“MONSTROUS AND ILLEGAL PROCEEDINGS”: LAW ...

in the continental interior. They developed a chain of missions across Paraguay into
modern-day Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, where they missioned to tens of thousands of
Guaraní. The missions became the focal points of the early colonial economy and served as
the bulwark of the Spanish empire on its southern peripheries.
The bulk of this dissertation’s story occurs in the eastern half of the Río de la Plata’s
drainage south of the Jesuit territories in Paraguay. Framed by the Uruguay River to the
west and the Atlantic Ocean to the east, these lands were zones of particularly sharp conflict
between the Portuguese and Spanish empires. From the earliest moments of European
contact in the region, the history of the Río de la Plata’s eastern rivers and plains
surrounding the Uruguay evolved in the long shadow of the Treaty of Tordesillas.
Fashioned in Rome at the very dawn of the Atlantic empires in 1494, the treaty purported to
define the limits between the Spanish and Portuguese empires in the western hemisphere. In
reality, the treaty codified European ignorance of South America’s geography. The first
Europeans would not arrive in the Río de la Plata until fourteen years after its putative
division. Not surprisingly, the Iberian powers could not reach any definitive agreement as to
where their imperial boundaries lay. The treaty became more of a statement of imperial
destinies than a practical delineation of their respective spatial spheres. In the Río de la Plata
borderlands, the extended struggle to push Portuguese boundaries to their “natural” limit at
the Uruguay’s mouth reflected the legacies of these initial, nebulous attempts to define
Brazil’s southern peripheries. These incursions, and Spanish resistance to them, were the
salient feature of the region’s colonial history. 6
6 For a more detailed description of the eastern Río de la Plata’s geography focused
particularly on Rio Grande do Sul, see Stephen Bell, Campanha Gaúcha: A Brazilian Ranching
System, 1850-1920 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 13-31.
7