The Indian Settlement of the Río de la Plata territory: Cultural Exchanges in the Colonial Period (16th-17th Centuries)

Abstract

As a result of the conquest of the Rio de la Plata and Paraguay, a series of cultural exchanges were generated between the Guarani groups and the Spanish settlers, that enabled the former to cope with the new colonial society. One of the key contexts in which to analyze such exchanges and negotiations are the Franciscan Indian settlements. We will analyze the diverse significance that these settlements had for the various colonial protagonists, in order to illustrate that, far from acting as spaces of cultural loss –as regional historiography tries to show– the settlements were spaces that contributed to the restructuring and redefining of the Guarani’s traditional customs and beliefs, enabling them develop as a group until the middle of the ninteenth century.