The Guaraní under Spanish Rule in the Río de la Plata

"This ethnographic study is a revisionist view of the most significant and widely known mission system in Latin America, that of the Jesuit missions to the Guarani Indians, who inhabited the border region of Paraguay, Argentina, and Brazil. It traces in detail the process of the adaptation of the Guarani to Spanish colonialism from the sixteenth through the early nineteenth centuries." "This book demonstrates conclusively that the Guarani were as instrumental in determining their destinies as were the Catholic Church and Spanish bureaucrats. They were neither passive victims of Spanish colonialism nor innocent "children" of the jungle, but important actors who shaped fundamentally the history of the Rio de la Plata region. The author suggests that a multiplicity of cultural processes helped condition the encounter between the Guarani and the Spaniards. The Guarani responded to European contact according to the dynamics of their own culture, their individual interests and experiences, and the changing political, economic, and social realities of the late Bourbon period." "More broadly, the book permits a rigorous comparison with studies by ethnohistorians of Mexico, Peru, and other parts of Latin America, and it furthers our understanding of the dialectics of colonialism and native peoples both in the past and present."--Jacket.