Communities in conflict. Political spaces in the missionary frontiers of northwestern Mexico and eastern Bolivia

Abstract

The present article contributes a comparative study of indigenous world systems that intersected with the Iberian imperial realms established in North and South America. This focused comparison of two distinct colonial frontier provinces complicates the concept of world system as well as the north/south and Western/non-Western dichotomies commonly used in both developmentalist and postcolonial studies. It interrogates the polysemic meanings of modernity, polity, and ethnicity through the institutions of internal governance that were forged by colonial overlords and colonized tribal peoples in northern New Spain (Mexico) and the tropical lowlands of eastern Bolivia, on the contested borders of the Portuguese and Spanish American empires. Colonialism viewed from different frontiers reveals the porosity of ecological, social, and imperial administrative boundaries in the historical production of culture.