For a long time, the heterogenous population that inhabited the Río de la Plata Region, in the borderlands of Spain and Portugal, toward the end of 18th Century, was associated to barbarism. To make that population homogenous and to adjust its behavior to indigenous Law, the Spanish Monarchy carried out several policies of control. However, in a short term these policies were neither able to modify the economic, political and symbolic practices of that population, nor were they able to weaken the perception this population had of the State. On the contrary, local actors kept their own dynamics until almost the first half of the 19th Century. This paper analyses the contradiction between State representations of local actors and the concrete dynamics that characterized them, their perceptions of territory and State, and their strategies for avoiding control by official authorities.
Félix de Azara; gauchos; Guarani; crossbreeding