Estrategias para traducir la alteridad: los nativos rioplatenses entre sus testigos directos y la Historia general de los hechos de los castellanos de Antonio de Herrera y Tordesillas (1536-1615)

Abstract

This paper aims to analyze the production of representations about the native peoples of the Rio de La Plata in two different instances. The first, during its first conquest (1536-1545), considers texts produced by their direct witnesses, Spanish colonial agents installed in an foreign territory; then, the reappropriation of these representations in the historiographical project of Antonio de Herrera y Tordesillas (1601-1615). Taking both of them as cases of cultural translation, we intend to stress the intellectual operations needed to understand and communicate American native peoples’ ways of life in two different contexts that were nevertheless close in time.