Colonial Kinship: Guaraní, Spaniards, and Africans in Paraguay

Abstract

In this foundational work of the burgeoning scholarship on colonial Paraguay, Shawn Austin focuses on the Guaraní outside the Jesuit missions, those living in reducciones in Asunción and in areas between the missions. He is the first historian to systematically use judicial files, which show female litigants as well as Africans and their descendants, to examine how the Guaraní interacted with the Spanish and Africans in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Paraguay. Austin successfully demonstrates that encomienda, understood by the Spaniards and the Guaraní through cuñadazgo or tovajá, became the mode of colonial governance. The term tovajá initially named the exchange of women by the Guaraní for gifts given by the Spaniards, but increasingly this term shaped contexts central for expanding colonialism: for the encomienda system subjecting tributaries and also for trade. The marriage of Spanish men into the kinship of Guaraní caciques became central to securing Indigenous tributaries for the Spaniards, the core of the encomienda. Spaniards seemingly understood the implications of the term tovajá as binding them politically and economically with Guaraní leaders (p. 33). From the Spanish sources it is clear, also, that these women were not property but part of the conquistador household as inheritors. Conquistadores, and sometimes priests as well, also arranged marriages for their mestizo children in order to secure their future. The expectations of reciprocity that tovajá ties carried for the Guaraní also influenced the development of colonialism and, more broadly, the entire Paraguayan colonial society.While based on reciprocity, the tovajá system was unequally beneficial for the Spaniards, as a colonial configuration based on Guaraní cultural elements that facilitated access to labor and provisions. It was a system of reciprocity that the Spaniards institutionalized to promote colonial exploitation through encomiendas, which made Indigenous tovajás tributaries of labor.The Spaniards' ability to establish tovajá ties with Guaraní groups also allowed them to conduct raids (rancheadas) and war with other Indigenous people. Even under open violence tovajá relationships emerged. Sometimes Guaraní groups declined to participate in peaceful exchanges. In these cases, Spaniards forced their way through raids capturing women and provisions. These women were integrated into Spanish households through tovajá ties as long as the integrity of their Guaraní group persisted, and this created a sense of reciprocity under violence (p. 41). The terms of exchange placed women in the household of conquistadores and other Spanish men (which liberated Spaniards from manual labor and also provided them food), and the Spaniards retributed with iron tools like cuñas (axes). The similarity of the Guaraní word for “woman,” kuña, with the Spanish terms cuña and cuñado was noticed by the Spanish and the Guaraní as belonging to a vocabulary making sense of an economy of gift giving.Austin provides a chapter examining Indigenous resistance against the colonial regime as an antidote to misconceptions of kinship as a peaceful way of belonging to the Spanish empire in Paraguay. Somewhat naturally, this leads to studying the creation of Guaraní militias defending Spanish rule, which closes the second section of the book. The Guaraní developed a formidable militia system that influenced the larger politics of the region, for instance, during the many Spanish sieges of Portuguese Colonia del Sacramento. Austin also examines the city of Asunción, which was, in a way, the largest reducción, an Indigenous space, and the core of Spanish colonialism in Paraguay. Given the proliferation of small encomiendas in Asunción, the city became a rural-urban settlement with a high concentration of encomendero and tributary populations.The author also examines African slavery, and particularly free Black men and women in the context of cuñadazgo. A relatively large number of Africans lived in Paraguay since the conquest and as an extension of the slave trade to Buenos Aires after 1580. Free Black men's obligations to encomenderos sometimes were shaped by the ties of cuñadazgo, as seen in a Mercedarian convent's “encomienda of blacks” (p. 261). While the Mercedarians had freed these Africans and Afro-descendants from slavery, they kept them as tributaries through the ties of encomienda. In other instances, free Black men and women became tributaries of encomienda because of their marriages with Guaraní tributaries. In all these cases, free Black men and women were tied to obligations to Spaniards understood as tributaries and thus with meanings of tovajá ties. The tax on free men and women of African ancestry survived over the centuries in Paraguay due to its connections with Indigenous personal service, given that this was paid in labor. This tax was hardly applicable in other parts of the Río de la Plata, which may explain also why so many pardos from Paraguay are found in the eighteenth-century sources in Buenos Aires and Montevideo.This is a great read for understanding the reworking of Indigenous culture into the making of all aspects of a colonial society in the borderlands of Latin America.