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Roots of Revolution: Frontier Settlement Policy and the Emergence of New Spaces of Power in the Río de La Plata Borderlands, 1777 – 1810

2008; Duke University Press; Volume: 88; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-2008-003

1527-1900

Julio Djenderedjian,

Indigenous Cultures and History

In the last years before the independence revolutions erupted in the Río de la Plata, decisions made in Buenos Aires, the capital of the viceroyalty, were largely ignored on the frontiers. One example among several documented cases is that of Gualeguay, a small town in the province of Entre Ríos. In 1802 a group of town councilmen dared to defy the viceroy in support of a local hacendado. Three times these men, barely able to sign their own names, defended him in his bid to be reelected as mayor, which was strictly prohibited by law. A year or so later another councilman, apparently more aware than his colleagues of the possible implications of such actions, explained to the viceroy that “in these parts . . . most of the inhabitants have scant knowledge of the respect and veneration that is owed to Your Excellency’s great dignity.”1Certainly the region had a long history of opposition to central authority, a history that even included open revolts. As far back as the difficult days of the conquest, the authority of the Spanish throne had existed, for the most part, only in theory. When attempts were made to establish greater control, the central government was obeyed only insofar as such obedience did not clash with local interests.2 However, now the crown faced something new and more complicated. The town of Gualeguay, like many nearby towns, had been created by viceregal initiative only a few decades earlier. In light of such origins, these wretched little settlements of, at most, two or three hundred souls might have been expected to “keep their mouths shut and obey” the renewed authority of the Bourbon period.3 But it would be from these very towns that the strongest challenge to the higher powers would emerge, first as an unruly rural insurrection, but later incarnate in fearsome caudillos upheld by the unwavering support of their gaucho followers.How is it possible that these actors, in such a short time, constructed such solid, concrete local spaces of power? What made it possible for a handful of rustic frontier commandants to confront, and ultimately to defeat, the armies of the once-proud capital? This is no small subject; here I will try to understand the basis for the complex revolutionary process that erupted in the Río de la Plata region after 1810, or at least to reconstruct some of its background and causes. Despite the abundant analyses that have already been written, some fundamental issues still need to be unearthed and examined. First, historiography, blinded by the larger-than-life figure of the caudillo, has failed to take note of subaltern actors. They have been seen as just part of the mass of political maneuvers, mere cannon fodder in times of war. Worse yet, they have been considered a marginal phenomenon, an epistemological vacuum, manipulated only with great difficulty by the owner of the estancia or by the caudillo.4 But as I will show, these actors had a clear awareness of their objectives, which they struggled tenaciously to attain. This awareness had a deeply rooted history; beyond that, however, the opinions of these actors were determining factors in the actions of the caudillos, a fact that has only recently begun to be recognized.5 Furthermore, the national (and even provincial) limitations of historiography have obstructed the view of the common processes affecting that entire, vast portion of the Spanish colonial empire before today’s independent states emerged. Part of my task will be to reevaluate the role of the political elements in existence prior to the revolutionary crisis. Above all, we must think of the region as frontier borderlands.6 Finally, the intimate link between the frontier policies of the late Spanish Empire and the land distribution policies being carried out at the same time has not always been noticed. In fact, even good historians find those two policies worthy of mention only in regard to the relative degree of emphasis given to one or the other by this or that royal official.7 But the importance of the two policies can be seen in their effects on the construction of local spaces of power, and the consequences of the formation, consolidation, and growth of those local powers regarding access to and control of resources. In addition, the intrusion of politics, bringing about profound changes in legal norms regarding land ownership, affected all current and future investments in the region. This in turn produced substantial alterations in patterns of accumulation, in the behavior of the actors, and in the distribution of the wealth created by new opportunities for economic development.8Most of the territory occupied today by the Republic of Uruguay, the Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul, and the Argentine provinces of Corrientes, Misiones, and Entre Ríos was once one vast frontier area of the Spanish colonial empire of the mid-eighteenth century. There were the old, more densely populated Guaraní missions, a few cities with their surrounding hinterlands, and a handful of reducciones and towns of various sizes. The rest of the territory was inhabited solely, and precariously, by scattered indigenous groups and a few nuclei of Spanish and creole settlements. The old cities of Buenos Aires, Santa Fe, and Corrientes were founded in the sixteenth century and joined by Montevideo in 1726; these were the seats of government, from which local elites (mainly merchants and officials) struggled to enforce a few minimal security measures in the region. These essential nodes of power were also centers of commerce, which had learned to coexist with relentless and widespread contraband that deprived royal coffers of tax revenue while enriching private interests.But significant changes were under way. A process of land occupation or reoccupation was beginning, with a concomitant increase in the rural population. A period of stagnation had lasted for decades, during which nearly the entire Río de la Plata region, from Paraguay to Buenos Aires, had been fighting off fierce indigenous attacks. Now, however, rapid expansion was taking place, based on military offensives and the founding of new towns and reducciones. During these years the Charrúas were soundly defeated in what is now the Argentine province of Entre Ríos and in Uruguay, and a lasting peace was established with the formerly threatening caciques and chiefdoms of the Chaco.9 With the increase in the rural population, the agrarian economy expanded as well. Spanish creoles quietly but persistently populated spaces that had previously been the preserve of indigenous tribes or of precarious, ill-defined estancias cultivating herds of wild cattle.10 The old, isolated Jesuit missions were shaken by the War of the Seven Pueblos (1755 – 56), the consequence of an unfortunate border agreement between Spain and Portugal. The resulting disorganization of the mission economy led to the dispersal of their inhabitants, from which the missions never recovered.11 This uprooted indigenous population joined the movement of campesinos toward the frontiers of the Río de la Plata, forming subsistence-based groups free of government supervision and largely outside the growing mercantile economy.Moreover, the frontiers of production were expanding, despite recurring armed conflicts. Several factors contributed to an increase in the production of hides for export, including the development of Atlantic commerce, the incipient Industrial Revolution, and improvements in maritime technology. Meanwhile, intercolonial trade, using the old land routes, was also expanding. The 1760s and ’70s were, therefore, a good time for setting up large cattle estancias in an area that was no longer in a constant state of war with the indigenous peoples, and where the land was still almost completely undeveloped. In 1754 a Real Pragmática was issued, clearly establishing at last the guidelines for claiming lands belonging to the crown. From that time on, there is considerable documentary evidence showing that the wealthy urban merchants sought to obtain extensive tracts of land on which they could set up estancias to produce hides and tallow for export.12 These enterprises soon took on dimensions far greater than those of the meager estancias in the countryside around Buenos Aires. Distinguished by their more visibly mercantile nature, they also were more highly specialized in cattle and represented larger investments than were customary for the times. Their owners consistently sought to make the most rational use of resources. Since labor could be very expensive, they often utilized large contingents of slaves; they incorporated advanced technical improvements; they specialized in the most lucrative export commodities; and with their often enormous scale of operations, they were well situated to take advantage of the most abundant resource — land.13 The Bourbon reforms called for a series of measures to open up trade; when superimposed on the market factors mentioned above, these achieved important increases in the output of the local market (or at least in channeling more of that output through the legal tax system).14Younger sons from Spanish hidalgo families that had come down in the world, coming to America to flee poverty in the Iberian Peninsula, set themselves up as administrators of these large installations, receiving orders from absentee owners in Santa Fe, Montevideo, or Buenos Aires. For these younger sons, exile to these fertile frontiers seems to have been a last resort, a fate only slightly preferable to remaining in the large cities and earning one’s fortune in commerce. But the relative openness of the overseas market, added to the local power that they would soon be able to acquire, made for advancement in their personal careers. Some of them began to build their own large cattle ranches (estancias), achieving their goals in a relatively short time. A classic example was Joseph de Urquiza, father of future Argentine president Justo José de Urquiza. Joseph came to Entre Ríos around 1784 as manager of a hacienda after a fight with his uncle Mateo Ramón de Alzaga, an important Buenos Aires merchant, over a decade of unpaid wages at his uncle’s store. A few years later he succeeded in establishing his own cattle ranch; in 1809, his 60 thousand head of cattle made him the most important rancher in Concepción del Uruguay. For many years he also held the strategic position of comandante de milicias for the area.15These large cattle estancias were not alone in their rapid development during the 1770s and ’80s. Family-owned farms and ranches also became increasingly visible during this period, as creole shepherds and farmers settled on the frontiers, attracted by high wages and opportunities to acquire land, accumulate capital, and achieve economic independence. Although a diversified agriculture was practiced here, with some production for local markets, these smallholdings and medium-sized ranches were far more oriented toward cattle raising than was the case among similar ranches located in areas that had been settled earlier. In addition, these new landholdings were much larger than older ones, not only to take advantage of the concentration on cattle but also because of certain characteristics of the setting itself, which we will examine later in more detail. This focus on cattle raising, even among small or medium-sized ranchers, caught some officials by surprise. Their preconceptions as Enlightenment-era physiocrats led them to equate the promotion of settlements with the establishment of farms. In 1785 Intendant Francisco de Paula Sanz disparaged the new settlers in Minas, Santa Lucía, Pando, and San José, who “plead for land only for estancias, thinking solely of cattle, and complain that the lands assigned to them are designated as chacras [small farms].”16As the movement to occupy more territory advanced, these new cattle-raising establishments increasingly competed with each other for access to land. Under these conditions, the colonial government’s settlement policies further aggravated conflicts and tensions on the frontier.It is well known that Spain tended to be more directly involved in managing its frontier regions than were the other colonial powers. Rather than delegating authority to individuals or companies who were then responsible for populating the territories and collecting revenues (taking on, as well, the inherent risks), the Spanish colonial government retained within its own sphere the administrative control of its far frontiers. The result was a state of marked irregularity and instability. For some time, Spain had been concentrating most of its resources on the core areas of the empire, paying attention to its outlying regions only when concrete threats made it necessary to do so. Nevertheless, once the threat appeared to diminish, Spain’s interest would quickly diminish as well, given the high cost of interventionism. Governance of the frontier regions was often abandoned to local authorities, whose actions were dictated more by their own interests than by those of the crown. Histories of the outlying Spanish dominions in South America are filled with accounts of territories won by force and then lost at the negotiating table, often, allegedly, because of the actions of some corrupt official or the fraudulent advances of other powers.One of these sporadic effusions of the Spanish colonial state (and the most serious in quite some time) was the policy of frontier settlement carried out in the Río de la Plata from 1777 to 1801. The Bourbon Crown had suffered a painful defeat in the Seven Years’ War, including the temporary loss of Havana and Manila, the keys to Spanish power in the Atlantic and the Pacific, respectively. In partial reaction to this defeat, the crown decided to carry out a project of strategic settlement of territories that had never before been of much interest, since they had neither precious metals nor large indigenous populations. Having nearly been lost to other colonial powers, they were now of greater interest.17In the Río de la Plata, the most salient point of this new policy consisted of founding towns along the border to “fence off” Spanish territory from Portuguese holdings in Brazil.18 The mechanism, despite differences in form, was always essentially the same. In response either to a petition from a group of settlers (usually a request to build a chapel) or to a direct order from above, the decision was made to found a town (villa) or city.19 Its status was defined, its boundaries marked off, and a commissioner was sent to set the process in motion. Those settlements were almost always humble assemblages of at most a few hundred persons. Inhabitants scattered throughout the countryside were urged, even required, to join with others and collaborate in laying out and building the town. The head of each household was to set up a house and wait for a promised lottery at which land designated for small farms or estancias would be parceled out by the higher authorities.Designation of the new settlement as a town or as a city carried with it the possibility of establishing a cabildo (town council), elected from among the local vecinos (legal residents). The creation of this local authority made it possible, in turn, to apportion land within the jurisdiction by means of permisos de población (settler’s permits) with provisional titles. According to old Castilian law, one could acquire the status of vecino by occupying and maintaining a house, practicing a trade or other recognized occupation, and serving in the local militia, all of which was to be registered and verified before the cabildo. Political rights acquired in this way were not limited to holding positions in the local justice system; according to some authors, another prerogative well worth possessing was the right of petition to higher authorities.20Thus the creation of a town signified, on the one hand, granting a previously invisible group of people an opening to exert pressure on the imperial authorities, and on the other, curtailing the jurisdiction of another, preexisting town or city, on which this new settlement would no longer be dependent. Foreseeing these difficulties, since 1627 the Leyes de Indias (Laws of the Indies) had prohibited viceroys, audiencias, or governors to grant titles of town or city, reserving that function to the Council of the Indies. However, the Real Ordenanza de Intendentes, issued in 1782, empowered town councilmen to exercise local judicial authority and instructed that they be elected from among the local vecinos. In settlements that did not yet have a council able to oversee those elections, the intendants were to appoint the councilmen and constitute a council.21 And in practice, the viceroys of the Río de la Plata exercised full power to create towns, provoking protests from the older towns and cities — yet another indication of how important the policy of frontier settlement was in the eyes of the higher authorities.Complementing the Jesuit missions (now in secular hands) that had formerly served as a bulwark against Portugal, once the revised boundaries with that colonial power were set by the Treaty of San Ildefonso (1777), new settlements began to spring up like mushrooms. In the region now occupied by the Argentine provinces of Corrientes and Entre Ríos, Uruguay, and the Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul, two towns or villas were founded in 1778; seven in 1780; three in 1781; one in 1782; four in 1783; and one each in 1786, 1791, 1793, 1795, 1800, and 1801.Physiocratic notions were in the air, and the functions of the crown were being reconceived to include procuring the prosperity and material well-being of its subjects. In this context, the administrative creation of municipalities seemed to be thoroughly justified.22 Religious authorities came on board as well. Anxious to show the crown their enthusiasm for frontier settlements, they competed with each other in trekking through the roughest terrain of the Río de la Plata Diocese. These expeditions culminated inevitably with the founding of new parishes, whose locations and borders often set off new conflicts.23Government actions also affected security measures on the frontiers. Traditionally, the responsibility for pursuing smugglers and bandits fell mainly to a few of the great absentee hacendados. While they absorbed the costs of such functions, they also took control away from the higher authorities, acting according to their own criteria, dealing with impunity in contraband, and frequently creating problems for the other settlers.24 With the settlement policy, however, new actors emerged whose duties and authority included policing the frontiers, and in whose hands it might be supposed the royal interests would be better protected. Given that these local authorities owed their very existence to the higher powers, were in direct communication with them, were accountable to them, and depended on them to confirm the power they had granted the locals to use and distribute the resources in their trust, there was little reason to question where local loyalties lay.But in addition, and much more important, these processes exacerbated collisions of interests between the absentee owners of vast cattle installations and the local groups of estancieros, herdsmen, and farmers who played key roles in the new settlement policy. The available information leads us to believe that these conflicts of interest were quite widespread, albeit with variations in timing and specific characteristics.25 Repercussions from those conflicts reached the highest government circles, leading to the implementation in the early 1780s of the arreglo de los campos. This was an abortive attempt to reorganize landholdings in the area of the Río de la Plata’s border with Brazil, where the previous division of land into latifundios was seen as an obstacle to settlement.26 Though the measure was never fully implemented, one of its consequences was a halt to all land grants to large cattle-raising interests, whether local or absentee.As the process of frontier settlement advanced through the founding of new towns, settlers received double benefits. First, the creation of town councils opened to them the possibility of petitioning (and pressuring) the higher authorities. Second, and far more important, the cabildos were empowered to distribute lands under their jurisdiction to new settlers. The resulting disputes and uncertainties over land ownership were the subject of vehement protests from the large absentee landowners, but these were ignored, at least for the time being. The imperatives of populating the frontier set the limits of state action.The best way to appreciate the complexity of these land disputes is through a micro study of the phenomenon at the local level. Several examples from Entre Ríos can provide us with concrete evidence on the impact and evolution of those processes. In these new areas, the large productive units tended to encompass not only an extensive quantity of territory but also a great deal of the best-quality land. There were two basic reasons for this. First, the large hacendados were the first to arrive. The region was very sparsely populated when they began to create their holdings, and they were therefore able to select the best spaces, with naturally protected areas to keep the cattle from straying over unfenced land, and with plenty of water and pasture.Second, despite the general fertility of the region, useful land was not really abundant, given the technological conditions of that time. Hills cut off access to streams, leading to the paradoxical situation of too much water in some parts and too little in others nearby. All of the land was well watered, but much of that water was brackish, and in any case the streams were a good distance apart. Marshes and forests kept an important part of the soil out of production. The lowlands had the most fertile soil, accumulating both moisture and organic matter that flowed down from the hills; unfortunately, the lowlands were subject to frequent flooding, making it necessary to own land at both high and low elevations in order to move cattle back and forth between them. The high relative humidity contributed to diseases, parasites, and death among the animals, making the availability of more elevated lands crucially important in periods of heavy rain.27 All of this, added to the high cost of labor, meant that increases in the number of cattle would soon begin to stress environmental resources, creating problems of overgrazing and lack of control over herds. Thus, in order to raise cattle on a large scale, very large expanses of land were required. This resulted in a surprisingly low ratio of cattle per hectare, a notable phenomenon on the largest estates and one that contrasted with the relatively high capital investments mentioned earlier. As the area’s human and livestock populations continued to grow with the arrival of creole estancieros, herdsmen, and farmers, environmental stresses intensified.In addition to environmental pressures, the arrival of these new actors meant the displacement of significant numbers of indigenous families belonging to local tribes or to groups of Guaraní migrants who had left the missions.28 Those migrants had left their reducciones to escape the growing pressures caused by the decline of the missions. This tendency had been growing since the difficult juncture of 1750 – 56.29 On the fertile lands of the frontier, these groups were able to re-create much of their traditional way of life. They produced mainly for their own subsistence, selling little to external markets. They supported themselves through migratory and sporadic agriculture, hunting wild cattle, and utilizing a wide range of natural resources, all supplemented by male family members who occasionally hired themselves out as laborers on the nearby estancias. Names of indigenous workers predominate in the lists of peons, at least during the 1760s and ’70s. The few descriptions that we have of these people reveal extreme austerity in the matter of material possessions. As for their agriculture, it was little more than occasional plantings that, to the eye of a European, were indistinguishable from the weeds and disorderly growth of the forest. They had few domestic animals and would spend certain seasons hunting and gathering in the countryside.30 In other words, they made extensive use of the local environment. This inevitably conflicted with the more extensive, market-oriented production standards of the new creole settlers, who had little need to hire outside labor on their family-operated farms and ranches.We have concrete evidence showing a substantial increase in conflicts among all these actors during the early 1780s, although the form of conflict and when it occurred doubtless varied from one place to another. Petitions for permission to build chapels and for the formation of towns were now mixed with piteous complaints from groups of persons presenting themselves as “decent” vecinos, “Spaniards,” poor herdsmen and farmers whom certain large absentee hacendados were attempting to evict from their lands, which they have earned with the sweat of their brows and paid for with their blood, copiously shed in the struggles against the indigenous people. These pleas, which also include subtle references to the area’s strategic role in colonial defense,31 have been accepted uncritically in the traditional regional bibliography, which was written for the most part by descendents of those same settlers. It is obvious, however, that they include arguments that are tailored for the ears of the higher authorities and are therefore of dubious veracity. They exaggerate or twist the facts, since the indigenous presence had not represented a threat for several decades; they fail to mention that they, too, were carrying out evictions of their peaceful indigenous neighbors, who did not know how to defend themselves in the Spanish legal and political culture.This phenomenon appears to have been quite significant, at least in some areas. In Entre Ríos in 1785 a serious conflict arose between those creole ranchers and farmers and the indigenous people who were being displaced from the best zones. The indigenous people turned for aid and representation to certain great absentee hacendados and to Francisco Méndez, a local creole leader who spoke Guaraní (and whom they called “Protector,” a title that would later, and not by accident, be used by the caudillo José Artigas). They asked Méndez to represent them before the authorities of the viceroyalty, to ask that they “be left alone, and not have the possession of their houses taken away by the councilmen” of the new towns being founded in the area.32 The indigenous people mobilized, took up arms, and assigned themselves military duties. They even attempted to gain the support of a Guarani cacique who was highly respected in his new home because of his former position. But the local authorities, backed by the government of the viceroyalty, suppressed the movement with unusual severity motivated by the specter of the recent indigenous rebellions in Alto Perú.33This episode, and the support that the indigenous people received from the hacendados (for whom, as we have seen, they were a useful source of reserve labor), have only now been placed in evidence. In these circumstances, however, this support was not particularly helpful; the colonial state and its officials were not, at that time, going to favor the hacendados over the preferred actors of the policy of strategic frontier settlement. The support the indigenous people sought from one of those “preferred actors,” Francisco Méndez, was also contradictory. He was part of the cultural middle ground of the borderlands, but above all, Méndez was also a beneficiary of the fruits of that imperial policy.34 Appointed alcalde of the first local cabildo, he belonged to the new sphere of local power, having previously held the positions of alcalde de la hermandad and juez comisionado (these officials met police functions in rural areas and had the right to resolve small disputes over values of 60 pesos or less). His position in the creole world, and his simultaneous role as intermediary for the indigenous rebels, placed him in a difficult dilemma; probably this was the cause of his suicide while in prison. It is not surprising to find that the indigenous peoples were ultimately pushed aside; by the end of the 1790s they had disappeared from the central settlements of the occupied lands.The privileged scenario in which these conflicts would be played out was now the sphere of local political institutions created through the policy of frontier settlement and the founding of new towns. The founding commissioner of the town would appoint the cabildo and other necessary officials, choosing those vecinos who were most apt for the positions. Those appointed were usually medium-or large-scale estancieros, often illiterate but always local residents. Members of the outgoing cabildo would elect their successors, but all elections were approved by the viceroy, who thus maintained his prerogatives.The requirement that local officials also be local residents opened unexpected opportunities to those younger sons (literally or figuratively speaking), previously mentioned, of Spanish hidalgo families. Prior to the creation of the new town councils, those younger sons could only aspire to second-rank status, administering huge haciendas for economic interests centered in the large coastal cities. Now, however, they encountered economic opportunities that could make them rich, as well as opportunities to take control of the political instruments through which to build that wealth. Most of these hacienda administrators had left the centers of col