| This is a study of the multifaceted interactions between Portenos and Indians in the plains or Pampas that extended southwest of Buenos Aires, between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. In the Pampas, the Spaniards did not encounter large, farming Indian populations like those of central Mexico or the Andean highlands, but mobile hunter-gatherers whom they were unable to conquer and subdue. Using an ethnohistorical approach, this dissertation shows that although Indians remained independent, they thoroughly reinvented their societies under the multidimensional impact of the Spanish arrival, which included ecological changes, epidemics, slaving raids, and intercultural commerce. Most dramatically, the Pampa Indians became superb horse-riders, deft hunters of (feral) cattle, avid consumers of Spanish manufactures, and an integral part of long-distance exchange networks that extended west across the Andes and reached into southern Chile.;On the basis of this ethnohistorical understanding of the Pampas, this dissertation offers an ambitious reconsideration of Buenos Aires' early colonial period. The intersection of Andean and Atlantic trade circuits in Buenos Aires during the seventeenth century provided the stimuli for the development of cattle ranching as a main local economic activity. Spanish settlers adapted Iberian cattle-ranching practices to the challenges and opportunities of the Pampas by developing a hunting industry to exploit the proliferating herds of feral livestock that roamed the plains. Such hunting industry put the Spaniards in direct contact, and competition, with the Indians who inhabited the Pampas and with the Indians who arrived seasonally from the Andean zone to hunt and trade. The dissertation examines the complex intercultural and intertribal relations that ensued, which included Indian raids, military expeditions, diplomatic negotiations and treaties, and short-lived Jesuit missions. By the 1750s, these relations had resulted in the emergence of a militarized frontier line lying barely a hundred miles southwest of Buenos Aires. This frontier line defined intercultural relations in the Pampas for the next hundred years, and became a fundamental element in the narrative of Argentina's emergence as a modern nation in the early twentieth century. |
