Brazil today constitutes one of the major manufacturers of microcomputers in the world, a seemingly surprising feat for a country that many view as part of the Third World. How was it possible for a developing nation like Brazil to create a high-technology industry and join the exclusive club of highly industrialized countries like the United States, Japan, and Germany as one of the major manufacturers of computers? Many political scientists, economists, and sociologists have tried to explain this exceptional phenomenon in primarily political terms. Most have studied the rise of nationalistic technocrats who began in the mid-1970s to implement a series of regulations that made it possible for Brazilian manufacturers to monopolize the domestic markets for minicomputers and microcomputers.

This essay is in large part inspired by Fr. Antonine Tibesar OFM, whom I had the privilege to meet in 1982 just after I returned from my doctoral research sojourn in Bolivia. Fr. Antonine was for many years the director of the Academy of Franciscan History when that institution had its beautiful campus in Potomac, Maryland, a suburb of Washington, D.C. I had corresponded with Fr. Antonine earlier and during my visit enjoyed discussing with him the many facets of Franciscan missions in Latin America. He proudly showed me the large collection of books in the academy library. What impressed me about both Fr. Antonine and the friars I had met in Bolivia during my research was their selflessness and willingness to help a budding scholar—one who at that point had little of scholarship to show. These characteristics got me thinking about the Franciscans and their worldviews and how those must have affected the missions. Although I was determined to write mainly about the indigenous population on the missions (after all, they constituted the vast majority of the mission population and were the ones most profoundly affected by the mission experience), I realized that it was important not to ignore the missionaries. Though few in number—most missions had just one or perhaps two friars—it was their desires for the native population and the overall goals and local organization of the missions they founded that profoundly shaped the human settlements they supervised.

Using the example of nineteenth-century Bolivia, this article argues that economic motivations need to be taken into account in understanding the role of peasants in constructing Latin American nation-states, especially in the Andes. Based on local archives, it considers the case of the altiplano region of Oruro-Poopó. From this perspective, during the half-century that followed independence, Andean communities were mostly in favour of a free-trade regime. They were integrated into the nation-state, but in a subordinate position. By the 1850s there was such prosperity in trading activities that community members refused to participate as authorities in their communities due to the time it would consume. However, the assault on community lands that began in the 1860s impoverished the Indians and marginalised them as peasants, turning them into a threat to the new, racist nation-state.

In Latin America missions have traditionally played a large role in conquering and incorporating native populations into dominant society. Most studies of the missionary enterprise have focused on the colonial period, when the missions reached their high point. The Jesuit missions in Paraguay and the Franciscan missions of central and northern Mexico, for example, ruled over vast territories and thousands of Indians. Although these institutions and their leaders have been widely studied because of their importance and visibility for colonial Latin America, it is not often recognized that missions continued to play a crucial role in the frontier development of the region even after the Spanish and Portuguese had been driven from the continent. Throughout the republican period, missionaries from many orders and creeds became critically important actors who, to a large degree, determined the shape of relations between native peoples and national society. This is quite clear even today in the Amazon basin, where missionaries often provide the natives' first exposure to Europeanized society.

Labour history in Latin America has, to a great degree, followed the models set by the rich historiography in Europe and North America. Other than a justifiable concern with the peculiarities in production for export of primary goods, much of the Latin American historiography suggests that the process of labour formation was rather similar to that of the North Atlantic economies, only lagging behind, as did industrialization in this region of the world. However, this was not the case. The export orientation of the mining industry and its peripheral location in the world economy introduced certain modifications not found in the North Atlantic economies. The vagaries of the mining industry, exacerbated by the severe swings in raw material prices, created conditions which hindered proletarianization and modified the consciousness of the mine workers.

The epic struggles between Mexicans and the Apaches and Comanches in the far northern reaches of the Spanish empire and the conflict between gauchos and Araucanians in the pampas in the far south are the images the mind conjures up when thinking of Latin American frontiers. We must now add for the twentieth century the dense Amazon jungle as one of the last frontiers in popular (and scholarly) minds. However, these images ignore the eastern Andean and Chaco frontier area, one of the most vital and important frontier regions in Latin America since colonial times, today divided up into three different countries (Argentina, Bolivia, Paraguay) in the heart of the South American continent. This frontier region has not received sufficient attention from scholars despite its importance in at least three different aspects: First, the indigenous peoples were able to remain independent of the Creole states much longer than elsewhere other than the Amazon. Secondly, indigenous labor proved to be vitally important to the economic development along the fringes, and thirdly, a disastrous war was fought over the region in the 1930s by Bolivia and Paraguay. This essay provides an overview based on primary and secondary sources of the history of the eastern Andean frontier and compares it to other frontiers in Latin America. It thus endeavors to contribute to frontier studies by creating categories of analysis that make possible the comparisons between different frontiers in Latin America and placing within the scholarly discussion the eastern Andean region during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The land tenure arrangements of missions in Latin America have received insufficient attention. Given the vast extent of land the missions controlled on the Latin American frontier and the effect that land tenure arrangements had on the functioning of the missions, this is a serious oversight. Rather than focus on land tenure, most studies of the missions have examined primarily issues such as evangelization, the labor regime, and demographic patterns. While these topics are also important, indeed vital, to an understanding of missions, an analysis of land tenure arrangements is a useful way for understanding the economic and even the political dimensions of mission systems. For example, the control that the missionaries imposed on their charges should have been reflected in a majority of the land controlled directly by the missionaries rather than holdings controlled by individual Indian families. In this sense, the land tenure system reflected the missionary regime in important ways and helps test hypotheses about economic resources as well as power within this controversial institution. In addition, the changes in ownership and use of land became a key ingredient in determining the survival of indigenous groups once the government secularized the missions.

An earlier version of this essay was presented at the Symposium “Bolivia: Formation and Development of a Labor Force, 1600 to the Present,” organized by Ann Zulawski and Lesley Gill for the 45th International Congress of Americanists, Bogotá, Colombia, 1985. The author wishes to thank Robert H. Jackson, Brooke Larson, and Nils Jacobsen for their comments on the paper. Research funds were provided by the Social Science Research Council, Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Research Program, and the Inter-American Foundation.