Juan Rena and the Frontiers of Spanish Empire, 1500–1540

Speaking the Language of Friendship: Partnerships in the Political Construction of the Late Sixteenth‐Century South‐East Charcas Frontier

“…Classification and stereotyping were, however, contested and contextual fields and highly relational (Rappaport, 2014: 5) As the documentary evidence shows over and over, today's ‘friendly’ natives could be tomorrow's ‘enemies’ and ‘cannibals’. The approach followed here is focused on frontiers as places constructed from below and through complex processes of appropriation carried out by individuals and groups in daily interactions (Herzog, 2015: 8), which highlights the importance of political agency (Nesvig, 2018; Escribano Páez, 2020). In the early modern Iberian worlds, it was in relation to those able to govern – understood at the time as those able to establish law and deliver justice, and capable of fostering and engaging in communicative processes emerging from diverse and reciprocal interests, described by Holenstein as ‘empowering interactions’, in doing so (Blockmans, Holenstein and Mathieu, 2009: 25–28) – and in line with their concepts of status, race, and religion (regardless of whether they were Chiriguana chiefs or Spanish captains–) that agents defined themselves, negotiating and contesting identities and labels.…”