Jesuit Tradition and the Rise of South American Nationalism
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chapter 23 Jesuit Tradition and the Rise of South American Nationalism Andrés I. Prieto In the introduction to his 1789 Saggio sulla storia naturale della provincia del Gran Chaco, the former Jesuit José Jolís explained that he had composed his book in response to the “patronizing and unflattering image that some authors present of [America] by describing its climate as so noxious that not only men degenerate, but also the animals, plants, and trees brought from Europe.” Jolís’s intent was not only to correct the distorted ideas about the nature of the Americas that were circulating in Europe, but also to defend “the insulted honor of innumerable American nations and of the Europeans who are still living there.”1 Jolís was responding to the claims of American inferiority in the natural and moral realms advanced by enlightened philosophes such as Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, William Robertson, and especially Cornelius de Pauw, whose Recherches Philosophiques sur les Américains came off the presses in 1769, the year in which 2,267 Jesuits who had been banished from Spanish America arrived in Europe.2 Jolís’s attitude was characteristic of the exiled Jesuit writers, who published numerous defenses of their patrias between 1776 and 1810. Jolís accused De Pauw of basing his work on unreliable informants who had never spent any significant length of time in America; people who did not take the time to observe its nature or learn the native languages.3 These objections to the armchair brand of natural history practiced by European philosophers were common among the exiled Jesuits.4 They felt aggrieved by what they considered calumnies against their 1 José Jolís, Ensayo sobre la historia natural del Gran Chaco, trans. María Luisa Acuña (Universidad Nacional del Nordeste, Facultad de Humanidades, Instituto de Historia: Resistencia, Chaco, 1972), 37. 2 Jonathan Wright, God’s Soldiers, 187. 3 Jolís, Ensayo, 42. 4 Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, How to Write the History of the New World. Histories, Epistemologies, and Identities in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (Stanford University Press: Stanford, ca, 2001), 208; Silvia Navia Méndez-Bonito, “Las historias naturales de Francisco Javier Clavijero, Juan Ignacio de Molina y Juan de Velasco,” in El saber de los jesuitas, historias natu- rales y el Nuevo Mundo, eds. Luis Millones Figueroa and Domingo Ledezma (Iberoamericana Vervuert: Madrid and Frankfurt am Main, 2005), 241–242. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004283879_025 <UN> 400 Prieto patrias disguised as science. The same year Jolís’s Saggio appeared, the Quiteño Juan de Velasco published his Historia de Quito “to give this poor present to the Nation and the Patria offended by some rival pens intent on obscuring their glo- ries.”5 According to Antonello Gerbi, these feelings of attachment to their native lands explained the fact that, whereas most Jesuit writers exiled from Spain were prepared to accept De Pauw’s arguments, the Jesuits removed from America were adamant in their condemnation of De Pauw’s ideas.6 Even though love and nostalgic pining for their patrias was a prominent feature of the texts published by the former Spanish American Jesuits in the late eighteenth century, I argue here that both their content and their passion- ate defense of New World territories was ultimately the product of a long his- toriographical tradition that reached back to the seventeenth century. As will become clear, the banishment and suppression of the Jesuit order brought a Jesuit historiographical tradition from the New World to Europe: a tradition whose language and rhetoric helped define the claims to the territories and spaces, both cultural and natural, as well as the language deployed by the nationalistic movements of the first half of the nineteenth century. I illustrate the importance of this tradition in the writings of Creole Jesuits by discussing Juan Ignacio de Molina’s Saggio sulla storia naturalle del Chili (1782) and Juan de Velasco’s Historia del Reino de Quito (1789). The Jesuits and Creole Proto-Nationalism The Jesuits’ spirited defense of their patrias was the product of local traditions that harked back to the early seventeenth century. With the notable exception of Bernabé Cobo’s Historia del Nuevo Mundo (1653), most seventeenth-century Jesuit writers in South America shunned totalizing descriptions of the conti- nent and restricted themselves to writing regional histories. By and large, their books focused on the missionary enterprises of the Society of Jesus, emphasiz- ing the hardships encountered by Jesuit missionaries in isolated areas of the continent, while showcasing their role in the political and economic success of the territories in which they worked. The fact that Jesuit writers considered the history of their order and the his- tory of conquest and colonization as part of the same narrative can be explained by two factors. On a general level, the nature of Spanish rule encouraged a 5 Velasco, Historia del Reino de Quito, 1:5–6. 6 Antonello Gerbi, The Dispute of the New World (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1973), 191–192. <UN>.