Frontiers of Evangelization

Throughout colonial Latin America, Catholic missions set out to convert and integrate indigenous peoples into the Spanish empire. Given the importance of these missions, the lack of transregional scholarship on the subject is keenly felt. Most works focus on a specific region (primarily in New Spain or Paraguay) and a religious order. Robert Jackson's Frontiers of Evangelization: Indians in the Sierra Gorda and Chiquitos Missions seeks to address one aspect of this gap by comparing the mission experiences of sedentary Indians in present-day Bolivia with those of nonsedentary Pames and Jonaces Indians in central Mexico. Jackson is not the first to compare missions in Bolivia and New Spain: Cynthia Radding's Landscapes of Power and Identity (2005) is a more meticulous environmental and cultural history of the same Chiquitos missions studied by Jackson and the Sonoran missions of New Spain.Frontiers of Evangelization purports to be a case study of the Sierra Gorda and Chiquitos missions that shows that the outcome of a mission, as judged by its demographic profile, was influenced by the missionaries' organizational strategy and by whether the target population was sedentary or nonsedentary (similar to the argument in Jackson's 2015 book). While both factors were most certainly influential, Jackson fails to prove either claim. His argument rests on the assertion that the nonsedentary populations of the Sierra Gorda missions were more fragile than the sedentary populations of the Chiquitos missions. He bases this conclusion on demographic data for the Sierra Gorda and Chiquitos missions from the 1740s and for a Paraguayan mission in 1759. Such a comparison is problematic given the uneven paths of sociocultural change in each mission group: the Franciscans only began bringing the Pames and Jonaces into missions in the 1740s, whereas the Jesuits had started the Chiquitos missions half a century earlier and the Paraguayan mission over a century earlier.A major problem is that much of the book focuses on other native peoples, leaving Jackson without sufficient evidence from the Sierra Gorda and Chiquitos missions to prove his claims. In chapter 2, Jackson pays about equal attention to evangelization in central Mexico (12 pages) as he does to the religious, social, economic, and political organizational strategies employed in Chiquitos (10 pages) and the Sierra Gorda (13 pages). The lack of attention to the Sierra Gorda and Chiquitos missions is even more extreme in chapter 3, where Jackson dedicates far more space to demography in the Paraguayan missions (22 pages) than in the Chiquitos and Sierra Gorda missions (5 pages and 8 pages, respectively). While Jackson defends his reference to the Paraguay missions as providing context about demographic patterns among sedentary mission populations, the discussion is not only distracting but not applicable as he mostly focuses on epidemics that struck the Paraguayan missions under extraordinary circumstances.Overall, the reader is left with a limited understanding of the Pames and Jonaces Indians of the Sierra Gorda and the Indians of Chiquitos both before and during the missions. In contrast, the reader gets bogged down with too much detail in chapter 1, where Jackson mentions the names and founding dates of numerous missions (many of which were neither Sierra Gorda nor Chiquitos missions). More maps and tables organizing this information would have been helpful. The map of the Sierra Gorda did not include many of the places mentioned in the chapter, and the map of the Chiquitos and Mojos missions did not provide any perspective on where these missions are located in South America (the map only shows the departments of Beni and Santa Cruz). Also missing is a map of the numerous Paraguayan missions discussed extensively in chapter 3.Even though Jackson doesn't prove his claims regarding the nonsedentary Indians of the Sierra Gorda and the sedentary Indians of Chiquitos, other mission scholarship does suggest that, all things being equal, nonsedentary peoples were more reticent to join missions and more apt to leave them than were sedentary peoples. Although missionaries' organizational strategies influenced people's willingness to relocate to and remain in missions, Jackson's claim that the religious order determined the strategy is weak; rather, as David J. Weber showed in his 2005 book, in the mid-eighteenth century the Bourbons took the new approach of integrating missions and indigenous peoples into the market economy. In defending his claims that Franciscans interfered more than Jesuits in native societies, Jackson highlights that Franciscans implemented harsh measures of social control, including flogging and incarcerating single females in dormitories. Such measures were not limited to Franciscan missions. Barbara Ganson (in 2003) and Julia Sarreal (in 2014) have shown that Indians in the Jesuit Guaraní missions were flogged for shirking labor duties and other crimes; in addition, women's dormitories existed in these missions. Similarly, Radding has described flogging in the Chiquitos missions.Jackson is one of the few scholars doing comparative work on missions; Frontiers of Evangelization contributes to this endeavor, but much work remains to be done

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