Misiones en Chile austral

Misiones en Chile austral: Los Jesuitas en Chiloé, 1608 – 1768 is a detailed account of the missionary work performed by the Jesuits in the Chilean archipelago of Chiloé. According to Rodrigo Moreno Jeria, from the early seventeenth century until the expulsion of the Jesuits, the mission of Chiloé was a success that merits greater attention than it has hitherto received. Fathers acted here with a great deal of pragmatism and did not attempt to organize the Indians into the traditional reducciones. Instead, the Jesuits respected the fact that settlements were scattered in the main island and in the other smaller islands around it, and evangelization was performed by going from one native settlement to the next, according to a strict liturgical calendar. (Environmental factors and the availability of food, mainly seafood, determined the pattern of settlement.) Notwithstanding that rotation was the key to success, many pages of the book are devoted to describing this same rotation as a source of problems. To start with, rotation involved extended periods of absence from a native community and, until a priest could return to it, a converted Indian was in charge of watching over the neophytes for the observance of basic Christian behaviors.Based on secondary and primary sources (the Cartas Annuas in particular), the author offers a narrative that starts with a brief description of the origins of the Society of Jesuits and its first steps in the Americas. In 1608 the mission of Chiloé was founded to both convert the Huilliches and the Chonos and to spiritually assist those Spaniards settled in the main island, most of them living in the colony of Castro. Difficulties started out from dealing with the Spaniards as much as from finding enough human and material resources to fulfill the needs of the Colegio de Castro, but these problems did not deter the priests from attempting to expand farther eastward. They indeed crossed the Andes and established another mission in the Nahuel-Huapi region in present-day Argentina. Besides the zeal to harvest souls, the push into new lands across the Andes was fueled by the legend of the City of the Caesars; a rich reign governed by white men and supposedly located someplace around the Strait of Magellan. Overall, the Jesuits had an uneven success with the evangelization of the Puelches and the Poyas of the Nahuel-Huapi area. When Father Nicolás Mascardi was killed in 1673, the mission was abandoned and future attempts at establishing a permanent Jesuit presence on the eastern slope of the Andes ended in failure. The effort lasted until 1717, when the murder of Father Francisco Elguea made the Society withdraw from the Nahuel-Huapi region.Misiones en Chile austral contains useful historical data ranging from the financial situation of the Jesuit haciendas to personal information about the priests. The author has surveyed many sources in some German archives that shed light on the origins of the Jesuits sent to Chiloé and on the Christian traditions and devotions pertaining to that part of Europe, which the priests introduced to southern Chile. The book also has interesting descriptions on how changes in the administration of both the church in general and the Jesuits in particular interfered with the goals of the priests in Chiloé.It is clearly a book for a specialist, who will profit from the abundance of facts by placing this case study into the broader historiographical framework of the colonial borderlands. Regrettably, the book fails to provide us with such a needed framework. Above all, the bibliography concentrates on very well-known Chilean historians and some of their works, although without mentioning their current debates. Moreover, many pieces of research written either in English or in Spanish about the Jesuits, the missions, and the frontiers are vastly ignored; and this is true even in the case of titles referring to colonial Chile and the Araucanía. Nonetheless, the relevance of the book lies in the fact that it has skillfully reconstructed the entire life of a Jesuit mission located at the southern end of the Americas

Archaeology · Archipelago · Art · Ethnology · Geography · Human settlement · Humanities · Literature · Narrative · Settlement (finance) · Cultural and Social Studies in Latin America · History · Latin American history and culture