This article examines relationships between archival records produced in borderland spaces and the histories of autonomous (non-subjugated and non-missionized) Indigenous peoples. Focusing on the Banda Oriental region of Southeastern South America, it argues that the geographical content, dispersion, and curation of colonial records have served to silence Native pasts. As Portuguese, Spanish, and Jesuit administrators sought possession of this borderland, they overstated the reach of their own settlements and strategically ascribed ethnic labels to Indigenous neighbors to appropriate their lands or delegitimize their sovereignty. The geographical dispersion of colonial records over time has masked the inconsistencies of such claims, and colonial ethnogeographic imaginations thus persist. By reading colonial sources from multiple settlements against one another, this article identifies contradictions in the geographic and ethnographic information they provide, laying a foundation for new ethnogeographic imaginations that center the spaces and agency of autonomous Indigenous communities.

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Since the 1990s, scholars of Latin America have rediscovered maps as historical documents and mapping as a historically significant social practice. Inspired in part by theoretical developments in the broader history of cartography, particularly the notion of maps as cultural texts embedded in sociopolitical contexts that shape their production and meaning, cartographic histories of the region have flourished in recent decades, leading some to herald this development as a new direction in Latin American historiography. This essay examines the emergence and principal trends of this body of scholarship, assessing its contributions and limitations. Taking a broad approach that examines studies of both the colonial and modern periods from Patagonia to the Rio Grande, it argues that while critical map histories have transformed earlier notions of cartographic sources and deepened our understanding of traditional subjects such as colonialism and nation‐building, they have yet to reach their full potential. More dialogue between scholars in this emerging subfield, more reflection on the spatial assumptions that undergird Latin American history as a whole, and more attention to the diversity of maps available for study are needed to enhance the conceptual contributions of Latin American cartographic history and to expand its visibility both inside and outside the region.

This chapter addresses the disappearance of Charrúas and Minuanes from historical records by the 1830s. Rather than marking the end of Charrúas or Minuanes themselves, this discursive shift was due to three factors. First, during the eighteenth century, colonial agents captured and exiled several thousand Charrúas and Minuanes, whose separation from tolderías rendered them ethnically indistinguishable in written records. Second, as Indigenous go-betweens moved between settlements and tolderías, colonial writers disassociated them from the ethnic labels that they reserved for tolderías. Third, the dissolution of the interimperial border via wars of independence in the early nineteenth century made tolderías an untenable living arrangement. The disappearance of tolderías as political entities engendered the discursive erasure of Charrúas and Minuanes altogether.

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