Do Encobrimento ao protagonismo: os Guarani-missioneiros dos Sete Povos nos litígios fronteiriços entre as monarquias ibéricas

Abstract

This study aims to analyze questions related to the self-determination of subjects in the Jesuit missions of the Paraguay Jesuit Province, focusing on the Seven People Missions when the Guarani War. Assuming that the Guarani did not accept peacefully the unilateral imposition of a new way of life, it is pointed that much of what happened was negotiated: the Guarani accepted to be King’s vassal, accepted to build a geopolitical barrier against the Lusitanian advance to the Seven People, joined the cristian practices, but, in contrast, kept themselves on their territory and, somehow, cultivated yet their traditional practices. Thus, we question if the Indians were just instruments of the crown interests, manipulated by the Jesuits. Our hypothesis indicates to a contrary way: they recognized themselves as right owners, as individuals with social, political and cultural differences regarding to the Spanish, Portuguese and Jesuits. For this just observe the happenings after the Boundary Treat. While Spain and Portugal believed in a subservience of those people, what happened, however, was a resistance which was liquidated only after a powerful military union between the colonial armies of the Iberian monarchies. In this sense, we problematize how were the Guarani-missionaries perspective about the international relations between the Iberian empires, observing how was built in the Guarani-missionary imaginary the figure regarding to these absolutist monarchies. Equally, we observe the representations of the Iberians and Jesuits about the Guarani, mainly about their fight against the Treat of 1750. We seek to understand how the Guarani-missionaries appropriated these relations and how they positioned face to the different movements that involved the relations between Portugal and Spain. Equally, we present how the Indians appropriated the speech which were around them: the exhortations and recommendations from the Spanish King to defend the territory against the Portuguese; and also the Jesuits evangelizing speech, appropriating from the demon symbolism, and appropriating the figure of a punisher and benevolent God. Finally, we aim to present the resistance and self-determination of historical subjects against the expropriation of their material and cultural patrimony, analyzing specifically the indigenous fight against the Madrid Treat, in this sense, there is the core of the matter: similarly that the Crown used the indigenous to its interests, the indigenous used their relations with the colonial world (reductions and Spain) to perpetuate theirs, and when the negotiations exclude the indigenous through the Madrid Treat, the subjects resist and fight for their rights.