Guillaume Candela

This work transcribes and studies the letters of Martin Gonzalez, a priest who lived in Paraguay between 1542 and 1564 and dedicated his life to the defense of the Guarani from Spanish abuses. This work gives a new vision of the Conquest of Paraguay, long depicted as an idyllic encounter by the historiography of the Rio de la Plata.

This article challenges the predominant notion among historians that early colonial Paraguay was an ’island surrounded by land’ disconnected from the rest of the Spanish empire and the world. Through an examination of archival documents from the 16th and 17th centuries, the work unveils the surprising ethnic, cultural, and linguistic diversity of the region. Case studies are presented of Africans, Afro-descendants, indigenous people from throughout America, as well as Europeans of diverse origins (English, Italians, Greeks, French, Germans) who found their way to Asunción and this supposed frontier backwater. Their mobility, movements, and connections across the Spanish Empire are traced through legal records, letters, wills, and court cases. The experiences of individuals such as the maroon leader Diego Bretón, the Greek carpenter Estamate Cámara, the French gunpowder maker Julián, or the German soldier Ulrich Schmidl belie any notion of an insular and monocultural Paraguay in this period. Far from the mythical Hispanic-Guaraní society, this work portrays a pluralist colonial society immersed in transatlantic and transcontinental movements of peoples and flows of information. Rethinking Paraguay’s past based on long-forgotten primary sources promises to demolish persistent historiographical prejudices that portray it as a historical isolate, stagnating adrift from the broader currents of the early modern world.

This article studies the role of ’women in love’ in the conquest of the Rio de la Plata. A lengthy judicial process found in the National Archive of Asuncion describes the attitude of Spanish elites and their control over women, particularly Spanish prostitute women. This essay shows how these women were powerful agents in this region and aims to understand the daily life of these invisible actors in the conquest-era society. This work examines the complex network between Spanish women and different colonial subjects to understand women’s spaces of power in the early colonial period of the Rio de la Plata.

The peripheral territories of the Spanish Empire seem to differ in terms of their conquest process. To the effects of marginality must be added the absence of mineral wealth, which in turn brings about a great impact on the development of the early colonial Paraguay between 1537 and 1575. All of this leads us in this article to propose a reflection on the adaptation of both the Indigenous Peoples and the colonizers in the face of this new colonial pact, basing our analysis on the concepts of indianization, ethnogenesis, and middle ground.

As early as the 16th century, the best-informed reporters on Brazilian and Paraguayan linguistic reality were noting that the groups referred to as «Tupies» and «Guaranies» were in fact «the same people and spoke the same tongue». This article asks how and why two ethnic groups and two languages, Tupi and Guarani, came to be treated as separate. One of the main conclusions emerging from a close examination of 16th-century sources is that the ethnonym «Tupi» was coined by the Spanish to refer to the Indigenous Peoples of the Portuguese coast of Brazil. «Guarani», on the other hand, referred rather to the language spoken in the vast territories explored by the Spanish between Santa Catarina island and the foothills of the Andes by way of Asuncion. We also note that, unlike Quechua or Tupi, Guarani was not considered a lingua franca until very late on, and then only exceptionally.