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

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 centerpiece 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. ²

This 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. ³

The 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.

From the Desert to the Tropics: Ecological and Colonial Frontiers

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...