A Passionate Pacification: Sacrifice and Suffering in the Jesuit Missions of Northwestern New Spain, 1594 - 1767

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Citation Bayne, Brandon Lynn. 2012. A Passionate Pacification: Sacrifice and Suffering in the Jesuit Missions of Northwestern New Spain, 1594 - 1767. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard Divinity School.

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A Passionate Pacification: Sacrifice and Suffering in the Jesuit Missions of Northwestern New Spain, 1594 – 1767

A dissertation presented

Brandon L. Bayne

The Faculty of Harvard Divinity School

in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

Doctor of Theology

in the subject of

History of Christianity

Harvard University Cambridge, Massachusetts May 2012

Advisor: David D. Hall Author: Brandon L. Bayne ABSTRACT

A Passionate Pacification: Sacrifice and Suffering in the Jesuit Missions of Northwestern New Spain, 1594 – 1767

This dissertation tracks Jesuit discourse about suffering in the missions of Northern New

Spain from the arrival of the first missionaries in the 16th century until their expulsion in the

18th. The project asks why tales of persecution became so prevalent in these borderland contexts and describes how missionaries sanctified their own sacrifices as well as native suffering through martyrological idioms. It argues that in both corporeal and textual forms, missionaries put their passions to use in the pacification of the norther frontier of Mexico. It also correlates colonial martyrologies to longer traditions of redemptive death in the history of

Christianity. The belief that sacrifice begets growth reaches back to the biblical writers and church fathers like Jerome and Tertullian. More recently, Talal Asad has argued that “dying to give live” lies at the foundation of western civilization and its capacity for war. This dissertation charts a transitional moment in the longer geneology of matyrological discourse that extends early Christian tales of persecution to the modern logic of redemptive sacrifice. It argues that

Christian martyrdom traditions helped early modern Jesuits rationalize their participation in the

Spanish colonization of the Americas and explain rebellion, disease, and death as providential.

In addition to the deaths of specific missionaries at the hands of rebellious converts, it takes up the wider motif of martyrdom that permeated their entire evangelistic enterprise in

New Spain. Through histories, annual letters, personal correspondance, and maps, it describes how metaphors of agricultural growth, economic exchange, cosmic war, exile, and “prolonged martyrdom” downplayed the material causes of violence and instead elevated convert and v missionary suffering as ultimately redemptive. The disseratation shows how Jesuit martyr language had a symbiotic, though conflicted, relation to native religious practices, spurring native revolt, aggressive retribution, and spatial redistribution. In distinction from early

Christians who cultivated martyrdom as rhetoric of victimization under imperial persecution, early modern missionaries used their own passion stoties to justify imperial expansion and the often difficult pacification of indigenous groups. When located in Christian history, the blood of

Jesuit martyrs helped place native landscapes within an imagined Christendom in the minds of

European audiences who encountered their tales of sacrifice through letters, histories, maps, paintings, and reliquaries. Whether positioning themselves vis-à-vis other religious orders, petitioning superiors, preparing campaigns to extirpate native “idolatries,” or protecting converts from European and indigenous enemies, Jesuits believed that their greatest victories would be resurrected from stories of victimization.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS vii

INTRODUCTION 1

1. CONQUESTS ABUNDANT IN SPIRITUAL FRUIT 24

2. A REDEMPTIVE ECONOMY: RELICS AND REDUCTION 60

3. IN ODIUM FIDEI: HAGIOGRAPHY AND HATRED OF THE FAITH 108

4. BLOODLESS MARTYRS: MISSIONARY VOCATION AS WHITE MARTYRDOM 142

5. THE CHALICE OF SUFFERING: MARTYRDOM IN THE EXPULSION OF 1776 168

EPILOGUE: RESURRECTING KINO 192

APPENDICES 214

BIBLIOGRAPHY 217

vii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to acknowledge the institutional support of Harvard Divinity School and the the Committee for the Study of Religion at Harvard University. Funding for coursework, the

Divinity School’s Dean’s Dissertation Fellowship, the David Rockefeller Center for Latin

American Studies travel fellowship, and the William R. Hutchison memorial gave support for the initial study and later archival research in Arizona, California, and Mexico. More personally, I wish to thank my advisor David Hall for his patience with somebody who began working on

Puritans in New England and ended studying Jesuits in northern New Spain. Patrick Provost-

Smith advised the first stages of this work and inspired many of its argments. Also, Davíd

Carrasco’s integral support and David Hempton’s constructive feedback made the completion of this project possible. I owe thanks as well to the members of Harvard’s North American

Religions colloquium for a collegial environment in which to present many of the first drafts of this work. Specifically, I want to thank Adrian Weimer, Heather Curtis, Rachel Gordan, John

Seitz, Lauren Brandt, Eliza Young Barstow, Angela Tarango, Samira Mehta, Zack Matus, David

Charles, Brenna Moore, Stephen Shoemaker, Curtis Evans, Jon Roberts, Bob Orsi, Wallace Best, and many others who came through the colloquium or other seminars and offered both direct and indirect inspiration for my work. Linford Fisher probably heard more versions of this project than anybody over the years and for his carefull advice and caring friendship I am most grateful.

Beyond the walls of Harvard, I want to thank Phoenix Seminary, Claremont School of

Theology, Indiana University, and Fordham University for giving me the opportunity to teach and try out some of these ideas with students.Thanks to colleagues like T. J. Tomlin, Paul Lim,

Sarah Imhoff, Matthew Suriano, Joshua Paddison, Constance Furey, Candy Gunther-Brown, viii

Franklin Harkins, Benjamin Dunning, and John Pennimen who expanded my intellectual horizons in frequent and fun conversations at all of these institutions. I owe much to Ronnie

Hsia and the members of the Mellon Seminar on Early Modern Global Catholicism at Penn

State. Veronica Gutierrez, Danny Wasserman, Leon Garcia, Frederick Vermote, Jared Staller,

Chris Wisniewski, Adina Ruiu, and Pablo Aranha challenged me to be better and stretched my understanding of early modern Christian missions

I also depended heavily on the guidance and aid of librarians and staff at the Arizona

Historical Foundation, Map, and Chicano Research Collections housed in Hayden Library of

Arizona State University in Tempe; the Huntington Library in Pasadena, California; the Bancroft

Library at the University of California at Berkeley; the Nettie Lee Benson Library of the

University of Texas at Austin; as well as the Biblioteca Nacionál de México and Archivo Generál de la Nación in Mexico City. Special thanks to Dale Brennemen, Michael Brescia, and Diana

Hadley of the Office of Ethnohistorical Research of the Arizona State Museum who not only allowed me to scan microfilm in their office, but constantly provided welcome help and crucial insights. Likewise, I would like to acknowledge the Arizona Historical Society in Tucson which funded the work for the epilogue with a research grant and the archivist Kate Reeve who pointed me to a treasure trove of documents about the recovery of Father Eusebio Kino.

Finally, let me thank Nidia Flores Bayne for believing in this degree, supporting me, and working to bring this to a close even as our family expanded. My mother, Arlene Bayne was not only a loving presence, but also a thorough editor of the final drafts, and my father Brett Bayne inspired much of the curiosity that began my education decades ago. To all these that memory allows me to record here and those who only my heart knows I owe my gratitude. 1

Introduction

Frontiers in Need of Martyrs

In their classic portrait of medieval and early modern hagiography, Saints and Society,

Donald Weinstein and Rudolph Bell made the broad claim that “Wherever Christianity encountered a frontier, it had need of martyrs. Whether carrying the faith to infidel and heathen lands, combating the encroachments of kings and princes, or fighting heresy in Europe itself, martyrs there would be.”1 On one hand Weinstein and Bell were stating a rather obvious, if unfortunate, observation about the cultural products of violent encounters in late antique and medieval Christendom. On the other hand, the authors suggested something more, that

European stories of faithful death did something. They proved socially and politically useful in the conquest and pacification of frontiers both within and without the continent. The argument that martyr stories had political uses was only part of Weinstein and Bell’s larger thesis that hagiographic narratives arise and speak to specific communities and complex social contexts.

More than two decades after its publication, the notion that martyr accounts need to be interpreted in light of political history, intercultural encounter, and social networks hardly seems worth highlighting. Their work has inspired multiple reinterpretations of saints’ vitas and passion stories. Most of these interpreters have ignored older historical preoccupations with authenticating or debunking hagiographic events and instead reoriented our attention towards the uses to which memories of lives and deaths can be put.

1 Donald Weinstein and Rudolph Bell, Saints and Society: The Two Worlds of Western Christendom, 1000 – 1700 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 160. 2

Scholars of early Christianity have pointed to the central role of suffering and sacrificial death in the identity formation and disciplining of early Christian communities.2 For example, over a decade ago Judith Perkins highlighted the techniques through which early Christians cultivated a "suffering self' as a way of connecting to marginalized groups and consolidating a persecuted identity that paradoxically led to the “triumph of Christianity.” She used the language of “triumph” intentionally, with reference to its specific Christian theological connotation.3 As early as the second letter to the Corinthians, New Testament writers connected apostolic suffering to Roman triumphal processions.4 Drawing from the Roman practice of triumphal marches and victory parades, Christians flipped classical notions of victory on their head by proclaiming their own deaths as triumphs. Jerome’s pronouncement, “the suffering of the martyrs is the triumph of God,” demonstrates another manifestation of this logic.5 Eventually, the adjective “triumphant” came to refer theologically to the Christian dead,

2 Nicole Kelley, "Philosophy as Training for Death: Reading the Ancient Christian Martyr Acts as Spiritual Exercises," Church History 75, no. 4 (December, 2006), 723-731; Daniel Boyarin, Dying for God: Martyrdom and the Making of Christianity and Judaism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999); R. D. Young, In Procession before the World: Martyrdom as Public Liturgy in Early Christianity (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2001). 3 Judith Perkins, The Suffering Self: Pain and Narrative Representation in the Early Christian Era (London: Routledge, 1995), 3, 12, 17. 4 In 2 Cor. Paul compares Christian sufferings to Roman triumphal processions, “14But thanks be to God, who in Christ always leads us in triumphal procession, and through us spreads in every place the fragrance that comes from knowing him. 15For we are the aroma of Christ to God among those who are being saved and among those who are perishing; 16to the one a fragrance from death to death, to the other a fragrance from life to life. Who is sufficient for these things?” 2 Cor. 14 – 16, New Revised Standard Version. See also, Andreas Hock, "Christ is the Parade: A Comparative Study of the Triumphal Procession in 2 Cor 2,14 and Col 2,15," Biblica 88, no. 1 (January 1, 2007), 110. 5 In a letter to a female interlocutor, Jerome answered twelve questions she posed. Question 11 asks, “What is the meaning of 2 Cor. 2:16?” Jerome’s full interpretation is as follows, “Triumphus Dei est passio Martyrum; et pro Christi nomine cruoris effusio, et inter tormenta laetitia. Cum enim quis viderit tanta perseverantia stare Martyres, atque torqueri, et in suis cruciatibus gloriari, odor notitiae Dei disseminatur in gentes, et subit tacita cogitation quod nisi verum esset Evangelium, nunquam sanguine defenderater. Neque enim delicata et divitiis students ac secura confession est; sed in carceribus, in plagis, in persecutionibus, in fame, in nuditate et siti. Hic triumphus est Dei Apostolorumque Victoria.” Latin text is from Epist. CXX. Ad Hedib. Cap. 11 in Migne, Hieronymus-Epistolae Secundum Ordinem Temporum Distributae –Patrologia Latina, Vol. 22: Col. 0325-1224, p.262 from http://www.documentacatholicaomnia.eu/02m/03470420,_Hieronymus,_Epistolae_Secundum_Ordinem_Tempor um_Distributae,_MLT.pdf\ (accessed on March 3rd, 2008). 3 as in the designation “the Church Triumphant,” to designate deceased saints. In those foundational centuries, Perkins contended, textual representations of persecution “worked not simply to represent a realistic situation so much as to provide a self-definition that enabled the growth of Christianity as an institution.”6 The early martyrdom accounts of Peter, Paul, Ignatius,

Polycarp, Perpetua, and the martyrs of Lyons variously display this conviction that Christian victory could come from dramatizing their victimization. Likewise, in her work on martyrdom and memory in early Christianity, Elizabeth Castelli analyzed the real world social contexts of

“performing persecution,” and unpacked what she called a politics of martyrdom. As Castelli explains, “Regardless of the historicity of the martyr’s story, it is a story that can both make an ethical demand and lend legitimacy to other forms of power claims.”7

However, not every scholar has embraced this portrayal of Christian martyr and passion stories. Notably, the historian of early modern Europe Brad Gregory has argued that such an approach to understanding historic Christian martyrdom is woefully wrongheaded, obscuring historical difference with theoretical assumptions that are at best anachronistic. Writing about

Protestant, Catholic, and more radical martyrs in the 16th century, he contends that most contemporary theoretical concerns smack of presentism and only impede us from truly understanding martyrs, the rulers who persecuted them, and the communities who celebrated them.8 Once more, Gregory maintains that martyrs are particularly resistant to critical theory

6 Perkins, The Suffering Self: Pain and Narrative Representation in the Early Christian Era, 12 7 Elizabeth Castelli, Martyrdom and Memory: Early Christian Culture Making (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 32. 8 Gregory writes, “First, using a hermeneutics of suspicion to ‘unmask ideologies’ destroys the very possibility of understanding historical difference. With arbitrary condescension, it pigeonholes the past according to contemporary values and assumptions, separating the ‘ideological’ from the ‘authentic,’ the ‘reactionary’ from the ‘progressive.’ Functioning as a presentist mirror, it predictably yields a history reflecting the interpreter’s 4 because they cannot be accused of merely “representing” themselves or masking ideologies in order to justify secondary motives. On the contrary, they actually gave up material comforts and political liberties to die for the very doctrines they confessed. For Gregory, the idea that martyrs were “performing,” only obscures the true reasons for the all too real sacrifices they made. When all parties involved, including opponents and proponents, agree that they are killing and dying over their beliefs in ultimate truths and objective reality, how can modern interpreters simply dismiss the martyrs’ confessional claims and persist in a “hermeneutics of suspicion”?

While disagreeing with overly politicized readings of martyrdom, Brad Gregory nevertheless recognized the social contexts of passion plays and devotional literature in the

Middle Ages. He has helpfully charted how pious idioms like the imitatio Christi and ars moriendi sublimated the ideal of sacrificial death into everyday piety. In turn, these practices prepared European believers to die for their salvation when the opportunity came in 16th century wars of religion. After centuries in which actual martyrdoms were seldom; Catholics,

Protestants, and more radical groups sometimes faced persecution, exile, and even death in

European nations struggling over reformations and confessionalization. At the same time,

European missionaries increasingly found opportunity to die for their faith in the colonial missions of Asia and the Americas. Across the Atlantic Allan Greer, Julia Boss, Emma Anderson, and others have reexamined from ethnohistorical perspectives the stories of missionary deaths that punctuated and propelled the post–tridentine expansion of the Roman Catholic Church in

commitments.” Brad Gregory, Salvation at Stake: Christian Martyrdom in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 14. 5

New France.9 In diverging political, geographical, and temporal contexts, these authors make a nevertheless similar claim about the import of martyrdom in the history of Christianity. Mainly, that narratives of holy death cannot be extracted from lived realities to be read as pietistic, devotional set pieces, but instead must be firmly situated in the political, social, and theological locations from which they emerged and traced to the communal contexts for which they were intended.10

The case of missionary death on Spanish frontiers in the Americas affords a different context for analysis than early Christian persecution or martyrs in New France. This is because the dozens of missionaries who died violently on the northern edge of colonial New Spain occupied a more complicated space between imperial expansion and indigenous rejoinder than did persecuted minorities within pagan Rome or isolated traveling evangelists in Canada. One way of evidencing the distinctly messy position of colonial Spanish missionaries is to note that not one of them has been canonized, while the eight Jesuit missionaries killed in the 17th century in Canada and New York were all canonized in 1930. Many more Catholic missionaries died violently in colonial Latin America than in North America, but proving that they died

9 The death narratives of once celebrated missionaries like Isaac Jogues and Jean de Brébeuf, who along with six other Jesuits died in New France during the 17th century, are now being plied for their “uses,” provoking attention more for their “discursive constructs” and “community definitions” than their canonical details. Allan Greer and Emma Anderson have demonstrated the ways that both European and indigenous conceptions of suffering framed understandings and presentations of coloniality for European audiences. Allan Greer, "Colonial Saints: Gender, Race, and Hagiography in New France," The William and Mary Quarterly 57, no. 2 (Apr., 2000), 323; Emma Anderson, "Blood, Fire, and "Baptism": Three Perspectives on the Death of Jean De Brébeuf, Seventeenth-Century Jesuit "Martyr"," in Native Americans, Christianity, and the Reshaping of the American Religious Landscape, ed. Joel W. Martin and Mark A. Nicholas (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 325. Paul Perron’s study of narrative constructs in the martyrologies of Isaac Jogues and Julia Boss’ treatment of martyrological social locations in Allan Greer and Jodi Bilincoff’s collection Colonial Saints nicely demonstrate the possibilities of this approach. Julia Boss, "Writing a Relic: The Uses of Hagiography in New France. " in Colonial Saints: Discovering the Holy in America, 1500 - 1800, ed. Allan Greer and Jodi Bilinkoff, 2003), 211 - 234.; Paul Perron, "Isaac Jogues: From Martyrdom to Sainthood," in Colonial Saints: Discovering the Holy in America, 1500 - 1800, ed. Allan Greer and Jodi Bilinkoff (New York: Routledge, 2003), 153-68. 10 Gregory, Salvation at Stake, 12 - 15. 6 because of hatred of the faith has proved much more difficult. This was not for lack of hagiographical and interpretive effort. We need not fully accept David Sweet’s simplistic claim that European missionaries in Latin America were the “stalwart servants of the state religion of colonialism” to appreciate the irony that the men employed to pacify Spain’s colonial frontiers positioned themselves as passive victims when faced with opposition from those they would conquer and convert.11 As such, Jesuit missionaries were tasked with “reducing” wandering peoples to settled spaces, “pacifying” warring tribes, “civilizing” them to Spanish conceptions of time, language, and law, and “converting” them to Catholic religion. Employed with pacifying colonial borderlands, these men they positioned themselves as passive victims when faced with opposition from those they would conquer and convert.

At the same time, the missionary martyrs’ sincerity and motivations need not be undermined in order to read their rhetoric in light of the wider colonial situation. Contrary to

Gregory’s claim that “post-everything” critical theory only blinds interpreters to the motivations of the very martyrs they hope to explicate, it is my contention that we cannot understand the missionaries who went out, prepared to give their lives for others, without first exegeting the prevailing discourse on death and memory that undergirded their aspirations.12 To understand

11 David Sweet, "The Ibero-American Frontier in Native American History," in The New Latin American Mission History, ed. Erick D. Langer and Robert H. Jackson (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 8. 12 Were the object of critical theory simply the “unmasking of ideologies” or suspicious hermeneutics, Gregory may have a point about the unbridgeable gap that separates unbelieving scholars and their believing subjects. It is my contention that critical theory is necessary to bridge just such gaps between the scholarly subject and historical and/or cultural “others.” Surely, Gregory’s assumptions of historical difference demand some sort of theoretical justification or else why not posit sameness between scholar and subject? On the other hand, works that fail to appreciate what Michel Foucault called the episteme of discursive knowledge - that is the historical a priori and cultural assumptions that make received truths seem self-evident or “given” at a particular time and place and amongst a certain people and thereby provide the very conditions of possibility for belief and action - run the risk of at once lacking sympathy for their subjects and at the same time making anachronistic assumptions about what that subject meant in its own context. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage Books, 1973), 344f. 7 those very beliefs in context, we need both theory and theology. Without an appreciation for the missionaries’ deeply held beliefs about subjects like salvation, native religion, conversion, and just war it is impossible to understand either their motivations or actions. And yet, to stop at this would be to tell less than half of the story. While missionaries drew on a long tradition in the history of Christianity as they positioned themselves to be martyrs, they also used these

Christian discourses of martyrdom as a means of securing their place and rights in an ever- shifting colonial landscape. Whether defending themselves against critics, competing against other religious orders, recruiting future missionaries, petitioning superiors, or protecting their converts from European and indigenous enemies, missionaries often found that winning would only come through their wounding and their greatest victories could only be resurrected from their victimization.

Contributions to Scholarship

By their very nature, these histories speak to an ongoing discussion in the Study of

Religion about the fraught relationship between suffering, sacrifice, and cycles of violence. In his recent work on suicide bombers, Talal Asad has argued that idioms of redemptive death are foundational to the history of Christianity and ultimately modern liberal culture in the west.

According to Asad, sacrificial death is the necessary foundation to our capacity for violence. For western society, “dying to give life” is not only central to marking cultural boundaries but also the making of war. He argues, "In Christian civilization, the gift of life for humanity is possible only through a suicidal death; redemption is dependent on cruelty or at least on the sin of disregarding human life."13 Asad’s critique of the secular iterations of formerly sacred

13 Talal Asad, On Suicide Bombing (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 86. 8 discourses of sacrifice addresses both the prejudice that somehow only Islam inspires martyrs, or shaheed, as well as the assumption that modernity has transcended the bloody history of martyrdom that marked Christendom in the “middle ages.” From organ donation to 9/11 memorials, Asad problematizes contemporary assumptions, sometimes assertions, of difference from others, whether Muslim suicide bombers or fundamentalist Christian militias.

This insertion into current conversations about martyrdom and memory in Islam leads to many questions about the history of Christianity. In what ways do historical and contemporary communities draw on the traditions of Christian sacrifice to memorialize their dead? How did practices associated with martyrs - relics, mausoleums, holydays, memorials, or martyrologies – help to justify the conquest and colonization of the Americas? What role might such idioms and rituals play in the making of peace and war?

This dissertation charts just one discourse of sacrifice by correlating colonial passion stories to these longer traditions of redemptive death. It also contributes to this discussion by suggesting that traditions of martyrdom helped missionaries, soldiers, and magistrates translate colonial violence into terms that helped justify the expansion of imperial borders and consolidate an imagined Christendom in the minds of audiences that received their letters, histories, maps, paintings, and reliquaries. It examines accounts of missionary death in northwestern New Spain from the last decades of the 16th century until the Jesuit expulsion in

1767. In addition to the deaths of specific missionaries at the hands of rebellious converts, it takes up the wider motif of martyrdom that permeated the entire evangelistic enterprise throughout the colonization and conversion of the northern frontier. In so doing, the dissertation focuses on the opening and closing of a specific missionary field, mainly the area of 9 northern New Spain known as the Pimeria Alta.14 Beyond being a study of the beliefs of the martyrs and their fellow missionaries or the uses to which their deaths are put, I theorize that martyrdoms are sites for competing interpretations of reality, which provide a window into warfare, the formation of communal memory, as well as the defining of cultural and political borders. More to the point, I suggest that the Jesuit martyrdoms had a symbiotic, though conflicted, relation to native religious practices, aggressive violence, spatial redistribution, and colonial politics. What should have been the ultimate sign of love, sacrifice, and passion in the

Christian tradition, not only emerged in the context of forceful cultural change, economic discipline, and political intervention, but all too often begot more suspicion, extirpation, and reduction.

Historians of Latin American missions have long challenged earlier works, which memorialized the sacrifices of heroic missionaries without engaging the troubling impact of their conquests, colonizations, and conversions on native communities or accounting for these very communities’ perspectives on the sometimes violent encounters. In the context of northern Mexico and the American Southwest, they have worked to overturn the dominant legacy of Herbert Bolton, the California historian who pioneered the field he called the “Spanish

Borderlands.” Bolton famously hailed Jesuit missionaries like Eusebio Kino as men who

14 The “Pimeria Alta” was the contemporary Spanish designation for the desert and mountainous region that now constitutes much of northern Sonora in Mexico and southern Arizona in the United States. Home to small settlements and “wandering peoples” known by the missionaries as Seris (Cunca’ac), Opatas (Tegüima), Pima Bajo (Nebomes), Eudeves, Papagos (Tohono O’odham), Sobaipuris, Yaquis (Yoeme), Yumas (Quechan), Cocopas, Maricopas, and Yavapais, in this period Jesuit missionaries to the Pimeria Alta largely focused on pacifying, settling, and converting the small settlements along the Altar, Magadalena, Asunción, San Miguel, and Santa Cruz river valleys, inhabited by Upper Pima (O’odham). For just two summaries of the varying trajectories of tribal nomenclature see Bernard L. Fontana, “Introduction,” in Jacobo Sedelmayr, Before Rebellion: Letters and Reports of Jacobo Sedelmayr, S. J., trans. Daniel S. Matson (Tucson: Arizona Historical Society, 1996), xxix – xxxi and Cynthia Radding, Wandering Peoples: Colonialism Ethnic Spaces, and Ecological Frontiers in Northwestern Mexico, 1700 – 1850 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), 21 – 25. 10 sacrificed themselves to bring Christianity and civilization to some of North America’s first frontiers.15 In tune with larger patterns in social, cultural, and post-colonial historiography, writers like David Sweet have urged fellow scholars to reject Bolton’s program, “remove the missionaries from the center stage,” and turn to the once obscured native actors they hoped to change.16 Ethnohistorians have laudably taken up Sweet’s challenge and mined missionary texts, colonial registers, archeological data, and modern ethnography to supply a scholarly account of Sonora’s “Wandering Peoples” and other “people without a history.”17 However, comparatively few have undertaken a study of the theological convictions and epistemic assumptions that framed the very accounts they hope to mine.18 While the goal of uncovering

15 For examples of Bolton’s wide influence see Herbert E. Bolton, The Spanish Borderlands: A Chronicle of Old Florida and the Southwest (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996), Herbert E. Bolton and John F. Bannon, Bolton and the Spanish Borderlands (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1964). For contemporary critiques of Bolton and his influence on the study of the “borderlands,” see Susan M. Deeds, Defiance and Deference in Mexico's Colonial North: Indians Under Spanish Rule in Nueva Vizcaya (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003), 3-15.; Robert H. Jackson, ed. New Views of Borderlands History (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1998), 1-20; Sweet, The Ibero-American Frontier in Native American History; Russell M. Magnaghi, Herbert E. Bolton and the Historiography of the Americas (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1998), 211; David J. Weber, "Turner, the Boltonians, and the Borderlands," The American Historical Review 91, no. 1 (1986), 66. 16 With this in mind, Sweet argues for a critical evaluation of missionary hagiographies, “We must reread their accounts more critically than has sometimes been done, with an eye primarily to what they have to say about the dimly viewed Indian ‘other’; and we must learn to distinguish their high ideals and aspirations, the inflated claims of their fundraising appeals, and the well-meaning instructions regularly sent by their superiors from what we can reconstruct of their actual practice.” Sweet and others urge extreme hermeneutical suspicion, ultimately dismissing the missionary documents as hopeless obstacles, which need to be surmounted in order to arrive at “authentic” accounts of what really happened. Sweet, "The Ibero-American Frontier in Native American History," 9 17 Deeds, Defiance and Deference in Mexico's Colonial North: Indians Under Spanish Rule in Nueva Vizcaya; Ramon A. Gutiérrez, When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality, and Power in New Mexico, 1500-1846 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991); Cythia Radding Murrieta, Wandering Peoples: Colonialism, Ethnic Spaces, and Ecological Frontiers in Northwestern Mexico, 1700-1850 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997); Thomas E. Sheridan, Empire of Sand: The Seri Indians and the Struggle for Spanish Sonora, 1645-1803 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1999). 18 For a remarkable exception, see the work of Daniel Reff, whose recent comparative history of Catholic ritual in early Christian growth and the early modern Jesuit missions Plagues, Priests, and Demons as well as his long introduction and extensive editorial notes for Pérez de Ribas’ History of the Triumphs have laid the foundation for many of this dissertation’s arguments. Daniel T. Reff, Plagues, Priests, and Demons: Sacred Narratives and the Rise of Christianity in the Old World and the New (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Andrés Pérez de Ribas, History of the Triumphs of our Holy Faith Amongst the most Barbarous and Fierce Peoples of the New World, 11 the native “other” by removing the missionary subject from the “stage” seems praiseworthy, it perpetuates an equally problematic rendering of the colonial situation. Because of the nature of the sources, as well as the colonial situation itself, the missionary cannot simply be “removed from the stage.” Colonist and colonized, evangelist and evangelized cannot be so easily extricated from each other.

I contend that Jesuit histories and maps of missionary martyrdoms hoped to locate their sacrifices in both Christian time and New World space. By remembering their fallen brothers and depicting their graphic deaths, writers and cartographers aligned their projects with an apostolic past and at the same time laid claim to an indigenous place. These stories also speak to an ongoing discussion in the Study of Religion regarding the way traditions mark the boundaries and borders of both space and time. Mircea Eliade was not the first scholar to bring sacred space and sacred time to the forefront as the key characteristic of the varied phenomena he calls religious, but he was the most prominent.19 In almost all of his work, but particularly in the three books that made his reputation - The Myth of the Eternal Return,

Patterns in Comparative Religion, and The Sacred and Profane - Eliade posited that religious beliefs and actions centered on key distinctions between the sacred and the profane in relation to boundaries of time and space. Specifically, he suggested that in order to live in the world, humans must “found” it by marking borders between sacred order and profane chaos. For if no boundaries were drawn, Eliade argued, “no world can come to birth in the chaos of the

ed. Daniel T. Reff, trans. Daniel Reff, Maureen Ahern, and Richard Danford (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1999). 19 Emile Durkheim argued for a similar dualism between sacred and profane forms to distinguish between religion and secularity, but he had less interest than Eliade in spatial and temporal markers and more focus on social and communal practices. 12 homogeneity and relativity of profane space.”20 A decade later, the sociologist Peter Berger reformulated a similar idea, describing religion as a project in “world-construction” and “world- maintenance,” where “man must make a world for himself,” out of the raw material of biology, space, and time.21 More recently, Jonathan Z. Smith has challenged Eliade’s picture of religious temporality and territoriality, arguing that Eliade’s depiction of the sacred and profane presents an imperial, “locative” map of the cosmos, where space is static, marked by the boundaries between center and periphery and time is punctuated by highly structured ritual repetitions of an original event (illo tempore). In contrast, Smith proposed the existence of an alternate map of the cosmos that is “utopian,” characterized by chaos, reversal, liminal experience, rebellion, and flight to new worlds and new creations. In his essay “Map is Not Territory,” Smith reversed

Eliade’s preoccupation with literal sacred spaces to argue that humans map their own worlds through social and cosmological construction. Likewise in his later work on ritual theory, Smith goes on to contend that “human beings are not placed, but bring place into being,” making places sacred through cosmological mapping practices like rituals.22

Though missionary deaths happened for a variety of reasons, I believe martyrologies and accompanying rituals of remembrance (recovering the body, collecting of relics, artistic representations) helped missionaries use potentially ruinous moments to “bring place into

20 Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, trans. Willaim Trask (San Diego: Harcourt, 1959), 22. 21 Peter Berger, The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (New York: Anchor Books, 1967), 5. 22 Smith’s description of the two maps are not meant to be dualist or exclusive, but rather illustrative of the way previous theories of religion (themselves maps) had depicted “primitives” as extraordinary, exotic religious beings that were somehow different than modern man because they replicated primal myths in ritual and space (Noble Savage) or rejected it through rebellions, messianism, and liminal experiences (Wild Man). According to Smith, both maps deplete natives of their humanity, assuming that they are wholly other than us by their very lack of situatedness. That is, their fidelity to original myths and inability to negotiate, adapt, and apply such maps to particular situations made them uniquely “religious,” and thereby not modern. Jonathan Z. Smith, Map is Not Territory (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1993), 88 – 94. 13 being.” More specifically, they brought a Christian place into being by transforming native spaces in the Americas into parts of Christendom through their sacrificial deaths. Iberian

Christians believed that Native Americans needed several elements to become both civilized and Christian, including law, cities, literacy, and religion. Part of the argument advanced here is that martyrologies, relics, and visual depictions of death acted as “ceremonies of possession” that mapped undifferentiated indigenous spaces into the historical imagination of

Christendom.23 The term “ceremony of possession” used here intentionally refers to the various practices and rituals that supplemented European physical conquests of the Americas. As described by Patricia Seed, colonial regimes employed these“ceremonies” in multiple configurations, including maps, dances, parades, ritual submission, and even gardens.24

Practices of rememberance associated with martyrdom like relic collecting, mapmaking, paintings, letters, and histories acted as rituals of conquest. They purchased Jesuit presence in and possession of native landscapes as their broken bodies and spilled blood sacralized the space and purchased their place in Christian imagination. In addition, discursive accounts of missionary passions helped missionaries transform potentially “utopian” moments into more

“locative” cosmological maps that made sense to imperial audiences. However, explanations of missionary deaths were not mere rhetorical or ritual exercises, but rather served the crucial role of determining the success or failure of a particular mission. Chapter Three charts one example of this process by interpreting the literal maps of Eusebio Kino and Manuel Venegas

23 For a similar assessment of the way in which colonial Jesuits produced Christian place for European audiences, see Jonathan Boyarin, The Unconverted Self: Jews, Indians, and the Identity of Christian Europe (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2009), 58; Ivonne del Valle, Escribiendo Desde Los Márgenes: Colonialismo y Jesuitas En El Siglo XVIII (México, D.F.: Siglo XXI Editores, 2009), 157f. 24 Patricia Seed, Ceremonies of Possession in Europe's Conquest of the New World, 1492-1640 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 14 that imbedded scenes of martyrdom into panoptic depictions of the landscapes of northern

New Spain. For the missionaries, such maps were territory. If their fellow evangelists’ deaths were interpreted negatively – or worse, totally forgotten – their larger enterprise might come to its own tragic end. On the other hand, if sense could be made out of the events, superiors might find new motives to support evangelization and fund further exploration.

Method and Sources

The missionaries’ own interpretations of the deaths were not the sole occasion for the cycles of violence, nor are they the only sources for this dissertation. Rather, the Jesuits

(themselves quite diverse) were one group amongst many in a colonial situation replete with competing interests. Soldiers, settlers, and magistrates all had a stake in the rise and fall of the missions, as did the various evangelists. Not all of these groups left the same sort of sources as the Jesuits, who to keept superiors consistently updated and provide contemporary scholars with diaries, letters, sermons, ledgers, histories, maps, as well as cultural and geographic surveys. However, many of the soldiers involved in investigating and punishing rebels did leave their own interpretations of missionary death for posterity.25 In addition, after native rebellions civil magistrates and religious superiors investigated the causes, results, and responses to rebellions. Inquisition records, civil trials, regal decisions, and commands from Jesuit rectors, visitors, provincials, and generals reflect secondary, but often crucial, perspectives. This dissertation relies on microfilm and archival work done at the Office of Ethnohistorical Research

25 Many of the diverse and lengthy documents compiled and preserved by the military leader who traveled with Eusebio can be found in Juan Mateo Manje, Kino and Manje, Explorers of Sonora and Arizona: Their Vision of the Future. A Study of their Expeditions and Plans with an Appendix of Thirty Documents, ed. and trans. Ernest J. Burrus, Sources and Studies for the History of the Americas, vol. 10 (St. Louis: Jesuit Historical Institute, 1971). See also Juan Mateo Manje, Unknown Arizona and Sonora, 1693-1721: From the Francisco Fernández del Castillo Version of Luz de tierra incógnita, trans. Francisco Fernández del Castillo and Harry J. Karns (Tucson: Arizona Silhouettes, 1954). 15 of the Arizona State Museum (OER) and the Arizona Historical Society (AHS) in Tucson, Arizona; the Arizona Historical Foundation Collection, Map Collection, and Chicano Research Collection housed in Hayden Library of Arizona State University in Tempe (ASUH); the Huntington Library in Pasadena, California (HL); the Bancroft Library at the University of California at Berkeley

(UCB); the Nettie Lee Benson Library of the University of Texas at Austin (UTB); as well as the

Biblioteca Nacional de Mexico (BN) and Archivo General de la Nación (AGN) in Mexico City. Due to the substantial institutional and regional interest in the earliest evangelists and explorers of the southwest, an enormous quantity of this material has been published, annotated, and sometimes translated. Some of these published editions are of extremely high quality and have been relied upon extensively.26

As is the case with so many other colonial contexts, the sources for indigenous perspectives are nowhere near as plentiful. In fact, with few exceptions virtually no surviving documents provide direct Indian explanations of the causes, principal events, and results of

26 For example most of the relevant sources located in Jesuit archives in Rome, St. Louis, and Tucson were edited, translated, and published by Father Ernest Burrus, S. J. over his long and incredible career. El Noroeste De México: Documentos Sobre Las Misiones Jesuíticas, 1600-1769, ed. Ernest J. Burrus and Felix Zubillaga (México, D. F.: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México Instituto de Investigaciones Históricas, 1986); Jesuit Relations: Baja California, 1716-1762, ed. Ernest J. Burrus (Los Angeles: Dawson's Book Shop, 1984); Misiones Mexicanas De La Compañía De Jesús, 1618-1745: Cartas e Informes Conservados En La "Colección Mateu", ed. E. J. Burrus and F. Zubillaga, Vol. 41 (Madrid: J. Porrúa Turanzas, 1982); Juan Mateo Manje, Kino and Manje, Explorers of Sonora and Arizona: Their Vision of the Future. A Study of their Expeditions and Plans with an Appendix of Thirty Documents, ed. Ernest J. Burrus, Vol. 10 (St. Louis: Jesuit Historical Institute, 1971); Ernest J. Burrus, "Mexican Historical Documents in the Central Jesuit Archives," Manuscripta: A Journal for Manuscript Research 12, no. 3 (November, 1968, 1968); Ernest J. Burrus, ed. La Obra Cartográfica De La Provincia Mexicana De La Compañía De Jesús, 1567- 1967 (Madrid: Ediciones José Porrúa Turanzas, 1967); Benno F. Ducrue, Ducrue's Account of the Expulsion of the Jesuits from Lower California (1767-1769): An Annotated English Translation of Benno Ducrue's Relatio Expulsionis, ed. Ernest J. Burrus, Vol. 2 (St. Louis: Jesuit Historical Institute, 1967); Kino and the Cartography of Northwestern New Spain, ed. Ernest J. Burrus (Tucson: Arizona Pioneers' Historical Society, 1965); Eusebio Francisco Kino and Aveiro,Duchess Maria de Guadalupe de, Kino Writes to the Duchess: Letters of Eusebio Francisco Kino, S.J., to the Duchess of Aveiro, an Annotated English Translation, and the Text of the Non-Spanish Documents, ed. Ernest J. Burrus (St. Louis: Jesuit Historical Institute, 1965); Eusebio Francisco Kino, Correspondencia Del P. Kino Con Los Generales De La Companía De Jesús, 1682-1707, ed. Ernest J. Burrus, Vol. 5 (México: Editorial Jus, 1961); Ernest J. Burrus, Francisco Javier Alegre: Historian of the Jesuits in New Spain,1729-1788 (Roma: Institutum Historicum S.I, 1953), 440-509. 16 their rebellions, let alone specific missionary death. The narratives that do survive are inevitably filtered through the lenses of Spanish speaking translators, scribes, functionaries, soldiers, and missionaries with their own conscious and unconscious purposes. Such documents can be read critically for what they reveal about native cultures, actions, sentiments and intentions with some success. For instance, because of Indian success in destroying much of the colonial apparatus during the 1680 Pueblo Revolt, surviving sources on 17th century New Mexico are relatively scarce. However, records from Inquisition trials (which were sent to metropolitan centers like Mexico City, Madrid, and Rome) provide some invaluable insights into the conflicts between various Pueblos, missionaries, and governors in the decades leading up to the rebellion. Ramon Gutierrez, John Kessel, and Andrew Knaut have used Inquisitorial testimonies to gain some echoes of the voices of the indigenous actors, which may otherwise be lost altogether.27 Similarly, post-rebellion investigations, trials, and sentences carried out by secular authorities and soldiers often supply testimonies from both friendly Indians and captive rebels that show both independent confirmations of and surprising discrepancies from the narratives and interpretations of priests. Of course all such reading requires a critical eye for the overall contexts, limitations, and purposes of both those who produced such material and those who read and collected them. However, ethnohistorians like Daniel Reff, Susan Deeds, and Cynthia

Radding have demonstrated the remarkable details about native communities that can be gleaned from Jesuit, secular, and civil sources, both through direct and indirect revelations. Not only is their hard work reconstructing the history of these “people without a history” a key foundation for my own work, but methodologically they provide a model of the “reading

27 David J. Weber, ed. What Caused the Pueblo Revolt of 1680? (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 1999), 132. 17 between the lines” that will be a critical means of uncovering Indian perspectives on the making of memory, war, and martyrs in this project.

Chapter Outlines

Chapter 1 Conquests Abundant in Spiritual Fruit

From the earliest years of the mission, Jesuit writers employed agricultural metaphors to argue for the eventual fruitfulness of both native and missionary suffering. Though not the first to invoke these metaphors, the Jesuit missionary, historian, and Provincial Andrés Pérez de

Ribas did so most explicitly in his History of the Triumphs of our Holy Faith Amongst the Most

Barbarous and Fierce People of the New World, a work that became the paradigm for future interpretations of missionary death. His use of these images had a long genealogy in the history of Christianity, with antecedents in patristic sources like Tertullian and Ignatius of Antioch as well as the synoptic Gospels. These symbols found particular resonance in the context of a difficult evangelization in a land that missionaries pictured as “savage.” Soil, seeds, water, plants, fruit, vineyards, and harvests variously captured the stages of investment and return through which the missionaries came to understand the redemptive mystery of missionary trials and convert tribulations. Hard work and sacrifice reclaimed and then tilled the soil of indigenous communities, long dominated by a diabolic master. Longsuffering preaching - even when it entailed sickness, exhaustion and death- sowed the seed and planted Christianity in native hearts. Missionaries watered these seedlings with the sweat, tears, and blood of many daily and more dramatic sacrifices. Indian loyalty and cases of edification, especially in the midst of suffering, testified to their ripeness as fruit. Taken together, Jesuits imagined their missions as fields and vineyards that would one day teem with a bounty of indigenous 18

Christians. At the same time, oppositions, idolatries, vices, and resistance were rocks, weeds, thorns, and thistles that threatened the growth of these Christianities. As such, indigenous traditions had to be uprooted; while vices must be pruned away. Ultimately, harvests of conversions depended on the uprooting of superstitions, sacrificial work, and substantial suffering. However, the logic of the agricultural metaphor held out the promise of eventual harvests of Christianity. Physical reduction, political loyalty, and diligent labor joined spiritual conversion as potential benefits of sacrificial seeding. Even when immediate conversion, stability, or peace were lacking, suffering itself could become its own commodity as it evidenced the spiritual maturity of both missionaries and converts.

Chapter 2 A Redemptive Economy: Relics and Reduction between Monte and Misión

Martyrdom not only served as a site for competing interpretations of reality, but also incarnated real conflict latent in colonial situations. This chapter tracks one source of conflict in the competing traditions of the holy dead as held by missionaries and indigenous communities.

Taking examples from Sinaloa, Durango, and Sonora, it tracks the ironic convergences and inevitable conflicts between native and European treatments of death and dead bodies. In recent years scholars have studied extirpation campaigns in the Andes, the Yucatan, and central

Mexico in an attempt to evaluate the success of Iberian evangelization.28 They have not, however, tracked the cycles of violence that spun out of such attempts when zealous missionaries were murdered for their intrusions. Nor have many connected missionary views of native practices to longer conversations in the history of Christianity about conversion,

28 Inga Clendinnen, Ambivalent Conquests: Maya and Spaniard in Yucatan, 1517-1570, 2nd ed., Cambridge Latin American Studies; 61 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), Kenneth Mills, Idolatry and Its Enemies: Colonial Andean Religion and Extirpation, 1640-1750 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997). 19 persistent idolatry, and the cult of the saints.29 Yet, Europeans and Indians actually shared similar concern to recover and revere the body parts of their deceased. European missionaries were connected to longer histories in Christianity and wider “martyrdom economies” that prized the collection of relics as tokens of divine presence. Native communities of northern

New Spain also valued body parts as powerful, sometimes as ancestral bone bundles and other times as war trophies. Occasionally this led to shared veneration of Jesuit missionary martyrs.

But, it could also lead to vicious “idolatry” extirpation campaigns that targeted indigenous relics and led to further rebellions.

Chapter 3 In Odium Fidei: Hagiography and Hatred of the Faith

This chapter charts a transition in martyrological discourse from the hagiographic typologies that characterized earlier histories of the 16th and 17th centuries to more practically oriented reports of the 18th century, in which passion stories had little place or pathos. In contrast to these two extremes, Eusebio Kino’s Innocent, Apostolic, and Glorious Death of the

Venerable Father Francisco Javier Saeta, S. J. mixed trust in the redemptive role of martyrdom with realistic assessments of Spanish mistakes and missiological prescriptions for avoiding future conflict. The Pima Revolt of 1695 and the murder of the young Father Javier Saeta necessitated this martyrology. Due to the missionary’s death and the ensuing uprising that led to burned missions and the death of O’odham converts, the pioneer missionary was called to give an account by superiors. In response, he presented his case for the ongoing validity of the mission in a multivalent report that mixed typology, historical citation, and earnest reports

29 One exception would be the work of Sabine MacCormack. See Sabine MacCormack, On the Wings of Time: Rome, the Incas, Spain, and Peru (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006); Sabine MacCormack, Religion in the Andes: Vision and Imagination in Early Colonial Peru (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991). 20 about colonial abuses. Like Pérez de Ribas and other Jesuit missionaries before him, he argued that the death of his companion should not be taken as a defeat, but rather a victory. The gift of martyrdom was a sure sign of the devil’s anger about their progress in the conversion of the

Pima. In so doing he affirmed that Saeta’s death met the martyrological requirement of dying in odium fidei, or in hatred of the faith. At the same time, such an admission naturally undermined his belief that his Pima converts were loyal and ultimately model Christians. When read as martyrdom, Saeta’s death presented a practical problem as it suggested that the O’odham had rejected Kino’s mission. Kino bridged this gap by arguing that like Saeta, the O’odham were persecuted innocents, victims of a diabolic enemy as well as colonial violence.

Chapter 4: Bloodless Martyrs: Missionary Vocation as White Martyrdom

In response to the 1695 murder of missionary Javier Saeta, Diego de Almonazír wrote a circular letter to New Spain’s northwestern missions. The Jesuit Provincial acknowledged that the Fathers longed “with a thousand desires” to join their holy companion in death. However, he urged the remaining missionaries to the Upper Pima to “prolong their bloodless martyrdom by continually risking their lives and by clinging tenaciously to the ministry despite brute obstinacy.” The founder of the mission, Father Eusebio Kino, relished the commission. Quoting it throughout his account of Saeta’s life and death, Kino argued that their bloodless martyrdom was the tougher lot, as it was “more laborious, hard, painful, and prolonged,” than a quick death by arrows, fire, or sword. Perhaps Saeta’s blood sowed the seed, but their sweat and tears watered the plants and brought forth final spiritual fruit. Both before and after Kino, the prolonged or “white” martyrdom of daily suffering became a consistent theme for the Society’s evangelists from the 16th century until their expulsion in the 18th century. From the earliest 21 attempts in Florida until the last days in Baja California, they insisted that their work in New

Spain constituted a martyrdom of exile and exasperation. It meant dying to their previous identities in Europe, severing ties with family and friends, and leaving behind all they had known, only to suffer daily indignities and severe deprivations. Drawing on the medieval traditions of imitatio Christi as well as Ignatius’ Spiritual Exercises, this sublimated ideal of mission as martyrdom constituted a core missionary identity that informed every aspect of their life and work.

Chapter 5 The Chalice of Suffering: Martyrdom in the Expulsion OF 1776

In July of 1767 the Governor of Sonora, Juan Claudio Pineda, opened a sealed envelope that contained a decree from the Spanish crown ordering the expulsion of all Jesuit missionaries from New Spain. Pineda was told to gather all 31 Sonoran Jesuits, transport them to the coast, and guard them until arrangements could be made for them to be sent back to their respective countries. Once collected, he confined them under close guard for 9 months in a makeshift hut in the port of Guaymas, where 20 colleagues from Sinaloa joined them.

Experiencing hunger, sickness, and cramped conditions, the 51 suffered greatly. Months later almost 30 California missionaries followed. The 20th century French Jesuit historian Gerard

Decorme featured these exiled missionaries as the final victims in his History of the Martyrs of

Mexico.30 And he worked in a tradition that went back to the exiles’ memoirs. Expulsion histories painted tearful scenes of familial separation; Jesuit fathers ripped away from spiritual

30 The French Jesuit Gerard Decorme, like Bolton, sought to recover the colonial Jesuit martyrs for his own purposes in the first half of the 20th century. Publishing primarily in Spanish, Decorme resurrected the memory of his Jesuit ancestors for Mexican audiences in the midst of fierce battles over Church and State. Gerard Decorme, La Obra De Los Jesuítas Mexicanos Durante La Época Colonial, 1572-1767 (México: Antigua librería Robredo de J. Porrúa e hijos, 1941); Gerard Decorme, Mártires Jesuitas De La Provincia De México (Guadalajara: E. Acevez, 1957). 22

“children.” This chapter takes up the curious case of expulsion as a reversal of the “prolonged martyrdom” of the American mission. Now, instead of severing themselves from the comforts of Europe for exile in Mexico, Jesuits parted from their adopted homes and “children.”

Martyrological discourse helped them reconstitute missionary identity in exile, whether as grieving fathers or worried shepherds. It also bridged the expanse that separated them from new world converts, if only in their own imaginations and memories.

Epilogue Resurrecting Kino: Recovering, Remembering, and Reimagining Jesuit Sanctity

The past is never completely past; so believed the historians, anthropologists, archeologists, and religious devotees who searched for the body of Francisco Eusebio Kino throughout the 20th century. Beginning with Bolton’s publication of Kino’s Memoirs of the

Pimeria Alta, numerous scholars began to speculate about the whereabouts of the missionary’s remains.31 After numerous failures, an inter-disciplinary team from Arizona, Sonora, and

Mexico City located Kino’s grave and disinterred his remains. Over the next five years, the city of Magdalena rearranged its entire central plaza to proudly display the body of the missionary who brought Christianity and civilization to their region. Along with the federal and state governments, the newly christened town “Magdalena de Kino” funded and supported the leveling of private homes, removal of public buildings, and creation of neo-colonial portals to surround a large equestrian statue beside a mausoleum housing Kino’s body at the center of the city. The search to recover and display Kino’s body as well as the movement to memorialize

31 Eusebio Francisco Kino, Kino's Historical Memoir of Pimería Alta: A Contemporary Account of the Beginnings of California, Sonora, and Arizona, ed. Herbert Eugene Bolton, trans. Herbert Eugene Bolton (New York: AMS Press, 1976). 23 him with statues in Sonora, Arizona, and Washington, D. C. beg the question of whether the

Jesuit martyrdom motif still remained over two centuries after their expulsion from the borderlands. The epilogue takes up the peculiar civil embrace of sacred forms of memorial that characterized the campaign to make Kino a sort of secular saint throughout the 1960s.

1 CONQUESTS ABUNDANT IN SPIRITUAL FRUIT

Introduction: Agricultural Metaphor

From the earliest years of the mission, Jesuit writers employed agricultural metaphors to argue for the eventual fruitfulness of both native and missionary suffering. The use of these images has a long genealogy in the history of Christianity, but found particular resonance in the context of a difficult evangelization. Soil, seeds, water, plants, fruit, vineyards, and harvests variously pictured the stages of investment and return through which they came to understand the way in which missionary trials and convert tribulations produced conversion. Hard work and sacrifice reclaimed and then tilled the soil of indigenous communities, long dominated by a diabolic master. Longsuffering preaching - even when it entailed sickness, exhaustion and death- sowed the seed and planted Christianity in native hearts. Missionaries watered these seedlings with the sweat, tears, and blood of many daily and more dramatic sacrifices. And,

Indian loyalty and cases of edification, especially in the midst of suffering, testified to their ripeness as fruit. Taken together, Jesuits imagined their missions as fields and vineyards that would one day teem with a bounty of indigenous Christians.

At the same time, oppositions, idolatries, vices, and resistance were rocks, weeds, thorns, and thistles that threatened the growth of these Christianities. As such, indigenous traditions - like the preservation of body parts, participation in ritual dances, or seeking of shamanic interventions - had to be uprooted; while vices like drunkenness, laziness, or sexual liberty must be pruned away. Ultimately, harvests of converted Indians depended on the uprooting of superstitions, sacrificial work, and substantial suffering. Still, the logic of the 25 agricultural metaphor held out the promise of eventual harvests of Christianity at the end of these exertions. To make sense of colonial violence, Jesuit writers used these images to link tales of sacrifice to an apostolic and patristic past through typological parallels, concurrences that vindicated their momentary victimization by displaying the predestined pattern of victory.

Apostles, early Christian Fathers, and medieval saints had all advanced the cause of the church through their willing deaths. They had spread the seed faithfully and, despite hindrances, seen it bear fruit one hundred fold. So too, early modern missionaries in colonial peripheries would extend the kingdom of God through their passions. Physical reduction, political loyalty, and diligent labor joined spiritual conversion as potential benefits of sacrificial seeding.

Seed of Christians

Agrarian symbols drawn from early Christian writers helped explain this enigmatic idea of growth through death. Gospel writers, for instance, had used such images to explain growth through pain in the first two Christian centuries. Jesus reportedly told his disciples in the Gospel of John, “Unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds.”32 In the words of their founder and savior, early Christians encountered an explanation for their seeming failures. While the crucifixion appeared to be an end, it was in fact the beginning of much new life. Certainly this notion had roots in Jewish and

Greek notions of sacrifice. However, early Christians began to develop a particularly strong sacrificial identity.33 What was the cross if not the expression of the belief that Jesus’ death brought new life? Likewise, the disciples’ pain would have meaning in its power to multiply. By

32 John 12:24, The Holy Bible: New International Version (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1984). 33 Perkins, The Suffering Self: Pain and Narrative Representation in the Early Christian Era; Castelli, Martyrdom and Memory: Early Christian Culture Making; Young, In Procession before the World: Martyrdom as Public Liturgy in Early Christianity; Boyarin, Dying for God: Martyrdom and the Making of Christianity and Judaism, 247 26 the second century, the idea that Christian suffering and death actually grew the church by seeding conversion had become a prominent way of understanding intermittent persecution.34

While perhaps less radical than Tertullian, many early Christians agreed with the North African bishop that, “The blood of Christians is the seed of the Church.”35 Blake Leyerle has argued that for Tertullian and other early Christians who employed the metaphor, the idea of blood sacrifice encompassed a whole semantic range of ideas drawing on Jewish, Latin, and African notions of control, ethnic solidarity, and gendered power. But, most prominently, the symbol of the seed drew directly on widespread fertility cults that relied on correspondences between bodies to seed and blood to water.36 Christians applied these ritual sensibilities to their own persecution at the hands of Rome and thus transformed the meaning of their suffering.

As much as these earlier traditions explained the persecution of Christians at the hands of the Roman Empire, their immediate applicability to early modern Catholic missionaries is more complicated. Since Jesuits, Franciscans, and other religious orders actually engaged in the aggressive pacification of imperial frontiers, they had a less clear claim on the persecuted identity. This did not stop them from using the image, however. In fact, in his comparative study of early modern Jesuit evangelism, Luke Clossey has argued that the language of crops,

34 W. H. C. Frend, Martyrdom and Persecution in the Early Church: A Study of a Conflict from the Maccabees to Donatus (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1981). 35 “The oftener we are mown down by you, the more in number we grow; the blood of Christians is seed.” Tertullian, Apolegetica, 50.12-13, Alexander Roberts, James Donaldson, and A. Cleveland Coxe, Ante-Nicene Fathers: The Writings of the Fathers Down to A.D. 325 (Peabody: Hendrickson, 1995), Vol.3, 150. The Latin reads as follows, “12] Sed hoc agite, boni praesides, meliores multo apud populum si illis Christianos immolaveritis, cruciate, torquete, damnate, atterite nos: probatio est enim innocentiae nostrae iniquitas vestra. Ideo nos haec pati deus patitur. Nam et proxime ad lenonem damnando Christianam potius quam ad leonem confessi estis labem pudicitiae apud nos atrociorem omni poena et omni morte reputari. [13] Nec quicquam tamen proficit exquisitior quaeque crudelitas vestra; inlecebra est magis sectae. Plures efficimur quotiens metimur a vobis; semen est sanguis Christianorum.”http://www.tertullian.org/latin/apologeticus.htm (accessed on March 3rd, 2008). 36Blake Leyerle, "Blood is Seed," The Journal of Religion 81, no. 1 (Jan., 2001), 46-47; Joyce E. Salisbury, The Blood of Martyrs: Unintended Consequences of Ancient Violence (New York: Routledge, 2004), 44-49. 27 harvesting, and fruits constituted the most frequent images employed by Jesuits to talk about their converts’ souls.37 In the case of New Spain, the metaphor had an assuaging influence. As they wrestled with their own consciences and the questions of superiors about their role in often bloody missions, it provided an essential rationalization of their setbacks. They embraced the logic of the agricultural metaphor as a way to make sense of not only their personal sacrifices, but also the sorrows of the native communities with whom they worked. The natives of Sinaloa, Sonora, and Baja California who died from epidemic disease, coercive labor, internecine warfare, and colonial reprisal became the seed of their community’s own conversion. Likewise, rebellions and ensuing martyrdoms were not a rejection of the missionary or colonial project; rather they provided the blood that watered the soil in which indigenous

Christianities could flourish.

Abundant Fruit

Father Andres Pérez de Ribas’ 1645 History of the Triumphs of Holy Faith Amongst the

Most Barbarous and Fierce Peoples of the New World presented Jesuit and native deaths as the seed of Mexican Christianity.38 In explicit and elaborate detail, he wedded missionary labors

37 Luke Clossey, Salvation and Globalization in the Early Jesuit Missions (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 225. 38 Pérez de Ribas was a missionary, historian, and Jesuit Provincial in New Spain, giving him multiple perspectives on the early history of the missions from 1594 to the 1640s. He published the Historia de los Triumphos in Madrid in 1645. There are two modern editions cited throughout this chapter. The first is a facsimile edition of the original, published in Mexico in 1992 and the second an excellent translation in English, with introduction and annotation by Daniel Reff, Maureen Ahern, and Richard Danford. Although the original manuscript and facsimile have been consulted and compared, this modern English translation forms the foundation of most quotations, with exceptions noted in the footnotes. Andrés Pérez de Ribas, Historia De Los Triumphos De Nuestra Santa Fee Entre Gentes Las Mas Barbaras, y Fieras Del Nueuo Orbe: Conseguidos Por Los Soldados De La Milicia De La Compañia De Iesus En Las Missiones De La Prouincia De Nueua-España: Refierense Assimismo Las Costumbres, Ritos, y Supersticiones Que Vsauan Estas Gentes, Sus Puestos, y Temples, Las Vitorias Que De Algunas Dellas Alcançaron Con Las Armas Los Catolicos Españoles, Quando Les Obligaron à Tomarlas, y Las Dichosas Muertes De Veinte Religiosos De La Compañia, Que En Varios Puestos, y a Manos De Varias Naciones, Dieron Sus Vidas Por La Predicacion Del Santo Euangelio ..., ed. Alonso de Paredes (Madrid: Alonso de Paredes, junto a los estudios de la 28 with convert losses to prove that the older Christian logic of sacrifice could explain the eventual success of colonial evangelistic enterprises, even in the face of severe setbacks. Throughout the

764 page opus, the Provincial of New Spain featured the travail of both Indians and Europeans as the necessary seed for spiritual harvests. This interpretation became the paradigm for

Eusebio Kino’s Favores Celestiales, José Neumann’s Historia de las rebeliones en la Sierra

Tarahumara, Francisco Javier Alegre’s Historia de la Compañia de Jesus en Nueva España and most other histories of the Jesuit mission in New Spain.39 In one of his most explicit summaries of his overall goal in writing his history, Pérez de Ribas explained the role of “spiritual fruit” in his work,

The Principal intention of the manifesto…has been to make known how thoroughly evangelical preaching has accomplished its goal among these people, no matter how fierce and barbarous they might be. The goal is to show that these conquests are just as successful and abundant in spiritual fruit as those carried out in those nations of the world that are of greater renown and more illustrious and noble.40

For him, the themes of success and spiritual fruit would shine through all situations. But this was often difficult, as he recounted rebellions, sickness, opposition, and death, and he feared

Compañia, 1645); Pérez de Ribas, History of the Triumphs of our Holy Faith Amongst the most Barbarous and Fierce Peoples of the New World, 761; Andrés Pérez de Ribas , Historia De Los Triumphos De Nuestra Santa Fee, ed. Ignacio Guzmán Betancourt, edicion facsimilar ed. (México, DF: Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 1992). On Pérez de Ribas’ life and the process of his writing, see Reff’s “Introduction” in Pérez de Ribas, History of the Triumphs of our Holy Faith Amongst the most Barbarous and Fierce Peoples of the New World, 11-46; Maureen Ahern, "Visual and Verbal Sites: The Construction of Jesuit Martyrdom in Northwest New Spain in Andres Perez De Ribas' Historia De Los Triumphos De Nuestra Santa Fe (1645)," Colonial Latin American Review 8, no. 1 (June, 1999), 7-33; Peter Masten Dunne, Andrés Pérez De Ribas, Pioneer Black Robe of the West Coast, Administrator, Historian, Vol. 25 (N.Y.,: United States Catholic Historical Society, 1951), 175. 39 Francisco Javier Alegre and Carlos María de Bustamante, Historia De La Compañía De Jesús En Nueva España, Que Estaba Escribiendo El p. Francisco Javier Alegre Al Tiempo De Su Expulsión (México: Impr. de J. M. Lara, 1841), 229 - 235; Kino, Kino's Historical Memoir of Pimería Alta: A Contemporary Account of the Beginnings of California, Sonora, and Arizona, 87, 223; Joseph Neumann, Historia De Las Sublevaciones Indias En La Tarahumara, ed. Bohumír Roedl and Simona Binková, Vol. 6 (Praga: Universidad Carolina, 1994), 70. 40Pérez de Ribas, History of the Triumphs, 461 29 that potential recruits would balk at working with such “savages.” So, he had to convince them that their own potential sacrifices would be worth the cost.

Like many other Jesuit missionaries, Pérez de Ribas’ writing shows a certain inferiority complex about the missions in northern New Spain, as they took place with “barbarous peoples,” that could not compare to classical, European, or even Asian cultures in their attainment to “civilization.” Part of the goal of his work was to convince young Jesuits that an evangelistic vocation in the Americas could measure up to the satisfaction of educational posts in Europe or more renowned missionary fields in Asia.41 As such, he had to explain to potential recruits why working with “savages,” might merit equal consideration to nations that Jesuits and other Europeans already considered to rank as more “civilized” like China, Japan, and India.

Against what these audiences might think, the Provincial of New Spain argued that the comparative “barbarity” of his missions by no means diminished their glory. On the contrary the difficulty of the task, the thorns of native resistance and weeds of their “superstitions” only increased the splendor of this evangelistic enterprise, as fruit grown from difficult soil made its gardeners all the more worthy. Even as conditions were more difficult in the Americas than in

Europe, Asia, or the Ancient world, Jesuit missionaries could reap equally bountiful crops

Therefore, his History was ultimately a comparative work; one that worked under the assumption that readers had deep familiarity with both ancient and contemporary examples of missionary success.42 In describing the grounds for optimism in New Spain, Pérez de Ribas demonstrated parallels to biblical and medieval examples, explaining that all evangelistic work

41Ibid., 64 42 Reff nicely outlines the biblical and hagiographic contexts that informed both the Jesuit historian and his readers in his introduction to the modern English edition. Reff, “Critical Introduction,” Ibid., 19 - 23 30 required costs. As confirmation to doubters, he pointed to stories of resistance which were followed by fruit in the New Testament. For example, even “the Apostle to the Gentiles, Saint

Paul” had endured “great hardships and dangers for the salvation of souls,” risking all to beget spiritual progeny.43 To be sure, some highly civilized Greeks like Dionysius the Areopogite, immediately converted and became “very precious fruit,” but many other elites mocked his preaching and resisted the seed of the Gospel. From the Pauline example, the Jesuit drew two points of “special solace for the ministers who labor in these nations,” one about perspective and the other about potential.

He also referred to obstacles in hagiographies like the Golden Legend, which had become common Jesuit reading by the time of Father Pedro de Ribadeneyra’s 1601 edition of the Flos Sanctorum, or Flower of the Saints.44 The lessons he drew from the medieval lives of the saints were multiple. First, he argued that missionaries should not worry about their present lack of success, for “the fruit of the salvation of these souls should not be measured only in terms of the present harvest.” Rather, missionaries should regard resistance as simply tough soil, some of which would only yield after insistent toiling. The particular difficulty of working with “barbarous people” was not the root cause of their lack of productivity, for, “even in populous, civilized, and wise nations this fruit seems limited.” Instead, success was simply a matter of time. In another example more close to home, James (Santiago), the martyr and patron saint of Spain had deposited the seed of the gospel in their homeland, but saw few conversions in his own time. And yet, the small seed of his preaching and the water of his

43 In proof of the connection between hardship and salvation, he cited 2 Timothy 2:10, and in reference to “betting in Jesus Christ,” he quoted 1 Corinthians 4:15. In so doing, he mixed metaphors of productivity, alternating between the familial and botanical images, picturing converts as both fruit and “children and descendants” Ibid., 461 44 Ibid., 244, n.52 31 heroic death had yielded thousands of harvests for, “hundreds of years in both the old and new

Spains and throughout the entire New World.” For his faithfulness the proto-martyr and patron saint had been crowned in heaven “with the heroic fruit harvested by Spanish Catholics,” and thereby had obtained eternal glory as the first sower of gospel seed.45 As the examples of Paul and James illustrated, evangelists had to take a long-term view when looking for the fruit of their labors, trusting in both typological patterns as well as in the celestial gardener who superintended the growth.

Second, Pérez de Ribas reminded them that Jesus, Paul, and James did not wait for perfect conditions for preaching, but started boldly and let the seed fall where it may. To illustrate the point, the Jesuit Provincial reminded his readers of the Parable of the Sower, which Jesus had shared with the apostles as an encouragement toward persistent evangelism.

The lesson of the parable seemed clear. Some seed might be trampled, some devoured by wild animals, some fall amongst rocks, and other kernels might be choked out by weeds.

Nevertheless, if the sowers kept at it, the right germs would eventually find good soil and yield a crop up to a hundredfold.46 Likewise, Paul had written to the Corinthians that the wise of the world may see his teaching as foolish, but that God had chosen the weak to shame the strong.47

Pérez de Ribas saw this as descriptive of the Mexican mission, as it may appear foolish, but could be used to shame the wise. Paul’s later example of this maxim as recorded by Luke in Acts of the Apostles should also console Jesuits who worried that their planting would be wasted in such barren lands. The apostle had not only gone to the rich and powerful, but had also

45 Ibid., 169 - 170 46 Ibid., 461. Luke 8: 5- 8 47 1 Corinthians 1:18, 26 - 30 32 reached out to the humble, even women on the shores of the river, trusting that “the few grains he sowed would produce and yield fruit by the hundreds if they fell on good soil.”48 Good soil could be found in surprising locales, and missionaries could look to Paul’s work amongst the meek and be confident of the eventual fruit of their work. Together, the examples of St. Paul and Jesus’ Parable of the Sower should give solace even in the face of setbacks.

In all these cases, the Provincial insisted that even though the conditions for growth might not be as good as those encountered in places like Judea, Greece, Spain, or China, early modern missionaries to New Spain could still reap a harvest that was “successful and abundant in spiritual fruit” if they were willing to make appropriate sacrifices. Even though some may assume that the work was impossible and yielded little recompense, he insisted that their suffering could be its own reward, for “Among these barbarous nations one still finds crowns of blood shed for Christ and His Gospel and unspeakable toil suffered for His glory.”49 This connection between suffering, martyrdom, and ultimate conversion became the central logic that the agricultural metaphor explained. Harvests of native Christianities would not come unless the seeds of indigenous lives fell to the ground and willing missionary blood watered them.

Pérez de Ribas was not the only Jesuit historian who argued that spilled blood brought abundant fruits. Father Eusebio Kino used the Provincial’s History as a paradigm for his account of the Pima Revolt of 1695 and murder of Father Javier Saeta, Inocente, Apóstolica y Gloriosa

Muerte del Venerable Padre Xavier Saeta. Citing Pérez de Ribas multiple times, Kino used The

48 Andres Pérez de Ribas, History of the Triumphs, 461. Acts 16:13 49 Pérez de Ribas, History of the Triumphs, 461 33

History of the Triumphs as a principal source for his summaries of sixteen Jesuit martyrdoms.50

From these examples, he drew the conclusion that missionaries should not be “disheartened or dismayed at the martyrdom of so many of their brothers,” but should instead “offer themselves to carry on the work….at the risk of their lives in such glorious endeavors.”51 He and his fellow

Jesuit missionaries also quoted Tertullian time and again as they struggled to make sense of the death of Father Saeta and their own suffering in northern New Spain. Kino reminded his critics that God could snatch victory out of defeat and that “sanguis martyrum sit semen christianorum - – ‘The blood of the martyrs is the seed of Christians.’”52 For this reason Kino and his colleagues became convinced that the young missionary’s death as well as the deaths of numerous innocent O’odham would plant a new Christianity in the Pimeria Alta, teeming with spiritual fruits.53 Sacrificial death seeded new crops of conversion, harvests of Indian souls watered by their blood.54 They trusted in the providential power of the dictum, a citation that located their own death alongside apostles, fathers, and saints in the long history of redemption.

Kino also looked beyond Tertullian to the established pattern of northern New Spain. He cited letters from Spanish soldiers, secular governors, and religious superior that confirmed his

50 Eusebio Francisco Kino, Kino's Biography of Francisco Javier Saeta, S.J, ed. Ernest J. Burrus, trans. Charles W. Polzer, Vol. 9 (Rome and St. Louis: Jesuit Historical Institute and St. Louis University, 1971), 127 - 129; Eusebio Francisco Kino, Vida Del P. Francisco J. Saeta, S.J.: Sangre Misionera En Sonora, ed. Ernest J. Burrus, Vol. 102 (Mexico: Editorial Jus, 1961). 51 Kino, Saeta, 129 52 Kino, Vida Del P. Francisco J. Saeta, S.J.: Sangre Misionera En Sonora, 88. In Favores Celestiales, Kino repeats this interpretation and explicitly cites Tertullian, Apolegeticus adversus gentes, Cap. 1., L. Kino, Kino's Historical Memoir of Pimería Alta: A Contemporary Account of the Beginnings of California, Sonora, and Arizona, 157. For other examples of Jesuit citation of the dictum in their martyrologies see, Juan Eusebio Nieremberg, Varones Ilustres De La Compania De Jesus (Bilboa: Administracion del Mensajero del Corazon de Jesus, 1887), 280, 496. 53 These deaths will be discussed in further detail in Chapter 3. 54 Kino uses this phrase throughout the work, but more importantly assembles numerous letters from Jesuit colleagues who employ the quote as well, Saeta, 101 –113; See also, Kino, Historical Memoir, 148-157 34 conviction that martyrdom inevitably, preceded mission growth in the northern frontier. In all of them, the agricultural metaphor girds their reasoning, supplying them with a conviction that the young Jesuit’s death and the Pima revolt will not be in vain. Kino took comfort in the words of Father Antonio Menéndez, the Rector of the Mayo and Yaqui missions, who maintained that

“It is a good sign, Father that all those missions begin with the blood of a minister to cultivate it since it is a sign of their perseverance and good stability.”55 Menéndez went on to cite the martyrdoms of Father Tapia in Sinaloa, Fathers Pascual and Martínez in Chínipas, “among the

Tepehuan, seven glorious Fathers,” as well as Fathers Cornelius Basilio, Faronda and Sánchez who graced the Tarahumara “con su sangre.” Together the pattern was clear, that blood not only cultivated the vineyard, but helped stabilize it and guarantee its survival. As such, the missionaries to the upper Pima should take solace, because “God was pleased that the fervor of

Father Francisco Javier Saeta should be the first fruits of that mission.” So, Saeta’s death portended increased harvests.

Likewise, the Rector of Sonora, Marcos Antonio Kappus, expressed his hopes to Kino that, “all these evils will fructify greater and greater blessings.”56 Though some critics might take the uprising and death as a sign that their missionary field is cursed, the opposite was in fact true. Once more, the blood was foundational as each new work required an initial blood sacrifice to inaugurate it. Father Visitor Juan Muñoz de Burgos prayed that Saeta’s blood would irrigate the fields of the mission, “I trust in the Lord that for the future this watering by the blood of that angel will serve the Lord by producing much fruit in the Pimería.”57 Kino’s close

55 Kino, Biography of Francisco Saeta, 113 56 Ibid., 103 57 Ibid., 103 35 friend and traveling companion Juan Mateo Manje confirmed this interpretation in his diary accounts. When explaining his reason for taking heart even in the face of so many contradictions and obstacles in the entrance of the missionaries to “this Vineyard of the Lord,” he extoled the “sacrifice of life,” of the missionaries and connected it to the “infinite and precious blood,” of Jesus.58 Once more, Saeta’s death formed a branch of the “fruitful tree,” planted by Ignatius of Loyola and extended by Francis Xavier, which would connect northern

New Spain as a “flowering Christianity redeemed in the cruciform tree of the Cross.”59 Finally,

Kino quoted from letters from Father Antonio Leal of Durango and Captain Pascual de Picondo

(the lieutenant in charge of the Pimería), which agreed that Saeta had been blessed a thousand times for “the gift of having his stole bathed in blood” and that because of his martyrdom the

Pima mission would be equally exalted with “flourishing” and “ripening fruit” fertilized with the flesh and wetted by the blood of their brother.60 Together, these Jesuits and their military supporters believed Saeta’s death promised an abundant produce for the Pimería Alta.

Clearing and Cultivating Good Soil

Despite these grand aspirations, the process of growing native Christian crops was long and tedious. It took many stages, but began by reclaiming ground and preparing the soil. This step could be the most difficult, Jesuits in New Spain insisted, as it often entailed work that

58 “La ocasión de condolerme de ver que de diez años a esta parte, experimentamos tantas contradicciones, que han hecho nociva la entrada de operarios a esta Viña del Señor; unos con informes sutiles de lo que oyen algunos laicos mal afectos a conversiones, sin refleja de la cuenta, que les pedirá el recto y justo juez, de que se malogre su preciosa e infinita sangre por su causa; otros, con verídicos, defendiendo la doctrina de los indios, han sido causa de estar ministros y prelados, tantos años con perplejidad, entibiando con estos evangélicos de espíritu y fervor, que han procurado entrar, a sacrificar su vida en tan santo y meritorio empleo.”Juan Mateo Mange, Diario De Las Exploraciones En Sonora: Luz De Tierra Incógnita (Hermosillo: Gobierno del Estado de Sonora, 1985), 15. 59 “Para hacer una cadena indisoluble de florida cristiandad como redimidas en el crucífero árbol de la Cruz, y como lo han hecho con otras muchas naciones del Orbe, siendo San Ignacio frondoso árbol, cuyos ramos y eslabonadas hojas del melifico nombre de Jesús, extendió por San Francisco Javier….para doctrinarlas para sacar mas fruto.” Ibid., 17 60 Kino, Biography of Francisco Javier Saeta, 103-111 36 previous apostles and saints seldom confronted. The land where the missionaries now worked had become particularly infertile. Separated as it was from the dominion of Christ by great distance and ruled by a diabolic lord who depleted the resources of indigenous civilization.

Satan had scattered impediments everywhere; native practices variously imagined as rocks, weeds, thorns, thickets, and brambles. Together these hindrances constituted veritable forests of entangling practices that made it impossible for good seed to find rich soil. Alternatively, missionaries also imagined the landscape of native culture as the opposite of a forest, a veritable “desert,” characterized less by the proliferation of superstition and more so by the lack of the elements of civilization. Jesuits from José de Acosta forward believed that the missions to northern New Spain were unusual because they dealt with people that had no law, cities, literacy, god, or religion. If they did not have these basics, then the missionaries must civilize, even as they Christianized. These additional tasks illustrated the missionaries’ belief that they faced a peculiarly difficult task. Through both willful neglect as well as intentional spreading of idolatries, superstitions, and vices, the devil had created a spiritual terrain that variously mirrored the tangled forests, rugged mountains, and vast deserts of northern New

Spain. In light of this reality, the Society’s evangelists had to vary their evangelistic program to employ practices that would deal directly with both the forest of superstitions as well as the desert of savagery.

In addition to spreading the seed of the Gospel in such environments, missionaries had to first recover the land and return it to its rightful master. Pérez de Ribas frequently described the snares implicit in working with people of New Spain, “who were more possessed by the devil than any others on earth.” This, he argued, was because the “tyrant who possessed them” 37 had sown “vices and savage and inhuman customs” throughout his domain. In an earlier description of Sinaloa, he spoke in cosmic terms about the effects of the diabolic master on the terrain. The people lived in an “abyss of darkness” and their land was, “a veritable kingdom of

Satan that resisted the light of the Gospel.” This kingdom of darkness had wrought disastrous material and spiritual effects. Because Sinaloa and its inhabitants had long lived under “the tyrannical reign of the devil,” they had become “hardened in their obstinacy,” unable to render physical, intellectual, or transcendent fruit. The solution, though, seemed clear. Only at great cost could missionaries work to “dispossess him (Satan) of those many nations that he had taken from their Creator” and restore possession back to the Son of God, who had received them “for his patrimony.” The Jesuit historian pictured indigenous land as locked in a cosmic battle, caught in between the Devil and Jesus as they struggled for territorial supremacy.

Because of this, both the physical landscape and its inhabitants had become resistant, hardened, and obstinate. In turn, the missionaries must work even harder to reclaim the land, render it usable for planting the evangel, and ultimately present its fruit to Jesus as its rightful lord.

Even if captured for Christ, northern New Spain had been so severely depleted and neglected after centuries under the domain of the Devil that both the physical and spiritual grounds had become either jungles or deserts. Again, Pérez de Ribas accentuated the desolation of the place in describing Sinaloa, "the wretched state of this land,” not only because it had few Christians, but because of “Satan’s heavy yoke.” And the master had corrupted not only the land, but its inhabitants. Under his diabolic rule, the natives had become, “wild and barbarous, living and dying in misery,” while the land lacked, “everything necessary for physical 38 life,” and the “daily living conditions” were meager, producing only “wild fruits, bitter roots, and even locusts,” for sustenance. He compared the spiritual state of the natives to their barren environment, devoid of the resources for any type of life. Nevertheless, the glory of the missionaries only shined brighter when readers considered, “the poverty of this land and the rustic nature of its people.” The desperation the conditions at the beginning of the work only made the fruits of their labor sweeter in the future.61

Diabolic neglect had created deserts of ignorance. Eulogizing the first missionary who worked in Sinaloa, Father Martín Perez, the hagiographer Pérez de Ribas described his work as a, “pilgrimage and holy exile to such a distant land.” His time in northern Mexico was like, “a hermit in the most remote solitude of the desert,” not only because of distance from home and companionship, but also because of the civilizational depravity of the inhabitants. And yet, it was his greatest desire to live and perhaps be martyred in this exile, “among barbarous peoples,” because “he wanted to die there for Christ, for whom he preached His Holy Gospel in the desert of this heathenism, which has been so forgotten by the world.” For Jesuits like Pérez de Ribas and by implication Martín Perez, the arid physical landscapes of the coasts and islands materially manifested the spiritual resistance they encountered as much as the thick brush of the mountains and the monte. Both the rugged conditions and the “savage” practices of the

“barbarous peoples” of northern New Spain confirmed the cosmic implications of their work as well as the necessary expansion of their evangelistic task. It meant that planting the Gospel demanded more time and toil than other nations in more “civilized” parts of the world, since it

61 Pérez de Ribas, History of the Triumphs, 377 39 entailed ridding them of demonic influence, uprooting impediments, and enriching the soil with deposits of blood, sweat, and tears.

Still, northern New Spain had a variety of environments. The metaphorical deserts came from neglect, but sometimes the devil intentionally sowed wild plants too. When watered by his temptations, such superstitions could grow into jungles of idolatry, in need of massive pruning. At times the weeds were quite literal, as in the case of the herbs used for the practice of euthanasia discovered in Sinaloa. Pérez de Ribas decried the consumption of a deadly weed, likely the same one used to poison arrow tips, as a way to escape the ravages of epidemic disease. This custom, he maintained, had been spread by the devil as a way of impeding evangelization. However, the missionaries had fought to “banish this abuse” and “conquered this gentile nation with good words and speeches.” Through example and preaching, “Christian customs and laws became well established in this nation,” and this allowed the Jesuits to not only transform hearts, but also the physical landscape, by removing Indians from the jungles and reducing them to civilized Spanish spaces. Pérez de Ribas summarized this process of clearing the literal and symbolic brush, “Once this jungle was razed and the weeds were uprooted, the evangelical seed began to spread and yield happy fruits, as did the divine word and frequent participation in and respect for the sacraments.” The transformation of the landscape and the creation of reducciónes became a crucial step before they could sow

Christianity.

Uprooting of Weeds and Thorns

Nevertheless, such harvests were hard won. The devil did not release his subjects easily and had woven the wild plants of sickness and accompanying superstition to obstruct the 40 conversion of Sinaloa. Burial practices constituted one of the primary impediments. According to Pérez de Ribas, Sinaloans typically buried the dead by placing the remains in caves, on top of elevated platforms that would prevent the corpse from moving, “in case it attempted to walk.”

They also placed funerary goods, like food and drink that would accompany them on their journeys.62 On the one hand, the Jesuits praised this practice because they interpreted it as showing an awareness of an afterlife. On the other hand, they believed that the practice was

“nonsense” as Christian theology contended that the corpses had no power to move and the spirits had left. As such, these weeds need be “uprooted” and replaced with “the Christian practice of burying the dead.”63 The missionaries, therefore, contested with Sinaloans over space. It was not good enough to have the living relocate from the monte (the wild) to the missions, but their deceased loved ones too, must be placed in Christened locations.64 The missionaries believed that their success and the natives’ salvation depended on the correction of such practices. Pérez de Ribas argued that, “To better introduce Christian customs and the holy ceremonies of the Church, the priests were careful to remove from this field the weeds of the monte and the wild grasses of abuse and gentile superstition.” He explained that the

62 On the variety of burial practices in Sinaloa, including bone bundles and cave platforms see Ralph L. Beals, The Acaxee: A Mountain Tribe of Durango and Sinaloa, Vol. 6 (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California press, 1933), 32.; Ralph L. Beals, The Comparative Ethnology of Northern Mexico before 1750 (New York: Cooper Square Publishers, 1973), 122-123.. 63 Such debates over the method and location of proper burial not only dated back to early Christianity, but were common to other Jesuit missions in Latin America. Peter Brown, The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 24-27; Mills, Idolatry and its Enemies, 42, 75; Peter Gose, "Converting the Ancestors: Indirect Rule, Settlement Consolidation, and the Struggle Over Burial in Colonial Peru, 1532–1614," in Conversion: Old Worlds and New, ed. Kenneth Mills and Anthony Grafton (Rochester, New York: University of Rochestor Press, 2003), 140–174. 64 The term “monte” will be described at length in the following chapter. It loosely translates to “the bush,” and came to mean the wild areas outside of the missions that included thick brush, caves, hills, and overall rough terrain. For Pérez de Ribas the term came to have cosmic and diabolic connotations. Pérez de Ribas, History of the Triumphs, cf.168, 172, 246, 314, 401 41 missionaries did so slowly, as Christ had instructed in the parable of the tares and the wheat.65

They must separate the good plants from the bad, so that the true seeds could prosper. Even so, the monte, the space outside of the mission that teamed with “wild grasses of abuse and gentile superstition,” symbolized a place of darkness, hiddenness, and temptation back to the idolatries of the devil. Full conversion meant cutting down those grasses, pulling out those weeds, and relocating indigenous living and dead to civilized and Christianized spaces.

The idea that thorns and weeds beset the Mexican mission helped Pérez de Ribas understand why the missionaries had not been as successful as he had hoped. In a general description of efforts with the “Chichimec” who inhabited the Bajio region of New Spain, just north of Mexico City, the Provincial almost despaired of their salvation. Because of their semi- nomadic practices, which he characterized as “wandering like savages,” these Oto-Pamean relatives of the Aztecs had “no hope of salvation.” This was because there were so many difficulties in “planting the Gospel in a forest so full of thorns and weeds.” Even though they had evangelized “more civilized and populous nations” all over Mexico, the Chichimec had remained “a fierce and indomitable enemy.”66 The inability to reduce these groups to a sedentary and therefore “civilized” lifestyle in missions meant that they persisted in barbarian practices and idolatries. Pérez de Ribas cited their frequent raiding of Spanish caravans, drunkenness, and the fact that “some murderers among them boasted and bore as a trophy a bone on which they recorded the number of Spaniards and Indian servants they had killed.” The

65 Matthew 13 66 Ibid., 699. For a fascinating chronicle of the people called “Chichimec” by the Nahua of central Mexico as well as their association with migration and semi-sedentary practices, see David Carrasco and Scott Sessions, Cave, City, and Eagle's Nest: An Interpretive Journey through the Mapa De Cuauhtinchan no. 2 (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press;Published in collaboration with the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies and the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 2007), 161 - 169. 42 keeping of human remains as war trophies, a common practice we will return to later, expressed the height of their descent into inhumanity in the Provincial’s mind. And yet, this sort of weed was merely a symptom of the wider problem which was that they resisted Spanish attempts at civilization, remaining with neither “a settled dwelling place nor a king,” making it impossible to conquer, pacify, and then evangelize.

Pérez de Ribas repeated this theme throughout his History of the Triumphs, reiterating that any groups that resisted Jesuit attempts at reduction and evangelization simply suffered from wild seeds planted long ago by the common enemy. Nevertheless, they would eventually yield after some intensive weeding. For example, in his narrative of the work of Fathers

Gerónimo Ramírez and Juan Agustín in Zacatecas in 1594, he explained why they had few initial accomplishments. “These two evangelical ministers were first to cultivate this vineyard, or forest of thorns and weeds, sowing the seed of the divine word,” Pérez de Ribas began. But, they had been continually frustrated by the weeds of superstition and thorns of rebellion. Then, he went on to cite letters from both missionaries, that detailed how they, “suffered great hardships and, with them, death,” for the sake of their Indians.67 Summarizing the two accounts, he highlighted how they, “reveal the means by which divine providence directed the relief and salvation of these souls.” The point was that the “thorns and weeds” of indigenous traditions and practices impeded the spread of the Gospel and that they must be taken into account when accessing the long term prospects of any mission. Ultimately these setbacks did not mean Jesuits had not sown good seed, but rather that, “although the fruits that were gathered at first seemed few, they became great at the end.” Perhaps this one sentence

67 Pérez de Ribas, History of the Triumphs, 658 - 659 43 captures his persistent theme better than any other in the entire History, as it summarized the patience and perspective for which he advocated even as it relied on agricultural metaphor to make the point.

The Provincial expressed a similar sentiment when describing the many setbacks suffered by Father Hernando de Santarén in his first mission in Sinaloa. Santarén arrived in the wake of the murder of Gonzalo de Tapia in 1594 and then suffered the subsequent rebellion of the Acaxee in 1601, which destroyed many of his initial efforts. In his annual report (Carta

Annua) of 1604, he celebrated the conversions and spiritual maturity that came out of the earlier setbacks. According to Santarén, the principal results of the rebellion and subsequent suppression were repentance and reduction. He celebrated the gathering of “more than five thousand people” into pueblos and “thirty-seven hundred people have been baptized this year following the uprising.” In addition to quantitative results, the missionary celebrated qualitative advances; increased confession, intense devotional rituals, and “a large blood procession,” on

Holy Thursday. These Holy Week acts of piety culminated on Good Friday, when Sinaloa Indians scourged themselves as flagellants in imitation of the crucifixion. The Jesuit pointed out the symmetry between the bloody rebellion and the blood-soaked repentance. “These people who the year before could not get enough Spanish blood, now shed their own with great sorrow for their sins and a desire to repent their deeds.”68 For Santarén, their acts of devotion symbolized the intimate connections between Jesuit sacrifice, native suffering, and mission success.

In Peréz de Ribas, the fellow missionary who included the letter in his history, the stories only further illustrated his overall conviction that fruit came only after sacrifice and the removal

68 Ibid., 511 44 of obstacles. The campaigns to pacify the Acaxee rebels and then purify the land of their idolatries had achieved their results; so much so that superiors could send more laborers to

“work in the vineyard, where the once-thick weeds and thorns had already been uprooted.”69

For him, the rebellion of the Acaxee, the attempted murder of Santarén and the other missionaries, as well as the death of many Spanish colonists, did not represent disaster so much as thorns and weeds that must be cleared in order that the seed find good soil. Once these impediments were removed, they would see much fruit, whether native conversion or in the discovery of other resources such as the silver mines of the Sierra Madre, which had silver mines with “veins like trees – trees whose roots send out many shoots.” In other words, tragedies only prepared the ground for triumphs, whether native Christianity or colonial discovery. God worked in mysterious ways.

Every Thorn Had its Rose

Every rose had its thorn, at least in the Jesuits’ estimation of their mission. And these afflictions could come in many forms. Sometimes these thorns could be quite literal, as when residents in the missions of Toro, Vaca, and Chois in Sinaloa “surrounded their houses with thorny branches,” making it impossible for the missionary to enter. Searching for an explication for this practice, the Jesuit Father Cristóbal de Vallalta ascertained that the “superstition” was a part of a ritual response meant to ward off a "sicknesses of thorns,” likely an anticipated epidemic of smallpox, measles, or typhus in their towns.70 The diseases had been foretold by shamanic leaders (who Pérez de Ribas inevitably terms “sorcerers”) in response to an eclipse

69 Ibid., 511 70 Daniel Reff interpreted the “enfermedades de espinas” as “probably malignant smallpox, measles, or typhus, each of which produces a rash that, from the Indians’ perspective, may have been analogous to the inflammation and swelling that can occur with puncture wounds from cholla or other cacti that abound in the monte.” Ibid., 255, n.73 45 that the Sinaloans believed portended cosmic battles between the moon and its enemies, with ensuing results in the human world. The missionary surmised that his intended converts correlated disease and death to such events. For this reason he concluded that evangelistic preaching could only begin after “burning the thorns” of indigenous superstition by literally gathering the branches and setting them on fire. He insisted that his converts should rid themselves of the deceptions of the devil, then “should turn to God for relief and the Holy

Sacraments,” in order to obtain pardon.71 Despite having burned away the physical thorns, spiritual thistles remained. The Indians with whom he pleaded resisted the sacraments, including baptism and confession. Most vexing, they began hiding their sick under woven reed mats in order to avoid the application of Extreme Unction. They refused because they had connected this particular Catholic ritual to their own deaths and assumed the sacrament had a causal effect on the high mortality rate. In exasperation, Father Villalta tried to persuade them that, “on the contrary, it was often a means of attaining bodily health.” However, he did so with great difficulty, since “the serpent attempted to place snares in every path and in all the means to salvation, just as he had done with the forbidden tree.” In this case the thistles that beset the missionaries and their converts had grown symbolically into a full tree, not unlike the edenic prototype. If Satan had infiltrated even the Garden of Eden to plant the seeds of temptation,

Jesuits should not be surprised to find his tempting trees tangling the terrain of New Spain.

If every rose had its thorn, the inverse was true as well. Surely there were thorns in this work, but God, Pérez de Ribas maintained, could still find roses to pluck. This was the case with the missions of Fathers Hernando Santarén and Diego de Acevedo in the Sierra de Topia in the

71 Ibid., 255 46 mountains just east of Sinaloa. Father Acevedo wrote in his annual letter of 1612 – 1613 that the devil had been seen roaming the Sierra in physical form, usually as “a child of ten or twelve years of age.” The demonic apparition’s principal occupation seemed to be exhorting dying natives to flee to the monte, the thickets and mountains, to die since “the ancestors did not have the custom of being buried in churches.”72 These child shamans also built up resistance to

Catholic preaching and sacraments, pointing to a correlation between baptism, confession, last rites and their relatives’ sickness and death. In a brilliant reversal, these child shamans branded the missionary Acevedo as the “sorcerer” who cast spells on the children and elderly and only brought suffering through his words and rituals. And yet, Pérez de Ribas told himself and his readers that all was not lost, because, “God well knows how to pick roses from among thorns.

This was the case during a time of illness when, with Holy Baptism, God harvested infants as His first fruits of heaven.”73 Faced with plagues that swept away the communities that settled in their missions, the diseases and death should not discourage the evangelists or readers, as long as they promoted baptism and therefore eternal life. These were the roses of infant mortality.

The fact that deaths amongst children and the elderly could be interpreted as “roses from thorns,” rightly may give pause to contemporary interpreters. But, the Jesuit missionaries sincerely believed that they had snatched the souls from the clutches of Satan by sacramental grace just before their physical death.74 Lacking the benefits of contemporary epidemiology and the knowledge that they themselves had likely brought the plague that ravaged native towns, the Provincial thanked his Lord that the missionaries had arrived just in time to rescue converts

72 Ibid., 521 73 Ibid., 521 74 For an extensive discussion of the Jesuit approach to epidemic, baptism, infant mortality, and salvations, see, Reff, Plagues, Priests, and Demons, 179 - 189 47 from hell and deliver them to heaven. As he saw it, native suffering was redemptive as, “God harvested infants as His first fruits of heaven.”75 Their early deaths helped them achieve salvation, since they would never have a chance to sin and therefore died in a state of grace.

“However, there is no denying that we receive a very tangible reward in the form of fruit so palpable. When I recall that during those years I baptized with my own hands nearly one thousand children who died – children who were not old enough to sin – it seems to me that I have no right in this life; the consolation is that abundant.”76 Their untimely deaths may at first appear tragic, but in fact it was yet another “triumph of our most holy faith,” as baptized indigenous children brought divine fruits.

As he concluded in another situation in which resistance yielded growth, “The fragrant flowers of infants that are plucked for heaven now grow where once there were thorns.”77

These flowers not only manifested in christenings, confessions, and communions, but also in

“other Christian exercises, including feast days, Christmas, Epiphany, Easter, Pentecost, and

Holy Week ceremonies with blood processions.” In the case of the Zoe reducción in Sinaloa, such extensive participation in Catholic sacraments and rituals came at the cost of much sacrifice. However, they eventually issued forth in the blossoming of Sinaloa Christianity. Such crops of initial conversions could be harvested only after evangelists cleared the weeds of idolatry and endured the thorns of suffering. While prickly, these pains were to be expected if one wanted fruits and flowers. Both of these botanical similes, cultivated throughout centuries

75 Pérez de Ribas, History of the Triumphs, 521 76 Ibid., 516; Pérez de Ribas, Historia De Los Triumphos De Nuestra Santa Fee, 499-500. In the original, “habito de tantos años de sujeción al demonio y la tierra donde estamos de mucha occasion de padecer y merecer, por la variedad de temples y toseos y pocos mantenimientos; pero no se niegue, sino que a vezes, y muchas, nos paga Dios nuestro Señor de contado, viendo el fruot tan palbable, que quando yo me acuerdo que en estos años se han muerto al pie de mil niños bautizados por mis manos, sin edad para poder pecar….” 77 Pérez de Ribas, History of the Triumphs, 262 48 of Christian theology, helped Jesuits make sense of grave tragedy and hope for future produce out of present toil.

In addition to the death of innocent Indians, Jesuit sacrifices proved the mystery of new life implicit in Christian notions of death and redemption. Describing the short life and work of

Father Juan Augustín, who died at 30 years old in 1602 in the mission of Parras, Pérez de Ribas contended that, “although he did not surrender his life to the Indian’s arrows and clubs,” his death was like that of “the holy men and confessors of Christ who ended their lives, exiled for their holy faith.” Augustín had endured such suffering and setbacks in this exile in the “desert,” that he warranted veneration as a white martyr, who “God cut down” as a “handsome shoot from the Parras mission to graft him to Christ.”78 He went on to imagine him as a vine, which connected his converts to the branch of Christ and thus made the desert bloom even in life and death. And yet, his life was full of suffering and setbacks as he “waged war” with the devil and dominions, both physical and human. Pérez de Ribas cited a personal letter he had obtained that Agustín had written to a fellow Jesuit just before his death. Speaking of the “dreadful” circumstances of his mission, Agustín confessed, “My soul is now weary of my life.” He admitted that he begged God for an enduring spirit and the ability to suffer as “I await death.”

He lamented the trials, the loneliness, the travel, the deserts, the starvation, “the filthy and foul smelling waters,” the pests, deprivation, and the exposure to the elements. Then, he summarized both the physical and personal trials,

What thorns! What people and how childish they are! What tlatollis (debates) and confrontations with sorcerers! But if everything were a bed of roses, Father, what would remain for us to enjoy in heaven? Let the will of the Lord be done in me.79

78 Ibid., 693 79 Ibid., 691 49

These present trials were trying, but Jesuits expected as much. The missionary life in its purest essence meant enduring these barbs, since there was no clearer path to an imitatio Christi. And for those who endured faithfully to the end, the real bed of roses awaited them in heaven.

Sowing the Seed

While sowing seed through martyrdom had a long history in Christianity from Jerome to

Tertullian, Jesuits employed the metaphor liberally as a way to explain suffering and death caused by violence and disease. Sometimes, the work could be easy. Speaking of his own missionary work amongst the Ahome of Sinaloa, Pérez de Ribas contended that he spread seed through his labors as well as those of a native catechist he had trained. In his account of his mission, he marveled at his good reception and how quickly his “gentle children” in Ahome learned their doctrinas (catechism), songs, prayers, and received “rebirth in Christ through the water of baptism.” But his work had grown so quickly because he found good soil. For this he owed the selfless tilling of an unnamed “blind Christian Indian” from Guasave who had prepared the ground. Because this catechist had gone before him, his sowing was made easy,

“because divine seed fell on such good soil, the Ahome by nature being pliant, it yielded the abundant fruit that has been discussed.” Similar scenes in which kernels of evangelical instruction found rich ground and quickly sprouted up are repeated throughout the Historia de los Triumphos.80 They expressed the ideal situation in which evangelists found their hoped for conversions quickly and easily.

Seed could also come from more difficult soil. And sometimes that soil needed to be enriched with blood. So, Christianity could sprout not solely from preaching but also from

80 Ibid., 376; Pérez de Ribas, Historia De Los Triumphos De Nuestra Santa Fee, 340-341 50 dying. In their estimation Indian deaths often had this result. Pérez de Ribas cited a letter by

Juan Bautista de Velasco of 1601 that explained his process for baptizing sick adults in Sinaloa.

Although he preferred to spend more time catechizing them, he recognized that time was of the essence and explained that he baptized them as soon as he had explained the basics. This he performed quickly because so many were dying from disease. Yet he took a providential view of those who survived became seed for future generations and the spreading of

Christianity. “Our Lord took for Himself a great number of them, but not all, for He also left seed that would bear fruit in the future.”81 By this account, those who died from sickness fortunately avoided suffering and found their way directly into eternity. Nonetheless, those who survived equally served the mission as they became seed for the future. Likewise, in his account of the mission of Sinaloa, Pérez de Ribas argued that the resources should be focused on young people. Speaking of Father Pedro Méndez, he wrote that the missionary tried to win older Sinaloa natives over during the last stages of their lives, hoping that he could rescue them for eternity. “He satisfied Himself by winning many of them over in the final moments of their lives, leaving the youth to be reared as the seed of the Gospel, which produced more abundant fruit.”82 While Méndez worked with adults to rescue them from burning, he knew that young people would be the “seed” of his work and would produce more abundant fruit in the future.

To illustrate his point further, Pérez de Ribas pointed to examples of missionary and native convert preaching that encountered setbacks, labeled as weeds of superstition or thorns

81 In Spanish, “Y quando juzgava, que ya avian entendio lo conveniente de los principals misterios de nustra santa Fe, los bautizava; y destos se llevo nuestro Senora para si buen número, aunque no todos, que tambien dexava semilla que frutificasse adelante.” Pérez de Ribas, History of the Triumphs, 163; Pérez de Ribas, Historia De Los Triumphos De Nuestra Santa Fee, 99. 82 In Spanish, “Con ellos iva Dios entresacado los viejos, que suelen ser estorvo a la doctrina destas gentes contentandose de ganar a muchos dellos en el termino ultimo de su vida y dexando la juventud para que diese mas abundantes frutos la semilla del Evangelio, con su crianza.” Ibid., 100 51 of resistance, but through uprooting eventually found good soil. In describing the work of

Fathers Méndez, Velasco, Villafañe, and Brother Francisco de Castro along the rivers of Sinaloa in 1601, the historian described the epidemics and idolatries that stood in the way of salvation.

Since so many of their intended converts were dying so quickly, the missionaries scrambled to baptize infants and elderly in order to give them the saving sacrament before they entered into eternity. When quick enough, they reaped eternal bounties by baptizing both children and sick adults, “Because God wishes to take some adults to heaven quickly, it is not only children who enter with baptismal grace and obtain with its flower the fruit of this Holy Sacrament.” Father

Juan Bautista Velasco emphasized this redemptive sensibility throughout his carta anua of

1601, concluding that while the death of so many sick was lamentalbe it meant salvation for the deceased, and left the kernels of salvation for future generations. “Our Lord took for Himself a great number of them, but not all, for He also left seed that would bear fruit in the future.”83

Velasco went on to give an example of a Christian woman who contracted a disease because she tended to and buried the sick. He had brought her healing by sharing sacramental wine and a “Gospel story” with her. Such “cases of edification” reinforced the notion that Christian sacraments could overcome suffering. By this reckoning, native suffering had twin rewards. It not only pushed converts toward baptism and therefore personal salvation, but also sowed the seeds of future conversions as both those who died and those who were healed found solace in the sacraments and gave testimony to future generations.

Not all seed bore fruit. In the example of Father Julio Pascual and the Chínipas mission, the results were mixed. To be sure Chínipas placed among the many nations that had

83 Juan Bautista Velasco, Carta Annua, 601, Historia, 363, AGN, Historia. See also Reff, n.150; Pérez de Ribas, History of the Triumphs, 163 52

“produced an abundant harvest of souls converted in Christ,” over the first fifty-three years of the Sinaloa mission. And, in general, “Father Julio lived very happily cultivating the tender grapevine that he had planted for the Church, whence God was harvesting His fruits.” He went on to unpack the symbol, in case there was any doubt, that the fruits were, “the souls of children and adults whom He took to Himself before the storm arrived that nearly destroyed the new Christianity.” Even during their rebellions and persecution, God rescued, “many innocent lambs, which were children, to go to praise Him eternally in blessedness, as well as some predestined adults, whom God usually selects and removes from the midst of those condemned to hell.” Pérez de Ribas mixed the pastoral metaphors here, speaking of innocent lambs and harvests of fruit, and at one point, “the fruit of the flock, or herds of domesticated sheep.”84 When one considered the happy converts, the baptized adults who passed away during such uprisings and the christened children swept away by the disease, the reader could see how good could come out of evil and might conclude along with the Jesuit evangelist that,

“divine providence nevertheless had its harvest.”85

As much as Jesuits were trained to find the good in the bad, however, they also found that good seed and weeds often grew up side by side, entangling, chocking, and engaging in an all-out battle for life. Apostates mixed with loyal converts in ways that often made it difficult to discern the difference and therefore protect “true Christians” from hidden traitors. The fact that rebels rose up from the Guazápare right beside the Chínipas reminded missionaries that the battle was not merely between a diabolic monte filled with weeds and the misiones

84 Ibid., 301 85 Pérez de Ribas, Historia De Los Triumphos De Nuestra Santa Fee, 254; Pérez de Ribas, History of the Triumphs, 301 53 teeming with tender vines, but between thorns and fruit inside the missions themselves. And yet, this too conformed to biblical teaching. Citing the Parable of the Sower again, he reasoned,

“Not all the seed that this evangelical laborer planted bore fruit (as was taught by the Son of

God).”86 Some seeds had been trampled, neglected, choked out, and burned away. This was a theme he repeated throughout his history, explaining in another chapter on the “fruits of illness,” that, “there was no shortage of the bad seed,” but this was something, “about which the Son of God preached.”87 He made the point that priests face “innumerable hardships,” ranging from natural disasters like floods, to the preaching of rival shamans, to “vestiges of deeply rooted vices.” At the same time, converts faced epidemics of measles and smallpox.

But, he rarely faced the material causes behind such setbacks. Rather, colonial violence and indigenous sickness could be transmuted into steps in a supreme plan and read with providential eyes.

In his mind the final cause mattered more than the immediate reasons for suffering, sorrow, and sickness. And by his estimation a diabolic Johnny Appleseed was to blame for harvests of wheat mixed with persistent tares. “The enemy of the salvation of souls was sowing this bad seed even in the midst of good seed.” Still, all of these oppositions conformed to the logic of Gospel teaching, because Christ had warned them that, good seed would mix with bad and wheat would be inseparable from tares.

For this reason, rather than missionary failure or colonial injustice, the fruit, “was not as copious as was hoped.” However, where evangelistic preaching was stamped out, the blood

86 “Otros algunos se quedaron con Gentiles complices foragidos, y obstinados, que no toda la semilla que sembró el Labrador Evangelico se logró.”Pérez de Ribas, Historia De Los Triumphos De Nuestra Santa Fee, 268; Pérez de Ribas, History of the Triumphs, 312 87 Ibid., 539. For other examples of bad seed or seed chocked out by weeds, see Ibid., 148, 348, 593, 689 54 and bodies of the martyrs purchased new seed and continued watering the fields. This was the result in the case of Pascual and Martínez, he believed,

Even though his sudden death did not give him the opportunity to cultivate this vineyard, he harvested a fair amount of fruit for himself with the crown of martyrdom. He left this entire Christianity watered with his blood, and it has been bearing fruit and growing ever since the death of these holy men.88

Apostasy and rebellion might cut short the work of an individual missionary, but this did not stop his production. On the contrary their blood only multiplied the extent of the crop and guaranteed many more seasons of harvests.

Watered by Blood

Writing about the protomartyr of northern New Spain, Gonzalo de Tapia, and Pérez de

Ribas argued that both the missionary’s bloody relics as well as the “blood-stained relics” from

Europe he carried with him had been recovered from the site of his murder in 1594. Both were a testament to the missions’ ongoing prosperity, because blood watered new Christianity.

“Even though this adverse event and the persecution of that primitive Church were something of a setback, in time the land bore fruit. It was watered with the blood of this apostolic man who so desired the spread of Christ’s glory in Sinaloa.”89 This became the prototype for all subsequent accounts of bloody martyrdoms. On the other hand, unlike his companion he lived and became the prototype of daily, more quotidian sacrifice. “This apostolic man sowed the seed of the Gospel in this ignorant and savage land, and after he cultivated it and endured immense hardships, it has borne the ripened fruit that the Church militant and triumphant has

88 Ibid., 312 89 Pérez de Ribas, Historia De Los Triumphos De Nuestra Santa Fee, 52; Pérez de Ribas, History of the Triumphs, 128 55 subsequently stored in its granaries for heaven and earth to enjoy.”90 As Tapia’s death had watered the mission, so must each ensuing generation continue irrigating the harvest.

In Book Seven of The History of the Triumphs, the author took a step back from the relentless recording of details to meditate on the parallels between the Mexican mission and the biblical and patristic patterns of evangelical preaching. He begins by arguing that, “these barbarous peoples are no less valuable or meritorious than missions among more noble and civilized nations.”91 Most of what followed contained citations from the Gospels, Paul,

Augustine, and other Church Fathers in addition to more recent Jesuit prototypes like Francis

Xavier to prove that “barbarous peoples” had the power to become Christians if they were also given the proper elements of “civilization.” These proofs included classical sources as well, including Cicero and Horace. In addition to arguing for the viability of native conversion, the

Provincial of New Spain also took on the objection that ministers may die in a mission among such savage people. The question implied that it was not worth the cost to send such well trained and mature souls to a place where they would be killed, “as though he were a deer or beast of the field or an enemy encountered in the countryside whom this Indian shot with arrows.”92 Addressing these concerns, Pérez de Ribas argued stridently that their deaths were

“triumphs” won for “the glorious cause” of the Gospel. As such, their spilled blood was not worthless, but central to watering the fields of conversion. And so he pledged himself to, “write about the difficulties that have been overcome as well as the blood spilled by the members of

90 Ibid., 376 91 Bk. VII, Ch.1, Ibid., 433; Pérez de Ribas, Historia De Los Triumphos De Nuestra Santa Fee 92 Pérez de Ribas, History of the Triumphs, 440; Pérez de Ribas, Historia De Los Triumphos De Nuestra Santa Fee, 415 56 our Company of Jesus to attain the current successful state of the missions.”93 When spilled in the right place, blood was not wasted but actually proved essential to watering the seeds of the

Gospel.

Later in Book Ten he returned to the theme of spilled blood. Speaking of the eight Jesuit priests who died during the Tepehuan revolt of 1616, Pérez de Ribas recorded a biography and martyrology for each one in the final chapters of the book. As will be described in Chapter 4, it was his regular practice to end each book with either an example of a “red” or “white martyrdom,” the former being a violent death and the latter a lifetime of sacrifice. He explained that in many of the other books in the History he had concluded with pious biographies of “the lives of illustrious men,” or prolonged martyrs, “who, although they did not suffer violent death for Christ, still spent their lives assisting others with the salvation of their souls.” However, the tenth book was special because it provided “the unique circumstances surrounding the deaths of those who watered and fertilized this mission with their blood.”94 Seed could come in many forms – evangelical preaching, apostolic toil, indigenous suffering – but nothing could replace the outpouring of blood to water the evangelical plants. At stake here was the meaning of their blood. While rebels had intended “bloodshed to prevent additional fruit,” missionaries like

Bernardo de Cisneros and Diego de Orozco were “steadfast in preaching the doctrine of

93 “Muchos frutos se continue y logren; como tambien los muchos trabajos y derramiento de sangre, que ha costado a los hijos de la Compania.” Ibid., 415 94 The eight Jesuits missionaries were Fathers Hernando de Tover, Bernardo de Cisneros, Diego de Orozco, Juan del Valle, Luis Alaves, Juan Fonte, Jerónimo de Moranta, and Hernando Santarén. For a hagiographic, but thorough, account of these martyrdoms, see José Gutiérrez Casillas, Mártires Jesuitas De Los Tepehuanes (México: Tradición, 1981). For a more theoretically informed critique of these martyrologies see, José de la Cruz Pacheco, Milenarismo Tepehuán: Mesianismo y Resistencia Indígena En El Norte Novohispano (México, D.F.: Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 2008), 154 - 162. Christophe Giudicelli and Pierre Ragon, “Les martyrs ou la Vierge? Frères martyrs et images outragées dans le Mexique du Nord (XVIème-XVIIème siècles),” Nuevo Mundo Mundos Nuevos, BAC - Biblioteca de Autores del Centro, 2005, Online Source, http://nuevomundo.revues.org/615 (accessed on March 22nd, 2011). 57 heaven, to the point of spilling blood for it.”95 When their bodies could not be located as the remains, “could not be distinguished from those of the other loyal Christians who died with them,” the writer still felt that the greatest “relic remained from the religious instruction given by these two evangelical ministers – the Christianity that is now improved in the Tepehuan.”96

Even if the relics of body and blood disappeared, their fruits remained in the conversion and civilization of Mexico’s indigenous people.

Over a century after these deaths, Father José Neumann, a Belgian missionary to the

Tarahumara, wrote to his former superior a retrospective of the Jesuit work with the

Tarahumara in 1730. In a clear reference to their embattled mission, he titled his book, History of the Rebellions against the Society of Jesus in the Tarahumara.97 But, like Pérez de Ribas and

Kino, he insisted that the indigenous rebellions against the Society’s work did not portend failure. Rather, they provided crucial irrigation for crops of Christians. For example, he titled the opening chapter, “The first rebellions of the Tarahumaras are watered with the glorious blood of four missionaries.”98 In the ensuing account he told how the deaths of Fathers Cornelius

Beudin and Jiacomé Antonio Basilio in Papigóchi and Julio Pascual and Manuel Martínez in

Chínipas prepared the way for all future missions in the Sierras of Durango. In reference to

95 Pérez de Ribas, History of the Triumphs, 650, 654 96 Ibid., 654 97 The manuscript was sent from Mexico to Prague in 1724, and then published in Latin in 1730. Historia seditionum, quas adversus societatis Jesu missionarios, eorumque auxiliares moverunt nationes Indicae, ac potissimum Tarahumara in America septemtrionali, regnoque Novae Cantabriae. Luis Gonzalez recovered the publication as a part of his dissertation work, and published a Spanish translation in 1991 and a subsequent Spanish edition was published in Prague in 1994. Joseph Neumann, Historia De Las Rebeliones En La Sierra Tarahumara, 1626-1724, ed. Luis González Rodríguez, Vol. 8 (Chihuahua: Editorial Camino, 1991), 18; Neumann, Historia De Las Sublevaciones Indias En La Tarahumara, 189 98 “Las primeras sediciones de los tarahumares son regadas con la gloriosa sangre de cuatro misioneros.” Neumann, Historia De Las Rebeliones En La Sierra Tarahumara, 17 58

Pascual, he recorded a foreshadowing that the missionary received of his own future crowning as a martyr, a bleeding stole during mass.

Without doubt it was a presage of his imminent martyrdom (where only Father Julio knew) as an example of Christ. He was to soon pour out his blood for the Glory of the Lord at the hands of gentiles….the first moments of these Tarahumara missions, ennobled with the memory of the glorious blood of our martyrs.99

For Neumann as well as for the missionary who had accepted his fate beforehand, Pascual’s death was not tragic because he had the blessed opportunity to “pour out his blood for the

Glory of the Lord.” Once more he had enriched the soil of the Tarahumara, having “ennobled” it with the “memory of his glorious blood.” The later historian believed the lesson was clear. The blood of the martyrs had prepared the way for future harvests. They had died, along with many others, “paying their life in the cultivation of the vineyard of the Lord.”100

Conclusion

Jesuits drew on agricultural metaphors as a primary way to explain multiple trying circumstances in their mission in New Spain. Sickness, suffering, superstitions, and sacrifices all made more sense when tied to a process that ultimately produced conversion. To describe this process they employed images of fertility and growth that had roots in both the classical world as well as early Christianity. Citing Jesus, Paul, Tertullian, and medieval hagiographies they concluded that God historically expanded Christianity through the suffering of his saints. The symbolism of soil, seeds, water, fruits, vineyards, and harvests invested this language with a

99 “Con seguridad era un presagio de su inminente martirio, por donde conoció el padre Giulio que, a ejemplo de Cristo, había de derramar muy pronto su sangre por la Gloria del Señor a manos de gentiles. Baste el anterior resumen de los primeros tiempos de estas misiones tarahumaras, ennoblecidas por el recuerdo de la gloriosa sangre de nuestros mártires.” Ibid., 27 100 “Muchos de ellos han fallecido ya, gastando su vida en el cultivo de esta viña del Señor.” Ibid., 16 59 sort of common-sense logic. If the natural world brought life through death, then nothing less should be expected in the Mexican enterprise. But, whereas early Christians had pictured these processes as passive persecutions, early modern Catholic missionaries saw their role in growth as active. Much like farmers they labored to uproot rocks, weeds, thorns, and thistles so, too must apostolic laborers extirpate idolatries, abolish vices, and suffer rebellions. At times, these obstacles could develop into superstitious jungles and savage deserts, at once tangled with temptations and devoid of civilization. They could also mean diseases that ravaged their way through harvests and ate away crops of converts. Yet, the sacrificial logic held. Even when native communities suffered epidemic collapse, their deaths could become divine fruits if paired with Catholic sacramental rituals. As such, trying colonial conquests fit into Christian providential history and assured missionaries of the justice and fruitfulness of their work.

2 A REDEMPTIVE ECONOMY: RELICS AND REDUCTION

Introduction: Tender Memories

In a 1716 report to the Provincial of New Spain, the new Rector Father Luis Velarde described the state of the Pimeria Alta conversions after the death of Father Kino in 1711. In the relation he argued that the work progressed well, “despite contradictions.”101 He also recounted the inspection tour of the Visitor Father Luis Mancuso of 1714. As Visitor, Mancuso was a Jesuit from outside the Pimería who had been charged by the Provincial with reviewing the missions of the rectorate and addressing any problems. Father Mancuso also had other business. A native of Palermo, Italy, he had developed a particular devotion to “the tender memory of his holy paisano the venerable Francisco Xavier Saeta,” with whom he had first traveled to the New World 24 years earlier. Because of this beloved remembrance, the missionary to the Tarahumara requested that the elderly Agustín Campos guide him to the site of Saeta’s grave in Cucurpe, Sonora. Since Campos had participated in the burial and funeral 19 years earlier, he still knew where to find the grave. So, he and Mancuso entered the church in

Cucurpe, “opened the sepulcher of the venerable father,” and looked for “the place where

(Saeta’s) bones lay.” Hoping to recover the full body, Mancuso must have been disappointed that “they found very few, and it was a lot if they found any at all, since he had suffered such a violent death and been burned.” Nevertheless, the Visitor contented himself with these few pieces and “the sole of a shoe.” Gathering these tokens of Saeta’s body together with a sworn

101 Luis Velarde, “La Primera Relación de la Pimería Alta,” Chs. 9 – 11 and folios 81v – 92v of Juan Mateo, Manje, Luz de tierra incognita, AGN, Historia, Tomo 393, 47r – 95v; Luis R. Gonzalez, ed. Etnologia y Mision En La Pimeria Alta, 1715-1740: Informes y Relaciones Misioneras De Luis Xavier Velarde, Giuseppe Maria Genovese, Daniel Januske, Jose Agustin De Campos y Cristobal De Cañas, Vol. 27 (Mexico: Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, 1977), 66. 61 testimony and a letter on the “Life of Saeta” from Father Campos, Mancuso sent the reliquary back to his home province of Sicily, in the hope that Saeta’s sacrifice “might have a singular place in the history of the Company (of Jesus).”102

However, Mancuso did not take away from the missions a “holy crucifix of rare material, tender to the touch, preciously and devotionally made,” which had been “rescued from the furor and rancor of the murders.” Saeta had brought the crucifix all the way from Sicily to adorn his humble mission church in Caborca in 1694. While much of the church and many artifacts were burned during the Pima Revolt of 1695 that took Saeta’s life, “a good Indian had hidden it in a box inside of a bag of wheat,” and brought it to Father Agustín Campos, handing it to him with sincere devotion “on his knees.” The relic reportedly had some miraculous qualities, testifying in its material presence to the connection Saeta had with his Lord. Writing of this same crucifix, Captain Juan Mateo Manje, the soldier in charge of the Pimeria, said, “It was so flexible it seemed like living flesh, transparent in its veins, nerves, and arteries.” Campos commended the cross to a soldier named Antonio Solís, ironically, the same man whose violent murders Kino would later blame for the Pima uprising. Lieutenant Solís, in turn, placed the crucifix in Arizpe, Sonora, where it was ensconced with “much veneration in a rich golden sepulcher of six crystal moons.” At the time of Manje’s writing around 1721, the Opata

Christians of Arizpe still used the recovered and adorned relic as the cross and coffin in their

102 “También entonces abrió el sepulcro del venerable padre, como que había asistido a su entierro y sabía el lugar que ocupaban sus huesos, de los que se hallaron muy pocos (y fue mucho se hallasen algunos, habiendo padecido tan violenta muerte y sido quemado) y una suela de zapato. Lo cual, con certificación jurada del padre Agustín, llevó el dicho padre visitador para imbiar a su santa provincial de Sicilia con dicha carta. En virtud de lo cual y de las demás noticias de su santa vida, no dudo tundra lugar debido en la historia de la Compañia.” Ibid., 75 62

Procession of Burial each Holy Week.103 In reverence for this devotion and to leave the

Christians of Sonora with their own holy memory of Saeta, Mancuso left the sacred crucifix in place.

The Redemptive Economy

The collection of relics and their transport back and forth across the Atlantic provides an entrée into both the material culture that formed the substance of colonial martyrologies as well as the logic that guided the missions. Jesuits believed that these sacred objects, whether images and bodies from Europe or New World articles, connected them to both their European supporters as well as their Mexican converts as they were baptized with the blood of martyrs.

These objects therefore had value to multiple communities that transcended their commercial worth. Their worth derived from their power to invoke memories as well as the paradoxical logic of triumphant tragedies which fostered a redemptive economy in the colonial missions of northern New Spain, a rationalized system in which God rescued good effects from evil causes.

Since the 1970s scholars have used the term “moral economy” to describe early modern uprisings, everything from 18th century peasant riots in Europe to indigenous revolts in colonial

Latin America.104 In those contexts “moral economy” referred to shared values and actions that

103 Ibid., 75; Juan Mateo Mange, Luz de Tierra Incognita En La America Septentrional y Diario De Las Exploraciones En Sonora, ed. Francisco Fernandez del Castillo, Vol. 10 (Mexico: Talleres Graficos de la Nacion, 1926), 238 - 239. According to Manje this was a separate crucifix entirely from the burned cross that he himself recovered from Caborca and had given to Father Eusebio Kino to hang in his mission at Nuestra Señora de los Dolores. That cross is discussed further in Chapter 3 of this dissertation. 104 The idea of “moral economy” has been developed by various Marxist and neo-Marxist theorists since E. P. Thompson’s seminal essay on “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century,” Past and Present 50 (1971), 76 – 136. See also Patrick Collinson, "Puritanism and the Poor" in Pragmatic Utopia: Ideals and Communities, 1200-1630 , eds. Horrox, Rosemary Horrox, Sarah Jones, and Sarah Rees (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 242-58; John Powelson: The Moral Economy (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998); Adrian Randall and Andrew Charlesworth eds., Moral Economy and Popular Protest: Crowds, Conflict and Authority (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000); James Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia, (New Haven: Yale, 1977); E. P. Thompson, Customs in Common: Studies in 63 transcended and transgressed enlightened assumptions about the way rationalized agents should act in emerging market economies.105 More recently, Luke Clossey has employed similar terms for a totally separate context and community. He has described the Jesuit early modern evangelistic enterprise as a “sacred economy,” one in which the Society’s far flung missionaries bartered hagiographical accounts for spiritual intercession from global colleagues and financial support from European patrons. Masses, relics, sacred objects, and edifying accounts of native conversion became commodities, traded horizontally and hierarchically for prayers, philanthropic gifts and political influence.106 The idea of a “redemptive economy” employed in this chapter borrows and builds on these foundations as it argues that Kino and other Jesuits relied on a counterintuitive logic that did not simply count the cost of colonialism in terms of

Traditional Popular Culture (London: New Press, 1993); Kevin Gosner, Soldiers of the Virgin: The Moral Economy of a Colonial Maya Rebellion (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1992); Emily Van Tessel, "Only the Law Would Rule Between Us: Antimiscegenation, the Moral Economy of Dependency, and the Debate over Rights after the Civil War," Chi.-Kentucky Law Review, 70, (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1995). 105 These studies charted emerging class-consciousness based on shared moral concerns for economic justice. The term has been particularly helpful in unpacking the logic of subaltern revolts, violent colonial resistance that defies western academic explanation. James Scott applied Thompson’s terms to peasant revolts in southeast Asia in James C. Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), 246. He extended the idea to uncover “hidden transcripts” of global peasant resistance in James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985). In both works Scott argues that subalterns act in ways that transcend the logic of post- enlightenment market economies. Eric Wolf applied a similar concept to early modern and modern Latin America (if not the exact language) in his seminal work Europe and the People without History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982). Wolf argued that European historical narrative and anthropological descriptions had not comprehended subaltern communities as historical actors, as dynamic agents in their own histories, because these communities often acted in ways that defied the expectations of capitalist society. In the study of colonial Latin America, Kevin Gosner’s work on Chiapas and Guatemala, Soldiers of the Virgin, 6 –12, has been particularly influential as it employs the concept to explain the cultural motivations, relationships, and justifications that gave rise to a prominent Tzeltal uprising against colonial reforms. For a more contemporary, post-colonial critique of the historicist assumptions embedded in western academic discourse and modern historical imagination as well as a challenge to the essentialism inherent in notions like Scott’s “peasants,” see Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000), 301. Walter Mignolo has made a similar argument about European discursive formation, technologies of knowledge collection, historical writing, and colonial territoriality vis-à-vis Latin America in Walter Mignolo, The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, and Colonization (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003). 106 Clossey’s concept lacks the neo-Marxist attention to class consciousness or colonial conflict, but nevertheless articulates a similar situation to the moral economies of previous analysts; he presents networks of exchange that combined ethical, ethereal, and economic concerns in hybrid ways that defy the predictions of world systems, rationalization or secularization theory. Clossey, Salvation and Globalization, 217f 64 financial and human resources, but in light of a theological conviction that Christian growth was predicated on suffering and sacrifice.

When paired with apostolic typology, historical dictums, and graphic imagery, victim discourse penetrated many aspects of Jesuit identity formation, helping fuel their global missionary enterprise. Jesuit training purposely cultivated this desire from the early days of their novitiate on through the thirteen-year process of discernment, education, and profession of the four vows. Beginning with their first performance of Loyola’s Exercises, Jesuits learned to discipline their intellect and cultivate detailed imaginations of embodied suffering through prayer, fasting, deprivation, and highly focused meditations on the passion of Christ.107 Tales of historic sacrifice surrounded Jesuits throughout their education, filling up their senses with both verbal and visual depictions of saints who had suffered and given all for Christ.108 Even as their founder read the lives of the saints while convalescing after the Battle of Pamplona, so too, young Jesuits spent many an hour reading collections like the Flos Sanctorum and other Acta, vita, and pasio of the saints. In addition to an actual “life,” the vitae just as often featured tales of holy death, in which martyrs died at the hands of diabolic kings or ungrateful apostates.109

By the 1600s, the Society’s novices were just as likely to read accounts of fellow Jesuits suffering passions in mission fields as the vita of a medieval saint or Passion of a church father.110 In fact, descriptions of missionary sacrifice so permeated their literature and

107 J. W. O'Malley, The First Jesuits (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 38- 48. 108 Ahern, "Visual and Verbal Sites,” 9; Joseph De Guibert, The Jesuits, their Spiritual Doctrine and Practice: A Historical Study (Chicago: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1972), 128 - 139. 109 Ahern, Visual and Verbal Sites,” 9; James D. Ryan, “Missionary Saints of the High Middle Ages: Martyrdom, Popular Veneration, and Canonization,” The Catholic Historical Review, Vol. 90, Num. 1, January 2004; O'Malley, The First Jesuits, 457. 110 Jane ten Brink Goldsmith, ed. Jesuit Art in North American Collections: Exhibition 7 March-16 June, 1991, (Milwaukee, Wis.: Patrick and Beatrice Haggerty Museum of Art, Marquette University, 1991), 19. , Ahern, “Visual 65 architecture that Luke Clossey has concluded that Jesuits closely identified the role of the missionary and the status of martyr by the 17th century. This is no surprise, because even as they ate and relaxed, Jesuit novices might look up at the frescoes on the walls and ceilings of their refectories and libraries and take in graphic images of the Society’s fallen heroes, previous generations who had faithfully completed their imitatio Cristi and given their lives in evangelistic service.111 In specific reference to northern New Spain, Ivonne del Valle has similarly charted a trade of books and bodies between colonial frontier and metropolitan audiences that she terms an “economia del martirio,” or a martyrdom economy. Del Valle argues that missionary bodies, in both corporal and textual form, bridged distances between periphery and center, linking native environments to European imaginations in the person and story of the martyred missionary. She locates this trade in the wider process in which

Europeans collected increasing knowledge about and power over indigenous people and places throughout the 17th and 18th centuries. The economy she outlines relies on the exchange of

Christian suffering for heathen conversion, in which missionary death paid for pagan souls, “la muerte como ‘pago’ por las almas de los paganos.”112 In her telling, this corpus of literal and literary sacrifice laid the foundation for knowledge collection, the cartographies and natural histories that supplied enlightenment discursive control of the New World. But, del Valle argues that the discursive force of martyrdom declined in the mid-18th century, in light of epistemic shifts and increasingly rationalized approaches to colonization. Bourbon reforms, local pressure

and Verbal Sites,” 9; Marcus B. Burke, ed. Jesuit Art and Iconography, 1550-1800: Introductory Essay and Exhibition Catalogue (Jersey City, N.J.: Saint Peter's College, Art Gallery, 1993), 3. 111 Clossey, Salvation and Globalization, 82-83;Ahern, "Visual and Verbal Sites," 9-10; Jane ten Brink Goldsmith, ed. Jesuit Art in North American Collections: Exhibition 7 March-16 June, 1991 (Milwaukee: Patrick and Beatrice Haggerty Museum of Art, Marquette University, 1991), 72. 112Valle, Escribiendo Desde Los Márgenes, 157-158 66 to secularize, endemic instability caused by disease and Apache raiding, as well international pressures against the order forced missionary writers to face “a colonial semiotic crisis that made it impossible to extract the same old meanings from events.”113 As such, the hagiographical accounts of sacrifice that had driven the martyrdom economy in the first century of the Society’s mission in New Spain had become “naked” deaths by the mid-18th.

Certainly Ivonne del Valle is right to highlight the changing contexts of martyrological discourse, the audiences and priorities that authorized or perhaps ignored them. Yet, even if

Jesuit writers like Kino were moving forward into a rationalized future that accounted for missionary deaths in concrete terms of resources and expenditures, many still looked backward to find redemptive meaning in their losses. Well into the 18th century, they framed missionary death in historical Christian terms and invoked typologies that drew from classical medieval hagiographies like the Flos Sanctorum and Golden Legend, as well as frequent references to the writings of Church Fathers and the New Testament.114 They also employed rituals - the collection of relics, prayers to the victims as intercessors, and parades under triumphal arches – that memorialized their missionary dead with classical and medieval ritual idioms. This is not to say that these colonial passions were mere rehearsals of Christian typologies. Both in ritual practice as well as literary production, missionary martyrologies connected traditional hagiographic idioms to colonial realities in creative ways and then distributed them to emerging global networks and institutions both horizontally and hierarchically. The logic of paradigm shifts that Del Valle employs misses this mestizaje and creative hybridity of the missionary logic.

113Ibid., 104; Jose Gabriel Martinez, “Spanish Jesuits and Frontier Chronicles: Review of Luis Millones, Karl Kohut, Ivonne Del Valle,” invited book review, Colonial Latin American Review (unpublished, author’s copy, 2011). 114 Reff, “Critical Introduction,” in Pérez de Ribas, History of the Triumphs, 20 -22 67

As royal officials increasingly measured the profitability of colonial projects with rationalized tallies of gains and losses, martyrological discourse insisted that native rebellions and missionary deaths should be counted with a different sort of calculus. According to this tradition, martyrdoms represented temporary losses, but guaranteed long-term profits.

Missionary death was a necessary sacrifice, an investment that would yield great spiritual profits. As such, native revolts and missionary deaths should not be read as setbacks, but successes, necessary investments that would eventually yield a consistent revenue stream of pacified native peoples.

The term “redemptive” refers to the idea that God rescues or “redeems” evil events, even death, and intends them for good. The concept of redemptive economy developed here borrows from these studies, sharing an interest in early modern writers that employed hybrid logics, at once medieval and modern, periphery and center, typological and practical to understand colonial experience.115 Well into the 18th century, martyr stories and rituals of remembrance drew upon Christian tropes, especially of redemptive death, but also sought to address material concerns and quotidian realities. The Society’s evangelists understood their toils and tragedies as crucial investments in a system that depended on martyred blood, missionary sweat, and indigenous tears. The redemptive economy was built on this contrary logic, one in which Indian suffering and missionary sacrifice could be understood as positive steps toward conversion and successful colonization. Kino explained this sentiment as he

115 At the same time, by using the word “redemptive” I tweak notions of a moral economy by suggesting that the logic of martyrdom draws upon different interpretive traditions in the history of Christianity dating back to Jerome, Eusebius, Tertullian, and behind them to Paul of Tarsus and even Jewish roots in Maccabean sacrifice and Levitical blood covenants which contrasted with developing market economics by arguing losses could be redeemed, or made profit. Boyarin, Dying for God: Martyrdom and the Making of Christianity and Judaism, 247. 68 introduced letters of fellow Jesuits after Saeta’s death, “Out of all the opposition and contradictions He will accomplish incomparably greater good as He is well able and accustomed to do.”116 This faith in redemption - good rescued out of bad - helped missionaries embrace martyrdom as a means of understanding setbacks as well as justifying their continuing presence in the tumultuous borderlands of northern New Spain. In order to claim both validity for missionary sacrifices and authenticity of native conversions, Kino described a peculiar redemptive economy in the missions of northern New Spain, a system that worked contrary to the logic of the emerging capital order of supply and demand growing between missions, mines, and markets.

Jesuit missionaries who struggled to understand and explain the indigenous suffering and missionary violence that they witnessed did not appeal to economic analysis as much as theological precedent and missionary networks. Even as they looked back to Christian history for parallels, Jesuit writers distributed their remembrances of contemporary sacrifice upward through hierarchical chains of command that collected news from below and beyond the confines of European knowledge. This information spread horizontally as well, through personal communications to family members, circular letters to colleges, and books marketed to both religious and secular audiences. In the final case, Jesuit relations, natural histories, curious letters, maps, and cases of edification plied Jesuit novices, noble patrons, and intellectuals with tales of exotic lands, heathen peoples, and heroic deeds. Likewise missionaries forwarded relics to local colleges in Guadalajara, Mexico City, and ultimately to authorities in Rome. Books and letters accompanied these bodies, devotional accounts of deaths that supplied both patrons

116 Kino, Biography of Francisco Javier Saeta, 101 69 and colleagues with pious material. This was a sacred economy that sent textual and corporal mementos of suffering across oceans, through institutional networks and bestselling publications in exchange for intercessory prayers, financial support, and new recruits.117

This project was not without its challenges, however. After the Council of Trent, the

Vatican had increasingly sought to control the “saint trade,” standardizing the Roman martyrology and censoring claims of sanctity.118 Nevertheless, while post-Tridentine reformers hoped to consolidate canonization and beatification into Roman hands, Simon Ditchfield has argued that making saints remained “a dynamic of reciprocity within inequality,” in which local worshippers, parish clergy, religious orders, and Roman curia fought, exchanged, and sometimes synthesized their accounts of saints and martyrs.119 As much as Roman authorities wished to monopolize accounts of sanctity, other parties had ways of acknowledging official commands while making their own claims about holy lives and deaths. Jesuits played multiple roles in the give and take of early modern martyr-making. Of course, Ignatius Loyola’s own sufferings and meditations on the passion of Christ formed part of the Society’s founding narrative and basic discipline in preparation for service.120 However, for Jesuit missionaries, martyrs and relics became so constitutive of their identity that Luke Clossey identifies them as the key currency that fueled a “sacred economy” of Jesuit globalization and salvation. As the

117 On the networks of Jesuit patronage in an Asian context see, R. Po-chia Hsia, Noble Patronage and Jesuit Missions: Maria Theresia Von Fugger-Wellenburg (1690-1762) and Jesuit Missionaries in China and Vietnam, Vol. 2 (Rome: Institutum Historicum Societatis Iesu, 2006). 118 This will be discussed in much greater detail in Chapter 3 in the context of early modern martyrological requirements. 119 Simon Ditchfield, "Martyrs on the Move: Relics as Vindicators of Local Diversity in the Tridentine Church," in Martyrs and Martyrologies (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1993), 224. 120Ahern, "Visual and Verbal Sites," 7-33; Ignatius of Loyola, David L. Fleming, and David L. Fleming, The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius: A Literal Translation and a Contemporary Reading, Vol. no. 7 (St. Louis: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1978); Joseph De Guibert, The Jesuits, their Spiritual Doctrine and Practice: A Historical Study [Spiritualité de la Compagnie de Jésus: esquisse historique] (Chicago: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1972), 692. 70 leading edge of resurgent Catholicism on both internal European borderlands and external colonial frontiers, Jesuits acted as investors, offering up their lives and bodies as deposits, seeking the eternal dividends of salvation for savage pagans and separated Protestants alike.

They also acted as producers, collecting relics and creating martyrological accounts for eager consumers at home and abroad. Jesuits often procured these same products themselves,

Sonoran Jesuits eagerly snapping up accounts of colleagues suffering crucifixion in the Marianas or Japan, while novices in Spain, Germany, and Italy relished passion stories of tortured bodies and indigenous cruelties in New Spain and New France. Formal Jesuit systems of missions, visitations, local chapels, regional colleges, colonial provincials, and ultimately Roman governments exchanged these martyr stories and relics back and forth from center to periphery and back again. But, less formal networks of letter writing, mapmaking, praying, and book publishing also transported these spiritual and material goods beyond Jesuit structures to eager readers and pious supporters in Europe, Asia, and the rest of the Americas.121

Martyrdom as Cosmic War

In addition to connecting them to patrons and supporters at home, Jesuits came to believe that relics and rituals of remembrance served as a common currency of exchange with native converts in the missions. In particular, they celebrated the exemplary Indian convert communities who had embraced their fallen missionaries as martyrs. One of the best examples is the encyclical sent by “some Tarascan Indians who were working in the mines of Topia,” back to indigenous churches in Michoacán after the death of Gonzalo de Tapia in Sinaloa. Written in

Tarascan, the letter informs the “residents of Pátzcuaro, Sivina, Navatzín, Charano, Arantzán,

121 Clossey, Salvation and Globalization, 216f. 71 and all the other pueblos of the province,” that Tapia had died and had become “a very great martyr.” It goes on to provide explicit details about severed appendages, signs of sanctity, and the specific location, time, manner of death. The letter closes with the pious request that, “all of you might pray an Our Father, just as we are all preparing to have a Mass said.” Jesuits helped spread news of the letter to other native converts and read it in the missions of

Michoacán. They also preserved them in Cartas anuas and histories, holding up the Tarascan excitement over Tapia’s martyrdom as an example to both European audiences and other natives.122

While they popularized the passion stories of fallen brothers as well as the devotions of

Christian Indians who embraced them, Jesuit evangelists also believed that shared idioms of suffering could stitch converts and European Christians together. For this reason they also presented converts as longsuffering children, innocently tormented by the diabolic, “common enemy.” To be sure, some judged the dislocation, disease, and unjust punishments that Indians endured to be the just punishment of God. Others pointed out the similarities between missionary sacrifice and native suffering. They exonerated their charges in various ways, portraying them as everything from ignorant dupes to innocent victims. Pérez de Ribas, for example, portrayed the mission as cosmic war in which most native lands represented diabolic spaces; its inhabitants suffered under the tyranny of the Prince of Darkness, constantly tempted

122 “Carta de los indios Tarascos escrita a los Tarascos de Michoacan sobre la muerte del Padre Gonzalo de Tapia, por relación que les dio el Indio Tarasco, que estava con el Padre quando lo mataron,” in Memorias para la historia de la Provincia de Sinaloa Archivo General de la Nación (AGN), Historia, Legajo 15, Mexico City, Mexico, Consulted on Microfilm. Office of Ethnohistorical Research, Arizona State Museum, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ (AZTM, J-02-D-01 AGN), 40v- 42; Also consulted in Memorias para la historia de Sinaloa, Mexican Manuscripts (M-M) 224 - 227, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, CA; See also Pérez de Ribas, History of the Triumphs, 199 72 into drunkenness, adultery, and sedition.123 But, he also mingled stories of Indian death and suffering with the accounts of exemplary missionaries, using native converts as “cases of edification” in an attempt to stitch their cause together with that of their ministers.124 They shared suffering and glory, because, “the sons of the Company of Jesus have led many of these nations, albeit scorned and humble, into God’s royal palace. Some have entered the palace of the Church militant and others the Church triumphant.”125

Pérez de Ribas featured relics of martyrs as well as stories of native piety as trophies won in the battles of an ongoing cosmic war. In fact, he explained that the title of his work,

Triumphs of the Holy Faith referred to Saint Jerome’s dictum “Triumphus Dei est martyrum passio,”or “The Triumph of God is the suffering of martyrs.” Pérez de Ribas agreed with the 4th century exegete that “the martyrdoms of saints” are not the defeat that they seem to be, but instead “triumphs of God and apostolic victories.”126 In both phrases, he tied the missions of northern New Spain to a long history of Christian martyrdom, arguing that missionary death was sure proof of both the apostolic nature of their work and their advance in a cosmic battle

123 Ibid., 68, 89 - 91 124 “Case of Mexica Indian Lorenzo, Holy Life and Acceptance into Society of Jesus in his Death.” Ibid., 716 - 718 125 He was forthright about the epidemic context of the mission and the ample exempla of affliction such diseases environments could supply. In the mining town of Parras, for example, a priest encountered “a very old Indian who was so thin that he was a living portrait of death.” And yet, God gave him enough life to hear the Gospel, accept baptism, and give the priest an edifying account of his own spiritual journey. The difference between militant and triumphant was one of life and death, Pérez de Ribas contended that the goal was for indigenous converts to enter into glory, even if sorely afflicted in life and often experiencing death from European disease. Ibid., 52 126 Ibid., 64 Pérez de Ribas cites Hier. epist. ad Hebdil. Q. 11. But, he is probably referring to Jerome’s letter to Hedibia “a lady of Gaul much interested in the study of scripture,” usually noted as Hier. epist.ad. Hedib. Epist. CXX. Ad Hedib. Cap. 11 in Migne, Hieronymus-Epistolae Secundum Ordinem Temporum Distributae –Patrologia Latina, Vol. 22: Col. 0325-1224, p.262 from http://www.documentacatholicaomnia.eu/02m/03470420,_Hieronymus,_Epistolae_Secundum_Ordinem_Tempor um_Distributae,_MLT.pdf\, (accessed on March 3rd, 2008). 73 with Satan.127 Jerome’s epigram referred to the Apostle Paul’s vivid invocation of Roman triumphal procession imagery, comparing Christian suffering to Roman conquest. As such,

Jerome argued that, “blood poured out for the name of Christ” (pro Christi nomine cruoris effusio) was the only true mark of the apostolic Gospel and sure path to victory. Even before

Jerome, martial metaphors punctuated Christian discourse on martyrdom. In fact, the account of the martyrs of Lyons, included in Eusebius’ Ecclesiastical History had raised the stakes of faithful death to the level of eschatological warfare, explaining how “the adversary assailed us with his whole strength,” attacking martyrs for the purpose of training his servants for “future movements.”128

Pérez de Ribas and Kino tapped into these interpretive traditions, in which fathers like

Tertullian of Carthage had compared martyrdom even more directly to militaristic exploit, heroic sacrifice, and celestial battle against pagan and diabolic forces.129 As Tertullian readily

127 For a superb account of Perez de Ribas’ audience, purpose, and use of “cosmic battle” themes, see Reff, “Critical Introduction,” Ibid., 11 -46 128 The Martyrs of Lyons, 1.5 in Eusebius, Eusebius' Ecclesiastical History Complete and Unabridged (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1998), 148. On the motif of spiritual warfare implicit in this letter see Richard Valantasis, Religions of Late Antiquity in Practice (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000), 399. 129 “11And you cast statues in honour of persons such as these, and you put inscriptions upon images, and cut out epitaphs on tombs, that their names may never perish. In so far you can by your monuments, you yourselves afford a son of resurrection to the dead. Yet he who expects the true resurrection from God, is insane, if for God he suffers! 12But go zealously on, good presidents, you will stand higher with the people if you sacrifice the Christians at their wish, kill us, torture us, condemn us, grind us to dust; your injustice is the proof that we are innocent. Therefore God suffers that we thus suffer; for but very lately, in condemning a Christian woman to the leno rather than to the leo you made confession that a taint on our purity is considered among us something more terrible than any punishment and any death. 13Nor does your cruelty, however exquisite, avail you; it is rather a temptation to us. The oftener we are mown down by you, the more in number we grow; the blood of Christians is seed.” Tertullian, Apolegetica, 50.12-13 in Roberts, Donaldson, and Coxe, Ante-Nicene Fathers: The Writings of the Fathers Down to A.D. 325, Vol.3, 150“ The Latin reads as follows, “12Sed hoc agite, boni praesides, meliores multo apud populum si illis Christianos immolaveritis, cruciate, torquete, damnate, atterite nos: probatio est enim innocentiae nostrae iniquitas vestra. Ideo nos haec pati deus patitur. Nam et proxime ad lenonem damnando Christianam potius quam ad leonem confessi estis labem pudicitiae apud nos atrociorem omni poena et omni morte reputari. 13Nec quicquam tamen proficit exquisitior quaeque crudelitas vestra; inlecebra est magis sectae. Plures efficimur quotiens metimur a vobis; semen est sanguis Christianorum.”http://www.tertullian.org/latin/apologeticus.htm (accessed on March 3rd, 2008). 74 confessed, “Well, it is quite true that it is our desire to suffer, but it is in the way that the soldier longs for war.” Insisting that Christians “conquered through dying,” Tertullian employed all the imagery of the Roman circus spectacle to describe the cosmic spoils and spiritual fruit reaped from the martyrs’ battle.130 Likewise, Kino urged his fellow 17th century missionaries to press on in the face of “the hate that the common enemy has for the new missions, seeing in them the loss of his dominion over so many souls.” He reminded his critics that God could snatch victory out of defeat and that “sanguis martyrum sit semen christianorum.”131 Kino and his contemporaries frequently cited versions of Tertullian’s oft (mis)quoted maxim that “the blood of Christians is seed.” Along with the notions of fertility discussed in the previous chapter, they invoked Tertullian’s larger argument that shed blood brought spiritual victory, cosmic regeneration, ethnic solidarity, and masculine power to their mission. Just as martyrdom became Tertullian’s ultimate weapon in the war on pagan idolatry, so too Jesuits in northern

Mexico recognized an intimate, violent link between their own sufferings and the war against native religion.132

Tertullian believed that Christians triumphed over Roman religion by refusing to eat meat sacrificed to pagan deities and instead offering up their own bodies in a cosmic “battle for the truth” of the resurrection of the flesh.133 As such the rejection of idolatry became intimately tied to Christian martyrdom. Sacrificial death, therefore, constituted an integral part of the war against paganism. When martyrs died they did not just bear witness to Jesus’ suffering, but

130 For the martial language, see Tertullian, Apolegetica, 1.50.1-4, in Roberts et al. Al, Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol.3, 150. 131 Kino, Vida Del P. Francisco J. Saeta, S.J.: Sangre Misionera En Sonora, 88. In his Favores Celestiales, Kino repeats this interpretation and explicitly cites Tertullian, Apolegeticus adversus gentes, Cap. 1; Kino, Historical Memoir of Pimería Alta, 157 132Leyerle, Blood is Seed, 47 133 Tertullian, Apol., I , L. 75 actually achieved territorial gains in the gradual conversion of the empire. Jesuits emphasized these same themes for the missionary martyrs of northern New Spain. For instance, the theme of cosmic warfare with Satan over souls and territory prevails throughout Pérez de Ribas’ work.134 Just as Tertullian presented martyrs as soldiers, “a militia Christi whose ‘storm troops’

(agonistici) formed in the fight against Satan,” so to Pérez de Ribas extolled the “heroic deeds” of the “soldiers of Christ’s militia.”135 Martyrs were heroes, spilling their blood to conquer spiritual strongholds and redeem captives. The Jesuit Provincial continued,

These men labored in their apostolic ministry and spiritual conquests to free the souls that God had redeemed with His blood and to destroy the fortresses where the devil held them captive. Some of these valiant soldiers spilled their blood at the hands of infidels for preaching the Gospel in these enterprises and missions.136

Perez de Ribas’ bellicose language stands out here. While most would see Jesuit deaths and native rebellion as cause for concern and perhaps recognition of defeat, the historian casts them as advances in a divine/diabolic battle for territory. The irony, of course, is that now instead of resisting imperial coercion, they believed Christian deaths advanced it.

Reduction through Relics

With those same martial purposes in mind, the Provincial placed a graphic account of martyrdom at the end of each book in his volume, beginning with the decapitation of the protomartyr of Jesuit New Spain, “the life of the venerable Father Gonzalo de Tapia.”137 Careful to not overreach, by claiming Tapia as a saint before the Holy See had placed its official seal of

134 Reff, Plagues, Priests, and Demons, 136 135 Frend, Martyrdom and Persecution in the Early Church, 268 136 Pérez de Ribas, Historia De Los Triumphos De Nuestra Santa Fee Entre Gentes Las Mas Barbaras, y Fieras Del Nueuo Orbe, 73; Pérez de Ribas, History of the Triumphs of our Holy Faith Amongst the most Barbarous and Fierce Peoples of the New World, 76; Pérez de Ribas, Historia De Los Triumphos De Nuestra Santa Fee, 761 137 Pérez de Ribas, History of the Triumphs, 194 - 197 76 approval, the Jesuit Provincial went as far as he could in extolling Tapia’s wondrous works both in life and death.138 While living, the learned Tapia had not only pioneered the Jesuit missions of New Spain, but had converted thousands by preaching against “idolatry” and impressing

Sinaloa natives with his pious life.139 Not to be undone by death, however, Tapia performed greater miracles post-mortem, his very relics converting Sinaloa Indians out of their “barbarous customs.”140 In his blow by blow description of Tapia’s demise, Pérez de Ribas described the cannibalism of the Zauque murderers as they severed the Father’s left arm and unsuccessfully attempted to roast it. Along with the father’s fingers being locked in the sign of the cross, Pérez de Ribas took the permanence of the father’s flesh to be a sure sign of his saintliness. However, as Zuaque celebrations proceded, the perpetrators skinned the arm, stuffed it to the finger tips, donned the black robe’s vestments, and finally “drank wine from the skull of that holy head.”141

The cannibalism and bodily desecration, along with other “dances, drunkenness, and superstitions,” Pérez de Ribas interpreted as “very clear indications of the motives of the devil

138 In the late 16th century and early 17th century the papacy increasingly asserted control of the canonization, beatification, and veneration process. Jesuits like Pérez de Ribas and Kino walked a thin line between devotional propaganda and daring in labeling missionaries like Tapia and Saeta “martyrs,” and venerating their relics before they had been declared so by Rome. Ibid., 200 See also, footnote 10 above. On Perez de Ribas’ use of Tapia as a “paradigm” for all Jesuit sacrifice and triumph, see Ahern, "Visual and Verbal Sites," 16 139 Relying on Cartas Anuas and the Relation of Martin Perez, Perez de Ribas not only pointed out Tapia’s physical purity, chastity, and mortification, but also his extensive learning, mastering theology, Latin, and six indigenous languages. Pérez de Ribas, History of the Triumphs, 195-198. For Perez’ letter see the Carta Annua of 1594 in Archivo General de la Nación (AGN), Historia, Tomo 15, fol. 42f, Mexico City, Mexico. I consulted the letters at the Jesuit Historical Institute, Arizona State Museum, Office of Ethnohistory, Microfilm, collected as Memorias para la historia de la Provincia de Sinaloa, 1530-1629. For information on this collection of Jesuit Cartas anuas and other relations from 16th and 17th century Sinaloa see Hubert Howe Bancroft et al., History of the North Mexican States and Texas, Vol. I (San Francisco: The History Company, 1886), 120; Félix Zubillaga and Miguel Angel Rodríguez, eds., Monumenta Mexicana V, 1592-1596, Vol. 5 (Rome: Monumenta Historica Soc. Iesu, 1973), 44-46. 140 Pérez de Ribas, History of the Triumphs, 202 141 Ibid., 126 77 and his ministers for taking the life of such a saintly man.”142 Clearly, for this later martyrologist, the Zuaque had killed and Tapia had died out of hatred of the faith.

Yet, according to Jesuits, even these most gruesome of moments served to further the

Christian cause amongst Sinaloa natives. For instance, Pérez de Ribas claimed that the father’s decapitation and desecration led to the “marvelous effect” of ending drunken celebrations in the province of Sinaloa.143 He attributed the cessation not to the missionary’s bold preaching, but instead to the martyr’s bodily presence. Specifically, Tapia’s skull wrought the change,

“because they used it to drink the wine for their inebriation.” Pérez de Ribas explained that, in the midst of their “pagan” celebrations, the Zauque came to a miraculous conviction of sin regarding their murder and their alcoholic revelries. “The blessed skull extinguished and did away with that pernicious and evil vice, and if it was this vice that took the priest’s life, then he look its life [in return].”144 Tapia had converted them from their idolatry through his very bones.

And, in the accounting of a redemptive economy, it was an equal exchange. Just as Tertullian had claimed that suffering Christian flesh brought victories over pagan sacrifice, so too Tapia’s death had brought spiritual conquest and his body had extirpated native vice.

In extolling the relics’ power of persuasion, Pérez de Ribas pointed to a key issue. He believed that a chief goal of the evangelization was the extirpation of “idolatrous” practices. As such, missionary deaths would be worth the cost if they succeeded in “extinguish[ing] and

142 Ibid., 126 143 “This practice was so completely uprooted that it has never again been seen or heard among these people, and this is a most unique and miraculous thing, for you will not find among all the many nations in the extensive Kingdom of Nueva España a single one that is more abstinent or freer from this vice.” Ibid., 201 144 Ibid., 202 78

[doing] away with pernicious and evil vices.” 145 Pérez de Ribas cited Satan as the ultimate perpetrator of the violence. In his words,

The devil understood that if he did not stem the course of the Gospel, he would soon be stripped of all the souls in Sinaloa. He realized that Father Gonzalo de Tapia, as captain of the conquest, was the principal person waging war against him. Therefore, he fired all his shots at the priest. It seemed to him that with Father Tapia dead, all the soldiers who accompanied him would lose heart.146

With Tapia out of the way, the Provincial reckoned, “the infernal demon” could destroy all the churches, altars, and crosses of the “true God,” and ensnare the Sinaloa people once again with drink, dances, and idolatry “until he carried them off to hell.” Interpreting the violence as a celestial, Manichean battle both confirmed the apostolicity of the mission and brought increased urgency to the encounter with natives.147 However, it did so by occluding more quotidian causes for his death. Tapia had requested that Tovoropa’s alcalde mayor whip and tonsure the elder cacique, Nacebaba, for his opposition to Tapia’s preaching against native practices like polygamy, drinking, dancing, warfare, and sacrifice.148 Perez de Ribas shared

Kino’s perspective that Satan was the ultimate and final cause of missionary death. However,

Kino had also blamed Spanish abuses and defended Pimas from the accusation that they had killed solely out of hatred for the faith; Pérez de Ribas softened Jesuit violence in order to blame Sinaloa’s “sorcerers,” idolatrous practices, and other demonic forces.

145 Ibid., 157 146 Ibid., 125 147 Ibid., 125 148 “El Padre Martin Pelaez al Padre Antonio de Mendoza, Asist., Sept. 1594,” in Zubillaga and Rodríguez, Monumenta Mexicana V, 1592-1596, 293 - 295. See also the Carta Annua of Pedro Mendez of 1594 in Memorias para la historia de la Provincia de Sinaloa, 49. 79

In the years after Tapia’s martyrdom, Jesuits erected statues and portraits, as well as recovering and translating the Father’s relics to San Felipe, Guadalajara, and Mexico City.149 As they remembered, celebrated, and ultimately prayed to the martyr for heavenly intercession, they also began to employ sterner measures in the conversion of Sinaloa natives. For instance,

Tapia had originally argued that the Sinaloa Indians were nonviolent and “knew nothing about religion in general, nor idols.” After his murder, Tapia’s companions became convinced that

Sinaloans not only harbored idols, but that diabolic cult and “hechiceros” had occasioned the violence that brought his death.150 Second, Tapia had followed Bartolomé de Las Casas’ advice and traveled to native villages without military escort.151 Learning their lesson from his death

(as well as earlier disasters in Florida and Virginia), northern missionaries of the 17th century increasingly depended on the military stick to complement their evangelical carrot.

Combining these two convictions, fellow Jesuits like Hernando de Santarén not only employed armed forces for self-defense, but initiated aggressive attacks on native religious practices. Father Santarén had arrived in Sinaloa the very week of Tapia’s death, making a visit to Tapia’s body his first act as a missionary in the north.152 In addition, his first evangelistic forays took place during the general insurrection and military subjection that followed in the wake of the martyrdom. Santarén had very different expectations from both Sinaloa natives and Spanish soldiers. From the beginning, he anticipated Indian aggression and believed

149 William Eugene Shiels, Gonzalo De Tapia (1561-1594): Founder of the First Permanent Jesuit Mission in North America, Vol. XIV (New York: The United States Catholic historical society, 1934), 166-167. 150 “El Padre Gonzalo de Tapia al Padre Claudio Acquaviva, General,” Sinaloa, 1 de Agosto, 1592, Zubillaga and Rodríguez, Monumenta Mexicana V, 1592-1596, 7 151 Félix Zubillaga, ed. Monumenta Antiquae Floridae (1566-1572), Vol. 3 (Rome: Monumenta Historica Soc. Iesu, 1946); Clifford Merle Lewis, Albert J. Loomie, and Virginia Historical Society, The Spanish Jesuit Mission in Virginia, 1570-1572 (Chapel Hill: Published for the Virginia Historical Society by the University of North Carolina Press, 1953), 294. 152 Shiels, Gonzalo De Tapia, 161 80 missionaries should work hand in glove with the military in the “pacification and conversion” of

Sinaloa’s idolatrous peoples.153 As part of a larger plan to reduce Acaxee people from higher elevations to the Sinaloa river valleys, he joined Captain Diego de Avila in 1600 for a “jornada, pacificación y conversion,” under direct authority of the viceroy.154 While Captain Avila reduced them to Spanish spaces, Santarén would uproot Acaxee “idolatries.” Ironically, the actual objects that most concerned them were fetishes, “idols,” and bundles of bones the Acaxee collected to remember their elders and body parts collected as trophies from defeated enemies.155 The Acaxee, it seemed, had relics too. In a systematic campaign, Santarén and Avila went from town to town in the Sierra and ordered its people to produce their bone bundles or other human remains. When they suspected that a town was not forthcoming, they would inspect the monte, looking in caves, ravines and bushes for hidden idolatries. Once these had been gathered, the Acaxee were made to pay ritual obedience to the priest Santarén and then watch as the bundles were broken up, ground down, and then burned.156 Then, they were forced to leave their settlements in the Sierra to gather in the Jesuit reducciónes in the river valleys below. In light of the wider process, the ritual of burning indigenous bones and other

“fetishes” acted as a ceremony of possession that demonstrated Spanish dominion over the

153 Pérez de Ribas, History of the Triumphs, 496f 154 Nicholas Cushner has a good description of the Sinaloa idolatry extirpation campaigns, though he mistakenly identifies the missionary as “Fr. Alonso [sic] Santarén.” See Nicholas P. Cushner, Why have You Come here?: The Jesuits and the First Evangelization of Native America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 72. 155 On burial, cannibalism, and treatment of dead bodies amongst the Acaxee and other Sinaloans, see Beals, The Acaxee: A Mountain Tribe of Durango and Sinaloa, 153; Beals, The Comparative Ethnology of Northern Mexico before 1750, 122-131 156 “Testimonio jurídico de las poblaciones y conversions de los serranos acaxes hechas por el Capitán Diego de Avila y el venerable Padre Hernando de Santarén por el año de 1600, AGN, Historia, Tomo 20, Exponiente 19, folios 183 – 294.” See also, Deeds, Defiance and Deference, 22; Pacheco, Milenarismo Tepehuán, 76f. 81

Acaxee.157 Without a hint of irony or introspection, missionaries believed that native burials and rituals of body collection must be extirpated, even as they cherished the relics of their own fallen dead.

What to modern interpreters may seem like a very fine line between a relic and idolatry was a hardened barrier for missionaries, constituted by ancient binaries. Calling something a relic meant the difference between Christian and pagan; civilized and savage; religion and superstition. It could also mark the difference between conversion and apostasy. Pérez de Ribas often expressed frustration at the fickle choices of converts who initially responded to Jesuit evangelistic work, but later returned to their “gentile” state. Such apostasies reminded him and his readers that sometimes the fruits were “not as copious as we had hoped.”158 In an extended discourse on the murders of Fathers Julio Pascual and Manuel Martínez during a revolt of the

Guazápare and Chínipas in 1632, he described in thick detail their torments in death as well as the “barbarous” treatment given their bodies by “apostates” afterward.159 He started with the calm before the storm, painting an idyllic picture of the Chínipas mission where Pascual toiled

“with fervent enthusiasm to spare no effort, labor or act to remove from the clutches of the devil these souls that were created for heavenly bliss.” His converts rewarded the hard work of their missionary with “an abundant harvest of souls converted to Christ.”160 Until this point, everything conformed to the regular pattern of missionary labor compensated with the expected wages of native Christianity.

157 Patricia Seed, Ceremonies of Possession in Europe's Conquest of the New World, 1492-1640 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 158 Pérez de Ribas, History of the Triumphs, 301; Pérez de Ribas, Historia De Los Triumphos De Nuestra Santa Fee, 254 159 Pérez de Ribas, History of the Triumphs, 301 - 311 160 Ibid., 301 82

But beneath the serene veneer storms were brewing, as a shaman named Cabameai from the neighboring Guazápare nation held “illicit meetings” in the monte, filled with tobacco, drink, and other vices. In these meetings he urged his companions to return to their liberties, and “kill the priest who had introduced such laws and had changed the people’s old ways.”161

Their plan was delayed by the arrival of a new missionary, Father Martínez, along with accompanying soldiers. This event, Pérez de Ribas suggested, was part of God’s providential plan, because “He wished to crown two ministers together with the glorious triumph of death for the preaching of His Gospel.”162 After the departure of the soldiers, the Guazápare led by

Cobameai entered the town of Varohío on a Saturday morning in early February. The two missionaries were working on a small church along with nine native builders and “eight little

Indian choirboys who served the church.” Cobameai and his men surrounded the buildings and set fire to them, declaring their intention to kill the missionaries, and “live as they wished.”

Evidently the fire burned slowly, “extending their martyrdom” for another day. The hidden blessing of this prolonged torment was that the priests had time to catechize, confess, console, and “prepare the faithful Christians who were with them to suffer death.” After praying with their converts, preparing their souls, and pleading with the apostates to desist throughout the night, the two missionaries finally decided to leave the house early Sunday morning. According to the later hagiography, they resolved together, “Let us not die for Christ sadly and with cowardice.” The decision to accept their own death is a key typological detail that confirms that they are dying in odium fidei, in hatred of the faith. After exiting, Pérez de Ribas wrote that they were “struck by thousands of arrows covered with poisonous herb,” which “rained upon their

161 Ibid., 303; Pérez de Ribas, Historia De Los Triumphos De Nuestra Santa Fee, 256 - 257 162 Pérez de Ribas, History of the Triumphs, 304 83 bodies until they became two Saint Sebastians.”163 The reference to the fourth century

Diocletian martyr, whose well known passion story depicted his death by arrows, confirmed the missionaries’ saintly status. The had become Mexican Sebastians.

In the narrative he explained that two of the Indian Christian choirboys escaped and provided other Jesuits and soldiers with the details of what happened next. To the Provincial, the details only confirmed that the priests had died as true martyrs, suffering for the sake of

Christ. “While still alive and after they were dead these blessed priests were tortured by fire, smoke, and insults as well as wounds from arrows, knives, and maces.” The bodies were struck with more arrows, beaten, and cut with knives. The sacramental vessels were profaned and used in “barbarous dances.” In a typological reference to Gospel accounts of the division of

Jesus’ clothes, “the rebel Indians ripped the priests’ cassocks to pieces and divided them among themselves.”164 However, Pérez de Ribas found it remarkable that the heads were not severed according to local custom, as had been the case with Gonzalo de Tapia and the Tepehuan martyrs like Santarén. He attributed the restraint of the killers to the intimidation caused “by the clamors of innocent blood,” divine will, and the actions of a loyal convert. First, he likened

Pascual to “the innocent Abel,” whose blood cried out for justice.165 The innocence, by Pérez de

Ribas’ interpretation, had the effect of scaring the murderers and condemning their consciences. Second, the providence of God, “which many times kept the claws of lions and the fangs of hungry wolves from touching the bodies of martyrs,” miraculously intervened to

“constrain these ferocious Indians,” from severing the heads, because they had become the

163 Ibid., 306 164 Ibid., 309. Matthew 27:35; Mark 15:24 165 Ibid., 310 84

“relics of holy men.” Finally, the justice came when a loyal Christian Chínipa named Crisanto

Sivemeai fought off the attackers with his own bow, killing five and protecting the bodies from further damage. Together, innocent blood, providence, and the loyalty of native Christians warded off further desecration of the corpses and “arranged safekeeping for these holy bodies.”166

When more help arrived from Chínipa the next day, they found the bodies still intact, which they supposedly ascribed to divine intervention as well, since the corpses had been protected from dogs and other animals. They took the bodies to Chínipa, made two graves inside their humble church and buried them by the altar. They seemed to have combined the

Christian burial with some of their own traditions, as they “deposited the bodies and covered them with the mates they use.” Pérez de Ribas wrote that they grieved the losses extensively.

While their tears confirmed the Jesuits’ sense of mission, the redemptive logic assured all that the loss was a victory, since the two missionaries, “became their intercessors in heaven,” and therefore would guarantee their safety, perseverance in faith, and progress “even though they were persecuted.”167 This mutual grief and persecution supplied the historian with firm confirmation of his thesis that native suffering and Jesuit sacrifice worked together for the triumph of Christianity. Their attention to the bodies did as well. When fellow Jesuit Marcos

Gómez later decided to remove the corpses to his mission at Conicari, the Chínipa expressed

“great sorrow” to lose “their relics,” since Pascual had “engendered them in Christ.” This devotion to the remains should be a “consolation to all missionary priests,” Pérez de Ribas maintained because they demonstrated the “special love for the ministers who baptize them

166 Ibid. 167 Ibid., 310 85 and transform them from barbarians into Christians.” Such recompenses were the greatest dividend possible for Jesuits who would deposit their lives in these “savage” lands.168

The Jesuits displayed their own reverence for the bodies, first by celebrating a solemn funeral on February 14, 1632. After sermons, rituals, and singing by a native choir from

Conicari, the “venerable remains, which had been pierced by arrows, beaten with macanas and clubs, and wounded with knives and hatches – all suffered for Christ and His Gospel – were interred.” However, they did not rest in peace for long as brothers from the priests’ college in

Mexico City requested some relics to remember their fallen companions. Ironically, they

“requested the heads of the two priests, which those barbarians beat and wounded.”169 These blessed tokens of divine presence should encourage Jesuit novices and serve as an example of their desired ultimate sacrifice of “shedding their blood for Christ.”170 If the irony of the practice struck any of them as strange, Pérez de Ribas did not let on. The fact that the missionaries branded their would-be converts as barbaric and savage because they removed the heads of their victims did not seem contradictory to the Jesuits’ own practice of removing the skulls and collecting them as sacred relics. The phenomenological correspondence of their rituals was beside the point. What made one savage and the other sacred were the motives and civilizational status of the people who acted, not the act.

168 Ibid. 169 The later Jesuit historian Peter Masten Dunne confirmed that the heads were likely removed and sent to the college, since when their skeletons were exhumed in 1907 the skulls were missing. Peter Masten Dunne and Herbert Eugene Bolton, Pioneer Black Robes on the West Coast (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1940), 261. f.14. 170Pérez de Ribas, History of the Triumphs, 311 86

Between Monte and Misión

In 1611 Tehueco experienced a smallpox epidemic.171 This small Cáhita-speaking pueblo, nestled in between the Gulf of California and the Sierra Madres, lay on the northern bank of the

Río Fuerte in Northwestern New Spain.172 Five years earlier, the Jesuit missionary Pedro

Méndez had “reduced” disparate settlements in the area to form one mission at Tehueco. In his

1601 annual letter to superiors, Mendez explained that Tehueco’s neighbors “were so inspired by the Baptism of the Tehueco children” that they “crossed the river and came with great enthusiasm” to offer their own children, settle in the mission, and abandon their native language in exchange for that of Tehueco. We have reason to doubt that christenings were the only motivation for such a momentous move. Jesuit missionaries recognized and readily confessed the material advantages a mission could bring to a community. Nevertheless, in ensuing years the new reducción “began to bear first fruits” of a spiritual harvest, according to the Jesuit provincial Andrés Pérez de Ribas. When spring came, instead of going out to the woods and mountains (monte) to hunt, the newly baptized converts chose to stay put, exchanging their bows for crosses, chases for confessions, and feasts for flagellations. Their

Passion Week devotion culminated in careful attention to Father Mendez’s sermon and an elaborate Lenten procession, complete with the Stations of the Cross.173

171 Though the dates are not mentioned in the text, Father Méndez (the priest who reported the scene to the Jesuit Provincial Andres Pérez de Ribas) entered the settlement with Captain Hurtaide in 1606 and fled for his life in 1611. On the location, language, and culture of the Tehueco and Rio Fuerte see Edward H. Spicer, Cycles of Conquest: The Impact of Spain, Mexico, and the United States on the Indians of the Southwest, 1533-1960 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1962), 609. On Méndez’ entrada see Dunne, Andrés Pérez De Ribas, 175; Pérez de Ribas, History of the Triumphs, 228f 172 This river is now located in the northern part of present day Sinaloa, Mexico. Information about its location comes from the map and description in the critical introduction to Ibid., 81, 205-206, 229 173 Forgoing their hunt in the spring of 1607 may have been made possible by an increase yield in the mission crops or extra meat offered in Pascal celebration. On Tehueco and other Cahita practices of hunting and participation in 87

However, the vineyard was not always so healthy. Tehueco’s reduction, baptisms, and early embrace of Christian ritual practice had taken place during an epidemic that had spread along the Fuerte River in late 1606 and early 1607. Four years later, another outbreak of smallpox hit the neighboring mission of the Sinaloa. In response, some of Tehueco’s caciques announced that the sickness would no doubt soon strike them as well and that they should seek out traditional healing methods to find a cure. Without Mendez’s knowledge the leaders urged Tehueco to begin with a communal dance. Then, Pérez de Ribas narrates,

They took a manta, or cotton sheet, by the four corners and threw some of the things into it through which the devil makes his pacts. Making faces and performing other ceremonies, blowing in all different directions, they went to all the houses in the pueblo saying that they were gathering up the illness to take it to the monte, where they also repeated these superstitious acts.174

While sickness had been a key context for Tehueco’s decision to resettle, build a church, postpone seasonal hunting trips, and partake in Christian rituals, it also became their impetus for returning to the monte. When Mendez attempted to end the trips to the monte, his Jesuit

Provincial summarized Tehueco’s response, “All this had the effect of preparing the people to rise up and return to their gentile freedom; to do away with the priests, churches, and instruction once and for all.”175

A remarkably flexible term that described everything from mountains to thick brush, in missionary discourse the monte had come to symbolize the veiled, untamed wilderness to which fickle converts fled when they wished to avoid prying eyes or disciplinary measures.176

the missions, see Beals, The Comparative Ethnology of Northern Mexico before 1750, 65; Ralph L. Beals, The Aboriginal Culture of the Cáhita Indians (New York: AMS Press, 1978), 17-24. 174 Pérez de Ribas, History of the Triumphs, 237 175 Ibid. 176 This accorded with contemporary Castilian usage, which, since the Poema del Cid, had described the monte as “tierra inculta cubierta de árboles, arbustos o matas,” a hidden land, so blanketed with trees and bushes that wild 88

Missionaries in northern New Spain equated these hidden spaces outside the mission with diabolic space, places where superstition and sorcery still reigned. In reference to lingering

“idolatry” in Tehueco, Pérez de Ribas claimed that it was well known that when the light of the gospel dawned amongst New World converts, the dispossessed demons (“demonios desterrados”) and the “sorcerers” (hechizeros) through whom they worked “fled to darker places away from the light.177 For this reason, the monte had become a site of enduring superstition, even as the misión could simultaneously progress with conversion. While missionaries believed that Christian ritual, Spanish architecture, and European agriculture had successfully reorganized Tehueco’s time and space, they had to confess that older practices still reigned outside the mission walls, out in the monte.

Similar patterns prevailed in other frontier missions in northern New Spain. As missionaries struggled to “reduce” previously mobile communities to fixed locations, they found their physical and spiritual wanderings hard to contain. In both hagiographies and martyrologies, Jesuit writers like the Provincial Juan Antonio Balthasar praised missionaries for sacrificing their lives in the cause of reducing natives from the monte to the Jesuit reductions.178

and thieving people fled their to hide from justice. Francisco López Estrada, Poema del Cid: Texto Completo En Castellano Actual, Ed. conmemorativa del VIII centenario del manuscrito de Per Abbat ed. (Madrid: Editorial Castalia, 2007), 2693. See also “Monte” in Martín Alonso ed., Enciclopedia del Idioma: Diccionario histórico y moderno de la lengua española (siglos XII al XX): Etimológico, tecnológico, regional e hispanoamericano, Tomo II (Madrid: Aguilar, 1958), 2885; “Monte” in Joan Corominas y Jose Pascual eds., Diccionario Crítico Etimológico Castellano e Hispánico (Madrid: Editorial Gredos, 1980), 131. 177 Pérez de Ribas, Historia De Los Triumphos De Nuestra Santa Fee, 195 178 In his review of the pioneer work of Francisco Maria Pícolo and the martyrdoms of Fathers Nicolas Tamaral and Lorenzo Carranco Father Provincial Juan Antonio Baltasár commended Tamaral for mastering the most difficult art of reducing savage Indians from the monte (indios montarazes) to civilization. “Aprendió el arte de las artes, y mas difícil de todas, como en realidad lo es, domesticar Indios montarazes, educados con costumbres de brutos, y propriedades de fieras, reducir barbaros a vida racional, y política, y gobernar a los que se criaron siguiendo siempre su antojo en una total libertad.”He goes on to praise him for going out into the monte to extirpate “superstition” and baptize. Carta del Padre Provincial Juan Antonio Balthasar en que de noticia de la exemplar vida, 89

In order for conversions and colonies to progress, missionaries would have to bring native peoples out from the monte and into misiones. For this reason Father General Miguel Angel

Tamburini prayed in reference to the Upper Pima (O’odham) that God would not only “disclose those new regions, and to reveal to us the many souls that are scattered outside his flock,” but also empower their missionary, Eusebio Kino, to “draw them from their forests and reduce them to churches and pueblos.”179 And yet, even when missionaries like Kino were successful in persuading a community to settle in a mission, groups like the Upper Pima rarely stayed put.

Pre-existing patterns of seasonal movement, frequent epidemics, missionary discipline, mining opportunities, and Apache raiding all combined to destabilize the missionary dream of settled communities in the northern frontier.

Several interpreters have pointed to native mobility as evidence of missionary failure and indigenous resistance, arguing that evangelists only won superficial conversions in the missions while natives secretly preserved ancestral religion in the monte. Contrasting the “rote memorization” and empty “ritual” of the mission to the “covert practice,” “cultural persistence,” and “retention of traditional cultural elements” that happened outside them, historians like Robert Jackson and David Sweet have concluded that native converts from New

Mexico to Brazil followed at best “syncretic forms” of Christianity and more often adopted a

“thin veneer” of the new faith that only “masked the persistence of traditional religious beliefs

reliogosas virtudes, y apostolicos trabajos del fervoroso misionero el Venerable P. Francisco Maria Picolo, 1752, Huntington Library (HL), Rare Books, Mexico, 1752. 179 Miguel Angel Taburnini, “Letter to Father Eusebio Kino, September 5, 1705” cited in Favores Celestiales Kino, Kino's Historical Memoir of Pimería Alta: A Contemporary Account of the Beginnings of California, Sonora, and Arizona, 93 90 and practices.”180 This interpretation, however, presupposes extremely daft missionaries, constantly dissembling converts, or a definition of religion that assumes ritual and practice are inherently superficial. But should the choice of indigenous groups like the Tehueco to move their community, baptize their children, build churches, and celebrate Catholic conceptions of time and space be dismissed as mere “rote memorization” or “empty ritual”? And, did their trips to the monte always conceal covert resistance? At the same time, could well-educated

Jesuits like Pérez de Ribas and Kino be so naïve as to claim “mission accomplished” even as the war to pacify Indian souls went so woefully wrong? Words like retention, persistence, and resistance imply as much, posing a zero-sum notion of religious change.181 While this interpretation may satisfy various prejudices about the parties involved, it does not adequately illustrate the way communities often weaved together multiple practices and beliefs in the face

180 Notably, proponents of “The New Latin American Mission History,” while arguing for a more critical hermeneutical approach to missionary sources ironically affirm Jesuit pessimism as to the authenticity of native Christianity. In a broad survey of Spanish missionary work from Paraguay to California, Robert H. Jackson has pointed to flights to the monte (like that at Tehueco) to conclude that “neophytes complied with the rituals of the new religion, such as reciting prayers learned through rote memorization, but at the same time continued to covertly practice their old religion.” See Robert H. Jackson, “Introduction,” and Sweet, The Ibero-American Frontier in Native American History 181 Peter Van der Veer, William Taylor, and others have argued that “syncretism” is hardly better, with its negative connotation of an impure admixture of paganism and an imagined Christian ideal. More problematic, “syncretism,” “hybridity,” and “melding” all assume an eventual stasis, a comfortable synthesis arrived at after years of dialectic battle between two religious forces. For problematic renderings of religious combination and conversion, see Erick D. Langer and Robert H. Jackson, eds., The New Latin American Mission History (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), vii-xv, 39-46; Robert H. Jackson, Missions and the Frontiers of Spanish America: A Comparative Study of the Impact of Environmental, Economic, Political, and Socio-Cultural Variations on the Missions in the Rio De La Plata Region and on the Northern Frontier of New Spain (Scottsdale, AZ: Pentacle Press, 2005), 246f. For critiques of “syncretism” in the context of colonial Latin American religion see, Mills, Idolatry and its Enemies, 243f; Martin A. Nesvig, Local Religion in Colonial Mexico (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico, 2006); William B. Taylor, Magistrates of the Sacred: Priests and Parishioners in Eighteenth-Century Mexico (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 5, 47 - 62; Peter Van de Veer, Conversion to Modernities: The Globalization of Christianity (New York: Routledge, 1996), 264f. 91 of acute pressures like draught and disease. Nor can it account for the ways in which those braids could often become disentangled and re-entangled over time.182

Scholars have demonstrated this point well in other historical and geographical contexts.183 However, fewer and fewer studies embrace the older term “conversion” to describe these newer understandings of mixed and mixing identities, preferring more innocuous terms like “cultural contact” or “religious change” to describe the creative practices and forms they encounter in material, historical, and ethnographic sources.184 Others scholars have argued for dispensing with the term “conversion” altogether, seeing it as unable to capture the forced changes of Spanish colonialism and inaccurate for describing “the real

182 On “braiding” and “entanglement” as helpful metaphors for cultural change in colonial and contemporary Peru, see Andrew Orta, Catechizing Culture: Missionaries, Aymara, and the "New Evangelization" (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 23, 65, 123f. Orza uses the language of braiding, weaving, and “trenzas” to “evoke a process of separation and reunification,” of disentangling and reentangling that describes the process of religious weaving that describes Aymara adaptation, missionary histories in their attempts to create meaning, as well as his own scholarly project of comprehending, clarifying, and also re-complicating descriptions of this change. 183 Among many studies see Allan Greer’s discussion of Iroquois Catholicism in his chapter “Conversion and Identity: Iroquois Christianity in Seventeenth-Century New France” in Kenneth Mills and Anthony Grafton, eds., Conversion: Old Worlds and New (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2003), 177 - 184. For more recent studies of conversion in colonial and contemporary Latin America and the Phillipines, see MacCormack, Religion in the Andes, 13f; Nicholas Griffiths and Fernando Cervantes, eds., Spiritual Encounters: Interactions between Christianity and Native Religions in Colonial America (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999); Van de Veer, Conversion to Modernities: The Globalization of Christianity; Joel W. Martin and Mark A. Nicholas, eds., Native Americans, Christianity, and the Reshaping of the American Religious Landscape (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010); Samuel Y. Edgerton and Jorge Pérez de Lara, Theaters of Conversion: Religious Architecture and Indian Artisans in Colonial Mexico, 1st ed. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2001); Robert W. Hefner, Conversion to Christianity: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives on a Great Transformation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); Vicente L. Rafael, Contracting Colonialism: Translation and Christian Conversion in Tagalog Society Under Early Spanish Rule (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988). For an account of the shifting fate of the term “conversion” in recent scholarship, see Kenneth Mills, “Introduction” in Mills and Grafton, Conversion: Old Worlds and New, 301. On the inadequacy of “conversion” for explaining religious changes in colonial Africa, see Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 250. Though more comfortable with the term, Robert Hefner’s collection of anthropological and sociological studies of conversion, Conversion to Christianities, in its presentation of historical contingencies undermines any notion of clear change from one religious systems to another. 184 For a classic description of conversion as rational choice and identity evacuation, see Arthur Darby Nock, Arthur Darby Nock, Conversion: The Old and the New in Religion from Alexander the Great to Augustine of Hippo (Oxford: Clarendon press, 1933), 309. Peter Wood’s “Afterward: Boundaries and Horizons,” makes this point while still accepting the term in Hefner, Conversion to Christianity: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives on a Great Transformation, 305-307 92 transformations that took place among Indians in the frontier missions.” Yet, many of these same writers find themselves returning to the term, almost unintentionally, in their narratives of religious change.185

From the perspective of the colonial missions of New Spain, the term “conversion” may still have payoff as an analytical tool. This value comes not through focusing our attention on the elusive quest to uncover native “hearts” or pry under the “thin veneer” of syncretism, but instead as an instrument for measuring the shifting use of rituals and space by both missionaries and missionized.186 Once some communities had chosen to relocate their rancherías to a centralized reducción, they embraced a central goal of Jesuit conversion, so much so that the word conversión became virtually synonymous with reducción or misión, representing one stage in the spiritual, legal, and spatial process of full Christian status and colonial incorporation. Conversion in this sense did not mean something “undergone voluntarily by rational adults who have learned something new that makes sense to them and that seems so important as to cause them to want to adjust the rest of their thinking and behavior to it,” as David Sweet has defined it.187 Though rational choice should not be precluded out of hand as one aspect of conversion, historians have followed both missionaries and their critics too eagerly, focusing undue attention on doctrinal proposition and cognitive

185 Sweet, 44. Even collections that focus on conversion as a theoretical construct often contain articles that reject the term. In the volume, Conversion: Old Worlds and New, Peter Gose writes a brilliant essay mapping the way Andean burial practices belie the either/or model of religious change. In doing so, he promises, “I will not use conversion as an analytical concept,” explaining that it only dichotomizes, codifies, and objectifies religious traditions. And yet, Gose cannot get away from the term (despite best intentions) not only titling the piece, “Converting the Ancestors,” but employing the term in his article to mark both moments of change in Andean religious and political status as well as a general descriptor for the Spanish project in colonial Peru. Peter Gose, “Converting the Ancestors: Indirect Rule, Settlement Consolidation, and the Struggle over Burial in Colonial Peru, 1532-1614,” in Mills and Grafton, Conversion: Old Worlds and New, 141, 155 - 158. 168 186 On the perennial missionary and historical attempt to discern native “hearts” see Orta, Catechizing Culture, 22. 187 Sweet, 44. 93 assent in the allusive quest to discern the true intentions of mission communities. In fact, to both missionaries and converts words such as “conversion,” “reduction,” “doctrine,” and

“mission” usually denoted the actual place to which communities relocated and in which they participated in Christian architectural, ritual, and civil projects. In short, conversión was a place.188

Spatial and architectural notions of conversion run deep in the history of Christian missions and antedate the primarily cognitive definitions that Talal Asad has traced to discourses of global progress and religious tolerance emerging in the reforms and conflicts of the 17th century.189 In late antiquity the conversion of Roman temples, catacombs, civic spaces, and rural landscapes constituted the key marker of an emerging, distinct Christian identity.190

By 601 CE, Pope Gregory the Great was urging Augustine of Canterbury to preserve English religious locations. Capitalizing on preexisting spatial and ritual loyalties, he told Augustine to have temples “converted from the worship of devils to the services of the true God.”191 For

188 According to Charles Polzer, the terms entrada, conversión, and doctrina represented three phases in the process of establishing a mission, the entrada being the pre-mission phase, the conversion being a fully functioning mission, and the doctrina a pre-parochial phase just before secularization.Terms like rectorado, cabecera, and visita functioned to designate administrative levels within Jesuit structure, while reducción and parroquia had to do with legal and civil status. Though very helpful as a guide, Jesuit letters and histories show that the differences between these terms were not always so clear to participants on the ground. Charles W. Polzer, Rules and Precepts of the Jesuit Missions of Northwestern New Spain (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1976), 5-7, 47-51. 189 Talal Asad, “Comments on Conversion” in Van de Veer, Conversion to Modernities, 267 190 Brown, The Cult of the Saints, 187. 191 In this case, conversion did not necessitate the eradication of all pagan practices or spaces, but their redirection to the service of the Christian god. While wanting to “convert” the temples, Gregory first urged the eradication of idols and replacement with Christian relics. “I have, upon mature deliberation on the affair of the English, determined … that the temples of the idols in that nation ought not to be destroyed; but let the idols that are in them be destroyed; let holy water be made and sprinkled in the said temples, let altars be erected, and relics placed. For if those temples are well built, it is requisite that they be converted from the worship of devils to the service of the true God; that the nation, seeing that their temples are not destroyed, may remove error from their hearts, and knowing and adoring the true God, may the more familiarly resort to the places to which they have been accustomed. ” Pope Gregory I, “Letter to Abbot Mellitus, then Going into Britain [A.D. 601]” in Bede, Ecclesiastical History of the English People, I, 30, Internet Medieval Sourcebook, http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/basis/bede-book1.html (accessed on November 13th, 2007). 94

Gregory, then, conversion meant not changing minds, but changing places, restructuring space and reinterpreting spatial movements like pilgrimages for Christian purposes. In the same way, when Fernando III of Castile conquered the Muslim taifa of Cordoba in 1236, he recognized the beauty and grandeur of its Great Aljama Mosque (which itself had been constructed on the spot and with materials from the destroyed Visigoth monastery of San Vicente) and saw to its

“conversion” for Christian use as a cathedral. Similar scenes repeated throughout the New

World, as Templo Mayores became Cathedrals and sacred mountains were refitted to be saintly shrines.192

These examples suggest that historians of religious change in the contact zones of North

America pay more attention to space. In doing so, this dissertation makes the corollary argument that, despite its evident drawbacks, the term “conversion” serves as a helpful analytical tool for understanding both missionary goals and indigenous actions in those spaces, at least within the context of New Spain. Attention to space allows us to track both missionaries and “wandering peoples” as they not only moved across geographical and cultural borders, but sometimes decided to stay put. “Conversion” not only describes elastic attempts to redefine spaces and native rituals, but also indigenous decisions to remake those spaces into their own places, to adapt Christian rituals to their own use, and move in and out of both according to changing circumstances.

Like the term “reducción,” the word “conversión” conveys much more than religious affiliation. Along with traditional definitions of the verb “convertirse” as “to repent” or “follow

192 Art historian Samuel Edgerton has called our attention to one powerful example of a project of spatial conversion shared by natives and missionaries, labeling the art and architecture produced by Franciscan missionaries and Indian artisans “theaters of conversion.” Edgerton and Pérez de Lara, Theaters of Conversion: Religious Architecture and Indian Artisans in Colonial Mexico, 350 95 another opinion,” contemporary Castilian dictionaries defined the noun conversión as “the movement from one state to another, as in natural things, in which water converts to an icicle or ice cube.”193 In that tradition, the word conversion has stood up quite well in the sciences, used to describe everything from car parts to electrical transformers, chemical transitions, and units of measurement. In architectural terms, people still convert apartments to condos, basketball courts to ice rinks, and malls into churches. Even as the term “conversion” retains explanatory force in other academic fields and popular discourse describing changes that are often contingent and reversible, why is it that historians of religion still grapple with its connotations? Surely, contemporary discomfort with the idea of conversion derives from the way ther term came to be defined as primarily cognitive, culturally total, and utterly irreversible in Anglo-Protestant historiography.194 However, this definition ignores the possibilities latent in the wider semantic field, which include the creative redirection of use, restructuring of space, and reinterpretation of movement.

In many cases conversion, in the spatial sense, was exactly what was at stake for both

Indian and Jesuit communities.195 Missionaries certainly recognized reducción or resettlement as a key marker of religious change.196 In fact, for Jesuits like Miguel Venegas of Baja California

193 “Convertir” in Sebastián de Covarrubias Orozco, Benito Remigio Noydens, and Martín de Riguer, Tesoro De La Lengua Castellana o Española, Según La Impresión De 1611, Con Las Adiciones De Benito Remigio Noydens Publicadas En La De 1674 (Barcelona: Horta, 1943), 354. 194 Arthur Darby Nock, Conversion: The Old and the New in Religion from Alexander the Great to Augustine of Hippo (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1988), 309. 195 Of course the problem we face here is the perennial question of sources. We have no colonial histories written in Indian hands, and the testimonies we have are rendered infinitely complex by transcription, translation, and textual histories. However, as numerous ethnohistorians have argued, we can do our best with what we do have, reading colonial sources critically for insight into Indian actions and comparing them to archeological record as well as other material and oral sources Radding, Wandering Peoples, xvi-xvii; Susan Deeds, Defiance and Deference, 9- 10. 196 Not surprisingly, then, Peter Gose has argued that the term “reducción,” normally translated as “reduction” in English, conveyed a much broader semantic range in early modern Castillian, including “ordering, rational 96 reducirse meant hacerse Cristiano, being reduced meant becoming Christian.197 Conversely,

Jesuits branded notoriously mobile groups like the Apache and Seri as wild, savage, and inherently non-Christian for their refusal to accept Christian order and spatial reducción.198

Though we may rightly reject many of the biases behind language that branded these indigenous communities as inherently savage, it was generally true that the more mobile the ethnic group, the less likely their incorporation into colonial society or Christian missions in

New Spain, while the Spanish converted the structures and spaces of settled groups like the

Nahuas with more alacrity. Between the Nahua and Apache extremes, many groups chose a comprehensive strategy that employed both settlement and mobility, corresponding to changes in environment, power, and resources. For example, residents of Tehueco probably understood their decision to relocate and adopt some forms of Christian ritual and Castilian agriculture as a key moment of change, with a much more tangible impact on their lifeworlds than any confession about the nature of God. The move granted access to key resources, such as fertile flood plains as well as Spanish trade and Christian tradition. Nevertheless, their actions also indicate that they did not understand this decision as permanent and irrevocable.

persuasion, religious conversion, and political subjugation,” noting that the Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española includes the definition “convincerse” or “to become convinced.” Gose, "Converting the Ancestors," 140– 174 197 Miguel Venegas, Noticia De La California y De Su Conquista Temporal y Espiritual Hasta El Tiempo Presente. Sacada De La Historia Manuscrita, Formada En México a De 1739 (Mexico: Reimpreso por L. Álvarez y Álvarez de la Cadena, 1943), 248, 257, 263. 198 This prejudice dated back to Jose de Acosta’s influential Natural and Moral History of the Indies, where he divided new world civilizations into three levels based on cultural markers like literacy, laws, and lodging. Pointing to Florida natives and “in New Spain all the Chichimecas,” Acosta described this “third kind of government” as “absolutely barbarous, and these are Indians who have neither laws nor king nor fixed dwellings but go in herds like wild animals and savages.” José de Acosta, Natural and Moral History of the Indies [Historia natural y moral de las Indias.] trans. Jane Mangan and ed. Walter Mignolo (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 380-381. Despite the prejudice implied by such categories, it is significant to note that the groups that stayed in one place and had built their own structures, like the residents of Tenochtitlan and Cuzco, though perhaps never Christian in the way in which the missionaries had hoped, nevertheless adopted Christian places and practices with more alacrity than non-sedentary groups like the Apache and Seri. 97

When the second epidemic came to the Fuerte River valley in 1611, they quickly made use of other methods and spaces, gathering up the sickness and taking it out to the monte. Problems came about when Father Mendez challenged them to remain in the mission and rely exclusively on Christian ritual. Accustomed to pre-existing patterns of both settlement and movement, many resisted by threatening the missionary’s life, burning the mission Church, and fleeing to higher climbs.199

At first, it may seem like the Tehueco totally rejected Christianity, its agents, its rituals, its relics, and its locations. Historians of northern New Spain have long been drawn to such moments of indigenous rebellion, where churches are burned, missionaries are killed, and settlements are abandoned. Many times, these revolts prove both the missionary failure to convert and native decisions to reject Christianity.200 Take, for example, the revolts among some Upper Pima (O’odham) in 1695 and again in 1751.201 Each manifested itself primarily in

199 The Tehueco rebellion of 1612 was ultimately thwarted by military suppression, Captain Diego Martínez de Hurdaide aiding the Jesuits in bringing Tehueco back to submission. Shortly thereafter, they forced two nearby Tehueco settlements that were inhabited primarily by “gentiles” to join the mission community, maintaining that the rancherias agreed to reduction “in order to govern themselves better and to benefit more from catechism.” Pérez de Ribas, History of the Triumphs, 239. See also, Thomas Naylor and Charles W. Polzer, eds., The Presidio and Militia on the Northern Frontier of New Spain: A Documentary History (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1986), 212. But, there is some evidence that the Tehueco won concessions, or at least a standstill. Mendez was removed from the mission and at the same time widespread sickness was averted. Decades later, the Visitor Juan Antonia Baltsasar confirmed that the Fuerte River missions still struggled with native mobility and ritual exclusivity. Juan Antonio Balthasar, Father Balthasar Visits the Sinaloa Missions, 1744 – 1745, Rare Book, HL, trans. Jerry Patterson (Printed by Frederick Beinecke, 1959), 14. 200 Thomas Sheridan, Landscapes of Fraud: Mission Tumacácori, the Baca Float, and the Betrayal of the O’odham (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2006), 48; Jackson, “Introduction,” in Langer and Jackson, The New Latin American Mission History. 201Likewise, the German Jesuit Ignaz Pfefferkorn believed that the Apaches and Seris that raided the northern missions could never be fully converted, due to their semi-nomadic lifestyle and economies based on hunting, raiding, and fishing. Nevertheless, he rejoiced with surprise when “The Seris allowed themselves to be persuaded to forsake their cliffs and caves, and to assemble in four newly founded villages, where fertile soil could provide them with a sure sustenance. Here, under the supervision of two missionaries, the newly converted Seris lived for several years in a very Christian manner, peacefully and entirely satisfied.” And yet, their rejection of Christianity came when they “determined to throw off the Spanish yoke” and flee back to the hills, encouraging some Christianized Pimas from Caborca to abandon the missions and join them in the Black Mountain (Cerro 98 the destruction of and flight from Christian spaces (churches, fields, missionary homes).202 On the other hand, missionaries like Kino and Pima leaders marked the reestablishment of peace and the acceptance of Christianity (pacificación) by noting the rebels’ choice to resettle in missions, rebuild churches, and reestablish spaces for cattle and crops.203

Interpreters drawn to the revolts have paid comparatively less attention to native decisions to relocate to missions in the first place, stay in missions for decades, and return to missions after revolts run their course. However, Cynthia Radding has argued that selective use of missions and missionary rituals became the norm among native Sonorans. While missionaries and colonial governments sought stability in the missions, some Opatas, Eudeves,

Pimas, and Jobas sought missions out as a place to reconstitute themselves as a people

(ethnogenesis) in the midst of colonial disruptions. None of these groups, however, saw their resettlement as permanent or bounded by territorial markers. Instead, they maintained much older notions of dispersed ethnic and cultural space and regular movement that transcended mission borders and extended into the monte. As such, life for Sonoran people had always been punctuated by moments of flight and resettlement, according to environmental, ethnic, and economic circumstance.

Prieto)during the revolt of 1751. Ignaz Pfefferkorn, Sonora: A Description of the Province (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1989), 150 - 151. 202 When both Spanish and Pima witnesses explained the eruptions, they pointed to the obliteration of missions and the scattering of cattle, horses, and people as clear proof of the converts' rejection of Christianity. And, in some ways, they ushered in real changes, as some Pima elected to join Seri groups in the monte, while others returned to missions and negotiated concessions from both Jesuits and colonial authorities. Concessions ranged from the punishment of soldiers to the removal of distrusted missionaries, punishment of abusive native fiscales (particular those coming from other groups like the Opata and Eudeves), freedom from burdensome labor, and right to leave missions for extended hunts or farming. 203 “They discovered that all the nearby Rancherias had fled in fright. Nearly all the cattle, horses, and mules were scattered about….” Kino, Biography of Francisco Javier Saeta, 95, 145, 175; Radding, Wandering Peoples, 253. On Christian pacification being marked by tracking down in the monte, resettlement, rebuilding of churches, and the search for stolen Christian relics, see the journal of General Juan Fernandez de la Fuente in Naylor and Polzer, The Presidio and Militia on the Northern Frontier of New Spain, 637f. 99

Mapping the Martyred Mission

Jesuits like Pérez de Ribas, Eusebio Kino, and Miguel Venegas attempted to map the dialectical process of martyrdom, memory, and conversion for their European audiences. Pérez de Ribas did so verbally, by describing the geographic expansion and periodic sacrifices throughout the history of the missions. He argued that each evangelistic local began with martyrdom or some other sacrifice to prepare the ground. Thus, savage spaces were sacralized by the blood of missionary martyrs. In so doing, the martyrs and missionaries had converted once diabolic spaces into Christian places, locating them in the realm of Christian history and dominion. Other Jesuits presented this bloody conversion visually. For example, in two of the concluding books to his Life of Javier Saeta, Eusebio Kino depicted the geographic “state of the missions” through two maps and a collection of the young Jesuit martyr’s “Apostolic opinions” about the missions.204 These maps, completed during the 1695 rebellion and its aftermath, brilliantly illustrated Kino’s wider goals for his account of Saeta’s death. The first drawing,

“Theater of the Apostolic Works of the Society of Jesus in North America,” demonstrated the extent of Jesuit missions throughout the wider region of Northern New Spain, while highlighting the strategic importance of the Pimería in relation to New Mexico, Nuevo Viscaya, Sinaloa,

Sonora, and Baja California (Appendix 1). Though his 1695 edition still represented California as an island, there were already clear hints that there might be a peninsular bridge, which Kino would verify in his 1698 – 1701 expeditions and make explicit in his famous map of 1701. Kino believed his Pimería stood as the frontier in the Spanish enterprise of North America,

204 Actually, the maps for Book Seven were never included in the unpublished archives of the Saeta biography. However, they were located in a separate collection and published by the Jesuit Ernest Burrus. Ernest J. Burrus ed., Kino and the Cartography of Northwestern New Spain (Tucson: Arizona Pioneers' Historical Society, 1965). 100 strategically located as a base for defense and expansion. It would be, Kino was persuaded, the key to further missions and exploration in Baja and Alta California, as well as a solid bulwark against raiding Apaches, Janos, and Jocomes from the Northeast.205 He even suggested that further exploration might link New Spain with New France, discovering a more efficient return passage to Europe. In addition, an expansion into the Californias from a base in the Pimería may finally create the conditions necessary for a port on the South Sea (Pacific), which could supply ships in the China trade and fend off feared Russian intrusion from the North. In short, Kino still thought that the Jesuits could serve a unique role for many years in the expansion of the

Spanish empire far to the north.206

He also believed that the sacrifice of the martyrs prepared the way for this imperial expansion. Far from a deterrent, the death of Saeta and all the martyred Jesuits of the 17th century should rather be viewed as the key to the entire progress of empire. In order to illustrate the wider story of Jesuit sacrifice, Kino decided to add a letter “M” in the locales where all those previous martyrs “shed their glorious blood in imitation of the Divine Lamb,” to

205 Kino hints at this motive already in Saeta, 154 – 163, 169, but made it much more explicit after the discovery of the peninsula. Cf. Kino’s Favores Celestiales, published in English as Kino’s Historical Memoir. Eusebio Francisco Kino, Kino's Historical Memoir of Pimería Alta: A Contemporary Account of the Beginnings of California, Sonora, and Arizona, ed. and trans. Herbert E. Bolton (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1948). 206 In response to his maps and his account of Saeta’s death, Kino won support for this plan along with the extension of the mission to California after his visit to Mexico City in 1696. He and his colleague Juan Maria Salvatierra were commissioned by the Mexican Viceroy José Sarmiento de Valladares to begin the California work. The first Bourbon King of Spain, Phlip V, confirmed this commission in a royal decree of July 1, 1701 and the Jesuit Provincial Francisco de Arteaga made Kino the Rector of the Pimeria again in 1702 with specific instructions to prepare for the extension of the mission to the north and west into the modern states of Arizona and California. They were granted 6000 pesos annually from the Mexican treasury, but more importantly given the right to create their own fund to ask support from European patrons, the well-known Pious Fund of California (Fondo Piadoso). Eusebio F. Kino, Plan for the Development of Pimería Alta, Arizona & Upper California: A Report to the Mexican Viceroy (Tucson: Arizona Pioneers’ Historical Society, 1961), 7 – 25, 37 -38, 50 -51; Kino Reports to the Headquarters: Correspondence of Eusebio F. Kino S. J. from New Spain with Rome (Rome: Jesuit Historical Institute, 1954), 108 – 109; Kino, Historical Memior, 157 – 158, 216. Francisco Maria Piccolo, Informe Del P. Francisco. María Píccolo, ed. Albert Pradeau (México: Editor Vargas Rea, 1953), 32f. 101 his “Theater” map. 207 The surviving work, which he forwarded in 1696 to Rome for his friend and recently elected General of the Jesuits Tirso Gonzalez, does not have the designations.208

However, in the text of the Life of Saeta he made clear his hope that by placing the “M” on the map in each mission where a Jesuit had died, he marked a battle site and victory in the war against the commony enemy. For the letter M, would “signify the places where our glorious soldiers of Jesus gave their lives for the Catholic faith.”209 Kino’s map illustrated for the Jesuit

Provincials in Mexico City, Juan de Palacios and Diego de Almonazír, as well as the General Tirso

Gonzalez his conviction that missionary martyrdoms had won decisive victories and propeled the northern advance. By tying each martyr to a specific mission on the map, Kino brought indigenous lands into the conceptual space of Christendom. As he explored the region, he had given each settlement the name of a saint, combining the preexisting native names for a site with a Christian patron. Now, especially blessed towns could also claim for themselves Jesuit martyrs who had joined the saints in sacralizing the landscape. The combination of charting accurate geographic locations, endowing with patron saints, and adding martyr “M”s helped illustrate Kino’s argument that the Jesuits’ “apostolic labors” in this theater of evangelism had brought civilization and Christianity to previously unknown regions. It also reinforced the notion that conversions were hard won, but ultimately brought the extension of the rim of

Christendom. In this sense he literally created a map that transformed the potentially utopian moments of native revolt and missionary death into the locative space of Christendom.210

207 Ibid., 115. 208 Kino, Correspondencia del Padre Kino Con Los Generales, 40 - 43 209 Kino, Saeta, 113 - 115 210 See Introduction on J. Z. Smith, “Map is Not Territory.” 102

The word “theater” also points to the metaphor of cosmic war. While a common synonym for large scale maps in the early modern period, the word also recalls the scene of battle for the missionaries. Just as the Jesuits’ Spanish name “Compania,” had both militaristic and relational connotations, so too Kino’s “Theater,” both performed persecution for eager metropolitan audiences and charted a colonial war for the commanding Generals of the

Comapany in Rome. More explicitly, Kino’s second map linked the three themes of mission, martyrdom, and expansion by telescoping the missions, visitas, and rancherias of the

Pimería.211 In order to drive his point home, he sketched a portrait of Saeta’s martyrdom right on top of the young Jesuit’s beloved missions (Appendix 2). In a 1698 letter to Kino, Gonzalez thanked the missionary for the map “which shows the Pima region where the servant of God,

Father Francisco Javier de Saeta, was put to death by unconverted natives.” The General of the

Society understood its purpose perfectly. The combined martyrology and map reminded superiors that the advance of Christianity and civilization depended on missionary sacrifice.212

By visualizing the murder scene as a prominent feature on the Sonoran landscape, Kino defied the cartographer’s rules of perspective, but imposed the logic of martyrdom onto the borderlands scene. The arms are extended in a cruciform pattern, with the left hand conspicuously close to the two offending towns. His knees rest upon his principal mission

(cabecera) of Caborca and his primary preaching point (visita) of Pitiquín. Together, Saeta’s outstretched arms and bended knees encompass the rebellious territory and emphasize the new purchase that the Jesuits had gained over the territory. Combining martyrology and

211 In the portrait, Tubutama and Caborca are marked as missions with small churches, crowned with crosses. Oquitoa is a rancheria without a missionary (the supposed reason for their jealous anger). Saeta’s left knee rests upon San Diego de Pitquis, which was a preaching point or visita linked to Caborca. 212 Ibid., 40 - 43 103 cartography, the Father visually represented his argument from the preceding chapters. Pima rebellion and Jesuit death should not be perceived as a catastrophic impediment to further spiritual and territorial expansion. Rather, the blood of this passive martyr would be the very seed of glorious Christian and Spanish advance.

Finally, in the concluding portion of the Life of Saeta (Book XIII) Father Eusebio supposedly highlighted the martyr Saeta’s insights on the Indians, their conversion, the method of reductions, qualities needed in prospective missionaries, the “new people” being created at the pristine missions, and other means and motives “to make new evangelical conquests among these new conversions and missions.”213 However, Charles Polzer has persuasively argued that this whole chapter is not based on any documentary source and has all the earmarks of Kino’s own thoughts regarding missions.214 If he is right – that “Saeta’s opinions” are really those of Kino - then this final chapter represents Kino’s most extended treatise on missionary method, motivations, and goals. The details of his missiology are not essential for our purposes, and have already been covered by Polzer.215 In the final book we have a remarkably cogent statement of the exchange Kino believed to be essential for the growth of the borderlands redemptive economy. If Christ’s kingdom was to be extended, both bloody and bloodless martyrdoms must be paid. According to the Padre, Saeta “always said that as long as this most blessed goal was attained, no one should mind what he might have to suffer or what might happen – crosses, labors, set-backs, dangers, aversions, persecutions, or opposition of

213 Ibid., 211. Burrus, Kino and the Cartography of Northwestern New Spain, 49. See also, the republishing of most this work in Charles W. Polzer, The Jesuit Missions of Northern Mexico, The Spanish Borderlands Sourcebooks; 19 (New York: Garland Pub., 1991), 105 - 140. 214 Charles W. Polzer, Rules and Precepts of the Jesuit Missions, 45 - 48. 215 Ibid. 104 visible and invisible enemies.”216 Martyrdom should be viewed not as unmitigated loss, but rather as the indispensable cost of sacralizing and civilizing territory.217

After Kino, other Jesuits used cartographic and historical work to make a similar point about the way that missionary martyrs converted native terrain into Christian territory. Miguel

Venegas, for example, featured the deaths of Fathers Lorenzo Carranco and Nicolás Tamaral his

Noticia de la California y de su Conquista, written in 1739 and published in 1757.218 Though most of the history focused on the natural history of California and the progress of the missions, Venegas dedicated multiple chapters to the Pericue Rebellion of 1734 and gave detailed accounts of the deaths of both missionaries. The text supplied hagiographical details like the Fathers’ prayers for “their flock” and their murderers. Like Christ, in the midst of their suffering they prayed for forgiveness for those who had murdered them. Venegas also featured depictions of the missionary murders on an elaborate map enclosed with the text (Appendix 3).

A map based upon the earlier explorations of Kino supplied the centerpiece for the illustration.

Drawings of California animals, fauna, priests, and healers surrounded the map and indicated the theme of the history. Intriguingly, the Jesuit historian also placed illustrations of Tamaral and Carranco’s violent deaths by sword and arrow at the two corners of the map. The visual meaning could not be clearer and confirmed the hagiographical narrative inside. Through their martyrdoms and other sacrifices, the Jesuits had become Californian themselves, purchasing a place in the native landscape and natural history.

216 Kino, Saeta, 183. 217 Both secular and religious superiors followed Kino’s logic and not only cleared him of blame in the rebellion but commissioned him to extend the pacifications in California and north of the Pimeria into modern Arizona. See note 206 above. 218 Miguel Venegas et al., Noticia De La California y De Su Conquista Temporal y Espiritual Hasta El Tiempo Presente, Sacada De La Historia Manuscrita, Formada En México año de 1739 (México: Reimpreso por L. Alvarez y Alvarez de la Cadena, 1943), 451 - 477. 105

Conclusion

In this light, movement from the misión to the monte, whether for seasonal hunts, ritual intercession, or wider rebellion, looks less like an irreversible rejection of Christianity and more like circumstantial response, consistent with pre-Hispanic patterns of cultural and ethnic mobility. Likewise, the convergences and contrasts to European notions of body collection, burial, and other rituals of remembrance represented both possibility and persistent impediments. Movement from monte to misión could represent entangled motives that included the desire to access both physical and spiritual resources in the context of asymmetrical relations of power between colonizers and colonized. Those who emphasize the definitive nature of either reduction or rebellion (whether missionaries or later scholars), miss the more flexible notion of time and space that motivated native movements between monte and misión. Conversion should be read, not as definitive cultural transformation, but as tactical religious mobility, entailing boundary crossing between what some Europeans read as bordered spaces. Even as missionaries hoped to make Indians into “hijos del pueblo,” the older practice of

“rancherías volantes” frustrated their desires. These elastic “ethnic spaces” constituted a third option between the complete reduction to sedentary and agricultural subsistence that missionaries desired and the seemingly nomadic existence of Papagos, Seris, Jocomes, and

Apaches (though none of these groups were entirely transient). If settlement, flight, and resettlement gave semi-sedentary groups one way of assuring “access to fertile cropland and to mountainous forests for hunting and gathering,” conversion could give them access to both 106

Christian ritual in the mission and traditional practices in the monte.219 From a perspective of religious change, such selective appropriation points to the contingent and changing nature of conversion, reminding us not only that the relationship of distinct Indian communities to the mission program could change over time, but also that groups like Tehueco and the upper Pima were themselves “converting” Spanish spaces and rituals to their own use.

In their preaching against native cultural and religious practices, Jesuit missionaries of northern New Spain encountered resistance ranging from sarcastic questions to outright revolt.

Some rebellions led to missionary suffering and death. In response to these deaths, Jesuits collected relics, published martyrologies, and built memorials that celebrated the deaths and portrayed them as victories in a spiritual war for territorial control against diabolic forces.

When distributed, these histories could occasion more zeal, increase recruitment, and inaugurate new campaigns to punish Indian “sorcerers” and eradicate “pagan” practices. Some of the Jesuits who led these campaigns ultimately obtained their own palm of martyrdom as new groups like the Tepehuanes and Tarahumaras resisted the increasingly hardened Jesuit approach. The need to prove that missionaries died because of native hatred for the faith offered both pitfalls and promises in this process. In many ways it contributed to these cycles of violence by fostering holy memories and practices of veneration that obscured more quotidian and material causes for violence. However, Jesuits like Kino and Pérez de Ribas also used the discourse to direct the gaze of doubting superiors away from the culpability of actual indigenous groups like the Pima and Zuaque and toward the final, diabolic source of hostility.

They insisted that ultimately the devil’s evil schemes would come to naught and these groups

219 Radding Murrieta, Wandering Peoples, 8-10, 110-111, 143-144 107 would repent of their hatred and embrace Christ. In short, for Jesuit missions in northwestern

New Spain, as for the martyrs of the early church, winning could come through their wounding and victory through their victimization.

108

3 In Odium Fidei: Hagiography and Hatred of the Faith

Introduction: Like a Swift Arrow

On the Saturday morning between Good Friday and Easter Sunday of 1695, Father

Francisco Javier Saeta woke early, eager to prepare for the glorious culmination of Holy Week.

Having arrived at his station in Caborca, Sonora just months before, Saeta had resisted repeated offers from his fellow Jesuits to spend the week with them at the more established missions of Northern New Spain.220 He explained that he not only toiled piously with his native converts, but had so much physical labor he could not spare the time. In March, Saeta lamented to his mentor Father Eusebio Kino, “I will not enjoy your favors, for in reality, and I am swamped both spiritually and temporally.” By April, however, he had relented a bit and promised the pioneering padre a visit sometime after the paschal celebrations. Thanking Kino for a care package of letters, bread, and cookies, the new missionary excused his absence by expressing paternalistic concern for his native converts. He explained that he was presently occupied with his newborn “children” in the faith, but would “nevertheless steal a while and like a swift arrow fly to put myself at your feet.”221 Saeta invoked the archery imagery whenever possible, an obvious play on his family name, which meant “arrow” in both the missionary lingua franca Castilian as well as his native Italian that Saeta shared with Kino.222 He

220 “Pimeria Alta” was the official name given to an area of Northern New Spain occupied by various groups of Pima Indians and under Jesuit mission control. With some thirty thousand inhabitants, the area was populated, but fairly isolated from other Spanish work. The region corresponds to parts of Arizona and Sonora (Mex.) on both sides of the United States – Mexico border today. As a reference, the reader may find it helpful to refer to the two maps included in Appendices 1 and 2. 221 From Saeta’s letters to Kino as edited and translated in Kino, Biography of Francisco Javier Saeta, 75 222 “Saeta” in de Covarrubias Orozco, Noydens, and de Riguer, Tesoro De La Lengua Castellana o Española, Según La Impresión De 1611, Con Las Adiciones De Benito Remigio Noydens Publicadas En La De 1674, 919. The entry links the name to both Greek and Latin cognates as well as the Persian Zodiac character of Sagittarius. See also Isaiah 109 savored the pun, but he did not anticipate its tragic irony. Weeks later, when he finally did arrive at Kino’s feet, he did so in a highly ritualized procession that was anything but swift, and the only arrows were those collected in the reliquary that contained Saeta’s bones and ashes.

Jesuit writers relished prophetic tidbits like Saeta’s “arrow” pledge, eager to point out every sign that martyred missionaries fervently expected and embraced their fate. When placed in letters, encomiums, histories, and reports these omens transcended hagiographical anecdote and reinforced a shared sense of providential suffering between missionaries and the

Jesuit colleagues who read of their sacrifices from Europe, other parts of the Americas, and even Asia.223 Indeed, for early modern Jesuits, the missionary vocation meant living in light of an impending death. Jesuit colleges cultivated this link for novices in training through artwork, litanies, and devotional exercises.224 Once on the field, missionaries patiently awaited their passions, praying that they might be counted worthy to join a growing company of colleagues who had entered glory as witnesses to the faith. Even those evangelists who never obtained a martyr’s crown invoked prophecies and imagery of innocent death to express their daily sufferings and ultimate hope of a full imitatio Christi. By highlighting premonitions such as

Saeta’s “swift arrow” comment, hagiographers like Kino cultivated these desires and reminded fellow Jesuits as well as wider audiences that martyrdoms were both the imagined ideal and

49:2 “y me puso por saeta bruñida, me guardó en su aljaba,” in Cipriano de Valera and Casiodoro de Reina, La Biblia, Que Es, Los Sacros Libros Del Vieio y Nvevo Testamento: Revista y Conferida Con Los Textos Hebreos y Griegos y Con Diversas Translaciones, Segua icion ed. (Amsterdam: En casa de Lorenço Iacobi, 1602). 223 Clossey, Salvation and Globalization, 88 224 Gauvin A. Bailey, Between Renaissance and Baroque: Jesuit Art in Rome, 1565-1610 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), 7-9, 44, 52 - 53, 62 - 67. 110 ever-present reality for New Spain’s northernmost missionaries.225 Martyrdom was a possibility, in both actual and symbolic senses. It could really happen and it could really help.

Eusebio Kino’s account of Saeta’s death, The Innocent, Apostolic, and Glorious Death of

Father Francisco Javier Saeta, provides not only an intriguing example of this logic, but a wider look at the multiple functions of native suffering and missionary sacrifice in the comprehension, justification, and ongoing provision of the Jesuit frontier evangelistic project. Kino prepared the work explicitly for the purpose of defending the Pimeria Alta mission on the occasion of Kino’s recalling to Mexico City in early 1696.226 Due to its occasion and audience, Kino needed to recast the rebellion and the ensuing missionary death as a positive investment in God’s redemptive economy. However, he also argued out of conviction, rooting his opinions in both

Christian theology and Jesuit training. This redemptive sensibility, the trust that the Lord would rescue good out of what others had intended for evil, ran through Kino’s account of the rebellion. He found support for this hope in the minutiae of Saeta’s own life, the recent history of the Jesuit missions in northern New Spain, the letters of supportive missionaries and soldiers, as well as an historic Christian theology that twinned persecution and church growth. More generally, this pairing of opposites, of suffering and success, of victimization and victory, undergirded the Jesuit understanding of Christian history and their own mission. In the case of

Father Saeta, Kino hoped to demonstrate the divine plan behind his tragic death, showing both

Saeta’s particular calling to martyrdom as well as the historical pattern of God rescuing triumphs out of tragedies.

225 For another example of martyrological premonition as assurance of providential meaning, see Neumann, Historia De Las Rebeliones En La Sierra Tarahumara, 27 226 Kino, Biography of Francisco Javier Saeta, 363 111

At the same time, martyrdoms presented physical, theological, and theoretical challenges to missionaries working in New Spain. This was because Catholic missionaries in colonial Latin America occupied a problematic space, tugged in two directions as both colonizers and evangelists. Charged with settling and converting the “wandering peoples” of the northwestern frontier, Jesuit missionaries in New Spain had a particularly complicated job description that entailed both civilizing and Christianizing “wandering peoples,” semi-nomadic indigenous groups.227 Because kings funded and controlled the missions under the system of patronato real, the missionaries did not merely serve the Pope, the Jesuit General, or other superiors in the Society, but also royal governors and viceroys, concerned primarily with stabilizing frontiers, pacifying indigenous inhabitants, and consolidating territorial gains.228 So, rebellious converts and ensuing missionary deaths were implicitly political events. For this reason successful passion stories in colonial New Spain not only made typological parallels but also confronted frontier realities. Kino had to address multiple audiences, from pious patrons longing for tales of heroic sacrifice to royal officials concerned with native rebellions and frontier instability.

227 The term “wandering peoples” is not used in a derogatory way here. Instead, it refers to diverse, semi- sedentary groups like the Seri (Cunca’ac), Opata (Tegüima), Pima Bajo (Nebomes), Eudeve, Papago (Tohono O’odham), Sobaipuri, Yaqui (Yoeme), Yuma (Quechan), Cocopa, Maricopa, and Yavapai, in this period. Jesuit missionaries to the Pimeria Alta largely focused on pacifying, settling, and converting first the Opata of southern Arizona and then groups along the Altar, Magadalena, Asunción, San Miguel, and Santa Cruz rivers valleys, inhabited by Upper Pima (Akimel O’odham) that populated the area of northwestern New Spain targeted by Jesuit missionaries, designated as Sinaloa, Sonora, and the Pimeria Alta. They developed sophisticated ways of surviving and thriving in harsh desert and mountain environments through regular patterns of settling and moving Radding Murrieta, Wandering Peoples, 14. 228 The series of “bulls of donation,” issued by Pope Alexander VI in the 1480s and 90s set up the system of royal patronage of the Church (patronato real in Spanish, padronado real in Portuguese). See, “Inter Caetera, the Papal Bull of 1493,” in Lewis Hanke and Jane M. Rausch, eds., People and Issues in Latin American History from Independence to the Present: Sources and Interpretations, 3rd ed. (Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener Publishers, 2006), 146 - 148; For a full description of the patronato, see William Eugene Shiels, King and Church: The Rise and Fall of the Patronato Real (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1961), 195f.; Ismael Sánchez Bella, Iglesia y Estado En La América Española, Vol. 16 (Pamplona: Ediciones Universidad de Navarra, 1990); Polzer, Rules and Precepts of the Jesuit Missions, 6f. 112

Don’t Let Me Be Lost from View

For his part, Saeta only heard the first hints of his perilous situation late in the Holy

Week celebrations of 1695. On the afternoon of Good Friday, he had received a distressing letter from Kino with “the news that the Jocomes had attacked San Pedro de Tubutama and killed poor Martín and the boy Fernando,” two of Saeta’s assistants who had taken Caborca mission cattle to the nearby ranchería. After reading the heartrending warning, Caborca’s missionary began a reply, in which he mourned the loss of his Opata helpers and fretted over the fate of Father Daniel Januske, his closest geographical compatriot on this far flung frontier of Spanish enterprise in the New World. Nevertheless, Saeta tried to carry on with the day’s sacred festivities as well as more quotidian mission chores. In the evening he heard confirmation of the attack from his Pima (O’odham) converts and grew increasingly apprehensive.229 In a postscript to his reply to Kino, he pled for more information and protection, “For God’s sake, dear Father, let me know what has happened and how Father

Daniel is faring.” Then, after sealing the letter, he mentioned that he was forwarding Kino some

229 In this dissertation, I use both “Pima” when speaking from perspective of the Spanish/missionary sources, and “O’odham” when presenting their perspectives. “Pima” was the designation given to diverse, semi-sedentary Uto- Aztecan communities that spoke a similar dialect in Sonora. The regional term “Pimeria Alta” was the contemporary Spanish designation for the desert and mountainous region that now constitutes much of northern Sonora in Mexico and southern Arizona in the United States. For just two summaries of the varying trajectories of tribal nomenclature see Bernard L. Fontana, “Introduction,” in Jacobo Sedelmayr, Daniel S. Matson, and Bernard L. Fontana, Before Rebellion: Letters & Reports of Jacobo Sedelmayr, S.J (Tucson: Arizona Historical Society, 1996), xxix - xxxi; Radding Murrieta, Wandering Peoples, 21-25. Most Akimel O’odham were semi-agricultural, gathered in small villages with five or six families called rancherias. They rarely established wider political organization, except in the case of forming war parties. As Edward Spicer notes, “The Upper Pima were a single tribe only in the sense that they spoke dialects of a single language.” Gordon Curtis Baldwin, Indians of the Southwest (New York: Capricorn Books, 1973); Frank Russell and The Smithsonian Institution Bureau of American Ethnology, The Pima Indians (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1975); Spicer, Cycles of Conquest, 119. 113 valuable ornaments and relics, perhaps for safekeeping, and anxiously appealed, “Please don’t let me be lost from view.”230

By the time Kino received the appeal before mass on Easter Sunday, it was too late. At sunrise on Holy Saturday a group of 50 to 60 Pima from the missions of Tubutama, Oquitoa, and

Pitquín had arrived at Caborca. Saeta probably did not know that the murders in Tubutama had been committed by these Pima converts, and not Jocomes or Apaches, as Kino had first warned. Typology and chronology mix in the diverse accounts of the ensuing events.

Nevertheless, soldiers, missionaries, and native witnesses all agree that Saeta died soon after the Pima group arrived on that morning of April 2, 1695, suffering at least two initial arrow wounds to his chest and absorbing other blows to the rest of his body.231 In addition to the missionary, six other native converts, four Opata, one Seri, and one Pima were killed in the uprising. While the initial uprising was largely episodic and local in character, in the following weeks cycles of violence spun out of the murders. Indiscriminant and disproportionate Spanish reprisals provoked the wider-spread revolt, eventually leading to burned missions, retreating missionaries, and fleeing former converts throughout the Pimeria Alta. In addition to the capricious punishments meted out to the few Pima unlucky enough to get caught in the initial

Spanish military campaign, other retaliations stoked the flames of rebellion. Specifically, an

230 Kino, Biography of Francisco Javier Saeta, 77 231 Diverging accounts put the direct blame on different towns, which will be discussed in more depth later. For example, the Father Visitor General Guillermo de Burgos agreed that the trouble began in Tubutama, but insisted that Caborca’s convert sjoined in the killing, “porque los de la Mision del Padre tomaron tambien las armas contra el con el mismo furor que los demás enemigos.” Guillermo de Burgos in “Padre Guillermo de Burgos al Padre Provincial Diego de Almonazir,” Vanamitzi, June 1, 1695, Archivo Historico de Hacienda, AGN, Mexico, Temporalidades, Legajo 972, No. 1, 2f. For other dissenting testimonies, see Juan Fernandez de la Fuente, “A Campaign Against the Pimas,” in Naylor and Polzer, The Presidio and Militia on the Northern Frontier, 621f; Kino, Biography of Francisco Javier Saeta, 89-92; Juan M. Manje, Unknown Arizona and Sonora, 1693-1721: From the Francisco Fernández Del Castillo Version of Luz De Tierra Incógnita (Tucson: Arizona Silhouettes, 1954), 54. 114 initial attempt to make peace at a marsh called El Tupo went sorely awry, ending in the tragic killing of 48 O’odham, including both guilty and innocent parties. This event, as much as or more than the initial revolt, led to the larger Pima rebellion of 1695. As such, the double tragedy of missionary murder and convert massacre raised serious questions about the viability of the Pimería Alta mission.

All of this violence left Kino, the founder of the mission, struggling to make sense of how his supposedly “docile” converts had turned first on his own handpicked disciple and later on the entire missionary project. At the same time, O’odham Christians must have wondered why the preachers of peace allied themselves with violent soldiers and indigenous enemies that brutalized them at every turn. Further away, but no less pressing on Kino, superiors in metropolitan centers like Mexico City, Madrid, and Rome questioned the ultimate viability of the mission. Faced with such wide-ranging doubts and challenges to the Pimeria Alta mission,

Kino set out to address the perception that Saeta’s murder represented a drastic, if not a fatal setback to the institution. ()While some interpreted the violence as a sure sign of Pima resistance and Jesuit failure to reduce them to Spanish places and practices, Kino argued that

Saeta’s death was a “celestial favor,” a paradoxical sign of both missionary success and

O’odham desire for Christianity. According to Kino, the revolt could be explained by multiple causes, with immediate, structural, historical and even spiritual grounds. If, however, soldiers, missionaries, governors and their superiors simply blamed Pima savagery, then they denied their complicity in the violence. In doing so, they would not only miss a chance to correct their mistakes, but also the opportunity to advance Pima pacification and conversion through the blood of the martyr. 115

The “Life” and “Death” of a Colonial Saint

In short, Kino had to show the redemptive value in the martyr’s death. In so doing, he hoped to vindicate his vision for the Pimeria as the launching pad for new explorations, colonizations, and conversions to the west in California and north into the Colorado, Gila, and

Salt River valleys of modern Arizona. Rather than defend his cause in a formal report, however,

Kino took up an established, if to modern eyes, unexpected, literary form. He imbedded his defense of the Pima mission into his narrative of the Innocent, Apostolic, and Glorious Death of

Father Francisco Javier Saeta.232 Despite its title, Kino’s work did not solely meditate on the death, nor was it a traditional Vita or Life of a saint. It could not really be classified as hagiography, history, biography or even eulogy. To be sure, it gives some requisite details of the young missionary’s life and death, but these traditional concerns are limited to the first three chapters. The bulk of the book (the remaining four chapters) is given over to making meaning of the violence. In each of these chapters Kino puts on a different authorial hat, writing as historian, journalist, theologian, apologist, geographer, and missiologist. By crisscrossing the conventions of hagiography, history, theology, and report; he extolled Saeta as the protomartyr of the Pimeria, while carefully noting the material causes of violence and corrections needed to further the mission. It was a tricky balance. He had to remain realistic about the need to address immediate circumstances, and yet waxed philosophical about the final cause for the martyrdom. Unnecessary provocations should be avoided, he argued; nevertheless, ultimately such martyrdoms would work for the overall good of native conversions. Far from

232 Ernest Burrus entitled his translation Kino’s Biography of Francisco Javier Saeta, which hardly describes the contents, since Kino devotes very little attention to the details of Saeta’s life. To be fair, Burrus does detail the very genres contained within the work in his “Introduction,” Kino, Biography of Francisco Javier Saeta, 1-7. 116 extraordinary, missionary deaths should be desired and expected as the regular path to success for the missions of New Spain’s frontiers. As the Jesuit Father Visitor Juan Muñoz de Burgos prayed, “I trust in the Lord that for the future this watering of that angel’s blood will produce much fruit in the Pimería for the greater glory of God.”233

Like Muñoz de Burgos, Kino had an unwavering trust that Saeta’s sacrifice would seed spiritual harvests. Others did not agree. Soldiers, superiors, and even fellow missionaries believed the Pima were intractable enemies, better dealt with through military campaign than missionary conversion. Kino’s Death of Saeta should be read primarily as a defense of the mission, in light of its critics. Numerous references throughout the work make reference to the

“perfidious objections and oppositions,” that impeded his work. Kino leaves these unattributed, always careful not to name names, and thus cede the moral high ground to his opponents.234

His opponents were not so polite, specifically singling him out as the cause of the rebellion, being too indulgent of the natives and too haphazard in his evangelization. Therefore suspicion, disputation, and contradiction occasioned Kino’s account of Saeta’s life and death. As such, the martyrology blends with apology, a thoroughgoing justification of Kino’s method as well as his converts.

The multiple audiences for the work help explain the origin of its hybrid genres and

Kino’s creative intermingling of letters, maps, eulogy, and report. Kino certainly hoped that his

Life of Saeta might make its way to eager readers in Europe and beyond, both Jesuits and their secular patrons. To this end he sent the work directly to Tirso González, a longtime friend and

233 “Letter of Father Visitor Juan Muñoz de Burgos to Father Eusebio Kino,” April 13, 1695, cited in Kino, Biography of Francisco Javier Saeta, 103 234 Ibid., 159. 117 newly elected General of the Society in Rome. However, the more immediate audience for the work was the Jesuit Provincial and Viceroy in Mexico City, who respectively governed the religious order and colonial government in New Spain. As a frontier missionary for the colony,

Kino and his fellow missionaries served two majesties and two purposes, converting and civilizing otherwise independent natives for the glory of God and King. As such, they received support, funds, and permissions from both colonial and religious superiors and reported to superiors in both structures. In the case of the Jesuits, this meant a highly regulated, sophisticated hierarchy extending down from the General to Provincials, Procurators, Visitors,

Rectors, and to the missionary.235 Accountability to royal officials and colonial governors was less direct, since the Society maintained a separate government. Nevertheless, missionaries frequently wrote to soldiers, important colonists, governors, and even Viceroys in hopes of maintaining good relations or soliciting support. In Kino’s case, he had already planned a trip to

Mexico City in 1695 in hopes of procuring more missionaries for the Pimeria Alta and winning permission to begin again the work in Baja California.236 In all likelihood some of the work had already been prepared as a report on the state of the mission and missiological plan for future conversions, but had to be entirely reframed and reworked in light of the Pima rebellion and

Saeta’s death.237 After Saeta’s death, the trip to Mexico City took on crucial importance as he was asked to give account for the disastrous uprising and missionary murder. For this reason he dedicated the work to Provincial of New Spain, Diego de Almonazír, from whom he also took his

235 On the Jesuit missionary structures see, Polzer, Rules and Precepts of the Jesuit Missions, 141 236 After a reconnaissance trip with Captain Juan Mateo Manje in which they had seen California from a mountain northwest of Caborca, Kino had written the Provincial to request to travel to the capital for the sake of procuring more missionaries and making plans for the extension of the mission to California. Herbert E. Bolton, Rim of Christendom: A Biography of Eusebio Francisco Kino, Pacific Coast Pioneer (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1984), 329-331. 237 Burrus, “Introduction,” in Kino, Biography of Francisco Javier Saeta, 13 118 dominant theme of the “prolonged bloodless martyrdom” discussed in the next chapter.238 The fact that Kino wrote both to colonial superiors concerned with the ongoing sustainability of the mission as well as imagined audiences of fellow Jesuits in Europe partially explains the mixed genres at play in Saeta’s passion story.

Saeta: The Stroke of the Arrow

To explain the redemptive purpose of Saeta’s death, Kino began by charting the providential arc of the martyr’s life. Indeed, like so many patriarchs of the Hebrew Scriptures, his very name portended his fate. The man who was literally surnamed “arrow” would be refined and revealed through those very weapons. For example, Saeta had once excused his poor handwriting in a January 1695 letter, by explaining that he wrote “with the strokes of arrows.”239 By recalling this instance and other sly mentions of arrows, Kino offered proof that the young missionary had sensed his fate and accepted it, and by implication, participated in a larger divine plan. Reinforcing this sense of predestined sacrifice, Kino claimed that Saeta often stated that God had, “placed {him} as his chosen arrow.” With this phrase Kino linked Saeta to

Isaiah 49:2, “He made my mouth like a sharp sword, in the shadow of his hand he hid me; he made me a polished arrow, in his quiver he hid me away.” The missionary Castilian would have used the specific word “Saeta” to signify the arrow, and the Latin Vulgate translates the Greek phrase for “polished arrow,” as “sagittam electam,” or “chosen arrow,” conveying more directly Saeta’s specific sense of divine election.240 Once more, the context of the biblical

238 Ibid., 37. For more on this image, see Ch. 4 “The Prolonged Martyrdom” below. 239 Kino, Saeta, 61. 240 The full verse in Latin, is as follows, “et posuitos meum quasi gladiumacutum in umbra manus suae protexit me et posuit me sicut sagitta me electam in faretra sua abscondit me.” Isaiah 49:2, Vulgate, referenced online at http://www.fourmilab.ch/etexts/www/Vulgate/Isaiah.html February 17, 2009. In English, “Listen to me, O coastlands, pay attention, you peoples from far away! The Lord called me before I was born while I was in my 119 passage portrays a man struggling to find meaning in a time of great sacrifice and loss. For consolation, the writer turned to his predestined vocation as a suffering prophet, chosen from the womb to give his all as a messenger of his God. By citing this particular scripture, Kino rescued meaning out of Saeta’s words, linking the young missionary’s name and premonition of death to the larger prophetic call to bring God’s message even at great personal cost. He also wedded the events in the Pimería in early 1695 to a biblical past, one in which his God superintended events, working out his divine plan through moments of opposition and great suffering.

He went on to ply redemptive meaning out Saeta’s devotional practice, by describing the martyr’s particular dedication to St. Colette. By Kino’s account, Saeta carried an engraved parchment, or vitela, with her likeness. His patroness had presaged Saeta’s suffering, since she was “represented in paintings with arrows of divine love coming to her from the crucified

Christ and with a lamb which holds in its hand a crown of gold bearing this inscription,

‘Coronaberis’ – ‘You will be crowned.’”241 The significance of the relationship between Saeta’s devotion to Colette and his murder was not immediately self-evident. The 14th century reformer of the Poor Clares was not a martyr herself, not even beatified until a half century after Saeta’s death, and not particularly associated with arrows or archery imagery. She was best known for her meditations on suffering and pursuit of a white martyrdom through severe

mother’s womb he named me. 2He made my mouth like a sharp sword, in the shadow of his hand he hid me; he made me a polished arrow, in his quiver he hid me away,” Isaiah 49:1-2, NRSV. Kino explained, “How many times was he won’t to say, speaking of his own last name, ‘Saeta’ (which in Italian means “arrow” just as “sagitta” in Latin): ‘He placed me as his chosen arrow.’” Ibid., 63 241 Ibid., 63 120 asceticism.242 Kino extracted martyrological meaning from this reputation, depicted in devotional paintings. He noted in the image of Colette recovered from Saeta’s mission a four- fold association with sacrifice. The image of Santa Coleta foretold Saeta’s fate, with its piercing darts of celestial caresses, communion with the crucified Christ, the sacrificial and yet victorious lamb, and finally the promise of a heavenly crown; a reference to the second chapter of the

Revelation of St. John, in which Jesus commands the church to prepare for affliction and diabolic persecution and commands his followers to “Be faithful until death, and I will give you the crown of life.”243 Just as his name tied him to the words of the suffering prophet Isaiah,

Saeta’s devotion to Colette linked him back through Christian history to New Testament apocalyptic martyrology. By correlating Saeta’s name to his devotion and then to his manner of death, Kino painted a multivalent and multisensory picture of God’s providence in the murder.

Clearly, this was not just a frontier uprising, but also a providentially ordered outlay in the economy of God. When Kino learned of the manner of Saeta’s demise, he grieved the loss, but delighted in this poetic concurrence. Surely his devotion to a pierced patroness confirmed

God’s redeeming plan in the midst of rebellion. He also converted the engraved parchment of

St. Collete into a relic, a token of the divine promise in spite of human oppositions.

Kino could describe the holy relic in such detail because he likely had it in his room as he wrote his Life of Saeta. His friend and traveling companion, Lieutenant Juan Mateo Manje had recovered Saeta’s saint, “among the rest of his holy things,” in the Caborca ruins and given it to

Kino soon afterward, during Saeta’s funeral service. The missionary delighted in his friend’s gift,

242 “Saint Colette” in David Hugh Farmer, ed. The Oxford Dictionary of Saints, 4th ed. (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1997), 107. 243 Rev. 2:10 “Do not fear what you are about to suffer. Beware, the devil is about to throw some of you into prison so that you may be tested, and for ten days you will have affliction. Be faithful until death, and I will give you the crown of life.” NRSV. 121 having “saved it and venerated it as a special relic.”244 In his own description of Saeta’s death,

Manje confirmed both his gift and Kino’s sense of its import, noting that Kino “kept it as a relic and an aid in his prayer.”245 Along with the image, Manje also rescued a broken Crucifix and “22 collected arrows (“saetas”) from the floor of the room where the dead priest slept.” Alongside these corporal relics, Manje recovered, “an engraved parchment with a picture of a nun, which bore the name St. Colette.” He does not mention the crucified Christ or Lamb images, but instead “an angel shooting an arrow,” while “another {arrow} already pierced the Saint’s heart and still another one was between her and the angel.” In the hagiographical scene that Manje painted, a divine messenger, not any diabolic enemy shoots the saint. No theologian, Manje had traveled with Kino over a decade, on nine expeditions and over thousands of leagues in the

Pimeria Alta, and he had heard many Jesuit sermons along the way. Consequently, he understood that God worked through human suffering. And the soldier reasoned that the relic only confirmed that ultimately God had chosen Saeta’s martyrdom. The deceased missionary had been providentially chosen to become the protomartyr of the Pimeria. Even as Colette’s heart had been pierced as the ultimate symbol of her devotion to God, the Jesuit missionary

Saeta had fulfilled his devotion to her in his own divinely pierced passion. As such, “he gave his life to enter Heaven triumphantly in eternal glory to celebrate the victory of Christ, receiving the palm and crown of a martyr.” The collecting of his relics, the arrows, the image of Colette, and his crucifix would only serve to “sanctify these lands with the blood of the martyr” and

244 Kino, Biography of Francisco Javier Saeta, 63-64 245 The full passage in Manje’s original reads, “Tube la dicha de ayudar a recoger los huesos, zenicas y caveza que hallamos todavía con pelo del difunto Padre que encerramos en una mediana caja. Cerca de las quales halle tanvien una vitela de pergamino de una Monga (Según el Avito Pardo Y negro) hera venita o franelica con el titulo de Santa Coleta, Y un Angel enarcando una flecha, otra la clavada en el corazón de la Santa y orta en el intermedio de ella y el Angle que lleve al Padre Kino y la tenia por reliquia y registro en su rezo.” Juan Mateo Manje, Luz de Tierra Incognita, AGN, Historia, Tomo 393, Hoja 58. 122 prepare the Pima for new priests and “the saving of souls with fervor and zeal.” Through Saeta’s intercession as well as “the many prayers of the little children” – referring here to O’odham children who had been baptized in innocence and thus “enjoy eternal salvation” - the Lord

“might have pity on these souls redeemed by His precious blood and dispose that all of them be gathered into the Faith.”246 Therefore, Saeta’s death brought relics, intercession, and a shared bond with the suffering of native children which could only further sanctify the mission and seed future conversion.

In the rest of his account, a diary originally begun in the moment, but compiled and edited over two decades later, Manje provided the provenance for the picture as well as additional martyrological details. The Flying Company, (Compañia Volante) of Sonora, led by his uncle and veteran General, Don Domingo Jirónza de Cruzát, had been charged with pacifying the rebels and recovering the martyr’s body.247 As a Lieutenant in the Flying Company, Manje had sent a Pima ally ahead to Caborca to scout for a possible ambush. Arriving at a deserted and destroyed mission, the Pima man found Saeta’s body, but decided to burn it because it had become “swollen and decayed due to poisoned arrows and 13 days,” of desert sun. Upon arrival, Manje “had the blessing of helping to gather,” Saeta’s charred remains, including “the bones, ashes, and head, which had still had some of the deceased priest’s hair.” Even after purification and burning, the relics remained saintly, tokens of sacrifice that guaranteed future

246 Manje, Unknown Arizona and Sonora, 259 247 For an account of the campaign of the Flying Company in the suppression of the rebellion and recovery of bodies, see Naylor and Polzer, The Presidio and Militia on the Northern Frontier, 584 - 656. 123 returns. He explains that Saeta’s body was burned by the Indian for symbolic as well as practical reasons, since “this nation {burned} the dead bodies of those most beloved and venerated.”248

By adding this detail, Manje raised a highly problematic fact, the corruption of Saeta’s body by heat and venom. In terms of Catholic canonical expectations, martyrs bodies should give signs of incorruption as a testament to their sanctity. This was not a hard and fast rule, but a hagiographical trope that often bolstered a candidate’s claim on beatification. As a model of pious death, there might have been some expectation that his corpse would have remained incorruptible or resistant to decay. The tradition of unburnable martyrs dated to Polycarp, the

Bishop of Smyrna who was killed in 155CE. He only died after his body displayed many signs of incorruptibility, most notably giving off a sweet odor of baking bread when his persecutors tried to burn it.249 In addition, numerous previous Jesuit martyrs in New Spain had proved their sanctity by resisting fires. For example, hagiographers carefully noted how the Jesuit protomartyr Gonzalo de Tapia’s arm could not be burned when natives in Sinaloa killed and dismembered his body in 1594.250 Much later, the Jesuit provincial Juan Antonio Balthasar carefully noted how the bodies of two Baja California missionaries, Lorenzo Carranco and

248 AGN, Historia, Vol.393, 58. See also, Manje, Unknown Arizona and Sonora, 58; Mange, Diario De Las Exploraciones En Sonora, 239. 249 “Now when he had uttered his Amen and finished his prayer, the men in charge of the fire lit it, and a great flame blazed up and we, to whom it was given to see, saw a marvel. And we have been preserved to report to others what befell. 2 For the fire made the likeness of a room, like the sail of a vessel filled with wind, and surrounded the body of the martyr as with a wall, and he was within it not as burning flesh, but as bread that is being baked, or as gold and silver being refined in a furnace. And we perceived such a fragrant smell as the scent of incense or other costly spices. At length the lawless men, seeing that his body could not be consumed by the fire, commanded an executioner to go up and stab him with a dagger, and when he did this, there came out a dove, and much blood, so that the fire was quenched and all the crowd marveled that there was such a difference between the unbelievers and the elect. “The Martyrdom of Polycarp,” Chs. 15 – 16 in Joseph Barber Lightfoot and J. R. Harmer, The Apostolic Fathers: Revised Greek Texts with Introductions and English Translations (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Book House, 1984), 568. 250 Pérez de Ribas, History of the Triumphs, 123; Shiels, Gonzalo De Tapia, 198. 124

Nicolas Tamaral, remained intact despite the best efforts of Pericue rebels.251 Incorruptibility was not an absolute test of sanctity; many saints had been canonized with no such evidence.

Nevertheless, it was a strong sign of God’s favor and was an established trope in Jesuit colonial hagiography.

In the case of Saeta, the idea that a Pima convert had burned his body because it was putrefying could easily raise many questions. Why did his corpse not stand up as had those of previous missionary martyrs? How could the details of his death be accurately ascertained if the body was no longer intact? And, why would an indigenous ally take the liberty of reducing the body to bones and ashes before a European soldier or missionary could even verify its identity? Manje and Kino’s explanation taken together address these concerns. First, no body, even holy ones, lasted long in the harsh Sonoran heat. Besides, it was the harsh desert environment and not the persecutors that had begun to reduce it. So, it was not in the moment of trial that the body decomposed, but afterward. Second, the Pima who burned the body was a Christian and important ally whom the soldiers had sent ahead on a reconnaissance mission.

Third, and most importantly for the cause of sanctity, the body had been burned out of reverence and not anger. For that reason, perhaps God was validating O’odham acts of devotion as much as European expectations of sanctity. In the context of New France Allan

Greer has called similar narrative mixtures of indigenous actions and European meanings a

“colonial inversion of hagiography,” one that participates in European hagiographical norms, but also transforms them in light of New World realities.

251 Juan Antonio Baltasar, Carta del P. Provincial Juan Antonio Balthassar, En Que dà Noticia de La Exemplar Vida, Religiosas Virtudes, y Apostolicos Trabajos del…P. Francisco Maria Picolo (Mexico, 1752), 88. 125

In an extended encomium to the Jesuit missionaries, Captain Manje ascribed the early success of the Pimería to both the hard work of men like Kino and the sacrifices of martyrs like

Saeta. The land, “where these ministers work with such immolation and spirit, to the point of losing their life for love of the one who sacrificed his for us,” had been blessed by God and granted stability for many years. As evidence he recalled the year 1695, “when they shot with arrows the venerable Father Francisco Javier Saeta, being in the Soba nation, employed in the evangelical labor and faith.” Like Kino before him, Manje delighted in the poetic convergence of arrows in name and in death.

Saeta was his name, and there were 22 that penetrated and wounded his body. Piously we might say that the saetas took away his corruptible body and at the same time gave him the life and glory of the soul. In this, the proverb is fulfilled that “the worker who perseveres in his position, perishes in his position.” This man, in his position and in his last name that he represented, left behind a body without life and left with his soul to eternity.252

Blending the hagiographic coincidences with his own interpretation of the corruptible body,

Manje explained that Saeta’s murder had a greater purpose. The same arrow that he carried as a family name had freed him for eternity. At the same time, his death was the first to unite the

Pima mission to sacrifice made by the Jesuits throughout the globe and he connected them to

Japan, Ethiopia, the Philippines, Moscow, China, as well as “24 Jesuits in New Spain and various other martyrs” who honored Ignatius in their perfect imitation of his ideals.253 All of the

252 “Donde trabajan estos obreros, con tan afamada emulación y espíritu, hasta perder la vida por amor del que la sacrificó por nosotros, como lo experimentamos el año de 1695, en que flecharon al venerable P. Fr. Francisco Javier Saeta, estando en la nación soba, empleado en la labor evangélica y su fe santa, su blasón, fueron veinte y dos la que hirieron y penetraron su cuerpo, y piadosamente diremos, que se saetas le quitaron la vida del cuerpo corruptible, estas le dieron la vida y la gloria del alma, en que cumple el proverbio que el obrero que persevera en su oficio, en el perece: este, en su oficio y apellido con que blasonaba, quedó sin vida del cuerpo, y fue con la del alma a la Eterna.” Mange, Diario De Las Exploraciones En Sonora, 16 253 “Y omitiendo los muchos que la han perdido y sacrificado En el Japón, Etiopia, Marianas, Moscovia, China, y otras partes, solo diré las de esta Nueva España, como en la Florida, Chinipas, Tepehuana y otras partes, veinte y 126 hagiographic details in his Diary bore out this truth and should assure doubters that the colonization and Christianization of the Pimería Alta would ultimately be successful.

Likewise, in his own account of Saeta’s death, Kino appealed to the Lieutenant of the

Pimeria, Captain Juan Mateo Manje, to insist to his readers that Saeta’s death did not represent the end of the mission, but a new beginning. Instead of retreating, hagiographic detail and providential pattern should encourage them to continue and bring more missionaries as Saeta’s death had watered the ground for future crops.

This crop of souls is going to be fertilized by the blood of that most fervent Father and martyr Francisco Javier Saeta. In time it will flourish, as happens in the fields where the earth is fertilized by means of irrigation so it can raise in exuberant growth crops of wheat, etc.

Manje concurred with so many other Jesuits and officials that the murder of Saeta was an unfortunate, but helpful fertilizer that would ensure future crops of Pima Christians. And, he insisted that the death did not demand revenge, but rather expectation of future conversions.

“Nor will this innocent blood of our venerable martyr be like that of Abel which cried out for vengeance. Rather it will become a flood of supplications and clamors for the conversion of these pagans and for their repentance.”254 These martyrdoms did not operate under the Old

Testament law of lex talionis, rather they represented the peculiar logic of Christianity, that individual sacrifice brought eternal life both for the martyr and for the multitudes.

cuatro religiosos jesuitas con varios martirios que con sus vidas han imitado a los doce fundamentales hijos del Celestial Padre y por decirlo claro, aquellos sagrados apóstoles, hermanos de este moderno, de una compañía llevando ambos, el glorioso fin de atraer todas las naciones del Mundo a un Ayuntamiento universal, unidos en una voluntad, y finalmente en una fe, por lo que dijo el ingeniosísimo P. san Agustín que vio en una ocasión una piedra iman de virtud.” Ibid., 16-17 254 Kino, Biography of Francisco Javier Saeta, 111 127

Odium Fidei

Even as Jesuits like Kino and military supporters like Manje extolled Saeta’s sacrificial seeding of the gospel, they struggled to protect their expected harvest of souls from internal and external attack. Both religious and secular critics charged Pima converts with “barbarity, ungratefulness, cruelty, and hatred of the faith (odio de la fe).”255 Critics voiced suspicion and prejudice about “all new and barbarous nations,” and some superiors wondered whether the desolate lands and semisedentary tribes of the north even warranted the trouble of evangelization. A few suggested that attention should be devoted to more “worthy” groups and others ramped up longstanding arguments that spiritual conversions could never pacify the northern frontier.256 These proponents of mission secularization pressured royal officials to abandon these costly efforts and instead turn to more traditional means of military conquest, coerced labor, presidios and parochial administration.257 On top of these more general critiques, rumor spread that soldiers like Lt. Antonio de Solís and even fellow Jesuits like

Francisco Xavier Mora and Marcos Kappus were making more personal accusations against

Kino. They questioned the founding missionary’s influence in the region and argued that his

255 Ibid., 81 256 Jose de Ortega, Apostolicos Afanes De La Compañia De Jesus, ed. Francisco X. Fluvia (Reimpreso en México: L. Alvarez y Alvarez de la Cadena, 1944), 263. 257 Though pressure to curtail the independent operations of religious orders in general and the Jesuits in particular increased dramatically in the 18th century under Bourbon reformers, critics argued for the secularization of the northwestern missions throughout the 17th century as well. Fueled by the discovery of new silver mines in 1680s, these criticisms only mounted during the first decade of the Pimeria mission, as settlers hoped to appropriate native land and labor for commercial use see Daniel Reff’s “Critical Introduction” in Pérez de Ribas, History of the Triumphs of our Holy Faith Amongst the most Barbarous and Fierce Peoples of the New World, 30-31; Evelyn Hu- DeHart, Missionaries, Miners, and Indians: Spanish Contact with the Yaqui Nation of Northwestern New Spain, 1533-1820 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1981), 40-49. See also, Radding Murrieta, Wandering Peoples, 40- 42; Deeds, Defiance and Deference, 95 128 spiritual negligence had led to internal dissension among the missionaries as well as a rebellious attitude of Pima converts that eventuated Saeta’s death.258

Kino expected such opposition from colonists and soldiers over dealings with Pimas. For this reason he had procured special exemptions for the Pimeria Alta from unauthorized military discipline or forced labor (repartimiento).259 He also made clear whom he favored between the competing military personalities on the Sonoran frontier. However, he expressed feelings of surprise and betrayal about colleagues who “should have been helping us, but instead hurt us, who were our friends, but became our enemies.”260 For example, Father Kappus blamed Kino’s catechetical work for Pima rebellion, complaining that the Italian baptized “trochi mochi,” or

“willy-nilly” and therefore left converts in a state of liberty and barbarism.261 Father Mora built

258 Convinced that the “barbarous” tribes must be taught a lesson, Solís pressed for stronger military control of the Pimas, and resented the missionary’s dominance of indigenous relations.Bolton, Rim of Christendom: A Biography of Eusebio Francisco Kino, Pacific Coast Pioneer, 331f; Francisco Xavier Mora, Kino: ¿Frustrado Alguacil y Mal Misionero? Informe De Francisco Xavier De Mora SJ Al Provincial Juan De Palacios, Arizpe, 28 De Mayo De 1628, ed. Gabriel Gomez Padilla, edición facsimilar (Guadalajara and Culiacán, México: Universidad de Guadalajara and Colegio de Sinaloa, 2004), 173. 259 Concerned about military past “violence that terrorized and caused (new converts) to flee from conversion,” Kino asked for exemption from forced labor (repartimiento) and military punishments before entering the Pimeria Alta. Coinciding with a general royal proclamation (cédula) that participants in new missionary conversions receive protection from forced labor for a period twenty years, the governing Audience of Guadalajara issued Kino the desired order in 1686; “Kino a la Audiencia Real de Guadalajara” and “Auto de la Audiencia de Guadalajara,” December 16, 1686, Archivo General de Indias (AGI), Guadalajara, 69. Bolton, Rim of Christendom, 234. Kino reproduced the entire Royal Cédula in Favores Celestiales, translated in English as Eusebio Francisco Kino, Kino's Historical Memoir of Pimería Alta: A Contemporary Account of the Beginnings of California, Sonora, and Arizona, ed. Herbert Eugene Bolton, trans. Herbert E. Bolton (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1948), 108-109. 260 Eusebio Francisco Kino, Francisco Fernández del Castillo, and Emil Böse, Las Misiones De Sonora y Arizona. Comprendiendo: La Crónica Titulada: "Favores Celestiales" y La "Relación Diaria De La Entrada Al Norueste", Vol. 8 (México: Editorial "Cultura", 1913), 21; Kino, Historical Memoir, 98 261 Padre Marco A. Kappus al Padre Provincial Diego de Almonacír. Curcurpe, 28 de Julio de 1695. Francisco Xavier Mora, Kino: Frustrado Alguacil y Mal Misionero, 173. There are various explanations for the derivation of the phrase “Trochi Mochi,” ranging from Nahuatl loan words to a combination of the Spanish verbs “Trocear” (divide) and “Mochar” (cut). Most sources agree, however, that the phrase originally referred to bad haircuts and became applied more broadly to anything done without organization, or helter skelter. See “Trochemoche,de Covarrubias Orozco, Noydens, and de Riguer, Tesoro De La Lengua Castellana o Española, Según La Impresión De 1611, Con Las Adiciones De Benito Remigio Noydens Publicadas En La De 1674, 975; “Troche y moche,” Diccionario de la Lengua Española Vigésima Ediciónhttp://buscon.rae.es/draeI/SrvltConsulta?TIPO_BUS=3&LEMA=trochemoche (accessed on July 21, 2008). 129 on this allegation, informing on Kino to both local and metropolitan supervisors. Writing to the

Visitor Horacio Policí and the Provincial Diego de Almonizír, Mora accused Kino of buying off his converts with gifts, spending too much time away from his mission, failing to catechize converts, and never properly learning the Pima language.262 In short, more punctilious missionaries worried that Kino cared more about his role as frontier explorer than his calling as a missionary. Failing to fulfill his role as a pastor and teacher, he left converts in a state of relative paganism, while he set off for more adventures. What the 20th century biographer

Herbert Bolton had seen as Kino’s greatest talent, combining exploration and mission, fellow missionaries like Mora saw as his Achilles heel. More problematic, Kappus and Mora argued that the Pimeria would never see peace, development, or long-term success if Kino’s haphazard methods prevailed.

The task of simultaneously defending Saeta, himself, and the entire Pima conversion from the opposition of fellow Jesuits and some soldiers required rhetorical dexterity on the part of the veteran missionary. It also posed a serious conundrum. Kino hoped to explain Saeta’s death as an unfortunate, but necessary sacrifice for the sake of heavenly intercession and spiritual advance. However, the novice missionary’s status as protomartyr of the Pimeria raised serious theological and political issues. In order to be recognized by the larger church, Saeta or any other prospective martyr must have been killed for hatred of the faith or in odium fidei.263

262 Mora sent an elaborate and lengthy report to the Provincial in 1698, accusing Kino of all sorts of failures, ultimately leading to the decline of the Pimeria. Mora, Kino: Frustrado Alguacil y Mal Misionero, 54f. 263 Contemporary Catholic theologians frequently cite death for “hatred of the faith” or “in odium fidei,” as the central requirement for official recognition as a martyr. Though the idea that one must have died for the faith dates back to the early church, it is unclear exactly when this phrase made its way into official church dogma. Seeking to discourage suicidal risk taking and distinguish faithful deaths from accidental deaths, theologians like Augustine stressed the necessity of unprovoked suffering for the sake of the faith, not private instigation. Medieval popes began the process of consolidating the canonization process in Rome in the 11th and 12th 130

This standard had its roots in the teaching of Saint Augustine of Hippo. According to Augustine, true martyrdom entailed both the willing acceptance of a faithful death on the part of the victim and the willful rejection of the Catholic gospel on the part of the perpetrators.264

Augustine argued that contrary to pagan deity rites, which often celebrated deceased emperors, the Christian cult did not celebrate martyrs in and of themselves, as if they were heroes praised for their deeds, but instead Christians venerated the faith to which they bore witness. Since miraculous power came from the faith, it was not inherent to the holy person, but rather the object of their faith. Therefore the reason and motivation for the martyrdom constituted its power, not the victim. Centuries later, Thomas Aquinas codified Augustine’s teaching on martyrdom in his Summa Theologica, arguing that perfect martyrdom only came

centuries. Michael Goodich, Vita Perfecta: The Ideal of Sainthood in the Thirteenth Century, Vol. 25 (Stuttgart: A. Hiersemann, 1982). For this reason, Sixtus V created the Congregation of Rites in 1588 in the Bull Immensa Aeterni Dei with accompanying prohibitions on unregulated cults or veneration of saints. Though Sixtus did not use the term “odium fidei,” authors increasingly employed it throughout the 16th and 17th in reference to true martyrs. For example, in 1634 Pope Urban VII prohibited any cult to be given to any saints or martyrs without official recognition by the Holy Spirit via the Roman pontificate. Benedict XIV, Doctrina De Servorum Dei Beatificatione Et Beatorum Canonizatione (Bruxellis, 1840). By 1675 the Holy Office of the Inquisition had decided to apply this decree broadly, beginning investigations of improper cults and censoring books that promoted undue reverence of undeclared saints and martyrs. In the case of martyrs, the key criterion was a death suffered out of hatred for the faith; Gonzalez, Etnologia y Mision En La Pimeria Alta, 71. For a contemporary confirmation of this position from the current Pope Benedict, see his encyclical letter to the Session of Congregation for Sainthood Causes of April 24, 2006. The latter Benedict writes, “It is of course necessary to find irrefutable proof of readiness for martyrdom, such as the outpouring of blood and of its acceptance by the victim. It is likewise necessary, directly or indirectly but always in a morally certain way, to ascertain the "odium fidei" [hatred of the faith] of the persecutor. If this element is lacking there would be no true martyrdom according to the perennial theological and juridical doctrine of the Church. The concept of "martyrdom" as applied to the saints and blessed martyrs should be understood, in conformity with Benedict XIV's teaching, as ‘voluntaria mortis perpessio sive tolerantia propter Fidem Christi, velalium virtuti sactum in Deum relatum.’ This is the constant teaching of the Church. For a modern argument for the extension of martyrdom to include faithful deaths beyond “odium fidei,” see Karl Rahner, “Dimensiones del Martirio,” Concilium, 183, Mar, 321-324 and the work of Jon Sobrino in the Salvadoran martyrs of the 1980s; Jon Sobrino, Witnesses to the Kingdom: The Martyrs of El Salvador and the Crucified Peoples (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2003), 121-123. 264 In the culminating chapters to The City of God, the Bishop of Hippo highlighted this kind of martyrdom as the defining mark of Christian triumph over pagan superstition. He explained that martyrdom by definition meant the testimony of a death, suffered out of hatred for the faith. “For the martyrs themselves were martyrs, that is to say, witnesses of this faith, drawing upon themselves by their testimony (martyrium) the hatred of the world, and conquering the world not by resisting it, but by dying.” Philip Schaff, ed. St. Augustine's City of God and Christian Doctrine, Vol. II (New York: The Christian Literature co., 1886), 491. 131 about when a perpetrator took life out of hatred for the Christian faith, while the victim gave life for love of the same. As such, neither death for the sake of general truths nor suffering for true faith without culminating death could rightly be declared true martyrdom.265

The martyrological qualifications set by Augustine and Aquinas received fresh articulation in the early modern period. In response to Protestant challenges and Tridentine reform in the 16th century, Roman authorities confirmed these standards and used them to increase their control over ever-proliferating martyr cults. Through papal pronouncement and

Inquisitional purview, they hoped to vet claims of holy death as a way of producing more liturgical unity, limiting local cults, and buoying Catholic identity. Over the ensuing centuries, both the Papacy and the Holy Office developed structures and procedures to control unauthorized cults and local beatifications. For example, in 1625 Urban VIII specifically prohibited publications that urged the public veneration of purported saints, without official papal investigation and approval. The papacy also established a separate office, the

Congregation of Rites, to regulate, judge, and ultimately denounce or recommend candidates for canonization.266 At the same time, the Holy Office of the Inquisition issued its own ban on nonauthorized hagiographies and enforced its censorship in the presses of far-flung colonies.

265 Answering the objection that death may not prove essential for martyrdom, Aquinas cited Maximus, who had preached that "in dying for the faith he conquers who would have been vanquished in living without faith." Aquinas went on to conclude, “Therefore the perfect notion of martyrdom requires that a man suffer death for Christ's sake.” Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, II.2, q.124, art.4 (New York: Benziger Bros., 1947). 266 Simon Ditchfield has detailed the elaborate structures erected for the purpose of authorizing official hagiographic accounts and consolidating beatification procedures. Vetting these martyrological claims would not only bring some unity within the diversity of increasingly global worship practices, but also gird up Catholic identity vis-à-vis Protestant challenges at home. While Ditchfield maintains that centralizing forces were mediated by local dynamics, the founding of the Congregation of Rites in 1588, the assertion of Inquisitional censorship of hagiographical accounts in 1625, and the issuing of papal decrees on canonization in 1642, nevertheless s circumscribed both public worship as well as published claims of martyrdom. Simon Ditchfield, “Tridentine Worship and the Cult of the Saints,” in R. Po-chia Hsia ed., Cambridge History of Christianity: Reform and Expansion 1500-1660, Vol. 6 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 206-215. See also Ditchfield, Martyrs on the Move, 213f 132

With specific regard to martyrs, the head of the Congregation and Promoter of Faith Cardinal

Prospero Lambertini (later Benedict XIV) inscribed the requirement of dying “ex odio in fidem” into formal beatification dogma a century later. In what became the standard work on canonization up until the twentieth century, Benedict XIV confirmed the Augustinian notion that true martyrdom required death for hatred of the faith. The standards of odium fidei consisted of both a voluntary victim and a willful persecutor, each acknowledging that faith in

Christ constituted the crucial issue leading to death.267

For this reason Jesuit martyrologists faced Vatican prohibition and Inquisitorial inspection of any accounts which promoted a martyr’s cause outside of official channels. In order to satisfy these interests, they offered careful declarations or “protestas,” before their works, insisting that their celebration of fallen brothers did not impinge on Roman prerogatives. They often cited Urban VIII’s Bull of 1625 specifically and vowed obedience.268

Most admitted that words such as “Holy, Blessed, Venerable” were used provisionally and the final judgment of all “revelation, prophecy, ecstasy or miracle” belonged to “the infallible decision of the Holy Roman Apostolic Catholic Church.”269 For example, in his presentation of

Saeta’s martyrdom, Kino anticipated both pontifical and Inquisitorial inspection and offered a wary qualification in his prologue. “I openly declare (protesto) that, I do not want the least expression in this little work of mine to detract one bit from the holy opinion and judgment of

267 Benedict XIV, Doctrina De Servorum Dei Beatificatione Et Beatorum Canonizatione, 118f. Benedict employs the ablative and accusative form “ex odio in fidem” instead of the dative genitive “ex odium fidei” throughout the section on martyrdom, 120 – 124, nevertheless underlining the Augustinian and Thomistic definitions of true martyrdom as willing death and knowing murder out of hatred for the faith. 268 Pérez de Ribas, Historia de Triumphos, xiv. 269 Mange, Luz de Tierra incógnita En La America Septentrional y Diario de Las Exploraciones En Sonora, 11 133 our Holy Mother Church and its holy tribunal, the Holy Inquisition, or from our Holy faith.”270

Though never published, Kino hoped that his account of Saeta’s life and death would make its way to press, an exempla for the edification of the global Jesuit community as well as an apologia for their mission against more immediate critics in Sonora and Mexico City.271 In furthering the martyrological cause of his young protégé, he wanted to demonstrate that Saeta was the long hoped for protomartyr of the Pimeria, performing sacrifice and preparing the way for further evangelistic exploration. Kino explained that Saeta had indeed lived a holy life and more importantly died in odium fidei. But, he had to make this argument without incurring the discipline or censorship of the Holy Office, charged with guarding the right to ultimate papal say so. Consequently, any argument for martyrdom was only in a provisional and informal sense and deferred to the Holy Office for the final word.

More precarious than possible censorship, however, the claim of “faith hatred” ran the risk of undermining the entire justification for the Jesuit mission in northern New Spain.

Cheaper than presidios and ostensibly more humane than organized labor systems like encomienda or repartimiento, Jesuit missionaries were charged with pacifying the “wandering peoples” of a far frontier. However, the notion that Jesuits died because their charges hated the faith ran the risk of convincing superiors to give up on the mission and try another method.

270 For a similar declaration see Pérez de Ribas’ distinction between personal and public veneration. He argues that there is a difference between reverence shown to those “who, with good and prudent reasoning, the individual judges to have been of distinguished sanctity,” and the “public veneration,” by the faithful of saint’s relics, which the “Supreme Vicar alone declares and certifies for the Catholic Church.” Pérez de Ribas, History of the Triumphs, 200 271 On Jesuit martyrology as exempla and models for fellow Jesuits see Goldsmith, “Jesuit Iconography” in Jane ten Brink Goldsmith and Patrick and Beatrice Haggerty Museum of Art, Jesuit Art in North American Collections: Exhibition 7 March-16 June, 1991 (Milwaukee, Wis.: Patrick and Beatrice Haggerty Museum of Art, Marquette University, 1991), 16f.; Pérez de Ribas, History of the Triumphs, 761; Polzer, Rules and Precepts of the Jesuit Missions of Northwestern New Spain, 141 134

After all, why should miter and scepter invest so many valuable human and material resources in people who violently reject those gifts?272 Yet, martyrological criteria demanded that candidates for canonization demonstrate just such a rejection. While Kino’s paternalistic impulses and the survival of his mission demanded that he defend the ultimate innocence of his charges, Jesuit solidarity and sacrificial identity meant he must proclaim the concurrent blamelessness of the murdered missionary. Once more, to demonstrate Saeta’s blamelessness, beatification procedure and genre expectations demanded the blame to be laid squarely at the feet of “barbarous nations.”

Victims of the Common Enemy

So, Kino found himself in a catch twenty-two. If he admitted Pima hatred, he gave critics or rival religious orders a reason to question Jesuit effectiveness in the region he pioneered.

However, if he conceded that Saeta’s death was somehow accidental, he minimized his brother’s sacrifice and undermined his status as protomartyr of the Pimeria. Kino and every other promoter of the Jesuit missions of northern New Spain faced fairly unique limitations on their celebration of Jesuit martyrs. These restrictions came along with the peculiar place of missionaries in colonial New Spain. Unlike early Christian martyrs, who represented embattled minorities testifying against imperial rule, Jesuits (or any other religious order) while in some respects set apart, nevertheless served as agents of empire. As much as they would like to read their mission typologically in light of biblical, apostolic, and medieval passion narratives, they did so in a context largely unforeseen by early Christian fathers. Jerome, Tertullian, Augustine, and even later hagiographers like Supulcius Severus celebrated martyrs killed in contexts where

272 Reff, “Critical Introduction” in Pérez de Ribas, History of the Triumphs, 25-27 135 persecutors held power, whether legal or de facto.273 Even after Constantine, those few who still faced persecution did so in local contexts where rival groups usually controlled an apparatus of legal discipline and punishment. As such, the language of Christian martyrdom, which had developed and flourished in a milieu of minority persecution under imperial domination, turned highly paradoxical in this much later context of colonial conquest and pacification of less powerful native peoples. Pointing out the hatred of the faith of Roman persecutors, barbarian hoards, or even Muslim “infidels” seemed necessary, if not natural, to earlier hagiographers. But, in colonial New Spain, Jesuit missionaries needed to maintain the ultimate innocence of their converts. If they blamed the natives, they simultaneously indicted themselves for failing to pacify them and win them over to the gospel.

Jesuits missionaries served two masters, or as they put it, “los dos majestades.” To be sure they were soldiers of Jesus, but they were also regal emissaries, serving the global colonial ambition of the Castilian monarchs and Roman pontiff. As such, the criteria for martyrdom, formulated at an earlier period with distinctly different relations of power, placed them in an awkward position. How could they portray themselves as victims and also assure superiors of their victories? Missionaries hesitated to suggest that converts had completely rejected their message, but eagerly longed to celebrate the sacrifice of their fallen brothers.

273 In addition, while medieval saint’s lives and martyrdom accounts shaped their narratives, they led to inevitable paradoxes, since medieval missionaries from Patrick to Martin of Tours presented Christianity in the context of crumbling empire, more often overrun by “pagan” armies than imposing colonial structures on subject peoples. Of course, there are many exceptions to this generalization, as many medieval missionaries happily accepted military aid and royal patronage when circumstance provided. For example, the 8th century British missionary to Frisia, Wilifred (later St. Boniface) enjoyed the sponsorship and at times violent military aid of the Carolingians. Nevertheless, in general, they relied largely on argument, tales of miracle, the lures of what Richard Fletcher calls “latinas,” or Roman cultural resources. Richard A. Fletcher, The Barbarian Conversion: From Paganism to Christianity (New York: H. Holt and Co, 1998), 562. 136

For that reason, in his account of the martyrdom, Kino employed a multipronged explanation of the endemic violence.274 First, he conceded that some Indians may have killed missionaries out of hatred for the faith, or in odium fidei. However, he minimized this cause of death as a generalization that applied to any new mission field. In other words, some initial resistance should be expected from any “new and barbarous” people, but the Pima were not unique in their reticence to embrace new things. Unless the crown was being asked to give up missionary endeavors altogether, this should not be a specific complaint against the Pimeria

Alta. He also pointed out that the real killers were actually “gentiles,” or nonconverts, a distinct minority of obstinate holdouts and unrepresentative of the otherwise “docile” Pima converts.275 In the latter case, Kino explained that some Pimas had killed Saeta, not because they rejected Christian conversion, but on the contrary because they were jealous of Caborca’s status as a home (cabecera) to the new missionary, while they had patiently waited for years to receive their own Father. Kino argued that the rebellion began in Tubutama. The harsh discipline of an Opata foreman (mayordomo) had angered the residents. In the same way that the Spanish used Tlaxcalans as colonizers and examples of Christianization throughout Latin

American frontiers, Jesuits had employed Opata and Tarascan converts from southern missions to serve as models, manage labor, and lead worship in the Upper Pima missions. The Pima protested that Opata were ancient enemies, and that one particular overseer in Tubutama named Antonio beat a Tubutama leader (principal) almost to the point of death.276 Kino argued

274 Kino, Biography of Francisco Javier Saeta, 78-83 275 Ibid., 157 276 Ibid., 81. Kino claimed that the other mission at Oquitoa had rebelled because of mission jealousy. Evidently, Father Visitor Juan Maria Salvatierra had promised Oquitoa a missionary after his 1690 tour of the Pimeria. In preparation for elevation to mission status, with all the access to resources (“temporal goods and spiritual benefits”) that might bring, Oquitoa had appointed legal officials (“governador, alcalde, fiscal mayor, alguacil, 137 that the use of enemy Opata as model converts and mayordomos had bred resentment and tension and was the immediate cause of the rebellion in that mission.

Second, Kino argued that his Pima converts were passive victims of a “common enemy.”

Far from murderous rebels, they suffered under both Spanish abuses and satanic domination.277 At the human level the Spanish were to blame for “various disorders, severities, and cruel and rigorous punishments” that had led to the deaths of eight Tubutama residents in the days and months leading up to the murder. He provided no further detail of the exact circumstances of the deaths, but left little doubt that some military leaders and their native allies were to blame. Then, Kino mentioned that soldiers had carried out ad hoc campaigns of retribution against these northwestern settlements, unjustly blaming Pimas for thefts and

topile, fiscales, etc.”) had their children baptized, only to watch other, more remote missions receive the missionaries, along with “clothing, cattle, sheep, goats, horses, mules, farms, cow-hands, pack-trains, and drivers.” Kino, Biography of Saeta, 89. While the notion that Indians would kill missionaries out of frustration and jealousy over their desire to have a mission may seem dubious to critical scholars today (cf. writers of the “New Latin American Mission History” like Robert Jackson and David Sweet argue as much), Daniel Reff has traced this common combination of desire and frustration from communities awaiting Jesuit missions in other parts of northern New Spain. And, even Kino himself acknowledged that the primary motivation for mission status was access to trade, material goods, and key land. For doubters, see David Sweet, “The Ibero-American Frontier Mission in Native American History,” in Langer and Jackson, The New Latin American Mission History, 39-46; Reff, Plagues, Priests, and Demons, 162. 277 As is the case with so many other colonial contexts, the sources for indigenous perspectives on the death are nowhere near as plentiful as those of Europeans. In fact, no surviving documents provide direct O’odham explanations of the causes, main events, and results of this rebellion, let alone Saeta’s death. However, some possible indigenous perspectives can be culled from the journal kept by Juan Fernandez de la Fuente and other military leaders during the 1695 campaign to “pacify” the rebellious western Pima contains numerous second hand testimonies from O’odham about the causes of the violence. Confirming Kino’s explanation, a Pima from Tubutama named Xavier gave testimony for hours, explaining that that pueblo had rebelled not against the missionaries but against the Opata mayordomo Antonio who had whipped them. He claimed that Tubutama had deliberately spared their missionary’s (Father Daniel Januske) life, and that Caborca Indians had killed Saeta for their own reasons. However, another anonymous witness explained that a Tubutama leader named Diego had led the uprising and encouraged his relatives in Caborca to extend the rebellion in order to plunder cattle and material goods. Such testimony reveals alternate reasons for the violence, not revealed by the missionary martyrology. However, it also reflects filters of translation and bias, as well as the individual motives of separate native towns and individuals to protect themselves from Spanish reprisals. Naylor and Polzer, The Presidio and Militia on the Northern Frontier, 685-687, 708-710 138 plundering actually committed by Janos, Jocomes, and Apaches.278 Not only soldiers abused

Tubutama residents. Missionaries, too, must recognize the ways in which they had contributed to an unstable situation. Although he does not specifically call out his fellow Jesuit Daniel

Januske, Kino implies as much, explaining that O’odham converts had complained about their

Opata Christian overseers for many weeks before taking matters into their own hands. If

Januske himself was not directly responsible for beating the Pima, he had given free rein to an aggressive Opata fiscal named Antonio, who disciplined Tubutama residents with extreme brutality. And he had failed to respond to Pima complaints. On the particular occasion that caused the revolt and eventual murder of Saeta, the Opata Antonio had beaten a Pima cattle foreman, leaving him “half dead” after kicking him “with spurs and lacerating him all over his body.” By employing such people as servants and model Christians, Jesuits unwisely encouraged the physical abuse of a people with whom they had hoped to share Christ’s love.

In addition, officials should realize that other abuses and native suffering had set the stage for the revolt and Saeta’s eventual murder. For example, the Spanish soldier Antonio Solís led a massacre on a number of Pimas who had gathered to make peace after the 1695 rebellion, slaying guilty and innocent together. Kino highlighted the Spanish guilt in the uprising by calling it a “massacre” (la matanza) and “disgrace” or (desgracia).279 He also understood the

Pima as sharing in missionary suffering. Whether Apache, military, colonial, or diabolic, enemies surrounded his upper Pima and persecuted them with raiding, punishments, labor, and evil

278Kino, Biography of Francisco Javier Saeta, 81 279 Ibid., 134-135 139 temptations.280 Although they had remained faithful to him and his mission, the Pima endured harsh treatment from soldiers and even “sinister reports” from fellow Jesuits who doubted their loyalty. He believed that such persecutions, and not native “obstinacy,” had actually caused the death of Javier Saeta. While others blamed Pima “barbarity,” Kino pointed to

European, “errors, faults, defects, harshness, severity, narrowness, temper, and foolish resentments,” leading to unjust “mistreatment, torture, and murder,” of the Pima.281 The culmination of this persecution came in 1695 when Spanish soldiers and native allies indiscriminately killed 48 Pima at El Tupo, who had come to make peace after Saeta’s death.

Kino lamented the disgraceful killing of the “innocent,” calling it an “extremely heavy cross.”282

Then, he insisted that all shared the loss, “even the palefaces, the very ones who killed the innocent men, and especially the whole Pima nation.”283

What did Kino gain by identifying both evangelists and evangelized as victims of common enemies? The martyr motif transformed setbacks into successes. Specifically, the logic of mutual persecution helped Jesuits secure their place in a constantly shifting colonial situation. Under the pressures of Apache raiding, endemic infection, labor demands, and secularization, Jesuits held up their sacrifice and native suffering as a way of laying claim to space and providing hope of success. It also helped assuage doubts about their participation in

280 Like other Jesuits, Kino attributed final agency to the devil, because “It has been publicly known for years that the common enemy opposes the advancement of all of them (Pima) and the coming of the Fathers that so many souls will not be lost; for by tyrannizing them he [the common enemy] holds them in his power.” Original in AGN, Misiones, Vol. 26, 74. Consulted in “Relación de nuestra Señora de los Remedios en su nueva capilla de su nuevo pueblo de las nuevas conversiones de la Pimeria en 19 de Setiembre de 1698” in Materiales para la Historia de Sonora, Vol. 16, No. 17. Microfilm. Mexican Manuscripts (M-M) 229. Bancroft Library. Berkeley, California, 323- 324; See also, Documentos para la historia de Mexico, Ser. 3. Vol.4 (AGN: Mexico City, Mex.), 814 – 816; Bolton, Rim of Christendom, 390 - 392; Fay Jackson Smith, John Kessell, and Francis J. Fox, Father Kino in Arizona (Phoenix: Arizona Historical Foundation, 1966), 142. 281 Ibid., 81 - 83. 282 Ibid., 137. 283 Ibid. 140 a colonial project that clearly brought widespread disease, disruption, and death to the very communities they had come to serve.

At the same time, he addressed doubts as to whether the missions could hold the line of civilization against mounting losses from Apache, Jocome, and Janos raids. Kino countered that

Pimas were both loyal Christians and good soldiers, capable of celebrating Christian sacraments and defeating Apaches with brutal efficiency. They had proved their loyalty by sticking with the

Spanish even as they suffered abuse from other tribes and murder at the hands of soldiers. Just like missionaries, Pimas could be both innocent victims and conquering warriors. Kino mentioned five specific objections to keeping Jesuit missionaries in the Pima mission: that it had too few people, too poor land, that the Pimas were lazy, that they were thieves, confederated with the Jocomes and Janos, and that they cost too much to the royal treasury. In addition to arguing against each complaint himself, the missionary included a letter from Juan

Fernandez de la Fuente, the general in charge of pacifying the rebellious Pimas, testifying to the fact that they were indeed pacified and worthy of further spiritual and temporal investments.284

But, Kino worried that by focusing too much on Pima “odio de la fe,” Spanish superiors might miss these real world causes.

284 Kino, Vida Del P. Francisco J. Saeta, S.J.: Sangre Misionera En Sonora, 143-150. On their brutal efficiency in battle against Apaches, Jocomes, Mansos, and Sumas, see Kino’s gleeful spreading of the news that the Pimas had killed three hundred “warriors” (Kino went to verify the victory and found 54 corpses, twenty three of which were women, nevertheless he rejoiced at seeing the scalps) in Kino, Kino's Historical Memoir of Pimería Alta: A Contemporary Account of the Beginnings of California, Sonora, and Arizona, 178-183. For a slightly extended account, see Eusebio Kino, “Breve relacion de la insigne Victoria que los Pimas, Sobaipuris en 30 de Marzo de Año de 1698 han conseguido contra los enemigos de la Provincia de Sonora. 3 de mayo, 1698,” in Documentos para la historia de Mexico, Ser. III, Tomo IV, 810-813; Kino, Biography of Francisco Javier Saeta, 81 141

Conclusion

Despite the limitations posed by the criteria of odium fidei, Jesuits found creative ways to at once defending the innocence of their converts and extolling the cause of their martyrs.

From the start, Kino and others readily admitted that men like Saeta died for hatred of the faith. By claiming death for specifically religious reasons, Jesuits consecrated the death of their beloved coworker, placed the Pimeria mission in the larger Christian tradition of triumphal suffering, and hoped to recruit fellow Jesuits to join the apostolic fight against pagan religion.

At the same time, they explained that natives did not persist in their hatred and argued that they were in fact the victims of demonic treachery, themselves suffering under the cruel dominion of the “common enemy.” As such, rebellions were launched by obstinate pagan minorities and not the vast majority of faithful converts. Those Pima neophytes who did participate, however, acted unwillingly, tempted momentarily to pagan reversion en route to their ultimate conversion. By minimizing native agency and locating ultimate cause in diabolic machinations, Kino contended that Saeta died because of the devil’s hatred of the faith, but that natives had fallen victim to his temptation because of more material and quotidian aggravations rather than inherent odium fidei.

142

4 BLOODLESS MARTYRS: MISSIONARY VOCATION AS WHITE MARTYRDOM

Introduction

In response to the 1695 murder of missionary Javier Saeta, Father Diego de Almonazír wrote a circular letter to New Spain’s northwestern missions. In the epistle, their Provincial acknowledged that the surviving Jesuits longed “with a thousand desires” to join their holy companion in death. However, he urged the missionaries to the Upper Pima to “prolong their bloodless martyrdom by continually risking their lives and by clinging tenaciously to the ministry despite brute obstinacy.”285 The founder of the mission, Father Eusebio Kino, relished his superior’s commission. Referencing it throughout his own account of his colleague Saeta’s life and death, Kino argued that while death brought its own blessings, the white martyrdom reserved for those who remained was the tougher lot, as it was “more laborious, hard, painful, and prolonged,” than a comparatively quick death by arrows, fire, or sword.286 Therefore, the survivors’ quotidian sacrifices proved just as essential to the new harvest as the red martyrs’ original, episodic deposits. Perhaps Saeta’s blood sowed the apostolic seed, but the sweat and tears of those who remained watered the plants and ripened the spiritual fruit.

Martyrdom permeated the northern missions of New Spain both as an orienting metaphor and ever-present reality. In fact, Kino’s very arrival on the scene of the colonial evangelistic enterprise had come at a time of large-scale rebellion in the north. As a newly arrived missionary in Mexico City in June 1681, the young Jesuit found the capital still grappling with accounts of startling destruction in New Mexico. The recent revolt of the Pueblo in late

285 “Padre Provincial Diego de Almonazír to Padre Eusebio Kino, 1695,” cited in Ibid., 37 286 Ibid., 37. 143

1680 had left over 400 colonists and native allies dead. Most prominent among the losses, the rebels had killed 21 Franciscans. For most, the targeted murder of over half of the frontier colony’s missionaries represented a drastic setback for both imperial and evangelistic causes.287

When Pueblo decapitated priests, destroyed churches, and defecated on images of the Virgin and saints the message for the priests seemed fairly unambiguous.

Nevertheless, Catholic theologians had a way of rescuing redemptive lessons out of loss and rejection. Preachers in Mexico extolled the sacrifice of Francis’ sons and promised that their death did not presage failure, but instead spiritual fruit. For example, in a March 1, 1681, memorial service held in the Cathedral of Mexico City, the renowned orator Ysidro Sariñana y

Cuenca transformed the meaning of the tragedy. Working with thick biblical and Franciscan typologies, Sariñana y Cuenca insisted that contrary to expectation, “this suffering is joyous—it is the sure road to life; because the better title corresponding to such deaths is to call them lives.” According to the cathedral preacher, the arrows which pierced the martyrs came not just from apostates, but from the very quiver of God. The Lord himself had allowed their wounding so that the imitatio Christi of St. Francis could be fulfilled. As an alter Christus, Francis had bore the signs of crucifixion, the stigmata of divine love. Now, his sons endured hate and persecution, completing his identification with the Lord. What should new and surviving missionaries do in light of these sacrifices? Instead of retreating, they should finalize the imitation of Christ by returning to the place of persecution, for “In no better way can (Francis’)

287 Gutiérrez, When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away, 136-137; Weber, The Spanish Frontier in North America, 136. 144 sons show forth this imitation than when, without avoiding the risks through fear, they obediently bare their breasts to the dangers.”288

While tales of Franciscan deaths brought fear and panic to many colonists, it came as no surprise, and likely welcome news, to Kino. In fact, accounts of the martyrdom of Charles

Spinola in Japan and the persecution of Adam Schall and Ferdinand Verbiest in China had first inspired a young Kino to study mathematics and pursue a missionary vocation.289 Perhaps the best-known Jesuit of the Chinese Imperial court after Mateo Ricci, Verbiest had sent a circular letter to Jesuit colleagues in Europe in 1678 recruiting future missionaries for China.290 As a young Jesuit novice, Kino read with awe about how Verbiest and other Jesuits had suffered years of imprisonment, persecution, and near execution before he had out-dueled a rival

288 “Funeral Oration over the Twenty-one Franciscan Missionaries Killed by the Pueblo Indians, August 10, 1680, Preached by Doctor Ysidro Sariña y Cuenca March 20, 1681,” Historical Society of New Mexico, No. 7, Santa Fe, 1906, in Wagner, The Spanish Southwest, no. 54. Microfilm. New Haven, CT: Research Publications, 1975. (Western Americana; Reel 473, no. 4768), 20; Isidro Sariña y Cuenca, Oracion Funebre, Que Dijo El Doctor D. Ysidro Sariña y Cuenca En Las Exequias De Veinte y Un Religiosos De La Regular Ovservancia Del Seraphico P.s. Francisco, Que Murieron a Manos De Los Indio Apostatas De La Nuevo - Mexico, En Diez De Agosto De 1681 (New Haven, CT, 1681), 20. For further analysis see Gutiérrez, When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality, and Power in New Mexico, 1500-1846, 136-137 289 “Eusebio Kino, Cadiz, to Maria de Guadalupe Lancastre, Duchess of Aveiro,” December 6, 1680, Kino Letters, Huntington Manuscripts (HM) 9984, Hungtington Library (HL), San Marino, CA; See also Kino and Duchess of Aveiro, Kino Writes to the Duchess, 87; Kino seems to be referring to a circular letter written by the astronomer and mathematician Verbeist to his Jesuit colleagues in Europe on August 15, 1678, imploring them to train and come to China because the harvest was plentiful and the workers few. Verbiest had recently won a place at the imperial court because of his correct prediction of a comet, but had endured years of persecution and imprisonment beforehand. For an account of the letter and Verbiest’s ideal of the “mathematician as martyr,” see Florence C. Hsia, Sojourners in a Strange Land: Jesuits and their Scientific Missions in Late Imperial China (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2009), 30 - 33; R. Po-chia Hsia, The World of Catholic Renewal, 1540-1770 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 1; Ferdinand Verbiest, Henri Josson, and Léopold Willaert, Correspondance De Ferdinand Verbiest De La Compagnie De Jésus (1623-1688) Directeur De l'Observatoire De Pékin, Vol. 49] (Bruxelles: Palais des académies, 1938), 232 - 250. 290 “Epistola ad Socios Europae (Letter to fellow fathers in Europe) of August, 15th, 1678” in Noel Golvers, “The Missionary and his Concern about Consolidation and Continuity,” A Lifelong Dedication to the China Mission: Essays Presented in Honor of Father Jeroom Heyndrickx, CICM, edited by Noel Golvers and Sara Lievens, Leuven Chinese Studies, XVII (Leuven: Ferdinand Verbiest Institute, 2000), 358 -360; English translated from French translation of the letter, “Lettre du P. Ferdinand Verbiest, vice- provincial de la mission de Chine, a ses confreres de la Societe en Europe, le 15 aout 1678 , de la residence imperial de Beijing,” trans. Noel Golvers, Courier Verbiest, Vol. V (Leuven: Ferdinand Verbiest Institute, December 1993), 5 -6. 145

Chinese astronomer in a shamanistic showdown of prophetic skills.291 For his victory, Verbiest had been granted permission to preach Christianity anywhere in the empire and recruit new

Jesuits for the work. With this in mind, Verbiest wrote back to his former companions in the

German Jesuit provinces that the harvest was plentiful, but the workers few. Nevertheless, he warned that the Asian work demanded a particular type of missionary, somebody who could be at once an accomplished mathematician and a willing martyr. In order to have success at the

Imperial court, future missionaries must prepare for years in the best European universities, so that they could serve the Chinese emperor as astronomers, cartographers, and mathematicians.

He also recognized that he competed against people like Andrés Pérez de Ribas who extolled the virtues of missionary martyrdom. Ironically, whereas we have seen that the

Mexican Provincial worried that his province paled in contrast to the more civilized societies of the East, Verbiest feared the opposite. He worried that the, “generous soldiers of the Society of

Jesus most resolute sons of our leader Saint Ignatius and brothers of so many illustrious martyrs,” viewed martyrdom as essential to missions and would be bored with the safety of

China. To this he responded that, although the Jesuit mission enjoyed privilege for the moment, this depended on the emperor’s good will and oppression could be renewed at any moment.

He also explained in a lengthy section that the sea journey itself would be its own form of extended martyrdom, complete with great hunger, pain, suffering, and perhaps death.

Whether through arduous sea journeys or systematic persecutions, Jesuit missionaries must be

291 For his mathematical, cartographical, and linguistic skills, the Flemish Jesuit had achieved a high place at court and become an intimate advisor and friend of the Kangxi Emperor; Hsia, Sojourners in a Strange Land: Jesuits and their Scientific Missions in Late Imperial China, 28. 146 willing to train in languages, mathematics, and science for upwards of thirteen years, and then sacrifice that training and their lives should circumstance and the Lord demand. But Verbiest offered this information less as precaution and more as enticement to Jesuit novices, a martyr’s death would be the lucky reward of a chosen few.292

As a young student, Kino read Verbiest’s letter as if it were Jesus himself calling him to drop his nets and follow. One of his relatives, Father Martini had already gone to China and implanted the idea in his mind. Now Verbiest’s letter sealed the call.293 He pursued the epistle’s recommended course of training in his own formation, studying languages, mathematics, and astronomy and enacting Loyola’s Exercises as a way of steeling himself for an arduous vocation.

His passion grew when he saw two of his teachers assigned to the China mission.294 Then, on the eve of his departure for his mission he suffered a cruel twist of fate. Already an accomplished astronomer, Kino had put in for an assignment to the Marianas or Philippines, the

Jesuit gateway to East Asia and ultimately the imperial court in Peking. This hope was thwarted in September of 1680. The Jesuit general had decided to send both Kino and father Antonio

Kerschpamer on mission, but only one would go to the Marianas and the other to New Spain, leaving the missionaries to decide themselves. With customary humility, each deferred to the other to the point that they decided to draw lots. To his great disappointment, Kino got the short end of the stick, literally. He took the news hard for a few months, praying regularly for peace and the ability to obey.295 Finally, he resolved that God had spoken, resorting to martyrological metaphors and concluding that all missions began with “crosses, suffering, and

292 Ibid., 32 293 Kino, Historical Memoir, 77-78. 294 Clossey, Salvation and Globalization, 139; Bolton, Rim of Christendom, 32. 295 Bolston, Rim of Christendom, 37 - 39 147 adversities.” Then, he entrusted the Asian mission to God’s providence and the intercession of sacrificial patrons, deciding that Asia would not be abandoned because “it had already been seeded with the precious blood of martyrs.”296 If he could not go as a missionary, at least he knew it was in good hands since it had been founded on the spilled blood of Jesuit missionaries like Father Schall.

In Kino’s case, the Mexican assignment represented a martyrdom of hopes and dreams, since he had prepared for so long to serve at court and turned down so many prestigious opportunities in pursuit of this hoped-for vocation. He had given up a chair in mathematical sciences, offered by the Duke of Bavaria at the Jesuit University of Ingolstadt.297 In a last ditch attempt to rescue his plans, he sent numerous letters to his patroness, the Duchess of Aveiro, indirectly pleading for her intercession with Jesuit superiors. Yet, as a fully professed Jesuit he could not insist on a change himself, holding faithful to his vow of obedience. He stoically conceded, “only the obedience which est melior quam victima (“is better than sacrifice,” cf. 1

Samuel 15:22) could mitigate (my) disappointment that some of us were ordered from Rome for service in New Spain.” In response to his lament, his patroness, the Duchess of Aveiro consoled Kino by predicting his very own martyrdom in New Spain, to which the young Jesuit responded with delight, “It would be good for your grace and it would be good for me because

296 “Ni parece me podrá ser que Nuestro Señor desampare aquella Cristiandad, ya sembrada con la preciosa sangre de los mártires,” Kino to Lancastre, Cadiz, 15 September, 1680, HL, 9980; Kino and Aveiro,Duchess Maria de Guadalupe de, Kino Writes to the Duchess: Letters of Eusebio Francisco Kino, S.J., to the Duchess of Aveiro; an Annotated English Translation, and the Text of the Non-Spanish Documents, 73-74; Eusebio Francisco Kino and Maria de Guadalupe Duchess Aveiro, Kino Escribe a La Duquesa; Correspondencia Del P. Eusebio Francisco Kino Con La Duquesa De Aveiro y Otros Documentos, ed. Ernest J. Burrus (Madrid,: J. Porrúa Turanzas, 1964), 88. 297 Kino, Historical Memoir of Pimería Alta, 30, 333 148 your Grace would be a prophet and I would be a martyr.”298 A year later Kino was in Mexico City preparing for his first mission as royal cosmographer and evangelist to California, when the

General of the Society wrote him about the risks of his work. Referring specifically to the

Franciscan deaths in the Pueblo revolt of 1680, Charles de Noyelle prayed that “God might free you and your companions from these perils,” but then reminded the Italian, “Dangers are inseparable from this apostolic ministry.”299 Danger was exactly what Kino was counting on.

Maybe he could be a mathematician martyr yet.

Death for the faith, or more precisely, out of other’s hatred for the faith (in odium fidei), was a much hoped-for ideal to which most Jesuit missionaries, like their Franciscan counterparts, aspired. In part, they simply shared in wider cultural values. In Salvation at Stake,

Brad Gregory charted the “sublimation” of the idealized sacrificial death in the late medieval world into various idioms of spiritualized or “white” martyrdom. Gregory argues that while martyr stories constituted a hagiographic ideal in late medieval Europe, the actual opportunity for real martyrdom had diminished substantially in this period for all but a few missionary friars.

This led to a “sublimation” of martyrdom into other sorts of rituals and practices. Ascetic practice and stoic patience became core themes at the heart of most vita. Literary genres like

Imitatio Christi and Ars moriendi helped translate the martyrological ideal into everyday life and common death. At the same time meditations on the death of Christ, from devotions

298 “Kino to Lancastre,” Cadiz, 6 December, 1680 in Kino and Aveiro,Duchess Maria de Guadalupe de, Kino Writes to the Duchess: Letters of Eusebio Francisco Kino, S.J., to the Duchess of Aveiro, an Annotated English Translation, and the Text of the Non-Spanish Documents, 88, 225; Kino and Aveiro, Kino Escribe a La Duquesa; Correspondencia del P. Eusebio Francisco Kino Con La Duquesa, 121 299 He also expresses the hope that the King will provide better protection, given the “barbarous” nature of the people. “Dios libre a Vuestra Reverencia y a sus compañeros de estos peligros; y no es dudable que Su Majestad les asiste con muy especial providencia entre gente tan bárbara; aunque los peligros son inseparables de ese apostólico ministerio.” El Padre General Carlos de Noyelle al Padre Kino, 2 de enero, 1683, in Kino, Correspondencia del P. Kino Con Los Generales, 30-31 149 associated with the crucifix to performance of civic passion plays, set the passionate death as a model for more quotidian forms of suffering.300 For example, St. John of the Cross’ widely popular devotional work The Dark Night of the Soul compared ascetic suffering favorably to swift death at the hands of infidels. The mendicant mystic maintained that the pilgrim who died through long-suffering service to God was in fact a true martyr, “in the highest and substantial sense,” because God bestowed, “on that soul the essential love and reward of a martyr, making it a martyr of love, granting to it a prolonged martyrdom of suffering, the continuance of which is more painful than death.”301 The “prolonged martyrdom of suffering,” first articulated by

John of the Cross became a central facet of Jesuit missionary identity that helped them believe in the meaning of everyday and tedious sacrifices that fell short of the strict definitions of “red martyrdom.”

The daily imitation of Christ also became the discursive foundation for the red martyr

“renaissance” of the 16th century. Post-Tridentine Catholic missionaries found new opportunities for actual death on the colonial frontiers of Asia and the Americas. Jesuit training purposely cultivated a desire for such an honored death from the early days of their novitiate on through the thirteen-year process of discernment, education, and profession of the four vows. John O’Malley has argued that all Jesuit novices learned self-discipline by cultivating detailed imaginations of embodied suffering through prayer, fasting, deprivation, and highly focused meditations on the passion of Christ.302 In addition, tales of historic sacrifice

300 Gregory, Salvation at Stake, 41- 62 301 Bk. II, Ch.15 in John of the Cross, The Ascent of Mount Carmel eds. David Lewis and Benedict Zimmerman (London: T. Baker, 1928), 165. 302 John O'Malley, The First Jesuits (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 38- 48. , Maureen Ahern, "Visual and Verbal Sites,” 9; Joseph De Guibert, The Jesuits, their Spiritual Doctrine and Practice: A Historical Study (Chicago: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1972), 128 - 139. 150 surrounded Jesuits throughout their education, filling up their senses with both verbal and visual depictions of saints who had suffered and given all for Christ. Even as their founder read the lives of the saints while convalescing after the Battle of Pamplona, so too, young Jesuits spent many an hour reading collections like the Flos Sanctorum, The Golden Legend, and other

Acta, vita, and pasio of the saints. The vitae were not only biographies, but just as often obituaries, featuring exotic tales of holy death, in which missionaries suffered at the hands of diabolic kings or ungrateful apostates.303 And, by the 1600s, the Society’s novices were just as likely to read accounts of fellow Jesuits suffering passions in mission fields as the vitae of medieval saints or Passion stories of church fathers.304 In fact, in his work on global Jesuit networks, Luke Clossey concludes that descriptions of missionary suffering so permeated Jesuit letters, histories, classrooms, libraries, dormitories, and churches that the order came to closely identify the missionary with the martyr.305 Paired together, the broader medieval discursive legacy of “white martyrdom,” the contemporary afflictions of colonial missionaries provided a powerful organizing metaphor for 17th century Jesuit evangelization.

Martyrological propaganda ramped up in the early 1600s, just as real martyrdoms increased considerably and missionary vocations underwent an equally dramatic decline.306 The uptick in real suffering and increased rhetoric of martyrdom could have been either a cause or

303 Ahern, “Visual and Verbal Sites,” 9; James D. Ryan, “Missionary Saints of the High Middle Ages: Martyrdom, Popular Veneration, and Canonization,” The Catholic Historical Review, Vol. 90, Num. 1, (January 2004); O'Malley, The First Jesuits, 457. 304 Jane ten Brink Goldsmith, ed. Jesuit Art in North American Collections: Exhibition 7 March-16 June, 1991, (Milwaukee, Wis.: Patrick and Beatrice Haggerty Museum of Art, Marquette University, 1991), 19; Marcus B. Burke and Saint Peter's College. Art Gallery, Jesuit Art and Iconography, 1550-1800: Introductory Essay and Exhibition Catalogue (Jersey City, N.J.: Saint Peter's College, Art Gallery, 1993), 3. 305 Even as they ate and relaxed, Jesuit novices might look to frescoes on walls and ceilings which depicted the Society’s fallen heroes, who had given their lives in evangelistic service. Clossey, Salvation and Globalization, 82- 83; Ahern, "Visual and Verbal Sites," 72; Burke, “Jesuit Art and Iconography.” 306 Reff, Plagues, Priests, and Demons, 133. 151 symptom of declining interest in missions. This dissertation has argued that the martyr motif had cyclical influence, both as a reason for and response to real passions. Who could blame a novice that who had second thoughts about his calling after hearing about the great persecutions in Japan during the 1620s? Likewise, the eight Jesuits who died during the

Tepehuan revolt in New Spain in 1616 left superiors there in a scramble to explain to future missionaries the transcendent significance of their personal risk. Such widespread sacrifice was made possible, at least in part, by the beliefs and practices of faithful death cultivated in the previous two centuries. But, it also demanded fresh interpretive work. For this reason Jesuit martyr literature and calls for sacramental benefits for suffering missionaries increased throughout the 1600s. These martyrologies and plenary indulgences helped ply more adventurous novices away from the safe environs of urban universities by lending redemptive value to their sacrifice. Passions provided motivation, “pushing (novices) softly toward their duty,” but also bridged vast distances between Asia, the Americas, and Europe to forge an

“imagined community,” of shared mission and collective suffering.307

As early as 1566, Pedro Martinez, the soon to be protomartyr of the Florida mission, had petitioned the Jesuit General Borgia for plenary indulgences and papal benedictions for all missionaries who risked their lives in New Spain, whether as martyrs in the strict sense or as white martyrs, who died after a long-suffering journey or laborious mission.308 By the 1640s the colony’s Provincial, Andres Pérez de Ribas, was using both kinds of martyrdom as exempla to

307 Clossey, Salvation and Globalization, 83 308 Félix Zubillaga, Monumenta Antiquae Floridae (1566-1572), Vol. 3 (Romae: Monumenta Historica Soc. Iesu, 1946), 107, 692. 152 recruit future missionaries to Mexico.309 In his History of the Triumphs, Pérez de Ribas argued that the entire Jesuit mission was essentially an unremitting martyrdom, inaugurated with blood and dependent on ongoing sacrifice for its continued success.310 Beginning with a eulogy for the red martyr Gonzalo de Tapia as well as equal praise for the white martyr companion

Pedro Méndez, the Provincial alternated each chapter between “red” gruesome deaths and

“white” ascetic lives throughout the History.311 He explained that this alternating method would provide for the occidental Indies, what others had done for “the Indies of the east,” giving a full account of apostolic labors and sacrifice in the Americas. This specific comparison with the

Asian mission reminds us of the competitive nature of Jesuit missions. Even as they contended with the claims of rival religious orders within New Spain on native communities and competed with educational institutions for vocations, they also vied with other evangelistic theaters within the order for recruits. As such, tales of suffering functioned polemically to establish the relative value of a mission.312

However, death was not the only way to guarantee good returns. Quotidian suffering could yield copious profits as well. Surely, a chosen few of “Jesus’ soldiers” had the blessing of

“being killed by poisoned arrows or having their heads split open by a macana and then being eaten by them.” But, many others suffered daily passions as they, “traveled through the dry

309 Pérez de Ribas, History of the Triumphs, 719-722. 310 Ibid., 64 311 Some chapters tell of Jesus’ “valiant soldiers,” who had “spilled their blood at the hands of infidels for preaching the Gospel,” but an equal amount feature the members of Christ’s militia whose “heroic deeds and evangelical labors” achieved victories by exposure “to an infinite number of other hardships, including hunger, thirst, very rough roads, etc,” Ibid., 65 312 Pérez de Ribas said that this method would provide for the occidental Indies, what others had done for “the Indies of the east,” give it a full account of apostolic labors and sacrifice. The specific comparison with the Asian mission reminds us of the competitive nature of Jesuit missions. Even as they contended with the claims of rival religious orders within New Spain on native communities and competed with educational institutions for vocations, they also vied with other evangelistic theaters for recruits. Ibid., 64 153 and terrible wilderness without any water, or through dense and thorny thickets, or through swamps and burning sand dunes, thirsting for the welfare of these souls.”313 This constant sacrifice should be expected as intrinsic to their vocation, because, as Pérez de Ribas explained,

It is an illustrious vow taken by the sons of the Company of Jesus, who are well instructed by so many of their holy brothers that when the time comes to give their lives for the profession of that glorious name and the aid of souls, which He redeemed with His blood, they spare no labor, danger, torment, or life until [they have] attained such a noble and glorious objective.314

Pérez de Ribas makes explicit the way in which martyrdom both educated and exemplified mission. The ultimate goal of death in odium fidei would be the culmination of a Jesuit’s lifetime of training, whether through ascetic exercises of self-discipline or daily acts of torment expended in the evangelistic cause. Nevertheless, he insisted that this could not be the only kind of martyrdom, since the church had declared some who had died while healing the sick, others who were killed because they defended their chastity, and still more who had died because they “had gathered up the blood, bones, and relics of those whom they considered to be saint” or gave food and water to martyrs on their way to persecution. Strictly speaking, they had not died in the act of proclamation, but nevertheless the doctors of the church had declared them martyrs.315 Citing Augustine, Ambrose, and Chrysostom, as well as the Jesuit hagiographer Eusebio Nieremberg, he argued for an expansion of the concept of martyrdom to include the prolonged sufferings of missionaries. He insisted that they endured, “a type of

313 In an opening dedication to Philip IV, King of Spain, the Provincial explained that while some, “courageous preachers of the Gospel ended their lives in such a glorious labor,” others who were “currently employed in that labor are none too free of danger.” So, “both groups have nevertheless achieved very glorious triumphs.” Ibid., 53 314 Ibid., 323 315 In the original, “de un genero de martirio, quesi no con derramiento de sangre, que a vezes en breve passa, por lo menos de otro triunfo, y vitoria de inumerables y prologados trabajos, y linage de martirio de muchosanos.” Pérez de Ribas, Historia De Los Triumphos De Nuestra Santa Fee, 419; Nieremberg, Varones Ilustres De La Compania De Jesus, Bk. I, Doctrine 10, Ch.95 154 martyrdom that was not with the spilling of blood, that sometimes passes quickly, but another kind of triumph and victory of innumerable prolonged trials, a martyrdom lasting for many years.” In defining martyrdom, the import lay not simply in the destination, but also in the journey.

Following the definitions established by John of the Cross, Verbiest, and Pérez de Ribas,

Kino came to understand his own North American mission as a prolonged martyrdom, a life of exile from both Europe and his much-desired Asian vocation. After thirteen years of studying math and science with the hope of illustrious service as the Chinese imperial court, he found himself on the most far-flung frontier of Northern New Spain, in what Europeans considered the very rim of Christendom and civilization. In both the introduction and conclusion to the Life of Javier Saeta, he embraced the idea of his bloodless martyrdom, connecting it to his patron saint, Francis Xavier. Kino had taken the middle name Francisco as an 18 year old in 1663, in gratitude to Xavier whom he believed had rescued him from an illness in his youth.316

Throughout his life he strived to imitate Xavier and thank him for his divine protection.

Therefore, it makes sense that he pointed back to the example of Xavier when claiming for himself and fellow missionaries the title of prolonged martyrdom. He concluded the book, “It should be noted at the same time that the devotees of Saint Francis Xavier ascribe to him the crown of a prolonged martyrdom in his apostolic ventures.” Though Xavier had not been murdered by infidels, he had died en route to China in the context of an eve more prolonged mission filled with suffering. In addition to the crowns of doctrine and virginity, characterized by gold and lilies, he added “the third crown of the roses of martyrdom.” Likewise, his second

316 Ibid., 27; Burrus, Kino and the Cartography of Northwestern New Spain, 3 155 patron the Our Lady of Sorrow, Nuestra Señora de Dolores, could add to her title, “Mary the

Most Holy Queen of Martyrs” as she had birthed a mission that “even when no blood was shed,” was still characterized by sacrifice.317 Together, the examples of the two patrons confirmed the teachings of the church fathers as well as previous missionaries that sweat and tears shed in service of the faith could sometimes count as much as blood.

Though not as dramatic as the violent deaths of the Pueblo martyrs or his contemporary

Father Javier Saeta, Kino believed that the surviving Jesuits’ “bloodless” martyrdom accomplished more painstaking tasks. By this train of thought, red and white martyrs worked together, each accomplishing something for the mission. The deceased curried favor in heaven, but “the rest of the Fathers,” had been preserved by the divine majesty that, “they may instruct these peoples through the laborious task of their ministry.”318 So, those who died performed crucial ritual and spiritual tasks that prepared the way and lent protection. However, all the others should continue working with the knowledge that their labors brought actual conversions. As such, the white martyrdom should not be looked down upon as something less, but embraced as the main objective of their life. Kino made this clear in his conclusion to the work. “Finally, let the blessed crown of a prolonged bloodless martyrdom be the distinguishing motive and special goal of these new missions wherever a sudden and bloody martyrdom like that of Father Francisco Javier Saeta is wanting.”319

Memory helped unite the bloodless martyrs to their bloody companions. This is why

Kino rehearsed the passion stories of fifteen previous Jesuit martyrs who had died in northern

317 Kino, Biography of Francisco Javier Saeta, 217 318 Ibid., 39. 319 Ibid., 217 156

New Spain in the century before Saeta’s death in 1695. He argued that, far from discouraging the survivors, their memory should inspire further labors and more sacrifice. Citing Pérez de

Ribas’ argument about the relationship between sudden martyrs and surviving missionaries,

Kino argued, “Not on account of all these or even more murders would the apostolic missionaries of the Society of Jesus abandon their flocks.” On the contrary, “a new spirit was recognized among all missionary priests – a spirit of dedicating lives to God and of assisting the souls they were teaching.”320 Likewise, Father Andrés Tutino lamented having escaped death during the Tepehuan rebellion and blamed his own sins for his lack of such a blessed end.

Nevertheless, he comforted himself “with the extraordinary consolation of the fragrance of so sweet a memory as that which lingers from our brothers who so gloriously spent their life’s blood.” Tutino prayed that he should one day be so lucky as to shed his own blood for the same cause.321 The Belgian missionary to the Tarahumara, Father Joseph Neumann also regretted that was he could not join those who died as red martyrs. In his own report to superiors, he asked them to pray for his crown. “Plead for me in your prayers the happy and long thirsted end of my life.” However, he feared he would not receive this blessing, having “never merited achieving it, even though I have awaited it in three rebellions that I narrate here.” Nevertheless, he did not despair of some future form of sacrifice, “because grave and constant dangers surround us here.” He rested in the hope that, “there may yet be an occasion to offer my life for the glory of God, whether by pouring out my blood or by some other way the Lord

320 Ibid., 127 321 Both Kino and Perez de Ribas cited Tutino as the ideal response to the tales of martyrdom. Kino, Saeta, 129. Pérez de Ribas, History of the Triumphs, 610 – 611. 157 disposes.”322 Not every Jesuit could obtain the martyr’s palm they desired, but the rest could live vicariously through those who did.

Mission as Exile: “The Misery of this Mexican Island”

As much as some Jesuits expressed love for their converts and mission, many bemoaned their circumstances. They expressed ambivalence about their adopted homeland and were frustrated by their converts, tested by difficult climates, and longed for the comforts of companionship and "civilization." The prolonged passion of the exile had begun in Europe as they entered the Society, and it had been advanced in their missionary calling to foreign lands.

As they said goodbye forever to their homes, families, colleges, and countries, they had surrendered their previous identities and opportunities.

A centruy earlier the Provincial Pérez de Ribas had already pictured the mission in northern New Spain enduring a particular type of prolonged martyrdom, characterized not just by sacrifice and suffering, but most particularly by exile. The evangelist in these regions, “lives in isolation from mankind,” only compounded the pathos of his hardships, because he had to dwell, “in the company of wild beasts who inhabit hovels along the seashore or in the montes, forests, and deep canyons.” Leaving home, family, friends, and even the companionship of fellow Jesuits, these ministers lived in isolation from everything that constituted their identity.

He called this loss a “perpetual exile,” that no sane person would desire.

In the final analysis, to live among them is to experience a kind of perpetual exile (even though one’s life may not be lost). The cost of all these continuous and

322 “Reciban, pues, esteopúsculo, prueba de mi estimaciónporustedes, e impetrenparamí en susoraciones el feliz y anheladotermino de mi vida.Nuncamerecíalcanzarloaunque lo hay esperado en lastresrebelionesqueaquínarro; pero no pierdo la esperanza de lograrlo con la ayudadivina, puesnosrodeanaquí graves y constantespeligros, de modoquepodríadarse la ocasión de ofrendar la vidapor la gloria de Dios, ya sea derramando mi sangre o de otromodocomo el Señordisponga.”Neumann, Historia de Las Rebeliones en La Sierra Tarahumara, 16 158

acknowledged hardships would appear to debase dealings with these peoples and to discourage any rational person from undertaking such an enterprise.323

By this understanding all the missionaries were exiles and, as such, they were living martyrs who had already lost all that a European might conceive of as life. And yet, “All this suffering is endured for the glory of Christ and His redeemed souls,” he argued. Once again the paradigmatic sacrifices of Christ and his apostles helped make sense of even these white martyrdoms. Knowing that their exile had meaning in its imitation of Christ’s kenosis and Paul’s apostolic suffering “provides an equal amount of consolation to our religious missionaries, who sacrifice and dedicate their lives to God by laboring in exile.”324 For those who never had the chance to die at the hands of persecutors, the daily death of “laboring in exile” became their deepest consolation.

A century later, the German missionary to California Father Lambert Hostell frequently wrote home to his family and friends about the sacrifices of leaving European comforts for a thankless and “destitute peninsula.” In a 1743 letter to his sister, he felt the difficulty of the work and distance of being, “more than three thousand Spanish miles away from Europe.”

Nevertheless, Hostell expressed his contentment, “so much so that I would not exchange this strenuous and needy mission with the pleasantest position and place in Europe.” And, he expressed his determination to, “remain in this sterile peninsula and to devote myself to the task of cultivating this evangelical vineyard to the honor of God.”325 For Hostell, as for Kino

323 Pérez de Ribas, History of the Triumphs, 443; Pérez de Ribas, Historia De Los Triumphos De Nuestra Santa Fee, 418 324 Pérez de Ribas, History of the Triumphs, 443; Pérez de Ribas, Historia De Los Triumphos De Nuestra Santa Fee, 418 325 Father Lambert Hostell, S. J., “The Second Short Letter of Father LamberHostell, S. J. to his religious sister,” Welt-Bott, No. 761, translated in Ducrue, Ducrue's Account of the Expulsion of the Jesuits from Lower California (1767-1769): An Annotated English Translation of Benno Ducrue's Relatio Expulsionis, 169 159 before him, a sacrificial mission in the New World could more than make up for the loss of prestige and the “pleasantest position” in Europe.

The painful separation from Europe often entailed not only physical removal, but also cultural transition as German, Czech, Slovenian, and Italian missionaries struggled to take on Spanish names, language, and culture. Then, they had to adapt to indigenous tongues and customs.326 Kino, for instance, had gone from being the child Chino to student

Kuhn to the missionary Kino, as he moved from Italian to German, and then Spanish territories. He showed some ambivalence about these transitions and on the eve of his departure told his Patroness the Duchess of Aveiro that he was Italian by birth and Austrian by education.327 Many like Hostell, the Austrian Father Franz Inama, and the Swiss German

Father Phillip Segesser spent as much time anguishing over Spanish culture in letters to their relatives as they did indigenous practices. ”328 Segesser, for example, wrote to his family throughout his missionary career about the various culture shocks that heightened his feeling of separation from home. Upon first leaving, he wrote his brother to express his sorrow at not saying goodbye to his nephew who he “wished (he) could touch with a kiss,

326 Jesuits from the Provinces of Austria, Germany, and Bohemia had been prohibited work as missionaries in Spanish colonies of and on until 1664, when a special agreement between the Castilian crown and Jesuit General Paul Oliva allowed up to ¼ of the total missionaries to come from parts of the Holy Roman Empire. In the 18thcentury even this proportional guard was lifted and Germans became a majority of the northern missionaries. Del Valle, Escribiendo Desde Los Márgenes: Colonialismo y Jesuitas En El Siglo XVIII, 57 - 59; Karl Kohut and Maria Cristina Torales Pacheco, Desde Los Confines De Los Imperios Ibéricos : Los Jesuitas De Habla Alemana En Las Misiones Americanas, Simposio "Diversidad En La Unidad: Los Jesuitas De Habla Alemana En Iberoamérica, Siglos XVI-XVIII En Mexico City, 2005., Vol. . 16 (Madrid :Frankfurt am Main: Iberoamericana ;Vervuert, 2007), xxi; Clossey, Salvation and Globalization in the Early Jesuit Missions, 172; John Francis Bannon, “The Mission Frontier in Sonora (1620 – 1687)” in Charles W. Polzer, The Jesuit Missions of Northern Mexico (New York: Garland Pub, 1991), 164 - 170. 327Clossey, Salvation and Globalization, 35; Kino and Aveiro, Kino Escribe a La Duquesa; Correspondencia Del P. Eusebio Francisco Kino Con La Duquesa De Aveiro y Otros Documentos, 105-115 328 Father Lambert Hostell, S. J., “The Second Short Letter of Rev. Fr. Lambert Hostell, S. J. to his religious sister,” originally published in German in Welt-Bott, (Vienna, 1761), No. 761 and translated in Ducrue, Account of the Expulsion, 176 - 177 160 whom I am never likely to see again in this life.” But, even more so than Hostell, Segesser also experienced his dislocation culturally, writing frequently about the tensions he felt as a

German Jesuit in Spanish lands. He penned tales of what he considered to be inferior

Spanish habits, food, architecture, and education. He even felt the strain of leaving his home culture amongst the members of the Society, telling his brother that, “there is a big difference between German and Spanish Jesuits,” just before embarking for the New

World.329 Yet, his commitment to the mission never wavered. Writing about a sick missionary forced to return to Vienna on the eve of departure, he insisted, “As to what concerns me, if nothing else will happen, I am committed rather to lose my life here in Spain according to the will of God than to return home, even if I had to wait my whole life here.”330

Once in the Americas, Segesser complained frequently of conflict with Spanish superiors as well as Spanish customs. From Cuba, he wrote to his mother to tell her about tensions with the Spanish over pastoral practices and the preference of the indigenous and

African converts for Germans, or “foreign missionaries,” because they were more patient in confession.331 He grumbled, in correspondence with his brother from Sonora in 1735 that

Spanish superiors discriminated against German missionaries in their assignments, but nevertheless boasted that his church - built on German methods - held up better against

Apache raids than Spanish missions. He also told of trouble in civilizing and evangelizing

329 Segesser’s Letters to his family have been translated and published online by AlbrecthClassen, a Professor at the University of Arizona, The Letters of the Swiss Jesuit Missionary Philip Segesser http://aclassen.faculty.arizona.edu/sites/aclassen.faculty.arizona.edu/files/Engl.trans__2.pdf, (accessed on October 8, 2011). On German and Spanish differences, see “Letters 25 – 28,” 74 – 78 and “Letter 39,” 105. 330 Ibid., “Letter 37: Letter to My Highly Born Honorable Mother, Puerto de Santa Maria, 1730,” 103 331 Ibid., “Letter 41: Letter to his mother Anna Maria Catharina Segesser, née Rusconi. Havana, April 3, 1731,” 112. 161 because they had to remove the Pima’s “deeply rooted habits,” not just because of their

“savage” state, but also “since they have been instructed in Spanish, not German.”332 All of these details remind us that the notion of an essentialized “European” missionary, maintained in popular imagination and still too often in scholarly writing, never do justice to these deep cultural divides.

By the 1740s Segesser had planted deep roots in his adopted home. He still desired news of home, but now dedicated most of his time to the ups and downs of missionary life.

In a telling request to his brother for seeds for his garden, he asked for cauliflower, or

“coliflor, for I can no longer remember how it is called in German.”333 In the same letter, he recalled fondly how his mission converts at San Miguel de los Ures, whom he always suspected of being disloyal, mourned his leaving when he was switched to another mission.334 As much as he insisted to his parents and siblings that he recalled them frequently in his prayers and imagination, his heart and mind now rested in Sonora and the hoped-for conversion of its spiritual children. Likewise Father Imana of Austria described life without German bread as one of many reasons his mission was, “perilous and exhausting,” alongside illness, heat, dangerous animals, and native treachery. Still, he came to appreciate such mestizo cuisine as tortillas, even sharing a recipe with his Carmelite sister for her to try out at her convent in Cologne.335 Even though the mission entailed untold costs it could also mean a certain solace in the host culture, if only in bits and pieces.

332 Ibid., “Letter 52,” 148. 333 Ibid, “Letter 60,” 171. 334 Ibid. 335 Father Franz Inama, “Letter of Reverend Father Franz Inama, S. J., Missionary in California, from the Austrian Province to his Reverend Sister, a Carmelite in Cologne on the Rhine, written from Mission San José on October 14, 1755,” in Welt-Bott, 759 and translated in Ibid., 152 162

In a letter to his father, Hostell also lamented the hardships of his American sojourn, with the “wild, rough, dry, and utterly unproductive” land. He was pessimistic about the indigenous groups with whom he worked, calling them native “barbarians” who ranked “below animals rather than be considered equal to other humans” as they “lived without any religion, laws, government, knowledge of divinity, houses or villages,” and roamed naked through the wilderness “in accordance with the inclination of (their) sensuous nature.”336 And yet, he still expressed enthusiasm about their conversion and his own goal of “being a capable instrument in promoting the glory of God and effect the salvation of the Christian and pagan California Indians,” for he explained, “this is and this will ever be until I die my one desire.” In another letter to his spiritual mentor, he detailed the deprivations, dearth and dangers of death that plagued him, but he concluded, “Never have

I regretted, even for a moment, having exchanged the comforts of my beloved homeland for the misery of this Mexican island.”337 California might be a hot and sweaty mess of a

“Mexican island,” full of dusty terrain and barbarous peoples, but it was his miserable land and the Jesuits’ sacrificial mission. Still, he could never fathom that he would one day regret his removal from that isla and return to those family members a broken man, dying just after the suppression in the Jesuit College of Dusseldorf in 1773.338

Like Kino, Segesser, Imana, and Hostell, the Slovenian Marcus Kappus expressed his time in the Mexican mission in terms of personal sacrifice. His frequent letters to his brother Johann

336Hostell, “The First Letter of Rev. Fr. Lambert Hostell, S. J., missionary in California of the Lower Rhine Province addressed to his father from the mission of San Luis Gonzaga, September 27, 1743,” Welt-Bott, No. 760 in Ibid., 163 - 165 337 Hostell, “The Fourth Letter of Rev. Fr. Lambert Hostell, S. J., missionary in California of the Lower Rhine Province, to Rev. Fr. Josef Burscheid of the same Order and Province,” Welt-Bott, No. 783 and translated in Ibid., 176 - 177 338 Burrus, “Introduction,” in Ibid. 163 expressed homesickness, reminiscing about his childhood and grieving the fact that he would not ever see his beloved sibling, parents, or country until eternity.339 He also reflected on his isolation and frustration with natives in a 1689 letter to his aunt, Lady Francisca Adlmanin, a nun in Skofja, Slovenia. Kappus initially lamented that the Seri, Tapolque, and Pima had, “no work, religion, or idol,” and lived nomadically, “like animals.” But in the same letter, he rejoiced that he had baptized two extremely old Pima, who he estimated to be 120 years old and had thus arrived in time to save them “from the jaws of the devil.”340 A decade later in 1699, he still expressed some pessimism about living conditions in Sonora, especially the rebellions of the

Pima and Tarahumara and martyrdoms of fellow missionaries in the 1680s and 90s.

Nevertheless, he had come to appreciate his own Opata converts as well as many aspects of his adopted country’s food, fauna, animals, and agriculture. To be sure he missed his brother

Johann and closed his note with a touching prayer that he might one day, “see his brother again, if not in this world, then in the other world with immortal joy.”341 Such moments are telling reminders for modern interpreters that Catholic missionaries left home without any hope of hearing the voice or seeing the face of their loved ones again. It also reinforces the claim that the mission itself was a martyrdom; a death to a former self, rooted in country, home, family, and language.

Others expressed their sacrifice in cosmic terms. Figures as diverse as Gonzalo de Tapia in the 16th century, Andres Perez de Ribas in the 17th, and Jacob Baegert in the 18th, imagined

339 Marcus Kappus, "Letters of Marcus Antonius Kappus from Colonial America," in Part1: Acta Neophilologica XIX, ed. Janez Stanonick, 1986), 35-36. “Let, consulted at Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkely,: F799 358 1986 v.1-5 340 Kappus, “Letter of Father MarcusKappus to his aunt, Lady Francisca Adlmanin, a Nun at SkofjaLoka, April 30 1689,” Ibid., Vol. 1, 55- 56 341 Ibid., Vol. 4, 48 -50 164 their travel from Europe to the Mexican north as a transition from the kingdom of light to a land of darkness, from Christian civilization to diabolic deserts.342 In the 1640s Pérez de Ribas had compared the Jesuits to heroes of old, who had forsaken “the splendors of which other nations in the Old World boast – civil order, letters, and material opulence for a wealth of conversions. Even though “the Prince of Darkness,” reigned in the New World with “fortified castles of superstition, sorcery, and barbarous customs,” Christ’s soldiers had journeyed across the waters to win “successes, trophies, and victories of conversion and “spilled their blood and given their lives in this conquest.”343 A century later the Swiss German Father Jacob Baegert expressed a similar opinion about the Jesuit mission in California,

For the sake of this work, they leave their homeland and, with it, everything, to sail over the seas. Like St. Paul, they fear no dangers, but suffer shipwreck, hunger, thirst, and dwell in deserts, exposed to ugly vermin. They live among wild beasts and such human beings as are only distinguishable from beast by their bodies. They risk their lives a hundred times, and spill their blood in a hundred different ways.344

For these Jesuit missionaries, their vocation meant renouncing previous attachments and ambitions in exchange for physical pain as well as cultural, linguistic, psychological, and spiritual isolation on a God-forsaken frontier of New Spain. Nonetheless, they had been called to expand the territory of Christ, through triumphant acts of service, whether in the quotidian martyrdoms of sweat and tears or the glorious blessing of spilling their blood.

Perhaps more than any of these authors, Father Jaime Mateu, the Spanish missionary to the Tarahumara and author of the unpublished account of the expulsion,

Destierro de misioneros de la América septentrional española (Exile of the Missionaries of

342 William Shiels, Gonzalo De Tapia, 198; Pérez de Ribas, History of the Triumphs, 761 343 Pérez de Ribas, History of the Triumphs, 761 344 Jacob Baegert, Observations in Lower California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1952), 162. 165

Spanish North America), drew parallels between the sacrifices of leaving Europe for the

Indies and the sorrowful removal from Mexico back to Europe that will be discussed in the last chapter. From the title onward, he invoked the word for exile, destierro, to describe missionary movement in both directions. Echoing the words and themes of Pérez de Ribas,

Kino, Segesser, and Baegert before him; Mateu emphasized the inherently sacrificial nature of the foreign mission. “Trial, sweat, anguish, affliction, and danger – all of these were the cost paid by the Jesuits who exiled themselves voluntarily in those deserts amongst such barbarous people.” The particular conditions of northwestern New Spain, with its “deserts” and “barbarous people,” made Sonora, Sinaloa, and California particularly difficult assignments, as opposed to the usually preferred Asian missions amongst more “civilized” cultures, as defined by José de Acosta’s quadripartite definition of civilization: cities, law, literacy, and religion.345 Mateu’s use of a particular imperfect, reflexive form here, literally:

“they were exiling themselves” (“se desterraban”), gives agency to the missionaries in the embrace of their afflictions. The Spanish phrase also forefronts the location and dislocation from land in a way that the English “exile” cannot convey. They literally unearthed themselves, according to him, from their countries and families only to experience severe suffering in deserted spaces on behalf of savage people. But, Mateu claimed, they did it all for the glory of love; they chose exile, “for the love of (Indian) souls, without hope of reward or any thanks in this life.”346

345 Acosta , Natural and Moral History of the Indies, 76f; Anthony Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 161 - 165. 346 Matheu, Ch. 3, photo 12, “Tantos trabajos sudores angustias aflicciónes peligros le costaba todo eso a los misioneros jesuitas que se desterraban voluntariamente en aquellos desiertos entre aquellos bárbaros para amor de sus almas sin esperanza de premio ni agradecimiento ninguna en esta vida ni pertenece a este lugar al declararlo el evangelio.” 166

Later, Mateu reiterated the contrast between Jesuit opportunities at home and the difficult northern Mexican mission, once again calling it an exile,

Even if the lands were fertile and even supposing the comforts that they could have had at home, the Jesuits were men of great talent who usually could have done well anywhere, voluntarily left their lands and made trips by sea and land of thousands of leagues to go and be exiled (desterrado) amongst those barbarians that resemble animals more than men.347

Challenging the rumors he encountered in Europe of secret Jesuit wealth or hidden kingdoms, Mateu emphasized the thankless nature of the mission. The members of the

Society went to Mexico, “with hope of so many trials and dangers and without hope of any kind of honor, praise, comfort or any other thing that the world cherishes, yet in their eyes all is misery.” According to Mateu, those who suspected that Jesuits had grown wealthy in the New World had no sense whatsoever of their trials. For him and many others who went to Mexico in the decades before the expulsion, the missionary life constituted an exile, a sojourn that entailed great personal, cultural, and cosmic sacrifice because it meant a full imitation of Christ in his deepest misery.

Conclusion

For almost two centuries Jesuits who went to New Spain as evangelists expressed their hope of serving and ultimately dying for their faith at the hands of infidels. For some, like

Gonzalo de Tapia, Javier Saeta, Tomás Tello, and Enrique Ruhen, the hope became a reality as they received their crown and suffered a sudden, red martyrdom out of hatred for the faith.

However, countless others never had that opportunity. They wrestled with more quotidian

347 Mateu 167 struggles like travel, hunger, climate, language, homesickness, solitude, and sickness. For these surviving missionaries the notion that these everyday ordeals constituted a separate, but equally valid form of martyrdom became compelling and consoling. Drawing on the teachings of early fathers like Augustine and Ambrose, medieval devotional traditions like the imitatio

Christi, ars moriendi, and John of the Cross’ Dark Night of the Soul; as well as the Spiritual

Exercises created by their founder, they imagined their sufferings to be like Christ, Paul, and the martyrs of the church. While they never spilled blood like these previous saints, they did shed sweat and tears in their “bloodless martyrdoms.” More than anything they contended that they had lost their lives as they left family, home, and country to serve Jesus and the Society that bore his name. However, when a surprising reversal meant that they had to return to Europe and leave their “exile” in the coming years they learned to draw on these same rhetorical resources and embrace their ultimate and most prolonged martyrdom.

168

5 “THE CHALICE OF HIS SUFFERING”: MARTYRDOM IN THE EXPULSION OF 1776

Introduction: A Spectacle before the World

On July 11th of 1767 the Governor of Sonora, Juan Claudio Pineda, opened a sealed envelope that had been sent with great urgency and secrecy by the Viceroy of New Spain, Don

Carlos Francisco Marqués de Croix. Inside he read a royal decree that surprisingly ordered the expulsion of the Society of Jesus from New Spain and the seizure of all Jesuit property. More specifically, the Real Decreto instructed Pineda to arrest the 31 Jesuit missionaries working in his province, secure their assets, transport them to the coast, and guard them until arrangements could be made for them to be sent back to Mexico City, then to Spain, and eventually to their respective countries.348 The expulsion had already begun in central Mexico in a coordinated action on the morning of June 25th. But, these orders just now reached this northwestern corner of Spanish colonialism in America. Ever obedient, Pineda planned a similarly coordinated operation for the 23rd of July, enlisting all the soldiers under his command to spread out throughout the territory, prepare logistics, and then execute the order on the same day. Due to the scope of the task, however, things did not go as swiftly or smoothly as the

Viceroy or Governor had hoped. The military guards took weeks to locate and then recall each of the Jesuits from their scattered missions. Once gathered, missionaries and guards took many more days marching south toward the Pacific port of San José de Guaymas. When the full contingent finally arrived on September 2nd, Governor Pineda confined the Sonoran

348 For both a narrative of these events as well as the relevant documents including the Real Decreto, see Alberto Francisco Pradeau, La expulsión De Los Jesuitas de Las Provincias De Sonora, Ostimuri y Sinaloa en 1767, Vol. 24 (México: José Porrúa e Hijos, 1959), 26 - 46. 169 missionaries under close guard in a makeshift hut by the coast where they awaited twenty colleagues from Sinaloa who finally joined them in their improvised prison on September

21st.349

Over the next eight months, these 51 northern missionaries suffered from insect bites, rat infestations, spoiled food, salty water, dysentery, devastating heat and cramped conditions.350 Not surprisingly, the elderly Father Joseph Palomino of Sinaloa passed away in

April, the first in a series of losses the missionaries would endure during a two-year-long march toward exile.351 At last, in May of 1768, they began a sea journey down the Pacific coast that, due to poor equipment and rough weather lasted 48 additional days, leading to weakness and widespread scurvy.352 When they finally landed, the group was forced to move by foot and

349 Miguel Mathes, Los Padres Expulsos De Sonora y Sinaloa, Vol. no. 51 (Culiacán, Sinaloa Mexico: El Colegio de Sinaloa, 1999), 7. 350 Jaime Mateu, S. J. (wrongly attributed to Atonio Sterkianowski), Destierro de los misioneros de la America septentrional española por Don A. S. olim misionero de norogachic, Bancroft Library, University of California Berkeley, Bolton Papers, C-B 840, Container 29, Folder 23, 108 – 109. Large sections of this text are cited and summarized in the above cited work of Alberto Pradeau as the work of the Moravian missionary Antonio Sterkianowski, due to the signed initials “A. S.” cited in the title. This follows the assumptions of Herbert Bolton and Perter Masten Dunne. See Peter Masten Dunne, "The Expulsion of the Jesuits from New Spain," Mid-America: An Historical Review 19, no. 8 (January, 1937, 1937), 13, n.30. However, Ernest Burrus persuasively argued that the Spanish missionary to the Tarahumara, Jaime Mateu was the true author as attested by the Jesuit cataloguer Ramón Diosdado Caballero who met Mateu in Spain during the exile as well as Mateu’s own signature on the Latin translation Burrus, Mexican Historical Documents in the Central Jesuit Archives, 139; Pradeau, La expulsión de Los Jesuitas, 64 351 Technically, Palomino was the second death during the process of the expulsion. The former superior of the Sinaloa mission, Father Andres Ignacio González died in Jesuit college at Bamoa, Sinaloa on September 7th. Since he was moribund at the time of the expulsion, he had been allowed to stay behind, under the care of Palomino, for a couple of weeks after his colleagues had departed. Dávila y Arrillaga, Pradeau, and the contemporary scholar Julio César Montané Marti all count González as the first deceased amongst the exiles. José Mariano Dávila y Arrillaga and Francisco Javier Alegre, Continuación De La Historia De La Compañia De Jesus En Nueva España Del P. Francisco Javier Alegre Vol. 1 (Puebla: Imp. del Colegio pio de artes y oficios, 1888), 309; Pradeau, La expulsión De Los Jesuitas, 165, 189; Julio César Montané Marti, La expulsion de los Jesuitas de Sonora (Contrapunto, 1999), available online at http://www.monografias.com/trabajos27/jesuitas-sonora/jesuitas-sonora.shtml (accessed on November 11th, 2011). 352 Jaime Mateu, "Destierro De Los Misioneros De La America Septentrional Española Por Don a. s. Olim Misionero De Norogachic" (Unpublished Manuscript, 1780 - 1800), Folder 22, Photos 11 - 115, Ch. 15, Bolton Papers, Bancroft Library ; Dunne, The Expulsion of the Jesuits from New Spain, 22; Bernhard Middendorff, Vertreibung Und Gefangenschaft, Vol. II (Munster, 1845), 54. 170 horseback across the continent through swamps, forests, and mountains; first to Guadalajara, then to Mexico City, and ultimately to the Atlantic port of Vera Cruz. Before even departing from New Spain, almost half their number had died most succumbing during the first days of the overland journey. Those 20 missionaries died during the last week of August in and around the small village of Ixtlán del Río in Nayarit, after which the survivors divided into two groups of healthy and sick. Eventually, the surviving 30 arrived at the Spanish port of Cadíz two years later on July 10th, 1769. From there, the lucky ones made their way to their home countries or the

Papal States. However, many lingered in Spanish monasteries, sometimes in solitary confinement, for over a decade before being released.353

By most accounts, the Sonora and Sinaloa missionaries were exceptional in that they probably experienced more suffering and loss as well as a longer Spanish imprisonment than any other group of Jesuits exiles worldwide.354 Still, their story formed only part of an unprecedented retraction of the Society globally, as Jesuits were expelled first from Portugal

353 Among the several secondary sources that provide a basic narrative of the expulsion, see the dated, but still foundational Peter Masten Dunne, “The Expulsion of the Jesuits from New Spain, 1767,” Mid-America: An Historical Review, XIX (January, 1937), 3 – 30; Pradeau, La expulsión de Los Jesuitas. which offers both summary and extensive citation of primary sources; For more recent treatments, see Eva María St. Clair Segurado’s dissertation, Expulsión y exilio de la provincial jesuitamexicana (1767 – 1820), Universidad de Alicante, 2002; Mathes, Los Padres Expulsos De Sonora y Sinaloa, 46; John J. Martinez, Not Counting the Cost: Jesuit Missionaries in Colonial Mexico, a Story of Struggle, Commitment, and Sacrifice (Chicago: Jesuit Way, 2001), 262.; Julio C. Montané Martí, La Expulsión De Los Jesuitas De Sonora, (Hermosillo: Contrapunto 14, 1999), 126.; Salvador Bernabéu Albert, Expulsados Del Infierno: El Exilio De Los Misioneros Jesuitas De La Península California, 1767-1768 (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 2008), 196. The best primary source summaries that have been translated to English are Ducrue, Ducrue's Account of the Expulsion of the Jesuits from Lower California (1767- 1769): An Annotated English Translation of Benno Ducrue's Relatio Expulsionis, 212; Joseph Och, Missionary in Sonora: The Travel Reports of Joseph Och, S. J., 1755 - 1767, ed. Theodore Treutlein (San Francisco,: California Historical Society, 1965), 196; Baegert, Observations in Lower California, 218, the latter a translation of ; Antonio Lopez de Priego, Rafael Zelis, and Francesco Saverio Clavigero, Tesoros Documentales De México, Siglo XVIII, ed. Mariano Cuevas (México: [Editorial Galatea], 1944), 3 p. l., 9-405 p., 1 l.; Francisco Javier Alegre and Carlos María de Bustamante, Historia De La Compañia De Jesus En Nueva-España, Que Estaba Escribiendo El P. Francisco Javier Alegre Al Tiempo De Su Espulsion. Publicala Para Probar La Utilidad Que Prestará a La America Mexicana La Solicitada Reposicion De Dicha Compañia (Mexico.: Impr. de J.M. Lara, 1841). 354 Dunne, The Expulsion of the Jesuits from New Spain, 3-30 171 and its colonies in 1759, then from French territories in 1762, and finally from Spanish lands in

1767.355 In the Spanish case alone, thousands of missionaries were recalled to Spain from as far west as the Philippines and as far south and east as the reducciónes of Paraguay. Within New

Spain, 678 members of the Society made their way from missions in California and Chihuahua as well as the colleges of central and western Mexico.356 Many perished during the Atlantic voyage or in the holding cells and hospices of Vera Cruz, Havana, and Cadíz before the survivors made their way to scattered refuges throughout Europe. In addition, they endured the extra loss of their identity as Jesuits, when Pope Clement XIV bowed to pressure from Portugal and

France and formally suppressed the order in July 1773 with the brief, Dominus ac Redemptor.357

Paired together, the expulsion and suppression meant the death of the Jesuit identity, cultivated over two centuries, as a global missionary order. At a loss for how to reconstitute themselves as individuals and maintain bonds to the wider community of fellow evangelists and converts, the former members of the Society appealed to the suffering of Jesus for whom they were once named.

This chapter makes reference to the broader contexts of exile in which all Jesuits found themselves, but focuses on the way in which the Society’s missionaries in northwestern Mexico, the provinces of Sinaloa, Sonora, and California, made sense of these losses. As they had since

355 Ibid., 5. For other accounts of Jesuit exiles from areas other than New Spain see, Francisco Xavier Puig b.1720. and Nicholas P. Cushner, Philippine Jesuits in Exile: The Journals of Francisco Puig, S. J., 1768-1770, Vol. 24 (Rome: Institutum Historicum, 1964), 202; José del Rey Fajardo, La Expulsión De Los Jesuítas De Venezuela, 1767-1768 (San Cristóbal: Universidad Católica del Tachira, 1990), 398; Magnus Mörner ed., The Expulsion of the Jesuits from Latin America (New York: Knopf, 1965), 207; Hsia, Sojourners in a Strange Land: Jesuits and their Scientific Missions in Late Imperial China; Francisco Javier Alegre et al., Testimonios Del Exilio, Vol. 12 (México: Jus, 2000), 156. 356 Alma Montero Alarcón, Jesuitas De Tepotzotlán: La Expulsión y El Amargo Destierro, 1a ed. (Tepotzotlán :México, D.F.: Museo Nacional del Virreinato ;Plaza y Valdes, 2009), 39 - 41. 357 For a dated, but helpful summary of the papal suppression as well as an English translation of the brief, see Giovanni Battista Nicolini, History of the Jesuits: Their Origin, Progress, Doctrines, and Designs (London,: H. G. Bohn, 1854), 362. 172 the beginning of their mission in the 16th century, they worked to translate the suffering into martyrological terms. They understood their exile from New Spain as their final and culminating sacrifice, a martyrdom of their missionary identity itself and, in so doing, their ultimate identification with Christ. For instance, writing almost a decade later from Munich the former superior of the California mission, Father Benno Ducrue concluded his account of the expulsion with a reference to Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians. “We have become a spectacle,” Ducrue lamented, “if not to angels then at least to men.” Nevertheless, the Jesuits were, “more than conquerors,” he insisted, as their persecution had been performed before both New and Old

World audiences. Ducrue urged the remnants of the Society to keep their missionary identity alive in their memories, through which they could maintain imaginary connections with each other as well as suffering converts. Remember the mission and keep praying for “our poor

Indians,” he wrote, that God preserve them in His grace, “in order that so much effort and the sacrifice of so many workers be not in vain, but that they receive with us eternal happiness.”

Father Ducrue and other survivors of the northern Mexican missions found solace in their mutual suffering, as it was fundamentally an identification with their Lord Jesus Christ. They also hoped that their blood, sweat, and tears were not shed in vain, praying that their persecutions and prayers had won divine protection for their former converts. Like so many of his colleagues, Ducrue found reason to rejoice in the exile and later suppression, thanking God that “the Society of His Son,” had been allowed to “taste a bit of the chalice of His suffering.”

His only regret was that they could not have joined their fallen brothers and suffering natives in death, and thereby “drink all of it.”358

358 Ducrue, Ducrue's Account of the Expulsion of the Jesuits, 116 -118 173

Over a decade ago, Judith Perkins highlighted the techniques through which early

Christians cultivated a “suffering self” as a way of connecting to marginalized groups and consolidating a persecuted identity that paradoxically led to the, “triumph of Christianity.”

She used the language of “triumph” intentionally, with reference to its specific Christian theological connotation, the paradoxical notion that sacrificial death is the pathway to success, as in the designation “the Church Triumphant” to refer to deceased saints or in

Jerome’s dictum, “the suffering of the martyrs is the triumph of God.” In those foundational centuries, Perkins contended, textual representations of persecution, “worked not simply to represent a realistic situation so much as to provide a self-definition that enabled the growth of Christianity as an institution.”359 Building on this understanding of martyred identity as an empowering communal representation, Elizabeth Castelli has argued that narratives of

Christian suffering drew on antique idioms and practices of spectacle. Early Christian writers like Paul, Tertullian, Jerome, and Augustine drew imagery from victor processions and gladiatorial arenas to celebrate pain as a performance and explain tragedies as moral triumphs for watching and listening audiences.360

In a similar manner, Jesuits understood their suffering as spectacular, in the sense articulated by Castelli. Exiled missionaries of northern New Spain like Fathers Benito Ducrue,

Jacob Baegert, Ignaz Pfefferkorn, Jaime Mateu, Bernardo Middendorff, and Joseph Och likened their own ordeal to a "spectacle," one that displayed their martyred identity before multiple communities as they made their trek to Europe. In their memories and histories,

Jesuit exiles highlighted their connection to each other in diaspora as well as those they left

359 Perkins, The Suffering Self, 12 360 Castelli, Martyrdom and Memory, 4, 117, 125. 174 behind, the indigenous participants in their pain. Grieving and distressed native converts not only validated their mission, but also leant the final vindication to Jesuit sacrificial identity as they expressed their deep love for their former missionaries by shedding tears and even blood during the exile procession. In addition to stories of local and native responses and their grief at expulsion and abandonment in exile, these writings globalized the spectacle of

Jesuit suffering as accounts of the expulsion dramatized missionary anguish for sympathetic readers in Europe, Asia, and other parts of the Americas. Written from their former home countries (now rendered strangely foreign), these memoirs recalled New Spain and its natives with nostalgia, idealizing the loss of their converts and conversiones as the ultimate imitatio

Christi, a martyrdom of their global missionary identity.

Exile as Martyrdom

Up to this point, this dissertation has argued that martyrdom became a principal way in which Jesuits hoped to redeem colonial violence - the losses, disease, and death of both evangelists and indigenous converts that they witnessed in their missions. This chapter, however, presents the curious case of the Jesuit expulsion as a counterintuitive martyrdom, dying for faith not in their choice of a missionary vocation, but in their loss of it. From this perspective, the expulsion represented an outstanding reversal of fortune, as the Jesuits who had sacrificed kin and country in their embrace of an American mission, now understood their return home as their greatest sacrifice. They also understood themselves and their converts as the greatest victims of Iberian colonialism. In the eighteenth century,

Bourbon reformers sought to rationalize Spanish colonialism by exerting centralized systems 175 and eliminating older patchworks of local autonomy and authority.361 As a religious order constituted significantly of Germanic missionaries, trained in Central Europe, and under obedience to a Roman pontiff, the Jesuits working in northern New Spain represented a third column in the development of an enlightened system of governance. At the same time, rumors of fabulous wealth as well as tensions over labor control, political power, and overall independence threatened hopes of economic development, modernized legal codes, and political modernization on the “imperial periphery.” 362 These pressures and disputes meant that pious tales of sacrifice, spilt blood, and passion stories fell on increasingly deaf ears amongst soldiers and ministers in New Spain after the 1750s.

While Jesuits had ambivalent feelings about their mission and especially the natives they hoped to convert, many had come to embrace their departure for, travel to, and endurance in missions in martyrological terms. The idea that they might abandon this task and return to Europe undermined this sacrificial identity. The expulsion and exile represented an unimaginable and unprecedented reversal of fortune for two reasons, one local and one global, but both connected to their identity as evangelists for the Society of

Jesus. Luke Clossey has recently argued that by the 17th century Jesuits came to understand themselves as primarily a global network, engaged in a work of worldwide redemption through accumulated acts of sacrifice.363 This communal identity - sometimes pictured as a verdant tree with continental branches and other times in portraits of martyrdom that covered the world map - helped wed the Jesuit self-understanding with mission. In turn, the

361 David J. Weber, Bárbaros: Spaniards and their Savages in the Age of Enlightenment (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 5-6. 362 Gabriel Paquette, Enlightenment, Governance, and Reform in Spain and its Empire, 1759-1808 (New York: Plagrave Macmillan, 2008), 244. 363 Clossey, Salvation and Globalization, 327 176 missionary vocation became infused with martyrdom as verbal and visual depictions of sacrificed were used in training and prayer in European colleges. By the mid-18th century, however, both the global and sacrificial aspects of Jesuit identity were under attack as they

364 found themselves embroiled in controversy in Europe, Asia, and the Americas. In disputes over rites in Asia, debates with Jansenists in Europe, and doubts about the propriety and power of reducciónes in the Americas, the Society's global reach and sacrificial witness came under serious threat almost everywhere in this period. Even with these challenges, the expulsion represented a decisive moment. Each step and every wave that pushed them eastward to Europe also stripped them of their global missionary identity.

The expulsion threatened this vocational identity and called into question the myriad sacrifices of those who had gone before. If they were to be yanked from their converts without any notice then surely the missions would fall apart. If so, then of what value were the two centuries of sacrifice invested to build up the enterprise? Although a return to home and family might sound nice at first, it threatened the very raison d’etre of the Society and its members. Some of the Jesuits’ opponents argued that the Jesuits should relish their return to Europe and chided crowds who grieved their departure. One former missionary to

364 The various contentions that led to the Jesuit expulsions and then suppression are numerous and beyond the scope of this chapter. However, a representative example would include Jansenist opposition in Paris, Bourbon reforms in Spain, and conspiracy theories about the wealth and power both Paraguayan and Californian missions, as well as the Chines and Malabar rites controversies in Asia. Additional suspicions surrounded the Society’s missionaries in New Spain, since by this most of them were not Spanish but rather German, Slavic, or Italian. Not surprisingly, many felt increasing distance from the wider colonial project, and expressed constant tension with administrators and colonists who viewed them as shady foreigners. Their additional role as cultural and scientific informants for eager readers of their histories, relations, observations, and letters ramped up considerably during this period, only adding to distrust from Spanish authorities. In some ways the events of 1767 only sped up this process of mutual suspicion. By declaring them enemies of the crown, the expulsion attempted to ply Jesuits away from their adopted homes in California, Sinaloa, Sonora, and Chihuahua. Granted, contemporary Jesuits had no sense of this inevitability and were caught by surprise when they heard Carlos III’s decree of banishment. See Bertrand M. Roehner, “Jesuits and the State: A Comparative Study of their Expulsions (1590–1990),” Religion, 27:2, (Routledge, 1997),165-182 177

Sonora, the German Joseph Och, had gone to Mexico City because of sickness just before the expulsion. As such, he escaped the brutal journey of his colleagues from the north.

However, he recalled a final sermon preached in Mexico City by the Dominican Father

Francisco León during his departure. As both Spanish nobles and Indian faithful had gathered around the Jesuits to say goodbye in their procession out of the city, the grief and lamentation evidently became too much for Father León who announced a “farewell sermon” at the Jesuit church to the crowd. Leon began with a rhetorical question, “How long shall this, our unavailing grief, endure?” But, he quickly transitioned to chastisement,

“Cease weeping! You have no reason to do so. You are bewailing an imagined misfortune of the Jesuits.” The Dominican preacher contrasted their imagined suffering to their actual good fortune, “Do you think these good people will be led to slaughter, or will have to languish in gloomy prisons? You are very much mistaken. Don’t you see the splendid carriages in which they were driven away like cavaliers? ” Then, he went on to explain to the crowd that the Jesuits deserved no pity as they were going back to lives of luxury, secured by secret treasures absconded from the country,

You were apprehensive that they would all be sentenced to death, and have their throats cut or worse. They will be well settled, cared for, and splendidly fed for the rest of their lives. The King will grant them handsome pensions and they will live in the Papal States….. To anticipate the misfortune which would sooner or later overtake them they have provided for themselves. All of their estates have long been sold and transferred into astonishing sums of money. This money, many millions, they have already sent overseas andplaced in safety. Their accounts lie as credit in Rome, Genoa, Amsterdam and London, perhaps by the hundreds. Hence they will not be in want. They have enough for their livelihood and will be well off.365

Leon insisted that a return to Europe was a blessing, an unexpected windfall for the Jesuits

365 Och, Missionary in Sonora, 65 178 that guaranteed an easy life of wealth and security. At least in Och’s telling, León deliberately contrasted this to the popular conception that they were in procession to their martyrdom, “led to slaughter” or “gloomy prisons.” Even more explicitly he reflected their belief that the expulsion was a sort of martyrdom and stated in his final words, “Therefore, do not bewail them as future martyrs; rather congratulate them, as great gentlemen who have been removed to your material and spiritual advantage. Dry your tears!” Since all Jesuit papers were confiscated during the expulsion, Och did not have notes of the Dominican’s sermon when he wrote his later account of the expulsion, rather he rehearsed the scene from memory. Therefore, it is a reasonable to wonder whether the martyrdom language is that of the Dominican preacher or the later Jesuit narrator. Nevertheless, Och’s use of the story in the context of a dramatic processional in which Jesuits on horseback are surrounded by grieving Mexicans, “for a distance of two hours,” conveys the pathos with which Jesuits portrayed their ordeal. Och certainly framed the exile as an unremitting loss of his life and calling.

In the beginning of his narrative, he recalled the day of May 9th, 1754 in Heidelberg, when he received permission to go to the Indies mission as, “one of the most pleasant days of my life.” This optimism never failed through his journey across the Atlantic and ultimately to the furthest northern missions of the Pimeria Alta.366 Even though he was beset by hardships, from mosquitos to heat to the intransigent Pima language, he also embraced his new home, and hailed chocolate, pulque, maguey, and aloe as superior to comparable

366 Theodore Treutlein, “Translator’s Introduction,” Ibid., xii-xiii 179 products in Europe.367 He praised the affection he encountered between the elderly missionary Gaspar Stiger and the Pima converts at San Ignacio and expressed deep satisfaction with his mission despite the Pima Rebellion and martyrdoms of Ruhen and Tello in 1751. Curiously, however, he never mentioned the fact that he developed crippling arthritis during his decade of service, the very reason for which he was ultimately removed to Mexico City.

The translator of Och’s Travel Reports, Theodore Treutlein adroitly noticed that his

“point of view seemed to change when he became an expulso.” During and after the suppression of the Society he makes frequent mention of his illness, usually in the form of saying that he lay, “crippled and lame.”368 The revelation of his severe infirmity marks a switch from buoyant exuberance about his mission to tortured pathos about his expulsion, even as the former represented a separation from his beloved family and the latter a restoration. Whereas giddy excitement and discovery characterized his travel to the mission, a stoic endurance of persecution frames the second half. His own pain and the travails of other Jesuits becomes the substance of the latter reports. At the end of his account, he is simply happy to get home to Wirzburg, “after more than twenty-two hundred hours of travel on water and more than eight hundred hours on land, cripple and lame.” Then, he thanked God, “because eighteen of my brother missionaries, all hale and hearty and in the best years of their manhood died on the voyage in different ships and were buried at sea.

How I, as a cripple in great pain, came through alive, God alone knows.”369 In Father Och’s

367 Ibid., 34 - 38 368 Treutlein, “Translator’s Introduction,” in Ibid., xii-xiii 369 Ibid., 115 180 memory, the mission had been a wonderful blessing, something that covered up illness and pain. But, the shame and trial of the expulsion, from the sermon of León to the travails of travel, uncovered his anguish and linked it to the numerous deaths of his Jesuit colleagues.

Just as the final sacrifice of Christ had abolished the need for the ongoing temple sacrifices, so Mateu and his Jesuit colleagues came to understand their later expulsion as a final, collective martyrdom that completed the need for all other sacrifices. In the expulsion, the archetype of the first missionary destierro from Europe found its surprising antitype, the ultimate fulfillment of their mission even in its loss. Mateu used the natives of Sonora and

Sinaloa to make this typological relationship clear, outlining a connection between the long and extensive sacrifices of the northern missionaries, the suffering of natives, and the sorrow of the expelled. Just as Och had cited Mexican grief for the exiles as a confirmation of the Jesuits’ connection to Jesus, Mateu’s vivid descriptions of indigenous lament displayed the Jesuit’s persecution to potential European readers. “The Jesuits did not aspire, they did not look to their own interest, everything was for the advantage and utility of these

(Indians),” Mateu piously reiterated. Their removal finally made this truth clear, because even though, “this was a well-known and obvious truth in those regions,” it was finally

“revealed fully in the sentiment of the mission Indians when the Jesuits left as exiles.”370

370 Ibid.,75. “Que los Jesuitas no pretendía, no buscaban su proprio interés, sino que todo era para su provecho y utilidad de estos…. Que es eso una verdad muy patente y muy sabida en aquella parte Y se vio finalmente con el mucho sentimiento de los Indios, que hubo en las Provincias de Misiones, quando los Jesuitas salieron desterrados. Por eso como ya dije arriba venían tantos y tan distantes naciones a pedir Jesuitas para ser alumbradas y cultivadas con la luz y eficacia de la fe de JesuChristo. Y en realidad, que es una gran maravilla por cierto que a unas gentes tan bárbaras, tan rudas y totalmente enemigas de sujeción y trabajo, lo moviera tanto el atractivo de la caridad y buen modo de la Jesuitas que los obligara a caminar centenares de leguas para conseguir su petición acabaron de la de mas de eso con acciones de muestra instancia y humildad. Pero ese motivo que lo dicho, no era sol ni era suficiente para atraer semejantes naciones. El principal motivo de el origen y fuente de donde todo procedía era, porque como Dios quería valerse de los Jesuitas para la conversión de naciones tan bárbaras puesto que para la salud de las almas les había enviado al mundo, con el poder de su gracia divina hacia agradables a esas gentes,” 181

In addition, the mourning and devotion of the indigenous inhabitants of Sonora,

Sinaloa, and Nayarit illustrated missionary sanctity by pointing to shared suffering as the ultimate vindication of the Jesuit cause. In previous years Mayo, Tarahumara, Opatá, Yaqui, and Pima had chosen to enter into the Jesuit missions, some even traveling from long distances away from silver mines or rival Franciscan missions. In Mateu’s mind this had already proven the Society’s lack of self-interest, verified in the choices of Indian converts, but their mourning over the expulsion displayed for all to see the Jesuits’ innocence and sacrificial love.

Nothing dramatized this point better than the 20 Sonoran and Sinaloan missionaries who died during their overland march from the Pacific coast toward Mexico City in August of

1768. Along this journey, three Jesuits passed away in the small town of Aquacatlán,

Nayarit, 13 in the next village of Ixtlán del Rio, and another four along the way to

Guadalajara (Jalisco).371 Modern historians are not sure what actually caused such a large number to pass away at this juncture, since by all accounts the group had suffered various sicknesses, deficiencies, and dangers since their time in Guaymas, Sonora a year earlier.

Contemporary observers like Father Francisco Ita, whose letter of October 1770 to Mateu supplied the basic details of the Sonoran expulsion, explained that the exhaustion from sea and land travel had simply been too much for the three who died in Aquacatlán on August

22nd.372 Upon their arrival the next day in Ixtlán, Ita explained, that “almost all were sick unto death that inclement day.” When they were lodged on the wet ground, near a river, he reasoned that their bodies had been so broken down that almost any sickness could take

371 Pradeau, La expulsión de Los Jesuitas, 99-100 372 Fathers Enrique Kurtzel, Sebastian Cava, and Vicente Rubio, according to Ita. Mateu, Ch. 18, 132; Ibid., 96 182 hold. According to Bernardo Middendorff, many (including Ita) became delirious, others showed signs of stroke, with paralysis in their mouths or face, but many just died suddenly.373 So many died so quickly, that Father Ita thought it was a divine miracle that any had survived the damp conditions, “Almost all got sick to death and it still seems like a wonder that not every single one of us died right there, God surely wanted to preserve many to suffer more afflictions in Spain!”374 In fact, every missionary except one, Father José

Lorenzo Garcia, became so sick that they received last rites, which naturally fell to Garcia.

Eventually, the group was forced to divide and push on to Guadalajara in hopes of escaping the disease environment, leaving behind moribund colleagues. Even so, four more died in the following days on the road to Guadalajara. Ita summarized the tragedy this way, “Those who stayed in Ixtlán died. In all there were 20 dead, having lost their life in the pains of trials suffered for God, leaving 30 alive also to glorify the same God with the arduous lives that awaited them.”375 Like so many Jesuits before him, Ita believed that all the missionaries shared in a suffering identity, whether dying immediately “for God’ in Mexico or being chosen by Him for more prolonged martyrdoms in exile. For Mateu’s wider purposes, the account nicely illustrated his large point that the Jesuits had given all for the sake of their mission, first as “desterrados” and finally in death.

In similar manner, California missionaries, who made their own journey home six months later in 1769, compared the pain of exile with the longer history of Jesuit sacrifice in

373 See the summary of Julio César Montané in Aarón Grageda Bustamante, Seis Expulsiones y Un Adiós: Despojos y Exclusiones En Sonora, 1.th ed. (México, D.F.: Plaza y Valdés, 2003), 50. 374 Pradeau, La expulsión De Los Jesuitas, 97; Mateu, Ch. 18, 133 – 134; Dunne, The Expulsion of the Jesuits from New Spain, 25; Middendorff, Vertreibung Und Gefangenschaft, 40 375 Mateu, 136 – 137. “Pero tambien murieron, como los otros, que habian quedado en Istlan, y entre todos fueron 20 los muertos, habian perdido la vida a fuerza de trabajos padecidos por Dios, quedando 30 vivos para glorificar tambien al mismos Dios con la vida trabajosa que les esperaba. 183 their mission. In his Observations on Lower California, written from Mannheim, Germany in

1772, Jacob Baegert said relatively little about the expulsion and exile, as Jesuit silence on the matter was still being bought by the Spanish crown through a small stipend. However he did note simply at the end of the work by comparing all previous sacrifice of blood, sweat, and tears in the mission with the tragedy of the expulsion. “We were sixteen Jesuits in all, fifteen priests and one lay brother; six were Spaniards, two Mexicans, and eight Germans….

Exactly the same number, that is, sixteen Jesuits, one brother and fifteen priests, we left behind, buried in California.”376 The parallel between the desterrados and the enterrados, the exiled and the entombed, highlights the connection that former Jesuits living in Europe sought to forge between the prolonged martyrdom of the mission’s two hundred-year history with the present martyrdom of exile. The 16 California exiles left 16 others behind who had laid down their lives in service, and many openly worried that if the missions were abandoned their tears and blood may have been shed in vain. This compulsion to find meaning, to relate the expulsion both to the longer history of the Jesuits as well as Christian theology of redemption guided Baegert and others to recall their native “children,” even when years and oceans separated them.

Fathers and Shepherds to Sorrow

To supply meaning in the face of such an abrupt end, Baegert, Ducrue, and Mateu looked to their role as both Fathers and Shepherds to Indian converts as a continuing exile, even if they had been ripped away from their children and sheep. This paternal language,

376 Baegert, Observations in Lower California, 172; Baegert, Nachrichten Von Der Amerikanischen Halbinsel Californien: Mit Einem Zweyfachen Anhang Falscher Nachrichten, 8; Jacob Baegert, Paul Kirchhoff, and Pedro R. Hendrichs, Noticias d[e] La Peninsula Americana d[e] California (S. L.: Antigua libería Robredo de José Porrúa e hijos, 1942), 262. 184 infantilizing as it was to native cultures, helped Jesuits reconstitute themselves in the

“destierro” or their mission. In exchange for their lost identity as sons and siblings in

Europe, they took up new positions as brothers to fellow missionaries and "Fathers" to native “children.” Even in exile, once the suffering in travel and sorrow of imprisonment had subsided, Jesuits still grieved their loss. More than their own pain or grief at the death of so many friends and colleagues, the expulsion and eventual suppression threatened the loss of their identity as missionaries, Fathers, and ultimately Companions of Jesus. Mateu frequently pictured the missionaries as parents who had been forced to abandon their children. The exile meant the abandonment of those spiritual progeny. Mateu argued that leaving their native “children” behind was the greatest sorrow of the entire exile for all the northern Jesuits.

That the Indians saw their Apostles and Doctors of the Faith in Christ in chains was more tiring and trying than being afflicted with the weight of the exile. Even if there were no other affliction, the act of abandoning these Indians, their beloved children engendered in Christ left them with no peace, not even in their afflicted hearts where they carried them with them always. 377

While the missionary Fathers would carry their children in their hearts forever, Mateu believed the native communities whom they served returned the familial affection. For example, he pointed to the Indians and Spanish who cared for and then buried the 20 Sonora and Sinaloa missionaries who died in and near Ixtlán as the greatest testament to the sanctity and power of the Jesuit mission. After their deaths, Mateu (relying on Ita) notes that natives came from all the surrounding towns “to request the bodies” of the missionaries. In fact, he argues that the devotion was so strong that a “santa envidia” or “holy envy” arose between the towns as they

377 Ita, cited in Mateu, 137 - 138 185 competed to praise these new “saints.” Mateu wrote, “Men and women, young and old, all with one voice praise these deceased missionaries as saints, and not only them but in great praise for the Company of Jesus, extolling it as holy.”378 They surrounded the bodies with flowers and candles and carried them in procession to their respective villages and towns “to deposit them in their churches.” According to Father Ita, most requested entire bodies that could become “su santo” or “their saint.” But others contented themselves with the deceased missionaries’ “images, crucifixes, breviaries, clothes and in a word all the things that had served the deceased, they requested anxiously as relics.” When these requests went unanswered, their devotion was so great that some committed a “pious robbery” of their bodies or personal affects.

Almost every missionary adopted paternalistic metaphors when it came to the indigenous communities with whom they worked. At best, this took the form of guarded appreciation and indignant protection for native communities, such as Eusebio Kino’s famous defense of the Pima.But, probably more often, missionaries complained about their

Indian sons and daughters, their "childish superstition, insincerity, and disobedience." For example, Jacob Baegert advised European readers that, "As a general rule, it may be said that the California Indians are stupid, awkward, rude, unclean, insolent, ungrateful, mendacious, thievish, abominably lazy, great talkers to their end, and naïve and childlike."379 The missionary imagined himself as an exasperated parent, complaining that his children never listened to him. Yet, Baegert did not know what he had until it was gone.

378 Ibid. 379 To be fair, Baegert blamed these defects on their environment, which he pictured as a sort of “inferno”. Ibid., 80 186

When faced with expulsion, he switched course and lauded his converts for their loyalty, their sorrows a sign of his own success. To do this, he used both paternal and pastoral images. He also provided detailed relations of how his own converts grieved his departure and how, “their general crying and pitiful lamenting,” moved even him to tears, so that he

“could not restrain himself from weeping all the way to Loreto.” At Loreto, Baegert says that the Jesuit superior preached to them of Paul’s farewell to the Ephesians (Acts 20) and invoked the Pauline metaphor of Shepherds and sheep. The natives were like sheep without shepherds once the Jesuits left, exposed to marauding wolves and left to "rot in their graves" without benefit of sacraments. The “spectacle of their suffering” had left such an impression that even in exile he mourned the presumed fate of his California Christians.

"Even now," Baegart explained “tears fill my eyes as I remember my”unprotected sons and daughters who likely returned to their sins after their separation from his guidance.

Benito Ducrue described the same tearful final sermon in his account of their expulsion. As the superior it had fallen to him to actually preach it, and his own account evokes both the pastoral motif as well as the pathos of the people. He recounts his worry of leaving, “his flocks without a shepherd, without consolation, without any hope of ever returning to them, rather with the well-founded fear of seeing them scattered after the departure of their shepherds." Much of this was founded in the missionaries' pessimism about Indian conversion, "anyone acquainted with the fickle nature of the Indians cannot hope for their perseverance." However, Ducrue's sorrow was also founded on a representation of Jesuit vocation based on sacrifice. "Who would not grieve to see the efforts and sacrifices of his predecessors through seventy years wiped out suddenly? Who 187 would not weep over the natives, still victims of their abysmal ignorance pleading for baptism as they returned to the wilderness from which they had emerged?”380 Ironically, the same fears that evoked sympathy and provided apologetic defense of the mission through the pathos of native plight also undermined any pretension to actual success in their goal of conversion. If the Indians would no doubt return to paganism immediately after their departure, what gains had the 70 years of sacrifice actually won?

As Emma Anderson has argued about the Jesuit missions of New France, martyrdom could shore up Jesuit identity when their work as evangelists failed.381 Shared suffering stitched the missionaries to their converts, forging a relationship that transcended time and place, even if missionaries doubted their fidelity to Christian life, they emphasized the

Indian's love of their Fathers. To illustrate this connection, they rehearsed vivid scenes of separation. "Some knelt on the sand to kiss our hands and feet, others knelt with arms outstretched in the form of a cross and publicly pleading for pardon. Others tenderly embrace the missionaries, bidding them farewell and wishing them a happy voyage through loud weeping and sobbing."382 Even though he was a decade and a continent removed,

Ducrue returned to California in his imagination, as he switches from past to present tense,

"It is time for our departure. The Indians gladly carry on their shoulders the missionaries to the waiting ship in payment for having been brought by them to Christ. Farewell beloved

California, farewell beloved Indians. We leave you not of our own free will, but by a higher decision." Then, he floats between his past and present, as he anticipates the missionary's

380 Ducrue, Ducrue's Account of the Expulsion, 51 381 Anderson, "Blood, Fire, and 'Baptism', 63 382 Ducrue, Ducrue's Account of the Expulsion, 66 188 absence and the power of his own memory to conquer distance and death, "True, we are separated physically, but we shall always preserve the memory of you in our hearts, which neither time, nor forgetfulness, and not even death itself will ever efface." Ducrue left them with a command to turn their tears into laughter as all forms of Christian suffering find their antetype in Christ, "Cease, then from weeping, cease from all sobbing- they are of no avail.

Do not weep over us. We go with joy in our hearts because we have been held worthy to suffer contumely for the name of Jesus."383 lgnaz Pfefferkorn, a German missionary, lamented his expulsion from Cucurpe, Sonora in similar terms. “I administered it with great contentment until 1767, at which time we missionaries were separated most painfully from our dear little sheep.''384 Expulsion histories painted tearful scenes of familial separation; fathers ripped away from spiritual progeny and "children" longing for their parents. Jesuit writers utilized stories of declining indigenous communities as morality tales, wayward adolescents set adrift in colonial frontiers. Even more poignantly, the California Jesuits encountered other suffering Indian Christians along their journey. After arriving in the Pacific port of San Blas, they were housed with a group of Otomí Indians from San Luis Potosí who rioted when they heard word of the missionaries’ removal. As punishment, authorities had severely beaten the natives, imprisoned them, and sentenced them to hard labor. Like so many Jesuit martyrs, the Otomí Christians now suffered for their loyalty to the mission.

"Some overcome by their suffering had died; others were still paying the penalty of their temerity. One of us was summoned to hear the confession of one of them. The skin hung in tatters, torn as it had been by the lashings, naught but blood and bones were to be seen and

383 Ibid., 68 384 Pfefferkorn, Sonora: A Description of the Province, 263 189 yet the lashings continued daily." The Jesuits grieved the site of loyal converts who had been reduced to skeletons and endured brutal persecution and even death for their sake. Jesuits sympathized with these bloody scenes, but also delighted in them, seeing Indian sacrifice as the ultimate testament to their mission.

What one of us would not be touched to the quick at such a sight? What source for additional suffering, as the reader can easily imagine, and I shall frankly state. We were moved to the deepest compassion for these unfortunate natives. They said that it was out of love for us that they endured all this, not that our men had introduced them to revolt but that the love and esteem of the natives for our men had led them to act as they did.385

Even as they had come to die for their converts, now natives had laid down their lives for them.

As such, the Otomí embodied an identity of mutual victimization that vindicated the Jesuit mission against the injustices of Bourbon coloniality.

Conclusion: A Fragile Image of His Triumph

Throughout his account of the exile, Benito Ducrue constantly noted the convergences of Christian feasts and Jesuit tragedies. They first got word of the decree, according to the

Superior on the Feast of the Apostle Saint Andrew. This convergence, Ducrue believed, “had a providential significance – to recall his cross and to gladly accept the cross in store for us.”386

The Fathers were gathered together by the Spanish Governor at Loreto on Christmas Eve, “at the very moment when the Martyrology, according to Spanish custom, was being sung.”387

The decree was read and promulgated on the Feast of St. Stephen, the great Christian

385 Ducrue, Ducrue's Account of the Expulsion of the Jesuits, 78 - 79. For a general summary of the various Indian rebellions that coincided with the Jesuit expulsion, see Martinez, Not Counting the Cost: Jesuit Missionaries in Colonial Mexico, a Story of Struggle, Commitment, and Sacrifice, 236-239 386Ducrue, Ducrue's Account of the Expulsion of the Jesuits, 42 387Ibid., 58 190 protomartyr.388 After departing San Blas, Ducrue presented the rest of their journey as a procession of persecution, which further confirmed Jesuit identification with their Lord. For example, he recalled how he and the 15 other California Jesuits had been paraded through the streets of Vera Cruz after an arduous land journey across the mainland of Mexico. For him, it was no mere chance they entered that final Mexican port on the "Day of Palms." He drew solace as he noted the parallels between their inglorious departure and Christ's entry into Jerusalem. Noting that they arrived "around the Ninth Hour,'' he described how the missionaries mounted mules and rode towards the port as soldiers stood guard and curious onlookers crowded the streets. The convergence of Palm Sunday, mules, and the liturgical hour of None set aside for meditations on the crucifixion all served to identify the missionaries with Jesus. As Ducrue summarized, we were "like Christ our leader," and they rejoiced in their opportunity to further identify with him, because "it was a source of no little consolation for us to memorialize in ourselves a fragile image of His triumphal entry."389

Exiled missionaries like Bennito Ducrue, Jacob Baegert, Jaime Mateu, Joseph Och,

Francisco Ita, and Bernardo Middendoff recorded these losses in their memoirs and histories of the expulsion, detailing numerous other trials and tribulations. In retrospect, they pictured the ordeal as an imitatio Christi, a typological fulfillment of the suffering servant from whom the Society of Jesus took its name. Indeed for Ducrue, the greatest loss by far in the entire expulsion, exile, and suppression of the Jesuits was the moment that Spanish officials removed “the most Holy Name of Jesus,” the Jesuit IES symbol, “from the doors and walls of our hospice.” This is because they believed that their lives and deaths were fundamentally an

388Ibid., 58 389 Ibid., 86 - 87 191 identification with their Lord. Far from victims, they should be counted as victors. Now, instead of severing themselves from their families and the comforts of Europe, Jesuits parted from their adopted homes and “children.” Their memoirs displayed a nostalgia that had as much to do with their needs in diaspora as indigenous realities. Martyrological discourse helped them reconstitute missionary identity in exile, whether as grieving fathers or worried shepherds. It also bridged the expanse that separated them from new world converts, if only in their own imaginations and memories.

192

Epilogue Resurrecting Kino: Recovering, Remembering, and Reimagining Jesuit Sanctity

Recovering

At first, even the headlines of The Arizona Daily Star on May 24, 1966 were a bit incredulous.390 “Kino’s Grave Believed Located in Magdalena,” the cover story began, qualifying the claim with a hedging subtitle, “Confirmation Still to Be Made.”391 The next day the newspaper was less circumspect, proclaiming the “Grave of Father Kino Found in Magdalena,” and supplying photos and summaries of the discovery.392 Other media outlets in Tucson,

Phoenix, and Hermosillo confirmed the event. “Father Kino Find Hailed,” read the Tucson

Citizen.393 The Arizona Republic misspelled his name, but got the basic facts straight, telling

Phoenix readers that an interdisciplinary and binational team from Mexico and the United

States had discovered the bones of the Jesuit priest and missionary, Eusebio Francisco Kino, just south of the Arizona border.394 A search for the grave ordered by President Gustavo Díaz Ordaz of Mexico in 1965 had taken nearly a year, entailed 800 yards of trenching, countless archival hours, and numerous rabbit trails, but had borne fruit. Kino had been recovered.

Then, as now, spectators in Mexico got more graphic proof. Almost everybody who lived in and near Magdalena flocked to the archeological dig, eager to catch a glimpse of Father Kino

390 “Kino’s Grave Believed Located in Magdalena,” The Arizona Daily Star, 24 May 1966, 1. This and most of the newspaper articles cited here can be found in the Papers of Jane Ivancovich at the Arizona Historical Society, Tucson, Arizona. Ivancovich not only spearheaded many of the memorials, publications, and events surrounding the 250th anniversary of Kino’s death in 1961, but collected commemorative publications, correspondence, and newsclippings relating to Kino for over three decades. Ivancovich Papers, AHS, MS 0915. 391 Bob Thomas, “Kino’s Grave Believed Located In Magdalena,” The Arizona Daily Star, 24 May 1966, 1. 392 Bob Thomas, “Grave of Father Kino Found in Magdalena,” The Arizona Daily Star, 25 May 1966, 1. 393 Jay Hill, “Father Kino Find Hailed,” Tucson Citizen, 25 May 1966, 1 394 “Kino Remains Discovered in Mexico,” The Arizona Republic, 25 May, 1966. The Republic ran a typo for Kino’s first name, calling him “Fusebio” instead of Eusebio. 193 for themselves. But, for those who could not go in person, Hermosillo’s El Sonorense provided 8 pages of detailed coverage, complete with pictures of the discovery team, political dignitaries, and - most importantly - the dead body.395 Many skeptics believed Kino’s bones had been removed during the persecutions of the 1930s. To refute this, the periodical offered close-up photos of Kino’s bones lying prone in a trench. Some still sniffed conspiracy because the remains were missing the skull. For them, the paper supplied a separate photo, in which the anthropologist William Wasley of the Arizona State Museum cradled the priest’s cranium.

Wasley pointed out to the gathered reporters the identifying features that supposedly marked

Kino’s age, gender, and northern Italian origin. He also compared the skull to an imagined portrait of Kino, a 1962 rendering based on the physical characteristics of Kino’s Italian descendants.396 Sonora’s other large dailies, El Imparcial and El Regional, ran similar, if less comprehensive stories, respectively emphasizing the process of confirming the bones’ identity and the breakthrough’s national import.397 In the ensuing months, news of the discovery spread to readers in Mexico City, Los Angeles, San Francisco, St. Louis, Mexico City, Madrid,

Milan, and Rome, as American, Mexican, European, and indigenous faithful made their way to

395 El Sonorense ran multiple stories, editorials, summaries, and photos of the discovery under the larger headline, “Hallaron Los Restos De Kino,” providing both the historical prologue as well as the specific details of the discovery, El Sonorense (Hermosillo, Sonora, Mex.), 25 de mayo, 1966, 1- 8. 396 The portrait had been painted by Frances O’Brien of Tucson in the early 1960s as a part of the process of making the Kino Memorial statue for the U.S. national capitol. It was based on photos of many members of the Chini (Kino’s Italian name) family of Segno, taken by the Jesuit historian Father Ernest Burrus in 1962. The photos of the family and portrait sketches can be found in “Kino portrait commission – photographs and clipplings,” in Ivancovich Papers, AHS, MS 0915, Box 1, Series 1, f.14 – f.15. Many papers featured photos of the cranium, cf.“¡Frente a Kino!” and “Un Encuentro con la Historia: Cráneo, Antes Testa Genial,” El Sonorense,25 de mayo, 1966, 5; “Fecha para la Historia,” El Imparcial, 25 de mayo, 8; “Catholics Hail Discovery,” Tucson Daily Citizen, 25 May, 1966, 5. For accounts of how the composite portrait was used to verify the skull’s identity, seeJorge Olvera, Finding Father Kino, 246; Charles Polzer, S. J., A Kino Guide: His Missions, His Monuments (Tucson: Southwestern Missions Research Center, 1976), 40. 397 Luis Farman, “Indentificaron los Restos del Padre Kino, Resonante Triunfo de los Investigadores,” El Imparcial (Hermosillo, Mex.), 25 de Mayo, 1966, 1; “Yáñez y Salvat Vienen a Sonora Esta Semana, Interés Nacional por el Hallazgo de los Restos de Fray Eusebio Kino,” El Regional (Hermosillo, Sonora, Mex.), 25 de mayo, 1966, 1, 10. 194

Magdalena to verify and venerate the relics.398 El Imparcial described an impromptu pilgrimage to Magdalena by O’odham natives from both sides of the border to honor the man who had given up, “the comforts of Europe for the ignoble and dangerous America.” Noting that

Magdalena was already the site of the traditional O’odham pilgrimage to Saint Francis Xavier in

October, the journalist maintained that even in May a veritable “human avalanche” had descended on the plaza to honor the missionary who brought his patron Francisco Xavier to them.399

The past is never completely past; so believed the historians, archeologists, politicians, priests, and local folk who searched for the body of Father Eusebio Kino throughout the 20th century. Beginning with Herbert Bolton’s publication of Kino’s Memoirs of the Pimeria Alta in

1919, diverse groups began to speculate as to the whereabouts of the Jesuit missionary’s remains. From the 1920s to the 1960s, numerous investigators from both sides of the border dug through archives, missions, and ditches for clues as to the whereabouts of Kino’s body. In this longer trajectory, the headlines of May 25th, 1966 represented the culmination of a search, an answered prayer. They also heralded a new beginning, a process of publication,

398 “Remains of Famous Friar Found,” San Francisco Examiner,26 May, 1966, 1; “A 30 Year Search Pays Off,” San Francisco Examiner, 6 June, 1966, 1; “Trovati nel Messico i resti di un missionario italiano,” Corriere della sera, Milano,venerdi 27 maggio 1966; “Identificata nel Messico la tomba del P. Eusebio F. Chino,” L’osservatore romano (Rome), 28 Maggio 1966; “Erigirán Un Mausoleo al Padre Eusebio Kino,” La Prisma (Mexico, D. F.), 7 de junio 1966; Dan L. Thrapp, “Grave of Explorer Padre Kino Located,” Los Angeles Times, 9 July, 1966, 1, 5; “El Padre Kino, Insigne Forjador de la Civilizacion,” El Sol de Mexico (Mexico, D. F.), 19 de julio, 1966; “Kino’s Grave Discovered, ” The Jesuit Bulletin (St. Louis, MO.), Vol. XLV, No. 4, Oct. 1966, 5; Father Ernest Burrus, S. J., “Finding of Kino’s Grave – A Resume,” The Jesuit Bulletin, Vol. XLV, No 5, December, 1966, 3, 6-7. 399 The immediate visit of thousands of Mexican onlookers was well documented in all of the local papers. Vatican representatives, including the Jesuit historian Ernest Burrus arrived from Rome in June to help verify Kino’s identity and prepare the ground for any possible canonization campaign. In Spanish, “Indios pápagos de Arizona y pimas de Sonora, con sus vestidos multicolores…., empezaron a concentrarse hoy en Magdalena para rendir homenaje a Eusebio Francisco Kino, el Padre Blanco que enseñó a sus antepasados. Sitio tradicional de peregrinación para los indios, Magdalena, que en octubre rebosa de visitantes durante las fiestas de San Francisco Xavier, vió esta mañana cómo se anticipaba la avalancha humana ante la noticia del descubrimiento del sepulcro y los restos del gran civilizador.” Enguerrando Tapia, “Llegan los Indios a Magdalena a Venerar al ‘Padre Blanco’,” El Imparcial, 26 de mayo, 1966. 195 memorialization, and propaganda meant to preserve Kino’s memory and present him as an ambassador of humanitarianism and collaboration. Kino was a useful symbol, and the recovery of his bones allowed leaders in Mexico to highlight their own attempts to bring “civilization,” commerce, and international cooperation to Mexico’s northern border. Local leaders in Sonora felt honored by the attention suddenly lavished upon them by Mexico City, feeling like Kino had

“given them a name.”400 At the same time, politicians in Arizona found in Kino a powerful symbol of the prototypical Western pioneer. A solitary ranchman, explorer, cartographer, and educator, curiously independent of centralizing authorities, Kino seemed to be everything

Senator Barry Goldwater had been arguing for in his “states’ rights” presidential campaign of

1964. These contrasting visions of Kino’s memory, as civilizing Mexican industrialist and rugged

American pioneer, bumped up against each other, sometimes bouncing and other times blending, in the memorials that preceded and proceeded from the recovery of Kino’s body. The moment and process of memorialization raise new questions about the persistent place of older idioms of sacrifice and sanctity in promoting discourses of modernity and civilization.

Remembering

As soon as the body was recovered, the movement to remember began. Most of the newspapers began running stories that rehearsed the basic details of Kino’s life, explaining how he brought both Christianity and “civilization” to the native tribes of the Mexican north and

American southwest. Announcing the find in a televised speech on May 24th, the Governor of

Sonora, Luis Encinas Johnson, celebrated Kino for “teaching Indians the practical elements of civilization,” and placing the “foundations of development” for Sonora, Arizona, and both

400 Alfonso Lopez Riesgo, “Un Nombre Para Sonora,” El Sonorense, 27 de mayo 1966, 3. 196

Californias. He called for a monument to be raised over the grave, perhaps with a museum and library that “would make Magdalena a center for cultural and historical research.” Along with the museum, a “Kino Mission Route,” should be developed in which renovated church buildings would be easily accessible by modern highways. Such attractions would lead to more tourism, developing commerce, and stronger ties with their northern neighbors. Taking the first step,

Encinas invited Governor Sam Goddard of Arizona to join him soon for a formal ceremony to show “the gratitude of the two communities that owe so much of their current progress and civilization to Fray Eusebio Francisco Kino.401 At the same time he stated that the Mexican

Secretary of Education, Agustín Yañez; Director of Tourism, Agustín Salvat; and Eusebio Dávolos

Hurtado, Director of the National Institute of Anthropology and History (I.N.A.H) would visit within the week to begin plans for the museum, memorial, and mission route.402

Dávalos Hurtado arrived in May, and when Salvat and Yañez got there in early June a tribute was organized for June 9th. In his speech, Governor Encinas continued his earlier theme, arguing that Kino’s agricultural, architectural, educational, and cartographical work had planted the seeds of modernity, the fruit of which was the economic growth and progress that characterized Sonora and Arizona. Thanks to the localization of his remains, the whole world,

“because before men like Kino borders disappear,” could now embrace him as a humanitarian.

Encinas suggested that the bones should not be a symbol of death, but of life. Indeed, the

Jesuit’s “shining example” still “continues his untiring civilizing work today.” His mission

401 “Grave of Father Kino Found in Magdalena,” Arizona Daily Star (Tucson), 25 May, 1966, 1; “Identifcaron los Restos,” El Imparcial, 2; In Spanish, Encinas’ invitation read, “la gratitud de dos pueblos que deben mucho de su progreso y de su civilización actuales a Fray Eusebio Francisco Kino.” “Monumento y Museo a la Memoria de Kino,” El Imparcial, 26 de Mayo, 1966, 1. It is a sign of Gov. Encinas’ relative lack of sophistication about Kino’s actual work that he called him, “Fray,” a title used for friar, which – as a Jesuit – Kino was not. 402 “Yañez y Salvat Vieen a Sonora Esta Semana, Interés Nacional por el Hallazgo de los Restos de Fray Eusebio Kino,” El Regional, 25 de mayo, 1966, 1. 197 marched on, uniting people and converting them to the gospel of international understanding as, “The fruit of his extraordinary effort will keep multiplying century after century, meriting the appreciation of all humanity, without distinction to borders, creeds or ideologies.”403 Secretary of Education Yañez picked up Encinas’ rhetoric in his speech, explaining that the “fundamental lesson of Father Kino is that of being a great and indefatigable worker who converts enormous deserts into lush gardens and teaches primitive groups a better level of life and rewarding cultivation.” Yañez suggested that Kino was a representation of a moral and economic grandeur that was “constitutive of the grandeur of Mexico” and “an example of work and education for entire humankind.”404 In short, Kino was a good worker bee and goodwill ambassador, a model of Mexican industry and dedication to prosperous international relations, precisely the two major projects President Gustavo Díaz Ordaz was pushing throughout the 1960s in border cities like Juarez, Tijuana, and nearby Nogales.

During the five years after the recovery of Kino’s body, Magdalena rearranged its central plaza to proudly display the relics of the missionary who had brought Christianity and civilization to their region. The city even renamed itself in honor of the missionary who had founded the town as a mission in 1688 and had blessed it with his death in 1711.405 Through private donations, city funds, and financial support from Mexican federal and state governments, the newly christened town of “Magdalena de Kino” raised over 10 million pesos

(about 1million USD) for the project. And in 1968 they began to level private homes, remove public buildings, and create a neo-colonial plaza that would surround a large equestrian statue,

403 Lic. Luis Encinas, “Kino Continua su Obra Civilizadora,” El Sonorense, 10 de junio 1966, 1, 6. 404 Agustin Yañez, “Lección de Kino: Trabajo Constante,” El Sonorense, 10 de junio 1966, 7. 405 So, Kino triply christened the town in three different centuries, bestowing the native settlement of Buquivaba with its first Spanish Christian patroness in Mary Magdalene in the 17th century, a second patron in Francis Xavier by donating a statue of his saint in the 18th century, and then lending his own name in the 20th. 198 museum, and mausoleum housing Kino’s body. In 1971, the President of Mexico, Luis

Echeverria, visited Magdalena to dedicate the new plaza and celebrate the city as a gateway for northward bound exports and southward bound tourism from North America.

Certainly tourism plays a big role here, but the search to recover and display Kino’s body, rearrange civic space, and then memorialize him with mausoleums, museums, shrines, chapels, statues, publications, plays, TV shows, movies, and even wines, provokes other questions.406 The first of which might be why Mexico’s ostensibly secular government, fervently dedicated to eradicating Catholic “superstitions” just three decades earlier, would spend so many human and financial resources to find a dead priest’s bones in the 1960s? What changed between 1934, when authorities ordered the burning of Magdalena’s patron saint, St. Francis

Xavier, and converted its church into a union meeting house, and 1965 when President Gustavo

Díaz Ordaz ordered his Minister of Education, who in turn appointed Mexico’s foremost anthropologist, to find Father Kino. Having recovered the Jesuit, why would they help rebuild a church and proclaim the Jesuit priest as the “great civilizer of the north”?407 A related question, more relevant to our conversation today, is what the state of Arizona had at stake in Kino. Both before and after the team found him, the state erected statues of the Jesuit, first in the

National Capitol in 1961 and then in front of the State Capitol in 1967, adding later versions in

Tucson and Nogales in the 70s and 80s. Supported by Senators Barry Goldwater and Carl

Hayden as well as Governors Paul Fannin, Samuel Goddard, and Jack Williams, Kino memorials

406 For example, the conglomerate Casa Domeq released the extremely successful low budget wine, Vino Padre Kino, in the 1980s, an ironic title given that Kino renounced drinking wine, except in Mass. A second example would be the 1977 film, The Father Kino Story, starring Richard Egan, Ricardo Montalban, John Ireland, and Cesar Romero. 407 James S. Griffith, Beliefs and Holy Places: A Spiritual Geography of the Pimería Alta (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1992), 50. 199 grew up along with the young state, reflecting both its insecurities and its aspirations.408 Well into the 1980s Kino became an Arizona state symbol, a character celebrated in publications, parades, and pilgrimages.409

Memorialization of Father Kino dates back to 1711, the year of his death. Kino’s colleague for two decades in the Pimeria, Father Agustin Campos, was first to eulogize his sanctity and hold him up as an example for imitation. Besides giving us the exact time and place of death, March 15, 1711, Campos also supplied the specific burial location that would ultimately prove essential in locating the body. In the Magdalena burial register, Campos started out with basic details, “On March fifteenth a little before midnight having received the

Holy Sacraments, Father Eusebio Francisco Quino [sic] died in great peace and edification in this house and pueblo of Santa Maria Magdalena at the age of 70.” Along with the Slovenian missionary Marcus Kappus and the Mexican-born Francisco Mora, Campos had been an early critic of Kino’s explorations and relative lack of settled pastoral work as a missionary, actually blaming him for rebellions in the 1690s. However, after two more decades of collaboration,

Campos had adjusted to Kino’s rambling style, coming to admire his apostolic gifts. He added the following commendation to Kino’s burial register, “[He was] a missionary almost 24 [years]

408 Ironically, there has been a strong push, led by Arizona Republican representatives to replace Arizona’s other statue in the National Hall of Statuary, the industrialist John Greenway, with none other than Barry Goldwater, while some have suggested replacing Kino with Carl Hayden. 409 In honor of the 250th anniversary of his death, Father Kino was selected as the theme for an annual rodeo and parade in Tucson, where over ten floats represented his life on Feb. 23rd, 1961. Arizona Daily Star, 24 February, 1961. He was also the subject of a March 1961 special edition of the nationally distributed Arizona Highways magazine, containing summaries of his life and work, photos of missions, maps, and oil paintings executed by celebrated Tucson artist Ted De Grazia. “Father Kino, 1645-1711,”Arizona Highways, March 1961. The academic journal, America and the West, also dedicated its spring, 1961 issue to Kino. Numerous other special events, from ceremonies at the Jesuit University of San Francisco to special masses at Tumacacori mission and the Tucson Cathedral marked the anniversary. 200 at Nuestra Señora de los Dolores, founded by the same Father who worked tirelessly in continuous journeys and reduction of all this Pimeria.”410

By the time Father Luis Velarde, Kino’s successor at Dolores, wrote his own account of the founder’s life and death in 1716, the legend of his sanctity had grown substantially. Velarde began by connecting Kino to Francis Xavier, his patron saint, making clear that Kino had brought the saint’s bulto, or statue, to Magdalena, overseen the building of its chapel, and fell ill during the very mass of consecrating it, all superintended by Xavier. “The Sacred Apostle (to whom he was very devout) had called him so he could be buried in his chapel, accompanying the statue,”

Velarde reasoned. Then, he noted the parallel between Kino’s original missionary vocation and his calling home to the heavenly presence of his patron, “since that Saint had initiated him

(Kino) in his apostolic and evangelistic employment and might also go with him to Heaven.”411

Velarde then went back in time to rehearse the holy deeds of Kino’s life, his devotion to Jesus and Mary, his humility in confronting insults, his constant prayers, severe asceticism, harsh penance, abstention from alcohol, food, sleep, and all comforts. In summary, “He died as he had lived, with extreme humility and poverty…. He was pious with everybody and cruel with himself, lacerating his body.” Setting the dual tone of later hagiography, Velarde eulogized,

410 Kino’s name was sometimes spelled by others as Quino. Kino changed the initial “Ch” of his actual last name, Chini, to a “K” in order to preserve the hard pronunciation of his native Italian, and avoid the Spanish pronunciation of the “Ch,” which would have left it as “Chino,” or “Chinese Man.” He was actually 65 at death; the estimation of 70 years probably speaks to great wearing down from prodigious travel and severe arthritis. “Padre Eusebio Francisco Kino,” Libro de Entierros de Santa María de Magdalena, 1711, 15-16. Pinart Collection, Bancroft Library, University of California;.Smith, Fox, and Kessell, Father Kino in Arizona, 128-129. 411 Kino had first committed to the Jesuit order after a bout with severe illness as a teenager for which he petitioned Xavier and received healing. In gratitude, Kino took on the middle name “Francesco,” later “Francisco,” and volunteered for mission. See, Bolton, Rim of Christendom; Velarde’s eulogy of Kino is buried inside his “Relación de la Pimeria,” which in turn bécame chapters IX, X, and XI in Captain Juan Mateo Manje’s Luz de Tierra Incognita. Luis Javier Velarde, “Relación de la Pimeria Alta, 1716” in Archivo General de la Nación (A.G.N.), Historia, Tomo 393, fojas 91v - 92 and Manje, Luz de Tierra Incognita,262-263. 201

“nobody could find any vice in him – to discover lands and convert souls were the virtues of

Father Kino.”412

This heightened view of Kino’s sanctity, evangelistic prowess, and prodigious exploration grew later in the 18th century in the work of Javier Alegre, who relied heavily on

Kino’s Favores Celestiales as a key source for his Historia de la Compania de Jesus de Nueva

España, and praised him as both a missionary and scholar. Alegre admitted that for Kino he had to go well beyond his normal restraint as an historian, praising him because,

The upper Pimería is owed entirely, in human terms, to (Kino’s) zeal, nor less for his patience and admirable perseverance. Always persecuted and slandered, not only in himself, but in the form of his converts…. He carried forth the work of the Lord for 24 straight years, almost alone.413

Alegre set the “great man” theory for understanding Kino that would be picked up later by historians and politicians. For both Alegre and later biographers, Kino was a solitary figure, a lone gun that literally put Arizona on the map. In the 19th century, American historian Hubert

Howe Bancroft followed Alegre’s lead, relying on Kino in many of his works, including History of the North Mexican States and Texas and his History of Arizona and New Mexico, and pointing to the Jesuit as our best source for understanding early Sonora, Arizona, and Lower California.

But, nobody did more to build up the figure of Eusebio Kino or reignite interest in finding his body than the California Berkeley historian Herbert Eugene Bolton. Beginning in

1908, when he called him, “the creator of the Pimería Alta as a Spanish province,” Bolton began

412 AGN, Historia, 393, f.92. 413 Francisco Javier Alegre and Carlos María de Bustamante, Historia De La Compañia De Jesus En Nueva-España, Que Estaba Escribiendo El P. Francisco Javier Alegre Al Tiempo De Su Espulsion. Publicala Para Probar La Utilidad Que Prestará a La America Mexicana La Solicitada Reposicion De Dicha Compañia (Mexico.: Impr. de J.M. Lara, 1841), 155-156. 202 reconstructing Kino as a pater familias of the southwest.414 For Bolton, Kino was the key in demonstrating the Spanish contribution to civilizing the American West. What Turner had done for English pioneers and Parkman for French trappers, Bolton believed he could accomplish for the Jesuit missionaries of northern New Spain, and Kino was the example par excellence.415

Well before the international team recovered Kino’s body in 1966, Bolton had recovered his memory, by finding, editing, and translating many of Kino’s works. Most importantly, in 1919 he published what he called Kino’s Historical Memoir of the Pimería Alta, his carefully chosen name for what Kino had titled Favores Celestiales de Jesus y de Maria Santisima y del

Gloriosissimo Apóstol de las Indias S. Francisco Xavier.416 By choosing the term, “historical memoir,” Bolton obscured Kino’s religiously themed account of the missions, for the purpose of emphasizing Kino’s secular credentials. The classification of historical memoir also glossed over what was actually a fascinating collection of documents; diary, apologetic, hagiography, biography, and history. The subtitle to Bolton’s translation, A Contemporary Account of the

Beginnings of California, Sonora, and Arizona, by Father Eusebio Francisco Kino, S.J., Pioneer

Missionary, Explorer, Cartographer, and Ranchman aptly captures that larger project of whitewashing Kino of his medieval superstitions. In Kino, Bolton saw the quintessential western

414 Smith, Fox, and Kessell, Father Kino in Arizona, xi. 415 Bannon, Herbert Eugene Bolton, 120; Weber, The Spanish Frontier in North America, 364 n.11; Albert Hurtado, “Parkmanizing the Spanish Borderlands: Bolton, Turner, and the Historians’ World,” Western Historical Quarterly, Vol. 26, No. 2 (Summer, 1995), 162; David Weber, “Turner, the Boltonians, and the Borderlands” in The American Historical Review, Vol. 91, No. 1 (Feb., 1986), 68-70. For a challenge to Bolton, see Jose Cuello, “Beyond the ‘Borderlands’ is the North of Colonial Mexico: A Latin – Americanist Perspective to the Study of the Mexican North and the United States Southwest,” in Proceedings of the Pacific Coast Council on Latin American Studies, Vol.9 (1982), 3 – 5. 416 Kino, Historical Memoir; Eusebio Francisco Kino, Francisco Fernández del Castillo, and Emil Böse, Las Misiones De Sonora y Arizona. Comprendiendo: La Crónica Titulada: "Favores Celestiales" y La "Relación diaria de la entrada al Noroeste" (México: Editorial "Cultura", 1913), 413. 203 man, a practical polymath who mastered ranching, astronomy, mapmaking, education, and construction.

This picture of Kino, the man of science and industry, captured the attention of both historians and businessmen in Arizona. Bolton traveled to Tucson in 1932 to keynote a Kino celebration arranged by the Dean of the University of Arizona, historian Frank Lockwood. The speech marked a new round of Kino memorialization and was published as the brief biography,

The Padre on Horseback that same year. In turn, it inspired the slightly larger biography by

Arizona State Teachers College Professor Rufus Kay Wyllys in 1935. In addition, Bolton joined

Dean Lockwood for an exploratory trip through Kino country in southern Arizona and northern

Mexico in 1934, where they began to hypothesize and even investigate the whereabouts of

Kino’s body. Following local informants in Sonora, Bolton had suggested in his introduction to

Kino’s Historical Memoir in 1919 that the missionary’s bones had been moved to San Ignacio

Caborica. However, Lockwood had made a few investigative trips to Magdalena for the purpose of finding Father Kino in 1927 and 1928 and convinced Bolton that Kino was still in Magdalena.

Lockwood published his account of those journeys later that year.417 Also in 1927, Lockwood had proposed establishing a Kino Memorial Committee in Arizona, “devoted to the erection of a suitable monument for the great missionary of the Southwest,” and suggesting “an idealized statue” to be placed at San Xavier del Bac mission south of Tucson.418 The committee was formed, but due to the exigencies of the Depression, the bronze statue was not realized.

Instead, a bas-relief memorial was placed in a Tucson park in March of 1936, the same year

417 Charles Polzer, S.J., Kino, A Legacy: His Life, His Works, His Missions, His Monuments (Tucson: Jesuit Fathers of Southern Arizona, 1998), 40. 418 Smith, Fox, and Kessell, Father Kino in Arizona, xii. 204

Bolton’s massive, and to this day definitive, biography of Kino, Rim of Christendom, first appeared.419

Throughout the 40s and 50s, Bolton’s students and Arizona history buffs continued to write about Kino and searches for Kino’s body were mounted by Eduardo Villa, Rubén Parodi,

Dolores Encinas, and Professor Fernando Pesqueira. Things heated up again around 1960 on the eve of the 250th anniversary of Kino’s death. That is when multiple parties began to suggest something be done to honor him as Arizona’s earliest explorer. In early August of 1959, the

Jesuit Father Edwin McDermott of Brophy Preparatory Academy began talking with Father

Charles Polzer of Tucson about ways to celebrate the anniversary.420 They pondered a beatification campaign, but also thought about publications and memorials. McDermott did his part, speaking to various groups around Phoenix and writing about the legacy of Kino.421 He also contributed the title article for a special edition of the popular magazine Arizona Highways dedicated to the memory of Father Kino.422 Published in March of 1961, the magazine used maps, photos of missions, portraits by Tucson artist Ted De Grazia, and McDermott’s article to remind readers of the central role Kino played in exploring, mapping, describing, and promoting the land that became their state. The magazine advertised renewed tourism to the Kino missions, which conveniently provided the famously breathtaking backdrop to which the publication’s readers had grown accustomed. It also included an article by Donald Page and

419 Ibid.; Herbert Eugene Bolton, Rim of Christendom: A Biography of Eusebio Francisco Kino, Pacific Coast Pioneer (New York: Macmillan Co., 1936), 644; Frank C. Lockwood, “Padre Eusebio Kino, Pioneer of the Pacific Coast,” New York Times, 2 August, 1936, BR6. 420 Charles Polzer, S.J., “Padre on Horseback, To obscurity and back: Toward the Beatification of Eusebio Kino, SJ,” http://www.companysj.com/v194/padre.htm (accessed on January 15, 2010). 421“Priest to Talk in Glendale on Padre Kino,” Arizona Register, 10 February 1961. 422 “Father Kino, 1645-1711,”Arizona Highways, March 1961; “De Grazia Sketches Honor Father Kino,” Tucson Citizen, Feb 18, 1961 205

Colonel Gilbert Proctor, the eclectic collector and rancher, which speculated on locating Kino’s body in Magdalena a few blocks away from the plaza in a building dubbed by locals, “La

Capilla,” and by Arizona investigators as “Proctor’s Chapel.” The curious architectural features of the building had convinced numerous residents in Magdalena that this was in fact the older chapel of San Francisco Xavier, under which Kino had been buried.423

At the same time that McDermott worked in Phoenix, Polzer began working with

Bernard Fontana and William Walsley of the University of Arizona on possible alternatives to the “La Capilla” site. In 1963, the Lion’s Club of Magdalena had begun to excavate the site, and found suspicious holes in a tile floor that could have fit the locations of Kino’s coffin and the ossuary boxes of two other Jesuits who had been moved to the chapel later in the 1700s. In

Magdalena, local folks were convinced that the remains had been removed from the site for safekeeping in the 1930s, due to the intense persecution of the church by Mexican President

Plutarco Elias Calles. After studying that suggestion, both historical documents and archeological comparison with other mission sites convinced Polzer and Walsley that the

“Proctor Chapel” could not have been Kino’s chapel. The search must continue.424

In the meantime, other preparations were being made in both Phoenix and Tucson to memorialize the Father with a statue in the nation’s capital. The principal force behind the movement was none other than Barry Goldwater. In his introduction to a commemorative edition of various Kino works in 1966, Goldwater described the decades-long process that led to

423 Polzer, A Kino Guide, 35; Jorge Olvera, Finding Father Kino: The Discovery of the Remains of Father Eusebio Francisco Kino, S.J., 1965-1966 (Tucson: Southwestern Mission Research Center, 1998), 8. 424 Ibid. 206 the statue.425 He started by recalling the work of Bolton, Lockwood, Wyllys, and others to promote the memory of Padre and specifically the work of Lockwood’s early Kino Memorial

Committee. However, the more recent push for a statue came from the Arizona Historical

Foundation, which was founded by Goldwater in 1959 with the explicit purpose of preserving documents relating to Arizona and promoting its history. In its first annual membership meeting in 1960, the board of directors voted to promote a “Father Kino Memorial Statue,” as a central project. They began collecting funds and promoted the Arizona House Joint Memorial No. 5 of

1961, which nominated Kino as Arizona’s second representative in the national Hall of Statuary.

Pursuant to the House Memorial, Governor Paul Fannin appointed a Kino Memorial Statue

Committee, composed of prominent Arizona business leaders like George Babbit, Jr. and Frank

Cullen Brophy, as well as Father McDermott, who was appointed as the official historian. Jane

Ivancovich, a wealthy Tucson socialite, Arizona Pioneer Historical Society board member, and tireless promoter of all things Kino became the de facto organizer of the project. Goldwater made sure that Arizona obtained permission from Congress, guiding through House Joint

Resolution No.439 in August, 1962.426

After approval, the committee issued an advertisement and prospectus to search for a sculptor. Behind the scenes, they argued over how much to emphasize the secular and religious aspects of Kino’s work. Ivancovich urged the committee to promote, “the explorer aspect of

Father Kino, rather than the religious aspect.” But, McDermott argued for a more balanced representation and suggested they appeal to their mutual friend and ultimate Kino expert,

425 Barry Goldwater, “Introduction” in Smith, Fox, and Kessell, Father Kino in Arizona, xi-xvii 426 “Kino Memorial Statue Committee Minutes,” Jane Ivancovich Papers, Arizona Historical Society, MS 0915, Box 2, File 11; K. M. S. Committee, The Kino Memorial Statue Competition: Prospectus for Sculptors (Tucson: The Kino Memorial Statue Committee, 1963), 12. 207

Father Ernest Burrus.427 Being a Jesuit, Burrus predictably weighed in for both evangelism and education. The commission was eventually granted to renowned Belgian-American artist,

Baroness Susanne Silvercruys, who promised to use both religious and scientific artifacts, placing both a crucifix around Kino’s neck and astrolabe in his hand.428 The selection worked well for Goldwater, who had chosen the same artist to make his own statue just a few years earlier.429 Silvercruys also happened to be the founder of a prominent anti-communist political action group, Minute Women of the U.S.A., which coincided nicely with Goldwater’s presidential campaign themes. Informed by groups like the John Birch Society, the Minute

Women typified McCarthy-era resistance to everything that hinted at socialism, atheism, or internationalism, from social security to the United Nations. They organized housewives for letter-writing campaigns, distributed anti-Semitic tracts, opposed racial integration, and even took over a Houston school board to monitor teachers for their promotion of socialist ideology.430 Yet, she was also a committed Catholic and mystic. Speaking at the statue’s unveiling in Washington, D. C. in 1965; she told the gathered dignitaries that Father Kino and his patron, Saint Francis Xavier, had guided her hands in the execution of the statue. “And somehow everything became easy, and I could tell you the miracles that happened while I was working on that statue…, believe me I never worked alone.”431 Silvercruys’ involvement,

427 “KMSC Minutes, July 14, 1962,” Ivancovich Papers, AHS, Box 2, File 11, Piece 9. 428 “Susanne Silvercruys Explanatory Letter of Statue Proposal,” Ivancovich Papers, AHS, 2, 11, Piece 15. 429 United States. Congress (89th 1st session: 1965), Acceptance of the Statue of Eusebio Francisco Kino: Presented by the State of Arizona (Washington, D.C.: U.S. GovernmentPrinting Office, 1965), 16. 430 Chandler Davidson, “Review of Red Scare! Right-Wing Hysteria, Fifties Fanaticism, and their Legacy in Texas,” Journal of Southern History,” Vol 52, No. 2, May 1986, 327–8; "The Houston Scare", Time Magazine, November 2, 1953, 23f. 431 “Address by the Sculptor Susanne Silvercruys, United States. Congress (89th 1st session : 1965), Acceptance of the Statue of Eusebio Francisco Kino : Presented by the State of Arizona (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Govt. Print. Off, 1965), 23. 208 connected to Goldwater’s concurrent campaign, should alert us to a wider political context to the Kino memorial, one that emphasized states’ rights and sought to limit the role of the central government.

Other speakers that day resorted to similarly spiritual language in describing Kino’s importance as a symbol. Not surprisingly, the Catholic Bishop of Tucson, Reverend Francis

Green summoned the divine in the ceremony’s Invocation. But he also wedded it to nationalist ideals. “We come as sons and daughters of Arizona to place this inspired and inspiring figure in the hallowed shrine of our Nation’s great.” He went on to hail Kino in Boltonian terms for bringing “the light of the Gospel and civilization to our rim of Christendom,” asserting that the nation had been “consecrated by his incessant footfalls,” and that Kino could serve the United

States “in this challenging hour,” as an example of “sacrifice and dedication.”432 Samuel

Goddard, the recently elected young Governor of Arizona, was equally mystical. Speaking of

“the starry skies” and “scales of endless time,” Goddard elicited the “primitive fear” one feels when confronting the “savage,” natural beauty of Arizona. In contrast, the bold missionary ventured forth, “a solitary mortal led and protected by the immortal spark of the spirit; the invisible armor of God.” Goddard employed a series of binaries, contrasting native savages with

Kino’s civilization and untamed wilderness with Kino’s order and gentility.

Padre Eusebio bore in his person the seeds of change. His maps opened out the distant wilderness for the legions of New Spain; his crusading spirit planted graceful missions whose bells rang with holy sound the fruits of civilization. They called together the solitary savage people; they measured the growing seasons and regulated the new order of cattle growers and farmers; the gentled wilderness.433

432 “Invocation,” Ibid., 21 433 “Presentation of Statue, Honorable Samuel P. Goddard, Jr., Governor of Arizona,” Ibid., 26 209

He went on to speak in similarly florid terms about Kino’s mission and his international provenance (coming from Italy, Austria, Spain, Mexico, and the United States), then suggested that Kino became a model for cooperation with Mexico. “I know Governor Encinas of Mexico shares with me the dream of enriching Padre Kino’s pasture with all the fruits of our common history, civilization and the spirit which knows no limits to the brotherhood of man.”434

Governor Encinas returned that sentiment after the recovery of Kino’s remains, not only during the ceremony in June 1965 that Goddard attended, but also when he went to Phoenix to dedicate a 12 ½ foot, 8,000 pound bronze statue of Kino that the state of Sonora gave to

Arizona in August, 1967. The large equestrian figure was made in Mexico City by the sculptor

Julian Martinez. He made two sculptures, one each for the twin state capitals of Hermosillo and

Phoenix. The Phoenix statue was unveiled in a ceremony conducted completely in Spanish in front of the Arizona Capitol building. Emphasizing their shared history, geography, and commercial interests, Encinas declared that Kino would be a symbol of cooperation and strengthened relations, so that “we may form with the same prosperity of all and with the same ideological goals in all the American continent, the most solid and inexpugnable front of liberty and democracy.”435 The new Republican Governor of Arizona, Jack Williams, reciprocated the sentiment and exhorted, “God has made us neighbors. Let us not only be good neighbors, but good brothers.”436 They ended the ceremony by depositing a time capsule so that the triple values of commerce, cooperation, and civilization that had been carried there by Kino and confirmed by the two states could be communicated to the future.

434 Ibid., 27. 435 The sentiment, expressed in Spanish, clearly suffers in the journalist’s unwieldy translation. “Throng Hails Sonora Chief,” Arizona Republic, 23 August, 1967, 1, 12. 436 “Statue Given, ‘Neighbors and Good Brothers,’” The Phoenix Gazette, 23 August, 1967, 19. 210

Reimagining

In the context of an escalating war in Vietnam and lingering American fears of Mexican socialism, Encinas’ pledge of the “friendship in all of Latin America,” and a “front of Liberty and democracy,” were not just sonorous language, but coded messages, assurances that Sonora was on the American side. Dedicated to Arizona’s economic growth, Williams surely received the memo. The Arizona Republic took another message out of the gift. In an editorial called

“Sonora and Arizona,” they argued that “No other man so intimately reflects the intertwined spirit of Sonora and Arizona as Father Eusebio Francisco Kino,” as such his bones in Magdalena and statue in Phoenix “will remain a permanent reminder of the friendship and co-operation of the two states, and two nations, which share a common heritage and abiding respect for each other.” In fact, the states even shared, “ties between the two that were closer than their respective ties with Mexico City or Washington, D.C.” While Sonora was wealthier and more technically innovative than the rest of Mexico, the paper reasoned, Arizona had more Spanish culture than the rest of the United States. Based on that shared heritage and Kino’s example, the Republic argued that the states should work on easing restrictions on trade and immigration.

The notion that the states should work independently of their national capitals would have been music to Goldwater’s ears. But the use of Kino as an inspiration to address border tensions speaks to our own day as well. O’odham Indians, whose families are increasingly bisected by the 18-foot border fence bisecting their land, still find solace in both Kino and his patron, San Francisco. As they have since the 18th century, thousands of individuals from both sides of the border meet in the plaza of Magdalena each year on October 4th for the feast of St. 211

Francis Assisi, fulfilling promises (mandas) to St. Francis Xavier around the bones of their third

St. Francis; those of Eusebio Francisco Kino. As the land has changed hands from Jesuits to

Franciscans and from Union hall to National Shrine, they walked every autumn from Sells,

Tucson, and Nogales to Magdalena. It is a massive reverse immigration that strains the Mexican border guards and custom officials for one week each year. They are joined today by North

American tourists and Mexican families, hoping to drink, eat, buy gifts, and catch a glimpse of the two Franciscos, one reclining in the church and one lying prone in the mausoleum.437

Conclusion

The language of civilization and barbarity, center and periphery, sacred and profane were constant themes in the recovery and representation of Kino in the 1960s and 70s. For

Mexican politicians, he was the sacrificial hero who gave his life to bring progress to the backward nations of Mexico’s north, extending the metropolitan reach of Mexico City, Madrid, and Rome into the landscapes of “wandering peoples.” For their American counterparts, Kino played a different role. He was the pioneer padre who advanced the “Rim of Christendom,” and in so doing, baptized Arizona and its natives with European names and forms well before

Washington was a general, much less a city. He demonstrated the spirit of rugged independence, taming the savage desert without the interference of meddling bureaucratic fat cats in Washington. At the same time, this sort of language was part of a process in which both state governments in Arizona and Sonora, as well as the Mexican central government attempted to appropriate and utilize the sacred space of others for political, nationalistic, and

437 Griffith, Beliefs and Holy Places, 218. 212 commercial purposes. What we witness with the Kino recovery and the Kino memorials is the forging of a shrine at the church and plaza of Magdalena meant to reconcile multiform tensions in Mexican society. First, it was an attempt to achieve a detente between the Catholic Church and the Mexican government that had aggressively persecuted it throughout most of the first half of the 20th century. Restoring the church, recovering Kino, and building the memorial was an implicit recognition that the “Calles Law,” which led to the burning of Kino’s Francisco statue in the Magdalena brewery, had gone too far, leaving devout Mexican and O’odham bitter and distrustful. It was also an appropriation of O’odham ritual space, an attempt to incorporate existing patterns of devotion into the new national goals of international tourism and cooperation. In American Sacred Space, David Chidester and Edward Linenthal argued that most contemporary sacred spaces exist in dialectic relationship to the “modern” and “the profane,” and though these monuments can incorporate centuries old traditions and ritual patterns, they are also implicated in all manner of political and economic processes, from tourism and commerce, to nationalism and the making of borders.438 When they become national shrines, sacred spaces also become strategies, places employed by large institutions with the capacity to produce a narrative of sacredness; in this case about progress, modernity, civilization, and commerce. Nevertheless, the space can still be contested, challenged by the tactics of individuals and hybridized by communities who bring their own practices, interpretations, and memories into that place.439

438 Sacred spaces are “battlefields,” by necessity implicated in conflict because they involved the “politics of position, property, exclusion, and exile.” Creating a sacred locale involves locating (position), possessing (property), demarcating (exclusion), and differentiating (exile) specific places, all of which entail forms of conflict over and against other people and places. David Chidester and Edward Tabor Linenthal 1947-, eds., American Sacred Space (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 7-10, 16-20. 439 Ibid., 16-20. 213

Another point of entry into understanding the Kino memorials might be Talal Asad’s argument that the idioms of redemptive death are foundational to modern nation states, a necessary flip side to their capacity for violence. For western society, he contends, “dying to give life” is central to coercion and the making of war. The paradoxical dialectic of self-sacrifice and aggression has deep roots in Christianity, because "In Christian civilization, the gift of life for humanity is possible only through a suicidal death; redemption is dependent on cruelty or at least on the sin of disregarding human life."440 Once more, rituals of blood, body parts, sacrifice, and aggression still play a central role in the legitimizing of nation states and modern liberal democracy.441 Although Asad’s claims about violence today need further explicating, colonial

Jesuit missionaries like Eusebio Kino would have eagerly embraced the logic Asad articulates. As this dissertation has argued, redemptive death became a central interpretive tool for them as they sought to make sense of both their own sacrifices as well as native suffering in the missions of northern New Spain. Their martyrs’ blood sowed seed that bore spiritual harvests and would lead to the civilizing of the frontier. Their broken bodies could help sanctify and thereby civilize native spaces and secure a Jesuit presence in a contested colonial field. The language, idioms, and practices associated with the recovery, display, and memorialization of

Kino’s body remind us of those longer trajectories. Kino’s relics, gave Mexico’s north and

America’s southwest a patron saint. Even in secularized form, American and Mexican officials hoped that the holy relics of a sacrificial figure would advance civilization and finally bring the frontier into modernity.

440 Talal Asad, On Suicide Bombing, 86-87. 441 Asad suggests the language and rationales of organ donation as just one example of Christian notions of redemptive death translated into the terms and demands of modern liberalism. Asad, On Suicide Bombing, 88-90 214

APPENDIX 1

“Teatro de los Trabajos Apostólicos de La Compañia de Jesús en La America Septéntrional” from Ernest J. Burrus ed., Kino and the Cartography of Northwestern New Spain (Tucson: Arizona Pioneers’ Historical Society), 46 – 48, Plate VIII.

215

APPENDIX 2

Kino’s 1696 “Map of the Martyrdom of Father Saeta” in Burrus, Kino and the Cartography of Northwestern New Spain, 49 – 50, Plate IX.

216

APPENDIX 3

Map of northwest and 1734 martyrdoms of Fathers Lorenzo Carranco and Nicolás Tamaral in Miguel Venegas’ Noticias de California (Madrid: Viuda de M. Fernández, 1757).

217

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