Frontiers of Evangelization: Indians in the Sierra Gorda and Chiquitos Missions

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The Spanish crown wanted native peoples in its American territories to be evangelized and, to that end, facilitated the establishment of missions by more than a few Catholic orders. Specializing in the Franciscan missions of the Sierra Gorda in Northern New Spain (Mexico) and the Jesuit missions of Chiquitos in what is now Bolivia, Frontiers of Evangelization takes a comparative approach to understanding the experiences of indigenous populations in missions on the frontiers of Spanish The united states.

Marshaling a wealth of data from sacramental, military, and census records, Robert H. Jackson explores the many factors that influenced the stability of mission settlements, including the indigenous communities’ previous subsistence patterns and circle of relatives structures, the evangelical techniques of the missionary orders, the social and political organization within the mission communities, and epidemiology on the subject of population density and mobility. The two orders, Jackson’s research shows, organized and administered their missions very another way. The Franciscans took a heavy-handed approach and implemented disruptive social policies, at the same time as the Jesuits engaged in a comparatively “kinder and gentler” form of colonization.

Yet the most critical factor to the missions’ success, Jackson finds, used to be the indigenous peoples’ existing demographic profile—in particular, their mobility. Nonsedentary populations, like the Pames and Jonaces of the Sierra Gorda, were more susceptible to demographic collapse once brought into the mission system, whereas sedentary groups, like the Guaraní of Chiquitos, experienced robust growth and greater resistance to disease and natural disaster.

Drawing on more than three decades of scholarly work, this analysis of an important archival material augments our understanding of the role of missions in colonization, and the fate of indigenous peoples in Spanish The united states.

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