Mapping Spanish and Portuguese South America - Where Caciques and Mapmakers Met: Border Making in Eighteenth-Century South America. By Jeffrey Alan Erbig Jr. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020. Pp. 259. $24.95 paper

Jeffrey Erbig takes readers along and across contested borders in the Río de la Plata, where Indigenous and Iberian competition and collaboration unfolded slowly and unevenly over a long eighteenth century (1730s to the 1850s) that was marked by dramatic political, economic, and territorial changes (Africans appear on the book's cover but are mentioned only a handful of times). By mapping tolderías named in 700 manuscript sources onto GIS datasets (9), and analyzing a rich variety of colonial-era maps, Erbig shows how “Minuán caciques developed spatial networks . . . along coastal routes, while Charrúas traveled between the Paraná and Uruguay rivers and their tributaries,” signaling a “broad territorial reach of particular caciques” that “implies a certain level of hierarchy among tolderías” (28, 29). Once Indigenous people were separated from tolderías and read by colonial agents as sedentary rather than mobile, they became “‘Indians,’ a discursive gesture that masked individuals’ provenance or kinship ties” (138) and helped fashion a narrative of Indigenous disappearance (162). Because “a paucity of source materials has impeded discussions of Charrúa and Minuán self-identification,” it is hard to understand what these affiliations meant to Indigenous, African, or Iberian subjects before or after the arrival of mapmakers (162).