Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

From the Counting House to the Field and Loom: Ecologies, Cultures, and Economies in the Missions of Sonora (Mexico) and Chiquitanía (Bolivia)

2001; Duke University Press; Volume: 81; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-81-1-45

1527-1900

Cynthia Radding,

Colonialism, slavery, and trade

Comparative histories of colonial frontiers are raising provocative new questions for scholars working on the boundaries of British, French, Spanish, and Portuguese America.1 Some of the classic themes of borderlands history are receiving fresh scrutiny from different disciplinary and thematic perspectives, such that military encounters and territorial conquests are recast not as singular events but as conflictive processes conditioned by the environmental and cultural contexts in which they occurred. The religious mission, long a center-piece of Spanish and Portuguese colonial frontiers, is no less an object of critical historical approaches inspired by ethnohistorical readings of both new and familiar texts. Practitioners of the new mission history emphasize the complexity of the institution that gave rise to ethnically mixed communities with layered political, economic, and cultural dimensions.2This article focuses primarily on mission economy in two different settings, in order to reconstruct the ways in which the labor of Indian peoples living in missions produced marketable surpluses and to explore the linkages between the material life of the missions and the cultural frameworks in which they developed. The comparison between contrasting natural environments— one semiarid and the other subtropical—and different social milieus allows us to question the complexities of trade and market exchange under the constraints of colonialism and to explore the varying means by which nascent frontier elites accrued wealth and political sway over their respective regions. The economic analysis presented here goes beyond the institutional histories of colonial missions, in order to examine the allocation of labor, production of surpluses, and redistribution of material wealth in relation to both environmental and cultural factors. It provides a necessary point of departure for addressing the larger historical debates concerning the mission as a colonial institution and a site of contestation in which missionaries, Spanish governors and military commanders, as well as Amerindian communities figured as significant historical actors.3The following interpretive questions guide the discussion. What were the systems of production and redistribution that underlay the religious and political life of the missions? What were the degrees of coercion and choice that led the Sonoras and the Chiquitanos to enter the missions and recreate distinctive ethnic communities there?4 What different relations of accommodation and conflict developed between indigenous peoples and the mission, a European transplant and vehicle of conquest?The chronological framework for this comparative analysis covers the eighteenth century, when the mission system had matured in both of these provinces. The economic life of these two mission districts, and the stories of which they are a part, outlived the Jesuit administration of both Sonora and Chiquitos and extended beyond the formal limits of Spanish colonial rule into the early national period. For comparative purposes, however, the present discussion is centered on the years extending approximately from 1720 to 1810. During this time the expulsion of the Jesuit Order from all Spanish dominions, occurring in 1767–68, provides a fulcrum point of before-and-after to assess comparative processes of change that are both temporal and spatial. The Jesuit administrative system provides a common institutional reference, even as the contrasting geographical parameters of Sonora, in northwestern Mexico, and Chiquitanía, in eastern Bolivia, enrich their dual histories.Sonora constitutes the Sonoran Desert and the semiarid highlands, bounded by the Gulf of California and the Sierra Madre Occidental. The mission enterprise was centered on the piedmont areas of riverine agriculture and the trading networks that connected the village farmers of this zona serrana with the hunter-fisher-gatherer nomads of the desert. Five major river valleys flow southwestward from the foothills of the Sierra Madre to the Gulf, creating successive basin and range formations that support irrigated cultivation in the lowlands and, alternatively, the monte of scrub forest for hunting and foraging (see figure 1).The province of Chiquitos of eastern Bolivia is subtropical, lying between the Andean highlands and the tributaries of the Amazon and Pilcomayo river basins (see figure 2). These vast lowlands present a high diversity of forest, savanna, and wetland vegetation communities, known in local parlance as bosque, pampa arbolada, campo cerrado, and campo húmedo. Notwithstanding the relative poverty of these tropical alluvial soils, the bosque alto supports scattered clearings for planting seasonal crops of rice, maize, plaintains, peanuts, and yucca, while the pampa arbolada and campos provide timber for fuel and construction, medicinal plants, game, and many different fruits and seeds for gather ing.5 Located on the extreme western edge of the Brazilian Precambrian Shield, the Chiquitana dry forest constitutes a transitional vegetation zone between the Amazonian rain forest proper and the drier alluvial plains of the Gran Chaco; it is bordered on the south by the Serranía de Santiago and the Serranía de Chiquitos; to the west by the Guapay River and alluvial plains of Santa Cruz; to the east by the Paraguay River; and to the north by the humid plains of Beni (in colonial times, the Province of Moxos).6Sonora and Chiquitos comprised marginal areas of the Spanish empire that remained on the fringes of the mining centers of northern New Spain and Upper Peru. Each of these frontier provinces had relatively sparse European settlement; in both areas agriculturalists and seminomadic hunters and gatherers submitted to Spanish rule through the institution of the religious mission administered by the Jesuit and Franciscan Orders. Notwithstanding these broad similarities, the cultural processes of subdivision and commingling among different peoples brought about by the colonial missions led to different kinds of ethnic mixtures and identities in the two regions. The numerous ethnic and linguistic groups of highland Sonora had coalesced into a few polities or nations, identified in colonial nomenclature as the Opata, Pima, and Eudeve, by the mid-eighteenth century, and these would form the core of the Spanish-speaking mestizo peasantry of the region by 1900. By way of contrast, the larger, more urban mission centers of Chiquitos continued to recognize distinct language and kin groupings known as parcialidades that retained ethnic and cultural significance. Thus Chiquitanos, while differentiated among themselves, remained distinct from the non-Indian population of the province, an ethnic divide that remains even to the present day.The human ecology of Sonora and Chiquitos created distinct landscapes and followed different modes of adaptation to the environment.7 Sonoran peoples represented the northern frontier of Mesoamerican farming practices, symbolized by the trilogy of maize, beans, and squash. Their horticulture was centered on irrigated floodplain fields supplemented with ephimeral plantings in the arroyos and swidden cultivation (quema y rosa) dependent on seasonal rainfall at higher elevations.8 Cultivation and gathering were closely related, in that Sonoran agriculturalists used both the wild and domesticated varieties of a number of species, as is illustrated by indigenous knowledge of the teppary bean and the amaranth grains and foliage.9 In the river valleys of central Sonora, where the mission system flourished among the Opata, Eudeve, and Lower Pima villagers, native livelihood depended on communally maintained agricultural systems.The agroecology of lowland South America, however, obeyed a different logic. Here, the savannas and tropical forests with good drainage and distinct wet and dry seasons favored cultivation based on root or vegetative propagation. Chiquitana subsistence depended on a variety of tubers and palm fruits that were gathered and domesticated, principally yucca, sweet potatoes and maize. Planting methods did not require irrigation, but centered on slash-and-burn clearings of shifting plots (chacos, a local variant of chacras), in which two-to-three years of cultivation were followed by a longer period of fallow.10 Both Sonora and Chiquitos presented differentiated seasons of rainfall and drought; furthermore, in both areas, rivers were central to the development of indigenous cultures, but for different reasons. The Sonoran piedmont was intersected by a network of rivers that constituted the heart of village agriculture, based on gravitational irrigation systems.11 In eastern Bolivia, agricultural peoples were not dependent on the floodplains for cultivation; nevertheless, the rivers served natives and colonials alike as the principal means of trade, travel, and communication.Agrarian technologies in both regions were inseparable from the cosmologies that created ethnic territories and gave meaning to their agrarian cycles. In the Sonoran river valleys and arid plains village farmers faced the dual risks of drought and torrential flooding that could wash away floodplain soils and destroy irrigation fences and dams. Desert O’odham as well as the piedmont nations of Pimas and Opatas punctuated their annual rhythms of cultivation, harvest, hunting, and gathering, with ceremonies to bring on seasonal rains, germinate the seeds, and make the desert bloom.12 Water held a special significance in the Chiquitanía as well, where the spirits or guardians of ground-level springs, forests, and chacos, known as jichis, received special veneration.13Seasonal migratory patterns were a defining feature of the cultural systems of Sonoras and Chiquitanos. Their physical existence depended on the multiple resources of game, wild plants, and cultigens that, in turn, required access to different ecological niches within a widely defined ethnic territory. Equally significant, the kinship systems and lines of ethnic differentiation that supported their rationale for conjugal coupling and societal groupings implied a spatial distribution of shifting communities as well as larger nucleated villages. The territorial mobility on which the Sonoran and Chiquitano peoples relied for their economic production and their social reproduction clashed repeatedly with the Spanish colonial policy of reducción, the concentrated settlement of mission neophytes in fixed settlements through a combination of force and persuasion. In both of these frontier provinces, the missionaries eventually reached a compromise with the cultural and ecological imperatives of the indigenous environment; their demands for the Indians’ labor took into account the fruits of gathering, which they put to commercial purposes, and accommodated alternating seasons of hunting and cultivation.Spanish colonialism only gradually incorporated Sonora and Chiquitos into the northern and southern frontiers of its American empire, with significant contrasts and similarities in both areas. Military expeditions crossed north-western Mexico and eastern Bolivia during the second and third-quarters of the sixteenth century. Their ephemeral outposts created the need for missionary orders to “reduce” native communities to settled compounds, a process that marked the transition from conquest as private enterprise to state imperialism. The conquerors’ routes to Sonora proceeded north from Compostela— following the westernmost trade routes from Mesoamerica in search of mythic cities, precious metals, and Indian laborers—and westward from the silver mining reales of Zacatecas and Durango. Neither the ruthless conquests of Nuño and Diego de Guzmán nor the epic explorations associated with fray Marcos de Niza and Francisco Vázquez de Coronado, however, succeeded in creating enduring Spanish settlements or in establishing encomiendas among the indigenous nations north of San Miguel de Culiacán. During this same period the Chiquitanía faced two different avenues of approach. Portuguese explorers and slave hunters invaded Chiquitos from Matto Grosso; Jesuit missionaries worked under the aegis of the Order’s colleges established in Tarija and Asunción del Paraguay. Looking westward to the Andean highlands, the Chiriguano frontier separated Chiquitos from the prehispanic imperial polities of the Andes, but under the mission regime, the province became linked to La Plata and the great mining complex of Potosí.Several mid-sixteenth-century military expeditions, made up of a few hundred Spaniards and several thousand Indian auxiliaries, used Asunción del Paraguay as their base of departure to explore possible routes of access through the Chiquitanía to the mineral wealth of Alto Perú. In 1563 Ñuflo de Chávez founded Santa Cruz de la Sierra, a precarious villa of adobe dwellings at the base of the serranía of San José; the settlement subsequently retreated westward to a site known as San Lorenzo de la Barranca closer to the foothills of the Andean escarpment. Santa Cruz and San Lorenzo would be the focal points of contact between the Spanish encomenderos and the indigenous peoples of a place that would become the province of Chiquitos.The Society of Jesus began operating in the Villa of San Lorenzo in the 1580s, but their contacts with Chiquitanos were limited to the families that had been assigned in servitude to the encomenderos. Only a century later, in 1691, did the Jesuits begin their program of mission reducciones in Chiquitanía proper, with viceregal authorization and the material support of the Jesuit Province of Paraguay. By the mid-eighteenth century the Black Robes had established seven stable mission compounds, a number that would reach ten by the time the Jesuit enterprise was forcibly halted in 1767. Each of these mission towns was settled by a considerable Indian population that oscillated between one thousand and three thousand souls and comprised various different parcialidades, or ethnic nations whose kinship and dialectic identities were meaningful to the Chiquitanos and the missionaries.14 Formal civil government was not instituted in the Chiquitanía until after the expulsion of the Jesuits, at which time the province was transformed into a governorship separate from that of Santa Cruz, and the missions were placed under the diocesan authority of the bishop of Santa Cruz.15 Although they were known as curates, the Chiquitano missions continued to function under the corporate structures that the Jesuits had established; however, the political and economic life of these reducciones was increasingly dominated by the conflicting policies that emanated from the ecclesiastical and civil authorities of the province.European contact both in and out of the missions radically transformed native cultures. Old World diseases reduced their numbers, even as encomenderos and slave raiders, operating out of the villas of Santa Cruz de la Sierra and San Lorenzo, exploited the labor of diverse nations and bands that raided these Spanish settlements in search of iron tools. The introduction of metal axes and knives into the Bolivian lowlands signified a veritable technological revolution by altering methods of shifting cultivation, hunting, fishing, gathering, and construction. Access to metal tools undoubtedly intensified inter-tribal warfare and their continued supply became the quid pro quo of negotiations between the Chiquitanos and Spanish missionaries and colonists.16 Throughout the colonial period and well into the nineteenth century, Chiquitos remained a porous frontier, traversed by diverse Chiquitano and Ayoreode peoples, Guaycurú hunters and warriors, Portuguese contrabandists and slave raiders (mamelucos), and Spanish colonists. Jesuits and their successors persisted in bringing other ethnic enclaves out of the forest and into the mission towns, further complicating the diverse mosaic of parcialidades.17The Jesuit mission enterprise in northwestern Mexico followed the advance of the mining frontier during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. As mining reales multiplied in Nueva Vizcaya and military presidios were established along the western flank of the Sierra Madre, Spanish governors and commanders focused their attention on the Cáhita and Sonora village peoples. Responding to an appeal by the governor of Nueva Vizcaya, and counting on viceregal support, the Jesuits began their missionary entradas in 1591, working northward from the Colegio de San Felipe y Santiago de Sinaloa. The Black Robes advanced gradually through the river valleys, their progress halted at times by indigenous resistance and conflicts with Spanish colonists who vied with the Jesuits for access to the Indians’ land and labor. By the early decades of the eighteenth century the Jesuit mission field of Sonora and Sinaloa had reached its maximum contours, but the northernmost missions of Pimería Alta remained an open frontier, where new entradas among the Pima and Maricopa peoples of the Colorado and Gila valleys awaited stalwart Sons of Loyola. Here, as in Chiquitos, Jesuit explorers, with or without military escorts, traveled with an ample supply of trade goods, noting the Indians’ eagerness to acquire metal tools.18 Despite the concerted efforts of missionaries and Jesuit provincials, the Order never accomplished its goal of uniting the mission provinces of Sonora and Baja California by land.During the first century of evangelization the Jesuits represented the only consistent line of authority in direct contact with the Indian communities of Sinaloa and Sonora. In 1732, however, the provinces west of the Sierra Madre Occidental were separated from the large territorial unit of Nueva Vizcaya and placed in a new governorship. As the century wore on, the governors and their tenientes and alcaldes constituted a political and administrative column distinct from both the Society of Jesus and the military officialdom linked to the pre-sidios. Following the eclipse of the Jesuit enterprise in 1767, Bourbon policies militarized the frontier even further with the expansion of presidial troops and the establishment of the commandancy general of the internal provinces, even as they centralized the lines of administrative accountability by converting the governorship into the Intendancy of Arizpe.19 The mission pueblos of Sinaloa and the southern provinces became secular parishes under the care of diocesan priests; many of them, in fact, were ethnically mixed villages. North of the Yaqui Valley, Franciscan friars from the Province of Xalisco and the Colegio de la Santa Cruz de Querétaro replaced the Jesuits in the Pima, Eudeve, and Opata missions of Sonora and Ostimuri.20Several distinguishing features emerge from this broad summary of the ecological and cultural parameters of the Sonoran and Chiquitano mission frontiers. First, indigenous agrarian systems, responding to the environmental conditions of each of these regions, conditioned the character of the mission enterprise. Native Sonoran irrigation works required communal labor and fostered greater degrees of sedentarism than in Chiquitos, where subsistence was sustained by slash-and-burn clearing of shifting plots; albeit both agrarian regimes were complemented by hunting and gathering. Not only the size and composition of the reducciones but also the types of linkages that each district would establish with the colonial economy were dependent on native subsistence practices, which, in turn, rested on a complement of technical skills and cosmic beliefs. Sonoran mission compounds generally followed prehispanic settlement patterns, notwithstanding the concentration of outlying rancherías into larger villages, while the Chiquitano reducciones represented a sharp contrast to indigenous encampments and villages. Second, the Jesuit missions established in Sonora and Chiquitanía belonged to specific hierarchical networks that developed under the aegis of royal patronage. Jesuit rectorados in northwestern Mexico, numbering 6 in Sonora and Sinaloa, maintained regional surveillance and support for 40 mission districts—comprising as many as 103 pueblos at the height of the mission system—that were accountable to the Jesuit provincial in Mexico City.21 Chiquitos mission province, although geographically proximate to the Moxos missions of the tropical savannas of northern Bolivia, was tied administratively to the Jesuit province of Paraguay; following the expulsion of the Jesuits, the ecclesiastical and governing points of reference for the ten mission towns of Chiquitos centered on Santa Cruz de la Sierra (San Lorenzo) and La Plata, seat of the Audiencia of Charcas.22 While the history of Jesuit evangelization in northwestern Mexico covers nearly two centuries (1591–1767), the Black Robes’ effective presence in the Chiquitanía was limited to three-quarters of a century (1691–1767). Third, in this latter province the reducciones competed with the agricultural and service encomiendas that cruceño colonists tenaciously defended. The encomienda and rescate—”ransom” of war captives—forcibly drew an undefined number of Indians away from the Mercedarian missions of Porongo and Buena Vista and from the Jesuit towns of the Chiquitanía proper.23 By way of contrast, the encomienda was not established in Sonora; however, the proximity of the missions and mines in the zona serrana brought the Indians into direct contact with regional colonial markets for labor and produce. Finally, the flow of material goods in and out of the mission districts, duly registered in the ledger books of the Jesuits and their successors, constituted tangible evidence of the Indians’ productive labor channeled to the circulation of commodities. As the mission economies developed in both these frontiers, they created commercial and symbolic wealth whose significance varied for the Sonoras and Chiquitanos, for the missionaries, and for the merchants and governing officials of their respective colonial spheres.“The muleteers took all the wheat that the mules could carry, and we should not despair over what I still owe [you] of the 60 fanegas, because as things are with me, when I look for it, it is not to be found. I would like to send you a few fanegas soon after Easter, so that they can be ground into flour and stored there for me.”24 The agricultural productivity of the land supported the mission economy that Jesuits erected in the province of Sonora, as illustrated in the above exchange between the priests Miguel Almela and Andrés Michel. During March and April 1766, Almela, the missionary of Opodepe and its visita of Nacameri, sent 32 fanegas of wheat (48 bushels) and 11 fanegas of maize (16.5 bushels) to his superior, Father Michel, in Ures through the offices of Marcial de Sossa, a local merchant. The following year, in June 1767, Father Almela reported on the wheat harvest in progress: “I am writing to you from Nacameri, where I am watching over the cutting of wheat, it is necessary to keep a close eye on these my people [the Indians]. The crop was not very good this year, but I hope to raise a little more than last year, why without having sold as much as a fanega, I have almost none left [from the previous harvest].”25Mission crops of wheat, maize, beans, and chickpeas—planted and harvested on the communal fields that were cleared and irrigated under the supervision of indigenous officials and overseers—provided subsistence for the families that lived in the mission, beyond their own milpas or individual plots in return for their labor. In addition, the Jesuits channeled surplus grains into the provincial circuits that linked the mission pueblos to one another and to the mining reales that operated in Sonora and Sinaloa and across the mountains in Chihuahua. Mission produce served as payment for the semiannual shipments of merchandise that missionaries ordered by means of memorias, ostensibly from the Jesuit provincial in the viceregal capital, but in practice through the merchants established in the principal mining centers, such as San Antonio de la Huerta, Río Chico, Santísima Trinidad, and the provincial capital of San Miguel de Horcasitas. The debt, which Father Almela acknowledged, in fanegas of wheat, was an integral part of this commercial circuit. The relative values of harvested crops and merchandise, rendered in their equivalent in silver reales, were calculated and tabulated for each transaction. Normally, these debts were allowed to accumulate and, over several years, would tend to even out. At times, however, rancorous correspondence among the missionaries, and between them and the merchants did occur;26 nevertheless, all parties were mainly concerned with keeping goods and produce circulating in a regional commercial system that bred interdependence.The merchandise that flowed to the missions typically included different kinds of textiles, which varied from the simple cotton and woolen mantas produced by the obrajes of central Mexico to fine woolens and silks imported from Europe. In addition, missionaries regularly purchased tobacco, shoes, needles, stockings, ribbons, writing paper and, less frequently, tools and implements such as plowheads and harnesses. Eagerly awaited mule trains brought these trade goods to the mission pueblos, mining camps, and presidios, where they were destined for redistribution to the mission Indians, to vecinos27 living in the missions or nearby settlements, and to the missionaries themselves who had purchased mirrors, paintings, and statuary to adorn the churches. In return, the missionaries dispatched the arrieros with shipments of grains, ground wheat flour and corn pinole, dried chiles, chickpeas, brown sugar, soap, lard, and candle wax. Livestock was also a marketable commodity, as the missions supplied the mining reales and presidios with horses, mares, mules, and cattle for hides and meat. Not infrequently, missionaries received uncoined silver, stipulated in marcos, as payment for their livestock and produce.Jesuit ledgers for the Mission of San Pedro de Aconchi in the Sonora River valley, including the head village of Aconchi and its visita downstream at Nuestra Señora de la Concepción de Baviácora, provide an important record of the production and sale of mission surpluses from 1720 to 1766.28 The patiently compiled accounts of sales and purchases, as well as the volume of fanegas harvested in the mission from 1749 to 1762, allow for an approximate calculation of the portions of mission produce that were stored or consumed in the pueblos and marketed. Table 1 shows the production of wheat, maize, and beans in Aconchi and Baviácora, including an estimate of the fanegas either sold or stored during the period for which comparative data are available. Table 2 lists sales and purchases for the entire period of 1720–66, by summarizing the multiple transactions recorded for each year and grouping the items in a few consistent categories. Mission income derived from three main sources: grains, cattle, and silver payments. Expenditures comprised productive assets, such as plows, iron tools, planting seed, and livestock; trade goods to distribute to the Indians; religious cult and church adornment; and wages, paid in money or in kind to non-mission laborers for specialized work often associated with church construction.The ledgers of Aconchi, combined with the Jesuits’ correspondence for these same years, reveal several important patterns in the economic administration of the missions.29 Grain harvests varied significantly from one year to the next (see table 2; standard deviation = 267 and mean = 457), dependent on the vagaries of the weather and on the available labor supply. Wheat harvests were consistently higher than maize, by a ratio of as much as 2.8 to 1, which may indicate that irrigated fields along the floodplain were reserved for wheat, while maize was planted in milpas de temporal that were dependent on rainfall. The relationship between production and sales for both crops, however, is inverted: only one-fifth of the wheat crop was destined for the market, for the sample years included in this study, while over two-fifths of the maize harvests were sold outside the mission. While both of these grains served subsistence and commercial purposes, it appears that maize, the autochthonous crop cultivated during the hot summer months, maintained a strong demand in the mining camps and presidios. The missionaries may have kept less maize than wheat in storage—perhaps mainly as seed grain—in view of their expectation that mission Indians would plant maize in their own milpas. Wheat, sown in the winter and harvested in the spring, supplied mission granaries for shipment to new reducciones in the Pimería Alta and Baja California, and was sold throughout the year to Hispanic settlements in the presidios and reales de minas.30Turning to the figures on revenues and expenditures, mission harvests were the most important source of income, representing over 80 percent of the total value in pesos accruing to the mission of San Pedro de Aconchi for the entire period of 1720–66. Livestock sales accounted for a little over 10 percent of total income, followed by remittances of silver at 7.6 percent. The sale of livestock declined significantly during the last decade of Jesuit administration at Aconchi, due possibly to the increased productive capacity of haciendas and ranches that had built up their own herds and competed with the missions for a greater share of the provincial market.The preponderance of grain sales indicates the dependence of the missions on the labor of the Indians, who were bound to serve the común in lieu of paying tribute to the Crown, to produce the surpluses that sustained the commercial exchange of merchandise and produce. That the Jesuits considered it