Jesuit Reductions - History

History

In the 16th century, priests of different religious orders set out to evangelize the Americas, bringing Christianity to indigenous communities. The colonial governments and missionaries agreed on the strategy of gathering the often nomadic indigenous populations in larger communities called reductions in order to more effectively govern, tax, and Christianize them. Reductions generally were also construed as an instrument to make the Indians adopt European lifestyles and values, which was not the case in the Jesuit reductions, where the Jesuits allowed the Indians to retain many of their pre-colonial cultural practices. In Mexico the policy was called congregación, and also took the form of the hospitals of Vasco de Quiroga, and the Franciscan Missions of California, and in Portuguese Brazil they were known as aldeias. Legally, under colonial rule, Indians were classified as minors, in effect children, to be protected and guided to salvation by European missionaries.

The Jesuits, only formally founded in 1540, were relatively late arrivals in the New World, from about 1570, especially compared to the Dominicans and Franciscans, and therefore had to look to the frontiers of colonization for mission areas. The Jesuit reductions originated in the early seventeenth century when the Bishop Lizarraga asked for missionaries for Paraguay. In 1609, acting under instructions from Phillip III, the Spanish governor of Asunción made a deal with the Jesuit Provinical of Paraguay. The Jesuits agreed to set up hamlets at strategic points along the Paraná river, that were populated with Indians and maintained a separation from Spanish towns. The Jesuits were to "enjoy a tax holiday for ten years" which extended longer. This mission strategy continued for 150 years until the Jesuits were expelled in 1767. Fundamentally the purpose, as far as the government was concerned, was to safeguard the frontier with the reductions where Indians were introduced to European culture. In 1609 three Jesuits began the first mission in San Ignacio Guazú. In the next 25 years, 15 missions were founded in the province of Guairá—but since some of these were within the Portuguese area they were subjected to frequent destructive raids by Bandeirantes of São Paulo to enslave the Indians. In 1631, most of the reductions moved west into Uruguay, which was under Spanish jurisdiction, in some cases to be re-opened from the 1680s onwards.

The missions also secured the Spanish Crown's permission, and some arms, to raise militias of Indians to defend the reductions against raids. The bandeirantes followed the reductions into Spanish territory and in 1641 the Indian militia stopped them at Mbororé. The militias could number as many as 4,000 troops, and their cavalry was especially effective, wearing European-style uniforms and carrying bows and arrows as well as muskets. In the Treaty of Madrid (1750) the Spanish ceded to the Portuguese territories including the Misiones Orientales, reductions now in Brazil, threatening to expose the Indians again to the far more oppressive Portuguese system. The Jesuits complied, trying to relocate the population across the Uruguay river as the treaty allowed, but the Guarani militia under the mission-born Sepé Tiaraju resisted in the Guarani War, and defeated Spanish troops, obliging them in 1754 to sign an armistice in Guarani - a victory that helped to ensure the eventual defeat of the reductions. The war was ended when a larger force of 3,000 combined Spanish and Portuguese troops crushed the revolt in 1756, with Guarani losses in battles and massacres afterwards of over 1,500.

The reductions came to be considered a threat by the secular authorities (as well as by the indigenous people), and caught up in the growing attack on the Jesuits in Europe for unrelated reasons. The economic success of the reductions, which was considerable, although not as great as it has often been described, combined with the Jesuits' independence to become a cause of fear. The reductions were considered by some philosophies as ideal communities of noble savages, and were praised as such by Montesquieu in his L'Esprit des Lois (1748), and even by Rousseau, no friend of the church. Their intriguing story has continued to be the subject of some romanticizing, as in the film The Mission (1986), whose story relates to the events of the 1750s, shown on a miniature scale. It is generally accepted by modern historians that the reasons for the contemporary opposition to them were political, humanitarian, and economic. When the Jesuits were expelled from the Spanish realm in 1767, the reductions slowly died out, becoming victims of slave raids or being absorbed into European society. Some of the Reductions have continued to be inhabited as towns while most have been abandoned and remain only as ruins. Córdoba, Argentina, the largest city associated with the reductions, was atypical as a Spanish settlement predated the Jesuits, and functioned as a centre for the Jesuit presence with a novitiate centre, and a college that is now the local university. The Córdoba mission was taken over by the Franciscans in 1767. Many have been declared UNESCO World Heritage sites, including six of the Jesuit Missions of Chiquitos in Bolivia, and others in Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay. There are also two creole languages, Língua Geral and Nheengatu, originating in the reductions and based on Guaraní, Tupi and Portuguese.