The Chaco Mission Frontier
The Chaco Mission Frontier

Author: James Schofield Saeger

Publisher: University of Arizona Press

Published: 2016-03

Total Pages: 286

ISBN-13: 0816533598

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Spanish missions in the New World usually pacified sedentary peoples accustomed to the agricultural mode of mission life, prompting many scholars to generalize about mission history. James Saeger now reconsiders the effectiveness of the missions by examining how Guaycuruan peoples of South America's Gran Chaco adapted to them during the eighteenth century. Because the Guaycuruans were hunter-gatherers less suited to an agricultural lifestyle, their attitudes and behaviors can provide new insight about the impact of missions on native peoples. Responding to recent syntheses of the mission system, Saeger proposes that missions in the Gran Chaco did not fit the usual pattern. Through research in colonial documents, he reveals the Guaycuruan perspective on the missions, thereby presenting an alternative view of Guaycuruan history and the development of the mission system. He investigates Guaycuruan social, economic, political, and religious life before the missions and analyzes subsequent changes; he then traces Guaycuruan history into the modern era and offers an assessment of what Catholic missions meant to these peoples. Saeger's research into Spanish documents is unique for its elicitation of the Indian point of view. He not only reconstructs Guaycuruan life independent of Spanish contact but also shows how these Indians negotiated the conditions under which they would adapt to the mission way of life, thereby retaining much of their independence. By showing that the Guaycuruans were not as restricted in missions as has been assumed, Saeger demonstrates that there is a distinct difference between the establishment of missions and conquest. The Chaco Mission Frontier helps redefine mission studies by correcting overgeneralization about their role in Latin America.

The Chaco Mission Frontier
The Chaco Mission Frontier

Author: James Schofield Saeger

Publisher: University of Arizona Press

Published: 2022-09-20

Total Pages: 286

ISBN-13: 0816550700

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Spanish missions in the New World usually pacified sedentary peoples accustomed to the agricultural mode of mission life, prompting many scholars to generalize about mission history. James Saeger now reconsiders the effectiveness of the missions by examining how Guaycuruan peoples of South America's Gran Chaco adapted to them during the eighteenth century. Because the Guaycuruans were hunter-gatherers less suited to an agricultural lifestyle, their attitudes and behaviors can provide new insight about the impact of missions on native peoples. Responding to recent syntheses of the mission system, Saeger proposes that missions in the Gran Chaco did not fit the usual pattern. Through research in colonial documents, he reveals the Guaycuruan perspective on the missions, thereby presenting an alternative view of Guaycuruan history and the development of the mission system. He investigates Guaycuruan social, economic, political, and religious life before the missions and analyzes subsequent changes; he then traces Guaycuruan history into the modern era and offers an assessment of what Catholic missions meant to these peoples. Saeger's research into Spanish documents is unique for its elicitation of the Indian point of view. He not only reconstructs Guaycuruan life independent of Spanish contact but also shows how these Indians negotiated the conditions under which they would adapt to the mission way of life, thereby retaining much of their independence. By showing that the Guaycuruans were not as restricted in missions as has been assumed, Saeger demonstrates that there is a distinct difference between the establishment of missions and conquest. The Chaco Mission Frontier helps redefine mission studies by correcting overgeneralization about their role in Latin America.

Frontier Intimacies
Frontier Intimacies

Author: Paola Canova

Publisher: University of Texas Press

Published: 2020-10-20

Total Pages: 207

ISBN-13: 1477321489

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Until the 1960s, the Ayoreo people of Paraguay's Chaco region had remained uncontacted by the world. But as development encroached on their territory, the Ayoreo began to experience rapid cultural change. Paola Canova looks at one aspect of this change in Frontier Intimacies: the sexual practices of Ayoreo women, specifically the curajodie, or single women who exchange sex for money or material goods with non-Ayoreo men, often Mennonite settlers. Weaving personal anecdotes into her extensive research, Canova shows how the advancement of economic and missionary frontiers has reconfigured gender roles, sexual ethics, and notions of desire in the region. Ayoreo women, she shows, have reappropriated their sexual practices, approaching intimate liaisons on their own terms and seeing the involvement of money not as morally problematic but as constitutive of sexual encounters. By using their sexuality to construct an intimate frontier operating according to their own logics, Canova reveals, Ayoreo women expose the fractured workings of frontier capitalism in spaces of rapid transformation. Inviting broader examination of the ways in which contemporary frontier economies are constructed and experienced, Frontier Intimacies brings a captivating new perspective to the economic development of the Chaco region.

A Population History of the Missions of the Jesuit Province of Paraquaria
A Population History of the Missions of the Jesuit Province of Paraquaria

Author: Robert H. Jackson

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2019-05-08

Total Pages: 343

ISBN-13: 1527534308

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Scholars have debated the demographic consequences for the indigenous populations of the Americas of 1492, the beginning of sustained contact between the Old and New Worlds. Some have hypothesized an initial die-off of indigenous population resulting from the introduction of highly contagious crowd diseases such as smallpox and measles. So-called “virgin soil” epidemics caused catastrophic mortality that culled the indigenous populations, and some scholars such as the late Henry Dobyns hypothesized a rate of decline of around 90 percent as epidemics spread across the Americas like a miasmic cloud. However, over the course of generations, the indigenous populations developed immunities to the maladies, and recovered. This book presents a detailed case study of indigenous populations congregated on Jesuit missions in lowland South America that challenges the basic assumptions of the model of “virgin soil” epidemics. It shows that epidemic mortality varied between communities, and that catastrophic mortality occurred on some mission communities generations after first sustained contact. It concludes that patterns of demographic change among indigenous populations were far more complex than is often assumed. This study is of interest to specialists in historical demography, colonial Spanish America, Native American history, and the history of Spanish frontier missions.

A Concise History of Bolivia
A Concise History of Bolivia

Author: Herbert S. Klein

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2011-01-31

Total Pages: 379

ISBN-13: 1139497502

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In its first Spanish edition, Herbert Klein's A Concise History of Bolivia won immediate acceptance within Bolivia as the new standard history of this important nation. Surveying Bolivia's economic, social, cultural and political evolution from the arrival of early man in the Andes to the present, this current version brings the history of this society up to the present day, covering the fundamental changes that have occurred since the National Revolution of 1952 and the return of democracy in 1982. These changes have included the introduction of universal education and the rise of the mestizos and Indian populations to political power for the first time in national history. This second edition brings this story through the first administration of the first self-proclaimed Indian president in national history and the major changes that the government of Evo Morales has introduced in Bolivian society, politics and economics.

Expecting Pears from an Elm Tree
Expecting Pears from an Elm Tree

Author: Erick D. Langer

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2009-08-19

Total Pages: 392

ISBN-13: 0822390914

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Missions played a vital role in frontier development in Latin America throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. They were key to the penetration of national societies into the regions and indigenous lands that the nascent republics claimed as their jurisdictions. In Expecting Pears from an Elm Tree, Erick D. Langer examines one of the most important Catholic mission systems in republican-era Latin America, the Franciscan missions among the Chiriguano Indians in southeastern Bolivia. Using that mission system as a model for understanding the relationship between indigenous peoples and missionaries in the post-independence period, Langer explains how the missions changed over their lifespan and how power shifted between indigenous leaders and the missionaries in an ongoing process of negotiation. Expecting Pears from an Elm Tree is based on twenty years of research, including visits to the sites of nearly every mission discussed and interviews with descendants of mission Indians, Indian chiefs, Franciscan friars, mestizo settlers, and teachers. Langer chronicles how, beginning in the 1840s, the establishment of missions fundamentally changed the relationship between the Chiriguano villages and national society. He looks at the Franciscan missionaries’ motives, their visions of ideal missions, and the realities they faced. He also examines mission life from the Chiriguano point of view, considering their reasons for joining missions and their resistance to conversion, as well as the interrelated issues of Indian acculturation and the development of the mission economy, particularly in light of the relatively high rates of Indian mortality and outmigration. Expanding his focus, Langer delves into the complex interplay of Indians, missionaries, frontier society, and the national government until the last remaining missions were secularized in 1949. He concludes with a comparative analysis between colonial and republican-era missions throughout Latin America.

The Grandchildren of Solano López
The Grandchildren of Solano López

Author: Bridget María Chesterton

Publisher: University of New Mexico Press

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 191

ISBN-13: 0826353487

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"Paraguay's Chaco frontier unleashed possibly the bloodiest twentieth-century war in the Americas, the Chaco War between Paraguay and Bolivia (1932-35). This study of Paraguayan nationalism analyzes the role of the Chaco frontier in Paraguay's perception of itself during the period leading up to the Chaco War"--Provided by publisher.

Frontiers of Evangelization
Frontiers of Evangelization

Author: Robert H. Jackson

Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press

Published: 2017-07-21

Total Pages: 263

ISBN-13: 0806159308

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The Spanish crown wanted native peoples in its American territories to be evangelized and, to that end, facilitated the establishment of missions by various Catholic orders. Focusing on the Franciscan missions of the Sierra Gorda in Northern New Spain (Mexico) and the Jesuit missions of Chiquitos in what is now Bolivia, Frontiers of Evangelization takes a comparative approach to understanding the experiences of indigenous populations in missions on the frontiers of Spanish America. Marshaling a wealth of data from sacramental, military, and census records, Robert H. Jackson explores the many factors that influenced the stability of mission settlements, including the indigenous communities’ previous subsistence patterns and family structures, the evangelical techniques of the missionary orders, the social and political organization within the mission communities, and epidemiology in relation to population density and mobility. The two orders, Jackson’s research shows, organized and administered their missions very differently. The Franciscans took a heavy-handed approach and implemented disruptive social policies, while the Jesuits engaged in a comparatively “kinder and gentler” form of colonization. Yet the most critical factor to the missions’ success, Jackson finds, was the indigenous peoples’ existing demographic profile—in particular, their mobility. Nonsedentary populations, like the Pames and Jonaces of the Sierra Gorda, were more prone to demographic collapse once brought into the mission system, whereas sedentary groups, like the Guaraní of Chiquitos, experienced robust growth and greater resistance to disease and natural disaster. Drawing on more than three decades of scholarly work, this analysis of crucial archival material augments our understanding of the role of missions in colonization, and the fate of indigenous peoples in Spanish America.

Landscapes of Power and Identity
Landscapes of Power and Identity

Author: Cynthia Radding

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2006-01-18

Total Pages: 457

ISBN-13: 0822387409

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Landscapes of Power and Identity is a groundbreaking comparative history of two colonies on the frontiers of the Spanish empire—the Sonora region of northwestern Mexico and the Chiquitos region of eastern Bolivia’s lowlands—from the late colonial period through the middle of the nineteenth century. An innovative combination of environmental and cultural history, this book reflects Cynthia Radding’s more than two decades of research on Mexico and Bolivia and her consideration of the relationships between human societies and the geographic landscapes they inhabit and create. At first glance, Sonora and Chiquitos are quite different: one a scrub-covered desert, the other a tropical rainforest of the greater Amazonian and Paraguayan river basins. Yet the regions are similar in many ways. Both were located far from the centers of colonial authority, organized into Jesuit missions and linked to the principal mining centers of New Spain and the Andes, and then absorbed into nation-states in the nineteenth century. In each area, the indigenous communities encountered European governors, missionaries, slave hunters, merchants, miners, and ranchers. Radding’s comparative approach illuminates what happened when similar institutions of imperial governance, commerce, and religion were planted in different physical and cultural environments. She draws on archival documents, published reports by missionaries and travelers, and previous histories as well as ecological studies and ethnographies. She also considers cultural artifacts, including archaeological remains, architecture, liturgical music, and religious dances. Radding demonstrates how colonial encounters were conditioned by both the local landscape and cultural expectations; how the colonizers and colonized understood notions of territory and property; how religion formed the cultural practices and historical memories of the Sonoran and Chiquitano peoples; and how the conflict between the indigenous communities and the surrounding creole societies developed in new directions well into the nineteenth century.