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Forgotten Conquests: Rereading New World History from the Margins PDF

217 Pages·2001·44.756 MB·English
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Forgotten Conquests Rereading New World History from the Margins Copyrighted Material • "" .• ' ". - 0 • . . ~ "" , " ' , o ". 0'0", t • 0 ... : ,- , •• ' - _ • -." '. ,'--,'.--'. -.' " "" .. '-.. . :-.. "'-.,-,, ' . -- . -- .-- " ',' ' .0 _ .,_", . " ., -" . " -.- --..-. . " -. . '.::.:. .-.--". ._..-., "" - ,' . -, : :.' -- : .' .'" , MA." '.-R.... f " "',0 C 'E'A' ~r () : ,':":: ~ di:j,4"",""co, " , , ',,' :': " ',',' : ' " ',' ',-.. , , ,: ' Copyrighted Material Forgotten Conquests Rereading New World History from the Margins Gustavo Verdesio TEMPLE UNIVERSITY PRESS PHILADELPHIA Copyrighted Material Temple University Press, Philadelphia 19122 Copyright © 2001 by Temple University All rights reserved Published 2001 Printed in the United States of America e The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39-48-I984· Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Verdesio, Gustavo. [La invenci6n del Uruguay. English] Forgotten conquests: rereading New World history from the margins / Gustavo Verdesio. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1-56639-833-9 Icloth : alk. paper)-ISBN 1-56639-834-7 Ipbk. : alk. paper) I. Uruguay-Discovery and exploration-Historiography. 2. Uru guay-Description and travel-Historiography. 3. Uruguay-His tory To I8ro-Historiography. 4. Indians of South America-Uruguay First contact with Europeans. 5. Uruguay-In literature. 6. Indians in literature. I. Title. F2723.V47I3 2001 985.5 '007' 2-dc2I 00-04I193 Based on a Spanish language edition published in 1996 by the former Graffiti Publishers, Uruguay. FRONTISPIECE. This Jesuit map shows the territory on the northern shore of the River Plate as a land surrounded by two enormous rivers: the Parana and the Uruguay. This kind of visual misrepresentation finds its correlate in the chronicles of the colonial period that describe the region and its inhabitants. From Paulo di Forlani, La descrittioni di tutto i1 Peru IRome: 156[1]). Reproduced with permission of William L. Clements Library, Uni versity of Michigan. Copyrighted Material In Memoriam: Emilio Verdesio, Sr. Ernesto Verdesio, Sr. Juan Carlos Casco Copyrighted Material Copyrighted Material Contents Preface ix INTRODUCTION I I. THE ENTRANCE TO HISTORICAL TIME 14 2. YEARS OF DISAPPOINTMENT, OR THE LONG EUROPEAN SIESTA 39 3· THE PACIFIC PENETRATION 59 4. EMPIRES IN CONFLICT 72 5· THE ENCYCLOPEDIAS 93 6. THE TENTATIVE GAZE OF THE TRAVELER 110 CONCLUSION: THE TERRITORY AS THE STAGE FOR THE DRAMA OF DIFFERENCE 145 Notes 163 Bibliography I 8 5 Index 201 Copyrighted Material Copyrighted Material Preface This volume studies texts that for the most part have not received the atten tion of scholars in the field of Latin American colonial studies.l It also stud ies canonical texts by Antonio de Herrera, Pedro Martir de Angleria (Peter Mar tyr), Father Bartolome de Las Casas, and others that have been read and analyzed countless times, but attends to passages that have been neglected or forgotten by most scholars in that field of studies-those dealing with the ter ritory on the northern shore of the River Plate. As a response to this state of affairs, I am proposing not only a reading of non-canonical texts, but a new reading of those canonical texts that focuses on the forgotten fragments in order to attempt a recovery of the history of the discourses and actions pro duced on and about that lump of land. As I have stated, many of the texts that deal with the lands on the north ern shore of the River Plate are not part of the corpus (and even less of the canon) of Latin American colonial studies. The reason for this omission can be found in a tendency in our discipline to fall victim to what could be called the predominance of the three cultures (Inca, Maya, and Aztec), which pre vents scholars from focusing their research agendas on Amerindian peoples who did not organize their social lives around a state or an empire-two struc tures that resemble those developed by Western culture and, for that reason, seem to be easier to understand than other indigenous forms of social orga nization. These other forms (tribal, nomadic, and a long etcetera) are precisely the ones practiced by the majority of indigenous groups that populated the Americas at the time of the colonial encounter. If we limit our research to studying what took place in the lands dominated by Aztecs, Incas, and Mayas, and if we do not make sense of the territories occupied by other native groups, our understanding of the colonial encounter will be incomplete. Even worse, it will become a distortion of history. Copyrighted Material

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