Where Spanish Possession and Indigenous Territoriality Meet: Counter Reading the Peace of Lacangayé in the Gran Chaco

By the mid-18th century, Spanish conquerors could not control the Chaco Inlands effectively. Instead, a combination of defensive and offensive strategies secured colonial spaces and borders with other colonial cities, while most Indigenous groups maintained their autonomy. This article investigates the tensions between Spanish forms of possession and the territoriality of Indigenous Peoples not yet subjected to colonial rule. Based on various scholarly works and archival sources, I suggest that the forms of production and subsistence of high mobility groups, including hunting, gathering, and certain agricultural practices, precluded territorial possession by the Spanish. The seasonal, itinerant, and collective uses of land and its resources contributed to and combined with acts of Indigenous insurgency that hampered the colonial possession of their lands. To illustrate this point, I present a close reading of a map (and historical event) known as “La Paz de La Cangayé” (1774), where the strategies of land possession and repossession employed by both the Spanish and Indigenous peoples intersect.