The Guaraní and Their Missions: A Socioeconomic History by Julia J. S. Sarreal (review)

Although the colonial frontiers of South America have received relatively little attention from historians, the Guaraní missions of the Jesuit Province of Paraguay are an exception. They have fascinated the general public from the eighteenth century’s Candide to the twentieth century’s The Mission and have inspired inquiry among scores of South American, North American, and European scholars. In a crowded historiographical field, Julia Sarreal has managed to add something new to our knowledge with The Guaraní and Their Missions: A Socioeconomic History.

Sarreal’s introduction includes a valuable survey of this historiography. The book’s nine chapters cover the history of Guaraní-Spanish interactions from the contact period through the first years of the nineteenth century. The first two chapters describe the founding and sociopolitical life of the missions. A chapter on the Jesuit mission economy is followed by another (based almost entirely on secondary sources) describing the Guaraní War and the Jesuit expulsion. The most important new contributions of the book are found in chapters 5 through 9, dealing with various aspects of the decline of mission society after the Jesuit expulsion. Here Sarreal makes use of new primary sources including a wealth of accounting records generated by the post-Jesuit administration.

Sarreal describes her approach to Guaraní mission history as realistic, and there is a definite material emphasis to her work. She states that Jesuit success in founding missions depended above all on their ability to provide food and other material comforts, especially beef and yerba mate. The realistic and material emphasis is even more apparent in the post-Jesuit chapters. In businesslike language, the author explains how the missions went bankrupt because of the loss of Jesuit unity of management, the loss of a de facto subsidy provided by the Jesuit trade network, and a great increase in overhead expenses due to the separation of temporal and spiritual administration that required twice the administrative personnel. While Guaraní leaders continued to live relatively well and stayed in the missions, many other Guaraní left the missions for wage labor in Spanish settlements or joined nearby independent Indians. The post-Jesuit economy was a hybrid of market and communal structures, and mission leaders struggled (ultimately unsuccessfully) to profit enough from the market to fund the communal redistribution of goods that provided a safety net for the less fortunate and an incentive to remain in the missions. Sarreal describes in depth how two missions, particularly rich in cattle, tried to profit from a booming Atlantic market in hides, yet lost most of the profits to Spanish employees and administrators. Whereas previous studies argued that mission decline was primarily the result of corruption and overexploitation by Spanish administrators, Sarreal insists convincingly that the story was much more complicated. In the end, no one could find a way to make the post-Jesuit missions break even economically.

A thread of Guaraní agency runs throughout the book. Sarreal is especially interested in the part played by caciques, the hereditary lineage heads who formed a sort of middle layer in Guaraní society. She shows Guaraní elites and commoners as actively pursuing their own interests and making rational economic choices. Unfortunately, these choices were beneficial only in the short term, and Guaraní leaders ended up using up all of the assets accumulated in the Jesuit period.

Experts in the field will appreciate Sarreal’s book as a valuable supplement to the previous literature, which sheds new light on the role of Guaraní caciques and the process of decline in the post-Jesuit period. For English-language readers who want to read one book on the Guaraní missions, The Guaraní and Their Missions is an excellent choice.