Missions
General background on missions in Spanish America and Brazil
Missions
The mission was the quintessential Spanish frontier institution, designed to subjugate at a lower cost native groups living on the fringes of Spanish
America, and to implement social, culture, and religious change among the native populations. This entailed settlement in permanent villages, changes
in many social practices including marriage, a new labor regime, and adherence to a new religion. In Brazil, the equivalent became a labor camp for
Portuguese settlers to recruit workers.
The Spanish and Portuguese brought with them a form of Catholicism forged in the crucible of the reconquista, the seven-century sporadic war to
reclaim Iberia from Muslim domination. Iberian Catholicism was militant, and saw as its mission the conversion of all non-Catholics. Moreover, Iberian
Catholicism developed in a multi-ethnic and multi-religious society. As the Catholic kingdoms on the Peninsula emerged as the dominant political
force, Iberian Catholicism became increasingly intolerant, and governments and church leaders became concerned for maintaining orthodoxy as large
numbers of Jews and Muslims became new Christians, often by force. In the late fourteenth and the fifteenth centuries there were anti-Jewish pogroms
in Catholic Iberia, particularly Castile, and the newly-converted Jews and Muslims became suspect in their beliefs. In the late fifteenth-century,
Isabel of Castile created the first national inquisition, designed specifically to insure that the forced converts did not secretly practice their own
beliefs, and to make sure that Jewish and Muslim religious practices did not contaminate the one and true faith. Iberian Catholicism also had a strong
mystical belief in Marianism, and it was Iberian clerics who promoted the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception adopted at the Council of Trent that
ended in 1565.
This was the faith that the Spanish and Portuguese brought to the Americas, and the government assumed that the native populations would have to
become Catholics. Moreover, the Papacy conceded extensive authority over the church in the Americas to the Crown of Castile, known as the real
patronato. The Papacy theoretically was responsible for organizing missions to non-Catholics, but in the late fifteenth-century the Popes did not have
the resources to fund missions, and were distracted by convoluted Italian politics. The Papacy granted the Crown of Castile the right to nominate
clerics for positions in the Church, to create new ecclesiastical jurisdictions such as parishes, and to collect the tithe to finance Church entities,
and to keep a portion of the monies collected. The Crown was also given authority to censor Papal Bulls, or decrees on doctrine and other issues
related to the operation of the Church. In return the Crown assumed responsibility for evangelization of the native peoples in the Americas.
In MesoAmerica and the Andean region, the Spanish encountered native peoples living in hierarchical and stratified state systems, in which native
peoples paid tribute and provided labor for the benefit of the state. The Spanish harnessed and modified the existing tribute and labor system to
produce income and laborers for their own purposes. In the coastal region of Brazil the natives lived in tribal societies, and the Portuguese had to
use coercion to get men to provide labor, and used the mission communities called aldeias to congregate natives into nucleated communities under the
supervision of a missionary, where they could be required to work for the Crown or for settlers. On the fringes of Spanish America native peoples were
either sedentary farmers living in clan based tribal societies who often practiced seasonal migration to exploit wild food sources, or were nomadic
hunters and gatherers living in small bands exploiting food resources generally in well-defined territories. Military conquest of these peoples proved
to be elusive or overly expensive, so colonial officials turned to missionaries to organize communities from whole cloth based on the blue print of
the politically autonomous pueblos reales in MesoAmerica and the Andean region, where natives would be congregated, converted to Catholicism, and
subjected to a program of directed social-cultural change that attempted to transform the natives into sedentary farmers who would pay tribute and
provide labor in corvees organized by colonial officials. In cases where natives already lived in permanent communities, such as in the case of the
Pueblo peoples of News Mexico, the missionaries established the mission on the fringe of the existing community. These communities were known by
different names including doctrina, missi?n, reducci?n, and came into existence only through royal fiat and received varying levels of financial
support from the Crown.
Members of religious orders staffed and managed the missions, and generally were independent of Episcopal authority, which frequently became a source
of tension between Bishops and missionaries. The missionaries claimed exemption from the payment of tithes and Episcopal mandates, and in some
instances received authority to confirm, normally a privilege of the Bishops. The mission was to be a short-term measure, and when the natives were
deemed ready to assume their role in the new colonial order the mission was to be turned over to Episcopal authority. Royal legislation in the 1570s
limited the authority of the missionaries to a decade, but many missions operated for as long as a century or more. In the late seventeenth-century
the Papacy organized a special bureaucracy to help manage the growing number of missions in the Americas and other areas in the world, known as the
Congregation of Propaganda Fide. The bureaucrats of Propaganda Fide in turn attempted to institute measures to provide future missionaries with
training to serve on the missions, such as the organization of Apostolic Colleges by the Franciscans that managed groups of missions and provided the
missionary personnel to staff the missions. The Jesuits and Franciscans were the most important missionary orders in Spanish America, but Dominicans,
Augustinians, and Mercedarians also staffed missions.
The Crown established missions across the northern tier of territories in northern Mexico, as well as Florida, which was administered from Cuba and
not Mexico City. There were also missions along the frontier of Spanish South America from the Venezuelan llanos to southern Chile, and in the Rio de
la Plata region. These missions experienced different levels of success, as defined by the goals of both royal officials and the Crown. Missionaries
faced difficulties in areas where they had to compete with settlers who demanded native labor for mines, farms, and ranches. One example of this was
Nueva Vizcaya in northern Mexico, where Jesuit and Franciscan missionaries administered communities that were essentially labor camps, and were
accused by native peoples of being organizers of exploitation. There were frequent uprisings and flight by the natives. When missions operated in
relative isolation or with limited settler pressure on native labor, land, or water rights, such as in the Jesuit missions of Paraguay, the
missionaries achieved more success in creating stable native communities.
Two case studies, the Jesuit missions of Paraguay and the Franciscan missions of Texas, provide a sense of the range of experiences on frontier
missions. In 1604, the Jesuits received authorization to establish the Province of Paraguay, and three years later in 1607 the King gave the Black
Robes permission to establish missions. The Franciscans had established missions in Paraguay beginning in the late sixteenth-century, but the Jesuit
missions would be different because they sought converts among native groups not bound in encomiendas, and on the frontier of Spanish authority in
South America. The Spanish in Paraguay had already had to cope with 22 native uprisings, and hoped missionaries would be able to stabilize their
position in the region. The Jesuits established their first mission in 1609 named San Ignacio Guazu, in what today is southeastern Paraguay. Within
two decades the Jesuits were pushing their mission program into Tape (modern Brazil), Guayra (Brazil), and Itatin (northern Paraguay and Brazil).
However, slave raids by settlers from Sao Paulo called bandeirantes forced the Jesuits to retreat in the 1630s to districts located west of the
Uruguay River. As a consequence of the slave raids, the Jesuits organized a mission militia that defeated the Paulistas at the battle of Mborore in
1641. The Jesuits maintained the mission militia, and local government officials mobilized Guarani troops on numerous occasions to battle the
Portuguese and rebel colonists in Paraguay.
The Jesuits stabilized the missions after 1641, and beginning in the 1680s, following the establishment of Colonia do Sacramento by the Portuguese,
ventured back into western Rio Grande do Sul in Brazil. By the 1720s, the Jesuits operated thirty missions in southeastern Paraguay, and in parts of
Brazil and Argentina. It was this group of missions that earned the epitaph of the ?Jesuit Republic,? and the fancy of Rosseau in Candide. In 1732,
some 141,000 natives lived on the thirty missions. The missions were in many ways self-governing indigenous communities on the model of the pueblos
reales of the Andean region and MesoAmerica. The Jesuits retained the social and political structure of the Guarani intact within the missions.
Although the Jesuits introduced Iberian municipal government with a cabildo or town council, the caciques or traditional political leaders continued
to exercise control within the mission communities. The missionaries assigned each cacique a block of housing for the natives subject to their
cacicasgo, and in records such as censuses and registers of baptisms and burials the missionaries identified the neophytes as also belonging to the
cacicasgos. This practice continued in Paraguay into the early 1840s. The Jesuits shared power with the caciques and cabildos.
The Jesuits and the Guarani neophytes participated extensively in the regional economy, producing in addition to food crops, cattle hides, cotton,
and yerba mate. The missions controlled extensive estancias in the Banda Oriental, several of which measured in the thousands of square hectares and
included such improvements as chapels, store houses, and bunk rooms for the Guarani vaqueros. There was a division of labor within the missions,
divided between labor on communal projects under the supervision of the missionaries and labor controlled by the caciques for the benefit of the
communal group and the individual family. This meant that the Jesuits controlled surpluses, but so to did the Guarani, and they actively participated
in regional trade under the orders of the Jesuits as well as on their own.
The Jesuits directed the construction of extensive building complexes that included the sacred precinct of the church dominating the main square of
the mission community, the residence and office of the missionaries, shops for the manufacture of cloth and other craft goods, housing for the
neophytes, and the coti guacu, a dormitory for single women and widows. Censuses show a gender imbalance in the missions, and large numbers of widows
as compared to only small numbers of widowers. Men went away on service with the militia or on building projects for the Crown, but there was also
out-migration. The peak of building construction in the missions dated from about 1720 to about 1760s. The early missions had had buildings of wattle
and daub, compressed earth, or adobe bricks. During the last phase of construction at many of the missions, stone structures replaced the older
churches and cloisters, although not all buildings, particularly neophyte housing, was rebuilt of stone. Jesuit officials did insist on the use of
tile roofs to prevent fires, and documents suggest that there was a common plan for the development of mission communities.
In the decades following the arrival of the Spaniards in Paraguay, epidemics spread through the native populations. Although the limited
documentation speaks of high mortality, the sources do not comment on the recovery of the Guarani populations. Epidemics were horrific episodes that
caught the attention of Spanish chroniclers, officials, and priests, but the slow recovery of the population would not have been as dramatic. In the
late seventeenth and first half of the eighteenth centuries, the Guarani mission populations grew at slow to moderate rates, punctuated by major
mortality crises that occurred approximately every generation. However, unlike other frontier native populations brought to live on missions, the
Guarani populations rebounded or recovered following epidemics. Thousands of Guarani died during the 1730s, for example, and the population of the
missions dropped from 141,000 in 1732 to 73,900 in eight years, but then recovered and grew.
In 1767/1768, the Spanish Crown ordered the expulsion of the Jesuits from its territories, and placed the missions under the control of civil
administrators. Although there was continued out-migration following the Jesuit expulsion, the ex-missions continued to exist as viable communities
for decades. The seven missions located east of the Uruguay River fell to a Portuguese colonial militia force in 1801, and in the 1820s were attacked
and partially depopulated during civil wars in the region. The ex-missions located between the Parana and Uruguay Rivers, modern Misiones, Argentina,
were damaged during civil wars and Brazilian invasions between 1810 and 1820. The ex-missions located in what today in southeastern Paraguay continued
to function as autonomous communities, until Carlos Lopez ordered them secularized in 1848, with the state taking livestock and other assets. The
surrounding forest reclaimed many of the buildings of the former missions.
Franciscans first established missions from 1690-1693 among the Hasinai (Caddoes), sedentary agriculturalists living in a sophisticated tribal
confederation in the east Texas Piney Woods, and again in 1716. In both instances the impetus for colonization was a French interest in the lower
Mississippi River Valley. In the mid 1680s, La Salle established a short-lived colony on the Texas coast, after failing to locate his original target
the mouth of the Mississippi River. Royal officials in Mexico City dispatched expeditions to locate the French colony that they found abandoned, and
in 1690 sent a group of Franciscans accompanied by soldiers to east Texas. The Spanish abandoned the missions three years later under duress. The
Spanish government authorized a new effort to colonize Texas in 1716 after St. Denis, the French commander of the recently established outpost at
Natchitoches on the Red River, arrived at San Juan Bautista presidio on the Rio Grande River with orders to establish trade with Mexico. St. Denis
convinced Spanish officials in Mexico City that the Hasinai would accept the return of the missionaries. The Franciscans returned, and eventually
established six missions in the Piney Woods. Reports of a French trader on the Trinity River east of modern Houston prompted the establishment of
Nuestra Senora de la Luz de Orcoquisac in 1756.
During the course of four decades the Spanish established some twenty missions in Texas, which during the Spanish period was the territory located
north and east of the Nueces River, which enters the Gulf of Mexico at modern Corpus Christi. The missions were in four regions: the Piney Woods of
east Texas, including Orcoquisac mission; central Texas that included the area of modern San Antonio and a district on the San Xavier mission
northeast of San Antonio; the Coastal Bend or Gulf Coast region; and missions established for the Lipan Apaches west and northwest of San Antonio.
There were other missions established within the boundaries of modern Texas, but these missions were jurisdictionally never a part of Texas and were
established by Franciscans dispatched from New Mexico and Nueva Vizcaya.
The Franciscans established six missions among the Hasinai, but in 1731 relocated three to sites on the San Antonio River in the modern city of the
same name. The Hasinai benefited from being located on the Spanish-French colonial frontier, and preferred to trade rather than accept conversion. The
Franciscans failed to congregate the natives, and baptized very few, only around 300 individuals over more than fifty years. Those baptized were
mostly adults, who accepted conversion on their death bed. In 1763, at the end of the Seven Years War (1755-1763), Spain acquired Louisiana from
France, and no longer needed the expensive missions as a buffer. The government abandoned the three remaining missions in the early 1770s. As noted
above, in 1756 the Franciscans established a mission among the Orcoquisac on the Trinity River. The Orcoquisac were also sedentary agriculturalist
related to the Hasinai, and some had previously congregated for a short period of time on the San Xavier missions established in the late 1740s. The
mission languished for fifteen years, and also failed to congregate or convert the natives.
In 1722, the missionaries established Espiritu Santo mission near the site of the failed French settlement near the coast of the Gulf of Mexico. They
later added Rosario (1754) and Refugio (1793) missions. The principal native group in the Coastal Bend region was the Karankawas, members of bands of
hunters and gatherers who practiced season transhumance between permanent village sites on the coast and creeks and rivers in the interior. The
Franciscans failed to congregate the Karankawas, who often came and left the missions as they saw fit and apparently worked the mission as an
additional source of food when needed. The Franciscans on several occasions expressed frustration over their inability to control the Karankawas, and
what they perceived to be the failure of the military to provide more support.
From the 1720s to 1749, Apache band members raided the Spanish settlements in Texas, and the Spanish military garrisons tried to stop the raiding. In
the early 1750s, royal officials approved a plan to establish missions for the Lipan Apaches, and in 1757 a group of Franciscans and soldiers founded
San Saba mission and presidio. The Apaches visited but did not settle, and evidence suggests that they attempted to embroil the Spanish with their
enemies the Comanches. In early 1758, a force of 1,500-2,000 Comanches and their allies, including some Hasinai, destroyed San Saba mission, after the
Apaches apparently attack the Comanches and left behind goods given to them by the Spanish to try to implicate the Spanish. In 1762, the commander of
San Saba presidio relocated to the Upper Nueces River, where the missionaries established two mission. Some Apaches settled, but it appears that the
band leaders left women, children, and the elderly at the missions while they went off to hunt buffalo and attack the Comanches. The Comanches located
the two missions, and raided the settlements, thus ending the effort to settle the Apaches to missions. The Lipan Apaches engaged in complex and
convoluted politics, and were able to convince the Spanish that their request for missions was genuine. The evidence suggests, however, that their
intent was to try to bring the Spanish into their hostilities with the Comanches.
The final group of missions was comprised of the five missions established on the San Antonio River between 1718 and 1731, and the three San Xavier
missions dating to the late 1740s. The Spanish initially authorized a mission on the San Antonio River as a way station between the Rio Grande River
and the new establishments in the east Texas Piney Woods. The Franciscans founded the first, San Antonio de Valero, in 1718, and added a second
mission they designated San Jose y San Miguel de Aguayo two years later in 1720. In 1731, as noted above, the Franciscans relocated three
establishments from east Texas to the San Antonio River. When compared to the other Texas missions, the five San Antonio establishments attained a
relative level of stability, and following the abandonment of the east Texas settlements the San Antonio area communities, including the presidio and
a planned settler community, became the center of Spanish Texas. In the late 1740s, the missionaries established three missions on the San Xavier (San
Gabriel River) River for different bands of natives, but abandoned the three missions after eight years because of drought, an epidemic, and a
conflict with the commander of the military garrison ostensibly assigned to protect them. Supplies from the three missions went to the Apache mission
program, and the neophytes still living at the missions relocated to the San Antonio missions.
The Franciscans congregated members of bands of hunters and gatherers collectively known as the Coahuiltecos, from the scrublands between San Antonio
and the Rio Grande River, and into Coahuila. Whereas other native groups in Texas demonstrated ambivalence towards the Spanish the mission programs,
the Coahuiltecos apparently saw a benefit from moving to the missions. The prevailing interpretation is that increased warfare between Apaches and
Comanches left the Coahuiltecos caught in the middle, and by settling on the missions they also cemented a military alliance with the Spanish. A
second less plausible interpretation is that the Coahuiltecos obtained a more reliable supply of food in the missions, which ignores the fact that the
natives had developed a highly sophisticated economy based on hunting and the collection of wild plant foods. The threat of raids by hostile natives
prompted the Franciscans to modify the design of the mission building complexes to include military features such as bastions armed with canons, and
to completely enclose the mission communities in walls. These adaptations afforded additional protection, but also forced the native neophytes to live
in close quarters within the walls which facilitated the spread of contagious crowd diseases such as smallpox.
The Franciscans baptized thousands of natives in the five San Antonio missions. Reports on conditions in the missions recorded the total of baptisms
and burials. Between 1720 and 1761, the missionaries stationed on San Jose baptized 1,972 natives, and recorded 1,247 burials, and from 1731 to 1761
the Franciscans at La Purisima, San Juan Capistrano, and San Francisco baptized 792, 847, and 815 respectfully and recorded 558, 645, and 513 burials.
Altogether, the missionaries at the four communities baptized 4,426 and buried 2,963. These figures highlight the one element that eventually
undermined the mission program, the demographic collapse of the native population. By the 1790s, the population of the five missions had declined to
some 200, and in 1794 the government ordered the secularization of San Antonio mission, an action taken because of the greatly decreased population,
but also because of the need to provide land to settlers forced to abandon the east Texas settlements in the early 1790s. Final secularization of the
remaining four missions occurred in 1824.
The mission as an institution on the frontier of Spanish America came under attack in the late eighteenth-century, as royal officials influenced by
enlightenment ideas argued that the missionaries actually prevented the natives from being integrated into colonial society. Moreover, settlers
criticized the missions, but were often motivated by desires to gain access to native labor, lands, and water rights. In the 1720s, for example, a
coalition of settlers and royal officials in Sonora on the northern frontier of Mexico petitioned to have the Jesuits removed from the missions,
unsuccessfully. In the Rio de la Plata region settlers complained about competition in the Yerba Mate trade from the Jesuit missions. In 1767, King
Carlos lll ordered the expulsion of the Jesuits from Spanish territory, an action that followed the expulsion of the Black Robes from Portuguese
dominions in 1759 and from French territories in 1764. The King never gave his reasons for his decision, but it is generally accepted that the
Jesuits, who answered directly to the Pope unlike the other orders such as the Franciscans who had a separate national organization within each
country, were seen as not being under complete royal control.
Missions continued to operate into the nineteenth-century, although under increasing attack. In 1813, the liberal Cadiz Cortes decreed the
secularization of all missions in the Americas, but the dissolution of the Cortes the following year prevented the implementation of the order.
Mexican liberal reformers called for the closing of all missions following independence in 1821, and ordered the closing of remaining missions in 1833
during a short stint in power. The decree only affected the California missions, as most other missions on the northern Mexican frontier were in a
state of decline. As noted above, the Paraguayan government closed the surviving ex-Jesuit missions in the Rio de la Plata region in 1848, and
confiscated remaining assets. This anti-mission ideology, tied in with growing anticlericalism, viewed the missions as anachronisms that prevented the
integration of natives into society, but that also retarded economic development. However, this did not spell the end of the use of missions. Several
national governments, including Bolivia, reintroduced missions in the nineteenth-century to help with recalcitrant natives on several frontiers. In
Bolivia, for example, Franciscans established missions among the Chiriguanos and the different native groups in the Chaco. These missions operated for
decades, and the last one was not closed until the late 1940s. However, the Republican missions differed from the colonial-era establishments in a
number of ways, particularly the legal status of the natives. During the colonial period the natives were considered to be wards of the state, and
were legally subject to the missionaries. The closing of the colonial missions also included emancipation of the natives. Settlement on the Republican
missions was voluntary, and, as has been shown for the Chiriguano missions, many of the neophytes came and went as they chose, and many went to work
on sugar plantations in northern Argentina. The missionaries of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries did not enjoy the same level of state support
as during the colonial period.
-----Robert H. Jackson
References: (Please follow editorial guidelines for the bibliography?.author?s last name first, and many of your entries lack complete bibliographic
data)
Alvarez Kern, Arno, ed., Arqueologia Historica Missioneira. Porto Alegre: EDIPUCRS, 1998.
Carbonell de Masy, Rafael, Estrategias de desarrollo rural en los pueblos Guaranies (1609-1767). Barcelona: IEF, 1992.
Crosby, Harry, Antigua California: Mission and Colony on the Peninsula Frontier. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1994.
Deeds, Susan, Defiance and Deference in Mexico?s Colonial North: Indians Under Spanish Rule in Nueva Vizcaya. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003.
Furlong Cardiff, S.J.,Guillermo, Misiones y sus pueblos de Guaranies. Buenos Aires: Imprenta Balmers,1962.
Barbara Ganson, The Guarani Under Spanish Rule in the Rio de la Plata. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003.
Pablo Hernandez, S.J., Organizacion social de las Doctrinas Guaranies de la Compania de Jesus, 2 vols.(Barcelona: Gustavo Gili, 1913.
Robert H. Jackson, The Spanish Missions of Baja California. New York: Garland, 1991.
Robert Jackson, Indian Demographic Decline :the Missions of Northwestern New Spain, 1687-1840. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1994.
Robert H. Jackson, From Savages to Subjects: Missions in the History of the American Southwest. Armonk: M.E. Sharp, 2000.
Robert H. Jackson, with Edward Castillo, Indians, Franciscans, and Spanish Colonization: The Impact of the Mission System on California Indians.
Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995.
Erick Langer and Robert Jackson, "Colonial and Republican Missions Compared: The Cases of Alta California and Southeastern Bolivia, Comparative
Studies in Society and History 30 (1988), Pp. 286-311.
Erick Langer and Robert Jackson, editors, The New Latin American Mission History. Lincoln:University of Nebraska Press, 1995.
Ernesto Maeder, Misiones del Paraguay: Conflictos y disolucion de la sociedad guarani (1768-1850) Madrid: Editorial MAPFRE, 1992.
Cynthia Radding, ?From the Counting House to the Field and Loom: Ecologies, Cultures, and Economies in the Missions of Sonora (Mexico) and Chiquitania
(Bolivia),? The Hispanic American Historical Review 81:1 (2001), 45-87.
Cynthia Radding, ?Comunidades en conflicto: Espacios politicos en las fronteras misionales del noroeste de Mexico y el oriente de Bolivia,? Descatos
10 (2002), 48-76.
James Saeger, The Chaco Mission Frontier: The Guaycuruan Experience. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2000.
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