Colonial routes: Spatial mobility and community formation in the Portuguese Amazon

This is a study of how native Amazonians pursued their own interests and built enduring communities under the constraints of Portuguese colonialism. It argues that they did this by following long-established patterns of spatial mobility and by selectively engaging with colonial institutions and state-sponsored projects that required long-distance travel. Drawing on a wealth of village-level sources from regional archives, supplemented by sources from archives in Rio de Janeiro and Lisbon, the dissertation focuses on an important but sparsely researched period. This period, from 1750 to 1800, saw the implementation of major reforms: some sixty Amazonian missions were secularized, contested borders with the Spanish empire demarcated, and Indians more effectively mobilized in the service of the Portuguese state. This period is often characterized as the definitive "coming of the state" to the Amazon, with all of the negative consequences for native autonomy that this implies. The present work, however, joins other recent revisionist studies in demonstrating that the period's stability derived not from the imposition of royal control, but from an overlap of interests between colonial officials and the members of corporate Indian communities.;With its engagement of these topics and sources, the dissertation contributes to scholarship on native mobility and colonial community formation in two main ways. First, it moves beyond the standard conception of movements as either coerced (Indians being displaced to locations not of their choosing) or fugitive (Indians fleeing colonial authority and rejecting fixed residence). In many cases, native Amazonians left their villages because they were obligated or encouraged by colonial authorities to do so, but also in pursuit of their own interests. Relocating, exploring, and trading across vast distances in the service of the state, Indians staked out a more autonomous position within the colonial system. Second, the dissertation revises our understanding of settled communities in the Amazon and in colonial societies more generally. When one speaks of mobility, migration, and displacement---all typical features of colonial societies---there is a tendency to forget that people did find homes, did take part in society, and had an active role in forming that society. Through a close examination of the experiences of mobile individuals and the ties they maintained with their communities of origin, as well as the relationships that they built en route and at their destinations, the dissertation shows that the colonial Indian villages were enduring places where community identity was continually reproduced over time by generations of villagers as well as by migrant newcomers.