Aquellos Fértiles y Dilatados Países: A Reflection about Spanish Possession and Indigenous Territoriality in the Chaco

Towards the middle of the 18th century, the effective control of the territory by the Spanish conquerors in the Chaco region had not been achieved. Instead, a combination of defensive and offensive strategies secured spaces and borders with other colonial cities. This article investigates the relationships between Spanish forms of possession and the territoriality of indigenous groups not yet subjected to colonial rule. Many of the difficulties that the Hispano-Creoles faced in their attempts to take possession of the Chaco lands were related to their different notions of territory forms of occupation, and usufruct compared to indigenous understandings of territoriality. The ways in which the highly mobile indigenous groups of the Chaco occupied lands also differed greatly from the border formation practices of the Spanish empire. The indigenous groups of the Chaco had productive, social, spiritual, and political relationships with the territories they occupied, but they did not consider possession as an excluding, permanent, or continuous relationship to the land, not even in communal terms. Similarly, their forms of territoriality might not involve "demonstrable" signals of possession on the terrain, due to their mode of social and biological reproduction. I suggest that the forms of subsistence of the nomadic and semi-nomadic groups (hunting, gathering, and incipient agricultural traditions) became successful strategies to preempt territorial possession by the Spanish. The seasonal, itinerant, and collective uses of land and its resources, in fact, contributed to the indigenous insurgency that hampered the colonial possession of their lands. While the native groups carried out attacks against the settlement of colonial cities, their traditional forms of organization were fundamental for the maintenance of indigenous autonomy, the impossibility of co-opting their political leaders in a stable manner, and the exercise of territoriality on their own terms.