ABSTRACT
This chapter highlights four key concepts that determine the production of knowledge networks throughout the Spanish Pacific: 1) the attempted territorialization of the sea, embodied in fictions of a Terra Australis (great southern continent) and the doctrine of mare clausum; 2) the deterritorialization and reterritorialization of regional economies spurred by the Iberian presence in the Pacific; 3) the changing role of missionaries with the decadence and relapse of millenarian aspirations and their concomitant instrumentalization as agents of “spiritual conquest”; and 4) the counterpoint process of frontierization in the age of political centralization. These themes frame the exhaustion of the Spanish vision of conquest, as the dispersion of the military, economic, and religious forces into unconquered space would engender decadence and corruption at their furthest reach as well as new forms of life and society. The rhetorical and theological traces of these frames belie the withdrawal of an actual infrastructure and material basis of Spanish hegemony in the Pacific. At the same time, however, the colonial legacy in its cultural and religious dimensions would engender the transculturation and mestizaje of local communities negotiating the process of change and continuity.
