Towards a historical anthropology of maroonage: the configuration of frontier societies in Eastern Venezuela at the end of the eighteenth century

This article reconstructs the historical fusions among Indigenous peoples, Afro-descendants, and criollo populations through cimarronaje in eighteenth-century eastern Venezuela. It examines the spatial overlap between missionised Indigenous communities and other non-Indigenous and mixed populations situated within colonial hierarchies. First, it situates colonisation within the region’s multi-ethnic Indigenous organisations. Second, it analyses interactions between Indigenous and mixed populations inside the perimeters of colonial control, with particular attention to the legal incorporation of maroons into the generic category of ‘Spaniards’, a juridical construct defined against missionised Indigenous populations. Third, it explores encounters on the margins of colonial authority. Finally, it argues that interethnic alliances helped produce mixed social groups that contributed to the fragmentation of Spanish colonial rule in the early nineteenth century. In conclusion, cimarrón societies help reveal how the expected colonial correspondence between ethnicity, race, and social space became unstable in this frontier setting.