Depersonalised: analysis of documentary records on Indigenous women in the southern frontier between the XVIII and XIX centuries

Abstract

The different frontier territories and spaces in the south of Buenos Aires at the end of the eighteenth century, were the scenario for the relations between the Spanish-Creole authorities and the different Indigenous partialities. In all the various forms these relations took, Indigenous women were registered by colonial officials in a quantitative and depersonalised manner. In these frontier spaces (Nacuzzi, 2010) there were situations that allowed both the creation of links between actors as well as the exercise of dominance over each other. The binomial resistance and complementarity (Néspolo, 2012) allows us to identify different processes, such as trade exchanges, treaties, and competition for resources, among others. In this context, we propose to analyse the data on the Indigenous women’s presence and their roles, recorded in different types of documentation -among them, Border Command reports, peace treaties, parish records, and travel diaries. In most of these documents, women were registered in different situations, in which Indigenous women appear in an anonymous and statistical way. This presents today the challenge to systematise and categorise these data so as to analyse the possible roles that Indigenous women must have  played  in interethnic relations.