The Guarani Under Spanish Rule in the Rio de la Plata (review)

Barbara Ganson has composed the most comprehensive study of the Guaraní during the colonial period to date, and her book is likely to remain authoritative for years to come. She divides it sharply into two parts. The first, totaling some 70 pages, examines Guaraní cultural change and continuity up to the mid-eighteenth century. The second, just over 100 pages in length, studies Guaraní responses to the transforming changes they experienced from 1750-1825, in particular the Treaty of Madrid, the expulsion of the Jesuits, and the War for Independence.

Ganson states that the central concern of her book is the contrast between Jesuit accounts of Guaraní culture and the versions that emerge from the Guaranís' own writings. But these writings do not emerge before the mid-eighteenth century and seem to consist primarily of petitions to the crown and minutes of cabildo meetings; any private correspondence has yet to be discovered. The author neglects to describe the character of these native writings in any detail, which is strange because her narrative stresses their difference in perspective from the more standard Spanish sources. While Ganson remarks that her book was influenced by Charles Gibson's classic, The Aztecs Under Spanish Rule (1964), other than for the most general conclusions about native cultural adaptation, similarities are hard to find. The books are structured very differently, Gibson made little use of informal Nahuatl sources, and the peoples and situations studied could hardly be more distinctive from each other. As Ganson acknowledges, the Guaraní were a tropical semi-sedentary people who lacked dense numbers and precious metals and who consequently lived on the fringes of the empire.

Part I of the book is an informative, up-to-date survey of Guaraní cultural change and retention under the Spanish. The Spanish used Guaraní women as a significant part of their labor force and even obtained access to male laborers through the latter's kinship ties to senior females. Guaraní, rather than Spanish, became the dominant language for conversation. Even the Jesuit missionaries preached in it. The colonists organized Guaraní males into militia units which served throughout the greater Río de la Plata region, not just on the famed Jesuit missions. In Part II, Ganson relates how the Guaraní population on the seven affected missions organized armed resistance to prevent coming under the authority of the Portuguese, as provided in the 1750 Treaty of Madrid. No Jesuits joined the armed resistance nor were any killed in the battles. Ganson finds that the 1767 expulsion of the Jesuits had an even greater impact on the Guaraní mission population. Many fled to towns and ranches rather than into the countryside. When colonial authorities attempted to round up the fugitives to force them back onto the missions, most eluded their pursuers because they preferred working as free-wage laborers. In 1800, the Spanish government exempted some mission Indians from providing communal labor. The goal of the Bourbon rulers was now to secularize the missions and to make the Guaraní into independent small farmers. To that end colonial officials even encouraged miscegenation.

Ganson's book represents a successful effort to bring the study of the colonial Guaraní into the active scholarly discussion that is taking place about so many indigenous societies, especially in Mesoamerica and the Andean zone. Ganson's relentless work in numerous archives both in the Americas and in Europe has enabled her to reach that goal.