Between Banishment and Cloister: Captivity and Penal Deportation in the Río de la Plata

This paper considers experiences of penal deportation (destierro/degredo) in the Río de la Plata during the late eighteenth century. While Spain’s and Portugal’s use of forced migration as a punishment for purported criminals predates their arrival to the Americas, eighteenth-century border making both expanded and transformed the practice. Specifically, the growing number of borderland fortifications (presidios) produced a greater demand for penal laborers, while efforts at territorializing colonial jurisdictions via violent military campaigns produced large numbers of Indigenous captives, who were in turn inserted into colonial systems of criminal punishment. These structural dynamics generated crisscrossing and intersecting patterns of forced migration among convicts and captives in the creation of colonial borders. If deportation has come to mean the compulsory migration of people across established borders, the creation of those very borders entailed forcing people to or from them.

Within this broader context of forced migration, this paper addresses the gendered experiences and actions of convicts and captives entrapped within it. It asks two questions: Why were individuals marked as men banished to borderland penal establishments while those marked as women or children confined in casas de recogimiento or in elite households in colonial cities? How did captives experience the labor expectations and deleterious health effects of these distinct establishments, especially when they were often much older or younger than those who entered via colonial systems of justice? In doing so, it seeks to identify both convergences and divergences among captives’ and convicts’ experiences, while highlighting the solidarities they forged.