State expansion, indigenous territoriality and property rights in the Buenos Aires south frontier in the post-colonial period

LANTERI, SOL

Lisboa

Conferencia; International Conference Property Rights, Land and Territory in the European Overseas Empires; 2014

ISCTE-Centro de Estudos de História Contemporánea-Instituto Universitário de Lisboa

In the River Plate, after the disintegration of the central power due to the revolution and war process, the post-independent political and institutional organization was formalized in provincial States during the first half of the 19th century, up to the sanction of the Constitution of 1853 and the unification of the State about 1862. Since 1820, the provincial State of Buenos Aires developed a territorial expansion process towards the south of the Salado river, natural limit with the indigenous groups originally established in situ during the colonial period, by means of the foundation of rural towns, institutional power structures and other policies such as the delivery of the public land, in order to articulate the resource to the process of cattle expansion and to extend the sovereignty and tax system of this State in construction. This process generated a great extension of the official territory, the settlement of diverse origin and nature population that was articulated to the productive process and complex interethnic relations with the indigenous groups, which had other forms of conceiving and exploiting it, not assimilable to Cartesian western terms, alternated between periods of tension and relative peace. The aim of this presentation is to examine the territorial mobility and the definition of property rights of Indian friends groups in interaction with other frontier agents and the State, focusing in the changes and continuities during the century with the successive governments and the scopes and limitations of the official knowledge and instruments to measure and control the frontier territory, which not often reflected with accuracy the social and material contemporary reality.