2. Two ‘ways of proceeding’: damage limitation in the Mission to the Chiquitos

Kate Ford

The churches of the Mission to the Chiquitos in the eastern part, the Oriente, of what is now Bolivia are essentially theatrical (fig. 2.1); and on first seeing them ten years ago I wondered why – until I began research.

Figure 2.1. A nocturnal procession during Holy Week arriving at the door of the restored church of La Inmaculada, Concepción. (Source: A.E. Bösl (1988), Una joya en la selva boliviana (Zarautz: Banco Nacional de Bolivia), photograph between pp. 162 and 163).

It then became apparent that their 18th-century Jesuit missionary architects were acutely aware of the lowly nature of the adobe from which the new churches were built and, accustomed from their seminary days to beginning-of-year theatre presentations with spectacular scenic effects, took the obvious steps to disguise this. To the indigenous artisan painters, whose forebears had covered numinous sites all over the region evangelised by the mission with drawings and carved images and who were part of a culture in which body modification was thought to protect the human from the supernatural, this protective inscription would have seemed a sensible precaution.

This chapter begins by looking at marked rock sites in this region, at archaeological finds and at the practice of tattooing and painting the body; and it notes the persistence of belief to this day in the potency of both the image and its site. It then looks briefly at the growth of the Chiquitos mission from its unpromising beginnings and at the construction of the churches, comparing the colours and iconography of rock markings with what was to be painted on the church walls. The similarity of the role of indigenous shaman with that of a mission priest is observed: both individuals, in indigenous eyes, were seen to receive supernatural succour from the consumption of mysterious liquids. It concludes that the churches of the mission to the Chiquitos represent an artistically fortuitous encounter between two equally valid cultural practices and should not be read as a narrative of ‘clever’ Jesuits and ‘child-like’ indigenous people. The 76 years of the mission to the Chiquitos were the blink of an eye in the history of the Oriente, across which a mobile, flexible, pragmatic indigenous society with widespread links in trade, language and beliefs had moved for at least 20,000 years in pre-European times.¹ This society believed itself to be at the mercy of supernatural beings, whether those beings were the deities of the Manasica people or the jichis of Chiquito belief. The former were mocked by the missionary Lucas Caballero in 1706 in an ode written to his patron, Juan José Fernández Campero de Herrera, the first Marqués de Tojo, entitled ‘Sátyra contra los Dioses de los Manasicas’.² It should be remembered that, certainly at the beginning of the mission, the indigenous deities lambasted by Caballero in the ‘Sátyra’ were as real to the missionaries as the ‘Devil’ of Christian theology,³ while the jichis, the shape-shifting spirits of the Chiquitos, subsequently documented by 20th-century ethnologists, were regarded by the Chiquitos as capable of inflicting devastating harm if enraged.

Marked rock sites

The constant and creative flux of the largely nomadic indigenous past – underwritten, like the classical or biblical past well known to the Spanish invaders, by the universal imperatives of ‘man’s need to eat; and the authority of such professionals as the warrior, the healer, and the poet or scribe’, as Brotherston puts it⁴ – was endlessly recalled in song and story and existed iconographically in the markings drawn on or carved into rock. The 2014 register of the Sociedad de Investigación del Arte Rupestre de Bolivia includes 50 sites of rock paintings or carvings in the Oriente, many with evidence of later overdrawing, indicating that the site retained its ideological significance over centuries.⁵ Indeed, German researchers in the 1960s and 1970s were led to remote sites by eager indigenous guides, who could not explain the marks but sensed a link to their ancestors.⁶ Bolivian rock marking tends to be either in places with an amphitheatre-like quality or hidden away and ‘secret’.⁷ In an article published in 2007 on the drawings in the cave of Juan Miserandino near Santiago de Chiquitos, S. Calla Maldonado notes that although the ‘shamanic model’ of interpretation of rock markings is criticised by some as too general, the diverse nature of the marks and the numerous ways in which they can be read make it impossible to discredit.⁸ Given the geographical location of this region between the Amazon and the Chaco, it is probable that any ceremonies involved in the process of rock marking would have incorporated the consumption of hallucinogens, smoked or drunk, by a priestly elite. In 1706 the missionary Lucas Caballero noted the use of a ‘foul-smelling’ black liquid in the process of initiation of a new mapono [shaman]⁹ by the Manasica people whom he was intent on converting and ridiculed the claim by his interpreters that this dark liquid enabled the mapono to ‘fly’,¹⁰ as, of course, a psychotropic drug would have done (‘fly’ retaining its inverted commas here).

In 1981 the anthropologist Jürgen Riester published a monograph, Arqueología y arte rupestre en el oriente boliviano, as an offshoot of anthropological fieldwork in the 1960s and 1970s.¹¹ The sites Riester investigated – most of them extremely remote and only accessible after several days’ journey on horseback and foot – are in the Serranía de San Simón and at Piso Firme,¹² both in the north of the 18th-century mission’s vast catchment area; in the north-west, he explored a site beside the river San Julián, 20 kilometres from Yotaú. In the east, his study covered the area around Roboré, Santiago and Yororobá;¹³ he also visited Piedra Marcada, south of Concepción.

Figure 2.2. Part of a rhomboidal grid marked in reddish pigment on a rock face in the Serranía de Santiago. (Source: J. Riester, Arqueología y arte rupestre en el oriente boliviano (Cochabamba and La Paz: Los Amigos del Libro, 1981), p. 176).

In his survey of the area around Roboré, Riester found rock drawings of ‘single, double and triple wavy lines transformed into a great variety of zigzags’ and ‘motifs in the form of a grid and of rhomboids that partly cover an area 5m x 2.50m’¹⁴ (fig. 2.2) and a variety of what he interpreted as zoomorphic and anthropomorphic drawings, together with circular motifs, comb-like short vertical lines linked horizontally in a row and smaller lozenge grids made with red ochre pigment.¹⁵

Four hundred kilometres to the west, drawings in the River Mizque area documented by Roy Querejazu Lewis in 2001 show a startling similarity of motifs, perhaps indicating a common sacred sensibility across the pre-Spanish Oriente, not just in the practice of marking rock but also in the character of the marks.¹⁶ In the course of his research, Querejazu Lewis discovered that certain sites retained associative significance: on his second visit to Lakatambo during a period of drought in the late 1980s he found offerings of coca leaves and pebbles in small man-made dimples in the rock which had not been there on his first visit.¹⁷ Calla Maldonado notes that a folk tale current in 2004 around Roboré described brujos, witches, meeting in the cave of Juan Miserandino, where there were two walls of rock drawings.¹⁸ The meaning of the marks might have been lost but their presence continued and continues to lend significance to particular sites.

Their meaning might not have been entirely lost, however: a modern example indicates continuity of belief allied to the mark rather than the site. At a site between Santiago de Chiquitos and Roboré, Riester described his elderly Chiquitano¹⁹ guide’s analysis of one drawing: ‘It seems important here to give the interpretation of an indígena. Pedro Masiaré’s point of view is of limited value but it is founded in a religious world closer to that of the authors of the rock drawings than an anthropologist’s is’.²⁰ The image that most affected Pedro Masiaré was one of a lozenge grid in which he saw Hichi-tuúrsch, the water jichi of Chiquito/Chiquitano belief, in the form of a serpent. This drawing has some lozenge shapes filled in with a smaller lozenge, what might or might not be figures with linked arms and a horizontal motif made of much smaller linked diamond shapes (fig. 2.3). ²¹ Hichi-tuúrsch was ‘Ysituu’, the water spirit of the Manasicas, documented by Caballero in his Relación of 1706.²² If Masiaré’s exegesis did indeed explain the drawing, belief in Hichi-tuúrsch would appear to date from considerably further back in history than the 18th century when Caballero noted it, as well as continuing in the modern day.

Figure 2.3. Rock drawing given an ancient interpretation by a 20th-century Chiquitano. (Source: J. Riester, Arqueología y arte rupestre en el oriente boliviano (Cochabamba and La Paz: Los Amigos del Libro, 1981), p. 177).

Archaeological finds

Riester also carried out small-scale archaeological digs in the 1960s in both the north and south of the territory which became the mission’s hunting ground for new members from the 1690s to the expulsion of the Jesuits from South America in 1767. In the far north of the area, at Piso Firme at the junction of the rivers Paraguá and Iténez, and at El Abasto, he found undecorated urns containing fragments of bone with lids in the shape of a bowl,²³ the size of the urns – between 32cm and 65cm tall and between 40cm and 95cm in diameter – indicating that what they were made to contain was just the bones or ashes of the dead rather than an entire body. Cremation was still carried out in the 18th century in this region. In his Relación historial of 1726 the missionary Juan Patricio Fernández recorded a ritual surrounding the burning of a body and the putting of ashes into a clay urn by an unnamed, non-evangelised people in the north-west of the Mission area, a sight, he wrote, that so terrified the earlier missionary Lucas Caballero’s indigenous escort on an evangelising expedition in the early 1700s that the party fled: ‘When night fell the body was carried to the centre of the plaza and after the deceased’s friends and relations had embraced the body for the last time it was placed on a pyre. The fire was lit and the corpse was reduced to ash which, with tremendous ceremony and weeping, was gathered and put into a clay urn’.²⁴ Riester’s 20th-century finds were buried between 4cm and 90cm deep and protected by a similar fear on the part of the inhabitants of the area: if an urn was discovered when sinking the uprights for a new house in the 20th century, it was left in place and the house was re-sited.²⁵

Inside the urns and nearby, Riester found (as well as fragments of bone) small bowls and jars, plain and decorated. Although the urns were plain, the bowls and jars were in many cases incised with stylised depictions of what seems to be a face, or two faces, one each side,²⁶ enclosed by bent arms, hands resting on a putative belly. The faces’ mouths are rectangular with stepped zigzag lines radiating from each of the four corners and some pieces show lines which could be tattooed or painted marks on the cheeks.²⁷ The designs are set into a band encircling the outside of the bowl or jar with the patterning fitting into a space delineated by bands of closely parallel lines or alternating dots which make a zigzag pattern. The patterned areas and the faces they frame have equal importance in the design and both are given space to breathe. They give the impression of a maker sufficiently confident with technology and imagery to change and adapt the model. The patterns on the decorative bands vary: rhomboids in a mesh pattern;²⁸ curlicues;²⁹ and upright and slanting variants of the Greek-key pattern (fig. 2.4). ³⁰ The design is incised into the clay, mostly with a solid line, sometimes dotted; sometimes the grooves have been emphasised with white earth or chalk. ³¹

Figure 2.4. Schematic drawings of incised decoration on three bowls disinterred at Campo Grande (top), El Abasto (middle) and Puerto Rico (bottom). ( Source: J. Riester, Arqueología y arte rupestre en el oriente boliviano (Cochabamba and La Paz: Los Amigos del Libro, 1981), pp. 73 (Campo Grande), 50 (El Abasto), 91 (Puerto Rico)).

During anthropological fieldwork in the same period with the now almost extinct Guarasug’wé people in Campo Grande in the north of the province of Velasco, Riester came across a modern bowl on top of a ten-year-old grave with a roughly incised face-on-decorated-band design similar to his nearby Piso Firme finds and was told by an old Guarasug’wé woman: ‘This piece of pottery was to hold food for the dead. We do the face like that because that’s the way our ancestors did. Perhaps it’s Yanaramai [the supreme being of Guarasug’wé belief ] you see on the bowl’.³² While Riester’s Chiquitano guide near Roboré reacted fearfully to what he read as an image of Hichi-tuúrsch, the 20th-century Guarasug’wé maintained a tradition of engraving faces on funerary vessels while acknowledging they might not understand what it meant (that tantalising ‘Perhaps’ …). Both reports suggest that the image, old or new, understood or not, and however clumsily executed, retained iconographic potency, possibly allied to its site and the material on which it was crafted.

Body marking

Rock and clay were not the only surfaces on which identity was inscribed in the Oriente. As Jesuit chroniclers recorded, before the arrival of missionaries tattooing and body painting were widely practised, not just among the peoples in the mission area but also among those to the north, south, east and west of it. Several of the vessels Riester disinterred in the 1960s were engraved with a ‘face’ with what could be lines painted or tattooed on the cheeks (Fig. 2.4 shows schematic drawings of three of these).³³ In the pre-Mission period altering the appearance of the body in this area would have identified it with a societal group and have been thought to make it more powerful and lift it into a zone of contact with the supernatural. The modified body was protected against malignant spirits as well as possessing some of their power through the combination of blood-letting, the pigments, the media – spittle, ash and charcoal – used to mix them or to fix the design and the designs themselves.³⁴ The Chiquitos mission priest Julian Knogler was later to describe the modifications made to the bodies of indigenous peoples in his Relato,³⁵ stating that they were evidence of the ‘strange nature’ of people of a ‘lower level of civilisation’.³⁶ They were, rather, evidence of the cautious nature of these people, who had, over the course of time, evolved strategies they believed capable of thwarting supernatural caprice.

Figure 2.5. European engraving of Xaraye people in the 16th century. (Source: U. Schmidel, Viaje al Río de la Plata 1534–1554 (Buenos Aires: Cabaut, 1903 [1567]) and facsimile at http://www.cervantesvirtual.com, Chapter XXXVI [no pag.]).

The only contemporaneous pictorial record of body painting practice in this area following the arrival of the Spanish is an engraving illustrating the Bavarian mercenary Ulrich Schmidl’s record of his soldiering in the region in the 16th century. This was not drawn from life by Schmidl but made later by a European artist who gave the two main protagonists a distinctly Teutonic look. It shows extensively painted or tattooed figures in a Xaraye settlement on the upper River Paraguay apparently parleying with European soldiers (fig. 2.5).³⁷

Written accounts of the appearance of ethnic Chiquitos occur in an addendum to the 1689–99 Carta Anua of the province of Paraguay³⁸ and a little later in the Jesuit Francisco Burgés’s 1703 Memorial.³⁹ Burgés’s words were elaborated on by the aforementioned Fernández in his Relación historial 20 years later.⁴⁰ Both chroniclers refer to lip and ear piercings but do not mention painting or tattooing. Fifty years later, after the expulsion of the Jesuits, Knogler, however, left another account:

‘Around here’ was around the mission of Santa Ana de Velasco in the north-east of the Chiquitos mission area, which Knogler founded in 1755 and many of whose inhabitants were ethnically Guaycurú while nominally Chiquito (all members of the Mission were given the identity Chiquito by the Jesuits regardless of their natal ethnicity). The Jesuit missionary-naturalist José Sánchez Labrador, who served among the Guaycurú in a different Mission, left a full description of them in his post-expulsion El Paraguay Católico, written in the 1770s. He notes that women were both painted and, from the age of puberty, tattooed – lower-class women with an organ-pipe-like design over the forehead (top image in fig. 2.4) and sometimes from the bottom lip to the chin – while the arms of upper-class women were tattooed from shoulder to wrist with ‘squares and triangles’. Fish bones were used to prick the design, which was fixed with ash or plant ink. ‘Fortitude during this strange procedure was a sign of bravery’, he records.⁴² He describes lines drawn over the whole body among Guaycurú men and ‘drawings, grid- and lattice-patterns principally on the face’. In earlier times, he notes, men’s bodies had been stencilled with ‘stars’ and ‘suns’ over previous painting in ‘colours and black’.⁴³ These ‘stars’ and ‘suns’, like Knogler’s ‘flower’, ‘bird’ and ‘animal’, are a European interpretation of motifs which would have carried a different meaning to those on whose skin they were marked.

Figure 2.6. Drawing of a painted or tattooed Caduveo (Kadiwéu) woman by Guido Boggiani in 1892 (right); and a drawing on paper made by a Caduveo (Kadiwéu) woman in the 1930s for Claude Lévi-Strauss (left). (Source: C. Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, translated by J. and D. Weightman (London: Jonathan Cape, 1973 [1955]), photograph between pp. 224 and 225).

The missionised Guaycurú ‘Chiquitos’ were the forebears of the Caduveo [modern spelling: Kadiwéu] on the east side of the upper River Paraguay whose body-marking practice was documented by Claude Lévi-Strauss in the 1930s, when tattooing had been replaced by painting. He noted that old women equipped with a bamboo spatula dipped in the ‘juice of the genipapo’⁴⁴ improvised freehand scrolls and arabesques, spirals, Ss, crosses and Greek-key patterns on the faces of young women, which were halved and sometimes quartered by vertical and horizontal lines.⁴⁵ To avoid the expense of 1930s photography, Lévi-Strauss asked the painters to draw on sheets of paper the designs they would normally put on a face, the success of this exercise indicating to him that the marks were not dependent on ‘the natural contours of the human face’⁴⁶ (fig. 2.6, right).

Far to the south of the mission to the Chiquitos Martín Dobrizhoeffer, in the Jesuit mission to the Abipones in the (now Argentinian) southern Chaco in the mid 18th century, recorded elaborate tattooing practice among the Abipones:

To the south-east of the mission’s catchment area were the people now known as the Ayoréode, the Zamucos of the 18th century, condemned in the Anuas for their resistance to evangelisation, but persisting until the 20th century in marking the body with soot and with pigment from a red rock called kuredé, scraping the stone with another to grind off grit, which was moistened with saliva.⁴⁸

Arrival of the Jesuits and foundation of the Mission

By the 1690s the colonised Oriente had become a rich hunting ground for both Portuguese and Spanish slavers. Its inhabitants were captured and sold to Brazilian sugar plantation owners or local Spanish encomenderos, or were sent to certain death in Potosí. In 1690 Campero de Herrera, patron of the missionary Lucas Caballero, founded a Jesuit college in Tarija to develop a mission to the Chiriguanos to the north of Tarija, a project which was strategically important as the Chiriguano people were resisting the authority of the viceroy in Lima. Campero petitioned successfully for the college to be under the jurisdiction of the Jesuit province of Paraguay rather than that of the province of Peru as attempts to settle the Chiriguanos had begun already from the former’s college in Córdoba. The Jesuit priest José de Arce was sent north-east from the newly founded college in 1691 with orders to find a route to the River Paraguay to facilitate the journey from Buenos Aires, where ships from Cádiz carrying new missionaries docked, through Asunción to Santa Cruz de la Sierra and Charcas. However, on his journey, moved by the sight of a group of Chiquito slaves in Santa Cruz, Arce ignored instructions and instead, on the last day of December 1691, founded the mission of San Francisco Xavier de los Piñocas (later San Javier) to the north-east of Santa Cruz.

Over the next 69 years 11 more mission pueblos were established, some abandoned after a couple of years and others merged into the nine pueblos extant at the time of the expulsion in 1767.⁴⁹ The province of Peru, which had controlled the three Jesuits sent to Santa Cruz in 1585 to minister to the Spanish and Criollo population and had administered the mission to the Moxos since 1682, claimed that a shortage of missionaries prevented it from taking on responsibility for staffing another mission. Though acknowledged as being part of the Jesuit province of Paraguay in letters from the Jesuit general in Rome, Michele Angelo Tamburini,⁵⁰ the mission to the Chiquitos was seen as a means to an end, that is, as a base for investigating the possibility of a river route from Buenos Aires to Charcas – a goal which was not to be achieved until six months before the expulsion of the Jesuits from South America in 1767. It continued to be regarded as less important than the hoped-for mission to the Chiriguanos, as well as being perceived as a kind of poor relation to the earlier, richer mission to the Guaraní to the south, the flagship of the Paraguay missions.

Jesuit prejudice against the Order’s missionary wing

‘Ministry to the Indians requires little study’, Diego Álvarez de Paz, the Jesuit rector of Cuzco, had written in 1601, ‘because it is not necessary to tell them about subtle concepts or preach Holy Scripture’.⁵¹ As A. Maldavsky explains, in the 17th century the Jesuit Order in the province of Peru was prejudiced against its missionary wing, a powerful lobby within the Order claiming that ministry to the Spanish was of far greater importance than ‘hear[ing] the confessions of four little Indians’.⁵² The Treaty of Utrecht (1715) allowed the recruitment of keen young seminarians to the mission to the Chiquitos from the Jesuit provinces of Austria, Bohemia and the Upper and Lower Rhine,⁵³ which were unaffected by the discrimination between Spanish, Creole and Mestizo Jesuits which had riven the province of Peru a century earlier. However, what still prevailed was what V. Fraser calls the ‘hierarchy’ of building materials, especially in the case of a building carrying the cultural weight of a church. Marble was regarded as being at the top of a list of ideal building materials and mud and straw were at the bottom.⁵⁴ Protecting the souls of the Chiquitos from the devil – and their persons from Spanish and Portuguese slavers, which was what, after all, had inspired Arce – needed to be done in a way which protected this branch of the Order from the intellectual and architectural snobbery of its more urbane members and reinforced its position in the province of Paraguay. How better could this be done than by building dazzling churches?

The construction of the churches which remain today started 50 years after the mission’s foundation, once the pueblos were secure from indigenous attacks. The Swiss missionary Martin Schmid, who served in the mission from 1730 to 1767, began the construction of his first church in San Rafael in 1745, together with housing for the priests and the indigenous population of the pueblo. Both stone for building and money were in short supply in the second half of the 18th century; what there was, by then, was plenty of manpower. In addition, among the pre-evangelisation Chiquitos there had existed a practice called metórr, whereby a community would rally round to construct a large building, the ‘men’s house’ in a settlement, which was used for the segregation of men and teenage boys and for hospitality. The churches were based on this roof-on-posts local structure, with the addition of walls made of adobe due to the lack of stone; they were roofed at first with pasto (dry grass) and later with tiles. Housing – long houses to accommodate ten families – was built in the same way.

Decoration as protection

Fear of criticism by the Order, as much as the desire to beautify the church, led Schmid and his colleagues to attempt to disguise the humble nature of adobe and make the building look as much like a European baroque stone-built church as possible. Architectural features like pilasters and door and window surrounds were moulded and painted, or sometimes just painted on illusionistically, and tiny flakes of mica found in the area around San Rafael, San Miguel and Santa Ana were laid on the interior walls and some furnishings instead of silver or gold leaf. However, as we have seen, the Jesuits were not alone in thinking that adornment of a significant site, an important object or a vulnerable entity offered status and protection. Even in the 20th century the church was believed to have a jichi, a spirit, lurking behind it, as Fischermann and Quiroaga and Balza Alarcón argue.⁵⁵ There is little doubt that by marking the walls of these churches with the ur-patterns of curlicues and lozenges, which recall pre-evangelisation rock drawings and petroglyphs and the incised designs on clay vessels subsequently excavated in the region, the 18th-century members of the missions with a tradition of body marking and modification to the same ends hoped to provide the vulnerable ‘body’ that was the church building with protection from supernatural damage while continuing their forebears’ practice of marking numinous places.

Since UNESCO’s recognition of the Chiquitos mission as a World Heritage Site in 1990, the story of the mission has been about wise, kindly Europeans and ‘artistic’ Chiquitos. This ignores the fact that the Chiquitos had no concept of ‘art’. The notion of mark-making on a significant object or site being purely decorative would have been baffling to them. Aesthetics had nothing to do with it:⁵⁶ it was a matter of survival – and their part in the process of ‘disguising’ the churches was fundamental. The building of the churches of Schmid and his colleagues was a collective endeavour. There were rarely more than two priests in a mission and one of them was frequently away on expeditions: searching for the elusive Asunción/Chiquitos/Charcas route which Arce had been charged with forging in 1691; searching for indigenous peoples to evangelise; or chasing groups of them who had decided to leave the mission. In the Anua of 1714–20 it is recorded that ‘while one group of Fathers runs the temporal and spiritual administration of these pueblos, others are engaged on the apostolic exploration of the vast heathen territory outside it’.⁵⁷ Undoubtedly Schmid, the Bohemian Juan José Messner, the Spanish Bartolomé de Mora and whoever designed the other churches rolled up their sleeves, but the bulk of the work of construction and decoration would have been carried out by indigenous members of the mission.

The conservator at the mission to the Chiquitos, María José Diez Gálvez, writes: ‘The Chiquitano painters not only decorated the moveable pieces in the churches but also the churches themselves’.⁵⁸ Their work would undoubtedly have been supervised, perhaps to prevent the risk of the painter ‘falling into innocent heterodoxy’, as J. Plá notes in relation to indigenous engravers in the Guaraní missions.⁵⁹ This was, however, in this author’s view never a risk in the Chiquitos mission. A polarised Chiquito cultural history of spirits/humans and a social history of patron/peon has led, as V. Silva points out, to the Other, in the eyes of the modern Chiquitanos she investigates, being an entity which needs to be turned from predator into provider by means of obedience and appeasement.⁶⁰ Given a guide sketch drawn directly on the wall by, say, Schmid, or shown an engraving of a cartouche around the depiction of a saint in a book from the priest’s library, one must assume the craftsmen would have copied it exactly to the best of their ability.⁶¹ Knogler remarks that ‘those who are good at writing copy books we need in a hurry, like catechisms, missals, calendars and pieces of music’.⁶² ‘[T]hose who [were] good at writing’ were probably those entrusted with the job of painting the walls – and they would, again, have ‘cop[ied]’, but the physical and sensory act of painting on a sacred surface was theirs, with all the cultural connotations it carried. As P. Connerton writes, ‘[t]he world of the percipient, defined in terms of temporal experience, is an organized body of expectations based on recollection’.⁶³ The artisans would, of course, have been male: the pre-evangelisation women who made decorated clay vessels⁶⁴ and pricked freehand designs on the faces of pubertal girls were relegated to the hearth by the missionaries.

No plans of the original Chiquitos churches have been found, nor any sketches of how they were adorned. This reflects what may have been embarrassment at the time about the humble materials involved and that the construction resembled a ‘native’ building. Martin Schmid was not praised as an architect/builder in the Cartas Anuas, only as a musician, which was the reason he was sent there. The fact that the churches could not be built of stone or even brick, let alone marble, was glossed over by Schmid in his letters to his family at the time (intended for a sympathetic audience, though no doubt they would have been widely circulated once they reached Switzerland), which note the scene-painting/ trompe l’œil techniques used to overcome this failing.⁶⁵ However, it became apparent in Knogler’s Relato, written post-expulsion, that it was definitely considered a failing: ‘We do what we can to make [the churches] beautiful and respectable’, Knogler writes, making the best of what was evidently considered a bad job.⁶⁶ The 1762 Anua local, which was written for a more general readership than Schmid’s letters, mentions ‘fine, well-decorated churches’⁶⁷ but does not mention they were built of adobe; neither does Esteban Palozzi’s Informe (1763) to the governor of Santa Cruz, though he writes of ‘very good churches, quite well adorned’⁶⁸ (Palozzi was then the superior of the mission).

It is arguable that no plan was drawn up because the builders would have found difficulty in understanding it. However, in the mid 18th century, at a time when all educated people were taught to draw, why did Schmid, with his four churches, and those who built churches subsequently during the life of the mission, not, as far as is known, leave a visual record of them – like a little sketch, perhaps, in a letter? A clue lies in an observation by Sánchez Labrador: ‘While [the Guaycurú’s] female captives collect wood and water . . . and their male captives hunt and fish, the masters are just sitting there drawing lines on their bodies. In this way they spend entire days in total disregard of what needs to be done, amusing themselves with frivolous things while their families suffer’.⁶⁹ Sánchez Labrador’s judgmental tone is directed as much at the ‘idle’ Guaycurú as it is at recreational sketching since he also drew, but his work was a record of flora and fauna. It is notable that Sánchez and Florian Paucke (in the mission to the Mocobies in the western Chaco) are the only Jesuit missionaries to this huge region to have left any pictorial record on paper of their time there; and Sánchez’s work was not published until about 1770, after the expulsion, while Paucke’s frequently comic scenes of mission life did not see the light of day until the 20th century. It is possible that fear of condemnation by Church or political authorities for using humble materials during the period of construction of the mission churches was felt so strongly by Chiquitos mission priests that it was thought safer to commit nothing other than edifying words to paper.

For the Chiquito church painters, however, ‘drawing lines on their bodies’ was – culturally and just about within living memory of the painters – very far from a waste of time. Sánchez remarks amusedly on how the Guaycurú expressed concern to him that the Jesuits did not paint their own bodies, thereby laying themselves open to spirit attack.⁷⁰ Body painting was frowned upon in the mission to the Chiquitos, though tolerated outside the church building.⁷¹ What can be seen outside and inside the church building is a transmission of the idea of status and protection which transcended cultural differences, or, rather, happened to say the same thing in two mutually incomprehensible languages. Lévi-Strauss’s experiments with face-painters and paper in the 1930s showed him that the surface on which considered marks were made did not affect the quality of the mark-making. Extrapolating his conclusion to the mission to the Chiquitos 200 years earlier and 600 kms to the north-west may seem over-imaginative, but I have already drawn parallels between rock markings 400 kms apart and noted the similarity between Dobrizhoeffer’s observations on Abipone tattooing practice in the southern Chaco and those of Sánchez Labrador on the eastern side of the upper River Paraguay, 1,000 kms apart. Before the foundation of the mission reductions this was a highly mobile society. Once having thrown in their lot with the Jesuits, the peoples who inhabited the pueblos of the mission to the Chiquitos would surely not have been perplexed by the use of meaningful marks on a flat, white-washed church wall instead of on the contours of the body, an uneven rockface or a curved bowl. Both Fraser and Wake suggest that in an early colonial Mexican context the motifs on church walls would have held a different meaning for the craftsmen who carried out the work from the one they held for the priest who ordered them to be made.⁷² The baroque scrolls and geometrics were intended by Schmid and his colleagues to disguise an essentially local style of building and foliate Renaissance adornment was no doubt regarded by them as decorative (fig. 2.7), but in the context of the Chiquitos mission the marks were probably seen by both parties to perform the same function, that of protection.

Colour and iconography

It is easy to compare the colours on the church walls with the similar colours of rock drawing; pigment for the restoration of the churches in the 1970s (and the original work) came from four sites between San Ignacio and Santiago.⁷³ The majority of the conserved original motifs on the church walls, as well as the new and restored ones, are in light and dark red, dark grey and yellow-orange, as are the drawings on rock. Comparing the iconography is more challenging. It is difficult for a non-expert to look beyond what appears to be a confusing mass of isolated images on rock randomly placed with no apparent bearing on one another or the site. If, as suggested, these markings were made under the influence of a hallucinogenic drug, their haphazard nature is understandable. It is equally difficult to decipher drawings or petroglyphs on cattle-trodden or overgrown lajas [flat rocks]. However, two frequently occurring motifs appear in the churches. One is a circle with radiating spokes. Riester found one on a laja at Yororobá near Santiago. ‘Here we have a circle 105cm in diameter facing east with lines radiating from the centre’, he writes, continuing, ‘without doubt we are dealing with a solar symbol’.⁷⁴ Perhaps that is so, in which case the thinking behind the painting of the ceiling of the sacristy at San Miguel by the professional artist living illicitly in the mission, Antonio Rojas, with a depiction of a red sunburst bordered with grey clouds with cherubim peeping out would fit with indigenous as well as European graphic practice, as would the florid sunburst-framed windows in the façades of San Rafael, San Javier and Concepción (and the painting of a shining sun, only visible from the choir loft, above the inside of San Javier’s façade window). However, indigenous people did not ‘do’ art for art’s sake – and, as noted above, there is the strong probability that the ‘stars’ tattooed on the faces chronicled by Knogler and the ‘stars’ and ‘suns’ stencilled onto the Guaycurúes recorded by Sánchez Labrador were only described as such because that is what they looked like to a European. The radial rock drawing looks like a sun because that is how Europeans learn to draw the sun as infants. However, it is not what the sun looks like: as we squint at the sun it looks like a ball. On rock, radial lines might have indicated going or coming; many of the inhabitants of this region were nomadic or seasonally nomadic. Alternatively, the image might have some connection with the way hammocks were slung in a Chiquito house and, consequently, represent a period of stasis after seasonal wandering or a long hunting expedition: ‘In their houses’, Knogler writes, ‘they sink a post deep into the earth in the middle of the house and all tie one end of their hammocks to it; when the other end is fastened to the wall the whole forms the shape of a wheel with the hammocks as spokes’.⁷⁵

Figure 2.7. Wall painting behind a crucifix in the sacristy, San Rafael. (Source: P. Querejazu (ed.) (1995), Las misiones jesuíticas de chiquitos (La Paz: Fundación BHN, 1995), p. 114, photograph 237 by Plácido Molina).

Figure 2.8 View of San Miguel showing the lozenge-shaped mouldings on the doors. (Source: P. Querejazu (ed.), Las misiones jesuíticas de chiquitos (La Paz: Fundación BHN, 1995), p. 60, photograph 123 by Plácido Molina).

The other image is a rhomboid shape. Rhomboids, slanting grids and lattices all over Oriente rock sites indicate that repeating geometric motifs may have had cultic meaning at the time they were drawn, the repetition perhaps being as meaningful as the shape. A recurring feature of mission churches are the rhomboidal mouldings on doors (fig. 2.8) and the friezes of lozenge shapes along walkways.

Ekhart Kühne, the architect who worked on the restoration with the then Jesuit Hans Roth – who has been semi-sanctified among modern Chiquitano – noted the use of painted geometric motifs stencilled onto walls in the churches of Martin Schmid, the duplication of motifs articulating the purpose of different spaces within the building while maintaining artistic unity.⁷⁶ Again, the repetition was as meaningful as the shape.

Performing the numinous – sacraments, souls and shamans

Siting a mission church called for practical considerations to be taken into account – flat land, the proximity of suitable trees to be felled, orientation (though this was flexible and may have had more to do with indigenous than missionary sensibilities) – and the criteria for the site of a mission pueblo were dictated by Jesuit writ. However, once erected, painted and consecrated, well into the lifespan of the mission, I suggest the actual physical building of a church in the mission to the Chiquitos represented the sacred to members of each pueblo in the same way that a marked rock site did. A heightened sense of reality, induced by emotion rather than drugs, was there to be felt by priest and congregation – and it would perhaps not have escaped the attention of a mission priest’s acolytes that he partook of a ‘dark liquid’ as part of the rite, as the maponos had in the past. In his Relación historial Fernández gives a lurid account of the night-time processions of the Thursday of Holy Week:

Missionary hyperbole in letters and in the Anuas impressed a European readership. In a letter to a fellow Jesuit dated 10 October 1744 Martin Schmid wrote dramatically: ‘The result of our efforts to govern these souls is astonishing: the mats that cover the floor of the church are soaked with the tears of the penitents and the whole church resounds with their sighs. The homily is interrupted several times by the strenuous bouts of self-flagellation our listeners inflict upon themselves’.⁷⁸ Unsurprisingly, given the simplified version of Catholicism vouchsafed to them, the ritual surrounding the sacraments appears to have been at least as important to mission members as the divine grace the latter might bestow. The Eucharist was received between one and four times each year as part of a rigidly choreographed mass policed by indigenous marshals who escorted the barefoot, white-clad communicants to the altar rail.⁷⁹ The journey to an invalid made by a priest with the viaticum was especially revered. The unexpected recovery of some of those who received the sacrament could only have added to its reputation as a magical remedy for illness in indigenous eyes. This was an inversion of the experience of early missionaries, who found that, as they were only able to baptise an unshriven adult on the point of death, this sacrament was regarded as so dangerous that infants would be hidden away from an evangelising party to protect them from the same fate. So popular was the viaticum, however, that it was recorded in the Anua covering the period from 1735 to 1742 that priests had learnt to check whether a visit to a sick mission member was in fact needed before embarking on an unnecessary journey.⁸⁰ An Epígrafe attached to the same Anua, though possibly exaggerated, records a nocturnal journey to an invalid’s house in San José accompanied by ‘all the inhabitants of the pueblo’ along streets lit by 200 candles and strewn with flowers.⁸¹ It is possible to imagine that the group hysteria Schmid describes, if it really was the case, was induced by the size and splendour of the church, but it might have been aided by an atavistic collective memory of liturgical ritual directed by an authoritarian figure in a site with supernatural associations. As Connerton writes, ‘images of the past and recollected knowledge of the past are conveyed and sustained by (more or less) ritual performances’.⁸²

The authoritarian figure of the shaman and his role as go-between were fundamental to the process of engagement with the supernatural undergone by the Manasica people, as Caballero reported in 1706. The role of a Jesuit mission priest was identical. J.W. O’Malley writes of the Order’s use of the word ‘soul’: ‘By “soul” Jesuits meant the whole person. Thus they could help souls in a number of ways, for instance by providing food for the body or learning for the mind … They sought to be mediators of an immediate experience of God that would lead to an inner change of heart or a deepening of religious sensibilities already present’.⁸³ In a passage in his 1706 Relación Caballero describes an encounter between mapono and deity: ‘[S]peaking to the illustrious presence, the shamans and witch-doctors say to him “You are welcome, Father Tata” – that is what they call him’. He then adds: ‘and they also used to call me by the same name’.⁸⁴ Caballero lists the various duties of the mapono: ‘the priest, the wizard, the chaplain of the gods, the doctor of law, and the person to whom all the people of the village bring their doubts and problems’.⁸⁵ Thirty-eight years later Schmid, in a letter to his brother dated 17 October 1744, consciously or unconsciously referencing Caballero’s words, refers to mission priests as ‘councillors and judges’ before adding a list of practical skills crucial to the material well-being of ‘souls’:

How could newly reduced indigenous people fed with rudimentary Catholicism and the children and grandchildren later reared on this Catholicism combined with stories of pre-evangelisation life (even if they were dutifully portrayed as the ‘bad old days’ rather than the ‘good old days’) have failed to associate the office of mission priest with that of shaman? If, in the collective memory, sites with supernatural significance were associated with shamans, hallucinogens and drawing, how very natural it must have seemed to mission members that a Jesuit priest-architect empowered by the daily consumption of a ‘dark liquid’ which only he could drink should either pick up a chalk or a paintbrush himself or order others to do so? This being the case, how equally natural it must have seemed that what should be obediently drawn by indigenous craftsmen on the church walls should be the curves and rhomboids which had delineated supernatural experiences undergone by pre-mission shamans?

The Jesuit way – ‘modus noster procedendi’

In 1566 the Society of Jesus had won the consent of Philip II of Spain to send missionaries to the Americas and the first group of seven priests arrived in Lima two years later. By 1591 seven colleges had been founded in Peru with the aim of educating the young, ministering to the Spanish and indigenous populations of the cities in which they had been established and providing a base for relatively local attempts at evangelisation. The Jesuits did not see their function as administering mission pueblos and, indeed, in some circles of the Order, as explained above, the missionary role was regarded as less worthy than that of preaching to the Spanish. However, in 1576 the then viceroy, Francisco de Toledo, had given the Order the task of governing the Dominican-established reduction of Juli in Peru. As latecomers to the challenge of converting indigenous peoples in the Americas and with a methodology of conversion based on the acquisition of indigenous languages initiated by Juan de Atienza, the first Jesuit provincial of Peru, and put into practice at Juli, where priests were encouraged to learn Aymara (see chapter 8), the Jesuits saw themselves as different from other orders. ‘Modus noster procedendi’, the Ignatian ‘way of doing things’, distinguished 17th- and 18th-century Jesuit missions from those of other orders, as did the Order’s self-perceived answerability only to the king of Spain, rather than to the secular Church and local political authority. Jesuit missions, therefore, have more in common with each other than they do with missions of other orders. Priests corresponded with priests in other missions, they had sometimes served in other missions, they had read the same books, they inherited the ethos of Juli and they absorbed the edifying, extravagant eulogies of deceased priests, especially those who had died while attempting to evangelise. In letters home and in the Cartas Anuas they praised their charges’ quick acquisition of skills useful in mission life – musicianship, the ability to copy and obedience – and denigrated the shocking practices which the imposition of Catholicism had supposedly made obsolete. Principal among these were cannibalism (for which there is no evidence at all but which could be counted on to appall readers of the Anuas),⁸⁷ polygamy⁸⁸ and drunkenness.⁸⁹ Priests were part of a gentleman-scholar culture to which indigenous people could never be privy.

The quasi-sanctity attributed to individual priests in the early days and after the expulsion, the political imperative, the role of the Jesuit colleges, the simultaneous power and peril of the sacraments as understood by indigenous mission members, the use of a lengua general, the relegation of women to the home and the existence of a body of Jesuit poetry which explains Caballero’s rarely, if ever, referenced ‘Sátyra contra los dioses de los manasicas’: all are mentioned in this book – and all are reflected in the mission to the Chiquitos.

‘Modus illium procedendi’ – the indigenous way

It can look as if there was only one agenda at work in the mission, that of the Jesuit juggernaut. However, once historical, art-historical and ethnological sources are juxtaposed, the churches of the mission to the Chiquitos can be seen to offer visual evidence for a more nuanced story. Before the compilation of a dictionary of the Gorgotoqui language by the Jesuit priest Andrés Ortiz, seconded to Santa Cruz de la Sierra in the 16th century, and the transcription of Chiquito in the 18th century by Mission priests, the spoken languages of the Oriente were unwritten. Marks on rock and clay are difficult for modern eyes to read but they survive as a record that a language of distinction and belief existed and was expressed iconographically in the Oriente. Adorned rock sites can be posited as sacred places, as texts of a supernatural experience and as palimpsests of indigenous identity, due to the over-drawing visible at some sites. After evangelisation, a mission church performed the same function for indigenous mission members. In its architecture, based on an indigenous building, in its cosmetic baroque embellishment employing a fusion of European decorative imagery and indigenous memory, even perhaps in its jutting porch echoing the overhangs which have protected adorned rock from the elements for millennia, a complex cultural multi-layering can be seen. If the Chiquitano of the late 20th century adhered to old beliefs, as modern studies show they did, it is reasonable to assume that, as they were the ones to stencil rhomboids onto the cloister walls of mission church complexes originally, the Chiquitos of the 18th-century mission did so as well. The house of the new God in a mission pueblo, combining the idea of a ‘body’ in need of protection with being a supernatural site to be marked under the auspices of an authority figure, was embellished in a way which involved significant inscription of narrative and identity by means which simultaneously strengthened and defended it. The Jesuits adopted an explicit programme of disguise while the Chiquitos related an implicit narrative of existence and belief: ‘Modus illium procedendi’ – their way of doing things.

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1 D.E. Ibarra Grasso and R. Querejazu Lewis, 30,000 años de prehistoria en Bolivia (La Paz and Cochabamba: Los Amigos del Libro, 1986), p.14.

2 L. Caballero, S.J., Relación de las costumbres y religión de los indios manasicas, edited by M. Serrano y Sanz (Madrid: Librería General de Victoriano Suárez, 1933 [1706]), pp. 38–43.

3 L. Caballero, S.J., ‘Diario de la cuarta misión a los manasicas y paunacas, 1707’, in J. Matienzo et al. (eds.), Chiquitos en las Anuas de la Compañía de Jesús (1691–1767) (La Paz: Instituto Latinoamericano de Misionología de la Universidad Católica Boliviana, 2011), pp. 46–83 (p. 64).

4 G. Brotherston, Image of the New World: The American Continent Portrayed in Native Texts (London: Thames and Hudson, 1979), p. 18.

5 Matthias Strecker of the Sociedad de Investigación del Arte Rupestre de Bolivia (SIARB) defines a sacred site as one where it can be assumed rites were performed by specialists (conversation 1 Feb. 2011).

6 The rupestre expert Karl Kaifler recalled his period in San José de Chiquitos in the 1970s when, once his interest in rock markings became known among Chiquitanos and Ayoréodes, he was told by them of more and more sites. His escorts to each site were pleased the sites were there; they told him that they did not understand the marks but that they were ‘to do with their ancestors’ (conversation with Karl Kaifler, 7 March 2014); Riester writes: ‘While I was in Santiago I learnt from an old Chiquitano man that there were rock drawings to the southwest. Thanks to the help of this man I was able to visit this site’ (J. Riester, Arqueología y arte rupestre en el oriente boliviano (Cochabamba and La Paz: Los Amigos del Libro, 1981), p. 167).

7 Conversation with Matthias Strecker of SIARB, 1 Feb. 2011.

8 S. Calla Maldonado, ‘Documentación de las pinturas de la Cueva de Juan Miserandino, Reserva Municipal del Valle de Tucuvaca, Depto. de Santa Cruz’, Boletín, 21 (2007): 17–37 (23).

9 The use of the word ‘shaman’ is controversial. It is used here in the sense of a figure from a professional elite charged with mediating encounters with the supernatural.

10 Caballero, Relación, pp. 26, 29–30.

11 The book’s psychedelic cover font and publication in a series called ‘Bolivia mágica’ have not stopped it from being quoted in subsequent, more specialised work, an indication of its pioneering importance.

12 Piso Firme was investigated by SIARB in 1999.

13 SIARB investigations in these areas took place from 1989 to 1993.

14 Riester, Arqueología, p. 175.

15 Riester, Arqueología, pp. 163–203.

16 R. Querejazu Lewis, El Arte Rupestre de la Cuenca del Rio Mizque (Cochabamba: Sociedad de Investigación del Arte Rupestre Boliviano, 2001).

17 Querejazu Lewis, El Arte Rupestre, pp. 97–8.

18 Calla Maldonado, ‘Cueva’, 19.

19 Chiquitanos is the modern name of the Chiquitos, in use since the mid 20th century.

20 Riester, Arqueología, p. 184.

21 Riester, Arqueología, p. 183, drawing 48 on p. 178.

22 Caballero, Relación, pp. 27–8. Transcription of the Chiquito language (now known as Besɨro) varies according to whether the author was Spanish- or German-speaking.

23 Riester, Arqueología, p. 13.

24 J.P. Fernández S.J., Relación historial de las misiones de indios chiquitos que en el Paraguay tienen los padres de la Compañía de Jesús, ed. and intro. by D.J. Santamaría (San Salvador de Jujuy: CEIC, Facultad de Humanidades y Ciencias Sociales, Universidad Nacional de Jujuy, 1994 [1726]), p. 160.

25 Riester, Arqueología, p. 32.

26 Riester, Arqueología, p. 43 (Piso Firme).

27 Riester, Arqueología, p. 73 (Campo Grande), pp. 50–51 (El Abasto), p. 60 (10 de Abril).

28 Riester, Arqueología, p. 73 (Campo Grande, vertical rhomboid mesh); p. 89 (Puerto Rico, horizontal rhomboid mesh).

29 Riester, Arqueología, p. 75 (Campo Grande); p. 50 (El Abasto).

30 Riester, Arqueología, p. 37 (Piso Firme, bowl); p. 91 (Puerto Rico, bowl); p. 41 (Piso Firme, bipod vessel).

31 Riester, Arqueología, pp. 54–5 (El Abasto); p. 91 (Puerto Rico).

32 Riester, Arqueología, p. 80.

33 Riester, Arqueología, p. 49.

34 R. Karsten, Civilisation of the South American Indians with Special Reference to Magic and Religion (London: Dawsons, 1968 [1926]), pp. 188–9.

35 J. Knogler, S.J., Relato sobre el país y la nación de los chiquitos en las Indias occidentales o América del sud y las misiones en su territorio, redactado para un amigo [1767–72], in W. Hoffmann, Las misiones jesuíticas entre los chiquitanos (Buenos Aires: Fundación para la Educación, la Ciencia y la Cultura, 1979), pp. 121–85.

36 Knogler, Relato, pp. 140–41.

37 U. Schmidl, Viaje al río de la Plata 1534–1554, trans. by S. Lafone Quevedo (Buenos Aires: Cabaut, 1903 [1567]) and facsimile at: http://www.cervantesvirtual.com, Ch XXXVI (no pag.).

38 J. Matienzo, R. Tomichá, I. Combès and C. Page (eds.) (2011) Chiquitos en las Anuas de la Compañía de Jesús (1691–1767) (La Paz: Instituto de Misionología, Universidad Católica Boliviana), p. 21.

39 F. Burgés, S.J., Memorial al rey nuestro señor en su real, y supremo consejo de las Indias sobre las noticias de las misiones de los indios llamados chiquitos [1703], in R. Tomichá Charupá O.F.M. Conv (ed.), Francisco Burgés y las Misiones de Chiquitos: El Memorial de 1703 y documentos complementarios (Cochabamba: Editorial Verbo Divino, 2008), p. 91.

40 Fernández, Relación historial, p. 37.

41 Knogler, Relato, p. 140.

42 J. Sánchez Labrador, S.J., El Paraguay Católico, vol. 1 (Buenos Aires: Coni Hermanos, 1910 [c.1770]), pp. 285–6.

43 Sánchez Labrador, Paraguay, p. 285.

44 C. Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, trans. by J. and D. Weightman (London: Jonathan Cape, 1973 [1955]), p. 187. The ink was made from the fruit of Genipa americana, family Rubiaceae.

45 Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, pp. 193–5.

46 Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, p. 185.

47 M. Dobrizhoffer, S.J., An Account of the Abipones: An Equestrian People of Paraguay, trans. by S. Coleridge, vol. 2 (London: John Murray, 1822), pp. 19–20.

48 M. Bórmida and M. Califano, ‘Los Ayoreo del Chaco Boreal’, in J. Zanardini (ed.), Cultura del Pueblo Ayoreo (Asunción: Centro de Estudios Antropológicos de la Universidad Católica, 2003), pp. 91–3.

49 The foundation of San Javier was followed by that of San Rafael de Velasco in 1695 and San José de Chiquitos in 1697. San Juan Bautista de los Xamarus, which no longer exists, was founded in 1699, as was La Inmaculada Concepción. San Ignacio de los Boococas was founded in 1707 (within two years it had been incorporated into Concepción); San Ignacio de Zamucos in 1719; San Miguel de Velasco in 1722; San Ignacio de Velasco in 1748 after the abandonment of San Ignacio de Zamucos in 1745; Santiago de Chiquitos in 1754; Santa Ana de Velasco in 1755; and Santo Corazón de Jesús de Chiquitos in 1760. Dates vary slightly according to different authors. These dates are taken from G.A.P. Groesbeck, ‘Evanescence and Permanence: Toward an Accurate Understanding of the Legacy of the Jesuit Missions of Chiquitos’ (2012), viewed in 2013 at www.LaGranChiquitania.com.

50 Matienzo et al. (eds.), Anuas, p. 115, n. 157.

51 A. Maldavsky, ‘The problematic acquisition of indigenous languages: practices and contentions in missionary specialization in the Jesuit province of Peru (1568–1640)’, in J.W. O’Malley et al. (eds.), The Jesuits II: Cultures, Sciences and the Arts, 1540–1773 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), pp. 602–15 (p. 607).

52 Maldavsky, ‘Acquisition’, p. 608.

53 P. Caraman, The Lost Paradise: An Account of the Jesuits in Paraguay (1607–1768) (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1975), p. 317.

54 V. Fraser, ‘Hierarchies and roles of materials in building and representation’, in V. Fraser and G. Brotherston (eds.), The Other America: Native Artifacts from the New World (Colchester: University of Essex, 1982), pp. 41–56 (p. 42).

55 B. Fischerman and R.M. Quiroaga, ‘Viviendo en el bosque’, El Deber, 21 Sept. 1996, cultural section, pp. 3–5; R. Balza Alarcón, Tierra, territorio y territorialidad indígena: un estudio antropólogico sobre la evolución en las formas de ocupación del espacio del pueblo indígena chiquitano de la ex reducción jesuita de San José (Santa Cruz: Apoyo para el Campesino-Indígena del Oriente Boliviano, 2001), p. 259.

56 V. Fraser, ‘Ixmiquilpan: from European ornament to Mexican pictograph’, in S. Diez-Ruiz et al. (eds.), Altars and Idols: The Life of the Dead in Mexico (Colchester: University of Essex, 1991), pp. 13–16 (pp. 15–16); E. Wake, Framing the Sacred: The Indian Churches of Early Colonial Mexico (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2010), pp. 102, 177. Both make the point about a parallel agenda in relation to early colonial Mexico.

57 Matienzo et al. (eds.), Anuas, p. 107.

58 M.J. Diez Gálvez, Los bienes muebles de Chiquitos: Fuentes para el conocimiento de una sociedad (Madrid: Agencia Española de Cooperación Internacional, 2006), p. 379.

59 J. Plá, ‘El grabado en las misiones jesuíticas’, Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos, 198 (1966): 577– 92 (12).

60 V.C. Silva, ‘Extracción, dueños y patrones entre los Chiquitanos del Valle del Alto Guaporé, frontera Brasil-Bolivia’, in D. Villar and I. Combès (eds.), Las tierras bajas de Bolivia: miradas históricas y antropológicas (Santa Cruz de la Sierra: El País Srl., 2012), pp. 297–317 (pp. 316– 17).

61 Despite exhaustive research in the mission music archive, not one single piece of music has been found which can categorically be attributed to an indigenous musician. Given the score of a piece of liturgical music to perform, it is difficult to imagine an obedient 18th-century Schmid- or Messner-trained Chiquito musician choosing to improvise a descant or an instrumental part.

62 Knogler, Relato, p. 156.

63 P. Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 6.

64 In the Relación Caballero notes fired clay vessels made by Manasica women ringing like metal to the touch (Caballero Relación, p. 17).

65 Hoffmann, W., Vida y obra del P. Martin Schmid SJ (1694–1772) (Buenos Aires: Fundación para la Educación, la Ciencia y la Cultura, 1981), p. 149. This contains Schmid’s letters.

66 Knogler, Relato, p. 171.

67 Matienzo et al. (eds.), Anuas, p. 379.

68 Matienzo et al. (eds.), Anuas, p. 407.

69 Sánchez Labrador, Paraguay, p. 286.

70 Sánchez Labrador, Paraguay, p. 287.

71 Participants in a ‘caza espiritual’ painted their faces red for the expedition (Diez Gálvez, Los buenes muebles, p. 382, n. 9). Knogler reports that mission members were not allowed to receive communion ‘adorned with feathers and painting’ (Knogler, Relato, pp. 176–7).

72 Fraser, ‘Ixmiquilpan’, pp. 15–16; Wake, Framing the Sacred, pp. 102, 177.

73 C. [K.] Kaifler, ‘Tres sitios de pinturas rupestres en la parte occidental de la Serranía San José, Depto. de Santa Cruz, Bolivia’, Boletín, 7 (1993): 59–95, at p. 59.

74 Riester, Arqueología, pp. 194–8.

75 Knogler, Relato, p. 144.

76 E. Kühne, Die Missionskirchen von Chiquitos im Tiefland von Bolivien: Bau und Restaurierung der Kirchen von Martin Schmid (1694–1772) (doctoral thesis, ETH, Zurich, 2008), p. 148.

77 Fernández, Relación historial, p. 75.

78 M. Schmid, S.J., letter, 10 Oct. 1744, in Hoffmann, Vida y obra del P. Martin Schmid, p. 141.

79 Knogler, Relato, p. 174.

80 Matienzo et al. (eds.), Anuas, pp. 292–3.

81 Matienzo et al. (eds.), Anuas, p. 216.

82 Connerton, How Societies Remember, p. 40.

83 J.W. O’Malley, S.J., The First Jesuits (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), quoted in M. Zampelli, ‘“Lascivi spettacoli”: Jesuits and theatre (from the underside)’, in J.W. O’Malley et al. (eds.), The Jesuits II: Cultures, Sciences and the Arts, 1540–1773 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), pp. 550–71 (p. 553).

84 Caballero, Relación, p. 23.

85 Caballero, Relación, p. 31.

86 M. Schmid, S.J., quoted in B. Krekeler, Historia de los chiquitanos (Santa Cruz de la Sierra: Apoyo para el Campesino-Indígena del Oriente Boliviano, 1993), p.138. The date of this letter appears to be the same as the date of the letter from Schmid to a fellow Jesuit referred to above. This is not impossible, though it seems unlikely. The origin of the possible error cannot be traced.

87 References to cannibalism abound in the Cartas anuas. See Matienzo et al. (eds.), Anuas, pp. 45, 50, 133, 167, 217, 343. In some cases the instances referred to are hearsay and could equally well relate to evidence of the practice of endocannibalism, in which a corpse is disinterred and either the whole of what remains is burnt (Karsten, Civilisation, p. 434: ‘among Amazon tribes’); or the flesh is scraped off the bones and the bones are burnt (Karsten, Civilisation, p. 433: ‘among the Indians of north-west Brazil’). Fernández mentions the discovery of piles of bones and pieces of fresh meat in a settlement deserted in a hurry by the Cozoca people as an evangelising party from San Javier approached (Relación historial, p. 206). This could be evidence of a variant of endocannibalism which involves the flesh being removed from the bones immediately after death, before the bones were painted and covered with feathers before burial (Karsten, Civilisation, p. 32: ‘among the Bororo’). Other cases in the Anuas report information delivered to a mission priest by a member of a tribal group with a grudge against another group, who clearly understood how this information could be used to his advantage against an enemy.

88 Before evangelisation Chiquito caciques would have two or three wives, sometimes sisters. Fernández explains this was because one wife was not able to make sufficient chicha (fermented maize beer) to satisfy the numbers the cacique was obliged to entertain by virtue of his office (Fernández, Relación historial, p. 37).

89 Fernández reports that missionary priests did everything they could from the beginning to stamp out drunkenness, provoking the Chiquito to ‘reach furiously for their clubs and arrows’ (Fernández, Relación historial, p. 39), but Knogler, in his much later Relato, was still forced to note that ‘this wretched drink was a constant worry to us’ (Knogler, Relato, p. 149).