South America’s Final Frontier: Indigenous Leadership and the Long Conquest of the Gran Chaco, 1870-1955
Gilbert M. Joseph and Stuart B. Schwartz
My dissertation provides the first comprehensive history of efforts by Argentina, Paraguay, and Bolivia to conquer an isolated borderland region known as the Gran Chaco. Decades of conflict among three nascent nation-states and a panorama of indigenous groups produced new political subjects: indigenous leaders who played decisive roles in local, regional, and national histories. The degree and duration of conflict in the Chaco may have been exceptional, but similar processes took place across the Americas. As states devoted increasing attention to their peripheries and internal frontiers converged on national borders, native peoples were trapped between – and ultimately within – states.
Teaching Fellow, History of Brazil, Yale Teaching Fellow, Colonial Latin America, Yale
“Cacique Politics: Indigenous Leaders and the Long Conquest of the Argentine Chaco (1911- 1955).” XXXI International Congress of the Latin American Studies Association, Washington, D.C., May 30, 2013. “Regulating Violence and Rewriting History: Argentina’s Napalpí Reservation and the 1924 Massacre.” Conference on Latin American History, 127th Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association, New Orleans, Louisiana, January 3, 2013. “Populismo y negociación: los líderes aborígenes en la constitución del estado peronista en Chaco y Formosa (1943-1955).” Conquistas americanas: Territorios, poblaciones y violencia. XII Jornadas de Historia, Universidad Torcuato Di Tella, Buenos Aires, Argentina, November 15, 2012. “Hacer política, hacer violencia: el pragmatismo de los caciques tobas y mocovíes y la constitución del Estado en los territorios de Chaco y Formosa (1911-1955).” XXXII Encuentro de Geohistoria Regional, Instituto de Investigaciones Geohistoricas (CONICET/UNNE), Resistencia, Argentina, September 28, 2012. “Regulating Violence and Rewriting History: Argentina’s Napalpí Reservation and the 1924 Massacre.” Fourth Annual Meeting of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association, Uncasville, Connecticut, June 4, 2012. “Racism and Revolutionary Violence in the Mexican Border Town of Cananea, 1899-1920.” Columbia University Latin American History Graduate Student Conference, New York, New York, March 6, 2010.
Fulbright Scholarship to Argentina; International Dissertation Research Fellowship, Social Science Research Council; MacMillan Center Pre-Dissertation Research Grant, Yale; Andrew D. White Prize, Yale; George A. Schrader Jr. Prize, Yale; Phi Beta Kappa; Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, History Scholars Program
Co-coordinator, Latin American Studies Graduate Student Working Group, Yale; Co-organizer, Latin American History Graduate Student Retreat for Columbia, NYU, and Yale; Organizer and Moderator for special event at Yale on contemporary Paraguay