History of the Triumphs of Our Holy Faith Amongst the Most Barbarous and Fierce Peoples of the New World (review)

History of the Triumphs of Our Holy Faith Amongst the Most Barbarous and Fierce Peoples of the New World. By Andrés Pérez de Ribas [1645]. Translated by Daniel T. Reff, Maureen Ahern, and Richard K. Danford. Annotations and introduction by Daniel T. Reff. (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1999. ix + 744 pp., preface, introduction, table, maps, glossary, bibliography, index. $85.00 cloth.)

This translation of the single most comprehensive ethnohistorical source on northwest Mexico in the first half of the seventeenth century is a welcome addition to the scholarly literature of the region. Despite its title, Andrés Pérez de Ribas's chronicle of the Jesuit missionary enterprise among a number of northwestern indigenous groups offers a wealth of information to those able to read knowledgeably and imaginatively enough to sift the Indian ethnographies from the Jesuit worldview. Spanish editions of the work have been available since its original publication in Madrid in 1645. These include transcriptions published in Mexico in 1944 and 1985 as well a facsimile edition in 1992. The highly abridged English version by Tomás Robertson (1968) has now been replaced by this translation of the complete work from the original edition, accompanied by maps and a glossary. The translation has been skillfully executed by a team of experts in Spanish language and literature (Maureen Ahern and Richard Danford) and anthropology (Daniel Reff). Although any serious scholar would want to consult the original Spanish edition, the translation and the comprehensive index offer an extraordinary opportunity to begin research.

Pérez de Ribas first served the Jesuit order as a missionary in Sinaloa in the initial decades of the seventeenth century. He began writing his history in the 1620s and continued to work on it through the early 1640s, when he completed his term as head of the Jesuit province in Mexico, drawing not only upon his own experiences but also those of other missionaries who had submitted annual reports (cartas ánuas) to their superiors. Intended to attract and train Jesuit novices as well as to promote the Jesuit missionary endeavor to the Spanish Crown, Pérez de Ribas chronicled in twelve books with subchapters the first half-century of Jesuit activities among a variety of coastal and sierran indigenous groups in present-day Sinaloa, Sonora, Durango, and Chihuahua. Among them were Ahomes, Zuaques, Mayos, Yaquis, Nebomes, Acaxees, Xiximes, Tepehuanes, and Laguneros.

The History of the Triumphs is first and foremost a vehicle for lauding Jesuit efforts as apostolic models of an enduring God, whose omnipotent design provided the causal explanation for all earthly phenomena, above all in terms of the conversion of the natives to Christianity. Here it should be noted that Pérez de Ribas's views were very much a product of his time and did not characterize the Jesuit missionary endeavor a half-century later. In his rendering, missionary struggles with Indian shamans are always presented as duels between God and the devil and as attempts to substitute Aristotelian notions of civilization for "savagery." In order to convey accounts of conversion and miracles through a series of edifying cases of individual missionary lives, Pérez de Ribas had to furnish information about the evils to be overcome. It is in these descriptions of autochthonous material culture and worldview that the scholar finds a rich source of ethnographic data on a plethora of topics, including dress, diet, housing, subsistence patterns, kinship, sociopolitical organization, indigenous rivalries, warfare, ceremonial music, dance, and use of intoxicants, ball games, and belief systems.

In a critical introduction, Daniel Reff offers anthropological and postmodern literary methodologies for peeling away the layers of Pérez de Ribas's worldview that obscure or distort his ethnography. Reff is most adept at explaining the sources of the former, a mixture of medieval devotionalism and Renaissance humanism, and in describing the...