The Space Between

Daniel Astorga Poblete

Go-Betweens and the Colonization of Brazil, 1500-1600. By Alida C. Metcalf

The Forbidden Lands: Colonial Identity, Frontier Violence, and the Persistance of

Brazil’s Eastern Indians, 1750-1830. By Hal Langfur

Landscapes of Power and Identity: Comparative Histories in the Sonoran Desert

and the Forest of Amazonia from Colony to Republic. By Cynthia Radding

The process of colonization of America after the arrival of Columbus was an

enterprise that until today we still are trying to understand in all its complexity. The

encounter of the “American” aboriginal people with the Europeans and Africans enacted

a machinery of conquest of the “New World” territory and the subjection of the wrongly

called “Indians.” Although the imperial powers established different procedures so they

could dominate the new territories and people, colonization was an everyday exercise

where those procedures suffered the necessary transformations in order to achieve their

final aim. Moreover, those modifications emerged as the colonizers confronted different

people, places and situations with the consequent moldability of the colonization

mechanisms. However, during the encounter it was not just the colonizer who had to

permeate its horizon of possibilities but also the colonized. Through alliances with the

European, mobility of places and negotiation among the different aboriginal groups, the

different Indigenous American groups drew their own colonial destiny.

Go-betweens and the Colonization of Brazil, by Alida Metcalf, enters into the

debate of the colonization through the analysis of the different elements that functioned
as links between the colonizer and the colonized. Although the definition of “go-

between” and “intermediary” elements she used attempts to overload the concept, what

interests us is that the focus of her study is not in the European nor in the Indigenous

people of now Brazil but the “middle ground” and the point of contact. Indeed, her study

approaches the problem in a spatial fashion as she brings the idea of “middle ground”

from Richard White study of the Great Lakes Region. Her analysis of the Brazilian

situation, then, imagines the relation conqueror/conquest in the liminal and frontier zone

or, in other words, in the space of contact where the two elements engage in a conflictive

zone where power is enacted. Moreover, the notion of “middle ground” could be

problematized if we ask: middle for whom? If we bring a spatial notion of “middle” we

can observe that what we consider the “middle” point or ground is relative and depends

of the point where the subject understands its position in the power and spatial relation.

Indeed, to talk about a “middle ground” in a literal and metaphorical manner could

provoke an interpretation of equilibrium of both parts. Nonetheless, as Metcalf rightly

asserts, it is important to understand the “middle ground” in a hierarchical form where

knowledge about the Americas was produce in order to enact discursive mechanisms that

favored colonization. If that knowledge served, later, to dominate and exercise the

colonial discourse, it is part of other discussions.

Hal Langfur’s The Forbidden Lands: Colonial Identity, Frontier Violence, and

the Persistance of Brazil’s Eastern Indians, 1750-1830, situates the reader in a similar

problematic that we already discussed above. His work on the Easter Sertão of Minas

Gerais invites us to look over the importance of the frontier zone and the conflict with the

Botocudo. In Langfur’s book, moreover, we can see the double tension that I referred
above. On the one hand, the machinery of colonization was envisioned and discussed in

the imperial centers (Spain, Portugal, England, etc.) as in the colonies’ centers (Lima,

New Spain, Salvador and Rio de Janeiro); nonetheless, the colonial power in the frontier

zone had to adapt its resources even if contradicted the central orders so the final aim of

colonization could be achieved. The moldability of the conquest apparatus, indeed, was

necessary for the captaincy so they were able to take the lands even before the declaration

of war to the Botocudo. On the other hand, if in Metcalf’s book we observe the role of the

intermediaries and metaphorical borderland zones between conquerors and colonizers

that develops with an harmonious tone, in Langfur the literal borderland space between

the Botocudo and Portuguese, Mestizo and Afro-descendent settlers appears as a violent

zone where the machinery of the colonial power, through the captaincy and local settlers,

had to adapt itself in order to secure their interests as they took consideration of the vital

importance of the frontier zone in relation to the decrease of the productivity of Minas

Gerais’s mines. Thus, what were considered forbidden lands by the Portuguese empire,

the frontier zone of Easter Sertão, was, indeed, an active area were settlers tried to occupy

the Botocudo’s area through violent means and struggle with the Indigenous population.

Cynthia Radding’s Landscapes of Power and Indentity: Comparative Histories in

the Sonoran Desert and the Forest of Amazonia from Colony to Republic, deals directly

with the themes that we have discussed previously. In her comparative study of the

frontier colonial settlement in the dessert of Sonora and Chiquitos, as the title suggest it is

the space the central theme that develops the argument. Certainly, the contact between

the indigenous people of the Americas and the Spaniards was located in a tridimensional

place and, therefore, subjected to the characteristics of the landscape. The colonization of
the Americas brought with it the reducciones and misiones that changed the relation

indigenous people has with their environment. The displacement to settle territories, the

cultivation of new products, breeding of animals and the new idea of economy and

private property dislocated indigenous conceptions of the subject in relation to its land.

Moreover, what we can observe from Radding’s book, if we compared it with Langfur

and Metcalf, is the particular interest in observing the literal and metaphorical idea of

“middle ground” from the perspective of the indigenous people. Thus, the idea of

“middle ground”, for the indigenous missions in Sonora and Chiquitos, was not a

”middle” but, in fact, a “ ‘new’ ground” where they had to deal with new conceptions of

land, economy and political power established by the colonial enterprise. More

importantly, from Cythia Radding’s book we can argue that in the case of Sonora and

Chiquitos, there was not just one borderland or frontier but several interacting with each

other: the actual frontier zone of the Spanish Empire; the colonizer/colonized borderland;

the colonized experience of transferring from one conception of land to the European

model.