
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the coastal jungles and interior deserts of the continent, Solís and his party sailed south along the coast of Brazil in search of suitable points of disembarkation and were the first Europeans to encounter the Río de la Plata. Although the expedition was historically consequential, it was short-lived and ended abruptly when native peoples killed Solís and a contingent of men who went ashore near the mouth of the Río de la Plata.19
As evidenced by the fate of Solís, to carry out successful expeditions through the South American interior, early European travelers had to negotiate their very presence by incorporating themselves into well-established indigenous networks of sovereignty and fluctuating political alliances.20 The consequences of working outside the native sociopolitical context are apparent in the narrative of Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca’s early sixteenth century expeditions into the Paraguay River basin. In 1540, King Charles I named Cabeza de Vaca governor of the new Spanish administrative province of Río de la Plata and charged him with Christianizing the local Indians and finding reliable routes through which to connect the isolated riverine port of
Asunción with the Andean mining district of Charcas.21 Previous explorers had motivated a surge of expeditions by reporting news of successful inter-continental treks that successfully reached Charcas through navigable routes across the fluvial plains of the Chaco.22
19 Rolena Adorno and Patrick Charles Pautz, eds., Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca, vol. 1 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999), 383.
20 Catherine J Julien, Desde el oriente: documentos para la historia del oriente boliviano y Santa Cruz la Vieja,
1542-1597 (Santa Cruz de la Sierra: Fondo Editorial Municipal, 2008), xv.
21 Baker H. Morrow, “Translator’s Note,” in The South American Expeditions, 1540-1545, by Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca, First Edition (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2011), xiii. During the mid-sixteenth century, the province of Río de la Plata was located in Paraguay but also included portions of modern-day Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay.
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From 1541 to 1544, Cabeza de Vaca led a series of such expeditions himself and commissioned others from his base of operations at Asunción. Many of these expeditions traveled north and northwest through the Chaco and into the eastern margins of Chiquitos in search of gold and silver mines as well as reliable routes to the mines of the Andes. In the narrative of his expedition known as Comentarios, Cabeza de Vaca claimed that during a 1544 excursion up the Río Paraguay, he complied with a mandate given by royal officials to halt the search for precious metals and return to Asunción. Many of the expeditionaries accompanying him, however, argued that the decision to turn back was made solely by the governor himself and against the will of the company and the royal officials in attendance. The arguments of the company received a more amenable audience. As a result, soon after his arrival in Asunción, Cabeza de Vaca was arrested and placed aboard a ship bound for Spain.23
In addition to the charge that Cabeza de Vaca abused his power by halting an expedition against the will of royal officials, his detractors made other accusations including claims that he restricted trade with Indians to himself and his closest supporters, abused native peoples when it pleased him, and confiscated the property of men under his command without providing
compensation.24 Despite such claims, upon closer review it appears that a number of Cabeza de Vaca’s governing policies actually favored Indians rather than the Spanish men who searched for gold and the acquisition of encomiendas (grants of indigenous laborers). Not surprisingly,
policies viewed as indigenous-friendly would have been perceived as intolerable to opportunistic adventurers and settlers seeking fortunes during a period of conquest and colonial expansion in
23 Ibid., 1:392–93.
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which both Iberian empires strengthened their efforts to obtain Indian labor and locate sources of mineral wealth.25
Published in 1555, the Comentarios was a collaborative work produced by Cabeza de Vaca and his secretary, Pedro de Hernández, a political ally who gave a formal deposition in Madrid regarding the ex-governor’s legal troubles in Río de la Plata.26 Written as a
self-advocating defense intended for both the crown and a wider audience, the Comentarios depicts Cabeza de Vaca as a capable and just governor caught in an unfortunate sequence of conflicts caused by the avarice and envy of the men he attempted to command.27 The narrative is important for modern studies of Chiquitos and the greater Paraguayan river basin because it reveals insightful descriptions of the region’s natural environment and native inhabitants during the years immediately following European contact.28 Cabeza de Vaca conveys a sense of fascination with the cultural diversity and political complexity of the indigenous groups living along the Paraná and Paraguay rivers and throughout the surrounding lowlands. Portions of the Comentarios portray the greater Paraguayan river basin, the Chaco, and the eastern margins of Chiquitos as biologically and culturally diverse borderlands with different ethnic groups fragmented among numerous and changing polities. During each of his journeys, Cabeza de Vaca recorded instances in which he had to navigate volatile indigenous political landscapes and intricate trading networks, and he often evaluated indigenous actions and motivations. From his
25 Cynthia Radding, Landscapes of Power and Identity: Comparative Histories in the Sonoran Desert and the
Forests of Amazonia from Colony to Republic (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 47.
26 Morrow, “Translator’s Note,” xiv.
27 Adorno and Pautz, Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca, 1:405.
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account, we infer that he was forced to rely on the intimate knowledge of native peoples to traverse the varied natural environment and difficult terrain.29
In 1542, as part of the same wave of expeditions that included the excursions under the auspices of Cabeza de Vaca, the lieutenant governor of Río de la Plata, Domingo de Irala, led a group of men from Asunción up the Paraguay River to the Pantanal, the massive wetlands southeast of Chiquitos.30 Irala recorded his encounters with diverse indigenous groups who participated in a vast trading network that intersected Chiquitos and connected the tropical lowlands of Amazonia and the Paraguayan River basin to the Andean highlands. He departed from Asunción again in 1548 to traverse large portions of the Chaco and the eastern savannas of Chiquitos.31 Heading west from these regions and following a route revealed to him by native guides, Irala and his party crossed the Río Grande where they met Spanish-speaking Indians laboring under encomienda service for Spaniards living in Charcas.32 During his travels, Irala interacted with numerous native populations and even compiled a list of indigenous ethnic designations called parcialidades for the Chiquitos region and the adjacent plains and riverine forests. Many of these monikers reappear decades later in documents recording encomienda grants and other affairs related to the founding of Santa Cruz.33
29 Morrow, “Translator’s Note,” xiii–xix.
30 Adorno and Pautz, Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca, 1:392. Irala’s official title under Cabeza de Vaca was maestre de
campo and he was responsible for pacifying newly claimed territory, administering justice, and ensuring the fair treatment of Indians.
31 Catherine J Julien, “La descripción de la población del oriente boliviano en el siglo XVI,” in Desde el oriente:
documentos para la historia del oriente boliviano y Santa Cruz la Vieja, 1542-1597 (Santa Cruz de la Sierra: Fondo Editorial Municipal, 2008), 51–52.
32 Domingo Martínez de Irala, “Relación de la jornada al norte,” in Desde el oriente: documentos para la historia
del oriente boliviano y Santa Cruz la Vieja, 1542-1597, ed. Catherine J Julien (Santa Cruz de la Sierra: Fondo Editorial Municipal, 2008), 1–11.
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Subsequent Spanish expeditions to the area were driven by the motivation to establish permanent settlements north of the Pantanal from which to form a string of future outposts even farther afield to secure the unexplored lands outside the jurisdiction of Asunción. A 1557 expedition with this intent headed by Ñuflo de Cháves, former member of the Irala and Cabeza de Vaca expeditions, traveled a more westerly course than the previous incursions and
encountered a number of native groups whose descendants would inhabit the Jesuit missions of Chiquitos a century later. Documents related to this expedition contain the earliest references to the diverse predecessors of the Chiquitos peoples. In 1561, after crossing the Río Grande traveling west, Cháves founded the original settlement of Santa Cruz de la Sierra “la Vieja” on the southern reaches of Chiquitos where he distributed the region’s first encomienda grants.34 The fate of these sixteenth century expeditions shows, on the one hand, that the indigenous peoples of the greater Paraguayan River basin were divided into multiple groups and, on the other hand, that many of these groups fiercely resisted the advance of European incursions attempting to move northwestward through the region.
Jesuit Missionary Accounts: The Evangelization of Chiquitos
Jesuit missionaries wrote the vast majority of the documentary sources about Chiquitos during the eighteenth century because they represented the strongest permanent European presence in the isolated and sparsely populated region at the time. These archived reports, missives, and published histories, many of which have been printed by historians in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, reveal important accounts related to the first long-term
34 Jose Maria Garcia Recio, Analisis de una sociedad de frontera: Santa Cruz de la Sierra en los siglos XVI y XVII (Sevilla: Excma. Diputacion Provincial de Sevilla, 1988), 212–13. A royal cédula or decree gave provincial
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interactions between Indians and Europeans in Chiquitos and comprise the documentary
foundation for modern studies of the region’s Jesuit period. The accounts written by Father Juan Patricio Fernández are among the earliest published documentary sources concerning the
physical and human geography of Chiquitos. In the late seventeenth century, Fernández traveled to Chiquitos and, together with Father Juan Bautista de Zea, he founded the mission of San Juan. Fernández also lived in the mission of San Rafael and, in 1706; he became the rector of the Jesuit college of Tarija.35
According to Fernández, Chiquitos was a land of varied terrain, geology and climate which fostered abundant natural and cultivated resources. He was especially impressed by the human geography and seemingly boundless cultural diversity he encountered and remarked that the province’s languages were as infinite as its distinct nations of indigenous people.36 Echoing sentiments of the Spanish explorers who visited the region before him, Fernández depicted Chiquitos as a contested frontier and he recounted instances of intercultural warfare, indigenous migrations, and territorial conflicts between native populations and the expanding Iberian empires.37
Following the path worn by Fernández, the Bavarian Jesuit Julián Knogler traveled to Chiquitos in 1752 and worked in the missions of San Javier and Santa Ana, located at the
35 Javier Matienzo et al., eds., Chiquitos En Las Anuas de La Compañía de Jesús (1691-1767), 1a ed, Colección Scripta Autochtona 6 (Cochabamba, Bolivia: Instituto Latinoamericano de Misionología : Itinerarios Editorial, 2011), 439.
36 Juan Patricio Fernández, Relación historial de las misiones de indios chiquitos: que en el Paraguay tienen los
padres de la compañía de Jesús (Asunción del Paraguay: A. de Uribe, 1896), 2–5. Fernandez’s Relación, written in 1723 and published multiple times, recounted the founding of the missions in Chiquitos. It is important to note that portions of this history are based on an earlier, much shorter account written by another Jesuit named Lucas Caballero.
37 Guillermo Cárdiff Furlong, “De La Asunción a Los Chiquitos Por El Río Paraguay: Tentativa Frustrada En 1703,
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western and eastern margins of Chiquitos respectively, for nearly twenty years. In 1769, Knogler wrote an account of his experiences in the mission communities and his reflections have been an invaluable source for modern scholars of the region. The German historian Werner Hoffman translated Knogler’s text from German to Spanish and published portions of the work in 1979 to make it more widely accessible.38 Knogler described Chiquitos as a harsh environment of vast, thick forests, open planes, and seasonal marshes. At the time of his visit, the province and its people were subject to extreme weather patterns characterized by polarized periods of heavy flooding and severe droughts that continuously altered a landscape dotted with meandering streams and fluctuating wetlands. He also recounted that the native populations exploited this unforgiving climate and landscape by cultivating New World plants such as palm, yucca and corn, as well as Old World species like lemon trees brought by missionaries. A number of the introduced cultigens such as apples and peaches, however, failed to prosper due to the humid climate and insects. Knogler indicated that the Jesuits adapted to the alien environment over time and taught the indigenous inhabitants of the mission towns various European horticultural and agricultural methods to increase the yield of their staple crops. Mission Indians supplemented this European inflected diet by continuing traditional practices such as hunting for deer, bear and monkeys and fishing the surrounding rivers and wetlands.39
According to Knogler, before their conversion to the Catholic faith and the
accompanying settled mission life, the different groups who would become the Chiquitos were uncivilized, seminomadic peoples living under the tenuous influence of petty caciques who
38 Werner Hoffmann, “Textos sobre las misiones jesuíticas entre los chiquitanos: El Padre Julían Knogler y su relato
sobre el País y la nación de los chiquitanos,” in Las misiones jesuíticas entre los Chiquitanos (Buenos Aires: Fundación para la Educación, la Ciencia y la Cultura, 1979), 120.
39 Julián Knogler, “Textos sobre las misiones jesuíticas entre los chiquitanos: El Padre Julían Knogler y su relato
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wielded very little governing power. Knogler claimed that pre-mission caciques only exercised a measure of true authority while organizing hunting and fishing parties and commanding groups of armed men in times of war. Thus, he argues, native political organization was chaotic and volatile and in need of pacification and effective leadership. The Jesuits, in his view, moved into the region in order to civilize and instruct this wild, unorganized, and poorly governed
population.40
In their efforts to civilize the native peoples of Chiquitos, Jesuit missionaries constructed permanent villages in carefully chosen locations well suited for old world agricultural practices and European civic life. The Jesuits’ orientation to European crops and temperate climates, however, made it difficult for them to select sites in the tropical environment of Chiquitos
suitable for establishing permanent villages. As a result, they relied on indigenous knowledge for developing missions in the region and moved a number of their settlements from one place to another. In addition to instructing the tenets of the Catholic faith, the Jesuits taught mission Indians the discipline and work habits necessary for a civilized existence in accordance with Old World cultural norms and a Christian world view. Knogler drew a sharp contrast between what he viewed as the newly civilized mission communities and the cruel indigenous groups living in savage disarray outside of the Jesuit settlements. He specifically described the Guaycurús as a warlike people who maintained a constant threat to Jesuit missionary efforts and used horses acquired from the encroaching Portuguese to raid Indian and European settlements.41 The Guaycurús are ethnographically identified as Kadewei and not considered part of the Chiquitos families of “nations”.
40 Ibid., 121–32.
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Throughout Knogler’s tenure, numerous Guaycurúan bands living in villages in the Chaco boreal frequently raided the Jesuit missions located in the southeastern corner of
Chiquitos. These violent assaults inspired the diplomatic visit of the Jesuit priest Joseph Sánchez Labrador whose informative chronicles were published by Guillermo Cárdiff Furlong in 1952. With the help of indigenous intermediaries, Father Sánchez Labrador traveled north from the Mbayá mission community located on the Río Ipané, a tributary of the Río Paraguay, across myriad tropical wetlands connected to the Pantanal, and through numerous native polities to reach the easternmost Chiquitos mission of Santo Corazón.42 The account of Sánchez Labrador’s arduous journey reveals that during the late Jesuit period, the greater Paraguayan River basin comprised an indigenous borderland of varied and often difficult terrain positioned at the
intersection of fluctuating territorial boundaries on the fringes of the Iberian colonial imperium.43 From the perspective of Jesuit missionaries like Fernández, Knogler, and Sánchez Labrador who were engaged in the daunting endeavor of indigenous evangelization, Chiquitos was a wild, dangerous and unwieldy region located on the hinterlands of civilization. Even during the most successful years of the Jesuit period, missionaries were the few permanent European residents of Chiquitos. Thus for them, the region occupied an incomprehensible space in which a confusing array of cultures, ethnicities, and polities competed for resources, influence and territory in ways that complicated an uncertain Iberian colonial project.
42 Radding, Landscapes of Power and Identity, 299.
32 Nineteenth Century Travel Narratives:
International Imperial Competition and the Commercial Potential of Chiquitos
During the mid to late eighteenth century, Enlightenment thought, dynastic change, and dramatic colonial reforms spurred the Spanish crown to begin organizing research expeditions to assess the state of its far-flung empire. In the spring of 1789, the Bohemian polymath Thaddäus Häenke received an offer to join one such royally sanctioned expedition to collect scientific, commercial and administrative information concerning Spain’s imperial reaches in and near the Pacific Ocean. The expedition leader, Alejandro Malaspina, needed a naturalist with special training in botany to complete his team of scientists and he offered the important position to Häenke. Not yet 30 years of age, Häenke had earned a strong reputation among members of Europe’s scientific community and boasted formal training in mathematics, astronomy, botany, music, chemistry, mineralogy, and medicine. Häenke also held a prestigious post at the Smíchov Botanical Gardens in Prague before taking another highly regarded position at the Imperial Gardens of Schönbrunn in Vienna.44
Despite entertaining other promising career opportunities, Häenke accepted Malaspina’s offer in June of 1789. After securing permission and funding from the Kingdom of Bohemia, Häenke traveled to Madrid to meet Spanish emissaries before joining Malaspina and the other expedition members in the coastal city of Cadíz.45 Malaspina and the team spent a month in Cadíz to complete preparations before beginning the transatlantic voyage to Montevideo in August. After weeks on the open sea, Häenke’s first attempt at landfall in South America was harrowing. On 23 November 1789, his ship entered the Río de La Plata within sight of
44 María Victoria Ibáñez Montoya, La expedición Malaspina, 1789-1794, Tomo IV, Trabajos científicos y
correspondencia de Tadeo Haenke (Madrid: Lunwerg Editores, S.A., 1987), 23–33.
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Montevideo before running aground near Punta Carretas. Häenke was not injured in the
shipwreck but he fell sick shortly thereafter and had to spend three weeks convalescing before he could begin his research.46
Once Häenke had fully recovered, he rejoined Malaspina’s expedition and traveled through portions of what are today the countries of Uruguay, Argentina, Chile, Peru, Ecuador, and Colombia, and into parts of Central America and Mexico. The expedition then crossed the Pacific to arrive at the Marianas Islands before sailing on to the Philippines, Mindanao,
Australia, New Zealand, Tonga and other neighboring islands. In July of 1793, after a long period research in the South Pacific, Malaspina and his team made a return transpacific voyage to the Americas and landed at El Callao on the coast of what is now Peru. Malaspina decided to leave the ships, traverse the Andes, and cross the continent again by land to reach Buenos Aires. At El Callao, Häenke and a few other team members split from the broader expedition to carry out more targeted research in Alto Perú before rejoining Malaspina in Buenos Aires.47
From coastal Peru, Häenke set out to tour portions of the Andean Cordillera located in present day Bolivia, before heading southeast to Cochabamba, capital of a new colonial intendancy. In Cochabamba, Häenke established a close relationship with the presiding intendant governor, Francisco de Viedma, who offered to support his studies. With Viedma’s administrative backing secured, Häenke commenced intensive fieldwork in Moxos and
Chiquitos, sparsely populated provinces included in the Intendancy of Cochabamba. Shortly after arriving in these remote lowlands, he set up a base of operations in Santa Cruz where he
purchased a ranch from which to produce agricultural products for export to Europe. Once these
46 Ibid., 33.
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affairs were in order, Häenke set out to follow in the footsteps of the Catholic missionaries who evangelized the region, a practice he had picked up during his time in the Philippines, and he made multiple tours through the former Jesuit mission towns of Moxos and Chiquitos.48
While meeting his official responsibilities as a naturalist and botanist, Häenke also took advantage of the travel opportunities afforded him by Malaspina’s expedition to indulge in other wide-ranging interests that included anthropology, archaeology, linguistics and musicology. Foreshadowing the research of nineteenth century European naturalists like Alcides d’Orbigny, Häenke diligently assembled vocabularies of native languages, wrote reports on pre-Columbian archaeological sites, and took ethnographic records of indigenous music and dance. In Moxos, he compiled vocabularies of indigenous languages such as Mobima, Cayuguevos and Pupua among others. During visits to local Yuracaré settlements, he took note of the particular way the group had assimilated the Catholic liturgy to ancestral cultural traditions and practices.49
Much of Häenke’s work was also humanitarian in nature. In collaboration with Intendant Governor Viedma, Häenke endeavored to find sustainable economic opportunities for the
isolated lowland communities and to improve the standard of living and public health for the region’s population. As a trained physician, he began medical and public health projects that included administering smallpox vaccinations and delivering life-saving pharmaceuticals to local indigenous villages.50 To identify commercially viable natural resources, he applied his
knowledge of geology and chemistry. After testing different salt deposits in the region, Häenke determined the high quality and potential profitability of salt extracted from mines located near
48 Ibid., 35–37, 50.
49 Ibid., 35–38, 50–52.
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the former Jesuit mission towns of Chiquitos. Indians and Europeans had mined salt in this area for decades and Häenke worked diligently to identify the richest deposits as a needed source of revenue for the surrounding towns and villages.51 Government administrators eventually took notice of the province’s high quality salt deposits during the early Republican period and began managing quarries near the western Chiquitos mission communities of Santo Corazón and Santiago as state resources.52
In 1798, Häenke sent the first draft of his research report on the environs in and near the Intendancy of Cochabamba to Spain. Titled Introducción a la historia natural de la provincia de Cochabamba y circunvecinas, the work outlined a number of novel interdisciplinary findings Häenke had made during his fieldwork and shed light on the diverse and remote indigenous cultures of the region. Telégrafo Mercantil, a widely distributed newspaper printed in Buenos Aires, published a few chapters of the report in 1809, making Häenke’s findings available to a broad readership in South America. In addition to extensive information regarding his
discoveries in natural history, environmental science, botany, linguistics and anthropology, Häenke’s report includes passages addressing a number of indigenous social issues of the time that he viewed as unjust. For example, he made known his opposition to the onerous burdens placed on Moxos and Chiquitos by a heavy-handed administrative organization recently implemented by the colonial government; he expressed support for numerous subjugated and impoverished indigenous populations, and he criticized the domineering actions of parochial clergy and European settlers who had exploited native peoples for their labor and commercial
51 ABNB, Ramo Mojos y Chiquitos (hereafter MyCh GRM) vol. 30, exp. XLIV, folios 1-11. This document
contains correspondence between the governor of the province of Chiquitos and the Viceroy of Río de la Plata regarding the removal of troops stationed in Santiago de Chiquitos and their replacement with Spanish settlers. The reasons for this change included the reported abuse of Indians carried out by soldiers and newly introduced efforts to build up a population of Spanish subjects to provide a buffer against Portuguese encroachment from the east.
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products for years. According to Häenke’s observations, during the end of the eighteenth century, Moxos and Chiquitos were poor and marginalized provinces inhabited by indigenous populations struggling under stifling and abusive colonial bureaucracies after the departure of the Jesuits. Häenke was known to have opposed the colonial exploitation of Spanish America and after his visit, rumors circulated that he may have also been an apologist for the coming independence movements.53 In the years following the wars for independence across South America, Häenke’s work began to garner attention for its contributions to the burgeoning patrimony of a sovereign Bolivian republic formed in 1825.54
The independence of Spain’s American colonies in the early decades of the nineteenth century opened the young nation-states to international research expeditions similar in form to the Spanish led Malaspina expedition. These expeditions held some distinctions, however, because they were sanctioned by non-Iberian European states competing for geopolitical and economic interests during a different age of imperialism and global commerce. New and transnational commercial markets and financial opportunities played a central role for most of these expeditions but a number of them also incorporated multidisciplinary scientific research projects much like those carried out by Häenke decades earlier. In the first half of the nineteenth century, a series of French researchers directed expeditions that gathered information about the newly independent nations as they attempted to debut on a worldwide stage. For the purposes of this study, I will review the travel accounts written by the leaders of two such French
expeditions, Alcides d’Orbigny and Francis Castelnau. The records left behind by these men
53 Ibáñez Montoya, La expedición Malaspina, 1789-1794, Tomo IV, Trabajos científicos y correspondencia de
Tadeo Haenke, 36–37, 52.
54 Manuel V Ballivián, “Foreword,” in Tadeo Haenke: escritos, precedidos de algunos apuntes para su biografía y
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comprise an extensive documentary source for eastern Bolivia during the formative years of the Republic.
D'Orbigny led the most renown of the nineteenth century French expeditions to South America from 1826 to 1833. With support from the Muséum d'Histoire Naturelle' in Paris, d'Orbigny traveled through Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay, Chile, Bolivia, and Peru. He published his findings between 1835 and 1847 in 9 tomes and 11 volumes under the title Voyage dans l'Amérique Méridionale.55 From 1829 to 1832, d’Orbigny traveled through Bolivia gathering information related to geology, biology, and indigenous cultures. At the conclusion of his travels, he had amassed an impressive ethnographic and anthropological collection and had recorded the vocabularies of thirty-six indigenous languages. His anthropological findings, published as a major synthetic work titled, L’Homme Américain, were among the most comprehensive at the time and made lasting contributions to the developing field of Americanist ethnography.56
D’Orbigny spent the summer of 1831 visiting the missions of Chiquitos and he recorded his experiences there in Voyage. He described the region as biologically rich and geologically varied with an exceptionally high diversity of indigenous ethnicities and languages. D’Orbigny’s detailed records contain information regarding native appearance, linguistics, dress, music, vdance, games, economy, subsistence practices, and social structures. His notes on the ethnic and linguistic diversity of the mission towns became a source de rigueur for future historians and anthropologists. According to d’Orbigny, each mission was comprised of discreet indigenous populations that he called “sections”. These sections corresponded to what are now more widely
55 Marie-Thérèse Venec-Peyre, “Alcide d’Orbigny (1802-1857): sa vie et son oeuvre,” Comptes Rendus : Palevol, 2002, 313–14.
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referred to as parcialidades, the Spanish term used throughout the colonial period and generally understood by modern scholars as dialectically different groups.57 After acknowledging the immense diversity of the indigenous groups of Chiquitos and the ethnic complexity within each mission community, d’Orbigny lauded the ability of the Jesuits to consolidate several native groups into mission communities all speaking one common language known as Chiquitana or Besiro. In fact, much of d’Orbigny’s musings about the missions and their native inhabitants depict the years of Jesuit rule as a golden age of order and prosperity. Echoing Häenke’s earlier sentiments, d’Orbigny believed that the post-Jesuit years ushered in a clearly discernible period of declension in which the missions and their diverse indigenous populations languished in a state of abject poverty only exacerbated by the exploitative practices of constantly changing and unstable administrations.58
A decade later, another French expedition, led by Conde Francis de Castelnau, crossed the South American continent from Brazil to Peru and documented important information for future studies of Chiquitos. Castelnau’s party was made up of a team of prominent scientific researchers that included zoologists Emile Deville, mining engineer Eugene d’Osery, and botanist Hugh Algernon Weddell, a protégé of Adrien de Jussieu, presiding president of the renowned Académie des Sciences. With the support of the Muséum d'Histoire Naturelle' and political backing from the Maison d’Orléans, Castelnau and his group of researchers set out to explore the poorly charted Amazon basin in an effort to determine the area’s potential for economic development. In order to locate navigable routes between major watersheds in the
57 Roberto Tomichá Charupá, La Primera Evangelización En Las Reducciones de Chiquitos, Bolivia, 1691-1767:
Protagonistas y Metodología Misional (Cochabamba, Bolivia: Editorial Verbo Divino, 2002), 221–23, 255–58.
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basin, they mapped the course of the Amazon River and its primary tributaries. The expedition had a number of scientific objectives and team members carefully compiled an inventory of the natural resources they encountered. Despite these objectives, however, the economic interests of Castelnau’s sponsors were the driving force behind the expedition. Castelnau’s team focused primarily on Brazil and neighboring regions because they believed these environs contained especially high concentrations of natural resources deemed ideal for commercial exploitation.59
Castelnau arrived in Rio de Janeiro on June 17, 1843 and remained in Brazil until the middle of 1845 when the expedition entered eastern Bolivia from Mato Grosso. Traveling west to Santa Cruz, Castelnau passed through the Chiquitos mission villages and took note of the province’s geography and culture. Although he remained in Bolivia for six-months, he dedicated most of that time to replenishing supplies rather than carrying out thorough explorations because the country was not considered a central objective of the expedition. Upon returning to Europe, Castelnau’s team published records concerning geography, botany, archaeology, ethnography, and geography in a series of installments. Although the publications did not have a wide-ranging impact at the time, Castelnau’s experiences and the direct observations he recorded in his works continue to reveal important information for scholars of eastern Bolivia and Chiquitos.60
Castelnau’s visit coincided with a period of nation formation and state organization for the fledgling Bolivian Republic. The Chiquitos that he described was a region experiencing significant population growth, a developing infrastructure, and a new government. Impoverished indigenous communities possessed cattle ranches and farms in the area, and native peasants cultivated sugar, cotton, and tobacco. Some native populations produced crude textiles of
59 Castelnau, En el Corazón de América del Sur, 17.
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unbleached cotton known as lienzos, which indigenous weavers had exported from Chiquitos since the Jesuit period. Castelnau’s observations also indicate that the Indian populations of the mission towns managed some measure of cultural preservation. Despite recent large-scale political transformations, and the persistent and longstanding efforts on the part of non-indigenous administrators to unify the province under centralized governing structures, the indigenous peoples of Chiquitos encountered by Castelnau continued to adhere to their own separate cultural identities and organized themselves around distinct ethnic affiliations speaking ancestral languages.
The maintenance of autonomy and cultural viability played out in the midst of what Castelnau, Häenke and d’Orbigny all understood as a much longer era of post-Jesuit decline. Within this setting, indigenous representatives struggled to retain the strong presence in local government that they had held for more than a century. Castelnau recorded instances of unrest among Indian leaders unhappy with such marginalizing efforts from outside governing structures intent on maximizing the economic production of Chiquitos while upholding the province’s political and geographical isolation.61 These conflicts and others will be discussed in greater detail in the chapters that follow. During the contentious years of secularization and
administrative consolidation, eastern Chiquitos became a boundary between the recently independent nation-state of Bolivia and territory controlled by Brazil. As such, it comprised a newly reoriented peripheral space of contact and exchange traversed by Bolivians, Brazilians, fugitive African slaves, and fragmented indigenous populations.62
61 Ibid.,30-63.
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The travel narratives written by Häenke, d’Orbigny, and Castelnau provide us with valuable ethnographic information concerning Chiquitos during a relatively understudied temporal scope that spanned from the first decades after the Jesuit expulsion until the founding of the Bolivian Republic in 1825. They reveal sweeping changes for the indigenous societies and cultures of the eastern lowlands, convey images of the deteriorating state of the mission towns, and give a few details regarding the ways in which native peoples negotiated the turmoil and disruption characteristic of such changes. The narratives also point out that Chiquitos continued to function as a pervious and disputed borderland space in the face of the ever-evolving
dynamics of local politics, administration and commerce. The boundaries and zones of contact within this borderland shifted to take on different meanings, however, as newly emergent power structures attempted to assert authority and to dictate the territorial boundaries and social
organization of this liminal space.
Historical and Anthropological Studies of Chiquitos
Modern research on the imperial borderlands of South America privileges the impact of indigenous actors and imperial peripheries on the objectives of European metropolitan centers. Spatially focused with sensitivity to social, economic, and cultural processes, recent borderlands studies demonstrate that native populations inhabiting the imperial fringes never existed as neutral pawns. Rather, they opportunistically chose sides, deftly manipulated their advantages, asserted autonomy, and frequently directed the outcomes of multifaceted intercultural
