In this book, I will study some of the sixteenth-, seventeenth-, and eighteenth-century texts that discursively constructed the referents “lands” and “peoples” of the geographic zone north of the River Plate. This will allow us to see the different forms given to those referents by the European observer, as well as the Amerindian resistance to the Europeans’ attempts to appropriate the land.

Unlike in many parts of Mesoamerica and the Andes, the conquest of the lands on the northern shore of the River Plate, as in the majority of the lands populated by nomadic or high-mobility groups, did not take...

At the moment of “discovery,” the lands on the northern shore of the River Plate, until then unknown to Christendom, became a potential object of knowledge for the European subject. The process through which this gnoseological appropriation occurred is very difficult to grasp because the record of the encounter and of the years that followed is so fragmented. For scholars interested in reconstructing a polyphonic situation, the absence of texts by non-European groups presents an additional problem. It is partly for this reason that the history of Western culture and the Western episteme have become the framework for the “discovery”...

After the expeditions cited in Chapter One, voyages to the northern shore of the River Plate became less frequent, and Europeans were deterred from settling there for two main reasons: First, the famous silver was never found, causing the region to be classified astierras de ningún provecho(lands of no profit, or unprofitable lands); and second, the region was considered dangerous. The Amerindians had already killed dozens of Spaniards. Settlement did take place in other parts of the River Plate region (Buenos Aires, Santa Fe, and Entre Rios, all located within modern Argentina), but those populated centers had very...

After Ortiz de Zárate’s departure, the lands on the northern shore of the River Plate fell into a deep oblivion. By 1576, hunger and hardships, ongoing hostilities by the Amerindians (presumably the Charrua, to judge from Barco Centenera’s account, whose area of influence was believed to include the San Salvador region, where the Spanish military camp was located), and the absence of precious metals had persuaded the Spaniards to abandon their only settlement on the northern shore of the River Plate.¹

Despite the difficulties, the Spanish monarch showed interest in the region at least once before Ortiz de Zarate evacuated...

Apart from Céspedes’s short-livedreducciones, no European settlements were founded in the lands of Uruguay until 1680. In that year, the Portuguese established a military camp in San Gabriel—an event that started a series of conflicts in the region that lasted roughly a century (1680–1776). During this period, other towns and military camps were established, of which the most significant is Montevideo. The texts studied in this chapter record the conflict between the peninsular empires—Spain and Portugal—that developed during this historical period.

At the start of the seventeenth century, Hernandarias had increased the potential wealth of...

The histories written in the eighteenth century could be considered the encyclopedias on the region because of their systematic and conscious attempt to account for an object of study with the purpose of gathering all the available knowledge about it. These texts are not letters of relation that intend to prove the author’s services to the crown in order to get a pension from the king; rather, they are explanations of a determinate object that could be called “River Plate,” understood as a geopolitical region. They are an eighteenth-century phenomenon that reminds us of a moment in the history of...

The texts in this chapter belong, in their majority, to the genre of travel accounts. Although many take the form of letters, logbooks, or diaries, all record European visitors’ impressions of the River Plate region. Yet despite the travelers’ shared Occidental worldview, the homogeneity of their representational strategies is fragmented. By this time, the Spaniards and the Portuguese are not the only ones producing representations of the region; other subjectivities have entered the universe of discourse and are contributing their own versions of the referent “Uruguay” (or “lands of Uruguay”). These new subjectivities include the French, the Italian, the Dutch,...

I have thus far limited my analysis of colonial times to texts. But written (and oral) discourse was only one of the means through which European subjects imagined and described the American territory. Their descriptive arsenal also included a tool for representing and controlling the lands they possessed: geography and its privileged form, cartography. In the language of geography, the American territory was imagined as a blank page waiting for European subjects to leave inscriptions on it. European cartography from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is early testimony to that conception when it represents inhabitable American space through a theoretical...