Na bagagem dos peruleros: mercadoria de contrabando e o caminho proibido de São Paulo ao Paraguai na primeira metade do século XVII

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to analyze some goods inventoried in Asunción and in Guairá, in the Provincia do Paraguai, during the first decades of the 17th century, of characters who left Sao Paulo for the interior of Spanish America in demand of commerce and riches of the “Peruvian space” in parts of Peru. The route, which alternated between river stretches - Tietê and Paraná - and land routes, was prohibited by Real Cédula from the end of the 16th century and its use resulted in the arrest and confiscation of goods of several people who used it in both directions. Among them, Manoel Pinheiro, miner-mor of Brasil, who left Sao Paulo for Paraguai in 1606 and was arrested in Asunción; Manoel Rodrigues, imprisoned in 1620 with several other companions, all without a license; and Miguel Moxica Maldonado, a Canarian who had all his goods confiscated in the “sertão” (backwoods) of the Guairá in 1621. The list of goods reveals the predominance of fabrics - of various types - but also of varied objects such as knives, scissors, combs and counters, and some gold pieces. We intend to understand these objects of material culture - seen here as commodities in the process of circulation - as constitutive elements of a connected Luso-Castilian spatiality in South America, as articulators of social relations and hierarchies, and part of the exchange networks established between the Capitania de São Vicente and the Provincia do Paraguai in times of Union of the Iberian Crowns.