Persistence of Indigenous Peoples and Struggles for Land Rights. Cordoba Between the Bourbons and the United Provinces of Rio de la Plata

TELL, SONIA

Cambridge

Congreso; International Seminar on the History of the Atlantic World, 1500-1825; 2010

Harvard University

Between 1790 and 1815, some of the few surviving pueblos de indios in Cordoba resorted to the judicial system to defend or recover their communal lands. In these lawsuits, not only indigenous land rights but also the very existence of these pueblos with an indigenous population was challenged by local authorities and elites. By exploring some of these cases, we attempt to look into the native access into the legal system in a region which had suffered a severe destructuring of indigenous societies since early colonial times, but whose surviving pueblos de indios had developed a strong litigious tradition. Our purpose is to reconstruct some basic features of these conflicts by identifying the courts and conjunctures in which they initiated legal actions, the laws and land titles used by indigenous people and local elite to form their legal arguments, and the role of ethnic authorities (curacas and cabildos indígenas) in this process. We expect to correct the previous assumptions that these pueblos de indios had disappeared in Cordoba by the end of colonial times.