Where Caciques and Mapmakers Met
Border Making in Eighteenth-Century South America
By Jeffrey Alan Erbig Jr.
280 pp., 6.125 x 9.25, 24 halftones, 13 maps, 6 tables
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Paperback ISBN: 978-1-4696-5504-8
Published: April 2020 -
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4696-5503-1
Published: April 2020 -
eBook ISBN: 978-1-4696-5505-5
Published: March 2020
David J. Weber Series in the New Borderlands History
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Drawing upon manuscripts from over two dozen archives in seven countries, Jeffrey Erbig traces on-the-ground interactions between Ibero-American colonists, Jesuit and Guaraní mission-dwellers, and autonomous Indigenous peoples as they responded to ever-changing notions of territorial possession. It reveals that Native agents shaped when and where the border was drawn, and fused it to their own territorial claims. While mapmakers' assertions of Indigenous disappearance or subjugation shaped historiographical imaginations thereafter, Erbig reveals that the formation of a border was contingent upon Native engagement and authority.
Published with support provided by the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas
About the Author
Jeffrey Alan Erbig Jr. is assistant professor of Latin American and Latino studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
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Reviews
“This provocative case study alternately provides a reexamination and, in places, reiteration of the core arguments of spatial history. It demonstrates how cartographic practices simultaneously created and transformed ethnicities while significantly contributing to the contemporary marginalization of Native peoples.”--CHOICE
"This is a detailed reconstruction of the La Plata borderlands over time, offering a new view of the transformations in the Americas through the creative use of historical maps and modern GIS. It integrates and makes central long overlooked groups of Indigenous peoples."--Alida C. Metcalf, Rice University
"Historians of South America tend to distinguish between an 'internal' border (against Indigenous peoples) and an 'external' one (between European nations). Abandoning this false dichotomy allows Erbig to ask how various borders coexisted and interacted with one another, opening the road to an account that reconstructs complex dynamics where boundaries were neither imperial nor local, neither omnipresent nor irrelevant. This is an innovative book, precisely and beautifully written."--Tamar Herzog, Harvard University