Expecting Pears from an Elm Tree: Franciscan Missions on the Chiriguano Frontier in the Heart of South America, 1830–1949 - Softcover

Langer, Erick D.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822345048 ISBN 13: 9780822345046

Publisher: Duke University Press, 2009

Synopsis

Missions played a vital role in frontier development in Latin America throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. They were key to the penetration of national societies into the regions and indigenous lands that the nascent republics claimed as their jurisdictions. In Expecting Pears from an Elm Tree, Erick D. Langer examines one of the most important Catholic mission systems in republican-era Latin America, the Franciscan missions among the Chiriguano Indians in southeastern Bolivia. Using that mission system as a model for understanding the relationship between indigenous peoples and missionaries in the post-independence period, Langer explains how the missions changed over their lifespan and how power shifted between indigenous leaders and the missionaries in an ongoing process of negotiation.

Expecting Pears from an Elm Tree is based on twenty years of research, including visits to the sites of nearly every mission discussed and interviews with descendants of mission Indians, Indian chiefs, Franciscan friars, mestizo settlers, and teachers. Langer chronicles how, beginning in the 1840s, the establishment of missions fundamentally changed the relationship between the Chiriguano villages and national society. He looks at the Franciscan missionaries’ motives, their visions of ideal missions, and the realities they faced. He also examines mission life from the Chiriguano point of view, considering their reasons for joining missions and their resistance to conversion, as well as the interrelated issues of Indian acculturation and the development of the mission economy, particularly in light of the relatively high rates of Indian mortality and outmigration. Expanding his focus, Langer delves into the complex interplay of Indians, missionaries, frontier society, and the national government until the last remaining missions were secularized in 1949. He concludes with a comparative analysis between colonial and republican-era missions throughout Latin America.

About this title

About the Author

Erick D. Langer is Professor of History and core faculty at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. He is the author of Economic Change and Rural Resistance in Southern Bolivia, 1880-1930; editor of Contemporary Indigenous Movements in Latin America; and co-editor of The New Latin American Mission History.

From the Back Cover

"Culminating over a decade of research, "Expecting Pears from an Elm Tree" brings the republican-era Franciscan missions of the Chiriguania of southeastern Bolivia into the center of frontier history. Erick D. Langer integrates the empirical data from numerous archives into cultural frameworks in ways that create a powerful narrative of ethnogenesis in the 'fields of interaction' that emerged from the institutional mission."--Cynthia Radding, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Expecting Pears from an Elm Tree

Franciscan Missions on the Chiriguano Frontier in the Heart of South America, 1830-1949By ERICK D. LANGER

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2009 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4504-6

Contents

List of Illustrations and Tables...................................................................ixAcknowledgments....................................................................................xiIntroduction.......................................................................................11. The "Chiriguano Wars" Indian Warfare and the Establishment of the Missions.....................212. The Franciscans.................................................................................613. Death and Migration The Population Decline of the Missions.....................................1014. Daily Life and the Development of Mission Culture...............................................1265. Conversion, Chiefs, and Rebellions Relationships of Power on the Missions......................1606. Missions and the Frontier Economy...............................................................1967. Outside Relations and the Decline of the Missions...............................................2188. From the Chaco War to Secularization, 1932-1949.................................................2579. Comparisons.....................................................................................270Appendix: The Inauguration of Tiguipa Church (1902)................................................284Glossary...........................................................................................289Notes..............................................................................................291Bibliography.......................................................................................337Index..............................................................................................355

Chapter One

The "Chiriguano Wars": Indian Warfare and the Establishment of the Missions

A new conception of frontier history is necessary to understand the Chiriguano frontier in the nineteenth century. The wars for independence against the Spaniards resulted in the creation of various nation-states in the region, dominated by Creole elites. For most Chiriguanos, these conflicts also resulted in freedom from all oppressors, including the Creoles. Most of the space that the colonial state carved out of the Chiriguana returned to the control of the indigenous villages. The reasons for this independence were multiple: the demographic weight and political culture of indigenous society, effective guerrilla warfare by the Indians and the types of weapons used, as well as the weakness of the ranching economic model and of the Bolivian state. These factors provided the majority of Chiriguanos with a period of effective independence that waned only in the second half of the nineteenth century.

In other words, frontier expansion was a variable process that did not inevitably lead to European or Creole domination. The frontier waxed and waned in different directions; at certain times indigenous groups retook territory, and at others the Creoles invaded successfully. The frontier created different possibilities for both indigenous and settler societies that changed over time as the power balance shifted from one side to the other. Groups within both indigenous and Creole societies allied with and against each other, so that an analysis based on a bifurcation between Indian and settler is simplistic. Rather, changing interethnic and intra-ethnic alliances (including between different indigenous ethnic groups) resulted in differing coalitions over time that made control of the frontier by the Bolivian state impossible until the very end of the nineteenth century.

The Franciscan missions founded during the republican period helped slowly but surely to limit the Chiriguanos' independence by creating new alliance structures that, in the end, resulted in a frontier society in which the Indians were subordinated to local Creoles and, to a lesser extent, to the Bolivian state. Even here, resistance to domination changed over time and created different opportunities for different indigenous groups as they negotiated and continuously adapted to new circumstances. During the first half of the nineteenth century it was not at all clear that either the Bolivian state or the colonists would overcome the powerful Chiriguanos. The establishment of missions was the result not of a deliberate and long-range strategy of frontier development, but rather a policy engendered by a weak state that found itself unable to protect its citizens despite its best military efforts. In the end, frontier conflict meant mainly Indian-on-Indian violence, and it was only after permanent alliances, fostered by the missions, were established between Creoles and indigenous groups that the Bolivian state was eventually able to claim a partial supremacy in the region. This chapter delineates this lengthy process and shows what role the missions played in the larger strategic, military, and political contexts of the frontier region.

The National Context

Before discussing the Chiriguano frontier, I need to provide the context of nineteenth-century Bolivian political development on the national level. The Bolivian state did not control the Chiriguana until about the turn of the twentieth century. Creole leaders in Sucre and La Paz arrogated for the Bolivian state possession of lands, including the Chiriguano territories, based on European (and colonial) ideas of statehood without any reference to the desires of the independent indigenous population. Bolivian national leaders (and their Paraguayan and Argentine counterparts) drew bright lines across maps that showed huge tracts of lands marked "unknown," believing that they thus had rights to the territory. The reality on the ground, as we shall see, was quite different. Indeed, the Chaco War in the 1930s and further into the twentieth century showed the Bolivian elites how little they actually controlled or knew about what they claimed to be national territory. Be that as it may, we still need to take into account Bolivian politics, since it impinged in myriad ways upon the frontier during the nineteenth century.

The independence wars (1810-1825) brought about the creation of Bolivia based on the territory encompassed by the jurisdiction of the Audiencia de Charcas, an important colonial administrative and judicial body. The Alto Peruvian elites believed that they were better off alone rather than as a part of neighboring Peru or the Argentine Confederation. They persuaded second-in-command Antonio Jos de Sucre to join the cause for independence and, through flattery, were able to convince the independence leader Simn Bolvar to separate the country from Peru. After all, the great Liberator would now have a country named after him, and he diligently wrote a constitution (never implemented) for Bolivia. Sucre became Bolivia's first true president and, in his short administration, was able to implement liberal reforms. Although Bolivia later became known for its many revolutions and political instability, it emerged as one of the most powerful South American states in the first half of the nineteenth century. A series of strong and reform-minded leaders, such as Andrs de Santa Cruz (1829-1839) and Jos Ballivin (1841-1847), tried to improve the country's administration. A lack of fiscal resources, the threat of internal instability, and conflict with neighboring countries prevented much progress, though Bolivia was better off than all countries on the continent other than Chile and Brazil. Foreign involvement did not help, such as Santa Cruz's ill-fated Peru-Bolivian Confederation (1836-1839) or Agustn Gamarra's invasion of Bolivia at the head of Peruvian troops in 1841. Also, most national administrations, when they could, worried more about the status of Tarija (which had voted to join Bolivia rather than Argentina in 1826) or the Pacific coastal region of Atacama, under pressure from Chile and Peru. Only the Ballivin administration attempted to penetrate the eastern regions and establish state control, though it had little success, as we shall see later.

Political instability increased throughout the century. Factionalism increased and became more violent, with leaders whose political ideologies were diametrically opposed to each other. There were also personal enmities. Thus Manuel Isidoro Belzu (1848-1855) hated Jos Ballivin, who had seduced his wife, the famous writer Juana Manuela Gorriti. Belzu was also the declared enemy of Jos Mara Linares (1857-1861), as well as of Mariano Melgarejo (1864-1870), who in 1865 ended Belzu's life. Belzu, who had spent part of his military career on the Tarija frontier, represented a pro-artisan populism not seen before, while Linares represented the civilian, fervently pro-Catholic, but also free trade party. General Melgarejo also surrounded himself with laissez-faire liberals and imposed liberal policies, such as auctioning off Indian community land and taking advice from the free-trade Chilean ambassador. Melgarejo was forced to move from city to city, suffocating revolts against his regime, and finally was overthrown by an alliance between his Creole enemies and the Aymara Indians, who retook their usurped lands.

Melgarejo had signed away part of Bolivia's rights to its Pacific coast to the Chileans. The inability of the Bolivian state to impose control over the extremely arid but resource-rich Atacama coast (populated mostly by Chilean workers) led to further disputes with Chile. Bolivia tried to compensate for its weakness, signing a secret defense treaty with Peru, but a dispute over taxes on the coast led to the disastrous War of the Pacific (1879-1884), in which Bolivia lost its coastal territory to Chile. The war was a decisive turning point in Bolivian politics. As a result, the military was discredited and the newly wealthy silver mining elite of Sucre and Potos took over the country after 1880. Allied with Chile through commercial and financial connections, they lobbied for railroad access to the Pacific and turned to consolidate control over the eastern frontier, including the Chiriguana. They launched expeditions into the Chaco and into the rubber areas of the Beni region and created new land laws that made the legal taking of "vacant" (i.e., Indian-controlled) lands easier. The mining elites also tried to create new land markets by attempting to parcel out Indian communities to individuals and also open them up to sale. In the end, they lost out to another Aymara Indian rebellion, whose leaders allied themselves with the Liberal Party and La Paz regionalists. The Federalist War of 1898-1899 brought the Liberal Party to power and moved the executive and legislative branches to La Paz permanently, although the new government in the end repressed the Aymaras and intensified the Indian community land sales in the Andean highlands. In sum, the Bolivian state was able to concentrate its resources on the eastern frontier only at the end of the nineteenth century, though it did try to do so earlier as well, such as in the 1840s, under the Ballivin administration.

Political and Social Organizations on the Frontier

Given the weakness of the Bolivian national state during much of the nineteenth century, it is essential to focus on the local level for understanding the Chiriguano frontier, particularly the political and economic organizations of both the Chiriguanos and the settlers. Inter- and intra-ethnic relations created conditions that affected the struggle over the region's resources. During the first half of the nineteenth century the non-Indians on the frontier regions were difficult to define as "settlers." Most non-Indians were not agriculturalists but were cowhands, merchants, or ranch owners. The first two rarely stayed in one place. Although there were landowners who on paper owned huge tracts of land in this region, they usually lived in the Spanish towns distant from the frontier. This pattern was clearest in the southern portion of the frontier, where the heroes of the independence movement, Generals Bernardo Trigo and Francisco Burdett O'Connor (the latter an Irish aristocrat who fought with Bolivar's Colombian army and later married into the Tarija elites), were by far the largest landowners but lived in the town of Tarija, located 100 miles from the frontier. As one moved northward along the frontier, owners tended to live closer to their ranches, as in the case of Juan Agustn Tern, a resident of Sauces (today Monteagudo), who in 1833 received title to lands located in Sauces and in nearby Sapirangui cantones. Even here, the land grant contract made allowances for other individuals, called piqueros, to pasture up to twenty-five head of cattle without prejudice; the owner was to have four hundred head himself within the year.

The economic basis of the frontier Creoles was ranching. Cattle thrived in the subtropical climate of the Andean foothills; they were used to the periodic droughts that scourged the region. Most important, the live animals or their hides could be transported to market in an area where roads were practically nonexistent. This type of ranching involved extensive rather than intensive use of the land and fostered only a very sparse settler population. Moreover, in the first half of the nineteenth century, the frontier economy was poorly connected to the markets in the highlands. This meant that the settler economy remained relatively poor; although certain individuals owned huge amounts of land and hundreds if not thousands of cattle, there was little they could do with them and they had little incentive to expand production. The impetus for new lands came primarily from the exhaustion of old pastures, for cattle inevitably changed the ecology of the region where they grazed, leading eventually to erosion of the steep hillsides and the predominance of spiny plants that were unpalatable to the voracious bovine palate.

Despite a common dependence on cattle, the settlers were divided politically into often antagonistic camps. The most important divisions among the colonists corresponded to the administrative boundaries of the three departments, Santa Cruz, Chuquisaca, and Tarija, which claimed jurisdiction over portions of the Cordillera. Departmental boundaries could not be demarcated in the unconquered frontier. The three departmental administrations thus rarely cooperated in any consistent manner, since each political unit was afraid that aiding the other might lead to a diminution of its own territory. For this reason military efforts remained generally uncoordinated and ineffective. For example, in 1866 Sebastian Cainzo, the frontier commander of San Luis (Tarija), and General Francisco Burdett O'Connor tracked the attackers of a raid on a village of Indian allies into the jurisdiction of another militia commander. The commander prohibited the entry of the armed posse into his territory, and as a result the raiders, under the leadership of Buricanambi, the chief of Ingre (Chuquisaca), and some mestizos from Chuquisaca, were able to make off with the stolen cattle and the women and children taken as slaves.

Moreover, policies toward the Chiriguanos also varied from department to department. In Tarija the colonization of the eastern frontier remained the highest priority. The departmental prefects frequently maintained relations with the Chiriguanos, as had been historically the case since the founding of the villa in 1574, when Luis de Fuentes beat off a host of Chiriguano armies before securing possession of the Guadalquivir valley. The Tarija settlers also had to deal with other Chaco tribes, such as the Tobas, Matacos, Tapiets, and Chorotis. Especially the Tobas were much-feared horsemen, and settlers had to consider their actions within the wider context of interethnic alliances and counteralliances.

In Chuquisaca there was much greater governmental neglect of the eastern frontier than in Tarija; officials of the departmental capital, Sucre, were usually much more concerned with national affairs because it was also the seat of the national government. If there was any help to be had from national military forces, it was most likely to come from Chuquisaca. Perhaps because the settlers were assured of military backing from the capital, settlers from Chuquisaca tended to be the most brutal group toward the ava and the least likely to seek alliances or compromises with the indigenous groups. However, the intense focus on national politics at times also brought about occasional ruptures between authorities appointed from Sucre and the settlers; in 1844, for example, the "principal vecinos [settlers] and landowners of Sauses" protested the Azero governor's request for weapons and men to combat "the invasions of the barbarians [brbaros]," which, they said, was only "a pretext to oppress the inhabitants," not fight Indians.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Expecting Pears from an Elm Treeby ERICK D. LANGER Copyright © 2009 by Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Duke University Press
• Publication date: 2009
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0822345048
• ISBN 13: 9780822345046
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 390