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Antonio Ruiz De Montoya, Apostle of the Guaraní journal of jesuit studies 3 (2016) 197-210 brill.com/jjs Antonio Ruiz de Montoya, Apostle of the Guaraní Barbara Ganson Florida Atlantic University [email protected] Abstract This essay highlights the accomplishments of one of the foremost Jesuit missionaries in seventeenth-century Paraguay, Antonio Ruiz de Montoya. Born in Lima, Montoya distinguished himself as a chronicler of the first encounters between the Jesuits and the Guaraní Indians of South America. He defended Indian rights by speaking out against Indian slavery. Montoya spent approximately twenty-five years among the Guaraní indigenous peoples who influenced his worldview and sense of spirituality, which are reflected in his 1636 first account of the Jesuit reducciones in Paraguay, Conquista espiritual hecha por los religiosos de la Compañía de Jesús en las provincias del Paraguay, Paraná, Uruguay, y Tapé. Keywords Guaraní – Spanish missions – ethnohistory – hybridity – Apostle St. Thomas – cannibalism – Indian slavery – Paraguay – reducciones – Antonio Ruiz de Montoya Introduction In 1636, the Peruvian Jesuit Antonio Ruiz de Montoya published in Madrid his Conquista espiritual hecha por los religiosos de la Compañía de Jesús en las pro- vincias del Paraguay, Paraná, Uruguay, y Tapé. This is a detailed account of his missionary experiences as a Jesuit and later superior of the Jesuit missions in an area known as Guayrá, which today is in southern Brazil (see Map 1), and then along the Paraná and Uruguay rivers of the Río de la Plata and Brazil between 1612 and 1637 in what became the most celebrated missions in the New World. Father Montoya became deeply immersed in the work of evange- lization of the Guaraní during most of his adult life, experiences that shaped © Ganson, 2016 | doi 10.1163/22141332-00302002 This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution- Noncommercial 4.0 Unported (CC-BY-NC 4.0) License. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/Downloaded from Brill.com09/25/2021 04:05:18PM via free access <UN> 198 Ganson Map 1 Paraquaria vulgo Paraguay cum adjacentibus. From Joannes Blaeu, Atlas Maior (Amsterdam: Blaeu, 1662). the man he became. Montoya became a classic “go-between,” moving between different cultures and serving as an intermediary, working tirelessly on behalf of the Guaraní indigenous peoples both in South America and across the Atlantic, as a representative of the Jesuit order.1 Between 1610 and 1628, the early Jesuits succeeded in baptizing some 94,990 Guaraní.2 Montoya was a key participant in the initial encounters with Guaraní shamans, a founder of reduc- ciones (settlements or Indian towns), and later as a negotiator in diplomatic meetings with Spanish and Portuguese officials, including Philip iv, king of Spain and Portugal, at the court in Madrid. Following in the tradition of Spanish Dominican priest Antonio de Montesinos (c.1475–1545), who protested Indian 1 For a discussion of three different types of go-betweens see Alida Metcalf, Go-Betweens and the Colonization of Brazil, 1500–1600 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005), 1–15. 2 Jurandir Coronado Aguilar, Conquista spiritual: A historia da evangelizacao na provincia Guaira na obra de Antonio Ruiz de Montoya, S.J. (1585–1562) (Rome: Editrice Pontificia Università Gregoriana, 2002), 213; Robert H. Jackson, Demographic Change and Ethnic Survival Among the Sedentary Populations on the Jesuit Mission Frontiers of Spanish South America, 1609–1803: The Formation and Persistence of Mission Communities in a Comparative Context (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 13. journal of jesuitDownloaded studies from 3 Brill.com09/25/2021 (2016) 197-210 04:05:18PM via free access <UN> Antonio Ruiz De Montoya, Apostle Of The Guaraní 199 servitude at Santo Domingo in 1511, and other theologians, Antonio Ruiz de Montoya spoke out against injustice and Indian slavery in Brazil and the Río de la Plata during the 1620s and 1630s. His was a lonely voice, along with those of other Jesuits in the region who questioned the justness and legality of Indian slavery during the period when the two kingdoms of Spain and Portugal were joined into one (1580–1640). In British North America, where Indian slavery also existed, there was no similar apostle of the native peoples. Montoya was a product of his time in how he evaluated and related to native peoples through his own sensibilities, social categories of thought, and background. One of Montoya’s Jesuit contemporaries who served in the Guaraní mis- sions during the mid-seventeenth century, Dr. Francisco Jarque (1609–91), rec- ognized the words and deeds of this remarkable Peruvian Jesuit. In 1661, Dr. Francisco Jarque became Montoya’s first biographer, but his four volumes of Ruiz de Montoya en Indias were not published in Madrid until 1900.3 We learn from his works that Antonio Ruiz de Montoya (1585–1652) was born in Lima in 1585. Although he was an illegitimate child of Cristóbal Ruiz de Montoya, a Spaniard from Seville who left Spain to seek his fortune in Peru, and Ana de Vargas, a creole woman of Lima, that status did not prevent him from entering the priesthood.4 Following the loss of his mother, five-year-old Montoya traveled with his father to Spain but when he fell ill in Panama, both returned to Lima. Then, following the death of his father, the eight-year-old, orphaned Montoya entered the Jesuit Seminario de San Martín in Lima. At seventeen, Montoya abandoned his studies, preferring to live independently. Two years later, he became a soldier and joined an expedition to combat the non-sedentary Araucanians (Mapuche) in Chile, where he was wounded four times.5 Returning to Lima and the same Jesuit school, he finished his studies and toyed with the idea of becoming a Franciscan. At age twenty-one, having completed the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius Loyola, he experienced a spiritual awakening. Montoya may have recognized that perhaps he could convert and enlighten native peoples through spirituality, rather than violence. He entered the novitiate in 1606, and completed his training in Cordoba, Argentina, before being ordained in Santiago del Estero in 1611.6 3 Francisco Jarque, S.J., Ruiz de Montoya en Indias, 4 vols. (Madrid: Victoriano Suárez, 1900). 4 A “creole” in this historical context was a white son or daughter born in the Americas claim- ing Spanish status. 5 Robert Charles Padden, “Cultural Adaptation and Militant Autonomy Among the Araucanians of Chile,” in The Indian in Latin American History: Resistance, Resilience, and Acculturation, ed. John E. Kicza (Oxford: SR Books, 2000), 71–92. 6 José Luis Rouillon Arrospide, S.J., has also published details on his life more recently. See also John E. Groh, “Antonio Ruiz de Montoya and the Early Reductions in the Jesuit Province of journal of jesuit studies 3 (2016) 197-210 Downloaded from Brill.com09/25/2021 04:05:18PM via free access <UN> 200 Ganson Montoya was one of the first Jesuits assigned to preach among the semi- sedentary Guaraní in 1612 in Guayrá, where he joined two other Italian Jesuits, Giuseppe Cataldini (1571–1653) and Simone Mascetta (1577–1658) who had arrived there in 1610. Early Jesuit missionaries sought to evangelize native peoples by following the policies of Viceroy Francisco de Toledo that originated in Peru in the 1570s, which required the resettlement of native peoples into reducciones where they could be more easily converted. The Guaraní constructed huts using wood, palm leaves, and straw, similar to their traditional longhouses, only smaller. Montoya was instrumental in founding thirteen reducciones in the region.7 Of all the Catholic missions in the Americas, from New France to California to Chile, the Guaraní missions established in Paraguay under the Jesuits have been considered the most successful in terms of the size of their native popula- tion, the level of economic prosperity, and the extent of religious conversion of the Indians, at least from the perspective of Europeans. The Guaraní were highly receptive to the teachings of the Jesuits, largely due to their need for intermediaries to help them survive in southern South America, where Indian slavery had become prevalent. Beginning in the 1570s, bandeirantes (Portuguese settlers and their descendants who explored the interior of colonial Brazil) rounded up native peoples and forced them to march to the coast, carrying away as many as sixty thousand Guaraní between the years 1628 and 1631, often initiated by burning down their villages. Spaniards also sold the Guaraní into slavery in Paraguay, as well as Peru.8 A list of Guaraní captives in the year 1615 reveals that approximately seventy percent were women and children. This preference for Guaraní women reflects the sexual division of labor in agricul- ture in which women were predominant in the planting and harvesting of crops.9 Women could also serve as concubines and domestic servants. Forging Paraguay,” Catholic Historical Review 56 (1970): 501–33; Clement J. McNaspy, S.J, “Introduction,” in Antonio Ruiz de Montoya, The Spiritual Conquest Accomplished by the Religious of the Society of Jesus in the Province of Paraguay, Paraná, Uruguay, and Tapé, trans. Clement. J. McNaspy, S.J., John R. Leonard, S.J., and Martin E. Palmer (St. Louis: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1993). 7 Montoya, Spiritual Conquest, 29. 8 “Ydea del Estado antiguo y modern de la América Meridional,” Madrid, Archivo Histórico Nacional (hereafter ahn), “Cartas y documentos sobre los tratados de límites de América entre España y Portugal y sucesos,” Sección jesuitas, legajo 120, doc. 7; “Representación que hace al Rey N.S. en su Real Consejo de las Indias al P. Provincial de la Comp. de Jesús en la Provincia del Paraguay,” Buenos Aires, April 23, 1752, ahn, Sección jesuitas, Legajo 120, doc. 38; Pierre François Xavier de Charlevoix, The History of Paraguay, vol.
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