Becoming Chiquitano: Crafting Identities in the Broader Paraguayan River Basin

Justin B. Blanton

A dissertation submitted to the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of History.

Chapel Hill 2018

Approved by:

Cynthia Radding

John Chasteen

Kathryn Burns

Kathleen DuVal

Brandon Bayne

1

Abstract ______Justin B. Blanton: Becoming Chiquitano: Crafting Identities in the Broader Paraguayan River Basin (Under the direction of Cynthia Radding)

This project poses two basic conceptual problems: How do ethnic and communal identities emerge and how are their meanings expressed by diverse groups of historical actors?

To address these problems, my research focuses on indigenous communities who inhabited

Catholic missions in the colonial Spanish province of Chiquitos located in portions of present- day southeastern Bolivia and southwestern Brazil. It provides a deeper understanding of the ways in which these native peoples bestowed meaning upon the public dimensions of their reconstituted communities and transformed, articulated, maintained, and defended ethnic, linguistic and communal identities. My full temporal scope extends from the late sixteenth century through the Jesuit mission regime (1691-1767) and into the early nineteenth century, but

I place special emphasis on post-Jesuit historical processes. By focusing on these understudied years, I reveal how native resistance to late eighteenth and early nineteenth century imperial developments impacted the evolution of identities that began to emerge a century earlier. During this period of mission secularization, indigenous peoples continually mediated administrative and sociocultural changes to construct and articulate ethnolinguistic and communal identities.

My interdisciplinary research provides an innovative model for the examination of indigenous and imperial borderlands centered on the themes of ethnicity, community, colonial conflict, and intercultural exchange.

2

To Allison and my family.

And to the memories of Daniel Jackson Stanley and Ina and C.A. Blanton.

3

Acknowledgments ______

This project would not have been possible without the support of many generous people and institutions. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has provided me with the majority of the financial resources necessary for my research. A Tinker Pre-Dissertation Field

Research Grant from the Institute for the Study of the Americas made it possible for me to begin field research in Bolivia. Thanks to the history department’s Mowry and Clein Dissertation

Fellowship, a Graduate Research Award from the Program for Medieval and Early Modern

Studies, and an Off-Campus Dissertation Research Fellowship provided by the Graduate School,

I was able to continue research in Bolivia. A combination of funds from the Graduate School’s

Summer Research Fellowship and a Mellon Dissertation Fellowship for Latin American

Research from the Institute for the Study of the Americas supported a final research trip to

Buenos Aires.

I benefited from the generous assistance of several scholars and archivists during my research trips to Bolivia, Argentina and Brazil. In Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Paula Peña Hasbún, the director of the Museo y Archivo Histórico Regional de la Universidad Autónoma Gabriel

René Moreno provided me invaluable recommendations during the earliest stages of my research. Isabelle Combès, an anthropologist associated with the Institut Français d'Etudes

Andines, freely shared with me her extensive knowledge of the history and ethnology of the

Bolivian lowlands and graciously mentored me during my time in Bolivia. Enrrique Rivero

Coimbra, director of the Archivo Histórico Departamental Hermanos Vázquez Machicado, a collection within the Museo Histórico Regional de la Universidad Autónoma Gabriel René

Moreno introduced me to his colleagues and the scholarly community of eastern Bolivia. Anita

4

Suarez de Terceros, opened to me the archives of the Catedral de Santa Cruz de la Sierra. My dear friends Junior Pantoja Abrego and Vanessa Salvatierra made me feel at home in Santa Cruz and enriched my life in countless ways. In Sucre, I am indebted to the professional staff of the

Archivo y Biblioteca Nacionales de Bolivia. I would also like to thank William Lofstrom, PhD, and Ana María Zamora Lofstrom for welcoming me into their home and supporting me with warm companionship and Julia Flores Colque for looking out for me as her surrogate son. The late Stephen Jacobs, Professor Emeritus, School of Architecture, Tulane University opened so many social and professional doors to me in Sucre and I miss him dearly. In Cuiabá, I am thankful for the assistance of Fernando Tadeu de Miranda Borges and the staff of the Arquivo

Público de Mato Grosso. In Buenos Aires, I am grateful for the friendship and professional support of Cecilia Martinez and Guillermo Wilde. The directors and staff of the Archivo General de la Nación in Buenos Aires made my research productive.

My fascination with Latin America began during a study abroad trip to Honduras led by

Stewart McCrae who inspired me to begin the path that ultimately led to this dissertation.

Visiting Mayan ruins and Spanish colonial towns left an indelible mark on my future and significantly broadened my perception of the world. Upon returning from Honduras, I declared anthropology as my major and set out to learn Spanish. After completing intensive courses, I obtained a proficiency in Spanish that has served to invigorate my love of Latin American culture. Unfortunately, Stewart passed away while I was conducting research in Bolivia and very few days go by without me thinking about his profound influence on my life.

As an undergraduate at the University of Florida, I gained knowledge of cultural anthropology, archaeology, and ethnohistory. I developed a strong interest in archaeology while taking a course on the archaic period of North America. This interest led me to apply for a

5 position in an archaeological field school in Granard, Ireland in the summer of 2002. Under the tutelage of Florin Curta, I spent six weeks learning archaeological theory and methodology while excavating a late-medieval village site. I began my graduate studies at the University of North

Florida by enrolling in a Florida history course taught by Daniel Schafer. His mentorship fostered my interest in Spanish colonial history and Latin American. In the fall of 2007, I began a yearlong study of early-modern Spanish paleography under the guidance of J. Michael Francis.

With his encouragement and support, I obtained the necessary grants and funding to put my paleography skills into practice conducting archival research at the AGI. During the summer of

2008, I spent three months in Seville researching the expedition of Hernando de Soto. I examined a number of documents written by men who participated in the expedition in order to obtain a better understanding of Soto’s treatment of the Indian populations he encountered. This introduction to archival research improved my ability to read and interpret challenging early- modern Spanish paleography. Up until this point, all of the primary source documents I used had been either transcriptions or translations. This was the first time that I had the ability to utilize my skills to interpret the intent of the original author. This experience transformed my interest in

Latin American history into a passion and affirmed my determination to obtain a doctoral degree.

My graduate education at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, especially in the fields of ethnohistory and Iberian borderlands, prepared me to complete this project. I worked systematically to master the published anthropological and historical literature of Chiquitos while placing an emphasis on the scholarship produced in Latin America. Moreover, I have taken graduate seminars and taught undergrad courses related to Latin American history, anthropology, native peoples and space. Throughout my graduate career at UNC, my committee offered guidance and wisdom. My advisor Cynthia Radding bolstered my confidence with her

6 unwavering guidance, encouragement and belief in me, carefully read and evaluated every word of my dissertation at every stage, and I owe her a lifetime of gratitude. John Chasteen taught me to be a better writer, helped me to find and convey my voice, and supported me as both a friend and mentor. Kathryn Burns, Kathleen DuVal, and Brandon Bayne provided critical feedback and insightful comments that helped me to strengthen and clarify my assertions. I am also thankful for the generous advice and support of Arturo Escobar and Miguel La Serna. All errors, shortcomings, and facile assessments in my dissertation are mine alone.

I had the great privilege of building relationships with and learning from a talented cohort of graduate students at UNC and Duke University including Jeffery Erbig, Jason Kauffman,

Angélica Castillo, Benjamin Reed, Julián Díez, Francisco Brignole, Laurent Corbeil, Yuridia

Ramírez, Corinna Zeltsman, Ezekiel Moreno, Samuel Finesurrey, Bonnie Lucero, Elizabeth

Ellis, Sarah McNamara, Daniel Giblin , Aaron Hale-Dorrell, Anndal Narayanan, Steven Riegg,

Thomas Sheppard, Maikel Farinas Borrego, Joel Hebert, Jeanine Navarrete, Alexandra Ruble,

Jeffrey Harris, Mark Hornburg, Shannon James, Daniele Lauro, Jose Manuel Moreno Vega,

Daniel Velásquez, Mary Elizabeth Walters, Garrett Wright, Mishio Yamanaka, Anthony

Rossodivito, Ann Halbert-Brooks, Gregory Mole, Andrew Ringlee, Ryan Peeks, Sarah

Barksdale, Rachel Hynson, Warren Millteer, Philip Stelzel, Robert P. Shapard, Anna Krome-

Lukens, Jonathan Hancock, Peter Gengler, and Scott Krause. These friends and colleagues enriched my life in Chapel Hill and made me a better scholar.

Most importantly, I would like to thank my family for their unwavering support. My parents, Donald and Cheryl Blanton, and sister, Christa, have always believed in me and encouraged me to pursue an education. As a first generation college student, it was my family’s support and belief in my abilities that convinced me that I might actually excel in the unfamiliar

7 world of academia. I could not have accomplished this feat - or any others - without their unconditional love. Finally, I thank Allison Somogyi for her emotional support, intellectual contributions, and preternatural patience. I could never have completed this dissertation without her.

8

Introduction ______

Dramatic political, social and economic changes that occurred in Europe during the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries precipitated a revolution in self-understandings. These transformations continued in the Iberian America colonies where imperial administrators formed social hierarchies organized by newly constructed racial classifications that included “indio”.

These classifications were further distinguished by smaller ethnolinguistic subsets which often had pre-contact meanings and affiliations among indigenous populations. Within this framework, diverse colonial subjects experienced social interactions delineated by specific obligations and limits conferred upon the group in which they were placed. As colonial subjects lived in accordance with ascribed social terms, they bestowed meaning upon the public dimensions of their communities and transformed imposed categories into identities that they performed and defended. My research shows the particular ways in which the native populations of Chiquitos mediated and influenced these early modern historical processes to formulate and express different ethnolinguistic and communal identities. Most studies on the construction of ethnicity, race and community in the colonial Americas focus on contexts of consolidated imperial control in more densely populated European settlements, but the intercultural and inter-imperial borderland settings of Chiquitos presented far different conditions.1

Beginning in the late seventeenth century, Jesuit missionaries assigned to Chiquitos made multiple forays into native territories in search of new converts. These expeditions gathered distinct indigenous groups speaking different languages into mission towns founded under early

1 Irene Silverblatt, “Foreward,” in Imperial Subjects: Race and Identity in Colonial Latin America, ed. Andrew B. Fisher and Matthew D. O’Hara (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), ix–xii. 9 modern European norms of civic life. The Jesuits began to use the term “Chiquito” – and later

“Chiquitano” – as a general and homogenizing ethnic and linguistic moniker for the diverse populations that moved in and out of the missions. Over time, the mission Indians adopted the ascribed label and “Chiquitano” became a unifying identity that has endured to the present day.

Contrary to prevailing understandings of ethnogenesis among the indigenous peoples of

Chiquitos, however, I argue that the development of a unified Chiquitano identity did not occur through a monolithic process that began and ended during a sharply bounded period of time.

“Becoming Chiquitano” was, instead, a multivalent set of processes that emerged under the

Jesuit regime and continued long after their expulsion. My research shows that these processes of ethnogenesis refracted in different trajectories throughout a protracted era of mission secularization that altered the spatial, administrative, and sociocultural organization of the

Chiquitos mission province and reoriented native communities.

Theoretical Frameworks

This dissertation engages with a number of theoretical frameworks used in both history and anthropology. Its research approach incorporates methods employed by ethnohistorians in order to extract native peoples’ understandings of and reactions to historical change. I analyze discernible indigenous cultural manifestations and performances and consult with historical documentation to interpret the ways in which they ordered their actions.2 My particular practice of ethnohistory follows a model formulated by anthropologist Frank Salomon in his study of indigenous rulers of the northern Andes during the pre-Columbian and Spanish colonial periods.

In accordance with Salomon’s model, rather than employing anthropological methods and

2 Frank L. Salomon, The Cord Keepers: Khipus and Cultural Life in a Peruvian Village (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 6–22. 10 concepts to simply expand the practice of history, I use them to ask anthropological questions of historical processes. That is, to take account of the ways in which the cultures of the various native groups who inhabited the Chiquitos mission towns held different understandings of the relationship between human actions and change over time. Through this perspective, it is possible to show how these “different diachronic senses” shaped the ways in which indigenous peoples crafted ethnolinguistic and communal identities.3

Identity consists of the interplay between external categorizations and self-understanding.

As a concept, it is most effectively accessed and understood through the evaluation of historical practices observed in specific times and places.4 I understand identities to be relations that obtain significance and composition in accordance with their perpetual historical construction. By applying this concept of identity to ethnicity, I borrow from anthropologist John Comaroff who maintains that asymmetrical power relations always affect ethnic identities. As is the case with

Chiquitos, contention and struggle is often involved in the construction of ethnic identities.

Furthermore, ethnic identities assume a powerful significance for the cultures that construct them and take them on. Thus, according to Comaroff, identities often appear “to be natural, essential,

[and] primordial.”5

While taking into account the critique that identity is an unwieldy term freighted with reifying connotations, I find the concept useful for researching how conflicts that evolved

3 Frank Salomon, Native Lords of Quito in the Age of the Incas: The Political Economy of North Andean Chiefdoms (Cambridge University Press, 2007), 9.

4 Andrew B. Fisher and Matthew D. O’Hara, “Introduction,” in Imperial Subjects: Race and Identity in Colonial Latin America, ed. Andrew B. Fisher and Matthew D. O’Hara (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 19–21.

5 John Comaroff, “Ethnicity, Nationalism, and the Politics of Difference,” in The Politics of Difference: Ethnic Premises in a World of Power, ed. Edwin N. Wilmsen and P. A. McAllister (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 166.

11 through uneven power relations influenced the development of new ethnolinguistic and communal affiliations.6 Identity frames my research on conflicts that evolved through uneven power relations and influenced the development of new ethnicities.7

To access these historical processes among the indigenous people of Chiquitos, I examine the native mission councils known as cabildos and analyze the ways in which they used their positions to articulate different identities. Introduced by the Society of Jesus, these councils were comprised of indigenous officers elected by Jesuit missionaries and later by secular priests to govern their communities as representatives of the various language and kin groups that comprised the mission towns. Cabildos were the primary institution of internal mission governance and political culture that persisted after the Jesuit period to maintain authority and assert distinct ethnolinguistic identities. A critical analysis of archival materials produced after the Jesuit period has yielded valuable information about the motivations of cabildos. I have used this research approach to examine cabildos as spokespersons for the communities they represented in order to trace evolving articulations of identity over time among the broader

Indian population. To this end, I evaluate the cabildos’ interactions with Iberian interlocutors, the methods they used to assert authority, and the political discourse they used to promote the communities they represented.

My efforts to historicize ethnic identity are inspired by anthropologist Arturo Escobar.

His work on African-descendant villages of the Colombian Pacific coast in the modern period reveals the ways in which “black ethnicity” emerged through historical interactions connected to broader power structures that included neoliberal “development projects,” such as palm oil

6 R. Brubaker and F. Cooper, “Beyond ‘Identity,’” Theory and Society 29 (2000): 1–47.

7 Ibid. 12 plantations, the industrial cultivation of shrimp and other intrusive capitalist enterprises supported by the Colombian state. The reform of the national constitution, along with State-level institutional and political practices shaped by various social activists, led to legislation that provided opportunities for Afro-Colombian communities to construct powerful discursive ethnic identities in the face of hegemonic power structures. According to Escobar, a diverse group of actors involved themselves in this rearticulation of black ethnicity. As such, the production of a new identity was processual and dialectic as it incorporated a number of dynamic interactions linked to wider networks of power.8

Though my research does not directly correspond to Escobar’s study, there are some important linkages that influence my approach. While a minority population shaped by hegemonic relationships characteristic of a postcolonial environment produced such historical developments as contemporary political consciousness in Escobar’s work, the indigenous groups of Chiquitos constituted a majority population living within a sociocultural, economic and geographical setting shaped by colonialism during the early modern period. Nevertheless, both cases involved asymmetrical power relations that fostered dialogic and relational processes of identity formation marked by struggle, mediation and negotiation. Thus, Escobar’s conceptual interventions offer a pertinent theoretical framework to support my overarching argument.

In perceiving culture and identity as process, my study uses historian Karen Vieira

Powers’s concept of “ethnogenesis”, which she defines as a continuous cultural development

“that is simultaneously reproductive and transformative.”9 Finally, I follow the path of a number

8 Arturo Escobar, Territories of Difference: Place, Movements, Life, Redes (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 201–11, 217–20.

9 Karen Vieira Powers, Andean Journeys: Migration, Ethnogenesis, and the State in Colonial Quito (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2009), 1-15. Also see Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra and James Sidbury, “Mapping Ethnogenesis in the Early Modern Atlantic,” In William and Mary Quarterly, 68, 2 (2011) 181-208. 13 of scholars, including Rita de Grandis, who have understood these processes through the concept of “hybridity”, which de Grandis defines as “the coexistence of different conflictive belief systems, languages, styles, and linguistic consciences.”10 I combine the concepts of hybridity and ethnogenesis to reveal how different permutations of ethnic identities emerged from centuries of interactions between disparate cultures of indigenous groups and Europeans.

Historian Hal Langfur’s work on the Eastern Sertão of colonial Brazil during eighteenth- and nineteenth-centuries examines a different region, time period and set of historical actors, yet contains a number of important parallels and theoretical models that inform my research. His analysis of the dynamic interactions of diverse agents entangled in Portugal’s uneven colonizing efforts on the imperial fringe throws new light on the development of Ibero-American imperial consolidation and the discordant ways in which the different groups involved in that process sought to territorialize their societies and reformulate distinct identities. Langfur argues that keys to understanding the particular transformations that accompanied frontier incorporation can be found in the incompatible ways in which these disparate groups sought to territorialize their distinctive societies – that is, “to construct, sustain, reproduce, and protect those societies” in an unsettled frontier environment. The frontier, Langfur argues, represented an isolated geographic expanse distant from the European core yet central to numerous indigenous societies. Within this setting, territorial consolidation was far from secure and the consequences of “multiethnic cultural encounters remained in doubt.” According to Langfur, during the ethnically diverse processes involved in contentious territorial expansion, a number of the indigenous groups

10 Rita De Grandis, “Pursuing Hybridity: From the Linguistic to the Symbolic,” in Unforeseeable Americas: Questioning Cultural Hybridity in the Americas, ed. Rita De Grandis and Zilá Bernd (Rodopi, 2000), 221.

14 inhabiting the Sertão took on an imposed identity and became the Botocudo.11 In accordance with this conceptual framework, I argue that ethnolinguistic and communal identities created through the chaotic exchanges involved in the Spanish territorial consolidation of Chiquitos were subsequently taken on and adapted by a number of the indigenous groups living in the region and performed into the nineteenth century.

Following the work of Henri Lefebvre, I understand the Chiquitos province as a culturally and materially produced space that was altered and transformed over time.12 As such, I examine the articulation and construction of this borderland space and how these historical developments relate to ethnolinguistic and communal identities. Moreover, I argue that Chiquitos as a space was marked by social interactions and functioned as a site for the perception and substantiation of mutual differences. Thus, in the Chiquitos missions, articulations of identity emerged as products of what the various groups inhabiting or visiting the space chose to define and distinguish. More specifically, the groups interacting within Chiquitos constructed discursive articulations reflecting such variables as preconceptions, particular endeavors, cultural perspectives, political projects and uneven power struggles.13

A number of current theoretical interpretations of Ibero-American borderlands regions that have recently evolved in reaction to debates regarding geographical definition, institutional focus, and ethnic perspective also influence my work. Frederick Jackson Turner’s notion of borderlands as a “meeting point between savagery and civilization,” and Herbert Eugene

11 Hal Langfur, The Forbidden Lands: Colonial Identity, Frontier Violence, and the Persistence of Brazil’s Eastern Indians, 1750-1830 (Stanford University Press, 2008), 35.

12 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Oxford, OX, UK; Cambridge, Mass., USA: Wiley-Blackwell, 1992), 11, 292.

13 Santa Arias and Mariselle Meléndez, “Space and the Rhetorics of Power in Colonial Spanish America: An Introduction,” in Mapping Colonial Spanish America:Places and Commonplaces of Identity, Culture, and Experience, ed. Santa Arias and Mariselle Meléndez (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2002), 16–17. 15

Bolton’s epic chronicles of “Spanish pathfinders and pioneers,” are no longer the conceptual focal points of contemporary borderlands historians.14 As Susan Deeds noted, these conventional themes “produced static, unidimensional pictures rather than thicker, integrated slices of regional history.”15 Borderlands historians such as Barbara Ganson and David Block have demonstrated the importance of evaluating the impact of indigenous actors and colonial imperial peripheries on the politics of the European metropole.16 As a result of these interventions, far-reaching imperial narratives covering borderlands as a whole and focusing on conquest, political administration, and international rivalries have given way to spatially and regionally focused social, economic, and cultural studies, which account for the various actions of local indigenous populations throughout the Americas.

Synthesizing Iberian borderlands historiography up through the 1990s, Donna Guy and

Thomas Sheridan argued that borderlands are places of historical interaction where different polities contended for natural resources and territorial control.17 In the following decade, the borderlands field became interdisciplinary, informed by theoretical frameworks from Native

American studies, cultural geography, and comparative history. Borderlands scholars currently use concepts such as regional spatial analysis, environmental change, and social divisions based on class, race, gender, and identity. Building upon these developments, I employ methods from

14 Frederick Turner, Frontier in American History, by Frederick Jackson Turner (H. Holt and Company, 1920), Bolton was far more concerned with the impact of Spaniards on the frontier than in the influence of the frontier on Spaniards and his work focused on the high drama of exploration and heroic figures and largely ignored Indians.

15 Susan M. Deeds, “New Spain’s Far North: A Changing Historiographical Frontier?,” Latin American Research Review 25, no. 2 (1990): 226–35.

16 Barbara Ganson, The Guarani Under Spanish Rule in the Rio De La Plata (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005). David Block, Mission Culture on the Upper Amazon: Native Tradition, Jesuit Enterprise, and Secular Policy in Moxos, 1660-1810 (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1994).

17 Donna J. Guy and Thomas E. Sheridan, Contested Ground: Comparative Frontiers on the Northern and Southern Edges of the Spanish Empire (Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 1998), 10. 16 cultural anthropology and environmental history to uncover indigenous practices of reconstituting community, and refashioning identity, in the ecological and imperial frontiers of Chiquitos.

Taking the above contributions as a point of departure, I view the borderland region of

Chiquitos as a unique area of focus because it illustrates the fluid qualities of the internal imperial boundaries of South America; yet it is not as well studied as other borderland regions in the colonial Americas such as the Guaraní mission provinces of the lower Paraguay Basin and the Río de la Plata. In accordance with historians David Weber and Jane Rausch, I conceive of borderlands as regions on the periphery of imperial boundaries where various cultures interact with one another and with their physical environment to produce phenomena that are unique to time and place.18 I argue that the broader historical processes at issue in Chiquitos, including culture as process, the historical construction of identities and the dynamic developments of ethnogenesis, transcend regional boundaries and can be applied to studies of other colonial Ibero-

American borderlands. Moreover, this case study viewed over the longue durée has far-reaching implications for the construction of identities and the multivalent meanings of borderlands beyond this particular region.

Traditional scholarship holds that nearly a century of European contact permanently transformed the native groups of Chiquitos through disease, labor exploitation, the mixing of distinct ethnic groups, religious conversion, and forced native participation in the regional political economy. Without denying these factors for change, I explore how the region’s indigenous peoples constructed and presented their own identities in the course of colonial transformations. More specifically, I chart identities among the different native communities of the Chiquitos missions following the basic theoretical premise that ethnolinguistic affiliations were not pre-contact entities

18 David J. Weber and Jane M. Rausch, eds., Where Cultures Meet: Frontiers in Latin American History (Wilmington, DE: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1997), xiv. 17 diluted through colonialism; rather, I argue that the survival of the diverse peoples of Chiquitos was contingent upon their adaptions to colonialism. I explore how ethnolinguistic and communal derivations among the native mission residents of Chiquitos developed vis-à-vis European colonization efforts. To answer this question, my work focuses on indigenous practices of the physical and social reconstitution of communities and on the ways in which they shaped the borderlands. This broadens understandings of the Chiquitos region and its place within Latin

American borderlands history while also contributing to conceptual frameworks used by both anthropologists and historians who study colonial cultural interface in different time periods and regions.

Sources and Organization

Four primary questions guide my research: I. How did interactions between the indigenous groups of Chiquitos and Iberian colonial institutions transform native settlement patterns, social structures, political paradigms, leadership practices, and economies? II. In what ways did migration, trade networks, and Iberian territorial and jurisdictional reorganization change indigenous cultures? III. How did indigenous patterns of resistance condition imperial policies? VI. How did Chiquitos become a contested borderland in which ethnolinguistic differences and communal identities evolved historically? To address these questions, I targeted documents that record the intersections between native peoples and Iberian institutions. During the course of more than fourteen months of fieldwork, I visited six different archives located in

Bolivia, Brazil, and Argentina to compile a substantial collection of primary sources including mission censuses and documents containing accounts of indigenous unrest and colonial administrative disputes. Written by colonial bureaucrats and clerics, these documents outline

18

Iberian imperial endeavors, but few of them contain detailed references to Indian agency.

Reading them against the grain, however, has enabled me to discern indigenous voices and uncover the variegated processes through which native populations expressed identities in the midst of social and cultural upheaval. The Archivo y Biblioteca Nacional (ABNB), in Sucre,

Bolivia is the primary repository for documents related to the lowland imperial borderlands of colonial Charcas. This extensive archive contains important documentary assemblages including the “Gabriel René Moreno” and “Mojos y Chiquitos” collections with documents dealing with mission demographics and indigenous ethnolinguistic affiliations including parcialidades

(language and kin groups), native councils and regional politics. The Archivo y Biblioteca de la

Universidad Autónoma Gabriel René Moreno (UGRM) and the Archivo de la Catedral, in Santa

Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia, contain documentation from the post-Jesuit era of secularization in

Chiquitos produced by the diocese of Santa Cruz. Many of these documents provide insights into how the new parish structures and military garrisons established in the missions after the Jesuit expulsion altered the spatial and administrative organization of native communities. Iberian colonial endeavors influenced the present-day location of the documentary sources that support my research. In 1776, the Spanish Crown founded the Viceroyalty of Río de la Plata in Argentina and colonial officials began to transfer records from cities located in what is now Bolivia to the administrative center of Buenos Aires. As a result, the Archivo General de la Nación in Buenos

Aires, Argentina now holds large collections of documents concerning the late Spanish colonial period in Chiquitos. Finally, Brazil’s Arquivo Público de Mato Grosso in Cuiabá houses documents relating migratory patterns across the Portuguese and Spanish imperial boundaries of the greater Rio de la Plata region.

19

The dissertation proceeds chronologically from the Jesuit mission period until the early nineteenth century. Chapter 1 provides an overview of the changing historical interpretations of

Chiquitos and surveys the academic studies that inform my research. Chapter 2 discusses the geography, ecology and ethnohistorical background of the Chiquitos province, traces the historical construction of this borderland, and provides an outline of the Jesuit mission period.

The third chapter focuses on the cabildos and investigates the ways in which indigenous councilors maintained authority and asserted ethnic and communal identities during the first administrative changes introduced by civil and ecclesiastical authorities in the wake of the Jesuit expulsion. The final two chapters examine how native resistance to late eighteenth and early nineteenth century imperial developments impacted the evolution and articulation of ethnic and communal identities and altered indigenous political projects. Chapter 4 analyzes intercultural struggles that occurred as a result of the establishment of a military government in Chiquitos to trace emerging communal and political alliances formed by indigenous peoples as they brokered tensions between indigenous sovereignty and changing alignments of colonial authority in ways that influenced their articulations of community and transformed their political culture. Chapter 5 examines the impact of regulatory changes known as the New Plan of Government promulgated in 1790 and analyzes the differing ways in which indigenous peoples, church officials and colonial authorities reacted to the regulations. The chapter shows how native mission residents addressed the reforms of the New Plan with a variety of strategic approaches that advanced the interests of their particular communities. Their varied approaches to maintaining distinct ethnic and communal identities and defending their separate interests influenced the course of the colonial project in Chiquitos.

20

My research contributes to the ethnographic history of interethnic borderlands and provides new theoretical perspectives on the themes of ethnicity, identity, space and territory.

Firstly, it elucidates the historical processes involved in crafting ethnicities and borderland communities by bringing together a comprehensive analysis of original documentary sources and ethnographic data. Secondly, it links the spatial concepts and historical processes that produced indigenous borderlands and integrated them into Iberian imperial borderlands. Thirdly, by focusing on late-colonial developments, it bridges an important gap in the Chiquitos scholarship that places greater importance on the Jesuit period. This temporal scope sheds light onto pivotal historical processes that complicate prevailing histories of the indigenous people of Chiquitos.

21

Chapter 1 ______

Shifting Frontiers: Changing Interpretations of Chiquitos

Introduction

This chapter focuses on different historical perceptions of Chiquitos and surveys various depictions of the region that date to the earliest years of Iberian colonization and illustrate its fluid qualities and changing boundaries. The chapter begins with an examination of sixteenth century chronicles written by Spanish explorers before discussing accounts featured in eighteenth century Jesuit missionary records. It then moves on to review nineteenth century travel narratives recorded by European scientists and naturalists whose studies of the region were inspired by expanding imperial and geopolitical competition. The chapter ends with an evaluation of a selection of modern academic studies of Chiquitos to underscore how their conclusions influence current understandings of the region’s people and history and to assess the particular ways in which these works influence my own research.

Early Chronicles: European Contact in Chiquitos

The Chiquitos region and its people have been the subjects of chronicles, travel narratives, and scientific studies produced and published in multiple European languages since the early colonial period. Sixteenth century Spanish explorers are responsible for recording the first written documentation of Chiquitos and the neighboring environs. The initial Spanish explorations of the interior of South America from the Atlantic Ocean were extensions of the

1516 Juan Diez de Solís expedition. Inspired by news of great mineral wealth lying just beyond

22 the coastal jungles and interior deserts of the continent, Solís and his party sailed south along the coast of Brazil in search of suitable points of disembarkation and were the first Europeans to encounter the Río de la Plata. Although the expedition was historically consequential, it was short-lived and ended abruptly when native peoples killed Solís and a contingent of men who went ashore near the mouth of the Río de la Plata.19

As evidenced by the fate of Solís, to carry out successful expeditions through the South

American interior, early European travelers had to negotiate their very presence by incorporating themselves into well-established indigenous networks of sovereignty and fluctuating political alliances.20 The consequences of working outside the native sociopolitical context are apparent in the narrative of Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca’s early sixteenth century expeditions into the

Paraguay River basin. In 1540, King Charles I named Cabeza de Vaca governor of the new

Spanish administrative province of Río de la Plata and charged him with Christianizing the local

Indians and finding reliable routes through which to connect the isolated riverine port of

Asunción with the Andean mining district of Charcas.21 Previous explorers had motivated a surge of expeditions by reporting news of successful inter-continental treks that successfully reached Charcas through navigable routes across the fluvial plains of the Chaco.22

19 Rolena Adorno and Patrick Charles Pautz, eds., Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca, vol. 1 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999), 383.

20 Catherine J Julien, Desde el oriente: documentos para la historia del oriente boliviano y Santa Cruz la Vieja, 1542-1597 (Santa Cruz de la Sierra: Fondo Editorial Municipal, 2008), xv.

21 Baker H. Morrow, “Translator’s Note,” in The South American Expeditions, 1540-1545, by Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca, First Edition (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2011), xiii. During the mid-sixteenth century, the province of Río de la Plata was located in Paraguay but also included portions of modern-day Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay.

22 Adorno and Pautz, Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca, 1:383. One of the most remarkable instances in which European parties attempted to reach Charcas from the Atlantic was the journey made on foot from the Brazilian coast by shipwrecked victims of the ill-fated Solís expedition. 23

From 1541 to 1544, Cabeza de Vaca led a series of such expeditions himself and commissioned others from his base of operations at Asunción. Many of these expeditions traveled north and northwest through the Chaco and into the eastern margins of Chiquitos in search of gold and silver mines as well as reliable routes to the mines of the Andes. In the narrative of his expedition known as Comentarios, Cabeza de Vaca claimed that during a 1544 excursion up the Río Paraguay, he complied with a mandate given by royal officials to halt the search for precious metals and return to Asunción. Many of the expeditionaries accompanying him, however, argued that the decision to turn back was made solely by the governor himself and against the will of the company and the royal officials in attendance. The arguments of the company received a more amenable audience. As a result, soon after his arrival in Asunción,

Cabeza de Vaca was arrested and placed aboard a ship bound for Spain.23

In addition to the charge that Cabeza de Vaca abused his power by halting an expedition against the will of royal officials, his detractors made other accusations including claims that he restricted trade with Indians to himself and his closest supporters, abused native peoples when it pleased him, and confiscated the property of men under his command without providing compensation.24 Despite such claims, upon closer review it appears that a number of Cabeza de

Vaca’s governing policies actually favored Indians rather than the Spanish men who searched for gold and the acquisition of encomiendas (grants of indigenous laborers). Not surprisingly, policies viewed as indigenous-friendly would have been perceived as intolerable to opportunistic adventurers and settlers seeking fortunes during a period of conquest and colonial expansion in

23 Ibid., 1:392–93.

24 Ibid.

24 which both Iberian empires strengthened their efforts to obtain Indian labor and locate sources of mineral wealth.25

Published in 1555, the Comentarios was a collaborative work produced by Cabeza de

Vaca and his secretary, Pedro de Hernández, a political ally who gave a formal deposition in

Madrid regarding the ex-governor’s legal troubles in Río de la Plata.26 Written as a self- advocating defense intended for both the crown and a wider audience, the Comentarios depicts

Cabeza de Vaca as a capable and just governor caught in an unfortunate sequence of conflicts caused by the avarice and envy of the men he attempted to command.27 The narrative is important for modern studies of Chiquitos and the greater Paraguayan river basin because it reveals insightful descriptions of the region’s natural environment and native inhabitants during the years immediately following European contact.28 Cabeza de Vaca conveys a sense of fascination with the cultural diversity and political complexity of the indigenous groups living along the Paraná and Paraguay rivers and throughout the surrounding lowlands. Portions of the

Comentarios portray the greater Paraguayan river basin, the Chaco, and the eastern margins of

Chiquitos as biologically and culturally diverse borderlands with different ethnic groups fragmented among numerous and changing polities. During each of his journeys, Cabeza de

Vaca recorded instances in which he had to navigate volatile indigenous political landscapes and intricate trading networks, and he often evaluated indigenous actions and motivations. From his

25 Cynthia Radding, Landscapes of Power and Identity: Comparative Histories in the Sonoran Desert and the Forests of Amazonia from Colony to Republic (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 47.

26 Morrow, “Translator’s Note,” xiv.

27 Adorno and Pautz, Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca, 1:405.

28 Radding, Landscapes of Power and Identity, 45–53.

25 account, we infer that he was forced to rely on the intimate knowledge of native peoples to traverse the varied natural environment and difficult terrain.29

In 1542, as part of the same wave of expeditions that included the excursions under the auspices of Cabeza de Vaca, the lieutenant governor of Río de la Plata, Domingo de Irala, led a group of men from Asunción up the Paraguay River to the Pantanal, the massive wetlands southeast of Chiquitos.30 Irala recorded his encounters with diverse indigenous groups who participated in a vast trading network that intersected Chiquitos and connected the tropical lowlands of Amazonia and the Paraguayan River basin to the Andean highlands. He departed from Asunción again in 1548 to traverse large portions of the Chaco and the eastern savannas of

Chiquitos.31 Heading west from these regions and following a route revealed to him by native guides, Irala and his party crossed the Río Grande where they met Spanish-speaking Indians laboring under encomienda service for Spaniards living in Charcas.32 During his travels, Irala interacted with numerous native populations and even compiled a list of indigenous ethnic designations called parcialidades for the Chiquitos region and the adjacent plains and riverine forests. Many of these monikers reappear decades later in documents recording encomienda grants and other affairs related to the founding of Santa Cruz.33

29 Morrow, “Translator’s Note,” xiii–xix.

30 Adorno and Pautz, Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca, 1:392. Irala’s official title under Cabeza de Vaca was maestre de campo and he was responsible for pacifying newly claimed territory, administering justice, and ensuring the fair treatment of Indians.

31 Catherine J Julien, “La descripción de la población del oriente boliviano en el siglo XVI,” in Desde el oriente: documentos para la historia del oriente boliviano y Santa Cruz la Vieja, 1542-1597 (Santa Cruz de la Sierra: Fondo Editorial Municipal, 2008), 51–52.

32 Domingo Martínez de Irala, “Relación de la jornada al norte,” in Desde el oriente: documentos para la historia del oriente boliviano y Santa Cruz la Vieja, 1542-1597, ed. Catherine J Julien (Santa Cruz de la Sierra: Fondo Editorial Municipal, 2008), 1–11.

33 Isabelle Combés, Diccionario Étnico: Santa Cruz la Vieja y Su Entorno en el Siglo XVI (Santa Cruz, Bolivia: Instituto de Misionología-Editorial Itinerarios, 2010), 8–9. 26

Subsequent Spanish expeditions to the area were driven by the motivation to establish permanent settlements north of the Pantanal from which to form a string of future outposts even farther afield to secure the unexplored lands outside the jurisdiction of Asunción. A 1557 expedition with this intent headed by Ñuflo de Cháves, former member of the Irala and Cabeza de Vaca expeditions, traveled a more westerly course than the previous incursions and encountered a number of native groups whose descendants would inhabit the Jesuit missions of

Chiquitos a century later. Documents related to this expedition contain the earliest references to the diverse predecessors of the Chiquitos peoples. In 1561, after crossing the Río Grande traveling west, Cháves founded the original settlement of Santa Cruz de la Sierra “la Vieja” on the southern reaches of Chiquitos where he distributed the region’s first encomienda grants.34

The fate of these sixteenth century expeditions shows, on the one hand, that the indigenous peoples of the greater Paraguayan River basin were divided into multiple groups and, on the other hand, that many of these groups fiercely resisted the advance of European incursions attempting to move northwestward through the region.

Jesuit Missionary Accounts: The Evangelization of Chiquitos

Jesuit missionaries wrote the vast majority of the documentary sources about Chiquitos during the eighteenth century because they represented the strongest permanent European presence in the isolated and sparsely populated region at the time. These archived reports, missives, and published histories, many of which have been printed by historians in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, reveal important accounts related to the first long-term

34 Jose Maria Garcia Recio, Analisis de una sociedad de frontera: Santa Cruz de la Sierra en los siglos XVI y XVII (Sevilla: Excma. Diputacion Provincial de Sevilla, 1988), 212–13. A royal cédula or decree gave provincial governors the power to distribute encomiendas. Conquistadors and their descendants were the first colonists eligible to receive the highly coveted grants. 27 interactions between Indians and Europeans in Chiquitos and comprise the documentary foundation for modern studies of the region’s Jesuit period. The accounts written by Father Juan

Patricio Fernández are among the earliest published documentary sources concerning the physical and human geography of Chiquitos. In the late seventeenth century, Fernández traveled to Chiquitos and, together with Father Juan Bautista de Zea, he founded the mission of San Juan.

Fernández also lived in the mission of San Rafael and, in 1706; he became the rector of the Jesuit college of Tarija.35

According to Fernández, Chiquitos was a land of varied terrain, geology and climate which fostered abundant natural and cultivated resources. He was especially impressed by the human geography and seemingly boundless cultural diversity he encountered and remarked that the province’s languages were as infinite as its distinct nations of indigenous people.36 Echoing sentiments of the Spanish explorers who visited the region before him, Fernández depicted

Chiquitos as a contested frontier and he recounted instances of intercultural warfare, indigenous migrations, and territorial conflicts between native populations and the expanding Iberian empires.37

Following the path worn by Fernández, the Bavarian Jesuit Julián Knogler traveled to

Chiquitos in 1752 and worked in the missions of San Javier and Santa Ana, located at the

35 Javier Matienzo et al., eds., Chiquitos En Las Anuas de La Compañía de Jesús (1691-1767), 1a ed, Colección Scripta Autochtona 6 (Cochabamba, Bolivia: Instituto Latinoamericano de Misionología : Itinerarios Editorial, 2011), 439.

36 Juan Patricio Fernández, Relación historial de las misiones de indios chiquitos: que en el Paraguay tienen los padres de la compañía de Jesús (Asunción del Paraguay: A. de Uribe, 1896), 2–5. Fernandez’s Relación, written in 1723 and published multiple times, recounted the founding of the missions in Chiquitos. It is important to note that portions of this history are based on an earlier, much shorter account written by another Jesuit named Lucas Caballero.

37 Guillermo Cárdiff Furlong, “De La Asunción a Los Chiquitos Por El Río Paraguay: Tentativa Frustrada En 1703, ‘Breve Relación’ Inédita Del Padre José Francisco de Arce,” Archivum Historicum Societatis Iesu, no. VII (January 1, 1938): 59–60. 28 western and eastern margins of Chiquitos respectively, for nearly twenty years. In 1769, Knogler wrote an account of his experiences in the mission communities and his reflections have been an invaluable source for modern scholars of the region. The German historian Werner Hoffman translated Knogler’s text from German to Spanish and published portions of the work in 1979 to make it more widely accessible.38 Knogler described Chiquitos as a harsh environment of vast, thick forests, open planes, and seasonal marshes. At the time of his visit, the province and its people were subject to extreme weather patterns characterized by polarized periods of heavy flooding and severe droughts that continuously altered a landscape dotted with meandering streams and fluctuating wetlands. He also recounted that the native populations exploited this unforgiving climate and landscape by cultivating New World plants such as palm, yucca and corn, as well as Old World species like lemon trees brought by missionaries. A number of the introduced cultigens such as apples and peaches, however, failed to prosper due to the humid climate and insects. Knogler indicated that the Jesuits adapted to the alien environment over time and taught the indigenous inhabitants of the mission towns various European horticultural and agricultural methods to increase the yield of their staple crops. Mission Indians supplemented this European inflected diet by continuing traditional practices such as hunting for deer, bear and monkeys and fishing the surrounding rivers and wetlands.39

According to Knogler, before their conversion to the Catholic faith and the accompanying settled mission life, the different groups who would become the Chiquitos were uncivilized, seminomadic peoples living under the tenuous influence of petty caciques who

38 Werner Hoffmann, “Textos sobre las misiones jesuíticas entre los chiquitanos: El Padre Julían Knogler y su relato sobre el País y la nación de los chiquitanos,” in Las misiones jesuíticas entre los Chiquitanos (Buenos Aires: Fundación para la Educación, la Ciencia y la Cultura, 1979), 120.

39 Julián Knogler, “Textos sobre las misiones jesuíticas entre los chiquitanos: El Padre Julían Knogler y su relato sobre el País y la nación de los chiquitanos,” in Las misiones jesuíticas entre los Chiquitanos, ed. Werner Hoffmann (Buenos Aires: Fundación para la Educación, la Ciencia y la Cultura, 1979), 121–32. 29 wielded very little governing power. Knogler claimed that pre-mission caciques only exercised a measure of true authority while organizing hunting and fishing parties and commanding groups of armed men in times of war. Thus, he argues, native political organization was chaotic and volatile and in need of pacification and effective leadership. The Jesuits, in his view, moved into the region in order to civilize and instruct this wild, unorganized, and poorly governed population.40

In their efforts to civilize the native peoples of Chiquitos, Jesuit missionaries constructed permanent villages in carefully chosen locations well suited for old world agricultural practices and European civic life. The Jesuits’ orientation to European crops and temperate climates, however, made it difficult for them to select sites in the tropical environment of Chiquitos suitable for establishing permanent villages. As a result, they relied on indigenous knowledge for developing missions in the region and moved a number of their settlements from one place to another. In addition to instructing the tenets of the Catholic faith, the Jesuits taught mission

Indians the discipline and work habits necessary for a civilized existence in accordance with Old

World cultural norms and a Christian world view. Knogler drew a sharp contrast between what he viewed as the newly civilized mission communities and the cruel indigenous groups living in savage disarray outside of the Jesuit settlements. He specifically described the Guaycurús as a warlike people who maintained a constant threat to Jesuit missionary efforts and used horses acquired from the encroaching Portuguese to raid Indian and European settlements.41 The

Guaycurús are ethnographically identified as Kadewei and not considered part of the Chiquitos families of “nations”.

40 Ibid., 121–32.

41 Ibid., 139–41. 30

Throughout Knogler’s tenure, numerous Guaycurúan bands living in villages in the

Chaco boreal frequently raided the Jesuit missions located in the southeastern corner of

Chiquitos. These violent assaults inspired the diplomatic visit of the Jesuit priest Joseph Sánchez

Labrador whose informative chronicles were published by Guillermo Cárdiff Furlong in 1952.

With the help of indigenous intermediaries, Father Sánchez Labrador traveled north from the

Mbayá mission community located on the Río Ipané, a tributary of the Río Paraguay, across myriad tropical wetlands connected to the Pantanal, and through numerous native polities to reach the easternmost Chiquitos mission of Santo Corazón.42 The account of Sánchez Labrador’s arduous journey reveals that during the late Jesuit period, the greater Paraguayan River basin comprised an indigenous borderland of varied and often difficult terrain positioned at the intersection of fluctuating territorial boundaries on the fringes of the Iberian colonial imperium.43

From the perspective of Jesuit missionaries like Fernández, Knogler, and Sánchez Labrador who were engaged in the daunting endeavor of indigenous evangelization, Chiquitos was a wild, dangerous and unwieldy region located on the hinterlands of civilization. Even during the most successful years of the Jesuit period, missionaries were the few permanent European residents of

Chiquitos. Thus for them, the region occupied an incomprehensible space in which a confusing array of cultures, ethnicities, and polities competed for resources, influence and territory in ways that complicated an uncertain Iberian colonial project.

42 Radding, Landscapes of Power and Identity, 299.

43 Cárdiff Furlong, “De La Asunción a Los Chiquitos Por El Río Paraguay: Tentativa Frustrada En 1703, ‘Breve Relación’ Inédita Del Padre José Francisco de Arce,” 59–60. 31

Nineteenth Century Travel Narratives: International Imperial Competition and the Commercial Potential of Chiquitos

During the mid to late eighteenth century, Enlightenment thought, dynastic change, and dramatic colonial reforms spurred the Spanish crown to begin organizing research expeditions to assess the state of its far-flung empire. In the spring of 1789, the Bohemian polymath Thaddäus

Häenke received an offer to join one such royally sanctioned expedition to collect scientific, commercial and administrative information concerning Spain’s imperial reaches in and near the

Pacific Ocean. The expedition leader, Alejandro Malaspina, needed a naturalist with special training in botany to complete his team of scientists and he offered the important position to

Häenke. Not yet 30 years of age, Häenke had earned a strong reputation among members of

Europe’s scientific community and boasted formal training in mathematics, astronomy, botany, music, chemistry, mineralogy, and medicine. Häenke also held a prestigious post at the Smíchov

Botanical Gardens in Prague before taking another highly regarded position at the Imperial

Gardens of Schönbrunn in Vienna.44

Despite entertaining other promising career opportunities, Häenke accepted Malaspina’s offer in June of 1789. After securing permission and funding from the Kingdom of Bohemia,

Häenke traveled to Madrid to meet Spanish emissaries before joining Malaspina and the other expedition members in the coastal city of Cadíz.45 Malaspina and the team spent a month in

Cadíz to complete preparations before beginning the transatlantic voyage to Montevideo in

August. After weeks on the open sea, Häenke’s first attempt at landfall in South America was harrowing. On 23 November 1789, his ship entered the Río de La Plata within sight of

44 María Victoria Ibáñez Montoya, La expedición Malaspina, 1789-1794, Tomo IV, Trabajos científicos y correspondencia de Tadeo Haenke (Madrid: Lunwerg Editores, S.A., 1987), 23–33.

45 Ibid., 32–33.

32

Montevideo before running aground near Punta Carretas. Häenke was not injured in the shipwreck but he fell sick shortly thereafter and had to spend three weeks convalescing before he could begin his research.46

Once Häenke had fully recovered, he rejoined Malaspina’s expedition and traveled through portions of what are today the countries of Uruguay, Argentina, Chile, Peru, Ecuador, and Colombia, and into parts of Central America and Mexico. The expedition then crossed the

Pacific to arrive at the Marianas Islands before sailing on to the Philippines, Mindanao,

Australia, New Zealand, Tonga and other neighboring islands. In July of 1793, after a long period research in the South Pacific, Malaspina and his team made a return transpacific voyage to the Americas and landed at El Callao on the coast of what is now Peru. Malaspina decided to leave the ships, traverse the Andes, and cross the continent again by land to reach Buenos Aires.

At El Callao, Häenke and a few other team members split from the broader expedition to carry out more targeted research in Alto Perú before rejoining Malaspina in Buenos Aires.47

From coastal Peru, Häenke set out to tour portions of the Andean Cordillera located in present day Bolivia, before heading southeast to Cochabamba, capital of a new colonial intendancy. In Cochabamba, Häenke established a close relationship with the presiding intendant governor, Francisco de Viedma, who offered to support his studies. With Viedma’s administrative backing secured, Häenke commenced intensive fieldwork in Moxos and

Chiquitos, sparsely populated provinces included in the Intendancy of Cochabamba. Shortly after arriving in these remote lowlands, he set up a base of operations in Santa Cruz where he purchased a ranch from which to produce agricultural products for export to Europe. Once these

46 Ibid., 33.

47 Ibid., 33–36.

33 affairs were in order, Häenke set out to follow in the footsteps of the Catholic missionaries who evangelized the region, a practice he had picked up during his time in the Philippines, and he made multiple tours through the former Jesuit mission towns of Moxos and Chiquitos.48

While meeting his official responsibilities as a naturalist and botanist, Häenke also took advantage of the travel opportunities afforded him by Malaspina’s expedition to indulge in other wide-ranging interests that included anthropology, archaeology, linguistics and musicology.

Foreshadowing the research of nineteenth century European naturalists like Alcides d’Orbigny,

Häenke diligently assembled vocabularies of native languages, wrote reports on pre-Columbian archaeological sites, and took ethnographic records of indigenous music and dance. In Moxos, he compiled vocabularies of indigenous languages such as Mobima, Cayuguevos and Pupua among others. During visits to local Yuracaré settlements, he took note of the particular way the group had assimilated the Catholic liturgy to ancestral cultural traditions and practices.49

Much of Häenke’s work was also humanitarian in nature. In collaboration with Intendant

Governor Viedma, Häenke endeavored to find sustainable economic opportunities for the isolated lowland communities and to improve the standard of living and public health for the region’s population. As a trained physician, he began medical and public health projects that included administering smallpox vaccinations and delivering life-saving pharmaceuticals to local indigenous villages.50 To identify commercially viable natural resources, he applied his knowledge of geology and chemistry. After testing different salt deposits in the region, Häenke determined the high quality and potential profitability of salt extracted from mines located near

48 Ibid., 35–37, 50.

49 Ibid., 35–38, 50–52.

50 Ibid., 37, 52.

34 the former Jesuit mission towns of Chiquitos. Indians and Europeans had mined salt in this area for decades and Häenke worked diligently to identify the richest deposits as a needed source of revenue for the surrounding towns and villages.51 Government administrators eventually took notice of the province’s high quality salt deposits during the early Republican period and began managing quarries near the western Chiquitos mission communities of Santo Corazón and

Santiago as state resources.52

In 1798, Häenke sent the first draft of his research report on the environs in and near the

Intendancy of Cochabamba to Spain. Titled Introducción a la historia natural de la provincia de

Cochabamba y circunvecinas, the work outlined a number of novel interdisciplinary findings

Häenke had made during his fieldwork and shed light on the diverse and remote indigenous cultures of the region. Telégrafo Mercantil, a widely distributed newspaper printed in Buenos

Aires, published a few chapters of the report in 1809, making Häenke’s findings available to a broad readership in South America. In addition to extensive information regarding his discoveries in natural history, environmental science, botany, linguistics and anthropology,

Häenke’s report includes passages addressing a number of indigenous social issues of the time that he viewed as unjust. For example, he made known his opposition to the onerous burdens placed on Moxos and Chiquitos by a heavy-handed administrative organization recently implemented by the colonial government; he expressed support for numerous subjugated and impoverished indigenous populations, and he criticized the domineering actions of parochial clergy and European settlers who had exploited native peoples for their labor and commercial

51 ABNB, Ramo Mojos y Chiquitos (hereafter MyCh GRM) vol. 30, exp. XLIV, folios 1-11. This document contains correspondence between the governor of the province of Chiquitos and the Viceroy of Río de la Plata regarding the removal of troops stationed in Santiago de Chiquitos and their replacement with Spanish settlers. The reasons for this change included the reported abuse of Indians carried out by soldiers and newly introduced efforts to build up a population of Spanish subjects to provide a buffer against Portuguese encroachment from the east.

52 Radding, Landscapes of Power and Identity, 297–98. 35 products for years. According to Häenke’s observations, during the end of the eighteenth century, Moxos and Chiquitos were poor and marginalized provinces inhabited by indigenous populations struggling under stifling and abusive colonial bureaucracies after the departure of the

Jesuits. Häenke was known to have opposed the colonial exploitation of Spanish America and after his visit, rumors circulated that he may have also been an apologist for the coming independence movements.53 In the years following the wars for independence across South

America, Häenke’s work began to garner attention for its contributions to the burgeoning patrimony of a sovereign Bolivian republic formed in 1825.54

The independence of Spain’s American colonies in the early decades of the nineteenth century opened the young nation-states to international research expeditions similar in form to the Spanish led Malaspina expedition. These expeditions held some distinctions, however, because they were sanctioned by non-Iberian European states competing for geopolitical and economic interests during a different age of imperialism and global commerce. New and transnational commercial markets and financial opportunities played a central role for most of these expeditions but a number of them also incorporated multidisciplinary scientific research projects much like those carried out by Häenke decades earlier. In the first half of the nineteenth century, a series of French researchers directed expeditions that gathered information about the newly independent nations as they attempted to debut on a worldwide stage. For the purposes of this study, I will review the travel accounts written by the leaders of two such French expeditions, Alcides d’Orbigny and Francis Castelnau. The records left behind by these men

53 Ibáñez Montoya, La expedición Malaspina, 1789-1794, Tomo IV, Trabajos científicos y correspondencia de Tadeo Haenke, 36–37, 52.

54 Manuel V Ballivián, “Foreword,” in Tadeo Haenke: escritos, precedidos de algunos apuntes para su biografía y acompañados de varios documentos illustrativos, ed. Manuel V Ballivián and Pedro Kramer (La Paz: Impr. y litografía de "El Nacional de I.V. Vial, 1898), i–iii. 36 comprise an extensive documentary source for eastern Bolivia during the formative years of the

Republic.

D'Orbigny led the most renown of the nineteenth century French expeditions to South

America from 1826 to 1833. With support from the Muséum d'Histoire Naturelle' in Paris, d'Orbigny traveled through Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay, Chile, Bolivia, and Peru. He published his findings between 1835 and 1847 in 9 tomes and 11 volumes under the title Voyage dans l'Amérique Méridionale.55 From 1829 to 1832, d’Orbigny traveled through Bolivia gathering information related to geology, biology, and indigenous cultures. At the conclusion of his travels, he had amassed an impressive ethnographic and anthropological collection and had recorded the vocabularies of thirty-six indigenous languages. His anthropological findings, published as a major synthetic work titled, L’Homme Américain, were among the most comprehensive at the time and made lasting contributions to the developing field of Americanist ethnography.56

D’Orbigny spent the summer of 1831 visiting the missions of Chiquitos and he recorded his experiences there in Voyage. He described the region as biologically rich and geologically varied with an exceptionally high diversity of indigenous ethnicities and languages. D’Orbigny’s detailed records contain information regarding native appearance, linguistics, dress, music, vdance, games, economy, subsistence practices, and social structures. His notes on the ethnic and linguistic diversity of the mission towns became a source de rigueur for future historians and anthropologists. According to d’Orbigny, each mission was comprised of discreet indigenous populations that he called “sections”. These sections corresponded to what are now more widely

55 Marie-Thérèse Venec-Peyre, “Alcide d’Orbigny (1802-1857): sa vie et son oeuvre,” Comptes Rendus : Palevol, 2002, 313–14.

56 Alcides Dessalines d’Orbigny, Viaje a la América Meridional, Tomo III, trans. Alfredo Cepeda (Buenos Aires: Editorial Futuro, 1945), 1153–57.

37 referred to as parcialidades, the Spanish term used throughout the colonial period and generally understood by modern scholars as dialectically different groups.57 After acknowledging the immense diversity of the indigenous groups of Chiquitos and the ethnic complexity within each mission community, d’Orbigny lauded the ability of the Jesuits to consolidate several native groups into mission communities all speaking one common language known as Chiquitana or

Besiro. In fact, much of d’Orbigny’s musings about the missions and their native inhabitants depict the years of Jesuit rule as a golden age of order and prosperity. Echoing Häenke’s earlier sentiments, d’Orbigny believed that the post-Jesuit years ushered in a clearly discernible period of declension in which the missions and their diverse indigenous populations languished in a state of abject poverty only exacerbated by the exploitative practices of constantly changing and unstable administrations.58

A decade later, another French expedition, led by Conde Francis de Castelnau, crossed the South American continent from Brazil to Peru and documented important information for future studies of Chiquitos. Castelnau’s party was made up of a team of prominent scientific researchers that included zoologists Emile Deville, mining engineer Eugene d’Osery, and botanist Hugh Algernon Weddell, a protégé of Adrien de Jussieu, presiding president of the renowned Académie des Sciences. With the support of the Muséum d'Histoire Naturelle' and political backing from the Maison d’Orléans, Castelnau and his group of researchers set out to explore the poorly charted Amazon basin in an effort to determine the area’s potential for economic development. In order to locate navigable routes between major watersheds in the

57 Roberto Tomichá Charupá, La Primera Evangelización En Las Reducciones de Chiquitos, Bolivia, 1691-1767: Protagonistas y Metodología Misional (Cochabamba, Bolivia: Editorial Verbo Divino, 2002), 221–23, 255–58.

58 d’Orbigny, Viaje a la América Meridional, 1153–1157.

38 basin, they mapped the course of the Amazon River and its primary tributaries. The expedition had a number of scientific objectives and team members carefully compiled an inventory of the natural resources they encountered. Despite these objectives, however, the economic interests of

Castelnau’s sponsors were the driving force behind the expedition. Castelnau’s team focused primarily on Brazil and neighboring regions because they believed these environs contained especially high concentrations of natural resources deemed ideal for commercial exploitation.59

Castelnau arrived in Rio de Janeiro on June 17, 1843 and remained in Brazil until the middle of 1845 when the expedition entered eastern Bolivia from Mato Grosso. Traveling west to Santa Cruz, Castelnau passed through the Chiquitos mission villages and took note of the province’s geography and culture. Although he remained in Bolivia for six-months, he dedicated most of that time to replenishing supplies rather than carrying out thorough explorations because the country was not considered a central objective of the expedition. Upon returning to Europe,

Castelnau’s team published records concerning geography, botany, archaeology, ethnography, and geography in a series of installments. Although the publications did not have a wide-ranging impact at the time, Castelnau’s experiences and the direct observations he recorded in his works continue to reveal important information for scholars of eastern Bolivia and Chiquitos.60

Castelnau’s visit coincided with a period of nation formation and state organization for the fledgling Bolivian Republic. The Chiquitos that he described was a region experiencing significant population growth, a developing infrastructure, and a new government. Impoverished indigenous communities possessed cattle ranches and farms in the area, and native peasants cultivated sugar, cotton, and tobacco. Some native populations produced crude textiles of

59 Castelnau, En el Corazón de América del Sur, 17.

60 Ibid., 18-19. 39 unbleached cotton known as lienzos, which indigenous weavers had exported from Chiquitos since the Jesuit period. Castelnau’s observations also indicate that the Indian populations of the mission towns managed some measure of cultural preservation. Despite recent large-scale political transformations, and the persistent and longstanding efforts on the part of non- indigenous administrators to unify the province under centralized governing structures, the indigenous peoples of Chiquitos encountered by Castelnau continued to adhere to their own separate cultural identities and organized themselves around distinct ethnic affiliations speaking ancestral languages.

The maintenance of autonomy and cultural viability played out in the midst of what

Castelnau, Häenke and d’Orbigny all understood as a much longer era of post-Jesuit decline.

Within this setting, indigenous representatives struggled to retain the strong presence in local government that they had held for more than a century. Castelnau recorded instances of unrest among Indian leaders unhappy with such marginalizing efforts from outside governing structures intent on maximizing the economic production of Chiquitos while upholding the province’s political and geographical isolation.61 These conflicts and others will be discussed in greater detail in the chapters that follow. During the contentious years of secularization and administrative consolidation, eastern Chiquitos became a boundary between the recently independent nation-state of Bolivia and territory controlled by Brazil. As such, it comprised a newly reoriented peripheral space of contact and exchange traversed by Bolivians, Brazilians, fugitive African slaves, and fragmented indigenous populations.62

61 Ibid., 30-63.

62 Herbert S. Klein, African Slavery in Latin America and the Caribbean (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 251. African slaves from Brazil had strong motivations for crossing into Bolivian territory at this time. Although slavery would not be completely abolished in Bolivia until 1851, in 1831 the young republic declared that all slaves born since independence in 1825 were free. 40

The travel narratives written by Häenke, d’Orbigny, and Castelnau provide us with valuable ethnographic information concerning Chiquitos during a relatively understudied temporal scope that spanned from the first decades after the Jesuit expulsion until the founding of the Bolivian Republic in 1825. They reveal sweeping changes for the indigenous societies and cultures of the eastern lowlands, convey images of the deteriorating state of the mission towns, and give a few details regarding the ways in which native peoples negotiated the turmoil and disruption characteristic of such changes. The narratives also point out that Chiquitos continued to function as a pervious and disputed borderland space in the face of the ever-evolving dynamics of local politics, administration and commerce. The boundaries and zones of contact within this borderland shifted to take on different meanings, however, as newly emergent power structures attempted to assert authority and to dictate the territorial boundaries and social organization of this liminal space.

Historical and Anthropological Studies of Chiquitos

Modern research on the imperial borderlands of South America privileges the impact of indigenous actors and imperial peripheries on the objectives of European metropolitan centers.

Spatially focused with sensitivity to social, economic, and cultural processes, recent borderlands studies demonstrate that native populations inhabiting the imperial fringes never existed as neutral pawns. Rather, they opportunistically chose sides, deftly manipulated their advantages, asserted autonomy, and frequently directed the outcomes of multifaceted intercultural encounters. As territorial and cultural boundary crossers, native peoples of the borderlands – majority populations with an intimate knowledge of the physical and political terrain – exploited their positions, their mobility and their numbers. A few scholars working specifically on colonial

Chiquitos and neighboring peripheral regions support these perceptions and the current trends in

41 borderlands historiography while opening new interpretive windows with studies related to such wide-ranging topics as evangelization, mission architecture, the natural environment, hybrid cultures and institutions and indigenous kinship structures and sociopolitical conventions. The following section surveys a number of these important works to review their contributions to our understanding of Chiquitos history and to point out the ways in which they inform my research.

Spanish historian, José María García Recio offers the most comprehensive study of the early years of European contact and settlement in Chiquitos during the sixteenth century. By skillfully investigating this poorly documented yet formative period, García Recio traces the development of a frontier society centered in Santa Cruz “La Vieja”. His findings reveal how the volatile nature of Indian and settler relations, repeated incursions of Spanish and Portuguese slaving expeditions, and the interactions between Jesuit missionaries and encomenderos

(grantees of indigenous laborers), affected native communities and influenced the trajectory of

Iberian imperial projects.63

Relying mostly on sixteenth and seventeenth century documentary sources found in

Spanish archives, García Recio sheds light on the historical processes involved in the establishment of Santa Cruz and underscores the points of conflict between an incipient colonial society, indigenous populations, and the preliminary years of Jesuit evangelization. He also emphasizes the punctuated violence characteristic of the period as well as the permeability of

Chiquitos as a liminal space of transmigration and intercultural exchange. His analysis of early

Hispanic institutions like the encomienda, which established asymmetrical forms of interdependence between Indians and Europeans, elucidates the critical antecedents of the Jesuit period and the gradual institutionalization of Spanish dominion in the region.

63 Garcia Recio, Analisis de una sociedad de frontera, 28–34. 42

García Recio’s sixteenth century investigations and pioneering contributions inform my research, but I place a greater emphasis on the understudied period between Jesuit expulsion and

Bolivian independence. These later years were characterized by shifting, cross-cultural and multilateral conflicts associated with a series of stalled efforts to implement local administrative changes within the broader setting of Spanish and Portuguese territorial consolidation. To examine this temporal scope against the context of earlier colonial developments covered by

García Recio, I draw on a predominately eighteenth and nineteenth century source base housed in South American archives.64

Bolivian historian Alcides Parejas Moreno and architect Virgilio Suárez focus the research for their co-authored study of Chiquitos solely on the Jesuit years. They examine the economic and social systems employed by Jesuit missionaries including their application of various didactic resources for evangelization, the use of hybrid architectural styles in the construction of mission buildings, the organization of planned settlements, and the ways in which native peoples shaped such imperatives. Through their analysis, Parejas and Suárez demonstrate that Jesuit evangelization in Chiquitos involved the provision of a cultural and economic infrastructure as well as an institutional framework. To achieve this, Jesuits built new mission settlements organized around regimented church attendance, the division of labor, training in agricultural practices, and a closely guided education in the arts, music and language.

They designed these settlements to be the foundation upon which to build a kingdom of God on earth. Thus, both the organization and the management of mission villages involved synthesizing spiritual elements of doctrinal teaching with temporal components like socio-spatial

64 Ibid.

43 arrangements, constructions methods and architectural styles that reflected both European and indigenous civic culture.65

Parejas and Suárez show that the planned use of land and space – a central aspect of the

Jesuits’ new evangelical order – included interrelated networks of buildings, agricultural fields, and towns. They created this model by borrowing from Franciscan missionary approaches which organized mission settlements around core sets of religious structures built in accordance with hybrid architectural styles. To erect buildings better suited to withstand the tropical climate,

Jesuits relied on native construction techniques. They also appropriated the architecture of indigenous buildings and integrated the great space characteristic of native communal houses into their Church designs.66

The Jesuits turned to the natural environment of Chiquitos in their efforts to produce building materials that they could utilize to match European aesthetics as closely as possible.

Such materials included plant and animal dyes applied as paint and the use of plasters made from mineral compounds like mica. Missionaries also merged native construction practices and architectural design with European sensibilities for carpentry and woodwork. For example, they became familiar with the wood qualities of a variety of local tree species and used specifically chosen hardwoods for load bearing walls while selecting precious softer woods for fashioning furniture, ornaments and other decorative effects incorporated into Church buildings.

The work of Parejas and Suárez provides a number of important findings that guide the sections of my project focused on the Jesuit period. By highlighting the persistence of pre-

Colombian architecture and civic culture in hybrid buildings and institutions, for example, and

65 Alcides Parejas Moreno and Virigilio Suárez, Chiquitos: Historia de Una Utopía (Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia: Cordecruz, Universidad Privada de Santa Cruz de la Sierra, 1992), 248–49.

66 Ibid., 250. 44 by demonstrating the importance of bilateral intercultural relationships, they offer novel vantage points from which to view the specific ways that indigenous groups influenced the social, administrative and physical organization of the missions. Despite these contributions, however, certain aspects of their study are shortsighted. Most prominently, they portray the Jesuit mission settlements as timeless and insular utopias inhabited by Europeans and Indians in equitable harmony.67 By contrast, my research shows that the missions were made up of changing and diverse populations arranged and rearranged according to uneven power relations marked by dynamic processes of mediation, struggle and acculturation.

The hybrid architectural design of the Chiquitos churches examined by Parejas and

Suárez has garnered significant attention from tourists and scholars alike throughout the twentieth century. Since the 1930s and 40s, there have been sustained efforts to restore many of the churches in order to preserve their unique design. The large-scale work involved in these restoration projects culminated in the recognition of the Chiquitos churches as world heritage sites by UNESCO in 1990. This international recognition has inspired historical studies similar to that carried out by Parejas and Suárez while drawing greater attention to the Jesuit architects responsible for designing the churches and the construction methods they employed.68

The most well-known of the Jesuit architects involved in the construction of the churches during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries was Martín Schmid. Born in what is now Switzerland, Schmid worked in the Chiquitos missions for three decades instructing neophytes, establishing schools, composing and teaching music, and designing churches and

67 Ibid., 250–51.

68 Eckhart Kühne, ed., Las Misiones Jesuíticas de Bolivia: Martin Schmid, 1694-1772 (Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia: Pro Helvetia, 1996), 10–11.

45 other mission buildings.69 Schmid has been credited with developing innovative architectural and construction methods used to build a number of the mission churches including those of San

Miguel and San Ignacio.70 According to Hans Roth, himself a Jesuit architect, and historian

Eckhart Kühne, Schmid along with another unknown architect developed a system of architectural expression unique to Chiquitos and a product of the region’s climate, natural environment and indigenous cultures. The legacy of Schmid’s innovations survives in Chiquitos today as many of the basic methods that characterize his system are still used in the region to build private homes and other simple structures.71

In 1996, as part of an exposition held in Bolivia to celebrate the 300 year anniversary of

Schmid’s birth, Roth and Kühne edited a collection of studies devoted to the Jesuit architect’s tenure in Chiquitos.72 Although the volume was intended primarily as a Schmid biopic, a number of the chapters also examine such themes as the fusion of indigenous and European religious rites, the Chiquitana language, various evangelization approaches and pedagogical practices of the Jesuits, the musical patrimony of the mission Indians, and, of course, church architecture.

The chapter co-written by Roth and Kühne opens with a discussion of Schmid’s architectural innovations before moving on to highlight twentieth century restoration projects in which Roth personally participated.73 Roth and Kühne assess the symbolic, communal and institutional

69 Ibid., 9 and 19.

70 Hans Roth and Eckhart Kühne, “Esta Nueva y Hermosa Iglesia: La Construcción y Restauración de Las Iglesias de Martin Schmid,” in Las Misiones Jesuíticas de Bolivia: Martin Schmid, 1694-1772 (Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia: Pro Helvetia, 1996), 89.

71 Ibid., 89–90.

72 Kühne, Las Misiones Jesuíticas de Bolivia: Martin Schmid, 1694-1772, 10–11.

73 Roth and Kühne, “Esta Nueva y Hermosa Iglesia: La Construcción y Restauración de Las Iglesias de Martin Schmid,” 89. 46 importance that the churches have held in the Chiquitos mission settlements since the Jesuit period. They argue that the long-term and painstaking church restorations of the twentieth century had much broader consequences than simply repairing and rebuilding the centuries-old structures.

Restorations required a significant amount of manual labor and project directors turned to the local population to fill the majority of the positions that made up the workforce. Roth and

Kühne show that this steady and reliable source of employment gave Chiquitano workers access to weekly wages which, in turn, generated a more inclusive monetary economy in the region.

Restoration projects also gave rise to educational programs that were open to the public and designed to teach potential workers different skills necessary for restoration work such as painting, carpentry, and sculpting, among others. Opportunities to gain education and technical skills along with greater access to paid labor and a monetary economy altered the existing social hierarchy in Chiquitos. Such changes, Roth and Kühne argue, freed the primarily indigenous lower classes from their longstanding positions of servitude and dependence. Moreover, because the churches occupied the social and spiritual center of each pueblo, community wide projects to restore the buildings in accordance with hybrid architectural styles of the Jesuit era influenced

Chiquitanos to direct greater attention to a common history and cultural heritage. Thus, the mission churches and their Jesuit legacy continue to play important roles in the development and maintenance of a shared identity for the people of Chiquitos.74

The development and importance of cultural and institutional hybridity is one of the central themes of David Block’s examination of the Jesuit missions located in the tropical Moxos region northwest of Chiquitos. Through this study, Block provides evidence for the existence of

74 Ibid., 100–101. 47 a distinct “mission culture” under which indigenous groups retained a measure of autonomy through hybrid institutions that survived until the frontier region entered the global market economy in the late 1800s. Like Roth and Kühne, Block examined cultural institutions introduced by the Jesuits. Instead of focusing solely on churches, however, he examined cabildos

(town councils), and showed how Indians adopted, altered and utilized them to protect and advance their own interests even as they collaborated with mission authorities and royal officials.

According to Block, the Jesuits’ success in the peripheral interior of South America was due to their willingness to accommodate Catholic orthodoxy to pre-Columbian religious, cultural, institutional and political traditions.75 While Parejas and Suárez and Roth and Kühne also highlight the impact of indigenous cultures on European institutions, Block goes a step further by tracing the evolving processes through which native peoples helped to develop hybrid forms of institutional and administrative structures in order to maintain some degree of sovereignty in relation to the imposition of mission imperatives. Block’s research shows that Jesuit missions were not static outposts of syncretism operating in symmetrical accord; rather they were necessarily dynamic and uneven dialogic spaces of fluid hybrid cultures that exemplified varying degrees of both European and indigenous traditions.

In Roberto Tomichá Charupá’s study of the Jesuit period of Chiquitos, he argues that the native peoples inhabiting the missions were protagonists in their own evangelization, and that they contributed to the formation of a new, “indo-Christian” culture similar in nature to the mission culture introduced by Block. While Tomichá’s concept of an indigenous-inflected Catholicism informs aspects of my research, his work on ethnic identity is especially relevant. He references an impressive corpus of Jesuit records found in archives in Europe and South America to examine

75 Block, Mission Culture on the Upper Amazon: Native Tradition, Jesuit Enterprise, and Secular Policy in Moxos, 1660-1810, 2–6. 48 a large number of indigenous ethnic monikers, many of which had origins dating to pre-European contact. Through this ambitious research, Tomichá has been able to demonstrate the immense complexity of the parcialidades that moved in and out of the missions over the course of two centuries and contributed to the formations of new ethnicities.76

Tomichá argues that the Jesuit missions of Chiquitos were “laboratories” of linguistic and cultural mixing that facilitated unique multicultural relations and produced new “mentalities”, traditions and worldviews. From this crucible emerged a distinct “Chiquitana” culture and an identity that contributed, along with other incipient hybrid cultures such as that of the Mojeña, to the development of a broader eastern Bolivian society and identity that exists today.77 The work of Tomichá provides an excellent point of departure for studies of ethnic identities among different indigenous groups of Chiquitos but it gives a rather fixed representation of the various ethnic names and language families that inhabited the mission communities throughout the Jesuit period.

My project builds upon Tomichá’s groundbreaking contributions, but I historicize the creation and recreation of ethnicities after the Jesuit expulsion and take care to perceive ethnonyms and identities as necessarily fluid and ever-changing.78

Cynthia Radding also addresses ethnic identity and the formation of hybrid cultures in her comparative study of Jesuit missions located in the arid lands of northwestern Mexico and the subtropical forests of Chiquitos.79 Radding views the geography and the natural environment of these two different Spanish borderlands as tools of analysis rather than simply stages upon which

76 Tomichá, La Primera Evangelización en Las Reducciones de Chiquitos, Bolivia, 1691-1767, 251–288.

77 Roberto Tomichá Charupá, “La Formación Socio-Cultural de Los Chiquitanos En El Oriente Boliviano, Siglos XVI-XVIII,” in Estudos Sobre Os Chiquitanos No Brasil E Na Bolivia : História, Língua, Cultura E Territorialidade (Goiânia, Brazil: Goiânia : Editora da UCG, 2008), 238–242.

78 Tomichá, La Primera Evangelización en Las Reducciones de Chiquitos, Bolivia, 1691-1767, 251–288.

79 Radding, Landscapes of Power and Identity, 5. 49 historical processes played out. From this perspective, she shows that before and after European contact, the indigenous peoples of both regions developed their understandings of spatial organization and practices of inter- and intra-community relations in response to connections with and conceptions of local landscapes. Conversely, she argues, as spaces constructed through human labor, local landscapes emerged from cultural as well as ecological processes.80

Reflecting themes from David Block’s study of Moxos, including indigenous cultural resiliency and adaptation, Radding’s analysis reveals that in the contrasting environmental settings of Sonora and Chiquitos, some native populations were able to carve out separate spaces and develop or maintain their ethnicities, while others adopted strategies of integration. Both outcomes, she argues, resulted in fragmented ethnic identities. Radding also points out that the environment and natural landscape influenced the historical processes related to indigenous cultural persistence and adaptation. Although colonial institutions altered natural landscapes, they still had to function within the significant limitations those landscapes imposed. These understandings of space, physical environments and landscapes guide my examination of the natural settings of Chiquitos and the sociocultural and material construction of the region.81

In the sections of Radding’s study focused more specifically on ethnic identity, she shows that indigenous populations, through the separation, relocation, and eventual congregation of disparate linguistic families and ethnic affiliations, produced “ethnic mosaics”. The social and cultural meanings of these ethnic markers, she argues, indicated intersecting processes of the amalgamation and fragmentation of communities and kin groups. Seen in this light, it is evident that ethnicity emerges from persistently fluctuating historical developments. My research

80 Ibid., 7.

81 Ibid., 7–9. 50 magnifies this perspective while focusing exclusively on Chiquitos to uncover the particular ways in which processes of cultural adaptation among the native peoples inhabiting this borderland developed in tandem with the European colonial enterprise.82

Radding’s work on nineteenth century commercial development in the Chiquitos mission communities directs my analysis of the post-Jesuit period. Her findings support the opinions of

Häenke, d’Orbigny and Castelnau who saw Chiquitos as an impoverished region suffering through a period of declension brought on by the exploitative policies of rotating government officials and repeated cycles of administrative consolidation. According to Radding, during the late- and post-colonial periods, external administrators sanctioned various political and economic strategies intended to increase the exportable goods produced in Chiquitos. These strategies included the introduction of mechanized textile workshops designed to ramp up cloth production in a region that had manufactured textiles using traditional methods for more than a century. The indigenous spinners and weavers who labored in these workshops under unfamiliar conditions saw no increase in remuneration for their extra production. To make matters worse, non-Indian administrators and priests strictly mediated the indigenous workers’ access to economic markets outside of the missions. As Radding shows, such imposed transformations impacted internal governance, commercial expansion, and the economic roles of the mission communities in the years following Jesuit expulsion. These developments, in turn, precipitated significant and broader ecological, sociocultural and economic changes for the region’s indigenous populations.83

82 Ibid., 117.

83 Ibid., 242–47. 51

Mission economy and commercial development are the focal points of Julia Sarreal’s study of the Guaraní missions established by Jesuits in the Río de la Plata region during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Located southeast of the Chaco Boreal, the thirty missions of the Río de la Plata were the wealthiest and most densely populated of all the Catholic missions founded in the Americas. Sarreal’s detailed economic study offers a different approach to ethnohistory as most of the scholarship on these missions and their indigenous populations can be categorized as cultural histories. By employing a detailed economic analysis, Sarreal illustrates important aspects of the missions not covered by culturally focused studies to provide a more comprehensive understanding of the daily lives of the Guaraní and their central role in mission commerce. Sarreal uses Jesuit letters, reports and ledgers as well as documents written by the Guaraní to support her argument that the Guaraní created the economic framework of a successful mission enterprise and were the principal agents of social development during a post-

Jesuit period of economic and demographic decline. Although Sarreal’s primary concern is the mission economy, she does not ignore cultural processes; rather she extends the analytic lens used by David Block to examine how the Guaraní shaped a hybrid mission culture in the greater

Río de la Plata region.84 Sarreal’s innovative analysis and methodology informs my investigation of the post-Jesuit period in which a newly organized colonial administration established mechanized textile workshops designed to increase economic production in the frontier region.

Although historians are responsible for a significant portion of the Chiquitos scholarship produced over the years, anthropological studies constitute the major part of modern research on the region. A number of these studies demonstrate a heightened sensitivity to cultural processes involving indigenous agency and self-determination that informs my analysis. To begin with, the

84 Julia J. S. Sarreal, The Guaraní and Their Missions: A Socioeconomic History (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014), 2–10. 52 innovative work and professional guidance of French anthropologist Isabelle Combés has influenced the research design for my project since its preliminary stages. In her study of the native peoples of the Bolivian Isoso, a region located to the south of Chiquitos, Combés examines historical data from an anthropological perspective to trace the production and reorientation of ethnic identities.85 Her emphasis on the contingent nature of identity and the dialogic processes involved in the development of ethnicities vis-à-vis European imperialism provides inspiration for my interpretive framework.86

Argentine anthropologist Guillermo Wilde’s study of the Guaraní missions of the Río de la Plata takes a different approach than Sarreal as he emphasizes cultural, religious and political dimensions of the missions. Wilde rejects the common portrayal of Jesuit missions as strongholds of European culture and administration and points out the ability of Guaraní leaders living within mission communities to maintain connections with vibrant, non-European cultures and native social structures.87 As was the case in Chiquitos, kinship ties transcended the imposed jurisdiction of the missions and cut across ethnic frontiers to incorporate groups of non-mission

Indians.88 Guaraní residing under the purview of the Jesuits preserved bonds with unconverted

Guaraní living outside the missions which led to the development of what Wilde calls

“heterogeneous” and “ambiguous” cultural practices.89

85 Isabelle Combés, Etnohistorias Del Isoso: Chané y Chiriguanos En El Chaco Boliviano, Siglos XVI a XX (La Paz: Fundación PIEB / Institut français d’études andines, 2005), 13–16.

86 Combés, Diccionario Étnico: Santa Cruz la Vieja y Su Entorno en el Siglo XVI. 87 Guillermo Wilde, Religión y Poder En Las Misiones de Guaraníes (Buenos Aires: Editorial SB, 2009), 23.

88 Ibid., 165.

89 Ibid., 151.

53

Wilde privileges the influence of indigenous actors, and when possible, he draws on

Guaraní language sources to show that the Guaraní communities inhabiting the missions succeeded in holding onto the autonomy associated with choosing their leaders. The Guaraní managed to do this in spite of Jesuit efforts to control the succession of native governance through the practice of primogeniture as well as other attempts to eliminate traditional indigenous polygamous family structures.90 Wilde’s work impacts my project by providing a model applicable for analyzing the structure and function of parcialidades and for assessing the authority held by the indios jueces or indigenous officers who helped to administer the Chiquitos mission communities.

In 2008, anthropologist Catherine Julien published a collection of the earliest known documents concerning Iberian explorations of the greater Paraguayan River basin. Better known for her ethnohistorical research of the Andes, Julien held a faculty position at the University of

Bonn, Germany in the early to mid-1990s and this published assemblage of primary sources is a product of the German university’s long-term Eastern Bolivian Project. Julien’s work compiles her careful transcriptions of original documents that she located during painstaking research in the Archivo General de Indias, in Seville, Spain, the Biblioteca y Archivo Nacional de Bolivia, in

Sucre, Bolivia and the Archivo Departamental in Potosí, Bolivia. These important sources record the initial contacts between Europeans and indigenous peoples inhabiting the forests and plains of Chiquitos and the first iterations of Iberian institutions in the region.91

Julien’s decision to assemble and publish these sources was inspired by the research of a growing number of Bolivian historians and anthropologists who study the formation of a distinct

90 Ibid., 141. 91 Catherine J Julien, Desde el Oriente documentos para la historia del Oriente Boliviano y Santa Cruz la Vieja (1542-1597) (Santa Cruz de la Sierra: Fondo Editorial Municipal, 2008), XIII.

54 lowlands culture that emerged in the environs of Santa Cruz de la Sierra during and before the

Iberian colonial period. Building a level of national renown during the late twentieth century, this group of researchers constitutes what the Bolivian academic community has dubbed the “School of Eastern Bolivian Historiography”.92 The discoveries made by this cadre of scholars, along with Julien’s published documents, have resulted in the broader academic recognition of eastern lowlands histories and their incorporation into the national Bolivian historiography while providing the impetus for new and exciting avenues of historical investigations to which my work also contributes.93

Julien’s collection comprises 25 documents, ranging from the years 1542 to 1597, and related primarily to the founding years of Santa Cruz de la Sierra and the decades immediately preceding. Many of these sources have been published sparingly elsewhere but, according to

Julien, access to those publications is very difficult and nearly impossible for Bolivian scholars.94

Thanks to Julien, the sources are now broadly accessible and, most importantly, within the reach of cruceño investigators who continue to provide important contributions to the widening historiography of their understudied region. This invaluable primary source repository has proven essential for my examination of the early contact period in Chiquitos and especially the ways in which these formative years influenced later, post-Jesuit historical developments in the region.95

92 Ibid.

93 Ibid., XIII–XIV.

94 It should be noted that Julien published her carefully annotated compilation of documents after García Recio’s pioneering work on the early years of Spanish contact in Chiquitos.

95 Ibid., xv – xviii.

55

Since 1996, the Santa Cruz based non-profit NGO known as Asociación Pro Arte y

Cultura (APAC), has functioned to preserve the cultural heritage of eastern Bolivia. Although

APAC is best known for its creation of an international baroque and renaissance music festival centered in Chiquitos, the organization has also gained attention by publishing numerous anthropological studies on the region. The most important of these publications for my project is

Sieglinde Falkinger’s research on native sermons and cabildos in Chiquitos. Falkinger shows that in the present day indigenous province of Velasco, near Santa Cruz, the practice of reading and writing the Chiquitana language, also known as Besiro, has endured with few interruptions since the Jesuit period. As mentioned earlier, during the seventeenth century, the Jesuits made

Chiquitana/Besiro a lingua franca to unite the distinct indigenous groups living in the mission villages. In order to employ the language as a critical instrument of evangelization, missionaries assiduously studied the grammar and vocabulary and recorded it through writing catechisms and sermons. Over the course of two centuries, the language became central to the Chiquitos ethnic identity.96

In 2008, Falkinger in cooperation with the municipal government of indigenous communities near the town of San Ignacio de Velasco, began the ambitious project of recovering, compiling and documenting sermons written and spoken in Chiquitana/Besiro.97

During visits to multiple indigenous communities in the area, Falkinger and her team gathered close to 200 written sermons and recorded more than 100 spoken sermons. Falkinger discovered that from the Jesuit period until present day, Chiquitos men have delivered these orations during

96 Sieglinde Falkinger, Anauxti Jesucristo Mariaboka: Manual de Sermones (Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia: Fondo Editorial APAC, 2010), 111.

97 Ibid., 7.

56 the religious festivals that make up the Catholic liturgical calendar. Each oration records the specific themes of the festivals with which they are associated. Falkinger discovered that sermons form an essential part of a Jesuit heritage that marks what is now called “Chiquitano” culture. She uses the term “Chiquito” when speaking of colonial era documentary sources and

“Chiquitano” to refer to the nation or ethnicity. When referencing the language, she uses the terms “Chiquitana” or “Besiro” with “Besiro” being the term chosen by the Chiquitano people and the official name of the language for the Bolivian government.98

Falkinger found that offices within the cabildos or town councils of Chiquitano communities are related inextricably to the privilege of giving sermons. In accordance with their position, cabildo members delivered orations at designated times to specific audiences. For example, the Cacique de Sección is charged with giving a sermon during the early morning hours on Tuesday of Carnaval while those occupying the office of Segundo Síndico are responsible for delivering the sermon of Víspera during festivals celebrating their community’s patron saint. All officers within the cabildo, no matter their rank, are accountable for preserving and teaching sermons to new members and ensuring that neophytes deliver sermons properly. Such longstanding historical processes have helped to preserve the sermons and, by extension, the

Chiquitana/Besiro language. The components of Falkinger’s research which identify methods of protecting and reproducing culture across generations, categorized as “memory study” by scholars, directs my analysis of primary source documentation.99

Tracing the intercultural roots, structure, and role of the cabildo in Chiquitos and the transformation of the hybrid institution over time is one of Falkinger’s primary goals. To

98 Ibid., 10.

99 Ibid., 19–21.

57 accomplish this, she focuses on religious festivals, the Chiquitana/Besiro language, and sermons.

According to Falkinger, these cultural manifestations, indissoluble components of Chiquitano identity, were introduced by the Jesuits but subsequently appropriated by the indigenous inhabitants of the missions, transformed into something uniquely their own, and maintained, in one form or another, until the present day. As Falkinger’s work demonstrates, since the Jesuit period, language and the cabildo have played fundamental roles in organizing, reproducing and transmitting Chiquitano culture and identity. These findings belie the commonly held notion of a simplistic division of Chiquitos into three distinct periods: pre-Jesuit, Jesuit, and post-Jesuit.100

Under the direction of German anthropologist Jürgen Riester, another Santa Cruz based

NGO known as Apoyo Para el Campesino-Indígena del Oriente Boliviano (APCOB) has also published a series of anthropological studies of Chiquitos and its indigenous populations. Two such APCOB publications offer useful references for my project and Bärbel Freyer’s study is the most widely cited of these publications. Freyer’s work diverges from the majority of Chiquitos scholarship, which tends to use European sources to focus on the extraordinary merits of Jesuit missionaries and the dramatic effects of their actions on native peoples. Although Freyer employs European sources, she carefully analyzes their content with an eye for discerning the indigenous cultural traditions that developed independently of Jesuit influences. Using this methodology, she presents an ethnographic description of the native peoples of Chiquitos that gives important insights regarding their roles in developing material and spiritual culture, economy, settlement patterns, social organization and political structures.101

100 Ibid., 107.

101 Bärbel Freyer, Los Chiquitanos Descripción de Un Pueblo de Las Tierras Bajas Orientales de Bolivia Según Fuentes Jesuíticas Del Siglo XVIII (Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia: APCOB, 2000), 7–19. 58

Completed in pursuit of a Master’s degree, Birgit Krekeler’s research is the second

APCOB publication with findings relevant for my project. Krekeler’s study sets out to dispel a common myth held by many scholars which maintains that the indigenous peoples of Chiquitos failed to resist the European conquest but instead submissively accepted material and spiritual elements of the conquest that they recognized as superior to their own traditions. Krekeler argues that this erroneous notion supports a patriarchal view of the conquest as a necessary and civilizing mission that brought mostly positive outcomes for primitive indigenous populations devoid of agency. In her efforts to correct this perspective, Krekeler underscores numerous and effective indigenous struggles against European imperial objectives. During the course of these struggles, native peoples used skillful forms of resistance including strategic and spontaneous violent uprisings and orchestrated plans to flee in large numbers from the isolated European settlements of the region that were dependent upon Indian labor. Krekeler argues that although the indigenous populations of Chiquitos ultimately succumbed in their struggle against European domination and were subsequently incorporated into the masses of subalterns forced to labor under an expanding colonial regime, their defeat was neither passive nor absolute. In fact, in their refusal to yield, some groups dictated the outcomes of important cross-cultural disputes, retained a measure of sovereignty, and preserved cultural traditions that persist in the eastern lowlands of Bolivia today.102

102 Birgit Krekeler, Pueblos Indígenas de Las Tierras Bajas de Bolivia: Historia de Los Chiquitanos (APCOB, 1993), 7–12.

59

Conclusions

The interdisciplinary scholarship on Chiquitos surveyed in this chapter engages with debates regarding interethnic and multicultural borderlands, hybrid institutions, environmental history, and Indian agency. These studies throw light on the sociocultural negotiations carried out by indigenous peoples both within and outside European settlements. My research builds upon their contributions by assessing how native communities grappled with colonialism in the interstices of imperial spheres and evaluating the particular ways in which such developments influenced the creation, reformation, and maintenance of different identities. Moreover, by focusing more intently on post-Jesuit and late colonial developments, I bridge an important gap in the historiography of the Chiquitos missions that has placed much greater importance on the

Jesuit period. This temporal scope contains lesser warn paths to historical processes involved in the construction of indigenous identities.

The following chapter traces the historical creation of Chiquitos as a borderland and evaluates the processes through which diverse cultures have altered, delineated and defined the region as a geographic as well as a discursive space. It analyzes the ways in which spatial arrangements within the region influenced the lives of the individuals and populations who interacted within it and links the spatial associations of Chiquitos to the asymmetrical power relations of domination, subordination, alliance and noncompliance that marked the region’s history. The chapter also highlights the developments that led to the production of indigenous borderlands and integrated them into Ibero-American imperial borderlands.103

103 Michael R. Redclift, Frontiers: Histories of Civil Society and Nature (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006), 24. 60

Chapter 2 ______

Intersecting Borderlands: The Historical Construction of Chiquitos

Introduction

This chapter begins with an overview of the regional geography and ecology of Chiquitos to show how the region’s indigenous populations were shaped by the natural landscape which they, in turn, altered. It then turns to a discussion of the historical construction of Chiquitos as a region situated on an ecological, intercultural, and inter-imperial borderland. Chiquitos was a permeable zone of contact, exchange, mediation, and conflict in which territorial consolidation and the consequences of dynamic multiethnic and sociocultural interactions were uncertain and difficult to predict. I define “borderland” as a culturally and materially produced space of contested boundaries between territorial dominions. As this chapter demonstrates, the disputed and contingent nature of colonial South American borderlands like Chiquitos gave diverse native peoples opportunities to navigate shifting intercultural relationships and evolving territorial conflicts to maintain some degree of autonomy and cultural viability.104

Chiquitos: The Place and the People

Chiquitos is a subtropical lowland region located east of the Andean foothills between the tributaries of the Amazonian and Paraguayan river basins, in parts of southeastern Bolivia and southwestern Brazil (see map 2.1). It extends from 18-degrees latitude south in the south to 15- degrees latitude south in the north and from the Paraguay River in the east to the Río Grande in

104 Jeremy Adelman and Stephen Aron, “From Borderlands to Borders: Empires, Nation-States, and the Peoples in Between in North American History,” The American Historical Review 104, no. 3 (June 1999): 814. My definition of borderlands is informed by the work of Adelman and Aron. 61 the west. Geographically, it is located on the western edge of the Brazilian Precambrian shield and comprises 143,098 square miles of undulating hills, grassy plains, forests, mesas, and low- lying mountain ranges that reach heights of 1,200 meters.105 Numerous rivers and streams intersect Chiquitos and drain into swamps and bogs located in the southern portion of the province. These waterways served as a means of travel, communication, and trade for Indians and European settlers alike.106 In terms of climate and vegetation, Chiquitos constitutes an ecological and cultural zone of transition between the Amazon rainforest and the Chaco

Boreal.107

Northern Chiquitos is characterized by heavier rainfall and dense forest typical of

Amazonia, while the south is made up of semiarid plains and scrub vegetation more similar to the dry Chaco.108 Chiquitos experiences well-defined wet and dry seasons with annual precipitation averaging between 800 millimeters and 1,200 millimeters. The climate has been defined as “tropical with dry winters”. Average annual temperatures hover around 24 degrees

Celsius but the region registers extremes that oscillate between 38 degrees Celsius in the summer and 3 degrees Celsius in the winter with the arrival of frigid southern winds known as suraznos.109

105 Freyer, Los Chiquitanos Descripción de Un Pueblo de Las Tierras Bajas Orientales de Bolivia Según Fuentes Jesuíticas Del Siglo XVIII, 27.

106 Alvaro Diez Astete, Compendio de etnias indígenas y ecoregiones: Amazonía, Oriente y Chaco (Plural editores, 2011), 396.

107 Cynthia Radding, “From the Counting House to the Field and Loom: Ecologies, Cultures, and Economics in the Missions of Sonora (Mexico) and Chiquitania (Bolivia),” Hispanic American Historical Review 81, no. 1 (2001): 52.

108 Werner Hoffman, Las Misiones Jesuíticas Entre los Chiquitanos (Buenos Aires: Fundación para la Educación, la Ciencia y la Cultura, 1979), 4.

109 Astete, Compendio de etnias indígenas y ecoregiones, 397.

62

Map 2.1

Chiquitos contains a high diversity of ecological zones: bosque (uncultivated forestland), pampa arbolada (wooded flatlands), campo cerrado (forested savanna), and campo húmedo

(humid savanna). The bosque is central to both the material existence and cultural symbolism of

63 the different indigenous populations that Iberians began to label “Chiquitos”.110 This ecological zone provides native peoples with enough arable soil to support chacos, small seasonal plots cleared and burned to cultivate crops such as maize, cotton, peanuts, sweet potatoes, papaya, plantains and manioc. Local indigenous populations constructed cultural spaces of scattered settlements in the bosque that revolved around alternating cycles of planting, harvesting, hunting and fishing. The human geography of Chiquitos corresponds to differences in land use and subsistence patterns; seasonal demographic movements with shifting settlements and fluctuating populations; trade, political alliances, and warfare.111 The varied landscapes of Chiquitos provided lowland peoples with a range of natural resources including medicinal plants, edible fruits and vegetables, timber for fuel and construction, poisonous resins for hunting and fishing, plant fiber used to make baskets and rope, leaves for hats and clothing, and numerous other natural materials.112

The chaco was the basis of subsistence for the native inhabitants of Chiquitos but cultivated crops constituted only a portion of their diet. They depended on hunting, fishing and gathering wild foods as well. Hunters sought out game such as the tapir, the pampas deer and the peccary, as well as various species of birds, reptiles, and insects. Bees provided honey and wax for local consumption and trade. Freshwater streams, lakes and swamps were thriving habitats for a number of edible fish species and other aquatic animals that also supplemented the native diet. Movements necessitated by hunting, fishing and foraging accompanied the seasonal cultivation of the chaco and these patterns of subsistence helped to form important social

110 Radding, Landscapes of Power and Identity, 35–37.

111 Ibid., 38.

112 Astete, Compendio de etnias indígenas y ecoregiones, 396.

64 connections and spatial organizations that bonded together families, communities and settlements.113

Migratory cycles linked to procuring food influenced spatial distribution, kinship networks and community arrangements known as rancherías – semi-permanent settlements made up of extended families.114 In order to exchange and distribute communal tasks, ranchería members adopted a system of structured reciprocal duties called minca. Under this system, groups of workers collaborated on public projects such as clearing land for chacos, constructing houses, and hunting. These important working relations helped to shape the contours of domestic spaces and political territories. Thus, native sociopolitical relations were connected to rhythms of subsistence and kinship ties and it is likely that pre-contact ethnic identities emerged from shifting alliances among local communities. It is important to note that minca is known as metósh in the Chiquitano language and the system has only been observed and studied ethnographically in a post-European contact form influenced by developments set in motion by

Iberian colonial administrations. As will be discussed more in later chapters, metósh was central to the performance of indigenous ethnicities as these came to be established historically in

Chiquitos.115

Ecological and Interethnic Borderlands, Iberian Incursions, and the Formation of a Colonial Society

The first pre-Colombian indigenous populations entered the greater Paraguayan river basin and what is now known as Chiquitos from tropical environs to the north by navigating

113 Radding, “From the Counting House to the Field and Loom,” 57.

114 Ranchería is a Spanish term and not peculiar to the Chiquitos settlements.

115 Radding, Landscapes of Power and Identity, 41.

65 tributaries of the Orinoco and Amazon River systems. Because Chiquitos was comprised of a mostly flat inland expanse with few major physical barriers, native peoples began to use the region as a natural crossroads. This geological and ecological transition zone functioned first as a north-south corridor and later as an intercontinental network of migration and trade routes that connected the eastern lowlands to metal producing regions located to the west in the Andean cordillera.116 While geography and ecology influenced the use, perception and arrangement of

Chiquitos, they were not the sole determinants of how native peoples understood the region’s spatial configurations.117 Rather, the landscape and other natural features reflected indigenous conceptions of physical spaces even as they formed them. Spatial conceptions in turn, impacted sociopolitical disputes and the delineation of territorial boundaries.118

On the eve of European contact, Chiquitos was an indigenous borderland situated at the nexus of diverse native polities and territories. It operated as a locus of cultural and material exchange for the riverine Guaraní of the Paraguayan watershed to the east, the semisedentary

Guaycurúan groups of the Chaco in the south, and the Arawak-speaking chiefdoms of Mojos, located to the northwest. Chiriguano, Quechua, and Aymara populations passed through

Chiquitos from the west in the foothills of the Andes. The western margins of Chiquitos also comprised a contact zone crossed by Chiriguano, Yuracaré and Guarayo groups as well as many of the ancestral cultures of the native communities that would later inhabit the Jesuit missions

116 Oscar Tonelli Justiniano, El Peabirú Chiquitano: Ensayo Sobre El Ramal Chiquitano de Una Ruta Interoceánica Prehistórica (Santa Cruz de la Sierra: Editorial El País, 2007), 7, 21. Chiquitos was located on an ancient Amerindian interoceanic route referred to by Tonelli as “Peabirú” that connected the Atlantic to the Pacific.

117 Redclift, Frontiers, 38.

118 Martin W. Lewis and Kären E. Wigen, The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 1–6.

66 during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.119 It was into this ecological frontier and ancient indigenous borderland, intersected by multiple disputed boundaries and shifting ethnic territories that the first European explorers entered in the sixteenth century.120

The earliest phase of the Iberian invasion of Chiquitos began in the 1530s with a series of

Spanish expeditions proceeding north from the city of Asunción. Three decades later, immediately after the establishment of Santa Cruz “La Vieja”, Spanish war parties known as malocas began raiding surrounding native settlements and taking captives to sell into bonded servitude. Maloca campaigns supplied the isolated Spanish settlement with enslaved laborers at a time of demographic contraction caused by the spread of Old World diseases and large-scale outmigration as indigenous populations fled increased warfare.121 Portuguese slave-raiders, known as bandeirantes, and contrabandists, called mamelucos, constituted another early

European presence in Chiquitos during the formative years of Iberian colonization.122 Traveling west from Brazil, bandeirantes frequently crossed into Chiquitos and neighboring frontier regions in search of native captives to supply an emergent slave trade that developed with the growing labor demands of Portuguese mining operations. 123

Because the lowlands surrounding Santa Cruz constituted a disputed space where different polities competed – often violently – for territorial control, access to natural resources,

119 Radding, Landscapes of Power and Identity, 44–45.

120 Mario Arrien Gutiérrez, “Chiquitos Nativo En Tiempos de La Conquista Española, Siglos XVI y XVII,” in La Voz de Los Chiquitanos: Historias de Comunidades de La Provincia Velasco, ed. Ana María Lema (Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia: APAC : Fundación AVINA, 2006), 3–4.

121 Radding, Landscapes of Power and Identity, 130–31.

122 Krekeler, Pueblos Indígenas de Las Tierras Bajas de Bolivia, 51.

123 José María García Recio, Analisis de Una Sociedad de Frontera: Santa Cruz de La Sierra En Los Siglos XVI y XVII (Sevilla: Diputacion Provincial de Sevilla, 1988), 147–54.

67 and the power to define categories of people, Iberian dominion over the area during the early colonial period was precarious at best. From the 1560s until the first third of the seventeenth century, roving bands of Chiriguano attacked Santa Cruz intermittently. Later in the 1620s, bloody clashes with groups of Yuracarés became a major concern with skirmishes persisting until the beginning of the eighteenth century.124 Groups of Chiriguano and Yuracaré also blocked vital lines of communication with core Spanish settlements in the Andes by ambushing convoys traveling along trade routes between Santa Cruz and Charcas.125 The constant threat of such assaults prompted Spanish militias to carry out punitive campaigns against native villages that, in turn, gave impetus to the formation of new indigenous political coalitions and migratory networks.126

Periods of warfare around Santa Cruz were punctuated by episodes of relative peace that varied in duration and stability depending on the circumstances surrounding the most current indigenous alliances. Various breaks from violent conflict allowed the city to establish trade relations with the Chiriguano. During these brief windows of reconciliation, cruceños offered

Chiriguano communities metal axes and knives, horses, harquebuses and gunpowder. In exchange, the Chiriguano provided the frontier Spanish outpost with valued native cultigens like corn and yucca as well as wild game, fish, and foraged foods such as honey and fruit. Open commerce with the Chiriguano also allowed cruceños to trade for enslaved indigenous laborers

124 Combés, Diccionario Étnico: Santa Cruz la Vieja y Su Entorno en el Siglo XVI, 135–38, 342-344.

125 Roberto Tomichá Charupá, La Iglesia En Santa Cruz: 400 Años de Historia 1605-2005 (Cochabamba: Editorial Verbo Divino, 2005), 16–17. In the sixteenth century, during the early years of Santa Cruz “La Vieja”, the Chiriguanos inhabited the piedmont region east of the Andes from the Río Guapay north to the Río Pilcomayo. The Yuracarés lived in the Llanos de Grigotá and at the end of the sixteenth century, bands of Yuracarés lived to the west of the city of Santa Cruz.

126 García Recio, Analisis de Una Sociedad de Frontera, 118–22.

68 captured in the course of intertribal warfare. Thus, even intervals of peace were marked by violence. A rise in Spanish labor demands over the course of the sixteenth century led to an increase in the seizure and trade of indigenous captives that transformed traditional native territories and their terms of captivity.127 Moreover, the introduction of metal tools into the indigenous economy revolutionized horticultural practices, traditional methods of hunting and fishing and methods of warfare. These rapid changes often led to an intensification of existing rivalries and the creation new interethnic competition.128

Interactions between cruceños and the Chiriguano in times of reconciliation also fostered temporary military alliances during which both sides provided support in conflicts against mutual enemies. For example, cruceños came to the aid of the Chiriguano of Cunayuru in many of their attacks on the Charagua Indians. For their part, groups of Chiriguano supported cruceños in several of their punitive raids against the Yuracaré.129 Most notably, Chiriguano bands joined forces with cruceño rebels, who took up arms against the Spanish colonial regime in 1587 after the presiding Governor of Santa Cruz, Don Lorenzo Suárez de Figueroa, refused to authorize slaving campaigns against the Timbú Indians.130 These sporadic alliances occurred against a larger backdrop of fluid, cross-ethnic relations as longstanding indigenous rivals began to join

127 Ibid., 120–22. Even protracted periods of peace were interspersed with violent conflicts involved in the capture of indigenous laborers.

128 William M. Denevan, “Stone vs. Metal Axes: The Ambiguity of Shifting Cultivation in Prehistoric Amazonia”, Journal of the Steward Anthropological Society 20, no. no. 1–2 (1992): 153–65.

129 García Recio, Analisis de Una Sociedad de Frontera, 123–24.

130 Tomichá Charupá, “La Formación Socio-Cultural de Los Chiquitanos En El Oriente Boliviano, Siglos XVI- XVIII,” 225–26.

69 together in new coalitions to withstand the rapid changes triggered by Iberian colonial endeavors.131

Violent interactions, occasioned by the maloca campaigns (discussed above), marked

Indian-Spanish relations in Chiquitos during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.

Often executed with the backing of governors and provincial administrators, these violent expeditions altered settlement patterns, political organization and territorial claims by displacing and fragmenting native communities.132 The Spanish term piezas de rescate (ransomed pieces) was commonly used at the time to refer to native peoples taken from their villages by maloca parties and forced into bonded servitude either on cruceño estates, or in the mines and agricultural valleys of the Andes. Spanish settlers created and imposed classificatory tribal labels that became ethnic monikers for the native captives taken and traded through this practice. A number of documented disputes over the possession of enslaved indigenous laborers reveal such ethnic designations for various native groups captured by raiding parties. Although these labels were not static, many of them had pre-contact origins and are the earliest recorded ethnonyms for

Chiquitos peoples.133

The encomienda, a more widely practiced Spanish institution of forced labor, also had a strong and formative presence in Chiquitos during the initial years of conquest and colonization.

Despite the tenuous nature of Iberian dominion in Chiquitos during much of the sixteenth century, the encomienda system affected prevailing sociocultural, political, economic, demographic, and territorial transformations for the region’s indigenous populations. The

131 Radding, Landscapes of Power and Identity, 132–33.

132 García Recio, Analisis de Una Sociedad de Frontera, 235–37.

133 Radding, Landscapes of Power and Identity, 130–32.

70 bestowal of encomienda grants dispersed and regrouped native populations that the Spanish designated as encomendados (indigenous laborers assigned to encomienda service).134 The alterations in demographic patterns that followed led to new and consequential interethnic encounters as colonial officials forced disparate linguistic, cultural, and kin groups to live and work together. Moreover, the implementation of this system further compounded preexisting ethnic and territorial patterns of change recently initiated by the decline of the native population.135 These myriad changes set in motion by encomienda grants and maloca campaigns defined trade, warfare, interethnic alliances, settlement patterns, kinship, and ethnic affiliations in Chiquitos for centuries.136 According to Tomichá, the introduction of the encomienda ushered in a long period of “cultural mestizaje” or multicultural dialogue that helped to form a distinctive culture in Chiquitos and the surrounding regions that would become the eastern lowlands of

Bolivia.137

Participation in the encomienda offered opportunities for some native leaders to establish political and economic relations with the Spanish as well as with other indigenous groups. Such interactions often led to important trade relations for the procurement of metal tools. Those

Spanish settlers fortunate enough to receive an encomienda gained the right to exploit indigenous labor, which gave them greater access to wealth and a higher social status.138 Forms of

134 Ibid., 133, 159.

135 Roberto Tomichá, “La Formación Socio-Cultural de Los Chiquitanos En El Oriente Boliviano, Siglos XVI- XVIII,” in Estudos Sobre Os Chiquitanos No Brasil E Na Bolivia: História, Língua, Cultura E Territorialidade (Goiânia, Brazil: Goiânia: Editora da UCG, 2008), 224–226.

136 Ibid., 127.

137 Tomichá Charupá, “La Formación Socio-Cultural de Los Chiquitanos En El Oriente Boliviano, Siglos XVI- XVIII.” 224–226.

138 Cynthia Radding, “Las Misiones Jesuíticas: Su Legado Ecológico y Cultural En El Oriente de Bolivia,” in La Voz de Los Chiquitanos: Historias de Comunidades de La Provincia Velasco, ed. Ana María Lema (Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia: APAC : Fundación AVINA, 2006), 21. 71 encomienda existed previously in areas surrounding Chiquitos, but the institution did not begin in Santa Cruz until April of 1561, when the city’s first governor, Ñuflo de Cháves, distributed grants of Indian laborers among the descendants of the men who participated in the earliest incursions into the region. Subsequent provincial governors had a similar capacity to grant encomiendas and exercised this authority well into the seventeenth century.139 The Spanish

Crown granted exemptions to the curtailment of the encomienda in frontier provinces like

Chiquitos because of their relative poverty, thus extending the life of the institution in a number of these regions into the eighteenth century.140

The subsistence methods, settlement patterns, territorial arrangements, and migratory rhythms of the native peoples of Chiquitos varied widely and affected the manner in which governors of Santa Cruz assigned and distributed members of their communities to encomienda service.141 Groups living in the immediate vicinity of Santa Cruz such as the Gorgotoquis and

Manasica were sedentary agriculturalists while populations to the south near the Chaco boreal made a living as semisendentary hunters and gatherers. Thus, cruceños could distribute individuals from these groups in accordance with their specific villages or territories. A number of nomadic bands, however, inhabited lands to the east and any approach to distribute laborers that corresponded to permanent settlements could not apply to them. Cruceños became familiar with these important differences and distributed encomiendas accordingly. 142

139 García Recio, Analisis de Una Sociedad de Frontera, 212–13.

140 Radding, Landscapes of Power and Identity, 125–33.

141 Combés, Diccionario Étnico: Santa Cruz la Vieja y Su Entorno en el Siglo XVI, 42–45.

142 Julien, Desde el oriente, 99–109. In 2008, Catherine Julien published a more accurate version of the 1561 padrón examined by Combés. Titled “Documento 15B”, this document contains an extensive list of the villages, caciques, and indigenous populations involved in Cháves’s first encomienda grants and provides invaluable information about the native population and the diversity of ethnic groups living in the area during the mid-sixteenth century. 72

Through her close analysis of Santa Cruz registers dating to 1561 of officially documented encomiendas, Isabelle Combés discovered that Governor Cháves distributed the first grants using three models that followed the different native settlement patterns discussed above.

The first and most common model granted Spanish encomenderos the service of entire villages of indigenous laborers.143 The second model distributed lineage groups of sedentary populations.

For this model, the registered title of the encomienda grant often corresponded as much to the territory in which a group of encomendados lived as to the name of a clan, lineage or parcialidad

(distinct pre-contact language and kin groups) to which a group of encomendados belonged.

Under the third model, Cháves distributed grants of nomadic bands according to the authority of the particular cacique under which they lived. Thus, many encomiendas were linked either to networks of jurisdiction or to the more enduring territorial delineations of indigenous leaders.

Without accounting for the odd cases in which information is unclear or incomplete, the data from the encomienda registers reveals that Cháves distributed 269 grants in 1561 using these three models.144

In the decades following Governor Cháves’s grants, many encomenderos voiced their desires to move Santa Cruz westward and closer to La Plata, the capital city of the Audiencia of

Charcas (known today as Sucre). These desires stemmed from the constant threat of Indian raids and the extreme distances that separated Santa Cruz from the growing economic markets of

Spanish cities closer to the Andes, like Cochabamba. The founding of Cochabamba in the fertile

Kichwa valleys east of the Andean altiplano (high plains) in the early 1570s, set in motion the

143 Combés, Diccionario Étnico: Santa Cruz la Vieja y Su Entorno en el Siglo XVI, 44. According to Combés, there are cases in which it is unclear whether specific encomienda grants correspond to the name of a village, the name of a cacique or the ethnic designation related to a parcialidad.

144 Ibid., 42–47.

73 development of a productive regional economy. This economy was linked to the mines of Alto

Perú and by extension to Europe and offered lucrative financial opportunities for cruceños.145

Moreover, recent expeditions departing from Santa Cruz into adjacent regions reported of richer lands to the north and west, thus providing additional incentive for relocation. In 1621, colonial officials yielded to these increasing demands, and moved Santa Cruz to its current location at a site called San Lorenzo de la Barranca, within view of the Andean foothills and near the floodplain of the Río Guapay. For Spanish administrators and settlers, Chiquitos was already a remote and disputed territory situated between Iberian imperial borders; therefore, the relocation of the largest Spanish population center to the western margins further isolated the region and made it more vulnerable to the intrusions of bandeirantes, contrabandists and the illicit but pervasive malocas.146

Maloca campaigns, often led by groups of cruceños, evaded the economic oversight of the local colonial government of Santa Cruz by taking captives from nearby native communities and selling them to larger European population centers in the Andes with no commercial restrictions.147 The sale of captives taken during maloca raids near Santa Cruz became so common that cruceño slavers saturated the regional market and caused prices for Indian slaves to plummet.148 Malocas also undermined the security of the isolated frontier city because the raids

145 Brooke Larson, Colonialism and Agrarian Transformation in Bolivia: Cochabamba, 1550-1900 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 3–6, 74–76. Cochabamba was incorporated into the Spanish colonial intendancy of Santa Cruz de la Sierra in the late eighteenth century.

146 García Recio, Analisis de Una Sociedad de Frontera, 50–53, 116–18. García Recio argues that the primary objective of Spanish officials for moving Santa Cruz to San Lorenzo and thereby making it the only significant population “nucleus” in the region was to create a better defense against the Chiriguanos and, to a lesser extent, the Yuracarés.

147 Pedro. Querejazu and Plácido. Molina Barbery, eds., Las Misiones Jesuíticas de Chiquitos (La Paz, Bolivia: Fundación BHN, Línea Editorial: La Papelera, 1995), 272.

148 Pierre-François-Xavier de Charlevoix, Domingo Muriel, and Pablo José Hernández, Historia Del Paraguay, (Madrid: Librería General de Victoriano Suárez, 1913), 171. 74 provoked bloody conflicts with native populations perceived by many cruceño administrators as warlike. Thus, factions of cruceños involved in the slave trade instigated the very violence that threatened the city and gave maloca raiders justification to enslave hostile Indians as

“barbarians”. By the end of the seventeenth century, these problems had become intolerable for government authorities in Santa Cruz. The security threats posed by malocas and their evasion of governmental and economic control – along with the continued encroachment of bandeirantes from the east – compelled colonial officials to reorganize the local administrative structure.149

Agustín Arce de la Concha, governor of Santa Cruz from 1686 to 1691, solicited help from the

Jesuits to carry out part of the reorganization plan. Arce asked leaders of the religious order to begin the process of building a mission enterprise in the province of Chiquitos, to the north and east of Santa Cruz, as a means to incorporate the liminal borderland into the colonial governing structure and to provide an imperial buffer against Portuguese intrusions.150

Jesuit Missionary Entradas and Emergent Indigenous Identities

In 1690, Jesuits working within the jurisdiction of Asunción, the administrative center of the religious order in Paraguay, established a permanent presence nearer Chiquitos with the founding of the college of San Miguel Arcángel in the city of Tarija, some 700 kilometers southwest of Santa Cruz.151 Historically, Jesuits from La Plata served Tarija and its environs, but in recent years, Paraguayan Jesuits had begun to visit the city with intentions of evangelizing

149 García Recio, Analisis de Una Sociedad de Frontera, 152–53. Spanish colonial administrators intended for the Jesuit missions of Chiquitos to serve as a shield for Santa Cruz to protect the city against Portuguese encroachment with the support of the cruceño military.

150 Querejazu and Molina Barbery, Las Misiones Jesuíticas de Chiquitos, 272–73.

151 Matienzo et al., Chiquitos En Las Anuas de La Compañía de Jesús (1691-1767), 1.

75

Chiriguano populations inhabiting the nearby Andean piedmont. Tarija depended on the

Audiencia of Charcas for colonial administration and therefore the new college would likely have been part of the Jesuit Province of Peru. However, the founder of the college, Governor

Juan José Campero de Herrera, requested that the Jesuit Padre General assign Tarija to the jurisdiction of Córdoba del Tucumán – the residence of the Provincial Superior – due to the city’s greater proximity. Furthermore, Jesuits from Lima could not participate in evangelization efforts in and around Tarija because they were already occupied in the new mission field of

Moxos. The Padre General agreed to Campero’s request and from Tarija, Paraguayan Jesuits began evangelization efforts among the Chiriguano.152 Between 1690 and 1735, Jesuits stationed in Tarija built five mission towns among the Chiriguano called reducciones.153 The term derives from the Latin root reductio, meaning “join” or "gather together".154 These mission reducciones did not endure, however, and all but one was abandoned before King Carlos III issued a decree expelling the Jesuit order from all Spanish imperial territories on 27 February 1767.155

Jesuits working among the Chiriguano shifted their attentions farther north to Santa Cruz after receiving Governor Arce de la Concha’s request to begin a mission enterprise in the region.156 In 1691, with viceregal approval, the Jesuits founded their first mission in Chiquitos,

San Francisco Javier.157 Ecclesiastically and governmentally, the city of Santa Cruz depended on

152 Antonio Menacho, Por Tierras de Chiquitos: Los Jesuitas En Santa Cruz y En Las Misiones de Chiquitos En Los Siglos 16 a 18 (San Javier, Bolivia: Vicariato Apostólico de Nuflo de Chávez, 1991), 65.

153 Matienzo et al., Chiquitos En Las Anuas de La Compañía de Jesús (1691-1767), 1.

154 Falkinger, Anauxti Jesucristo Mariaboka, 108.

155 Matienzo et al., Chiquitos En Las Anuas de La Compañía de Jesús (1691-1767), 1.

156 Querejazu and Molina Barbery, Las Misiones Jesuíticas de Chiquitos, 272. The Jesuits founded San Xavier despite strong protests from a contingent of cruceño slave traders.

157 José Eduardo Fernandes. Moreira da Costa, A Coroa Do Mundo: Religião, Território e Territorialidade Chiquitano (Cuiabá, Brazil: Editora da Universidade Federal do Mato Grosso, 2006), 55. 76 the audiencia of Charcas, and was independent from Paraguay and Tucumán, which were both linked to the audiencia of Buenos Aires. Therefore, the mission field surrounding Santa Cruz initially fell under the Jesuit Province of Peru. Peruvian Jesuits arrived in Santa Cruz “La Vieja” as early as 1587 and by 1609 established a residencia misional in the city from which they began their evangelization of Moxos.158 Not surprisingly, the decision for Paraguayan Jesuits to take on the responsibility of establishing a mission enterprise in Chiquitos with the request of the cruceño governor created a point of conflict with Jesuits from Peru, who already saw a decrease in their range of influence after losing control of Tarija and the Chiriguano missions.159

In 1696, Padre General Tirso González resolved the conflict with his declaration that the

Chiquitos missions would remain in the hands of the Paraguayan Jesuits until the province of

Peru sent their own missionaries to the region. Due to their continued work in Moxos, however, the Peruvians could not spare missionaries and as a result, the missions of Chiquitos officially became part of the Jesuit province of Paraguay and were tied administratively to Córdoba del

Tucumán and Asunción.160 In 1700, the Jesuits successfully petitioned the Audiencia of Charcas to exempt missionized Indians from encomienda service. Jesuits missionaries working in

Chiquitos also protested malocas campaigns that were either authorized or led by the governors of Santa Cruz.161

158 Tomichá Charupá, La Iglesia En Santa Cruz, 30–31.

159 María José Diez Gálvez, Los bienes muebles de Chiquitos: fuentes para el conocimiento de una sociedad (Madrid: Agencia Española de Cooperación Internacional, Ministerio de Asuntos Exteriores y de Cooperación, 2006), 30–31.

160 Ibid.

161 García Recio, Analisis de Una Sociedad de Frontera, 186–200, 206–18. Missionized Indians were considered rescatado or "rescued" from encomienda service for the purposes of evangelization.

77

The new missions of Chiquitos functioned with the administrative support of the college of San Miguel Arcángel at Tarija. The college was the nearest and most important administrative center for the Jesuits working in Chiquitos and it served as their primary connection with the mission province of Paraguay.162 From 1691 until the expulsion of the religious order in 1767,

Tarijeño Jesuits established ten stable mission settlements in Chiquitos. During this period of less than one century, their missions provided the principal institutional presence of Spanish colonialism in a region perceived by Iberian colonists and Jesuit missionaries alike as a permeable and chaotic borderland traversed and contested by Christian and non-Christian

Indians, Iberian settlers, Portuguese slaving expeditions and contrabandists.163 The newly established population centers and their evangelization objectives complicated existing demographic, political and sociocultural transformations in the disputed and trans-imperial borderland caused by the seizure and trade of Indian captives, intercultural warfare, and the encomienda system.164

Prior to establishing permanent mission settlements, the Jesuits began their work in

Chiquitos by spreading the Catholic faith through forays into remote indigenous territories. With the help of native leaders, these evangelical expeditions gradually drew together different groups speaking distinct languages into mission towns founded under Iberian norms of civic life. Such changes initiated new and different waves of indigenous population movements that altered ethnic, political, and territorial orientations. While many of these conversion attempts were successful as large bands of extended families relocated to mission settlements, a number of

162 Tomichá Charupá, La Primera Evangelización, 218.

163 Janaína Amado, Leny Caselli Anzai, and Luiz Carlos Figueiredo, eds., Anais de Vila Bela, 1734-1789 (Cuiabá, Brazil: EdUFMT, 2006), 53–58.

164 Menacho, Por Tierras de Chiquitos, 65–67.

78 semi-sedentary groups either moved in and out of the missions intermittently or resisted resettlement altogether. The success of Jesuit evangelization and the viability of the entire mission enterprise depended on the continued migratory patterns of itinerant populations, and the support of local indigenous leaders.165

The diverse native populations that relocated to the missions organized themselves in accordance with discreet ethnic and linguistic affiliations known by the Spanish term parcialidades that underpinned the internal governing structures of their communities. The parcialidades documented by the Jesuits in their census records had pre-contact origins but were not static groups.166 They represented, instead, multiple families, fragmented by malocas, who had reassembled and moved into the missions either voluntarily seeking refuge or through some method of coercion.167 Although these new communities formed within a relatively brief period of time under a colonial context shaped by maloca campaigns and Jesuit evangelization, they gave rise to enduring ethnic identities that continued to be associated with distinct parcialidades at least until the end of the twentieth century.168

In an effort to consolidate and control the diverse mission populations made up of numerous parcialidades speaking distinct languages, many of which belonged to different linguistic families, Jesuit missionaries elevated the region’s most widely spoken native tongue to the status of lingua franca. From the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries, European

165 Radding, “Las Misiones Jesuíticas: Su Legado Ecológico y Cultural En El Oriente de Bolivia,” 23.

166 Tomichá Charupá, La Primera Evangelización, 221–228.

167 Cynthia Radding, “Las Misiones Jesuíticas: Su Legado Ecológico y Cultural En El Oriente de Bolivia,” in La Voz de Los Chiquitanos: Historias de Comunidades de La Provincia Velasco: Guapomocito, Suponema, San Antoñito, Monte Carlo, Quince de Agosto, ed. Ana María Lema (Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia: APAC, Fundación AVINA, 2006), 20–21.

168 Tomichá, La Primera Evangelización, 1691-1767, 221–228.

79 explorers, settlers, and Jesuits from Peru used the word "Chiquitos" as a generic term for all of the ethnic groups who spoke this language. Because no other common name for the language existed at the time, Tarijeño Jesuits adopted the generic term already in use and referred to their mission lingua franca as “Chiquita”. Long before the arrival of Jesuit missionaries from the college of San Miguel, Chiquita-speaking ethnic groups had maintained a semi-sedentary settlement pattern centered on the seasonal cultivation of crops and exerted a measure of sociocultural and linguistic hegemony over the diverse, largely non-sedentary neighboring populations. Linguistic unity, however, did not mean cultural unity and significant cultural diversity persisted within the parcialidades linked to the Chiquita language.169 The Jesuits used

Chiquita for all religious and civic affairs and it evolved as a written language under the auspices of missionary tutelage.170

The imposition of the language was a powerful instrument of evangelization and unification within the reducciones for Chiquita-speakers as well as for the populations who learned the lingua franca after a period of missionary acculturation. According to anthropologist

Sieglinde Falkinger, the lingua franca in addition to communal work and the celebration of

Catholic holidays comprised the three most important elements involved in the unification of the diverse mission populations and the development of what she calls a “pueblo chiquitano”.

169 Ibid., 229,243. The Jesuit reducción experience led to the formation of an ethnic identity that unified the distinct language and ethnic groups who inhabited the missions, including those parcialidades who spoke languages other than Chiquita. After having integrated into the mission reducciones, the diverse populations gradually developed a measure of sociocultural unity based on the lingua franca.

170 Falkinger, Anauxti Jesucristo Mariaboka, 10.

80

Contemporary Chiquitanos call their language Besiro meaning “correct speech” and the Bolivian government recognizes Besiro as the official name of the language.171

The Jesuits eventually used the term Chiquitos as a single label to encompass all of the different parcialidades living in their missions – even those speaking languages other than

Chiquita. Gradually, the term became a unifying ethnic identity tied to the mission lingua franca.172 As such, Chiquitos did not denote one ethnic affiliation, nor did it refer only to the groups who exclusively spoke Chiquita; rather the Jesuits used the term as a collective moniker for a number of distinct groups sharing similar material cultures but differentiated by language, ethnicity, and political consolidation.173 Jesuit records show that the indigenous populations who moved in and out of the missions represented nearly eighty ethnic groups speaking four

Chiquitos dialects and at least six non-Chiquitos languages.174 The non-Chiquitos populations included Arawak-speakers like the Chanés, Guaraní-speakers like the Itatines or Guarayos, and a number of other groups speaking languages that have since disappeared.175 Although many of the

Jesuits’ foremost objectives for the reducciones served to promote Chiquita-speaking ethnic groups including the transition to a sedentary lifestyle and the introduction of a lingua franca, the

171 Falkinger, Anauxti Jesucristo Mariaboka, 10, 111.

172 Tomichá, La Primera Evangelización, 1691-1767, 221–228, 231.

173 Krekeler, Pueblos Indígenas de Las Tierras Bajas de Bolivia, 26–27.

174 Radding, Landscapes of Power and Identity, 140.

175 Javier Matienzo et al., “Introduction,” in Chiquitos En Las Anuas de La Compañía de Jesús (1691-1767), ed. Javier Matienzo et al. (Cochabamba, Bolivia: Cochabamba, Instituto Latinoamericano de Misionología : Itinerarios Editorial, 2011), 2. Jesuit documents record more than seventy five different parcialidades, belonging at least to six different linguistic families.

81 mission regime continued to recognize the cultural significance and ancestral languages of non-

Chiquita-speaking parcialidades.176

The primary takeaway here is that the term “Chiquitos” is a colonial construct. Before the

Jesuit period, none of the indigenous languages spoken in the region had a common name for the groups who later became known as Chiquitos because they belonged to several distinct ethnolinguistic affiliations.177 Historian Roberto Tomichá asserts that Chiquitos was a label originally imposed by “outsiders”, and therefore “external”, and in no way reflected the indigenous cultures or dialects of the Chiquitos family of languages.178 Yet, by the late sixteenth century, the entire region was known as Chiquitos and the term had become a widespread and common distinction used by Europeans and indigenous populations alike. This is comparable to the term “indio” that carried legal and juridical distinctions.179

There are a number of theories regarding the origins of the imposed term. The most popular theory explains that Chiquitos comes from the diminutive form of the Spanish word chico meaning small and used in reference to the low-lying doorways of the houses built by indigenous groups inhabiting the lowlands near Santa Cruz.180 Father Diego Martínez recounted that the Indians’ doorways were so low to the ground that one had to crawl on all fours to enter them. Jesuit missionaries who visited the region during the late sixteenth century explained that native peoples built their houses in this way to defend themselves from cold winter weather and

176 Tomichá Charupá, La Primera Evangelización, 221–228, 231.

177 Radding, Landscapes of Power and Identity, 138–40.

178 Tomichá Charupá, La Primera Evangelización, 229.

179 Tomichá, La Primera Evangelización, 1691-1767, 224–229.

180 Ibid., 225–26.

82 enemy raids.181 Working among the descendants of the same native populations a century later,

Father Franciso Burgés corroborated this origins theory but claimed that the natives’ low-lying doorways protected them against swarms of mosquitos and other biting insects that accompanied the rainy season.182

Father Diego de Samaniego offered a second theory for the origins of the term in his sixteenth century report on Jesuit missions populated by Chiriganos, Chiquitos, and Itatines.

Samaniego explained that groups of Chiriguanos used the pejorative word Tapuymiri, meaning

“slaves of small things,” to refer to a rival indigenous group who tipped their arrow heads with lethal herbal toxins. According to Samaniego, the Spanish later translated the indigenous word to

Chiquitos. It is likely that Tapuymiri was initially used to refer to a specific indigenous group inhabiting the eastern margins of Chiquitos near the shores of the Laguna de los Xarayes, a portion of the Pantanal floodplain. Like many ethnonyms, the term probably spread with the passage of time and for reasons of linguistic economy.183

A third theory is attributed to the anonymous author of an eighteenth-century study of the

Chiquita language titled Gramatica de la Lengua de los Indios llamados Chiquitos. In the

181 Martínez Diego, “Carta Del P. Diego Martínez Al P. Juan de Atienza, Provincial. Santa Cruz de La Sierra, 19 de noviembre de 1592, Inserta En La Relación Del P. Pablo Joseph de Arriaga Al P. Claudio Aquaviva. Lima, 6 de Abril de 1594,” in Monumenta Peruana, ed. Antonio de Egaña, vol. V, 1592–1595 (Rome: Institutum Historicum Societatis Iesu, 1970), 436. Quoted in Tomichá, La Primera Evangelización, 226.

182 Tomichá Charupá, La Primera Evangelización, 226–27.

183 Diego de Samaniego, “Relación Del P. Diego de Samaniego, Con Muchas Noticias Sobre Misiones Hechas a Los Itatines, Chiriguanas y Chiquitos. San Lorenzo de La Frontera, 26 de diciembre de 1600,” in Historia General de La Compañía de Jesús En La Provincia Del Perú. Crónica Anónima de 1600 Que Trata Del Establecimiento y Missiones de La Compan︢ ía de Jesús En Los Países de Habla Española En La América Meridional, ed. Francisco Mateos, vol. II (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas, 1944), 488. Quoted in Tomichá, La Primera Evangelización, 225-226. Tomichá argues that even though this philological interpretation of the term Chiquitos conforms to linguistic digressions made by the anonymous author of Gramatica, it could offer insights into understanding the semantic phonetic change of the name Chiquitos to "Chiquitanos", denomination of the current natives of language Chiquita.

83 prologue, the author stated that Chiquitos derives from the indigenous word chiqui-s meaning

“eggs” or “testicles” and used to disparage outsiders. The author further explained that native groups given this label responded by taking on the name M'oñeyca, meaning "the men" or “the people”. The derogatory term chiqui-s emerged in the context of intertribal warfare and the enslavement of some native groups by Iberians and others.184

Jesuit Mission Reducciones and the Native Councils

The Society of Jesus began a mission program in Chiquitos informed by experiences gained while working among other indigenous populations throughout the Americas for nearly a century.185 The organization of their new reducciones followed a model developed in the

Guaraní missions and corresponded to a compilation of city planning ordinances issued by Philip

II in 1573 as part of the Laws of the Indies.186 Each of the ten stable mission towns founded in

Chiquitos comprised an ethnically diverse indigenous population that fluctuated between one and three thousand people.187 Because they were isolated from Jesuit administrative centers and other

European settlements, the missions could not depend on external support and thus operated with a measure of administrative and economic self-sufficiency.188 Even during the most successful years of the Jesuit period, Chiquitos remained a contested frontier situated on the fringes of the

184 Tomichá Charupá, La Primera Evangelización, 227–28.

185 Parejas Moreno and Suárez, Chiquitos: Historia de Una Utopía, 75.

186 Axel I. Mundigo and Dora P. Crouch, “The City Planning Ordinances of the Laws of the Indies Revisited. Part I: Their Philosophy and Implications,” The Town Planning Review 48, no. 3 (July 1, 1977): 248. The Ordinances served as the guidelines for the layout of Spanish towns all across the Americas. According to Mundigo and Crouch, this set of decrees “stressed a Christian ideology and a cultural imperialism designed to provide the Spaniard in the New World with an urban environment which would include recognizable features, while remaining adaptable to a variety of geographic locations.”

187 Radding, “From the Counting House to the Field and Loom,” 53–54.

188 Parejas Moreno and Suárez, Chiquitos: Historia de Una Utopía, 76.

84

Iberian colonial imperium. In this frontier setting, native peoples remained the majority population and influenced the Jesuit program of reducción as active participants in the construction of a new Indo-Christian mission culture.189

Each of the Chiquitos reducciones functioned under the immediate authority of two Jesuit missionaries: one responsible for administering spiritual matters and religious indoctrination and the other charged with managing temporal affairs such as overseeing the instruction of European trade skills and agricultural practices.190 The missionaries relied, in turn, on hierarchical native councils known as cabildos to reproduce Hispanic institutions, maintain order, and execute the daily proceedings of the reducción process.191 The cabildo comprised eight elected officials called jueces who represented the distinct parcialidades to which they belonged and thereby acted as intermediaries between their ethnic polities and the Jesuit regime.192 Although the cabildo structure accommodated the representation of various language and kinship groups, jueces used the Chiquita language to carry out all council deliberations.193

Because caciques carried out Jesuit objectives through their indirect rule as cabildo officers, mission priests enhanced their prestige. Each year, priests elected jueces from a select group of traditional male authority figures of advanced age and ability called caciques and granted them ceremonial clothing and canes of office crowned with silver. The prestige vested in

189 Tomichá Charupá, La Primera Evangelización, 289. See also Block, Mission Culture on the Upper Amazon: Native Tradition, Jesuit Enterprise, and Secular Policy in Moxos, 1660-1810, 2–6.

190 Parejas Moreno and Suárez, Chiquitos: Historia de Una Utopía, 77–78.

191 Radding, Landscapes of Power and Identity, 171.

192 Moreira da Costa, A Coroa Do Mundo, 66–67.

193 Falkinger, Anauxti Jesucristo Mariaboka, 108–12. Missionaries compiled grammar and vocabulary for Chiquita and codified the language in written manuals.

85 the cabildo was ceremonial, but jueces also enjoyed concrete advantages that included extra rations of food, sumptuous gifts, and places of honor to sit in church services. While the cabildo had Iberian origins, it is important to note that in the Chiquitos missions, the institution functioned in accordance with indigenous sociocultural practices. The elevated status and authority bestowed upon cabildo officers by the Jesuits imbricated existing pre-contact native kinship structures, linguistic affiliations, and political paradigms observed and maintained by the different parcialidades in each of the missions.194

The governance structure of the cabildo integrated elements of native leadership practices and social hierarchies with Iberian civic principles, but the Jesuit implementation of the councils did not benefit all members of the traditional native elite. While caciques enjoyed elevated positions as political leaders through their access to cabildo offices, the Jesuits excluded leadership practices and positions of influence they perceived as subversive to their project of reduccíon. Most notably, they actively undermined the legitimacy of shamans because they acted as spiritual intermediaries with curative powers and esoteric knowledge and thereby fulfilled roles that threatened the authority of mission priests.195

The cabildo was comprised of different and distinct positions of authority. Officers were known collectively as jueces, but they were distinguished by separate titles that carried different sets of responsibilities. The corregidor was the chief cabildo position and highest ranking indigenous officer of the mission, with administrative and judicial authority.196 A teniente served

194 Radding, Landscapes of Power and Identity, 170–173.

195 Peter Strack, Frente a Dios y Los Pozokas: Las Tradiciones Culturales y Sociales de Las Reducciones Jesuíticas Desde La Conquista Hasta El Presente; Fiesta Patronal y Semana Santa En Chiquitos (Bielefeld: Verl. für Regionalgeschichte, 1992), 27.

196 Radding, Landscapes of Power and Identity, 170–74.

86 as the immediate subordinate and assumed corregidor duties in the event of his absence. These officers were followed in rank by a royal standard-bearing alférez real, a first and second alcalde, a comandante, a justicia mayor, and a sargento mayor. Each of these jueces were assisted, in turn, by subordinate council members charged with supervising daily tasks, monitoring behavior, imposing discipline and enforcing liturgical worship. Among these subsidiary officers were alguaciles, fiscales, and regidores. The mayordomo de colegio maintained the community storehouses and directed the semiannual distribution of meat and other foodstuffs to the mission population. The supervision of communal labor was carried out by different capitanes selected from the most skilled tradesmen and craftsmen of the reducciones to train and oversee blacksmiths, silversmiths, carpenters, weavers, painters, wax chandlers muleteers, cattle ranchers, and other occupations involved in the mission economies.197 Native officers called cruceros, distinguished by the wooden crosses they wore, closely monitored important events such as marriages and births and activities within their respective parcialidades and informed resident missionaries of behavior that required attention.198 Through their close surveillance of the mission communities, cruceros acted as important agents of social control for the Jesuit regime.199

The hierarchy of indigenous councilors extended to officeholders entrusted with managing church functions and implementing ecclesiastical principles. The maestro de capilla aided by a maestro de canto led devotional music, trained native musicians, and directed the church choir. They held esteemed positions because choral and instrumental music were

197 Parejas Moreno and Suárez, Chiquitos: Historia de Una Utopía, 80–82.

198 Falkinger, Anauxti Jesucristo Mariaboka, 108–9.

199 Parejas Moreno and Suárez, Chiquitos: Historia de Una Utopía, 80.

87 important elements of Catholic indoctrination. As the most literate indigenous inhabitants of the missions, these officers were also responsible for teaching children to read, write, and transcribe liturgical music. Native sacristans served as custodians of the church and other religious buildings and maintained sacred vessels, images, and vestments.200

Christian doctrine was at the center of social life and communal identity for the reconstituted communities of the Jesuit reducciones. Mission Indians worshipped collectively through attendance at Mass, liturgical ritual ceremonies, and the observance of Catholic festivals.

These displays of religiosity and devotion reflected the Indians’ adaptations of Christian teachings. Their religious practices in the form of festivals, processions and the performance of choral music exhibited Catholic liturgical precepts at the same time that they affirmed connections with indigenous cosmologies. A combination of Catholic and native religious traditions also imbued the indigenous councils. The ranked hierarchies and maintenance of cabildo offices corresponded to liturgical ceremonies, religious convocation, indigenous political representation and ritual declamation. As noted above, cabildo officers used the codified

Chiquita language for all council deliberations. In accordance with their rank, native officers also delivered orations and moral exhortations in Chiquita during liturgical ceremonies and religious feast days. These formal sermons and public recitations of devotional verses, infused with idioms of religious convocation, displayed both indigenous and Catholic modes of authority and ritual performance.201

The spheres of political and religious authority overlapped in the cabildo, and native officers employed the solemn language of their sermons to construct a political discourse used in

200 Falkinger, Anauxti Jesucristo Mariaboka, 109.

201 Radding, Landscapes of Power and Identity, 165, 222–26, 232.

88 interactions with civil authorities. A few letters and petitions written in Chiquita and Spanish during the deliberations of local quarrels exemplify the sermonizing tone. Such disputes increased during the period following the Jesuit expulsion and reflected the turmoil of dramatic administrative changes. The cabildo outlived the Jesuit regime and officers took on important roles in these conflicts, many of which escalated into violence. Cabildo officers continued to assert their authority to protect and advance the interests of the communities they represented even as they collaborated with provincial governors and military administrators. The following chapter expands upon these historical developments to examine how native resistance to post-

Jesuit imperial developments of the late eighteenth century, including mission secularization and the establishment of a military administration, impacted the evolution and maintenance of ethnic identities that emerged a century earlier under different sociopolitical contexts.202

202 Ibid., 176–77, 188–89, 231–34. 89

Chapter 3 ______

Refracted Processes of Ethnogenesis: Identity Formation in the Early Post- Jesuit Years

Introduction

The development of a Chiquitano identity did not occur through a monolithic process that began and ended during a clearly bounded period of time. Becoming Chiquitano was, instead, a series of multivalent processes that emerged under the Jesuit regime, but continued long after the expulsion of the order in 1767. In the post-Jesuit years, these processes refracted to follow different paths through a protracted era of secularization that altered the spatial, institutional and administrative organization of Chiquitos and reoriented the region’s indigenous communities.203

To demonstrate this more complicated understanding of identity formation, this chapter focuses on the changes that occurred during the first decade after the Jesuit expulsion; changes that have been thoroughly documented in a substantial body of archival sources. Written by colonial bureaucrats and ecclesiastical officials, these sources carefully outline Iberian imperial endeavors. Few of them, however, contain direct references to the actions and motivations of

Indians. As a result, the documents that comprise this source base provide a wealth of information regarding the time period in question, but offer only implicit indications about the importance of the events they detail for the native people of Chiquitos.

I have corrected for the official oversights in the documentary record by critically reading each source against the grain to discern indigenous voices and to uncover the processes through

203 Combés, Etnohistorias Del Isoso, 23-27. I employ Combés’s concept of ethnogenesis – the evolving self-identity of different populations – to trace the emergence of ethnicities over time. 90 which diverse native populations crafted and articulated ethnic identities. This analytical approach has enabled me to find evidence that the Indians responded to colonial changes in varied and unpredictable ways in large part because they belonged to separate communities and inhabited different reducciones. Although nearly all of the documents were written by Spanish bureaucrats and church officials with the express purpose of recording imperial endeavors, a number of these sources contain valuable if indirect or faint inferences about the motivations of native cabildo officers and, by extension, the broader indigenous mission populations they represented. While these kinds of documents comprise the majority of my primary source base, the rare documents that explicitly give account of the intersections between native peoples and

Iberian institutions are crucial components of my historical inquiry.204 Employing this research design, I examine the cabildos as representatives of the broader indigenous populations of the

Chiquitos missions in order to trace their evolving articulations of identity. In accordance with this methodology, I evaluate the ways in which cabildo officers negotiated and influenced post-

Jesuit developments and demonstrate how they asserted authority and expressed conceptions of identity in their interactions with different Iberian interlocutors, primarily priests and colonial administrators.205

204 Fisher and O’Hara, “Introduction,” 19.

205 David Block, Mission Culture on the Upper Amazon: Native Tradition, Jesuit Enterprise and Secular Policy in Moxos, 1660-1880 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994). In his study of the Jesuit missions established among the hierarchical native cultures of Moxos, David Block demonstrates a stark divide between the cabildos and the common Indians. The indigenous populations of Chiquitos, however, were more politically and socially egalitarian than those of Moxos and the divide between the elites of the native councils and commoners was narrower.

91

The previous chapter concluded with a discussion of the cabildos and explained that members of these indigenous councils were elected by elite mission Indians to serve as representatives of their distinct parcialidades, and to govern the internal deliberations of the reducciones. This chapter focuses more narrowly on the cabildos and investigates the ways in which native justices maintained authority during administrative changes that occurred in the wake of the Jesuit expulsion. It examines how early post-Jesuit Iberian imperial developments, including the secularization of the missions and the introduction of Bourbon era economic initiatives, continued to influence the evolution of indigenous ethnic identities; a series of processes that had begun to emerge a century earlier under very different sociopolitical contexts.

As we will see, late eighteenth-century Bourbon fiscal policies and power struggles between

Spanish colonial officials, secular priests, and different Indian communities altered the nature of the cultural politics through which the cabildos asserted their autonomy and articulated their identities. The methods used by native councilors to achieve these ends, however, were neither uniform nor unified.

Early post-Jesuit administrative modifications and regulatory reforms introduced by colonial bureaucrats impacted the cabildos of Chiquitos and the broader indigenous populations they represented by subtly redefining the basis of ethnic identities. The bishop of the diocese of

Santa Cruz, Francisco Ramón Herboso y Figueroa, implemented the first regulations in

Chiquitos following the Jesuit expulsion. Herboso believed that sudden and dramatic changes could upset the province’s indigenous inhabitants and lead to widespread desertion of the mission towns; thus, he worked to execute a seamless administrative transition. To this end, the bishop’s new regulations preserved many sociopolitical elements developed under the Jesuit

92 administration, particularly the prominence of the native cabildo.206 As discussed in the second chapter, the Jesuits structured their system of governance – including the cabildo – around the different linguistic and ethnic groups known as parcialidades in each of the ten mission towns.

Herboso’s decision to maintain the native councils as well as other components of the Jesuit system allowed mission Indians to assert authority and to retain and affirm the separate identities of the different parcialidades to which they belonged – even if unintentionally. As we will discuss in the final chapter, however, the cabildos’ affirmation of identities linked to distinct parcialidades would become less common after colonial officials imposed new regulations during the final decade of the eighteenth that affected more dramatic changes. These regulations, inspired by political developments in the 1770s during the establishment of a military government, culminated in an administrative overhaul in 1790 that effectively ended all remnants of the Jesuit governing structure. Within the bureaucratic, cultural and socioeconomic contexts precipitated by these reforms, the appropriation and assertion of a cohesive Chiquitano identity gradually began to gain importance for the indigenous people of the province.207

Understanding the transformations of civil and ecclesiastical governance in Chiquitos is necessary for discerning the modalities used by native peoples to sustain their autonomy and express separate ethnic identities vis-à-vis evolving colonial initiatives and conflicts. Therefore, this chapter provides a summary of the first post-Jesuit regulations and policies that structured the spiritual and material administration of the missions. The chapter begins with a synopsis of the Jesuit expulsion in Chiquitos and the regulations introduced by Bishop Herboso in 1769. It

206 “Relación Informativa Presentada Por El Obispo de Santa Cruz de La Sierra Al Gobernador de Chiquitos, Sobre El Estado y Modo General de Las Misiones de Chiquitos,” 1769, GRM MyCh 24. II, ABNB.

207 Oscar Tonelli Justiniano, Reseña Histórica, Social y Económica de La Chiquitanía (Editorial El País, 2004), 114–16.

93 then turns to an examination of the methods used by native peoples to mitigate the impact of the regime change and concludes with the years immediately preceding the establishment of a military government in Chiquitos – the focus of the following chapter.208

The Jesuit Expulsion and the Regulations of Bishop Francisco Herboso

On 27 February 1767, King Carlos III of Spain signed the Decreto de Extrañamiento – a royal decree to expel the Society of Jesus from Spain and all of its colonies.209 The acting president of the audiencia of Charcas, Juan Martínez de Tineo, was charged with overseeing the expulsion in Chiquitos and Tarija. In order to fulfill the directives of the decree successfully,

Tineo had to provide safe passage for the expelled Jesuit priests to Lima where they would join other members of the order from Perú before embarking on their voyage to Europe.210 In an official letter to the governor of Santa Cruz written in July of 1767, Tineo dispatched covert orders to carry out the expulsion.211 The orders included instructions to provide escorts for the

Jesuits on their journey to Lima to as far as the Andean city of Oruro and to seize all mission assets and records.212

208 Tomichá Charupá, La Iglesia En Santa Cruz, 69. Ochoa became bishop in 1781.

209 Carlos III, “Expulsión de Los Jesuitas,” April 5, 1767, Estante 6.01, 04 Caja 16, x1-1, ACSC. In a document drafted after the promulgation of his initial decree, Carlos III explains: “Reservo en mi real ánimo, usando de la suprema autoridad, que el todo poderoso ha depositado en mis manos para la protección de mis vasallos, y respeto de mi corona he venido en mandar extrañar de todos mis Dominios de España, y Indias, Islas Filipinas, y demás adyacentes a los regulares de la Compañía de Jesús, así sacerdotes, como coadjutores, o legos que hayan hecho la primera profesión, y a los novicios que quisieren seguirles, y que se ocupen todas las temporalidades de la Compañía en mis dominios.”

210 Menacho, Por Tierras de Chiquitos, 117–18.

211 Juan Victorino Martínez de Tineo, “Oficio del Presidente de La Audiencia de La Plata al Gobernador de Santa Cruz. Comunica a las Instrucciones para el Incumplimiento del Decreto de Extrañamiento de los Padres de La Compañía de Jesús.,” July 19, 1767, GRM MyCh 23. I, ABNB.

212 “Oficio Del Gobernador de Mojos Al Presidente de La Audiencia de La Plata, Solicita Los Libros de Entradas y Salidas Que Manejaron Los Jesuitas En Cada Pueblo y Sobre El Régimen Que Llevaban En El Manejo de Su 94

The governor of Buenos Aires, Francisco de Paula y Ursúa Bucareli, received one of the earliest official orders to expel the Society of Jesus from Spain’s American colonies. From

Buenos Aires, Bucareli transferred the orders to President Tineo who declared the expulsion effective in the Jesuit missions under his jurisdiction.213 Tineo entrusted Lieutenant Colonel

Diego Antonio Martínez de la Torre, the interim governor of Chiquitos, with personally executing the plan in the remote frontier province.214 To this end, on 21 August 1767, Martínez de la Torre departed from the city of Santa Cruz for Chiquitos in command of eighty mounted soldiers.215

Soon after his arrival in Chiquitos, Martínez de la Torre discovered that there was popular support for the Jesuit priests among the native inhabitants of the missions and therefore the task of forcibly removing them from the province carried the risk of violent reprisals and even open rebellion.216 As a result, Martínez de la Torre and his men had to place their trust in the knowledge and judgement of the Jesuit missionaries and closely collaborate with them in order to carry out the expulsion process peacefully.217 Intending to avoid mounting tensions, upon learning of the expulsion decree, the Jesuit Superior of Chiquitos dispatched a letter to each

Correspondencia y Otros,” 1768, GRM MyCh 2. VII, ABNB. Colonial administrators accused the Jesuits of burning mission records before their expulsion.

213 Ernesto J. A. Maeder, “La Organización de La Provincia de Chiquitos En La Epoca PostJesuitica: Diferencias y Semejanzas Con La Provincia de Misiones de Guaraníes,” Revista de Historia Del Derecho, Instituto de Investigaciones de Historia Del Derecho 16 (1998): 157–158.

214 “Expediente Obrado Sobre El Nombramiento de Gobernadores Para La Provincia de Moxos Al Coronel Don Antonio Aymerich; y Para La de Chiquitos Al Capitán Don Diego Martínez, y Salarios Que Se Les Deben Asignar,” 1768, MyCh 22. folios 1 - 10, ABNB. Martínez de la Torre served as interim governor of Chiquitos before the Audiencia officially proclaimed the province to be an independent governorship.

215 Maeder, “La Organización de La Provincia de Chiquitos En La Epoca PostJesuitica,” 157–158.

216 Tomichá Charupá, La Primera Evangelización, 121.

217 Menacho, Por Tierras de Chiquitos, 122.

95 of the reducciones under his jurisdiction with special instructions devised to preclude widespread unrest and insurrection. In his letter, the Superior urged the priests to remain silent about the impending expulsion and instructed them to cooperate with the colonial officers sent to take inventory of the mission assets. His instructions also required at least one Jesuit missionary to remain in each of the reducciones to keep the peace until secular priests arrived from Santa Cruz and Chuquisaca to take charge of the province. Due to these cautious deliberations, the Jesuit expulsion in the Chiquitos province took eight months to complete.218 The entire operation extended from the first day of September 1767 until 18 April 1768.219

Even as the last remaining Jesuits made arrangements to leave Chiquitos, colonial

Spanish officials transformed the province into an independent governorship and placed the mission towns under the authority of the diocese of the bishopric of Santa Cruz.220 While the basic corporate structure established by the Society of Jesus continued to function in each of the reducciones – at least in its superficial form – ecclesiastical and civil officials from outside

Chiquitos began to transform local political and economic affairs by implementing new policies, many of which were conflicting.221 A royal auto, issued 18 September 1767 and enacted in

January of the following year, mandated the creation of a new civil governorship for the

Chiquitos province separate from the administrative center of Santa Cruz.222 As an early step

218 Ibid.

219 Tonelli Justiniano, Reseña Histórica, 91.

220 “GRM MyCh 24. II, ABNB.”

221 Cynthia Radding, “Historical Perspectives on Gender, Security, and Technology: Gathering, Weaving, and Subsistence in Colonial Mission Communities of Bolivia,” International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 15, no. 1 (2001): 111. The newly formed governorship of Chiquitos was separate from the governorship of Santa Cruz.

222 “Oficio Del Presidente de La Audiencia de La Plata Al Obispo de Santa Cruz, Comunica Que Con El Auto de 18 de septiembre de 1767 Se Aplacará El Genio Del Gobernador de Chiquitos,” 1768, GRM MyCh 23. IV, ABNB. In a 96 toward instituting a nominally civil administration in the newly independent province, Coronel de Milicias Francisco Pérez de Villaronte Martínez replaced Martínez de la Torre as the governor of Chiquitos. Upon assuming the governorship, Villaronte faced the imminent challenge of creating and instituting guidelines for a new administrative structure to replace the system of governance created by the Jesuits. Realizing the scale and difficulty of this undertaking,

Villaronte turned to the audiencia of Charcas and President Tineo for assistance. For his part,

Tineo named Bishop Herboso as special envoy to the Chiquitos province and charged him with appointing secular priests to replace the Jesuit missionaries as the primary administrators of the mission towns.223

The appointment of replacement priests held special importance because it was a directive expressly mentioned in the instructions that accompanied the royal decree of expulsion.

These instructions clearly stipulated that secular clerics must be stationed in every mission town immediately upon the departure of the Jesuit missionaries. Colonial bureaucrats feared that the

Indian neophytes of the province might abandon the reducciones if even one day were to pass without the supervision of non-indigenous, outside authority figures. Such a mass desertion, so they thought, would signal the end of the stable institutional presence in Chiquitos that the mission towns had afforded the Spanish crown for three-quarters of a century. Without this presence, they feared that the remote frontier province would become more exposed to illicit

letter dated January 1, 1768, President Tineo instructed Herboso to follow the auto issued during the previous year and create the governorship of Chiquitos.

223 Tonelli Justiniano, Reseña Histórica, 95–98.

97 trade and opportunistic efforts for territorial consolidation on the part of multiple native polities and aspiring colonists who claimed allegiance to both Spanish and Portuguese crowns.224

The perceived necessity of installing Iberian administrators, as expressed by Tineo and

Herboso, reflected the refusal of Bourbon officials to recognize the central position of the cabildos within the mission communities and, by extension, the Indians’ capacity for self- governance. This intransigent disregard for native sovereignty would influence the policies of subsequent administrations, lead to the hasty appointment of incompetent and unscrupulous priests, and give rise to conflicts between indigenous justices and colonial officials.225 Not all of the officials’ perceptions were ignorant or unwarranted, however. Population data compiled in census records of the Chiquitos missions taken during the transition from Jesuit to diocesan administration bear out the prevailing fears of desertion. The following tables summarize this data and show a total population decline of 16% between 1767, the year of the Jesuit expulsion, and 1768, the first year under the new regime. The census records also confirm the importance of the majority indigenous population for maintaining the missions and stabilizing the province – a reality not lost on Herboso.

224 Ibid., 97: Tamar Herzog, Frontiers of Possession: Spain and Portugal in Europe and the Americas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 74–78. Jesuits working for both the Spanish and Portuguese crowns were instrumental in consolidating imperial territories throughout the Americas.

225 Tonelli Justiniano, Reseña Histórica, 97.

98

Chiquitos Population Data, 1767 226 Missions Families Widows Widowers Single Single Souls Young Young Men Women San Xavier 720 31 51 890 789 3,201 Concepción 713 20 41 998 793 3,278 San Miguel 245 8 20 419 436 1,473 San Ignacio 731 4 34 797 837 2,734 San Rafael 562 20 26 798 778 2,746

Santa Ana 367 8 34 481 530 1,787

San Joseph 618 3 46 780 650 2,715 San Juan 425 10 19 559 515 1,953 Santiago 410 4 58 363 369 1,614 Santo 532 9 32 560 622 2,287 Corazón Total 5,323 117 361 6,645 6,319 23,788

Chiquitos Population Data, 1768 227 Missions Parcialidades Families Widows Widowers Single Single Souls Young Young Men Women San Xavier 7 770 25 42 244 168 2,022 Concepción 11 745 15 61 741 620 2,913 San Miguel 4 322 10 24 387 380 1,373 San Ignacio 6 588 7 39 489 422 2,183 San Rafael 3 438 62 35 548 525 2,046 Santa Ana 4 388 4 34 481 476 1,771 San Joseph 3 608 2 29 471 350 2,038 San Juan 6 430 5 31 439 464 1,770 Santiago 5 420 6 13 332 403 1,579 Santo 3 546 0 44 561 582 2,287 Corazón Total 52 5,255 144 352 4,693 4,390 19,981

226 “Censo Realizado En La Provincia de Chiquitos, Incluye El Reglamento Elaborado Por El Obispo de Santa Cruz de La Sierra, Para El Gobierno Temporal y Espiritual de La Provincia de Chiquitos,” 1767, MyCh, 24, I, ABNB.

227 “Censos y Padrones Elaborados de Los Pueblos de La Provincia de Chiquitos,” 1768, MyCh, 24. VI, ABNB.

99

In addition to the responsibility of appointing secular priests to replace the recently expelled Jesuit missionaries, Bishop Herboso was also charged with creating and implementing guidelines for the priests to observe.228 To achieve this end, Herboso personally embarked on an official tour or visita of the mission towns nearest the city of Santa Cruz to assess the state of the province.229 After concluding the tour at the beginning of 1769, he dispatched two separate reports of his findings to the audiencia of Charcas. The first report, dated February 6 of that year, was accompanied by a set of ecclesiastical precepts comprised of 36 articles created to regulate the conduct of the secular priests.230 This section instituted several practices observed by the

Jesuits and codified a number of general rules such as guidelines for the administration of the sacraments, the weekly responsibilities of the priests, directions for keeping parish records, including censuses, and pastoral edicts for encountering sorcery. The articles also included pastoral regulations for dealing with the arrival of forasteros – Indians who fled their labor obligations by migrating from either the Andes or the Paraguay River basin, in parts of present- day Brazil and Paraguay.231 A second report dated March 4 contained a series of ordinances for the management of temporal matters.232 Comprised of 61 articles, this section paid close attention to governmental structure and the administration of mission goods. It also contained provisions and regulations for indigenous authorities, and various skilled trades, workshops, and

228 “Vista Del Fiscal Protector de Misiones y Auto de La Audiencia de La Plata, Sobre El Régimen Político y Administración Eclesiástica Para Los Misiones de Mojos y Chiquitos.,” 1767, GRM MyCh 23. II, ABNB.

229 Maeder, “La Organización de La Provincia de Chiquitos En La Epoca PostJesuitica,” 158-159. Bishop Herboso appointed Pedro de la Rocha to complete a visita of the Moxos missions.

230 Tonelli Justiniano, Reseña Histórica, 95.

231 Francisco Herboso, “Reglamento Eclesiástico Por El Obispo de Santa Cruz de La Sierra, Para La Observancia de Los Curas de La Provincial de Chiquitos,” 1769, GRM MyCh 24. III, ABNB.

232 Maeder, “La Organización de La Provincia de Chiquitos En La Epoca PostJesuitica: Diferencias Y Semejanzas Con La Provincia de Misiones de Guaraníes,” 159.

100 guilds.233 Governor Villaronte confirmed both sets of Herboso’s regulations and the audiencia quickly approved them before mandating their immediate application in the provinces of Moxos and Chiquitos.234

The articles presented by Herboso for the governance of Chiquitos maintained the general corporate structure established by the Jesuits.235 The following judicial decree approved by the audiencia in 1769 to articulate the formal outlines of the new regime shed light on the principles that guided the bishop’s decision to preserve certain aspects of the Jesuit system and underscore his recognition of Chiquitos as primarily an indigenous space:

It would not be suitable to institute new and sudden changes in the lives of the Indians. In

accordance with the present circumstances, the new regulations will maintain those old

(Jesuit-era) methods and enact imperceptible alterations in the future without

precipitating a startling transformation that may upset the disposition of the Indians and

cause them to abandon the missions in exasperation and return to the montes (forests).236

233 Tonelli Justiniano, Reseña Histórica, 95.

234 Ibid., 94.

235 Ramón Gutiérrez da Costa and Rodrigo Gutiérrez Viñuales, “Territorio, Urbanismo y Arquitectura En Moxos y Chiquitos,” in Las Misiones Jesuíticas de Chiquitos, ed. Pedro Querejazu and Plácido Molina Barbery (La Paz, Bolivia: Fundación BHN, Línea Editorial: La Papelera, 1995), 307.

236 “Auto Acordado Por La Audiencia de La Plata En Virtud de Los Reglamento Remitidos Por El Obispo de Santa Cruz Para La Administración y Régimen de Las Misiones de Chiquitos,” 1769, This is the author’s translation of the following: no ser conveniente una nueva repentina mutación en orden a la vida particular de los indios y que atendidos las presentes circunstancias, se mantenga bajo de aquel antiguo método y que en lo sucesivo se vaya alterando insensiblemente sin introducir una extraña novedad, que inmute los ánimos de aquellos naturales y haga que exasperados deserten los pueblos y se retiren a los montes…, GRM MyCh 23. XXVII, ABNB.

101

Herboso had come to understand the political limitations of Spanish imperial governance in the province. He believed that enacting radical changes in the missions might provoke unrest among the indigenous populations or even incite an open insurrection that the colonial government was incapable of quelling. To avoid these crises, as elaborated in the excerpt above, Herboso modeled his ordinances on the theocratic government established by the Society of Jesus. The economic system and liturgical practices introduced by the Jesuits and central to their project of reducción had become acceptable standards among the mission Indians of Chiquitos.237 The bishop and audiencia officials intended to implement innovations that further deviated from the

Jesuit system at a later time, when the Indians had grown accustomed to the post-Jesuit regime, and had assimilated into more gradual and carefully established political changes. In spite of moving forward with this prudent blueprint for continuity, the transition set in motion a number of impactful changes, including foundational elements of a protoindustrial mercantile economy, that would be more evident early on.238

Informed by his understanding that the stability of the province depended on the mission

Indians, Herboso designed his regulations to incorporate the authority of the cabildos and allow them to retain their representative governing structure, leadership practices, and social hierarchies. In the process of developing his regulatory system, Herboso came to acknowledge the effective authority and influence exercised by the cabildo and recognized the advantages of retaining the institution. The native councils maintained the rhythm of quotidian life in the missions and operated as another level of bureaucratic supervision over a province in which

Spanish colonial authority was limited. Cabildos executed the daily tasks of village surveillance

237 Radding, “From the Counting House to the Field and Loom,” 70–72.

238 Maeder, “La Organización de La Provincia de Chiquitos En La Epoca PostJesuitica,” 160–61.

102 and managed communal labor including the work of skilled tradesmen, the planting and harvesting of crops and the collection of wax.239

The native councils also provided a counterweight to the secular priests – who wielded considerable authority – and consequently served another valuable, albeit unintentional, function for Herboso. In an official report written by Herboso in 1769, the bishop stressed the importance of the cabildos. He informed Governor Villaronte that native officers prevented the priests from imposing unilateral authority and undermining cabildo deliberations by routinely discussing mission affairs among themselves during private meetings in the church cemetery.240 The cabildos merged indigenous conventions of governance with Iberian administrative order and native councilors employed the hybrid institution to achieve their own ends.241 Moreover, the councils functioned as loci of ethnically based identification and representation and, therefore, contributed to the maintenance of ethnic distinctions as well as the articulation of separate parcialidades.242

The following table presents information from a 1785 archival record of the appointment and formal confirmation of cabildo officers in the mission of San Ignacio. This document is neither comprehensive nor definitive, but the data it records features patterns that outline sociocultural, political and kinship structures present in the other Chiquitos missions. Such patterns show intricate family ties between native justices and the broader mission populations

239 Ibid., 61.

240 “GRM MyCh 24. II, ABNB,” Herboso also maintained the process used to elect cabildo officers.

241 James C. Scott, Dominance and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (Yale University Press, 1990), 120. The cemetery where the cabildos met to discuss mission affairs is an example of what James Scott identifies as a social site of the “hidden transcript” in which the native justices were able to voice a discourse of resistance beyond the surveillance of power holders.

242 Radding, Landscapes of Power and Identity, 163, 230–31.

103 they represented.243 In reference to the tables featured above containing population data from the years 1767 and 1768, San Ignacio was one of the four largest missions with a population of more than 2,000.244

Indian Justices from the Six Parcialidades of San Ignacio, 1785245 Title Christian Name and Surname Parcialidad Corregidor Zacarías Poriabos Guarayo Teniente Calizo Carupas Curiquia Alférez Ignacio Topirus Piococa Alcalde del Voto Basilio Pachuris Tañipica Alcalde de 2 Voto Ignacio Topirus Xubereca Alcalde Provincial Andrés Mocapes Xamanuca Comandante Rafael Zocores Piococa Mro del Po Joseph Peteas Xubereca Sargento Mayor Alexo Yovios Guarayo Maestro de Capilla Miguel Putares Xubereca Regidor Bonifacio Yovios Guarayo Regidor Antonio Xubes Curipica Regidor Francisco Xores Piococa Regidor Pedro Xores Tañipica Regidor Thomas Xubes Xubereca Regidor Benito Tamaquai Xamica Alguacil Pablo Xores Guarayo Alguacil Bartolomé Yoripis Curiquia Alguacil Juan Yovios Piococa Alguacil Ignacio Putares Tañipica Alguacil Cornelio Poquibiquis Xubereca Alguacil Pedro Pachuris Xamanuca Capitán Ignacio Muxos Guarayo Capitán Pedro Pachuris Curiquia Capitán Mariano Xubes Piococa Capitán Antonio Yovios Tañipica Capitán Gerónimo Yovios Xubereca Capitán Joaquín Zeois Xamanuca Alférez Ventura Xarupas Guarayo

243 Yanna Yannakakis, The Art of Being In-Between: Native Intermediaries, Indian Identity, and Local Rule in Colonial Oaxaca (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), My discussion of patterns of family ties between native justices and the broader mission populations is influenced by Yannakakis’s concept of a “Shadow System” within indigenous politics.

244 “ABNB, MyCh, 24, I”; “ABNB, MyCh, 24. VI.”

245 “Nombramiento de Indios Jueces de Las Seis Parcialidades Que Componen El Pueblo de San Ignacio de La Provincia Chiquitos,” January 1, 1785, GRM MyCh 26. XXVI, ABNB. 104

Title Christian Name and Surname Parcialidad Alférez Pedro Pachuris Coriqua Alférez Ignacio Topiris Piococa Alférez Pablo Xocures Tañipica Alférez Mariano Zoquires Xubereca Alférez Ignacio Maravis Xaramuca Sargento Joseph Xubes Guarayo Sargento Francisco Tominaiz Coriqua Sargento Bruno Peteas Piococa Sargento Gaspar Zeois Tañipica Sargento Diego Putares Xubereca Sargento Antonio Yopies Xamanuca Fiscal de Mujeres Xavier Peteas Guarayo Fiscal de Mujeres Sebastián Mavis Curiquia Fiscal de Mujeres Sebastián Maravis Piococa Fiscal de Muchachos Sebastián Maravis Curiquia Fiscal de Muchachos Diego Zocores Piococa Fiscal de Muchachos Sebastián Xores Tañipica Fiscal de Muchachas Thomoteo Potubutis Guarayo Fiscal de Muchachas Pedro Peis Xubereca Fiscal de Muchachas Matías Poxarubas Xamuca Crucero Pablo Xores Guarayo Crucero Simón Matus Curiquia Crucero Domingo Toxubes Piococa Crucero Félix Peteas Tañipica Crucero Lucas Tapeoris Xubereca Crucero Ambrosio Poiquis Xamanuca (Continued from the previous page)

The native justices listed in this document and formally recognized by civil officials, were identified personally by their family names as well as the titles of their confirmed offices.

They were distinguished further by the moniker of the parcialidades they represented. These details indicate the maintenance of separate parcialidades – at least eight – and, by extension, the continued importance of different ethnic and linguistic identities within San Ignacio nearly twenty years after the Jesuit expulsion. Moreover, the enumeration of individual native justices in this document shows the repetition of surnames that occurred both within and across distinct

105 parcialidades.246 Patterns of surname repetition that transcended the ethnic and linguistic barriers delineated by the parcialidades indicate the existence of strong kinship networks that intersected the cabildo and influenced the ways in which the institution functioned. My analysis of this demographic data and broader research of surnames that appear in various other documents from this period reveals the existence of three parallel networks: parcialidades, family alliances and the mission community. Each of these networks were sources of meaningful identities for the indigenous people of Chiquitos. As we will see, native justices functioned as representatives of these networks and invoked the identities associated with each of them – either independently or in conjunction – during their engagement with colonial and ecclesiastical officials and with other cabildos.247

The Bureaucratic Structure of the Post-Jesuit Administration

Under Herboso’s administrative system, one lay official and two secular priests replaced the Jesuit missionaries as the chief local authority figures within each of the reducciones. These changes, in addition to the establishment of an independent governorship, created parallel bureaucracies between ecclesiastical and civil authorities. In accordance with this structure, the governor of Chiquitos could not implement administrative decisions without gaining prior approval from each of the secular priests who were charged with managing all spiritual and civil matters in the mission towns. As a result, in practice, the priests impeded the authority of the

246 Ibid. With the exception of the Fiscal de Mujeres, Fiscal de Muchachos and Fiscal the Muchachas, the cabildo offices that appear in this table were created during the Jesuit regime, as discussed in the previous chapter, and are familiar. I can surmise that the new offices were created to supervise women and minors.

247 Block, Mission Culture on the Upper Amazon: Native Tradition, Jesuit Enterprise, and Secular Policy in Moxos, 1660-1810, 87–89. My reading of the demographic data presented in this table is influenced by David Block’s research on the Jesuit missions of Moxos. Block made similar conclusions in his analysis of mission census records taken by Jesuit missionaries during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

106 provincial governor, based on the power they wielded in the missions and thus caused significant frustration and conflict. The priests were also responsible for administering economic affairs in the missions such as establishing regular correspondence with the receptor general (receiver general) and keeping official records of each and every commercial account in the mission enterprise.248 Moreover, the audiencia ordered the priests, lay administrators, and the provincial governor to maintain the vital trade networks that had connected the Chiquitos province with

Alto Perú for the better part of a century.249

Colonial bureaucrats working under the new regime began to enact policies intended to boost commercial productivity, deepen the integration of the Chiquitos province into the local market economy, and generate more internal wealth.250 Increased wealth would enable the mission towns to operate with a degree of self-sufficiency and become less reliant on support from the Junta Provincial de Temporalidades (an agency created to oversee mission assets after the Jesuit expulsion).251 During the Jesuit period, the mission towns manufactured and exported goods – primarily beeswax and crude textiles – to a regional commercial market under a closely monitored system of exchange.252 Bourbon administrators endeavored to intensify the economic model created by the Jesuits and transform the reducciones into centers of protoindustrial production of textiles, metallurgy, carpentry, wax and commercial cultigens.

248 Maeder, “La Organización de La Provincia de Chiquitos En La Epoca PostJesuitica,” 161.

249 Radding, Landscapes of Power and Identity, 78.

250 Radding, “From the Counting House to the Field and Loom,” 72–73.

251 Susan Migden Socolow, The Bureaucrats of Buenos Aires, 1769-1810: Amor Al Real Servicio (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1987), 39. I borrow this definition of Junta Provincial de Temporalidades from Socolow.

252 Radding, “From the Counting House to the Field and Loom,” 69–71.

107

A series of letters written in 1769 between the president of the Audiencia, Juan Tineo, and the governor of Chiquitos, Francisco Villaronte, provides an account of some of the specific imperatives developed under the Bourbon regime to increase production in the Chiquitos missions. The plans deliberated by the two administrators centered on enhancing the commercialization of commodities already generated by Indian labor as well as the introduction of directives to produce new commodities. Among the plans deliberated by Tineo and Villaronte were the expansion of land brought under cultivation for the production of tobacco, coffee and coca leaves, and the construction of ox-drawn carts better suited for navigating the province’s shifting footpaths that were often flooded during the rainy season. The latter proposal was intended to expedite the shipment of commercial goods and facilitate the distribution of provisions to and from the remote frontier province. The plan to cultivate tobacco was of especial importance for Tineo and Villaronte. They had both received several reports that the soil surrounding the missions could produce tobacco of a quality similar to that of Brazil and the cultivation and sale of the cash crop would provide a sorely needed economic boon for the province.253 Despite these designs, however, agricultural production in Chiquitos remained a subsistence endeavor. The only marketable surpluses generated by Indian labor under the

Bourbon regime were salt and the two commodities produced during the Jesuit period – beeswax and cotton cloth.254

The introduction of economic programs like those discussed above marked the transition from Jesuit to Bourbon rule and further integrated the Chiquitos missions into the broader

253 “Oficios Del Presidente de La Audiencia de La Plata Al Gobernador de Chiquitos. Relativos a La Pronta Remisión de Productos, Sobre El Cultivo de Tabaco, Café y Coca; Se Obligue a Los Indios a Llevar Apellidos Patronímicos y Otros Asuntos.,” 1769, GRM MyCh 23. XX, ABNB.

254 Radding, “From the Counting House to the Field and Loom,” 87. It should be noted that beeswax and salt were gathered.

108 colonial economy.255 These programs also gave rise to other significant and unintended consequences for the native people of the province. The implementation of such initiatives depended on the use of communal mission properties, redirected indigenous skills, trades, and technologies away from community subsistence to generating marketable surpluses, and channeled wealth out of the reducciones. 256 Moreover, Indian laborers did not have direct access to trade outside of the province and were forced to depend on non-Indian ecclesiastical and civil officials for essential rations and supplies. To make matters worse, the distribution of provisions within the missions gradually took on the character of commerce between the Indians and their resident priests.257 For their part, the priests faced long delays between the deliveries of their annual sínodos or stipends and appealed to the Bishop of Santa Cruz to address the issue, but to no avail. Without a dependable income, the priests took advantage of the powers given them and began to support themselves by engaging in the regional trade of mission commodities produced by Indian labor. Much of this trade was illicit, generated commercial wealth for Santa Cruz merchants as well as the priests, and occasioned exploitative labor demands characterized by physical abuse of the mission Indians.258

The mission-as-enterprise model and resulting dysfunction within Chiquitos transformed the economic roles played by native peoples, stripped them of control over the commodities they produced, exploited their collective resources, and threatened their internal sovereignty.

Furthermore, deeper integration into the regional market exchange created fiscal exigencies and

255 Radding, “Historical Perspectives on Gender, Security, and Technology,” 113.

256 Ibid., 111–12.

257 “Informe de Diego Antonio Martínez de La Torre a La Audiencia de Charcas. Comunica El Estado En El Que Se Encuentran Las Misiones de Chiquitos,” 1768, MyCh 23. IX, ABNB, GRM.

258 Ibid.; Radding, Landscapes of Power and Identity, 79–83.

109 greater labor demands that undermined the ecological and cultural foundations of the indigenous communal economy.259 Despite Herboso’s efforts to avoid dramatic and contentious administrative changes, Bourbon commercial directives created contradictory entrepreneurial and communal claims to the wealth generated by Indian labor, which, in turn, gave rise to abuse, legal disputes and, episodes of violent confrontation. The cabildos took on leading roles in these conflicts and served as defenders of the collective property and ethnic territory of their communities.260

Localized Disputes, Confrontations and Rebellions

Positioned at the center of internal governance, political culture, and social allegiance, the native councils provided the modality through which mission Indians asserted autonomy.261 A number of investigative reports written in the aftermath of conflicts between Indian justices and civil authorities exemplify a political discourse of mediation that merged indigenous political representation with Iberian administrative order and Catholic liturgical performance. This documentary trail also shows that cabildo justices and the separate parcialidades they represented collaborated only intermittently with native councils from other mission towns.

Although multiple cabildos participated in and led numerous uprisings during the years following the Jesuit expulsion, such violent conflicts were isolated. The separate councils hailing from each of the different missions did not articulate a shared Chiquitano identity to address province-wide struggles. Rather, they dealt with localized issues that affected the distinct

259 Radding, “From the Counting House to the Field and Loom,” 82–84.

260 Radding, Landscapes of Power and Identity, 78, 242–47.

261 Ibid., 168–75.

110 communities they represented and, in the process, affirmed the identities of those communities.

Moreover, the cabildos’ complaints recorded in many of the investigative reports reveal conceptions of identity expressed by the justices and the broader Indian populations in defense of their communal mission patrimony. These expressions attest to the function of the cabildos as forums for the representation and articulation of distinct local and often linguistic and ethnic- based identities.262

On 7 February 1768, the parcialidades of the mission of Concepción led a revolt against one of their resident priests, Ignacio Góngora for administering a repressive work regime, physical and verbal abuse and incessant punishments. The revolt began when several Indians armed with bows and arrows gathered in the central plaza and began to play drums and threaten to kill the priest. Fearing for his life, Góngora hid in the church until the other resident priest,

Antonio de la Palenque, intervened and convinced the Indians to put down their arms. The incident ended without bloodshed and Góngora fled to the mission of San Xavier leaving

Palenque as the sole ecclesiastical authority in Concepción.263

Months later, Governor Martínez de la Torre travelled to Concepción to convene a meeting with the cabildo members in order to investigate the causes of the tumult. After concluding his visit, he dispatched an official report of his findings to the president of the audiencia, Juan Martínez de Tineo. Referencing testimonies given by the native justices with whom he met, the governor informed Tineo that the different parcialidades of Concepción had revolted with the intent to kill Góngora. The justices claimed that on the morning of the revolt,

262 “Oficio Del Gobernador de Chiquitos Al Presidente de La Audiencia de La Plata. Comunica Sobre La Falta de Obediencia de Los Indios y Que Los Indios Del Pueblo de La Purísima Concepción y Santa Ana Se Han Sublevado En Contra de Sus Curas,” 1768, GRM, MyCh 23. V, ABNB.

263 “Alzamiento En Concepción,” 1768, 6-2, ACSC.

111

Góngora had publically insulted a group of Indians before ordering them to repair the roof of a mission building. While forcibly carrying out this dangerous task, scaffolding collapsed and fell onto six Indians who were standing below. No one died, but the accident inflicted serious injuries and proved to be the final affront that sparked the revolt. The justices warned Martínez de la Torre that they would kill Góngora if he returned to Concepción and requested that Antonio de Palenque take his place as their resident priest. They explained that Palenque acted in their best interests because he had come to Chiquitos with an order from the president of the

Audiencia to supervise the conduct of the governor and the priests.264

After recounting the details of the revolt and conveying the cabildo’s accusations,

Martínez de la Torre devoted a portion of his report to delivering his own personal indictment of

Góngora. According to the governor, he regularly took provisions from the mission storehouses for his own personal use and openly boasted that the priests of Chiquitos are not subject to the authority of the governor. Although Martínez de la Torre directed most of his condemnation toward Góngora, he also denounced the behavior of other resident priests in the province and pointed out that many of them profited from the sale of mission property as well – including spiritually valuable church effects such as violins. Furthermore, citing complaints made by native justices, he stated that the secular clerics sent to replace the Jesuits failed to carry out their spiritual responsibilities and, as a result, several missions had gone without confession for months. The governor concluded his report by warning the Audiencia that the missions and, indeed, the entire province would be lost within two years unless the inept priests were replaced by more qualified and competent mendicant friars.265

264 “ABNB, GRM MyCh 23. V.”

265 Ibid.

112

A year after the turmoil in Concepción, the cabildo officers of Santa Ana united to inform

Bishop Francisco Herboso of the insolent and violent behavior of one of their resident priests,

Joseph Blas de Villanueva, and to call for his expulsion and punishment. Herboso responded to the cabildo’s rising clamor by dispatching two ecclesiastical officials to Santa Ana with orders to investigate the allegations against Villanueva and to hear the testimonies of the presiding cabildo members. Speaking on behalf of the mission as a whole, each of the native justices claimed that

Villanueva became belligerent after receiving a harsh admonishment from Santa Ana’s ranking priest, Thadeo Terrazas, for his crude and dissolute conduct. A few days later, Villanueva acted out in retaliation to the humiliating rebuke by flying into a vindictive rage and summarily administering corporal punishment to the mission teniente, the second-highest ranking justice on the native council, and publically disgracing him. According to the detailed accounts given by the justices, Villanueva verbally abused several other Indians prior to physically seizing the teniente in the central plaza and knocking him to the ground. He then proceeded to flog the man brutally with 100 lashes before stripping him of his cabildo insignia and revoking his authority as a native justice in the presence of the entire mission.266

In his testimony, Villanueva defended his behavior by explaining that he had flogged the teniente to punish him for administering 12 lashes to an Indian woman who had merely entered the colegio. The native justices countered by pointing out that “since the time of the Jesuits” only men were permitted to enter the colegio, therefore, the woman had violated a sacred space and the teniente’s decision to punish her was warranted. As such, the justices charged, the vicious flogging of a respected cabildo member for applying the authority vested in him by the

266 “Informe Del Obispo de Santa Cruz de La Sierra Al Presidente de La Audiencia de Charcas, Juan Victorino Martínez de Tineo, Sobre El Traslado de Fray Bernardo Terrazas a Santa Ana de Segundo Cura,” April 25, 1769, MyCh 64, ABNB, GRM.

113 community and rightly enforcing a longstanding and accepted prohibition of which Villanueva, a resident priest, was clearly ignorant, was a dereliction of both his spiritual and temporal duties.

Father Thadeo Terrazas supported these charges and corroborated the accounts given by the native justices. As the ranking priest of Santa Ana, Terrazas had issued several of his own complaints about Villanueva prior to this incident and had even asked Herboso to replace the troublesome priest with his relative, a Franciscan friar named Bernardo Terrazas.267

After concluding the investigation, Herboso judged the accusations against Villanueva to be credible and resolved to bring him to justice. To this end, he instructed the ecclesiastical officials, who had been in charge of the investigation, to place Villanueva in shackles and deliver him to Santa Cruz to await adjudication. In his official report of the incident written for the

Audiencia, Herboso informed the president that the cabildo of Santa Ana had employed their authority and influence to pressure him into forcibly removing Villanueva from their mission.

During the course of their denunciations and formal testimonies, the native justices conveyed to

Herboso the gravity of Villanueva’s offenses and detailed the repercussions that the priest’s actions could have had. From the perspective of the justices, Villanueva, the very spiritual steward entrusted with overseeing the religious instruction and physical well-being of the mission, had used his position to terrorize the community, threaten their security, and undermine the authority of the cabildo. Herboso pointed out that these violations put Santa Ana – a mission that had nearly rebelled at the time of the Jesuit expulsion and bitterly resisted the authority of the replacement priests – at serious risk of insurrection or desertion.268 To avoid such grave

267 Ibid.

268 Ibid., This document does not indicate whether or not Terrazas and Villanueva were among the priests who were initially sent to replace the Jesuits.

114 consequences, Herboso explained, he apprehended Villanueva, and recommended the most severe sentence possible declaring that no punishment was sufficient for the priest’s crimes.

Herboso concluded his report by expressing the consolation that he found in the prudent leadership of the cabildo members of Santa Ana. Rather than taking matters into their own hands and exacting retribution against Villanueva – a reaction that Herboso admittedly viewed as understandable given the gravity of the priest’s transgressions – the native justices showed careful restraint and appealed to the jurisdiction of the bishopric for justice.269

The tumults in Concepción and Santa Ana illustrate a few of the effective strategies used by the cabildos to maneuver the institutions of colonial rule in order to exercise autonomy and assert the different identities they represented within their mission communities. By threatening violence and forcing negotiations with Martínez de la Torre, the native justices of Concepción defended the mission as their communal patrimony against Góngora and successfully pressured the governor to replace him with a priest of their choosing. Moreover, in his report, Martínez de la Torre made it clear that “the parcialidades rose up to kill Góngora”, indicating that the mission Indians and native justices of Concepción did not invoke a unified identity in their efforts to protect their community and patrimony.270 Instead, they navigated conflictive spaces between different parcialidades, oriented toward kinship-based identities, and the political representation of the reducción in which they lived and exercised authority.271

269 “ABNB, GRM MyCh 64.” Thadeo Terrazas asked Herboso to replace Villanueva with his relative, a Franciscan friar name Bernardo Terrazas. Herboso forwarded Terrazas’s request to the president of the Audiencia.

270 “ABNB, GRM MyCh 23. V,” This is my translation of the governor’s words “las parcialidades sublevadas matarle.”

271 Radding, Landscapes of Power and Identity, 193–95.

115

In the case of Santa Ana, the cabildo employed a different method for resolving a dispute against an abusive priest. Rather than explicitly invoking the identities of the four separate parcialidades of Santa Ana, the justices joined together to present their disputations under the banner of the entire mission.272 Despite this more unified approach as defenders of Santa Ana, however, their struggle remained localized. The justices never declared a cause, expressed an issue or struggled to achieve goals that transcended the mission community. In pursuit of their locally defined aim, each of the justices implemented the authority wielded by the unified cabildo and emphasized the respect they garnered in the mission as cabildo members. Moreover, they made clear that Villanueva’s brutal physical punishment of the teniente was an act of brazen disregard for the esteemed position of the native council that deeply offended the entire mission population. By affirming the importance of the cabildo for the indigenous people of Santa Ana and presenting Villanueva’s actions as open contempt for the institution, the justices served to articulate the voices of the different ethnic and linguistic identities they represented as council members.273

The cabildos of the Chiquitos missions did not limit their representative authority and political engagement to struggles against ecclesiastical officials and colonial administrators.

During the first two decades after the Jesuit expulsion, there were several episodes in which cabildos from separate reducciones squared off against each other as they represented their kinship groups in disputes over communal property and territorial boundaries. In 1770, don

Francisco Pérez de Villaronte, successor to Governor Martínez de la Torre, informed the bishop of Santa Cruz about a territorial dispute between the native justices of Concepción and the

272 “ABNB, MyCh, 24. VI.”

273 “ABNB, GRM MyCh 64.”

116 cabildos of San Ignacio and San Miguel. According to Villaronte, the Indians of Concepción – justices as well as commoners – did not know the true boundaries of their mission territory because they “had no priest to lead them”. In their ignorance, it was alleged, they made use of lands that belonged to San Ignacio and San Miguel which elicited a series of disputes. To settle the conflict, Villaronte met with the cabildos of the three reducciones and presented them with archived documents that delineated the “original” boundaries of their respective mission territories. For their part, each of the cabildos recognized the boundaries recorded in the documents presented by the governor and reached an agreement to use only the lands that fell under the communal patrimony of the reducciones in which they lived.274

Other territorial disputes between mission communities and their cabildos took much longer to resolve. In 1779, the native justices of San Rafael and San Miguel settled a simmering border conflict that had lasted several years. The conflict revolved around the use of grazing lands adjacent to the easternmost mission of Santiago. The cabildos of San Rafael and San

Miguel actively maintained claims to the land and encouraged native ranchers from their mission communities to pasture cattle there for the better part of a decade. This indeterminate and poorly regulated use of valuable grazing land created confusion which, in turn, gave rise to mounting tensions. Such tensions are documented in angry complaints about livestock theft filed by native justices from both cabildos in reports that circulated between resident priests in the missions and colonial officials stationed in Santa Cruz.275

274 “Gobernador de Chiquitos Don Francisco Pérez de Villaronte Al Obispo de Santa Cruz de La Sierra, Sobre Deslindes de Tierras,” 1770, MyCh 152, ABNB. Unfortunately, the documents presented by Governor Villaronte to the native justices with the boundaries drawn or indicated otherwise are not located in this file.

275 “Compromiso Suscrito Entre Los Jueces Principales y Curas de Los Pueblos de San Miguel y de San Rafael, En Virtud Del Litigio Que Tuvieron Por Los Terrenos y Palmares Colindantes Con La Estancia y Terrenos Del Pueblo de Santiago,” 1779, ALP MyCh 144, ABNB.

117

Determined to end the mounting discord and settle their long-standing dispute, a select number of native justices from the cabildos of San Rafael and San Miguel requested permission to convene a diplomatic meeting in the presence of their resident priests and the acting governor of Chiquitos, Juan Bartelemí Verdugo. The justices used language of religious belief and moral suasion characteristic of Spanish political culture to convince Verdugo to approve of the meeting. According to the governor, the justices argued that it was necessary to devise “some prudent and Christian means to reach a solution concerning the lands that they all needed for the necessary subsistence of their cattle.”276

On the morning of 25 June 1779, five principal justices from both cabildos, “in consortium” with the ranking priest of each mission, appeared before Verdugo to deliberate a legal settlement. During the meeting, the two parties agreed to relinquish all exclusive rights to the disputed territory in perpetuity and formally recognized the land as a common space for the ranches of San Rafael and San Miguel to use for pasturing cattle at their free and open discretion.

Demonstrating their full commitment to this joint resolution, both cabildos elected to contribute portions of their mission property to increase the area of the newly recognized common space and ensure the accommodation of multiple large herds from several ranches. After judging this resolution to be sensible, equitable and necessary, Governor Verdugo signed a legal agreement in the presence of the resident priests. For their part, the priests officially recorded approval with their own signatures and, in turn, signed on behalf of the native justices who, according to

Verdugo, could not write. 277

276 Ibid.

277 Ibid.

118

The inability of the justices to sign the agreement they themselves had initiated and negotiated is both a surprising and important detail that must be taken into account when evaluating this episode. It should be noted that while cabildos operated primarily within a world of oral political cultures, especially in daily relations with the broader mission populations they represented, many, if not most, native justices had achieved some level of writing ability. In fact, the majority of reports and decrees involving cabildos produced by colonial officials during this period were signed by native justices. Although rare, some documents were authored entirely by native justices in the Chiquitano language and translated into Spanish demonstrating an advanced level of literacy. Thus, the alleged illiteracy of the justices of San Rafael and San Miguel was uncommon and almost certainly influenced the ways in which they interacted with priests, governors and other imperial authorities.278

Having displayed a strong understanding of colonial bureaucracy and the religious idioms of Spanish political culture through their successful arrangement of an audience with Governor

Verdugo, the justices would have conducted their negotiations with the knowledge that the power dynamics and the application of authority involved in resolving their territorial dispute functioned in accordance with an especially delicate balance. On the one hand, they exercised their authority and influence as cabildo members to press for the intervention of the governor in order to end the dispute and guarantee access to valuable grazing lands for the missions they represented and defended. On the other, they depended upon colonial authorities for reaching the settlement terms necessary to achieve a resolution, for signing the justices’ names thereby legally binding the cabildos and their missions to comply with the provisions of the resolution, and for

278 Ibid. 119 enforcing the resolution in the future. The fact that documents recording the resolution were written and archived at all is a reflection of this balance.

Conclusions

The creation of a unified identity among the diverse indigenous peoples inhabiting the

Chiquitos missions was not a single, direct and unimpeded process that reached a final state of permanent formation during the Jesuit period.279 As demonstrated by a close analysis of demographic data and an investigation of episodes of dispute mounted by the cabildos in their struggles against the burdens introduced by new governmental structures, the Indian peoples of

Chiquitos did not articulate a collective province-wide identity during the first decade after the

Jesuit expulsion. Rather, native justices who spoke for the broader mission populations they represented invoked the discrete linguistic and kinship affiliations that structured the social and political organization and spatial divisions of their distinct and diverse communities. Native justices also struggled to maintain political recognition for the institution of the cabildo as the most important source of their authority and defended the integrity of the missions in which they lived as an additional and separate conception of local identity. These multivalent processes continued to evolve and refract to follow varied trajectories in relation to the different sociocultural consequences of future administrative changes. The following chapter turns to the establishment of a military government in Chiquitos under Juan Bartelemí Verdugo. During his term as the first military governor of the province, Verdugo led a contentious campaign to reform the Jesuit administrative structure. Verdugo’s reform efforts, in turn, fostered new intercultural

279 Radding, Landscapes of Power and Identity, 21. Radding argues that the meanings of ethnic affiliations “unfold in historical sequences that do not have a singular origin; nor do they constitute permanent formations.”. 120 struggles that affected native peoples and conditioned their political culture as they developed and represented varying conceptions of community and affiliations of broader scope.

121

Chapter 4 ______

Mediated Terms of Local Rule: Changes in Political Culture during the Transition to a Military Government

Introduction

This chapter builds on the discussion developed in Chapter 3 regarding the historical construction of indigenous identities as articulated by native cabildos during conflicts occasioned by the installation of the first post-Jesuit administration in Chiquitos. It continues to analyze episodes of intercultural conflict – often related to stresses and anxieties elicited by the establishment of a military government beginning in 1777 – to trace the evolving formations of political and communal alliances asserted by indigenous peoples as they negotiated the competing spheres of influence that emerged under the new administration. Within this context, cabildos brokered the tensions between indigenous sovereignty and shifting configurations of colonial authority in ways that reconstituted their conceptions and expressions of community and transformed their political culture.280

The chapter outlines the broader historical developments that marked the establishment of a military government in Chiquitos. Such an outline is necessary because the local colonial framework imposed by ecclesiastical and civil authorities heavily influenced the social and political culture of the native communities who inhabited the province.281 As native justices

280 Yannakakis, The Art of Being In-Between, xiii.

281 Terence Ranger, “The Invention of Tradition in Colonial Africa,” in The Invention of Tradition, ed. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (Cambridge University Press), 247–52.

122 maneuvered the transition to a military administration, they altered the ways in which they declared, performed, and defended identities vis-à-vis the changing power dynamics in order to form or support advantageous networks of affiliation.282 They asserted situational categories of difference as a method of convincing colonial as well as indigenous interlocutors of their preferred interpretation of local disputes to shape the results of intercultural engagement. During this time period, several groups of social actors, including different indigenous populations,

Spanish soldiers, priests, colonial bureaucrats, enslaved people of African descent, and

Portuguese explorers, interacted in Chiquitos with distinct and oftentimes incompatible motivations and claims to power. This chapter shows that such interactions frequently led to the emergence of antagonistic divisions which created opportunities for native justices to define relevant foundations of identification, forge opportune alliances, and position their communities in favorable circumstances. 283 By manipulating broader conflicting interests in this way, native peoples strengthened their economic and political standing and influenced the trajectory of change in an ever-contested borderland.284

Turning from the initial post-Jesuit administration structured by Bishop Herboso’s regulations, this chapter focuses on the governorship of Juan Bartelemí Verdugo, the first civil and military governor of Chiquitos, which spanned eight years from 1777 to 1785, and examines his efforts to enact administrative reform in the province. As explained in Chapter 3, the regulations elaborated by Herboso in 1769 preserved many aspects of the Jesuit system and thereby maintained an administrative organization in which the provincial governor was

282 Kathleen DuVal, The Native Ground: Indians and Colonists in the Heart of the Continent (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 4–10.

283 Langfur, The Forbidden Lands, 8–13.

284 DuVal, The Native Ground, 1–12.

123 subordinate to the ecclesiastical authority of the secular priests – who were bestowed with the same responsibilities and powers held by the Jesuit missionaries they replaced – and, by extension, to the bishopric of Santa Cruz.285

Equipped with a broad knowledge of Chiquitos and the neighboring borderlands gained through a distinguished military career, Verdugo was an outspoken critic of the Jesuit governing structure and, accordingly, of Herboso’s ecclesiastical administration. Verdugo’s opposition to

Herboso’s administration and determination to reform it impelled him to issue an appeal to the

Crown in 1774 in which he proposed a series of administrative reforms for Chiquitos that included the establishment of a military government. In addition to his calls for reforms,

Verdugo also requested to be appointed the first military governor of the province. In 1777, the

Crown ruled in Verdugo’s favor, issued a royal decree to establish a military government administered by small detachments of soldiers, and named him governor. Despite these favorable determinations, Verdugo’s most substantial and innovative proposals went largely ignored. The royal decree stipulated that the military system was to be installed alongside the existing administrative structure, which was to remain intact. Prevailing intercultural tensions continued to simmer unabated and, as we will see, amid the newly contentious and overlapping jurisdictional domains, new and different power struggles began to emerge.286

Almost immediately upon Verdugo’s arrival in Chiquitos, mission Indians confronted his administration to denounce clerical misconduct and, in some cases, to protest abuses committed by detachments of soldiers who had been recently dispatched to the province with orders to set

285 Maeder, “La Organización de La Provincia de Chiquitos En La Epoca PostJesuitica,” 162.

286 Juan Bartelemi Verdugo, “Relación de Los Méritos y Servicios de Don Juan Bartelemi Verdugo, Coronel Que Fue de Caballería En La Expedición de Los Moxos, y Mato Grosso de La Provincia de Santa Cruz de La Sierra,” June 23, 1774, Sala IX, División Colonia, Sección Gobierno, Gobierno de Chiquitos 1789, Chiquitos 1766 – 1809, AGNA. 124 up the military government. Many of the Indians’ complaints underscored brimming unrest and the distinct possibility of violent conflict. Convinced that most of these problems were the direct result of Herboso’s deeply flawed administrative structure which had remained unchanged by the new government, Verdugo pressed forward with his efforts for reform. He issued numerous petitions to the Audiencia of Charcas in which he reiterated his initial proposals for significant administrative changes.287 Several of these proposals threatened to undermine the regulations established by Herboso and weaken ecclesiastical authority in the province. As a result,

Verdugo’s petitions brought him into conflict with Alejandro José de Ochoa, Herboso’s successor as Bishop of Santa Cruz. Ochoa stridently opposed Verdugo’s endeavors and successfully thwarted all reform efforts during Verdugo’s term in office.288

Verdugo’s struggles with Ochoa to institute reforms produced a documentary trail that reveals a number of important consequences of this period for the Chiquitos province and its peoples. Many of Verdugo’s petitions cited detailed accounts of abuse and unrest in the missions given by Indians as they addressed their grievances to the new administration. This chapter analyzes several of these accounts in order to trace the different alliances supported and expressed by indigenous peoples as they presented their appeals to colonial authorities during episodes of dispute and to shed light on how they defended mission patrimony and represented ethnic affiliations and expressions of community. The Indians’ versions of events and their understandings of social and political relations in Chiquitos, which were transcribed into the petitions that Verdugo presented to the Audiencia, evince changes in the political culture of the

287 Tonelli Justiniano, Reseña Histórica, 106–8.

288 Alejandro José de Ochoa y Murillo, “Informe Del Obispo de Santa Cruz de La Sierra Al Presidente de La Audiencia de Charcas, En El Que Propone Se Tome En Cuenta Los Reglamentos de Don Francisco Herboso, Para El Gobierno Espiritual y Temporal de La Provincia de Chiquitos,” April 12, 1783, MyCh 25. XXIII, ABNB, GRM.

125 indigenous communities of the mission province that would influence later colonial policies.289

Although Verdugo failed to implement change while serving as the acting governor of Chiquitos, as we will see in the following chapter, the Indians’ testimonials elicited by his petitions prompted the Crown to implement significant reforms during the final decade of the eighteenth century.

A New Viceroyalty and Establishing Military Governments in Moxos and Chiquitos

Portuguese territorial expansion to the south and west from the Colônia do Sacramento and increased contraband trade along the imperial border with Brazil threatened Spain’s control over the broad region surrounding the estuary of the Paraná and Uruguay rivers. Faced with a growing sense of frontier insecurity, King Charles III created Spain’s fourth viceroyalty in the

Americas in 1776.290 Governed from its capital city of Buenos Aires, the Viceroyalty of Río de

La Plata comprised Tucumán, Santa Cruz de la Sierra, which included Moxos and Chiquitos, the

Banda Oriental, the jurisdiction of the Audiencia of Charcas and the wealthy mining center of

Potosí – all regions previously under the control of the Viceroyalty of Perú. By partially dismembering the existing continental administration, governed in Lima, thousands of miles away from the Río de La Plata, the new viceroyalty provided the Crown with a local bastion against foreign territorial and commercial encroachments in the sparsely populated Southern

Cone.291

289 Radding, Landscapes of Power and Identity, 231–39.

290 John Lynch, Spanish Colonial Administration, 1782-1810: The Intendant System in the Viceroyalty of the Río de La Plata (Universtiy of London: The Athlone Press, 1958), 38–41.

291 Allan J. Kuethe and Kenneth J. Andrien, The Spanish Atlantic World in the Eighteenth Century: War and the Bourbon Reforms, 1713–1796 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 288-292. In 1776, prior to the Crown’s decree to establish the new viceroyalty, the former governor of Buenos Aires, Pedro de Cevallos, led a military expedition to clear Portuguese interlopers out of the Río de la Plata region. 126

The decision to create the new viceroyalty fit into a broader plan of imperial developments executed as part of the Bourbon Reforms, which accelerated during the reign of

Charles III.292 This transformative agenda featured a number of bureaucratic innovations developed by the more centralized French monarchy in Europe. One such innovation, the intendant system, was implemented in the Viceroyalty of Río de La Plata in 1782 with the Royal

Ordinance of Intendants. The ordinance divided the newly created viceroyalty into eight territorial and administrative units or intendancies. The intendancies were headed by officials called intendants who were responsible for the local administration of justice, defense, and finance who also exercised significant control over ecclesiastical patronage. Already approved by the Crown to function in Spain, the intendant system expanded colonial bureaucracy in the

Viceroyalty of Río de La Plata and thereby strengthened the connections between provincial authorities and the Audiencias to reign in illicit trade (see map 4.1).293

292 Parejas Moreno and Suárez, Chiquitos: Historia de Una Utopía, 150–52.

293 Kuethe and Andrien, The Spanish Atlantic World in the Eighteenth Century, 291, 350–51. The Royal Ordinance of Intendents brought Santa Cruz under the jurisdiction of the intendancy of Cochabamba in 1782. The Intendancy system was instituted provisionally in Sonora and Cuba as early as the 1760s.

127

Map 4.1

128

The dramatic territorial reorganization involved in creating the Viceroyalty of Río de La

Plata altered the local bureaucratic structures of peripheral regions that were previously under the jurisdiction of the Viceroyalty of Perú. In Chiquitos, these changes began with a royal decree issued in 1777 which officially joined Moxos and Chiquitos to the new viceroyalty and established military governments in both mission provinces. The royal decree and many of its provisions were influenced by a series of proposals elaborated by Verdugo in his extensive probanza de mérito (proof of merit) written in 1774 to promote military governments in Moxos and Chiquitos to defend against Portuguese intrusion. In this document, sent to the Crown by way of the Secretary of the Indies, Verdugo submitted a formal request for the position of first military governor of Chiquitos and detailed his record of royal service and personal qualifications. He also provided a summary of the problems that threatened the “unfortunate ruin” of Chiquitos including unchecked contraband trade and Portuguese incursions, called special attention to unrest and disruptive conflicts in the mission towns, criticized the existing administrative structure, and promoted himself as uniquely qualified to govern what he referred to as the “poor and remote province”. Verdugo placed the blame for many if not most of the conflicts on incompetent and abusive priests involved in illicit schemes to profit from mission property. The priest had been appointed during a hasty and injudicious process of secularization that Verdugo believed to be fundamentally influenced by Herboso’s flawed regulations.294

After making his diagnosis of troubling conditions in Chiquitos, Verdugo presented the

Crown with a new plan of government comprised of two broad objectives: to defend the province against enemy incursions and to counter what he saw as a process of decline in the missions due, primarily, to the political and economic administrative system established by the

294 Tonelli Justiniano, Reseña Histórica, 106–8. 129

Jesuits and maintained by Bishop Herboso. For the first objective, Verdugo proposed several strategies to consolidate territory under the control of the Chiquitos government and to delineate and secure more distinct provincial boundaries. As a measure to guard the province’s least populated and contested margins, he submitted an agenda for establishing two well-fortified

Spanish towns. One of the towns would be situated on the banks of the Río Iténez to impede

Portuguese forays into Chiquitos from the frontier settlements of Cuiabá and Vila Bela, located in the present-day Brazilian state of Mato Grosso.295 The other would be positioned farther south, on the Río Paraguay, to protect against raids from indigenous groups inhabiting the Chaco. To prepare for a protracted armed conflict, he advocated training “as many mission Indians as necessary” to use firearms. Finally, he called for launching a military expedition to “conquer and reduce” the more than sixty non-Christian indigenous groups, including the Guaycurú, who inhabited or regularly traversed the area that stretched from the easternmost Chiquitos mission of

Santo Corazón south to the mission of Nuestra Señora de Belén, located in the jurisdiction of

Paraguay. Verdugo claimed that it was necessary to execute this offensive maneuver quickly,

“before the shrewd Portuguese of Cuiabá” could seize the region, take full control of the

Paraguay River, and prevent the Chiquitos government from establishing riverine commerce with Buenos Aires along the contiguous navigable waterways of the La Plata and Paraguay-

Paraná river basins.296

Regarding the second objective, Verdugo presented a number of measures designed to correct the bureaucratic organization of the province and thereby improve the political and fiscal management of the missions. To incentivize ethical administrative behavior, he recommended

295 Amado, Anzai, and Figueiredo, Anais de Vila Bela, 1734-1789, 53–58.

296 Tonelli Justiniano, Reseña Histórica, 108.

130 allocating four recently vacant seats (sillas) in the Diocese of Santa Cruz de la Sierra as rewards for priests who made the greatest effort to carry out their religious and temporal responsibilities faithfully and to the benefit of their mission communities. Because Verdugo attributed most of the problems facing Chiquitos to clerical misbehavior and negligence, he also expressed the importance of mandating clearly defined punishments for priests who violated established rules or who failed to meet their responsibilities as caretakers of the missions. As Verdugo pointed out, the 1769 regulations of Bishop Herboso did not include such penalties for priests.297

In March of 1775, after carefully analyzing Verdugo’s probanza, the Council of the

Indies recognized the strength of his qualifications and offered formal support for his request.

Referencing his devoted royal service and “proven comprehensive knowledge” of the province, the council presented the Crown with an official commendation for Verdugo. Two years later, the Crown issued the royal decree establishing military governments in Moxos and Chiquitos and, in consideration of the council’s commendation, appointed Verdugo as governor of

Chiquitos. Ignacio Flores, a captain of the volunteer cavalry regiment, was charged with the same position in Moxos – both men were chosen for their military backgrounds.

The decree was accompanied by a series of instructions that gave form to the bureaucratic organization, maintenance expenditures, and the disbursement of salaries and stipends in the military governments moving forward. In accordance with the decree, the governors' salaries would be drawn from the cajas reales (royal coffers) of Cochabamba and the clerical stipends were to be paid from the proceeds from the mission estates and workshops.298 The

297 Ibid.

298 “Real Cédula Dirigida a Juan Bartelemí Verdugo, En La Que Se Le Confiere El Gobierno Político y Militar de La Provincia de Chiquitos y Contiene Las Instrucciones Para El Gobierno Espiritual y Temporal de Dichas Misiones, Entre Las Instrucciones Se Encuentran El Pago de Sínodos Con El Producto de Las Haciendas Jesuíticas, Promoción Para La Comunicación Comercial Con Paraguay, Reducción de Los Bárbaros, Libertad de Los Naturales 131 implementation of the new governments followed stipulations for the economic and political subordination of Moxos and Chiquitos within the Viceroyalty.299 Both mission provinces would be dependent on the Audiencia of Charcas for all political and administrative matters and subject to the governor of Santa Cruz with regard to military affairs – this was a continuity with the previous jurisdictional configuration. Because one of the primary functions of the military governments was to provide a buffer along the imperial border, the military governors were charged with facilitating stronger coordinated defenses by establishing two Spanish towns in areas separate from the missions, yet suitable for European industries, and easy to fortify. One of the towns was to serve as a weigh station for commercial trade with Paraguay.300

The military governments did not unseat the ecclesiastical administration maintained by

Herboso as the ranking authority within the mission provinces. The powers of the military governors continued to be tempered by the bishop of Santa Cruz and they were required to channel their directives through a diffuse ecclesiastical structure largely comprised of the resident priests who retained complete authority over both the spiritual and material management of their missions.301 Governors therefore had limited influence within the mission communities and struggled to monitor and address cases of impropriety and illicit behavior.302 Governors could do little more than complain to the Audiencia of Charcas and the bishop about the persistent misconduct of the resident priests or call attention to incidents of contraband trade with

Para Tratar y Contratar Entre Si y Reconocimiento a La Autoridad Seglar y Otras,” August 5, 1777, GRM MyCh 25. II, ABNB.

299 Tonelli Justiniano, Reseña Histórica, 108.

300 Parejas Moreno and Suárez, Chiquitos: Historia de Una Utopía, 152.

301 Ibid., 151–52.

302 Maeder, “La Organización de La Provincia de Chiquitos En La Epoca PostJesuitica,” 162.

132

Portuguese agents from settlements in Mato Grosso such as Cuiabá.303 Subject to these limitations, Verdugo did not wield the authority needed to resolve many of the problems that he had reported to the Council of the Indies. Nevertheless, he began his term under pressure to effect substantive changes. The power struggles between Verdugo’s government and the ecclesiastical administration fostered significant tensions that marked the political climate of the province.

Shortly after arriving in San Javier to assume the governorship, Verdugo began to receive appeals from native justices who called upon him to bring an end to the clerical mismanagement of their communities. They warned him that failure to restrain the abusive priests in an expeditious manner could result in such grave consequences as mass desertion or violent insurrection. Confronted with the urgency of these admonitions, Verdugo arranged to investigate the justices’ allegations personally. Over the course of two years, from 1779 until 1781, Verdugo conducted a tour of the province’s easternmost missions of San Juan, Santiago and Santo

Corazón where he met with representatives from different cabildos (see map 4.2).304 During these meetings, native justices recounted specific cases of clerical misbehavior that ranged from brazen disregard for the authority of the cabildo, to negligence and dereliction of ecclesiastical duties, to the theft of mission property and harsh physical punishments that resulted in serious bodily harm and even death. The justices’ bitter testimonies and the severity of the alleged

303 Gutiérrez da Costa and Gutiérrez Viñuales, “Territorio, Urbanismo y Arquitectura,” 374.

304 Radding, Landscapes of Power and Identity, 81–82.

133 violations further strengthened Verdugo’s resolve to reform the province despite his restricted power. 305

Map 4.2

305 Gutiérrez da Costa and Gutiérrez Viñuales, “Territorio, Urbanismo y Arquitectura,” 374.

134

Throughout Verdugo’s term as governor, he strove to raise awareness of the growing tensions in Chiquitos and applied persistent pressure on the Audiencia of Charcas and the

Viceroyalty of Río de la Plata to enact more significant reforms. To this end, he sent several petitions to the Audiencia in which he denounced the unscrupulous and incompetent priests, conveyed the Indians’ perceptions of hardship, and proposed administrative changes – many of which reflected those he had already proposed in his original appeal for the governorship in

1774.306 His petitions included specific examples of clerical transgressions taken from personal testimonies first recorded in hearings conducted in the course of his mission tour and later documented in a number of inquests into local quarrels held during the course of his governorship.307 Given by different indigenous and European actors – native justices, priests, and soldiers – the testimonies provide a window onto the varying ways in which indigenous peoples brokered shifting tensions created by the changes of the military government. Verdugo relied heavily on the testimonies of indigenous witnesses and their extensive knowledge of conditions within the mission communities to build evidence for his claims. Within this political context, indigenous actors had more opportunities to provide firsthand accounts for recorded deliberations of various provincial conflicts and, as a result, to shape the narrative of disputed events to steady themselves within the altered and fluctuating structures of space and power in the province. Moreover, in a number of these accounts, native justices and commoners promoted

306 “Expediente En El Que Don Juan Bartelemi Verdugo Representa y Solicita Al Rey El Cargo de Gobernador de Chiquitos, Acompañado de Varios Informes y Del Estado de Aquella Provincia,” December 5, 1774, Audiencia de Charcas, 27, Archivo General de Indias.

307 “Oficio Del Gobernador de Chiquitos a La Audiencia de La Plata. Comunica Sobre La Intención de Reducirse Ocho Pueblos de Indios Guaycurús,” 1784, MyCh 26. XV, ABNB.

135 different allegiances that bolstered their particular goals and advanced the interests of their communities.308

The Political Opportunities Created by Verdugo’s Reform Campaign

In February of 1779, the Vicar of Chiquitos, don Adrián Lagos Barrera, penned a letter to

Verdugo, who had just begun his term as governor, to inform him of brimming tensions in the province. Lagos opened his letter by apprising Verdugo of a recent appeal made by the Indians of San Juan against one of their resident priests. The Indians’ appeal, Lagos assured the governor, should come as no surprise because native justices from San Juan as well as several other Chiquitos mission towns had issued numerous complaints about their priests, but to no avail. The Indians’ formal complaints effected no changes, Lagos explained, because unscrupulous priests throughout the province routinely disobeyed his orders and ignored the directives of the native corregidores. Due to their insolence, the vicar held the priests responsible for nearly all the problems facing Chiquitos and claimed that many had openly regarded their superiors with contempt, considered themselves to be “the owners of their mission towns, and treated the poor Indians as if they were their slaves.”309

After declaring his personal commitment to God, king, and homeland, Lagos called upon

Verdugo to conduct a visita of the province and vowed to accompany the governor to the very last village, even at the risk of his life. Because the Indians were already aware of Verdugo’s

308 Yannakakis, The Art of Being In-Between, 99–102. In her research on colonial Oaxaca, Yannakakis evaluates similar strategies used by Indians for creating intercultural alliances.

309 “Testimonio Que Juan Bartelemi Verdugo Mandó Sacar Cuando Emprendía La Visita de La Provincia,” 1779, GRM MyCh 25.VII, ABNB. Within a few months after his verified arrival in Chiquitos in December of 1778, Verdugo agreed to embark on a general visita of the province with the vicar don Adrián Lagos Barrera.

136 loving nature and unselfishness, Lagos implored, if the governor’s visit did not remedy everything, it may at least prevent one soul from returning to the monte and completely apostatizing from the holy faith. Given his declared commitment to enact reform, Verdugo was readily amenable to Lagos’s message and agreed to tour the mission towns to address the problems described in the vicar’s stark depiction of the province (see Map 4.2).310

Lagos’s letter to Verdugo was among the earliest in a series of documents written during a reform campaign that created political opportunities and opened new channels of negotiation and resistance for the indigenous peoples of Chiquitos. As mentioned above, Verdugo relied heavily on information taken from Indian testimonies to support the claims and pleas for administrative changes made in his petitions. He regularly called upon mission Indians – elites as well as commoners – to give corroborative accounts of specific contentious matters to which he attempted to draw attention. The litigious and disputative climate engendered by Verdugo’s reform efforts even motivated Indians to draw up and present their own written petitions

(representaciones) and appeals (recursos) on a few occasions. By encouraging native actors to give their particular narrative of local affairs and offering them officially recognized avenues to do so, Verdugo provided the indigenous population of Chiquitos with a space in which to direct the outcomes of intercultural mediation and shape the uneven relationships of power in the region. As we will see, the Indians’ testimonies, many of which reflect the cross-cultural voices of several different social actors, illustrate the varying ways native communities positioned

310 Adrián Lagos Barrera, “Documentos Que Demuestran El Absoluto Predominio de Los Sacerdotes En Los Pueblos de La Provincia de Chiquitos,” February 2, 1779, MyCh, 25. XIV, ABNB. As explained in chapter 2, the corregidor was the chief cabildo position and highest ranking indigenous officer of the mission, with administrative and judicial authority.

137 themselves amid the shifting and, at times, conflicting domains of ecclesiastical, civil, and military authority that underlay the colonial order of the frontier mission province.311

In late May of 1779, Verdugo travelled to San Juan to hear an appeal made by the mission’s native justices against their resident priest, Father Ildefonso Vargas y Urbina. The entire cabildo – comprised of 25 justices – met with Verdugo, Lagos, and an interpreter to condemn Father Ildefonso’s practice of illicitly selling cattle from the mission’s herds to

Portuguese contrabandists who regularly intruded into the province along unauthorized trade routes that crossed the imperial border. On one specific occasion, two black men from Mato

Grosso visited San Juan and delivered a letter to Father Ildefonso and, shortly thereafter, two

Portuguese agents arrived and asked to speak with the priest. Ildefonso met with all four men and dispatched them, along with his personal attendant named Bernardo Figueroa, to the estancia of

San Josef, where the Indians of San Juan pastured their livestock, with permission to round up five hundred head of cattle and drive the herd back into Portuguese territory. When the men arrived at the estancia, they met resistance from the native mayordomo (foreman) and a few

Indian vaqueros (cowboys), who refused to hand over their communal patrimony. The Indians quickly relented, however, after Figueroa threatened to flog them on behalf of Father Ildefonso, and agreed to help the Portuguese agents drive the cattle to the east “as far as the Río Yauru.”

Months later, when a group of vaqueros from San Juan returned to San Josef to bring a few head of cattle back to provision the mission, they were startled to find Figueroa there accompanied by several Portuguese men who were armed and rounding up livestock. The vaqueros fled in fear of the weapons and left the rustlers to plunder the estancia freely and steal as they pleased.312

311 Yannakakis, The Art of Being In-Between, 100–102.

312 “Documentos Que Demuestran El Absoluto Predominio de Los Sacerdotes En Los Pueblos de La Provincia de Chiquitos,” May 31, 1779, ABNB, MyCh 25. XIV, ABNB. 138

The native justices of San Juan devoted the second half of their appeal to condemning both the temporal and the spiritual transgressions committed by their former priest, Father

Domingo Muñoz. The justices testified that Muñoz’s negligence as a religious caretaker prevented the mission community from meeting their spiritual obligations as faithful Christian neophytes. He only celebrated mass on Sundays and major holidays, refused to confer the

Eucharistic sacrament, and had even given orders to take the flour sent from the receptoría for the express purpose of preparing the communion hosts and use it to bake bread for his personal consumption. Furthermore, Muñoz rarely heard confessions, and only did so at his whim. The priest had been so heedless of his spiritual duties that on numerous occasions he failed to administer the sacraments of confession and last rights to the sick and dying. Native justices known as cruceros, whose responsibilities included conferring with their resident priests for matters of importance such as births, illnesses, marriages, and deaths, as well as other pressing issues within the missions, frequently warned Muñoz about the grave consequences of his negligence. Nevertheless, he made no changes, stubbornly disregarded the cruceros’ authority, and ignored their warnings time and again. Ultimately, Muñoz grew angry with the justices and threatened to whip them if they continued to voice their admonishments.313

Muñoz commonly employed or threatened to employ brutal and public corporal punishments, such as the lash, to intimidate and demean the mission community. His preferred method for staging public corporal punishments was to have two Indians bound and placed side by side in the central plaza and flogged with 50 to 100 lashes as the entire mission population

313 Ibid.; Radding, Landscapes of Power and Identity, 82–83. Cruceros were minor native justices distinguished by the wooden crosses they wore who closely monitored important events such as marriages and births within their respective parcialidades and responsible for informing the resident priests of emergencies and issues that required attention.

139 looked on. By employing this method, Muñoz had caused the deaths of two Indian men whom he had sentenced to endure 100 lashes. At the conclusion of this vicious and degrading spectacle, he gave orders to have the men’s severely lacerated backs rinsed with urine as a crude antiseptic.

Their wounds quickly became infected, however, filled with maggots, and both men died within three days. A short time later, Muñoz scandalized the entire population of San Juan when, in a sudden and furious outburst, he personally seized a young married woman, stripped off her tipoi

(a dress worn by the Indian women of the region) so that she was naked and flogged her with 50 lashes in the presence of the native justices and “all the people who could be found” in the mission. The horror and shame of the public humiliation drove the woman to abandon her husband and flee San Juan for the Portuguese territory of Mato Grosso.314 The appeal must be understood as a strategy of political mediation employed by the native justices of San Juan to present the communal motivations and interests of their mission in plaintive and understandable terms to Governor Verdugo and thereby establish their cultural authority in the eyes of the military administration. In their repudiation of Muñoz’s failures as a spiritual guardian, the justices exhibited a veneration for liturgical observance and desire to follow Christian doctrine.

Their condemnation of his theft of mission property including church effects bearing religious significance, demonstrated their high valuation of their collective material and spiritual assets.

Finally, by protesting Muñoz’s use of physical abuse and his refusal to heed the warnings of the cruceros, they conveyed a strong sense of indignation over his disregard for the authority of the cabilido, an authority recognized by Verdugo as evidenced by his reliance on the testimonies of native justices.315

314 “ABNB, MyCh 25. XIV, May 31, 1779.”

315 Radding, Landscapes of Power and Identity, 82–88. 140

In November of the following year, two small detachments of soldiers – one stationed in the mission of Santo Corazón and the other in Santiago – travelled to San Juan to meet with

Verdugo and offer sworn testimony about widespread abuses committed by resident priests and to corroborate some of the claims made by the justices in their appeal. The soldiers from Santo

Corazón, under the command of Sergeant Josef Moreno, echoed Lagos in the letter he sent to

Verdugo the previous year, by professing to have personally witnessed priests treating the

Indians “worse than if they were their slaves”. Citing firsthand accounts given to them by mission Indians, they alerted Verdugo that there was no recourse against abusive priests for the indigenous communities of Chiquitos other than to return to the “monte”, because native informants faced severe retaliation. Priests pursued and ruthlessly punished any Indians who reported incidents of clerical misconduct. Moreover, high ranking native informants – especially cabildo members – suffered “much more than punishment and persecution” as imperious priests often revoked the authority of justices who reported or even protested their transgressions. The soldiers ended their recorded testimony by warning Verdugo that mass desertion of the Chiquitos missions was imminent unless prompt changes were made. They claimed that Indians from different missions had declared that they would not endure the moral crimes of their priests much longer before fleeing to the monte. Many Indians had even revealed their specific intentions to seek refuge in Portuguese territory.316

The soldiers from Santiago centered their testimony on violations committed by Father

Joseph Jacinto Herrera, the resident priest assigned to their mission town. They testified that

Herrerra had abused Indians as well as members of their own contingent. He often distributed

316 “Documentos Que Demuestran El Absoluto Predominio de Los Sacerdotes En Los Pueblos de La Provincia de Chiquitos,” November 8, 1780, MyCh, 25. XIV, ABNB.

141 insufficient rations to the soldiers and on several occasions he had failed to distribute their provisions altogether. After the commanding officer of the military detachment approached

Herrera to inform him that his failure to distribute adequate provisions – one of his responsibilities as the principal administrator of Santiago – resulted in the troops going hungry, he became angry and doubled down on his impudence. Responding with a brash outburst of contempt, Herrera threatened to withhold the soldiers’ beef ration if they continued to pressure him about their provisions. Adding further provocation to this threat, Herrera quipped that if the soldiers wanted him to give them enough to eat, they would appeal to the bishop of Santa Cruz to have his clerical stipend expedited and delivered en plata (in specie).317

After witnessing Herrera’s brazen neglect of the military detachment, a group of Indians, including several native justices who had long endured similar treatment, recognized that they shared mutual interests with the troops. They approached several soldiers to reveal additional violations committed by Herrera and to warn them of the unrest mounting throughout the mission population in response to the priest’s misconduct. The Indians confided that Herrera’s abuses had stirred prevailing sentiments among the different parcialidades of Santiago to flee for the monte as a means of resistance and that the priest’s recent mistreatment of the troops who had been sent to protect them had only strengthened their resolve to abandon the mission.

Herrera disregarded indigenous authority as a matter of course and he incessantly jeered the entire mission by boasting that he could confiscate their communal property whenever he wished and use it for his own pecuniary ends. His insolence was so intolerable that many Indians had resolved to abandon their planted chacras and retreat into the forest should the military detachment choose to leave Santiago. Furthermore, according to the native informants, Herrera

317 Ibid.

142 had directed his arrogant contempt well beyond the mission community to the new military governor. They claimed that he had attempted to corrupt the native justices and the broader mission community by openly belittling Governor Verdugo in order to undermine his authority.

On several occasions, and in the presence of the soldiers as well as the Indians, Herrera boasted that he viewed the governor just as he viewed the Indians – “with considerable contempt”.318

In April of 1781, Verdugo, accompanied by six military officers from Santa Cruz, visited

Santiago to hear the native justices from that mission testify and provide their own firsthand accounts of Father Herrera’s moral improprieties. Verdugo recorded the sworn testimonies given by “all the judges of Santiago” in an official document that he and each of the military officers signed in the presence of witnesses. The document features the justices’ bitter accounts of

Herrera’s exploitation of Indian labor and his theft of mission property. According to their testimonies, he forced the Indians to work every day for his own personal ambitions and profited from their collective assets and produce. On one occasion, he used all of the iron from the mission storehouse, sent to Santiago by the receptoría for the express purpose of forging machetes and wedges for the entire town, by commanding native blacksmiths to melt it down to make locks, hinges, and other tools for his personal use. The judges also testified that Herrera was domineering and dispensed vicious punishments for seemingly trivial reasons in order to maintain absolute control over the mission population. He brutally punished a group of young

Indian men for visiting the military barracks near the mission, conversing with the soldiers, and wagering buttons, knives, and an equal value of lienzo on friendly wrestling matches. According to the justices, Herrera was so enraged by this incident that he ordered the Indians flogged, placed in shackles, and publicly exhibited for several days. The priest administered this harsh

318 Ibid. 143 sentence, they explained, because he perceived friendly relations between Indians and soldiers as subversive behavior that threatened his control over the mission.319

As a method of forestalling threats to his authority, Herrera actively worked to foster animosity between the native mission population and the small garrison stationed near Santiago.

To achieve this end, he even tried to exploit situations caused by his own negligence. The justices testified that Herrera attempted to incriminate the military detachment when he discovered that a few soldiers, who were poorly provisioned due to his failure to provide them with sufficient rations, had eaten a small amount of field corn (maíz del campo) grown by the

Indians to feed the mission livestock. Hoping to frame the incident as a malicious scandal,

Herrera delivered a public announcement in which he summarily condemned the entire military detachment as thieves and issued a prohibition against giving the soldiers food of any kind, even field corn, without approved remuneration. Moreover, in a rash ploy to further escalate tensions, he commanded the Indians to participate in the punishment of the soldiers by shooting arrows at their horses.320

The justices testified before Verdugo that the mission Indians ignored Herrera’s condemnation and refused to follow his orders. They explained that the native communities were resolute in their disobedience because they knew that Herrera’s failure to provide the military detachment with adequate provisions forced the soldiers to forage for food and because they saw no sufficient motive for punishing the men – especially with such a severe penalty – who had come to Santiago to look after them and defend them from raids carried out by the Guaycurús

319 “Documentos Que Demuestran El Absoluto Predominio de Los Sacerdotes En Los Pueblos de La Provincia de Chiquitos,” April 9, 1781, ABNB, MyCh 25. XIV, ABNB.

320 Ibid.

144 and other “indios bárbaros.” Instead, the justices claimed, “all of the people, went behind the back of the priest, and attempted to give the soldiers all that they could.” 321

The testimonies of the native justices from Santiago and the accounts given by the troops garrisoned in Santiago and Santo Corazón demonstrate that mission Indians and the military forces who recently arrived in Chiquitos found common ground and supported joint endeavors as they navigated tensions surrounding the balance of space and power recently altered by the military government. Struggles between resident priests, the military administration led by

Verdugo, and the indigenous communities inhabiting the missions gave rise to a restive political setting conducive for forming such intercultural relationships. While these coalitions held a common purpose and functioned accordingly, at the same time, the respective groups of collaborators – Indians, military officials, and priests – also advanced their own discrete ambitions.322 Mission Indians engaged in alliances with non-Indians to overcome mutual challenges and confront adversaries; thereby they strengthened their standing in the contested province to better protect the interests of their communities, defend communal property, fulfill political ambitions, assert authority, and maintain autonomy. Through their testimonies – many of which include details regarding episodes of bureaucratic conflicts incited by the changes of the military government – Indians from the different missions advocated their alliances with soldiers, often corroborating their accounts, and worked to promote their shared objectives.

Moreover, by presenting their own favorable versions of contentious issues, which often

321 Ibid.

322 James F. Brooks, Captives and Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest Borderlands (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 164–65.

145 concerned allegations of clerical misconduct, they shaped outside perceptions of – and involvement in – local conflicts.323

Appointed by Bishop Herboso to serve as replacements for the expelled Jesuit missionaries, the secular priests were bestowed with responsibilities similar to their predecessors and, thus, they wielded nearly unchecked authority within the mission towns. Unlike the Jesuits, however, many of the hastily chosen priests were poorly trained, unqualified to carry out both their spiritual and temporal duties, had no ethnographic knowledge of the region and its people, could not speak Chiquita or any of the other indigenous languages still widely spoken in the missions, and neither understood nor respected native authority and sociocultural conventions.

As we saw in Chapter 3, the priests’ combination of power and incompetence resulted in cases of clerical misconduct that disrupted the communal patrimony, internal governance, and political integrity of the native mission populations and spurred disputes and protests that sporadically escalated into localized armed rebellions. Under the direction of Verdugo, one of the express objectives of the military government was to end administrative and economic disorder in the province that included illicit trade with the Portuguese, and, to that end, to curtail the inordinate authority held by the priests.324

This objective was not lost on the priests and many openly resented the military government from the moment Verdugo took office. A few assumed decidedly defensive postures against the government and took various preemptive measures to hold onto their level of authority amid the corresponding bureaucratic changes by undermining the jurisdiction and

323 DuVal, The Native Ground, 3–8; Yannakakis, The Art of Being In-Between, 99–102.

324 “Oficio Del Virrey Del Rio de La Plata Al Presidente de La Audiencia de La Plata. Trata Sobre El Buen Régimen de La Provincia de Chiquitos Después de La Expatriación de Los Jesuitas,” 1782, MyCh 25. XX, ABNB.

146 endeavors of the troops stationed outside the mission towns. As discussed above, among the measures taken by priests to protect their authority against possible threats from the military government included Father Herrera’s efforts to pit the Indians of Santiago against the recently arrived soldiers. By fostering such divisions, priests intended to weaken military and indigenous influence and obstruct their opportunities for developing formidable alliances to prevent challenges to their stature as the preeminent authorities within the missions. Such strategies reflect efforts by the priests to exploit the overlapping and conflicting domains of authority that began to form as a result of the new bureaucratic structure and jurisdictional reach of the military government.325

The mission Indians also developed tactics to maneuver the shifting and often competing configurations of authority set in motion by the military government to advance their interests.

Forming alliances with the troops stationed in Chiquitos represented one such tactic. By allying with soldiers, the Indians took advantage of the division between the priests and the new military administration to broker nascent political tensions in the province in ways that shifted the local balance of power in their favor – even if slightly. Connections with the military forces conferred advantages on the native mission communities, not least of which was the imprimatur of significant institutional backing in confrontations with resident priests. As mentioned above, soldiers provided sworn accounts to corroborate claims of clerical misconduct made by native justices in testimonies they provided for Verdugo’s investigations into local disputes during his reform campaign. Moreover, in the case of the Indians of Santiago, through their relations with and assistance of garrison soldiers in opposition to their resident priest, they signaled their

325 “ABNB, MyCh 25. XIV, April 9, 1781.”

147 recognition of Verdugo’s authority and support for him as the military governor and placed themselves in a favorable position to establish their political legitimacy in his eyes.326

During Verdugo’s visit to Santiago in the spring of 1781 to investigate the misconduct of

Father Herrera previously reported by soldiers stationed near the mission, he met with the entire cabildo who addressed him as a sympathetic ally in a struggle against the contemptuous priest who posed a common threat to their interests. In their testimonies, the native justices enumerated grievances that would have caused concern and anxiety for Verdugo as the provincial governor of the frontier mission province. Father Herrera’s seizure of the collective assets of Santiago and his reckless attempts to drive a wedge between Indians and soldiers, which, according to the native justices, impeded the ability of the military detachment to defend their mission against threats from the Portuguese and Guaycurús, were actions that endangered the economy and security of the contested province and issues about which Verdugo had voiced significant concern. By touching on these issues and presenting themselves as allies of the local military forces, the native justices of Santiago employed a tactic of cultural mediation that reflected their understanding of the existing dynamics of the social and political climate in Chiquitos and

Governor Verdugo’s stakes within in.327

Of course, the social and political climate in Chiquitos was not static, but rather it changed over time through increased episodes of conflict, administrative turnover, and reiterated petitions among Indians, priests, and the military government in their continued struggle over the provisions of regional sovereignty. Indians adapted to these historical developments by modifying their tactics of negotiation and engagement. For example, they spoke to different

326 Ibid.

327 Ibid.

148 concerns and issues as they manipulated the conflicting interests of rival authorities, modified their political rhetoric in petitions to various colonial officials, and regularly fostered new alliances. In some cases, Indians adapted to particular social and political circumstances in ways that seemed to reverse tactics they had successfully used in the past to gain advantages for their communities.328

In what would appear to be a contradictory selection of strategies, members of the cabildo of Santiago, who had allied with the nearby garrison in 1781 and sought their support to air shared grievances against Father Herrera, submitted a petition to the vicar of Chiquitos, just two years later, condemning the misbehavior of troops from the very same military detachment.

The petition, which also included an ambivalent depiction of their new resident priest, Herrera’s immediate successor, was written and signed by four native justices in the Chiquita language and translated into Spanish. Using a rhetoric of formal deference imbued with religious declamation, characteristic of the political discourse developed by native cabildos, the justices presented themselves as humble and dutiful Christians earnestly striving to meet their spiritual obligations in the face of moral transgressions committed by soldiers who scandalized the entire mission.

The justices’ prefaced their petition with a religious invocation: “Praise God, he who gives health and life,” before enumerating several incidents of the soldiers’ misconduct.

Expressing a sense of anguish, the justices notified the vicar that the soldiers regularly engaged in physical altercations in disputes over Indian women and a few of them had even threatened to kill each other. On several occasions, soldiers had forcibly taken married women into their barracks at night where they beat and sexually assaulted them. In one audacious episode of moral

328 “Representación de Los Jueces Del Pueblo de Santiago de Chiquitos Al Vicario de Ella, Comunican de Los Agravios a La Moral Que Padecen Por Parte de Los Soldados Que Guarnecen Aquellas Fronteras,” May 18, 1783, MyCh 26. IX, ABNB. 149 impropriety, two soldiers named Simón Coimbra and Josef Arroyo abducted two young Indian women and left the mission to live with them in the monte “like barbarians”. After two months, a group of Indian men launched a search party, rescued the women, and brought the soldiers back to the mission with their arms and legs bound.

After denouncing the immoral behavior of the transgressive soldiers, the justices voiced their concerns over the military detachment’s subversion of their authority as cabildo members.

Assuming the role of beleaguered stewards of the mission struggling to secure their standing within the community, the justices claimed that the soldiers who: “have done much harm, commit sins in our presence, and then they hate us (nosotros jueces) because we put a stop to the evil that we have seen. For this reason, they are searching for excuses to take the cane (el bastón) from us.” Conveying a sense of urgency, the justices complained that the soldiers’ egregious violations and open contempt for their authority had diminished their influence so severely that their own children showed them no respect. They warned the vicar that if the soldiers’ crimes and effrontery continue unabated, the cabildo would no longer command the stature necessary to lead the mission effectively.329

The justices modified their language and tone in the passages devoted to their new resident priest who had recently arrived to replace Father Herrera. Through their depiction of

Herrera’s replacement, whom they never mentioned by name, the justices revealed tensions within Santiago that ran counter to the conditions detailed in the complaints about Herrera given by Indians and soldiers two years earlier. While the justices described the new priest as a dramatic improvement over Herrera with regards to his performance of religious duties and his administration of the mission economy, including his distribution of goods and provisions, they

329 Ibid.

150 also indicated that he was artlessly naïve, lacked Herrera’s capacity to assert his command, and was therefore easily manipulated by the military detachment. In order to establish their preferred version of the conditions within Santiago, the justices crafted a portrayal of Herrera’s successor that reflected a trenchant awareness of their intended audience, the vicar of Chiquitos. They appealed to the sensibilities of the high-ranking ecclesiastical authority by tempering their unfavorable examples of the priest’s acquiescence and ineffectual character with several laudatory accounts of his attentiveness and magnanimity. Using language that simultaneously expressed admiration and resigned disappointment bordering on pity, the justices explained that the priest continued to care for the soldiers so generously that he often provisioned them well beyond their needs in spite of their repeated offenses. In just one week, they claimed, he gave the military detachment four head of cattle, 25 candles, and 30 bars of soap – all products of the

Indians’ labor and collective assets of Santiago. Breaking from their measured tone to express a biting sense of exasperation over such a misguided and unjust distribution of their communal patrimony, the justices quipped that “everything [the soldiers] want, the father priest gives to them.” This flash of bitter and frank resentment was brief, however, as the justices resumed their measured tone and concluded their petition by recounting more affectionate examples of the priest’s commendable attributes. They reiterated to the vicar that he carried out his spiritual and temporal duties admirably, faithfully attended to the Indians’ religious ministry, and labored to ensure the material well-being of the entire mission.

At first glance, the bureaucratic disputes, social tensions, and intercultural alliances detailed by the four justices of Santiago in 1783 appear to represent an implausible reversal of the conditions in the very same mission described just two years earlier by the entire cabildo in their testimonies recorded by Verdugo during his tour of the province. Such abrupt and dramatic

151 changes, however, were consistent with the political discord and administrative turnover that accompanied the establishment of the military government. The bitter complaints presented to

Verdugo in 1781 by the native justices of Santiago and several troops from the nearby garrison was enough to convince military and ecclesiastical officials to depose Father Herrera and appoint his replacement to assume the role as the mission’s ranking priest. This administrative change proved consequential. The introduction of a new and prominent social actor with different motivations and ambitions than his predecessor reoriented intercultural affiliations and shifted the circumstances of provincial diplomacy. Furthermore, the seemingly remarkable transformation of the sociopolitical climate of Santiago expressed by the justices in 1783 corresponded to evolving strategies for mediation developed by the mission Indians as they engaged with and shaped the local political dynamics of this transitional period.330

Conclusions

This chapter illuminates the ways in which the indigenous peoples of Chiquitos adapted their political culture to the historical processes set in motion by the establishment of a military government. As we have seen, the new government shuffled the composition of colonial authority and altered the political climate in the province in ways that created new and different intercultural power struggles. In his role as the first military governor of Chiquitos, Juan

Bartelemí Verdugo fostered conflicting interests between ecclesiastical officials and his recently installed administration by attempting to implement a series of reforms intended to scale back the authority of the church and bolster his position. As part of his reform campaign, Verdugo sent petitions to the Audiencia of Charcas and the Viceroy of the Río de la Plata. Verdugo’s petitions

330 Ibid. 152 condemned the ineptitude of the resident priests and presented evidence for the necessity of his proposed changes from grievances expressed by the mission Indians’ in recorded testimonies elicited by his administration. These testimonies opened up a space for indigenous communities to broker political tensions arising from clashes between ecclesiastical authorities and the military government. Through their testimonies, Indians maneuvered competing spheres of influence to condition the pace and direction of change in confrontations over the terms of local rule and shaped the trajectory of the imperial project in Chiquitos. The version of events portrayed by the mission Indians prompted the Spanish Crown to order investigations into the causes of tumults that had plagued the province since the Jesuit expulsion. These investigations yielded findings that validated Verdugo’s calls for reform and ultimately convinced the

Audiencia to enact a transformative set of administrative regulations known as the New Plan of

Government, which effectively nullified the remaining elements of the Jesuit system so carefully maintained by Herboso in 1769. Approved in La Plata on 8 November 1790, the implementation of these regulations and the aftermath comprise the organizing themes of the following chapter.

153

Chapter 5 ______

Reform and Resistance: The New Plan of Government and the 1790 Rebellion of San Ignacio

Introduction

Chapter 4 showed that the political culture of the indigenous communities of the

Chiquitos missions evolved as they navigated the jurisdictional conflicts between the Church and the recently established military government led by Juan Bartelemí Verdugo. It ended with an evaluation of disputes related to indigenous sovereignty and the changing arrangements of colonial authority as documented during the course of Verdugo’s struggle to enact administrative reforms. Transitioning from the founding years of the military government, this chapter focuses on the impact of regulatory changes promulgated in 1790 that were influenced, in large part, by

Verdugo’s proposed reforms. The chapter begins with a discussion of Bishop Alejandro José

Ochoa’s opposition to Verdugo and his steadfast efforts to prevent the ratification of regulations that would undermine the authority of the Church in Chiquitos. It provides an overview of

Ochoa’s arguments against Verdugo’s reforms, which he presented in a report to the Audiencia of Charcas, and demonstrates that, like Verdugo, the bishop supported many of his assertions by invoking the spiritual and material well-being of the mission Indians. Although the Audiencia ruled in Ochoa’s favor and decided to maintain Herboso’s regulations, Verdugo’s efforts were not in vain. As mentioned in the previous chapter, Verdugo’s petitions and reports, written in support of his proposals, conditioned the Crown to be more receptive to reforms presented by

154 subsequent provincial governors in the struggle between religious and secular authorities that continued into the nineteenth century.331

Turning to the decades following Verdugo’s governorship, this chapter assesses the aftermath of his reform campaign during the implementation of regulations known as the New

Plan of Government adopted by the Audiencia in accordance with a royal provision issued on 8

November 1790. Inspired by Verdugo’s proposals, the regulatory changes that would comprise the New Plan of 1790 gained greater support from the Crown during the governorship of

Antonio López Carvajal, who was appointed in November of 1786, and effectively implemented by Governor Melchor Rodríguez after his arrival in the province in mid-1791.332 The chapter provides an overview of the New Plan’s most significant regulations and analyzes the differing ways in which native peoples, Church officials and colonial authorities reacted to the changes caused by the regulations. As with previous administrative reforms, the New Plan was met with a variety of responses and there was no consensus about their regulatory changes among the mission Indians. The chapter concludes with an analysis of the reactions to the New Plan by the native mission residents of Chiquitos at the end of the eighteenth century. It shows that different indigenous groups addressed the reforms with a variety of strategic approaches that advanced the interests of their particular communities. Their varied approaches, in turn, compelled secular and

Church officials to develop and modify their administrative and political endeavors accordingly.

331 Ramón Gutiérrez da Costa and Rodrigo Gutiérrez Viñuales, “Territorio, Urbanismo y Arquitectura En Moxos y Chiquitos,” in Las Misiones Jesuíticas de Chiquitos, ed. Pedro Querejazu and Plácido Molina Barbery (La Paz, Bolivia: Fundación BHN, Línea Editorial: La Papelera, 1995), 374.

332 María José Diez Gálvez, Los bienes muebles de Chiquitos: fuentes para el conocimiento de una sociedad (Madrid: Agencia Española de Cooperación Internacional, Ministerio de Asuntos Exteriores y de Cooperación, 2006), 47–48. 155

Ochoa’s Opposition to Verdugo’s Reforms

In preparation for mounting a defense against Verdugo and his reform campaign, Ochoa sent ecclesiastical officials to Chiquitos to investigate the state of the mission towns. He tasked the officials with gathering evidence that would undermine the military administration and persuade the Audiencia that implementing the regulatory changes proposed by Verdugo would entail inordinate difficulties. In April of 1783, Ochoa drafted an official report citing information obtained during his investigation and sent it to the president of the Audiencia, Ignacio Flores. In the report, Ochoa disputed Verdugo’s criticisms of the resident priests, which he considered excessive and unwarranted, accused him of being an incompetent governor, admonished him for overstepping his authority, dismissed his proposed reforms as ill-advised, and enumerated the benefits of upholding the regulations issued by Bishop Herboso in 1769.

Ochoa began his report by conceding the authority granted to Verdugo by the instructions delivered to him with the royal decree of August 5, 1777, when he was appointed the first military governor of Chiquitos. Verdugo’s instructions authorized him to propose to the

Audiencia of Charcas: “Everything that he might find suitable to change in order to achieve the best government of the missions, both in spiritual and temporal matters.” More consequentially, the instructions required the Audiencia to consider the ideas presented by Verdugo in good faith in order to determine those which it found to be just and worthy of implementation. After conveying his recognition of these provisions, Ochoa alerted President Flores that Verdugo had exceeded his authority as outlined in the royal instructions. According to the bishop, Verdugo had proceeded “completely in accordance with his own whim” to enact a key feature of his proposed reforms without the consultation or approval of either diocesan or civil authorities. He

156 therefore demonstrated a lack of the probity necessary for fulfilling the duties of his important position.333

Citing the findings made by ecclesiastical officials during his recent investigation of the province, Ochoa alleged that Verdugo had begun to unilaterally implement administrative changes in the Chiquitos missions. Of his own accord, Verdugo had stationed secular officials known as lieutenants in some of the mission towns to oversee economic affairs. He thereby stripped that responsibility from the resident priests, rendering them subordinate to the authority of his military government. Moreover, Ochoa claimed that his investigation revealed that

Verdugo had imposed a particularly egregious provision for garnering the funds needed to compensate the lieutenants for their work. Verdugo intended for each of the lieutenants to receive a salary comprised of two hundred pesos a year deducted from the stipend of the ranking priest who served the mission in which they were stationed in addition to one-third of the of the annual profits generated by the communities they managed. Ochoa viewed these measures as an affront to his authority as the leader of the diocese and, with a strident sense of indignation, he urged the Audiencia to promptly remove the lieutenants from the missions and block Verdugo’s reform plans.334

Ochoa informed President Flores that Verdugo was “not a sensible man of judgment and talent” and warned that allowing him to implement any of his poorly conceived reforms would exacerbate existing problems in Chiquitos and ultimately destabilize the entire mission province.

Either unaware or feigning ignorance of Verdugo’s extensive knowledge of Chiquitos and the

333 Alejandro José de Ochoa y Murillo, “Informe Del Obispo de Santa Cruz de La Sierra Al Presidente de La Audiencia de Charcas, En El Que Propone Se Tome En Cuenta Los Reglamentos de Don Francisco Herboso, Para El Gobierno Espiritual y Temporal de La Provincia de Chiquitos,” April 12, 1783, MyCh 25. XXIII, ABNB, GRM.

334 Ibid.

157 time he spent living in and near the region while conducting tours of duty during his military career, Ochoa attempted to convince the Audiencia that Verdugo lacked the background and experience needed to be an effective governor of the province.335 Pointing to Verdugo’s alleged ignorance of Chiquitos, Ochoa harshly criticized his proposals as misguided and irresponsible and emphasized the importance of maintaining the regulatory system devised by Herboso who was much more familiar with the province. Furthermore, Ochoa argued that due to his gross incompetence, Verdugo had hastily created a series of imprudent regulations while relying on

“vanity more than judgement” and then abused his authority to implement his regulations without considering the consequences for the mission province and its people. In his utter repudiation of Verdugo and his proposals, Ochoa made clear that his military administration and reform efforts represented an impertinent challenge to the authority of the diocese and threated the tenuous order and stability that Herboso’s regulations and the Church had established in the province since 1769.336

Drawing a sharp contrast to Verdugo, Ochoa depicted Bishop Herboso as an experienced and astute leader who was genuinely concerned about the interests and security of the native mission residents of Chiquitos and had proactively sought out and achieved a broad understanding of the specific challenges they faced living in the remote province. According to

Ochoa, while conducting a personal tour of Chiquitos, Herboso became intimately familiar with the region’s agricultural production and textile manufacturing, observed the different customs of its Indian populations, and learned about the economic and political government that the native

335 Juan Bartelemi Verdugo, “Relación de Los Méritos y Servicios de Don Juan Bartelemi Verdugo, Coronel Que Fue de Caballería En La Expedición de Los Moxos, y Mato Grosso de La Provincia de Santa Cruz de La Sierra,” June 23, 1774, Sala IX, División Colonia, Sección Gobierno, Gobierno de Chiquitos 1789, Chiquitos 1766 – 1809, AGNA.

336 Ochoa y Murillo, “ABNB, GRM MyCh 25. XXIII.” 158 mission residents had inherited from the Jesuits. Ochoa assured President Flores that, unlike

Verdugo, Herboso had applied his broad knowledge of Chiquitos to devise judicious regulations that were best suited for the particular circumstances of the province and its people. Thus, Ochoa reasoned, to alter his regulatory system with impulsive reforms would have perilous consequences.337

While Ochoa opposed Verdugo’s reforms altogether, he expressed a particular aversion to the governor’s independent decision to station lieutenants in the missions and he denounced the measure as rash and openly contemptuous. The presence of secular administrators in the province with jurisdiction over the economic output of the mission towns – a prerogative previously held by the Church – relegated the resident priests subordinate to Verdugo’s administration and thus weakened the bishop’s influence in the province. In his efforts to convince the Audiencia to rule against any further implementation of Verdugo’s reforms, Ochoa singled out what he understood to be potentially calamitous problems posed by the presence of the lieutenants.338 Although Verdugo had ostensibly stationed lieutenants in Chiquitos to curb illicit trade and prevent the priests from misappropriating the mission Indians’ communal assets,

Ochoa insisted that the measure was self-centered as well as shortsighted and would only exacerbate existing problems in the province. He denounced Verdugo’s plan as an impending disaster and derided its intended benefits as “imaginary and fantastical”.339 To persuade the

Audiencia of the naiveté, impracticality and danger of the plan, Ochoa employed to a rhetorical flare:

337 Ibid.

338 Ibid.

339 Ibid.

159

The remedy will be a greater ailment and the antidote will become poison if a secular

lieutenant is placed in each town who does not have the necessary requirements of true

selflessness and prudent devotion and commensurate talents. Their placement in the

missions will create a seminar of discord and anxieties and give rise to greater

opportunities for losses and arears in that decadent province. Because it is common (in

Chiquitos) to not generate sufficient funds to pay a competent salary to every lieutenant

placed in the ten towns, they will seek other illicit means for their prosperity and to

increase their profits, which will cause irreparable detriment to the missions. And it is

likely that the subjects who would be chosen (to be lieutenants) would not be dutiful,

trustworthy and of good conduct nor would they have the qualities already expressed and

needed for the proper performance of their employment. For if they possessed these

qualities, it would not be difficult for them to obtain better accommodation in Peru and

they would not be content with this fate of such meager income, proceeding in good faith

and with reticent conscience and in a country so uncomfortable and remote from all civil

society.340

As this passage shows, Ochoa believed that Verdugo’s plan could bring about several negative repercussions. Rather than reduce corruption and rectify the economic management of

Chiquitos, the changes instituted by the plan would create a bloated and discordant bureaucratic structure more conducive for graft and make it more difficult to appoint competent priests to

340 Ibid.

160 serve the mission communities. Given the fact that it was already challenging to find suitable priests under the current system, Ochoa argued, it would be nearly impossible to encounter ecclesiastical officials of any distinction who would subject themselves to the indignity of serving as a subordinate to Verdugo’s secular lieutenants in a province so distant and impoverished. According to Ochoa, even if the diocese were able to find priests willing to endure such onerous circumstances, they would eventually become disillusioned and lose the motivation to apply themselves to the exacting demands of the position such as learning the “peculiar language” of the neophytes which was necessary for adequately complying with the duties of providing spiritual guidance.341

The very presence of secular administrators in Chiquitos was troubling for Ochoa, but he found Verdugo’s provision for paying them exceptionally problematic. He argued that allocating a third of the annual mission profits to the lieutenants – who would likely be incompetent – as part of their due compensation, would incentivize them to pressure the native communities to work harder in order to produce greater returns under the specious pretext of advancing the economic progress of the province. Moreover, he believed that the isolated missions would rarely generate enough revenue to provide the lieutenants with a living wage and their broad jurisdiction would afford them ample leeway to conduct their own illicit ventures in order to make up for the consistent deficits. These concerning developments, in turn, would give rise to frequent and well-founded complaints and appeals from the mission Indians, which would weigh heavily on the already overburdened attention of the courts and the prelates who exercised jurisdiction over the province.342

341 Ibid.

342 Ibid.

161

Ochoa reminded the Audiencia that the majority of the problems detailed in his report were the result of a partial implementation of just one component of Verdugo’s much broader reform campaign. If he were permitted to fully implement his entire regulatory system, which was his expressed goal, conditions in Chiquitos would become much worse. Any official recognition of Verdugo’s reforms by the Audiencia, even minor elements, Ochoa warned, would embolden the governor to intensify his efforts to reduce the authority of the Church in the province. Citing specific provisions articulated by Verdugo in the petitions he wrote to promote his proposals, Ochoa informed the Audiencia that his ultimate goal was to decrease the number of priests in each of the mission towns from two, as designated by Herboso in 1769, to one.

According to Verdugo’s plan, if the remaining priests failed to meet the greater demands and obligations imposed upon them by the abrupt removal of half of their colleagues, they would be permitted to send a formal appeal to the military administration to request permission to hire an assistant. Should their request be approved, the priests would be required to draw on their own meager stipends to reimburse the assistants for the significant expense of traveling to the remote province and pay their annual salaries.343

Ochoa concluded his report by stressing his overarching concern that Verdugo’s reforms threatened the welfare of the indigenous communities inhabiting the Chiquitos missions. The dramatic and sudden administrative reorganization precipitated by such reforms would result in disruptive changes to the political hierarchy of the mission towns that would be especially harmful for the native residents. Beyond weakening the administrative capacity of the Church in the province, Ochoa argued, ousting half of the priests would negatively impact the spiritual lives of the Indians. The presence of two spiritual leaders in each of the mission towns gave the

343 Ibid.

162 neophytes the freedom to elect the individual priest to whom they felt most comfortable confessing their sins. Without this choice, Ochoa reasoned, Indians who lacked trust in the one and only priest who remained to serve their mission community would be less inclined to freely confide in him as their confessor and thus may fail to comply with the precepts of the Church – a distinct possibility given their rudimentary understanding of the faith.344 Furthermore, Ochoa argued that bringing outside secular administrators into the mission towns to control the Indians’ communal economy would diminish the authority of the priests in the eyes of the indigenous communities they served and thereby hinder their capacity to provide adequate religious leadership for the neophytes. According to Ochoa, if the mission Indians lost respect for their priests in this way, they would no longer be receptive to the spiritual ministry they provide and may ultimately stray from the faith, abandon their missions in apostasy, and leave the remote borderland province more vulnerable to enemy incursion.345

Ochoa’s arguments convinced the Audiencia to trust in his stewardship of the diocese to address the issues facing Chiquitos and on June 4, 1783, members of the tribunal ruled to maintain the regulations installed in 1769. The Audiencia’s ruling effectively barred the implementation of major reforms for the remainder of Verdugo’s governorship, but in light of the charges that he presented in his petitions and supported with testimonial accounts given by mission Indians, colonial officials began to see the need to make gradual adjustments. In 1785, the final year of Verdugo’s governorship, the Crown requested investigative reports of Moxos and Chiquitos and issued a royal decree introducing minor reforms in the two mission provinces.

Delivered in Madrid on July 16, the royal decree ordered the Audiencia of Charcas to produce a

344 Ibid.

345 Gutiérrez da Costa and Gutiérrez Viñuales, “Territorio, Urbanismo y Arquitectura,” 374.

163 comprehensive set of instructions for the subsequent administrations of Moxos and Chiquitos.346

The instructions required future governors of both provinces to submit detailed reports to the

Audiencia on the abuses and unrest in the mission towns under their jurisdiction. They would submit these reports at the beginning and the end of their terms of office. These reports were intended to help the Crown evaluate the administrations of each governor moving forward in order to better address the kinds of problems and conflicts detailed by Verdugo. The instructions also included provisions for the supervision of both provinces’ economic output and separated all future sales of mission products from the temporalidades (communal mission assets), which the priests still controlled. Any revenue yielded from these sales would thereafter be forwarded to the royal treasury of Cochabamba. This revenue, like the resources of other provinces already managed by the treasury, would belong to Moxos and Chiquitos as the particular provinces in which it was produced and would be set aside to be distributed for aid to the mission communities.347

Verdugo did not oversee the implementation of these changes. Due to the accusations made by Ochoa in his report as well as a litany of formal complaints given by several priests,

Verdugo was arraigned by the Audiencia of Charcas at the end of 1785 and ordered to leave

Chiquitos and appear in the city of La Plata to stand trial for charges of economic mismanagement and attempts to establish an unauthorized regime. Verdugo was acquitted of all charges on December 15, 1789, but he never returned to Chiquitos and died the following year in

La Plata at the age of 49.348 His reform campaign and subsequent removal from office ushered in

346 Ibid.

347 Ibid.

348 Oscar Tonelli Justiniano, Reseña Histórica, Social y Económica de La Chiquitanía (Editorial El País, 2004), 110.

164 a tumultuous period in which the province was administered by a series of interim and substitute governors appointed and deposed in an erratic succession of commands in the midst of the ongoing power struggle between religious and secular authorities and the different native populations inhabiting the missions. During the final decade of the eighteenth century and the first two decades of the nineteenth century, this power struggle revolved around the promulgation and implementation of the New Plan of Government of 1790.349

The Governorship of Antonio López Carvajal and the New Plan of Government

In September of 1785, Francisco Javier de Cañas replaced Verdugo as the provisional governor of Chiquitos. Just over one year later, Cañas ceded the position to Antonio López

Carvajal who had been appointed by the Viceroy of Buenos Aires to serve as the interim military governor of the province. In accordance with his responsibilities as defined by the recent royal decree, upon his arrival, Carvajal began gathering information about the mission towns to include in his first report for the Audiencia. He also arranged to meet with the mission priests to discuss possible resolutions for the lingering conflicts between the Church and the military government. Carvajal wished to avoid the interminable disputes with ecclesiastical officials that had marred Verdugo’s governorship, and he sought to begin his term by establishing more diplomatic relations with the diocese. Nevertheless, like his predecessor, he believed that the province needed administrative changes and he spent much of his brief governorship devising and proposing reforms, which put him at odds with the mission priests and Bishop Ochoa.350

349 Diez Gálvez, Los bienes muebles de Chiquitos, 47.

350 Tonelli Justiniano, Reseña Histórica, 112.

165

The knowledge that Carvajal had gained while preparing his report for the Audiencia only strengthened his belief in the necessity of reforming the province. Among other revelations, he found that several priests, in collusion with Spanish merchants from the city of Santa Cruz, were engaged in the illicit trade of mission goods, which had inhibited the productivity of the entire province. Carvajal’s research also yielded evidence that undermined the widespread perception of Chiquitos as an inherently unproductive backwater. According to his findings, the mission towns were actually producing more than enough to function self-sufficiently and, if not for the misappropriation of their communal assets, had the potential to generate at least moderate revenue for the Crown. The failure of Chiquitos to produce a significant amount of surplus resources was not the result of its remote location or an indolent or undisciplined native population. The reason for the province’s ostensible lack of productivity was because mission goods, the fruits of the Indians’ assiduous labor, consistently ended up in the hands of profiteering priests and unscrupulous cruceño merchants.351

In the report that Carvajal ultimately submitted to the Audiencia of Charcas, he detailed the involvement of priests and cruceños in the illicit trade of mission goods and disclosed other newly discovered problems impacting the province. To address these issues, he proposed a series of administrative reforms influenced by regulations developed for Moxos by that province’s presiding governor, Lázaro de Ribera. Many of Carvajal’s proposed reforms also featured innovations similar to those proposed by Verdugo – the most notable of which was the appointment of secular administrators responsible for supervising economic affairs in the missions. Bishop Ochoa was quick to repudiate Carvajal’s proposals in the same way that he had when he spoke out against Verdugo’s reform campaign. He denounced the changes as foolish

351 Ibid., 112–13.

166 and possibly calamitous and reiterated his strident defense of the prudent regulations created by

Herboso. The rhetorical approaches Ochoa used to present his opposition to the proposals made by both governors were fundamentally similar. His arguments against Carvajal, however, were much more concise and focused primarily on discrediting the new governor’s plans to bring in secular administrators to take on the responsibilities previously held by ecclesiastical officials.352

Influenced by the recently learned details of illicit trade within the missions, the Crown intervened in the latest dispute between ecclesiastical and civil officials and delivered a royal order on 29 April 1790, approving Carvajal’s proposals for administrative reform. Later that same year, the Audiencia of Charcas issued the Auto of 8 November, which enumerated the regulatory changes known as the New Plan of Government of Chiquitos. Comprised of 49 articles, the New Plan introduced a series of reforms that transformed the economic and political administration of the province. The most consequential of these reforms mandated that the authority of the mission priests would thereafter be restricted exclusively to matters of the

Christian faith. The priests’ duties in this realm would continue to be regulated by the 36 articles created by Bishop Herboso for the spiritual ministry of the native mission residents – except for the provision that granted priests the power to punish Indians with lashes. In direct response to the involvement of cruceño merchants in the illicit trade of mission products, the regulations prohibited Spaniards from participating in commercial engagements in Chiquitos. Five secular administrators referred to as “lieutenants” would be stationed in the province to supplant the priests as the primary supervisors of the local economy. Each of the lieutenants would be in charge of overseeing the temporalidades of two mission towns. Their broad responsibilities and duties included: the management and stewardship of the goods produced by the mission

352 Ibid., 113–14.

167 communities under their respective jurisdiction; the distribution and supervision of Indian labor, including the harvest and storage of crops grown in the priests’ chacras; the dispersal of aid to the native neophytes; and the surveillance and documentation of everything that occurred within the mission towns.353

The New Plan was officially promulgated on 29 November 1790 in Santa Cruz by

Manuel Ignacio Zudáñez, the city’s captain commander and deputy judge. A few days later, in the mission of San Javier, Governor Carvajal gave orders to enact the regulations and thereby initiated the process of implementing reforms that would significantly diminish the authority of ecclesiastical officials in Chiquitos.354 Although the New Plan expressed recognition for the authority of native justices as the representatives of their distinct parcialidades, the language used by royal officials in the various decrees and orders issued to disseminate the reforms conveyed a decidedly paternalistic view of the mission Indians as naïve children incapable of managing their own civil and commercial affairs and in need of vigilant supervision.355

Responses to the New Plan of Government and the Rebellion of San Ignacio

Soon after the Crown approved of the New Plan in April of 1790, various details of its regulatory changes reached the mission towns and elicited political controversy. During the months immediately preceding the official implementation of the reforms, rumors began to

353 Diez Gálvez, Los bienes muebles de Chiquitos, 49.

354 Tonelli Justiniano, Reseña Histórica, 114–15.

355 “AGNA, División Colonia, Sección Gobierno, Gobierno de Chiquitos, Chiquitos 1766–1809, Sala IX,” August 7, 1790, 20-6–7. A Royal Provision written by the Audiencia de La Plata about the New Plan of 1790 stipulated that the mission Indians “especially those of the class of judges and officers” had to be instructed in civil and commercial affairs “in order to gently prepare them so that they can negotiate, without the risks to which, until now, they would succumb due to their natural naivety, simple customs, and lack of knowledge.”

168 emerge that incited fear and suspicion among the native mission residents. Resentful priests who viewed the impending changes as a threat to their authority made incendiary allegations against

Carvajal to foster animosity between the mission Indians and the governor as a means of building opposition to the New Plan. The most alarming of these allegations was the claim that

Carvajal had begun to place civil administrators in the province who were tasked with seizing mission assets and employing the lash to force a harsher labor regime on the Indians.356

On 5 June 1790, amid the anxieties and escalating tensions caused by the priests’ allegations, Indians from the mission of San Ignacio rose up in a violent rebellion. Only two parcialidades led by their native justices initiated the rebellion, but they were soon joined by the remaining justices who ultimately brought the entire mission into the conflict. Armed with clubs and bows and arrows, the insurgents killed at least four people and injured several others. News of the violence circulated first to the nearby missions of Santa Ana, San Miguel and San Rafael, located to the west of San Ignacio, and then to the larger, more distant San José, the principal mission of southern Chiquitos. After receiving reports of the uprising, Carvajal summoned the rebellious native justices of San Ignacio to appear before him in Santa Ana to discuss possible resolutions. The justices refused Carvajal’s orders, however, and instead seized the communal products and trade goods from their mission storehouses. Rumors of additional tumults began to emerge in other missions where frightened and apprehensive witnesses claimed that thousands of

Indians were armed and prepared to revolt.357

Most of the details of the uprising are recorded in three sources: a petition written by the native justices of San Ignacio, a testimony given by Gregorio Barbosa, a soldier stationed in a

356 “Testimonio Del Soldado Gregorio Barbosa Sobre Rumores de Una Sublevación,” 1790, 6-1, A3, ACSC.

357 Ibid.; Cynthia Radding, Landscapes of Power and Identity: Comparative Histories in the Sonoran Desert and the Forests of Amazonia from Colony to Republic (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 190–93. 169 garrison outside San José, and a personal letter written by Manuel Rojas, the ranking priest of

San José. Several documents produced during the subsequent investigation of the revolt offer additional information. These sources provide varying interpretations of the circumstances leading up to the conflict and identify different motivations for the Indians’ use of violence.

In Gregorio Barbosa’s testimony, he claimed to have learned about the rebellion on 9

June from two Indian ranch hands upon their return to San José after working in their mission estancia. The two Indians approached Barbosa while he was lying in his hammock to inform him that their resident priest, Manuel Rojas, had told the Indian justices of San José that all of the other missions of Chiquitos were rebelling “because the governor, don Antonio Carvajal, had brought lieutenants to the province” who had taken over economic affairs and seized the Indians’ property. Rojas then commanded the justices to “work harder, because lieutenants are coming who will whip the Indians every day and loot the missions.” He also claimed that the lieutenants were not concerned with hearing confession or celebrating Mass because “only the priests can give Mass.” After warning the justices of the looming threat posed by Carvajal and his administrators, Rojas asked them “why they wanted governors or lieutenants in the province.”358

Barbosa learned more about the uprising from a petition written by the native justices of

San Ignacio, which the Indian ranch hands had brought to San José to deliver to Félix Hidalgo, the commander of Barbosa’s garrison. Originally written in Chiquita, the petition was translated into Spanish, signed by all the council members, and forwarded to the Audiencia of La Plata.

The justices began their petition by offering a customary religious benediction and directly addressing Carvajal with a deferential salutation before reminding him of his duty to protect the native mission residents as the governor of the province. They expressed their desire for him to

358 “Testimonio Del Soldado Gregorio Barbosa, ACSC, 6-1, A3 1790”; Radding, Landscapes of Power and Identity, 190–91. 170 visit San Ignacio to address injustices in their community that had incited the rebellion. Among these injustices, they explained, were the sexual improprieties and physical abuses committed by

Simón Gallo, the ranking priest of San Ignacio, and his nephew, Juan Gallo, an administrator stationed in the mission. Both men had taken Indian women into their quarters to live as concubines and Father Simón had brutally flogged a native ironsmith named José without the consent or even the knowledge of the cabildo. The tensions created by these affronts reached a boiling point when Miguel Rojas, the brother of Manuel Rojas and commander of the garrison near Santa Ana, appeared in San Ignacio unannounced with several heavily armed soldiers on the night before Corpus Christi and interrupted community celebrations. According to the justices, the mission Indians perceived the soldiers’ sudden arrival as an egregious imposition because their unexpected presence had upset the religious solemnity of the important Catholic feast day.359

In his letter to Commander Hidalgo, dated 9 June, Manuel Rojas gave a starkly different account of the rebellion and placed all of the blame for the upheaval on Carvajal. Rojas began his letter by presenting a bleak depiction of Chiquitos as an impoverished province languishing in the midst of a severe drought. He informed Hidalgo that “the news from [San José] is substantial and it is all bad. First, the cattle are suffering from a lack of water and grazing land, and the sown fields have all dried up to the stalk.” After enumerating the travails of the province, Rojas gave a report of the sequence of events of the uprising and listed the names of the dead and wounded, all of whom were Spanish soldiers and settlers. He indicated that he had received news that his brother Miguel, who had abruptly shown up in San Ignacio on the eve of Corpus Christi, was among the wounded, but he did not know whether or not he had survived his injuries. The

359 “ABNB, MyCH 29. XXII,” 1790, folios 163-165; Radding, Landscapes of Power and Identity, 191. 171 rebellious Indians had spared the lives of the priests because, Rojas claimed, they “are Christs on earth.” As a result, they had not harmed Simón Gallo, despite their dissatisfaction with him.

Although Rojas mentioned that the Indians of San Ignacio were upset with Father Gallo and had expressed their desire for him to leave the mission, he failed to reference the serious allegations of sexual and physical abuse leveled against the priest and his nephew. Rojas focused instead on what he believed to be incompetent decisions made by Carvajal, whom he derided with curses and anti-Semitic epithets throughout his letter. The Indians of San Ignacio rebelled, Rojas argued, because they were outraged by Carvajal’s introduction of civil administrators.

Furthermore, he claimed, Carvajal’s poor leadership continued to anger native mission residents and would provoke future revolts in due course. To provide evidence for this claim, Rojas alleged that Carvajal had recently infuriated the Indians of San José by taking the cane of office from their alférez, thus revoking his authority as a native justice, in response to unsubstantiated rumors that the alférez had made plans to kill him and his lieutenants. Rojas ended his missive by denouncing Carvajal as a “devil” and holding him solely responsible for the conflict in San

Ignacio and the resulting bloodshed and loss of life, including the injury and possible death of his brother Miguel.360

Two months later, on 7 August, Carvajal sent an official letter to the Audiencia of

Charcas, to offer his assessments of the uprising in San Ignacio and to issue his personal appeal to pardon the rebellious Indians. Carvajal blamed the uprising on the “negative forces” of disreputable priests – particularly Simón Gallo – and meddlesome Spaniards, but he provided no specific details about the tumult itself. Instead, he attempted to position the sudden outbreak of violence within the context of previous disputes and skirmishes that had occurred in Chiquitos

360 “Testimonio Del Soldado Gregorio Barbosa, ACSC, 6-1, A3 1790,” A summary of Manuel Rojas’s letter to Felix Hidalgo is recorded in this document; Radding, Landscapes of Power and Identity, 191–92. 172 since the Jesuit expulsion. He attributed all of these conflicts, including the latest, to incompetent priests and their propensity to mislead the mission Indians – problems that he believed had never been adequately addressed. Carvajal pointed out that the upheaval in San Ignacio was not without precedent and argued that the only differences that distinguished the latest upheaval from the prior incidents were the level of violence and bloodshed and the actions of Simón

Gallo. In the aftermath of earlier uprisings, Carvajal explained, priests who were found to be transgressive relocated to other mission towns or withdrew from the province altogether if the

Indians under their charge wanted them to leave. In the latest tumult, however, the opposite had occurred. The justices of San Ignacio had voiced their dissatisfaction with Gallo and asked for him to be removed, but he obstinately remained in the mission and his continued presence was the source of considerable tension which, according to Carvajal, could erupt into more violence.361

It is important to note that Carvajal’s letter features clear reflections of the concerns conveyed to him in the petition written by the cabildo of San Ignacio and supported a number of their expressed interests. He reaffirmed the authority vested in the native justices of each of the

10 mission towns as the representatives of their different parcialidades and emphasized the legitimacy and importance of the role they played in managing mission products. He also cautioned the Audiencia to be skeptical of disparaging portrayals of native mission residents so commonly featured in documents produced by colonial officials during investigations of the rebellion. According to Carvajal, such false and wrongful claims and rumors, rather than credible accounts, had been used to influence Audiencia members to negatively evaluate the Indians. In his view, “the greatest number of allegations against the Indians developed according to

361 “AGNA, Gobierno de Chiquitos, Sala IX, 7 August 1790.” 173 extrajudicial information given by Spaniards.” Both ecclesiastical and civil authorities characterized the Indians as exceptionally duplicitous and inclined to violence in order to discredit their valid appeals and grievances and to draw attention away from their own improprieties. Before asking the Audiencia to pardon the insurgents, Carvajal made clear that he did not endeavor to defend Indians in general. He declared that his position as governor included the role of strict judge and insisted that he would not hesitate to exercise his authority to deliver harsh punishment to maintain order in the province. Carvajal then softened his tone and explained that his conception of a good governor also included the role of compassionate father.

Assuming this role, he stated that he felt obligated to defended the Indians of Chiquitos, despite the recent crimes committed by a small minority, because he knew that “the great majority of their population” were “virtuous, strong, tolerant, and grateful to the point of inspiring admiration.” Given these virtues, Carvajal explained, if he failed to speak on their behalf, he would be “the most unfair man to ever tread on the surface of the earth.”362

In his efforts to exonerate the insurgent Indians, Carvajal argued that they had initially intended to peacefully protest the abuses against their community described in the justices’ petition, but had been incited to rebel by Father Gallo and Spanish interlocutors who acted in bad faith. Moreover, he claimed that the Indians were not even fully aware of the severity of their crimes because “no one had instructed them to behave righteously.” The oppression under which they lived had made them “malleable”, he argued, and their deceitful priest and intrusive Spanish settlers and soldiers had taken advantage of their malleability and provoked them to rise up and commit violence. Carvajal implored the Audiencia to consider the grievances expressed by the justices of San Ignacio in good faith and to trust their claims as rightful. He freely acknowledged

362 Ibid.

174 that there were credible examples of mission Indians lying to colonial officials, but argued that

“there was not a single one of those examples in which they had not been led to lie by the wicked artifice of those who had taken an interest in their lying.” If the Indians of Chiquitos were sufficiently educated, Carvajal reasoned, they would evade such deception and “be equal to all the other good men of the world.”363

To limit the negative influences on the mission Indians that led to the uprising in San

Ignacio, Carvajal called for instituting higher standards for evaluating future priests and proposed legislation to remove all non-clerical Spaniards from the province. He also made a point to praise the work of a few exemplary priests and requested to increase their stipends by

200 pesos “in order to show them that their hard work and rectitude would be recognized and rewarded.” Carvajal concluded his letter by asking the Audiencia to officially pardon the rebellious Indians and urging the president to commit all of his “prudence and devotion” to ensuring that the native mission residents of Chiquitos receive better instruction in the future.364

Given the conflicting details featured in each of the different accounts of the uprising in

San Ignacio, it is impossible to discern the Indians’ perception of the conflict or identify what did or did not motivate the native insurgents. It is reasonable to assume, however, that the justices of

San Ignacio and other Indians who had opportunities to present their accounts of the tumult to ecclesiastical or civil authorities, intentionally crafted versions of events that appealed to the political perspectives of their different audiences in order to play them off each other. Defined by

Yanna Yannakakis as “jurisdictional jockeying”, this was an important strategy used by native intermediaries when navigating overlapping spheres of colonial authority and required an

363 Ibid.

364 Ibid.

175 intimate understanding of shifting political tensions. Effective use of jurisdictional jockeying emphasized certain political dynamics while minimizing or ignoring others to influence, persuade, sow doubt, encourage assumptions and manipulate preconceived notions.365 In their petition to Carvajal, the justices of San Ignacio presented a version of events that appealed to the governor in order to garner his support. They claimed that physical and sexual abuse committed by their dissolute priest who disregarded the authority of the cabildo and the disruption of their solemn religious celebration by obtuse Spanish soldiers had provoked the rebellion. By depicting themselves as dutiful victims, they affirmed Carvajal’s belief that deceitful priests, who were representatives of an ecclesiastical administration that opposed his authority, were misleading the native neophytes and destroying the province. Moreover, despite credible accounts of the mission Indians’ opposition to Carvajal’s placement of lieutenants in the province, which was widely believed to be the primary motivation for the uprising, the justices made no mention of the governor’s unpopular administrative reforms. Their strategy proved to be successful. As evidenced by his letter to the Audiencia, they won the support of Carvajal who, in turn, exercised his considerable influence over the terms of local rule by advocating for their expressed concerns and pleading for the exoneration of the Indian rebels.

Conclusions

Armed with an intimate understanding of the conflict between ecclesiastical and civil officials and the political acumen to exploit the particular dynamics of that conflict – skills developed during the clashes surrounding the establishment of Verdugo’s military government and reform campaign – the Indians of San Ignacio effectively exploited the jurisdictional

365 Yanna Yannakakis, The Art of Being In-Between: Native Intermediaries, Indian Identity, and Local Rule in Colonial Oaxaca (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 118–19. 176 disputes between Carvajal and the Church in the aftermath of the rebellion. During the investigation to determine the origins of the conflict, the native justices of San Ignacio competed with priests and Spanish officials to impose their preferred version of events in order to cast the incident to their own political advantage. By doing so, they helped to create and establish conflicting perceptions of the rebellion and, by extension, the New Plan, which, in turn, informed the development of future colonial policies that conditioned the local political climate until the independence movements of the early nineteenth century.

177

Epilogue ______

On 26 May 1806, during celebrations in observance of the second day of Pentecost, the sacristans and solfas (musicians of the chapel) of Santo Corazón led a group of Indians in an attack against their administrator, Baltazar Rodríguez. Armed with sticks, the rebels descended upon Rodríguez’s residence, located on the central plaza, where they broke a window and door before storming in. Unable to find the administrator who was hiding under furniture, the angry crowd ransacked his room and struck his wife on the head. A group of bystanders, native mission residents participating in festivities on the plaza, intervened by entering the room and surrounding Rodriguez and his wife until Father Joaquín Baca, the mission’s secondary priest, and the native justices arrived with soldiers from the nearby garrison who quelled the tumult.

The following day, the cabildo sentenced the insurgents to be brought before the mission community and flogged with 25 lashes.366

In early June, the cabildo sent a brief letter to the acting provincial governor, Miguel

Fermín de Riglos, to notify him of the recent disorder and to assure him that they had resolved the issue. They native council blamed the turmoil on their ranking priest, Nicolás Mejía, who, they claimed, had cultivated an adversarial relationship with Rodríguez and deliberately turned the solfas and sacristans against the administrator.367 Though not members of the cabildo, sacristans and solfas were elevated positions that bestowed privilege within the mission community. Sacristans were responsible for the maintenance of the sacred vessels of the church

366 “ABNB, MyCh, Vol. 34, VIII, Oficio Del Gobernador de Chiquitos Al Protector General de Misiones, Comunica Lo Que Ha Averiguado de Los Alborotos Que Se Han Suscitado En La Pascua En El Pueblo Del Santo Corazón Contra Su Administrador,” 1806.

367 Ibid. 178 and solfas supervised the performance of liturgical music in a didactic capacity. Both positions were central to carrying out the theatrical elements of liturgical rituals like dances and processions that dramatized the solemnity of religious holidays. They held distinctive symbols of their rank, exercised supervisory functions over common Indians, and were exempt from public punishment. Although these prestigious positions were accessed through talent, they were strongly linked to lineage. Most sacristans and solfas were the sons of caciques who represented their distinct parcialiades by assuming leadership roles in the public sphere of ritual life and thereby established the political legitimacy of their ethnic and linguistic affiliations.368

According to the justices’ version of events, on the day of the revolt, after drinking chicha in celebration of the holiday, several drunken solfas and sacristans who had been influenced by Mejía’s views of Rodríguez “lost their heads” and decided to forcibly remove him from Santo Corazón. The justices insisted that Rodríguez bore no responsibility for the incident and expressed their hope that he would be permitted to remain in the mission and continue serving as their administrator. To conclude, the justices reported that they had apprehended and punished the “bad Indians” responsible for the clamor and encouraged Riglos to notify the

Audiencia that they had restored order in the mission.369

In response to the justices’ letter, Riglos dispatched the administrator of Concepción,

Ramón Baca, to Santo Corazón to conduct an investigation of the revolt. Riglos instructed Baca to take depositions from Indians as well as garrison soldiers “to find out the cause and origin of this incident.” Hoping to learn more than the limited details provided by the justices, he urged

368 Leonardo Waisman, “Soy Misionero Porque Canto, Taño, y Danzo: Martin Schmid, Músico,” in Las Misiones Jesuíticas de Bolivia, 1694–1772: Misionero, Músico y Arquitecto Entre Los Chiquitanos, ed. Eckart Kühne (Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia: Asociación Suiza por la Cultura “Pro Helvetia,” 1996), 59–60.

369 “ABNB, MyCh, Vol. 34, VIII, 1806.” 179

Baca to adopt a conciliatory approach when deposing Indian witnesses and encourage them to freely express their grievances. On 20 and 21 August, after removing Rodríguez from the mission, Baca recorded the testimonies of four native cabildo members and three soldiers stationed in the nearby garrison. The consensus that emerged from these testimonies broadly reflected the claims made by the justices in their letter to Riglos, but presented a more detailed rendering of the hours leading up to the revolt, including altercations between Mejía and

Rodríguez, and revealed alliances and conflicts related to mission-based politics.370

According to the witnesses’ accounts, at 8:00 a.m. on the morning of the uprising, tensions began mounting in Santo Corazón when Rodríguez declined Mejía’s request to borrow

40 yards (varas) of cloth from the mission receptoría. Rodríguez explained to Mejía that he was prohibited from lending communal mission property, but the priest erupted in anger and verbally assailed him. Choosing to brush off the altercation, Rodríguez prepared a table in the church refectory to share “a splendid midday meal” with Mejía in celebration of the feast day. At noon, when Rodríguez arrived at the refectory for the meal, he discovered that the table had been removed. A group of solfas and sacristans gathered in a corridor near the refectory told him that

Mejía had taken the table, tablecloth, and all of the settings to his room. Undeterred, Rodríguez went to Mejía’s room to implore the priest to dine with him in the refectory in order to provide a good example for the Indians, but he was met with more hostility. Mejía emerged from his room into the corridor where the solfas had begun playing music and assailed Rodríguez a second time. To prevent the solfas from witnessing the outburst, Rodríguez ordered them to leave the corridor. Incensed by Rodríguez’s attempt to issue directives to his parishioner’s, Mejía summoned all of the solfas and sacristans back into the corridor, where he declared himself to be

370 Ibid. 180 their sole authority and forbade them from obeying orders given by the Administrator who he then publicly threatened to punish him with 25 lashes. Startled by Mejía’s belligerence and appeal to violence, Rodríguez withdrew from the church and dined alone in his quarters.371

That afternoon, the sacristans and solfas who witnessed Mejía’s admonishment of

Rodríguez began making their way to the central plaza to drink chicha, dance and lead the celebrations of the feast day. During the festivities, they mobilized a group of native revelers to drive Rodríguez out of Santo Corazón and, according to the mission alférez, “while they were dancing, they rebelled.” At 3:00 p.m., the angry mob armed themselves with sticks and advanced on the administrator’s home.372

In aggregate, the seven testimonies recorded by Baca present a generally concordant version of events, but their individual accounts offer varying details that reveal contours of community rivalries. For example, the three soldiers alleged that Mejía collaborated with the commander of their garrison, whom they failed to name, to depose Rodríguez, and they claimed that both men had prior knowledge of the uprising and may have colluded with the native insurgents. According to the soldiers’ accounts, Mejía regularly visited their garrison and developed a close relationship with the commander who often left the priest in charge of the military post in his absence. During Mejía’s visits to the garrison, he convened with the commander in his quarters to conspire against Rodríguez. On the day before the uprising, Mejía went to the garrison to tell the commander that there was going to be unrest in the mission and together they devised a plan to falsely blame the turmoil on the administrator in order to have him removed. As evidence of their prior knowledge of the uprising, the soldiers pointed out that

371 Ibid.

372 Ibid. 181 neither of the men were in Santo Corazón on the day of the conflict. The commander did not come to the mission to take part in the feast day celebrations with the soldiers under his command and Mejía fled town on horseback immediately before the insurgents attacked the administrator’s house. 373

This episode reveals conflicts between political factions that intersected the community of Santo Corazón and crossed affiliations of language and ethnicity. The sacristans and solfas exercised their privileged positions to form a strategic alliance with Mejía and the garrison commander and mobilize a base of support among the broader mission population to defend the interests of their ethnic, linguistic, and political associations against other competing factions that fragmented the native population of Santo Corazón. Conflicts involving several different and contentious parcialidades inhabiting the same mission who brokered coalitions with native and non-native actors to pursue locally-oriented political goals persisted into the nineteenth century.

Such conflicts, which often evaded the view of colonial administrators, reflected the diverse populations that still inhabited the Chiquitos missions.374

At the end of 1805, less than a year before the uprising in Santo Corazón, the Archdeacon of the Cathedral of Santa Cruz conducted a visita of the Chiquitos province and compiled a census that confirmed the diversity of the missions. According to his findings, several distinct ethnic and linguistic affiliations persisted in each of the 10 mission towns. Concepción, the most diverse mission, was “composed of many nations that still speak seven different languages.” The

Archdeacon lamented that the neophytes struggled to learn the Catechism and Christian doctrine because of the profusion of languages. Chiquita was uniformly recognized as the lingua franca

373 Ibid.

374 Ibid. 182 by all the priests, but they had difficulties using the language for confession and explaining doctrine because many of the Indians did not speak or understand it. Nearly four decades after the Jesuit expulsion, on the eve of the Spanish American independence movements, a unified identity in Chiquitos was still nothing more than inchoate. As the many and distinct indigenous communities maintained their identities, the diverse ways in which they represented and defended their separate interests continued to influence the trajectory of the colonial project in the remote mission province.375

375 “ABNB, MyCh, Vol. 34, V, Cuadro Que Demuestra La Población Que Tiene Cada Uno de Los Diez Pueblos de La Provincia de Chiquitos, Correspondiente Al Año de 1805,” 1805. 183

Bibliography ______

Primary Sources

“ABNB, MyCH 29. XXII,” 1790. Folios 163-165.

“ABNB, MyCh, Vol. 34, V, Cuadro Que Demuestra La Población Que Tiene Cada Uno de Los Diez Pueblos de La Provincia de Chiquitos, Correspondiente Al Año de 1805,” 1805.

“ABNB, MyCh, Vol. 34, VIII, Oficio Del Gobernador de Chiquitos Al Protector General de Misiones, Comunica Lo Que Ha Averiguado de Los Alborotos Que Se Han Suscitado En La Pascua En El Pueblo Del Santo Corazón Contra Su Administrador,” 1806.

“AGNA, División Colonia, Sección Gobierno, Gobierno de Chiquitos, Chiquitos 1766–1809, Sala IX,” August 7, 1790.

“Alzamiento En Concepción,” 1768. 6-2. ACSC.

“Auto Acordado Por La Audiencia de La Plata En Virtud de Los Reglamento Remitidos Por El Obispo de Santa Cruz Para La Administración y Régimen de Las Misiones de Chiquitos,” 1769. GRM MyCh 23. XXVII. ABNB.

Bartelemi Verdugo, Juan. “Relación de Los Méritos y Servicios de Don Juan Bartelemi Verdugo, Coronel Que Fue de Caballería En La Expedición de Los Moxos, y Mato Grosso de La Provincia de Santa Cruz de La Sierra,” June 23, 1774. Sala IX, División Colonia, Sección Gobierno, Gobierno de Chiquitos 1789, Chiquitos 1766 – 1809. AGNA.

Cárdiff Furlong, Guillermo. “De La Asunción a Los Chiquitos Por El Río Paraguay: Tentativa Frustrada En 1703, ‘Breve Relación’ Inédita Del Padre José Francisco de Arce.” Archivum Historicum Societatis Iesu, no. VII (January 1, 1938): 54–79.

Carlos III. “Expulsión de Los Jesuitas,” April 5, 1767. Estante 6.01, 04 Caja 16, x1-1. ACSC. “Censo Realizado En La Provincia de Chiquitos, Incluye El Reglamento Elaborado Por El Obispo de Santa Cruz de La Sierra, Para El Gobierno Temporal y Espiritual de La Provincia de Chiquitos,” 1767. MyCh, 24, I. ABNB.

“Censos y Padrones Elaborados de Los Pueblos de La Provincia de Chiquitos,” 1768. MyCh, 24. VI. ABNB.

“Compromiso Suscrito Entre Los Jueces Principales y Curas de Los Pueblos de San Miguel y de San Rafael, En Virtud Del Litigio Que Tuvieron Por Los Terrenos y Palmares Colindantes Con La Estancia y Terrenos Del Pueblo de Santiago,” 1779. ALP MyCh 144. ABNB.

184

Diego, Martínez. “Carta Del P. Diego Martínez Al P. Juan de Atienza, Provincial. Santa Cruz de La Sierra, 19 de noviembre de 1592, Inserta En La Relación Del P. Pablo Joseph de Arriaga Al P. Claudio Aquaviva. Lima, 6 de abril de 1594.” In Monumenta Peruana, edited by Antonio de Egaña, Vol. V, 1592–1595. Rome: Institutum Historicum Societatis Iesu, 1970.

“Documentos Que Demuestran El Absoluto Predominio de Los Sacerdotes En Los Pueblos de La Provincia de Chiquitos,” May 31, 1779. ABNB, MyCh 25. XIV. ABNB.

“Documentos Que Demuestran El Absoluto Predominio de Los Sacerdotes En Los Pueblos de La Provincia de Chiquitos,” November 8, 1780. MyCh, 25. XIV. ABNB.

“Documentos Que Demuestran El Absoluto Predominio de Los Sacerdotes En Los Pueblos de La Provincia de Chiquitos,” April 9, 1781. ABNB, MyCh 25. XIV. ABNB.

“Expediente En El Que Don Juan Bartelemi Verdugo Representa y Solicita Al Rey El Cargo de Gobernador de Chiquitos, Acompañado de Varios Informes y Del Estado de Aquella Provincia,” December 5, 1774. Audiencia de Charcas, 27. Archivo General de Indias.

“Expediente Obrado Sobre El Nombramiento de Gobernadores Para La Provincia de Moxos Al Coronel Don Antonio Aymerich; y Para La de Chiquitos Al Capitán Don Diego Martínez, y Salarios Que Se Les Deben Asignar,” 1768. MyCh 22. folios 1 - 10. ABNB.

Fernández, Juan Patricio. Relación historial de las misiones de indios chiquitos: que en el Paraguay tienen los padres de la compañía de Jesús. Asunción del Paraguay: A. de Uribe, 1896.

“Gobernador de Chiquitos Don Francisco Pérez de Villaronte Al Obispo de Santa Cruz de La Sierra, Sobre Deslindes de Tierras,” 1770. MyCh 152. ABNB.

Herboso, Francisco. “Reglamento Eclesiástico Por El Obispo de Santa Cruz de La Sierra, Para La Observancia de Los Curas de La Provincial de Chiquitos,” 1769. GRM MyCh 24. III. ABNB.

Hoffmann, Werner. “Textos sobre las misiones jesuíticas entre los chiquitanos: El Padre Julían Knogler y su relato sobre el País y la nación de los chiquitanos.” In Las misiones jesuíticas entre los Chiquitanos. Buenos Aires: Fundación para la Educación, la Ciencia y la Cultura, 1979.

“Informe de Diego Antonio Martínez de La Torre a La Audiencia de Charcas. Comunica El Estado En El Que Se Encuentran Las Misiones de Chiquitos,” 1768. MyCh 23. IX. ABNB, GRM.

“Informe Del Obispo de Santa Cruz de La Sierra Al Presidente de La Audiencia de Charcas, Juan Victorino Martínez de Tineo, Sobre El Traslado de Fray Bernardo Terrazas a Santa Ana de Segundo Cura,” April 25, 1769. MyCh 64. ABNB, GRM.

185

Julien, Catherine J. Desde el oriente: documentos para la historia del oriente boliviano y Santa Cruz la Vieja, 1542-1597. Santa Cruz de la Sierra: Fondo Editorial Municipal, 2008.

Knogler, Julián. “Textos sobre las misiones jesuíticas entre los chiquitanos: El Padre Julían Knogler y su relato sobre el País y la nación de los chiquitanos.” In Las misiones jesuíticas entre los Chiquitanos, edited by Werner Hoffmann. Buenos Aires: Fundación para la Educación, la Ciencia y la Cultura, 1979.

Lagos Barrera, Adrián. “Documentos Que Demuestran El Absoluto Predominio de Los Sacerdotes En Los Pueblos de La Provincia de Chiquitos,” February 2, 1779. MyCh, 25. XIV. ABNB.

Martínez de Irala, Domingo. “Relación de la jornada al norte.” In Desde el oriente: documentos para la historia del oriente boliviano y Santa Cruz la Vieja, 1542-1597, edited by Catherine J Julien. Santa Cruz de la Sierra: Fondo Editorial Municipal, 2008.

Matienzo, Javier, Roberto Tomichá, Isabelle Combés, and Carlos Page, eds. Chiquitos En Las Anuas de La Compañía de Jesús (1691-1767). 1a ed. Colección Scripta Autochtona 6. Cochabamba, Bolivia: Instituto Latinoamericano de Misionología: Itinerarios Editorial, 2011.

“Nombramiento de Indios Jueces de Las Seis Parcialidades Que Componen El Pueblo de San Ignacio de La Provincia Chiquitos,” January 1, 1785. GRM MyCh 26. XXVI. ABNB.

Ochoa y Murillo, Alejandro José de. “Informe Del Obispo de Santa Cruz de La Sierra Al Presidente de La Audiencia de Charcas, En El Que Propone Se Tome En Cuenta Los Reglamentos de Don Francisco Herboso, Para El Gobierno Espiritual y Temporal de La Provincia de Chiquitos,” April 12, 1783. MyCh 25. XXIII. ABNB, GRM.

“Oficio Del Gobernador de Chiquitos a La Audiencia de La Plata. Comunica Sobre La Intención de Reducirse Ocho Pueblos de Indios Guaycurús,” 1784. MyCh 26. XV. ABNB.

“Oficio Del Gobernador de Chiquitos Al Presidente de La Audiencia de La Plata. Comunica Sobre La Falta de Obediencia de Los Indios y Que Los Indios Del Pueblo de La Purísima Concepción y Santa Ana Se Han Sublevado En Contra de Sus Curas,” 1768. GRM, MyCh 23. V. ABNB.

“Oficio Del Gobernador de Mojos Al Presidente de La Audiencia de La Plata, Solicita Los Libros de Entradas y Salidas Que Manejaron Los Jesuitas En Cada Pueblo y Sobre El Régimen Que Llevaban En El Manejo de Su Correspondencia y Otros,” 1768. GRM MyCh 2. VII. ABNB.

“Oficio Del Presidente de La Audiencia de La Plata Al Gobernador de Santa Cruz. Comunica a Las Instrucciones Para El Incumplimiento Del Decreto de Extrañamiento de Los Padres de La Compañía de Jesús,” July 19, 1767. GRM MyCh 23. I. ABNB.

186

“Oficio Del Presidente de La Audiencia de La Plata Al Obispo de Santa Cruz, Comunica Que Con El Auto de 18 de septiembre de 1767 Se Aplacará El Genio Del Gobernador de Chiquitos,” 1768. GRM MyCh 23. IV. ABNB.

“Oficio Del Virrey Del Rio de La Plata Al Presidente de La Audiencia de La Plata. Trata Sobre El Buen Régimen de La Provincia de Chiquitos Después de La Expatriación de Los Jesuitas,” 1782. MyCh 25. XX. ABNB.

“Oficios Del Presidente de La Audiencia de La Plata Al Gobernador de Chiquitos. Relativos a La Pronta Remisión de Productos, Sobre El Cultivo de Tabaco, Café y Coca; Se Obligue a Los Indios a Llevar Apellidos Patronímicos y Otros Asuntos.,” 1769. GRM MyCh 23. XX. ABNB.

Orbigny, Alcides Dessalines d’. Viaje a la América Meridional, Tomo III. Translated by Alfredo Cepeda. Buenos Aires: Editorial Futuro, 1945.

“Real Cédula Dirigida a Juan Bartelemí Verdugo, En La Que Se Le Confiere El Gobierno Político y Militar de La Provincia de Chiquitos y Contiene Las Instrucciones Para El Gobierno Espiritual y Temporal de Dichas Misiones, Entre Las Instrucciones Se Encuentran El Pago de Sínodos Con El Producto de Las Haciendas Jesuíticas, Promoción Para La Comunicación Comercial Con Paraguay, Reducción de Los Bárbaros, Libertad de Los Naturales Para Tratar y Contratar Entre Si y Reconocimiento a La Autoridad Seglar y Otras,” August 5, 1777. GRM MyCh 25. II. ABNB.

“Relación Informativa Presentada Por El Obispo de Santa Cruz de La Sierra Al Gobernador de Chiquitos, Sobre El Estado y Modo General de Las Misiones de Chiquitos,” 1769. GRM MyCh 24. II. ABNB.

“Representación de Los Jueces Del Pueblo de Santiago de Chiquitos Al Vicario de Ella, Comunican de Los Agravios a La Moral Que Padecen Por Parte de Los Soldados Que Guarnecen Aquellas Fronteras,” May 18, 1783. MyCh 26. IX. ABNB.

Samaniego, Diego de. “Relación Del P. Diego de Samaniego, Con Muchas Noticias Sobre Misiones Hechas a Los Itatines, Chiriguanas y Chiquitos. San Lorenzo de La Frontera, 26 de diciembre de 1600.” In Historia General de La Compañía de Jesús En La Provincia Del Perú. Crónica Anónima de 1600 Que Trata Del Establecimiento y Missiones de La Compan︢ ía de Jesús En Los Países de Habla Española En La América Meridional, edited by Francisco Mateos, Vol. II. Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas, 1944.

“Testimonio Del Soldado Gregorio Barbosa Sobre Rumores de Una Sublevación,” 1790. 6-1, A3. ACSC.

“Testimonio Que Juan Bartelemi Verdugo Mandó Sacar Cuando Emprendía La Visita de La Provincia,” 1779. GRM MyCh 25.VII. ABNB.

187

“Vista Del Fiscal Protector de Misiones y Auto de La Audiencia de La Plata, Sobre El Régimen Político y Administración Eclesiástica Para Los Misiones de Mojos y Chiquitos.,” 1767. GRM MyCh 23. II. ABNB.

Secondary Sources

Adelman, Jeremy, and Stephen Aron. “From Borderlands to Borders: Empires, Nation-States, and the Peoples in Between in North American History.” The American Historical Review 104, no. 3 (June 1999): 814–41.

Adorno, Rolena, and Patrick Charles Pautz, eds. Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca. Vol. 1. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999.

Amado, Janaína, Leny Caselli Anzai, and Luiz Carlos Figueiredo, eds. Anais de Vila Bela, 1734- 1789. Cuiabá, Brazil: EdUFMT, 2006.

Arias, Santa, and Mariselle Meléndez. “Space and the Rhetorics of Power in Colonial Spanish America: An Introduction.” In Mapping Colonial Spanish America:Places and Commonplaces of Identity, Culture, and Experience, edited by Santa Arias and Mariselle Meléndez. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2002.

Astete, Alvaro Diez. Compendio de etnias indígenas y ecoregiones: Amazonía, Oriente y Chaco. Plurales editores, 2011.

Ballivián, Manuel V. “Foreword.” In Tadeo Haenke: escritos, precedidos de algunos apuntes para su biografía y acompañados de varios documentos illustrativos, edited by Manuel V Ballivián and Pedro Kramer. La Paz: Impr. y litografía de "El Nacional de I.V. Vial, 1898.

Block, David. Mission Culture on the Upper Amazon: Native Tradition, Jesuit Enterprise, and Secular Policy in Moxos, 1660-1810. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1994.

Brooks, James F. Captives and Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest Borderlands. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2002.

Brubaker, R., and F. Cooper. “Beyond ‘Identity.’” Theory and Society 29 (2000): 1–47. Cárdiff Furlong, Guillermo. “De La Asunción a Los Chiquitos Por El Río Paraguay: Tentativa Frustrada En 1703, ‘Breve Relación’ Inédita Del Padre José Francisco de Arce.” Archivum Historicum Societatis Iesu, no. VII (January 1, 1938): 54–79.

Charlevoix, Pierre-François-Xavier de, Domingo Muriel, and Pablo José Hernández. Historia Del Paraguay. Madrid: Librería General de Victoriano Suárez, 1913.

Comaroff, John. “Ethnicity, Nationalism, and the Politics of Difference.” In The Politics of Difference: Ethnic Premises in a World of Power, edited by Edwin N. Wilmsen and P. A. McAllister, 163–205. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.

188

Combés, Isabelle. Diccionario Étnico: Santa Cruz la Vieja y Su Entorno en el Siglo XVI. Santa Cruz, Bolivia: Instituto de Misionología-Editorial Itinerarios, 2010.

———. Etnohistorias Del Isoso: Chané y Chiriguanos En El Chaco Boliviano, Siglos XVI a XX. La Paz: Fundación PIEB / Institut français d’études andines, 2005.

De Grandis, Rita. “Pursuing Hybridity: From the Linguistic to the Symbolic.” In Unforeseeable Americas: Questioning Cultural Hybridity in the Americas, edited by Rita De Grandis and Zilá Bernd, 208–25. Rodopi, 2000.

Deeds, Susan M. “New Spain’s Far North: A Changing Historiographical Frontier?” Latin American Research Review 25, no. 2 (1990): 226–35.

Denevan, William M. “Stone vs. Metal Axes: The Ambiguity of Shifting Cultivation in Prehistoric Amazonia.” Journal of the Steward Anthropological Society 20, no. 1–2 (1992): 153–65.

Diez Gálvez, María José. Los bienes muebles de Chiquitos: fuentes para el conocimiento de una sociedad. Madrid: Agencia Española de Cooperación Internacional, Ministerio de Asuntos Exteriores y de Cooperación, 2006.

DuVal, Kathleen. The Native Ground: Indians and Colonists in the Heart of the Continent. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007.

Escobar, Arturo. Territories of Difference: Place, Movements, Life, Redes. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008.

Falkinger, Sieglinde. Anauxti Jesucristo Mariaboka: Manual de Sermones. Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia: Fondo Editorial APAC, 2010.

Fisher, Andrew B., and Matthew D. O’Hara. “Introduction.” In Imperial Subjects: Race and Identity in Colonial Latin America, edited by Andrew B. Fisher and Matthew D. O’Hara, 1–38. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009.

Freyer, Bärbel. Los Chiquitanos Descripción de Un Pueblo de Las Tierras Bajas Orientales de Bolivia Según Fuentes Jesuíticas Del Siglo XVIII. Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia: APCOB, 2000.

Ganson, Barbara. The Guarani Under Spanish Rule in the Rio De La Plata. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005.

García Recio, José María. Analisis de Una Sociedad de Frontera: Santa Cruz de La Sierra En Los Siglos XVI y XVII. Sevilla: Diputacion Provincial de Sevilla, 1988.

189

Gutiérrez da Costa, Ramón, and Rodrigo Gutiérrez Viñuales. “Territorio, Urbanismo y Arquitectura En Moxos y Chiquitos.” In Las Misiones Jesuíticas de Chiquitos, edited by Pedro Querejazu and Plácido Molina Barbery. La Paz, Bolivia: Fundación BHN, Línea Editorial: La Papelera, 1995.

Gutiérrez, Mario Arrien. “Chiquitos Nativo En Tiempos de La Conquista Española, Siglos XVI y XVII.” In La Voz de Los Chiquitanos: Historias de Comunidades de La Provincia Velasco, edited by Ana María Lema. Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia: APAC: Fundación AVINA, 2006.

Guy, Donna J., and Thomas E. Sheridan. Contested Ground: Comparative Frontiers on the Northern and Southern Edges of the Spanish Empire. Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 1998.

Hoffmann, Werner. “Textos sobre las misiones jesuíticas entre los chiquitanos: El Padre Julían Knogler y su relato sobre el País y la nación de los chiquitanos.” In Las misiones jesuíticas entre los Chiquitanos. Buenos Aires: Fundación para la Educación, la Ciencia y la Cultura, 1979.

Ibáñez Montoya, María Victoria. La expedición Malaspina, 1789-1794, Tomo IV, Trabajos científicos y correspondencia de Tadeo Haenke. Madrid: Lunwerg Editores, S.A., 1987.

Klein, Herbert S. African Slavery in Latin America and the Caribbean. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.

Krekeler, Birgit. Pueblos Indígenas de Las Tierras Bajas de Bolivia: Historia de Los Chiquitanos. APCOB, 1993.

Kuethe, Allan J., and Kenneth J. Andrien. The Spanish Atlantic World in the Eighteenth Century: War and the Bourbon Reforms, 1713–1796. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014.

Kühne, Eckhart, ed. Las Misiones Jesuíticas de Bolivia: Martin Schmid, 1694-1772. Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia: Pro Helvetia, 1996.

Langfur, Hal. The Forbidden Lands: Colonial Identity, Frontier Violence, and the Persistence of Brazil’s Eastern Indians, 1750-1830. Stanford University Press, 2008.

Larson, Brooke. Colonialism and Agrarian Transformation in Bolivia: Cochabamba, 1550-1900. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988.

Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Oxford, OX, UK; Cambridge, Mass., USA: Wiley- Blackwell, 1992.

Lewis, Martin W., and Kären E. Wigen. The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.

190

Lynch, John. Spanish Colonial Administration, 1782-1810: The Intendant System in the Viceroyalty of the Río de La Plata. Universtiy of London: The Athlone Press, 1958.

Maeder, Ernesto J. A. “La Organización de La Provincia de Chiquitos En La Epoca PostJesuitica: Diferencias y Semejanzas Con La Provincia de Misiones de Guaraníes.” Revista de Historia Del Derecho, Instituto de Investigaciones de Historia Del Derecho 16 (1998): 153–69.

Matienzo, Javier, Roberto Tomichá, Isabelle Combés, and Carlos Page, eds. Chiquitos En Las Anuas de La Compañía de Jesús (1691-1767). 1a ed. Colección Scripta Autochtona 6. Cochabamba, Bolivia: Instituto Latinoamericano de Misionología : Itinerarios Editorial, 2011.

———. “Introduction.” In Chiquitos En Las Anuas de La Compañía de Jesús (1691-1767), edited by Javier Matienzo, Roberto Tomichá, Isabelle Combés, and Carlos Page. Cochabamba, Bolivia: Cochabamba, Instituto Latinoamericano de Misionología : Itinerarios Editorial, 2011.

Menacho, Antonio. Por Tierras de Chiquitos: Los Jesuitas En Santa Cruz y En Las Misiones de Chiquitos En Los Siglos 16 a 18. San Javier, Bolivia: Vicariato Apostólico de Nuflo de Chávez, 1991.

Moreira da Costa, José Eduardo Fernandes. A Coroa Do Mundo: Religião, Território e Territorialidade Chiquitano. Cuiabá, Brazil: Editora da Universidade Federal do Mato Grosso, 2006.

Morrow, Baker H. “Translator’s Note.” In The South American Expeditions, 1540-1545, by Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca, First Edition. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2011.

Mundigo, Axel I., and Dora P. Crouch. “The City Planning Ordinances of the Laws of the Indies Revisited. Part I: Their Philosophy and Implications.” The Town Planning Review 48, no. 3 (July 1, 1977): 247–68.

Parejas Moreno, Alcides, and Virigilio Suárez. Chiquitos: Historia de Una Utopía. Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia: Cordecruz, Universidad Privada de Santa Cruz de la Sierra, 1992.

Powers, Karen Vieira. Andean Journeys: Migration, Ethnogenesis, and the State in Colonial Quito. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2009.

Querejazu, Pedro., and Plácido. Molina Barbery, eds. Las Misiones Jesuíticas de Chiquitos. La Paz, Bolivia: Fundación BHN, Línea Editorial: La Papelera, 1995.

191

Radding, Cynthia. “From the Counting House to the Field and Loom: Ecologies, Cultures, and Economics in the Missions of Sonora (Mexico) and Chiquitania (Bolivia).” Hispanic American Historical Review 81, no. 1 (2001): 45–87.

———. “Historical Perspectives on Gender, Security, and Technology: Gathering, Weaving, and Subsistence in Colonial Mission Communities of Bolivia.” International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 15, no. 1 (2001): 107–23.

———. Landscapes of Power and Identity: Comparative Histories in the Sonoran Desert and the Forests of Amazonia from Colony to Republic. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006.

———. “Las Misiones Jesuíticas: Su Legado Ecológico y Cultural En El Oriente de Bolivia.” In La Voz de Los Chiquitanos: Historias de Comunidades de La Provincia Velasco, edited by Ana María Lema. Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia: APAC: Fundación AVINA, 2006.

———. “Las Misiones Jesuíticas: Su Legado Ecológico y Cultural En El Oriente de Bolivia.” In La Voz de Los Chiquitanos: Historias de Comunidades de La Provincia Velasco: Guapomocito, Suponema, San Antoñito, Monte Carlo, Quince de Agosto, edited by Ana María Lema. Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia: APAC, Fundación AVINA, 2006.

Ranger, Terence. “The Invention of Tradition in Colonial Africa.” In The Invention of Tradition, edited by Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger. Cambridge University Press, 2012.

Redclift, Michael R. Frontiers: Histories of Civil Society and Nature. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006.

Roth, Hans, and Eckhart Kühne. “Esta Nueva y Hermosa Iglesia: La Construcción y Restauración de Las Iglesias de Martin Schmid.” In Las Misiones Jesuíticas de Bolivia: Martin Schmid, 1694-1772, 89–102. Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia: Pro Helvetia, 1996.

Salomon, Frank. Native Lords of Quito in the Age of the Incas: The Political Economy of North Andean Chiefdoms. Cambridge University Press, 2007.

Salomon, Frank L. The Cord Keepers: Khipus and Cultural Life in a Peruvian Village. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004.

Sarreal, Julia J. S. The Guaraní and Their Missions: A Socioeconomic History. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014.

Scott, James C. Dominance and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts. Yale University Press, 1990.

Silverblatt, Irene. “Foreward.” In Imperial Subjects: Race and Identity in Colonial Latin America, edited by Andrew B. Fisher and Matthew D. O’Hara, ix–xii. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009.

192

Socolow, Susan Migden. The Bureaucrats of Buenos Aires, 1769-1810: Amor Al Real Servicio. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1987.

Strack, Peter. Frente a Dios y Los Pozokas: Las Tradiciones Culturales y Sociales de Las Reducciones Jesuíticas Desde La Conquista Hasta El Presente; Fiesta Patronal y Semana Santa En Chiquitos. Bielefeld: Verl. für Regionalgeschichte, 1992.

Tomichá Charupá, Roberto. “La Formación Socio-Cultural de Los Chiquitanos En El Oriente Boliviano, Siglos XVI-XVIII.” In Estudos Sobre Os Chiquitanos No Brasil e Na Bolivia: História, Língua, Cultura e Territorialidade. Goiânia, Brazil: Goiânia: Editora da UCG, 2008.

———. La Iglesia En Santa Cruz: 400 Años de Historia 1605-2005. Cochabamba: Editorial Verbo Divino, 2005.

———. La Primera Evangelización En Las Reducciones de Chiquitos, Bolivia, 1691-1767: Protagonistas y Metodología Misional. Cochabamba, Bolivia: Editorial Verbo Divino, 2002.

Tonelli Justiniano, Oscar. El Peabirú Chiquitano: Ensayo Sobre El Ramal Chiquitano de Una Ruta Interoceánica Prehistórica. Santa Cruz de la Sierra: Editorial El País, 2007.

———. Reseña Histórica, Social y Económica de La Chiquitanía. Editorial El País, 2004.

Turner, Frederick. Frontier in American History, by Frederick Jackson Turner. H. Holt and Company, 1920.

Venec-Peyre, Marie-Thérèse. “Alcide d’Orbigny (1802-1857): sa vie et son oeuvre.” Comptes Rendus: Palevol, 2002, 313–23.

Waisman, Leonardo. “Soy Misionero Porque Canto, Taño, y Danzo: Martin Schmid, Músico.” In Las Misiones Jesuíticas de Bolivia, 1694–1772: Misionero, Músico y Arquitecto Entre Los Chiquitanos, edited by Eckart Kühne, 55–64. Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia: Asociación Suiza por la Cultura “Pro Helvetia,” 1996.

Weber, David J., and Jane M. Rausch, eds. Where Cultures Meet: Frontiers in Latin American History. Wilmington, DE: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1997.

Wilde, Guillermo. Religión y Poder En Las Misiones de Guaraníes. Buenos Aires: Editorial SB, 2009.

Yannakakis, Yanna. The Art of Being In-Between: Native Intermediaries, Indian Identity, and Local Rule in Colonial Oaxaca. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008.

193

194