This ethnographic study is a revisionist view of the most significant and widely known mission system in Latin America—that of the Jesuit missions to the Guaraní Indians, who inhabited the border regions of Paraguay, Argentina, and Brazil. It traces in detail the process of Indian adaptation to Spanish colonialism from the sixteenth through the early nineteenth centuries. The book demonstrates conclusively that the Guaraní were as instrumental in determining their destinies as were the Catholic Church and Spanish bureaucrats. They were neither passive victims of Spanish colonialism nor innocent “children” of the jungle, but important actors who shaped fundamentally the history of the Río de la Plata region. The Guaraní responded to European contact according to the dynamics of their own culture, their individual interests and experiences, and the changing political, economic, and social realities of the late Bourbon period.

Accompanying DVD includes the opera Patientis Christi memoria by Johann Bernhard Staudt, performed in the chapel of St. Mary's Hall, Boston College.

This edited volume brings together essays that examine recent scholarship on the history of the Rio de la Plata region (present-day Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay and southern Brazil) from the colonial period to the nineteenth century. It illustrates new themes and historical methods that have transformed the historiography of Rio de la Plata, including the use of new sources, digital methodologies and techniques, and innovative approaches to the already well-studied themes of gender, race, commerce, the slave trade, indigenous history, and economic, political, and military history. Contributions privilege trans-national and Atlantic approaches to the Rio de la Plata, emphasizing the inter-connections of processes beyond imperial and national lines, and aiming at uncovering the history of Africans and Amerindians, popular classes, women, urban groups, as well as the partnerships created across the Spanish and Portuguese imperial borders, which also involved other agents from Britain, the Netherlands, and the United States. Furthermore, each chapter offers historiographical introductions covering scholarship produced in the twenty-first century. This book will be an indispensable and unique tool for English speaking students of colonial and nineteenth-century Rio de la Plata and for those with a broader interest in Latin American and Atlantic History.

The thirty Guaraní missions of the Río de la Plata were the largest and most prosperous of all the Catholic missions established throughout the frontier regions of the Americas to convert, acculturate, and incorporate indigenous peoples and their lands into the Spanish and Portuguese empires. But between 1768 and 1800, the mission population fell by almost half and the economy became insolvent. This unique socioeconomic history provides a coherent and comprehensive explanation for the missions' operation and decline, providing readers with an understanding of the material changes experienced by the Guaraní in their day-to-day lives. Although the mission economy funded operations, sustained the population, and influenced daily routines, scholars have not focused on this important aspect of Guaraní history, primarily producing studies of religious and cultural change. This book employs mission account books, letters, and other archival materials to trace the Guaraní mission work regime and to examine how the Guaraní shaped the mission economy. These materials enable the author to poke holes in longheld beliefs about Jesuit mission management and offer original arguments regarding the Bourbon reforms that ultimately made the missions unsustainable.

This unique collection of multidisciplinary essays explores recent developments in Paraguay over the course of the last thirty years since General Alfredo Stroessner fell from power in 1989. Stroessner’s strong authoritarian legacy continues to exert an impact on Paraguay’s political culture today, where the conservative Colorado Party continues to dominate much of the political landscape in spite of the country having transitioned into a modern democracy. The essays in Native Peoples, Politics, and Society in Contemporary Paraguay provide new understandings of how Paraguay has become more integrated into the regional economy and societies of Latin America and changed in unexpected ways. The scholarship examines how the political change impacted Paraguayans, especially its indigenous population, and how the country adapted as it emerged from authoritarian traditions. Each contribution is exemplary in the scope and depth of its understanding of Paraguay, especially its indigenous peoples, politics, women’s rights, economy, and natural environment.

This Oxford Handbook comprehensively examines the field of Latin American history.