Landscapes of Power and Identity
Notes to Chapter 8: Contested Landscapes in Continental Borderlands
1) Griffith, Beliefs and Holy Places, captures this quality admirably for Pimería Alta and the contemporary
O'odham villages of Arizona and Sonora. Similarly, Keith Basso's ethnographically sensitive reading of
Apache toponyms in the vicinity of Cibecue, in eastern Arizona, meshes the moral content of Apache
cautionary tales with the landscapes of "narrated place-worlds" in Wisdom Sits in Places.
2) Daniel Santamaria, "Fronteras indígenas del oriente boliviano. La dominación colonial en Moxos y
Chiquitos, 1675-1810," Boletin Americanista 36 (1986), cited in the Introduction, note 15, emphasized the
extensive internal frontiers formed, in part, by the river systems of the interior of South America. Northern
New Spain was designated the provincias internas, and institutionalized under that name by the Military
Commandancy of the Interior Provinces created in 1779.
3) UGRM MH Fondo Prefectural 17, 1835. José Manuel Herrera to the Governor of Chiquitos, transcribed
to the Prefect of Santa Cruz, from Santa Ana, October 31, 1835. Villa María was in Brazil, northeast of
Santo Corazón (see Janet Goff Greever, José Ballivián y el Oriente de Bolivia, Maps B and C).
“En todo lo que tengo andado en la Prov y fuera de ella, no he visto ni es capaz se hayan campañas iguales
a éstas porque es otro el contar al ver semejante hermosura. La Caza es tan abundante que no es capaz de
que se agote. Los ciervos, futas, gamas y vienas, andan en tropas tan grandes, lo mismo que el ganado de
cría. La abundancia de patos y demás aves del agua en los derramaderos del curichi, forman una multitud
inagotable, y nunca ví cosa igual. Los pastos para la cría de toda clase de ganados son muy superiores y
abundantes, y los mejores terrenos que tenemos en todo Bolivia, habían estado bacos y desconocidos hasta
esta fecha. Yo he quedado tan apasionado de semejante hermosura, que si seme permite, voy a ser poblador
de aquellos campos, y con este fin he mandado traer ciento y tantas cabezas de ganado vacuno de Villa
María y si V.S. y los demás señores de la Provincia vieren todo esto, harían lo mismo, pues el mismo
campo promete la manutención con sola la caza sin carnear una sola res.”
4) UGRM MH Fondo Prefectural 6, 1832, Informe del Gobernador de la Provincia de Chiquitos al Prefecto
de Santa Cruz, enciso #7; UGRM MH Fondo Prefectural 17, 1835. Governor of Chiquitos [Marcelino de la
Peña] to Prefect of Santa Cruz. Remito a V.G. una botella con la muestra de la referida sal. Ella es de una
calidad muy superior, y casi [de] soda pura. He dictado provisionalmente la orden para que 4 leguas a todos
vientos del centro de dichas salinas no se le permita a ningún bracilero poner sus establecimientos hasta en
tanto que el supremo gobierno disponga lo conveniente; ni menos extraigan sin permiso previo de este
gobierno. En el correo proximo dirigiré a V.G. el presupuesto de gastos para la empresa que propuse a V.G.
… para la apertura de un nuevo camino desde el Corazón en linea recta a estos pueblos del centro; que
nunca será más necesario que ahora para la aproximación de las comunicaciones con los del Norte y
facilitar los transportes.
5) See Chapter 7, Table 16. The description José Manuel Herrera sent to Governor Peña, probably knowing
that it would be forwarded to the Prefecture of Santa Cruz, reflects the language of nineteenth-century
promotional literature issued for midwestern and western territories in the United States. See G. Malcolm
Lewis, "Rhetoric of the western interior: modes of environmental description in American promotional
literature of the nineteenth century," p. 179-193 in Cosgrove and Daniels, The Iconography of Landscape.
6) UGRM MH Fondo Prefectural 31, 1842, f. 1, 10. The Actas celebrated in San Ignacio and San Miguel,
January 3-4, 1842, which followed instructions received from the Prefecture and notice of the national
ceremony of December 9, 1841, identified Ballivián's victory at Ingavi with the "campos de Viacha," in the
Department of La Paz.
7) Felipe Bertrés, Mapa corográfico de la República de Bolivia con la topografía de las fronteras limítrofes,
1843; Mapa de la República de Bolivia, executed by military officers Juan Ondarza and Juan Mariano
Mujía and the cartographer Lucio Camacho, published in 1859 (García Jordán, Cruz y arado, fusiles y
discursos, p. 252, n. 12, p. 257-8, n. 26; p. 271-80; Janet Goff Greever, José Ballivián y el Oriente
Boliviano (La Paz, Empresa Editora Siglo LTDA, 1987, p. 123). Cinchona bark from the Peruvian and
Bolivian Amazonian forests was a preferred source of quinine for treating malaria, becoming a prized
commodity in the nineteenth-century international markets (Michael J. Balick, Paul Alan Cox, Plants,
People, and Culture. The Science of Ethnobotany [New York, Scientific American Library, 1999] p. 2731). On the impact of cinchona gathering and its commercialization in the Province of Moxos, see David
Block, Mission Culture on the Upper Amazon, p. 159-60.
8) García Jordán, Cruz y arado, fusiles y discursos, p. 261-67; J. Valerie Fifer, Bolivia: Land, Location, and
Politics since 1825 (Cambridge, Cambridge Univ. Press, 1972) p. 172-3.
9) García Jordán, Cruz y arado, p. 270-1, n. 70; Fifer, Bolivia: Land, Location, and Politics, p. 170-4;
Greever, José Ballivián y el Oriente Boliviano, p. 113-18. The exact dimensions of the Otuquis concession
vary according to different authors and sources.
10) UGRM MH Fondo Prefectural 16, Gob. de Chiquitos al Prefecto. Santa Ana, 8 January 1834, No. 4;
Greever, Ballivián y el Oriente de Bolivia, p. 114-17.
11) Fifer, Bolivia: Land , Location, and Politics, p. 171; Greever, Ballivián, p. 119. Paraguayan military
forces occupied the colonial Spanish Fort Borbón as their northernmost outpost along the contested water
way of the Paraguay River.
12) Eulalia Maria Lahmeyer Lobo, "A importância estratégica e econónica da Provincia de Santa Cruz de la
Sierra durante a guerra da Tríplice Aliança - 1865/1870," Boletim de História Vol. 6, No. 6 (1961) p. 1113.
13) Moritz Bach, Descripción de la nueva provincia de Otuquis en Bolivia (Buenos Aires, 1843 [reprinted
in Buenos Aires, by Dr. Antonio Quijarro, 1885];3rd ed. in English, Description of the New Province of
Otuquis in Bolivia [La Paz, Unidas, 1929] Appendix I. Bolivia issued this edition of Bach's history of
Oliden's Province of Otuquis in order to substantiate its claims against Paraguay on the eve of the Chaco
War of 1932-35).
14) See the passage quoted from ecónomo José Manuel Herrera of Santo Corazón above, and the strongly
worded recommendation from the Prefect of Santa Cruz to the Governor of Chiquitos to order the
administrators to oversee the planting of cacao and coffee in the pueblos, in UGRM MH Fondo Prefectural
37, No. 71, July 29, 1847.
15) UGRM MH Fondo Prefectural 12, No. 65, 6fs. Moritz Bach sent an impassioned complaint to
Governor Marcelino de la Peña of Chiquitos, dated October 5, 1832, from Brazil, directed to the Bolivian
Congress, President, and Minister of the Interior, in which he accused the priest of Asunción de Guarayos,
P. Manuel Rodríguez of setting the fire and violently opposing Bach's settlement in Moxos.
16) UGRM MH Fondo Prefectural 17, #86, 1835; 29, 1841. Gov. of Chiquitos advised the Prefect that five
Brazilian slaves and eluded their convoy and taken five Indian youth ["muchachos"] from San Rafael,
presumably headed for the Villa of Santa Cruz. The governor forwarded a notice [in Portuguese] from the
administrative officer of Cuiabá, Manoel do Espíritu Santo, dated August 8, 1835, in which he described
the five runaway slaves. Brazilian slaves had good reasons for seeking their freedom in Bolivian national
territory: in 1831, Bolivia declared all slaves born since 1825 to be free; in 1838, all foreign slaves who
entered Bolivia were legally free and, in 1851, Bolivia abolished slavery altogether (Herbert Klein, African
Slavery in Latin America and the Caribbean [New York, Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1986] p. 251).
17) Bororós were identified on maps and drawings of the mid-nineteenth century, possibly related to the
colonial parcialidades of zamuco- and tao-speakers known as borós and orobedas. Bororós have been
studied ethnographically more consistently in Brazil than in Bolivia. See David Maybury-Lewis, ed.,
Dialectical Societies: The Gê and Bororo of Central Brazil (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press,
1979).
18) UGRM MH Fondo Prefectural 32, Salinas del Marco, José Miguel Peinado al Gobernador de
Chiquitos, Juan Felipe Baca, October 19, 1842; Bolivian Santiago Baca to the Governor of Chiquitos,
January 2, 1843; Sebastián Ramos to the Governor of Chiquitos, January 21, 1843, from the Pueblo of San
Ignacio.
19) UGRM MH Fondo Prefectural 29, 1841. Campo de las Salinas. Sebastián Ramos, juez territorial al
cura encargado de la economía del Pueblo de Santo Corazón, Don José Gabriel Merino Valde Iglesias. On
Ramos's peition to return to Bolivia in 1832, UGRM MH Fondo Prefectural 12, #67 and #81, Governor
Marcelino de la Peña to the Prefect of Santa Cruz. Citation: Los empleados descansados me deben
contemplar porque desde enero 15 de 1837, sirvo gratis de juez territorial de estas fronteras, mi persona y
bienes siempre pronto al servicio de la nación. El año '31 descubrí el Marco y a esta fecha he dado un
semicirculo abriendo por ultimo camino de S. Juan a este punto, recordando que el Rey de España gastó
miles de pesos en matemáticos y tropas para todo este descubrimiento que nunca lo consiguieron. Yo vivo
reuniendo y aldeando a los barbaros bororós, asistiendoles con lo que puedo para conservarlos en
subordinación para que no llegue el caso de que ataquen ó perjudiquen a los Corazoneños como lo hacían
en años atrás; con lo queda contestada su citada nota.
20) UGRM MH Fondo Prefectural 36. Santo Corazón, June 30, 1847. Sebastián Ramos, Teniente Coronel
Jefe de la Frontera Oriental, al Prefecto de Santa Cruz [Manuel Rodríguez Magasinos].
21) UGRM MH Fondo Prefectural 37, communications No. 38, May 7 1847, and No. 48, May 31, 1847, to
the Governor of Chiquitos.
22) Decree of January 27, 1853, signed by President Manuel I. Belzú and submitted to U.S. Secretary of
State Edward Everett. Notes from the Bolivian Legation in the U.S. to the Department of State, General
Records of the Dept. of State, Record Group 39, cited in Fifer, Bolivia: Land, Location, and Politics, p.
177.
23) Eulalia, Maria Lahmeyer Lobo, "A importância estratégica e económica da Província de Santa Cruz de
la Sierra durante a Guerra da Tríplice Aliança, 1865/1870," p. 15-20. In 1867-68, Bolivian President
General Mariano Melgarejo simultaneously negotiated a treaty of navigation and territorial concessions to
Brazil, the opening of a Bolivian consulate in Asunción, Paraguay, and a treaty with Argentina over
boundaries in the Chaco Boreal (ibid., p. 20 and Fifer, Bolivia: Land, Location, and Politics, p. 179-80).
24) Sociedad Progresista de Bolivia, Empresa de Navegación á vapor, caminos carreteros, colonización,
ganadería, agricultura, industria y comercio. Promotional Pamphlet, Sucre 30 September 1874; contract
between the Bolivian Government in 33 articles, proposed 31 January 1864 and signed 1 February 1864, 121 pp. in Bolivian Political Pamphlet Collection, UIUC Rare Book and Special Collections Library. On the
significant differences between Bolivians and citizens, see Chapter 7, p. 399-402.
25) On the disbandment of Chiquitano herds, see Chapter 3, p. 162-65; on the Ley de Exvinculación de
Tierras Indígenas de 1874, see Erick D. Langer, "El liberalismo y la abolición de la comunidad indígena en
el siglo XIX," Historia y Culture 14 (1988) p. 59-95, esp. 79-82; Pilar García Jordán, Cruz y arado, fusiles
y discursos, p. 291-94; Langer, "Missions and the Frontier Economy: The Case of the Franciscan Missions
among the Chiriguanos, 1845-1930," in E. Langer and R. H. Jackson, eds. The New Latin American
Mission History, p. 49-76.
26) Michael T. Taussig, Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing
(Chicago, Chicago Univ. Press, 1987); Michael E. Stanfield, Red Rubber, Bleeding Trees. Violence,
Slavery, and Empire in Northwest Amazonia, 1850-1933 (Albuquerque, Univ. of New Mexico Press,
1998); David Block, Mission Culture on the Upper Amazon, p. 161-3.
27) Jeremy Adelman and Stephen Aron, "From Borderlands to Borders," p. 814-816; Samuel Truett,
"Neighbors by Nature: Rethinking Region, Nation, and Environmental History in the U.S.-Mexico
Borderlands," Environmental History 2.2 (1997) p. 164-5. An excellent treatment of the social and cultural
development of Tucson and southern Arizona, focused on the Mexican population, is Thomas E. Sheridan,
Los Tucsonenses. The Mexican Community in Tucson, 1854-1941 (Tucson, Univ. of Arizona Press, 1986).
28) Juan Antonio Ruibal Corella, "¡Y Caborca se cubrió de glora!". La expedición filibustera de Henry
Alexander Crabb a Sonora (Mexico, Ed. Porrúa, 1976).
29) Bartlett, Personal Narrative of Exploration and Incidents in Texas, New Mexico, California, Sonora,
and Chihuahua, connected with the United States and Mexican Boundary Commission during the years
1850, '51, '52, and '53 (New York, D. Appleton & Co., 1854) Vol I., p. 423-4.
30) Bartlett, Personal Narrative, p. 460-62. Ronstadt later purchased the Hacienda of Ocuca in the Altar
valley.
31) Bartlett, Personal Narrative, p. 445-6. Juan and Refugio Tánori were Opata leaders who, when Bartlett
visited Sonora, fought with government troops in campaigns against the Apaches. By 1858, however, they
had joined Yaquis in open rebellion against the Liberal regime of Ignacio Pesqueira; in 1865, Refugio
Tánori joined creole and indigenous adversaries of Pesqueira to support the French occupation of Sonora.
See Hu-Dehart, Yaqui Resistance and Survival, p. 76-85.
32) William H. Emory, Report on the United States and Mexican Boundary Survey (Washington, D.C.,
U.S. Senate, 34th Congress, First Session, Ex. Doc. 108, Vol. 1, Part 1 [in seven volumes] 1857) p. 123.
33) Kozak and López, Devil Sickness and Devil Songs, p. 81-108-9.
34) Emory, Report, p. 94. The powerful Escalante family had registered numerous sitios of grazing land in
Cuchuta, Teuricachi, Mututicachi, and Santa Rosa, in the territory bounded by the presidios of Fronteras,
Bacoachi, and San Bernardino during the final years of colonial rule (Radding, Wandering Peoples, p. 200202). Lieutenant Ignacio Pérez obtained title to the ranch of San Bernardino, spreading over 73,000 acres,
in 1822 (Officer, Hispanic Arizona, p. 106-8). My interpretation of Emory's and Bartlett's "reading" of the
Sonoran landscape is informed by a path breaking work of environmental history in Africa, James Fairhead
and Melissa Leach, Misreading the African Landscape. Society and Ecology in a Forest-Savanna Mosaic
(Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996) esp. p. 237-95, in which they critique colonial discourses
of degradation which had characterized native land use practices.
35) Emory, Report, p. 124-5. William Emory may have anticipated by over a century the electrically
powered, deep well irrigation of the coastal desert west of Hermosillo that has transformed the ecology and
the economy of the Sonoran capital city and its environs.
36) Stuart Voss, On the Periphery of Nineteenth-Century Mexico. Sonora and Sinaloa, 1810-1877 (Tucson,
University of Arizona Press, 1982); see Chapter 7, p. 375-77.
37) Eusebio Francisco Kino, Las misiones de Sonora y Arizona. Comprendiendo la crónica titulada
"Favores celestiales" y la "Relación diaria de la entrada al noroeste." Versión paleográfica e índice por
Francisco Fernández del Castillo, con noticias bibliográficas del Padre Kino y sus exploraciones y
fundaciones por el Dr. Emilio Bose (Mexico, Editorial Porrúa, S.A., 1989).
38) To cite selected works, see Richard White, Roots of Dependency; White, Middle Ground; Patricia
Nelson Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West (N.Y., , 1987);
William Cronon, Geroge Miles, and Jay Gitlin, eds., Under an Open Sky: Rethinking America's Western
Past (N.Y., 1992); David J. Weber, The Spanish Frontier in North America; Weber, The Mexican
Frontier; Elizabeth A. H. John, Storms Brewed in Other Men's Worlds: The Confrontation of Indians,
Spanish and French in the Southwest, 1540-1795 (College Station, Texas A & M University Press, 1975);
Nancy Parrott Hickerson, The Jumanos: Hunters and Traders of the South Plains (Austin, University of
Texas Press, 1994); Pekka Hämäläinen, "The Western Comanche Trade Center: Rethinking the Plains
Indian Trade System," Western Historical Quarterly 29 (1998); Ramón A. Gutiérrez and Richard J. Orsi,
eds., Contested Eden. California Before the Gold Rush (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1998).
39) Jeremy Adelman and Stephen Aron, "From Borderlands to Borders," launched a provocative forum
essay in the AHR (1999) in which they attempted to intersect the political dimensions of borderlands with
the cultural dimensions of frontiers as spaces of liminality. Their construction of bordered lands in
reference primarily to the borders of the United States, Mexico, and Canada as modern nation-states,
implying a kind of narrative closure to the "shift from inter-imperial struggle to international coexistence"
(p. 816), raised problems of conceptualization, in reference especially to indigenous peoples, and of
empirical interpretation in their comparisons of Spanish, French, and British imperial policies in North
America. John R. Wunder and Pekka Hämäläinen wrote a spirited challenge to Adelman and Aron,
criticizing their vision of "sanitized" borderlands in which Indian agency had only a minimal role (AHR
Forum Essay: Responses "Of Lethal Places and Lethal Essays," AHR 100.4 (1999) p. 1229-1234.
40) David Lehmann, ed., Ecology and Exchange in the Andes (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press,
1982); Tierry Saignes, “De la filiation à la résidence: Les ethnies dans les vallées de Larecaja,” Annales
E.S.C. 33 (1978) 1160-1181; Shozo Masuda, Izumi Shimada, and Craig Morris, eds., Andean Ecology and
civilization: An Interdisciplinary Perspective on Andean Ecological Complementarity (Tokyo, Tokyo
University Press, 1985); Brooke Larson, Cochabamba, p. 13-50. Karl Zimmerer, in “ “ has challenged the
notion of vertical archipelagos with his observations of “patchwork” mixed cropping patterns in two
highland regions of Peru and Bolivia.
41) Daniel Santamaría, "Fronteras indígenas del oriente boliviano”; Anna C. Roosevelt, "The Martime,
Highland, Forest Dynamic and the Origins of Complex Culture"; F.M. Renard Casevitz, Th. Saignes, A.C.
Taylor, El Este de los Andes. Relaciones entre las Sociedades Amazónicas y Andinas entre los Siglos XV y
XVII, Tomos I, II (Lima and Quito, Instituto Francés de Estudios Andinos and Ediciones Abya-Yala, 1988
[L’inca, l’Espagnol, et les Sauvages (Paris, Editions Recherche sur les Civilisations, 1986)]. See Chapter 1,
notes 30, 44.
42) Adelman and Aron, "From Borderlands to Borders," p. 815-816; David J. Weber and Jane M. Rausch,
“Introduction,” in Weber and Rausch, eds., Where Cultures Meet. Frontiers in Latin American History
(Wilmington, DE, Scholarly Resources Jaguar Books, 1994) p. xiii-xli.
43) The bibliography is far too vast to cite here, but noteworthy contributions include: on the fur trade,
Bruce G. Trigger, Natives and Newcomers: Canada’s ‘Heroic Age” Reconsidered (Kingston, Ontario,
1986); Jennifer S. H. Brown, Strangers in Blood: Fur Trade Company Families in Indian Country
(Vancouver, 1980); Sylvia Van Kirk, “Many Tender Ties”: Women in Fur-Trade Society, 1670-1870
(Winnipeg, 1980); White, Middle Ground; on captives and human commodity trade, James F. Brooks,
Captives and Cousins. Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest Borderlands (Chapel Hill,
University of North Carolina Press, 2002); for late nineteenth-century capitalist borderlands, Samuel Truett,
“Neighbors by Nature: Rethinking Region, Nation, and Environmental History in the U.S.-Mexico
Borderlands,” Environmental History 2.2. (1997) 160-179; for the Andean world, Brooke Larson, Olivia
Harris, and Enrique Tandeter, eds., Ethnicity, Markets, and Migration in the Andes at the Crossroads of
History and Anthropology (Durham, Duke Univeristy Press, 1995); Tierry Saignes, Los Andes orientales:
Historia de un olvido (Cochabamba, 1985).
44) Oscar Martínez, Border People: Life and Society in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands; Truett, “Neighbors
by Nature,” p. 163-5, argues that the “corridors of steel” that brought the railroad through southern Arizona
and Sonora in the 1880s and the web of industrial mines opened in both states linked the United States and
Mexico as neighbors, but that “[a]fter 1854, the stories of the American West and the Mexican North take
their leave of one another …” Nevertheless, it can also be shown that the two border regions of Sonora and
Arizona grew together across the binational boundary, both in networks of trade and migration and in rising
spirals of conflict and violence. Alexandra Minna Stern, “Buildings, Boundaries, and Blood:
Medicalization and Nation-Building on the U.S.-Mexico Border, 1910-1930,” Hispanic American
Historical Review 79.1 (1999) p. 41-82 documents graphically the ways in which medical screening at the
Ciudad Juárez-El Paso border became an exercise in humiliation and intimidation invoking racialized and
gendered stereotypes of disease and contamination.
45) The sense of exceptionalism and difference in northern Mexico and southwestern U.S. has produced a
rich literature and repertoire in the plastic and performing arts, analyzed sensitively by Nestor García
Canclini, Hybrid Cultures. Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity (Minneapolis, NM, University
of Minnesota Press, 1995 [Culturas híbridas: estrategias para entrar y salir de la modernidad (Mexico,
Editorial Grijalbo, 1989)], especially p. 206-241. See, among many literary and historical treatments of
border cultures and identities, José David Saldívar, The Dialectics of Our America: Geneology, Cultural
Critique and Literary History (Durham, Duke University Press, 1991); Mary Romero, et al eds.,
Challenging Fronteras: Structuring Latina and Latino Lives in the U.S. (N.Y., 1997); Frank Bonilla et al
eds., Borderless Borders. U.S. Latinos, Latin Americans, and the Paradox of Interdependence
(Philadelphia, Temple University Press, 1998); José E. Limón, Dancing with the Devil (Madison,
University of Wisconsin Press, 1994).