14 - The Crises and Transformations of Invaded Societies: The La Plata Basin (1535–1650)

Summary

This chapter concerns the early years of invasion in the southeastern part of South America, specifically the vast basin of the Río de la Plata (sometimes called River Plate). Its scope includes all of Paraguay, as well as Tucumán and Cuyo in modern Argentina. How can we capture the essential characteristics common to the histories of these three areas?

Here, as in most other areas of America, indigenous societies that did not build strong centralized power structures, and that consequently lacked tributary or semitributary systems for the production and circulation of surpluses, faced Europeans for whom such systems were the essence of politics. In these cases European conquest did not mean a state takeover of an existing state, as in the Andes or central Mexico, but rather a long and arduous campaign to “pacify the territory” and build a labor-exploiting system amid native societies of drastically unfamiliar constitution. It was the difficulty of this process, from the European viewpoint, which attached the label “marginal” to such areas. (To some degree the formerly Inka-ruled areas of Andean Argentina, with their more complex native polities, formed exceptions.)

In broad strokes these commonalities create a common history. First, the Spanish found it necessary to overcome nearly every group through armed struggle. Although the presence of a few “allies” made part of the job easier, military conquest was still a difficult road for the Europeans to travel.

Second, the colonists devised numerous ways to extract surplus by controlling indigenous peoples’ labor. All of these systems were variations on obligatory “personal service” – that is, labor levies which crown officials could assign to favored Spaniards or to local industries and other applications. Theoretically the crown tried to hedge personal service with rules distinguishing “tributary Indians” and “tributary age,” but regulation did not work as planned; for example, forced labor obligations fell on multiple members of the same family. In Paraguay and Tucumán, this system survived until the end of the colonial era.

A third common element among these colonizations is that mestizaje, or miscegenation, began quite early. “Racial” mixing pervaded the entire area covered in this study. The reasons were numerous and complex. Political reasons included the fact that some of the conquerors felt obliged to join the family networks of ethnic leaders. In Paraguay an additional motive was to accumulate a labor force based on women. Along all the frontiers, the scarcity of European women inclined men to seek out native mates.