The Franciscan Missionary Enterprise in Nineteenth-Century Latin America

This essay is in large part inspired by Fr. Antonine Tibesar OFM, whom I had the privilege to meet in 1982 just after I returned from my doctoral research sojourn in Bolivia. Fr. Antonine was for many years the director of the Academy of Franciscan History when that institution had its beautiful campus in Potomac, Maryland, a suburb of Washington, D.C. I had corresponded with Fr. Antonine earlier and during my visit enjoyed discussing with him the many facets of Franciscan missions in Latin America. He proudly showed me the large collection of books in the academy library. What impressed me about both Fr. Antonine and the friars I had met in Bolivia during my research was their selflessness and willingness to help a budding scholar—one who at that point had little of scholarship to show. These characteristics got me thinking about the Franciscans and their worldviews and how those must have affected the missions. Although I was determined to write mainly about the indigenous population on the missions (after all, they constituted the vast majority of the mission population and were the ones most profoundly affected by the mission experience), I realized that it was important not to ignore the missionaries. Though few in number—most missions had just one or perhaps two friars—it was their desires for the native population and the overall goals and local organization of the missions they founded that profoundly shaped the human settlements they supervised.

My research concentrates on the missions among the Chiriguano (now called Ava-Guaraní) and to a lesser extent the Tobas and the Matacos (now called Weenhayek) in southeastern Bolivia from the 1830s to 1949. It was likely the most important mission system in the hemisphere during the post-independence period, encompassing more than 10,000 natives in the last decade of the nineteenth century. It was the central demographic, political, and economic institution of the Bolivian frontier, and its actions, organization, and authority had effects all the way to northern Argentina, where many neophytes went to labor in the sugarcane fields. The thoughts in the paragraphs that follow are based largely on my research on this mission system, but I will also bring in Argentina and Peru, where the Franciscans also labored among indigenous groups on the frontier and for which there are a number of excellent mission studies. Based on the information from these resources, I hope to be able to tell something about the Franciscan missionary enterprise in general.

The missionaries' perspective has been taken sufficiently into account in many mission histories and in historical research, a logical outcome of the fact that virtually all the material that historians have at their disposal was produced by the missionaries themselves. Indeed, many of the best histories of the Franciscan missions were written by those missionaries or by other Franciscans. ¹ Their perspectives have been important in elucidating many issues and in demonstrating the profound effect of the missionaries and missions on their charges. But what is missing from these histories is a critical examination of the missionaries themselves and the assumptions they brought to their work. The Franciscan missionary enterprise was profoundly affected by conceptual frameworks that were well established but largely unexamined by those who wrote the mission histories.

To understand these frameworks, it is necessary to look at five factors that shaped the Franciscan missionary enterprise in the nineteenth century. First, the missionaries approached their world and their work through cultural assumptions that made them attempt to organize the missions in certain ways, assumptions that often had little to do with spiritual matters but much to do with the perceptions they had grown up with. For this reason, it is important to conduct the same kind of ethnographic analysis of the missionaries as the missionaries and others did of the indigenous population. There is rich documentation for doing so, not only in the "self histories" that the friars kept, but also in much other documentation that they carefully preserved. ² It also seems only fair and proper to conduct this turn-about analysis, since the "new...